Sue-Eye reached the end of a road named after a tree and rolled back onto a road named after a former President, heaving a theatrical sigh just for effect. “Would you just pick a place already? Jesus H. Christ. I could have killed my way through all eight of these places in the time it’s taking you to pick one.”
Kane grunted, his lips twitching. His eyes moved restlessly from the lights of one hotel to the distant next.
In the back seat, his purple-haired pony hunched a little lower and rubbed restlessly at the window. “We’ve probably been seen by now anyway,” she mumbled. “Maybe we should look at another town.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Sue-Eye hit the brakes and stopped the car, right there in front of the charming little country church with the pancake social advertised right under the Subject of Sunday’s Sermon. “This is the fourth town we’ve been to already,” she argued. “Do you think they have all-night gas stations out in Hicksville? Get with it already!”
“Raven,” Kane said simply.
“Fine. They’re all alike, just pick one.” Raven crossed her arms and turned her face to the window, staring at the church.
“
Ichuta’a
, drive.” Kane hooked his arm over the back of his seat as the car started moving again and faced his pony fully. “Raven,” he said again, this time with menace.
Sue-Eye had the road to pay attention to, even if it was utterly deserted (naturally, it being all of midnight on a weeknight), so she couldn’t entirely enjoy the trapped-animal look on the pony’s face. But she could see enough of it in the rearview mirror to put a glow in her heart. She went with it, saying, “You know, if we do get caught tonight, it’ll be because you had to do all this dicking around instead of just doing the one job he gave you.”
Kane flexed the claws of one hand warningly, his eyes still on Raven. When he spoke, it was in a voice scarcely louder than the hum of the well-tuned engine, steel disguised with velvet. “We need to have an understanding.”
Raven’s face in the rearview mirror was lost in shadows, but Sue-Eye could still see the pony’s lips, downturned and trembling with unhappiness. She bit her cheeks to keep from smirking, but her hands clenched victoriously on the steering wheel.
“I give orders,” Kane went on. “And you obey them.”
“I picked the town,” Raven said. She sounded right at the verge of tears and Sue-Eye’s glee blossomed.
“Now I’m telling you to pick the place. And Raven, if you don’t obey me, I’m going to have to hurt you, and then I’m going to make you choose anyway. The only difference will be that I’ll also make you help me hunt.” Kane reached out his claw and brought Raven’s chin up. “Don’t,” he said quietly, “fuck with me. I can make you drink blood.”
Raven nodded, the shuddering sound of her breaths robbing the car of perfect silence, and Kane withdrew his hand from her.
“Where?” he asked.
Raven pointed, holding her hand out for as long as it took Sue-Eye to make the turn, and then she covered her face.
“Good girl.” Kane faced front again and returned his hand to Sue-Eye’s knee for the little time it took her to find a parking space. When she shut off the engine and opened her door, his hand tightened, holding her in the seat. His eyes slid her way and he smiled.
She smiled back uncertainly.
“You’d find me humans to hunt,” he said silkily, “wouldn’t you?”
And this, this dark star burning inside her, this was the closest Sue-Eye had ever been to ‘happy’.
“You bet I would,” she said, giving Raven in the mirror a broad grin.
“You wouldn’t care where.”
“Nope.”
“Or how many.”
“Bring ‘em on.”
“You’d work your way through the whole town if I told you to.”
“Tell me to,” she said, meeting his gaze with fierce triumph.
Kane patted her thigh and showed his teeth. It was not a smile. “That’s why I ask Raven,” he said, and got out of the car.
Sue-Eye’s face flamed. She shot an ugly glance into the mirror and if Raven had even been looking a little her way she probably would have done something stupid and suicidal. But Raven had her knees up and her face buried. Sue-Eye shoved her way out into the parking lot and followed the greater shadow that was Kane to the motel office.
The bell above the door sounded, raising a bored-looking man out of his magazine to offer a mechanical greeting, but Kane didn’t go inside immediately. He stood, frowning back over his shoulder at the car where Raven still sat. After a second or two, Sue-Eye heard the slow crunch of his claws digging at the door, although Kane himself was still and grim as stone.
The guy behind the desk waited politely enough for a while, then leafed through a few pages of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuits, and finally cleared his throat and said, “Can I help you?”
“I’ll be right with you.” Kane gave Sue-Eye a none-too-gentle nudge inside, and then let the door close. He started back across the lot.
Sue-Eye watched him through the window as he bent and had a few words with his pony. She might as well be looking at a photograph. Only the edges of Kane’s long coat moved, rippling in the breeze as time stretched out. Any second now, she expected him to pull Raven from the car and start slapping her around. God knew, if that were Sue-Eye herself out there, Kane would be threatening to empty her eye sockets by now.
But no. Kane straightened up and the door opened and out Raven came. Her head was bent, but from this distance, it didn’t look like anything but another sleepy traveler waking up to go to bed. Kane even put an arm around her as he walked her to the office.
For the first time, Sue-Eye found herself considering the possibility of just killing the bitch. She still thought she could make Kane do it for her, but she was sick of this waiting game. So kill her. Pillow over the head, middle of the night, all done in three minutes and not a peep to be heard.
Never happen, of course. Sue-Eye couldn’t scratch her nose in the night without waking Kane up. Besides, it wasn’t like he’d find the body in the morning and just assume she’d been whacked by a passing moose. Still, it was nice to dream.
Then Kane came a little closer to the light that spilled from the office window and Sue-Eye realized she might not have to dream after all. Kane was pissed. Not just a little. A
lot
. He was just one of those that quieted up the madder he got, not like the Dawg, who went full-throttle psycho-apeshit and let everyone in earshot know it. Kane was on a full boil, and when Sue-Eye saw that look in his black eyes, she stepped back and got the clean fuck out of his way.
“Okay,” drawled the motel-guy as Kane opened the door. “
Now
can I help you?”
Kane went to the counter, moving with swift, deliberate strides. His hand was firmly pressed to Raven’s back, propelling her before him. He didn’t say a word. He just reached out and stabbed a bloody hole in the middle of the desk guy’s throat. It made a crunchy sound, muffled, like stepping on a Frito that was wrapped in a sock.
The desk guy slapped both hands to his neck, throwing himself with shuddering force into the back of his own chair. He made a screaming face and bent over; to Sue-Eye’s point of view, it looked like he tried to puke, only the glut of blood he brought up came spraying out the hole in his throat, not his open mouth. It splattered all over the centerfold bikinis of Sports Illustrated.
“Oh God,” someone whispered, and it was a second before Sue-Eye realized to her relief that it hadn’t been her. Raven cupped her elbows, her face puckering, and watched the desk guy fumble for the telephone. She had gone past pale and all the way to grey.
Kane’s hand closed on Sue-Eye’s arm and she jumped instinctively, but all he did was move her bodily around and against the wall. He unslung his pack, pushed it into Sue-Eye’s arms, and opened it with an angry jerk of his arm. He still said nothing and his face was still stony with the blackest kind of rage Sue-Eye could imagine. He brought out the slender, shiny machine he collected brain juice in and inserted an empty vial. His eyes came up and connected with Sue-Eye’s briefly; it was like being hit with a hammer made of ice.
Then he turned away and Sue-Eye breathed again, inching back to give him as much room as the little office allowed. Kane took Raven’s wrist, yanked her arm out straight and slapped his hunting tool into her palm.
Raven’s whole body flinched and she stared at the thing in her hand like it was a snake. “Oh no,” she stammered, her eyes round and wet with horror. “Oh no, please don’t—”
Kane seized the back of her shirt and yanked, pulling her ear up next to his mouth. “Don’t tell me don’t,” he said, his lips scarcely moving. Without looking, he reached his free hand over, picked up the telephone that the desk guy was batting at, and slammed it down on the guy’s hand hard enough to shatter the base of the phone. The desk guy vomited out another gassy, unborn scream from the hole in his neck and fell off his chair.
Sue-Eye took another step back, now pressed up on her tiptoes into the very furthest corner of the office. She was hugging Kane’s pack tightly enough to make it a little hard for her to breathe. She’d seen killing like this in the past. Not head-breaking, puking-out-your-neck killing, but Kane’s kind of killing, the explosive kind that was right on the edge of splashing out and swallowing every living body in the room. She kept very goddamn quiet and willed herself to be invisible.
Kane turned Raven around and shoved her behind the counter. He followed, bent, and came up with a handful of hair. He slammed the desk guy facedown on the counter and held him there. The hole in the desk guy’s throat was foaming now. It was funny, really, because the foam was red and white and not pink like she’d expect. The blood didn’t blend. Weird.
Kane shot Raven a savage glance and she staggered one pace forward, still with that expression of abhorrence stretching her waxy features. “Now the piece I’m looking for,” he began, his voice as low and ominous as that first rattle of foundations just before the earthquake erupts, “is right above the spine, just here. Most humans have a knot of bone there that makes a handy gripping point. Feel.”
“Oh God.” Raven reached out one trembling hand, Kane’s device clenched tight in the other. The desk guy slapped thickly behind him as she touched him and she jumped back with a breathy squeak.
Kane’s hand banged into the back of her head too fast for Sue-Eye even to see. “You get right the fuck in there and feel it!” he snarled.
This was going to take a while. Sue-Eye shouldered the strap of the open pack carefully and eased around them to find the switch that operated the No part of the Vacancy sign. Kane’s gaze scorched across her, hot enough to feel even without looking, but she quietly thumbed the switch and he let her slip away again without comment.
“Not every human has that, of course,” he continued in his cold, lecturing tones. “Sometimes you have to find another way. Remember?”
“Yes.” Raven wasn’t crying yet, but she was damned close.
“This one does have that knot, though. So.” The wet crack of breaking bone put an end to the bubbling hiss of the desk guy’s screams and Sue-Eye, searching now for the master room card, glanced around again. She could see only Kane’s broad back; the folds of his long coat cloaked Raven’s shivering body like wings. “Put your hand right where mine is,” he was saying. “Your…what is that, this one?”
“My thumb,” Raven whispered.
“Your thumb should fit right in the hole I made.
Do it, Raven
!” he snapped as the pony suddenly stumbled back from him in a fit of dry heaves. “Right in there, right now!”
The master room card was in with the housekeeping stuff in the back room. Sue-Eye took it and stayed there, out of sight from him. Out of reach.
“Pull it away,” Kane instructed. “Move fast, but go easy. The stuff inside tends to slide around. If you puke on that, I’ll hurt you, Raven,” he added suddenly and venomously. “I am
not
kidding.”
The sound of Raven gagging momentarily blotted out other sounds and Sue-Eye leaned out of the doorway to risk a peek. Raven was biting on the back of her hand, sucking in breath after gaspy breath, but she didn’t throw up. Sue-Eye backed up fast. There was a smell in that room. Piss and blood and shit and something else, something strong and bitter. Not vinegar exactly, but something that put Sue-Eye in mind of it.
“All right. Quick now. Put your thumb there to open the collector—no, the black button…that’s good. Now that’s the thing you want, but you want it in one piece. Put the flaps over…good, just like that. Push the green button to close it up and it should start working on its own. That’s it. You just wait…and push the black button again to spit the meat out. Good job. You’ve harvested your first human.”
Sue-Eye stepped out into the office again and watched as Kane gave Raven’s shoulder a slap. He plucked his tool from her hand and turned around. He still looked pissed, but at least now he only looked
just
pissed. “Are we ready?” he asked.
She nodded, holding up the room card for proof.
“Go on, then. Let’s get to work. Raven.”
The pony didn’t move. She only stood there, staring down at the dead guy. She was still holding a chunk of bone and hair in her hand. Something was dripping out of it.
“Raven,” Kane said again, his fangs baring. “Human, you are really scratching me tonight.”
The pony remained motionless, silent.
And oh, praise the baby Jesus, this was it. Kane’s hand—the one with blood capping the claws—curled and began to rise. Sue-Eye’s breath caught and held.
Slowly, Raven looked around. Her eyes drifted to a point somewhere over Kane’s shoulder. “I killed him,” she said dully.
Sue-Eye bit her lip, watching Kane’s killing hand intently. It flexed once and then uncurled. She frowned.
“I killed him,” Raven said again. She looked at the mass of tissue and bone in her grip and let it drop. It hit something wet. Raven stared at the floor. “I killed somebody.”
“You’ve seen plenty of that since I came along,” Kane said darkly. His claws flexed again.
“That was you.” The pony’s chest started heaving. She hadn’t blinked yet. “This was me.”