“What is an X?”
She looked at him and laughed. It was an unhappy sound. She got up and went to check the hold for herself. He heard her rummaging in the groundcar’s interior, and then her quavering curse. “Damn. Just…just
damn
!”
Whatever it was she wanted, they did not appear to have one.
She leaned out to look at him, her eyes too bright. “I don’t suppose you can take those bolts off by yourself, can you?” She pointed to the hardware that held the wheel base to the vehicle.
She had a great deal of faith in him.
Tagen took off his jacket and, after a glance at Daria’s blackened hands, his shirt top. He returned them, neatly-folded, to the groundcar’s interior before kneeling to inspect the bolts. There wasn’t much to grip. Nevertheless. Tagen rubbed sand between his hands to roughen them, already knowing this was futile.
“Wait, I found it!”
She came running, a tool of slender bars set at crossing in her upraised hand, and Tagen moved back and left her to it. She fit the end of one of the bars to the angled cap of a recessed bolt, and the rest of the tool instantly became a lever for spinning them off. Daria fought to do just that for several seconds before Tagen took her place. The tightly-fit bolts were no match for a Jotan officer; he removed and held them while Daria exchanged old wheel for new.
“Almost done,” she said, spinning the bolts back on. “Are we in time?”
Meaning him, of course. Meaning Heat.
He felt no more than a faint discomfort, not even a true itching, yet, but he was tempted for an instant to claim more. All this day and all the last, there had been a heaviness between them. He knew it was his fault, his silence and his reserve, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to resolve. He couldn’t speak to her without the looming loss of her crowding at his thoughts, but he longed to hold her. He just wanted things between them to be as they were before the thought of leaving her had ever occurred to him.
But he was no seasoned liar and Daria would see through one even if he were. She might mate with him anyway, but sex without honesty was a dim thing. Even on Jota, where matings frequently had all the intimacy of a handshake, that much was so.
“Yes,” he said simply, and turned to gather Grendel, now basking in full sun beside its empty food tin.
“Oh.” Did he imagine disappointment? Her expression was unreadable when he glanced her way; she carried the ruined wheel to the hatch without meeting his eyes at all.
Tagen set Grendel in the rear of the groundcar and returned to his own seat, keeping his hands curled so as not to leave grime all across his reach. Daria harnessed herself, rubbing the grease that gloved her own fingers off on her pants, and started the engine. The vehicle moved smoothly back onto the road and neither of them spoke.
This was unbearable. Tagen moved his hand from his knee to hers, feeling the fabric of her clothing soft and warm between him and her firm flesh. She released half her grip on the guidance wheel to rest her hand over his, holding him there, and never mind the grease.
“Yours was the first house I came to after I had landed here on Earth,” he said suddenly, and then sat and wondered where to go from there.
“Well, I didn’t think you’d picked my name out of the phone book. I always figured I was just the first human you stumbled on.”
The weight of his plasma gun pulled at him; he could hear the crackle of crisping flesh, smell its phantom smoke. He said, “The first after I resolved to better know your kind, yes.”
“Lucky you.” There was sarcasm in her tone, but no venom.
“Indeed, I am. I anticipated battle—”
“And got it.”
“Ha. No.” He squeezed her knee lightly. “Difficulty, yes, but not battle. I have seen battle. You have been a remarkable host to me, more than ever I could have hoped.”
She returned her hand to the guidance wheel and Tagen shut his eyes to mask an open grimace. Host. A poor word. He flexed his claws on her thigh, thinking.
“I came to admire you,” he said. “Against my better judgment. And then to desire you, although I feared that you should know. Heat…came between us. I suppose I should be grateful. If not for this
tar shu-rak
weather, I would have never dared to show you my desire. And now…”
There was a reason Tagen had never been asked to give a speech, and this, he thought bitterly, was exactly why. He was stumbling blind in a mire and he refused to get any deeper in. Tagen took his hand from her and stared out the window at the rushing stream of trees that grew beside the road, wishing blackly that his father had, for even one season, allowed his son to be schooled in oration.
“Now?” Daria prompted.
He shook his head, not facing her. “I have made ruin enough of words for now,” he said bitterly. “It is your turn.”
She was silent a long time.
“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” she said finally. Her voice was very small, and yet still managed to push the air out of the groundcar. “You’ve been very honest with me about everything and…and I understand how things work. I’m not going to make things complicated when you have to leave.”
Her voice cracked on the last word, but there it was, spoken at last, and naturally it had been her to do so. He couldn’t touch her, as much as he wanted to. He couldn’t even look at her as she struggled for composure.
“I’m not as bad as I was,” she was saying. “You don’t have to worry about me, after. I’ll be okay.”
Her promise sounded hollow to his ears, a reminder that he had taken her by force from the security of her self-imposed prison, taken her out into strange lands at his command, and soon meant to abandon her. That she felt she had to reassure him at all was a touching reflection of her essential Daria-ness. She would be ‘okay’, too, whether she truly believed so or not. She was so much stronger than she knew.
But it was not fear of her making her way home alone that darkened his thoughts (although he supposed it should be, were he not so selfish a man), but simply the loss of her in his own life. If there were an easy way to say this…if there were
any
way to say this…
Daria’s hand rose from the console to swipe at her eyes. “Please don’t do this,” she said, her voice now scarcely above a broken whisper. “Please, don’t make me lose you before I have to. Say something.”
The silence drew out and out while Tagen strove to claw words together from the black chaos of his mind. At last, in pure desperation, he said, “My hands are dirty.”
He wanted to shoot himself.
Daria sighed and reached to switch on the vehicle’s radio. He caught her wrist halfway and only held it. He could feel the pulsing of her life’s blood beneath his thumb.
“I hate this,” he said quietly. “I hate this world and I hate this weather and I hate the prisoner who has necessitated this mission. I hate that I have come to feel
hate
for the first time in my adult life. The one thing, the
one
thing in all this Earth, that can make me forget all that I have come to hate is you. And I am leaving you.”
It was her turn to stare fixedly ahead and hold silent.
He looked down at the hand he had captured. Slowly, he brought it towards him and pressed his mouth to the sensitive skin of her inner wrist. Her scent, healthy human sweat faintly perfumed by female pheromones, illuminated his senses and he closed his eyes to breathe it in, to taste it.
“You’re already leaving me,” she said. “I’m riding around with you in the seat beside me and you’re already gone.”
He shook his head, not in dispute of her words, but in simple defeat. “Tell me what to do,” he said helplessly. “Tell me how I am supposed to leave you. Everything I can think of…hurts me.”
She laughed unexpectedly. It was a high, bright sound, and filled with despair. “Welcome to Earth,” she said. She pulled her hand gently from his grip and wiped at her eyes again before returning it to the guidance wheel. “There’s not always a good way to say goodbye, but there’s still plenty of bad ways. Giving me the silent treatment for five hundred miles two days in a row is a bad way, Tagen.”
He accepted this with a nod and a sigh. “I apologize. I know you are doing this for my sake.”
“Yeah, well.” Her lips twitched and she slid a glance at him that had at least some glint of real humor. “My motives aren’t entirely pure.”
“No?” He eyed her guardedly.
“I hope that when you see how I labor on your behalf, you will be desirous to mate with me.”
She captured his stilted and careful speech exactly. Tagen smiled helplessly and brushed at her hair. “It’s working,” he told her, slurring the peculiar N’Glish contraction with great care. She leaned into his hand slightly, but did not continue. Quiet descended again, but of an easy sort. And that was fine.
That was very fine.
T
hey stopped for the night at a real mom-and-pop place. The hotel’s yellowing roadside sign boasted cable, air conditioning and a pool, but the pool was empty and bleached by disuse, the A/C was louder than a jet engine, and the cable was limited to Lifetime, the WB, TNT, and Animal Planet. Not having access to local news made Raven nervous, but Kane didn’t move them on.
He was in good spirits, relaxed and even cheerful as he looked over the newly-filled vials in his pack. Ten more, from the other motel. Cozzzy Nook, it had been called. With a raccoon in a nightcap, holding a candle and yawning its way to bed, painted on the side of the building. She’d picked it out. They drove away from it with ten more bottles of brain juice. She hadn’t kept count of how many people had gone into filling them. Too many, that was all. One of them had been hers.
Kane…going from room to room and bed to bed like some demonic Sandman, bringing the bone-snap of death instead of dreams. All those people. But it was the kids that kept coming back to Raven’s mind, the kids that filled her with the sickest swelling of horror. Those poor goddamn kids. Too young, Kane had said simply, but he’d given them a good long look before he’d said it. Too young for Vahst, was what Raven knew he meant. No one was too young to die. So he let the kids sleep while he killed their parents, their big brothers, their big sisters. He let them live so they could wake up there in all that…mess.
Raven shuddered, rubbing at the pebbly fear-flesh that had come out over her arms, and then got up and went to sit on the floor beside the bed where Kane stretched out, working his little bottles of brain juice. She knew it was wrong to be coming to him for comfort—maybe all the way past wrong to obscene—but his hand had such a natural way of coming down to comb through her hair and rest on her shoulder that it was hard to remember that he was the source of the sick danger she was seeking shelter from. And he was laughing at her, she was sure, every time she came crawling to him for reassurance, but she couldn’t help being grateful for it, as much as she despised herself.
“Are you shivering?”
Raven made an effort to stop, banishing the shadowy memory of Kane standing over those two little bumps in the bed, the imaginings of how it must have been to wake up in the morning, surrounded on every side by death. She wasn’t entirely successful.
“Turn off the cold,” Kane told her. His eye wandered, as his eye so often did, to the blonde biker, adding, “And get us some food,” to Raven’s retreating back.
There was a restaurant adjoined to the hotel’s main office. She doubted they’d have steaks on hand, but Raven did the best she could. She called them up, fumbled her way through an order without a menu, and then had to bribe a server with a twenty-dollar tip to get their food delivered sixty feet across the parking lot. She supposed Kane wouldn’t care if she actually left to go and get it in person, but what was twenty dollars, really? Besides, she didn’t want to be alone right now. Not even alone in Wanda’s Waffle House in plain sight of Kane’s hotel room. Death was waiting for her every time she closed her eyes.
Kane was snapping his fingers as Raven hung up the phone. She went to him at once, but it was Sue-Eye he was wanting. “Go practice your letters,” was all she got. He didn’t even look at her when he said it.
It was a friendly little tussle, one that never got quite all the way to real sex, but it didn’t escalate to beatings, either. Listening to Sue-Eye’s breathless praise and Kane’s good-natured growls gave Raven gooseflesh all over again. He was making an effort to get the biker hot, which was something he never bothered with when he was in Heat, something he’d done to Raven only to humiliate her. But Sue-Eye sure wasn’t humiliated, or if she was, she was doing a damned fine job of hiding it.
Raven sat down at the table and picked up a pen, Kane’s alphabet flowing easily down the cheap stationary the hotel provided. Her attention drifted to the bed. She watched silently as Sue-Eye snapped and scratched viciously at Kane’s chest, drawing blood without any sign of caring. Kane gripped the hips that straddled him, his claws tearing holes in the fabric of the woman’s skirt, arching back into the bedding with obvious pleasure. “Harder,” he was snarling. “Like you mean it,
ichuta’a
!”
Raven wrote the alien word mechanically. Her letters were very neat. Kane was a stickler for penmanship these days. A soft thump from the bed drew her gaze again. Kane had flipped the blonde around and had her pinned facedown and writhing, his hand hard at work between her thighs. He was grinning at the back of her tossing head, all tooth and cruel humor, bringing her right to the edge, and then just keeping her there while she begged him to let her cum.
The man had a mean streak, that was for damn sure, but it was a sadism Raven didn’t want aimed at anyone but her. She sketched out more letters in obedient silence, making neat rows left to right, just to keep her hands busy. She needed to keep her hands busy. The urge to go over there and snatch that blonde bitch bald was very, very strong.