“Yes, Kane.” She didn’t look at him. She stayed huddled against her window, staring straight ahead and holding her ear.
“Good.” He yanked the car’s keys from the ignition and kicked his door open, admitting a billow of suffocating heat as he left. “Charak tiven kha y soc-se ichuta’a!” he spat and slammed the door with a rifle-like bang.
Sue-Eye didn’t move. She was breathing steady but hard and her eyes were fixed and unblinking.
In the interests of peace, Raven supposed she should say something, but all she could think of to say was ‘idiot’, and that wouldn’t help. She opened up her door instead, and Sue-Eye slowly did the same.
Walk. Ugh.
The heat of day, even here in the shaded woods, was staggering. Raven swung her legs out and set her feet on the sun-cracked earth, but then had to just sit there and work up the strength to stand. Her stomach was doing flip-flops and the cramps just made it worse. Walk from here? How far? The road curved out of sight a few dozen feet away and Raven could hear the muffled thump of a heavy bass beat somewhere in the distance, but no other people-sounds. And Kane wanted to walk? Raven figured she had about a quarter mile in her before she barfed everything up but her toenails and then died.
A shadow fell over her. She looked up into Kane’s narrowed eyes and stood up fast. Too fast. The blood dropped from her face, cold sweat prickled up all over her brow, and she stumbled against the side of the car, waiting to see whether she was going to faint or just throw up.
“Say it again,” she heard Kane say darkly. “Say how normal this is.”
Her own temper rose and popped like a black bubble. “I’d be fine if it wasn’t so fucking hot!” she snapped.
A stupid thing to say, maybe, but Kane merely grunted and looked upwards, making the sun the target of his bared teeth instead of her. It emboldened her.
“If…If I promise not to go anywhere,” she began hesitantly and he focused on her at once, his black eyes narrowing. “If I swear I won’t leave the car, can’t I just wait here?”
She didn’t honestly expect him to agree, but to her surprise, he actually seemed to consider it. He looked her over, hooking the thumbclaw of his hands through the waistband of his pants and tapping the talons of one foot on the hard-baked ground. Just as he opened his mouth, Sue-Eye suddenly spoke up.
“Are you crazy?” She was staring at Raven with the same disbelief she might have shown if Raven had asked Kane’s permission to juggle chainsaws. “Out here in the woods stinking like blood with wolves and bears running around?”
Raven’s jaw dropped. For a moment, she was utterly incapable of speech, even though she knew it wasn’t the best way to react with Kane studying her so closely. When her voice finally did return, it came with a coarse breathiness, as if her anger were physically choking her. “Wolves? Fucking wolves?”
“They can smell blood and they eat people,” Sue-Eye said sagely. She came around the front of the car to stand at Kane’s side. “They’re all over these woods and you know it.”
Kane glanced around at the trees.
Raven’s mouth opened and closed a few times, her mind spinning with the ridiculousness of this argument. “So I’ll stay in the car,” she said at last.
“You’ll die of heatstroke.”
“I’ll crack a fucking window!”
“And the wolves will smell you,” Sue-Eye said evenly, without hesitation. “Or a bear will. A bear could pull the top right off that car.”
The fact that a bear could indeed do that, coupled with the remote possibility that bears might actually be lurking somewhere in these woods, combined to fill Raven with a shaking, helpless fury. “They will not smell me, you bitch!”
“I can,” Kane said, and that was the end of that. “You’ll stay close, Raven. Both of you, follow me.” He turned and started up the twin ruts, aiming himself at the distant pulse of the music.
Raven swung on the blonde with her fists clenched, letting all her furious disbelief show. “What did you do that for?” she hissed.
Sue-Eye smirked at her.
For the first time in her life, Raven realized that the phrase ‘saw red’ wasn’t always metaphorical. She saw that smirk and then everything else washed out the color of blood. Her heart, soul, and skin caught fire. She swung, and her fist caught Sue-Eye square in her smug little mouth.
Sue-Eye tumbled back into the hood of the car, then came right up with a scream and launched herself at Raven. They went down in a windmill of arms and legs in the kind of no-holds fight that one seldom sees outside of redneck bars and elementary school playgrounds. There was kicking, clawing, hair-pulling, screaming, biting, swearing, and then suddenly Raven’s whole head snapped back in a splintering burst of pain, the red field that had suffused her sight shattering. She was yanked into the air by her hair and suspended, kicking, over the ground.
“Enough!” Kane shouted, and Raven’s struggles stopped at once. “I said, enough!” She was dropped so that Kane could swing, and he slapped the blonde hard enough to send her spinning.
“Bitch!” Raven spat.
Kane glared at her. “You be quiet,” he told her curtly.
She clamped her lips shut and seethed in obedient silence.
Kane thumped Sue-Eye back on her feet. “Behave yourself, both of you,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for this ti inak shit.”
“She started it,” Sue-Eye muttered.
Kane, who had already begun to turn away, now swung back with a look of pure amazement. “What—” he began, and then sighed and relaxed, all over, all at once. He covered his eyes with one hand, shook his head, and then looked calmly down at Sue-Eye.
He slapped her.
Sue-Eye flipped back off her feet and landed in the bushes. Kane covered his eyes again and waited for her to gain her unsteady feet, and then he slapped her again.
This time, he went after her, moving in that light, relaxed stroll that Raven had come to associate with killing. He got a foot under Sue-Eye’s ribs, turned her easily onto her back, and then hunkered down and waited for her to look at him. “I said something like that to my father once,” he said conversationally, once she’d met his eyes. “Although I was easily half your size at the time. It was a stupid thing to say to him and it is a stupid thing for you to say to me.”
Sue-Eye flushed and tried to drop her gaze, but Kane caught her by the hair and twisted her violently around to keep looking at him.
“Now I am going to tell you one more time to behave yourself and this time, you are going to say ‘yes, Kane’, which—” Here he laughed, very quietly and utterly without humor. “—is also the second time I have had to tell you are the only words I want to hear out of you for a while. And you’d better mean it this time, ichuta’a, because the next time I have to repeat myself, I’m going to put a reminder on you in the way of a broken bone. I’m not kidding. This bone, this one right here.” He picked up her left arm with the hand that wasn’t clenched in her hair, and pinched at part of her forearm. “Snap,” he said. “Just like that. And if you think I’m going to put you out somewhere so you can have it fixed, you are badly mistaken. You are with me for a while, ichuta’a, but I don’t need you whole. Now do we have an understanding?”
“Yes, Kane,” Sue-Eye whispered.
He nodded, and then, in a low voice that was almost a sing-song: “Behave yourself, ichuta’a.” He cocked his head expectantly.