“Why?”
“This is a dead party.”
Cain laughed, shouldering his pack. “Yes,” he said. “It will be. But I have all the flesh I need. More, in fact, than I even want.”
“I’m better than either of them.”
“No, I hate to hurt your feelings, but you’re really not.” He hunkered down again, pinched her chin between his thick thumb and fingers and gave her head a playful little shake. “Friendly advice, little fuck-mate. Get away from that shit you’re taking. The only door in that long hall opens on men like me.”
“I like you.” She caught his wrist and tugged at it hopefully, giving him her best bedroom eyes from the dry woodsy ground.
He smiled again, but it was a distracted thing. His attention was wandering back up the path to the clearing, and he stood up, pulling easily out of her grip. “Close your eyes, Kati,” he said, turning his back on her. “Count to a thousand.”
She could hear him walking away before she even got to five, but that didn’t matter. She’d show him she was good and he’d come back and get her. When he was done hunting big game in northern Nevada, that was.
Forty-one. Forty-two. Something popped, like a pine-knot in a fire. The boys, dumb shits that they were, making that damn bonfire now that she wasn’t there to stop them. (To wonder how she’d be able to hear a popping pine-knot from where she now lay did not and would never occur to her.) It wasn’t gunfire. Gunfire was louder, Kati knew that. She went to the movies.
Seventy-nine. Eighty. Eighty-one. Pop-pop. Someone screamed. Sounded like Tabby. Cumming from her toes, most likely; that wasn’t a splashing-in-the-river scream. It made Kati smile, thinking of Cain. That first thrust, splitting her, filling her.
One hundred and five. One hundred and six. Another scream, this one masculine. She couldn’t tell who. Probably one of the cousins or whoever was with Tabby. God, she wished Cain would come back. She was ready for round two.
No more screaming all through the one hundreds, all through the two hundreds. Kati was so good. She didn’t get up, didn’t lose count, didn’t fall asleep.
At five hundred and thirty six, Riffer’s CD ran out of music. No one started it up again.
Eight hundred, and Kati got up to pee, keeping a steady count as she crouched in the bushes and keeping her eyes tight shut to hold to the spirit of Cain’s command.
The nine hundreds were the longest, and she kept getting distracted by little sounds—trees creaking, leaves fluttering, bird calls. Where were all the big sounds, the people sounds?
One thousand. Kati got up and wandered back up the path to the clearing. Owen and Corky were still in the grass, sound asleep where they’d finished, still head-to-toe, although Corky had rolled onto her back at least. Her arm was dangling out into the path. Kati had to step over it.
Nothing moved in the clearing. The boombox was silent. Riffer was lying on his back just staring at the sky. Danny and one of the cousins were stretched out and stone drunk nearby. They’d torn their legs up in some blackberry bushes or something. Pretty bad, too. They’d gotten blood all the way up into their hair.
“Guys?” Kati called. She got a beer out of the cooler and squeezed the top off. There was no splashing by the river, no nothing. And Cain and his two girlfriends were gone.
“He’ll come back,” she said. She sat down on the party log and drank her beer. It was a really dead party. Summer sucked.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Daria spent the morning alone and filled her empty hours with cleaning. The obvious stuff first—sweeping, mopping, vacuuming—which led to the less obvious stuff—washing the cupboard faces, scrubbing the kick plates, wiping down Grendel’s food mat—and finally to the ridiculously obscure stuff—polishing doorknobs and switchplates. She was dusting her DVDs when the depression caught up to her and she stopped where she was, right in the middle of the Lord of the Rings collection, and sat down on the sofa.
The silence of the house was claustrophobic. She’d been living here alone for six years. Why hadn’t she ever noticed how claustrophobic silence was? She picked up the TV remote and switched it on.
It was a news channel, which was refreshing for the second it took to absorb what she was seeing. A young girl, maybe in her twenties, in the midst of about a thousand reporters, was being taken up some steps into a very official-looking building. One of the journalists, a fella who looked even younger than his disheveled subject, thrust his microphone out and shouted, “Miss Markham, Miss Markham, did you do it?”
‘Sure, fella, like she’s going to admit it on national television,’ Daria thought heavily.
“I guess so,” the girl said, at virtually the same time. The clamor of voices died at once and cameras started clicking madly away. The girl looked dazedly around her, oblivious to the two men in suits who were frantically hissing at her. “I dreamed that bible guy came to me. Maybe he told me to.”
The screen cut to a nice, neat newsroom, with a nice, neat newscaster behind a desk. “Markham’s lawyer has not yet indicated the line of his defense, but the District Attorney’s office has stated that they will be seeking the death penalty if she is convicted. Authorities in the area surrounding Sugarush have issued a warning on the dangers of drug abuse following the killings. Suspect Katrina Markham was allegedly under the influence of alcohol and other drugs when she was discovered with the bodies, including gamma-hydroxymethlyene, colloquially known as Baked Alaska, a powerful hallucinogen known for its euphoric effects.”
Just another sterling example of how Earth didn’t need an alien like E’Var to make its murder quota. Daria started surfing restlessly through the channels.
An euphoric hallucinogen. Tagen hadn’t said what this drug E’Var was making did, but seeing as its main ingredient came from the pleasure center of the human hypothalamus, an euphoric wasn’t out of the question. She considered asking him, but abandoned the idea. Even if she knew how to put the question in words he might understand, what would be the point of knowing? It didn’t have anything to do with her, and it would only put more pressure on Tagen to go out and find his fugitive.
More pressure was something Tagen did not need right now. He looked so much worse than yesterday. Oh, he was moving around more—due in large part, she was sure, to her forcing food and water on him whether he wanted it or not—but he looked horrible. Despite everything he said (and the increasingly hostile way in which he said it), it was impossible for Daria to look at him and not see a dying man.
Right on cue, she heard his door open. His step was slow and disturbingly heavy, and his claws scraped at the walls as he made his way to the bathroom. Daria watched the clock on the wall above the TV. It took him two minutes and ten seconds to walk ten feet. The door closed. A moment later, the shower came on.
She fought hard against the urge to go up and check in on him. He wouldn’t appreciate it. He might need it, but that didn’t matter. The more he needed it, the less he’d appreciate her help. She knew all about the paradoxical effects of pride.
But maybe it wasn’t that simple. Her mind kept going back to the look on his face when she’d asked if there was anything she could do to help him, and to the sound of his ragged voice telling her that she must never touch him, that yes, he would hurt her. These were things that should be filling her with panic. God knew, she’d freaked out more over a whole lot less since he’d come here, but all she felt was sorry…and sorry wasn’t enough.