She clearly thought she was being discreet, but Kane recognized a slave shifting for leverage when he saw it. Her invitation was no more or less than a crudely-disguised bid for power, and he didn’t like the way she’d maneuvered Raven into the conversation first. A pretense that artful deserved a second thinking-over. His ichuta’a was more than merely irritating, it would seem. She was dangerous, or she thought she was, and it amounted to the same thing, really.
“What are you wanting in exchange?” Kane asked, his voice no more than a growl. His hands, clasped until now behind his head in a posture of indulgence, silently unlocked and curled into killing claws.
“I only want to make you happy. If I please you, you’ll let me live.”
It was a good answer. In fact, by accident or by devious design, it was the only answer she could have given that would have saved her from an immediate and very difficult death. Kane continued to stare her down and she continued to kneel without meeting his eyes. He shifted his gaze to Raven, and she was frowning back at him, searching his face with a clear, if silent, demand to know if he was really stupid enough to believe her. Sue-Eye, the perfect example of acquiescence. Raven, the very picture of defiance.
But the empty vials in his chemist’s pack had a way of drawing his eye, too, and that was the image he allowed to persuade him. He was not convinced, but he allowed himself to be placated.
“All right then.” Kane turned away from both his humans and found his human footcovers. “Clean your face and get dressed. If you want to hunt, ichuta’a…let’s hunt.”
*
Tammy Trent stood in the claustrophobic box office at the Hillmark MoviePlex with her finger on the Close Out button, waiting out the last five minutes of her shift. It had been a long one. She’d come on at five and it was now eleven, which didn’t seem so long just by the numbers, but when you added in the heat and the boredom, then it was plenty.
Ideally, the night crew had to have at least one person at each station until twenty minutes after the last show started, but the candy girl had already gone home for the night because she was a lazy bitch. And there was no point in complaining to the night supervisor about it, because he’d gone home with the candy girl.
Oh well. It wouldn’t be the first time Tammy had closed up shop all by herself, and anyway, she wasn’t completely all by herself. There was Gavin, the projectionist, upstairs keeping all four films running smoothly for the benefit of all fifty-eight of their current patrons.
The MoviePlex always ran three new releases and a retread. The new releases all sucked: Big Man on Campus, the latest college-crowd pleaser, was nothing but a music video with poop jokes so god-awful that not even the copious amounts of bare tits and pantied asses could coax people in to look at it with any great success. Eternal Night was some serial-killer-in-space thing, full of aliens and tentacles and explosions and more bare tits and pantied asses, except of course, that the panties were shinier and more space-age. Finally, there was Take it to the Street, which was yet another gang-boy-becomes-rap-star thing, full of swearing and sex and drugs and shootings, and completely oblivious to the fact that there were no black people in Hillmark (that Tammy knew of), and certainly there were no ghettos (the half-dozen rundown trailer parks filled with filthy children, drunken adults, and half-feral dogs, for some reason, did not count), so naturally, it was tanking big time. This week’s retread was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more than half of the night’s crowd was in there, watching Indiana Jones leap around like a little girl at the sight of snakes.
In the olden days, Gavin told her, movies wouldn’t even start unless there were at least ten people in watching them. Nowadays, the movie ran even if the auditorium was empty. He called it a huge waste of time and money. Tammy didn’t really care. The only thing she really cared about right now was ticking down those last five, no, four more minutes until she was done for the night and out of this stuffy old box.
There was a fan in the box office with her, an ancient rotary with ribbons and rubber bands tied to the grate so the breeze would be pretty as well as soothing, but it didn’t really do much more than push the heat back a little. In the evenings, the sun bored down right through the glass and turned Tammy’s room into an oven. After six hours in that roasting pan, Tammy could almost smell cooked pork instead of just sweat. She couldn’t wait to get out of here and go upstairs were it was only muggy instead of openly boiling. Maybe on the way home, Gavin would stop and get her a milkshake or something. The McDonald’s in Kimsey was open all night. He might tease her about it a little bit, but she bet if she offered to let him have some (maybe served up in dribbles over her boobs) he’d buy it for her.
“Excuse me.”
Tammy looked up from her dreamy-eyed trance, staring at her computer screen and thinking of milkshakes, and wouldn’t you just know it? Customers.
There were three of them. The one at the window was a girl maybe Tammy’s age, just out of school, in other words, but there was no way she was a local. She had hair the color of a supermarket eggplant, with two white strips on either side of her face. Her eyebrows and her ears were pierced, and Tammy could see some suspicious bumps under the thin cotton t-shirt she wore that looked like her boobs were pierced, too. She looked nice enough, Tammy supposed, but a girl who would get pierced like that would probably pierce other things, too, and there was only one thing a girl like that would ever be good for. Everybody knew that.
The other two were just as south-bound, in Tammy’s opinion, if not as open about it as the purple-haired girl. There was another girl, a lot older than the pierced one, with straw-blonde hair just growing in dark, who looked like she’d be right at home on the back of one of the choppers that occasionally rolled through in the summertime. The tall man who stood with her looking over the coming attractions posters didn’t look much like a biker, but he did look kind of creepy. Long black coat open to his bare chest, wide-brimmed hat hiding most of his face, hands in his pockets…if he pulled a machete out of thin air right now, he’d make a damn good slasher killer for one of the teenybopper movies.
All of these thoughts passed serenely through Tammy’s head in the time it would take to blink an eye and none of them showed on her face. She was small-town born and bred, and she would be both surprised and hurt if anyone were to indicate she was at all judgmental. She’d been a chubby child and a fat teenager, and she believed that it had made her one of the most tolerant people in the whole world. She would never have told the three people before her that they were going to Hell. They probably got enough of that sort of thing from snotty church people all the time. Tammy was nice. Tammy just smiled and said, “Welcome to MoviePlex, how can I help you?”
The purple-haired girl looked up at the show times panels and bit her lip.
“Everything’s started,” Tammy said helpfully. “But Eternal Night started the soonest ago. It’s all about killer aliens and stuff. Do you like science-fiction?”
Both girls turned at the same time and looked at the man. He continued to inspect the movie posters. Pierced-Girl turned back to Tammy. “Can we have three for that one, please?”
Tammy rang them up, tore their tickets, and sent them in. The tall man glanced at her as he walked by. He smiled.