So it was time to move on. Hop a bus, head cross-town, on to better things. She’d called her mom to ask for money, but all she got (apart from that awful, haunting question) was the offer of a bus ticket home.
Home? Fuck that noise, Raven was home! She went to San Francisco, falling easily into the post-modern happy-hippie feel of the place. She tried her hand at face-painting on Fisherman’s Wharf, sometimes bluffed her way through a Tarot card reading, and when money got tight, well, there was always someone with his dick out, and Raven knew what knees were for. In the meantime, there were parties every night, and weed and Ex were everywhere. She was having fun. She was in control. She was up for anything.
And one day, floating on a cloud of drugs and good sex, the thought of hitching up to Seattle dug into her brain and it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Raven could remember this plan being greeted so warmly by her friends that they gave her a big going-away party with lots of hugging and making out and drinking and smoking. Someone gave her a huge bag of joints to send her on her way, and then she hit the road.
Halfway there, Raven sobered up enough to realize that Seattle sucked. And the very next car that stopped for her had two guys in it who said they were on their way to New York and would she like to go along? Hell, yeah. Would she mind trading a little slice of her pie for the privilege? Ain’t no thing, fellas. And then they turned out to be assholes, but so what? They were dead now, weren’t they?
She wanted the thought to comfort her, but it only brought home the too-real fact that she had traded a couple of assholes for the Devil himself. Christ, why hadn’t she just gone along with them?
Why, baby?
Raven rolled onto her back, away from her mother’s unhappy and horribly confused phantom, and saw the Devil’s eyes slide open. They stared into her, as black and empty as the eyes of a shark. There was nothing in those eyes that Raven could reason with. She said nothing, and soon he shut them again.
Raven could feel herself wanting to tremble and bit down on her panic with all the iron she had left. It was too damn short a distance from shaking to crying, and if she started that shit, she’d never stop. The human mind wasn’t fragile, but it was mortal, and once it broke, it was gone for good. She couldn’t afford to go even a little bit crazy in the company of this inhuman thing. She could spend the rest of her life forgetting that this had ever happened to her, but first she had to live through it.
The Devil said he wouldn’t kill her if she behaved herself. He said they had an understanding. He’d hit her, but only when she fought him and not as hard as he could have hit her. He said he wanted to keep her around as long as he could. Just how long that would be, she had no way of knowing, but she did know how she’d be spending her time.
On impulse, Raven fished in her jacket pocket for the plastic baggie that had held her going-away present. She’d been trading ass and grass all the way up the west coast, but there was still one joint left, and this was definitely time. Raven could do what she had to do to stay alive, but she didn’t want to have to face it sober. Raven lit up with shaking hands and took a deep drag.
Instantly, the arm around her middle tightened and the Devil’s eyes were on her once more. Raven looked back at him, hardly breathing, holding the smoke down deep in her lungs as if to protect it from him. She saw his nostrils flare, and then he reached up and plucked the joint from her fingers. He pinched out the embers, tossed it away, and then returned his arm to her waist and shut his eyes.
Raven exhaled as slow as she could, willing her mind to gentle itself on just one drag. She could see the white line of the joint lying in the dirt within easy reach, but she did not dare to reach for it. He hadn’t bothered to punish her for smoking, but now his thoughts on the matter were known, and if she picked that doobie up, he’d probably break her hand for her.
Oh Christ, this was bad. How did this get so fucking bad?
The urge to tremble came on her again, and this time, she couldn’t quite crush it. She could do what the Devil wanted, she knew she could, but ah God, she wanted to be stoned when she did it.
“Lie still,” the Devil growled, not even opening his eyes.
Raven tried, but clenching her fists only made the shivering more pronounced. Her heart was racing. Panic had got its claws in her at last.
Beside her, there came a short, hard sigh, the sound that experience told her would probably precede a short, hard slap. “I am very tired,” the Devil said. “And you are starting to annoy m—”
Sudden silence. He had opened his eyes, and something in the sight of her shut him right up. His arm came away from her and he sat up, catching her jaw and peering very closely into her face.
“Chok-se y vok!” he snarled, and sprang away.
That didn’t sound good. Raven tried to take a breath, calm herself, but her lungs were locked. Something was wrong. Raven’s feet began to drum on the ground. Her left arm swept out suddenly and smashed into a tree root hard enough to scrape her knuckles bloody. Her heart was slamming into her ribs; she could actually feel herself rocking with the force of its blows. She tried to scream, but the effort produced only a whistling gasp.
The Devil came back into the frozen field of her sight, but she couldn’t focus on him. Even her eyes were shaking now, jittering around in their sockets as a terrible pressure began to build behind them. Any second now, she was going to feel them explode out of her head. Dear God, she was going to see it!
The Devil swung a leg over her, straddling her chest, rapidly mixing something up from the little glass vials in his pack. There was a grim shard of light in each of his terrible eyes as he worked. “Try to be calm,” he told her, his teeth bared and set. He looked once, furiously, at the scorched joint lying on the ground and then took the vial he’d mixed and inserted it into the rodlike thing he’d injected her with earlier.
Raven’s body was bucking. The weight of the creature atop her was enough to keep her pinned to the ground, but her limbs flailed wildly. In horror, she saw one of her own hands fly up in a hard jerk and strike the Devil in the face.
He didn’t even flinch. “This is going to hurt,” he said, leaning over her with his device in his three-clawed hand. “A lot.”
Raven tried to nod, but succeeded only in starting a seizure wild enough to knock her head against the ground over and over. Without warning, she retched. Foam spewed sluggishly from between her clenched teeth, the rest slid back into her throat in a choking clot.
The Devil leapt up at once, shoved her on her side and gave her one hell of a whack between the shoulderblades. This dislodged only a tiny spray of vomit from the mass clogging her mouth. Her lungs kept working, trying to breathe it back in. Her vision was graying, neon spots exploding in space before her eyes.
She was dying.
Oh, thank God.
“Chok,” the Devil snarled again. His claws invaded her mouth, prying her locked jaws apart.
Bile poured from her as from a faucet, but she couldn’t cough to clear her throat. She couldn’t even tell if she were breathing or not.
There was a dull hissy sound as the Devil put his surgical tool to her throat and pulled the trigger.
The pain was immediate, fuming out from the base of her neck and quickly engulfing her whole body. She fell limp almost at once, suspended bonelessly in a sea of rolling fire so complete she could actually smell the fat in her flesh popping as she cooked.