“You are.”
She didn’t seem to know how to respond to such quiet conviction. At last, she felt back on her first argument, uttering it with a high despair that was close to tears. “You need to go back to your ship!”
“In the morning,” he said, and his heart clenched inside of him. “Whether I have found him or no. In the morning. Please.” He did look at her then, although she shivered away from meeting his eyes even for an instant. “Wherever he is, he is surely hours behind us yet. Do not ask me to spend those hours alone in space.”
Her shoulders hunched. “Okay,” she whispered. “You win. God help me.”
He turned his eyes out to the road ahead of them again. The sun was falling down, the night short, and the morning mere hours away.
Gods help them both.
*
The sun was low in the trees when Kane came to the end of the forest and saw the houses. The sight of them standing pleasantly in the sunshine of a summer’s evening infuriated him. It shouldn’t, and he was lucid enough to know that, but it did anyway. This was the hour he’d thought to be loading his females onto his ship and making ready for launch. Instead he was here, on foot, his ichuta’a gone and Raven at her limit, with no food or water since the previous day, and Heat scouring at him yet again. He couldn’t seem to feel anything apart from rage and that was a dangerous way to be.
He ordered Raven to sit and stay, and then he got low and crept in to the edge of the woods to get a better look. He saw no movement of any kind, not in any of the windows. There were groundcars parked before some of the houses, but not all of them, and Kane was smart enough to know that a groundcar on display was no guarantee that anyone was at home. Just his luck. All the humans that lived here had probably gone to the fucking fair.
No, a shadow moved. Kane’s eyes narrowed, trying to pierce the curtains and see clearly whether it was a human on the inside of that house or an animal, or just reflected light spilling in through the window and broken by branches. Futile. He could make nothing out but curtain.
The urge to just go kick in the door or smash through the window vomited up from somewhere deep inside him with enough force to momentarily blind him. Just tear his way inside and kill everything that moved—humans, animals, shadows, walls, every fucking thing.
Patience, gods damn him, patience!
Kane slapped a hand over his eyes, his claws digging hard into his own flesh, snarling as he fought for reason and calm. This was the last day and the Fleet had found him once already. He was lost, unknown kilometers away from his ship, and he had Raven to take care of. He couldn’t make mistakes anymore.
He dragged his hand across his face, wiping away sweat and blood in smears, and stared with fresh eyes at the houses before him. There were four, spread out in a miniature village along a dirt road, with four little patches of green grass before them and bright gardens filled with flowers lining their walkways. In the murderous heat of this unending summer, the sight said money to Kane, but at the moment, he couldn’t care less. All he cared about was getting something to drink, something to eat, something to fuck the Heat out of him, and then a new groundcar to take him the hell away.
The sun was sinking. He could hear the distant drone of the highway somewhere at the end of this dirt road. Shadows moved again within the curtained house. All these things were good things. He could still be gone from this world before its sun rose, but only if he were patient now.
Kane retreated from the forest’s edge and straightened as he turned. Raven was lying on her side, sound asleep. He hunkered down beside her, loathe to wake her. She was flushed with heat and yet, too pale. There was a rattling quality to her breaths that troubled him mightily. He’d seen her look worse when his tox-filters had been cleaning her out, but not much worse. No food, no water, too much sun and too much walking. And too much damned Heat coming at her. He was holding out as long as he could, but he had only so much strength left to him and he needed it for carrying her and not for fighting Heat. He didn’t even know how many times he’d stopped and had her since leaving the fair, but he knew that each new episode had left her weaker. Now here she was, a breath away from coma and him hard as rock again.
“Raven,” he growled. He brushed the backs of his claws across her brow, and then backed away fast as his blood surged.
She moaned, uncurling with arthritic slowness, and rolled onto her back. It seemed to take a very long time for her eyes to open and he didn’t see recognition right away. “I fell asleep,” she said thickly, a lost child stating the obvious, and closed her eyes again.
Gods, this wasn’t good. Kane paced back to the edge of the trees and had a second, sharper look. Did he need her? Four houses. That meant the chance of attracting attention from three of them even if he could clear out one without incident. If he left Raven here while he did his killing, he’d have to come back and get her, and that was three more chances of being seen.
He returned to Raven’s side, his stomach a hot stone, and said her name again.
She reached down without opening her eyes and pulled her skirt up, splaying her legs with stuporous indifference. He got back in a hurry, but then had to curl around himself, grinding the heel of his hand at the swollen agony of his tsesac. Time crawled around him in igneous streams as he battled for control of his body, and when it ended, Raven was asleep again.
He shook her. She woke with difficulty and lay limp, watching him from sunken eyes without expression.
“Houses,” he managed, and drove his claws into the earth to keep from rubbing at his cock. “And cars. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try. I need you on your feet.”
She nodded without strength or surprise and rolled onto her stomach. Kane watched from a careful distance as she struggled to rise—drawing one knee up and then the other so that she was posed with her hips in the air sent Kane back another body’s length—in the first of seven attempts to heave herself up. She fell back twice, once hard enough to knock her head on the ground. Kane did not help her. In the extremity of Heat, he didn’t dare.
But she managed at last without him. She stood swaying, gazing at him in vacuous anticipation as he circled her. “They’ll never let you in,” she said when he came back to face her.
“I’m not planning on doing the asking. You are.” He looked her up and down, his skin crawling at what he saw, adding, “And they’d have to be some cold-bellied bastards not to let you in.”
She gave him a small, sick smile. “Flatterer.”
He tossed his chin in the direction of the houses and she went before him, leaning on the trees she passed, but holding up pretty well, all things considered. Nothing stirred behind the windows of any of the houses as they crossed the manicured yard; he dared to hope that meant no one had seen them, not that no one was here. Food and water he meant to take in any case, but he needed a human here to give them the keys to a groundcar. He doubted even a human would leave something like that just lying around unguarded.
Kane sent Raven alone up onto the porch of the house he believed to be occupied while he crouched low in the adjoining garden, his back against the wall. She was right when she said no one would let him in. Even if he weren’t bursting out the front of his pants and looking like six shades of rabid death, he doubted anyone in these pert, prettied-up houses would unlock a door for a strange man. His little Raven, maybe, especially looking halfway to falling-down herself, but never him. That left him out of easy reach of whoever came to open the door, but some risks just couldn’t be avoided.