Raven hushed her, her eyes on Kane. He was flagging, straining. God, he was losing. Fear put a tremor in her hastily-chosen words, something about keeping quiet, she wasn’t really paying attention to herself. Kane stumbled, regrouped slashing, and heaved the cop into a tree. He was shaking, she could see it from here.
She couldn’t watch. She ducked away, hands over her eyes, and listened. If she could get up, she’d leap out there and take the cop’s eyes out. But she couldn’t. She could barely crawl.
The lady beside her suddenly gasped. Raven took her hands away from her face hopefully. The cop was on his back on the ground, his hands locked around Kane’s wrists, straining to keep the claws away that were steadily sinking towards his throat. Raven clenched her own hands into fists, her stomach like a tiny lump of molten lead, helpless.
“Don’t move!” the lady whispered. She looked around wildly, seized a length of charred branch from some ancient and illegal campfire, and leapt to her feet.
Raven grabbed at her ankle, holding her in place. “Don’t leave me!” she hissed desperately. “I’m hurt!”
The lady hesitated, her hand flexing on her impromptu weapon. Bark sifted off between her fingers. The stupid thing probably wouldn’t even last more than one whack before turning itself into kindling. “I have to help,” the lady said. “Tagen needs me.”
Raven burst into tears. It wasn’t hard. She was still all fucked-up-feeling from the crash, she hurt all over, and Kane was fighting for his life just a few feet away. This numb bitch and her rotten stick might actually make the difference between him winning and losing and Raven couldn’t do anything. “Please!” she cried. “Please, don’t!”
Beyond the bushes, Kane suddenly roared and Raven clapped a hand to her mouth, realizing too late that he’d heard her. He broke free of the cop’s hold and even as Raven screamed for him to stop, he turned and lunged toward her.
The cop had only to catch hold of Kane’s leg and pull. It probably didn’t even take that much effort. Kane hit the ground with quaking force, his breath knocking up a cloud of red earth and pine needles as it barked free of him. The cop was on him in an instant as Raven wailed. He took something from his belt—that handy little hissing gadget Kane had used on her so often—and drove it down into Kane’s neck like it was a knife instead of an air-gun.
The fight went out of him so immediately, so completely, that it was as though the cop had found Kane’s on/off switch and flicked it. The powerful body that had been fighting to rise dropped with a muffled whump back onto the ground and went limp. Kane’s eyes met Raven’s through the thicket, but there was only a glimmer of recognition in them. One claw twitched. That was all. The shark-black eyes rolled back and closed.
Chapter Forty
There is no silence so complete as the one that follows a fight.
Raven stared at Kane where he lay facedown, her hands fluttering to her face, her throat, her arms, and finally clenching at the dry soil. “Is he dead?” she whispered. The only part of her that was not numb was the stomach that fought to vomit out all the horror congealing in her.
“No.” The cop gained his feet, leaning heavily on Kane’s motionless body to do so. He looked at her. It was a hard look, a cop’s look, the kind that saw through every shade of bullshit. “You belong to him,” he said.
Se ven garrug-ta.
Raven’s eyes welled with fresh tears. She bent her head and brayed.
The lady’s arms were around her at once and she hissed some sort of admonition to the cop that Raven could not hear over the force of her tears. But the cop’s voice she heard; it rolled above her like God’s own thunder, every bit as commanding in its own way as Kane’s.
“You said yourself E’Var could never have gone so far without aid. Who do you think has aided him all this time if not her?”
The surviving element in Mary Frances Carter that had once made her lie down with the taste of the Devil in her mouth now took control of her again. She flung out her arms, exposing the mosaic of blood and metal and bruises that her body had become after the crash and screamed, “Look what he’s done to me!”
The cop stepped back, the grim animosity slapped utterly free of his face. He looked at her, and she followed his eyes down across the mottled canvas she’d become. He saw the bruises, no doubt. She saw silver and gold and Kane’s own name marking her flesh. Her arms closed around herself again and she folded over, touching her head to the dry ground. She squeezed her eyes shut and sobbed.
“We can’t leave her here, Tagen,” the lady said quietly. “She’s hurt, we’re in the middle of nowhere…and people are looking for her.”
Raven peered up through the broken veil of her matted hair and watched the cop rake his claws through his hair as he glared down at her. She tried to look as bereft as possible. It didn’t require much acting.
The cop shot a black look down at Kane’s still and silent body, bared his teeth, and finally sighed and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Bring me my pack.”
Raven’s good leg twitched, trying to obey the command she’d heard aimed at her so many, many times. She pressed her brow to the ground again and listened to the lady rise and limp away.
Silence. She heard her heart drumming, setting the beat for all her aches to throb by. She heard the hoarse wind of her breath, deafening in her ears. She stared into the earth, shivering in the heat.
A soft rustle beside her. She turned her head just a little and saw the cop’s knee and one hand dangling relaxed across it. She looked up and he was looking down. She wouldn’t have thought there could be eyes any scarier than Kane’s, but she was looking at them now. Kane’s eyes hid all his secrets. The cop’s eyes showed every cold doubt openly.
Raven met that piercing, raptor’s gaze without flinching. She could feel that survivor’s shadow-self separate from the back of her, circling the cop with chisel in hand, hunting for the soft heel of him.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
The look on his face had a sound, and it was the sound of a chisel striking in under armor.
“No,” he said. He glanced away at Kane, who was still facedown and motionless.
Raven followed his eyes. She could see the faint rise and fall of Kane’s breath, but it looked shallow and he showed no signs of waking up. One of his arms was still stretched out, the claws curled and the blood that tipped them dulled by dust. She could reach out a hand and touch him, but she didn’t dare even to look at him too long. She said, “Are people really looking for me?”
“Yes.”
“Cops?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him; he was still gazing down at Kane. “Do they think I killed those people?” she asked.
He hesitated and finally met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.
This was the part where panic should be chewing her up from the insides out, she knew, but it wasn’t. Calm had her in a grip so profound it made her head feel swollen. All her thoughts had weight and substance, all her nerves were awake and tingling, but she couldn’t make herself not be calm. “I didn’t,” she said, and looked down at her hands where they gripped the ground. She had no fingernails and she couldn’t remember biting them or anything. “I was there, but…how was I supposed to stop him? You tell me. How?”
She looked at him. He looked away.
“He did things to me,” Raven said.