He blinked several times, puzzling over the meaning of the words, and turned the box over in his hands. There was an image of a flower on the front, which was no help at all.
Raven took a different package from the shelf and opened it. She removed a small bit of paper and unfolded it, then showed it to him. There was a cut-away diagram of a human’s hips, clearly depicting a female’s genitals and hands as she inserted a torpedo-shaped object.
“What the hell?” It was all he could think of to say. He looked at Raven accusingly. “What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s called a period,” she said patiently. “It’s normal. It happens once a month, for about five days. I could tell you all about why, but you wouldn’t know any of the words. It’s completely normal. All this stuff here is sold, right out in the open, for us girls to use when it happens.”
“It…” He looked back down at the box in his hands. The flower on its face still baffled him. “It has nothing to do with what I did to you?”
“No.” Raven took the box from him and put it back on the shelf. She kept the one she’d opened under her arm. “It would have happened anyway.”
Kane inspected her closely. She didn’t seem pallid, or in great pain. He began to think she was actually telling the truth, for all that she was bleeding. “Are you all right?” he asked cautiously. “Is it safe to move you?”
She paused in the act of browsing the shelves for another box. When she looked at him, her eyes were strangely guarded.
He showed her his open hands. “I won’t kill you if it isn’t,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Will you die if I move you?”
“No,” she said, and slowly stood up. “I just have to be a little careful, that’s all.”
“Then you can die from it.”
She shrugged and dropped her eyes.
So it was dangerous. Kane looked hard at her skirt, as though he could see through it to the body beneath. Five days. He didn’t like the idea of waiting around in one place while she rested, but he didn’t want to put any more strain on her bleeding body than she could recover from. He’d done too much to her already, he knew. The piercings, all that invasive metal. The sex, the rough way he’d taken her. And he’d known better, damn him, he’d known it could kill a human! Now she was bleeding. Normal, she said, but there was such a thing as a trigger event.
But Heat was uncompromising, and the weather showed no signs of cooling. Kane was feeling the urge to hunt, to get his business done and get off this planet while luck was still with him. He couldn’t hunt without exposing himself to Heat; he couldn’t purge himself of Heat’s effects with Raven in this state, not unless he wanted to risk killing her.
For the first time, it came home to him exactly how it had felt to see that blood on the bedding, to think that he had killed her. Everything that followed, even his anger, had sprung from the same source, and if it had not been exactly fear, it had not been far from it. He didn’t want to lose her, and that being the truth, he needed to be careful.
“Get what you need,” he told her, already decided. He would let his Raven rest, build her strength as she struggled with this…period of hers. He would find another female for himself.
*
Fat Joey was just coming back to the center table with beers for the boys and so just happened to be looking out the window when the car pulled into Charlie’s lot and stopped. It didn’t park—that would have been strange enough—it just stopped, right there in the middle of the lot. It was blocking half a dozen bikes and both gang-owned cars, the SUV old Cook smuggled guns in and Heck’s busted-up Pontiac.
This car was fairly clean and fairly new, and was instantly and easily identified as not belonging to anyone in the Pack. Fat Joey, watching the car with the last full minute of completely relaxed interest he would ever experience, expected it to roll back and pull out again in the opposite direction. When the car’s engine actually stopped and a man stepped out of the passenger door, Fat Joey heard a low rumble of amusement from the brothers and knew he wasn’t the only one watching.
So this was good, he thought, setting down his beers and lowering his bulk into the comfortable recesses of his seat. It was hot as hell, even with Charlie’s ancient A/C grinding away in the window, and the boys were restless. Too hot to work, too hot to ride, hot enough that some of the low dogs had begun to bite at each other. Nothing rough yet, no knives, but that would change as soon as someone stupid went after one of the big dogs. A fight like that would be unthinkable in early spring or even winter—the Pack had been snowed in at Heck’s place for two and a half weeks once with no bloodshed—but it always seemed to happen in the summer. It was just the heat. The fucking heat.
Fat Joey glanced around the tables and booths at Charlie’s, taking a head count without consciously adding up numbers. He couldn’t have said how many of the Pack were present, but he knew they weren’t all there. Maybe a dozen low dogs, scrabbling at each other along the walls in the booths, ten brothers scattered out on the tables, and in the center of the bar, the Big Four: Fat Joey, Ratchet, the Cow-Boy, and Top Dawg himself, holding court over all. Apart from that, there were two bitches: Sue-Eye, who was almost as good as a brother when she had a knife in her hand, and Sheb’s bitch, Cammy. Sheb was down in So-Cal on a run, which made her the Dawg’s problem to pass out and he hadn’t named anyone yet, so Cammy was hanging close to the center table, not quite underfoot but close to it.
And then there was Charlie, tending bar and keeping one eye on the window and one hand close to the place he kept his shotgun. Old Charlie had been a brother, back in the day, and rode 66 with the Aces while the Dawg was still pissing diapers, and he was worth ten low dogs if it came to a fight. There were three bar whores working the booths in the heat, two of them former Pack-bitches, but Fat Joey didn’t count them. If it came to trouble, they might be allowed to jump in and spit on what was left of the guy when the Pack was done with him, but more than likely they’d be too busy spreading snatch for the victors.
Summer was like that—long days of nothing until your brains were half-baked and razor-edged with temper and then a quick fight, a good fuck, and back to nothing again. At least this time it was a stranger and not some Pack battle that could come back to kick you in the ass when summer was over and it was time to be brothers again.
The fella that had stepped out of the car was, at first glance, a joker in desperate need of getting the shit kicked out of him—a fucking weekend road warrior in oversized boots, black leather pants and a long leather coat that hung open on his bare chest. He wore a snap-brim fedora that shaded most of his face, especially the eyes. He had long faggoty hair, somewhere between yellow and brown, fine enough to snap out in the wake of each passing car. He wore his beard in that fucked-up fashion Fat Joey could distantly remember from history books, the kind that grew in low at the jaw, but left the chin completely bare. He looked like a movie-poster for one of those after-the-bomb shit-flicks.
The next thing you realized was that the motherfucker was huge, and when the Big Four saw that, they kind of quieted up and considered him again, even as the low dogs nudged each other and made faggot leather-boy jokes and got ready.
The stranger was in no hurry to come to the bar. He walked around the front half of his car and stood before the bank of bikes, the good ones, the ones the brothers rode, all gleaming chrome and glossy black. The man was big, taller than the Cow-Boy, which put him at maybe six-six or six-eight, and the fucker was broad. He had his full back turned to the bar and it was a big fucking back.