Kane set his pack on the table, slid his finger down the seam to open it, and tinkered with the computer that unfolded. He went to Raven’s side with the knife-edged syringe-thing and bent over her. “Is this much pain normal?” he asked.
Christ, like she had cancer or something.
“I’m okay,” she heard the bitch say. “Really.”
“Arguing with me is a good way to break a bone,” he replied, and Sue-Eye heard, beneath the overt threat of the words, a tone of real affection. “Be still.” He took the blood he’d drawn back to the table and sat down as he stuck it into the top of his computer.
Sue-Eye stood by the TV, working at her water bottle and watching both of them. She could still feel air itching between his claw and her naked eye. She could still smell the coppery stink of blood curdling in the heat as it soaked into Charlie’s floorboards. She was drifting along behind the killer. She had to get back on solid ground.
“You hungry?” Sue-Eye asked, addressing the bitch. The best way into dark places was on tip-toe; the best way to earn the monster’s trust was through his bitch. “I never been in a place with room service before. Bet you they put on a mean spread. And no offense because I know you did your best, but granola bars aren’t going to help you much.”
She put a little extra stress on the ‘you’ in that last remark, knowing that Kane would hear it, knowing he’d think whatever he thought about the girl’s bleeding and wonder what she needed to be eating.
Raven smiled, a pitiful shine of gratitude and relief. ‘Sure thing, sugar,’ thought Sue-Eye stonily. ‘I’ll keep all kinds of secrets for now. He wouldn’t turn on you anyway. Not until he gets to know me better.’
“I’m starved,” Raven said. “And I could really use a Coke.” Her eyes went suddenly to Kane, who was loading a vial into the gadget he’d used to ‘clean’ Sue-Eye with the night before. “Am I sick?” she asked, alarmed.
“Just a precaution.”
“It’s not…” Raven’s voice took on a note of unease and she pressed herself back a few inches into the headboard almost without seeming to be aware of it. “It’s not that…pain stuff you gave me, is it?”
Sue-Eye glanced at Kane in time to see him grin broadly. The expression was strangely at home on his killer’s face, and made him, just for that instant, more formidable than ever. There was nothing more intrinsically terrifying to Sue-Eye’s mind than the Devil with a sense of humor.
“So you do remember that.” Kane stood up and went to the bed, moving with a panther’s step and a wicked smile. He snapped his teeth and Raven flinched hard, prompting hearty laughter. “But no. No, it isn’t. Maybe later,” he said.
Kane emptied the contents of his instrument into Raven’s arm and then sat on the edge of the bed, studying her piercings one at a time.
Sue-Eye found the kitchen’s number and a printed menu on a card by the phone and dialed. She ordered steaks for her and Raven, and a surf and turf for Kane (nothing but the best for the Alpha male), along with a pitcher of Coke for the bitch. The cost was obscene, but they had plenty of cash after stripping the Pack at Charlie’s. When she hung up the phone, Kane was staring at her.
Being under that empty eye was like being under a knife. His face was hard, indifferent; he studied her body with a penetrating and impersonal attention utterly devoid of even the most abstract form of lust. His hand was at his groin, the claws flexing sometimes, the heel of his palm sometimes pushing at the bulge concealed there in a gesture of angry constraint. She’d been fucked by men before who didn’t care who they had as long as she had two tits and a tight snatch, but she’d never seen such a chilling lack of interest in any man’s eyes before.
“Let me look at you,” he said finally.
Sue-Eye shrugged out of her jacket—too hot to wear anyway—and pulled her top off. Her bare breasts were fuller than Raven’s, still firm in spite of the years’ hard use, and the crawling of her skin under Kane’s gaze had pushed her nipples out stiff as spikes.
For the first time, Sue-Eye saw a man who wasn’t the least bit interested in tits. Kane’s eyes went directly to the bleeding heart tattoo between them and his expression darkened.
“What does that mean?” he asked, his voice no more than an animal growl.
“It means, shoot there and I die,” she said calmly.
He eyed her suspiciously. “It’s not a name?”
“No.” Johnny Lobo had put it on her himself. So he had a target, he said, if she ever got out of line. Kane was looking at it now, his gaze flat and assessing. It was almost the same way Johnny Lobo had looked that night, straddling her in the filthy chair with the needle in his hand. She’d believed it was an act of love back then. God, what an idiot.
“I have others,” Sue-Eye said, as much to shut off that corner of her memory as to recapture Kane’s attention. She picked off her boots and shucked out of her jeans, turning around to show Kane the barbed wire wings stretching out over the crack of her ass.
“Hunh.” Kane’s claws scratched lightly at the markings, but when Sue-Eye glanced over her shoulder, she saw his gaze resting back on Raven. “I like this. Does it have a meaning?”
“Yeah,” she said dryly. “It means, ‘Hey look, I got a tattoo over my ass.’”
Kane laughed.
“It also means I blew a hundred bucks while I was stone drunk, which ironically is what this one means, too.” She pulled her panties down and showed him the arcing, golden sun tattooed around her belly button.
Kane’s eyes sparked fire and he leaned forward to get a better look. “I like that,” he said, almost grimly.
“Good. Because the only thing pierced about me are my ears.” She gave the stud in her left a dismissive flick. “You can put more in me if you want.”
Kane merely grunted and leaned back. He nodded at her panties and she rolled them off and stepped out of them. He drew back in disgust at once. “That comes off,” he said, his lips pulled back in a snarl.
Sue-Eye nodded, inwardly annoyed. What was his problem with bush?
His computer sounded loudly and Kane glanced at the screen, his lips moving in a humorless smile. His gaze lit on her again, tracking slowly up from her cunt to her face, and finally locking with Sue-Eye’s. “That’s for you,” he said. “You’re clean.”
She felt clean. Not just sober, which she hadn’t been more than a few hours at a time in the last six years, but clean. Her head was clear, her body felt strong; nothing burned or itched or ached. She had all her concentration with which to plan her answer.
“Thanks,” she said. “I feel great.”
He arched a brow at her.
“You don’t believe me? What can I do to prove it?” she asked, placing one hand on her naked hip.
“Nothing, yet.” His smile faded and he threw a glare out the window at the sun, his hand stealing to his crotch again and rubbing restlessly. He rose from the bed, glanced once at Raven, who had watched the whole inspection in guarded silence, and returned to his computer. “Drink something.” Spiky characters scrolled down the screen in columns as he began to work.
Sue-Eye picked up her top and crawled back into it, telling herself not to feel as irritated by his disinterest as she was. It was a good start. He liked her tattoos, he’d laughed at her joke, and he was talking to her. There was solid ground here somewhere. She was going to find it. She zipped up her jeans, leaving her panties discarded on the floor, and went to get another bottle of water.
It tasted even warmer and staler than the first, and her body didn’t want to take it. She sipped anyway, giving Raven a sister’s sour look as she drank.
“He gets nervous,” Raven whispered when Sue-Eye returned to the bed. “I think whatever he does to us is pretty dehydrating. I got really sick.”