Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Nine

Kane felt pretty good for someone who hadn’t accomplished anything.

Raven had driven all day steadily east at his command, but the end of the land never came. It was a big block of land, Kane knew, having seen it from space. He’d had an idle interest in mapping it out from the perspective of one on the ground, but his curiosity had waned and now he was thinking about hunting again. When the sun hit its highest point, he ordered Raven to turn them around. Once they were back into the comfortable zone wherein his locator could sense his ship, he had her go north until night fell.

They hadn’t taken many breaks. Just to refuel now and then, or to get food and drink (they didn’t even have to stop for this. There were places that would hand the food in hot bags right through the groundcar’s window), or to pull into one of the many piss-stops that dotted Earth’s roads so that Raven could walk around a little. Kane, who was accustomed to sitting long shifts on the bridge of the Null with nothing to do and nothing to look at but space, handled the drive far better than his human pilot. She needed those rests, needed to stretch out and walk up and down the paths around the piss-stop rubbing her ass and her thighs. Kane walked beside her, safely disguised in his hellishly hot coat, and watched all the humans come and go with dopamine cooking in their little human heads.

The groundcar’s climate controls worked fairly well, but as the day wore on, Raven’s rests had become longer and longer. Kane gave her no orders. She was the pilot, after all, and if she needed walking to keep her head clear and thus keep them from flying off the road and into a tree, so be it. For the most part, they were back on their way soon enough that it didn’t matter. For the most part.

She’d lingered a little too long only once, and then actually tried to argue with him when he’d started to unfasten his pants. Something about being outside, where people could see. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, and elected only to punch her in the stomach instead of taking out a few teeth. He’d even pulled her off the path and out of sight before fucking her. And after that, for whatever reason, she’d been awfully good about taking shorter breaks.

The only stop he’d insisted they make was to bed down for the night in a motel rather than camp out in the woods, and she’d been perfectly amenable to that. The place they stopped wasn’t as secluded as the first one, but neither did it prove ‘tricky’. Raven had even managed to get a shaver from the manager, and she’d remembered to ask without any extra prompting from Kane. Most humans were at their best with a few bruises on them.

Now Kane lay on his back on the motel bed, one arm lazily pillowing his head, watching the thing Raven had called a ‘tee-vee’ and listening to water run in the other room. It had taken him some time to decode the controls, and it made him feel pleased and vaguely masterful to press a button on the device in his hand and see the image on the monitor change. So many buttons…

He supposed it was part of the human mentality, to have so many fingers and then build things complicated enough to need them all.

The function of the tee-vee, as near as Kane could deduce, was mainly entertainment. With few exceptions, the images shown followed along lucid, lateral storylines and Kane had a feeling most, if not all of them, were fictional. Jotan did this, although they didn’t use quite so many different channel feeds to do it. Kane thumbed through several feeds, studying each new program only long enough to get the gist of it before moving on, until he had seen every available feed twice and felt informed enough to pick one.

The feeds had a lot to teach about ways to use the human language, not to mention ways to use the humans themselves. Kane couldn’t help but think that if Uraktus had just had access to a tee-vee and few weeks to study it, he wouldn’t have bothered keeping quite so many slavesl. Or maybe he would have. Urak was funny that way. Unpredictable. And Kane had to admit, once she’d settled in a little, Raven was pretty low-maintenance.

The sounds of water drumming on the wall stopped suddenly. Kane could hear Raven moving about in the bathroom, and then there was quiet again. Every so often, the water would come on in a short burst. He wondered what in the hell she was doing in there, and ultimately decided her personal grooming practices couldn’t be as entertaining as the tee-vee.

The sun had finally sunk low enough to come in through the window, aggressively radiant and irritating to Kane’s eyes. He got up to shut the curtains, but lingered at the window for a little while, looking out at the road and watching groundcars whiz past, back and forth. He needed to think about work.

In a few hours, he decided. Once it was dark. After he’d had a chance to eat and shower, perhaps sleep a few hours with Raven secure beneath his arm. When it was cooler.

Kane returned to his place on the bed and found another program on the tee-vee. It looked extremely interesting but cut out after only a few minutes. Annoyed, Kane went around to the back of the monitor and had a look at the electrical system.

The technology on this planet was limited, simplistic. He found the crude circuit damper almost immediately, and after disconnecting the monitor from its power outlet, set about adjusting it. The hardest part was working the little metal fasteners out of the device’s outer case—he didn’t have any tools that fit the cross-cut heads and he ended up carefully cutting the back of the case away with the miniature laser normally used for spot-welding the hull of a ship—but once the inner wiring was exposed, Kane was in familiar territory. He didn’t have to worry about putting it back together so it looked nice, either, he just had to make it safe enough that it didn’t set the wall on fire and that was easy.

When he plugged everything in again, the program was back on the screen and Kane put his tools back in his pack and sat down to watch it.

The bathroom door opened and Raven emerged, wrapped in one of the white drying cloths. It was a little too small to be used as clothing; when she moved, the edges opened, revealing a long slice of pale flesh all the way from her thigh to the shadow of her breast. She hesitated by the foot of the bed, then walked past and over to the little table on the other side of the room.

He watched her go, feeling a pleasant sort of vague interest in her. “I want to see,” he said.

She turned around, keeping her eyes down, and unwrapped herself for him.

She’d done it. She was smooth and utterly hairless from the neck down. Her sex was pale, almost shiny with the rawness of it, plump and round and perfect. She let the towel fall and came to him when he snapped his fingers, standing with her legs slightly spread so that he could feel the softness of her.

“What’s the word for this?” he asked, almost by rote.

“There’s lots of names.”

“I only need one.”

Raven thought about it and finally shrugged. “Pussy, I guess.”

He repeated her, stroking the soft swell of her shaven sex, and finally gave her thigh a slap to send her away so that he could get back to the television. He was watching humans get ready to fuck and found it queasily fascinating. The way the females moved was dig-in-your-gut arousing but the way the male’s tsesac flopped around was downright nauseating. The male kept trying to eat the female’s breasts, but the female seemed to like it. Of course, humans didn’t have that many teeth, so…

The humans had finally quit rubbing their hands and mouths on each other and started really fucking. The male lay down for this, and the female mounted. This was normal enough—ah, the Flesh-halls of Jota!—but she mounted backwards, facing the male’s feet, and that was a surprise. Then again, she probably did it so the male couldn’t take a bite out of her breasts while she was working. The male’s eyes were closed but he kept reaching out for the place the breasts would be if the female were turned around and his mouth was opening and closing.

Kane glanced over at Raven. She was sitting at the table but had the chair turned so that she could see the television, too. Her drying cloth was lying draped over her lap. He found himself wondering idly what breasts tasted like, if maybe they were the best part of the human or what. He’d eaten human once or twice, when there’d been no other food, but it had disturbed him. Meat was meat, but he didn’t like food that could talk at you.

The female was riding her mate faster now and making a string of high, moaning sounds. Raven made sounds a little like that when he fucked her, but not often, and not with quite the same urgency. Finally, the male threw his head back with a grimace and the female raised off him so that his true-cum shot out against her thigh. The female turned around and they rubbed mouths some more. Then they started talking and Kane lost interest.

It occurred to him that although this was not the first time he’d seen Raven completely naked, he’d never really looked at her. When he’d had her in the shower, he’d been far more interested in what she was doing than in how she looked doing it, and it was usually dark when he had her in bed with him. He turned his head now so that he could study her. He was growing more accustomed to the roundness of her, the softness. It almost looked natural to see her curves all folding together as she sat there.

Completely exposed and in full light, he could see all her different colors. The brilliant white lengths of hair around her face that made her skin seem tan; the deep, gleaming violet of the rest of her hair that made her skin seem white. The pinkness of her lips, the little circles of black and blue set in all that white in her eyes. The little brown dots in the middle of her breasts. The gold glinting in the puckered dimple of her belly. If she spread her legs, he would see pink in the folds of her pussy. There were even little smudges of purplish-yellow here and there where he’d hit her.

Kane cocked his head as he noticed a dark mark high on Raven’s right arm. It didn’t look like any of the other bruises. Its outlines were blurred, but it maintained a strange symmetry nonetheless. It looked like a scar or a burned-in brand. Kevrian miners branded their slaves and left marks somewhat like that.

Kane sat up a little straighter and snapped his fingers.

Raven was on her feet at once. She came to the bed and started to kneel, already reaching for him.

He knocked her hand aside impatiently with his knee and took her arm, turning it so that he could get a better look at the mark. It was perfectly smooth and flush with her skin, which meant that it couldn’t be a brand. Brands either stood out or were cut in. He ran the very edge of one claw carefully over it, but although he raised a red line of irritation, none of it flaked off. “What is this?” he asked, puzzled.

“It’s called a tattoo. It’s like paint, only under the skin instead of on it.”

Sounds from the tee-vee distracted him. The male human was now outside in a field with two yellow-haired females. The females were both attempting to blow him at the same time, stopping often to mouth each other or to rub their breasts against the male’s cock.

Kane watched the females compete for the right to mount the male, again strongly reminded of the Flesh-halls of Jota, although the humans in the program were considerably less frenzied. They were almost playful as they pulled each other off the male, sucking at him and then tonguing each other. Finally, the smaller of the two females apparently won, but instead of mounting him, she turned and presented him with her hocks.

Kane let go of Raven’s arm and slid in closer to the monitor, frowning. The angle of the feed changed, coming in very close to show the pink folds of the female, and the male’s cock pushing into her even though he was still behind her. The image changed again to bring all three of them into view: the male fucking the female who was now licking and sucking at the other female’s pussy as she lay on the ground and rubbed her own breasts.

He looked curiously at Raven. “Have you ever done that?”

“No.” She watched the monitor with convincing indifference.

The humans were readjusting themselves. To Kane’s utter astonishment, the male lay on his back for one female to mount and allowed the second to position herself over his face. He could see the male’s tongue thrusting up at the female as the two rubbed mouths and ground their breasts together.

Kane looked sharply at Raven. “Do that,” he commanded.

“Which part?” she asked, studying the images on the screen.

“That…that thing those females are doing to each other.”

Raven reached up and squeezed her own breasts obediently, looking at him from the corner of her eyes. After a second or two, she rubbed her palms over them, first lightly, then harder. It made the circles in the center of them stand out, but that was the only difference Kane could see. Certainly, Raven wasn’t tossing her hair or keening like the humans on the monitor.

“Turn around,” he said. “Put your hands on the floor.”

She did, presenting her hocks, and yes, he could see the pink swell of her sex beneath her cloacae. Kane touched her with one finger, rubbing along her outer folds as he watched the humans on the tee-vee maneuver into yet another outlandish mode of fucking. It had to be some sort of instructional program. After all, Raven’d had to learn that thing she did with her mouth somewhere.

Kane slipped one finger inside her and felt her clench on him. She was tense, staring fixedly straight ahead, taking deep, slow, deliberate breaths. He regarded her, amused, thinking how fun it would be to give her just a little prick with the claw he’d sunk inside her, just to see her try not to jump. Instead, he pulled back and resumed stroking her. He just couldn’t get over how smooth she was without the hair.

On the monitor, the male had finally finished and a new scene began, but Kane turned the tee-vee off. With one hand, he continued to caress Raven’s newly-shaved pussy, and with the other, he traced the faded edges of the tattoo on her arm.

“What does it mean?” he asked at last.

“It’s supposed to be a coyote. That’s a kind of animal here on Earth that lives in the desert. Mangy, ugly, noisy animals. I think it’s stupid.”

She was leaning back into his hand a little. He wondered if she knew she was doing it.

“Why did you get it, then?” he asked, nudging her thighs a little further apart.

“I didn’t want to,” she explained.

Now she was trying to lean away from him. He caught her shoulder and pulled her firmly back, thrusting one finger up inside her as punishment and discovered she was wet. A quick glance at the dark face of the tee-vee showed him a mirror of her distress, all the mask-like resignation of her earlier compliance utterly gone. He could feel himself smiling.

“You’re not answering my question,” he said, making it a warning. He pumped his hand against her, holding her steady and straight-backed in place. He made it a point to thrust hard every time she squirmed. “Why did you get it, Raven?”

“There was a guy I was working for.” Her words were breaking up, her breath quickening. She looked completely miserable. “He made me get it.”

Kane thought about that as the slick walls of Raven’s pussy began to contract and spasm, coating his hand with oil. “Why?” he asked, pumping harder.

“D-don’t—” she whimpered, reaching back to try and push him away.

He stood up fast, yanking her off the ground so that all her weight was on his hand, snapping his arm around her shoulders to restrain her, and drove another finger into her, rocking her whole body in rhythm. She came explosively, kicking and slapping, but she came anyway.

“Don’t tell me don’t,” he said reasonably, and shook another series of spasms out of her. She was dripping, dripping off his hand, and she was crying. “Don’t do that, Raven. I don’t like it, and you ought to fucking well know that by now.”

“I-I’m suh-suh-ar-ree-ee,” she sobbed, clutching at his arm, still trying weakly to lift her hips away from him.

“I think I’ll make you do this all night,” he continued thoughtfully. “How would that be?”

All she could do was nod and cry.

“Stop making that noise. I can’t understand you when you do that.” He made her cum again, just to hear her trying not to wail as she composed herself, and then asked, “The tattoo, Raven. Why?”

It had been just a hell of a long time since he’d had this much fun.

“It wuh-us his name,” Raven said, swiping desperately at her face. “So everyone would kn-know I worked for h-him.”

Kane’s entire body stopped moving. Not just his hands, but his heart, his lungs, even his blood. An ugly heat cut upwards through him from his stomach to the back of his throat. “Say that again,” he said softly.

“His name.” She tried to look at him, but timidly, as if she didn’t quite dare. “His name was Coyote, like the animal, so he—”

Kane put her down and stepped around her. He picked up the towel she’d discarded earlier and wiped his hands, trying to sort out just what he was feeling and why. The urge to kill was a maddening itch in his hands and right behind his eyes, but it wasn’t Raven he wanted for a target. Just what he did want to do to Raven wasn’t quite clear, but one thing was extremely certain.

Kane turned around. “Get it off,” he said. He even managed to sound calm.

“I can’t,” she said, and threw up her arms, falling submissively to her knees as he came at her. “It’s under the skin! I can’t do it!”

He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back up, giving her a vicious shake and snarling, “I will cut it right the fuck out of you and don’t think for a second—”

“I can’t! I can’t! Please don’t kill me I can’t take it off!”

He shook her again to shut her up and roared, “Then who can?!” full into her face.

She pressed her lips together, staring at him with her huge eyes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, “I don’t know. Please. I don’t know.”

An idea came to him. Kane let go of her and took a step back. “Do you know where you can find another tattoo human?”

She blinked twice and cast a dazed look around at the table and the phone that was there. “I…I could find one,” she said.

“Do that. And then get dressed.” Kane sat down and picked up one of the oversized human boots. Another thought occurred. “Where is this human Coyote?” he asked.

Raven had found a large yellow book in the table and had it open already. She looked around at him, her fingers marking her place in the book. “Someone told me he got killed.” Hesitantly, she added, “They said he was shot in the stomach.”

Gut wound. Took a long time to die from that.

Kane felt better.

*

“This is it,” Raven said, pulling the car up to the curb before The Priestess of Ishtar Tattoo Parlor. It was 8:50, and according to the sign, the place closed at nine, but it didn’t look empty. Although it was difficult to see past the posters plastered over the windows, Raven thought there were still people moving around in there.

Kane only grunted, waited for her to kill the engine, and then unstrapped himself and let himself out. He slung his pack over his shoulder, glancing up and down the empty street, and then went on ahead of her without looking to see if she followed.

There was a moment, even now, when Raven thought of running. Sitting there in the car, in that heartbeat-fast flicker of time, she looked at her hand on the ignition of the stolen car and thought of turning the key, gunning the gas, and getting the hell out of Dodge. The wheels would make a sound like a woman screaming when she peeled away from the curb, the smell of rubber would drift up even inside, and she’d be thrown back by the momentum of her leave-taking.

Yeah. All of that. All of it, so intensely visualized that it was almost like a memory of something that had already happened…along with the thought-memory of Kane leaping onto the back of the car (his weight bumping her, unbuckled, half-out of her seat), the sound of his claws blackboard-scraping-shrill as they peeled back the roof and then, oh, probably a burning, heavy sensation as he hooked them under her chin like a fishing gaffe and hauled her out by her jawbone.

No. Escape was still a thought for her, but it was a fleeting thought, and it was ignored.

She got out of the car, slipped the keys into her back pocket, and ran a little to catch up with Kane before he decided he had to look for her, an action that would terminate in a sound slap for her when he found her.

The door chimed when he opened it, and a huge, painted mass of muscle seated in front of an ancient rotary fan said, “We’re closed, pal,” without looking up from his magazine.

Kane did him one better by not even looking to see who spoke. He held the door open at arm’s length until Raven ducked inside, and then turned around to close the door and lock it. He leaned close to the glass panes, checking up and down the street with a practiced eye, and then turned off the neon ‘Open’ sign and began to lower the window shades.

That made Raven a little queasy. The windows of the tattoo parlor were completely covered in posters from about arm’s-reach and down. The fact that Kane was covering them the rest of the way pretty much meant he’d already decided on doing something that would…splash.

The big man with the magazine watched all this with an expression of mild interest. “What the fuck are you doing?” he inquired at last, pleasantly.

Kane continued to ignore him.

Raven hugged herself uneasily, shifting her weight from foot and foot and wondering when this was going to get bloody. She no longer thought of this eventuality in terms of ‘if’, only ‘when’. Later was better than sooner, but at least with sooner it was over faster. Kane was methodically giving the store the appearance of non-function, which meant he intended for them to be here for a while. Just what else he intended was not entirely known to her, and the uncertainty made her nervous.

The parlor was small, made even smaller by a low, oriental-style screen that separated the little waiting area where the big man sat from the artist’s area, from which place Raven could hear a high-pitched whine like that of a dentist’s drill. There was one other door, which Kane opened, examined, and shut again. Closet or bathroom then, but definitely not an exit.

The big man finally stood up, tossing his magazine onto the chipped coffee table that cramped the waiting space, and loomed over Raven. She could see his eyes, murky blue and slightly unfocused, and she could smell the thick, green scent of some quality pot lingering around him like a hazy halo. “What’s his story, Violet?” he asked, thumbing back at Kane, still with an appearance of good humor, but now with a little menace as well.

“He’s from outer space and he’s going to kill you,” she told him.

Kane spun around fast and stared at her.

“Jesus Christ,” the big man sighed, and pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Why do they always crawl out after dark?”

Well. She’d tried. And she wasn’t entirely immune to the ominous narrowing of Kane’s eyes either, but a person could only be so freaked out before she just sort of numbed over. She shrugged a shoulder, avoiding Kane’s black stare until he grunted and turned away.

“What’s going on, Jack?” a woman called over the whine of machinery.

Kane went to peer over the top of the screen that split the room.

“Is this your ride?” Raven heard the same woman ask, and a man’s startled voice answered, “I’ve never seen him before.”

Kane smiled, not broadly, not enough to show his teeth, but a definite smile and with what seemed to be genuine appreciation. “You’re making…creating a tattoo? Remarkable.”

“What the hell else did you think we did here?” the big man asked, giving Kane’s back a look of exasperation before turning his irritation back on Raven. “Did you miss the sign? Does it say Priestess of Ishtar Burger Bar? Christ!”

“Please,” Raven said softly. “Please don’t make him mad.”

The big man did something with his arms that was not quite a wrestler’s flex, but was probably meant to be. “I can throw both your butts out of here one-handed,” he said, and then blinked. “Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be from outer space and gonna kill me. I remember. Hey, spaceman.”

Kane turned his head just enough to look back and meet the big man’s eyes.

“You’re trespassing, you know that? It is after hours and we are closed. Now you want to take your high ass out of here right now, before I knock it into next week for you.” The big man flexed again.

Kane studied him in silence, then looked back over the separating screen again. “Did you do the tattoos on this man’s arms as well?” Raven heard him ask.

“Who, Jack?” the unseen woman answered. “Some of it.”

The big man, Jack, Raven guessed, actually gaped at Kane’s back for a few seconds. “Hey, fucker, I’m talking to you!”

“Settle down, Jack!” the woman called. She sounded annoyed, but tolerant. She’d probably been hearing his stoned-out hostility for quite some time. “Jesus, go roll a blunt or something. You can watch me finish up,” she added, in a lower voice. “But if you want something on you, you’re going to have to make an appointment because we really are closed.”

Raven edged back a few steps and sat down in one of the grungy chairs in the cramped waiting area. Kane glanced at her at the first movement, but only watched long enough to see that she wasn’t moving toward the door. Then he went back to staring over the screen.

After a while, Jack the painted man came back and thumped into his chair. He picked up his magazine, flipped through it, muttered a little, then slapped it back down and stood up again. “Hey, Violet,” he said.

Raven thought she was probably supposed to be nervous at the tone of his voice, but she couldn’t quite muster it up. This guy, this baked-out idiot who didn’t even know he was already dead, could not begin to provide the kind of aggression it took to make her nervous these days. She looked up at his unfocused eyes and rubbed her arms.

“You think you’re some kind of hot shit, don’t you?” the big man said. He advanced on her a step. “You and the spaceman over there just walk on in and start closing the fucking store. No big deal, huh? No big fucking deal.” He came another step, enough to practically stand on her toes and loomed over her for a few seconds, glaring, before he pivoted and went for Kane. “Hey, spaceman,” he called. “Your girlfriend says you’re gonna kill m—”

Kane turned, reached back with an absentminded air, and caught the big man by his long, shaggy hair. He yanked Jack down before the man could make a sound, dug in his claws, and snapped the back of the skull off as easily as if the human came with hinges. The yellowish part of the brain came with it and Kane leaned it into the crook of his arm as he opened his pack and got out the funky syringe he used to extract…whatever he was extracting. He did it casually, looking over the top of the partition as the sound of the drill broke off.

“Jack?” The woman’s voice again. “What was that? What’s going on?”

Raven huddled back into her sagging chair, hugging herself and trying to rub the gooseflesh out of her skin. The sight of the man’s brain sliding slowly out of the cavity of his head, crumbling gelatinously as it emptied, still had the power to sicken, but it not as vividly as it once had. She supposed pretty soon she’d be almost as used to it as Kane himself.

Now that thought was truly horrifying.

Kane’s machinery hummed for a few seconds and pale liquid pumped out into the attached vial. He ejected the used-up gland and turned around just as a tall, black-haired woman came around the screen. She saw the dead man as Kane dropped him to the floor, but she didn’t scream. She took a swift step back and slashed the thin pen-like needle through the air at Kane’s throat.

Kane caught her wrist, bent it, and let the needle fall from her fingers into his palm. He eyed it with interest. “You create the image…the tattoo, with just this?”

“What’s going on?” the other voice pressed, and another man came around the woman’s side, grasping at his shoulder, bright red and swollen, dripping two thin trails of ink and blood.

Kane looked him up and down as the man gaped around him, obviously struggling to take in the meaning of the dead body and the broken bit of skull. When the man opened his mouth again, Kane reached out and punched in his throat.

The man dropped to his knees, emitting a bubbly “haaaaa” that should have been a scream from the hole in his neck. He looked more confused than anything else. Raven looked away.

The black-haired woman stepped back as far as she could with her wrist still trapped in Kane’s grip, which did nothing but attract Kane’s attention again. He pulled her back, gave her a little shake, and said, “Look at me.”

She did, flinching, her hand clenching and flexing above his.

Kane made a motion with his other hand, the one holding the woman’s ink-gun, and Raven fairly ran to stand beside him. He turned her with one claw, pulling the sleeve of her shirt up and displaying the smudgy circle of howling coyote to the other woman’s frightened eyes. He tapped the very center of Raven’s faded tattoo. “I want this removed,” he said.

“I can’t.” The woman tried again to step back.

Kane’s eyes narrowed and Raven looked nervously up at him and gave him room, but the woman was already rushing to stammer out a rambling explanation of ink and human skin and lasers.

Kane cocked his head to one side, his eyes darting back and forth rapidly, as though reading the words in the air. Without warning, he released the woman’s arm and slapped her crisply across the mouth.

She staggered back, crashed into the separating screen, and slid to the floor with her legs bent painfully beneath her. She put one trembling hand to her mouth and looked up at Kane with huge, little-girl eyes.