Cain let out a sound Kati could only hear as a monster-movie special effect-a dinosaur growl or a lion or something. He spread his thighs, bumping her into a slightly different position, angled her hips up and suddenly Kati was in a whole new world of fucking. “Are you here?” she heard him ask coolly, from somewhere out beyond the blindness of this wrenching carnal fire.

Kati felt her first orgasm, her first real one. Not just a little shiver and a gasp, or that rosy warm glow she’d always thought were orgasms. No, this was a clenching, stabbing furnace-blast, every bit as painful as it was pleasurable. Kati writhed helplessly in its grip, fighting to escape it as much as to hold on to it, her mind blasted white by sensation.

Above her, Cain snarled out that monster-movie sound again and he hooked her again in those hands that did not have claws, did not have just the three fingers. His entire body locked up rock-hard. He thrust three times more, each more brutal than the last, and finally came. Katie felt the jet of it drumming up inside her and experienced a full-body sexual explosion, something so unreal and intense that for a while there, she felt eerily as though her soul had floated completely out of her, hovered around for a while looking at the trees, and then sank back down and sewed itself back to flesh.

She lay limp. Spent, as they say in bad books, but that was such a temporary-sounding word. Spent was something that happened to money, and it only took a trip to the ATM to get it back. Kati wasn’t spent. She was wilted. She was hollowed-out and burnt. She wasn’t dead, maybe, but she was in that soap-opera coma that leads there. Spent, ha. She was fucking bankrupt.

A scraping sound off to her left provided just enough motivation for Kati to open her eyes. Cain was up, dressed, and getting his suitcase packed again.

“What’s your hurry?” she asked sleepily, and stretched out an arm to tug at his boot. “Come on down here, baby.”

He glanced at her, smiling thinly, and pulled his foot out of her grip. “Baby,” he echoed, as though tasting the word, and then shook his head. “Heat’s done. It’s time for me to hunt.”

“Aw, come on, be a nice guy.”

“I’m such a nice guy—” Cain dropped to his hunkers and gave her a chuck to the chin that made Kati giggle. “—I’ll even leave you alone. I know, I know, I’m too sentimental. Stay here, Kati. Get some sleep.”

“I’m not tired,” she mumbled, rolling onto her side to play with his boot laces. “Will you take me with you when you go?”

“Why?”

“This is a dead party.”

Cain laughed, shouldering his pack. “Yes,” he said. “It will be. But I have all the flesh I need. More, in fact, than I even want.”

“I’m better than either of them.”

“No, I hate to hurt your feelings, but you’re really not.” He hunkered down again, pinched her chin between his thick thumb and fingers and gave her head a playful little shake. “Friendly advice, little fuck-mate. Get away from that shit you’re taking. The only door in that long hall opens on men like me.”

“I like you.” She caught his wrist and tugged at it hopefully, giving him her best bedroom eyes from the dry woodsy ground.

He smiled again, but it was a distracted thing. His attention was wandering back up the path to the clearing, and he stood up, pulling easily out of her grip. “Close your eyes, Kati,” he said, turning his back on her. “Count to a thousand.”

She could hear him walking away before she even got to five, but that didn’t matter. She’d show him she was good and he’d come back and get her. When he was done hunting big game in northern Nevada, that was.

Forty-one. Forty-two. Something popped, like a pine-knot in a fire. The boys, dumb shits that they were, making that damn bonfire now that she wasn’t there to stop them. (To wonder how she’d be able to hear a popping pine-knot from where she now lay did not and would never occur to her.) It wasn’t gunfire. Gunfire was louder, Kati knew that. She went to the movies.

Seventy-nine. Eighty. Eighty-one. Pop-pop. Someone screamed. Sounded like Tabby. Cumming from her toes, most likely; that wasn’t a splashing-in-the-river scream. It made Kati smile, thinking of Cain. That first thrust, splitting her, filling her.

One hundred and five. One hundred and six. Another scream, this one masculine. She couldn’t tell who. Probably one of the cousins or whoever was with Tabby. God, she wished Cain would come back. She was ready for round two.

No more screaming all through the one hundreds, all through the two hundreds. Kati was so good. She didn’t get up, didn’t lose count, didn’t fall asleep.

At five hundred and thirty six, Riffer’s CD ran out of music. No one started it up again.

Eight hundred, and Kati got up to pee, keeping a steady count as she crouched in the bushes and keeping her eyes tight shut to hold to the spirit of Cain’s command.

The nine hundreds were the longest, and she kept getting distracted by little sounds—trees creaking, leaves fluttering, bird calls. Where were all the big sounds, the people sounds?

One thousand. Kati got up and wandered back up the path to the clearing. Owen and Corky were still in the grass, sound asleep where they’d finished, still head-to-toe, although Corky had rolled onto her back at least. Her arm was dangling out into the path. Kati had to step over it.

Nothing moved in the clearing. The boombox was silent. Riffer was lying on his back just staring at the sky. Danny and one of the cousins were stretched out and stone drunk nearby. They’d torn their legs up in some blackberry bushes or something. Pretty bad, too. They’d gotten blood all the way up into their hair.

“Guys?” Kati called. She got a beer out of the cooler and squeezed the top off. There was no splashing by the river, no nothing. And Cain and his two girlfriends were gone.

“He’ll come back,” she said. She sat down on the party log and drank her beer. It was a really dead party. Summer sucked.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-Three

Daria spent the morning alone and filled her empty hours with cleaning. The obvious stuff first—sweeping, mopping, vacuuming—which led to the less obvious stuff—washing the cupboard faces, scrubbing the kick plates, wiping down Grendel’s food mat—and finally to the ridiculously obscure stuff—polishing doorknobs and switchplates. She was dusting her DVDs when the depression caught up to her and she stopped where she was, right in the middle of the Lord of the Rings collection, and sat down on the sofa.

The silence of the house was claustrophobic. She’d been living here alone for six years. Why hadn’t she ever noticed how claustrophobic silence was? She picked up the TV remote and switched it on.

It was a news channel, which was refreshing for the second it took to absorb what she was seeing. A young girl, maybe in her twenties, in the midst of about a thousand reporters, was being taken up some steps into a very official-looking building. One of the journalists, a fella who looked even younger than his disheveled subject, thrust his microphone out and shouted, “Miss Markham, Miss Markham, did you do it?”

‘Sure, fella, like she’s going to admit it on national television,’ Daria thought heavily.

“I guess so,” the girl said, at virtually the same time. The clamor of voices died at once and cameras started clicking madly away. The girl looked dazedly around her, oblivious to the two men in suits who were frantically hissing at her. “I dreamed that bible guy came to me. Maybe he told me to.”

The screen cut to a nice, neat newsroom, with a nice, neat newscaster behind a desk. “Markham’s lawyer has not yet indicated the line of his defense, but the District Attorney’s office has stated that they will be seeking the death penalty if she is convicted. Authorities in the area surrounding Sugarush have issued a warning on the dangers of drug abuse following the killings. Suspect Katrina Markham was allegedly under the influence of alcohol and other drugs when she was discovered with the bodies, including gamma-hydroxymethlyene, colloquially known as Baked Alaska, a powerful hallucinogen known for its euphoric effects.”