The Devil said he wouldn’t kill her if she behaved herself. He said they had an understanding. He’d hit her, but only when she fought him and not as hard as he could have hit her. He said he wanted to keep her around as long as he could. Just how long that would be, she had no way of knowing, but she did know how she’d be spending her time.

On impulse, Raven fished in her jacket pocket for the plastic baggie that had held her going-away present. She’d been trading ass and grass all the way up the west coast, but there was still one joint left, and this was definitely time. Raven could do what she had to do to stay alive, but she didn’t want to have to face it sober. Raven lit up with shaking hands and took a deep drag.

Instantly, the arm around her middle tightened and the Devil’s eyes were on her once more. Raven looked back at him, hardly breathing, holding the smoke down deep in her lungs as if to protect it from him. She saw his nostrils flare, and then he reached up and plucked the joint from her fingers. He pinched out the embers, tossed it away, and then returned his arm to her waist and shut his eyes.

Raven exhaled as slow as she could, willing her mind to gentle itself on just one drag. She could see the white line of the joint lying in the dirt within easy reach, but she did not dare to reach for it. He hadn’t bothered to punish her for smoking, but now his thoughts on the matter were known, and if she picked that doobie up, he’d probably break her hand for her.

Oh Christ, this was bad. How did this get so fucking bad?

The urge to tremble came on her again, and this time, she couldn’t quite crush it. She could do what the Devil wanted, she knew she could, but ah God, she wanted to be stoned when she did it.

“Lie still,” the Devil growled, not even opening his eyes.

Raven tried, but clenching her fists only made the shivering more pronounced. Her heart was racing. Panic had got its claws in her at last.

Beside her, there came a short, hard sigh, the sound that experience told her would probably precede a short, hard slap. “I am very tired,” the Devil said. “And you are starting to annoy m—”

Sudden silence. He had opened his eyes, and something in the sight of her shut him right up. His arm came away from her and he sat up, catching her jaw and peering very closely into her face.

“Chok-se y vok!” he snarled, and sprang away.

That didn’t sound good. Raven tried to take a breath, calm herself, but her lungs were locked. Something was wrong. Raven’s feet began to drum on the ground. Her left arm swept out suddenly and smashed into a tree root hard enough to scrape her knuckles bloody. Her heart was slamming into her ribs; she could actually feel herself rocking with the force of its blows. She tried to scream, but the effort produced only a whistling gasp.

The Devil came back into the frozen field of her sight, but she couldn’t focus on him. Even her eyes were shaking now, jittering around in their sockets as a terrible pressure began to build behind them. Any second now, she was going to feel them explode out of her head. Dear God, she was going to see it!

The Devil swung a leg over her, straddling her chest, rapidly mixing something up from the little glass vials in his pack. There was a grim shard of light in each of his terrible eyes as he worked. “Try to be calm,” he told her, his teeth bared and set. He looked once, furiously, at the scorched joint lying on the ground and then took the vial he’d mixed and inserted it into the rodlike thing he’d injected her with earlier.

Raven’s body was bucking. The weight of the creature atop her was enough to keep her pinned to the ground, but her limbs flailed wildly. In horror, she saw one of her own hands fly up in a hard jerk and strike the Devil in the face.

He didn’t even flinch. “This is going to hurt,” he said, leaning over her with his device in his three-clawed hand. “A lot.”

Raven tried to nod, but succeeded only in starting a seizure wild enough to knock her head against the ground over and over. Without warning, she retched. Foam spewed sluggishly from between her clenched teeth, the rest slid back into her throat in a choking clot.

The Devil leapt up at once, shoved her on her side and gave her one hell of a whack between the shoulderblades. This dislodged only a tiny spray of vomit from the mass clogging her mouth. Her lungs kept working, trying to breathe it back in. Her vision was graying, neon spots exploding in space before her eyes.

She was dying.

Oh, thank God.

“Chok,” the Devil snarled again. His claws invaded her mouth, prying her locked jaws apart.

Bile poured from her as from a faucet, but she couldn’t cough to clear her throat. She couldn’t even tell if she were breathing or not.

There was a dull hissy sound as the Devil put his surgical tool to her throat and pulled the trigger.

The pain was immediate, fuming out from the base of her neck and quickly engulfing her whole body. She fell limp almost at once, suspended bonelessly in a sea of rolling fire so complete she could actually smell the fat in her flesh popping as she cooked.

The Devil rolled her onto her back, and drove his mouth hard over hers. He breathed, bludgeoning her with air. Her lungs rebelled and she retched again. He was expecting it, and had her turned so that she could breathe afterwards. He was already mixing something else for her, muttering to himself in a coarse and guttural language.

The second injection caught her right at the base of her skull, stabbing inwards and upwards, freezing her brain and briefly turning everything she saw bright pink.

Then it faded. It all faded.

Raven fell down through the ground and out into darkness, blessedly black, blessedly cool. She lost track of her body, she lost all the power to speak or think. She was alone with her pain, her fear, and her mother’s voice, asking that question that Mary Frances Carter had long ceased to have power to answer.

Why, baby? Mary, why?

The reply came out of the blackness, his voice echoing in the empty that matched his awful eyes.

Why not?

*

‘Well, boy…’ Urak’s voice swam up from the back of Kane’s brain, speaking in precisely that tone of calm that usually preceded one hell of a storm. ‘What went wrong?’

“I don’t know,” Kane said wearily.

Imagination or no, Kane’s head actually rocked back with the non-force of the slap with which his father would have greeted that answer.

‘She nearly died,’ Uraktus went on, disapproval darkening every word. ‘Don’t you think you’d ought to know why?’

It was the smoke. Kane was almost sure of it. The smoke from that paper wrap, or more accurately, from whatever drug was burnt inside it.

‘So a taste of one of the poisons you are even now filtering from her body set her off.’ Urak’s black incredulity was undimmed by death, his voice quieting in the way it had just before his father lost his temper. ‘Say it again, boy. I need to know you really meant it.’

Damn him.

“I didn’t run a cross-reaction check before I injected her,” he said, and scowled down at the wan and twisted face of his sleeping human. He was so disgusted with himself he could hardly stand it. He’d mixed up the filters for all those different toxins, programmed the nanozymes, and just plugged it right into her. Just as though he’d never done it before, never practiced on all those slaves, never had a father who trained him to do it.

‘You need to start making a habit of thinking.’ The voice of his father was scathing, and dead or not, he could still make Kane want to fidget. ‘Wanting to fuck is not excuse enough to make a mistake that basic.’

Kane thought it was a damned good excuse, actually, but he was still angry with himself. Not with his human; even if the stolen breath of poison had brought the fit on, he couldn’t be angry at her for it. She couldn’t know any better, and there was no point in punishing her for ignorance. Rules and punishments made a human docile, but knocking one around whether it had misbehaved or not was a really good way to piss it off, and a pissed-off human was capable of anything.