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Chapter Sixteen

Kane came around slow, his mind calm and syrupy with sleep. Light was coming in around the heavy drapes, and with it, the ever-present heat. He should get up now, switch on that rattling bastard of a climate-regulator, and avoid Heat for a few precious hours. It was a tempting thought to stay where he was another day, but time was trickling by as steadily as it ever did, and he knew he had to hunt.

Later, he thought. Later.

His hand splayed flat against Raven’s belly and he felt the metal he had put in her beneath his touch. He smiled, his eyes still shut, and pulled her against him. His Raven. His fascinating, ferocious, fuckable little Raven.

The scent of blood was in his nostrils. Kane opened his eyes and looked down, seeing first the deep lacerations on her shoulder where he’d bit her the night before. He really had to remember not to do that again. And he’d better do something about it now, he realized. With all the metal he’d put in her, she’d probably take very easy to infection.

He sat up and threw back the thin bedding, meaning to fetch his pack and stir up some antibiotics, and his whole body locked up tight.

There was blood on the sheets. Blood all over the sheets, spreading out from Raven’s hips.

Kane’s voice ripped from him in a roar, snapping Raven out of sleep. She started to roll towards him, but he was already in motion. He seized the bedding and tore it away from her in shreds, then pushed her back on her face and tried to see how bad the damage was. He had no surgical gear, none at all. Damn him, she was going to bleed out and die!

“What the—?” Raven reached down between her thighs and looked at the blood painting her fingers. “Oh,” she said.

“Lie still,” Kane told her, his heart racing. What did he have? What could he use? There wasn’t so much blood, really. It was still wet, she must have been bleeding all night, but it wasn’t a heavy flow. There had to be a way to dress the wound. To cauterize and close it, if nothing else.

“Kane, it’s okay,” Raven was saying. “This is normal.”

He gaped at her. His N’Glish was good, but that just couldn’t be what she’d meant to say.

“It’s not what you think,” she said, and gently pulled out of his grip. “This doesn’t have anything to do with last night. This is something else.”

Something else. Kane’s thoughts leapt first to disease, to the hemorrhagic fevers the mining laborers often caught. That he could fix. He sprang from the bed for his pack. When he turned around, Raven had wiped herself clean with a handful of sheets and had spread her thighs to show him the source of the bleeding.

Kane stared, physically dizzied by confusion. Slowly, he put his pack back on the hotel table. “Did…did something tear?” he asked. His eyes flicked to the bed, but he saw no metal ornaments free on the sheets.

“No,” she said. “It’s normal.”

He couldn’t process that, couldn’t understand how his clever Raven could even say something like that. “Bleeding is not normal,” he argued. “It’s never normal.” He regarded her with growing suspicion. “What are you hiding from me?” he demanded. And what had she exposed him to, knowing this disease was rooted inside her as he fucked her?

She saw the expression on his face and seemed thrown by it. She looked down at herself, daubed again at the slowly-welling blood, and then looked around the room as though for help. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” she said. “But I can prove it.”

“How?”

Raven got up from the bed and started to dress herself. “You’re going to have to trust me, Kane. This is perfectly normal, and I can prove it.”

Kane followed her into the privy and watched, his guts in turmoil, as she wadded up tissues and staunched the flow of blood. She looked nervous, he thought, but how much of that was due to the hemorrhaging and how much to him, he couldn’t know. “Prove it,” he said finally.

“I can’t here,” she said. “We need to go to the store.” She turned to face him, her gaze steady and her chin bravely raised.

“If you’re lying to me, I am going to rip you open,” he said quietly, and he meant every word. His affection for her had congealed into a molten weight in his gut. The scent of blood was cloying in his nostrils; it was the smell of betrayal. If this was disease, then she’d hidden it from him hoping to have her vengeance by infecting him, and he meant to see her repaid.

She swallowed hard, but she never dropped her gaze. “I know.”

Kane held her with his eyes a minute longer, and then he turned and swiftly stalked away to dress. He shouldered his pack and went to the door, snapping his fingers for her to follow.

The heat of day beat down on him in a fury, but Kane scarcely felt it beyond his own churning emotion. He was primed for rage, holding it at arm’s reach by the merest shred of will. He did not believe her. He could not believe her. But he saw no lie in her eyes.

Kane sat silent and grim as death as Raven drove them away from the motel. He stared into the side of her face, tasting her edgy fear and her blood in every slow breath he took.

The place she called a ‘store’ was a great warehouse of a building, cool inside and brightly-lit, and stocked to the bursting point with goods, much of it food. Raven led him past several aisles of bright packages. She did not look around at him; her step was steady and sure. She glanced up at the director boards hanging over each double-row of shelves and finally aimed herself down one, Kane right on her heels.

At the very end of the aisle, she stopped. She took a thin, blue-colored box off the shelf before her and handed it to him. It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that he might not be able to read human, and in point of fact, Kane could, but it took a considerable effort to turn the alien characters before him into readable words. “Security plus,” he muttered, his eyes narrowed almost to slits as he grappled with the sideways writing. “Flexible to prevent leaks. Un…scented.”

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.”