“Then you can die from it.”

She shrugged and dropped her eyes.

So it was dangerous. Kane looked hard at her skirt, as though he could see through it to the body beneath. Five days. He didn’t like the idea of waiting around in one place while she rested, but he didn’t want to put any more strain on her bleeding body than she could recover from. He’d done too much to her already, he knew. The piercings, all that invasive metal. The sex, the rough way he’d taken her. And he’d known better, damn him, he’d known it could kill a human! Now she was bleeding. Normal, she said, but there was such a thing as a trigger event.

But Heat was uncompromising, and the weather showed no signs of cooling. Kane was feeling the urge to hunt, to get his business done and get off this planet while luck was still with him. He couldn’t hunt without exposing himself to Heat; he couldn’t purge himself of Heat’s effects with Raven in this state, not unless he wanted to risk killing her.

For the first time, it came home to him exactly how it had felt to see that blood on the bedding, to think that he had killed her. Everything that followed, even his anger, had sprung from the same source, and if it had not been exactly fear, it had not been far from it. He didn’t want to lose her, and that being the truth, he needed to be careful.

“Get what you need,” he told her, already decided. He would let his Raven rest, build her strength as she struggled with this…period of hers. He would find another female for himself.

*

Fat Joey was just coming back to the center table with beers for the boys and so just happened to be looking out the window when the car pulled into Charlie’s lot and stopped. It didn’t park—that would have been strange enough—it just stopped, right there in the middle of the lot. It was blocking half a dozen bikes and both gang-owned cars, the SUV old Cook smuggled guns in and Heck’s busted-up Pontiac.

This car was fairly clean and fairly new, and was instantly and easily identified as not belonging to anyone in the Pack. Fat Joey, watching the car with the last full minute of completely relaxed interest he would ever experience, expected it to roll back and pull out again in the opposite direction. When the car’s engine actually stopped and a man stepped out of the passenger door, Fat Joey heard a low rumble of amusement from the brothers and knew he wasn’t the only one watching.

So this was good, he thought, setting down his beers and lowering his bulk into the comfortable recesses of his seat. It was hot as hell, even with Charlie’s ancient A/C grinding away in the window, and the boys were restless. Too hot to work, too hot to ride, hot enough that some of the low dogs had begun to bite at each other. Nothing rough yet, no knives, but that would change as soon as someone stupid went after one of the big dogs. A fight like that would be unthinkable in early spring or even winter—the Pack had been snowed in at Heck’s place for two and a half weeks once with no bloodshed—but it always seemed to happen in the summer. It was just the heat. The fucking heat.

Fat Joey glanced around the tables and booths at Charlie’s, taking a head count without consciously adding up numbers. He couldn’t have said how many of the Pack were present, but he knew they weren’t all there. Maybe a dozen low dogs, scrabbling at each other along the walls in the booths, ten brothers scattered out on the tables, and in the center of the bar, the Big Four: Fat Joey, Ratchet, the Cow-Boy, and Top Dawg himself, holding court over all. Apart from that, there were two bitches: Sue-Eye, who was almost as good as a brother when she had a knife in her hand, and Sheb’s bitch, Cammy. Sheb was down in So-Cal on a run, which made her the Dawg’s problem to pass out and he hadn’t named anyone yet, so Cammy was hanging close to the center table, not quite underfoot but close to it.

And then there was Charlie, tending bar and keeping one eye on the window and one hand close to the place he kept his shotgun. Old Charlie had been a brother, back in the day, and rode 66 with the Aces while the Dawg was still pissing diapers, and he was worth ten low dogs if it came to a fight. There were three bar whores working the booths in the heat, two of them former Pack-bitches, but Fat Joey didn’t count them. If it came to trouble, they might be allowed to jump in and spit on what was left of the guy when the Pack was done with him, but more than likely they’d be too busy spreading snatch for the victors.

Summer was like that—long days of nothing until your brains were half-baked and razor-edged with temper and then a quick fight, a good fuck, and back to nothing again. At least this time it was a stranger and not some Pack battle that could come back to kick you in the ass when summer was over and it was time to be brothers again.

The fella that had stepped out of the car was, at first glance, a joker in desperate need of getting the shit kicked out of him—a fucking weekend road warrior in oversized boots, black leather pants and a long leather coat that hung open on his bare chest. He wore a snap-brim fedora that shaded most of his face, especially the eyes. He had long faggoty hair, somewhere between yellow and brown, fine enough to snap out in the wake of each passing car. He wore his beard in that fucked-up fashion Fat Joey could distantly remember from history books, the kind that grew in low at the jaw, but left the chin completely bare. He looked like a movie-poster for one of those after-the-bomb shit-flicks.

The next thing you realized was that the motherfucker was huge, and when the Big Four saw that, they kind of quieted up and considered him again, even as the low dogs nudged each other and made faggot leather-boy jokes and got ready.

The stranger was in no hurry to come to the bar. He walked around the front half of his car and stood before the bank of bikes, the good ones, the ones the brothers rode, all gleaming chrome and glossy black. The man was big, taller than the Cow-Boy, which put him at maybe six-six or six-eight, and the fucker was broad. He had his full back turned to the bar and it was a big fucking back.

Fat Joey got up and got a little closer to the window and Ratchet came with him and they had a good look at the guy in silence.

The man’s head turned a little, just enough to show the plane of his cheek, as if he could feel the weight of their stares, or maybe hear the low laughter of the Pack rousing itself for a fight. Fat Joey couldn’t see the man’s face, but the thought struck him that the man smiled and it was a hard thought to shake.

Then the man turned around, facing the bar like a gunslinger, and he just stood for a while with his long coat rippling around his knees in the backwash from the highway. His bare chest gleamed with sweat, hairless (inspiring a new wave of faggot jokes), and the muscles there rippled with every subtle movement, but they still couldn’t see his face. In the shadow of his low hat, he had no eyes at all, and Fat Joey found himself oddly transfixed by the thin slash of the man’s mouth. He couldn’t decide whether it was smiling or not.

The Dark Man turned around again in a billow of leather and moved away to keep looking at the bikes, and Fat Joey’s mind unstuck itself and sagged back into a little cold pool of deep unease. The Dark Man still looked like a faggot, like a weight-lifting faggot maybe, but he didn’t move like one. He moved like the Cow-Boy. He moved like Top Dawg. He moved like a motherfucker that means it.

And when he moved, Fat Joey could see a gun tucked down in the side of the Dark Man’s pants like an afterthought, a little black toy the Dark Man wasn’t even trying to hide.

“What do you think?” Ratchet asked, chewing on a toothpick.