“My name is Sue-Eye,” said the blonde biker.

“I don’t care,” he replied, and turned his attention back to his computer and the vials of brain juice he’d collected.

“You can call me whatever you want.”

“Yes. I can. Raven, what is she saying?”

The redhead hadn’t said anything. Raven shrugged an answer, her arms still around the biker’s shoulders.

Kane nodded, as if this were the answer he expected. “Go sleep then.”

Raven stood up and moved back toward the bench, fully expecting to hear the brittle crack of the redhead’s skull being broken open for harvest. Instead, she heard Kane asking in a low voice if the biker wanted to see the sun come up.

“Yes, sir,” the redhead sniffled.

“Go and bring me every bit of money in this room. Put it here on the table. If there’s blood on the money, clean it off. Then I want you to take the fuel out of those vehicles and put it into the car I came in until it is fully fueled. I will be watching you, and I will catch you if you run and make you wait for hours before I finish killing you. Understand me, human.”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, a breathless whisper.

“Look at me. Look right at me. That’s right. If you behave yourself and obey me, I will leave you here alive in the morning. I have done it before.”

Virtually the same speech he’d given to Raven. She relaxed a little, sliding into the booth and stretching out there, making a pillow of her hands. She was reasonably sure the redhead would be alive in the morning, or at least, if she weren’t, it would be her own fault.

“And you, go sleep.”

Raven heard footfalls and the creak of leather approach her, and then the shuffling sounds of a body settling into the same booth. She opened her eyes and saw the biker looking at her underneath the table. They stared at each other as Kane sat working at his lab and the redhead went around picking the pockets of the dead.

“Hi,” the biker breathed.

Raven chewed her lip. “Hi.”

“I’m Sue-Eye.”

“I’m Raven.”

“Sleep,” Kane commanded, without turning.

He means it, Raven tried to say telepathically.

Sue-Eye spoke silence as well she spoke posture. She closed her eyes at once.

Raven lay awake and listened to the low tak-tak-tak of Kane’s claws at his computer, the faint humming and bubbling of his chemicals and tools as he built his drug, and eventually, the thick snapping and gurgling pleas as he returned to the work of harvesting. She slept.

*

“Up.”

Raven jerked awake, struck her head on the side of the table, and struggled upright.

Kane, satisfied that she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, moved away from the booth and shouldered his pack. There were six more strange bikers on the floor, one of them a woman. Blood was now so thick around the center table that it hadn’t soaked into the floorboards, hadn’t even dried to a crust. The redhead was sleeping with her head on her folded arms, strands of her hair lying in a clotted puddle of the biker chief’s bloody brain matter. Sue-Eye was standing near the bar, looking solemn and very alert.

“Get your head together and drink something,” Kane said, striding towards the table where the redhead sat sleeping. “I want to get moving.”

He only had to touch her and the redhead came up with a shriek, arms slapping wildly all around her.

Raven flinched instinctively, dead certain she was about to see the girl’s head fly across the room, but Kane actually burst out laughing, stepping back with one arm up to fend off the biker’s puny blows.

“All right, that’s enough,” he said, still grinning. He caught one of the redhead’s wrists and she grew instantly still, staring up at him and shivering, white as milk. “Up,” Kane said, and gently towed her from her seat, only to take the chair for himself and pull her back down onto his lap. He put his arm around her, smiling like a shark and holding her pinned in his eyes, and then took out the funny spray-thing he kept in his pack.

“You said you’d let me live,” the redhead whimpered.

“This isn’t going to kill you,” Kane replied, and pushed the thing into her arm. It hissed as it performed its injection, and left a dime-sized red circle behind. “Now. Look at me, human. Right at me. That’s it. Listen well. I am going to leave very soon and I am leaving you behind. I understand that this means you will soon have the opportunity to tell others what has happened here tonight. No, keep looking at me,” he interjected as the redhead started to look spacily around the blood-soaked room. “Can you guess what I just put into your body?”

The biker gave him a miserable and blank-eyed look. “Poison?”

“No. I put something in you so that I can find you again, if I should, for example, turn on the TV and discover that the lawmen of your world are seeking for me or my Raven. Because if I see that, human, I am going to know exactly who told them who to look for.”

The redhead clasped her hands together and nodded, her eyes welling with silent tears.

“And if I have to come for you, I promise—” Kane put the scalpel-pen back in his pack and laid his empty hand over the biker’s belly, his eyes never wavering from hers. “—this little one will be walking and talking before I let you die of the things that I will do to you.”

The redhead squeezed her eyes shut and kept nodding.

“Very good.” Kane lifted her off his lap and set her on her feet again, giving her a careful tap on the ass to send her on her way. As the redhead walked woodenly to the door, he stood and looked over at Raven and Sue-Eye, still standing close together by the bathroom door.

Kane reached out the bottle of antibiotics he’d made for Raven and tossed it to her, saying, “Clean up together. Very clean, Raven,” he added, closing his pack and shouldering it. “But don’t make me wait too long.” He glanced at the sky as he passed the window, and paused a few moments, his head cocked. “I think it’s cooler today,” he remarked, and went out into the parking lot.

“Cooler, huh. What’s the weather got to do with it?” Sue-Eye asked, following Raven to the bathroom.

“He doesn’t like the heat,” Raven answered after a pause. She peed quickly and scrubbed at herself as best she could with a handful of paper towels before changing her tampon. She took her time with her piercings, carefully daubing them down wherever she suspected she still had leavings from the previous night’s events, and then rubbing in a good handful of Kane’s antibiotic juice.

Sue-Eye watched for a little while, then ran a little water in the sink and helped. Her hands were like leather, worn and rough to the touch, but she was gentle with them. Kane would probably appreciate that.

“When it gets really hot, he gets…horny, I guess, for lack of a better word,” Raven continued.

Sue-Eye nodded grimly. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You think you do, but you really don’t. He’ll need to get off about ten times in order to really get off. And I think it hurts when he does. At least, I know it hurts when he can’t, so he’s pretty much in a bad mood if he’s got to wait. And he’s…well, trying to work, you know, so anything that distracts him from that is not a good thing.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Raven regarded her warily. “Yeah.”

Sue-Eye’s gaze was almost as sharp as Kane’s could be, and her voice, although devoid of overt accusation, was flat and intense. “Why doesn’t he just fuck you anyway? So you’ve got your period, so what? It won’t kill him, and it won’t kill you.”

“I know. I think he just thinks it’s gross. Maybe his kind don’t have periods.”

“Maybe.” Sue-Eye stared her down a little longer. “Why’d you let him think taking it up the ass could make your period worse, or hurt you, or whatever?”

“Just…” Raven trailed off, looked away, looked back. “Just to have him think something that I knew was wrong. Like a secret. And to keep him…you know, from being so rough.”