Kane had turned them east after leaving Charlie’s Bar, and while his bitch drove, the big man dozed, his arms folded (the claws of his right hand still stained the ugly brown of dried blood) and his chin lowered to the smooth plane of his chest. He slept light, his eyes sliding open and instantly alert at the slightest of Sue-Eye’s movements. After two hours of this, he raised his head and leaned forward to look up the road.

“Do you want to stop?” Raven asked immediately.

“Briefly.” Kane’s gaze slicked back, black as oil, to run over Sue-Eye’s body. “We need water. Food. Different clothes for my ichuta’a. Then I want you take us back to the mountains.”

“We’re headed that way already,” Raven said.

“Good. It was cooler there. And I can do a little work—” His claws grazed over the top of his pack. “—before I have to hunt again.”

“What kind of clothes?” Raven asked. She was switching lanes, getting ready to pull off into the slat-board row of buildings that passed for a strip mall out here on the edge of nowhere.

“The kind you wear.” Kane eyed Sue-Eye’s jeans with an oddly impersonal irritation and grunted. “The kind I can get into.”

Raven parked at the end of the lot, switched off the engine and handed Kane back the keys. She picked up a t-shirt from the seat beside her and shrugged into it, setting her piercings to a muffled jingle, and then got out of the car. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

“I’ll be watching.” The warning in his voice was evident, but had the ring of habit to it. He settled back into his seat and watched Raven walk away, his claws flexing lightly on his biceps.

“You’re not afraid of her taking off?” Sue-Eye asked, trying for a tone of idle curiosity.

He didn’t answer, although he did rest his black eyes briefly and without expression on hers before returning to his watch.

The girl could be in there right now, telling the pop-eyed old farts who ran the place that the guy in the dark blue Nissan had a gun and was holding hostages, but clearly, Kane wasn’t going to hear it. Too soon, too soon to start picking at his rosy picture. Besides, Sue-Eye didn’t really think Raven would rat them out. The bitch knew too well what her man was capable of.

And here she came, rattling back across the parking lot with her rusty cart full of water bottles and two plastic sacks. She put everything in the front passenger seat, grimacing a little under the weight of the water (Kane shifted a little straighter in his seat, frowning), and then passing one of the sacks back to them. “They didn’t have much for food. I got beef jerky and granola bars.”

Kane went straight for the meat as Raven came back around and got behind the wheel. His teeth were sharklike, double rows of killing wedges, made for tearing throats and drinking blood. Sue-Eye faced front, listening as he ate.

After that, it was a three-hour drive east and into the mountains. The space around them got closer, choked in trees tall enough to block the climbing sun. The towns got further and further apart, and when they did run across one, there were a lot more antique stores and restaurants with words like ‘Tavern’ and ‘Cascade’ in their names. Tourist towns. Vacation towns. Places for rich people to come and look pretty while they hunted and shopped and looked at the lake.

“Stop here,” Kane said, when they came to one of these, a little six-street-square piece of nothing called Valley Springs. Sue-Eye couldn’t see a single person under fifty on the sidewalk.

Raven bit her lip as she scanned the quaint little shops for a hotel, and then turned up a side road, following a blue sign with the word Resort on it. There was a double row of cabins in a cute little park, and Sue-Eye knew they were in rich country when she saw how green the grass was. But there weren’t that many cars in the lot and she doubted they’d be turned away, even when they saw the color of Raven’s hair and the studs on Sue-Eye’s jacket. Raven parked the car, and Sue-Eye reached for the door latch.

Without warning, Kane’s hand closed in her hair and her head was wrenched back painfully. She opened her mouth, a ‘back off, motherfucker’ leaping instinctively to her throat in what would have been the very worst response, but her voice died.

She could see nothing but the claw that hung a hair’s breadth from her right eye. It was too close for her to bring it into focus, but she could feel it, she could feel the air itself bouncing off the reality of it and blowing back on her open eye. His face was somewhere beyond the claw, but she couldn’t look to see where. He was going to cut her good eye right out of her head.

“When I do this,” Kane said, very softly, from somewhere in the car, “you are going to feel it. You are going to feel your eye dimple just before I pop it. You are going to feel the heat of its guts pouring down your cheek. I may even make you drink it. Do you hear me, human?”

Yes. She couldn’t say it. She could barely mouth it.

“You’re going to feel it tug free of its tether. It’s going to hurt. Not much, I understand, not at first. Not until the cord snaps and I hold it free in my hand. It won’t bleed that much. You can’t die from it. Hear me, human. I can take them both and you will live.”

Yes.

Kane’s hand lowered and now she could see him, now the breath was scraping hoarsely in and out of her. Her eyes itched. She had to fight to keep from reaching up to rub at them.

He said, “We’re going in there. And that’s going to give you a great deal of power over me. But nothing you say, nothing you do, is going to stop me from taking your eyes. If I have time to do nothing else, I will still do that. Do we have an understanding?”

Her voice was still gone. She nodded instead.

“Good.” His eyes on her were black holes that mercy had never touched. “Stay close and keep quiet and you’ll live through this.” He opened his door and climbed out, snapping his fingers once as he went.

Sue-Eye followed him, her legs shaking and strengthless. ‘Be calm,’ she told herself. ‘He’ll hit you if he wants to hit you. He’ll fuck you if he feels like fucking. You’ve had a hundred men like him. They all say they’re going to kill you and none of them ever mean it.’

But none of them had ever threatened to cut out her eyes and feed them to her.

Kane’s arm came around her shoulders, a weight of warning. She could feel the lump of his gun pressing against her side. He waved Raven on ahead of them, and they walked a slow and measured pace across the lot to the resort’s office.

Sue-Eye was right. The clerk did look at Raven’s hair and he did look at Sue-Eye’s jacket. He looked longest at Kane, towering over both of them and gazing back at the clerk with a calm and smiling eye, but in the end, he filled out their registration forms without any show of hesitation. The kitchens were open until ten. The pool was available all night, but lifeguards were on duty only until six. Cabin eight. Have a nice day.

It was stuffy as hell inside the cabin and even hotter than it was outside. Sue-Eye went to the nearest window, but it was painted shut and impossible to move. There was an ancient air conditioner set into the wall, and when Raven switched it on, it spat out a cloud of dust and two dead houseflies, but no cold air. The furniture was nice and the curtains were clean, but a dump was a dump for all of that.

“I can’t believe how much they’re charging for this place,” Raven muttered, and gave Kane a helpless look. “Do you want to keep driving?”

“No.” Kane peered into the closet and then the bathroom, one hand rubbing at his crotch. “You need to rest.”

Oh right. Rest because of her period. Sue-Eye cast Raven a contemptuous glance and the bitch dropped her eyes.

“I can keep going,” Raven said, blushing just a little.

“I said, no.” Kane’s voice was stone, his eyes, steel. “You’re bleeding. I can smell it on you. And you’re hurt. I can see you griping at your belly when you think I’m not looking. So lie down. We’ll stay.”