Heat (27 page)

The big man finally stood up, tossing his magazine onto the chipped coffee table that cramped the waiting space, and loomed over Raven. She could see his eyes, murky blue and slightly unfocused, and she could smell the thick, green scent of some quality pot lingering around him like a hazy halo. “What’s his story, Violet?” he asked, thumbing back at Kane, still with an appearance of good humor, but now with a little menace as well.

“He’s from outer space and he’s going to kill you,” she told him.

Kane spun around fast and stared at her.

“Jesus Christ,” the big man sighed, and pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Why do they always crawl out after dark?”

Well. She’d tried. And she wasn’t entirely immune to the ominous narrowing of Kane’s eyes either, but a person could only be so freaked out before she just sort of numbed over. She shrugged a shoulder, avoiding Kane’s black stare until he grunted and turned away.

“What’s going on, Jack?” a woman called over the whine of machinery.

Kane went to peer over the top of the screen that split the room.

“Is this your ride?” Raven heard the same woman ask, and a man’s startled voice answered, “I’ve never seen him before.”

Kane smiled, not broadly, not enough to show his teeth, but a definite smile and with what seemed to be genuine appreciation. “You’re making…creating a tattoo? Remarkable.”

“What the hell else did you think we did here?” the big man asked, giving Kane’s back a look of exasperation before turning his irritation back on Raven. “Did you miss the sign? Does it say Priestess of Ishtar Burger Bar? Christ!”

“Please,” Raven said softly. “Please don’t make him mad.”

The big man did something with his arms that was not quite a wrestler’s flex, but was probably meant to be. “I can throw both your butts out of here one-handed,” he said, and then blinked. “Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be from outer space and gonna kill me. I remember. Hey, spaceman.”

Kane turned his head just enough to look back and meet the big man’s eyes.

“You’re trespassing, you know that? It is after hours and we are closed. Now you want to take your high ass out of here right now, before I knock it into next week for you.” The big man flexed again.

Kane studied him in silence, then looked back over the separating screen again. “Did you do the tattoos on this man’s arms as well?” Raven heard him ask.

“Who, Jack?” the unseen woman answered. “Some of it.”

The big man, Jack, Raven guessed, actually gaped at Kane’s back for a few seconds. “Hey, fucker, I’m talking to you!”

“Settle down, Jack!” the woman called. She sounded annoyed, but tolerant. She’d probably been hearing his stoned-out hostility for quite some time. “Jesus, go roll a blunt or something. You can watch me finish up,” she added, in a lower voice. “But if you want something on you, you’re going to have to make an appointment because we really are closed.”

Raven edged back a few steps and sat down in one of the grungy chairs in the cramped waiting area. Kane glanced at her at the first movement, but only watched long enough to see that she wasn’t moving toward the door. Then he went back to staring over the screen.

After a while, Jack the painted man came back and thumped into his chair. He picked up his magazine, flipped through it, muttered a little, then slapped it back down and stood up again. “Hey, Violet,” he said.

Raven thought she was probably supposed to be nervous at the tone of his voice, but she couldn’t quite muster it up. This guy, this baked-out idiot who didn’t even know he was already dead, could not begin to provide the kind of aggression it took to make her nervous these days. She looked up at his unfocused eyes and rubbed her arms.

“You think you’re some kind of hot shit, don’t you?” the big man said. He advanced on her a step. “You and the spaceman over there just walk on in and start closing the fucking store. No big deal, huh? No big fucking deal.” He came another step, enough to practically stand on her toes and loomed over her for a few seconds, glaring, before he pivoted and went for Kane. “Hey, spaceman,” he called. “Your girlfriend says you’re gonna kill m—”

Kane turned, reached back with an absentminded air, and caught the big man by his long, shaggy hair. He yanked Jack down before the man could make a sound, dug in his claws, and snapped the back of the skull off as easily as if the human came with hinges. The yellowish part of the brain came with it and Kane leaned it into the crook of his arm as he opened his pack and got out the funky syringe he used to extract…whatever he was extracting. He did it casually, looking over the top of the partition as the sound of the drill broke off.

“Jack?” The woman’s voice again. “What was that? What’s going on?”

Raven huddled back into her sagging chair, hugging herself and trying to rub the gooseflesh out of her skin. The sight of the man’s brain sliding slowly out of the cavity of his head, crumbling gelatinously as it emptied, still had the power to sicken, but it not as vividly as it once had. She supposed pretty soon she’d be almost as used to it as Kane himself.

Now
that
thought was truly horrifying.

Kane’s machinery hummed for a few seconds and pale liquid pumped out into the attached vial. He ejected the used-up gland and turned around just as a tall, black-haired woman came around the screen. She saw the dead man as Kane dropped him to the floor, but she didn’t scream. She took a swift step back and slashed the thin pen-like needle through the air at Kane’s throat.

Kane caught her wrist, bent it, and let the needle fall from her fingers into his palm. He eyed it with interest. “You create the image…the tattoo, with just this?”

“What’s going on?” the other voice pressed, and another man came around the woman’s side, grasping at his shoulder, bright red and swollen, dripping two thin trails of ink and blood.

Kane looked him up and down as the man gaped around him, obviously struggling to take in the meaning of the dead body and the broken bit of skull. When the man opened his mouth again, Kane reached out and punched in his throat.

The man dropped to his knees, emitting a bubbly “haaaaa” that should have been a scream from the hole in his neck. He looked more confused than anything else. Raven looked away.

The black-haired woman stepped back as far as she could with her wrist still trapped in Kane’s grip, which did nothing but attract Kane’s attention again. He pulled her back, gave her a little shake, and said, “Look at me.”

She did, flinching, her hand clenching and flexing above his.

Kane made a motion with his other hand, the one holding the woman’s ink-gun, and Raven fairly ran to stand beside him. He turned her with one claw, pulling the sleeve of her shirt up and displaying the smudgy circle of howling coyote to the other woman’s frightened eyes. He tapped the very center of Raven’s faded tattoo. “I want this removed,” he said.

“I can’t.” The woman tried again to step back.

Kane’s eyes narrowed and Raven looked nervously up at him and gave him room, but the woman was already rushing to stammer out a rambling explanation of ink and human skin and lasers.

Kane cocked his head to one side, his eyes darting back and forth rapidly, as though reading the words in the air. Without warning, he released the woman’s arm and slapped her crisply across the mouth.

She staggered back, crashed into the separating screen, and slid to the floor with her legs bent painfully beneath her. She put one trembling hand to her mouth and looked up at Kane with huge, little-girl eyes.

“Do you have any of those things here?” Kane demanded.

“No.” The woman took a breath and started over.

Kane let her talk for a few seconds, and then reached down, seized the front of her shirt, and pulled her up to her feet. This more or less put an end to the tattoo-lady’s little speech because she stopped talking when he first moved and started screaming. Raven winced, anticipating.

Kane chose odd moments to display tolerance, and this was one of them. Instead of slapping her again, he merely set her on her feet and touched one claw lightly to her lips. “Hush,” he said.

The black-haired woman’s scream died out in descending pitch, like a tea kettle removed from the stove. She blinked at him, shivered all over, and obviously took back a little of her equilibrium. For the first time, she looked past Kane and got a good look at Raven.

Raven looked back at her, trying to send thoughts of compliance in the hopes that this woman would turn out to be telepathic or something. Maybe it worked. The black-haired woman took a few more steadying breaths and stopped shaking quite so noticeably. When she turned her eyes back on Kane, she managed to do it without flinching.

Kane had waited patiently for her attention and when he saw he had it, he tapped Raven’s arm again. “I want this out,” he said. “What
can
you do?”

The woman stared at him, then at Raven’s tattoo. After a few tense moments, she reached out and tentatively raised Raven’s sleeve a little, and Raven obliged her by lifting her arm as well. The woman studied the smudged coyote with a frown, her lips moving without sound as she no doubt fought for coherent thought. “I can cover it with something else,” she said finally. “Something you choose.” She raised her free hand and pointed at the wall, where dozens of samples were haphazardly pinned.

Kane studied them, then stepped over the gasping, burbling man on the floor, and brought the black-haired woman with him to take a closer look. He glanced back once, measuring Raven’s tattoo with his eyes, and then made a low, growling sound in the back of his throat as he considered.

“What are these?” he asked at last, tapping the edge of a poster filled with Asian-looking symbols.

“Those are kanji,” the woman answered. “They mean different things. This one means Chi, the spiritual life force. And this one is Dragon. And this is Master. This one—”

“I get the point.” Kane looked thoughtfully back at Raven again, then at the woman he held. “If I make an image for you, can you put it on her body?”

“Yes,” the woman said at once.

Kane released the woman’s wrist. “Give me something to make my mark on,” he ordered. “Raven, come…here.” He finished this command in a low, distracted tone, his eye caught by the magazine lying open and abandoned where big Jack, now dead, had been reading. It was open, Raven saw, to images of body piercings.

Kane picked up the magazine, traced his claws over some of them, turned the pages, and then looked again at the posters papering the walls. Some of the people modeling tattoos also had piercings. Raven could see nipples, tongues, noses, lips, eyebrows, all gleaming with metal and studded with beads. She glanced at Kane and saw him staring fixedly at her bellybutton ring.

The black-haired woman returned from the other side of the room with a piece of torn, unlined white paper and a pencil, and Kane tossed the magazine back on the coffee table and took them from her. Using the wall as his backing, he quickly sketched out a rough image, very much like a kanji, but harder somehow. Alien.

“Do you have a color preference?” the woman asked hesitantly, taking the paper from him.

“No. As long as it covers that mark. Completely.”

“And…and that’s all?” The woman glanced back at Raven’s arm, but her eyes slid to the body on the floor, to the door, to the struggling customer gargling blood in the corner.

“No,” Kane said after a thoughtful pause. He was looking at the posters again, ink and metal and flesh. “I want something more. I want…holes.”

Raven felt a chill creeping up through her body from her pussy clear to her heart.

Kane’s gaze remained on the posters, but he reached back and unerringly laid his hand over Raven’s belly. She could feel the tiny pricking of his claws as he flexed them.

“Like this one,” he said, his thumb flicking lightly at Raven’s hoop ring. “Only more of them.” He took his hand from Raven and looked sharply back at the tattoo-lady. “Can you do that here?”

“Sure. We have lots of styles…rings and studs and bars behind the counter that, that I could…” The woman took a deep breath, seeming to orient and calm herself, and finally looked up again with a determined look. “I absolutely can give you holes,” she said. “Where do you want them?”

Kane put his hand on one of the posters, slowly splayed his fingers to frame a gold loop in a girl’s bellybutton. His eyes, unblinking, trailed up and down the two-dimensional body, and fixed on the jewelry glittering in her navel. He made a sound, the purr of distant thunder, and slowly showed his fangs in a smile.

“Everywhere.”

*

“Hold her still,” the female said, and Kane obligingly fit the thick strap of his pack into his Raven’s mouth and drew it taut. She opened her eyes, wet with pain and animal misery, and then closed them again, her chest heaving. Kane ran his thumb over the curve of her smooth, soft cheek, then up to her brows, to feel the ridges of new steel set over that thin stripe of short hair she wore there.

Raven’s new body was nearly done. His mark was on her, his name burned black into the supple flesh of her arm, dotted here and there with blood. He liked the look of it almost as much as the gleam of metal in her skin.

Kane had found the process of piercing fascinating. They did not do this on Jota. He supposed human skin was thin enough to make the procedure both possible and rewarding in some way. Certainly, Raven had borne up well under it at first. It wasn’t until the painted female had finished with Raven’s belly and begun on her sex that his little human really broke.

There were straps on the little table the female was using to work on, and when Raven made her first abortive effort at struggling, the female set about binding her with cool professionalism that Kane genuinely admired. The female worked until she had Raven pressed flat on her back with her legs spread hugely apart, and then merely picked up her piercer and went back to the task at hand.

“There we go,” she said now, firing the gun a final time. “Rivets on the inside of the lips, rings to trim.” The female straightened and leaned on the table between Raven’s open legs. “How’s that look to you?”