Heat

Chapter Four

Raven felt a pulling at her arm and rolled away from it. She could feel the muggy warmth of the air closing in all around her, but she couldn’t feel the sun itself stabbing at her, so she thought it must be night. It was night everywhere where she was now, and she liked it like that. She liked it here, all alone in the dark.

Hands closed on her, rolled her firmly onto her back, and then fingers pried her eyes insistently open.

The sky beyond the interlocked branches above still had the grayish-blue light of dusk. It was enough to see the Devil’s face by. She looked up into the twin voids of his eyes and felt nothing.

The Devil grunted, apparently satisfied with whatever he saw, and let her eyes close. “Can you talk?”

“No,” said Raven, rolling onto her side again. Her head hurt terribly and there was a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. Her whole body ached. She felt like she’d run a thousand miles, just to end up where she’d started, sleeping with the Devil. “I can’t talk. No one can.”

She heard a sigh and then a rustle as he stood. Raven’s eyes opened of their own dulled will and she watched him pace around the clearing. Every few steps, he would reach down and give his bulging groin a hateful grope. His chest was bare and soaked with sweat. His feet were bare and tipped with talons. All he wore was a black armband on his left forearm and pants. Shiny, shiny pants.

He was looking at her again. “Can you get up?” he asked.

“No,” she said, but she was already pretty sure she could.

That sigh again. This time with a little more irritation in it. “How do you feel?” he asked.

Raven thought about it. “Sad,” she said.

He looked at her for a second, and then smiled faintly. There was absolutely no humor in the expression. He came to her very slowly and hunkered down before her. He held up one hand, showing her his three fingers tipped with great, sharp claws.

And then he slashed.

Raven shrieked, falling back as the two sleeping halves of her memory collided, bringing with it the unrelenting reality of this—of her, of him, of everything. She kicked back blindly, both hands clapped to her mouth to keep from collapsing into screams, and when she realized that there had been no pain, she risked a glance at him.

His hands were loosely clasped between his knees. The smile was gone from his face, and his eyes were furious and unblinking. “Are you here?” he asked curtly.

Raven nodded, fighting back the shivers with the very last of her resolve.

“What hurts?”

The last time Raven had admitted that anything at all hurt, she’d been living at home with two parents and still had three names, but there was no lying to the Devil.

“My head,” she said, and touched the back of her skull. “Here.”

“Nothing here?” He reached out and touched a claw, cool and slick as a razor, to her belly.

“No.”

He raised his claw to the level of her heart and cocked an eye at her.

“No.” She fished for the hanging flaps of her shirt and tied them together without any conscious thought or any memory of how it had been torn. All her attention was on his face, his eyes.

“Good. Raven.” The man leaned forward. She could see him shaking slightly, but he had no trouble at all focusing on her. “You’re going to slow me down until we find a way to work together. I can live with that. But don’t think you can slow me down forever. I have only so much patience.”

Raven nodded. She didn’t know if that was really the right answer, but thought it best to acknowledge his words.

“Are you going to make trouble for me?”

“No.”

He nodded and leaned away from her, then rose, already rubbing at his crotch. “We’re going to do a lot of walking,” he said, staring grimly down into her face. “By sun-up, I want to have another…” His eyes raised and he tapped one talon against the ground, thinking. “Car,” he finished. “You are going to pilot it.”

“Okay.” Raven steeled herself and then asked, “What’s your name?”

That threw him. He didn’t step back, but he did tip his head and give her a long, narrow stare. “Kane,” he said finally.

Raven didn’t know she’d been holding her breath until it escaped her. She looked down, her eyes going numbly to a patch of earth between her thighs. Kane. The Devil had a name and his name was Kane. It didn’t make him human, but it did remove him from the realm of the faceless and demonic. It made him something Raven thought she could cope with.

“Okay,” she whispered, and stood up. When he snapped his fingers, she came right to his side, and they set off together.

*

It was, as he warned her, a lot of walking. Raven was fit enough, or at least she’d always thought she was, but the all-over ache in her body made even the first few minutes an ordeal. Then the sun finished going down, and there wasn’t much moonlight that made its way down through the trees. It was hot, even now, and she pulled off her leather jacket and left it behind without any awareness of having done so. Her mind felt sluggish, but she knew it was just the heat and unaccustomed activity. She could feel, with piercing clarity, the absence of drugs in her system. The combination of renewed vitality and physical strain made her feel like wilted lettuce.

Kane was intent on making distance, despite the fact that there was nothing around them but trees, and they all looked alike. For the most part, he didn’t bother to keep an eye on her, but every now and then he would half-turn and run his eyes over her in a hungry, crawling way. His erection had become monstrous; when he wasn’t rubbing futilely at the front of his pants, he was clawing furiously at the air. He was the textbook picture of a very bad man coming dangerously unraveled.

Raven kept moving, imagining that with every step, she could actually feel her strength waning. She hadn’t eaten for more than a day; thirst made her breath into sandpaper. She stumbled along behind Kane, trying not to get in his way or attract his attention, and wondered what he was saving her for. She had nothing to look at except the bunching and coiling of his muscles as he performed his odd, angry masturbation. She had nothing to listen to except his breathing as it steadily coarsened and thickened with growls. She was bitterly sure than when he finally snapped, he was going to take her so hard, he broke something. Or killed her.

Despite her best efforts, she began to fall behind. Kane’s step slowed to keep pace with her at first, but soon he was throwing dark glances back at her, and finally he stopped entirely and swung around to face her. Even in this light, she could see the look on his face—a look that said he was about to kill everything in sight, ending with things that don’t even die, like rocks and trees, but begi

“I can’t see!” she cried, before he could even raise his hand.

He stood back and stared at her with blatant suspicion. “What do you mean, you can’t see?”

“It’s dark,” she said helplessly. The unfairness of her situation began to sting at her. “You can hit me all you want, but I can’t go any faster!”

Any answer Kane was getting ready to make vanished with the sound of a electronic ping. Raven looked around the woods, dazedly expecting an egg-timer or something to be hovering in the air, but Kane’s eyes went directly to the black case he was carrying over one arm. He shrugged out of the strap, opened it with a swipe of his finger, and flipped up the screen of a monitor inside, lighting his face and chest hobgoblin green. Raven was close enough to see the weird letters scrolling down the side of the screen, and if she had any doubts left as to just what her captor was, they were dispelled in that instant. Devils don’t have computers.

Kane tapped at the keyboard, grunted, and then closed everything up again. He looked at her then, his eyes narrow and brutally assessing.

Her seven hours were up.

All of Raven’s will to argue with this man dropped away. She forgot how tired she was, how sore. She even forgot how hot it was. There was nothing left in the world but him and her.

Raven had known a great many men and been in and out of a great many bad situations. She had been knocked around more than once and she’d had her share of rough trade, and if one or two fellows had taken something from her that she hadn’t quite been ready to freely give, at least she’d never had a gun in her face or a knife at her throat. No one had ever made her scream and no one had ever seen her cry from anything they’d done to her. The right word at the right time was usually enough to keep a bad situation from getting to that point, and Raven believed she could honestly say she’d never been for-real raped. And she wasn’t going to be now. She started to take off her torn shirt.

Kane wasn’t interested in looking over the merchandise. “Down,” he said, opening the front of his pants.

Raven lowered herself and lay back, gripping the dry, brittle grass to keep from trembling. She wanted to ask him not to hurt her, but one look at him told her he was not in the mood to take requests.

Naked, Kane knelt between her legs and pulled her skirt up. He stared intently at her pussy, the tips of his fangs showing. She felt his hand first prod at her, and then part her. He stroked once deep inside her and then withdrew his hand and sniffed it. His eyes caught the moonlight and he gave her another of those assessing looks.

Raven had no illusions. All the same, something in her was still shocked when Kane lowered himself over her, blocking out the entire sky with the vastness of his body. His legs pushed against hers, forcing her wider even through she was not resisting. She felt his engorgement pushing at her, and it was not just his cock but his whole body that was rigid and unyielding as stone.

‘He’s being careful,’ she realized, and some of the terror of the moment subsided. ‘He’s not going to break anything. He’s not going to kill me. He’s probably going to hurt me, but it won’t be on purpose.’

And just as she thought that, he thrust and was inside her.

She couldn’t catch the rusty cry that tore out of her or stop her hands from flying up and pushing at him, but he didn’t retaliate. He might not even have noticed. He kept thrusting, splitting her a little wider with each movement, but he didn’t hit her. He didn’t call her names or grab her neck. He wasn’t raping her. She wouldn’t let this be rape.

Raven burst into great, braying tears. She bit her fist to try and stifle them, but she couldn’t stop them. Kane turned his face to her and snarled, the sound chopping against her ears in time with his ragged breath, but she still couldn’t stop herself. She put her arm around his neck instead, trying to show him she was behaving, and he accepted the apology by surging even harder against her.