Draven smiled and touched her hair. “Good sleep, my little pet.” After he turned away, Cali lay down on the seat. The blinders slid down inside the windows, and the car went dark inside except for the electronic glow of the screen, which Draven had not yet removed. Cali sat up and peered over the seat to where Draven sat studying a black screen filled with white words. For a long time he scrolled through it, changing the colors, touching the screen to bring up images of people and other things. The words sometimes changed to different sizes, and strange images flashed on the screen.
“What does it say?” she asked after watching him for a while.
“It’s news.”
“What is news?”
“It tells what’s happening here, and in North America, and the whole world.”
“What’s happening?”
He laughed, that warm chuckle that made her feel like she was falling asleep next to a warm fire instead of inside a cold car. “This is a story about Julianne Dormer. Do you know who that is?”
“No. Who is she?”
He shook his head. “Of course you don’t.”
“Well, who is she? Is this a story like your books?”
Draven chuckled again. “No, it’s a real person. An actor, an important one, very popular.”
“What does she act like?”
“She’s in the vids. Like books, but you watch the action happening on a screen instead of reading it.”
“I’ve heard of those. I know what they are. They’re like ads.”
Draven chuckled quietly. “Quite.”
“Well, what does this person do in the story?”
“She wants to buy a vid company, but she’s a Third, so she’s not allowed to own a major company. People are upset over it.”
“Why don’t they just let her?”
“Because even though she has worked relentlessly for nearly a hundred years, and earned enough money to buy it by saving every spare pence, the law prevents Thirds from owning businesses except for the smallest local boutiques. Only Seconds can buy national companies.”
Cali lay back and watched the light flicker on the car’s ceiling. Whenever Draven talked about Seconds and Thirds, she didn’t understand a thing he said. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. But every time she got close, she would remember the way it felt when the knife had pulled tight into the Superior’s shirt and the ripping sensation as it had slid through him. The feeling wouldn’t leave her hand, like it had imprinted into her muscles. She could see his face, full of shock and surprise, and hear the muffled thud as he toppled into the snow.
But she hadn’t killed him.
Once, she had thought she’d like to know how killing someone felt, but when she’d thought she had killed him, it hadn’t felt good. Now he lay back there, still alive according to Draven. After all the screaming she’d heard, she didn’t know if she believed him. In her mind, she could still hear the awful sound of it echoing around the steel trailer and slipping out the crack below the door. The sound of the metal cables scraping across the floor. Getting chained up couldn’t hurt that much. Draven had done something else to him.
Cali had worn a chain for over a year, and though it had been uncomfortable and bothersome, it only hurt when she tripped or pulled too hard on it. After a while, she’d gotten so used to it that she hardly noticed it. So used to it that when she’d gotten free of it, walking with both legs free had put her off balance. She’d felt strangely light and naked without it. And she’d certainly never screamed like that because of it.
A shiver gripped her body.
She could hear Draven fumbling around on the floor again. This time the screen went off with an electronic snap followed by a soft static sound, and the inside of the car disappeared into darkness. She slid her arms tight around her body and waited for him to slide over the seat, silent as always, and take her by surprise.
Draven had killed someone. Three people that she knew of. Maybe more. He was scary, and strong beyond imagining. No matter what he said, no matter how much he loved her and petted her and acted nice, she had to remember the other side of him. True, he treated her well, not like an inferior or much different from himself. She liked that. But sometimes it made her forget that they were different, and she had to remember that. It was dangerous to forget that he was dangerous.
Chapter 53
Sleep did not find Draven, either. Thoughts of all that had happened plagued him, thoughts of the man in the trailer behind them, suffering the loss of a hand that Draven had needed to activate the car, the dash screen, the locks on the trailer and the car. The hand now lay wrapped in a shirt beneath Draven’s feet, while the man in the trailer tried to regenerate it without the means necessary for healing.
Draven had known enough pain at the hands of the vigilante humans to hurt for the man whose pain he had inflicted. A tremendous sadness bore down upon him, as if it could press him through the warm seat and into the snow below. Two years ago, when he’d been captured, he could never have imagined he’d do something so brutal to survive. Now he was no better than they—perhaps worse. They had made him an enemy to protect their kind from his Superior nature. He had made an enemy of his own kind, to protect a human.
He turned his thoughts to more practical matters. Looking through the files, he had learned that Byron had left Princeton on ‘personal business.’ He’d learned that Byron labeled Cali a troublesome sapien who “responded well to physical force.”
In his file, he’d learned that so far he’d only been formally charged with stealing Cali, but he was suspected in the disappearance of the trackers. They had yet to find enough proof to convict him of their deaths. He had nearly missed the new information that Byron had added to Draven’s statistics, which had not changed in so long that he skipped over them the first time he scrolled through his file. But as he fingered back up the screen, the changes caught his eye. Along with the long-ago arrest and the lists of his residences and partnerships, the new information had stared back at him from the screen.
“Current residence: Unknown.
Affiliations: Unknown.
Attachments: None.
Employment: None.
Last seen: North America, Princeton area.
Status: Wanted.
Crimes: Theft of government property (two Homo-sapiens, aged 16 and 1 yr).”
But it was a new section at the end of his file, below several more fingers of unremarkable information, that stopped Draven, that made him sit and stare unblinking at the screen for minutes on end before he disabled the device.
“Other: Shows anti-social behavior, avoids others. Travels alone or with human female of breeding age. Known contact with incubus. Possible transformation to incubus suspected.”
In the darkness, Draven shifted on the ridges between the two front seats, listening to Cali breathing in the back seat. Wanting her. Aching to reach back and touch her again. To touch her as he’d touched her hair, stealing the most intimate touch imaginable. She didn’t know. She thought he’d simply soothed her, as he often did, with the innocent petting of his sapien.
Was Byron’s suspicion correct? Had Angel somehow converted him without his knowledge? Had his contact with Angel changed him into something he did not understand, while leaving him unaware of the change? From what little he knew, an incubus was someone who had evolved one step further or in a different way than Superiors, who gained energy sexually instead of by ingesting sap. If Superiors took human life force through blood, and an exchange of blood evolved a human into a Superior, couldn’t an incubus change one without using blood?
At the time, Draven had thought Angel only wished to save him, to free him from his paralysis. But when Angel had pressed his mouth to the hole in Draven’s skull, when he’d breathed a breath like arctic frost into Draven’s brain, had he done more than heal him?
Draven tried to recall all he could of Angel—his strange manner of speaking, his resistance to Superior weapons, his beauty and tears. Drave
n didn’t cry. Crying wasted emotion. It cheapened sadness, quenched the purity of emotion. He hadn’t become sad and lovely like the incubus. Most importantly, he still drew from Cali. He had never considered anything else.
The thought of becoming something he did not understand terrified him, but in a strange way, it also brought him relief. It explained changes that had begun to come over him, disturbing thoughts that had crept unbidden into his mind when he’d not guarded against them. It explained the unnatural thing he’d said to Cali. He wanted to believe her, believe he’d only touched her the way he always had, touched her lovely amber hair. That he’d only said those words out of desperation. Panicked at the thought of execution, he’d reached out to his companion, to touch someone for the last time, even a lowly sap.
But he could no longer fool himself into believing. He had needed to say those words as both an apology to her and a means of making himself honest before his life ended. To say that one thing that needed saying, a last honest act in a superficial life.
It was wrong for him to feel that way, perverse, even. But he had denied these feelings long enough, telling himself they were natural. Even before reading Byron’s addition to his file, he’d had his own suspicions, hadn’t he? He’d dismissed them, refused to examine his own longings as anything more than hunger pangs. Now he had to confront his sickness, admit to some twisted reality inside his mind that made him see Cali not as a meal but as… What?
Not a mate, certainly. Not a partner.
But as…a woman. He saw her as a woman. And to see a sap that way—that was perversion. Illegal perversion. Even so, the emotional attachment he’d developed bothered him more than the sexual stirrings. If he’d only had to wrestle with that perversion, a temporary insanity brought on by too much isolation and the close proximity of a female form that so resembled a Superior, but different somehow, as if he could see the warmth in her, he could have hidden it until it passed. He could have denied himself, refused to notice that she looked somehow yielding, softer even than much curvier Superior women, and so alive, warm, touchable... Penetrable.
Was this how an incubus felt towards a human—not violent but loving, helpless against the desire that would ultimately destroy her? He adored Cali, worshipped her from afar, scared to touch her for fear that if he indulged himself for even a moment, he’d be unable to stop. And though his desire threatened to overwhelm him in moments of weakness, the thought of acting upon it still repelled him. The thought of anyone else with her was unbearable as well, as maddening as the thought of someone harming her. Even as his fingers cried out for a moment of contact, he would die to protect her from himself. He’d allow no one to so much as touch her, to besmirch her loveliness.
To maintain the kind of fierce, protective yearning he felt for Cali, he could never surrender to his desires. The sexual act was akin to the act of crying, the outward expression of an inward longing. It provided a release, and he did not want to dispel the torment of love or yearning. It seemed a waste, a cheap way of letting something go that should be kept sacred, experienced in all its complexity and profoundness.
Already the sexual act scared her. Wasn’t that the perfect irony? Sex with her own kind frightened her. If she thought sex with a sapien dangerous, she had no idea what horror a Superior could bring upon her. If she caught the slightest hint of his changing interest, she’d run in a moment or put a stake through his chest. So he’d keep it inside. For her, he must pretend. He knew what he felt, what that made him. He knew how careful he’d have to be to hide it, to act with greater restraint.
They would continue onwards together, the two fugitives. When someone caught them again, they could submit or kill again in order to continue their own lives. Now that he’d taken a life, he’d always have to run for his own. They would never be safe. They would never have a home. They could never stop running.
He had reverted to nothing better than an animal, fleeing for its life. Was an incubus not an evolution gone wrong by a devolution, a return to animal instincts? Thinking of nothing but food and survival, killing to live, with no community or law.
He now thought of little but his survival and that of his food source, with whom he had developed a strange fascination. He had killed to save her, killed his own kind, with no loyalty to his people. He had betrayed and shunned his own kind, their laws, their society, in favor of the object of his obsession, a human. Perhaps that in itself proved him an incubus, or perhaps it required a physiological change, one that Superiors by their very nature could not undergo. Perhaps he only sought an excuse for his inexcusable behavior.
Certainly, he no longer felt superior to anyone, nor was he human. Yet he did not know if he had reverted to something more primitive. So he would forge onwards, hiding the changes, resisting his perverse nature, holding to the last civilized and moral parts of himself as long as he could. When all fell away, and he would know what he had become.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank all the people who helped me put this book together through all its many stages. Casey Siegel, my cover artist, for her endless patience. My sister Rose, who always reads the scary early drafts. My betas, Nadia Pelayo and John Bachert for all their advice. My family, for giving me time and space to write. And as always, my readers, who have waited for two years for this one. Hope you enjoyed it!
The Renegades (The Superiors) Page 38