Mira chuckled, shook her head ever so slowly. She lifted her foot, just a little, and in that ease of pressure Kevin thought he was free. He began to sit up. Her boot pushed him down again, this time grinding across his throat so hard he choked.
'Don't,' she told him, and her eyes flashed green behind the huge tunnel of the gun barrel.
'Step away,' Kevin's mother told her. 'Let him go.'
'Diana,' Hunter said, his voice so calm he might have been reading the news. 'They get up. Remember? They get up.'
Near Kevin's ear, water dripped from the table to the lino, keeping time wet and slow, slower than the clock on the wall, drip, drip, drip, puddling beside the dead rose on the floor. The smoke alarm kept its own shrill time, barp, barp, barp. In the background burning meat hissed and popped. The harsh stench of it made it even harder to breathe.
Above him, Mira's skirt hung open to reveal her leg above the rim of her knee-high boot, black tights shrink-wrapped around her thigh. It might've been sexy if she hadn't been killing him.
'They get up,' Hunter repeated. He took his pistol away. Put the radio down. Reached for the rifle.
'Who are you people?' Kevin's mother asked, her voice the barest of whispers. She let him take the rifle. She stepped back, shaking, and Meg hugged her, pulling her into a knot of arms and terrified expressions.
The radio squawked again and Hunter swapped the rifle for it. 'Go.'
He then stalked into the kitchen and took the pan off the stove. 'There's company coming.'
'Riders?' Mira asked.
'Probably.'
'How many?'
'Too many, would be my guess. Unless you got something a little extra tucked away under that coat.'
'Then let us see what the newborn knows. Take the women out of the room while I talk to him. Keep them quiet.'
'Mira-'
'I mentioned my sunburn, did I not?'
'Ladies.' He re-slung his radio. 'This way, please.' He motioned with his pistol.
'Don't hurt him,' Kevin's mother pleaded.
'Only a fraction more than he finds pleasurable, I assure you, little mother,' Mira told her. When the women had been shut in the nearest room, Hunter standing watch in the hall, she holstered the gun and hauled Kevin to his feet. He pedalled backward as she bulldozed him into the wall. His vision burst with a new set of flashing lights.
'Kevin?' his mother yelled, and Meg shouted too, a fearful 'Kev!', and Hunter kicked the door.
'He's okay. Just stay where you are.'
Mira held Kevin tightly by the throat, her face next to his. 'I understand you've had an intimate meeting with Taipan. Is that right?'
'What?' he croaked.
'I just need to make a blood test. It will hurt, but I promise you, you will like it.' She bit his neck and he cried out, the sound a strangled, pathetic hiccup under her carpet-snake grip. She sucked on the wound in his throat. The room spun, as though she was the centre of a whirlpool and he was a leaf caught in the swirling current.
'You getting anything?' Hunter asked.
'He's too weak. Barely had enough to get him across the line.'
Hunter sounded resigned when he asked, 'Cut and run, then?'
'Plan B,' she said, her gaze fixed on Kevin as though he was some new kind of bug and she was trying to identify him. 'How far out is that Night Rider?'
He talked into the walkie-talkie. 'A couple of minutes. Taking it real careful, Felicity says.'
'Enough time to put in a trace.'
'They'll find it.'
'Only if they taste him, in which case, they'll finish him off for us. But maybe we'll find out where they are. I don't see a downside.'
Mira pushed Kevin to the floor and pinned his arms with her knees. She was incredibly strong; like an anvil sitting on his chest. 'You like the view, boy?' Her tongue, so pink against her sharp white teeth, her lips glinting. She reached back to his cock and squeezed until he groaned. 'You do like it. Here, taste me.'
She bit her left wrist and he heard the flesh tear, smelled the blood flow, thick and metallic. He turned his mouth away, but she bled on him, splattering his lips, and he tasted her, steaming hot, and he was licking and gulping and trying to lift his head from the floor toward her, and finally she laughed and lowered her wrist till he could suck her down. A voice in the back of his head was screaming NO but the blood drowned it, drowned it completely as what felt like an electric current ran through him. Such delicious electrocution.
'Careful, don't make a mess. We don't want to leave tell-tale stains, do we? Your girlfriend might not like that.'
Romanian, he realised. Her name was Mira and she was Romanian, but that had been a long, long time ago. And the cop - Taipan had been right: he was no cop. Hunter wasn't even his name; it was his rank.
She held up her wrist, marked by two pink scars circling it down low, close to her hand. As he watched, fascinated and horrified, a bright scarlet earthworm burrowed under her skin until it circled her wrist like a bracelet, then solidified into a third ring of weird scar tissue. His eyes must've been playing tricks, because he thought he could see something moving inside the scars, like an eel in a mud puddle. And her eyes - her eyes glazed so deeply red they were almost purple.
'Got you,' she said, and kissed him, lapping at his lips and cheeks. She sat up and closed her eyes as though tuning out to a song only she could hear, and her forehead creased with concentration, little bubbles of rose-coloured sweat glistening. On her blouse, a circle of blood blossomed over her heart, and some kind of pattern grew inside it, rapidly blotching but looking vaguely star-shaped. She smiled at him then, like a prefect who'd just come head of the class, and said, 'But you - you do not have me.' The childish glee vanished. Her eyes snapped to green and then back to deep brown, almost black. Mira gripped his chin, forcing him to look at her. Her fingernails were long, glinting, sharp at the edge of his vision.
'If you tell Taipan what we've just done, you and me, he'll kill you. Do you understand? He will kill you and your mother and your girlfriend. All of you.'
He glared at her, wishing both she and Hunter were dead.
'If he tastes so much as a drop of your blood, you are a dead man. Understand?' She made him nod, his jaw aching from her pincered hold. 'Good boy.' She patted his cheek. 'You play your cards right, we might get to party later. Do you like the sound of that?' She crushed his balls once more, making him sob.
'Time, Mira.' Hunter had moved to the back door where he could look over the rear paddocks.
Mira uncurled, like a cat stretching, rising to her feet in one graceful movement. Kevin half expected her to raise her hands over her head, stand on her toes like a ballet dancer.
'The women?' Hunter asked.
'Let
