“Do you know what it’s like to be with a real man?” he said, the alcohol on his breath setting every nerve in her body on fire with a fight-or-flight reaction. “Someone who can show you what it means to be a real woman?”

“I know at least three women better at making me feel like a woman than any man,” she said. It wasn’t strictly accurate to throw down the lesbian card, but men like Postle tended to be as sticky as a filled condom if you didn’t handle them just right.

“Maybe you haven’t met the right man yet. Could be me,” he said, tipping his forehead so far forward it almost touched hers.

“I’m sure the right man for me doesn’t have breath like an iguana,” she said. She had no idea what an iguana’s breath was like, in truth, but her imagination was stuck on lizards for some reason.

She slipped her hands into her pockets and into her cat claws in their loose sheaths of chamois that kept them from puncturing or getting caught on the fabric.

“I love a woman who knows how to play the game,” Postle said.

“Game? Let’s set the rules, then,” she said, pulling out her claw-fitted hands. She reached around him with them and hooked him by the buttocks, the sharpened points piercing his denim with ease. A brief, excited ahhhh! turned into a gasp of alarm as he realized that she wasn’t using her hands.

She dug the flesh-ripping hooked blades into each cheek near the crack.

“Now, you can either promise to leave my body alone—talk whatever shit you want whenever you want, just don’t touch—or I can open you up and let the asshole out, so to speak. If you want to spend the rest of your life with a double-cut gasket and be on a first-name basis with adult diaper washers, just keep rubbing my breast like you think a genie is going to pop out.”

“You’re drawing blood!” he said.

“I’ll bandage you up personally, using plenty of iodine. Do we have an understanding on the hands-off policy?”

“Understood,” he said, crinkling his eyes in pain.

She extracted her claws. He didn’t seem the type to pull a gun in rage, but she watched him carefully nevertheless.

He stepped back, exploring his pants with a hand. He pulled out a blood-smeared finger.

“You owe me a pair of pants.”

“You owe me an ungroped breast,” she said. “How about we call it a push?”

Covering the damage with his tactical vest, he headed off to the men’s room.

The Canadians announced that they were going to the terminal for lunch, and offered to make purchases for the delayed travellers. She decided to try to bury the hatchet with Pistols and buy him a largish Canadian beer to make amends, and a hot pretzel to go with it. She handed over what she had left of Alexander’s distributed currency meant for “food, drink, and necessities” to get them through the night. When they returned, she gave the beer and pretzel to Pistols and sat down with Valentine and Ahn-Kha to eat her own stew.

The meat was tough and a little gamey and seasoned with something that was trying to be oregano. She wondered if she was eating moose or caribou or some other denizen of the Northwoods.

“I thought you didn’t like Postle,” Valentine said, seeing Pistols lift his bottle to her from across the hangar with a friendly smile.

“I like Postle just fine,” she said. “It’s his penis I can’t seem to get along with. It does too much of his thinking.”

With Pistols tamed and everyone else occupied and the office warm, she stretched out on the floor and napped until Valentine woke her (she didn’t know it, but after Pistols told of his impromptu blood-draw, everyone was careful not to startle her).

The pilot waved to them from the door. He looked freshly shaven and had a new chart under his arm.

“Last leg. In the air, anyway,” Valentine said.

She spent much of the flight looking at Postle, who was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. She honestly hoped the claw pricks weren’t becoming infected. She’d probably gone a little overboard in proving her point, but she’d managed to get back on board without so much as a glance from him. Maybe he’d have an entertaining story for the Swedish girls, or the girls wherever they were heading in the Baltic.

She was growing used to the rattling old plane now that their trip in it was just about over. She wished it were flying them all the way overseas; it seemed capable of a transatlantic hop if it could refuel in, say, Iceland, but it seemed there were stealthier arrangements for the other legs of the journey. Well, she wasn’t organizing it.

For some reason or other, Valentine liked the man. Probably because he was about as emotional as a reptile. Valentine had a hard time dealing with the messiness that went with any kind of emotional display. Besides, he and Sime had a past, mostly bad. They were like two drunks who’d beaten the snot out of each other in a bar fight and ended up drinking buddies. The combination of their air of cool appraisal and the inability to read their expressions put her on edge. She could never relax around such men.

Pistols, on the other hand, was more her type. Deadly—well, she hoped, for their sake—and direct. Now that his grabby habits were straightened out, that is.

CHAPTER FOUR

Halifax, April: Part fishing village, part seaport, part land’s-end outpost, the city is as tough and crusty as a barnacle. For much the same reason. The cold North Atlantic besieges the port, seemingly trying to force a retreat toward more hospitable ground. But this outer corner of Nova Scotia isn’t ready to surrender yet. Centuries of tradition have inured

Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy
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