She pushed the book back into the space on the shelf. Her hands shook from having done something, touched something, taken something she shouldn’t. She wiped her hands again. If he found out what she had done, he might be awfully angry. Maybe he’d hurt her a lot. She’d stolen from a Superior. She had touched his things, and not just to clean. She had touched his personal, private thing.
She hurried into the kitchen and found a ragged cloth, wet it in the sink, and began cleaning the surfaces in the kitchen. Most of them were clean enough, but everything had collected a thin layer of dust, so Cali cleaned that first. When she had finished, Lady Who Visits came out of the bedroom and cast a hungry look in Cali’s direction before turning back to Man with Soft Hair, who stood in the bedroom doorway. They both squinted in the bright morning light that streamed through the kitchen window.
Cali’s heart started racing. She was sure they knew she’d stolen. But how could they tell?
“Do you need shades?” Man with Soft Hair asked, retreating into his room and emerging with a pair of sunglasses. He handed them to the Lady Who Visits and she smiled and thanked him and put the glasses on.
“I’ll bring them back tonight,” she said, and Cali wondered at what she had missed, because it seemed the woman meant more than she said.
“I’ll be gone tonight,” the man answered. “I have plans. If you would like to return them tomorrow morning, you may.”
“I might just do that.”
“If you’d rather leave them outside my door while I’m gone, that would be fine, too. I have to return the sapien and I have a long night after that, so I need some sleep now.”
“Oh, yeah, of course.”
The man walked the woman to the door and opened it and they brushed their cheeks together before parting. He turned back to Cali and she had the instinctive urge to step backwards away from him, no matter how harmless he looked. She knew he was not.
“As you heard, I must sleep. Have you everything you need?”
“Maybe some food,” she said.
“Yes, of course.” He came to her then, and she did step back. She stepped back until she bumped against the window and she had to stop. The man took a bag from a cabinet and put it on the counter. He turned to Cali, and she noticed again how strange it was to see a Superior in only shorts. She had never seen one without clothes before this one. He looked just about like all the men she’d seen in the Confinement—on the small side, and more tightly packaged, but otherwise normal. There was nothing Superior about his looks at all—he looked just like a human with great hair and awfully sharp teeth. She thought if he’d been human, he would have been an awfully nice-looking man. But he wasn’t human.
She kept waiting for him to bite her again, or sneak up behind her and rip out her throat, or force himself upon her. But he only opened a jar of food and told her again to stay inside, and then he went back to bed. She sat at the small table eating the strange food he had brought her—a can of oranges, a can of tomatoes. He had also brought a box of crackers, a can of corn, and a package of cornbread. These were less exotic and more common to her.
After she finished eating, she rinsed the cans, put them in a small plastic basket on his counter, and cleaned the table. She washed the cans from the night before and put them with the other things he could return to the store for reuse, threw away the cornbread wrapper, and then began cleaning the rest of the house. She had nothing else to do while her captor slept. She liked it more than cleaning the new sap bar where she worked. Cleaning there was much worse than at Estrella’s. The sap bar was disgusting and dirty and it always would be, no matter how much the weakened humans cleaned. Too many years of too-tired humans doing a minimal cleaning job had left the bar permanently grimy.
So Cali cleaned, and when she got tired she slept in a soft chair Man with Soft Hair had in his living area, and no one made her get up or do a certain amount of tasks. No one came to bite her, no one had told her a list of things she needed to do and told her she would be punished if she didn’t finish them or if she forgot one. She hardly knew what to do with herself. So after she slept more, she cleaned more, ate more, and then she slept some more. When she woke, the bloodsucker was licking her wrist hungrily.
Chapter Seventeen
“I have to take you back,” Draven said as soon as he emerged from the shower. The slanting rays of light made the building next door look especially red behind Cali, who stood in front of the window. Draven squinted at her and went to ready himself for work.
When he came out of the bedroom Cali was sitting in the chair where he’d found her sleeping when he got up. She sat staring at the bookshelf.
“Have you read all these?” she asked.
“Yes. Can you read?”
“No.”
“Of course you can’t. Did you eat the food I brought you?”
“Some of it.”
“Eat the rest if you like. Otherwise I’ll have to throw it out.” He went to the window and opened it to let the air come inside. The small apartment always got stuffy when he forgot to open it in the morning. Not that one puny window did much as far as fresh air, but it was better than nothing. When he turned back from opening the window, Cali had moved to the counter to watch him. He wondered something briefly, what she was thinking. Of course that was ludicrous. He knew as well as anyone that sapiens weren’t so complex in their thinking, but her face seemed strangely contemplative. The notion amused him and he smiled on the way to his room again.
What a strange night he was having. First the unusual attraction he’d felt for Lira and now crediting a sap as capable of higher thought. Perhaps he needed more sleep. He opened the metal box on his dressing table and looked inside at the pathetic little stash of money he’d accumulated. He took out a few bills and folded them into his wallet and went to collect his illegal sapien.
“Come along, little sap,” he called to Cali. She trudged toward him. Her face was drawn, and her eyes darted around. But she came.
Though he wanted to draw from her again, he thought if he left her healthy, she might have a few extra days before she was nearly dead again. He found it more difficult to pay exact attention to her sap flow than with other sapiens, more difficult to ration it out and stop when he should. If he could leave his teeth in her arm and stay there all night until there was nothing left to suck out of her, he would.
Instead, he put his hand around the back of her neck and pushed her out the door in front of him, keeping a good grip on her so she couldn’t run, at least not without him sensing her intention. She was quite tense but she stayed a step ahead of him and let him steer her down the short hallway to the doors that led outside, then down the steps to the car and inside. She didn’t struggle or try to run, and no one saw them. Most people still slept or stayed inside until the sun sank a bit further. But Draven had to get Cali back and come all the way up from the South End to Estrella’s.
He thought Cali’s place of employment might be angry with him for keeping her an extra day. They might try to charge him more for the second night. He decided he would negotiate for the second night. Perhaps he could save up and just buy her outright. Although he hadn’t known how to take care of her very well and he didn’t have the proper facilities, he liked having her around. It made eating easy, and she wasn’t so bad to talk to, and she wasn’t bad to look at either. And most of all, he liked having her scent permeate the apartment, so the moment he walked in all he could smell was the most delicious fragrance.
“Are you very smart?” Cali asked as they drove through the deserted streets towards the south end of the city.
“Smart enough, I imagine.”
“And you’ve read all those books you have?”
“Yes.”
“How did you learn to read them?”
“Someone taught me.”
“When?”
He paused and glanced at her with a frown. “After I evolved.”
“Evolved?”
“After
I became…well, a long time ago.” He had talked to only Superiors for so long that he’d forgotten that sapiens didn’t know these things.
“Do people still teach that? Reading, I mean.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose they could. Someone ought to remember. It’s been quite some time since anyone has been taught to read, though. Everyone already knows.”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course not. You can’t be taught those kinds of things.”
“Why not?”
“Your brain doesn’t have the capacity to learn something so complex.”
“How do you know?”
He looked at her, trying to remember the reason he’d been given, but it hadn’t seemed important enough to commit to memory at the time. “I have forgotten. I probably read it somewhere,” he said, and then realized the irony of this statement and laughed. Cali laughed too, and he glanced at her, surprised again to hear the sound coming from a sap.
“What does that word say?” she asked, pointing to a sign.
“It means stop.” He stopped, and then continued driving.
“How do you know when you have to stop and when you get to go on?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just do.”
“You’re not very good at answering questions.”
“You ask too many.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Good. Let me have your hand. I very much enjoy your smell.” Darkness had fallen when Draven turned his car off the ramp onto a narrow street with dilapidated buildings and a few rusty old cars sitting in their trashy lots. The lots stood empty, still, except for a few tufts of dry grass sagging in defeat after trying to conquer the asphalt world through cracks filled with dirt-like residue.
“Scoot down in your seat,” Draven said. He put a hand on Cali’s head while she slid down until her knees touched the dash and her head was below the window level. He glanced around and sped up a bit, debating whether the trip to this dangerous and depressing side of town was worth it just for a nightcap of Cali. He would be expected to eat at the restaurant where he worked even if he had time to slip away for long enough to drive all the way down to South End and back during his break, which he did not. If only he had the money to buy her.
He decided that he would. He would save the money he made, every pent and every anya, he would put them in the tin on his dressing table until he had enough for her, and then he would work on getting the correct equipment for caring for livestock. He would be dining with Byron’s family soon, and he would ask about homo-sapien care, about equipment and facilities, and he would learn everything he could about them. By the time he bought Cali, he would know how to take care of her, what she was supposed to do and what was abnormal.
Draven’s mind filled with these thoughts until he pulled onto the street containing Sap Heaven, Sap Haven, and several other eateries of the same nature. He pulled up short in surprise, and Cali sat up. Instantly Draven’s hand shot out and nearly crushed her by pushing her down in the seat so fast. She made a small strangled noise of pain, and he jerked his hand back. Her eyes got watery and shiny and she sucked her lips in.
“Have I hurt you?” Draven asked, pushing the car up to a slow cruising speed. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cali shake her head no.
“Good. Your employment appears to be over. Your restaurant has been raided by the Enforcers. It will be closed down.”
“How do you know?”
Draven smiled. “There are laws about the treatment of saps, and this place violates nearly all of them. So you are out of a job. If you had been there, you would have been confiscated along with the rest of the restaurant’s live property.”
“So what are you going to do with me?” she asked in a small voice.
Draven glanced at her. He had forgotten she was barely older than a child. And sapiens were apt to frighten with little or no provocation.
“Zut! I don’t know.” He paused and turned left at the end of the street. “I couldn’t just stop and dump you out in front of the place. I would have been arrested for having you at all—they’d think I…acted inappropriately towards you. Perhaps I could bring you back now and say I found you on the street, that you’d escaped during the raid…” But he didn’t stop. He kept driving. Musing. “But they probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d look like the damn lottery prize to most of the derelicts around here. You’d be drained dry in five minutes. You’d never have made it to another street. And the saps in that place are all too weak to run anyway.”
Cali didn’t say anything. She just sat looking at the blue-black of the darkening sky and let him continue. “I could put you out but that would be even worse, because then you really would be sucked dry, and I wouldn’t just be slapped with a fine for borrowing you.”
“You could keep me?” Cali said in that same small voice. He glanced at her, frowning. She sounded almost hopeful. Why wouldn’t she be? He’d treated her well and kept her calm. And probably saved her life, with great risk to himself and not much personal gain. In fact, he’d been quite reckless and stupid.
“I can’t keep you,” he said. “I rented you. I had to fill out a form guaranteeing I’d bring you back in equal or better health to when I got you. If I kept you, I’d have to pay your full purchase price, and I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.” He didn’t want to admit to a sap that he had no money. He’d already mentioned it once, and she didn’t need to know those things about Superiors. Not that it mattered what she thought, but still. He knew she couldn’t understand if he tried to explain it to her, and it would just frustrate him more. “Be quiet so I can think,” he said, stroking her hair. All the way back he pondered his options.
When he drew close to his side of town, he turned right instead of left and sped up. “I’ve decided what I shall do.”
“What?” Cali asked, looking around. He sensed her increasing fear immediately. He took her wrist again and could feel the sap throbbing through her veins, could hear the acceleration in her heartbeat, the faint creeping odor of fear in the air inside the car.
“You’ll be alright, little pet. I won’t hurt you.” He pressed his nose to her wrist and breathed deeply of her scent, already missing her. “Nothing bad will happen to you. They take good care of livestock at the Confinement. It wasn’t so bad last time, was it?”
“You’re taking me back to the Confinement?” She pushed with her feet until she was sitting straight up in the seat. Her eyes widened as she looked ahead with him.
“Yes. I will tell them that I found you wandering and you appeared weak but not badly injured, and you were in a bad part of town. I didn’t know where you came from, and I didn’t imagine you’d live if I passed by and left you. They will scan your code and find that you belong to a restaurant that has been closed, and they will keep you. Do you understand what I’ve said to you?”
“Yes. I’m going back to the Confinement.”
He heard the awe in her voice and looked at her. She had a startlingly huge smile on her sapien face.
“Is this good news for you?” he asked.
She grinned even bigger. “Great news. I’ve been wanting to go back for years.”
“Is that so? But you ran away from there, yes?”
“I did, once. But I was younger and stupid and I didn’t know how lucky I was. Maybe I’ll find some of my family, if they haven’t been sold. It’s been so long, though… I don’t know if I’ll recognize them.”
“You have family?”
“Yeah, my mama and a lot of sisters. Mama made lots of new babies and the overseers treat her good because of it. I hope she’s still there.”
“I am glad you find this agreeable. It is the best I could think to do. You must remember what I’ve said to you, so you can tell the same thing if anyone asks. Can you repeat what I said to you, where I found you, what happened?”
She briefly recapped what he had said, but she sounded distracted
and he could feel her tension. She sat on her hands, leaning forward in the seat, looking out the windshield and smiling. He grew annoyed that she didn’t seem to take the situation seriously. He could be slapped with a large fine for having an illegal sapien, even a bit of jail time if he had committed another offense with her. He hoped the record of bringing her in the last time wouldn’t pop up in the system. It would seem a bit strange that the same Superior kept finding the same sapien wandering the streets.
He stopped at the back of the large parking lot, away from the security lights and cameras. “I will bring you inside so you don’t run again,” he said.
“I won’t run.”
“You can’t trust a runner,” Draven said, looking at Cali. “Although I don’t imagine you are strong enough yet.”
“Thank you so much for bringing me here,” she said, her voice welling with emotion. She leaned towards him and he just sat there, not sure what she intended, wary of her. And before he could be shocked by the realization of her intention, her arms circled his neck.
Chapter Eighteen
Cali’s smell flooded Draven’s nostrils and he filled with incredible hunger and longing at the mouthwatering aroma of her sap, flowing and pumping through every part of her, in the arms that surrounded him, in the warm knot of muscles at her shoulders, the soft little swells of her breasts, the neck that was so, so close to his mouth and so alive with veins.
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