He exploded, rage lambasting him at the very thought that she could see inside of him, see the innards of his emotions just like Chatha had seen the innards of his gut. He grabbed her, wrenched her hand and arm behind her back and slammed her chest first into the side of the truck.
“Don’t you f**king try to tell me what I am on the inside! Don’t you f**king dare!”
Faith tried to catch her breath, seeing as how it had gone slamming out of her on impact. Pain lanced like fierce fire through her twisted arm and she felt the incredible strength of him up against the entire length of her back. He pressed into her with all of his weight, making sure she could feel how very serious he was.
“I wasn’t,” she coughed. “Leo, please…I’m not…I have no strength in my whiteform. I’m no stronger than the average human woman. Ow!”
“You are not an average human woman,” he hissed into her ear. He leaned all of his significant strength into her, the muscled wall of his body hard and unmovable. “But you look it. You feel it. If not for your color you could pass for it.” She felt his hand wrapping around her throat, tipping up her chin to make her look into his angry whiskey eyes. “But you are inhuman. You are all inhuman. Give me the lowest scum of the natural born earth over you people any day of the week,” he spat at her.
“Who says humans were the ones born naturally to this earth?” she countered on a croak.
That seemed to give him pause. It made him think. Thinking was good. What he was doing now was instinct, fight or flight, stumbling in a world he couldn’t fully comprehend because of the way he had been thrust into it.
“Leo, not all of us want to hurt you…even if you are hurting us.”
The latter observation suddenly got through to him. He jerked away from her, releasing her and stepping farther back. She spun about and lunged for him, grabbing him by his shirtfront and yanking him toward her, pulling him in just in time to keep him from getting clipped by a speeding car. There was the sound of a horn and an angry curse, but they both paid no heed. Leo had reached out for the truck, gripped it on either side of her, his head bowed as he held her caged there and looked for all the world like he was trying not to throw up again.
After a long pair of minutes that had him sucking hard for air and then slowly winding down into deep, steadier breaths, he finally opened his eyes and looked down into hers.
“Stay. Out.” He said it through tightly clenched teeth.
“I can’t,” she said just as firmly. “You’d have to gouge out my eyes as well as the heart of me. I see with them both. Blind me and I can still see what you don’t want me to see.”
His eyes slid closed again and she had the distinct feeling that he was trying to keep from wringing her neck. So she figured she’d just as soon push him to it as not.
“I’ll see what you think he made you,” she said, taking care not to soften her voice, not to show anything he might consider to be pity. “Weak. A victim. Insignificant.”
“Shut up.”
“Rip out my tongue. Go ahead! Silencing me won’t stop those very same words from running around inside your head.”
“My god, have you no sense of self-preservation?” he growled at her. “Are you trying to goad me into breaking your neck?”
“No. Because just like you, I feel pain. Just like you, just like any of us, I can be made to hurt. All it will take is someone stronger than I am. And that’s what you’ve just realized, isn’t it? That there’s more people out there stronger than you are than you thought there were?”
“I’d hardly call you things people.”
“No more than white men thought you people were worth anything more than itinerant farmhands, right? Or that slaves were real people with feelings. Those kinds of people?”
“Goddammit!” He grabbed her by her arm, opened the driver’s-side door, and then shoved her into the truck. He slammed the door shut in her wake, staying out on the road. She figured she’d pushed well beyond his tolerance and decided to let him have a few moments of peace.
That was when she saw a car driving slowly toward them…a familiar-looking car. A small brown coupe with about three or four people crammed up into it. Their scrolls lit up as soon as she was in range, and ugly script appeared on them in white-hot letters.
“Leo,” she said in anxious warning. It wasn’t that she was afraid of them so much as it was that she was afraid of what Leo would do to them in his present state of mind. Because for all the hard, harsh truths that made him who he was, he was not as cold-blooded as he fancied himself. But if he were pushed too far at a moment like this, he could do something that would push him over a moral edge he had thus far avoided. “Leo, we have to go now,” she said as firmly as possible, reaching for the door handle.
“Stay in the truck. The day I can’t handle a bunch of drunk fools is the day I hang up my Desert Eagle.”
She watched him casually unzip the last two inches of his leather jacket in order to make it easier to draw the gun from the holster on his belt. He didn’t hide the fact that he was armed, but he didn’t flaunt it either as two of the men exited the car from other side of the road.
“Hey mister, you having some trouble?” one of the two that alighted from the car called out as they both crossed the road to approach. Leo quickly counted heads. Four of them. The one who had called out to him was skinny…unnaturally so. It reminded him of a snitch in his hometown named Ray-Ray who was more interested in buying his next high than he was buying his next meal.
Oh yeah, he thought, this is trouble.
“Anything we can help you with?” the second one asked, this one looking like he had consumed a great deal of the meals the first one had missed. He was burly and tall, easily topping Leo by a head and quite a few kilos. Leo was very sure he thought his size could get him to victory in a fight, and no doubt he was right…most of the time.
The first thing Leo noticed outside of their heights and weights, however, was that although they were speaking to him, they were staring in through the truck windows at Faith. An observation that was solidified with their next sentence.
“Whoo-wee! Look at that, Joey. You were right! She’s as white as a ghost!”
Joey? Leo would have guessed Joe-Bob or Billy-Ray or some other Podunk hyphenate. They were clearly walking-talking stereotypes and didn’t even know it. Maybe he should apprise them of the situation. Maybe they would appreciate him pointing it out.
“We’ve got things fully under control here,” Leo said, fighting back the urge to say “Opie.” Had he been alone, he wouldn’t have resisted. In fact, he was spoiling for a good fight right about then. At least fighting was something he knew, something he could get a handle on.
“Well, now, I don’t think you do,” the beanpole said. “Do you think he do, Joey?”
Joey shook his head. “Sure don’t.”
“Sure don’t,” the thin man echoed, as though repeating it made it more profound. As though Joey were a font of wisdom he had to access from time to time. “You were just about to fall right into traffic a second ago, boy.”
From inside the truck, Faith saw a sort of stillness come over Leo. He’d been leaning back, seemingly relaxed, already appearing quite still. But there was a difference between stopping motion and just…stopping. Everything. He didn’t so much as blink. Then he lowered his chin, the corner of his lips curling up in a smile that so clearly wasn’t a smile.
“We’re fine,” he said. “And if you want to keep breathing, you won’t call me ‘boy’ again.”
Oh boy, Faith thought. She leapt for the window, pressing the button just in time to hear the lead man of the twosome say, “That’s right unfriendly of you, Mister. Here me ’n’ Joey take the time to pull over and check on you, and you go and get attitude on us. Ain’t he got attitude on us?”
“Attitude,” Joey agreed sagely.
“Honey! What’s taking so long? I gotta pee!” Faith decided to sell it by leaning on the horn. Leo’s head pivoted and he looked at her, rather like she had to be out of her mind.
It made Joey and his friend laugh.
“Sounds like you got a problem after all, boy. The girl’s got to go.”
Leo laughed.
Uh-oh. She’d heard Leo laugh. This was not a Leo laugh. Not a good or genuine one, in any event.
It was like watching lightning leap from cloud to cloud, the way he leapt onto the first man, bending him over in his surprise, grabbing his jacket by the back hem and yanking it up and over his head, successfully tangling him up in his own clothing. Then he sprang off him and grabbed the big guy by the shirtfront. Leanly muscled, quick and light, Leo had ducked under not one but two swipes of Joey’s meaty paws and, using just the extension of his leg and a pull on that shirtfront, sent him sprawling face-first into the asphalt. By the time the thin man had caught his balance, worked himself out of the tangle of his clothing, and whirled around, Leo had his gun pulled and was aiming it…at the car. The two men in the backseat looked like grasshoppers on meth as they tried to hold up their hands and figure out which way to leap to gain safety, all the while trapped in that backseat.
“Here’s how this goes,” Leo said, with deep steady breaths and a fierce darkness in his eyes. “You get in yours, I get in mine and we all leave happy.”
“But—!” The slim man was working up to some kind of protestation, Faith could see it as well as Leo could.
“Or!” Leo said sharply. “Or I pump two of these armor piercing rounds into your engine block and leave you four stranded out here in the desert with coyotes and rattlesnakes for company.”
The thin man, now hunched in on himself, as though it might make him a smaller target, held out a placating hand.
“Now, we didn’t do nothin’ to you, b-uh…uh…mister!” Faith watched another smile touch Leo’s lips ever so lightly. It was no less cold than the first one had been. “But we’ll be on our way.”
“Better hurry if you’re going to catch up to your friends,” Leo advised.
Faith looked in the direction he nodded the gun at and realized the other two men had finally gotten out of the backseat of the car and were running down the road at full speed…or at least as fast as their lumbering bodies allowed for while they struggled to keep their pants up at the same time. Apparently both were in need of a good belt.
The thin man bent to help his friend off the road and Faith could hear them cursing at each other as they hurried across the road and got back into their car. Gravel, sand, and a long, loud screech filled the air as they whipped into a full U-turn and chased down their friends. More swearing ensued, this time louder than before, as they reacquired the rest of their group and peeled off with more sand and gravel flying. By the time she looked back at Leo, he was pulling his jacket straight, the weapon already in its holster. He opened the door to the cab, and looked her dead in the eyes for a long minute.
“I can’t get in until you move,” he said with genuine amusement touching his lips.
“Oh!” Faith said, realizing she was kneeling on the driver’s-side seat. She backed up quickly. “I’m sorry.”
She stared at him with genuine puzzlement and as soon as he had climbed in he looked at her and raised an inquisitive brow. Faith couldn’t help but marvel at him. Here he was, a fragile mortal male, no defenses or physical advantages…in fact he was shorter and a bit lighter than the average healthy man might be, and somehow he’d bested two—potentially four—full-grown men without using any deadly force.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“That they were planning to attack you…or rather, us.”
“I didn’t until just now.” He regarded her and took in her surprise. “I suppose you saw that on their light things?”
“Scrolls,” she corrected absently. “Yes. I did. But you don’t have the ability to see scrolls or read minds so…you couldn’t possibly have known—”
She sat back in her seat in honest bewilderment.
“It was their knuckles,” he said after a long minute.
“Their knuckles?” Now he was trying to confuse her, she thought petulantly. Just because she wasn’t familiar with humans like some of her breed were didn’t mean he could tease her as though she were stupid.
He rubbed a thumb across the ridges of his knuckles. “They both had fresh scabs on their knuckles. The kind you get when you’re in a fight. Coupled with their very obviously false sense of concern…it’s just better to gain the upper hand from the start and when they are least expecting it. Spares me having to buy more ammo.” He shrugged. “And we’d be detained by the cops, explaining why they’re all shot up. I figure we don’t have that kind of time to spare.”
“Don’t you f**king try to tell me what I am on the inside! Don’t you f**king dare!”
Faith tried to catch her breath, seeing as how it had gone slamming out of her on impact. Pain lanced like fierce fire through her twisted arm and she felt the incredible strength of him up against the entire length of her back. He pressed into her with all of his weight, making sure she could feel how very serious he was.
“I wasn’t,” she coughed. “Leo, please…I’m not…I have no strength in my whiteform. I’m no stronger than the average human woman. Ow!”
“You are not an average human woman,” he hissed into her ear. He leaned all of his significant strength into her, the muscled wall of his body hard and unmovable. “But you look it. You feel it. If not for your color you could pass for it.” She felt his hand wrapping around her throat, tipping up her chin to make her look into his angry whiskey eyes. “But you are inhuman. You are all inhuman. Give me the lowest scum of the natural born earth over you people any day of the week,” he spat at her.
“Who says humans were the ones born naturally to this earth?” she countered on a croak.
That seemed to give him pause. It made him think. Thinking was good. What he was doing now was instinct, fight or flight, stumbling in a world he couldn’t fully comprehend because of the way he had been thrust into it.
“Leo, not all of us want to hurt you…even if you are hurting us.”
The latter observation suddenly got through to him. He jerked away from her, releasing her and stepping farther back. She spun about and lunged for him, grabbing him by his shirtfront and yanking him toward her, pulling him in just in time to keep him from getting clipped by a speeding car. There was the sound of a horn and an angry curse, but they both paid no heed. Leo had reached out for the truck, gripped it on either side of her, his head bowed as he held her caged there and looked for all the world like he was trying not to throw up again.
After a long pair of minutes that had him sucking hard for air and then slowly winding down into deep, steadier breaths, he finally opened his eyes and looked down into hers.
“Stay. Out.” He said it through tightly clenched teeth.
“I can’t,” she said just as firmly. “You’d have to gouge out my eyes as well as the heart of me. I see with them both. Blind me and I can still see what you don’t want me to see.”
His eyes slid closed again and she had the distinct feeling that he was trying to keep from wringing her neck. So she figured she’d just as soon push him to it as not.
“I’ll see what you think he made you,” she said, taking care not to soften her voice, not to show anything he might consider to be pity. “Weak. A victim. Insignificant.”
“Shut up.”
“Rip out my tongue. Go ahead! Silencing me won’t stop those very same words from running around inside your head.”
“My god, have you no sense of self-preservation?” he growled at her. “Are you trying to goad me into breaking your neck?”
“No. Because just like you, I feel pain. Just like you, just like any of us, I can be made to hurt. All it will take is someone stronger than I am. And that’s what you’ve just realized, isn’t it? That there’s more people out there stronger than you are than you thought there were?”
“I’d hardly call you things people.”
“No more than white men thought you people were worth anything more than itinerant farmhands, right? Or that slaves were real people with feelings. Those kinds of people?”
“Goddammit!” He grabbed her by her arm, opened the driver’s-side door, and then shoved her into the truck. He slammed the door shut in her wake, staying out on the road. She figured she’d pushed well beyond his tolerance and decided to let him have a few moments of peace.
That was when she saw a car driving slowly toward them…a familiar-looking car. A small brown coupe with about three or four people crammed up into it. Their scrolls lit up as soon as she was in range, and ugly script appeared on them in white-hot letters.
“Leo,” she said in anxious warning. It wasn’t that she was afraid of them so much as it was that she was afraid of what Leo would do to them in his present state of mind. Because for all the hard, harsh truths that made him who he was, he was not as cold-blooded as he fancied himself. But if he were pushed too far at a moment like this, he could do something that would push him over a moral edge he had thus far avoided. “Leo, we have to go now,” she said as firmly as possible, reaching for the door handle.
“Stay in the truck. The day I can’t handle a bunch of drunk fools is the day I hang up my Desert Eagle.”
She watched him casually unzip the last two inches of his leather jacket in order to make it easier to draw the gun from the holster on his belt. He didn’t hide the fact that he was armed, but he didn’t flaunt it either as two of the men exited the car from other side of the road.
“Hey mister, you having some trouble?” one of the two that alighted from the car called out as they both crossed the road to approach. Leo quickly counted heads. Four of them. The one who had called out to him was skinny…unnaturally so. It reminded him of a snitch in his hometown named Ray-Ray who was more interested in buying his next high than he was buying his next meal.
Oh yeah, he thought, this is trouble.
“Anything we can help you with?” the second one asked, this one looking like he had consumed a great deal of the meals the first one had missed. He was burly and tall, easily topping Leo by a head and quite a few kilos. Leo was very sure he thought his size could get him to victory in a fight, and no doubt he was right…most of the time.
The first thing Leo noticed outside of their heights and weights, however, was that although they were speaking to him, they were staring in through the truck windows at Faith. An observation that was solidified with their next sentence.
“Whoo-wee! Look at that, Joey. You were right! She’s as white as a ghost!”
Joey? Leo would have guessed Joe-Bob or Billy-Ray or some other Podunk hyphenate. They were clearly walking-talking stereotypes and didn’t even know it. Maybe he should apprise them of the situation. Maybe they would appreciate him pointing it out.
“We’ve got things fully under control here,” Leo said, fighting back the urge to say “Opie.” Had he been alone, he wouldn’t have resisted. In fact, he was spoiling for a good fight right about then. At least fighting was something he knew, something he could get a handle on.
“Well, now, I don’t think you do,” the beanpole said. “Do you think he do, Joey?”
Joey shook his head. “Sure don’t.”
“Sure don’t,” the thin man echoed, as though repeating it made it more profound. As though Joey were a font of wisdom he had to access from time to time. “You were just about to fall right into traffic a second ago, boy.”
From inside the truck, Faith saw a sort of stillness come over Leo. He’d been leaning back, seemingly relaxed, already appearing quite still. But there was a difference between stopping motion and just…stopping. Everything. He didn’t so much as blink. Then he lowered his chin, the corner of his lips curling up in a smile that so clearly wasn’t a smile.
“We’re fine,” he said. “And if you want to keep breathing, you won’t call me ‘boy’ again.”
Oh boy, Faith thought. She leapt for the window, pressing the button just in time to hear the lead man of the twosome say, “That’s right unfriendly of you, Mister. Here me ’n’ Joey take the time to pull over and check on you, and you go and get attitude on us. Ain’t he got attitude on us?”
“Attitude,” Joey agreed sagely.
“Honey! What’s taking so long? I gotta pee!” Faith decided to sell it by leaning on the horn. Leo’s head pivoted and he looked at her, rather like she had to be out of her mind.
It made Joey and his friend laugh.
“Sounds like you got a problem after all, boy. The girl’s got to go.”
Leo laughed.
Uh-oh. She’d heard Leo laugh. This was not a Leo laugh. Not a good or genuine one, in any event.
It was like watching lightning leap from cloud to cloud, the way he leapt onto the first man, bending him over in his surprise, grabbing his jacket by the back hem and yanking it up and over his head, successfully tangling him up in his own clothing. Then he sprang off him and grabbed the big guy by the shirtfront. Leanly muscled, quick and light, Leo had ducked under not one but two swipes of Joey’s meaty paws and, using just the extension of his leg and a pull on that shirtfront, sent him sprawling face-first into the asphalt. By the time the thin man had caught his balance, worked himself out of the tangle of his clothing, and whirled around, Leo had his gun pulled and was aiming it…at the car. The two men in the backseat looked like grasshoppers on meth as they tried to hold up their hands and figure out which way to leap to gain safety, all the while trapped in that backseat.
“Here’s how this goes,” Leo said, with deep steady breaths and a fierce darkness in his eyes. “You get in yours, I get in mine and we all leave happy.”
“But—!” The slim man was working up to some kind of protestation, Faith could see it as well as Leo could.
“Or!” Leo said sharply. “Or I pump two of these armor piercing rounds into your engine block and leave you four stranded out here in the desert with coyotes and rattlesnakes for company.”
The thin man, now hunched in on himself, as though it might make him a smaller target, held out a placating hand.
“Now, we didn’t do nothin’ to you, b-uh…uh…mister!” Faith watched another smile touch Leo’s lips ever so lightly. It was no less cold than the first one had been. “But we’ll be on our way.”
“Better hurry if you’re going to catch up to your friends,” Leo advised.
Faith looked in the direction he nodded the gun at and realized the other two men had finally gotten out of the backseat of the car and were running down the road at full speed…or at least as fast as their lumbering bodies allowed for while they struggled to keep their pants up at the same time. Apparently both were in need of a good belt.
The thin man bent to help his friend off the road and Faith could hear them cursing at each other as they hurried across the road and got back into their car. Gravel, sand, and a long, loud screech filled the air as they whipped into a full U-turn and chased down their friends. More swearing ensued, this time louder than before, as they reacquired the rest of their group and peeled off with more sand and gravel flying. By the time she looked back at Leo, he was pulling his jacket straight, the weapon already in its holster. He opened the door to the cab, and looked her dead in the eyes for a long minute.
“I can’t get in until you move,” he said with genuine amusement touching his lips.
“Oh!” Faith said, realizing she was kneeling on the driver’s-side seat. She backed up quickly. “I’m sorry.”
She stared at him with genuine puzzlement and as soon as he had climbed in he looked at her and raised an inquisitive brow. Faith couldn’t help but marvel at him. Here he was, a fragile mortal male, no defenses or physical advantages…in fact he was shorter and a bit lighter than the average healthy man might be, and somehow he’d bested two—potentially four—full-grown men without using any deadly force.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“That they were planning to attack you…or rather, us.”
“I didn’t until just now.” He regarded her and took in her surprise. “I suppose you saw that on their light things?”
“Scrolls,” she corrected absently. “Yes. I did. But you don’t have the ability to see scrolls or read minds so…you couldn’t possibly have known—”
She sat back in her seat in honest bewilderment.
“It was their knuckles,” he said after a long minute.
“Their knuckles?” Now he was trying to confuse her, she thought petulantly. Just because she wasn’t familiar with humans like some of her breed were didn’t mean he could tease her as though she were stupid.
He rubbed a thumb across the ridges of his knuckles. “They both had fresh scabs on their knuckles. The kind you get when you’re in a fight. Coupled with their very obviously false sense of concern…it’s just better to gain the upper hand from the start and when they are least expecting it. Spares me having to buy more ammo.” He shrugged. “And we’d be detained by the cops, explaining why they’re all shot up. I figure we don’t have that kind of time to spare.”
