He stared after me. And he laughed. The laughter hurt; I could see the pain in his face. But he laughed. Fun, Beast thought at me. I curled my lips. “Not really,” I murmured. “Ten bucks says he won’t be back.”
Jane can’t kill more-than-five bucks. But I can. Beast shared a memory of feasting on a buck, points of his rack standing within her vision. The buck had been two hundred pounds, eighty pounds bigger than she. His blood was hot, his flesh so full of flavor it made the juices in my mouth run.
“Show-off,” I murmured to Beast. To myself. We both walked on, sharing the only kind of humor Beast and I could. Blood-sport humor.
Rick’s bike was gone when I tooled out of the side garden, braids streaming out behind me, beads clicking, my head sweltering in the helmet, motor rumbling with a heavy, powerful purr. My bike is a Bitsa. Bitsa this and bitsa that. Mostly parts from two 1950 Harley-Davidson FL pan/shovel bikes, modified, not restored to showroom perfection. The bike is dark teal with an iridescent, metal-flake, pearl sheen; it has black shadows of mountain lion forelegs along the gas tank, rising from the seat, between my legs, curved claws extended as if reaching to grab the handles and take over. And in certain light, one can see minuscule flecks of ruby blood streaking the claws. It’s a custom, one-of-a-kind job: the paint color, the artwork, and the bike itself.
Hunting for transportation after my last, very profitable job, had been much like hunting for food, and Beast, who seldom entered my conscious thoughts except when danger threatened, wakened when I started looking six months ago, and hung around for the entire search. My Beast had very specific opinions about vehicles. She had refused to let me buy a car or truck, and had simply spat when I showed her a minivan suitable for stakeouts. But the first time she saw the bikes, rusting and busted in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, she had approved.
Jacob, the Harley master mechanic who had worked as an engine/chassis builder in a Charlotte NASCAR shop for ten years, was more a Zen Harley priest than a mechanic. He’d not so much rebuilt Bitsa as resurrected her into the perfection only a master mechanic could envision. She was still a basic pan/shovel on the outside, but with modern updates, like a dependable, low-maintenance, quiet-running Mikuni HSR42 carburetor and hydraulic lifters; she was a dream bike. We’d had only one argument over Bitsa. Jacob had wanted to install an electronic ignition, but keys are for wimps. Bitsa had an old-fashioned kick start and always would.
We rolled down the street, the roar of the engine claiming our territory as much as Beast’s scream would announce and claim hers. Her scream, not a roar. African lions roar, panthers don’t. Cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and North American black panther, all refer to one beast—the Puma concolor—once the widest-ranging mammal on the North American continent, and one of the three largest modern-day predators other than man. As fierce as they are, pumas can’t roar. They scream, hack, growl, purr, yowl, spit, and make low-pitched hisses, and the young make loud, chirping whistles to call their mothers, but they can’t roar. Beast considers the gift of roaring highly overrated and likely to draw in the white hunter and his guns. Silent and deadly is better, with screams to frighten prey. She didn’t need more. But she liked the roar of the bike. Go figure.
She would likely stay quiescent—she sleeps nearly sixteen hours a day—as shopping, though predatory, wasn’t bloody enough to arouse her hunting instincts. I needed cooler clothes to survive this heat and humidity. The temps had reached mid-nineties, with hotter weather called for later in the week. I also needed to meet the butcher who would deliver my protein needs. To meet the ten-day bonus, Beast and I might be shifting every day, a round-trip ticket, making meat imperative. Five to ten pounds of fresh meat and a half box of oatmeal a day, and that was just to restore from two shifts. If I had to fight or run, I’d need a lot more calories.
As we powered out of the Quarter, accelerating down Charles Avenue, it started raining. From a clear blue sky. I sighed. My hair was gonna look awful.