Edge: Killer's Breed

"Captain," she murmured, locking her hands at his neck to press her face into her shoulder.  "Captain, there's an earthquake." She began to move her body in concert with his. His teeth sank into the soft firmness of her flesh as he sucked upon the saltiness of her. The tempo mounted and Hedges wanted to cry aloud his exhilaration. But his lungs were near to bursting and his throat was filled with an emotion which he did not understand. This is what it must be like to die, he thought, and gave himself up to whatever was possessing him, driving into the girl relentlessly.

"That was wonderful, Captain," she sighed as he finally lay still.

He raised his face from her shoulder, licking her blood from his lips. "Beats kissing," he said. "Obliged, Miss Fisher."

He rolled off her, on to his back. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. She laughed suddenly. "It really did feel like an earthquake."

"Something moved, sure enough," he confirmed. "I feel different."

"You are," he told her, and tried to force his grin to show humor. "You're a woman now. You came into this room a maiden and then you lost your head."

For long moments she was silent and he looked sideways across the pillow at her afraid he might see regret in her face. But it was a puzzled expression that creased her forehead and crinkled her nose. Then it was gone, as she saw the joke and happy laughter burst from her bruised lips. He broke into his own, harsher laughter and the sound of their joy filled the room. Without shyness she released his hand and reached down to find the source of her pleasure. His body offered an immediate response to her touch and their laughter reached a crescendo and then died as she urged him onto and then into her again.

"Where's your sister, Miss Fisher?" he whispered as his teeth tugged gently at her ear.

"Out with a man," she answered breathlessly.

"Humping?"

"One family can't have that much luck," she sighed, clasping him to her.

The cold grey light of dawn was streaking across them eastern sky as Hedges left the hotel to begin the bleak walk back to camp through the desolate city streets. He felt weak but replete, emptied but satisfied. If he had come through the opening horrors of war with any relic of his youth intact, tonight he had lost it. He felt the complete man in every sense of the word.

"Hold it right there, soldier boy." The words were spoken in an easy drawl, almost conversationally. But the expression on the speaker's face gave the lie to his easy manner. He was leaning against a pillar in the porchway of a bank, ten feet in front of Hedges. He was tall and thin, dressed in an eastern suit with a fancy vest which had a gold watch chain looped across the front. His low-crowned hat was tipped back off his brow so that the dawn light showed every line of his thin, aquiline features. His hands were thrust casually into his pants' pockets and a half-smoked cheroot angled from the comer of his mouth, issuing blue-grey smoke in a vertical column.

"You talking to me?" Hedges asked, slowing his pace.

"I've been waiting all night for you. Not likely I'd be addressing anyone else."

"Must be something real important you want to say to me," Hedges answered, halting a yard from the other man.

"Message from the Senator."

"Which one?"

The man took the cheroot from his lips with long fingers. "The one from Virginia. The one you attacked last night."

Hedges narrowed his eyes. "He can still talk?"

"Enough." The man rolled the cheroot between his thumb and forefinger and suddenly flicked it towards Hedges.

Hedges sidestepped, feeling the adrenalin pumping through his body, driving out the euphoria of post-sexual relaxation. A man cried out and Hedges made a half turn and looked at two hulking roughnecks, one of them raising a hand to where a circular burn mark decorated his cheek. But the second man had no such preoccupation. The massive fist he had launched continued on its course and only its target as altered. Aimed for Hedges' kidneys, it landed on the side of his waist, with enough force to tear a grunt from the injured captain's lips.

"He could say kill the bastard," the instigator of the violence announced casually as he lit another cheroot.

The man with the burned face recovered from his shock and directed his anger at Hedges, sending a straight right low towards the captain's solar plexus. Hedges chopped down with the edge of his hand on the wrist and launched a kick towards his attacker's groin. Both connected and the man yelled and staggered back as his partner landed a vicious punch to Hedges' neck. He staggered to the side, feeling the pain ricochet around the inside of his skull like a solid object.

"And, he said, painfully."

One of his attackers had not yet been hurt, and Hedges' mind, working coolly in spite of the pain, demanded that this roughneck had to be taken first, while the other nursed his injuries. Hedges turned to face square on to the advance, his eyes narrowing to slits as he saw the flash of a knife.