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"You don't talk like swamp trash."
"I grew up in New Orleans." Valentine thought he'd better get off the subject in a hurry. "Why'd you leave Big D?"
"You really want to talk, after a tab of Horny?"
"You're beautiful, RC, but I'm about to leave New Columbia. Still a little curious about you. You're authentically nice."
"Authentically nice. I'll take it."
"What's Dallas like?"
"I was on my back at twelve. You invest the capital you're given. I was pretty slender; the guys with a taste for ... younger stuff... dug me until I was over eighteen. My face and hair didn't hurt. But once I passed twenty and had a kid, well, I wasn't worth much to my boss. Dom and Garrett, the doorman, were hunting up girls on the cheap. Dom bought me out for next to nothing, and taught me to talk better and do my eyes right while he was building the joint."
"Where's your-"
"Son, they told me. New Universal Church youth center. Never even got a good look at him."
"Fresh start, huh?"
"Yes. Wasn't a real change, just on the outside. I'm still doing soldiers, still wondering if the penicillin they're giving me is the good stuff or not. I just wear a nicer dress is all. Appearances can be deceiving."
"Yes," Valentine said, drifting off to sleep.
"You ever wanted to change who you are?"
"Constantly."
RC might have been saying something else, just above a whisper, but he sank into an exhausted slumber.
* * * *
Molly was moving beneath him in the darkness of the little basement room. He felt her bucking beneath him, clawing at his back, but the pain only made him thrust harder. Her eyes screwed up tight in orgasm, then opened as she screamed in passion.
Her slit pupils widened in their yellow irises as her tongue shot toward his breastbone ...
* * * *
Valentine woke, the sheets wet against his back, a rancid taste in his mouth as though someone had wiped his mouth with a discarded diaper.
"What's going on?" he whispered. There were thumps and a shout or two from below.
RC turned against him. "Eyuuhh? I don't hear anything."
Valentine felt a Reaper, somewhere below. Its presence pulsed with cold energy. He heard the crash of a table overturning.
"It's two in the morning," RC yawned. "They're just closing up downstairs. Sometimes they have to drag people out."
The Reaper moved into the street as RC spoke. He heard an engine start.
"They took someone out," Valentine agreed. He could picture the scene downstairs. The Reaper arriving, possibly with a human goon or two, and shaking someone awake. The horrible realization that they probably had less than an hour to live as they looked under the hood at the pale, emotionless face. Handcuffs, a waiting vehicle. "The Meet Wagons," they used to call them in New Orleans. Then the final struggle against its embrace: the last dance.
"God, your heart is pounding," RC said, pressing her palm to his chest. "That always happens when you wake up?" She was a shadowy presence beside him, nude, her long hair tied up for sleep. He felt her skin against his leg, softer than the sheets, save for the tickling tangle of hair between her legs.
"I startle easy," Valentine said. The Reaper was gone. He collapsed back on the bed.
Her hand moved lower. "Do you always get a gun when you're startled?"
Valentine's hand had moved to his gunbelt hung on the corner of the bed when he woke, but her attention was fixed on flesh, not steel.
