Heat (42 page)

He did not know the word. All the same, her meaning was evident. “Yes.”

“From people? From humans?”

“Yes.”

“Just from humans?” she pressed. “You can’t make it from…dogs or cows or…or your own people?”

Clever Raven.

“Sure, I could.” Kane placed the ampule back into his case and sealed it, running his mind through an idle debate on just how much of the truth to tell her. “But humans are more convenient and they make a superior product.”

“What does it do?” she asked.

Kane leaned back with a laughing snarl, and shook his head at her, showing his teeth in a hard grin. “It makes fools feel pleasure. We call it Vahst. It means, ah…Heat.”

*

“Well, I’ve got to say, it’s got to be pretty hot shit because I just don’t see how it can be remotely profitable to come all the way to Earth, kill a bunch of people while evading the cops, and then fly all the way back. That would have to be one hell of a high.”

Tagen glanced wearily at Daria, specifically, at her hands, splotchy with foam as she scrubbed tensely at their dishes. Her tone was casual, almost indifferent, but her posture betrayed the same anger and fear that always seemed to lie just beneath her surface. He wished he knew the human words enough to explain about Vahst, but that might mean having to explain also about true Heat, and he could not face that. More and more often these days, his eyes had a way of resting on her hips, on her loins concealed beneath her clothing, and she was beginning to notice. She was easily smart enough to realize he was in Heat if he had to describe it for her, and he could well imagine her response.

“It is profitable,” he said only.

“Why doesn’t he just butcher his own damn planet?” she demanded. “There’s got to be less overhead in it. Or don’t you have murder on your perfect planet?”

“We do.” He returned his gaze to his glass of ice water, watching jewels of condensation drip down the outside of the plastic tumbler. “And it is done the way you say. But those chemists that do so are caught.”

“Every single time?”

“It is difficult to produce Vahst on-world, more difficult still to market it.” He shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position on the hard wooden chair, telling himself as he did so that he was not feeling the slow itch of Heat creeping up on him so early in the day. “And so sooner or later, they must leave Jota. And then they are caught.”

“If it’s that hard to get off-world, how did this…E’Var do it?” She was shooting him swift, angry glances as she asked this, as if she held him personally responsible for E’Var’s escape.

“You must forgive the lapses of our law,” Tagen said dryly. “E’Var left Jota when he was two, and his criminal years well ahead of him. The young of Jota are…” And there he was stumped for language, sitting in silent frustration and staring at his water. “…different,” he finished finally. “You humans keep the offspring you bear. Jotan do not.” And to forestall the questions he knew he had no words to answer, he added, “What you mean to ask, I think, is not how did E’Var leave Jota, but how did he come to Earth? Ships able to ride deep space are not idly passed out, and the Gates that open on the outer reaches like your world are both guarded and regulated.”

“Okay.” Daria ran a little more water into the sink. “Okay, we’ll start there. How did this guy get a ship and how did he get through your Gate and come to Earth? You said he was captured when his father’s ship was taken. I assume you didn’t give him the keys and tell him to follow you to the station.”

Anger flared, brief but very hot, and Tagen clenched his jaw and quietly said, “I know you are being sarcastic, Daria Cleavon, and I do not appreciate it.”

She went still as stone at once, her head bent and a tremor running just below the surface of her skin. She gripped the sides of the sink and stared into the water. She did not speak, not even to apologize. Somehow, that was the greatest indicator that she was, in fact, sorry for her words.

“I was not among those who took Uraktus E’Var’s ship, but I heard of the conflict. Twenty-five officers lost their lives, but of the criminals, only Uraktus E’Var was killed and only his son, Kanetus, escaped. There are on deep-space ships what your tee-vee programs call ‘escape pods’. When the Jotan officers took the ship, Uraktus held them away from the escape pod bay until Kanetus was away.”

Tagen’s voice trailed off and he gazed down at the tabletop. He disliked the way those words sounded, the nobility they conjured up. A father, dying for his son. Kolya Pahnee would have never—

“We know that E’Var had many allies among the criminal set,” he said, killing that thought before it could be fully birthed. “Kanetus was hidden by them for some time. And then, one day, he was arrested.”

“Just like that?” Daria turned around. “I’m not being sarcastic, I’m—”

“Just like that,” Tagen said. “And you are not the only one who was surprised to hear it. I believe…I do not know, but I believe that Kanetus E’Var may have planned his arrest.”

Tagen stopped there and rubbed at his eyes. The strain of having to pick apart his thoughts and fold them into human speech was wearing on him, invisibly but indelibly, like wind on a mountain. And there was Daria, watching him, faintly but distinctly hostile. “E’Var was being moved to a rikers—”

“To a
what
?”

His confidence in human speech evaporated and Tagen mentally replayed his last words. He hated this. Hated his ignorance. The video feed that had taught him so much of his N’Glish had said rikers, he was sure of it, and said it nearly every episode, but that was clearly the wrong word now. Cautiously, watching Daria’s face for clues, Tagen began again. “E’Var was being moved to a…place…for captured men…”

“Prison.” Comprehension suddenly flooded Daria’s eyes and she laughed. “Oh, I get it! Rikers! Riker’s Island is the name of the prison on
Law & Order
.”

He accepted that with a shrug and a nod, filing this new word away and feeling a faint relief that his lapse in N’Glish hadn’t been so grievous after all. “The prison is not near to Jota. We lost it when it passed through the Jotan Gate. It was suspicious, but not a cause for immediate action. Ships are lost at times.”

“Just like that, huh? Oh, drat, lost a ship. Ho hum?”

He rocked back in his chair and looked straight at her, a little grimly pleased to see her fall silent and drop her eyes. “You have ships that cross the sky here, I have seen them. Do they fall?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted, after a pause lengthy enough to clean three plates.

“And when they fall, it is assumed that one of your evil men has caused it to happen?”

A longer pause. She shook her head.

“So. There are many, many things which can cause a ship to break apart during a Gate. And the ships that are used in…prison transports are old and prone to accident. No, we did not suspect E’Var. There are some who still do not suspect him, but I believe that he killed his guards and took the ship. E’Var is a chemist, a very good chemist, and one that needs a lot of money if he means to return to his trade. That kind of money is made with Vahst, and Vahst is made on Earth.”

The fight wasn’t out of her yet. She just had trouble finding a new angle to come at him. She washed dishes and Tagen watched her, noting the slight flex of her back in the instant before she struck.

“How is he manufacturing this stuff?” she asked. “He can’t be just carting around a couple of human hypothalamuses in a Scooby-Doo lunchbox! Doesn’t he need a lab or gear or anything?”

“Yes.”

She waited, stacking her dishes with increasing noise. “
And
?”

“Give me time. I do not have your words.” Tagen leaned back over his glass, slid his thumb down the side of it to chase condensation into rivulets of cold water. “I have come to believe that one of the guards provided E’Var both with the means of escape aboard the ship and with the needed materials to harvest and manufacture Vahst. In exchange for what, I do not know, but what he got for his effort was death. E’Var has demonstrated great loyalty to his…his…family,” he concluded, but very slowly, knowing this was not the right word. “But he does not trust to the silence of mere accomplices.”

Both were silent. The dishes were washed, dried, stacked. Daria was scrubbing at the sink and countertops.

At last, in a small voice, she asked, “How many people is he going to kill for this drug?”

“I have no way of knowing. But as you say, if it is to be profitable, it must be many, and E’Var means not only to make the cost of the trip, but enough to keep himself comfortably beyond the reach of Jota.”

“How many?” she asked again, and her eyes beneath the veil of her hair were young and frightened.

*

“Two hundred,” Kane said. “Perhaps as many as four. Or it could be as few as fifty. It depends on certain things, and I haven’t decided how I want to go about it.” He watched Raven absorb this, rolling the ampoule of Vahst between his fingers.

“Christ, that’s a lot of people,” she said in a thin, faint voice. She was rubbing at her clit-ring, long after the lotion must have been absorbed, and he watched her hand. She seemed to have forgotten what she was doing. “So many people. How could you possibly get away with it?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I guess I would, because…four hundred people!” She shuddered.

“There’s a lot of humans on this planet,” Kane shrugged. “And they all mill around together and sometimes wander off and vanish or bump up and kill each other. We take a few here, a few there. No one notices.”

Raven’s hand had stopped its movements, but remained cupping her sex. She was staring at the wall beyond Kane’s head, her face locked in an expression of shock so profound it was almost grief. “No one?” she echoed, her voice scarcely audible.

“Mm.” Kane’s interest in the conversation was dissolving. He stood up and approached the bed, still watching her hand, and hooked one claw in the waist of his pants. He’d been patient, she was healed, and it was time to enjoy the work he’d had done on her.

“Hey, no!” she said weakly. “It’s too early! You’ll tear ‘em all out.”

He paused with one hand on her shoulder and the other raised to cuff her for her protestations, and considered that.

Her cunt was beautiful. Shaven smooth and gleaming with steel. He wanted to feel those rings rippling against the side of his shaft as he plunged in and out of her. She looked plenty healed up to him, but then, she might know better. And if the piercings ripped free, they might never go back in.

Of course, she could be replaced. There was no shortage of humans on this miserable planet, as he had just observed.

But there was no guarantee a replacement would prove any hardier than his Raven, who was, besides a convenient fuck, obedient and clever as well as decent company. Plus, he liked her hair, and he still hadn’t seen any other humans in that color.

And there were options, weren’t there? If the human video feeds had taught him nothing else, they had taught them that.

“Give me that,” he ordered, lowering the hand poised to strike and pointing at the lotion sitting beside her on the bed. “And get on your face…on your belly.”

Her face did a curious thing, like a buckling or crumpling, but she rallied to stoicism and slid forward onto her knees and then rolled to brace her hips against the foot of the bed, gathering in folds of blankets to muffle her mouth and presenting her hocks to him. She held up the little hotel bottle and her hand was fairly steady.

Kane tapped out the remainder of its contents into his palm, dabbed one finger into the white cream and rubbed this down Raven’s crevasse to the dimpled bud of her cloacae. The rest he lathered onto his cock, stroking and squeezing until it warmed slightly on his skin. He worked both, his cock and her wrinkled orifice, content for now just to do this.

“What is this?” he asked suddenly. “Tell me the name of it.”

“What?” she stammered, raising her head slightly, as one awakening, befuddled, from a dream of pain.

Kane pulled back his hand and cracked his palm across her flanks with his full strength, reasoning that she seemed thicker there and he wasn’t likely to break anything.

Raven shrieked into her arms, scratching at the bedding before shuddering and sobbing back into place.

“That,” he said coolly. “What is that?”

“My ass,” she wept.

“And this?” He punched his finger into her. Tight. Tighter than her cunt. He squeezed himself hard.

“Asshole,” she sobbed. “A-anus.”

He knelt carefully behind her, rubbing at his glans and sliding his arm beneath her belly to raise her just right, and fit them together. “Have you ever done this?” he asked mildly.

“No.”

Memories of Urak’s male human swam up from the black and Kane paused again, uncertain. “Will it kill you, do you know?”

“I don’t think so. You j-just have to go s-slow and stop if you see b-b-blood.” Her voice broke on the last word and she sank her human teeth into her own clenched fist, shivering.

“Slow,” he echoed. He flexed his arm, bringing her back instead of thrusting forward. He could feel in exquisite detail the tight muscle of her cloacae—of her anus—admitting him, feel the hot passage clamping and fighting him. His shaft sank into her; he withdrew a little ways and pulled her back again, imbedding himself a little deeper this time, shivering with the effort of restraint against the surging heat of pleasure. He eased back, stroked one hand down the jumping muscles of her belly, and then tightened his grip on her and shoved until his hard stomach pushed at her ass.

His head was thrown back, his throat working in silence, his fangs bared. He was scarcely aware of her, and yet intensely conscious of her all at the same time. His arm was an iron bar gripping her tight against him while his free hand moved lightly across her flanks, almost caressing, sometimes reaching up to comb out the tangles of her hair. He could feel his cock swelling, throbbing, almost jerking in the first throes just from the feel of her so tight and shaking with her tears.