Heat (86 page)

“
Please
!”

“Wrong.” He bent and closed his mouth over her nipple, the pleasure so immediate and exquisite that it hurt. He rolled the sensitive bud with his tongue, bit very lightly, and then pressed against her and sucked hard, bringing her just to the cusp of an explosive orgasm. He drew back, glancing down at his knee, still rocking against her. “You certainly seem to be enjoying this,” he observed, “but you
still
won’t ask me nicely. I think I’m done here.”

“
D’shorr, Kane
!” She was almost screaming it, her hips thrusting up at his knee. “
Tamya y…y…chok-sa d’shorr
!”

He chuckled. “Close. But you’ll have to do better. Let’s have one more, and if you can get it right, I’ll give you something special. If you can’t…oh well.” He moved toward her mouth, then out of reach again as she strained up to meet him. “Your lesson, Raven,” he said sternly. His whole body stilled, his eyes grew sharp and hot. “
Se ven garrug-ta
,” he said, all playfulness gone. “
Se garrug y sildurra Kane
.”

What was she telling him? Breathless, aching with need, she couldn’t make herself care. But she could say the words.

He closed his eyes to hear them, his face at once stony and tense with some violent, hidden emotion. When he opened his eyes again, they burned. “Very good,” he said quietly, and got up.

“No!” She surged forward, clutching at his arm. “You promised!”

Kane stepped away from the bed, but not out of her grip. “Show me,” he said. He unfastened the front of his pants, still staring down at her with that strange, hot expression. “Show me, and tomorrow, when you’re sure your period is done, I’ll let you take whatever you want from me.”

Raven dropped to her knees, reaching for him in a fever of lust. Her loins were throbbing, but it never occurred to her to satisfy her own need. She had eyes only for what he offered, and she was shaking with the unthinking need to please him. “
Se ven garrug-ta
,” she said, and took him into her mouth, worshiping him with ardent hunger.

His hand rose and rested on her head. “
Sur Raven
,” he murmured.

Gratitude bloomed in her, as fierce and all-consuming as orgasm. She lathed him in a storm of passion, licking up and down his cock, her fingers digging into his buttocks. When he began to rock against her, it was a reward that filled her whole body with warmth. She took him as deep as she could, swallowing rapidly along his shaft, and then pulled back to tongue his glans and milk him in her fist. “
Se ven garrug-ta
,” she moaned, again and again, devouring him between each recital. “
Se ven garrug-ta
. Please cum in me, Kane. Please!
Se ven garrug-ta
! Cum!”

His breath coarsened, the muscles of his stomach jumped and tightened, and his hand on her head clenched. “Say it!” he growled, thrusting harder.

“
Se ven garrug-ta
!” She swallowed him desperately, grinding towards him as he thrust into her. She welcomed the pain in her jaw, the dull ache at the back of her throat. She could not keep her hands still on his body, and at every opportunity, she pulled back to kiss and squeeze his throbbing cock and say it again. “
Se ven garrug-ta
!”

He threw back his head and howled, spasming in her hand, and Raven took him in with a cry of delight. She felt him splash into her mouth and she swallowed eagerly, drinking the heat that poured from his core and burning in the grip of a fierce, possessive joy. When she had taken everything, she bent around his leg, tracing kisses down his thigh to rest her head on his foot.

Kane leaned against the wall, breathing hard, staring down at her. “You’re mine!” he said, almost snarling. “Mine!”

“Yes.” She hugged his leg, her eyes closed and her face pressed against his lethal talons. “You’ll let me have you tomorrow. You promised, Kane.”

“That’s right.”

“I missed you.”

His hand came down to comb once through her hair. “I…missed you, too.” He spoke haltingly, a man unused to making such admissions, and followed up by pushing her away. “Back to your work,” he said, fastening himself into his clothes again.

Raven rose from the floor, the warmth of his cum still glowing in her belly, and there was Sue-Eye. She was standing just outside the bathroom door, still wrapped in a towel. Her hair was wet, her face pale. They held each other’s eyes for just a second.

Raven smiled.

*

It was night at last, the curtains open to admit a little moonlight, and the humans were finally asleep, each on their own bed. Kane sat at the hotel table in the darkness and watched over them as he prepared his Vahst. He had ten more ampules after the hunt at the motel, ten that would make five once he had them worked into the final product, and each one would fetch him close to one thousand
crona
once he was back home. After all the time he’d spent here, all the petty distractions, he was really coming down to the end of it.

This was the tedious part of the chemist’s trade: He had to empty the ampules two at a time into the analyzer, and then program the exact formula it required to achieve that magical transformation from human dopamine into the Jotan sex-endorphin known as Vahst.
Heat
. Ha. Kane had never sampled his own merchandise, but he knew it wasn’t very damned much like real Heat. It triggered the mating urge, that was all; it heightened pleasure and made the user feel he was burning all the while. For the first few times, it could also enable the user to fuck like he was in Heat, cumming over and over and over for hours, but without the brutal agony of true-cum waiting like molten lead in his tsesac. For the first few times. Afterwards—once the chemicals had finished frying the user’s brain, that was—Vahst was needed just to mate at all. Eventually, long use and chemical scarring would ensure that even true Heat would never be enough to put power in the piston. A Vahst-addict could lie screaming, his tsesac swollen with white-hot hell, and never be able to achieve the erection to fuck it out. That was a bad way to die, a ruptured tsesac.

Which was what such a man deserved for taking the shit in the first place. Kane had no sympathy at all.

Raven rolled in her sleep, kicking off the light sheet that covered her and lying nude in the dim moonlight. She was dreaming of him, relaxed, smiling, the scent of musk rich around her.

Bottle that, and he could make a fortune.

Kane felt his lips stretch in a smile, and he forced himself to return his attention to the chemicals he was supposed to be mixing and reducing. His Raven. So few days ago, she had wept with betrayal when her body took pleasure from him. Now she came to him begging to mate. Kane did not consider himself a gullible man, but there had been proof enough of her desire painting his hand when he touched her. ‘I missed you,’ she’d said, and said it with such a rueful humor that it had to be true.

And he’d missed her. He’d missed having her body tucked beneath his arm, missed the feel of her metal pressing against him, missed her cunt and her hands and her wonderful mouth. The other human, Sue-Eye, was adequate enough a vessel to serve Heat when it came on him, but she was no Raven and never would be, for all her pretenses.

Raven wanted him. He had not broken her; her will was as strong as ever, her mind as quick. He had won her instead. He had taken her away from her reality, dominated her with fear and pain, and then forced her to feel pleasure. Now she was his, his to take, his to train, his to shape into whatever form he willed. Sue-Eye was nothing to him, a receptacle of necessity who might yet prove profitable. Raven now, Raven would be crew someday, and his for all time.

The papers where she practiced her letters were here at his elbow. Kane ran his gaze idly over her writing. She was learning quickly. Oh, it was mindless mimicry now, but understanding would come. She was eager to be schooled, that was the important thing. The now-familiar formations of their names dominated the page, of course. She could not seem to be content with just the alphabet. And there, near the extreme edge of the paper, she’d carefully shaped words in Jotan letters that made no sense at all. Kane thoughtfully translated each to human characters and then to N’Glish and slowly the meaning of it came out.

‘I hate that blonde haired bitch’. Kane bared his teeth in a smile of ferocious approval. If she wanted, he would give Sue-Eye to Raven for killing. But that, as Uraktus may have put it, was a wide stripe of if. Raven had a good head on her slender human shoulders, but she had no taste for killing.

Yet. There was a time, and not too damned distant, when she’d had no taste for Kane.

To hear her voice, smoky with desire, begging him to take her had been a savagely satisfying thing. He had toyed with her, touching her as humans do while coaxing his language from her lips, but it had proved a dangerous game.

I belong to you
, she’d said, and suddenly Kane was no longer playing.
I belong to commander Kane. I belong to you
.

Tomorrow, he had promised to give her his body as her playground. His loins tightened even now at the thought. She wanted to take her time, to mate with him in human fashion. He meant to be ready for her, drained of Heat and receptive. He’d embrace her if she wished it, caress her, taste her. He would do all the things he had seen humans do as they mated in the video feeds. He would even attempt to use his mouth on her sex, if she asked him (he could imagine the taste, salty and heavy with musk, the metals he had put in her sharpening the flavor, and he licked his lips now without realizing it). He would be gentle while she wanted him to be gentle, and then he would wrest control from her as she lay in his arms. He would bring her back to that crazed and shaking hunger he had given her this night. And he meant to make her scream as she came.

Kane forced his attention back to his work, to the monotonous business of numbers and ratios, to the formula that would buy him (and his human crew of one) a ship and a future. He would have one more ampule of concentrated Vahst when the program was complete, five by the end of the night, but only if he kept his focus and refrained from pointless fantasy. He had promised himself to Raven, but that was for tomorrow. Vahst was for tonight.

Voices outside, more humans come to take lodgings in the hotel. A man and woman, by the sound of it. Kane listened with half an ear, idly considering the possibility of going out and taking them, adding them to the other humans he had collected in the ampules before him.

“He wouldn’t tell me, Tagen, and he was a total jerk about it. We’re going to have to wait to ask the day guy. Is that okay?”

“It will suffice. I need only you, and sleep.”

Kane shook his head, smiling faintly. Human romance. They were taking the room directly beside him; he could hear them moving behind the wall, hear the insectile hum of their climate controller pumping cold air into their room. He rejected the notion of harvesting them. It would mean waking his females and abandoning the hotel after he had killed, and he was looking forward to a few hours sleep himself. Let them alone, never knowing how close they had slept to Death.

Over the droning of the air-conditioner next door, Kane’s ears soon picked out low sounds, voices but not words, coming in slow rhythm. Mating. His own eyes slipped back of their own will to linger on Raven’s moon-slick form. He could smell her musk, and with the muffled groans and cries of passion behind him, he could easily imagine her body and his thrashing with abandon.

Raven murmured, her sleeping senses adopting the things she heard for her own dreams. Her throat arched, and Kane heard his name pass like a sigh through her lips. Her thighs parted, her hips rocked, seeking a partner.

Kane rose and went to kneel beside the bed. He touched his fingertip to her lips and she clutched at him, sucking and mewling with sleeping eagerness. He could feel himself stiffening.

The humans on the other side of the wall were growing louder, despite their obvious efforts to muffle themselves. The headboard of their bed slammed thunderously into the wall three times before silencing, but the universal language of coupling continued. The female sounded half-crazed by whatever the male was doing to her. Kane’s imagination unfolded a number of possibilities and his cock began to throb.

Kane pulled free of Raven’s hungry mouth and traced his claws down over her undulating body to the equally-hungry parts of her below. Her pussy clamped and sucked at him as eagerly as her mouth; he pumped his hand against her, matching the rhythm of the humans next door, and she cried out and coated him with her pleasure. Behind him, as though spurred on by Raven’s release, the male uttered a single, strained groan, and then there was silence.

Kane stroked his Raven’s thigh, soothing her back into the depths of sleep. Then he turned, stripping out of his clothing, and pulled the sheets away from Sue-Eye. She roused a little, muttering as she groped to cover herself again, and he caught her leg and flung her open. “Not a sound,” he hissed, flicking his eyes warningly at Raven, sleeping Raven. He straddled the bed, his thighs wide apart and his cock jutting greedily, and closed his fist around himself, rubbing Raven’s oils up and down his length. Then he seized her hips and yanked her up to impale him.

She had been blinking, struggling to waken and to sit up. Now she uttered a coughing gasp and dropped back onto the bed, all her body tensing. Kane fucked her hard, his thrusting hips chopping her breath into pants, and watched her fight for silence. He was hurting her, he knew he was.

“Do you want me?” he whispered, unable to resist goading her.

She nodded, her jaw clenched. Her legs came up and locked around his waist; she began to add to his movements, imitating his body’s lust with thrusting of her own.

This was not Heat. When it was done, it was done, and Kane was in the mood to play. He glanced at Raven, found her still sleeping in the glow of her release, and then withdrew from his grimly-willing partner and climbed from the bed. He gestured for her to follow and went into the bathroom, where he could put another door between them.