Varr was a seasoned slaver, with a hundred years and half again Kane’s weight to his advantage. He was the muscle Urak employed when conflict erupted and they were caught off-ship. He was stronger, he was faster, and he didn’t make empty threats.
Kane knew when he was outmatched. He’d backed up a step, watching warily until Varr picked up the human and thrust back inside it. Only then had he left, wondering how in hell he was going to bring this up to his father.
He’d gone less than a hundred paces back through the cargo bay when Urak’s hand came out between two stacks of hull panels and touched his arm. Urak did not speak or even look at him; his face was grimly set and his eyes were hooded in shadow. Seconds passed, and Urak’s hand slipped away, freeing Kane to leave.
The next day, Kane had come out of his sleeping pod into the quarters he shared with his father and found the human face-up on the table, and Urak calmly carving it.
“Sleep well?” Urak’s voice was even, almost disinterested. He withdrew a piece of gut from the human’s body and peered at it. “Does this look like a kidney to you?”
“What happened?” Kane asked after a moment.
“He died.” Urak placed the possible kidney in a specimen jar and capped it. “Bled out.”
Silence would have been a prudent reply.
“Varr?” asked Kane.
Urak had slid a cold eye back to Kane. “He bled out, too,” he said calmly, and returned to his dissection.
So that was that. Varr’s fate was obvious, but not spoken of by any of the crew, leading Kane to wonder just how many of the others had known about Varr’s visits to the cargo bay with Urak’s slave. As for the human, well, Varr had probably half-killed it (the memory of that blood drawing its way down the human’s leg was a cold one that had a way of swelling up like a bubble when Kane’s mind was unquiet) and Urak had finished the job. Kane couldn’t imagine his father killing the thing outright; he’d put too much time and effort into it to kill it over something it couldn’t possibly have helped. Urak was ruthless, but never unfair.
Kane shook the thoughts out of his head and looked down at the human in his possession. His Raven was nothing like that other human. She was strong. She was a survivor. She was going to be a pain in the ass until she was trained up, but once that happened, Kane thought she was going to be pretty useful, and for more than just mating.
He touched her hair again, picking dirt and tree-needles out of the waves of purple, and examined her face. In her fitful rest, she appeared to him to be very young. Ah, but experienced enough, however young she might look. Those things she did with her mouth, for example. That took schooling.
Kane put one careful claw on Raven’s lip and pulled, exposing her blunt human teeth.
She moaned and turned her face away at once. “I dunno why,” she muttered in drug-thick sleep. “Quit askin’.”
Kane growled low in his chest, coaxing her deeper into sleep. When her face finally relaxed and smoothed, Kane turned her back to him and looked again into her amazing mouth. He saw only the single row of teeth that all humans had, and they did not fold back when he pushed at them experimentally. Her tongue, too, hardly looked as though it were capable of the acrobatics it had played out over him. Kane bent and stole a breath from her mouth. He tasted bile and the faint minerals of his own seed.
His human. His Raven.
Despite all the humans Urak had kept, it occurred to Kane that he’d never really gotten a good look at one. They were merchandise when they were on the ship, nothing more, but if he was going to be spending a lot of time with this one, he thought he’d better get to know her.
Beneath the short coat, she wore a top of woven string, tight as a second skin, that couldn’t possibly afford her protection and which served only to display the body it was meant to cover. That was all right. Kane wanted her on display. He tried to find the opening in the string-top, telling himself it was only to answer his idle curiosity right up until his temper flared and he ripped his claws down and cut it open.
Fascination briefly overwhelmed his other thoughts as he examined her bared flesh. Raven was slimmer than Urak’s human, but she didn’t appear starved; this was a tendency of human females, like Jotan, to be smaller than the males. Another difference: High on her chest were two fleshy bumps, each with a circle of brown at their center. Kane was quite sure Urak’s male slave hadn’t had the bumps, although he’d had the circles.
Kane put his hand over one of the bumps and squeezed it carefully. Soft, but firm. He wondered what they was for. It had to be a female thing, because when Urak had dissected his male, he hadn’t found any corresponding organs in that place. Kane had seen plenty of naked or nearly naked humans in his life. Seen them. Not really looked at them. Now he was beginning to wish he had. He hated the feel of uncertainty.
Kane squeezed again, rubbing his thumb over the circle at the bumps center to make it stiffen and stand out. Urak had found this the most amazing thing and had installed firedims in his slaves to make the circles stand out whenever he wanted, but Kane couldn’t see what the big deal was. He pricked lightly at the hard bump with his claw, and Raven whimpered in her sleep and pushed at his hand.
He let himself be moved. His eye had been caught by her belly, where humans, like Jotan, had a dimpled placental scar. Raven wore a loop of gold in hers. Kane tugged at it lightly, but it was stuck tight. Bizarre. Maybe she clipped something to it. Maybe it was purely decorative.
Raven muttered again, distracting Kane from his inspection, and when he looked down again, it was with appraising eyes at the wrap she wore around her waist. He pushed it up.
She wore a thin scrap of a loin-cover, but it was already torn from Kane’s rough handling earlier. He started to pull it down, but the strands holding it together snapped under his claws and exposed her completely.
Dark hair grew in a patchy triangle over her sex, rich with the fragrance of her musk. It was not purple, and it was much coarser than the hair that grew on her head, but it trapped the aroma of her female sex and that was the important thing.
‘This is not a good idea,’ Kane thought, and bent down to fill his lungs with that intoxicating scent.
Heat—never far from him—scratched upward from his tsesac and sank deep in his belly. Kane reared back, his gaze clouding, and reached down to rub himself.
The human wasn’t clean. Wasn’t and wouldn’t be, not until well after nightfall. The human had the Creeping Waste, and that was nothing to play around with. He needed to practice some restraint here. She wasn’t clean, he wasn’t going to fuck her, and that was all there was to it.
Kane put his hand on Raven’s belly, combing down that coarse and somehow unpleasant patch of hair and then pushed between her thighs. The folds beneath his questing fingers were the same as any Jotan female’s. He stroked her lightly, careful of his claws, slipping inside her by slow degrees.
Ah, she was snug, even around his finger. She was going to grip his cock like a vise.
Warmth was pooling in his belly, swelling out in a hard, hot lump down in his tsesac.
Kane’s eyes traveled up her body to those curious bumps on her chest. How did those work, anyway? There had been no concavity on Urak’s male that would have corresponded. How did humans fit together? Raven was shaped like any female down below, hence Kane had thought humans must mate as Jotan do, face to face. But wouldn’t those bumps get in the way? The yellow-haired female must have had them, and thinking back, Kane could remember seeing them as she stood in the water, just before she took her last, wet breath. But he couldn’t remember what they’d felt like pressed beneath his body. Of course, he couldn’t remember much of anything from that time.