Hours passed without a word between them. The mountains fell behind them, the ground turned from stony and red to soft and brown, but it was all dry. The trees were nothing but dormant balefires. Even the sky looked thin and ready to spark.
Raven made a low coughing sound, bringing him out of his brooding, half-asleep inspection of the scenery. “We’re almost out of gas,” she said when he glanced at her.
The word meant nothing to him. Fuel for the groundcar, he supposed. “Get more,” he said. There had passed plenty of buildings and outposts along the way. Surely one of them could provide fuel.
“I don’t have any money,” she said.
Kane bared his teeth and aimed a sour curse at himself in lieu of the sound cuff Urak was not around to give him. Of course she would need money. And the two males had probably had the stuff. He hadn’t even thought to check the bodies for necessities. “Stop then,” he said. “We need to hide the car.”
Raven looked around at the empty road, the towering trees. “But-“
“Don’t argue with me, human.”
She pressed her lips tightly together and stared straight ahead. When she found the scars of a groundcar’s passage etched in the overgrowth to one side of the road, she turned off. It wasn’t a proper travel-way, and the car bumped hard as it tried to navigate the forest. When they were well away from the main road and completely lost to sight, Raven shut off the engines and sat back and looked at him.
Kane opened his door and heat struck him like the blast from unshielded engines. He rocked back, his senses swimming, realizing only then that the groundcar had some sort of climate controls and Raven had been using them. He was torn between feeling gratitude at this respite and unreasoning fury at her for not warning him. In the end, he settled for forcing himself out into the baking air and saying nothing to her except, “Let’s go.”
They walked for ages under the leaden stare of Earth’s baleful sun. Before one hundred paces had passed, Kane could feel the dull warmth and itch of seed growing in his tsesac. The itch became a swelling. The swelling became pain. The woods were all around them, deep and heavy and still, and the female was right beside him, close enough for him to smell her musky sweat. Right here. Completely unavailable to him.
“Stop!” Kane roared suddenly.
If she had jumped back (a natural-enough reaction, even in his extremity, Kane could admit that) he would have had an excuse to seize her, and having done that, he probably would have thrown her down and damned the consequences. But she did not jump back. She stopped dead in her tracks and watched him.
Kane got a breath in him—every breath he took was hot enough to have just passed from some unseen other’s mouth, suffocating him right out in the wide open—and then another, and tried to start walking again. The sensation of his clothing scouring at his stiffening cock made that impossible. He stopped again, leaning hard against the nearest tree, and tried to think what to do.
How long did the Heat season last on this miserable planet? He’d been here almost as many times as he’d had years in his life, and it had never,
never
been this hot. Urak, who could lay down five trips to Earth for every one of Kane’s, had never even mentioned that it
could
be this hot. And this was Urak’s favorite hunting ground. He’d have known!
Kane pulled the pack from his shoulder and opened it to check the time. When he saw that the female still had more than seven hours before she was safe for him to touch, Kane had to stoop, cautious as an old man, and put the pack down all the way out of his hands to keep from smashing it to pieces. That done, he stepped away from it and went to lean against another tree.
He wanted nothing more than to empty himself in his captured female, or failing that, to scratch until he dug the itch out in gouts of blood and meat. He could do neither. And he had seven hours before any other option presented itself. Kane dropped his hand to his throbbing shaft and rubbed, gritting his teeth against the ache and the unfairness of it.
“Are you going to rape me?” the human asked quietly.
Kane glared at her, pressing the heel of his hand over the hardest part of him and pushing roughly up and down along its straining length.
“Are you…” Raven swallowed hard. “Are you going to kill me first or second?”
She wasn’t making a damned bit of sense. “First or second to what?” Kane asked, spitting the words out through tightly-clenched teeth.
“Raping me.”
She was staring at the bulge beneath his hand, and he caught her meaning at last.
He nodded. “But I’m not going to kill you unless you make me,” he said. “I want to keep you as long as I can.”
He couldn’t stand it any more. Sweat was pouring down his body and his blood was pounding through him like a hammer, keeping time with the throbbing of his cock. His seed sat in him like molten lead, and whether the female was ready or not, it had to come out. Kane wrenched his coverings open and gripped his cock, not entirely unmindful of the human’s sharp flinch, but beyond the ability to care.
“You’re going to rape me,” she said dully.
“Not yet,” he hissed, moving his fist hard, feeling nothing yet but the churn of Heat pricking deep in his tsesac.
She watched him with huge eyes as he forced himself to a curt, spastic release, and her eyes only got bigger when he rubbed his cum into his rigid cock and kept on. His whole gut was on fire. This fucking weather!
When he managed a second spurt of quick-cum, he craned his neck to see the monitor in his open pack. Only eleven minutes had passed since he had begun.
Chok
.
“Do you want…um…”
“Now is not the time to annoy me.” He dropped his hand to the swollen burn of his tsesac and ground at it, trying to will it to react to the oils of his quick-cum. The pain was exquisite and the act was futile.
“I could give you a blowjob.”
Her voice was a knife of irritation going in deep beneath the frustration and growing rage that already twisted through him. Kane squeezed his eyes open and stared at her through streams of sweat, scarcely able to comprehend any of her language, much less the last word. “A what?”
She seemed a little stymied by explanation. Her eyes twitched toward his moving hand and she dropped hesitantly to her knees and came towards him.
Kane rocked back at once, raising one foot to kick her. He flexed the talons warningly in her face, baring his teeth. “Seven hours!” he snarled.
She looked more affronted than afraid. “I’m not going to fuck you, I’m just going to help you out a little.”
Kane lowered his talons to grip the ground again. Help, she’d said, as if he could believe that. “Fuck?”
Raven made a circle of her two fingers and thrust another rapidly through it in a crude but perfectly understandable demonstration. “Fuck,” she said. “You Tarzan, me Jane, we fuck.”
Oh. Funny, he’d thought the word a curse when he’d heard it used earlier. Then again, Jotan used all but the most academic words for ‘sex’ to swear by. Maybe there were such a thing as universal curses.
Kane closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree, wincing as another spasm clawed its way insistently up from his tsesac. “Seven hours,” he said again. And she had better be ready for it, because he intended to fuck her right down through this shit-begotten planet and out the other side.
Still…listening to her at least gave him something besides Heat to occupy his mind. “What’s a blowjob?”
Her hand closed around his cock, just above his.
He jerked back and swung, knocking her down hard enough to actually flip her completely over and onto her belly. “
Don’t
!” he roared. “Don’t do that!”
She raised her head and swiped hair out of her face. Her eyes were curtained in shadow, but they gleamed at him watchfully.
“You are not clean!” he spat. “And if I can stand to wait seven hours until you are, you sure as
chok
can, too! Stay down!”
Raven slid up to her knees, moving like she was poised on a pane of too-thin glass over a sea of spikes. She never took her eyes from him. Softly, she said, “Sometimes it helps if someone else does it. We can do this and be safe. I promise I’m clean enough for that.”
Heat cramped up with devastating force, sending a shudder through Kane so violent, it was nearly a seizure. When he was able to lock down on his muscles again, Raven had come closer. She reached up between his thighs and took hold of him again. This time, Kane let his hands drop away. He didn’t even know if he believed her and he knew damned well he didn’t trust her, but this was eight days now and he did not care anymore.
Raven squeezed, very lightly, testing him, and when he did not move, she crawled closer and took him into her mouth.
Oh. Blowjob. That’s what they called that here. Kane had never experienced one before. It took a talented female and a very trusting male, and the life of an off-world criminal did not lend itself to either.
She was licking at him, sucking as she stroked her fist up and down his length. No doubt she meant to be winsome in some way, but his tsesac was burning with acid seed, and he was almost insane with the need to be rid of it. He covered her hand with his and squeezed hard, snarling, “Faster!”
Raven could be obedient when she wanted to be, clearly. She adjusted her grip at once to that of steely enclosure, milking him in movements that were ecstatically brutal, and she was right—just the fact that it was someone else was a help.
And then there was her mouth. She sucked at his glans and slid her tongue beneath the thin slip-skin there, sometimes hard and sometimes gentle, drooling copiously to coat her hands with slickness. Every so often, she would nip at him very carefully, bringing a pleasure so immediate, it came almost as a physical blow.
Kane felt his quick-cum bursting out of him—once, twice, and then in gratifying rhythm. He curled around her without thinking, his hands rising to rest on her bobbing head, too tired to even thrust at her. She sucked faster, her whole upper body rocking with her pumping motions. He was shooting quick-cum into her mouth at nearly every squeezing pull of her human hands, and she kept trying to draw back and swallow. He didn’t know the word for ‘drool’, or he’d have roared it full into her face. He could only clench her by the hair and keep her moving, grinding against her mouth as he felt climax nearing.
She struggled up suddenly and let a mouthful of his own quick-cum and her drool spatter in ropes over his thighs and belly. She seized him in both hands and worked the mixture into his cock, and that, finally, brought on the explosion. Heat took him, and Kane threw back his head and screamed agony and ecstasy at the tree-cloaked sky.
Raven sputtered back as his true-seed erupted out of him, spraying her jaws and her clothing with gouts of white. Kane slid his eyes open to watch her swipe at her face and then closed them again.
Quiet fell. The rustle of branches, the distant drumming of insects, and his own ragged, wasted breath were all that Kane could hear. He thought he could sleep.
“Are you okay now?”
Kane smiled wearily. “I heard that.”
He felt her stiffen. “Heard what?”
“Is he sick and am I going to get it?” Kane opened his eyes and his smile broadened when he saw the trapped look in Raven’s eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m not. And no, you aren’t.”
She looked at him a long time before nodding, and then she sat back and brushed at the drying stains on her clothing.
Kane glanced at the timer on his monitor and felt a sleepy sting of surprise. She’d done in mere minutes what would have taken him hours to do on his own, and that with just her hands and mouth. That was good. Almost as good as rolling in the Flesh-halls of Jota, where Heat seasons lasted only a few hours of the day for maybe nine days a season.
And where he had lain, Kane reflected as his eyes slid shut once more. Where he had lain floating on his back in a drift of bedding while one female rode him furiously and others rubbed and reached for him from all sides. Where the oils of mating coated every body to a high sheen, and the scent of musky sex could keep a man drugged for hours while females fought through their own frenzy, mounting his hands in lustful desperation and thrusting their hands between the thighs of his partner to grip at the base of his cock…
Good days.
With a start, Kane realized he was nearly asleep and he sat up fast.
Raven had been quietly bedding down beside him, but at his unexpected movement she jerked away and threw up one hand as a shield before remembering how he rewarded that sort of thing.
He chose to overlook it, although he gave her hand a hard stare to let her know he’d seen it. When he met her eyes again, he said, “How often can you do that?”
She’d been expecting a blow for flinching, and the question caught her off-guard. “As often as you want, I guess,” she stammered.
He was going to need her again before it cooled, he was sure. And when night fell, they needed to travel. Kane growled, thinking.
At last, he lay down, pillowing his head on one arm, and gestured for her to slide right up against him. He put his arm around her waist, able now to feel every breath, every slight movement. He smiled and shut his eyes. “Sleep,” he said. “When I want you, you need to be ready.”
She didn’t answer, but that was all right. Just the feel of her body beneath his arm was all the answer Kane needed. He drifted off to sleep.
*
“Why, baby? Mary, why?”
Those were the last words Raven’s mother had said to her, and now, lying beneath the arm of this…this Devil-thing that had captured her, the girl who had been born Mary Frances Carter realized they would probably be the last words she ever heard her mom say. Of all the loose ends Raven had left behind her in her life, that echoing, unanswered question bothered her the most.
Why had she done it? Why run off to California and join the throngs of teenage runaways? Why change from Barbies to doobies in less than a week? Looking back, even from the tremendous vantage point this horror had gifted her with, Raven had no idea what had prompted her to run. All the other runaways she’d hung out with in L.A. had dramatic stories of rape, incest, drugs, beatings, or some combination of all four. Not Raven. No, little Mary Carter had a dad who believed in barbequing on the weekends and a mom who understood that teens should never be seen at the mall with their mothers. She couldn’t remember ever hearing a raised voice in the house, unless she counted the time Dad set the curtains on fire trying to make waffles. There was no bratty little brother, no bitchy older sister. There was no reason. Mary just left.