Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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And one day, floating on a cloud of drugs and good sex, the thought of hitching up to Seattle dug into her brain and it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Raven could remember this plan being greeted so warmly by her friends that they gave her a big going-away party with lots of hugging and making out and drinking and smoking. Someone gave her a huge bag of joints to send her on her way, and then she hit the road.

Halfway there, Raven sobered up enough to realize that Seattle sucked. And the very next car that stopped for her had two guys in it who said they were on their way to New York and would she like to go along? Hell, yeah. Would she mind trading a little slice of her pie for the privilege? Ain’t no thing, fellas. And then they turned out to be assholes, but so what? They were dead now, weren’t they?

She wanted the thought to comfort her, but it only brought home the too-real fact that she had traded a couple of assholes for the Devil himself. Christ, why hadn’t she just gone along with them?

Why, baby?

Raven rolled onto her back, away from her mother’s unhappy and horribly confused phantom, and saw the Devil’s eyes slide open. They stared into her, as black and empty as the eyes of a shark. There was nothing in those eyes that Raven could reason with. She said nothing, and soon he shut them again.

Raven could feel herself wanting to tremble and bit down on her panic with all the iron she had left. It was too damn short a distance from shaking to crying, and if she started that shit, she’d never stop. The human mind wasn’t fragile, but it was mortal, and once it broke, it was gone for good. She couldn’t afford to go even a little bit crazy in the company of this inhuman thing. She could spend the rest of her life forgetting that this had ever happened to her, but first she had to live through it.

The Devil said he wouldn’t kill her if she behaved herself. He said they had an understanding. He’d hit her, but only when she fought him and not as hard as he could have hit her. He said he wanted to keep her around as long as he could. Just how long that would be, she had no way of knowing, but she did know how she’d be spending her time.

On impulse, Raven fished in her jacket pocket for the plastic baggie that had held her going-away present. She’d been trading ass and grass all the way up the west coast, but there was still one joint left, and this was definitely time. Raven could do what she had to do to stay alive, but she didn’t want to have to face it sober. Raven lit up with shaking hands and took a deep drag.

Instantly, the arm around her middle tightened and the Devil’s eyes were on her once more. Raven looked back at him, hardly breathing, holding the smoke down deep in her lungs as if to protect it from him. She saw his nostrils flare, and then he reached up and plucked the joint from her fingers. He pinched out the embers, tossed it away, and then returned his arm to her waist and shut his eyes.

Raven exhaled as slow as she could, willing her mind to gentle itself on just one drag. She could see the white line of the joint lying in the dirt within easy reach, but she did not dare to reach for it. He hadn’t bothered to punish her for smoking, but now his thoughts on the matter were known, and if she picked that doobie up, he’d probably break her hand for her.

Oh Christ, this was bad. How did this get so fucking bad?

The urge to tremble came on her again, and this time, she couldn’t quite crush it. She could do what the Devil wanted, she knew she could, but ah God, she wanted to be stoned when she did it.

“Lie still,” the Devil growled, not even opening his eyes.

Raven tried, but clenching her fists only made the shivering more pronounced. Her heart was racing. Panic had got its claws in her at last.

Beside her, there came a short, hard sigh, the sound that experience told her would probably precede a short, hard slap. “I am very tired,” the Devil said. “And you are starting to annoy m—”

Sudden silence. He had opened his eyes, and something in the sight of her shut him right up. His arm came away from her and he sat up, catching her jaw and peering very closely into her face.

“Chok-se y vok!” he snarled, and sprang away.

That didn’t sound good. Raven tried to take a breath, calm herself, but her lungs were locked. Something was wrong. Raven’s feet began to drum on the ground. Her left arm swept out suddenly and smashed into a tree root hard enough to scrape her knuckles bloody. Her heart was slamming into her ribs; she could actually feel herself rocking with the force of its blows. She tried to scream, but the effort produced only a whistling gasp.

The Devil came back into the frozen field of her sight, but she couldn’t focus on him. Even her eyes were shaking now, jittering around in their sockets as a terrible pressure began to build behind them. Any second now, she was going to feel them explode out of her head. Dear God, she was going to see it!

The Devil swung a leg over her, straddling her chest, rapidly mixing something up from the little glass vials in his pack. There was a grim shard of light in each of his terrible eyes as he worked. “Try to be calm,” he told her, his teeth bared and set. He looked once, furiously, at the scorched joint lying on the ground and then took the vial he’d mixed and inserted it into the rodlike thing he’d injected her with earlier.

Raven’s body was bucking. The weight of the creature atop her was enough to keep her pinned to the ground, but her limbs flailed wildly. In horror, she saw one of her own hands fly up in a hard jerk and strike the Devil in the face.

He didn’t even flinch. “This is going to hurt,” he said, leaning over her with his device in his three-clawed hand. “A lot.”

Raven tried to nod, but succeeded only in starting a seizure wild enough to knock her head against the ground over and over. Without warning, she retched. Foam spewed sluggishly from between her clenched teeth, the rest slid back into her throat in a choking clot.

The Devil leapt up at once, shoved her on her side and gave her one hell of a whack between the shoulderblades. This dislodged only a tiny spray of vomit from the mass clogging her mouth. Her lungs kept working, trying to breathe it back in. Her vision was graying, neon spots exploding in space before her eyes.

She was dying.

Oh, thank God.

“Chok,” the Devil snarled again. His claws invaded her mouth, prying her locked jaws apart.

Bile poured from her as from a faucet, but she couldn’t cough to clear her throat. She couldn’t even tell if she were breathing or not.

There was a dull hissy sound as the Devil put his surgical tool to her throat and pulled the trigger.

The pain was immediate, fuming out from the base of her neck and quickly engulfing her whole body. She fell limp almost at once, suspended bonelessly in a sea of rolling fire so complete she could actually smell the fat in her flesh popping as she cooked.

The Devil rolled her onto her back, and drove his mouth hard over hers. He breathed, bludgeoning her with air. Her lungs rebelled and she retched again. He was expecting it, and had her turned so that she could breathe afterwards. He was already mixing something else for her, muttering to himself in a coarse and guttural language.

The second injection caught her right at the base of her skull, stabbing inwards and upwards, freezing her brain and briefly turning everything she saw bright pink.

Then it faded. It all faded.

Raven fell down through the ground and out into darkness, blessedly black, blessedly cool. She lost track of her body, she lost all the power to speak or think. She was alone with her pain, her fear, and her mother’s voice, asking that question that Mary Frances Carter had long ceased to have power to answer.

Why, baby? Mary, why?

The reply came out of the blackness, his voice echoing in the empty that matched his awful eyes.

Why not?

*

‘Well, boy…’ Urak’s voice swam up from the back of Kane’s brain, speaking in precisely that tone of calm that usually preceded one hell of a storm. ‘What went wrong?’

“I don’t know,” Kane said wearily.

Imagination or no, Kane’s head actually rocked back with the non-force of the slap with which his father would have greeted that answer.

‘She nearly died,’ Uraktus went on, disapproval darkening every word. ‘Don’t you think you’d ought to know why?’

It was the smoke. Kane was almost sure of it. The smoke from that paper wrap, or more accurately, from whatever drug was burnt inside it.

‘So a taste of one of the poisons you are even now filtering from her body set her off.’ Urak’s black incredulity was undimmed by death, his voice quieting in the way it had just before his father lost his temper. ‘Say it again, boy. I need to know you really meant it.’

Damn him.

“I didn’t run a cross-reaction check before I injected her,” he said, and scowled down at the wan and twisted face of his sleeping human. He was so disgusted with himself he could hardly stand it. He’d mixed up the filters for all those different toxins, programmed the nanozymes, and just plugged it right into her. Just as though he’d never done it before, never practiced on all those slaves, never had a father who trained him to do it.

‘You need to start making a habit of thinking.’ The voice of his father was scathing, and dead or not, he could still make Kane want to fidget. ‘Wanting to fuck is not excuse enough to make a mistake that basic.’

Kane thought it was a damned good excuse, actually, but he was still angry with himself. Not with his human; even if the stolen breath of poison had brought the fit on, he couldn’t be angry at her for it. She couldn’t know any better, and there was no point in punishing her for ignorance. Rules and punishments made a human docile, but knocking one around whether it had misbehaved or not was a really good way to piss it off, and a pissed-off human was capable of anything.

Besides. He did want to fuck her. As poor an excuse as that might be, when the sun beat down on him tomorrow, he wanted a female to bury himself in and get away from the worst of its fury. Kane waited for his father’s sarcastic comment, but there was nothing. Even the subconscious shadow of him that spoke in his father’s voice knew Urak’s mating preferences would make further recriminations hypocritical.

To fuck a human…

He’d had his chances, the gods knew. For as long as he could remember, there had been humans in the Null’s hold at least twice a year, and plenty of stops at breeding facilities and Kevrian sex-houses. Kane may have been the only crewman who hadn’t fucked one, but there was something so inherently distasteful in the very thought of it that he’d never even been tempted to before. Humans were too little, too creepily similar in form to Jotan. It had always seemed to Kane more than a little like fucking a child. He was a bad man by any standards of sentient life in the universe, but some things were wrong no matter what.

Kane couldn’t remember much of how it had felt to sex with the yellow-haired female of his first encounter. He recalled his relief, her struggles, and of course, the dull rage he’d felt when she sucked water and escaped him. The mating itself was a void in his mind. He had been a handspan or less from death, he knew that now. Heat had caught him by surprise, and he had abandoned the maintenance of his body to pursue relief. Now he knew better; he was resigned to it and more, he was equipped to deal with it. Let Heat come. He would take it and he would do his job, and he would probably never look at humans quite the same way again, but he would put it all behind him when he had a ship and a crew of his own.

Kane’s eyes found their way down to Raven’s pinched and sedated face. He lifted a lock of her hair, deep violet framed with pure white, and let it spill through his claws. He was going to have to fuck this one with his wits around him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He thought of old Urak’s humans. For as long as Kane had memory, Urak had been making Vahst from dead humans and selling the live ones for slaves, and for all that time, it had been Urak’s habit to keep one of them for himself as the ship flew from Earth to the Outer Reaches where the slave trade was going strong. Male, female, didn’t matter. He kept all sizes, all ages, all colors. Trial and error had revealed over time where and how hard you could hit them, what they could eat and what would poison them, and all the other complicated details of their care.

Urak’s last human had been male, and it had lived nearly two years, but there wasn’t much comparison between that human and this Raven. Urak’s slave had the look of prey, for all that he’d survived so long. He’d been thin-faced and frantic, always frightened, even after all that time in the relative safety of the commander’s favor. Old Urak had remained fascinated by him, but to the rest of the crew, the human was an irritant and an uncalled-for distraction, too damned fragile for life on the smuggler’s ship.

Not, Kane knew, that fragility had killed him. Or at least, it hadn’t killed him without help.

Kane had gone down to the cargo hold. He no longer remembered why. His business there hadn’t taken long, he knew that, but it had taken him all the way through the cramped bay, in and out of the stacks with nothing but the thump of the engines and the pipework above him to be his navigating points. And on his way back through the maze of cargo, he’d stepped out into a kind of clearing and found Varr with Urak’s human.

The human had been bent over a crate with Varr’s hand splayed over the side of its face, pressing it firm against the rough material. Varr was standing behind him. It took Kane a second or two to realize what he was looking at.

Varr had already seen him, but seeing him wasn’t stopping him. He continued his mating movements, pushing raw grunts from the human’s miserably-twisted mouth, and watched Kane without any appearance of concern.

Incredibly, the only thing Kane could think to say was, “That doesn’t belong to you.”

Varr backed up at once, drawing his cock free of the human’s cloacae, and shoved the human to the floor. There was blood on Varr’s wet shaft, blood trickling slow down the human’s thighs. “Come and get some,” Varr said, baring his teeth. “If it bothers you so much, I’ll let the fucking thing go, but this cock—” He’d gripped it hard, squeezing blood out between his fingers. “—is going into someone. It’s him, runt, or it’s you.”

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.

Exceedingly aware of the un-wisdom of what he was doing, and yet determined to remember she was not yet clean, Kane bent. He placed one hand on either side of her and carefully positioned himself atop her. He could feel his shaft stiffening, trapped by his coverings, but clamped nicely between Raven’s thighs. He lowered himself until he rested his weight fully atop her, and yes, he could feel those firm, fleshy bumps pressed between them. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

Kane rocked once, just as an experiment, and felt all of Raven’s body rubbing against his.

‘It’s okay,’ he told himself distractedly. ‘I’m not doing anything. I know she’s not clean. I’m just…exploring.’

Raven uttered a low, breathy moan and unexpectedly moved beneath him. Not stretching or pushing, but sort of writhing. Her legs opened, upsetting Kane’s balance, and without thinking, he arched forward, bumping his cock hard against her sex. He could feel the heat of her even through his coverings. It would be such a simple thing just to reach down, unfasten himself…one quick thrust and he could be inside her. Her program was more than half-run by now…Jotan were not as susceptible to disease as humans…really, what were the odds…?

“Venk tar!” Kane spat, and rolled off her, shaking. This wasn’t just Heat, this was madness. He’d never pretended to be wise, but he refused to be this stupid. She was going to feel good, yes, but no fucking could possibly feel good enough to die for.

Kane shut his eyes tight and willed himself to sleep while he still could. Heat was coming, Heat for real, and he’d managed to put even his human’s mouth completely out of commission. He did not trust himself to lay his arm around her once more. He held her hand instead.

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