Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

“Nice,” he said, and gave Raven a stinging slap to her hip that held no hostility at all. “Let’s wash up, human.”

She led him to the little bathroom and flipped on the light there, reasoning that the only window here faced the woods and she wasn’t likely to attract any attention. The bathroom wasn’t the smallest she’d ever seen in a motel, but it was plenty crowded with the two of them in it, and she stripped off her shirt selfconsciously, hoping he would maybe realize there was no way she could crawl through the narrow window and so leave her alone.

No such luck. Kane shrugged out of his overcoat and dropped it indifferently on the floor, then unfastened the black band hugging his arm and set it on the counter next to the sink. He rubbed at the pale flesh that exposed with a grimace of pleasure, and then started working his way out of his pants. Raven’s shoulders slumped. He wasn’t going anywhere, and since he was deliberately blocking the door, neither was she. Privacy was a thing of the ancient past, at least for now. Blushing, she sat on the toilet and urinated for what felt like forever, her eyes fixed on the floor.

“Been a while since I used something like that, either,” was his only comment. “Ah, civilization.”

Raven flushed and stood up, stepping into the bathtub to finish undressing behind the curtain.

“Cool water,” he told her. The sound of piss emptying at male capacity was drowned out when Raven turned on the tap. He raised his voice to say, “Gods, I already feel better,” and then slapped the flusher, briefly flooding her with scalding water.

Then the shower curtain was pulled back and he joined her in her hiding place. The water struck him in the chest and came off him in rivers of red-brown dust. Raven unwrapped the little bar of hotel soap and passed it to him. He turned it over in his claws and handed it back to her, and then leaned back against the tiled wall at the foot of the tub and looked expectant.

Yeah, okay. Raven soaped up a washcloth and started wiping him down, beginning with his face. He closed his eyes for one deep breath, and let it out in a low growl. He was still smiling, but there was no cruelty in it now. It was the smile of someone half-asleep and already dreaming. An innocent smile, on the face of the man who still had dried flecks of brown blood under his claws.

Raven washed him, scrubbing gentle as a geisha down his arm to each finger, cleaning each claw—first the left hand, then the right. She rubbed broad circles over his chest, and in short up and downs across his hard stomach. His eyes remained shut, his breath even. He turned around when she paused to re-lather her washcloth, presenting her with his bare back and leaning into his folded arms.

“Warmer,” he muttered. “A little.”

She adjusted the temperature and the angle of the spray, and then began to rub his shoulders with soap. His growl smacked of sensuality. Raven worked the taut muscles of his back, soothing and smoothing him beneath her hands. And he relaxed, gradually and not completely, but he did relax.

Raven knelt, kneading at his hips and buttocks where her own hurt the worst after the long car ride, and he groaned appreciatively into his arms. His thighs flexed as she massaged and cleaned them, spreading just a little for her to work. She went all the way to his feet, and when she’d washed his talons, he turned again.

She worked her way back up his powerful legs and when she reached his hips, her hands working in lather alongside his huge, hanging organ, he reached out to comb a single claw through her hair.

He didn’t speak. She didn’t need commands.

She encircled him with her soapy cloth and stroked, down, around and up again. Water sluiced over her, wiping him clean to be lathered again. She could feel him stirring, stiffening in her grip; she could see his abdomen ripple, see his thighs tighten. She leaned up on her knees and licked just once at the rising head of him with the very point of her tongue. He leaned back into the tiles again. His hand stayed light and playful in her hair.

Raven moved her washcloth to his stomach, to the V-shaped plain above his base, and rubbed in tiny circles, the same circles she now licked all down the underlength of him. She tasted the place his balls should be, and then danced a trail back to his glans. She closed her lips on him and sucked slow and hard as she lashed her tongue atop his sensitive tip.

“Sang chi’ay,” he whispered, and pulled at her head, but not insistently.

She went willingly anyway, letting him pull her along his cock, angling up to open her throat for him. The washcloth on his belly pushed as her other hand gripped his base and squeezed. He thrust slowly, drawing himself almost completely out of her before pumping into her mouth again. His three fingers flexed and relaxed on her head, flexed and relaxed.

She ran the soap through her fingers and wrapped her hands around his shaft, twining and tickling as she coated him with slick foam. Then she began to milk, steady and gentle and strong, rapidly lashing at him with the tip of her tongue only and sometimes pausing either to suck once or to blow a stream of air or water at his glans.

“Up,” Kane said hoarsely. “Up now.” His claws clenched painfully in her hair, pulling her faster when she didn’t rise fast enough, and then he pushed her into the long wall and lifted her, pulling her legs around his hips.

She didn’t have time to brace herself, but it wasn’t as bad as she remembered. The soap helped. He stroked up inside her all the way, forceful but not brutal, urgent but still calm. She hung her weight on his shoulders and tried not to feel what he did to the rest of her. He took what he needed from her with constant, indifferent motions, his taut stomach slapping wetly at hers with every swift thrust. It’d probably be over soon. That was something at least.

Then he pulled her thighs up, tilting her hips, penetrating even deeper, and suddenly the swollen friction of him was in a whole new place, one that sparked violently in unwelcome response to his movements. It startled a gasp from her, an instinctive tightening of her arms, and God help her, he noticed. His laughter was deep and nearly soundless, a rumble that passed from his body to her bones, melting humiliation into every pore of her.

She twisted her face away, but couldn’t unfeel his touch and now he was slowing, stroking at her with exquisite deliberation. She felt herself whimper, and then heard herself beg. “Please…just…No, please, no…just finish, please, just—”

His hands rubbed slickly around to her ass, pulling her even tighter, positioning her for an even fuller fit. His cock scoured her, massing at her from her pussy clear to her throat, and her traitor body seized on him and flooded with heat. She began to fight futilely, trying to squirm up and off him, but of course, succeeded only in adding to his rhythm. “I don’t want to!” Raven cried, but she knew what was coming. “Oh God, no!”

“No?” Kane gasped. He sent a tight succession of short, sharp thrusts against her, each one yanking her a little closer to that hateful climax. “This doesn’t feel like no to me.” He started to say more, and then hissed in breath as she came and let it out in a strangled, “Chok, Raven! Ah, gods! Ah, chok-se en erashe!” His body locked up tight and he unleashed an awful, strained groan and bucked twice into her with bruising force, cumming in shudders.

Raven sobbed, covering her eyes behind one hand, hating herself and the pleasure that still glowed out from her womb. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stand to see his mocking smile.

He leaned into her, only a little shy of breath, and slowly let her slide down his body to her own feet. He stepped back, combing once at the lock of her limp, purple hair, and then he reached down and tugged hard at her pubic down. “I hate the feel of this,” he said. “Take it off.”

Raven blinked wetly around the shower stall. “There’s no razor,” she said. “If we go to a store tomorrow, I can buy one.”

“Soon enough, I suppose.” He scratched lightly at the half-beard lining his jaw and then suddenly grinned and put his hand hard between her thighs.

She uttered a shrill, mewling sound and pressed herself flat against the tiles, trying to clench away from him.

“Now where…?” he breathed, pushing up, parting her. Even his finger was thick and long; her body gripped it greedily even as her guts churned. “Ah, gods! Feel that!” he grunted. He pumped his hand, and Raven broke into tears. “Move,” Kane said. “You know you want to.”

“I don’t want to!” Raven wailed.

Kane grabbed her hip with his free hand and pumped her towards his thrusting finger. Her nerves, already heightened, flared out in ugly orgasm. Kane paused again, his lips parting as he stared at her belly with that incredulous grin on his face. “I’ve never felt anything like that,” he remarked, and pulled his hand free of her at last.

“You bastard!” she sobbed, stupidly but beyond caring. In that moment, still with hellish pleasure tingling through her, she wanted to be dead.

He laughed at her. “Wash up,” he said cheerfully. He picked up the bundle of her shed clothing and his pants and tossed them in the tub with her. “Do what you can with these and hang them up to dry. And don’t take too long. If I have to come in here after you—” He stroked his open hand once across her pussy. “—I might get distracted.”

She covered herself as soon as he moved his hand away, shivering, and he left, still laughing. Raven found the spongy sliver of soap in the bottom of the tub and rubbed it over herself, her tears coming even harder. There wasn’t enough left for her to get clean. There wasn’t enough soap in the world for that.

*

Tagen burnt the bodies.

It took most of the night, too much time to spend in idleness, but Tagen sat watch over the burning regardless. He did not know the funerary customs of humans, but this much he could do for them. Despite the urgency of his mission, there was a guilt in him that needed to be assuaged, and he hoped that honoring the dead in this way would bring him that little peace.

He watched the bones blacken and shrink, and in his mind’s eye he heard the deafening crack of their weapons. Pellet projectiles. Crude, but quite effective in their own way. Had Tagen not been armed himself or had he been a little slower to return fire, he had no doubt he would be dead at this moment. It was a truth he did not ignore, and for that, he felt perhaps less responsibility for their deaths than he otherwise might have. But the ease with which he had extinguished their lives seemed more significant to him. He could have used his neural stunner. He had killed them instead.

His thoughts returned to the sight of the smaller human buckling and falling. It had not even tried to fire its weapon after it had seen its companion die. Its face had been stricken, disbelieving. The more Tagen thought on that, the more it bothered him. He wondered if the smallness of the human had been an indicator of age rather than mere size. He began to think perhaps he had killed a father and his son.

How often had Kolya taken him, as a child, into the wild places of Jota to hone his tracking skills? Living rough beneath the open skies, learning to forage and hunt, training his body to act beyond the effects of discomfort or want…and at times, sitting at a fire beside his father, sharing the bond of family. They were the only times Tagen could remember feeling happy as a child, that his presence in Kolya Pahnee’s home was more than a continuation of name and legacy, and that he were truly wanted.

What had he done?

Tagen closed his eyes and let his thoughts still. The image that came to him in the darkness of his quiet mind was that of all the debris and devises that orbited Earth. He could no longer believe them merely the leavings of Jotan smugglers and slavers. The humans had put it all there themselves.

The humans had been to space.

Five hundred years ago, they had been primitives on the verge of chaotic collapse. Now they were poised to leave their world, perhaps even to encounter another. They had made two thousand years of progress in an impossibly brief blink of time.

As disturbing as he found this, Tagen recognized that it could prove useful to him. The humans might have a means of detecting or tracking incoming traffic. Their on-world security forces may even have ways of monitoring their civilization for non-human infiltration. Gods willing, they may even have E’Var in custody already. And when Tagen relieved them of the criminal, perhaps they’d give him a clean-burning, inexpensive propulsion fuel for trans-orbital transport vessels.

Tagen rubbed his eyes and then leaned into his hands and watched the bodies burn.

The reality of his job meant that he could never count on outside help from any source, and moreover, logic dictated that if the humans truly had a coordinated anti-invasion force, Uraktus E’Var and others like him could never have made their fortunes.

Tagen was adrift and it was a singularly ugly sensation. This was not the world he’d been led to expect, but neither was it the sort of world he had come from. The humans were not small, scattered populations of hut-builders. Neither did they have oceanic colonies or out-world reach stations. He could not afford to keep going blindly and he could hardly continue to rely on the information he’d studied on the way to Earth. What else had changed since the Far-Reachers had made their studies? Were the pellet projectile weapons the extent of the human’s war-craft? What were their on-world defenses? They had been to space before, but could they follow Tagen’s craft when he left? Would they find the Gate? Gods, would they come through it?!

He had no way of answering any of these questions.

Tagen opened his eyes and stirred up the coals so that he could see the contents of his pack. There, at the very bottom, forgotten until now, he found the dermisprayer. A mild sedative, the scientist had said. To make them compliant.

Against every part of his training, Tagen began to consider the merits of overt contact. This could not continue. E’Var may or may not be on Earth, but the odds of stumbling across him as Tagen wandered in the woods were slim. Instead, he had encountered three humans, all of them armed, and had killed them all. The weather showed no sign of changing and he had only so many suppressants left. He needed some way of covering greater distance, he needed access to the humans’ media devices, and he needed reliable supplies of food and water.

In short, he needed to find a human. He needed to talk to it, to win its trust somehow, and use it to help him find E’Var.

The bodies were now nearly consumed. Tagen broke the bones apart and began to smother the coals with dirt.

He had a reasonable understanding of N’Glish, and he’d listened to the language program all the way to Earth. He thought he’d, well, if not mastered it, at least become competent, but most of what he’d heard so far had been utterly incomprehensible. Perhaps if Tagen could subdue a human, he would have more time to listen and decipher the words. Even if he gained nothing else, gaining the ability to communicate made the attempt worthwhile.

The fire was dead and Tagen was decided. The search for E’Var or his wreckage would have to wait until Tagen had discovered a better way to search. He would rest now, and find a human at the next opportunity. He rose and went to look through the camp for supplies.

He located a bulky, water-tight case filled with ice water and floating metal cylinders. Tagen gazed down at them for a long time, deeply mistrustful of anything the humans felt they had to cool. Perhaps they were harmless. Perhaps they were weapons of some sort that became unstable when heated. But Tagen’s analyzer told him the water, at least, was reasonably pure. He drank his fill and left the cylinders alone.

In the back of the groundcar, Tagen found packages of what he suspected were edible provisions. Some had been opened, and the smells were rich, even appetizing. He tasted some of it, cautiously at first, but then decided there was no point in being only a little bit poisoned and ate until his body ordered him to stop.

The sun was rising through the trees when Tagen emerged from the groundcar, burning over his skin where he was uncovered. Tagen took another suppressant, his sixth. Earth’s season showed no signs of ending. He might actually have to use all eighteen suppressants. He wondered idly if there were any health risks associated with long-term use. To his knowledge, there had been no studies. Why should there be? Who would ever need to take suppressants so many days in succession? He could be rupturing his liver or rendering himself sterile before he finished his investigation.

Oh well.

Tagen crawled into the human’s shelter and lay down on the bedding. The enclosure smelled of wood-smoke, grease and sweat.

He had killed the humans who slept here.

Tagen closed his eyes.

*

Kane wakened slow and easy with the rise of Earth’s sun and the sound of human groundcars on the road outside. He felt no pressing urge to get up. He’d had an aquatic shower, just like any he’d ever had on-ship. He’d had good sex, snugged up fast and free of Heat in Raven’s human body. He’d had sleep in a soft bed in a cool room with warm blankets. It was, in short, the easiest night he’d spent since before the raid.

The thought of sleeping in the wayside hostel had made him uneasy when Raven first suggested it. He didn’t trust his companion of necessity, and her warning that things could get ‘tricky’ had only unnerved him further, but things had worked out just fine and he was damned comfortable. He was determined to stay in one of these human ‘motels’ as often as he could arrange it.

Another car passed outside, large enough to make the air scream as it rumbled by, reminding Kane that the day was here and it was time to make use of it. But for now, he was still content to wait until his winsome little human woke as well. He expected that to take some time. She had not slept easy.

Kane bared his teeth in a grin, showing soundless humor to the ceiling. His winsome little human, and yes, gods, how winsome! He’d gone to the shower with her for the same reason he slept with her under his enveloping arm—to know where she was and what she was doing. He hadn’t been above teasing her in the car, but he’d thought himself too tired for sexplay.

But she had washed him. Massaged him. Knelt so submissively under the cool fall of water and cleaned him. Her hair had been black with dampness, black and white and marvelous. He couldn’t help but touch her. And she, dutiful little beast that she was, couldn’t help but touch him.

He’d felt with surprise and great interest her shivering efforts to deny herself pleasure. He only wished he knew what it was he’d done to make her feel it. Kane, who under ordinary circumstances, couldn’t care less what a Heat vessel, human or otherwise, felt or didn’t feel, was profoundly intrigued by Raven’s cumming. Her tight little body had gripped on him like nothing he’d ever known, sealing all around him so that when he’d moved, there had been such an exquisite suction, it had been like having her mouth all over again. The thought was a stirring one even now. If that was typical human sex, it was no damn wonder old Urak had preferred his playthings to come with five fingers.

And Raven, her back pressed against his front, now murmured in her sleep as she felt the physical effects of Kane’s wandering thoughts. He propped his head up on his fist, looking down at her and toying with the tips of her hair. She’d accommodate him if he woke her up right now. She’d do it just to prove she felt nothing.

He could make her cum, he was confidant of that. If humans and Jotan were at all alike in how they took pleasure, he could make her cum. Kane didn’t lead the kind of life that led to many different women, but he’d had Tari’i for a teacher, and that fine female took no shit when it came to mating. Tari’i demanded stamina and self-control, and if she didn’t get it, a male was liable to find himself in the way of a few cracked bones on his way out her door.

But although the where might be similar, there was still the matter of how, and more specifically, of how hard. Jotan sexplay got a little rough and human flesh tore easy. Kane ran his hand lightly down the rippling field of that flesh, his eyes resting on her sleeping face, hunting for clues in every slight shift of her features for what she might be feeling as he touched her. She mumbled again and shifted, her hips pushing back at Kane’s stiffening cock. He bumped back agreeably, and she slipped one leg through both of his.

Perhaps it meant something that she twined with him in her sleep. Perhaps not. Uraktus had taken many female slaves, and documented mating with the same meticulousness with which he had documented everything else about them. Once again, it was a study Kane had predominantly ignored at the time. He remembered only one female’s mating clearly, and that only because Urak had taken her right there on the bridge.

It seemed to Kane that she’d done something to deserve it, had tried to cover up when Urak wanted to look at her or something. That was about all he remembered, apart from Tari’i rolling her eyes as the human first was pierced, and the shamed and shrill wails of the human, so alike to Raven’s of the night before. And of course, his father, fucking harder every time he had to order her to hush her noise, right up until the brittle snap and Urak’s disgusted, “Oh hell.”

This had happened before Urak perfected his human regenerators and antibodies. The broken pelvis led to hidden bleeding and that to sepsis. She’d died, but it wasn’t a total loss. Urak had eventually built three good serums from the notes he’d taken during the experience-serums still used by slavers today-and to Kane’s knowledge, Urak had never broken another human’s hip during sex. Not by accident, anyway.

That was the only female Kane recalled clearly, but there had been others. Kane could think of many nights, from boyhood on up, lying in his bed and listening with a drowsing ear as his father fucked in the next room. Listening as the human cries had changed over time from purely pain to purely pleasure and all the many-hued landscapes in-between. So it could be done.

Raven woke. He knew it by the way her breathing changed and then by the way she scooted forward on the bed, away from his rigid shaft. But her hand came back a moment later to rest on his thigh. Her waking instincts had recoiled her from him, but she couldn’t resist trying to please him.

Kane could feel himself wanting to smile. He hid it by leaning in and biting at her shoulder. A little too hard; he drew blood and paused to lick it away. When he raised his head again, she rolled onto her back and moved her hand from his thigh to his cock. She stroked him, fixing him with her grim little eyes, determined to feel nothing, to prove to herself that the previous night had never happened. The way her little claws had dug at his back…

Kane bent and sucked at the bloody bite on her shoulder, letting her hand harden him. She had begged him just to finish with her, begged him. He had the distinct feeling his fierce little Raven didn’t do a lot of that.

Kane sat up suddenly, kneeling with his thighs wide apart and the blankets thrown back. She moved silently to take him in that amazing ‘blowjob’ that humans could do. He closed his mind to it with effort, letting her coat him with slick saliva as elaborately as she pleased. Then he pulled her off him and pushed her back into the bedding.

She resisted briefly, her body tightening and her face turning on itself. Oh yes, she remembered.

He pulled her thighs around his hips and sank into her. It was easier every time. She was cinched tight and tilted deep, forced still and receptive to the quick, hard thrusts he sent against her as he felt out the confines of her body. He was tempted to let go, to lie atop her and take his privilege, to feel the strange delight of her human breasts on his chest and see her hair fanned out violet beneath him. But no. No, he’d done something to her last night, and he wanted to see if he could do it again.

Kane leaned back, keeping her hips tight to him, and both slowed and lengthened his strokes, nudging upwards along her full pubic bone. He could feel the unpleasant scratch of her low hair at his belly, but he could also feel her sudden tension. There was a place on Jotan females, one that could be found just where the upper slope of their selves softened, one that could be counted on for furious pleasure. Kane hunted for it in Raven now, his eyes closed, painstakingly seeking her one slow sliver at a time.

“Unngh!” Raven’s hand flew out and slapped at his chest, her face contorting with misery.

Found. Kane lay back further, only one hand holding her now while the other braced his weight. He drove at her with greater confidence and she came up off the bed a little more with every thrust.

‘Don’t feel,’ Kane thought, his throat working with the effort. ‘Don’t feel. You can hear—gods, hear that sucking, you’ve made her pissing wet!—but don’t feel. It’s over if you feel.’

She was making a sound, not the eye-water sobbing he’d expected, but an urgent, moaning, mating sound. It dug into Kane’s brain and fired through his body. Her slapping hand became a scratching one; the sensitive skin of his chest and belly seared at her touch and it was all he could do not to fall on her in frenzy.

“Move,” he grunted. “Move, damn you, you know you want to!”

She threw back her head and howled, a cry that began at her toes and ground out of her throat as thick and raw as smoke. But then she did move. Her legs rose and wrapped his waist, her hips grinding at his. She pushed at him weakly just once more and then she was clinging to him, her face turned as far from him as she could, as though her mind were straining to physically separate from her body. She was mating with him, great gods, a vessel no longer but a willing partner.

Kane dropped his other arm to better balance his weight, and Raven came up from the pillows to straddle him. She gripped his shoulders with her blunt claws and rode him hard and fast, tears of betrayal leaking from her tightly-shut eyes. She was cumming, contracting on him to damned near the point of pain, and it was just as he’d remembered—that incomparable shivery seal, milking at him like he was a breeder male in a So-Quaal stable. He thrust harder, trying to prolong the excruciating sensation of her working at him, but then came with a violent shudder of his own and collapsed onto the bed.

She fell with him, her hands slapping at his chest to keep her braced separate from him. Her head was bent and shoulders bowed. Her ragged breath still held traces of that half-keening cry, and there were tears still spilling one by one from her eyes.

Kane put his hand on her hip and rubbed, watching her face buckle. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like it,” he growled, smiling. “I know you did.”

She said nothing, did nothing.

He gave her hip a little pull, forcing her to rock at him, miming the mating she had just played out with such reluctant passion. He, still joined to her, could feel her cunt clenching greedily. “You want me hard again,” he told her. “You’re primed. You’re hungry to fuck. Admit it. When was the last time you had a fuck like that?”

She answered him, surprisingly, although her voice was listless. “I can honestly say I’ve never had a fuck like that.” She still didn’t look at him.

“Flatterer.” He patted her hip again and then lifted her off him and dropped her on the bed. “I’m liking you more the longer I know you,” he said, sitting up. “Let’s get moving.”

His clothes and hers were hung up in the privy still, stiff but dried. Kane washed up and dressed rapidly, blocking the privy door in case his human took it into her purple-haired head to run. It was a precaution of habit; he no longer expected her to try.

The body was stinking up the main room already, but Raven found the food in the back and took it all. It was bread, different kinds and shapes, but all bread, dry and unsatisfying. For drinks, there were canisters of something Raven called ‘pop’. Kane’s analyzer told him it was sugar-and caffeine-saturated, but otherwise harmless. Not great, in other words, but like the bread, it was better than nothing.

Kane followed his human from the motel’s storeroom to sleeping quarters to linen room and back, watching with quiet amusement as she stripped the bed and replaced the sheets. A far-thinking human. She was past worrying about living and was already thinking about avoiding arrest. That took an admirable amount of wit and will. She cleaned every inch of every surface either of them had touched, and then took what she did not clean—the bedding, the bottles of soap from the shower, the towels they’d dried with—to the groundcar’s cargo hold and put them inside. A very far-thinking human.

“Forget anything?” he asked, when she’d thrown the cleanser in on top of the pile.

“I don’t think so. It’s a motel, lots of people have touched the shower curtain and the room key…and the bed.” She gave him a hollow-eyed glance full of weary humiliation and blame.

That look clenched on him with all the pleasure of her pussy on his cock. He grinned. “You make me wish I had all day just to play with you,” he said regretfully, and she flinched. “But I need to get to work.” He slammed the cargo hatch and handed her the groundcar’s keys. “Let’s go.”

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