“I’m right here,” she said again, stepping out onto the roadside. She even tried to smile as the male humans advanced on her. “Got carried away, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” one of the males said angrily. “You almost broke my nose, you numb cunt.”

“Hey, come on,” said the other, more placating if less sincere. “Lighten up. I got kicked in the balls and I’m still smiling. You just owe me a little more, right, Raven? Come on. Let’s get in the car.”

All their attention was fixed on Raven. Neither one of them glanced around as Kane came up behind them. He caught the largest one, pulled him back, and tracheated him in one swift motion. The second human kept walking for a few steps, still making his coaxing noises at the female he was trying to trap. Not until the silenced human hit the ground, rasping and clawing at his open throat, did he turn around.

Kane was ready for an attack, but did not anticipate the human’s choice of target.

“You set us up!” the human shouted, and lunged at Raven.

She was quick, dodging the punch he aimed at her and taking it on the shoulder instead of the eye. And then, to Kane’s astonishment, she attacked back, laying the human’s face open with her flimsy claws and then kicking him in the groin. She spat on the male’s face when he dropped to his knees, and yelled, “That’s for calling me names!”

Urak’s ghost spoke up in his rough, amused whisper, ‘Boy, you could not have picked a worse slave if you’d custom-ordered one from the unsuitable-slave store.’

There were things Kane needed to say to her, and things he needed to do before the sun rose and started its hellish work on him, but he put those things aside for now. It was time to make a few things clear.

Kane stepped over his muted human and got a handful of the other male’s hair. Raven gave him room, breathing hard, now directing her furious gaze at him as well as at the fallen humans. Kane didn’t mind. He wanted her to be looking at him.

He hooked the claws of one hand under the knob of bone at the base of the human’s skull and broke it off with a wet crack. He didn’t take his eyes off her; if she ran, it would be now, and he had to be ready.

The female paled, so rapidly and so completely, her face almost seemed to start glowing. She gave back a pace, her eyes huge as she stared at the chunk of bone in his hand, but she didn’t run.

Kane grunted and tossed the chunk of bone to the ground between her feet. She backed up again, bumping hard into the side of the groundcar, and clapped a hand to her mouth.

“We need to have an understanding,” Kane said again, and slung his pack off his shoulder. He took his harvester, loaded the first empty ampule, and took what he needed from the human’s exposed brain. Several drops of pale liquid collected in the bottom of the ampule, and Kane ejected the spent gland. It struck the side of Raven’s leg and she slapped at it with a coarse crowing sound. Kane waited until she was done brushing and cleaning at her hands, and then quietly said, “Bring me the other one.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide.

Kane waited, silently counting the seconds until she obeyed. Thirty-three in all. She was going to need some serious training.

She went to the muted male and tugged at his clothing ineffectively. After a few stops and starts, she got a good grip on his arm and dragged him, still weakly struggling, over to where Kane waited.

He harvested the male, held the vial up to the light of the groundcar to assess its volume, and then packed it away. Calibrating the computer to accept human readings was the work of mere seconds this time around, and then Kane was ready. He looked at his female. “Come here,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

She clasped her hands together, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and finally came.

The instant she was within reach, Kane exploded up from the ground, grabbed her by her throat and threw her violently against the roof of the groundcar (but not too violently, oh no, even Kane could be careful). He put his face right next to hers and snarled, “Do I look like I enjoy waiting?”

She screamed, kicking and thrashing blindly at him.

Kane punched her in the stomach (but carefully, oh so carefully), and she arched away from him, making a gasping, retching sound. He thumped her head once on the groundcar’s roof, and then said, “Do I?”

“No!” she managed to say. Her hands were on his chest, half-clutching and half-pushing.

He set her on her feet and went to stand in the light of the groundcar. He faced her grimly and snapped his fingers as he dropped to one knee.

She came, but not eagerly, and tried to resist him when he closed his hand around her wrist. He punched her in the belly and yanked her down when she barked out her breath, flipping her as she fell to catch her legs in a vise of his. He twisted one arm behind her and reached into his pack for the scanner.

She went still as death at once. “What is that?”

“I need to look at your blood,” he told her, and inserted the tip of the scanner. “You’re no good to me if you aren’t clean.”

She watched the blood collect through the clear sides of the scanner, her face white and plainly frightened. “I don’t really have that stuff I told you,” she whispered.

He made no reply, but he did let her slide out of his grip and sit down on her own power as he watched the monitor. At last, an electronic chime sounded, the ready-mark changed from gold to green, and letters spilled out in orderly rows. Kane read, his eyes narrowing.

She wasn’t clean. She was marginally malnourished and the toxic leavings of many drugs were there, as well as the disease Urak called the Creeping Waste, and that was a nuisance. On the other plate, there wasn’t anything wrong with her that couldn’t be fixed. It would take time, though. The Creeping Waste wasn’t as contagious to Jotan as it was to humans, but it was still deadly and unlike the human strain, it couldn’t be cleansed completely. Anyone stupid enough to swap fluids with the infected could find themselves suffering the result for the rest of their dramatically shortened life. Kane would have to fix it before he could mate with her, fixing it would take seventeen hours at the very least, and in the meantime, the sun would be burning down and filling his tsesac with hell.

Kane ran his eyes up and down the female’s body, weighing the urgency of his need against the frustration of having to stumble along for damned near a whole day with a female he couldn’t even fuck. And for the first time, Kane noticed her hair.

There were two stripes of white framing her face, but the rest was dark, and up until now, between one thing and another, that was all he had really noticed. Here, now, in the light of the groundcar and with time to catch his breath and think, Kane saw that what he had seen merely as ‘dark’ before was actually purple. A deep, dark, amazing shade of purple.

He’d never seen a human with purple hair before. The sight of it completely interrupted his chain of increasingly furious thought and he reached out to take some of it in hand. It flowed soft and straight between his fingers, not quite shoulder-length, but thick and full despite that.

Still…seventeen hours was a long time to wait just to fuck a human with purple hair.

But was there any guarantee he’d find another one in the same amount of time?

He really, really liked her hair…

Kane began to craft the necessary programs, a delicate mix of cleansers, filters, and aggressive anti-viral nanozymes. It was considerably less complicated than trying to correct the yellow-haired female’s congenital glucose disorder, but it still took time, and Kane was painfully aware that there were two bodies right there by the side of the road where anyone might roll by and see them.

At last, he was done and the dermisprayer was loaded yet again. He reached out for Raven’s arm and she flinched back and tried to cover her face.