‘Ha!’ Urak’s voice growled up wryly from the back of Kane’s mind. ‘If I’d had another boy, you’d have picked a fight on every hunt. The only thing you knew better than to do was pick a full-grown crewman to fight with.’

Well…maybe. But his ichuta’a still pissed him off.

“Kane?”

He was going to beat her until her hair bled.

“He’s busy,” he heard Raven whisper.

Silence then, allowing Kane to concentrate, gently coaxing numbers up and around, until he had the winning combination. He began to draw on chemicals, adding to the mix that circulated in the analyzer, and finally initiating the program to extract and refine. The hunt in the woods had been a good one for Vahst. Not many humans, but all of them rutting like wild animals. He took away six full vials of dopamine, which worked out to three of concentrated Vahst, but only enough of the human money for this night in the motel and maybe two meals. Kane didn’t mind going hungry a day, but Raven…the heat had done her a sinister turn. He’d sent Sue-Eye against her twice, and she still didn’t look recovered.

Sue-Eye. Who was even now glaring at the back of him and waiting for his attention just as though she had a right to it. Kane found himself thinking sourly of the drug-addled little female he’d had in the woods. Friendly little thing. Nothing in her blood but the poisons she’d been taking. Easily the worst fuck-mate he’d ever personally experienced, but enthusiastic enough, gods knew. Damn it all, he should have traded up when he had the chance.

“Kane?” Sue-Eye again. She’d seen he wasn’t actively typing anymore and was back to pestering him.

He shoved his chair back and faced the bed where his unruly ichuta’a waited. “When I want you,” he said curtly, “I’ll come and get you. When I don’t, it’s best for you if you stayed out of my way.”

She got that thin, frustrated look that meant she was cross with him, and Kane leaned his head back, feeling the slow simmer of anger unspool inside him. She was a hard little human, the kind who could close her mind away from random pains and never learn a thing by them. He’d broken ones like her before, but unfortunately, it was all too easy to break their bodies before their spirits.

“Ask your question,” he said at last. He hoped it was a stupid one, one that would allow him to give her the beating his hands itched to give.

“What is that stuff you’re making?”

“The name would mean nothing to you,” he said.

“Raven says it’s a drug.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?” Kane strolled to the bedside and touched the tip of one claw to her brow, freezing her in place as effectively as a cryo-sleeper. He pressed, dimpling the skin and then cutting through it, and watched a bead of blood form under the curve of his claw. “Do you think I enjoy interruptions?”

A trickle of red etched its way slowly down the hollow of her underbrow, around her eyes, and then down her cheek like a crimson tear.

She was perfectly motionless.

Kane cocked his head to one side. “Do you think I ask questions that I don’t want answered?” he asked, steel in his voice. He drew his claw down, cutting through the strip of hair above her eye and stopping again just above the softness of her eyelid.

“No,” she whispered.

He could always count on a threat to her eyes to get her cooperation. He was beginning to suspect she’d been injured there before, and maybe only had one good one. If he knew for sure which it was, he’d concentrate on targeting just it, and maybe then she’d train up for him.

“Do you think I enjoy interruptions?” he asked again, playing at patience.

“No.”

“Then, and again you force me to repeat myself, if you knew what I was making, why did you ask?”

“Raven only told me it was drugs. I didn’t know what it was.”

She was starting to sweat from the effort of holding so still.

Kane took his claw away and put it to her lips. He waited, and after a few seconds, she opened her mouth to suck her blood from his claw. “It’s a drug,” he said, feeling her tongue swirl cautiously around his finger. It was an agreeable sensation, like the look of that red tear below her unblinking eye. “What difference would it make if you knew the name of it?”

“None,” she said.

“Then don’t ask stupid questions.”

“I wanted to help.”

“Did you?” Kane returned to his chair and sat down, crossing one ankle over the other as he stretched out. “And how did you think to do that? Did you think if you knew the name, you’d suddenly know how to make it?”

“I know it’s made from people,” Sue-Eye said. She still hadn’t reached up to wipe away the blood he’d drawn. “And I know you’ve got a lot of empty bottles.”

Kane considered her, his stalking smile gradually fading. “What did you have in mind?” he asked at last.

“To help you find good places to hunt,” she said. Her eyes slipped away from his for the first time, towards Raven. “Humans know where humans go,” she said. “We could be helping you hunt faster.”

There was a great deal of emphasis in her words, not enough to be open accusation, but enough to send Kane’s gaze inquiringly toward his Raven.

The barb in Sue-Eye’s remarks wasn’t escaping anyone’s notice, it seemed. Raven frowned and drew her knees up before her like a shield. “He knows what he’s doing,” she said. “If he wanted my help, he’d ask for it.”

Kane looked back at Sue-Eye. He was not smiling at all now.

“It’s not your fault,” Sue-Eye told Raven. She returned her gaze to Kane. “I’ve been a bitch a lot longer than her. I know how it’s done. I know it’s our job to anticipate.”

Raven did just fine anticipating the things that mattered, but Kane refused to say so. He wasn’t going to defend a human and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to argue with one.

His cold and silent stare seemed to unsteady Sue-Eye. She dropped her gaze, curling onto her hands and knees in a submissive posture. “The haul you got at Charlie’s was a good one,” she said. “I can help you find another one just as good. One where you can kill easy and no one will interrupt you. If you want to know, just ask me.”

She clearly thought she was being discreet, but Kane recognized a slave shifting for leverage when he saw it. Her invitation was no more or less than a crudely-disguised bid for power, and he didn’t like the way she’d maneuvered Raven into the conversation first. A pretense that artful deserved a second thinking-over. His ichuta’a was more than merely irritating, it would seem. She was dangerous, or she thought she was, and it amounted to the same thing, really.

“What are you wanting in exchange?” Kane asked, his voice no more than a growl. His hands, clasped until now behind his head in a posture of indulgence, silently unlocked and curled into killing claws.

“I only want to make you happy. If I please you, you’ll let me live.”

It was a good answer. In fact, by accident or by devious design, it was the only answer she could have given that would have saved her from an immediate and very difficult death. Kane continued to stare her down and she continued to kneel without meeting his eyes. He shifted his gaze to Raven, and she was frowning back at him, searching his face with a clear, if silent, demand to know if he was really stupid enough to believe her. Sue-Eye, the perfect example of acquiescence. Raven, the very picture of defiance.

But the empty vials in his chemist’s pack had a way of drawing his eye, too, and that was the image he allowed to persuade him. He was not convinced, but he allowed himself to be placated.

“All right then.” Kane turned away from both his humans and found his human footcovers. “Clean your face and get dressed. If you want to hunt, ichuta’a…let’s hunt.”

*