Kane raised his eyebrows slightly, and then punched her in the stomach. “Don’t do that,” he said patiently as she doubled over, “If you expect to be hit, then I start thinking you probably need to be hit. Get up.”

She did, and he gripped Raven’s wrist and injected her just above the blue trace of a vein. The nanozymes went into her flesh on a burst of air and left a faint red circle behind for her to rub at.

“There,” he said, and leaned back against the front bolster of the groundcar. He offered her a thin smile. “You and I are going to be traveling together for a little while,” he told her.

She didn’t look surprised. Not pleased by any stretch of the imagination, but not surprised. She only waited, watching him with her wary eyes.

“If you behave yourself and obey me, you are going to live to see the back of me,” he said then. It was a thing Urak had been known to say from time to time, and he had always kept his word. Urak had often told him that a certain sort of person could always see a lie, however frightened or desperate they were, and Kane knew without question that Raven was exactly that sort of person.

Raven’s eyes narrowed now, searching his, and she must have seen the truth of it somewhere inside him because she ultimately nodded and seemed to relax, just a little.

Kane tapped a claw against the metal side of the groundcar. “What is this?”

“A car.”

“Can you pilot it?”

“Yes.”

“If you try to hurt me with it, you will die.” Kane raised his hand, studded grey with human brain matter, and raked his claws slowly through the air. “Badly.”

She nodded, pale as the face of the moon.

“Good.” Kane rose, shouldering his gear, and gathered up the corpses. He went to hide them from casual scrutiny and didn’t even have to order the female to stay with him. She followed, silent and obedient, at his heels.

*

There was both food and drink in the groundcar, although neither were immediately recognizable to Kane’s eyes. The food was something she called a ‘burger’, which was at least partially meat, and Kane ate all three of them, even the ones that the humans had taken bites out of. The drinks were sweet enough to be nearly undrinkable, and most of these he forced on Raven. The nanozymes cycling through her body would make her extremely susceptible to dehydration, enough that she might easily die. He told her none of this, of course, but he made her drink every last drop of what there was in the cups she showed him.

Kane rested in the seat beside her as she drove. He didn’t trust her enough to sleep, but he dozed a little as the sun rose. It was cool inside the car, cool and even a little breezy, and Kane savored the lull in weather with numb gratitude. By the time the weather turned foul again, perhaps the female would be ready and safe.

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.