Ah, what the hell. Kane had never had a personal slave before, but he considered himself well-schooled in the way of keeping them, having watched his father do it all his life. One of the greatest lessons his father had taught in that regard was that once in a while, whether they deserved it or not, you had to give slaves what they wanted or else they’d sour. A sour human was a dangerous thing. A sour human lost its fear, lost its training, started thinking that long life as a slave wasn’t necessarily preferable to dying and that as long as one was dying anyway, why not blow the ship up and kill everyone?

Sue-Eye had never been all that scared of him to begin with and hitting her didn’t seem to do much. Every now and then, old Urak had run into a slave that reacted like that and it had proved necessary to train them with reward rather than punishment. Urak didn’t like to keep them, but in the short term and with the proper incentives, they could be astonishingly loyal. And Kane knew what Sue-Eye’s prime incentive would be, didn’t he?

He caught the blonde’s chin as she scoured his chest with her teeth and brought her up so that he could nip at her cheek. Her smile was immediate, dazzling, and only brightened when Kane grazed his fangs lightly down the slope of her throat to bite at her shoulder. A knock sounded at the door and Kane gave Raven a push in that direction, both his hands slipping up beneath Sue-Eye’s shirt to scratch teasingly at her thin skin. “We’re going to eat,” he told her, in between careful testing of her fragile flesh. “And then I’m going to use my ichuta’a. How does that bite you, human?”

“Use me,” she hissed, and gave him a bite to the chest hard enough to draw a few beads of blood. Her hand cupped him through his coverings and he uttered a growl that was only half-warning. “Use me now.”

“I said, first we eat.” He pushed her off him, but not out of reach, and gestured for the waiting Raven to bring the food to the bed.

Humans ate the strangest things. Dinner came in a wide, square box and seemed to consist of hot bread topped with sauce, meats, and less identifiable things, all of it pressed into a round shape and cut into wedges. Kane had to watch his humans for clues as to how to eat it. He found the taste indefinably unpleasant, but both humans ate their share with unfeigned zeal. Kane had only the one wedge. His hunger dulled, he was content to wait for something better. His appetites at the moment were more for flesh than for food, anyway.

“Tomorrow we go north,” he said, settling back on the bed to watch his females feast. It struck a primal chord in him to see them devour what he had provided, if only obliquely. “I want another hunt. A good hunt.”

Raven lowered her food and looked at him. Sue-Eye helped herself to another wedge.

“How ‘bout a motel?” his ichuta’a asked lightly. “We could get the passkey, flip on the No Vacancy sign and go room to room, no problem.”

The words, predominantly meaningless, flowed through him and left only an impression of possibility behind, like a footprint in mud. He glanced at Raven and raised an eyebrow.

“I guess we could.” She looked down at her unfinished food and put it aside. “I wouldn’t want to hit one too close to the highway, though. You do that too many times and they start putting up roadblocks. We can’t afford to let any cops get too good a look at you.”

“Oh bullshit,” Sue-Eye said. “You have to kill, like, a hundred people right on the road before they go trolling for you like that.”

“Lady, we have killed a hundred people.” Raven’s voice faltered on the last word. She swallowed hard and looked away, her face shadowed.

This was interesting. Two voices, one of ambition and one of caution. It was like being a bystander in his own brain.

“A hundred people,” Raven muttered. She was still staring blankly at the opposite wall. “Jesus Christ.”

Kane reached out and rubbed at Raven’s thigh to bring her back to the here and now. She leaned into the touch for a second, then stood up and moved away to the table. He let her go, turning his attention to Sue-Eye. She responded at once, dropping the dinner box with its few remaining portions of food onto the floor and crawling to him on her hands and knees. She smelled of spiced sauce and sex musk, an appealing combination.

“Continue with your thought, Raven,” Kane said, as Sue-Eye’s teeth resumed their work on his flesh.

Raven glanced at him. It seemed to Kane that her gaze lingered where Sue-Eye teased him, but then, his blood was getting high and he couldn’t exactly trust himself to be objective. “There’s only so many roads going back and forth,” she said. “That’s pretty much my only point. We have to use them. I don’t like…hunting…on them so much. It’s risky, Kane.”

“We—” Sue-Eye began.

“Quiet. Your mouth is busy. Raven, look at me when I’m talking to you.” He waited for her to turn, waited for Sue-Eye to engage her mouth along his chest and stomach, and then said, “What risks are you worried about?”

Raven hesitated, biting at her lip. The sight of her little teeth exposed, even in an expression of anxiety, gave him a pleasant sort of jump. She said, haltingly, “We’ve left so many witnesses…”

“The female at the bar where I collected my ichuta’a, you mean.” Kane caught Sue-Eye’s hand and led it to the front of his pants. She slipped beneath the tight material, caressing the stiff length of him. “She won’t tell a tree, Raven. Her mouth is as good as capped with steel.”

“Not just her.”

“The female in the woods.” Kane shrugged, recalling with a smile the glazed and wondering shine in that human’s drug-addled eyes. “I don’t think she’ll tell anyone, either. She had enough shit in her blood, I doubt she’ll even remember me.”

“Not just her, either. Everyone, Kane. Everyone at every motel we’ve stayed at. People at gas stations. Food delivery guys. Everyone.”

“Easy, ichuta’a, we haven’t started yet.” Kane chased Sue-Eye’s fingers away from the fastens of his clothes, but then rested his hand comfortably on her thigh. He considered Raven thoughtfully while his over-eager mate of the moment indulged herself in what he’d allow her of his body. Raven’s face was striving to be stoic, but there was frustration in it she could not hide and it seemed genuine enough. “Why are you concerning yourself with people who haven’t even seen me hunt?” he asked at last, knowing there had to be a prudent answer.

“All it’s going to take is one tee-vee report asking who’s seen us and where and these roads are going to turn into a death trap for us.” Her voice slipped, admitting a thin note of exasperation through to stain her next words. “We stand out, Kane. We’re the kind of people other people remember.”

Far-thinking Raven. Such thoughts had probably never been far from her mind. And she was right. He was killing in large groups, leaving bodies right out where they could be found. What passed for the Fleet here on Earth must know someone was slaughtering their kind. The only question was, how easily could they focus in on who?

“We’ll watch for these tee-vee reports from now on,” he said at last. He pushed his hand between Sue-Eye’s thighs and she opened readily to his touch. He stroked at her in the same rhythm she used on him and was not surprised when she immediately quickened her pace. “And if we see anyone asking after us, we’ll leave.”

“We have to assume we’ve been seen already,” Raven said stubbornly. Her face had gone tight with the effort of not looking at Sue-Eye.

“Agreed. And so I’ll let you pick the towns where I hunt.”

She recoiled, but Kane noted this from the distraction of pulling Sue-Eye up into position for mating. When he looked around again, his ichuta’a seated and rocking wildly atop him, Raven was once again stone-faced.