He chuckled. “Close. But you’ll have to do better. Let’s have one more, and if you can get it right, I’ll give you something special. If you can’t…oh well.” He moved toward her mouth, then out of reach again as she strained up to meet him. “Your lesson, Raven,” he said sternly. His whole body stilled, his eyes grew sharp and hot. “Se ven garrug-ta,” he said, all playfulness gone. “Se garrug y sildurra Kane.”

What was she telling him? Breathless, aching with need, she couldn’t make herself care. But she could say the words.

He closed his eyes to hear them, his face at once stony and tense with some violent, hidden emotion. When he opened his eyes again, they burned. “Very good,” he said quietly, and got up.

“No!” She surged forward, clutching at his arm. “You promised!”

Kane stepped away from the bed, but not out of her grip. “Show me,” he said. He unfastened the front of his pants, still staring down at her with that strange, hot expression. “Show me, and tomorrow, when you’re sure your period is done, I’ll let you take whatever you want from me.”

Raven dropped to her knees, reaching for him in a fever of lust. Her loins were throbbing, but it never occurred to her to satisfy her own need. She had eyes only for what he offered, and she was shaking with the unthinking need to please him. “Se ven garrug-ta,” she said, and took him into her mouth, worshiping him with ardent hunger.

His hand rose and rested on her head. “Sur Raven,” he murmured.

Gratitude bloomed in her, as fierce and all-consuming as orgasm. She lathed him in a storm of passion, licking up and down his cock, her fingers digging into his buttocks. When he began to rock against her, it was a reward that filled her whole body with warmth. She took him as deep as she could, swallowing rapidly along his shaft, and then pulled back to tongue his glans and milk him in her fist. “Se ven garrug-ta,” she moaned, again and again, devouring him between each recital. “Se ven garrug-ta. Please cum in me, Kane. Please! Se ven garrug-ta! Cum!”

His breath coarsened, the muscles of his stomach jumped and tightened, and his hand on her head clenched. “Say it!” he growled, thrusting harder.

“Se ven garrug-ta!” She swallowed him desperately, grinding towards him as he thrust into her. She welcomed the pain in her jaw, the dull ache at the back of her throat. She could not keep her hands still on his body, and at every opportunity, she pulled back to kiss and squeeze his throbbing cock and say it again. “Se ven garrug-ta!”

He threw back his head and howled, spasming in her hand, and Raven took him in with a cry of delight. She felt him splash into her mouth and she swallowed eagerly, drinking the heat that poured from his core and burning in the grip of a fierce, possessive joy. When she had taken everything, she bent around his leg, tracing kisses down his thigh to rest her head on his foot.

Kane leaned against the wall, breathing hard, staring down at her. “You’re mine!” he said, almost snarling. “Mine!”

“Yes.” She hugged his leg, her eyes closed and her face pressed against his lethal talons. “You’ll let me have you tomorrow. You promised, Kane.”

“That’s right.”

“I missed you.”

His hand came down to comb once through her hair. “I…missed you, too.” He spoke haltingly, a man unused to making such admissions, and followed up by pushing her away. “Back to your work,” he said, fastening himself into his clothes again.

Raven rose from the floor, the warmth of his cum still glowing in her belly, and there was Sue-Eye. She was standing just outside the bathroom door, still wrapped in a towel. Her hair was wet, her face pale. They held each other’s eyes for just a second.

Raven smiled.

*

It was night at last, the curtains open to admit a little moonlight, and the humans were finally asleep, each on their own bed. Kane sat at the hotel table in the darkness and watched over them as he prepared his Vahst. He had ten more ampules after the hunt at the motel, ten that would make five once he had them worked into the final product, and each one would fetch him close to one thousand crona once he was back home. After all the time he’d spent here, all the petty distractions, he was really coming down to the end of it.

This was the tedious part of the chemist’s trade: He had to empty the ampules two at a time into the analyzer, and then program the exact formula it required to achieve that magical transformation from human dopamine into the Jotan sex-endorphin known as Vahst. Heat. Ha. Kane had never sampled his own merchandise, but he knew it wasn’t very damned much like real Heat. It triggered the mating urge, that was all; it heightened pleasure and made the user feel he was burning all the while. For the first few times, it could also enable the user to fuck like he was in Heat, cumming over and over and over for hours, but without the brutal agony of true-cum waiting like molten lead in his tsesac. For the first few times. Afterwards—once the chemicals had finished frying the user’s brain, that was—Vahst was needed just to mate at all. Eventually, long use and chemical scarring would ensure that even true Heat would never be enough to put power in the piston. A Vahst-addict could lie screaming, his tsesac swollen with white-hot hell, and never be able to achieve the erection to fuck it out. That was a bad way to die, a ruptured tsesac.

Which was what such a man deserved for taking the shit in the first place. Kane had no sympathy at all.

Raven rolled in her sleep, kicking off the light sheet that covered her and lying nude in the dim moonlight. She was dreaming of him, relaxed, smiling, the scent of musk rich around her.

Bottle that, and he could make a fortune.

Kane felt his lips stretch in a smile, and he forced himself to return his attention to the chemicals he was supposed to be mixing and reducing. His Raven. So few days ago, she had wept with betrayal when her body took pleasure from him. Now she came to him begging to mate. Kane did not consider himself a gullible man, but there had been proof enough of her desire painting his hand when he touched her. ‘I missed you,’ she’d said, and said it with such a rueful humor that it had to be true.

And he’d missed her. He’d missed having her body tucked beneath his arm, missed the feel of her metal pressing against him, missed her cunt and her hands and her wonderful mouth. The other human, Sue-Eye, was adequate enough a vessel to serve Heat when it came on him, but she was no Raven and never would be, for all her pretenses.

Raven wanted him. He had not broken her; her will was as strong as ever, her mind as quick. He had won her instead. He had taken her away from her reality, dominated her with fear and pain, and then forced her to feel pleasure. Now she was his, his to take, his to train, his to shape into whatever form he willed. Sue-Eye was nothing to him, a receptacle of necessity who might yet prove profitable. Raven now, Raven would be crew someday, and his for all time.

The papers where she practiced her letters were here at his elbow. Kane ran his gaze idly over her writing. She was learning quickly. Oh, it was mindless mimicry now, but understanding would come. She was eager to be schooled, that was the important thing. The now-familiar formations of their names dominated the page, of course. She could not seem to be content with just the alphabet. And there, near the extreme edge of the paper, she’d carefully shaped words in Jotan letters that made no sense at all. Kane thoughtfully translated each to human characters and then to N’Glish and slowly the meaning of it came out.

‘I hate that blonde haired bitch’. Kane bared his teeth in a smile of ferocious approval. If she wanted, he would give Sue-Eye to Raven for killing. But that, as Uraktus may have put it, was a wide stripe of if. Raven had a good head on her slender human shoulders, but she had no taste for killing.