He set her on her feet with a thump and she sagged against him, gasping and grinning. He toyed with her hair, patiently waiting for her to pick up the threads of her game, thinking that that was one child-rhyme he’d probably ruined for use on his own future sons, but he’d had enough fun playing it with Raven to make it worth the loss.

Her hand found his shaft at last, lightly squeezing and only that, but her temperature was rising. He helped her along, bending her back to taste her breasts, and felt her respond with eager stroking. “God, you’re good,” she whispered, and cried out as he grazed his teeth carefully across her stiffened bud. “I never thought you’d be so good. Oh! Oh God, Kane! God, I wish I could kill every other man I’ve ever fucked for not being you!”

“Blood hungry little beast,” he murmured, and kissed her hungrily, tickled right down to the core of him. Then he tossed her down on the bed and stood over her, brazenly and demandingly erect. “Tell me how you want me,” he told her, gripping himself for display.

“Ride me!” she gasped. “Pick me up! Pick…Pick me up!”

Easily done, if open to a certain amount of interpretation. Kane knelt on the bed and seized his writhing female. He let her claw at him a little, let her bite at his chest as she gripped and massaged his throbbing cock, but then he firmly held her up and turned her away from him. She arched in the air, and when he brought her down to enclose him, she threw her head back against his chest and screamed his name. He made his arm a bar around her, but put his free hand over her clit and teased it as he plumbed her. The rivets he’d set in her gripped his cock at the base like an extra fist while her shuddering cunt squeezed and slicked the rest of him. He fucked her slow, withdrawing nearly all the way on each thrust so that she had to feel him fully every time he claimed her again.

Her cries became prayers and Kane groaned to hear her frantically calling to him as god of her. He rubbed her clit harder, thrusting faster, and felt her ride out another fury of orgasm. She was tightening around him with every new spasm, and Kane knew his time was on him yet again. He pulled out, turned her, and pushed her down on the bed, panting himself calm. She bucked and writhed, clawing at his arms and crying, but her time as his commander was good and gone.

Now she was for his enjoyment, and he attacked her. He caught her flailing wrists and forced them down above her head and pinned them there. His mouth claimed her breasts, his fingers moved fast and hard inside her, and her pleas to be released were a music he could dance this way to all night long. She kicked and twisted, but she was snared and he let her have no part of him but the ones he felt like giving her.

“You promised I could have you the ways I want!” she screamed, her hips tossing as she tried in vain to make his stroking fingers impale her.

“Sure, I promised,” he panted, grinning. He tongued a nipple, sucked it deep into his mouth and bit, and then laughed at her. “But Raven, I lie.”

That hit her like a fist. He watched her whole body shudder, a convulsion he could not resist prolonging with the aid of his hand at her clit. When it passed, she pushed herself back into the bed and opened wide her legs to him. “Use your Raven!” she screamed. “Se ven garrug-ta!” Everything after that was a wordless howl.

He used her. He ravished her mouth with his until he tasted blood. He straddled her chest and thrust between her breasts, pushing her wrists into the mattress and beating the headboard into the wall while she tossed and struggled to reach him with her tongue. He bit and licked and tasted every inch of her from breasts to belly to thighs. He turned her into the pillows and pressed her flat while he explored the amazing sensitivities of her spine, and squeezed and kneaded her clenching buttocks until she begged him even to take her ass. Then he rolled her back and drank her oils again, restraining himself nothing as he forced her to cum over and over and quench his demanding thirst.

Then he released her and fell back, propped on his hands and open to her. She sprang on him like a wild thing and he panted at the ceiling, his eyes shut and mouth open, and let her take him. Blunt teeth and tiny claws or not, she did her finest work, striking where his skin was thinnest and his nerves keyed to her assault. Her mouth closed on his shaft, sucking him clean of her oils, and then she was sitting him again, her hips working hard, groaning praise and gratitude until he burst inside her.

He let himself collapse, laughing raggedly, and splayed himself to the cooling breeze. His entire body was sizzling in its own heat and sweat, and despite a shaking exhaustion, it tried very hard to convince him that he was keen to try again.

Raven couldn’t seem to stop kissing him, couldn’t stop her hands from reaching and sliding along his body. That was fine. Let her keep herself burning. He meant to fuck her unconscious before he quit for a nap.

For fun, he arched his neck to look for Sue-Eye. She was back on the bed, staring at them with baleful resignation.

“Unhappy ichuta’a,” he said with mock sympathy. “Did you feel left out? Come here.”

She tensed, uncertain, but rose when he beckoned and came from her bed to theirs.

He patted her thigh, and then gestured at his groin. “Clean me, ichuta’a.”

She bent obediently, licking off Raven’s oils and smears of his cum, cleaning him from belly to thighs.

“Now clean her,” he said. “She never was your equal, little bitch,” he added, smiling at her slight hesitation. “She was always your second master.”

Raven rolled half-over and opened her thighs to the blonde female, watching Kane with smoky eyes as she was tended. “Ask me why,” she said suddenly.

He raised a brow at her.

“Say it,” she insisted, baring her teeth at him. “Say, why.”

“Why?” he echoed amiably.

“Because I want to,” she hissed, and came for him, kicking Sue-Eye to one side. “I want to and Raven gets what Raven wants!” She seized a handful of his hair and yanked him into her kiss.

He didn’t understand that, but he supposed he didn’t need to. He lay back, relaxed and smiling, and let her have her way with him again.

*

Tagen knew by the sudden change in the set of Daria’s back that the call had ended badly a split-second before she slammed the device back into the wall from which she’d taken it. He heard the bang even here in the parking bay. He could not hear the stream of cursing he could see her mouth move to make, but he could well imagine it and it troubled him. It was not merely disappointment he was seeing in her now—that he had seen while they were still stopping at hotels—but a baffled, frantic anger.

The sound of the public phone striking down had drawn Grendel’s attention as well. The cat draped itself over the back of Tagen’s chair for a time, watching as Tagen watched. Daria picked up the thick book chained to the comm center, paged through it, and then suddenly tried to throw it as well. The short tether prevented more than a low thump and rattle, but even the sight of it in its tight swing could not satisfy Daria. She kicked at the solid wall of the darkened building at which they were stopped, and then limped a little ways off and leaned her face into the bricks.

He hoped that meant they were done for the night. They had driven until dark, stopping at every public privy and fueling station they passed to inquire after E’Var, and then at every feeding place as well. When the sun failed, Daria began to make her calls, leaving the highway to search the lesser roads for towns she may have missed. Now, with full dark all around them, she had turned and taken them perhaps halfway back to their starting point of the morning, calling all the places she had stopped them at during the day, and still there was no sign of him, no word. Somehow or another, the prisoner had eluded them.