Besides. He did want to fuck her. As poor an excuse as that might be, when the sun beat down on him tomorrow, he wanted a female to bury himself in and get away from the worst of its fury. Kane waited for his father’s sarcastic comment, but there was nothing. Even the subconscious shadow of him that spoke in his father’s voice knew Urak’s mating preferences would make further recriminations hypocritical.

To fuck a human…

He’d had his chances, the gods knew. For as long as he could remember, there had been humans in the Null’s hold at least twice a year, and plenty of stops at breeding facilities and Kevrian sex-houses. Kane may have been the only crewman who hadn’t fucked one, but there was something so inherently distasteful in the very thought of it that he’d never even been tempted to before. Humans were too little, too creepily similar in form to Jotan. It had always seemed to Kane more than a little like fucking a child. He was a bad man by any standards of sentient life in the universe, but some things were wrong no matter what.

Kane couldn’t remember much of how it had felt to sex with the yellow-haired female of his first encounter. He recalled his relief, her struggles, and of course, the dull rage he’d felt when she sucked water and escaped him. The mating itself was a void in his mind. He had been a handspan or less from death, he knew that now. Heat had caught him by surprise, and he had abandoned the maintenance of his body to pursue relief. Now he knew better; he was resigned to it and more, he was equipped to deal with it. Let Heat come. He would take it and he would do his job, and he would probably never look at humans quite the same way again, but he would put it all behind him when he had a ship and a crew of his own.

Kane’s eyes found their way down to Raven’s pinched and sedated face. He lifted a lock of her hair, deep violet framed with pure white, and let it spill through his claws. He was going to have to fuck this one with his wits around him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He thought of old Urak’s humans. For as long as Kane had memory, Urak had been making Vahst from dead humans and selling the live ones for slaves, and for all that time, it had been Urak’s habit to keep one of them for himself as the ship flew from Earth to the Outer Reaches where the slave trade was going strong. Male, female, didn’t matter. He kept all sizes, all ages, all colors. Trial and error had revealed over time where and how hard you could hit them, what they could eat and what would poison them, and all the other complicated details of their care.

Urak’s last human had been male, and it had lived nearly two years, but there wasn’t much comparison between that human and this Raven. Urak’s slave had the look of prey, for all that he’d survived so long. He’d been thin-faced and frantic, always frightened, even after all that time in the relative safety of the commander’s favor. Old Urak had remained fascinated by him, but to the rest of the crew, the human was an irritant and an uncalled-for distraction, too damned fragile for life on the smuggler’s ship.

Not, Kane knew, that fragility had killed him. Or at least, it hadn’t killed him without help.

Kane had gone down to the cargo hold. He no longer remembered why. His business there hadn’t taken long, he knew that, but it had taken him all the way through the cramped bay, in and out of the stacks with nothing but the thump of the engines and the pipework above him to be his navigating points. And on his way back through the maze of cargo, he’d stepped out into a kind of clearing and found Varr with Urak’s human.

The human had been bent over a crate with Varr’s hand splayed over the side of its face, pressing it firm against the rough material. Varr was standing behind him. It took Kane a second or two to realize what he was looking at.

Varr had already seen him, but seeing him wasn’t stopping him. He continued his mating movements, pushing raw grunts from the human’s miserably-twisted mouth, and watched Kane without any appearance of concern.

Incredibly, the only thing Kane could think to say was, “That doesn’t belong to you.”

Varr backed up at once, drawing his cock free of the human’s cloacae, and shoved the human to the floor. There was blood on Varr’s wet shaft, blood trickling slow down the human’s thighs. “Come and get some,” Varr said, baring his teeth. “If it bothers you so much, I’ll let the fucking thing go, but this cock—” He’d gripped it hard, squeezing blood out between his fingers. “—is going into someone. It’s him, runt, or it’s you.”

Varr was a seasoned slaver, with a hundred years and half again Kane’s weight to his advantage. He was the muscle Urak employed when conflict erupted and they were caught off-ship. He was stronger, he was faster, and he didn’t make empty threats.

Kane knew when he was outmatched. He’d backed up a step, watching warily until Varr picked up the human and thrust back inside it. Only then had he left, wondering how in hell he was going to bring this up to his father.

He’d gone less than a hundred paces back through the cargo bay when Urak’s hand came out between two stacks of hull panels and touched his arm. Urak did not speak or even look at him; his face was grimly set and his eyes were hooded in shadow. Seconds passed, and Urak’s hand slipped away, freeing Kane to leave.

The next day, Kane had come out of his sleeping pod into the quarters he shared with his father and found the human face-up on the table, and Urak calmly carving it.

“Sleep well?” Urak’s voice was even, almost disinterested. He withdrew a piece of gut from the human’s body and peered at it. “Does this look like a kidney to you?”

“What happened?” Kane asked after a moment.

“He died.” Urak placed the possible kidney in a specimen jar and capped it. “Bled out.”

Silence would have been a prudent reply.

“Varr?” asked Kane.

Urak had slid a cold eye back to Kane. “He bled out, too,” he said calmly, and returned to his dissection.

So that was that. Varr’s fate was obvious, but not spoken of by any of the crew, leading Kane to wonder just how many of the others had known about Varr’s visits to the cargo bay with Urak’s slave. As for the human, well, Varr had probably half-killed it (the memory of that blood drawing its way down the human’s leg was a cold one that had a way of swelling up like a bubble when Kane’s mind was unquiet) and Urak had finished the job. Kane couldn’t imagine his father killing the thing outright; he’d put too much time and effort into it to kill it over something it couldn’t possibly have helped. Urak was ruthless, but never unfair.

Kane shook the thoughts out of his head and looked down at the human in his possession. His Raven was nothing like that other human. She was strong. She was a survivor. She was going to be a pain in the ass until she was trained up, but once that happened, Kane thought she was going to be pretty useful, and for more than just mating.

He touched her hair again, picking dirt and tree-needles out of the waves of purple, and examined her face. In her fitful rest, she appeared to him to be very young. Ah, but experienced enough, however young she might look. Those things she did with her mouth, for example. That took schooling.

Kane put one careful claw on Raven’s lip and pulled, exposing her blunt human teeth.

She moaned and turned her face away at once. “I dunno why,” she muttered in drug-thick sleep. “Quit askin’.”

Kane growled low in his chest, coaxing her deeper into sleep. When her face finally relaxed and smoothed, Kane turned her back to him and looked again into her amazing mouth. He saw only the single row of teeth that all humans had, and they did not fold back when he pushed at them experimentally. Her tongue, too, hardly looked as though it were capable of the acrobatics it had played out over him. Kane bent and stole a breath from her mouth. He tasted bile and the faint minerals of his own seed.