“You were frightened.”

“That’s my problem, not his.” She shot him a look that was partly frustration and the rest imploring. “And it’s not yours, either,” she said sharply. “So drop it.”

Tagen’s face closed with a near-audible slam. He nodded once, and then turned and left her in the kitchen.

Good. She didn’t want to have to keep talking to him, anyway.

She scrubbed her countertops, listening as the strains of Law & Order once again flowed down the hallway.

He hadn’t even tried to keep talking, anyway.

And that was good.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Nine

Kane felt pretty good for someone who hadn’t accomplished anything.

Raven had driven all day steadily east at his command, but the end of the land never came. It was a big block of land, Kane knew, having seen it from space. He’d had an idle interest in mapping it out from the perspective of one on the ground, but his curiosity had waned and now he was thinking about hunting again. When the sun hit its highest point, he ordered Raven to turn them around. Once they were back into the comfortable zone wherein his locator could sense his ship, he had her go north until night fell.

They hadn’t taken many breaks. Just to refuel now and then, or to get food and drink (they didn’t even have to stop for this. There were places that would hand the food in hot bags right through the groundcar’s window), or to pull into one of the many piss-stops that dotted Earth’s roads so that Raven could walk around a little. Kane, who was accustomed to sitting long shifts on the bridge of the Null with nothing to do and nothing to look at but space, handled the drive far better than his human pilot. She needed those rests, needed to stretch out and walk up and down the paths around the piss-stop rubbing her ass and her thighs. Kane walked beside her, safely disguised in his hellishly hot coat, and watched all the humans come and go with dopamine cooking in their little human heads.

The groundcar’s climate controls worked fairly well, but as the day wore on, Raven’s rests had become longer and longer. Kane gave her no orders. She was the pilot, after all, and if she needed walking to keep her head clear and thus keep them from flying off the road and into a tree, so be it. For the most part, they were back on their way soon enough that it didn’t matter. For the most part.

She’d lingered a little too long only once, and then actually tried to argue with him when he’d started to unfasten his pants. Something about being outside, where people could see. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, and elected only to punch her in the stomach instead of taking out a few teeth. He’d even pulled her off the path and out of sight before fucking her. And after that, for whatever reason, she’d been awfully good about taking shorter breaks.

The only stop he’d insisted they make was to bed down for the night in a motel rather than camp out in the woods, and she’d been perfectly amenable to that. The place they stopped wasn’t as secluded as the first one, but neither did it prove ‘tricky’. Raven had even managed to get a shaver from the manager, and she’d remembered to ask without any extra prompting from Kane. Most humans were at their best with a few bruises on them.

Now Kane lay on his back on the motel bed, one arm lazily pillowing his head, watching the thing Raven had called a ‘tee-vee’ and listening to water run in the other room. It had taken him some time to decode the controls, and it made him feel pleased and vaguely masterful to press a button on the device in his hand and see the image on the monitor change. So many buttons…

He supposed it was part of the human mentality, to have so many fingers and then build things complicated enough to need them all.

The function of the tee-vee, as near as Kane could deduce, was mainly entertainment. With few exceptions, the images shown followed along lucid, lateral storylines and Kane had a feeling most, if not all of them, were fictional. Jotan did this, although they didn’t use quite so many different channel feeds to do it. Kane thumbed through several feeds, studying each new program only long enough to get the gist of it before moving on, until he had seen every available feed twice and felt informed enough to pick one.

The feeds had a lot to teach about ways to use the human language, not to mention ways to use the humans themselves. Kane couldn’t help but think that if Uraktus had just had access to a tee-vee and few weeks to study it, he wouldn’t have bothered keeping quite so many slavesl. Or maybe he would have. Urak was funny that way. Unpredictable. And Kane had to admit, once she’d settled in a little, Raven was pretty low-maintenance.

The sounds of water drumming on the wall stopped suddenly. Kane could hear Raven moving about in the bathroom, and then there was quiet again. Every so often, the water would come on in a short burst. He wondered what in the hell she was doing in there, and ultimately decided her personal grooming practices couldn’t be as entertaining as the tee-vee.

The sun had finally sunk low enough to come in through the window, aggressively radiant and irritating to Kane’s eyes. He got up to shut the curtains, but lingered at the window for a little while, looking out at the road and watching groundcars whiz past, back and forth. He needed to think about work.

In a few hours, he decided. Once it was dark. After he’d had a chance to eat and shower, perhaps sleep a few hours with Raven secure beneath his arm. When it was cooler.

Kane returned to his place on the bed and found another program on the tee-vee. It looked extremely interesting but cut out after only a few minutes. Annoyed, Kane went around to the back of the monitor and had a look at the electrical system.

The technology on this planet was limited, simplistic. He found the crude circuit damper almost immediately, and after disconnecting the monitor from its power outlet, set about adjusting it. The hardest part was working the little metal fasteners out of the device’s outer case—he didn’t have any tools that fit the cross-cut heads and he ended up carefully cutting the back of the case away with the miniature laser normally used for spot-welding the hull of a ship—but once the inner wiring was exposed, Kane was in familiar territory. He didn’t have to worry about putting it back together so it looked nice, either, he just had to make it safe enough that it didn’t set the wall on fire and that was easy.

When he plugged everything in again, the program was back on the screen and Kane put his tools back in his pack and sat down to watch it.

The bathroom door opened and Raven emerged, wrapped in one of the white drying cloths. It was a little too small to be used as clothing; when she moved, the edges opened, revealing a long slice of pale flesh all the way from her thigh to the shadow of her breast. She hesitated by the foot of the bed, then walked past and over to the little table on the other side of the room.

He watched her go, feeling a pleasant sort of vague interest in her. “I want to see,” he said.

She turned around, keeping her eyes down, and unwrapped herself for him.

She’d done it. She was smooth and utterly hairless from the neck down. Her sex was pale, almost shiny with the rawness of it, plump and round and perfect. She let the towel fall and came to him when he snapped his fingers, standing with her legs slightly spread so that he could feel the softness of her.

“What’s the word for this?” he asked, almost by rote.

“There’s lots of names.”

“I only need one.”

Raven thought about it and finally shrugged. “Pussy, I guess.”

He repeated her, stroking the soft swell of her shaven sex, and finally gave her thigh a slap to send her away so that he could get back to the television. He was watching humans get ready to fuck and found it queasily fascinating. The way the females moved was dig-in-your-gut arousing but the way the male’s tsesac flopped around was downright nauseating. The male kept trying to eat the female’s breasts, but the female seemed to like it. Of course, humans didn’t have that many teeth, so…