Kane had waited patiently for her attention and when he saw he had it, he tapped Raven’s arm again. “I want this out,” he said. “What can you do?”

The woman stared at him, then at Raven’s tattoo. After a few tense moments, she reached out and tentatively raised Raven’s sleeve a little, and Raven obliged her by lifting her arm as well. The woman studied the smudged coyote with a frown, her lips moving without sound as she no doubt fought for coherent thought. “I can cover it with something else,” she said finally. “Something you choose.” She raised her free hand and pointed at the wall, where dozens of samples were haphazardly pinned.

Kane studied them, then stepped over the gasping, burbling man on the floor, and brought the black-haired woman with him to take a closer look. He glanced back once, measuring Raven’s tattoo with his eyes, and then made a low, growling sound in the back of his throat as he considered.

“What are these?” he asked at last, tapping the edge of a poster filled with Asian-looking symbols.

“Those are kanji,” the woman answered. “They mean different things. This one means Chi, the spiritual life force. And this one is Dragon. And this is Master. This one—”

“I get the point.” Kane looked thoughtfully back at Raven again, then at the woman he held. “If I make an image for you, can you put it on her body?”

“Yes,” the woman said at once.

Kane released the woman’s wrist. “Give me something to make my mark on,” he ordered. “Raven, come…here.” He finished this command in a low, distracted tone, his eye caught by the magazine lying open and abandoned where big Jack, now dead, had been reading. It was open, Raven saw, to images of body piercings.

Kane picked up the magazine, traced his claws over some of them, turned the pages, and then looked again at the posters papering the walls. Some of the people modeling tattoos also had piercings. Raven could see nipples, tongues, noses, lips, eyebrows, all gleaming with metal and studded with beads. She glanced at Kane and saw him staring fixedly at her bellybutton ring.

The black-haired woman returned from the other side of the room with a piece of torn, unlined white paper and a pencil, and Kane tossed the magazine back on the coffee table and took them from her. Using the wall as his backing, he quickly sketched out a rough image, very much like a kanji, but harder somehow. Alien.

“Do you have a color preference?” the woman asked hesitantly, taking the paper from him.

“No. As long as it covers that mark. Completely.”

“And…and that’s all?” The woman glanced back at Raven’s arm, but her eyes slid to the body on the floor, to the door, to the struggling customer gargling blood in the corner.

“No,” Kane said after a thoughtful pause. He was looking at the posters again, ink and metal and flesh. “I want something more. I want…holes.”

Raven felt a chill creeping up through her body from her pussy clear to her heart.

Kane’s gaze remained on the posters, but he reached back and unerringly laid his hand over Raven’s belly. She could feel the tiny pricking of his claws as he flexed them.

“Like this one,” he said, his thumb flicking lightly at Raven’s hoop ring. “Only more of them.” He took his hand from Raven and looked sharply back at the tattoo-lady. “Can you do that here?”

“Sure. We have lots of styles…rings and studs and bars behind the counter that, that I could…” The woman took a deep breath, seeming to orient and calm herself, and finally looked up again with a determined look. “I absolutely can give you holes,” she said. “Where do you want them?”

Kane put his hand on one of the posters, slowly splayed his fingers to frame a gold loop in a girl’s bellybutton. His eyes, unblinking, trailed up and down the two-dimensional body, and fixed on the jewelry glittering in her navel. He made a sound, the purr of distant thunder, and slowly showed his fangs in a smile.

“Everywhere.”

*

“Hold her still,” the female said, and Kane obligingly fit the thick strap of his pack into his Raven’s mouth and drew it taut. She opened her eyes, wet with pain and animal misery, and then closed them again, her chest heaving. Kane ran his thumb over the curve of her smooth, soft cheek, then up to her brows, to feel the ridges of new steel set over that thin stripe of short hair she wore there.

Raven’s new body was nearly done. His mark was on her, his name burned black into the supple flesh of her arm, dotted here and there with blood. He liked the look of it almost as much as the gleam of metal in her skin.

Kane had found the process of piercing fascinating. They did not do this on Jota. He supposed human skin was thin enough to make the procedure both possible and rewarding in some way. Certainly, Raven had borne up well under it at first. It wasn’t until the painted female had finished with Raven’s belly and begun on her sex that his little human really broke.

There were straps on the little table the female was using to work on, and when Raven made her first abortive effort at struggling, the female set about binding her with cool professionalism that Kane genuinely admired. The female worked until she had Raven pressed flat on her back with her legs spread hugely apart, and then merely picked up her piercer and went back to the task at hand.

“There we go,” she said now, firing the gun a final time. “Rivets on the inside of the lips, rings to trim.” The female straightened and leaned on the table between Raven’s open legs. “How’s that look to you?”

“I like it.” Kane reached down and cupped the swollen bruise of Raven’s sex and heard a muted jingle. She moaned at his touch and turned her face into the heat of his stomach. He patted her head absently. “Beautiful.”

“Want one for the clit?” asked the artist.

Kane glanced at her, his hand still pressed against Raven’s pain-hot flesh. “Clit?”

“Move your hand.”

He did, and watched with keen interest as the female peeled back the folds of Raven’s pussy and rubbed at a small nub bedded at the head of it. Kane reached down and replaced the female’s hand with his own, rolling the so-named ‘clit’ beneath his thumb and listening to the ragged change in Raven’s breath. He drew back and patted Raven’s thigh with idle comfort. “Yes. Do it.”

As the female readied her gun and swabbed across Raven’s sex yet again with her primitive antiseptic, Kane ran his claws through a greatly-diminished box of rings and studs, and finally extracted a half-circle in silver with sparkling stones along the curved side. He tried to visualize how it would look, there in Raven’s cunt, and felt comfortably aroused. He handed it over and took up the gag again, holding it tight as the female cleaned the ring and fit it to her gun.

The female bent over Raven, her fingers at work on Raven’s clit and her piercer at the ready. Kane supposed she knew what she was doing well enough, but he found himself leaning out to better see what she was doing. Raven was giving no encouragement—she only lay there, too limp to do anything but sob her breathy sobs—but there was something primally compelling about that female’s hand at work.

Of course, she was working. Not playing. Not making the same movements as the females sometimes did in the mating programs on the tee-vee and certainly not with the same intention, but this human hand at Raven’s pussy captivated him all the same. When the female was at last satisfied with the pinch of skin she had and brought the gun forward, blocking his view, Kane heard himself growl.

The human froze at once, looking up at him from the edges of her wary eyes. Beneath her, Raven uttered a broken wail and bucked wildly against her restraints. The female’s hand stayed at Raven’s pussy, lightly rubbing as she murmured calming sounds, and her watchful gaze stayed with Kane. He flicked his claws at her impatiently, fighting to keep from showing more fang. He didn’t want to make her nervous, not with her so hard at work in such a delicate area. He focused on Raven’s flushed and pain-twisted face instead, until he heard the instrument make its muffled chukking sound. Raven shrieked star-bright behind her gag and he knew that the last of the metal had found its home.