Raven heard a rumble of throaty laughter and looked up into Kane’s pleasure-darkened eyes, now cat-narrow and content. He, too, was looking at the women, although his hand still combed down Raven’s hair.

“When I send you to sleep,” he remarked, amused. “I believe I am going to hear an offer of the best fucking humans can give.” He hissed sharply and looked at her hands, adding, “Which, if I do in fact receive, I may be astonished enough to let the ichuta’a live. You can’t imagine how good that feels, with five fingers. Put your mouth on me, Raven.”

Raven rolled her shoulders back to come at him from an angle and sucked him in all the way, until her lips locked around his base. She swallowed and pumped him, swallowed again several times as fast as she could, until he began to spasm and she pulled back, sucking the cum from his cock and letting it drool down from the corners of his mouth to stimulate what he called his ‘true’ cum. She’d gotten quite good at this, at closing both fists around his shaft and milking him in rhythm so that she could drink him without gagging on the flood of it until his body could react to the stimulant in his spend.

“Tell me,” she gasped between mouthfuls. “Tell me when, and you can have my ass.”

“Isn’t that…bad for your period?” he asked, his reluctance belied by the clenching excitement in his hands.

“Yeah,” she lied, sucking harder. “But I want it. I want you. I’ll risk it.”

He hissed between his teeth, was silent as he pumped out another three spurts of cum. Then, “I just got you the way I want you—Unh! I don’t want to break—break you! Chok, that’s nice! All right! But I’m going to be pissed if you die. Get up, right now!”

He hauled her up by the arm and swung her around, growling as he fisted his own dick, as if it hurt not to have her there, even the instant it took to place her against the booth table. She felt his claws pricking at her hips as he spread her cheeks and pushed his slick cock slowly into her. He groaned, bent to rest his full weight on her, and took several ragged breaths. Then he reared back and fucked her in earnest, banging the table into the wall with every thrust, pushing her breath from her body in low grunts which he apparently took for pleasure. He drove at her harder, faster, and she heard what might have been a part of her name in his roar of release as his cum coated her bowels.

He shuddered and bent, gasping, and lay his head on her shoulders. “Raven,” he said, laughing a little as he lay atop her. “I’m taking you with me when I go. If I never see Jota, if I never have Heat again, I can’t imagine the rest of my life without a fuck that fine.”

He nuzzled at her hair briefly, then straightened, slapping her flank stingingly but with affection, and bound himself up again. “Now go sleep. I’ll need you ready when it’s time to go.”

Raven went to the dank bathroom in the back of the bar to clean up and when she came out, Kane was injecting his scanner into one of the females, leaning back on his haunches to study the results. The hooker who was his object of consideration was sobbing into her fists. She screamed when he gripped her hair, but at least she died right away when he harvested her. It was just too awful when they didn’t.

Raven lay down in a booth and watched. The second hooker ended up the same as the first, which left Kane with the two bikers. He sat and considered them, then punched a hole in each of their duct tape gags.

“You’ve got plenty of poison in you,” he said, and rested his eyes on the one with red hair. “But there’s something strange in your blood, something I don’t recognize, and there isn’t much I can’t recognize. What can you tell me?”

“I’m pregnant,” the biker said.

“What?”

“Pregnant,” she said again.

Kane rubbed a little at the bridge of his nose and sighed, then hauled back his hand and slapped her, hard enough to flip her from her knees onto her side. “I heard you the first time. Tell me what it means.”

The redhead started sobbing. “I don’t know how!”

“It means she’s cooking up a baby,” said the other.

Kane looked at her, and Raven recognized the gleam of early impatience in his eyes. “She’s what?”

“A baby human,” the blonde said. “You know, baby? You fuck, you get a baby?”

“A b—Ah. I see. Baby.” Kane examined the scanner again. “That explains it. Hm.” He punched at the keys of his little computer, probably updating his program.

“Please,” the redhead whimpered. “Please, mister—”

“Be quiet,” Kane said absently. “Let me think.”

“I’ll do anyth—”

He cracked his hand across her again and she screamed and began to sob louder. Kane closed his eyes briefly, then opened them, grim and set with determination, and hit her again, harder. The redhead stuffed her fists in her mouth and cried quietly. Kane eyed his weeping victim and then returned his attention to his monitor.

“Raven, are you asleep?” he asked, raising his voice only a little.

“Not yet.”

“Come and find out about this baby. How…soon it is…How old it is.”

Raven got up and eased over to sit on the redhead’s other side as Kane turned his attention to the blonde.

“This is the part where I offer you the best fuck of your life,” the blonde said seriously.

Kane formed a thin smile.

“Look, I’m not going to play you,” said the blonde biker. “I do a lot of dope and as much coke as I can, and I’ve probably got the clap. But I will fuck you. I’ll fuck you until you scream. I’ll fuck you until you make me scream. I’ll fuck you any way you want. I’ll drink your piss if you want me to. I saw you looking at your girl and Rosie Harper. If you want, you can fuck me while I eat her out. Or we can do each other sixty-nine. We can take you together if you want. You’ve never fucked Earther until you’ve had a tit-rub. Swear. You can pierce me. You can pierce me yourself. You can cum all over her and I’ll lick it off her if you want. Just let me live, okay? Just let me live.”

“Dope, coke, clap,” Kane echoed, and reached for his scanner. “The drugs can be cleaned. This…clap…that too can be cleaned, but it will take longer. And I am not inclined to wait.”

But Raven shrewdly noted that Kane didn’t simply kill her. He leaned on his arms, still smiling. ‘Convince me,’ his posture said, and the blonde biker spoke posture pretty well.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” she said intently. “I’ll do anything. I’ll get down in that blood and suck you off right now. I’ll suck him off, if you want me to.”

Kane glanced at the dead biker when she pointed and said ‘him’, and his smile became a little wider. He looked back at Raven, considering her, and then down at his scanner.

The blonde was silent, unblinking. The only sound was Raven’s own low voice whispering to the redhead, and the redhead’s hushed weeping.

“I believe I can work with you,” Kane said at length. “I can fuck you for a few days at least. That is your only purpose, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will live to see the back of me. Give me your arm.”

The blonde held out her bound wrists and Kane slit them apart with one claw. As he loaded the funny little air gun he used for injecting, he remarked, “I appreciate your candor, human, and I’ll give it back to you. I will kill you the instant I suspect that you are…playing me. I’ll kill you if you slow me down. I’ll kill you if you anger me. I’ll kill you if you provoke me, inconvenience me, or bore me. Understand that.”

“Check, chief.”

“This—” Kane’s hand came down on Raven’s thigh and squeezed. “—is mine. I’ll kill you if you threaten her. You’re here for me to fuck for a few days. Her, I mean to keep.” He squeezed again, a warning Raven felt as comfort as she tried quietly to coax the redhead to speak.

Kane nodded once, shoved her head to once side, and injected her in the base of her neck. It raised a thin red circle, but that was all.