“How much longer?” she asked, wonder in her voice.
“You’ll have a Scaeven lifespan. On average, we live for four hundred of your Earth years.”
Hadiza sat bolt upright. “Four hundred years? That’s more than three times an average human lifespan.” She stared at him with wide eyes. “How old are you?”
“I don’t deal with human time standards very much.” He’d learned them, in the course of his research on the human trafficking ring, but their use didn’t factor much into his work. “I think…” He did the math in his head, struggling to convert between Crurian mathematics and the humans’ clunky base-10 system. “I think I have one-hundred and two Earth years.”
Hadiza continued to stare at him with those wide, fathomless eyes. “A hundred and two?” she repeated faintly. “I’m twenty-nine.” A laugh bubbled out of her, and she flopped back down onto the pallet beside him. “I’ve been stressing about turning thirty.” More laughter.
Errol watched uneasily, not certain if this was good laughter, or the kind that would turn into sobbing. She turned to face him, and the warmth in her eyes eased his worry.
She laid a gentle hand on his cheek. “So not needing sleep is a good sign?”
He lay still, enjoying the sight of her lovely face, savoring the touch of her hand upon his skin. “Yes. But it’s not a guarantee. You could simply be adjusting to a new environment.”
“The admiral didn’t react to me, but he reacted violently to Lyra’s sister. Maybe it’s because the matebond was already there?”
“We’d heard of such a thing before I left to infiltrate the auction. Some think the lack of reaction from other males indicates the matebond. But it’s equally likely that it was caused simply by my scent being on you. Having my seed inside you is a powerful claim, even if its not necessarily permanent.”
Hadiza’s cheeks flushed, and the scent of her arousal spiked.
Errol grinned lazily. “Does that excite you, rourra? Speaking of my claim on you?”
She buried her face in his chest. “Errol…”
“What if I tell you how much I want to fill you with my seed, again and again, until there’s no chance you can forget you’re mine?”
A pained breath escaped her. Her fingernails curled against his skin.
“I want you drenched in my come, so that everybody knows who you belong to.” His cock rose to painful erectness. He reached down, sliding his palm over her taut belly, over her lush mound, and cupping her sex—and found her dripping wet for him. She moaned, clenching her thighs together, trapping his hand as she ground against him.
“Beautiful creature,” he said hoarsely, turning her onto her stomach so that she lay prone beneath him. He straddled her thighs and ran his hands over the lush curves of her ass, gripping her flesh. The heavy weight of his erection settled in the valley between her thighs. “Let me take you. Let me show you you’re mine.”
Her hands fisted in the thin linens on his pallet. She tilted her hips, lifting her ass, presenting the slick, swollen petals of her pussy. The evidence of their earlier coupling still streaked her thighs, and the sight of it—his claim written on her skin—sent a pulse of lust that nearly doubled him over. He pressed the head of his cock against her her soft folds. She whimpered, lifting her ass higher.
“Please Errol,” she panted.
He gripped her hips with his big hands, entranced by the contrast of his hard gray body against her tawny softness. “Tell me who you belong to,” he growled, fighting the urge to plunge into her as hard as he could.
“You,” she gasped. “Please, Errol.”
He pushed just the tip of himself inside of her. She shuddered and moaned, her hips rolling, her hands pulling wildly at the linens.
“Say it again.”
“Yours. I’m yours. Errol!”
He thrust all the way inside of her on one swift, hard stroke. Her inner muscles fluttered and clenched along the length of his shaft, while her body undulated and writhed beneath him. He dropped down onto his elbows, bracing himself over her so that he could feel all of her writhing against him while he drove into her with powerful thrusts.
“Errol, Errol,” she sobbed his name, rocking back against him. Her hands closed on his biceps, her nails biting into his skin as she used her grip to leverage herself back, meeting his thrusts.
He loved her. Not for the perfect way their bodies came together, but for everything—everything—about her. He wanted so badly to tell her, but his sweet little human would feel obligated to say it back, and he couldn’t take that.
He arched down so that her could kiss her neck, her shoulder. She turned her head, catching his mouth with hers, and they tasted each other as they moved together in a brutal, ecstatic dance.
“I love you,” he growled against her lips in Scaeven. “Love you,” he repeated as he thrust into her. He said it again and again in a language she couldn’t understand, repeating it like a mantra. Love you, love you, love you…
He felt her climax building in the stiffening tension of her body, in the sloppiness of her kisses. And then she was coming, crying his name and arching against him as her pussy clenched down on his shaft, jerking him into his own brutal orgasm. He felt his semen coating her insides in hot spurts.
Please. Please let her be mine.
The climax left him in a brutal rush, and he collapsed to his side. They lay beside each other, panting haggardly. Hadiza whimpered, her body still going through the lingering waves of orgasm, easing slowly until her hands unclenched from the bed linens. She let out a shuddering gust of breath, and opened foggy, lust-glazed eyes. She met his gaze with an unfocused smile, and emotion choked Errol again. Pressure built behind his eyes, and a soft glow lit Hadiza’s beautiful face.
“Your eyes,” she said faintly, reaching out to touch his face. “They are glowing.”
“It’s an emotional response in Scaevens,” Errol said gruffly.
Hadiza smiled. “A good one?”
He gathered her into his arms, hauled her against his body. “Not always. But right now—yes.”
Hadiza burrowed into his embrace. “I can’t wait until you’re out of here. When you’re gone, the nightmares come back.”
Errol frowned. “Nightmares?”
“Human dreams can be terrifying.”
His arms tightened around her. “What terrifies you?” he demanded.
“Old memories.”
“War memories.”
“Yes. But they’re different now. I’m still back on the battlefields, but instead of watching my friends die, it’s…” She swallowed hard.
“What?”
“It’s you. I can’t save you. I keep watching you slip away.” The words came out choked. “Errol, you have to get out of this. You have to come back to me.”
The pressure behind his eyes became too much to bear. He squeezed them shut. “Haven’t I always? Even before we knew each other, I came for you, didn’t I?”
He felt her relax against him. “Yes,” she agreed. “You’re always… nobody else has…” She trailed off. He felt her fingers stroking absently over his chest. “I trust you. More than anybody.”
His chest swelled with feeling. It wasn’t a declaration of love, but it was something nearly as good. Given time, he might convince her to love him.
Chapter Seventeen
Leo Cluster, NGC 3842
Scaevos Multi-body System, Narik Moon
IG Standard Calendar 236.46.24
Hadiza sat in the rear seat of an interspace cruiser, while Lyra and Asier sat up front. Lyra sat at the controls, transitioning the cruiser smoothly from atmosphere to low orbit, sending them on their way to Narik and the human woman who was close to delivery. Hadiza trailed her fingers absently over her own stomach, wondering.
From the pilot’s seat, Lyra cursed and her fingers flew over the flight panel, making adjustments.
“You know how to pilot Scaeven vessels?” Hadiza asked, remembering the time they’d
tried to hijack one to escape the traffickers.
“Asier taught me. I’m going to get licensed and maybe take on some chartered jobs. I can’t sit at home all day, watching the light change.”
“No, you already have your chart,” Asier said fondly.
Hadiza nodded. She kept opening her mouth to ask one question, then chickening out and asking inane ones. You are a grown adult. You are a doctor. Stop being such a laboring prude and ask the damn question!
“So…” Hadiza began, her mouth going dry.
After a beat of silence, Lyra, and Errol looked back at her, waiting.
“Uh.”
A knowing smile tugged at Lyra’s mouth. “Parle en Français,” she told Hadiza. “Il ne le comprend pas.”
Speak in French. He doesn’t understand it.
Recognizing the attempt at privacy, Asier turned away from them, lips pursed and humor gleaming in his catlike eyes.
Hadiza hauled in a steadying breath. “I was thinking about the different signs that the matebond has, you know, happened. That conception has occurred,” she amended, more comfortable with medical terminology.
“Yes?” Lyra prompted.
“Uh, yes. Well, it occurred to me that the toxin doesn’t affect me anymore. And my pheromones don’t affect Errol.” It was the politest way she could say I don’t turn into a mindless sex zombie anymore when Errol kisses me. She managed to get it all out without self-combusting. “From a biological standpoint, it would make sense that, once the female conceives, the male’s toxin is no longer necessary for sexual compulsion.” Put as clinically as she could phrase it, and her cheeks still burned.
Lyra settled back into her seat, checking the flight panel and adjusting something. “Asier and I had the same thing, after that first time. There are a lot of theories. It’s possible that the intoxication effect is disabled by conception.” She shrugged. “But it’s also possible that just having his semen inside you is what does it.”
Hadiza really was going to self-combust. Her face was hot enough to fry an egg. “Yes,” she managed to say evenly. “Errol said the same thing about the lack of reaction from other males.”
“There’s a lot we just don’t know,” Lyra said, reverting to the Creole, bringing Asier back into the loop. “Because of the human ban, there’s not a lot of research or data to pull up. It’s all guesswork.”
“It’s not entirely guesswork,” Hadiza said, trying to lighten the mood. “You’ve got me.”
Narik was smaller than Varan, but still appreciably large. Based purely on visuals, Hadiza guessed the moon was about the size of Kepler. Instead of Varan’s lush green continents and wide blue oceans, Narik was rocky and orange. Surface altitude varied wildly, surging upwards into needle-sharp spires of rock, then dropping down into steep, narrow canyons, cut through with thousands of thin, twisting, rusty-brown rivers. The rock was striated with beautiful, undulating layers of white and red and yellow that spoke of a tumultuous geologic history. The vegetation was low and scrubby where it managed to take hold in the thin, rocky soil. But the colors were beautiful—ashy purple and smoky blue scrub brush mingled with vivid red and orange succulents of various shapes.
Cities like the ones she’d seen on Varan—complicated networks of interconnected, partially buried structures—clustered around intersecting rivers. Lyra took manual control of the cruiser, and guided them to a northern latitude on the moon, setting down near an earth dwelling with glass domes similar to those on Asier and Lyra’s home. In deference to the hotter, sunnier climate of Narik, large curving shutters had been extended over the domes, filtering the too-bright sunlight.
A Scaeven with long, elaborately braided black hair and gold-enameled fangs met them outside. His face was hard and tense, and his elliptical eyes settled distrustfully on Hadiza as Asier spoke to him in the Scaeven language. After a moment, he nodded and led them down a long tunnel into the the home.
The pregnant woman was seated in a lushly appointed room, dressed in a fine Bijari silk gown, a tray of untouched food set beside her. Her skin was warm bronze, her hair raven black. She was as short as Hadiza, and so heavily swollen with pregnancy that her massive belly dwarfed her small frame. She watched, mute and stone-faced, as Hadiza and Lyra shooed her Scaeven captor—her “mate”—from the room. Lyra stood at the door while Hadiza crossed to the pregnant woman and crouched to look into her blank eyes.
“Do you speak the Creole?” she asked.
The woman did not respond.
“Parlez-vous Français?” she tried.
Nothing.
“How about English?” Lyra asked from the door.
Expecting nothing, Hadiza ventured, “Betafhami-tú Espeurbaa?”
The woman’s hand shot out, catching Hadiza’s wrist and jerking her close. Hadiza braced her free hand on the edge of the woman’s seat, barely preventing herself from crashing against the woman’s pregnant belly. “Eres min Kepler?” the woman hissed.
“Sí,” Hadiza said. “De Johannesburg. Aismi Hadiza. Y tú?”
“Aisha,” the woman answered, giving her name. Her eyes were still distant, empty of feeling, but she sagged back against the chair, and met Hadiza’s gaze. “I have been having contractions for several hours,” she said flatly.
Hadiza nodded calmly, betraying none of her surprise. They’d told her the woman was close to delivery—not that she was due at any second. “I’m a doctor. Will you let me examine you?”
“No.” Aisha gripped the seat cushion with white-knuckled hands. “Let this monster to kill me.”
Hadiza’s stomach rose to her throat on a surge of revulsion. It wasn’t the thought of death. It was everything that had led to this moment—Aisha’s capture, her rape, a terrifying pregnancy by a foreign species. “I can’t—” she swallowed another surge of bile. “I can’t stand by and let you die. I’ve been brought here to perform a c-section. Human bodies are too small to deliver Scaeven infants naturally.”
“I do not consent,” she said coldly, looking away from Hadiza.
Hadiza watched her, at a loss, struggling with the ethics of what she ought to do, and what she had to do. Aisha tensed suddenly, bowing over her round belly. Her eyes squeezed shut and her hands clenched tighter on the seat.
When her body eased and her eyes opened again, Hadiza asked, “How long ago was your last contraction?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
Hadiza considered the woman for a quiet moment. She decided to take a risk. “Listen to me, Aisha. If you knew you could get away from here, would you choose to live?”
Aisha’s face crumpled. Heavy tears streaked down her cheeks. “Why would you taunt me?” she choked on a sob. She doubled over from pain that had nothing to do with labor.
“Please,” Hadiza reached out to grip the other woman’s hands. “Listen. I can’t make a promise, okay? But my friends—” she nodded over her shoulder at Lyra “—are trying to come up with something. She’s a pilot and her sister is… well, her sister’s very clever. Both of them are. And I’m a human medical practitioner, which seems to give me carte blanche to issue orders about humans and human well-being. If you give us some time—”
“So I have to keep living here? With him and his monster child?” she sobbed. “Just keep waiting and wondering and hoping and—” Aisha choked on her tears and her despair, and Hadiza felt sympathetic tears burning her own eyes. Aisha shook her head and pulled her hands from Hadiza’s grasp. “I can’t do it. Not a minute longer. Let me go. Please, just let me go. Give him his monster and let me go!” She shoved out of the chair, only to collapse back into it with a pained cry, clutching low on her stomach.
For the first time, Hadiza noticed the stream of blood, thick and viscous, running down the seat and pooling on the floor. She leapt to her feet. “Lyra!”
Lyra raced over and helped her hoist the diminutive woman up. Aisha’s head lolled back. A wide blood stain soaked the chair cushion where she’d been sitting. She’d bee
n bleeding since before Hadiza had arrived. Between the two of them, Hadiza and Lyra managed to haul her into the adjoining room—a birthing suite that had been prepared in advance.
They lowered Aisha into a wide, shallow tub carved into the floor. She slumped against the porcelain, lips pale, eyelids fluttering weakly.
Medibots on articulated arms emerged from the wall beside the tub. A screen built into the wall displayed a series of glyphs that Hadiza couldn’t read.
“Don’t let them touch her,” Lyra said nervously. “We don’t know if the AI thinks she’s male or female.”
Hadiza snapped the scalpel toolhead off the nearest medibot. Lyra reached for another one, doing the same. They left the medibots with monitoring equipment, allowing them to attach to Aisha’s skin.
Aisha groaned and curled up as another contraction wracked her body. Fresh blood pooled beneath her, spreading over white porcelain. “No,” she groaned in Espeurbaa, pushing weakly at Hadiza’s hands. “Let me go. Please, let me go.”
“Doc,” Lyra said urgently, staring at the spreading blood. Her already pale skin turned three shades whiter.
“I know.” Hadiza reached up, digging her fingers into the wall panel, and pried it away, revealing the bots’ medical supplies. She recognized most of it from interactions she’d had with the Ravanoth. She pulled out a spinal blocker, a scalpel, a retractor, a spreader, and a large forceps.
“Did you ever perform any kind of field aid when you were in the military?” she asked Lyra.
“Nothing very complicated,” Lyra said, looking ill. “When pilots take a casualty, things are generally past the point of recovery.”
“Do you think you can assist me without vomiting or passing out?”
Lyra took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Yeah.”
Heavy footsteps sounded in the other room, then a roaring, incoherent curse. Aisha’s captor and rapist appeared in the doorway, chest heaving. He barged into the room, taking up too much space, crowding Hadiza with his big body. He dropped to his knees beside the tub, bellowing in Scaeven, reaching for Aisha.
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