Venomous Craving

by Mary Auclair

  A shout traveled from the far end of the hallway, interrupting her thoughts. Her time was up.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROSE

  “Y ou little bitch!” Arrik’s enraged voice echoed off the walls.

  Rose was too scared to turn back. She kept running, hot tears running down her cheeks. She wasn’t even looking for the red hatch to the escape pod anymore. All her being was focused on one simple, meaningless task: to run as far away as she could from Arrik. She knew it was pointless. There was nowhere to go to inside the ship, nowhere she could hide, nobody who would lend a helping hand. Still, instinct pushed her legs faster, reaching the limits of her endurance.

  Behind her, Arrik’s footsteps were ever closer.

  Rose tried, but in the end, it hadn’t mattered. She had failed. She hadn’t found the escape pod. She was going to be raped and sold, then raped some more, for the rest of her life. She wasn’t even going to be allowed to die, she was too valuable for that. Whoever was going to buy her would keep her in optimal health for the duration of her long, hellish life.

  She stumbled, her forces near depletion, but regained her footing at the last minute. The first of a long line of horrors was about to grab her, she could almost feel its putrid breath on her neck. At the last minute, she bolted in a wild turn, not caring to look out before she did.

  Then it was there. The door wasn’t round like Father had told her. It was rectangular, with a red circle painted in the middle. Inside the circle was another, smaller circle. It was the sign for the escape pod.

  Fast, she pulled the lever and the door slid open. Rose rushed inside, and closed the door just in time to see Arrik’s furious face slam on the small round window. He was beyond enraged. He looked mad enough to rip her to shreds with his bare hands. His nose was bleeding the gray blood of his race, and his lips were split. A vicious satisfaction sprung inside Rose at the idea that she managed to wound him. Hers wouldn’t be the only blood spilled that day.

  “Push the release button.” A deep, masculine voice rose from somewhere inside the pod. “It’s the round one, right next to your hands.”

  Rose turned around and tried to see where the voice was coming from, but couldn’t make anything out in the near total darkness.

  “Who’s here with me?”

  “If you don’t push the button in the next five seconds, the door will be unlocked from the command center.” There was a quiet urgency in the stranger’s tone, and it made Rose’s already racing heart skip a beat. “You won’t get another chance.”

  The information raced to her mind and without another second of hesitation, Rose palmed around the door until she found what she was looking for. A large, round and flat button was there, right where the stranger said it would be. She pushed with all her strength with the flat of her hand. Nothing.

  “I don’t understand.” Rose spoke, her voice small and shaky in the confines of the pod. “It’s not working.”

  “Give it a second. It’s the safety features sealing the ship’s main air supply,” the stranger said. He spoke with a calm and confident tone, like he was trying to reassure a small child. “It has to disengage the hydraulic pressure for the release.”

  There was a loud clicking sound as the seals cut the air supply. The air in the pod changed now that it was isolated from the main ship. Rose could almost feel the aseptic void of deep space on her skin. Of course she couldn’t, or she’d be dead in a split second. Next, the anchors snapped free and the pod floated away, strangely small against the monstrous shadow of the Cattelans’ ship.

  The pod moved fast, using its high capacity boosters in a series of short bursts, as was its programming. She stared at Arrik’s face through the small window as the pod accelerated. In less than a second, he wasn’t visible anymore, and ten more seconds later, all that remained of the large slaver’s ship was a tiny dot in the black immensity of space. A giggle rose in the small space of the pod, a sound of drunken relief. A few moments later, Rose realized it had come from her.

  “You have to secure yourself.” The unknown voice came back, full of tension. “Fast.”

  “What?” Rose was too drunk on relief to understand. “We’re free!”

  “This pod is going to jump into hyperdrive. You’re going to get hurt if you don’t secure yourself.”

  The words brought her back to reality. The voice was definitively male, and spoke with a deep roll of the throat, a bit like a growl. It was a good, reassuring voice, a voice she would have found sexy if she wasn’t scared half to death. Whoever had spoken, he was right. The escape pod was about to undergo a series of accelerations so severe they felt like a single burst into the ungodly speed necessary for deep space travel. If she didn’t secure herself, Rose was going to be hurled against the walls like a rag-doll. She would be hurt; bones would be broken. She could die.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said, hating the shaking, plaintive undertone in her voice. “Where are the seats?”

  “Walk toward my voice,” the stranger said. “There’s a seat right next to me.”

  Rose obeyed, walking toward the voice as he kept uttering encouragements. Her hands stretched in front of her, her heart pounding. She had no idea what was supposed to be inside the pod. She had spent all her life in Earth’s wilderness, away from even the most basic technology. The only knowledge Rose had of all these things came from her mother and father, and the stories they and the other escapees told the children. She was clueless and defenseless.

  Finally, her hands hit cold metal bars. A second later, strong, warm fingers wrapped around them. The stranger was on the other side of those bars.

  “Good. The seat is on your left. I’ll hold you, so you won’t fall.” The stranger’s hands closed around her wrists. “You don’t have long before the pod takes the jump.”

  “Okay.”

  Rose was thankful for the stranger’s hands as she made her way to the side. She reached with one hand, the other still in the stranger’s hold, and found the thinly padded seat. Reluctantly, she pulled away from the stranger and sat. Belts were attached to the back of the seat, and she fidgeted with them until they were secured across her chest in a crisscross pattern.

  “Thank you. You just saved my life,” Rose said.

  “It’s my pleasure, Pretty Thing,” the stranger answered, his voice a low, humorous growl. “You just saved mine.”

  Rose opened her mouth to counter, but no words came to her mind, so she shut it again. How could he find the wit to call her Pretty Thing when their lives hung in such a precarious balance? And how would he know anything about her looks? The pod was pitch black.

  Less than thirty seconds later, the pod shot into hyperdrive, blasting away from the main ship, the computer having completed its calculations to the nearest planet capable of sustaining life. The sudden surge of speed cut her thoughts short. Rose’s head banged on the back of the seat as the pod surged forward, and darkness invaded her mind as she lost consciousness.

  The last thing her mind registered were the stranger’s strong hands, wrapping around hers.

  KARIAN

  What are you?

  The small female’s head lolled limply on her shoulders, long strands of hair covering her face in an avalanche of savage curls. Reaching between the bars of his cage, Karian lifted the curtain of curls from the female’s face.

  Her features were delicate and soft in a fragile way reminiscent of the just-born youngling, with large eyes framed by heavy eyelashes and plump lips that hung partly open. The bones underneath her silken skin were rounded and fine, giving her face an appealing, dainty appearance. Karian’s gaze traveled down her body, strapped in the seat. She was slender, reed like, willowy, like a blade of grass on the plains of his homeland. She was a true enigma, more so than any other female he had encountered before, and he had visited half the worlds in the Ring. He inhaled deeply, tasting her sweet pheromones in the back of his mouth.

  Midnight God! This female was arousing to no
end.

  Karian cursed the darkness that forced him to gaze upon the female with his infrared vision. The receptor cells in his eyes that allowed him to see even in total darkness were an invaluable asset in battle, but the landscape of red didn’t allow him to catch all the subtleties he sensed in her, and it frustrated him. Strange that he attached so much importance to this female, of all the things he should be worried about.

  But then again, after ten years in solitary confinement in a cage, he was starved for anything to keep his mind from spiraling into a pit of boredom bordering on insanity.

  As the pod sped away to some unknown planet’s surface, Karian let his thoughts wander back to the day he was captured by the Cattelans. All he could hope was that the others hadn’t fallen into the same trap he did. Karian had followed a lead indicating the presence of an illegal slave market on one of the worlds controlled by the Eoks and rushed to stop the hateful trade. Eoks never permitted slave trade on the worlds under their jurisdiction, even if it wasn’t entirely forbidden inside the Ring. Upon arriving at the market, Karian saw red and fought, killing the slavers until none remained. Or so he thought.

  He should have waited for reinforcements; he should have planned better. It was his fault he was captured. His nerves had been on edge after leaving his brother Arlen’s mating ceremony, and he was careless, his mind full of anger and distraction. He roamed the slave market, lost in his rage.

  The Cattelans came from behind. He didn’t even see them as they shot him with ionic charges. The extreme electric current ran through his body in a fraction of a second, before he could react or even formulate a thought. Only later did he take full measure of his mistake. He woke up in a Cattelan slave ship, in a cage, and already far away from home.

  Another hour in hyper-drive and the pod was free-falling, victim to an unknown planet’s gravitational force. Karian had no idea what the calculations had chosen, and could only hope for one of the many inhabited planets or moons in The Ring. There were plenty.

  Even if that was the case, he’d still need odds-defying luck if the slavers decided to hunt him down. They wouldn’t use all their fuel looking for him, but scouring one or two of the local moons and planets was a definite possibility.

  As soon as the pod landed, he’d need to re-wire the distress signal and send for his home world. If the Eoks came before the slavers, he was saved.

  For this, he needed to get out of that cage. The allurium alloy used to make it was the only metal strong enough to contain him. He was nowhere near strong enough to make a dent in it.

  Karian glanced at the female’s lolling head. She’d saved him, he couldn’t deny it. It was a unique chance that she had chosen the very pod he was detained in to escape. How this fragile creature had summoned the courage to fight a male such as Arrik was beyond his comprehension. Yet, she clearly had, and she’d won.

  He was going to repay the favor. A life for a life.

  Karian winced. It would be hard to get the female to help him out of the cage. Being Eok had a lot of perks, but their reputation was not exactly enviable, especially with females. The fear was unwarranted, of course, but she didn’t know that.

  The female moaned, and her incredible scent penetrated his nostrils again. His attention went back to her wondrous features.

  “What are you?” Karian asked her, reaching with his finger to pat a strand of silken hair away from her face. “Pretty Thing, you’re like nothing else I’ve seen.”

  “Of course I am,” the female answered, startling him. Her voice was musical and soft, even in her half-awakened state. “Humans are like unicorns and mermaids. Only fools claim they have seen one.”

  Her inviting lips stretched in a faint smile and she chuckled. Her eyelids fluttered, but remained closed. She fell back into oblivion, leaving Karian alone with the echo of her words.

  Karian stared at the female’s peaceful face while the pod dropped out of the unknown planet’s sky. Confusion and incredulity mixed together as he studied her closer, then incredulity gave way to a deep amazement. The soft grain of her skin, the delicate features, the soft curves and the sweet smell coming off of her body in intoxicating waves, were all threatening to take him to the edge of insanity. Yes, she was human.

  This changed everything.

  The small female that lay unconscious, strapped in the seat beside him, was worth a fortune. She was a unicorn, a mermaid, and a golden goose if there ever was one. Karian swallowed, pushing hard on the knot that had taken hold in his throat.

  Humans were extinct on their homeland of Earth. They had been hunted to extinction a century ago, decimated by other, stronger species’ greed. The few specimens that remained were kept in breeding facilities under careful supervision, and when sold, reached prices of astronomic proportions. Wherever this one came from, she was worth more than a small world’s yearly income.

  There was no way the Cattelans would let her go without a fight. They would search for her relentlessly, plow the nearby planets and moons until nothing remained unsullied by their dirty hands. They surely already had a rich buyer for her—most probably the emperor reigning a few planets over—to finance the mission until she was found. Karian cursed his luck at finding himself in the pod with her. She had saved his life and was more intoxicating than any female had the right to be, but the human was a poison fruit like no other. Even when she was unconscious and in the dark, his body responded to hers, and his crotch burned with a stubborn erection.

  No, she was definitively off-limits. He had more important things to think about than feeding his lust.

  His thoughts stopped when the pod shook violently as it entered the unknown world’s atmosphere. The human female’s head started to jerk back and forth. Too fast and too harsh. It might hurt her, do damage to that fragile body Karian knew little about. A wave of protectiveness overcame him, and he reached for her beyond the bars. She was so small, so fragile, with her soft skin and slender limbs, that fear shot through him at the idea of her being hurt. Reaching as far as he could, Karian cradled her head in his hands. He cursed the metal alloy bars that kept him away from her, stretching his own arms as far as they would go to touch more of her soft, warm body. Strands of her hair brushed his face and he inhaled her sweet, floral scent.

  “You’re a wonder, Pretty Thing,” he whispered in her ear. “I wish I could claim you for myself.”

  The human female turned her head his way and blinked. He knew she couldn’t see him, yet it was as if she saw through the darkness and deep inside his soul, where his most secret thoughts resided. Her full, soft lips stretched in a smile. She was not fully conscious, but the beauty of her face, the open trust of her smile, pulled him in.

  “Thanks for saving me,” she said with a voice like a spring breeze. “I wish you could claim me, too.”

  Then the human female closed her eyes and fell back into unconsciousness. Karian stared at her face, a knot of unprecedented feelings roiling inside his guts. Something shifted inside him, pushing his soul out of balance, and he knew nothing would ever be the same.

  CHAPTER 3

  ROSE

  T he screech of an impact filled her ears, making them ring painfully. The sound rippled through the fog in her brain and reached her bones. Rose’s eyes snapped open but the world refused to come into focus, swirling around like life in the eye of a tornado. Some remote part of her brain understood she was in the pod and that it was tumbling down as it hit the ground. Another sound soon joined the clanking of metal, and it took the burning in her throat for Rose to understand she was screaming. As if on cue, the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth as she bit her tongue, and pain joined fear in the chaos of her mind.

  The only light came from the small round window, filling the tiny habitat of the pod with streaks of dusty orange rays. Strong arms held her firmly in her seat, preventing her head from banging against her chest and hurting her neck. It was strangely reassuring, even if she didn’t know the man who was holding her.
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br />   His male smell permeated her panic: musky, deep and good. It soothed her, but not enough to stop the flow of the scream that scorched her throat. She used all the air from her lungs, pausing only to gulp more air, and screamed again until everything was spent. Gravity shifted, blurring her mind and making her lose all her bearings as the pod rolled wildly on the hard surface of the unknown planet.

  For an endless time, there was nothing but the merciless movement of the pod and the stranger’s grip, his voice hushing calming sounds into her ear like she was some kind of skittish wild animal.

  A final, deafening blow invaded the pod, filling it with sounds and light, and her eyes shut in reflex. Air exploded on her face, heating her cheeks with abrasive dust. A sharp pain shot through her forehead and warm liquid poured over her cheeks, entering her open mouth and adding to the coppery taste that was already threatening to make her throw up.

  As suddenly as the violence began, it stopped. Everything went eerily still. The world was an unmoving pit of darkness, the only sound the stranger’s breath against her ear, calm and strong.

  Her head hurt from the cut on her forehead and her throat was raw from screaming, but other than that, there was no pain. She allowed herself a few more breaths, then the soft brush of the wind on her face pried her eyes open. The stranger’s hands pulled away.

  Rose blinked furiously, trying to force her retinas to accept the sudden change in luminosity. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted enough to let her see the inside of the pod through the dust-filled air. There was a large gash in the opposite side, where the impact had ripped the metal open. It was a miracle they were still alive, even more so unharmed. If she hadn’t buckled herself in in time… The thought made her shiver with horror. The stranger had saved her life twice over.