Need had been through such a ceremony with Cleah—the female he had eventually mated—when the two of them were six cycles of age. They had grown up together and gotten Joined and bonded when they were just eighteen. The two of them had been devoted to each other, a perfect match despite their youth. Their lives had been wonderful—blessed by the Goddess—or so Need had believed.
Then Cleah got pregnant.
They wanted children, of course. But the pregnancy had been difficult right from the start. Cleah was sick all the time—she couldn’t keep any food or drink down to nourish her or the baby. And they lived far from any kind of advanced Kindred medical facilities.
Then Cleah had gone into labor several months too early—before she even began her fourth quadmester. Need had rushed her to the nearest Kindred medical facility but it was too late.
Both Cleah and his son had been lost.
The pain of the broken soul-bond when he lost his fated mate nearly killed Need—often he wished that it had. All the light had gone out of his life when Cleah died—what was there left to live for?
But somehow, he recovered. Recovered and went on, though there was nothing to go on for, he often thought. Only the knowledge that Cleah wouldn’t have wanted him to take his own life had kept him from ending it all and going to join her at the Goddess’s side.
That had been ten cycles ago—a decade of agony. Though time had blunted some of the pain it was still with him—a shard lodged in his heart that never really went away.
And around that shard of pain had grown a thicket of thorny vines—vines of anger and loss and resentment. Though all Kindred loved and revered females, Need had sworn to himself never to go near one again. Nor did he worship the Goddess, the Mother of All Life.
For she had taken the life of his mate—the only female in the universe that he loved. Why should he worship a being who would do such a thing? Why should he give his devotion and allegiance to the heartless deity who had deprived him of his mate and son?
The answer was, he shouldn’t. The Goddess wasn’t to be trusted—no female was. Cleah was gone and with her went any love or tenderness or devotion that Need had been able to feel towards anyone female. Those things were dead to him now—he didn’t even seek out female whores to slake his lust when he felt sexual need. Not that he felt it very often—when Cleah had died, his fangs had blunted and he’d had no desire to bite or Claim or make love with a female since.
His lack of desire or caring for females was what allowed Need to watch without compassion or mercy as the bidding began on the little female with the creamy brown skin. He watched without emotion as the slaver began taking bids from the males in the crowd, reminding them that she was a verified virgin and how she would have been the mate of a Galactic Senator had she not been captured in the raid on her school.
“Let’s start the bidding at five thousand credits,” the slaver cried, pointing to the trembling girl who was watching the crowd with wide, frightened eyes.
“Five thousand!” one of the Torgians bid, licking its three rows of serrated teeth with a long, leathery tongue. “She looks tender,” he added to the other Torgian beside him.
“And juicy,” his friend agreed.
“Indeed she is, my friends—there is no female as tender and juicy as a verified virgin!” The slaver nodded in agreement.
The girl stared at her prospective buyers in dawning horror as the implication of what they were saying came home to her.
“Ten thousand,” the Xanther called, bobbing his head on his long, telescoping neck. “Such a female is not for eating,” he told the Torgians, “But for breeding.”
“Well, if you’ve got a shaft as long as your neck, you’d better hope that little female has an elastic pussy!” one Torgian shot back, provoking a wave of trollish laughter from the crowd.
“Even if she doesn’t, there are surgeries designed to lengthen the vaginal canal,” the Xanther told them. “Surgeons from my planet perform them all the time on alien females. The entire abdomen can be used as a kind of sleeve to accommodate a male’s shaft.”
He peered more closely at the girl, extending his neck until his face was staring right into hers from only a foot away, though his body remained about twenty feet back in the crowd.
“The neck can be lengthened too to increase her beauty,” he remarked, still speaking about the girl rather than to her. He reminded Need of a male inspecting a vehicle he might like to drive—one which was easily customizable.
“My…my neck? You want to lengthen my neck?” The girl put a hand to her slender throat, her eyes grown huge with fear.