Free Heat by R. Lee Smith

had passed plenty of buildings and outposts along the way. Surely one of them could provide fuel.
    “I don’t have any money,” she said.
    Kane bared his teeth and aimed a sour curse at himself in lieu of the sound cuff Urak was not around to give him. Of course she would need money. And the two males had probably had the stuff. He hadn’t even thought to check the bodies for necessities. “Stop then,” he said. “We need to hide the car.”
    Raven looked around at the empty road, the towering trees. “But-“
    “Don’t argue with me, human.”
    She pressed her lips tightly together and stared straight ahead. When she found the scars of a groundcar’s passage etched in the overgrowth to one side of the road, she turned off. It wasn’t a proper travel-way, and the car bumped hard as it tried to navigate the forest. When they were well away from the main road and completely lost to sight, Raven shut off the engines and sat back and looked at him.
    Kane opened his door and heat struck him like the blast from unshielded engines. He rocked back, his senses swimming, realizing only then that the groundcar had some sort of climate controls and Raven had been using them. He was torn between feeling gratitude at this respite and unreasoning fury at her for not warning him. In the end, he settled for forcing himself out into the baking air and saying nothing to her except, “Let’s go.”
    They walked for ages under the leaden stare of Earth’s baleful sun. Before one hundred paces had passed, Kane could feel the dull warmth and itch of seed growing in his tsesac. The itch became a swelling. The swelling became pain. The woods were all around them, deep and heavy and still, and the female was right beside him, close enough for him to smell her musky sweat. Right here. Completely unavailable to him.
    “Stop!” Kane roared suddenly.
    If she had jumped back (a natural-enough reaction, even in his extremity, Kane could admit that) he would have had an excuse to seize her, and having done that, he probably would have thrown her down and damned the consequences. But she did not jump back. She stopped dead in her tracks and watched him.
    Kane got a breath in him—every breath he took was hot enough to have just passed from some unseen other’s mouth, suffocating him right out in the wide open—and then another, and tried to start walking again. The sensation of his clothing scouring at his stiffening cock made that impossible. He stopped again, leaning hard against the nearest tree, and tried to think what to do.
    How long did the Heat season last on this miserable planet? He’d been here almost as many times as he’d had years in his life, and it had never,
never
been this hot. Urak, who could lay down five trips to Earth for every one of Kane’s, had never even mentioned that it
could
be this hot. And this was Urak’s favorite hunting ground. He’d have known!
    Kane pulled the pack from his shoulder and opened it to check the time. When he saw that the female still had more than seven hours before she was safe for him to touch, Kane had to stoop, cautious as an old man, and put the pack down all the way out of his hands to keep from smashing it to pieces. That done, he stepped away from it and went to lean against another tree.
    He wanted nothing more than to empty himself in his captured female, or failing that, to scratch until he dug the itch out in gouts of blood and meat. He could do neither. And he had seven hours before any other option presented itself. Kane dropped his hand to his throbbing shaft and rubbed, gritting his teeth against the ache and the unfairness of it.
    “Are you going to rape me?” the human asked quietly.
    Kane glared at her, pressing the heel of his hand over the hardest part of him and pushing roughly up and down along its straining length.
    “Are you…” Raven swallowed hard. “Are you going to kill me first or second?”
    She wasn’t making a damned bit of sense. “First or