Tempted by Tentacles: a scifi alien

romance (Alien Gladiator Kings Book 3)

Jove Chambers
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/tempted-by-tentacles-a-scifi-alien-romance-alien-glad
iator-kings-book-3-jove-chambers/
 Contents
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
TEMPTED BY TENTACLES
Alien Gladiator Kings: 3

Jove Chambers
 TEMPTED BY TENTACLES
© copyright 2022 by Jove Chambers
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
 ONE

sienne
The first thing I thought of when I met Caspe Tetrone was his penis.
It was insane, really, that I would have thought about that, because it was only a few weeks after
my brother had died, and I was mostly angry back then.
Even now, I still felt angry when I thought about my brother’s death, but anger was a hard emotion
to hold onto. It lost brightness over time. It faded into things like resentment and bitterness and guilt.
This was my first attempt at a job following Colk’s death, and I felt like everything in the universe
had less color. Of course, the space station where we’d docked to queue up and try to make bids on
this work-for-hire job was mostly gray. The walls were gray, and there was a kind of carpet on the
floor, also gray. There were some fake plants, but they had white, waxy-looking flowers, and they
didn’t bring much color to the space.
Caspe was lounging up against the wall outside the room in the spaceport where we were queued
up. Caspe was a ccael, which meant that he looked like a Toth from the waist up and that the bottom
half of his body was a mass of tentacles. Toth and humans looked fairly similar, however, which
meant he looked a lot like a human male. There was his skin tone, which wasn’t human-like. His
entire body was purple-black—head to tentacles. And then there was the fact that he was entirely
hairless. He was bald, and he was smooth, and he was naked.
I guessed he didn’t feel the need to cover up considering he didn’t have any genitalia to cover up.
I wasn’t sure how ccael worked. Did they have retractable penises in there underneath all their
tentacles?
I was grieving my brother. I was angry. I was lost.
So, the fact that I looked at Caspe and my thoughts were as follows:
I wonder if he has a cock.
He’s not actually ugly.
Look at his shoulders.
Oh, stars, did he notice me checking him out?
Well, these thoughts didn’t make any sense for me to be having. I resolved right then and there to
hate him all the more because of it.
I knew of Caspe by reputation back then, because everyone in the underbelly of the galaxy did. He
was slime. He did Toth dirty work. He would undercut anyone for a job and make up the difference
by selling out the product to the Toth or pulling a double-cross.
I, on the other hand, made most of my credits by scavenging from space trash. Wrecked ships
orbiting planets, pieces of stuff floating around from space battles, that kind of thing. You never knew
what you’re going to find doing that. Sometimes, it could be perfectly usable spare parts, which could
then be sold for decent money.
But occasionally, my ship would take a work-for-hire job. I’d do smuggling, if the price was right
and it didn’t fly up against my moral compass. I didn’t smuggle people—not unless they were in
danger. I didn’t do things that furthered Toth interests. And I didn’t care how much money it was—
some things were more important than money.
So, this was a smuggling gig, taking blasters out to an outpost at the edge of the galaxy where they
were starving and needed the guns to hunt meat. It didn’t tick any boxes for me that were immoral, so I
wasn’t even sure what Caspe Tetrone was doing there.
But there he was, tentacles askew, looking bored. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said. “Something I can do
for you?”
“Yep,” I said, smiling tightly. “Don’t call me sweetheart.”
He smirked. “Sure thing. You got a name?”
“Sienne Dlach,” I said, glaring at him. “I’m the woman who’s going to get this job.”
He tilted back his head, folding his arms over his chest. “Oh, I don’t know, Sienne, I think I might
have this one all tied up.”
“We’ll see,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
Then I swung into that room with determination, and I swept that job right out from underneath
Caspe’s feet, er, tentacles.

sienne
I mentioned that I hated Caspe.
Well, he hated me too.
I didn’t like going to him for help, and he wasn’t inclined to help me, but there I was, on his ship,
which was docked on the planet Kalion, asking for a favor. “I need a griplacx coil,” I told him.
“Well, I need a million credits,” he said. “The world’s a tough place, and I could give a fuck what
you want. Out of my ship.”
“I’m stuck planetside, and I thought we could trade.” The coil was an expensive piece of
equipment, and I didn’t have the credits to buy one. I couldn’t make any credits, because I needed a
working ship to do a job, so I was stuck on Kalion.
Under regular circumstances, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d have gotten some stupid job
planetside and worked for as long as it took to get myself a griplacx coil. Under regular
circumstances, it would have been annoying, but there wouldn’t have been a time limit on it all.
However, we needed to get off Kalion. My brother’s pregnant mate, Llana, was a ssorins, another
species who were compatible mating-wise with humans. My brother hadn’t even known about the
baby when he died. That had been gemoons ago, and now Llana was a gemoon away from her
delivery date. She could not give birth to a half-ssorins, half-human baby on Kalion, because people
here were not equipped to deal with ssorins babies. Only on Llana’s homeworld would mother and
baby receive proper care.
This was my little niece (we did know the gender of the baby), and if my brother were still alive,
he would move the stars in space to protect his mate and his child. I had to do the same.
“No.” Caspe gestured with several of his tentacles. “You are my archenemy.”
“Don’t be dramatic. We compete over jobs occasionally—”
“You poached exactly three lucrative opportunities out from under my nose, one after I had
already signed the contract—”
“I do what I have to do, just like we all—”
“Probably because you’re a human woman. I bet you shook your tits—”
“I’ll back out of the running for the Gassoricks proposition, how’s that? Can we trade?”
“No.” His voice got even deeper. Caspe had every reason to hate me. I’d actually made it my
mission to make his life uncomfortable. I’d started tracking him, and I’d follow him and take jobs
from him that I didn’t even need or want. I didn’t do it all the time, because it was impractical and it
was petty, but sometimes, I just… I didn’t know. I got a charge out of it, I guess.
My boyfriend—well, not boyfriend, uh, second-in-command-with-benefits—Jak thought it was
funny, because he didn’t like Caspe either, but even he would sometimes object if he thought I was
being ridiculous about it. Jak was the pilot on my ship, and I was the admii. My brother used to be the
admii. I didn’t deserve to admii a ship, not after what had happened, but I had to do it anyway, for
him, for his memory.
Anyway, if Jak thought I was going over the top, he’d say something to me, and I’d usually drop
the idea of stealing another job from Caspe, even though it was really satisfying to do. Just the thought
of giving that gratts a bad day made me smile.
I guess I knew he’d never trade with me, but I had to try.
We’d already been on Kalion for half a gemoon, and we’d had no luck getting near enough credits
for the coil or trading with anyone or finding any kind of solution.
One of Caspe’s gigs was to broker deals with the Toth for prizes—women who would be
awarded to the winning gladiator in a deathmatch. The arena where these fights took place was
located on a space station that orbited Kalion. It was prostitution, essentially, and of course Caspe
didn’t have a problem taking a cut from something like that, because he was slime.
“The arena,” I said to him. “How much does that pay again?”
Caspe backed away from me, obviously stunned I’d gone there. “What?”
Like I had a choice at this point.
This was for my niece.
This was for Colk.
Colk who was dead, while I was alive.
What was sex in the middle of an arena with a dangerous alien, anyway? What was it when it
compared to what had happened to Colk? My brother had been important, and people had counted on
him. If he was here, I wouldn’t have to do this, but he wasn’t, and I was. I didn’t have a choice.
“How about it?” I pushed my breasts together. “I’m fuckable, right? I’d do me.”
“No,” he said, looking horrified.
I decided not to be offended by that, because he was a gratts. “I need to get off this planet. It’s
important. I can handle it.”
And what could he do?
He needed girls.
And I needed the credits.
 So, that was how I ended up in the arena, wearing nothing but a flimsy robe, staring at a ring full
of fighting gladiators. It was up on thrusters in the middle of the crowded arena, and everyone was
screaming. There were lights flashing and moving around the space, and there were two other floating
rings as well, containing other fights.
Here I was, watching the ring that contained the aliens fighting over me rip each other to shreds. I
did mean that literally. One of them, a rrox, had a protruding snout with two big horns growing out of
it, and he used them to gore one of the gladiators and root out his intestines, which were now strewn
all over the arena, red and steaming ropes of them coiled up over the dead body, and this was not
what I thought I was signing up for.
That rrox was going to win, and he was going to kill me.
These gladiators, they were in a bad position. They were usually forced into servitude with
threats against their loved ones or their clans or even their whole planets. The Toth didn’t have any
qualms about playing dirty to get whatever it was they wanted, and they loved their gladiator fights.
So, usually, these fights, they were brutal, but there was a certain respect the gladiators payed to
each other, owing to the fact that they were all stuck in a bad situation. They were being forced to kill
each other, but it wasn’t as though they hated each other.
Killing like the rrox was killing, it was needlessly cruel and gory.
That rrox… well, I was pretty sure he was either broken mentally or was a sociopath who’d
gotten into the ring because he liked killing and this gave him an excuse to do it. I knew that
sometimes the prizes in these fights were collateral damage, and I’d known that when I was signing
up. Caspe had made a lot of noise about protecting the girls he signed up, but I knew Caspe Tetrone
and—
“Up.”
I saw his tentacles before I saw him. They were floating and writhing out in front of him as he
pulled himself up over the seat next to me.
I blinked at him, at his purple-black skin and the gleaming muscles in his chest and abdomen, at
his grim face, his navpatch over one eye. I wore one too, but I’d had to take it off for the fight. It was
a piece of equipment that came in handy when trying to hack into various navigational systems.
“Up,” he said again.
I shook my head at him and turned back to the ring. The rrox was now going after the remaining
gladiator, who wasn’t even trying to fight. He was just trying to outrun the other fighter, his eyes wide,
his body visibly shaking.
“I know you can hear me, Sienne,” said Caspe.
I watched as the rrox cornered the other gladiator, who had spikes sticking out of his shoulders
and spikes sticking out of his nose, who cowered against the side of the ring. Abruptly, the other
gladiator vaulted backwards, hurling himself over the lip, choosing to fall to his death rather than be
killed by the rrox.
“Stars,” muttered Caspe. “Out of time. Get up, Sienne. We’re going.”
My lips parted. “G-going?” I gestured. “But I’m the prize.”
“That thing just got denied the fun of ripping up his second gladiator. What do you think he’s going
to do to you?”
He was right, of course. Hadn’t I just been thinking that the rrox was going to kill me? I stood up
on shaking legs.
One of Caspe’s tentacles came around my waist, the other under my knees. He lifted me off the
floor.
 I let out a cry of surprise.
The tentacles tightened and moved, and I found myself clutched against his chest. He held me like
I was nothing and used the rest of his tentacles to move us effortlessly through the air, over the seats
and toward the exit. It was like he was flying or floating or swimming. He was fast.
“I can walk,” I managed.
“You can, but you’ll slow us down,” he said.
The exit was in a hallway, and one side of the hallway was the way out. The other side of the
hallway was the archway that led to the ring, which was settling in with the thrusters, lining up so that
I could walk out to be given to the rrox.
There were some Qel attendants out there, green skinned and short, chattering in accented
Common, scolding Caspe.
He ignored them.
Uniformed men with tase sticks rushed past us, heading for the arena to collect the dead body out
there. Two of them saw Caspe making off with me and they peeled off from the group to come after
us.
Caspe’s tentacles flew out. He grabbed one by the neck and squeezed.
The man’s face turned colors and he slid down to the ground.
The second man used his tase stick.
Caspe recoiled, shocked tentacle yanking in tight against him, but his other tentacles were
seemingly unfazed, and he attacked the man from behind with two purple-black writhing tentacles.
That man went down too.
Behind us, the rrox was in the archway, roaring.
One of Caspe’s tentacles shot through the hallway—how was it so long?—and slapped the rrox
across the face, cracking in the air like a whip.
And all the while, we were moving, heading for the exit, going faster than I had realized that
Caspe could even move.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, pressing myself into his chest, noting that he was warm, like
a Toth or human, and wondering about that, because I hadn’t thought that having tentacles would mean
a species was warm-blooded. Of course, I’d also heard that the ccael had been made in a lab by the
Toth.
But the Toth took credit for everything and most of it was empty boasting.
We careened through the doorway at the exit, men with tase sticks shouting behind us, the rrox
roaring, and we dove into a transroom. The doors slid closed after us and Caspe used his tentacles to
press the buttons for our dock, where the ship was waiting. The transroom lurched to life, moving
sideways.
“You… you saved me.” I looked up at his face. “I didn’t think you would actually save girls—”
“No one likes dead pretty girls,” he rumbled.
“But…” I blinked at him, confused, adrenaline still pounding through my veins. “But you hate
me.”
He made a face. He didn’t say anything.
The transroom moved.
Hidosecs passed.
“You can put me down,” I said softly.
He let go of me unceremoniously, and I tightened my grip on his neck instinctively, holding on.
I got my feet back on the floor.
 He pried my hands off of him, glaring at me.
I stepped back, putting distance between us.
The transroom lurched and the doors opened.
Five men with tase sticks were waiting for us.
Caspe thrust his tentacles out ahead of both of us. They were all waving and moving, and I
couldn’t see.
I heard the sounds of shocks and Caspe’s harsh breaths of pain, and I saw sparks and smelled
smoke and burnt flesh.
And then Caspe pulled his tentacles back and all of the men were on the floor and he had all the
tase sticks wrapped up in his writhing limbs. “Out,” he growled.
I got out, picking my way over the bodies. “You’re, um, you’re kind of amazing with those.” I
gestured to the tentacles.
“Was that a compliment?” He cocked his head.
I squared my shoulders. “Well, I’m a little out of sorts right now. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“Go.” He pointed with his hand toward the ship.
I went.
 TWO

caspe
“I needed that money.” Sienne was standing in the doorway of the bridge to my ship, now fully
clothed, thank the stars, and even wearing her navpatch again. I had been disturbed by how much I’d
enjoyed all of her warm brown skin uncovered, the sight of her dark nipples and the aureoles around
them, the round curve of her ass, the way her skin seemed paler around her hips and thighs…
“You’re welcome,” I said, giving her a glance before I went back to the ship’s navigation panels.
We were making the jump to deep space in two hisecs, and I needed to hit the button at the right
moment. My fingers flew over the touchpad as it emitted some familiar beeps. “Better strap in,” I told
her.
“We jumping to deep space?” She sat down in the co-pilot’s chair and strapped in. “I really
needed that money. What am I supposed to do now? I’m going to be wanted for this. I’m going to be a
stars-shined outlaw.”
I hit the button. The ship accelerated, the engines whirring, and then catching, and then we
successfully made the jump to deep space.
“Are we in deep space?” She eyed the navpanel. “Where are we going?”
“Outlaws need to hide,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll smooth it over eventually. But we’ll need to lay
low for a little while.”
She leaned over to scroll through the touchpad. “Where are we going?”
I slapped at her hands with one of my tentacles. “Stop that.”
She rounded on me. “I needed that money. I need to be on Kalion. My ship—my crew—”
“Oh, yeah, I bet Jak Fisc is pleased you were about to fuck on camera in the middle of an arena.”
“What do you know about Jak?” She glared at me.
“Just that he’s cheating on you,” I muttered. “So, whatever. I guess he deserves it.”
“We’re not together,” she said. “We have an open, casual thing.”
“Casual enough that he’s okay with you selling your body?”
“It’s my body, not his,” she said, folding her arms over her chest.
“So, he was good with it?”
“I didn’t exactly tell him yet.” She hunched up her shoulders. “Now, I guess maybe I don’t even
have to. Or no, I guess if I’m an outlaw, I do. Thanks so much.”
 “Oh, you’re welcome. For your life.” Why had I saved this woman again? What the stars had I
been thinking?
“I need to get back to Kalion.”
“For your open, casual thing.”
“For my brother’s pregnant mate,” she snapped. “I need a griplacx coil, and I need to get her back
home to Taichh. Oh, why am I even explaining this to you? As if you could even understand the idea
of trying to take care of someone else.” She turned back to the panels in front of her and her fingers
began to scroll on the touchpad there.
I reached over with two tentacles and wrapped one around each of her wrists. I slammed her back
into the chair there and stretched her arms up over her head. I held her in place.
She let out an indignant gasp.
“Don’t touch my navpanel,” I said.
“Let me go.” Her voice was a little breathy.
I turned to her sharply. No, Caspe, you’re imagining things. You’re imagining things because
you find her tight little nude body much more interesting than you have any right to find it, but you
know how women see you. You’re monstrous and disgusting.
Right, and I also had no time or headspace for anything sexual. Sex was a headache I did not need.
So, let her go.
I didn’t let her go. Why? Fuck if I knew, but something rose inside me, something perverse,
something that responded to the breathiness in her voice, something that I didn’t even entirely
understand.
I yanked on her arms. I tugged her entirely upright, forcing her out of the chair.
“Caspe,” she said, her voice even breathier, higher pitched.
Yeah, she’s afraid of you.
I eyed her. Not afraid. No, no, not Sienne Dlach, my archenemy.
Are we forgetting we hate this woman?
Since when did I start conducting conversations within my head as if there was a committee in
there?
I sent out two more tentacles and wrapped one around each of her ankles. Then, gently, I pressed
her bound body into the wall next to the navpanel.
Her breath came out in gasps.
I eyed her.
Her gaze held mine and she struggled to get control of her breathing. “Put me down.” There was
no strength in her voice.
“No,” I said. “What if I don’t?”
“You… I have to get back to Kalion.”
I stepped closer to her, keeping her arms and legs trapped, pinning her there against the wall,
utterly at my mercy.
“I need a griplacx coil for my brother’s mate,” she said. “I need to get her back to her homeworld
so that she can deliver the baby. My ship is busted and it won’t fly, and if I don’t get back there—”
“Your brother’s mate is, um, the ssorins, right?” I raised my eyebrows.
“You know my crew, okay, what? You want a prize?”
“That’s who I saw Jak with.”
She furrowed her brow. “What are you saying?”
“This was…” I stepped closer. “I don’t know. Two gemoons ago. After you nabbed the Bress job
from me, I was not pleased, and I went to the space station for consolation drink, and they were there,
and she was sitting on his lap, and they were—”
“No.”
I stepped even closer. Now, I was right in her face. “You can’t go anywhere, all right? Not until I
fix this. I have contacts, and I will fix it, but until then, like you said, you’re an outlaw, and you ran
from a Toth arena, and if you go anywhere, you’ll end up locked up in a Toth prison. You can’t help
anyone’s baby from there.”
“You’re making this up because you’re afraid if you let me go, that I’ll get captured and lead the
Toth to you.” Her voice shook. “Because there’s no way that Llana would… not after everything
I’ve…” She grimaced. “Let me go.”
This time I did it. Her voice was different. I set her down and tugged back my tentacles, but I
didn’t move away from her. “Not so casual after all.”
“It’s…” She folded her arms over her chest. “Not him, I guess, but her. Everything I do is for her,
for that baby, because my brother is gone, and I’m all she has, and—”
“Call him up.” I nodded at her bracelet. “Use a secure channel and don’t tell him where we are.”
“I don’t know where we are.” Her nostrils flared.
I shrugged. “Do it. Make him own up to it.”
She just shook her head.
“Look, it’s what people do, Sienne,” I said. “They don’t mean to, but people are weak. You can’t
trust them. They just… want things and then they take them. Call him.” I nodded at her bracelet again.
“Not with you listening in,” she said, reaching up and putting a hand on my chest.
I made a guttural noise at the contact.
She shoved me.
I let her, flowing backwards with my tentacles, giving her space. I gestured to the door to the
bridge. “Fine, have some privacy. I’ll be in here.” I turned back to the navpanel.
It was quiet.
She didn’t move.
Finally, she spoke. Her voice was strangled. “You wanted to hurt me. You hate me.”
I didn’t deny it.
She stalked out of the room.
I settled down in a chair and began scrolling through the screen there. The thing about where we
were going? Yeah, I hadn’t figured that out yet.
And what the stars was I doing anyway? I should dump her somewhere. I’d saved her life. That
didn’t mean I owed her anything else. She didn’t want to be near me, anyway. I could easily toss her
at any old port and then go on my merry way. I didn’t even have to try to get a pardon for her.
She and I had breached a contract, and the Toth didn’t like that. If they found us, there would be
consequences.
I could get us out of it, but it was best if I waited, like I said.
And I could just get myself out of it and leave her behind like space trash to fend for herself.
But. Well.
It seemed like a waste to have gone to all the trouble of saving her and then just walk away. She
was a sunk cost at this point. I needed to see it through.
And I still had the perverse urge to want to restrain her again, hold her arms above her head like
that again, listen to her voice get breathy again.
The tips of my tentacles throbbed.
Fuck.
 THREE

sienne
I debated, fingers hovering over the holoprojection that came out of my bracelet. There was
Llana’s name and there was Jak’s. Who should I confront? Who should I call?
It was a lie.
Had to be.
Not because I would put it past Jak necessarily. Jak was… well, I fell into Jak’s bed after Colk
died. In the wake of that, I was a mess. Everything felt wrong, like trying to move through the air was
suffocating me, like existing meant I was squeezed too tight. I got drunk, just because it made
everything numb, and because I needed to be numb to even really breathe.
Llana couldn’t drink with me, because two days after Colk died, she figured out that she was
pregnant, and then she spent all her time in her berth, curled into a ball, sobbing her eyes out, and she
didn’t even want to talk to me.
So, it was just me and Jak, and I made all the moves, and he threw out caveats.
“If we do this, it can’t mean anything. If we do this, it doesn’t affect the way we run the ship. If we
do this, it doesn’t mean I owe you anything. If we do this, it’s just this, nothing else.”
You know, all that typical male bullshit, as if he was terrified of having emotions at all.
Usually, I steered clear of that kind of guy, because it was stupid. If two people engaged in
intimate behavior, it only followed that there was some kind of attachment and that the attachment was
different than if they’d never fucked. Two people could make promises and pacts and try to swear off
such a thing happening, but it wasn’t entirely in anyone’s actual control. It just happened.
Thing was, I was broken.
After Colk, I wasn’t capable of… well, anything, so I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything for Jak,
and the sex wasn’t even that good.
Well.
When I say it wasn’t good, what I mean is that I didn’t get off. Like, I didn’t even get close to
getting off. Jak was either unaware of the existence of my clitoris or was utterly uninterested in
stimulating it. Probably the latter.
And that was sort of what I liked about it.
I liked that he just used me for his own enjoyment and didn’t even try to turn me on. It was a total
gratts move, but it was… weirdly hot in a strange way.
And there was something good about being filled and fucked and prodded and rammed.
Something physically pleasurable, even if it never approached anything like an orgasm. It was just
good.
So, I went back for it, again and again and again.
I never slept in the same berth as him. Lots of times, we didn’t even do it in bed. Lots of times, we
didn’t even take off all our clothes.
Quick, dirty, harsh, and impersonal—that was my sex with Jak.
So, in the end, it was him I called on my bracelet. He’d give it to me straight, I thought. Llana
might lie, but he wouldn’t.
I sent a video query.
He accepted it, and a minute later a holoprojection of his head and shoulders appeared out of my
bracelet. “You know that you’re listed as a prize for the arena?”
I just laughed.
“I mean, what the stars are you thinking, doing something like that? Disrespecting yourself in that
manner, Sienne, it’s not like you, and if Colk could see that, he’d—”
“Are you fucking me and Llana?”
His eyes bulged and he choked.
“Guess that answers that question,” I sighed.
“Okay, here’s the thing, you can’t tell her,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, so neither of us knew?”
“You and me, it’s just… like, you’re on some weird kick or whatever, and I’m not even… like it’s
all cold with you. I’d say no, I want to say no, but it’s just… when you’re really ready to go like that,
it’s really difficult to—”
“Fuck you.” I considered hanging up on him, but I needed to get this all sorted out, so this
conversation was going to have to continue.
“Llana needs me,” he said. “For the baby and she’s, you know, warm.”
I nodded. “Ah, right. Because what you wanted was to have no-strings-attached, emotionless sex,
and when you actually got that—”
“I didn’t mean to fall for her,” he said. “I swear, I don’t do that. I don’t fall in love. But it just
happened.”
“You’re in love with her?” I gaped at him. “And you’re serious. How can you be in love with a
woman while you’re having sex with someone else?”
“It’s possible.” He was defensive.
I snorted.
“It is,” he said. “Come on, don’t tell her. That’s the last thing she needs right now. After losing
Colk, when she’s this fucking pregnant, and when we still don’t have a griplacx coil? She’ll hate both
of us, and she’ll go off on her own. She’ll be alone, and she can’t be alone right now.”
I smiled bitterly, because he did love her—well, he cared about her feelings, anyway. Mine? Not
so much, but considering I also cared about Llana’s feelings, I was inclined to agree. “Well, for now,
I’ll keep my mouth shut,” I said. “Because the thing is, I signed a contract for the arena, and then I had
to breach it because the thing I was supposed to fuck, it was…” I sighed. “Well, I wouldn’t have
survived. But now I don’t have money for the griplacx coil, and I’m on the run, and I can’t do anything
for Llana.” My voice cracked at the failure of it.
If Colk were alive, he would have already solved this problem. But Colk was dead, and I was
alive, and all I did was fuck things up.
“You’re on the Toth wanted lists?” he said.
“I mean, let’s face it, I already was,” I said. It was true enough. That was why we couldn’t simply
buy tickets to travel across the galaxy to Taichh. We weren’t the kinds of people who could travel on
public transport. “But now, I’ll be high priority, since it just happened, and it was at the Kalion arena.
It’ll be all over the newsnets by morning.”
“Stars,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to make things better—”
“No, I know you were. It’s just that now, even if I could get a coil, I’d have to fly the ship alone.”
“You could do it,” I said. “Llana could help a little, I think.”
“When can you get back?”
“I…”
He eyed me. “You don’t want to come back.”
“I mean, of course I do,” I said.
“No, why would you? You wouldn’t want to watch us together, I guess. It would kind of be
awkward. I mean, it’s been awkward. For me, anyway. It is kind of easier if you’re gone. Maybe we
should revisit the idea of the fake IDs and disguises? I think we could take public transport if we go
when they’re really busy. If it’s just me and her, we’ll look like a couple, right? It’s not like before,
where the three of us would be more suspicious.”
“Sounds like it’ll be perfect without me then,” I said.
“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said quietly. “I mean, we both always knew I was a poor replacement for Colk.”
“You were never going to replace Colk.”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it like that either.”
“Tell Llana I’m sorry?”
“Sienne—”
“When I get out of this, I do want to meet my niece. And I don’t know that I wholly approve of this
idea of you lying to Llana about your infidelity forever.”
“Whatever. What does knowing do to her except hurt her?”
“It’s a lie. You’re lying to her, a lie of omission.”
“Well, maybe sometimes it’s better not to know everything,” he said.
“Just know I’m not going to disappear forever, okay?” And then I did hang up on him.

sienne
After my conversation with Jak, I stayed in the lounge room and didn’t go seeking out Caspe. The
last thing I wanted was for him to gloat about being right. I didn’t want to see him at all.
I felt deflated.
Everything that had been important to me was suddenly gone. I’d had my brother’s ship, my
brother’s mate, my brother’s child, and they’d all been entrusted to me, and…
Well, it was my own fault.
I’d lost everything.
 I should never have hatched the stupid arena plan. I should have realized it was an idiotic idea.
This room was the place that I’d talked to the other girls, the other prizes. Near as I knew, they’d
both been claimed in the arena by alien gladiators. They had their money. I hoped they’d fixed their
problems.
But eventually, Caspe found me. He appeared in the doorway, tentacles askew, staring at me.
“What’d you find out?”
“I don’t need to get back to Kalion,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “That’s much better. The last thing I need is you trying to take the ship right back
to exactly where we cannot go.”
“You going to drop me off somewhere?” I slid down in the cushioned chair where I was sitting.
“Do I get to know where?”
“I thought you could stay with me,” he said.
“No, you didn’t.”
“It only makes sense,” he said. “Like you pointed out, if we’re separated, and someone catches
you, you’ll have no reason not to tell them the last place that you saw me. We don’t like each other,
and we won’t protect each other. Keep your enemies closer and all that.”
I sighed.
“And like I said, I have contacts. I’ll fix it.”
“Right, all the Toth you kiss the ass of.”
“I don’t like the Toth,” he said, sounding peevish. “No one likes the Toth, not even the Toth.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I play the game and I save my own skin, and since you’re a threat to me otherwise,
I’ll save yours too.”
“You want me to thank you?”
“It’d be polite. You still haven’t thanked me for getting you away from that rrox.”
I shook my head at him. Actually, I really didn’t understand why he’d done that. I got up out of my
chair. “Why did you save me?”
“Like I said, pretty dead girls really bum me out.”
“Yeah, but I’m me, and you hate me,” I said, advancing on him. I cocked my head to one side.
“You think I’m pretty?”
He gave me a nasty, predatory smile. “You’re the one who wanted me to evaluate how fuckable
you were, remember?”
Being glib like that had been a front. I was trying to psyche myself up for the whole thing. If it had
worked, it would have been worth it. But now I realized that Caspe had seen me without my clothes,
and I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed.
Instinctively, I knew I couldn’t let him see that I was bothered by it. It would give him power over
me, and I couldn’t have that. So, I sneered at him, looking at his crotch, where I imagined a cock
might reside if he had one. I wished I knew more about ccael. If they were made in a lab, it stood to
reason that they were all sterile. What kind of Toth-tentacle-horror could reproduce? “That something
you can even do?”
“What? Fuck you?” He moved fast and his tentacles moved faster. They surrounded me, and the
tips of all of his tentacles were suddenly touching me, caressing me through my clothes—at my arms,
my waist, my hips, my ass, my shoulders.
I gasped.
“I think I could manage it, yeah.” Just as quickly, he pulled everything back.
 My lips parted. I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. I stared at him, slack-jawed, because had he
just implied what I thought…?
“Not that I want to,” he said, dismissive now, cold. “Like you said, I hate you.”
I still couldn’t speak. I was imagining things about all of those tentacles, invasive and awful
things, and why did I feel warm between my thighs? Why was I thinking about the feel of those
tentacle tips against my arms and waist, how they had been smooth but insistent, about the little
suckers on the undersides of them, about—
Oh, stars, stop, Sienne.
“Yeah, but I mean, do you have a—?” Now, I choked on the word.
He tilted back his chin, amused, waiting.
I licked my lips, drawing in a breath, trying to adopt a prim and businesslike tone. “How do your
kind reproduce?”
He’d been smiling before, but his smile grew wider and self-satisfied. When he spoke, his voice
was gravelly. “You’re very curious about this, Sienne, I have to say. Why the sudden, deep interest?”
I swallowed. Did he just say ‘deep?’ Stars, why did my stupid body react to that stupid word?
“I’m not… I hate you too.” Why was my voice breathy?
“Do you.” His voice was even deeper.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
He swallowed too. I watched the knob in his throat bob.
And then we simply stared at each other, as if both of us were afraid to break the gaze, as if it was
a staring contest.
He was the one who broke it. He lifted one of his tentacles, and it was curled up, but he started
unrolling it and unrolling it. It was long. Was it the one he’d used on the rrox? Why was it longer than
all the other ones?
The tip of it hovered in the air in front of my face.
“Cotylus,” he said. “The long mating arm of the ccael male.”
I blinked. “Wait, that whole thing is your—”
“You know why it’s long?” he said. “Because it’s not uncommon, during mating, for female ccael
to lose their shit from the hormones released and attack males.”
I drew back, eyes widening.
“Kill them, even, I’m told. I wouldn’t know, though, because I’ve never met another ccael, female
or male, and everything I know about my kind I’ve learned from libraries. But, uh, it’s long so that the
mating can be done from a safe distance, apparently.”
“So….” I hesitated. “So, you weren’t… weren’t made by—”
“The Toth?” He grimaced. “No, the Toth did not make everything. Or anything, as near as I can
tell.”
“So, there are ccael, like a planet of ccael somewhere?”
“No,” he said. “There are not. Not anymore.”
“Because the Toth…”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Well, I’m sorry that your species was brought here for the purpose of being forcibly bred to the
Toth,” he said. “It’s a shit universe.” He sighed.
“It is,” I whispered. Then my gaze returned to the cotylus arm. “That whole thing is your cock.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t have a… it doesn’t work like that. I mean, it sort of does.
The cotylus arm is the one that has the ability to deposit sperm, but if it does that it, uh, detaches in the
female.”
“Your dick falls off if you have sex?”
“It grows back.”
I shook my head wordlessly.
“Obviously, it’s kind of a big deal. I don’t really do that with just anyone.”
“Or… or masturbate?”
“All of the tentacle tips are essentially the same in terms of, uh, sensation. The sperm depositing
thing isn’t necessary to experience a—”
He was interrupted by an alarm that rent the air, loud and earsplitting.
“Fuck,” he said, hurrying out of the room and down the hallway.
 FOUR

sienne
“What is that?” I said. “What does that mean?”
Caspe ignored me and rushed down the hall, using his tentacles to pull himself past doorways, so
quick that I could barely keep up.
When I did make it to the bridge, he’d turned off the alarm and he had the screen up. There was
another ship on screen. A Toth police ship.
“Aren’t we in deep space?”
“Mmm,” he said, zooming in on the ship.
“They can’t have followed us—”
“No,” he said. “This is coming from the other direction. The question is whether or not they got a
feed from the galactic nets before they made the jump to deep space, whether this ship will show up
on their wanted list and whether they’ll engage.”
“In deep space?”
“They’re scanning us, and if I block the scan, they’ll become suspicious, and if I don’t block the
scan, their scan gives them the capability to pull us out of deep space.”
Right, well, I knew this. It wasn’t as if I’d never encountered another ship in deep space, but we
were moving so fast right now that it was impossible to engage in a fire fight in deep space.
But if we blocked the scan, we’d be tracked, and the minute we came out of deep space, there
would be a Toth arsenal waiting for us. One police ship was better odds, even if we did get pulled
out of deep space. We might be able to take that.
I backed out of the bridge. “Your ion cannon pit is on the starboard side, right?”
“Who says I’m letting you touch my guns?” he said.
I was already halfway down the hall. “Starboard?”
“There’s one on each side,” he yelled after me. “And if you hurt my ship, I will destroy you.”
I rolled my eyes, hurrying down through the hallways of the ship. Instead of climbing the ladder to
the lower level, I just hopped down, landing on both feet, absorbing the impact.
I made it to the ion cannon pit and hurled myself inside. I yanked on the headset there, touching the
controls to turn it on. “They scanning us?”
“Yeah,” he said, his deep voice in my ear. “Still scanning.”
 “So, maybe they scan us, and we’re not on the wanted list, and they go their way and we go ours.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“It could happen,” I said. “We could catch a break.”
Suddenly, the ship lurched.
“Fuck,” he said.
“They’re pulling us out of deep space.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to detach them from us,” he said. “Hang on to something.”
I strapped myself into the ion pit seat, looking it over. It was a small, round room with a floor-to-
ceiling window that allowed me to see outside. There were screens on top and at the bottom of the
window that gave other views of outside. In the middle of the window, two long cylindrical cannons
jutted out. Inside, there were two steer-sticks to use to control the direction of the cannons.
Abruptly, the ship shuddered. Caspe had just detached us from the control of the Toth ship. Of
course, in order to do that, he had to take the ship out of deep space.
We jutted back into regular space, the whole ship shuddering and creaking, engines screaming.
I clutched the seatbelt, gritting my teeth until it was over.
Now, I could see the Toth ship outside, off in the distance. It had come out of deep space too. It
was one of the big carrier ships, and it had already dispatched short-distance fighter ships, four of
them, and they were coming straight for us.
The ship abruptly pitched to one side, and I couldn’t help but gasp in surprise.
“It’s evasive maneuvers, sweetheart, unless you want them to run straight into us,” came Caspe’s
voice in my ear.
I rolled my eyes again, seizing the sticks and moving the cannons. I sighted one of the fighter ships
and punched the buttons on top of them.
Two blasts of orange streaked through space and collided with one of the fighters, which went up
in a shower of sparks.
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” I said to him.
“I call everyone sweetheart.”
“I know that,” I muttered. “I just took out one of the ships, you see that?”
“You want a pat on the head?” he said. “And maybe your own sobriquet? A little name I use only
for you?”
“I hate you,” I said.
“Yeah, feeling’s mutual, babe,” he said. “Can you start shooting and stop talking?”
I swung the cannons around to sight another of the ships. “Don’t call me babe either.”
He just chuckled.
Fuck that man. I squeezed off another two beams, but they went wide and didn’t hit anything.
“Look what you made me do.”
“That was my fault?”
“Go towards them.”
“What?” He scoffed.
“Do it, turn and head for them.”
“If I head for them—”
“I know.”
“They’ll shoot us, and—”
“We can take probably five direct hits?”
“About that,” he said, and he was doing it. He had actually turned the ship and was heading
straight for the fighters.
“Good,” I said. “Now, we wait.”
“If it gets more than five hits—”
“Go faster and they won’t have time—”
A hit.
The ship rocked.
Caspe accelerated, and we were rushing for the fighters.
Another hit, and the ship rocked again.
“Almost,” I said to him.
“You better pull this off, babe,” he said, and there was some other quality to his voice, something
that seemed to make my insides vibrate.
“Oh, trust me, I got this,” I said, my voice breathy. Why was my voice always breathy around
him?
Another hit, but it didn’t matter, because we were close now, and I moved the two cannons each
to sight one ship and pushed down on the buttons on top, and the ships exploded, a chain reaction,
taking the third one out in their combined demise of sparks and fire.
I whooped, and Caspe cheered in my ear.
“Nice, babe,” he said.
“Don’t call me that,” I said, but I was still breathy, and I was grinning. “You knew what I was
planning.”
“It wasn’t hard to figure it out,” he said. “You did good, but we got that whole ship up there to
deal with, and it’ll have ten more of those short-distance fighters, and—”
“I know, I know,” I said.
At that moment the big ship shot at us.
It hit, and the ship rocked, a harder rock than from the fighters.
“We okay?”
“We’re great,” he said. “That was only the lateral thruster, and it’s still got eighty percent
capacity, so—”
“Turn everything off,” I said.
“Off?”
“If it hit the lateral thruster, it could look to them like they maybe hit the main engine back there?”
“Right,” he said in understanding. “And they can’t scan us, because I’ve still got the block up, so
they won’t know otherwise. Going dark.”
The ship suddenly powered down except for emergency lights and air. Even the gravity went out,
but I was strapped in.
It was oddly quiet now, and outside, it was nothing but dark and the distant points of light of stars
beyond.
“So,” I said softly, “now we just let them get us in their tractor beam and—”
“We wait until we’re right under them, right in their sensitive underbelly—”
“And everything’s under there. Everything. The propulsion system and the extra oxygen stores and
the waste management controls and—”
“You tell me when and I’ll give you power back, babe.”
“Absolutely,” I said, letting out a shaky breath.
He let out a soft chuckle. It seemed to come through the ear of my headset and caress me.
I let out another breath.
 He did too.
The tractor beam caught us, and we started to move toward their ship.
I waited, watching, my heart beating.
My fingers itched to touch the buttons on the sticks for the cannons, but it wouldn’t do me any
good now, not with the ship entirely dark.
I had to give the signal. I had to find exactly the right moment.
I waited.
We grew closer and closer to the ship.
It pulled us under, in a trajectory that would take us to the bottom of the ship, where I could
already see that the cargo bay doors were opening to accept us inside.
Almost close enough.
Almost.
I licked my lips, waiting.
Closer.
We were even closer now, the ship’s hull taking up the whole of my view from the ion cannon pit.
“Caspe,” I breathed.
“Now?” he said.
“Now,” I said.
Suddenly, the ship roared to life, and I swung up the cannons and pulled the trigger again and
again, sending beam after beam into the bottom of the ship. I took out the propulsion and the waste
management and then I hit the oxygen tanks and the thing exploded.
Half the ship went up in a big orange ball of flame.
Caspe yanked us backwards and our ship shot through space away from the conflagration.
“You got us out of the tractor beam?”
“Babe, I can get out of a lousy Toth tractor beam. Give me some credit.”
I snickered, watching as the ship’s fuel caught and there was another enormous explosion. That
that was the end of that ship.
“That’s a thing of beauty, Sienne,” he said in my ear. “Nicely done.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” I said. It was like he’d read my mind when I had the idea.
“Yeah, we were quite a team there, weren’t we?”
I grinned.
I could tell he was grinning too.
I yanked off the headset and unbuckled myself. I left the cannon pit and ran up the hallway.
He was coming down the ladder to meet me.
I ran for him, arms wide, laughing.
He hugged me, laughing too. He pulled me up into the air, using his tentacles too, and he whirled
me around and we were both laughing.
“They had no idea we were even still functional,” I said.
“They were sitting ducks. They never knew what hit them.”
“It was just… boom.”
“Stars, the size of that explosion, have you ever seen—”
“Crazy! We’re legends, aren’t we?”
“Legends, for sure.” And then he paused, and something in his expression changed.
My lips parted, and I stopped laughing.
Suddenly, I was against the wall in the corridor, and the tentacles that were holding my legs were
tightening around me, gripping my thighs and ankles and forcing my legs wider. Other tentacles seized
me around the wrists and pushed my hands above my head.
In seconds, I was flattened against the wall, held there, my arms and legs restrained.
I gasped, gaping at him.
He moved in close, his face inches from mine. “Hey,” he said in a very low voice.
“What are you doing?” I breathed. “Put me down.”
“Is that really what you want me to do?”
I opened my mouth to confirm it, but nothing came out. I looked at his mouth and then into his eyes
and then down at his tentacles, all of his tentacles…
One of them slithered up the front of my body, sliding over my pelvis, and I could feel the weight
of it through my clothes, and a little tremor rocked me.
I gasped.
The tentacle came higher, sliding over my stomach, between my breasts, and then up to my chin. It
paused there.
“Caspe.” My voice was raw. “What are you…?”
The tentacle tip swelled. One of the little suction cups moved and undulated against the skin of my
face.
His voice was soft. “Don’t tell me you’re not into this. You are.”
“You are an arrogant gratts,” I said, but my voice cracked, and I shut my eyes. “Fuck you,” I
breathed.
“Shh, Sienne,” he murmured. “Just relax. You don’t have to make any decisions. You can’t even
move your legs or arms. I’ll decide.”
My jaw worked.
“Now, I’ll tell you what I want,” he said.
I let out several shaky breaths.
“That would turn you on, wouldn’t it, doing what I wanted?”
I swallowed hard.
“I want you to lick me,” he said.
Before I could decide to do it, my tongue eased its way between my lips.
“That’s right,” he murmured. “Good. Very good.” The tentacle on my face swelled again, and it
moved up, so that the suction cup was right at my lips. His voice urged. “Go ahead.”
I did it. My tongue came out and licked the suction cup.
It rewarded me with a little gush of liquid. It was tart, like a fruit I’d eaten on the planet Jarides,
llum, and a little thick. I lapped at it.
Caspe groaned. “Good.” His voice was tight.
I licked again, my tongue going from the bottom of the suction cup to the top. It moved against me,
and there was more of the tart liquid.
I sighed.
Caspe sighed.
The tentacle pushed its way into my mouth, the swollen tip of it, more suction cups, and it was
foreign and strange and somehow erotic in a way that I couldn’t even explain. My pants felt too tight.
My breasts throbbed.
“That’s good,” said Caspe, and I felt the tentacles that bound me, that held me in place, tightening,
and that was good.
I groaned around the tentacle that was invading me, a deep groan as if something in me had been
unleashed, something I didn’t even know I wanted unleashed.
“How much of that can you take?” he asked in a low voice, urging more into me.
My mouth was full. I couldn’t answer, but I opened it wider, giving him access as he pushed
between my lips. Now, the suction cups were everywhere. On my tongue, under my tongue, on the
roof of my mouth, attaching and sucking and detaching, pumping more of that thick, tart liquid into my
mouth. I was swallowing it, and the tentacle was squirming and writhing and rubbing against the
cavern of my mouth, filling every spare space, and I liked it. It felt good.
Caspe’s face came close. He kissed me just below my jaw.
I moaned, tilting back my head, trying to get more of the tentacle in my mouth, my tongue
undulating against his suction cups.
“This is good for you,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear.
I moaned again.
His voice was as dark as space itself. “You’re thinking about what it would be like to have these
everywhere.”
Oh, stars. Suction cups on my nipples, on my clit? Jammed up in my—
He tugged the tentacle out of my mouth, all at once.
I sputtered, gasping.
“I just…” He panted. “Maybe we’re getting carried away.”
I turned to look at him. “What…? Why did you—?”
“I don’t know.” He slowly began to release my arms and legs, lowering me to the ground.
“You… you don’t have to stop.” My voice was small.
He kissed me below my jaw again. “I know.”
“But you’re…”
“Look, we blew up a ship together. That’s, you know, obvious foreplay, but—”
“Is it?” I let out a laugh.
“We don’t like each other,” he said.
“Well…” I looked into his eyes. “Maybe, um, that might make it good.”
He lowered me entirely to the floor. “Is that what it’s like with you and Jak?”
I looked away. I was leaning against the corridor, back against its calming firmness. “There’s no
me and Jak anymore, as you well know, because you exploded that for me, just to be a gratts.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I guess I did.”
I glanced up at him. “Did you do it on purpose?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe this hate-thing with us has been this kind of hate-thing all along?”
“You do like it when I restrain you,” he said. “You want me to tie you up and hold you down and
force you—”
“I don’t want to be forced.”
“You signed up for the arena.”
“But not because I have some… rape fantasy. What we were just doing, that was… I mean, I was
into it.”
“I know.” His voice was affected.
“Why’d you stop?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at me.
Then I felt embarrassed, because I was being needy and weird, and it had been kind of oddly one-
sided, hadn’t it? He stuffed a tentacle in my mouth and forced more and more of it into me, and was
that weird for me to have liked it?
It felt good, I protested internally.
“Girls who sign up for the arena, I’d say there’s a big percentage of them who have a…
fascination with some kind of…”
“Well, not me,” I said. No, not me, even though I had an entire affair with a guy who used me
and never got me off and I kind of liked that.
Well, this did feel good, and I was pretty sure that one of those tentacles, properly placed, could
have me shooting off to deep space in five hisecs flat.
I licked my lips. “Are you jealous of Jak?”
“I can’t be jealous of your fuck buddy, babe. I hate you.”
“I completely ended it with him. He’s into Llana, not me, and he said he didn’t even want to be
with me, but he had a hard time turning down sex.” Clearly, Caspe was different. Maybe that was
some sort of ccael thing, or— I straightened. “Oh, wait. Do you not like submissive women? Like, if
ccael women are aggressive during sex, do you want me to…”
He waited.
I didn’t finish.
“To what?” he said softly.
“You do,” I said.
“No,” he said.
I took a step toward him, pushing off the corridor wall.
He moved back, putting distance between us.
“You want me to order you to put your cotylus arm in me and detach it, even if it is a big deal,
even if you won’t have a cock until it grows back, but because I want it?”
He drew in a very shaky breath. “No,” he breathed. “I definitely don’t want that.”
“Because you hate me,” I said softly.
He nodded. Then he swallowed hard and used his tentacles to yank himself up the ladder and into
the upper floor, away from me.
I could have followed him, but I didn’t.
I stayed on the lower deck and touched my lips, which were a little swollen, the taste of his
tartness still on my tongue.
 FIVE

caspe
What the fuck was that?
What did I just do?
I hated Sienne Dlach. I despised her. She had ruined everything for me on more than one occasion,
and she seemed to take a specific sort of joy in it, too. More than once, she had taunted me with the
jobs she’d taken from me, and I had thought about strangling the life out of her.
Now, that image, a tentacle wrapped around her neck, made me feel off balance and a little
aroused.
I definitely didn’t want to replay that last thing she’d said to me, about forcing me to ejaculate in
her.
Fuck.
That was possibly the hottest thing a woman had ever said to me, but there maybe wasn’t a lot of
competition with that. My sexual experience was notably limited, because I wasn’t exactly the sort of
man that women wanted.
When I did get laid, it was because of the oddity of me, the adventure of fucking something
monstrous. There had been at least one chick who’d done it entirely because of the idea of the
tentacles, I was pretty sure. She’d been, uh, vocal about ordering me around, which… didn’t bother
me?
I didn’t…
I didn’t want to be dominated or anything.
I liked submissive females fine. I’d say of the women that wanted me to fuck them, being
restrained by the tentacles was a pretty common theme. So common in fact that the minute I’d
wrapped a tentacle around Sienne’s wrist, it had made me think of sex.
Yeah, Caspe, that’s why you thought of sex, not the fact that you watched her parade around
totally naked in the middle of the ring not a hihor before all that.
Maybe I was ambidextrous about domination and submission? Like, I could do both?
Why had I gone there with Sienne?
Why had I stopped?
Stars.
 I determined not to think about this. I was not going to make Sienne my fourth ever sexual partner
(that’s right, there had only ever been three other women), because I hated her. And sticking my
tentacle in her mouth didn’t count, because I hadn’t gotten off, and neither had she, and—
Well, okay, admittedly, I wasn’t entirely sure what did count for sex when it came to me.
If you wanted to count the, uh, sperm depositing thing? Detaching my cock into a woman?
Never.
I had accidentally detached it once when I was an adolescent and I was figuring shit out with my
own body and then once on purpose in a particularly intense autoerotic session. Both times, I vowed
afterwards never to do that again.
Because it hurt.
It felt good, yeah, but it also hurt, and the hurt part lasted longer than the feeling good part, which
was very intense, but pretty brief. Admittedly, the hurt part… it wasn’t exactly the worst pain ever,
but there was a lingering soreness, and if I accidentally bumped my cotylus arm against something, I’d
feel it, and be reminded that I had been masturbating—
It was possible being reminded of having fucked a woman would be a different thing, though.
Stars, I was not considering this.
I guessed I defined sex as when I had some part of my body inside another person and then I had
an orgasm, which I could have without depositing sperm. There would usually be a big rush of liquid
out of the tips of my tentacles and it felt good. So, anyway, I had not had sex with Sienne.
Of course, if you were a Toth, I think you counted it as sex if you put your cock in a woman, even
if there was no getting off. But if you were a Toth, you didn’t count oral sex as actual sex, even if you
did get off, which… did that make sense?
I guessed it did, but only because vaginal sex meant mating for the Toth.
However, the Toth also considered anal sex to be sex, even though that could never result in
offspring.
So…
Whatever. My definition was as good as any, I supposed.
I forced myself to look down at the navpanel in the bridge and I breathed. I needed to get us back
into deep space, and this time, I was going to do the more complicated calculations and get us into a
different path, something that wouldn’t be traveled by Toth ships. It might mean it took us a little
longer to get to our destination, but it would be worth it.
I sighed and pulled up a screen and began typing in numbers.
I did the calculations and set the course. Then we made the jump to deep space. I didn’t
communicate with Sienne during all this except to tell her to strap in for the jump. She yelled back an
affirmative from somewhere in the ship.
But then, once we were in deep space, I started thinking about her again.
Not about shoving my tentacles into every one of her crevices, though. I was not going to think
about that.
I was going to have to figure out what to do about her. We would need to lie low for nearly a
gemoon, I thought. Possibly shorter, but possibly even longer. It would depend on Diirk, when I got in
touch with him. He’d either be a gratts about it or he’d help me out, no problem.
Diirk was hard to predict, though.
When I decided she should stay with me for that long, what had I been thinking?
Probably that it would give you enough time to convince her to let you penetrate all her
crevices with every single one of your tentacles.
 Shut up.
Maybe I should get rid of her, after all, just drop her someplace and disappear.
On the other hand, why was I resisting fucking her? She seemed into it, and I was into it, too, and
—
Because it will be confusing, because I hate her.
That seemed like kind of a dumb reason.
No, it was because… because the feeling that I had for her was not exactly hate anymore. It was
not a positive emotion or anything. It was still pretty negative. But it was very intense and volatile,
and it had gotten worse when I’d allowed this weird sexual desire stuff to get mixed in with it.
I’d never felt anything like this before with a woman.
I didn’t know what it was.
It kind of freaked me out.
And… well, I didn’t… you couldn’t trust people, and there was a possibility that I might—
Trust her?
I scoffed internally at this.
I didn’t trust anyone. Okay, yes, putting my tentacles inside her body, letting her see me feel
pleasure, allowing myself to have an orgasm in front of her, that would make me vulnerable, but it
wouldn’t make me trust her.
I was too smart for that.
So, I went looking for her, and I found her still on the bottom floor of the ship. She was in my pool
room, gazing into the warm tub of water.
“Who said you could come in here?” I demanded.
“Sorry.” She looked at me with real regret and worry in her expression. “Is this…? Do you need
this? Do your kind live in water?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I sleep in it. If I’m out of water for too long, it’s bad for my skin. I grew up in a
tank of water, actually.”
“A tank?”
“Never mind.” Why had I said that?
“You said you’ve never seen another ccael, so I guess you never knew your parents?”
“This is not why I came looking for you.”
“Oh, you were looking for me?”
“I was.”
“Right,” she said, turning to me. “I guess, um, you’ve probably decided to leave me at some
spaceport after all. Do I get any say about where you drop me off?”
“I already said we should stick together,” I said. “We’re going to Geheri.”
Her eyes widened. “The Toth homeplanet?”
“Well, we’re not going to hang out with the Toth, don’t worry, babe. I have contacts there. There’s
a place we can lay low. And, uh, I was thinking about… earlier.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Earlier?”
“Yeah, when, we, um, when I…”
She waited, raising her eyebrows higher.
Say it, coward. “When I stuffed your face full of my tentacle?”
Her breath caught audibly. “Yeah?”
“I don’t know why I stopped. If you want…” I trailed off. “Because I want, too. I want you. I think
maybe you’re right about the hate-thing with us being that kind of hate-thing, and if we, um…”
 “This is the part where you tell me it’ll mean nothing. It’ll just be physical, and we won’t feel
things for each other—”
“Except hatred,” I said.
She let out a little laugh. Maybe it was bitter. “So, you’re offering me a hate-sex arrangement?”
I bobbed my head.
“And you want me to dominate you?”
“No,” I said. I considered. “Maybe we could take turns. And I’m not… I’m never detaching my…
in you.” My voice had rapidly lost any strength. “That’s not happening.”
She smiled. “I see.”
Fuck.
“Are we compatible?” she said. “We can’t…” She gestured back and forth. “We can’t make
babies, right?”
“I don’t know. How would I know this? I doubt it.”
“You’re warm-blooded.” She looked me over. “Do your females have breasts? Do you feed your
young milk?”
My gaze got snagged on her breasts. “I… that’s not a thing I researched, oddly.”
“But you like breasts, so…”
“Everyone with eyes likes breasts.” I was ogling her. I was thinking about how she’d stalked onto
my ship and squeezed them together for me. I’d do me.
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t put sperm in me anyway,” she said.
“Maybe,” I acknowledged, still staring at her chest.
“I guess I’m agreeing to this?” She let out another laugh, this one disbelieving. “Are there more
rules, besides no feelings except hatred?”
I lifted my gaze to hers. Rules… “I get to put them anywhere I want, my tentacles.”
She swallowed. “Maybe we should have, like, a safe word.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You think you could fit more than one in a, um…” The bottom dropped out of her voice. “Hole?”
“Totally doable,” I said, my own voice gravelly.
She shifted on her feet, affected. “What are we talking about?”
“Rules,” I said.
“Right.” She licked her lips.
“You want to just… try it and see where it goes?”
She considered. “I mean, rules might occur to us as we are, um, experimenting.”
“Exactly,” I said, closing the distance between us.
“Okay,” she said. “Should I take off my clothes?” She glanced at the tub. “Do you… have you
ever… in the water?”
I grinned. “We could do that.”
“I don’t know. Water always seems sexy, but then it washes away all your natural lube and it’s—”
“Not mine,” I said.
“Oh.” She gave me an almost shy look. “That was, um, I liked that. Your… it tastes…”
I closed the distance between us and kissed her.
She gasped against my mouth.
For a few moments, that was all I did, just kiss her, holding her with my arms, like a human man
might have held her. Her tongue was eager and sweet against mine, but then I remembered the way
she’d licked my suction cups, and I deepened the kiss, crushing her closer.
 I wormed two of my tentacles inside the hem of her shirt.
When they touched the bare skin of her belly, she let out a little huff of air.
This was nice, the feel of her warmth, how my tentacles were trapped between her clothes and
her skin. I liked that. I eased up, to the bottom of the supporter she wore over her breasts and then
squeezed them under that too.
Nice.
Both tentacles were flattened and squished as I found her nipples. I teased them hard with the tips.
She cried out into my mouth.
Then I applied a suction cup to one, still flicking the other.
She cried out again. “Caspe, that’s—stars.”
I chuckled. It felt good to me too. I liked how there was barely room for my tentacles under her
clothes. The were swelling and pulsing in the scant space, and it was good.
But I also wanted to see her breasts again.
See them up close and possibly put them in my mouth. And if we were going to get in the tub, I
needed to get her clothes off.
So, I released her from my embrace and I tugged on her shirt.
She raised her hands helpfully, and I yanked it off, and then trapped her hands there with one
tentacle, wreathing it around her wrists in a figure-eight pattern.
She looked up, gasping.
“You like that,” I said.
She nodded. “I do, but… I mean, I’m really not into…”
What was this about? Why did she feel the need to protest about that? Was she ashamed of liking
it?
Well, whatever. I was ashamed of wanting her, because I hated her. And this was supposed to be
hate sex. That was the deal, after all. So, if it made her feel ashamed, good. I wanted her to suffer a
little bit. That would turn me on, actually.
I reached around and undid her supporter, and then I realized I couldn’t get it off her with
tentacles wrapped around her wrists. So, I just ripped it.
She let out a noise of protest. “Did you just ruin my supporter?”
I smirked at her. “Yup.” My hands went to her pants to undo them.
She squirmed her hips backwards. “I have exactly one outfit on this ship, Caspe, and I have a
feeling you’re not going to take me out shopping. What am I supposed to do?”
“Uh, I am not opposed to easier access to your tits,” I said, using my tentacles to pull her hips
back closer. I made short work of her pants and pulled them off, using my hands and tentacles.
Ah, there she was again, all of her warm brown skin on display, the dark curls between her legs,
the curves of her hips and thighs, the swell of her breasts, the small protrusion of her belly.
Stars, I didn’t know if I’d ever get enough of her body uncovered like this. Had I always wanted
her this badly? Why hadn’t I noticed?
It’s that confusing hate feeling mixing with arousal is all. Watch yourself.
Right.
She was sputtering. “Y-you… I hate you.”
“Uh huh,” I murmured, lifting her by the arms, using my tentacles around her hips to balance her,
stretching her out, taking in every square inch of her bare skin.
“I’m realizing we never did make a safe word.”
“You want a safe word for your clothes?” I brushed a tentacle over her belly, dipping into her
belly button.
She shivered. “That tickles.”
I let out a noisy breath, making the tentacle go lower, over the swell of her belly, down into the
curls on her mound.
“Stop that.” Her voice was affected too. “I’m trying to think of a safe word, and you’re making it
impossible to concentrate.”
“Really sorry about that,” I whispered, delving my tentacle between the lips of her sex.
She threw back her head, panting. “Caspe, please.”
I yanked my tentacle away.
She gasped at that, eyes wide.
“Okay,” I said, pulling her forward, so that she dangled in front of me and we were eye to eye.
“Think of a safe word.”
She was still breathing hard. Her chest was rising and falling as she drew in shaky breaths.
“You’re such a gratts.”
“And you’re a bitch,” I said.
“I am not.”
“You steal jobs from me on purpose. Deny it.”
“You deserve that.”
“Because I’m a gratts?”
“Because you cater to the Toth and do their dirty work.”
“I don’t. I’m on one side, babe, my own.”
She rolled her eyes.
I kissed her.
Her tongue practically did battle with mine, and I remembered what it was like having my tentacle
in her mouth and groaned at the memory. I wanted that again. I wanted to plunder this mouth of hers. I
wanted to wring pleasure from it, take everything I could get.
Using my tentacles, I yanked her away from my body, and she made a noise of protest which
morphed into a shriek when I tossed her in the tub without ceremony.
I pulled myself up over the lip and perched there to look down at her surfacing, wet, the short
dark curls on her head flattened against her pretty, dark skin, her wide brown eyes furious.
Stars, she was like an angry goddess. I grinned at her.
“Safe word,” she ground out.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is navpatch,” she said.
“Navpatch?” I was still wearing mine, wasn’t I? I wore it all the time. I tugged it off and tossed it.
I could have kept it on. It was waterproof, and I could see through it fine, but it also didn’t seem like
the kind of thing I wanted to wear while fucking.
“Well, I looked up and saw it on you, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you say during sex,
so you won’t be confused.”
“Right.” I lowered myself into the tub.
She was standing and the water came up just over the nipples of her breasts, so that her lovely
shoulders were visible. Water droplets were clinging to her skin.
My tentacle tips all throbbed at once, almost painfully.
Stars, I wanted this woman. Now.
My tentacles surged through the water, and I wrapped them around her, one around her waist, one
around her hips, one around her legs, binding them together.
She let out a gasp and then a huff. “You could warn me before you do that.”
“I could,” I agreed, grinning at her.
“But you won’t.”
“No,” I said, pulling her through the water, closer to me. I tightened the grip around her hips and
legs, letting one of my tentacles slither over her mound. “How is that?”
She moaned.
“Good?”
She glared at me. “Fuck you.”
I applied a suction cup—not to her clit, no, she didn’t get that yet—but against her mound. One
cup and then another, and then two squirming in on either side of her labia.
Her eyes rolled back in her head and the noises that came out of her mouth were uncontrolled,
frenzied.
“Good,” I breathed, wrapping a tentacle around her hands again, trapping them behind her back,
tugging them there tight, so that her breasts were jutting out and prominent. I lifted her out of the water
just enough, so that they were sticking straight out.
Her nipples were warm and relaxed, and I put my mouth on one, licking it with the flat of my
tongue.
It stiffened right away.
I touched the other with my thumb and forefinger, a fluttering sort of pluck.
She whimpered. “Oh, stars, Caspe, I’ve never felt anything like—”
“Shut up,” I breathed, and I shoved a tentacle in her mouth.
She moaned around it, and her sweet little tongue went right to work on it, licking my suction
cups.
“You’re going to take more there,” I told her in a low voice.
Her nipples tightened even more against my fingers and mouth.
I eased another tentacle in next to the first one.
She moaned again, her tongue going to welcome that one, lick what she could of it as well.
I let myself enjoy that for a hisec, because when I got the next one in there, she probably wouldn’t
have room to move her tongue, and I planned to stuff her mouth full.
My tentacles at her hips and mound were still tight, the suction cups still working. I started to
make them undulate against her, swelling and constricting in a rhythm that made her tongue stop
moving against me as she let out a high-pitched unbridled noise.
That was when I put the other tentacle in her mouth.
I shoved the first one deep, down her throat.
She choked, her throat constricting, and I pulled it out, letting her breathe.
Tears came to her eyes, and she made noise around my tentacles.
I was realizing that she couldn’t say a safe word when I had her mouth full. I debated just not
worrying about it, because I hated her. On the other hand, I wasn’t… I didn’t really want to, like,
assault her. That did not get me going.
So, I leaned in, mouth against her ear and whispered, “Blink four times at me if it’s too much?”
She managed a nod.
She didn’t blink.
I grinned. I kissed her neck, her ear lobe, and I plunged down her throat again. Stars, that was
good. She was tight and when I forced her to swallow, she constricted against my tentacle tip in a
way that was fucking perfect. All of my tentacles swelled, each getting bigger and more erect.
I fucked her throat, giving her breaks to breathe, and I whispered filth in her ear. “You’re mine
right now. I’m taking your mouth, every inch of your mouth, and down your throat, all of it. You feel
like stars-shined perfection, and I’m going to flood you with my come, and you’re going to swallow
every drop of it.”
She writhed against me, squirming, moaning.
I squeezed her hips, suction-cupped her labia, rammed her throat, and she came.
I felt it, and then I did.
Every one of my tentacles swelled up—the one in her throat got the biggest, huge, and it felt like
an expanding balloon of bliss—I grunted—and then I was lost to a gush of squirting, overwhelming
pleasure as her throat worked to swallow every bit of me.
Waves of it went through me and then ebbed out, and I let go of her, my tentacles all a little bit
sensitive and limp. I retreated, moving through the water, giving her space.
She splashed, foundered, and then found the lip of the tub. She leaned into it, one arm clutching it
to keep herself upright, and she was out of breath as she gazed at me with parted lips and half-lidded
eyes.
We watched each other.
She licked her lips. “You, um, that…”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling a little ashamed of myself. I knew I hated her and everything, but that had
possibly been a little vile, doing it like that the first time, not even penetrating her pussy. The mouth
thing had certain Tothian connotations—usually done on a woman’s knees, usually to make her see
that she was just a collection of holes for her captor and overlord to use—and I mean, I meant it like
that, too, but I also—
No. Watch yourself. You hate her.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said in a wondering voice. “How did you do that? You
didn’t even touch my clit. It was just like it was being squeezed from the outside, by my own thighs,
and I think it somehow made it happen faster? Like, sometimes I think direct stimulation on my clit
feels too good somehow and I get desensitized, but you just… and those suction cups… and why
does your come taste like fruit?” She sagged into the side of the tub. “Stars, I hate you for being so…
good at that.”
I grinned, feeling pretty proud of myself. “What fruit?”
“Llum,” she said.
I snorted. “It does not.”
“Oh, like you’ve tasted yourself.”
I didn’t say anything, a little embarrassed.
She straightened up, giving me a view of her breasts again, her nipples still a little hard even in
the warm water. “You have?”
I moved through the water and kissed her. Her mouth did not taste like llum, but it was tart, I
guess, and it was a tart fruit. Maybe it was kind of…
“Oh,” she said softly, hands on my chest, looking up at me with a just-fucked expression of
adoration—
Fuck that, she does not adore me.
She went in for another kiss.
I couldn’t help wrapping her up with my tentacles, pulling her close, so that our slippery skin slid
deliciously against each other in the water. I might have groaned at the feel of her against me.
 Hate sex. It’s hate sex. Stop kissing her.
With effort, I pulled away.
She moaned in disappointment.
I drew in a breath. “I, uh, we should… get dressed.”
“You don’t wear clothes,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “Well, you should.”
“Should I?” She lounged back against the lip of the tub. “If it’s just you and me on the ship, should
I really bother?”
My lips parted.
This was a very stupid idea that you had to do this with her. Why did you ever think you could
do this?
No, no, it was fine.
I mean, okay, maybe I had not properly interpreted the emotions that I felt for this woman, which
were becoming a sort of weirdly tender-tinged kind of hatred—
That’s not a thing.
But regardless, even if I, you know, liked her, it didn’t mean I would let myself be weak with her,
that I’d open up to her, that I’d trust her.
I’m too smart for that, I assured myself.
 SIX

sienne
I was not one of those women who was super into giving blow jobs, so I would never have
thought I would have liked being mouth-fucked by three tentacles at once, but stars in space, it had
been tremendous.
If I was honest with myself, my objections to blow jobs were as follows:
First of all, they were often complicated by the idea that there was supposed to be some kind of
skill involved. Men wanted there to be hands involved, wrapped around the base, some twisting
motion incorporated into the whole thing, and I felt—rightly so?—that a man should just be fucking
grateful I was putting my mouth on that part of his body and even considering tasting his semen.
Second of all, they hurt my muscles. My jaw, my neck, my arm—from attempting to keep up that
complicated twisting motion at the base of the cock—and even with all of that effort on my part, they
seemed to go on forever.
Third of all, they resulted in a guy getting off, but me feeling no pleasure whatsoever, and then the
guy was usually worthless afterward. Lots of times, he even fell asleep.
But this thing with Caspe, it had not involved any of my objections.
Without feeling pressure to perform or please, I’d been able to concentrate solely on the physical
sensations of it all, and my mouth was a very sensitive place. Even the invasion of him, forcing
himself down my throat had been exciting—at first I’d choked and that had been unpleasant—but then
I’d caught his rhythm and swallowed him, and that had actually been pleasurable—there were nerves
back there, and it was nice. And inside my mouth, all his suction cups on my tongue and the roof of my
mouth, and that was to say nothing of everything that was going on below my waist, which had been
just… exultant.
It was crazy to me that I’d had all that sex with Jak and I’d never had an orgasm and Caspe did it
to me by stimulating my clitoris through my labia, using my own thighs to pleasure me. It was true
that if I had sex in certain positions with my legs pressed together, I’d noted that there was a lot more
clitoral stimulation—but never enough to make me come.
The truth was that I’d only ever been with one guy with whom I’d regularly had orgasms, and they
weren’t necessarily during sex. He’d usually go down on me before or after.
Well, I wasn’t sure if what I’d done with Caspe even counted as sex? Like how did I have sex
with tentacles?
I didn’t know, but I was pretty sure I wanted to find out.
And it was probably so hot because we hated each other. Hate and passion were right next to each
other on the scale of emotions—easy to slide from one to the other.
Even so, it kind of hurt my feelings when he scurried off immediately after our little interlude in
his tub. He said he needed to check the navpanels, even though we were in deep space, and I knew
that was bullshit.
I didn’t know why it hurt my feelings. It was ridiculous, really. I’d had emotionless sex with Jak
easily enough, and I really did despise Caspe. Why did I want him to stick around and cuddle with
me?
Cuddling.
He said he slept in this tub. I could not sleep in water. I didn’t know how we could ever—
Hate sex does not involve cuddling, Sienne.
Right.
I got dressed. My supporter was totally ruined, and I tried to be annoyed about that, but it was
kind of hot that he’d torn my clothes, and I remembered how he’d said he wasn’t bothered about
having easy access to my breasts, and that made me feel warm all over. I wanted suction cups on both
of my nipples at the same time, my breasts wrapped up in squirming, squeezing tentacles and I wanted
—
Okay, well, I obviously had goals to accomplish here. I needed to understand the perimeters of
this arrangement with Caspe.
I went looking for him.
He was not on the bridge. I knew he wasn’t going to check the navpanels. I looked all over and
found him in his office, which was where he had met with prospective prizes for the arena. He was
sprawled at his desk, scrolling through the holoprojection on there.
“Feel free to see if there’s any vids you want to watch in the lounge, babe. There’s a nice-sized
holoprojector in there.”
“How long is it going to take us to get to Geheri?” I said. “Not even a day, right?”
“Yeah, we should be there in a few hours.”
“So, this hate-sex arrangement? Is it over when we get there?”
He stilled behind the holoprojection. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“If it is, I think we should, um, take advantage of that? Like…”
The holo switched off and he stood up behind the desk. “Well, there’s definitely more, um,
territory to, uh, penetrate.”
I nodded fiercely. “Definitely is.”
“You did get dressed.” He looked disappointed.
“I can be undressed again easy,” I said.
He came out from his desk. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I just…” He closed the distance between us and his tentacles went behind me, brushing against
me, not twisting around me or anything. “Look, this kind of thing can get confusing.”
I blinked at him. “What are you saying?”
“That we really don’t like each other.”
“Well…” I shrugged. “I mean, do you have some reason why you’re always doing favors for the
Toth?”
 “I’m not always doing favors for anyone,” he said.
“Why do you broker deals for the arena? You’re a fucking pimp.”
He rolled his eyes, moving backwards, putting a little more distance between us. “I’m nothing like
a pimp.”
“What makes you say that?” I folded my arms over my chest, waiting.
“I don’t know that talking like this is a great idea.”
“If you have a good explanation, maybe I’ll understand, and I could… maybe I could like you.” I
looked up at the ceiling, feeling stupid. Had I just said that out loud?
He didn’t say anything.
Eventually, I turned back to him, and I found him staring at me fiercely, like he was angry or
something.
“Nothing you say or do will make me like you,” he said finally.
This hurt my feelings too. I squared my shoulders, glaring at him.
“So, it’s pointless to talk.”
“Fine,” I said.
He shifted closer, his voice going lower. “You going to take off your clothes now?”
“I’m kind of… this conversation is sort of a mood killer?”
He made a face, his expression sour.
I let out a breath and glanced at the door. “I guess I’ll go look for vids.”
“Women are going to sign those contracts whether I’m there to broker the deals or not,” he said. “I
like to think it’s better to have someone like me there instead of some leering Toth who’s just
imagining them naked.”
“And you’re not?”
“Not usually, no,” he said, his gaze flicking over me, lingering at my breasts, and then sliding back
up to meet my eyes.
“Oh, but I’m different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So… I think… go watch a vid. We’ll, uh, when we get to Geheri, we’re just
going to be in hiding for quite a while, probably at least a gemoon, and we’ll have time to, uh,
explore.”
“Assuming I even want that with slime like you.”
“What I was saying about it being confusing?” He gestured between us. “Case in point.”
“Why am I different? Why aren’t you attracted to women like that?”
“They’re desperate. There’s nothing attractive about desperate, terrified women.”
I shifted on my feet, liking that answer for some reason. “But I was desperate, too.”
“Desperation looks good on you.”
“But you just said—”
“I like it when you suffer,” he said with a nasty smile.
“Fuck you,” I said, turned around, and stalked out of his office.
Caspe Tetrone was a disgusting gratts, and I was never letting him touch me again.

caspe
Sienne and I didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. I think she got immersed in some three-part
vid about spaceship remodeling, one of those things where this team goes and digs up some old piece
of junk and then restores it to its former glory and adds stupid, pointless rooms to it, like hoverball
courts or salons.
Such a girly thing to watch, really.
I felt like shit for telling her I liked it when she suffered, which was obviously not true at all, not
if I felt guilty for hurting her feelings. Of course, there was the fact that her feelings were hurt,
because I’d said much worse, much more horrible things to her on numerous occasions, and she’d
barely blinked.
The hate-sex arrangement was a disaster.
We’d have to stop.
I should have fucked her pussy for stars’ sake. If I’d known it was going to be the only chance
with her, I would have.
Stars.
I really did hate her, though. Mostly what I hated her for right now was for making me feel guilty,
making me care about her stupid feelings, making me wistful about not getting to stick my tentacles in
her pussy, or in her mouth again, or to kiss her, or look at her naked again.
I really wanted to see her naked again.
That was all very annoying and very distracting, so I was glad when we arrived at Geheri. I had it
perfectly figured so that we’d come out of deep space around the bottom part of the planet, which
wasn’t occupied, considering it was the south pole. It was cold there, as poles tended to be, and no
one lived there.
However, the south pole had various structures built there, because there used to be a lot of Toth
scientists who’d lived there, doing experiments, making observations, whatever it was that the Toth
did before they lost all their women and went mad, taking over the entire galaxy.
Now, Toth scientists had lab ships that zoomed around in space.
Well, there were less crazy mad Toth scientists since they’d solved their female problem by
raping lots of other compatible species—notably humans since they were so similar in appearance.
Maybe all those mad scientists were just in a bad mood because of being supremely cock-blocked or
something. They sure as stars had focused most of their experimentation on sex—how to breed Toth
with everything under the suns.
Anyway, the old Toth labs there were all abandoned, and they were one of my hideouts. I had a
couple friends there who would give us shelter.
Maybe friends was putting it strongly. They’d probably double-cross us if the price was right, but
there was no bounty on our heads or anything. The Toth authorities didn’t routinely offer money for
criminals at large. Now, if some particular Toth decided he wanted to find me and was offering a
hefty amount of credits for my capture?
These friends of mine would sell me out it a heartbeat.
I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust anyone. Learned a long time ago not to do that.
Once we were out of deep space, I called out to Sienne that she needed to strap in for landing, and
she appeared on the bridge.
I spent too long looking at the shape of her breasts against her shirt without a supporter on them.
Why did women wear supporters, anyway? I always heard them complaining about how
uncomfortable they were, and they tended to give breasts odd shapes. I much preferred them unbound
and hanging free. I thrust one of my tentacles under her shirt. It was an impulse.
I caressed the underside of one of her breasts.
 She gasped.
I pulled it back. Stars, I decided we had to stop that. “Sorry.”
She gave me a look. It was hungry. “You should be. Don’t touch me.”
“You got it, babe. It was a particularly stupid idea to think we could do that anyway.”
“It definitely was.” She strapped in next to me, in the co-pilot seat. “Stop calling me babe.”
I just grinned. I was never going to stop calling her that. I started switching over levers on the
navpanel, pulling up the screen so I could see what we were doing. We were right in place to start the
landing procedures.
“You know, if we’re going to be hiding out for a gemoon together, and we’re not fucking, maybe
you should consider taking me somewhere else,” she said.
“Shut up, babe, I need to concentrate to land this ship.”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I said not to call me babe.”
I smirked.
“And don’t tell me to shut up.”
“I could shove some tentacles in your mouth.” Saying that was an impulse too.
She gaped at me. “Don’t you dare.” Her voice was breathy.
I got the sudden urge to see if I could land the ship and give her an orgasm at the same time.
Nah.
Too dangerous.
We might die if I was too distracted.
“You’re lucky that I have to focus to do this,” I said, my fingers moving over a touchscreen.
“Yeah, I am lucky. I don’t want your tentacles all over me. Or… or in me.”
I chuckled. “Oh, yeah, you hate my tentacles.”
“They’re… I mean, you’re like some kind of freak.” Her voice was throaty.
“Seriously, shut up, babe, you are distracting me.” My voice was gravelly too.
The ship lurched as we made contact with the outer atmosphere, as if to illustrate this fact.
“Sorry,” she breathed, clutching the handrests on the chair where she was strapped in.
“You like that I’m a freak,” I said. “You can’t get enough of it. Never met a woman who didn’t
like the tentacles.”
“Oh, stars, you are such a cocky jerk.”
I switched over to the steering sticks, hitting a few buttons to turn off any auto steering that had
been doing the work before. “Yeah, you like that too.”
“I don’t,” she said. “And for the record, bragging about how many women you’ve fucked is not
exactly the way to ingratiate yourself to the woman you’re currently fucking.”
I yanked up on the steering sticks. Had to keep the nose up or we’d plummet. “I thought you didn’t
want me to touch you anymore.”
The ship started to tremble. The sensation of falling gripped my stomach.
“I don’t want you to,” she said, gripping her armrests tighter. “And why don’t you just go ahead
and tell me how many it is, anyway, because that’ll probably make me hate you more. What? Fifty?
Two hundred?”
“Three,” I said. Why did I tell her that? I cringed.
She turned to look at me, eyes wide, speechless.
You’re landing a stars-shined spaceship, Caspe. Eyes forward.
I turned my attention back to the screen, back to the steer sticks, back to the trembling ship.
We made it through re-entry, and the ride smoothed out. We zoomed under the cloud cover of Toth,
frozen crimson-tinged clouds, and below us, the reddened snow cover of the south pole spread out
over the land.
“Three?”
I looked at her. “Five. Eight. Fifteen. I’m lying about three.”
“No, you’re not.” She gave me a little smile. “I’ve only been with three other people too.”
I shook my head. “Look, I am a freak. The tentacles are an acquired taste.”
“No, they’re just great,” she said. “You’re not wrong about that.”
We soared lower.
“You’re not a freak,” she said. “I’m sorry I said that.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
We were quiet.
I set the ship down, and that was when I realized I hadn’t had any contact from the surface. No one
was opening the garage for us either.
I sent a query.
It pinged back. No response.
I sat up straight.
“Something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I reached up to adjust my navpatch, which I’d put back on after our
escapade in the tub. I twisted it until I could see the digital signature of the opening hardware on the
garage doors.
Then I turned back to the touchpad and looked up the override codes for that garage. I opened it
remotely and we rolled inside.
“No one here to greet us?” said Sienne. “Is that right?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“That ship that scanned us, we blew it up,” she said. “So, even if it had our coordinates, the Toth
didn’t beat us here.”
“No,” I said. “If it was the Toth, they’d have been waiting for us when we came out of deep
space.” I shrugged. “It’s only a few other guys who stay here. Smugglers, pirates, other sorts of
outlaws. Maybe they’re just all out doing jobs or something. We might have the place to ourselves.”
“Oh,” she said. She gave me a little shrug. “You know… what I said about you not touching me?”
“Yeah?” I gave her an amused look.
She was coy. “Well, I guess I didn’t use the safe word, did I?”
I nodded slowly, my smile deepening. “Got it, babe.” I would absolutely force tentacles into her
as she protested if that was what she wanted, because that sounded—
Stars, I was supposed to stop this.
Who was I kidding?
No way was I keeping my hands or tentacles off that woman. No stars-shined way.
 SEVEN

sienne
I climbed out of the ship wrapped in a coat that Caspe had given me. He was similarly clad in a
big puffy overcoat, though it left his tentacles bare.
I eyed the tentacles, thinking about them. So, they were like extra hands he had, extra fingers, but
every single one of them was also kind of a penis. At least it was sensitive. All three of the ones in
my mouth had pulsed out hot strings of tart liquid when he’d climaxed, though I wasn’t sure about the
others. Still, I had to assume they were all capable of it, and what was that like, having your sex
organs exposed all the time, brushing them up against things every second of every day?
I asked Caspe this as I followed him through the garage, which was filled with three other ships,
all of which did look like pirate ships. They were the kind of souped-up ship that had been modified
to go as fast as possible and perform well, but not necessarily to look good. My own ship was much
the same.
Colk’s ship, I amended immediately. Why had I thought of the ship as mine? Anyway, I guessed it
really should belong to Llana’s baby girl.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “Like you’re saying.” He looked over his shoulder. “All the ships are
here. If they’re out on jobs, why did they leave their ships?”
“What’s it like, then?”
“What’s what like?”
“Rubbing your dicks all over everything.”
“You make it sound disgusting. They’re not dicks.”
“But they’re sensitive. They’re sexually sensitive, and it must turn you on—”
“Nope.”
“It doesn’t?”
“I just… not unless I think… Sex is mostly in your head, you know? You know how if you touch
yourself and you’re thinking about… I don’t know, hoverball, you never get off, not unless you
focus?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But I’m not sure that’s true for human males.”
He snorted. “Who knows?” He hurried across the garage then, moving fast with his tentacles in
that way of his.
 “Wait for me,” I called after him.
“Quiet,” he said, grabbing me with one of his tentacles.
Alarm went through me. “Why am I being quiet?” I whispered.
“Because all their ships are here, Sienne,” he said in a low voice.
“So…? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Stay behind me, all right?”
“Should we have blasters?”
“Don’t have a blaster.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t need one,” he said, waving his tentacles around, and I did remember how well he’d taken
out all the men when we were leaving the arena.
“If you think I’m huddling behind you like a damsel in distress while you fight the bad guys,
you’re insane.”
“I don’t even know what a damsel in distress is.”
“It’s a human—never mind.” I sighed.
“Stop arguing with me, babe. And stay behind me, please?” He glared at me and moved forward.
I scurried after him, fuming.
We moved through the silent, cold garage, and now the ships seemed hulking and threatening, like
slumbering giant monsters. I did stay behind Caspe, and I felt worried. I kept looking over my
shoulder, as if something was there.
What if something was following us, something that kept ducking out of sight whenever I turned?
Something that was going to jump on us at some point, something small but deadly, something with
sharp—
Caspe came to a stop, and I ran into him, letting out a little huff of surprise.
“Watch yourself, babe,” he said mildly. He was at the door to the garage, and he was opening it. I
should have been paying attention to where we were going instead of worrying about being followed.
“I’m just a little freaked out,” I whispered, pressing into the back of him, which was comforting. I
could feel his heat even through the puffy coat.
“Yeah, stay alert,” he said.
The door to the garage slid open and we stepped into a corridor.
The overhead light was flickering and hanging at an angle away from the ceiling.
The door to the garage slid closed behind us with a snap.
We both looked up at the light. It hung there by one cable. The other cable had snapped entirely,
and the light was precariously attached.
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” I said.
“No shit, babe,” he said.
Eyes on it, both of us worried it would fall on our faces, we moved carefully beneath it, down the
corridor to the next door.
Caspe opened that one.
I glanced over my shoulder again, half-expecting to see the small, sharp creature I’d imagined
following us leaping up onto the back of my neck to hook its claws—
Nothing there.
We went through this door came into an area where several corridors converged. To the right
there was an open doorway, the room inside dark.
There was a smear of blood on the corridor outside the room, as if someone had been holding
onto the doorway when they’d been yanked inside.
“Fuck,” Caspe breathed.
My heart skipped a beat and then came back with a pounding vengeance. Despite myself, I
clutched the back of him. I wanted a blaster.
Caspe lurched forward, leaving me behind, heading for the dark doorway.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t go in there.” It was stupid, I knew, but I wanted to turn around and run
back to the ship. This was a bad place.
Caspe ignored me.
He moved into the room and turned on the light.
Yellow light shone out, illuminating more blood, just inside the door, and a body, grayish skin and
brown fur—a clawed, lifeless hand lying splayed out on the floor.
I whimpered.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Aunt Sophia Primshock’s eyes, if it could not sneak in through her
ears. On the very next morning after Pee-wee’s brief career upon the
stage he received the following letter:

My dearest nephew Walter:

We were so pleased to see in the Council Fire column of a
newspaper that you have been awarded the scout badge for first
aid to animals. Prudence is so proud of her cousin that she
cannot wait to see you and tell you so. When we think of all the
cruelty that is inflicted on poor dumb creatures, and sometimes
by boys, it makes me very happy to think that my very own
nephew stands as the champion of the beasts and birds, and
will not harm them or allow anyone else to harm them. That is
better than selling sausages like a pedler, and if it is true that
they are made of dogs it makes one’s heart ache to think of it.
We want you to come here and see us very soon, and you must
stay for several days.
Your proud and happy
AUNT SOPHIA

Enclosed in the envelope was another missive, rather more formal

in tone, which read:

TO WALTER HARRIS, SCOUT:⸺

The Humane Committee of the Girl Scouts of North Deadham
invite you to attend their rally on Saturday evening, July the
tenth, and to accept the Black Beauty Cross of Mercy, for
friendship and kindness to dumb creatures. This cross is given
only by the North Deadham organization, to those rendering
conspicuous service in the field of humanity by championing our
dumb friends who cannot speak for themselves.
Katherine Kindheart
Sympathea Softe
Dorothy Docile
Prudence Primshock
Committee
 The hero’s acceptance of this invitation was a little disconcerting,
but it did not dim his glory. On the contrary (so far as his own efforts
were concerned) it increased his glory. He wrote:

Dear Aunt Sophia and Prudence and that Committee too:

I got that animal first aid badge so now I have ten badges
only I didn’t get it yet but anyway, I’m a star scout. You have to
have a general knowledge of farm animals and I know a lot
about them and I was kicked by a cow and she spilled the milk. I
like milk too. I know what’s good for colic and you have to know
that and it’s good for a horse. I don’t mean colic.
Once when I was drowning some kittens I saved two so that
was a kind act to those two and that counts. It counts one point.
I fixed a tin can that was tied to a dog’s tail because it was tied
too tight. I know all about the different knots, too. Once I
grabbed a bat because I thought it was a dish rag hanging up. I
bet most girls wouldn’t be kind to mice especially rats.
If a horse falls down you have to take off his harness and the
thing that goes kind of alongside his neck comes off like
suspenders. Anyway I like a belt better on account of wearing
my belt axe. Gee whiz I like girls and every kind of animals, only
they’re scared when they get in a rowboat.
I read that story about Black Beauty that your badge is
named after. I like elephants better. If you have a parrot you
better not swear because he learns it. Scouts have to cut birds
up in sections so as to tell the different parts of them. I’m going
to wear that Black Beauty badge alongside my star badge. I’m
going to go on the train that gets there in time for supper.
With love,
WALTER HARRIS
 First Aid
Physical Development
Personal Health
Public Health
Life Saving
Astronomy
Swimming
Forestry
Dairying
Animal First Aid that makes ten.
P. S. I don’t mean you have to cut birds up alive only in pictures.

Aunt Sophia put on her spectacles and scrutinized this letter

curiously, but in the end her eyes dwelt fondly on the words at the
end of the list of badges. Pee-wee always thus summarized his
glories, even in school examination papers. She gazed at the words
Animal First Aid and was reassured.
As for Sympathea Softe and Katherine Kindheart and Dorothy
Docile, they were greatly edified by the imposing list of Pee-wee’s
triumphs.
“Physical Development,” said Dorothy, in whispered admiration; “I
just bet he’s tall and dark, with a splendid chest. One can be big and
gentle at the same time.”
“Of course,” said Sympathea, “look at elephants; they’re as gentle
as can be.”
“Oh, I hope he isn’t like an elephant,” said Dorothy; “they’re so
clumsy. And they just eat, eat, all day. They just live on peanuts.”
“I pictured him as tall and lithe,” said Miss Katherine Kindheart;
“like a—like a tree. I think that one familiar with forestry is almost
sure to be tall. The swimming award too! Oh, I just long to see him. I
think that forestry is such perfectly scrumptious word too. Forestry! It
sort of reminds me of Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill—calm and
stately; you know what I mean.”
“Or General Pershing,” said Sympathea.
“Or Eugene O’Brien,” said Dorothy, who was something of a
movie fan.
 “Oh don’t you just long to see him?” they all asked each other.

1 Pioneer scout; a lone scout; one without troop or patrol affiliations.

 CHAPTER IV—HE ADVANCES
Pee-wee started for North Deadham in full scout regalia, carrying
a duffel bag instead of a suitcase, wishing to detach himself as much
as possible from the manners and customs of civilization. A new
feature of his motley array was a can-opener dangling from his belt,
intended to suggest the rugged scout’s dependence on his own
culinary art in the dense wilderness. It was rather suggestive of
Heinz 57 varieties.
On the train he made some memorandums in his scout report
book looking to the future government of his new patrol. The
following is a sample.
If any hop-toad can’t learn the pace he has to have his legs tied
together for an hour.
Every feller that gets a new hop-toad gets a piece of chocolate but
he has to give it to his patrol leader for the treasury.
If a hop-toad can’t croak like a frog he has to be turned over on
his back and somebody sit on him till he croaks.
A hop-toad has to be given to the tom-cats if he can’t learn
because the tom-cats want more because they only have six.
On account of going fast hop-toads have to have sticks in their
mouths.
I’m going to try to get tents near where the Robins were before the
other fellows chased them away.
When the train stopped at North Deadham, the girls of the
Humane Committee saw descending from it a diminutive figure clad
in khaki, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like him. His
scout report book bulged out of his pocket, his jack-knife and his
compass and his can-opener jangled in a kind of martial tune, his
step was the step of a conqueror. Beneath his flapping scout hat his
curly hair showed and upon his face was a frown, a terrible frown,
the frown of a hero.
The only discordant note in the martial figure that he presented
was the stick of lemon candy which he was sucking. During his ride
various articles, chiefly edible, had been left upon his lap for
inspection, and he bought them all, and they now bulged and
protruded here and there upon his scout attire.
Removing the stick of lemon candy from his mouth, he
contemplated the girls who had come to meet him, uttered the single
word “Hello” and replaced the candy in his mouth.
“Did you ever in your life?” gasped Sympathea.
“He is certainly not an elephant,” said Dorothy.
“Or a Daniel Boone or a Buffalo Bill,” chimed in Miss Kindheart.
“I’d rather be myself than them,” said Pee-wee.
“Yes, why?” asked one of the reception committee anxiously.
“Because they’re dead.”
“Oh, we’re so glad to see you, Walter,” said Cousin Prudence,
embracing him till he rattled like a Ford car; “I thought you’d never,
never, come to see us. And you’ve won the animal first aid badge!
Oh, isn’t that perfectly wonderful!”
“I won a lot of others too,” Pee-wee said; “I’ve got nine badges.
See them on my sleeve? When the tenth one is put there I’ll be a
star scout. I’m going to be a patrol leader, too. I lost a marshmallow
on that train. Are you going to have that meeting to-night?”
“We certainly are and you’re going to be the main attraction.
You’re going to sit on the stage! Isn’t that just perfectly fine? I don’t
believe you’ve ever been on a stage, now have you? Do you think
you’ll be afraid?”
It was very hard for Pee-wee to admit that there was anything in
the world he hadn’t done; and to have it intimated that he, the actor
in Double-crossed, had never been on the stage, was as much as he
could bear. But he remembered his voluntary promise to his mother
and modified his answer.
“Sure, I’ve been on platforms and they’re the same as stages,” he
said; “only they’re kind of different. When we get our awards we
have to go on platforms. Do you think I’m scared of audiences? Gee
whiz, they won’t hurt you. I’m not even scared of bears and they’re
not as bad as audiences, that’s one thing sure.”
“But I mean a regular stage,” chirped Sympathea, “with woods
painted in back and everything.”
“I’ve even been lost in the woods,” Pee-wee announced proudly.
“Do you think I’m scared of painted woods? You can’t get lost in
those. I’ve been—I’ve been—famished in the woods, when I was
lost.”
“I thought scouts never got lost,” Miss Dorothy Docile carolled
forth.
“That shows you don’t know anything about them,” Pee-wee said
disdainfully; “they know all about getting lost; they get lost better than
anybody else. Then they find their way out by resourcefulness. Do
you know what that means?”
“Isn’t that perfectly wonderful?” said Miss Katherine Kindheart.
“That’s nothing,” Pee-wee said; “you go around in a circle when
you get lost; do you know why?”
“No, do tell us.”
“Because your heart is on your left side. You have to know all
about astronomy if you’re a scout.”
“That isn’t astronomy, that’s anatomy,” said Cousin Prudence.
“Woods is my middle name,” said Pee-wee.
“Isn’t that a perfectly lovely name?” said Sympathea. “Walter
Woods Harris.”
“I don’t mean it’s really my middle name,” Pee-wee said. “Suppose
I was crazy about mince pie. I’d say my middle name was mince pie,
but it wouldn’t be Pee-wee, I mean Walter Mincepie Harris, would it?”
“And do you really go round in a circle when you get lost?” Cousin
Prudence asked him.
“S-u-re,” said Pee-wee conclusively, “your left side goes ahead of
your right side—”
“And what becomes of your right side?” Katherine asked.
“It comes along after your left side,” Pee-wee explained.
“And doesn’t it ever, ever catch it?”
“No, so that’s why you go round in a circle; see? Now I’ll close my
eyes and try to go straight. I’ll show you.”
 The demonstration of this item of scout lore was highly
satisfactory and very scoutish; for scouts are supposed to smile and
Pee-wee’s escort of honor did more than that, they screamed.
Closing his eyes, Pee-wee strode forward verging more and more
toward the curb until he stumbled and went head over heels into the
gutter, where his feminine admirers gathered about him, clamoring to
aid the hero.
Pee-wee was equal to the occasion. “A scout is supposed to
spread mirth,” he said, rising and brushing the mud from his regalia.
He had certainly spread mirth as thoroughly as the mud was spread
upon his scout uniform. “I’ll tell you something else about anatomy
too,” he said. “Just then when I fell down in the mud it reminded me
of it. Do you know how many muscles it takes to make a smile?”
“No, do tell us,” said Cousin Prudence as she brushed him off,
laughing uncontrollably.
“Thirteen,” said Pee-wee.
“No wonder you were unlucky,” said Sympathea, shaking with
laughter.
“It takes sixty-four muscles to make a frown,” Pee-wee continued.
“So you’re doing a lot of extra work if you frown,” he added, pulling
up his torn stocking.
The girls’ Humane Committee must have been of an economical
turn, for they did not use sixty-four muscles, or anything like that
number. They roared and screamed, and held their sides and
brushed him off and readjusted his official junk upon his diminutive
person, and just kept on laughing and laughing and laughing.
 CHAPTER V—HE STORMS THE INNER
FORTRESS
Having risen from the gutter like so many world heroes who began
as poor boys, Pee-wee proceeded to expatiate on the honorable
company which had come out of that lowly and muddy abode into
the dazzling halls of fame.
“That’s where Mr. Temple began who started Temple Camp,” he
said. “Wait till I see if I’ve got my money all right; I’ve got seven
dollars and fifty-two cents not counting my ticket because my father
paid for that. I’ll treat you all to sodas.”
“Oh I just couldn’t eat a thing while I’m laughing so,” Miss Dorothy
Docile explained; “thank you just as much.”
“Can’t you eat when you’re laughing?” Pee-wee asked
incredulously.
“No, can scouts eat while they laugh?”
“S-u-re, they can eat while they’re sleeping even. If you dream
about eats they taste just as good don’t they?”
“Can they eat while they’re going around in a circle?” Sympathea
asked mischievously. “You know we’re girl scouts, but we really don’t
know much about girl scouting, because we’ve only just started.
Don’t you think our Black Beauty award is a splendid idea?”
“Sure, I have lots of dandy ideas,” Pee-wee said; “but anyway
you’ve got a right to kill snakes—snakes and mosquitoes. But I
haven’t got any right to kill a lion.”
“Oh, I hope you never did that,” said Cousin Prudence.
“Sure I didn’t,” Pee-wee assured her.
If any proof of his courage was required, he gave it in his martial
advance up the wide, old-fashioned, thickly carpeted stairway which
led to the inner fortress where Aunt Sophia Primshock sat bundled
up in a big wheel chair. No weapon had she but her spectacles, but
she used those in such a way as to make her terrible to behold. Her
eyes made sudden flank movements around the side of them; they
went “over the top” as well; and peered straight through them in a
way of terrible scrutiny.
Aunt Sophia Primshock had all kinds of money and several
different kinds of rheumatism. As fast as there was a new kind, she
secured it. She was very deaf, but not too deaf to hear Pee-wee. It
was not quite as bad as that. Next to her collection of rheumatics
was her collection of cats. In the august presence Pee-wee now
appeared in all his scout glory—marred only by a hole in his stocking
—followed by Cousin Prudence.
“I am very glad to see my nephew,” said Aunt Sophia, as Pee-wee
advanced to receive her kiss, “and I am not only glad but proud to
call him my nephew,” she added. “I don’t know much about this
scouting, I’m afraid it makes boys a little wild. But when a boy
registers his friendship for dumb creatures I am proud, more than
proud, to call him my nephew. You have seen the girl’s committee?
They are dear, sweet girls, all of them.”
“Oh yes, he fell for us, Mother,” said Prudence.
“Fell for you?”
“Yes, he fell all over himself, but he isn’t hurt.”
“And what is better still, he would not inflict any hurt,” said Aunt
Sophia. “And what a fine boy he is, eh Prudence? A splendid, kind,
humane boy, with a heart—”
“On his left side, Mother,” said Prudence; “he proved it to us and
we know he has a heart.”
Aunt Sophia smiled indulgently. Like most persons who are under
the spell of one idea she was not even curious about matters in
general. It was perfectly evident that she had captured the helpless,
struggling, little Girl Scout troop and turned it into a humane society.
There was no doubt that the “committee” had originated in that
solemn apartment.
“You can kill snakes because they kill birds,” Pee-wee said; “and
cats kill birds too.”
There was no answer to this so Aunt Sophia said, “I was so happy
when I heard—saw it printed in a newspaper—that my nephew had
won the badge for first aid to dumb creatures.” (Aunt Sophia always
called animals dumb creatures.) “That is better than running after
circuses and going to—to shows. Isn’t it? I had a brother, a very dear
and promising brother, many, many years ago, and he joined a
troupe of play actors, which made his poor mother very, very sad.”
Pee-wee wriggled nervously but listened with respect. “The scout
boys, they don’t—they don’t fill their brains with—with wild west
shows? What is that you have there?”
“That’s my handbook, and this is my scout report book,” Pee-wee
exclaimed, glad enough to expound the ins and outs of scouting.
“Ah yes, and if you do a kind act you jot it down?”
“Sure.”
“Let me see them,” said Aunt Sophia holding out her hand; “my
arm is very stiff. Did you bring me my tea, Prudence dear?—I eat
very little and go about almost none at all. I am very, very stiff.”
“That’s because you don’t sleep outdoors,” Pee-wee said. “I bet if
you went scout pace you wouldn’t be stiff. Do you want me to show
you how?”
“Goodness gracious no, my dear! Let me see what is in the books
—”
“Rolling down hills is good too,” said Pee-wee; “I bet if you try that
you won’t be stiff. Lots of scouts roll down in barrels, because that
shakes them up. I’ll get a barrel for you if you want to try it.”
Aunt Sophia did not want to try it, but she was presently to be
shaken up in quite another way. Gazing with increasing severity
through her spectacles she saw sprawled upon the page the
dreadful words.

If any hop-toad can’t learn the pace he has to have his legs
tied together for an hour.
Every feller that gets a new hop-toad gets a piece of
chocolate—
If a hop-toad can’t croak like a frog he has to be turned over
on his back and somebody sit on him till he croaks.
 Aunt Sophia looked up, dumbfounded, speechless. She
readjusted her spectacles, as if even they might be deceiving her,
and read:

A hop-toad has to be given to the tom-cats—

She read no more. Rather she saw the page in a kind of trance.
Her astonished eyes jumped from one blood-curdling memorandum
to another, picking out the more heartless words and phrases. Given
to the tom-cats ... chased the Robins away ... turned on his back till
he croaks ... hop-toads ... sticks in their mouths....
Horrors, oh horrors! Here before her very eyes was a series of
recipes for cruelty! Directions, suggestions, memorandums written in
cold blood for the torture of hop-toads!
Pee-wee sensed the situation, but it was too late. The hop-toads
were already on their backs, the sticks were in their mouths, they
were croaking, or being fed alive to tom-cats, the robins had been
chased from their nests and their little ones, the boys were standing
around eating chocolate while the toads suffered, the massacre was
on.
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Pee-wee said, facing the awful face of his
outraged aunt. “You see hop-toads, they’re really not hop-toads; do
you see?”
“I do not see,” said Aunt Sophia.
“I’ll tell you all about it. Scout patrols are named after animals;
there’s a patrol at Temple Camp named the Robins, see? My new
patrol is going to be named the Hop-toads, because they’re all going
to be good at scout pace, see? Gee whiz, you don’t care if we make
fellers hold sticks in their mouths, do you? Because they can run
better that way. A hop-toad means a—a scout. I’m a hop-toad.
Maybe I don’t look like one but I am.”
Aunt Sophia was just about convinced—by a very, very narrow
margin. She was convinced, but she remembered the awful things
upon that fly-leaf. She was still a little, just a very little, suspicious.
But she accepted Pee-wee’s explanation....
 CHAPTER VI—CARRIED BY A MINORITY
That same memorable Saturday was the day on which Pee-wee’s
troop was to go to its summer quarters at the beloved Temple Camp.
As every scout knows, Temple Camp is a little in from the Hudson
River in the neighborhood of Catskill.
North Deadham is about thirty-five miles north of Bridgeboro.
Roughly speaking, North Deadham would be on a line between
Bridgeboro and Temple Camp. The brilliant idea of spilling the beans
in North Deadham is attributable to Artie Van Arlen, patrol leader of
the Ravens—Pee-wee’s own patrol.
“What do you say if two or three of us start hiking on Friday and
camp along the way and bang into North Deadham in time to foil our
young hero?” said Artie. “Foiling is his middle name, so we’ll try a
little of it. Then we’ll wrap him up and take him along to camp with
us. What do you say?”
“You mean hike all the way?” asked Connie Bennett of the Elks.
“Sure.”
“Declined with thanks,” said Connie. “Let him stay there a while.
What’s the use of starting out hunting for trouble? He’s wished onto
the Ptomaine Committee or whatever they call it; let them worry for a
while.”
“Anybody in the Silver Foxes want to hike it?” Artie asked.
“We promised Mr. West of the West Shore Railroad, we’d go that
way,” said Roy; “we can’t break our words. The train will be waiting
for us.”
“Some scouts!” said Grove Bronson of the Ravens.
“I’d just love to stop at North Deadhead for our young hero,” said
Hunt Ward of the Elks, “but you know how the directors of the
railroad would feel.”
“Sure, a scout’s honor is to be trusted,” said Roy.
 “How about his feet?” Artie shot back. “Can you walk from the
station to the train? You make me tired, you fellows.”
“If you’re so tired what do you want to hike for?” Roy asked.
“You’re so wide awake and full of pep, what do you want to go to
Fried ham or Dead-ham for? I should worry about Deadville or
whatever you call it. Right away when we get rid of Pee-wee you
want to go and get him. They’ve just had whooping cough at Temple
Camp; isn’t that bad enough? The raving Ravens are raving again,
no wonder the railroads are losing money with the Raven Patrol
walking all over the country.”
“Who’ll volunteer?” Artie said.
“A large chunk of silence,” said Roy.
“I won’t,” called one.
“Neither will I,” shouted another.
“Not for mine,” piped up a third.
“We’ll all volunteer not to hike,” said Roy. “Let the scouts in the
books do the hiking.”
“I will,” said Grove Bronson.
“He hasn’t got the railroad fare,” shouted Roy.
“All right,” said Artie, “you and I’ll hike together, Grove; we’ll take
the north turnpike—”
“Be sure to put it back when you get through with it,” said Roy,
“and give our kindest regards to the animated animal cracker and if
you’re going to hike from Deadtown to camp the best way is to follow
the Franklin Turnpike as far as Idaho and take the second turn to
your left. That’ll take you into the Great Salt Lake. Don’t hurry, take
your time.”
“The pleasure is ours,” said Artie.
“If you don’t get to camp till next summer it’ll be all right,” said Roy.
“Tell Pee-wee he’ll find us near the lake and we hope he’ll drop in.”
 CHAPTER VII—MENTAL TELEGRAPHY
Thus it happened that while Scout Harris, friend and champion of
the dumb creatures, was preparing to receive the tribute that was
due him, two scouts of his patrol were tramping along the dusty road
as the sun went down, on the last part of their long hike to North
Deadham. They crossed the frontier of the village unnoticed. The
only sentinel there was a rooster on a fence and he was asleep at
his post, or rather his perch.
The invading column passed through McCrockett’s Lane and
rested under a weeping willow tree, where they kindled a little fire
and brewed some coffee and fried some bacon. If the weeping
willow could but have known their business it would have laughed
rather than wept.
Their supper finished, the invaders trampled the fire out and
played mumbly peg under the tree just as if nothing were going to
happen. Scout Harris said afterward that just at that time (seven
thirty) a strange desire for fried bacon came over him and that he
smelled coffee. Thus soul speaks to soul across space in the mystic
realm of scouting!
At exactly eight o’clock by a cow-bell in a neighboring field,
verified by their own trusty scout watches, the invaders followed a
northwesterly course through the village square into Gordon’s Hollow
and thence to Main Street and to a certain commissary where they
made ready for the terrible work in hand by two stimulating ice cream
cones, which sent the blood coursing through their veins and gave
them strength and courage.
Passing the district school with great caution they succeeded in a
skilfully conceived flank move around the entire police department,
who was standing on a corner talking with an unsuspecting citizen.
This was at exactly seven minutes after eight by the town hall clock
which wasn’t going, no doubt in honor of the great occasion.
 Singular to relate, at precisely four minutes after eight by Pee-
wee’s reliable scout watch, and just as he was starting with his
cousin Prudence for the church lecture hall, he was conscious of a
shivering and decided to return and get his scout jacket. It was at
that very moment that the invading legion partook of ice cream
cones. Perhaps it was only a coincidence but so strong was the
thought of ice cream cones in Pee-wee’s mind that he bought two
(treating his cousin Prudence) on their way to the church. A most
singular and harrowing thing to relate is that these two separate
parties almost met in Pop Carroway’s Candy Parlor.
The lecture room of the church was ablaze with light from eight
kerosene lamps. One of these had a reflector on it, to be used
perhaps as a sort of spotlight on the hero’s entrance.
Aunt Sophia, by reason of her collection of aches and pains, did
not attend this gala meeting. She stayed at home with her cats. But
the minister was there and the Girl Scouts from South Deadham and
Deadham Centre were there.
This gay outpouring of nearly fifty people was not exactly in honor
of Pee-wee. It was a Girl Scout rally intended to stir up interest in the
local movement. But since Pee-wee, like a true scout, was always
prepared to take whatever came along, he appropriated all the stray
glory that was floating around.
Being the only boy in town, he was something of a lion and was
viewed with becoming awe by the spectators as he sat wedged in
between his cousin Prudence and one of the other girls on the
platform. His martial appearance was somewhat modified when he
pulled up his rebellious stocking, but his frown was terrible and his
belt axe was so skilfully displayed as to strike dismay to the most
courageous heart.
His nine merit badges (the final badge still lacking) were revealed
upon his sleeve. He and the two maidens who flanked his sturdy
form occupied but two chairs and from the rear of the little meeting
room Artie Van Arlen and Grove Bronson, lurking there unseen,
beheld the picture of these three as a sort of human sandwich (the
kind sold at railroad stations) with the middle part of almost
microscopic proportions. All of the valor in Scout Harris’s diminutive
body seemed to be squeezed up into his head by the flanking
pressure of his feminine hostesses and he gazed out upon the
assemblage, silent, uncomfortable, terrible.
The organization business of the evening being concluded and a
couple of songs about the woods having been sung, Miss
Sympathea Softe arose, replaced a straying lock of hair with skilful
daintiness, wriggled a little with becoming stage fright, and
proceeded to explain the happy idea which the Girl Scouts had hit on
in the Black Beauty Award.
 CHAPTER VIII—A PREDICAMENT
“Humanity and kindness,” she said in finishing, “are as broad as
the skies. So we planned not to confine our award to our local circle
or even to Girl Scouts everywhere. There are Boy Scouts as well
and we must not forget them.”
“There are more of them than there are Girl Scouts,” Pee-wee
spoke up, “because I can prove it—”
“And their activities are reported in newspapers throughout our
country—”
“They’re in Boys’ Life too,” Pee-wee announced vociferously, to
the great amusement of the audience.
“The Boy Scouts,” continued Sympathea, “have an award called
the First Aid to Animals Badge. It is the intention of our little troop to
tender the Black Beauty Cross to every scout winning that award.
The first one that we are going to honor is the cousin of one of our
members, Prudence Primshock; a scout from Bridgeboro, New
Jersey, a star scout who has won the badge that stands for
humaneness in his troop—Walter Mincepie Harris—”
“Good night, he’s disguised as a mince pie,” Grove whispered to
Artie; “the plot grows thicker, as Roy would say.”
“Excuse me,” said Sympathea blushing, “I mean Walter Woods
Harris. I’m just a little nervous and (great and reassuring applause) I
hardly know what I’m saying. We all know that Boy Scouts are
heroes, that their hearts are always on the left, I mean on the right, I
mean they’re in the right place. Walter—Scout Harris, will you please
stand up and—”
“Hold while there is yet time!” came a voice from the rear of the
little lecture room. “Water Mincepie Harris is not what he seems! He
has disgraced the beloved mince pie and he is trying to deceive you
all!”
“It’s Grove Bronson!” shouted Pee-wee, jumping from his seat.