“L-let the wuh-water f-fall on them f-f-first,” Sylvie advised, her teeth chattering and her skin pebbled into gooseflesh from the cold.
“Fine.” Kross positioned her so that the spray was hitting directly on her chest.
Sylvie shivered helplessly. For a moment she felt as though someone was tugging—hard—on her breasts. Then, abruptly, theweight on the left breast was gone and she heard a splashing sound on the shower floor by her feet. Then the weight on the right breast dropped off as well.
“There they go, the little fuckers!” Kross sounded relieved as he reached behind him to turn off the freezing water.
“Am I…are m-my nuh-nipples okay? Are they…st-still th-there?” Sylvie asked, her teeth still chattering.
Without waiting for his answer, she looked down anxiously, wanting to be sure the alien leeches hadn’t bitten off those extremely sensitive parts of her anatomy.
To her overwhelming relief, both her nipples seemed intact—though each one had a ring of tiny tooth marks all around it which was oozing blood. But then she made the mistake of looking lower—down at her feet.
“Don’t look!” Kross said again quickly but it was too late—Sylvie had already seen the leeches.
Both of them had grown horribly. When she’d first noticed them, they were no bigger than her pinky finger. Now they writhed on the floor like two fat sausages, each almost a foot long and monstrously thick.
“Blood sausages,” she whispered. It was too much—too awful.
Her vision grayed out and the world began to spin around her as she started to fall…
3
SYLVIE
Kross must have caught her, but Sylvie didn’t remember it. When she woke up, she was lying on the bed in the shuttle’s single bedroom. Her bottom half was wrapped in towels but she was topless from the waist up.
Looking down at herself, she saw that her breasts were as perky as ever, the nipples pointing at the ship’s rounded ceiling above her, thanks no doubt, to the float dots.
Her Kindred Protector was sitting beside her and as Sylvie watched, he did something strange. He put his first two fingers in his mouth, sucked them for a moment, and then pulled them out and began rubbing one of her stiff, pink peaks.
“Hey!” she protested, still feeling slow and stupid from fainting. “Wha…whadaya think you’re doin’?”
“I was wondering when you’d wake up, Princess. I’m healing you,” he said matter-of-factly as he circled her tight peak with his long fingers.
It occurred to Sylvie that she was no longer numb—she could feel everything he was doing and her nipple was as sensitive as it had ever been. In fact, the gentle caress of his fingers was sending sparks of pleasure straight from her tight peak to the sensitive place between her thighs.
“Healing me?” she repeated stupidly as she watched him.
“Yes—I’m half Blood Kindred. See?” he bared his teeth briefly, showing a double set of sharp, pointed fangs on either side of his upper jaw, where a human’s canine teeth would be.
“So?” Sylvie was a little more awake now. “What…what does that mean?”
“It means that my fangs make ‘essence’ that can heal,” he told her. “So I’m ‘milking them’ to get some for your nipples.”
He was apparently finished with the left nipple because he stuck his fingers in his mouth again and sucked them before beginning to circle her right peak.
“But…but I thought a Blood Kindred could…could only heal his…his mate.” Sylvie wished her voice wouldn’t come out so breathless. She also wished she could turn off the feeling of pleasure that was running in a direct pipeline from the nipple he was caressing and healing straight down to her pussy, which was feeling swollen and hot by now.
“I’m not a full Blood Kindred—I’m a Hybrid,” Kross reminded her, which didn’t really answer the question, Sylvie thought.
“Why not just…put some, uh, salve on them instead, though?” she asked. “Don’t we have some…um, some healing ointment or something in the…in the uh, cabinet?”
She hated the way she was stumbling over her words. It was hard to get her thoughts together when his touch was affecting her so much, damn it!
Kross shook his head.
“I looked but none of the medicines we have stop bleeding. The fucking leeches must have injected you with some kind of blood thinner—you were leaking all over the place, Princess. I knew my essence would close the wounds, so…”