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Meeting Warth By Strega

There were a dozen waiters, waitresses, and assorted attendants working this one bar, plus a couple of bouncers. The raccoon was the smallest of all of them and to his eyes the perfect candidate.

She was perhaps four feet tall, or a hair more if her ears popped up, with delicate black-furred hands and feet and a matching bandit's mask. Aevo couldn't take his eyes off her. Oh, no doubt she was wiry and strong under the fur, given the way she hefted trays full of plates, glasses and mugs for larger patrons, but he had a foot and a half on her and he was all wiry muscle, too. She shouldn't be difficult to overpower at all.

He was Faenva today, a race described by some as "What happened when the weasels stopped eating the bunnies and started fucking them." Sharp of tooth and claw, but with a rabbit's ears and long rounded muzzle. There weren't many of that people that ventured off world and the odds were against running into another here at the Ziggurat.

The Ziggurat was perfect, too. The staff here was all but immortal, protected by whatever god or force or mind created this strange pocket dimension. They fought and died in the arena, let customers torture them on the third floor, and on the fourth literally fed themselves to visiting predators. It was a horrible little society they had yet somehow it worked.

The first floor wasn't as grotesque as the higher-numbered ones. You could come for a drink or a meeting or an orgy and never get a scratch, barring the odd bar fight or love-nip. Even here, though, staff were sometimes killed, and they always came back.

So there was no good reason to value their lives. Aevo smiled as she finally noticed him and made her way over to his table.

"Shishi says you've been watching me," she chirped, and waved to squidlike waitress who smiled - probably - and waved back. "Are you feeling lonely?"

Aevo smiled his best friendly smile, keeping his bladelike canine fangs hidden. "I have money, if you know a private place."

There was a brief negotiation as to the amount of money and the length of time she'd be away from her job, but that was soon sorted. He also learned her name, which turned out to be Hazel. He filed that away with the names of the women he'd visited with, whose names had subsequently appeared in headlines.

Her time away from work would be longer than she expected, he knew. He felt the weight of the slender blade sheathed along his forearm and let her lead him by the other hand. Soon, quite soon, they would be alone, and he would have his chance.

He could have had her right there the moment she turned her back, but that would be fatally stupid. He was patient, letting her lead him from the crowded areas to an intersection of hallways between a dance hall and two other bars. Here she produced a key, letting them through a door so drab and commonplace it scarcely stood out from the stone walls.

In the short hallway beyond he passed up another opportunity. Tempted though he was by the furry expanse of her back that her dress left exposed - a swift knife jab into her spine, and he could have his way with her at his leisure - he held back for fear that someone behind him would see. By the time that door closed she had opened the next.

She ushered her into a what seemed a one-room library. Two other doors interrupted shelf after shelf of books, scrolls, and mysterious mechanical objects. Sat with its back to a wall was an oversized swivel chair with a mesh back, a desk of fine glossy wood scarred with scratches, and a little trash can. The faint odor of smoke lingered in the air and interspersed with the doors were a dozen monitor screens. All but one were blank, and that one showed a lengthy and scrolling list of numbers and what might be names.

"We should have some time to ourselves now," she said with a smile. As he sat in a smaller, comfortably padded chair she knelt down before him, her hand sliding familiarly up his thigh.

"Good," he said with a smile of his own, as the knife came sliding out of his sleeve. Her little hand was atop the stiffness along his groin - this was always the best moment, the moment when they would see what was about to happen. Of course he was excited. Soon she would be helpless and he would have her as she died. Just like the last one, and the one before.

But as his hand dipped in a practiced motion to catch the hilt of the knife his forearm somehow stuck to the arm of the chair. With a grunt of alarm he tried to stand and managed perhaps an inch of upward motion before the grip of the chair locked him fast. Hazel sprang backwards as a foot-long spark jumped from his wrist to the arm of the chair, doing no obvious damage but replacing the smell of smoke with that of ozone.

"Careful, Hazel," said a warm, purring voice. "He's dangerous."

"I know, dear," the raccoon said, and past her Aevo saw a strange creature pad into the room. Long and low and panthery-black but with a yellow-white mane from which protruded shiny black quills with crimson highlights. It was twice the size of him and the raccoon together and rose onto its hindpaws only to settle back into the swivel chair. The function of the mesh back was obvious as sharp quills slipped through the gaps. It was wearing loose white shorts for some reason, and were it not for that and the use of the chair - along, obviously, with it talking - he would have assumed it was some sort of animal.

Yellow eyes fixed on him and a long black tail with an elegant white plume at the end twitched as he struggled to escape the chair.

"Got it," the raccoon said as her fingers manipulated his wrist. Aevo's fur crackled with static as the disguise-field broke, collapsing to reveal the real him.

"You're a hard man to get sat down for a talk," the black creature purred as it looked him over. Without his field the bunny-weasel look was replaced with the real thing: a thin, bedraggled-looking foxy creature in a harness of emitter-studded plastic strips that encircled him from ankles to wrists every few inches. Hazel had already removed the control bracelet from his wrist.

"Don't use his knife," the black creature purred, but Hazel had already pulled out one of her own from somewhere. His knife had a forward-curving, scalpel-sharp edge and hers was smaller, straight bladed but just as sharp.

"You made one mistake," Hazel said as she cut the harness and shorts off him. "Two if you count murdering people. The disguise is very good, and you used a different one each time, but it doesn't change how you smell. You should have moved on before too many people got a sniff of your leavings. You carried your seed with you when you left, but your scent was all over Bonny and Marta."

"Yeah, you caught me," Aevo said. "So fine me, exile me from this shithole, whatever. All I did was inconvenience those women for a few days. No one stays dead, not if they work here."

"Mm, I can understand that line of thinking," the panthery black creature purred.

"I'm sure the women you raped and killed will understand your motivation," Hazel said. She had produced something that resembled both a wand and a vibrator and was running it over Aevo, not missing even his tail. It let out a chirp and she looked at it. "Clean. Well, greasy but clean."

"You people let yourself be killed all the time," Aevo growled. "You paint yourselves as disposable."

"Some of us," the raccoon chirped. "Warth?"

The panthery thing steepled his fingers - three per hand, plus thumb, and all with alarmingly sharp non-retractile claws. "Do you want him, Hazel?"

She stood up and looked down at Aevo. There was a strange measuring quality to the way she looked him up and down. "Too big, I think."

"Mm." The panther sat for a moment, lost in thought.

"Go ahead, dear. I understand."

With an unreadable expression the spiny cat opened a drawer and pulled out a second wand-vibrator indistinguishable from the first. Hazel stepped aside as it ran the device, magical or technological - it could be either here and there was just no telling - over him as he sat uncomfortably in the chair. There was the familiar chirp and the cat looked at it. "I'm sorry, Hazel."

"Don't worry about it, dear. It comes with your job."

The panther-beast was as much taller than Aevo as Aevo was taller than Hazel and when those huge clawed hands gripped him by the upper arms and lifted him he managed only to squirm like a snake trapped under a boot. The chair at last released him, presumably at the wishes of his captors.

"Aevo, or whatever your real name is," it purred, "It may seem to you that we don't value life. The opposite is in fact the case. Those of us who die and return do so by choice. You've shown yourself to be entirely untrustworthy and dangerous.

"Yes, we come back. When someone takes advantage of that, we make sure they won't."

Aevo blinked as the panther-thing worked its lower jaw from side to side, then his eyes went wide with horror as a gaping maw opened up in front of him. Flexible as a snake the panther disjointed his jaws and engulfed him to the shoulders in a single bite.

Hot, wet throat wrapped around Aevo's skull and sucked him inward as the cat swallowed, and as fast as his nose made its way down the gullet those huge hands pushed more of him in after. There was a creak of stretching ligaments as its jaws gaped still wider and his shoulders were taken, tasted briefly by a broad raspy tongue, and swallowed down after the rest.

Suddenly confronted by the same lack of control he inflicted on his victims Aevo panicked. His shriek of terror was absorbed by the wet fleshy walls around him and with his muzzle held shut by muscular gullet it was not loud even to him. In seconds the horrible wet throat sucked him in to the waist and the cat-thing tossed its muzzle upward, working its maw swiftly over his rump.

He had never softened after the excitement that built up before a kill and the touch of tongue against his swollen sheath was almost unendurable. As the muscular tongue pushed back against his balls and the gullet slipped wetly over his exposed tip Aevo's scream trailed off into a groan. The legs projecting from the big cat's jaws kicked uncontrollably as he spent himself against the slimy walls. It was a moment of perfect shuddering pleasure spoiled only by the second toss of the creature's jaws. With his arms pinned to his sides and little more than his feet and tailtip still outside its jaws there was no way to save himself.

With a last bob of its muzzle it took in his feet and fanged jaws closed around his toes. Aevo kicked, not so much to wound with his claws as in simple desperation, but a great contraction of the throat muscles took hold of him and he slid helplessly down the big cat's throat. The stomach waiting for him was warm, wet, and accommodating, but already his nosepad stung as stomach acids bit at the exposed skin.

"You can't do this," Aevo cried. It was too tight to do more than wriggle. Muscular stomach walls and strong furry pelt behind that held him still in the belly of a creature more than twice his mass. "It's not right!"

His answer was a burp that vented the air trapped in his fur and the folds of his body as he was swallowed. Aevo kicked, and squirmed and screamed, but there was no escape from the hot, gurgling dark.

Hazel watched Warth let out a long belch, yawn, and work his jaws until the lower one popped back onto its hinges. Sharp claws picked a few hairs from between his fangs and with that there as no trace at all but the twitching bulge in his middle and the scraps of harness on the floor that there had, until a moment ago, been three people in the room instead of two.

"Mm," Warth murmured. "It's been a while."

"It has, hasn't it," Hazel chirped, and she giggled as Warth's tail jerked suddenly. Her little hand had found the long bulge beneath his shorts, stiff as an iron bar.

"Shorts," she chirped.

"Oh, Hazel, you don't have to -"

"Well of course I don't have to. Shorts, dear."

The spiny black cat-hybrid grumbled good-naturedly as he undid the buttons that fastened the back of his shorts. His row of spinal quills and tail allowed no other way of putting pants on.

He had heard that his father had possessed no external testicles. In the spectrum of biologic weirdness seen at the Ziggurat that barely qualified as strange. Kzin males didn't have any either, and it most definitely did not interfere with their functioning judging by the scents Yellowstripe left on Hazel.

Warth did have them, though, and they were tense and heavy beneath her fingers. He let out a long, shuddering growl as she kneaded his sheath, working the tight furry skin up and down fractionally to get it to pull back.

It had been a long time since someone treated him this way. Far too long. She had only been kneading for a few seconds when Warth let out a startled grunt. One of her ears snapped around at the rustle his furry tail made as it vibrated against the floor, and her muzzle dipped suddenly.

She was barely able to push his sheath down and get her muzzle around his tip before it happened. Warth's sharp claws added four parallel grooves to the many in the expensive wood of his desk as Hazel swallowed once, then again and yet a third time.

"Thank you, Hazel," Warth said eventually, and made a small gesture toward the right side of her face. In her hasty efforts to get her jaws around his shaft some had escaped, and she raked her claws through her whiskers to strip off the blob of goo that gummed them together.

"I told you it's not healthy to get so pent up," she chirped as she licked her claws. "How can you concentrate on anything?"

"Maribell has been tied up. You know how it is."

She did. Though he was large and strong, and sharp-clawed, and could swallow her or most other lovers with ease - he had inherited both the ability and the urge to do that from his father - there was always a moment of vulnerability when you were with someone you cared about. He was not the sort to force himself on unwilling lovers and she could count on the fingers of one hand the people he trusted enough to let himself be that vulnerable.

He was an important person with an important job and just could not risk being out of circulation for a even a few days as the Ziggurat reformed him. He was needed and he took it seriously. For that he suffered, both in lack of friends and lovers and general isolation and loneliness. He had to be paranoid even when eating people; no one had tried to poison him with a criminal meal yet, but it was only a matter of time.

"Should we have kept him," she wondered, and felt the barely twitching bulge in his middle. The fox clung to life, but only just. Soon enough even that twitching would cease. Already a low gurgle was beginning and he would be utterly digested within a day. Warth's stomach was quick and efficient and had handled much larger meals in its time. In the morning he'd cough up a mass of fur, assuming there was too much to simply pass on through with the rest, and the last trace of the fox would go into the incinerator with the scraps of his harness.

Hazel would let it be known that the mysterious killer had been dealt with and many would assume, correctly, that he had met a sticky end in someone's stomach. They just would not know whose, and she would only smile if they asked. Even here on the first floor, where Warth's authority was second only to the floor manager's, few people knew who he was or what he did.

The panthery creature shook his head. "He enjoyed it too much. More even than the rest of us. For some people it is a sickness."

Hazel nodded. It wasn't the first time they had someone like that come here. Sometimes they showed potential, or were thought redeemable, which was why Yellowstripe's story hadn't ended a couple of months back when Reida had her meal of angry young kzin. Other times there were people who were just too dangerous to let live.

"Now I know your claws are sharp, but you have to be able to curl up and lick yourself," she chirped. "Yellowstripe can and you're less bulky."

"And how do you know he can do that," Warth purred. He was unsheathed, rather belatedly at that, and in between sentences the little raccoon was applying her tongue. His long smooth shaft was barely at all feline but then, no one really knew what Blackfur had been. Mix that alien beast with a feral, nonsapient black panther mother and he was lucky he came out as humanoid as he did.

"Because I asked him what he did when I wasn't around and he showed me," she giggled. "He was embarrassed. It was adorable."

"Well, maybe," he purred, and let it trail off into a groan. She had the time she needed to work her jaws over his cock this time, and he felt the pop as they unhinged. He would last longer this time, but eventually she would milk his seed out of him again. There was just no resisting the clenching muscles of a throat that could send someone her own size down into her belly.

The fox in his stomach kicked one last time and was still and very, very carefully Warth put his hand on the back of Hazel's little head as it bobbed, mindful of his sharp claws.

"He wasn't too big for you, was he," he murmured, and Hazel made an amused sound through a full throat. She was too good to him.