They left the hotel room, hand-in-hand, both of them eager to get the banquet over and done with and anticipating what would happen when they returned.
Neither of them had any idea they were walking into a trap.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Well, well—if it isn’t our guests of honor! Welcome to the seventy-fifth annual banquet of the Royal Botany Society of Lix’dor Prime!”
Master-Doctor Ostensio, the Minister of Botany, met them in the lobby of a huge stone building that was the Ministry of Botany. He was wearing an even more elaborate set of robes than he’d had on earlier.
The new robes were still black but they had either crystals or diamonds—Iyanna wasn’t sure which—sewn all over in curling patters. Given his short stature and his girth, it made him look like a walking disco ball, she thought, trying hard not to smile as the self-important little man nodded and bowed.
“Yeah, we’re here,” Dra’vik growled with poor grace. Iyanna cast a glance up at him. It seemed to her that he was as upset about being interrupted as she had been—maybe even more so. Which surprised her, because he had stated several times that he would not make love to her or “breed” her as he always put it. Had he really been that into going down on her?
Well, he certainly seemed like it, that naughty voice in her head remarked. Iyanna had heard rumors that Kindred liked tasting their females, but she’d thought they were just that—rumors. Now she was beginning to think everything she’d heard was true and they really did love making their women come with their mouths.
Not that I’m actually his woman, she told herself hastily. After this mission, I’m sure we’ll both go back to our regular lives. Maybe I’ll see him sometimes by chance, since we’re both living aboard the Monstrum Mother Ship. But it’s not like we’re dating or—
“I’d like you to meet someone very important—an investor who traveled halfway around Lix’dor Prime to be with us tonight,” Minister Ostensio said, interrupting her train of thought. “He’s poured millions of credits into our Ministry and the Royal Society of Botany, so please be polite to him.”
“What makes you think we won’t be fucking polite?” Dra’vik growled, frowning down at Ostensio.
“Uh—nothing. Nothing, of course.” The little round man swallowed nervously. “Please, come right this way. Our benefactor is waiting just inside the banquet hall.”
“First we’d like to see the plants we were promised,” Dra’vik told him. “You do have them here tonight, right?” he added, frowning.
“Of course I do! They are on display right here—see?”
Ostensio took them to the back of the lobby where a kind of square glass case like a terrarium had been set up. Inside it were a pair of plants that looked a little like the pleasure blooms aboard the Monstrum Mother Ship—a very little, Iyanna thought.
Because while the original pleasure blooms were long, slender ovals and the red female pods had lip-like structures on them, the Lix’dorian plants actually looked much more like a penis and a vagina. The female plant was bright pink with slick folds and a pulsing opening—several, in fact, because there was more than one female blossom.
The male plant straight up looked like a dick. But a really huge one, Iyanna thought faintly. I bet it’s as big as Dra’vik’s equipment is, was the thought that crossed her mind. Of course, she hadn’t actually seen the big Drake’s shaft, but the bulge she’d observed in his leather trousers looked to be about the size of the male plant.
It was long and thick and bright green with a maroon head and it grew from a long, snaky blue vine. The vine seemed to move it around because it kept whipping back and forth, thrusting into the various vagina blooms and depositing large amounts of dark blue jelly, which must be its seed, inside them.
Also unlike the pleasure blooms aboard the Monstrum Mother Ship, the dick plant—there was just no other word for it, Iyanna thought—didn’t dissipate and “die” after fucking one of the pussy blossoms. It only got more vigorous, thrusting into another and another, as though it couldn’t stop fucking, no matter how many times it “came.”
“Sweet Lord,” Iyanna breathed as she watched the snaking vine writhing and the enormous green and maroon dick plant thrusting into the pulsating openings of the female blossoms. It was like plant porn!
At the sound of her voice, the male plant whipped around on its long stalk. Fast as lightning, it struck at the glass of its enclosure, right where Iyanna’s face was.
Iyanna gasped and jumped back—it was almost as though the plant had heard her voice and was trying to get out of its terrarium to get to her! She felt the same way she would have if she’d been at the zoo in the reptile house and a particularly vicious rattle snake had struck at her through the glass.