Phil the bartender had been a good listener, but strangely Phil wasn’t there. Jack asked the substitute bartender about the absence. Phil had owned the bar for decades and seldom missed a night. The sub, a round-faced man with a scraggly beard, shrugged noncommittally and mentioned that Phil was sick. Normally, Phil would have automatically poured Jack his favorite brand, but tonight he changed brands, avoiding a minor embarrassment. He would have to drink the cheapest brand. After all, he’d not only lost his job, he was out a considerable sum of money.
He sat for two-drinks’-worth, settling down, letting the warmth of the liquor suffuse his body and soothe his soul. He’d taken out his phone and started searching for pictures of people who’d been at the party, when the bulky guy next to him got up to leave, revealing the presence of a young woman sitting two stools down, sipping a drink and looking at her watch.
He noted that she was model-quality in the looks department. A slim body, but with some shape in the blouse. Silky auburn hair, fine features. She looked up, trying to get the bartender’s attention, and he saw the flash of blue eyes. Very blue eyes. Trying to avoid staring, he went back to scrutinizing at his phone.
She took up her phone, and even over the rising chatter of the bar, he could hear her side of the conversation.
“You’re not coming? Seriously? That’s no excuse! Listen, I know about her. You know who I mean. I don’t care! Then don’t call me again!” She slapped the phone down on the bar and finished her drink. “Oh, damn,” she said to herself, her voice trembling slightly, her head down.
An opening! He thought. He leaned toward her. “Miss, on behalf of asshole men everywhere, I would like to formally apologize,” he said.
She looked up at him, slightly startled, then smiled, her eyes still glistening with tears. “Oh, you heard that? I guess I got kind of loud. Sorry.”
With a better look, he appreciated even more how truly gorgeous she was, with delicate lips upturned at the ends, a pert nose . . . and those beautiful, wide-set blue eyes. She was model material!
“Well, I have to admit, I am a recovering asshole,” he said, ducking his head in mock embarrassment. “But I’m two years’ reformed. Now a certified nice guy.”
“Well, you could relapse,” she said smiling again, but still only slightly. “Your sex does.”
“Not me. It helps when I meet nice people.” He raised his glass to indicate he meant her.
“You’re very kind.” She had the sweetest, silken voice.
“Look, let me buy you another drink,” he said raising his hand to the bartender. “I’ll listen, you talk, and I promise I’ll apologize as many times as it takes to make you feel better.”
After a long moment, she nodded her head agreeably, lifting her glass, turning toward him, and crossing her legs to reveal slim calves and a glimpse of perfect, smooth thigh. She had an undefinable aura about her, an allure, a delicious feminine magnetism.
Jack held out his hand. “I’m Jack.” He moved to the stool next to her.
She took his hand in hers, a delicate hand with gold rings on slim, manicured fingers.
“I’m Sam.”
• • •
Marc and Deborah—who were now the fairies E’iouy and A’eiio, since they had shed their flesh-suits—lay in an intimate, naked embrace on a blanket in the middle of the utter darkness of the pasture. The huge expanse of land around their country house far outside the capitol gave them perfect isolation for their mating flights.
They had flown wrapped in each other’s sylphlike arms and legs, borne on the blur of beating wings, rising slowly up and up, above the trees, into the moonless, velvet-black sky decorated with twinkling stars.
Suspended in the darkness, they had lovingly coupled, their skin becoming luminous as did that of mating fairies, singing the melodious song of love.
Had they been seen, they would have appeared as a softly glowing orb of light, floating in the sky.
Now, a faint glow remained as they separated to lay on their backs playing their guessing game. Which constellation marked the position of their home star? Was their home system even in this universe? Both questions were total speculation, since nobody really knew whether the wormholes used for their interplanetary travel connected regions within a universe, or between universes. In either case, their speculation always made them homesick, although even more thankful that they had each other.
“Twenty-three years, four months, and eight days,” she whispered.
“And let’s see . . .” He reached over and looked at the time on his phone. “. . . six hours and thirty-five minutes.”
“The Wardens won’t add to our sentence, will they? For the sighting?” She rubbed the back of her neck, where the Wardens had installed her coma chip. It had been decades since the surgery, but the slight bump of callous reminded her of the chip’s presence.
“I’m almost sure they won’t,” he said reassuringly, turning back to her and stroking her hair. “After all, it wasn’t any mistake on your part. And it only involved two creatures. And, I am sure that Sam and the others will neutralize them.”
“Thank goodness for Sam.”
“And the others, too.”
“Remind me, who did she get to help?” she asked.
“Good ones. Very adept at neutralizing. Mike, Steve, Robin, and, of course, Warren.”
“Of course, Warren. He loves to neutralize. And he’ll hold it over me, I’m sure. At least, we know Sam will handle it as well as it can be handled.”
“I feel sorry for the one who saw you.”
“Don’t,” she said emphatically, patting Marc’s smooth, bare chest. “He has it coming. He should have just kept his mouth shut.”
• • •
His first kiss with the stunning, sexy Sam was beyond wonderful, even magical. Her soft lips against his, her perfect warm body against his, and some indefinable allure—the result infused his soul with an entrancing, erotic warmth. Jack had never actually melted into any woman’s arms, but he did in Sam’s. They had just left the bar, and she had embraced him, turned up her beautiful face to his, and kissed him deeply. But she was the one who registered the effect.
“Whew!” she sighed, shaking her head apologetically. “I’m so sorry if that was too forward of me. I don’t do that. Maybe it was because of the state I’m in. Emotional and tipsy.”
Trying to recover, he smiled at both her declaration and the effect of the kiss. “Well, I like to think a little bit of it is me,” he managed to say puckishly.
They strolled the four blocks to his building, their arms around each other. They reached his apartment and entered. He had just closed the door and turned back to her, when she kissed him again, this time even more passionately. He felt hypnotized once again, but managed to recover enough to remember the proper etiquette for having a prospective bed partner over.
“Uh . . . can I get you a drink? I can make—”
But she interrupted him with yet another warm, deep kiss, and he found himself staring dumbly into those mesmerizing eyes. He remembered them being sky blue. Now they were green. Such a beautiful emerald green. He felt woozy.
Without speaking, she began to gently, deftly remove his clothes, slipping off his tie, his coat, his shirt, his undershirt, his shoes, his socks, his pants, his shorts. He stood there transfixed, watching the disrobing as if he were a bystander.
Then, she stood back, smiling, still mesmerizing him with those luminous, green eyes, and took off her own clothes.
Her undergarments fell to the floor, and he thrilled at the sight of her petite, perfect body, with shapely, perfect breasts and delicate curves. She embraced him, and he relished the warmth and indescribable softness of her skin. She led him into the bedroom, pulling back the covers he’d forgotten to make that morning, and laid him down.
He felt a sharp sting as she embraced him, but she whispered an immediate apology when he winced, declaring it was just “a ring I should have taken off, but I’m so us
ed to it.” He forgot the incident immediately, in the warm fog of lust.
Then the room faded.
• • •
Sam padded, barefoot and naked, through the living room, rummaging through her purse for her phone.
She dictated and sent the message, “He’s out, but he’ll be awake soon. You’re near?”
As if in answer, a series of loud thumps resounded on the door, and she opened it to reveal a hulking policeman in a dark blue uniform, grinning at her.
“Yeah, I figured you’d take care of him quick,” he chuckled in a deep, throaty voice. “You don’t waste time.”
She smiled. “Neither do you, Mike.”
He filled the doorway as he entered the apartment, followed by a hefty young woman in a flowered dress, and a slim, blond woman in hospital scrubs. None reacted visibly to Sam’s nakedness.
“He’s out?” asked the hefty, young woman in a breathy voice.
“Not for long, Steve,” said Sam. “Robin, where’s Warren?” she asked the young woman in scrubs.
“He got some kind of call to do with the Senate. He’s very important, you know,” Robin said with a large dollop of sarcasm. “How do you want to do this, Sam?”
Sam wrinkled her brow, as she pondered the strategy. “I think we send in Mike first. Start big. Then Steve—”
“Yeah,” said the hefty woman with the incongruous name of Steve. “Ya wanna go from uglier to ugliest,” she declared in a breathy, feminine voice.
Sam continued. “Then we go with Robin. By then, Warren should be here, and he can finish him off.”
With that, Mike began to shed his uniform, revealing a muscular, hairy body. Steve followed, her short buxom form a sharp contrast to the looming Mike. Then, Robin removed her hospital scrubs, her naked body slim and delicate with pale skin.
The naked Mike tapped his thick chest, and his skin and face sagged away from his body. He carefully slipped his head mask off to reveal a hideous, grinning face with yellow fangs sprouting from a protruding jaw. The effect was like that of a mutant bulldog. His skin fully shed, he stood as a gray-green, hulking monster, scratching his crotch luxuriantly.
By then, the portly young woman, Steve, had shed her skin to become a wrinkled, beady-eyed, squat-bodied male creature with a potato nose and a sparse crop of unkempt white hair. Steve’s voice transformed from a softly feminine timbre to a litany of masculine, guttural grunts.
Robin’s emergence from her flesh-suit was like that of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. She was a slightly more petite version of her dear friend A’eiio. She freed her gossamer fairy wings from the flesh-suit and fluttered them to limber up her flight muscles, shook her matted silver hair to fluff it out, and stretched lithely.
Sam peeked into the bedroom, pausing for a moment before turning back. “He’s coming around,” she whispered to the group. “You’re on.”
• • •
Jack opened his eyes to behold a bedroom that was moving, shifting, now expanding, now contracting. Was he drunk? No, he’d been drunk. This wasn’t like drunk. The room took on vibrant colors that began to slither and undulate across the walls and over the ceiling—orange, blue, green, red, purple.
Panting in shock and fear, Jack peered around the room, looking for the beautiful woman who had just shed her clothes. She had left. Noises in the living room. The colors still swirled madly.
Then, something huge appeared in the doorway made it go dark!
DEAR GOD, A MONSTER!
Looming over him, a hulking gray-green body, a face with depth-less onyx eyes. Long yellow fangs jutted from a massive, protruding jaw. He whimpered in fear, his heart pounding. The monster loosed a deep guttural growl.
He cowered against the headboard, whimpering, as the monster backed away into the shadows.
Then a squeal, like a pig’s, arose from the foot of his bed. He peered down at the source of the sound. Standing there, a gnarled creature with scraggly white hair, beady eyes, a potato of a nose, and a squat body. It grinned with crooked, stained teeth, and squealed again.
“PLEASE!” He wailed. “What? . . . who? . . .” He shut his eyes in hopes that the apparitions would vanish and with it the gut-wrenching fear that he was going insane.
A low, reverberating hum filled the room, and he felt a breeze waft over his naked body. He opened his eyes, gazing upward.
Hovering over him was the winged creature! The same slim, white-winged creature with the sapphire eyes he had seen before. Penetrating eyes! He felt as if her gaze pierced his body.
“You!” he moaned. “It’s you!”
To preserve some shred of sanity, he shut his eyes again to try to recover himself. He held them tightly closed, trying to block the sound as well, until the bed shook. Something huge had climbed onto it. A bone-rattling, guttural growl rose beside him. He opened his eyes to see a beast from hell. A furred, demonic creature that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. He shrieked in terror, wetness welling between his legs.
The beast thrust its hairy face into his, its eyes gleaming yellow, its bared fangs dripping with spittle. It opened its jaws and howled, it’s hot, fetid breath smelling of rotting meat making him choke and gag.
Staring horrified into the face of death, he began to sob piteously, whispering over and over “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no . . .”
He felt a pressure on his arm, maybe a jab.
Darkness.
• • •
“I saved you from getting banished, that’s for sure.” Senator Warren F. Lee chuckled and clasped his hands over his barrel chest, leaning back in the chair and grinning at Senator Deborah Bright. Senator Lee liked all meat, even the red meat of politics. At that moment, he would like some real meat, though, raw. He liked to drag a haunch into the forest surrounding his sprawling ranch and gnaw on it and howl at the full moon. He grinned an appropriately werewolfish grin.
“Well, Warren, the others had a little part . . . Mike the ogre, Steve the troll, Robin the fairy . . . and, of course, Sam the pixie,” said Deborah. She sat, across from him in his Senate office. It was larger and more lavishly decorated than hers, given his seniority as a six-term Senator. The walls were plastered with plaques and pictures of him with celebrities—foreign leaders, film action heroes, billionaires, generals.
“Well, I was the climax. He wet himself, y’know. And I had to come in the window. People out front could’ve recognized me.”
Deborah smiled but it was a smile meant to temper her disagreement with this boastful werewolf. “Well, Sam’s seduction . . . her pheromones, the hallucinogenic she gave him—”
“Yeah, that little pixie sure knows how to enchant males on this planet, I’ll give her that. I hope for your sake that he backs off.”
“Well, I hope so. We’ll see what the Wardens say. I’ve reported to them.”
“And the other guy? The waiter who collided with you?”
“Wendy took him.”
“She’ll enlist him. Angels are good at that. But to get back to us. It was dangerous, sneaking over there, takin’ off the flesh-suit and all. So you owe me, Debbie.”
“Of course.” Deborah took a deep breath. Now would come the inevitable cost of any favor given by Warren Lee.
“I want you to support increased funding for my military base. For the new weapons center.”
Deborah smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Your military base? Yeah, well—”
“Hey, Debbie, we need those weapons, you know we do. These creatures will be in another war soon, for sure.”
“Well, Warren, it means going up against a lot of—”
“Look, Debbie, I know what’s coming. I fought in every damn war for the last seventy years, in one identity or another. I have always defended freedom for whoever I fought for.”
“True, but eventually, we have to guide the planet toward a lasting, planetary peace.”
Lee stood up and leaned his beefy frame over his desk. “I been marooned on this damn plan
et for almost twice that. Just ’cause I killed a few more of my fellow werewolves than I shoulda. I’m gonna chair the Military Services Committee next term. I like playing with these species’ war toys. So, vote for it.”
Deborah sat back in her chair, regarding Lee coldly. “And you getting with these ‘war toys’ means a lot more death and destruction. These creatures are self-destructive enough as it is.”
“I do not care! They do it to themselves, and I enjoy the sport. Now, if you don’t mind, I got a lunch date with a defense contractor.”
She stood and nodded goodbye and, with a grim expression on her face, left.
• • •
Jack emerged from the enveloping blackness slowly. Only gradually did he become aware that he was lying on his bed, in his bedroom, and the morning light was coming through the window.
A swirl of horrifying memories rose to claw at his sanity. Terrible, terrible memories. Hideous faces, smothering hot breath, flapping wings, piercing eyes.
He experimented with moving his limbs. They were leaden. He tried lifting his head, and the throbbing headache made him give up the idea for now. So, he let himself lie there, trying to piece together his memories.
Finally, he decided to just endure the headache, and hauled himself up to a sitting position, enduring the throbbing. He looked down to find himself fully dressed in pants and shirt. He even had his socks on.
But he thought he remembered being naked, so vulnerable, under the nightmarish onslaught.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and managed to stand. Holding on to bed, then dresser, then doorway, he staggered into the living room. He scanned the area, seeing his coat and tie neatly draped over the back of a chair at the little kitchen table. He shook his head in confusion. He never did that.
A bottle sat on his sink—the liquor he kept in the cabinet over the sink. It was empty. He thought he remembered buying a new one only a day ago at the liquor store on the next block. Again, confusion. In the past, he had been known to significantly reduce the level of a full bottle. But not that significantly.
Mythicals Page 3
