Serve

by Laura Wylde

  Todd must have been feeling better. He sat on the edge of his bed, his feet on the floor, a terry cloth robe hiding his nudity. Thaddeus was sitting beside him, with only a sheet drawn up around his waist. They both looked up when I came in, and Thaddeus asked, “did you have a good walk?”

  “I did.” He and Todd moved over to the far end of the bed, and Todd patted the empty space behind him. It was a generous space. He had a king- sized bed with cushions ballooning from the headboards. Tara still had her arm around my waist, and I reached down to see if her firm bottom was willing. She didn’t pull away, so I scooped her into my arms and carried her to the bed.

  She clung to me as my hands reached up and explored the bare flesh under the shirt. She let go only long enough for me to pull the shirt up over her head so I could kiss her breasts and flat, lovely stomach. Then, she pushed me over, so she was on top and began kissing me the same way, starting at my earlobes, her tongue traveling down my neck, her fingertips dancing in the curly hairs of my chest, an entire explosion of sensations generating with each touch.

  She explored me! Her soft little hands and warm tongue tasted every inch of my body, even gliding over my thighs, and cradling the family jewels. She hovered above me, her hands guiding my shaft inside. I drove home and tumbled down… down into a sea of pleasure.

  Even as I lay back, catching my breath, Thaddeus was taking another turn with her. I watched drowsily as she sprawled over him like slithering silk, finding all his erotic zones, bringing them to full play. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching out occasionally to stroke that warm flesh as she made love to my team- mate. It was damp with sweat but the sweat was like dew drops on her sun-kissed skin.

  Todd liked to nuzzle and cuddle. She curled around him like a kitten while her tongue licked at his chest, neck and ears. Wherever her hands stroked him, golden dust glittered for an instant in the air before dissipating.

  There was something though, between her and Adrien that was different. They didn’t immediately engage in a passionate embrace. They sat cross-legged, facing each other. They lifted their hands so only their fingertips touched and gazed into each other’s eyes. After a few minutes, they simultaneously sighed, their foreheads touched, then they wrapped their arms around each other’s necks and kissed. When they made love, they seemed to meld together effortlessly, their bodies pumping in perfect rhythm. When they finished, they both broke away panting. It was then that something happened. Something nudged my mind. It wasn’t disturbing. It was somehow familiar and comforting, like a loved one returning home after a long period of time.

  We were all too exhausted to move. We drowsed. I went to sleep for a few minutes. When I awoke, Tania had just gotten out of the shower and had changed back into her original set of clothing, which had recently been washed and dried. She was making coffee in the kitchen. I showered off, put on fresh clothes and joined her.

  She sat across the table, holding her cup with both hands, a wobbly smile on her face. “You must think I’m a wild child,” she said.

  I searched the brown liquid swirling in my cup for a tactful way to reply. “I think you are very bold. Very brave, but I don’t think you understand what you’re up against.”

  She chuckled and set her cup down. “Not that, silly. The way I behaved. In the bedroom.”

  “Ah,” I said, pretending to understand, but not really. You mean the sex?” She nodded. “With all of us?” She nodded again and pecked at a nonexistent crumb on the table. “That’s a wild child?” I rocked back in my chair to think about that. “It’s a good thing then, isn’t it? I like it. You are our wild child.”

  She laughed. It was a light, musical sound that rolled off her lips without practice, like the unaffected delight of a child. “I’ve never really been a pass-around girl. In fact, I’ve never really been anybody’s kind of girl at all. Just the neighbor’s kid that hangs out with the boys and is good at baseball and shooting a gun.”

  “But those are good abilities, aren’t they?”

  The laughter peeled lightly around the room again. If all it took was a question to make her laugh, I was going to find things to ask her all day. She put a hand on my forearm stretched out on the table. “They are good abilities when you’re twelve. When you’re fourteen. When you wish to spend all your time with your older brothers and prove to them you are as good as they are. Do you know what happens when a tomboy grows up?”

  I wasn’t following her very well, so I shook my head without a clue. It was an honest answer. “I’ll tell you what happens. She doesn’t have a date for the junior or senior prom. She watches the girls her age go out with the boys she helped tear apart a car engine. She watches them get married and have children. Not one of the boys, not one, ever sees her as a woman.”

  I thought about the first day in the office, the way she had bulldozed in wearing a color-coordinated suit jacket over a pair of sturdily constructed pants, the style a little too conservative and masculine to be considered sexy, her spiked hair bristling. She was a very pretty torpedo, but the first thing you noticed when she appeared was that she was a torpedo. “Did you ever give anyone a chance to see you as a woman?”

  This time she didn’t laugh. She wrapped her hands back around the cup and stared into it. “I don’t really know how. My mother died when I was three years old. Cancer. I was a surprise package. They hadn’t really intended to have more children. My next youngest brother is seven years older than I am, so it was a life of being raised by men.” She sighed and propped her chin on her fists. “I could have found, I guess, a wilderness man. The cattle ranchers and the lumbermen like women who can work hard and don’t mind the solitude. But my father was a sheriff. Both my brothers went into law enforcement. By the time I was twelve years old, I felt like a dispatcher.”

  “You were following in their footsteps?”

  She nodded. “At first, I was going to transfer directly into the police academy from high school, but my grade average was very high, and I was encouraged by the school counselor to apply for a scholarship. So, I did, and I was accepted into the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I studied principles of law, sociology, psychology, pathology and forensics. When you’re putting yourself through school on grants and scholarships instead of your daddy’s money, you are required to maintain a high- grade average. Just passing won’t do. I spent four years in the largest city I had ever been in my life, with a swinging metropolitan population, and never got to see more of college life- style than a few field trips into the mountains.”

  She said it like it was very sad and unfortunate, yet it seemed to me that it proved her mettle. “I think you are a remarkable woman, and we are lucky you are our wild child.”

  A big smile spread across her face. “I was attracted to all four of you from the start. Leave it up to me to always be the odd ball. The first time I tumble, I don’t settle for one man. I fall in love with four men all at once.”

  “Our mating call is hard to ignore,” joked Todd, walking into the kitchen. He limped a little, but looked refreshed, even energetic. He poured himself a cup of coffee and added a little brandy. “It’s so high-pitched, it can be heard only on a subliminal level and only by women. As soon as you walked in that door, we were all doing the phoenix whistle. Can’t be resisted, kitten. It’s our fault, all in all.”

  She cocked her head at me. “Is he serious?”

  “No, but we do secrete this chemical that drives women to us like bees to flowers.”

  “You’re not serious, either. So, what about it? Am I your pass-around girl or am I a member of your team?”

  I stared away from her. She was so darned cute, I wanted to lock her away in a china closet. “I brought you candy,” I offered. “I guess that means you’re a team member.”

  I called the other two members into the kitchen and told them to rehearse their training exercises and pack their field kits. “Eat lightly tonight and a high-carb breakfast tomorrow. And Todd, put the brandy away. No morn
ing hangovers. Bright and early, we’re going into the tunnels.”

  Adrien

  The badgers had worked through the night to discover another pathway to the main chamber, yet always came to a dead end or emptied out into another twisted pathway of the maze. Discouraged, they were on their way home when we appeared and met them on the long, tumbling lawns of the park. The lawn felt safe. A troll couldn’t hide in the short grass rolling away from the shadows.

  Their leader was a construction engineer who went by “Foreman Oates,” or usually just “Foreman”. I don’t even know if he had a real first name. He looked like a foreman; a bit barrel-chested with a short beard and a balding head. “There is one cave passage from the alternative entrance the bears could get through, but they would have to remain in their human forms until they reached the large corridor. There is a fifteen- hundred- foot natural tunnel, three- and -a- half- feet high. Large enough for a man to crawl through, but not a bear.”

  “Fifteen-hundred-feet,” muttered Adonis, shaking his head. “No. It leaves them too vulnerable. Thaddeus, call the bears and tell them to remain guard at the other entrance. We’re coming in through the grate. Let’s see if we can flush them out.”

  Foreman had sorrowful looking eyes, probably from being around dust and debris so much, but it did give him a very sympathetic expression. “Boss,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t know how many you’re going to find down there. We picked up a lot of scents, both human and troll, but they came from all directions. They’ve buried themselves deep and they’ve set up housekeeping.”

  Adonis shifted the assault weapon he was carrying, sliding it more to the back. He wasn’t comfortable with guns. None of us were, except Tara. She kept her weapon at ready, her legs slightly spread to balance perfectly on her well-built hips. She didn’t really get it. Unless she was fortunate enough to hit a troll in the eyes, or repeatedly at point blank, those bullets were little more than b-b’s to a troll’s dense skin. Our ripping talons were far more effective. I had to admire her bravado, however. She lifted her little chin and said firmly, “then we’re the house cleaners.”

  I know the boss didn’t like it much at all. Having Tara along, that is. He felt she was a liability, and she probably was, but she was good at rallying the troops. Among the shapeshifting units, we were the odd balls. Adonis came unglued around water. He even had a hard time talking with mer people. Thaddeus suffered more paranoia than a goat tied out for bait. With his leprechaun DNA, Todd was a hybrid. And me? At twenty-eight years old and the first of a new line, I was probably the youngest phoenix alive. Our stats haven’t been very impressive compared to some of the other precincts with well-established phoenix teams. We needed that hyper-dose of confidence Tara gave us.

  Foreman shifted his expression from Adonis to Tara, then back to Adonis, his drooping eyes looking even weepier. “All I’m saying is, you’ll find it easier flushing goblins out of the catacombs then you will rounding up these trolls. The best thing you can hope for is to rescue the victims safely.” He hitched up his belt, which kept dropping below his waist. “I lost a nephew to trolls about twelve years ago. He was digging around alone in a cave he had no business being in. He would have been Adrien’s age if he was still alive. A young badger is no match for a troll.”

  He and his team walked away, muttering about the foolishness of youth. He left behind a cloud of gloom. That cloud seemed to follow us to Turtle Pond in a low-laying fog that flickered with uneasy shadows. I was walking just behind the others, using the video option of my camera to record the thick pattern of footsteps that went around the bridge and down the embankment, when I heard Todd jog into step next to me. “Hey,” he said, tightening an arm around my neck. “What did the troll say to the box of rocks?”

  I took a stab at the answer. “Will you marry me?”

  He roared with laughter, the sound temporarily brightening the air. “Good one! The answer is supposed to be, ‘nothing. Both are too dumb to speak.’”

  “I like my answer better.”

  “I do too. I do too. Say, what do you get when you cross a troll with a dumb waiter?”

  I shrugged. We were approaching the edge of the pond now. Our target area had been under surveillance so long, the ground was packed and hard with layers of footprints piling over the top of each other. There would be nothing to study here. I was sure I had captured four or five troll prints in the video scan and was eager to turn them over to Henry. I wrapped up the record and put the camera away in a water-proof case. “I give.”

  “You have a Set IV dinner service.”

  Adonis scoffed from in back. “You leprechauns must be getting desperate for jokes. That wasn’t even funny. Look lively, now. We’re going to enter the grate close together.” He was trying to sound hardy with his sailor talk, but I knew he was quaking inside. He wasn’t afraid of water. He was afraid of our limitations in the water. He had lost someone because he could not swim fast enough as a human or dive deeply enough as a phoenix. It was the most powerless he had ever felt. We all knew the story and it made all of us feel uneasy in water.

  Under our outer clothing, we wore wetsuits. We stripped down to them quickly and rolled our clothes into our waterproof packs. Adonis took the lead, diving into the water with Tara close behind him, then Thaddeus, then me. Todd went through last, lighting up the water behind him with a soft, golden glow that allowed us to see each other clearly in the murky pond.

  The tunnel murmured and boomed with Manhattan’s busy life suspended above it. There were lighting fixtures scattered throughout the manmade part of it, but the fixtures faltered, then ceased as metal and concrete gave way to rock and dirt. We reached an area where the tunnel branched off in several directions. Adonis turned toward Tara. We were using headlamps turned down to their dimmest settings. Tara looked pale and spooked in the wan circle of light. “Where to now?” He asked her.

  She hesitated, then pointed to the second to the last on the right. “I believe it was that one. Adrien, can you remember from your vision?”

  She had looked down and picked the one that looked the most like a trail was leading through it. I noticed the clear line through the middle of the ground clutter and nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  We stole through the tunnel stealthily, in single file, but we could have chanted like boy scouts with little effect on the noise volume. The tunnels groaned, clanked and rustled with their own mysteries, completely oblivious to the sounds of trespassers. My human instincts were taking over. My hand reached behind me for my assault weapon, and I crouched, my eyes straining ahead with each step, my breathing loud and rapid.

  Abruptly, the tunnel opened into the main chamber. Our lamps flashed around impotently, swallowed up by darkness. We turned up the lights. The chamber was empty; completely empty. The battery- operated lamps were gone, as were the troll stools, the boxes of personal plunder, the tools and weapons. Nothing was left but the charcoal remains of a campfire.

  Adonis squatted down to test the coals. “Still warm in the middle. They’ve been gone four to six hours. They must have moved into the cave system. Thaddeus, you and Tara take the east corridor, the rest of us will take the one on the left. The two channels are close enough together that we should be able to hear each other if we call out. As long as we don’t go too far in.” He gave Tara a warning look. “Don’t go too far in.”

  She promised to let Thaddeus take the lead, which would have been reassuring if it had been anyone else but Tara. Thaddeus knew the most about combatting trolls, but probably the least about combative women. He was putty in her hands. He would dive into a nest of harpies at her bidding. If there was a tug-of-war between what was safe and what Tara wanted, she was going to win. Adonis watched them go, doubt thundering through his eyes, then beckoned for us to follow him.

  The cave corridor scuttled with dark, pulpy things that slid along the walls and hid in corners. Water drops ran down the dirt walls and gathered in puddles. Something black and ominou
s flitted past the light reflected in my headlamp and I turned my head to track it. I saw it jump. Instinctively, I jumped a step backward and shapeshifted. The troll roared and swung back with its bladed fist. I flew as high as the corridor would allow, extending my talons in front of me.

  It was difficult to maneuver in the cave tunnel. The top was uneven, bowing high in spots and dipping low in others. The walls were not wide enough to allow a full spread of my wings. I tucked them in at a sharp angle and did a loop through the air, balancing out just behind the troll’s head. Before the slow-thinking troll could turn around, I drove my talons into the back of its neck, pulling with all my strength, my wings doing a steady backstroke as I tore at the skin. I curved my beak and stabbed him in one eye. He raised his hands, bellowing, swinging his weapon wildly. I let go and flew to the top of the cave, barely missing a swing that managed to slice away the tips of three tail feathers.

  I saw another troll creeping along the walls of the cave, and another not far behind it. Their ability for gripping rocks with their hands and feet made it easy for them to climb the walls or even walk upside down inside caves. I readied myself for another battle when I heard Adonis call, “fall back! Fall back! Do not engage.”

  I swished my wings cautiously, flying backward, keeping my eyes on the enemy. Strewn across the corridor floor was the troll I had killed, still gurgling, unable to comprehend he was dead, and three others Adonis and Todd had battled. Deep inside the corridor, I saw the dark movements of at least another dozen trolls.

  It was more comforting to be a phoenix in the main chamber. It had a high ceiling. It had wide open spaces. I flew around the nearly circular cavern, screeching, staring wild-eyed at the caves and the creatures that lurked within them. Todd tumbled in a backward roll, then caught himself, his wings spread and hovering just off the ground. Adonis nearly collided with him. “Back to the tunnel!” He ordered. He flew up once, higher than the rest of us, and barked, “Thaddeus, Tara! Back to the tunnel. There are too many. Go back! Do not engage!”