Natural Beauty

by Meraki P. Lyhne

  The two men finished getting dressed and followed Daniel from the master bedroom and out the door. Thoughts about Aaron’s place in it all were postponed yet again.

  Daniel headed for the school level and knocked on the door to the first classroom. He focused on making his eyes golden without doing the wooing thing. He’d figured out how by now, but if he was hungry, it could be troublesome.

  Someone called out for them to enter, and Daniel opened the door. The Sire knelt and motioned for the kids to do the same.

  “Thank you, please rise,” Daniel said, entering the room. Seldon and Elakdon followed in, and the Sire bowed deeply, the cubs following.

  “Thank you for the respect you show me as a guest in your House,” Elakdon said.

  The teacher and class stood again, and Daniel scouted to see if he could find Imdon. If he wasn’t in that class, hopefully the teacher knew where he was. But there he was, at the back of the room.

  “I was wondering whether a little field trip would interrupt your schedule, Sire…”

  “Todon, My Prince. And no, I don’t think I have anything more interesting than a field trip planned.” The Sire looked out over his class, and the kids seemed ecstatic about the prospect.

  Daniel tossed his head toward the door. “Follow me then.”

  “Yes, My Prince,” the cubs exclaimed, and chaos erupted.

  “Hey, hey, find your partners and move slowly,” Sire Todon said.

  One of the kids did a masterful impression of a Jim-Carry-sneak in slow motion making Daniel laugh and miss movie night. He was so going to watch Ace Ventura soon.

  The teacher finally managed to get the kids filed along the wall, two by two. “My Prince, we are ready.”

  Daniel led them through the halls toward the throne room. “I have a special little assignment for all of you today. Have any of you been to the throne room, yet?”

  “No,” a chorus of children’s voices sounded.

  “In the old House?”

  “Yes, I have!” a cub shouted.

  “Well, today we’re going to go see what it looks like in this House.”

  They got to the huge foyer from where almost everything was accessible. The throne room was even further into the mountain structure, and it was an oval shaft going from the lowest floor and all the way up to a huge skylight window. Daniel didn’t even want to know how much glass covered it—he just knew it had to weigh a fuck-ton considering the many metal beams supporting it. There had to be sixty feet from the ground to the window, and three spiral staircases with symmetrically distributed landings coiled from the floor to the top. All their relics were placed in pockets in the wall, and the staircases were wide enough for three people to stand side by side without any danger of one being shoved over the railing.

  “My armor made it, it seems,” Seldon said, pointing.

  The teacher gasped. “Look up there. That’s Lord Lokil-Nol’s armor.”

  Daniel saw plenty of armors and wondered if the cubs could find it if he couldn’t.

  “Do you want to come up and see it?”

  “Yes, Please, Lord Lokil-Nol,” the cubs said in unison, and Daniel couldn’t help but grin at the droned out and drilled in tone. They all followed Seldon, and it took almost five minutes to make it up the staircase once they had determined which one. It was like being in a museum. Seldon finally stopped at a piece of armor, and Daniel got a mental image of the hot Incubus in it. The leather and metal were scared and worn, and Daniel couldn’t help but run a finger across a deep nick.

  “That almost took off my arm,” Seldon said quietly. Daniel didn’t manage to suppress a full body shiver at the thought of Seldon being that badly hurt.

  “Do you have armor, My Prince?” Imdon asked.

  “No. I’m very young, and I was born in the human world.” He then remembered the armor he’d worn at a Halloween party. That certainly didn’t count.

  “I want to be a brave warrior when I grow up,” a boy declared.

  “Me, too,” a little girl said. “I want to make sure all the humans can’t hurt us anymore.”

  “And how would you do that?” Sire Todon asked the girl.

  “Kill them,” she said, shrugging.

  Daniel’s stomach dropped. “Well, that would seriously damage our feeding sources,” Daniel said. “We share the world with humans just like we share it with the animals in the forests, the birds in the sky, and fish in the lakes. We’re all part of the same world, and we all have an equal right to be here.” Daniel glanced at Elakdon because he was the one who’d taught him that, and Daniel had since thought about it.

  “But the humans don’t think so,” the girl said.

  “No, I guess they don’t,” Daniel said, saddened that the troubles of the Kingdom had made such an impact on the youngest minds of his people. They couldn’t grow up to think every human their enemy. Knowing that a mentality like that could be a danger to the Cubi by turning to raped energy, Daniel wondered how best to tackle that problem in the decisions he and his council made for the future. He certainly thought it relevant to mention. “It doesn’t mean we have to be like them.”

  “How do we make them stop hurting us?” the girl persisted.

  Daniel didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know. His only idea so far was to expand his people so that the humans didn’t dare.

  “May I?” Elakdon asked.

  “Of course,” Daniel said. “I’d love to learn from an old and wise King, too.”

  “And there you have it, cubs,” Elakdon said, pointing at Daniel. “Learning. Learning about what we fear helps us no longer be afraid of it because it helps us to understand it.”

  “So we have to learn about the humans,” Imdon said, nodding.

  “When we collect humans to feed upon, they’re afraid of us, too,” Todon said. “We work with them to teach them our ways and the world they’ll live in with us because our way of life is different from theirs. That’s what they fear. The differences. They often fear all the new things they come into contact with.”

  Daniel managed a straight face because that was a very watered-down version of how the humans learned about the Cubi ways in the stables.

  “So if the humans learned about us then maybe they wouldn’t be afraid of us and come and attack us?” the girl asked.

  “Oh, that’s another can of worms,” Seldon mumbled.

  Out the corner of his eye, Daniel noticed a spider. “When I was a little boy, I slept in a tent in my backyard. I was nine, I think.” A few of the kids jumped, raising their hands, so apparently, they were nine years old. “I thought I was very brave. Until I saw a huge spider.” Daniel held up his hands, and the cubs laughed, some making ew noises. “I then learned that my dad…human dad, actually, slept on a mattress under the shed roof to be able to help me, should an emergency occur in the middle of the night. Like, spider attacks, I guess. Anyway, he barged into the tent half a minute after I started screaming hell and brimstone. I told him to kill it, but he picked it up in his hand, and I watched as that ugly thing climbed around on his hand, and I was sure it was going to bite him and he’d die or something.” Daniel stepped closer to the wall and picked up the spider before kneeling in front of the cubs. They gasped and stepped back. “It was the same kind as this one. He taught me that this kind wasn’t dangerous. He taught me that it ate flies and mosquitoes and that it actually helped me by doing that.”

  “It’s still ugly,” a boy said.

  “Yes, but it has a purpose in life, too. Just because we don’t know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t important. We carried the spider outside and placed it in the stack of firewood. I’ve never killed a spider since.” Daniel let the spider climb onto the wall again, and it scurried away.

  “Now I know who’s going to catch the spiders at home.” Seldon shivered.

  Daniel laughed, imagining Seldon standing on a chair, yelling for Daniel to get the spider. “And we know where your armor is if we ever get attacked by spiders.
”

  Seldon slowly turned his head to glare at Daniel, but the tugging smile kinda ruined the ominous look he was going for. The cubs giggled.

  “Spiders weren’t what we were here for, so let’s get to the throne.” Daniel took Seldon’s hand, and they descended the stairs again.

  “It doesn’t look like a throne,” a boy said.

  “That’s because it’s just a chair,” another one said.

  “It should be much bigger!” Imdon exclaimed, raising his arms over his head.

  Sire Todon explained to the cubs what Seldon had to Daniel not long ago in the old House. That the throne was merely to raise the King to be able to see all he was responsible for and to remind him who he had to serve.

  “It also means it’s easier for you to see me and find me to tell me if something’s wrong.” Daniel took a seat on the top platform, but not in the old chair. He then motioned for everyone else to sit. Seldon and Elakdon took a seat on the platform just below Daniel’s, and everyone else sat on the floor. Daniel pulled the papers from the file. “Not long ago, Imdon came to me and told me about something this House is missing. Today, I asked you here to be my royal advisors on a topic. The playground.”

  The cubs grew restless and whooped, so Daniel handed them all the papers. Sire Todon looked awestricken, a smile stretching on his handsome face. Daniel sat back, pleased with how his idea for the day had turned out.

  An hour later, the cubs had managed to find what they liked, discussing it and laying it out on the floor. Sire Todon had helped keep order, and Daniel thought the guy was the perfect teacher. Patient and kind. The cubs respected him, and Daniel glanced at Seldon, wondering if he recognized any of what Daniel had asked Seldon for once they’d gotten to the point where Seldon talked to him instead of just slapping him.

  Daniel had thought the entire Cubi people barbaric. Not anymore. Instead, he recognized the different needs at the different levels of their society, and Seldon was the one taking care of the tough end of the scale. Could that insight help them when they had to educate the humans on Cubi culture? So they wouldn’t just think the Cubi people to be sex demons who stole humans to rape them?

  Sire Todor marked the layout of the playground and collected the papers, discarding the ones the kids had decided shouldn’t be there. He then handed them to Daniel. Next step of the plan was to get a set of experienced eyes on the plans to see what worked. He couldn’t wait to see the cubs playing on the playground they themselves had helped build. But they also needed way more than one. This one, however, was going to be opened in a celebratory manner. It was to be a marker of positivity and new possibilities in the cubs’ minds.

  Chapter Five

  They made it back to Daniel’s office, and he sat in his chair and looked over what the cubs had finally agreed upon. But something kept nagging at the back of his mind.

  “Ela, can I run a loose thought by you?”

  “Of course, young Prince, that’s why I’m here.”

  “The little girl said something that made me think. All that’s happened has to mean she’s not the only one afraid of humans now. That could be counter-productive since we also feed from humans. It could bring about the kind of feelings that would let us look at humans as far less valuable. It could be…”

  “Dangerous, yeah.” Elakdon sat back, looking contemplative. “And your loose thought?”

  “What would happen if we went public?”

  “Oh, shit.” Elakdon chuckled. “We lived openly when I was a child. When I was around two hundred, humans decided the Cubi needed to find our place.” By the tone, Daniel guessed he knew where the humans wanted the Cubi’s place to be. “Royals around the world were in trouble, too, and the rise of the monotheistic religions weren’t making things easier for us. We decided to lay low until such a time where we can live in peace among humans again. Now is not that time.”

  “I meant if we’re forced. If they make us.”

  “I don’t know, Beaudon, but I think you’ve done well so far in preparing avenues to aid it. The nightclubs, Heimli’s work to raise some of our Minglers to positions of social power, those are plans the other Royals are right now working on implementing in their nations as well.”

  Daniel nodded because he already knew that, and maybe he was just being impatient. He hated the waiting and not knowing what was going to happen. He was afraid the nightclubs would backfire, but the publicity would hopefully keep the military from going in, since it would look like domestic terrorism. It was—against the Cubi shared nation—but humans didn’t know that. In the end, the council had decided the need to feed was higher than the risk of military moving in on the clubs. But plenty of guards had been stationed at every club to look out for covert hostiles.

  “Should we ask one from your Council how it’s going out there?” Seldon asked.

  “Yeah. We could go see Geodin. See if Aaron is there, too.” Daniel looked at his phone to see his schedule. “I have to dose Marcadon now, and I’m hungry, too, so I think I’ll help suck it out of him. Unless you’re hungry again?” Daniel looked at Seldon, smiling.

  “Nah, I can hold out a few more hours. Make him feel valuable to you.”

  Daniel’s smile fell. “He doesn’t?”

  “He has ups and downs at the moment.”

  “I’ll make that an up then,” Daniel said, got up, and left the office.

  He hurried to the bathroom and cleaned up for what he knew would probably be a wild feeding. It usually was when he joined in, but he hadn’t the past week because of everything that had happened and with Seldon in the hospital. After he returned home, Daniel had focused on getting him well-fed and better, and Marcadon had encouraged it. But Seldon was almost back to his old self and good health. Daniel had never intended on Marcadon feeling pushed aside because Daniel had also seen what being dosed that heavily did to the otherwise strong and stoic Incubus.

  Daniel had felt a bit stretched. He hadn’t even met the new Changeling or found out how he’d come to be among them. He wondered what Elakdon had seen in him to force a change. Maybe he was particularly hot.

  Once done washing up, Daniel went to Marcadon’s apartment, but he didn’t bother putting on clothes. The apartment was the size of Seldon’s old apartment except it didn’t really have a front door as much as it did a hallway to separate it from Daniel’s huge ass apartment. It was even bigger than the one he’d been moved into at the old House. He wondered if the old structure should keep its name, but since Great meant the main House of the Kingdom, he figured he’d rename it as the Grand House of Dahlidin to honor what her vision had meant for the Cubi people of the West Kingdom.

  “Marca?”

  “In here!”

  Daniel found Levidon and Marcadon vegetating naked on the couch. Marcadon smiled, but it was one of those I’m expected to look upbeat smiles. So dutiful, just like his dad.

  “You look knackered,” Daniel declared.

  “That obvious, huh?” Marcadon turned his attention back to the TV, and Daniel plopped down next to him, looking at the screen. He had no idea what movie it was, but it looked like a shoot ‘em all flick.

  “Do you want to do a Jim Carry movie night with me soon?”

  Marcadon chuckled. “Only if it’s the Mask.”

  The sneaky walk that Daniel had seen a cub do was in that movie, too, he remembered. “Sure, the Mask.”

  Levidon leaned forward to look at Daniel. “My, Prince, did you strolled in here in all your naked glory to ask about a movie night?”

  “No. I have an hour and a half before my next meeting.”

  Marcadon glanced at him, and Daniel tried a big smile. “You’re staying after you dose me?” Marcadon asked, looking surprised.

  “If you’d like.”

  “Yeah.” Marcadon both looked and sounded relieved.

  “You dare take him on alone, My Prince?” Levidon asked.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I will tend to other duties then.” Levido
n gave Marcadon a kiss on the lips, got up, and left.

  Marcadon looked at Daniel, and he looked far from as dutiful and tired. “Any ideas?”

  Daniel wagged his brows. “A few. You get four doses, but we can do one at a time and take turns fucking each other all over the place.”

  Marcadon laughed. “Oh, you’re on. Shall we start here?”

  Daniel grabbed the lube from the table and straddled Marcadon’s legs. He leaned in for a kiss, and Marcadon sighed into his mouth as he returned it. “I’m sorry if it seems like I’ve neglected being a close friend to you the past week.”

  “You focused on my dad, I get that, and I can certainly appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, I know you do.” Daniel sat back to look at Marcadon. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the hardship you’ve chosen to take upon yourself to be my Fountain. I do know it’s difficult, and I do want to help you through it.”

  Marcadon smiled genuinely. “Thank you.” He took the lube, and Daniel heard the slick stuff squirt from the bottle. He bit his lip in anticipation of something cold hitting his ass, but he still sucked in a breath when Marcadon spread it between his cheeks.

  Daniel liked helping to suck the dose out of Marcadon because he was never dosed when he did. The only doses allowed around Marcadon were Daniel’s, or in the case when they fled the hotel in Vegas, Caledon’s because he was the next in line dosed heavily by Daniel. Well, Seldon’s worked, too, but he couldn’t ease the dose in his own son, which left Caledon and Daniel to do that.

  Marcadon pushed a finger in, and Daniel shoved all thoughts from his mind, focusing fully on his Fountain. He was going to feel very appreciated.

  “Oh, God, you’re doing that thing.”

  “Do you like that thing?” Daniel asked, grinning.

  “Fuck yes, I like that thing,” Marcadon whispered, pulled Daniel closer, and shoved one more finger up his ass. Daniel enjoyed the rough touch. He’d come to enjoy that very Marcadon-feel to their feeding. He found he’d come to enjoy just about every way of feeding once he focused on the one he was with. It was yet another Royal trait.