The Other Kind (The Progeny of Evolution Series)

by Arsuaga, Mike

  “Okay,” she said. “You asked for it.”

  With a ripping of Velcro, the garments separated and fell away. She expanded in all directions nearly touching the ceiling, seeming to fill the room. Arms and legs elongated as if made of modeling clay. A curved fanged snout grew out of the face some said could launch a thousand ships. Upon completing the morph she peered down on Oscar. Casual predation emanated from the height of coal black eyes.

  “Convinced now?” I asked above the sound of Cynthia’s low growl.

  Bug-eyed, Oscar slowly retook his seat.

  “Okay, you can morph back,” I said. Cynthia resumed human form, standing unabashedly naked in front of us.

  At last she held Oscar’s attention. She didn’t move until Sam told her to cover up.

  “My God, you do exist,” he said slowly.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Jethro is a lycan.”

  “Do you have any idea why he’s trying to expose you?” Oscar’s eyes remained riveted to Cynthia.

  “Jim thinks it’s for the fame and money. He’s an ambitious young man,” Sam answered. “But I believe he’s also doing it because Cynthia refused to sleep with him.”

  “Well, his motives are immaterial.” Oscar adjusted his glasses, redirecting his attention to the case. “There is no law against being one of these others, only against abduction and murder. Has anyone in this room committed any such crimes?”

  “We are what we are.” I answered. I paused and took a deep worried breath before continuing. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” he replied, rising to his feet. “I must pass on representing you. I will not suborn criminal acts. I can recommend others who may be able to help you.”

  “Please,” Ed entreated. “If not for us, do it for Sam and the little ones. They’re all that matter.”

  I opened my mouth to add my argument, to tell him the larger issues at stake—how the future of our kind may depend on his help, but stopped when Cynthia peeked out from her room. “Come in here and I will show you what else lycans can do,” she said to Oscar. Her scent and sultry demeanor told all in the room the extent of her arousal. She understood the importance of this sexual act, not only for us, but possibly for the whole community.

  As if in a trance, Oscar left his briefcase on the dinette table and entered the darkened room. Cynthia quietly closed the door behind them. While they had sex, Sam and I played cribbage. Ed made several trips to the bathroom, most likely to masturbate.

  Three hours later they emerged. Oscar came into the light, weak as a newborn kitten. He walked with discomfort, taking short tentative steps and I wondered whether she used the love beads or marked his ass.

  “I think it is settled now,” Cynthia announced.

  Oscar Young, newly retained attorney for the coven, destined soon to become attorney for The Other Kind, held his briefcase close to his chest and inched to the door. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, pausing in the doorway as if speaking and walking became mutually prohibitive, and left.

  Quoting a song from the sixties Cynthia surveyed a handful of red polished nails when she said, “He’s a little piece of leather, but he’s well put together.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Loving Cynthia and the Shadow of David

  The weather took an unseasonably warming trend in late March. Sam opened the windows for the first time since November. The mild currents flowing through the rooms, and the sunlight shining in places it hadn’t touched in months, invigorated all of us. Detective Borden and her colleagues remained out of our lives since Oscar straightened them out, which added to my positive mood. Sam, Cynthia, and I sat at the dinette table sipping tea. Cynthia acted edgy. Without analyzing her scents, I assumed it had to do with insufficient quantity of male companionship. It did, but not the way I thought. Sam grumbled in general discomfort.

  The babies filled her from chin to hips. Her legs, still as muscular and shapely as ever, looked like toothpicks supporting a hard-boiled egg. She displayed a crescent-shaped smile from a face rounder than it used to be, but not much. I explored the soft firmness of her hand with my thumb. She reached up and kissed my lips.

  “Awww,” cooed Cynthia snidely. “How cute.”

  I concentrated on Cynthia’s scents to understand what the matter was. I smelled a powerful desire, as certainly did Sam. After the conversation where Sam promised to loan me to her, Cynthia stuck to her word and behaved appropriately. As a recently emergent lycan, a new and prodigious sex drive had awakened and now coursed within her. The need to slake its rapacious demands dominated her life. Oscar’s visits helped, but to reach deep enough inside and really satisfy, she craved an accompanying kill or the mating stamina of our kind. Kills risked exposure or at least a return of Detective Borden’s attention, so we kept them to a minimum. Given Ed’s health and age, he was but marginally superior to Oscar, not a plausible solution. That left good old Dr. Jim.

  Noting Cynthia’s scent and manner Sam rolled her eyes in exasperation like a parent dealing with a nagging child. She stood with an expression of discomfort, bracing her back with a hand. “I’ll be so glad when this pregnancy is over,” she repeated for around the hundredth time.

  Apparently calling to mind Sam’s promise to share me, Cynthia said, “Well, I could have some sex if you said the word.”

  Sam shuffled to the bedroom with small labored steps. Her slippers barely cleared the floor. I thought she ignored or didn’t hear Cynthia, but I was wrong. “Do what you want with him,” she snapped weakly at the youngster, talking like I wasn’t there. “I’m going to lie down.” She entered, closing the bedroom door quietly behind her.

  After a minute she re-emerged. Cynthia and I sat across the table, still in stunned silence. “And don’t forget to use protection,” she said to Cynthia. “Or you might end up like me.”

  For obvious reason, lycans and vampires had limited experience with condoms. I kept a few around from before Sam for occasions when a woman insisted. The retort of “Don’t worry. I’m a vampire. I can’t get you pregnant or give you a disease, but I might kill you,” simply didn’t work.

  While I searched for them, Cynthia shut the windows in her room and prepared herself. I won’t lie. I fantasized doing this ever since the night I helped emerge her. It wasn’t the consuming obsession like the one that burned for Sam when we first met, more like a daydream that gnawed unobtrusively in the back of my mind. When Sam gave Cynthia permission to “borrow me” after the babies came along, I expected it to eventually happen, but I still reeled from the unexpected casual suddenness with which she offered me.

  Before joining Cynthia, I went to our room to talk to Sam, to make sure she wasn’t luring me into a pregnant woman’s loyalty test. Would David have done this? Would Sam have offered Cynthia to him? I drove myself crazy by letting thoughts like that run amuck in my mind.

  When I entered she peered at me from the covers. “Forget something?” she asked in a tired voice, but with the patient level gaze that invariably tied my brain in knots.

  “No,” I babbled. “It’s just... Well, I feel a little awkward and I’m not sure I really should. Well, what I’m trying to say is…”

  Sam cut me off. “She has been under your skin since she emerged. It’s only natural. You are male. She is young, highly sexual, and practically in heat for you. I love both of you, and it’s selfish of me under the circumstances to stand in the way. She practically owns Oscar as well as any other male she might desire, but the poor dear wants you. Either it’s you, or sex with a kill. We don’t need more food, so taking prey would be an unnecessary risk.”

  She sat up and reached for my hand. “I love you,” I said, searching her face for a sign of how I stacked up against my long dead rival, but, as usual, got nothing.

  “I know you do,” she answered, and added with a wink as she let her hand slip from mine. “Try not to enjoy it too much.”

  I went to Cynthia. Upon entering the room, I saw she had shaved the black mass o
f pubic hair down to two pencil wide lines shaped in a vivid ‘V’ on the milky abdomen, pointed to her female core.

  She stood at an angle to me, quickly turning her head when I entered. Long and thick black curls radiated centrifugally outward. Her eyes cut my way with an appraising expression. Every light in the room burned.

  Cynthia stared at my burgeoning erection. “Did you bring the rubbers?”

  In reply, I held out a strip of blue foil packets.

  “Good, lie down on the bed. This will be fun,” she said, tearing one of them off.

  I obeyed and stretched out with my head on a pillow. “Do you know how to use those?” I asked as she appeared to fumble with getting the packet open.

  “Sure I do. I saw how my dorky brother’s friends used them when they brought girls to the house.” I admired the curve of her hip and relished the scents of our mutual gathering arousal.

  She pulled the condom out of the packet, holding it pinched between two fingernails. It reminded me of a white ring worm in the jaws of a predatory red beak. She held my junk with one hand to get the angle she wanted and unrolled the condom down me one turn at a time. As she did, lubricant dripped cold onto my stomach and glistened on her hand.

  “Is this comfy for you?” she asked, giving the sheathed member a few test strokes to make sure the condom stayed put. I felt the heat of her nearness as she straddled me and slid alabaster inner thighs against my hips. To my consternation, when she lowered on to my sex I went limp and shrank out of the condom.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I sat upright, pressing firmly against the warm tufted roll of the headboard. “It’s not right,” I replied. “You’re an incredibly beautiful and desirable woman. I’m speaking from more than a century of experience, but doing this is not right. Sam fills all of me. There is no room for anyone else.”

  I expected her to get mad and pitch a fit but she didn’t. “I understand, I think,” she said, lying down beside me. She put her arms behind her head and stared at the ceiling. “I envy you and Sam,” she continued. “To be honest, part of my wanting you was to prove what you had together wasn’t so special, but I now see it is. I’d give anything for love and a family like yours.”

  Cynthia experienced a watershed moment. I believe she understood for the first time the world existed for purposes other than to satisfy her need for kills and sexual encounters. She reached beyond herself, tentatively—even blindly maybe, but clearly unselfishly. You have to start somewhere.

  I took her fingers in mine as she sat next to me, naked with a sheet covering our privates, and said, “You’re barely a child. For Sam and me, and our new family, learning about one another, and being together binds us as completely as anything else in our lives. With time you will understand what I mean, and the knowledge will put you at peace.”

  She leaned toward me, planting a kiss on my forehead, already striking me as more at peace than she had been in weeks. “You’re probably right, as usual.” She turned away, pulling the sheet around her, leaving me sitting naked on the bed. “Now you must go.”

  Turning out the light as I went, I left her to ponder the new possibilities we discussed and how they fit into a future lasting another two hundred and thirty years.

  When I returned to our room Sam stirred. She lay on her side facing away from me. She slept naked because none of her night clothes fit. “Have a good time?” She murmured.

  I placed the strip of sealed condom packets in front of her and the one I wore beside them. It had nearly dried. Sam’s head cocked slightly to the side like a curious puppy, surveying it.

  “There’s no semen on it,” she muttered with quiet surprise. Standing behind her I felt the soft warmth of happiness work its way across her face.

  Top that David!

  After a minute she asked, “How is our girl doing? Better I hope.”

  “I think so, at least for tonight.”

  “Very good,” Sam murmured, drifting back toward sleep.

  Watching from behind, as she lay there I could not tell she was pregnant. Under the cascade of red hair falling diagonally across her back rested the same slim square shoulders with prominent blades and parallel wraps of sinew cradling the arch of her spine. The curve of hip and the firmness of the small round butt remained unchanged since the day I came across her in the library. If anything, the smooth, unblemished texture of her skin acquired even greater radiance.

  “Come to bed before you catch cold,” came a sleep-logged rejoinder to my standing naked in the chilly darkness of our room.

  I joined her under the covers, putting my arm around her and our babies. I felt the latest episode of kicking inside, small tempests she learned to sleep through. Within seconds she fell back asleep. Lying in the dark I reviewed what I tried to tell Cynthia about Sam and me. How we began on a chance meeting. What we became, building a relationship at first based on passion but later from a multitude of events, gestures, and considerations. Holding a door open. Listening sympathetically to the story of a bad day. Tea in bed on a cold morning. My feelings upon learning of Sam’s pregnancy. Cuddling—a lot of cuddling. Each formed a brick in the structure of our life, bound by the mortar of care and understanding, and reinforced by the steel rebar of love, each as memorable and important as our most intense shared orgasms. Against this array, nothing—definitely no other woman, however beautiful she might be—stood a chance.

  I tried to make Cynthia understand this.

  After a minute Sam nuzzled me with her butt.

  “Hon,” I said, “You know we can’t do anything. Doctor Ortiz said to abstain until after the delivery.” Whether the recommendation came out of recent discoveries or from the medical doctrine of fifty years ago, I didn’t know, but the triplets were the first born of our kind, and no one wanted to take any chances.

  She took my hand, guided it around her stomach and below saying, “We still have our hands and mouths, don’t we?”

  I responded by slowly licking her shoulder and back. The ripple of taut muscle tissue as my tongue grazed wetly over her skin made me fully erect. Later, much later, she pressed hips down on the finger caressing her clitoris and gasped in orgasm. Responding to her expert reciprocal manipulations, my member raised from the plain of my stomach like a Texas oil well until seed exploded out through the top in a gusher of hot white gold. The climax swept away any lingering thoughts of Cynthia. I wondered about the effect our manual activities might have on the babies. I quickly got an answer. After Sam climaxed they didn’t kick for the rest of the night.

  If our little talk put Cynthia more at ease with herself and life in general, Milton Elsassar’s arrival two days later assured it. The warm weather continued. The windows remained open. Ed’s shift just ended. We left the front door ajar, in expectation of his arrival. Milton’s appearance took everyone by pleasant surprise.

  “How is my little mother?” The happy boisterous voice cried out from the other side of the front screen door.

  Milton stood on the porch with an outrageously large bouquet of gladiolas. He wore black leather pants with matching vest, bright yellow silk shirt and a black felt fedora. His stomach overreached the cinched belt. I thought of a two hundred pound bumble bee.

  From across the room Sam squealed, “Milton, It’s been too long. What brings you here?”

  “I was on my way to New York and couldn’t come all this way without stopping off see the first parents, especially the little mother.” He said stepping through the door as I held it open. “You are making history darling.” He said to Sam. He pitched the fedora onto the dining table and sat in a chair beside her.

  “Miltie, it’s so good to see you!” Cynthia squealed racing from her room, sliding her butt onto the arm of the chair, balancing on one cheek. Her legs reached out in front, for yards it seemed.

  “So when is the blessed event?” Milton asked.

  “Doctor Ortiz is sticking with the middle of May,” I said, “but we’ll know better after his
visit at the end of the week.”

  I remembered Oscar asked me to confirm the date of Dr. Ortiz’s next visit. He wanted to meet with us and the good doctor. The little attorney did not give a reason.

  “Only six weeks!” Milton exclaimed. “When is the baby shower?” He addressed the question to the two females.

  Sam and Cynthia exchanged confused expressions. Cynthia spoke first. “Baby shower?” She thought out loud, “We really hadn’t thought…”

  Milton threw his hands into the air. “This is unacceptable. Every mom-to-be deserves a baby shower. Didn’t your parents tell you about them?”

  “I remember attending a few when I lived in Flushing. But I really don’t think it’s necessary for us to—” Sam began.

  “Nonsense,” Milton interrupted. “The community wants to participate. Read the blogs, and even if the excitement wasn’t there you deserve something nice for enduring the pains and swelling.” He turned toward Cynthia. “What do you think, Sweetcakes? Are you up for organizing one?”

  Cynthia turned the idea over in her mind. “Sure,” she said after a moment. “Sure, I’ll do it!”

  “That’s my girl,” Milton said. Having settled the issue, he stood, and took Cynthia’s hand. “Stand up. Let me look at you.”

  Cynthia rose to her feet, took a few steps, and turned for Milton’s inspection. She wore white shorts. They shined in a circle, polished where the material made maximum contact when she sat. Slowly and expertly he surveyed her from head to toe. “Child, with those legs and face, do you know how many modeling agencies would kill to have you under contract? You really need to let me set you appointments with a few people I know.”

  Cynthia’s arms fell to her side. “I don’t know.” Her voice trailed off to nothing.

  “Go on,” I said. “What could it hurt?”

  “Not so fast,” Sam interjected. “We don’t want her face becoming well known. It might complicate creating future identities.”