Yulen: Return of the Beast – Mystery Suspense Thriller (Yulen - Book 2)

by Luis de Agustin

  II

  A Mediterranean morning sky that would soon turn gray over Saint-Tropez shone bright as Nathan crossed the wide lawn from his villa to its carriage house. Constance saw him from the pool, and trotted out dripping wet. “Nathan, wait!” she called, beaming devoted innocence for the one she loved.

  “I can’t. You’ll get me all wet,” he called, cavorting away.

  “Stop! Stop, Nathan,” she laughed. “Just one kiss.”

  He stopped and watched her. She was a good egg, shaped like one too, although to him substance, not shape, was what mattered. He leaned in and took her kiss.

  “Muaak!” she smacked, kissing his lips. “I love you so much, Nathan. Did you have fun last night with your friends?”

  “Yes, Constance. Thanks for the banquet.”

  “Where’s Leeda? She hasn’t been around in a while. You’re not seeing her on the sly, are you? She’s so beautiful.”

  “You don’t have to worry.”

  “Another kiss.” She puckered and closed her eyes, and Nathan pecked her lips. “I think I’m going to do another lap in the pool for that kiss,” she said, returning to the sparking water.

  “Don’t tire yourself.”

  “I’m Supergirl,” she called, reaching her arms out running back across the thick grass.

  He smiled. She was okay he thought going to his car, and unlike his Ferrari California convertible, low maintenance. She was the perfect woman for him: uncurious, gullible, fond of his every whim—few as they were—minimally demanding in bed, unable to conceive, and ready to die for him; and having someone around who would die for one, was truly convenient.

  A short drive from Villa Constanza, the Ferrari drove up a dirt drive to a weathered farmhouse, and stopped on a packed earth platform edging a ravine. Nathan looked at the gray sky arrived over the inland hills that would soon be over the coast. He walked toward the abandoned looking wooden hovel, and saw a tattered lace-curtain drop beside a window. It meant Leeda had watched him and that she was still there. He pulled open the unlocked door.

  Walking through the dreary place, he wondered how much longer Leeda could last. When he had seen her the week before, she already looked phantomlike in her thinness.

  “Don’t come in, Nathan,” he heard her scathed voice say.

  He walked the hall leading to a room with shuttered windows.

  “I don’t want you to see me like this,” said a hooded form standing by a window.

  “You know I don’t mind.”

  “But I do.”

  He stepped closer to her. “You won’t get anyone to find you here.”

  “I’m too weak to make it into town.”

  “Then what can you expect? Let me take you in the car and leave you at a place to find someone.”

  “No. Someone will come. Here it’ll be so much easier.”

  “I know that, but Leeda, you’re almost out of time. Come with me.” He moved closer to her.

  “I’m hideous, please don’t.”

  “Leeda, how can you say that? Am I a stranger? Would I care?”

  They heard a car’s tires on the dirt drive.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said eagerly, turning to spread the window’s curtain, the light striking a hand’s shriveled skin dried of all moisture. “A man,” she said, looking through the grimy window, then liberally splashing perfume onto her robe from a bottle. “I met him last night on a corner, but he couldn’t get away, and said he’d come here this morning.”

  Nathan brought his head to the window. “Leeda, he looks tough. I’ll stay.”

  “What for?”

  “In case . . .”

  “And what would you do, Nathan? What could you do?”

  He moved away ashamed.

  “I didn’t mean. I know you would, protect, if you could, but best you go. It’s not as if I’m a virgin in this matter.”

  Heavy footsteps stopped at the inside entrance.

  Her nose inhaled deeply from the direction of the door. “I’m feeling better already, Nathan. Go.”

  He started out.

  “Anybody here?” the man called.

  Nathan walked toward him.

  “Who are you?” the man said.

  “I’m . . .”

  “Is the woman here?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “The amputee.”

  Nathan acted confused, then heard Leeda call, “I’m here.”

  “You better go,” the brawny man said to Nathan.

  From where Leeda stood beyond the doorway, a murmur came that would soon throb, then softly chorus like angels to her visitor.

  “What a stinking smell in here, like rotting garbage,” the man said, walking toward the room.

  “Goodbye Nathan. Go,” she said.

  Nathan left for the door, and as he slid out, heard a smack and then a crash come from the room. When he returned, Leeda was on the floor, the man pulling the robe from her emaciated body.

  “You said you were an amputee, you bitch. Where? In your brain?”

  “Leave her,” Nathan said.

  “Get out, fancy boy.”

  “Go. Here, here’s some money. Go,” Nathan said, shuffling a wad of cash.

  “Money? You think I need your money—prick. I don’t want your money. Be a man. Here’s what I think of your money.” He smacked Nathan across the face, knocking him down. “You sure go down easy,” the man laughed. “Now get out before I get mad,” he said, and kicked Nathan’s backside when he attempted to get up, sending him back on the floor and down the hall.

  “Nathan, go,” Leeda called. “I’m okay. Go.”

  “Act like a man or get lost!”

  Nathan tripped out the front door, bruised from the falls. At his car, he reached to the visor, pressed a button, and on the first ring heard, “Yes sir.”

  “I need you,” Nathan said, and the phone instantly hung up. He then heard a scream come from the house, and reentered.

  “Mercy,” he heard Leeda’s voice plead, and when her assailant saw Nathan at the door, he threatened, “I told you to go, pretty boy. Stay out before I throw you out, this time with my fists all over your pretty face!”

  Again, Nathan went in, and again he saw Leeda on the floor, naked, hair and skull as on a cancer victim, teeth missing from her crying mouth.

  “I’ll give you anything,” Nathan said to the man. “Anything for you to go. Please.”

  “Please . . . oh please . . . please mister bad man,” the man mocked. “How about a nice brawl. How about giving me a nice fight. That’s what I can use right now. A rough, erection arousing fight. That’s what you can give me. But I don’t think you can, can you?” he said, going back to Nathan and smacking him while Leeda cried on the floor. “Guess not, pretty boy. Now piss off and let a man do his work. If you’re not gone next time I turn around, I’m going to . . . make you cry,” he scoffed.

  “Go Nathan, please. I can get through this. I’m ready, so go,” Leeda’s scoured face pleaded.

  As Nathan exited the place, a car raced to a stop before him, and a compact, stern faced man burst out. He looked at Nathan staring at the hills, at the door, and back at Nathan’s pained face with his back to the entrance. A stiletto blade snapped from the long steel handle in the tough’s sleeve, and the man went in.

  Nathan could not direct or instruct him, not even to save his own life or that of a loved one—had nature even allowed him to have loved ones, know love, feel love. He walked dispirited to the edge of the dirt platform, his eyes on the higher hills beyond, but his mind disturbed such that he did not see them. In the recent past, he had made peace with himself, peace with being who he was. What had just transpired between him and who he phoned, was all he could do. He could do no more than he had done. He could not have acted differently to help Leeda. He had acted as yulen. He could not act as something else, as man. He could not change who he was or how he could behave, anymore than any creation on earth. But if he had made peace with himself as he
had thought, and peace with his yulenness, and accepted all that meant, why did his mind suffer now? Why could he not accept that his nature would not allow him to strike that man, harm him, kill him if he might kill that innocent?

  “Traitor to his race,” T had called him when he had wanted a different human quality, when he’d wanted love and been prepared to risk all to gain what he thought was the supreme virtue and quality that yulen did not possess. He had made peace with his anxiousness to gain what he as yulen did not have. Yet now a different desire stirred, erupted, and flared through his body and mind. He desired something else, something else yulen did not have, something else nature denied them.

  What good to know the blessing of being yulen, and be granted the highest virtues: peacefulness, non-aggression, freedom from hatred, when in the end, peacefulness could not defend against human violence and hatred, and all that yulen could do was run. They could be hated, beaten, robbed, raped, face their own wanton murderer, and they could do nothing to defend themselves. What manner of animal could nature want to be so, so pathetic, so . . . cowardly.

  Survival was what ultimately mattered to nature, and yulen survived and survived, but was the price worth it? The suffering that yulen endured, he accepted as stoically as any. Ordeals and nightmares at the hands of men, he owned deep wells of, and they were not the dreams of angels. And whatever T had thought, and that he had convinced himself of and still believed, that their race was the blessed and chosen, and that it was the light and the highest achievement of this natural earth, it was now not enough for him. He now promised himself that what he had wanted and discussed the night before with his yulen brethren, was right to want and pursue and gain. To find a way to no longer be subordinate to man’s violence and malevolence; to be able to protect themselves, irrespective of harm to men; to lash out if necessary in their own self-defense; it was not unnatural. Their absence in a species or a race was unnatural! It could not be something that nature had intended to deny any of Her creatures, and surely not Her most noble and sublime. In this book, Book of Yulen, he was sure lie the answer to release them from their nature’s enslavement to meekness. He did not seek revenge on men. He did not want to harm them, or take strengths beyond theirs. He wanted only his own race’s . . . manliness.

  The sound of car wheels splintered his vision. Antoine, his man with the stiletto, was driving away, his job complete—the way he always finished his jobs—complete and without question. “The Algerian,” he was called. He’d met him on the Marseilles docks one night where he’d gone to take delivery of three Ferraris. Cornered by two muggers and looking desperate, Antoine materialized and walked up to him and his would-be muggers. Unsolicited, he slit the men’s throats and then offered his services “always with maximum discretion,” and The Algerian was hired without conditions.

  Leeda emerged from the farmhouse. She walked crookedly toward him. She carried a dripping mass from a hand. Her hooded ankle length bathrobe covered her frailness, but as she neared, Nathan saw her bare feet already gaining girth. Her gauzy skinned hand holding her bathrobe closed thickened before his eyes with layers of pristine new tissue.

  “The sky is gray,” she said, her pupils, irises, and whites, flush red. “Sunlight is bad for the skin,” her straining voice said, as she pulled the hood farther down over her face. “Really, I’m just vain. Your man is brilliant, and fast with a blade.” She lifted her assailant’s cleanly severed head she held from its hair, tossed it, and they watched it roll into the ravine. “Well, he wanted an amputee,” she said. “He got his kicks from one or no legged women. Perverted they can be.”

  “You were able to?”

  “Yes. Your man’s timing was perfect. The head came off. The body remained alive long enough.”

  “Good.”

  Her hand pulled the hood lower. “I wish you didn’t have to see me like this.”

  “I’m just glad you’ll be well.”

  “And vain as always.”

  “We all have our weaknesses, our differences.”

  “I’m going to rest,” she said, turning back.

  “I’ll go.”

  They walked toward the farmhouse, he stopping at the car, and she pausing.

  “When, Nathan?” she implored.

  His lips pursed and his eyes looked down and then back up. “Never.”

  Her hooded head lifted back and watched him get into the car. The Ferrari’s engine purred. The convertible hardtop glided out. She watched the exotic car leave.

  >

  Late for an appointment, Nathan swung the Ferrari tightly through the curves to the main road and toward his auto dealership. He opened it on arriving in Saint-Tropez just over two years earlier. Thanks to his unrivaled phone selling skills, he turned it into the largest exotic car dealership in southern France. They sold the usual MGs and TDs, but Ferraris, Aston Martins, Bugattis, and Maybachs, paved the showroom for every auto enthusiast with a roaring wallet. Sheikhs, CEOs, and every big-toy libertine of moneyed pedigree were his clients.

  As salespersons, he employed naturally cheerful people who loved people and cars in that order. Russell, who he hired, loved neither; however, he possessed the remarkable yulen gift to impact a person’s purchase decisions momentarily by telepathy over the phone. Within two weeks of starting with the firm, that telephony power turned him into its top salesperson.

  Tapping the gas or flicking the wheel, Nathan’s hastened Ferrari leapt or swiveled ahead, and avoided stopping at any changing traffic signals along the route.

  The dealership had actually been Constance’s idea. After an impromptu departure out of New York City, the entire New York police force on his tail, he landed in Russia. There, he went to work at the Moscow office of the mysterious telemarketing firm he worked for in New York. He soon discovered Moscow was home to another yulen. That made the town cramped, so he settled in St. Petersburg to work the firm’s phones and mint commissions there.

  The Sun started shining, and Nathan lowered the top, turning the final curve before his dealership.

  In St. Petersburg at The Hermitage Museum, he met Constance. She was looking at van Dyck’s George, Lord Digby, and William, Lord Russell, perfect male visages of the romance novels she adored. For Constance it was love at first sight for Nathan, a common reaction for people to experience for yulen. For him it was interest in an English-speaking tourist traveling alone. She might be useful in the future when his fundamental need summoned. “Do you like van Dyck?” he asked her, of the painting’s artist.

  “Oh, I love them both. They could be on a romance cover. One at a time, that is.”

  They dated, married, and honeymooned. “Perfect together,” she said, and he agreed—she making no demands on him.

  They moved to Saint-Tropez where Constance owned her, “villa right out of a romance novel” purchased with the gas fracking rights on the Montana cow pasture her daddy left her. Nathan, with his substantial saved commissions and her encouragement started the car business, putting everything in her name.

  Passing the glittering glass and aluminum trusses to the front of his showroom, he saw his client waiting parked in a Maserati Gran Turismo convertible, engine running.

  “You arrive, and the Sun shines,” the waiting driver said to Nathan pulling alongside.

  “That’s me, Mister Sunshine. Is that what you decided on, Prince?” Nathan said about the car.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a little thing I need for driving around here several weeks. Would I like the Ferrari better?”

  “Since you’re already in that, let’s see how you handle her, and we can decide.”

  “You don’t think I can drive?” responded the tall, tanned, ascot wearing hollow checked client.

  Nathan laughed and got into the passenger seat. The dashing man pushed hard on the gas, shifted and tore out on four tracks smoking rubber. The arrogant playboy prince, Nathan couldn’t remember from where, liked fast cars, had bought one from him previously, and couldn’t dri
ve a performance vehicle to save his life.

  Ripping from the coast road onto the mountain, the car rippled into the first turns, jerking from poor shifting. “It’s probably not as responsive,” Nathan politely said, “as what you’re used to driving.”

  “And what am I used to driving, Nathan?”

  “My guess, Aston, Lamborghinis.”

  The prince laughed. “You’re softening me up to take a Ferrari or Bentley from you.”

  Nathan smiled and looked ahead, his arms easing along the door rim and backseat. “No, Prince. Bugatti. That’s the car for you.”

  The prince chuckled and pressed the pedal.

  He shifted to high along the straightening curves, clumsily downshifted on the bends, and joggled them in their seats. Nathan smiled and looked ahead, the wind blowing his thick mane and kissing his impeccable skin.

  “My driving doesn’t impress you,” the prince said good humored.

  “Oh it does Prince, and why I suggested the Bugatti for you. It becomes part of the pavement, the tires lapping asphalt like drinking molten mercury.”

  “That’s not very technical,” the prince said, rounding a curve and almost leaving a side view mirror on the mountain wall.

  “Sitting in a Bugatti is living a poem, Prince.”

  “And don’t tell me, the Bugatti you have in mind for me it the Veyron.”

  “None other.”

  The prince laughed. “Zero to three hundred in how many seconds?”

  “It’s a poem, Prince. You live in its body and it makes love to you. What do seconds matter?”

  “Have you ever had Leeda?” the prince asked.

  “No.”

  “She must be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” The car shook sideways, and their necks jerked. “Someone like you, why not?”