The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution)

by Mike Arsuaga

  The dream returned, telling a continuing story. Episode piled upon episode. The random order didn’t matter. Once inside, from having experienced it so many times, she knew the events and each character so well that picking up in the middle of one or jumping to another didn’t confuse her, like opening a familiar book to a random page and starting to read. But when she awoke, the pageantry of complicated detail faded into nothing.

  These dreams differed from those Lorna experienced before emerging. The old ones had a single character, a kind, serene woman bringing solace and hope to her bleak life. Upon emergence, the kind lady never returned. Then, two years ago, the new dreams re-commenced. The woman returned, accompanied by more characters, but this time without conversation. Lorna remained a passive observer. Although she knew she sometimes entered the thoughts of those in the dreams, upon waking nothing stuck.

  A couple ran through a forest on a dark, moonless night. Behind them, hundreds of torch-bearing men pursued. Braces of fierce dogs bayed in the distance. With the battle won, General Galba detached two cohorts of his legion to hunt the survivors down—a thousand men accompanied by a hundred dogs. The remaining Romans walked among the fallen, slaughtering the wounded, and enslaving the rest.

  The woman’s name was Cithara, a vampire. Her mate, Aliff, was a lycan, but they used another term, wolfen.

  “In here,” Aliff, her mate, cried out between labored breaths. With a slender hand wrapped inside his far larger one, he pulled her toward the side of a rock face. “I played here as a youth.” He parted some brush, revealing the mouth of a cave. “We can hide.”

  “But the dogs will find us,” said Cithara.

  Aliff turned, warming her with a smile. “No, the cavern is deep. Swarms of bats live within. Their droppings will confound any tracking animal.”

  Without another word, they scrambled through the dark maw, feeling their way along its damp, rock-strewn, winding interior. Once, a startled flight of bats beat at them with soft leathery wings flying by to escape through the entrance. After the frantic departure, the cave returned to dark silence.

  “Won’t they alert our pursuers?” Cithara’s soft voice resounded, unnaturally loud in the darkness.

  “No,” replied her mate in deep tones. “They will return long before the Romans arrive.” Feeling behind him, he found a flat rock, and they both sat. “We are safe here, Village Girl.”

  The dream jumped to an earlier episode. No, Lorna realized, not another episode. I’m inside one of Cithara’s memories.

  Aliff, with his wolfen clan, raided her village for prey. They carried her off, along with two crones. “It is best to take those most burdensome to the village,” Aliff oft reminded the others. “Prune the old growth to make way for the new.”

  They took Cithara because the village offered her as a sacrifice. Her family put her outside for the predators. After ten summers, she still showed the mind of little more than a babe—dull of wit, slow of movement. The village thought her demented. To her family’s thin resources, she presented an unacceptable burden. The serene lady in her dreams did not desert her. That one wore dark hair, but in a style cut short at the neck. She presented the sole source of kindness in the girl’s life up to then.

  Who could this lady be? Lorna wondered while Cithara’s memories unfolded.

  Aliff often recounted the events of how he came to find Cithara. He’d rounded a corner with Roscera, his mate at the time. They were in lycan form, padding through a village at night. Large furred shadows on the hunt. Wearing only an old chemise, the bewildered girl wandered in an opening surrounded by several dwellings. The garment appeared to glow in the pallid light. At the sound of whispery movement she turned toward the black shapes, displaying, to their astonishment, not fear but curiosity.

  As the lady in her dreams instructed.

  “It was then,” Aliff said in his thunderous voice whenever he told the story around campfire gatherings, “by your fearlessness, I decided we should take you with us, but not a prey.” At this point in the telling, all the faces that surrounded the blaze brightened in amusement. The laughter stated happiness for the clan’s alpha male, Aliff, who’d found such joy in the company of the curious young female who would become his mate.

  Cithara could not hunt, and seemed unable or unwilling to learn useful skills. Everyone agreed she resembled a pre-emergent wolfen in many respects, but she placed a burden on the clan’s fragile ability to sustain itself. In any lean time, the clan clamored to take her as prey. Aliff alone objected. “Her scent is not human. It is different from ours, but not human. She is special.”

  They settled the matter after he agreed to take responsibility for her needs. When he brought Cithara to their tent, Roscera grumbled even though the young one berthed there in the role of a daughter.

  With time, Cithara learned a few skills, but not too well, still appearing dull-witted. Her sensitivity to light, coming after her fourteenth summer, made her even less useful to the clan. For a winter, she rested on the cusp of becoming prey, but with the onset of spring, her senses developed making her an asset for night hunts.

  In Cithara’s eighteenth summer, Roscera died at the hand of a Roman’s sword during a hunt. It was the clan’s poor luck to raid a village where a century of soldiers had quartered for the night. Unlike the villagers, they did not scatter in terror, but formed into a tight formation of stout shields bristling with sharp swords. The clan lost two of its number in the skirmish, a terrible toll that in an instant made Cithara all the more valuable, despite her differences from the others. One fall day a few weeks later, Aliff entered the tent to find Cithara lying on the hide-covered floor, writhing and groaning.

  “What ails you child?”

  “I don’t know, Lord. It comes from inside. Something grows. I’m changing.”

  She lay flat, with the laced hide pants pressing with special tightness on her prepubescent womanhood. Exuding from her were the unmistakable scents of growing sexual readiness. Aliff gasped, thinking he knew the answer, and raced from the tent. He returned with the remaining female in the clan. After a quick examination, she confirmed his suspicion. Cithara’s emergence had begun, but as what, she did not know.

  “My Lord, you must do it,” the female told him. “I can help, but by your touch alone will she emerge, able to control her changes.” Aliff knelt beside her. Through Cithara, Lorna sensed his powerful male presence. A mane of shoulder-length, ginger-colored hair washed across her chest, igniting her walnut-sized breasts.

  “But she is a child.”

  “She won’t be one for long, if you do as I instruct. She will become like the rest of us.”

  Kneeling beside her, he hesitantly pulled the leather pants down around hips no wider than the waist. She responded to his most trifling touch. Intense trembles coursed through her. When he brushed her pubis by accident, she climaxed for the first time, morphing in the process. She lurched up in a blurred jerk, and a yellow pallor swept over her. She grew in stature, lunging at his throat with long, ivory fangs, her eyes red and wild.

  Even in a vampire state, her strength fell far short of his. Reacting instinctively, he knocked her back to the ground with a back-handed slap, followed by a warning growl.

  “See, my Lord, the change has begun.” The female spoke from a safe distance behind them, pointing to Cithara’s breasts, which approached womanly fullness. “You must climax her until she is out. It is the way.”

  “Then help me with her.”

  As the clan learned later, it took fewer orgasms to complete her emergence than what their kind required. Unlike the wolfen, the physical changes occurred not at once, but over a few days. When she morphed before the assembled clan, they recognized her as a vampire, a mythical creature of their lore. After emergence, the lady who spoke to Cithara in her in dreams never returned.

  Each day, Aliff, along with the other two males, noted Cithara’s metamorphosis with interest. Talk of using her for prey breathed a last gasp. Soon, ano
ther problem arose. The female complained to Aliff of Cithara taking her mate into the forest. She demanded that he, the Alpha, render judgment on the matter.

  The same night, he approached his charge in their tent. Since emergence, he’d slept outside to avoid her sexual advances. She viewed his participation in her emergence as an act of love, but he thought of the ritual more like bringing a new life into the world. What she did with the other males should have been settled among her, them, and the female, but the female had put the conflict at his table, expecting him to resolve the issue or risk tearing the clan apart.

  When he entered, she sat in darkness, interrupted only by the small sputtering flame of an oil lamp at the entrance. “My lord.” She greeted him with a self-assured smile. “You have come to visit me at last.” Throwing off the furred skin covering all but her head, she stood before him in haughty nakedness.

  The sight of her, struck Aliff speechless. Lorna experienced the scene from Aliff’s point of view. Since her emergence, the changes couldn’t be ignored, but from a long-standing habit of viewing her as a child, he’d fought hard to deny them or to put them out of mind. Now she displayed a woman’s body, tight and compact, with strong, shapely legs arranged in precise alignment. Her hips flared with delicious roundness below a flat, hard midriff. Turning, she profiled a pair of small, pert breasts with brown, rocklike nipples that made him ache to touch them. Above the straight shoulders perched a face he would love for the rest of his life—round with full cheeks and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. Deep-brown eyes greeted him with warmth.

  “Are you ready, my lord?”

  There was no doubt of the correct answer. Their mutual scents said all. Without a word, he went to her, covering them both with the fur, for although early fall, the nights in the mountains of Cantabrian Gaul often dusted the ground with frost.

  His large, powerful hands explored her yearning body with a gentleness she hadn’t expected nor experienced when in congress with the other males. Lorna returned to Cithara’s mind. Lying on his side, he showed a broad, sculpted chest, tapering into the darkness of the blanket’s shelter to narrow hips she’d often admired for their supple strength. Tentatively, she touched an abdomen hard like iron but warm with an overlay of softness, like a hand of Roman chain armor gloved in lambskin. In response, he rolled toward her, claiming her mouth with his. Their faces pivoted around each other while tongues wrestled in the wet darkness.

  “You lascivious vixen,” he said in a tone of admiration when their mouths pulled apart.

  Sliding soft hands across his stomach, she left a searing hot trail, to meander below. He gasped when she reached the white flesh above his manhood. Pale because daylight made only rare appearances there. The radiated heat of his member warmed the eager fingers courting it.

  His tongue drifted down from her face, dawdling at the tendons of her throat, feeling the racing pulse, along with the draw and release of breath, growing with the rising tension.

  “My love. Take me, my love.” She touched the large angular face above. With her other hand, she took his shaft, guiding it toward her turgid femininity, to the promise of Paradise—the closest any being could hope to be in this life. With his eager cooperation, she inserted his stout manliness. He savored the frictionless entry, going places where few, in her limited experience, had ever been. Kneading his broad back with supple fingers, she raised an eager pelvis to accommodate his thrusts. His erection grew to its full length, signaling the wondrous machinery deep in his loins, the imminent release of its offering. Under the blanket, his finger circled their fevered mutual point of contact, soon moving up to the small, hard bud of flesh atop her vaginal lips. There, he made leisurely, titillating circles until her breathing came in rapid, throaty gasps of abandonment.

  Touching the area between his testicles and anus, she felt the contractions of his perineum, corresponding with spurts of liquid lacing the darkness of her female cavity. The accompanying ragged gasps intensified her ecstasy. For an instant, they detached from their corporeal selves to float somewhere between life and death. Lying together joined by their intimate parts, she displayed no rush to expel him.

  “Now,” he said in a parody of gruff authority. “I will have to make you my mate.”

  Peeking from under the fur, she snickered playfully. “Yes, you will.” The next morning, he announced their union in front of the clan, to the relief of the pack’s other female.

  The dream returned to the scene in the cave.

  “Our litter comes first.” Aliff’s voice rasped in the dark. He patted a belly that revealed no bulge to the eye.

  “What are you saying?”

  Cithara couldn’t see because of the darkness, but she’d memorized every subtlety of his face, with its golden skin, dark, gnarled brow, and the intense stare he wore when in the role of Alpha Male. “If we are trapped, you must be saved at any cost. In you resides something greater than our love, something more important than either of us. The future of our races depends on the treasure you carry. Promise me you will do this!”

  For several seconds, only the sound of their breathing filled the space. Then she took his hand in the darkness. “I will do what you ask. Our love is something beyond earthly bonds. The goddess Mari and her consort Sugaar teach if Fate shortens our time together in this life, we shall be compensated in another. Love cannot be created or destroyed between two souls who are fated to be together.”

  * * * *

  In the brief twilight of transition from sleep to consciousness, the images of Aliff and Cithara faded to nothing. Each detail of their world drained from Lorna’s mind like water from a sink.

  She opened her eyes. Heartbeat was returning to normal. A cold sweat glistened on her forehead. She had the sensation of awakening from a vivid nightmare to learn you are still safe in bed. However instead of a dream, it felt like having survived a close call, of which she could never remember any but the barest details.

  A great circular bed, that could have slept three or four, spread out around her. Daylight poured through tall, narrow windows. A breeze riffled the sheers covering them. The outside air filled a bed chamber of squad room dimensions.

  Squad room and full daylight!

  In panic she looked at her watch. The shift was half over. Unexcused absence—exactly what Gregg needed to have her ass. A floor-to-ceiling mirror across the room showed she still wore the outfit from the night before. With another touch of panic, she remembered slipping her hose and panties down in the backseat of the limousine. Now her clothes were back where they should be.

  Who redressed me?

  Forcing herself to calm down, she reached back into the events of what she assumed was the previous night.

  I was in the car with three men- Jerry nowhere to be found. They ignored my demands for an explanation…I morphed and came at them... Now, here I am in a room as large as a tennis court.

  Through the tall windows, the buzz of a hedge trimmer came like a very large, mad hornet. Outside, a crew tended to acres of lawn sloping to a lake. A few pruned hedges shaped into balls or spears, while the others trimmed the grass. Walkways crisscrossed the expanse of green, circling the flower beds and fountains. Colorful, tropical plants filled the flower beds.

  “Did I die and go to Heaven?” Lorna muttered to herself.

  A large plasma television imbedded in the wall blinked on. A man’s face, three feet high, came into focus. Lorna recognized Edward White, Junior, CEO of Coven International, Inc. “No, Ms. Winters,” the face answered in an amicable, if detached, voice. “This is my house. You are my guest.”

  Remembering the drugs, along with the rest of the circumstances most certainly involved with getting her to this palatial bedroom, she became belligerent. “Mr. White, do you invite all of your guests by kidnapping them?”

  He chuckled, leaning forward. The television screen enlarged the adamantine jaw line while accentuating the upturn of his nose. “No, I don’t, but the options available to meet and thank
you for the service you provided to me, and my family are limited.”

  “A drop by the office would have been nice.”

  “Ms. Winters, there are compelling reasons, some of which I cannot get into, as to why I don’t go out in public. If there’d been any other way…”

  “What about a simple thank-you note?”

  The great countenance smiled introspectively. “Your imaginative solutions and quick thinking to preserve our documents impressed Karla and Thomas very much. No easy task, I assure you.” He paused, lifting a magnificent, chiseled face for her inspection. “I was intrigued. A note would never do, especially after I had my staff run a search on you.”

  “And what did you find?” Lorna’s voice rose.

  Ed sighed, flipping through a folder on a desktop, beyond camera view. Then, engaging her in a level gaze, he replied, “I have your whole history, Ms. Winters. I was as interested in learning about you as you were about me.”

  Lorna frowned, remembering the search done on the office computer. “I used a secure police search for that.”

  “Apparently not secure enough. You spent several hours researching me along with several members of my family.”

  “That was official police business in connection with an ongoing investigation.”

  “Well, it’s of no matter. After reading about you, I decided on a personal meeting. As I said, I don’t get out much, and you’re an interesting person. You’re quite accomplished, with many admirable qualities. I admire your keen, intuitive mind, as well as your-ah-spirit.”

  In conjunction with the last sentence, a two-inch-tall green eye winked languidly through the monitor.

  “It sounds like you’re offering me a job,” Lorna quipped, too aggravated to appreciate the gesture. At the mention of “job,” she remembered the peril hers enjoyed at the hands of Captain Gregg. “Well, you put me in a hell of a mess. I’m way late for work. You’ll probably cause me to be fired.” Her eyes cut to the open window. She assessed her chances of escape. Hell, even if she managed to get out, she had no idea where she was.