The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy)

by Krista Gossett

  “No way; I don’t trust your claws. You’ve looked plenty anyway,” Dinsch said trying to cover himself but Kahtya knocked him backwards and straddled him to hold him down. She unclasped her top and let her breasts spring free and started rubbing her crotch against his shaft slowly, her tiny thong the only barrier between them. Dinsch pushed himself up onto his elbows and watched her rock her hips over him, her breasts swaying with the motion and it tortured him. He gasped as he felt pleasure build in him, but the pace was not enough and he wanted to do this right, but she was a virgin as far as he knew and he couldn’t bring himself to speed things up, no matter how insane the motion was driving him.

  She had stopped for a moment and he looked to see she moved the cloth aside and was guiding the tip, trying to find where it fit. Before Dinsch could say more than “no!” she used her weight to settle onto him and a small pooling of blood told him it was too late. She whimpered in pain and he flipped them both over so that he was on top. Dinsch wiped at her tears and mouthed ‘I’m sorry’ as he started slow to ease her past the pain then picked up speed as she seemed to be past it. He had to try to avoid looking at her bouncing breasts since he didn’t want to finish early and leave her unsatisfied. He increased his intensity with her happy little moans but was still careful not to be too rough and he had felt her clench and spasm and released himself into her with a fulfilled growl, propping himself up on his elbows above her to see how she was taking it.

  She looked at him with those big curious eyes full of wonder.

  “Does it always hurt like that in the beginning?” she asked unhappily. He smiled and rolled off of her.

  “No, Kahtya, but you probably should have asked that before you rushed into it.” He pulled out a soft bandana and wet it with a flask, handing it to her. “For the blood.”

  She was startled when he said that and looked. He turned his back to her and cleaned himself with a different cloth, then covered up. When he had turned around, she was dressed again, but she was sitting there staring off into the desert with her elbows propped up on her knees. He was really starting to feel like a jerk.

  “Kahtya…” Dinsch started, not sure how to apologize.

  She spun to face him, that faraway look on her face still.

  “Will you do that to me again once we reach this Mythec place? Please?” she said, her eyes searching his.

  He realized he wasn’t breathing when he sighed with relief. For once, he was glad he misread a woman. He smiled and wiggled his eyebrows.

  “You don’t have to ask me twice!” he told her jokingly but in a kind, soft voice.

  Kahtya looked at him blankly and he realized that probably wasn’t an expression she had heard before.

  Dinsch extended his hand to help her up so they could join Krose.

  “It means yes, Kahtya. Let’s head over to Krose. I’m starving!”

  Krose hadn’t been kidding about lunch and had laid out a blanket full of snacks and appetizers and mixes of herbs and fruits and vegetables he had been picking up on the journey. One thing Krose had always been good at was cooking and it occurred to Dinsch that he might toss that idea to Krose, to open his own restaurant, café or bar maybe after all this was done. They never said ‘if’; even the bravest men don’t rush into battle with the attitude that they wouldn’t be coming out of it. Until you breathe your last breath, there’s always a chance.

  When his companions returned, Krose had suppressed a smile; he knew immediately that the cat girl had gotten under his skin, or more correctly, under his loincloth. Her sexy sashay was no less sexy, but it was slightly wobbly and Dinsch’s eyes were hooded but dancing. He never was very good about hiding when he’d broken a dry spell. Cats and dogs never get along well either, but you still see them mounting each other in alleys sometimes. Sometimes anger just made things sexier.

  Krose realized he wasn’t completely right. Dinsch’s eyes seemed a little regretful too with the glow coming off of them. Krose briefly noticed a smudge of dried blood on the girl’s inner thigh and it didn’t take long to figure out why. Either he had been too rough or she had. Dinsch was no stranger to sex but he wasn’t used to virgins and Krose doubted it had been Dinsch to press her into anything. The girl was curious and Krose didn’t put it past her to have even been forceful with Dinsch to sate that curiosity. He laughed at that mental image and Dinsch shot him a look.

  “What?” Dinsch asked suspiciously.

  Krose shook his head. “Just thinking about that time in Neibelung when that one drunk stumbled into the wrong room.” Dinsch threw Krose an unhappy look of warning and Krose

  just laughed. In the incident that Krose referred to, a drunken

  young girl had stumbled into Dinsch’s room at night, intent to

  lose her virginity, and had pretty much forced Dinsch to be her

  first. He was pretty careful about locking his room after that;

  Dinsch had never been with a virgin and the girl had screamed

  bloody murder with the unsuspected pain of being deflowered.

  The girl’s father had come after him with a crossbow and

  threatened to turn him into rabbit stew. Krose caught Dinsch

  rubbing the scar on his hip where the man had successfully hit

  and Krose laughed again. This time, Dinsch did smile. Kahtya was happily sampling everything making noises as she

  chewed to show her satisfaction. Dinsch was munching at things

  without really looking at what he was taking as he watched

  Kahtya, completely excited about the things she was trying. “Geez, Krose, you should have your own restaurant! Mama

  had told me that there are places where people go to pay people to

  make them food and you’d be great at it,” Kahtya told him

  between mouthfuls. Dinsch grinned brightly since he had been

  thinking the same thing.

  “I don’t know; I’ve never really settled down anywhere for

  too long…” Krose trailed off.

  “You never really had a reason to, either! Maybe you could,

  once all of this is over, and maybe find a nice girl that doesn’t tie

  you up and leave you—“ Dinsch started.

  “Okay, okay, touché. Now shut it,” Krose said, but he was

  grinning. “Maybe I will, who knows? Too much talking, not

  enough eating!”

  It seemed that the closer they got to Mythec, Dinsch just got more somber and less talkative and Krose had never seen Dinsch so stuck in his own thoughts before. Dinsch could be deceptively smart or even childish and naïve (although nowhere near as much as their present company), but introspection wasn’t one of his usual traits. Krose was beginning to think he should have saved this trip for after their confrontation with Myceum… and for more reasons that his friend getting this fixation with a cat girl. What it came down to was they might have bought the old wizard a week to hold that barrier, but it wasn’t some kind of pass or assurance. If there’s one thing Krose was sure of, it was that things rarely went par for the course with this group and sometimes a streak of good luck came with a wagon full of hot, ripe shit bouncing along behind it, complete with a broken wheel.

  Still, the day was nice; a perfect temperature, a light breeze, so Krose intended to enjoy it and let Dinsch mope a bit. He certainly wasn’t selling Krose to the idea of love (or whatever it was) and he certainly wasn’t letting it drag him down either. At some point, Krose had remembered Ashe giving him a book on Folk that he had lifted from the old man’s collection. He had wondered why Ashe would think to give it to him, since he probably knew more than most, but Ashe must have read it on his face; he just told Krose that you can never know too much. Kahtya was all over the place sniffing and scratching and Dinsch was chasing after her like she was a toddler in a room full of glass vases, so his walk was slow and full of stops.

  “Hey, Dinsch, give me a heads-up if anything happens. I think I’ll start reading this boo
k while we’re walking,” Krose told his friend.

  Dinsch nodded and smiled but kept his eyes on Kahtya. Krose saw what looked like distrust flash in Dinsch’s eyes as he watched her but he wasn’t really sure what his friend was about at the moment.

  The Folk originated on the Vieres continent around 300 years ago in the Xarthis era. During the War of Black Violets, the Northwestern and Northeastern tribes were evenly matched and no side was achieving a clear victory. Southern Vieres was staying neutral in the war, only defending their territories from being set upon by the northern conflicts. It is not known if Mycean scientists were enlisted to help the Northeastern tribes or if they had simply been given permission to conduct the research, but nonetheless, in secrecy they built an underground lab, known only as The Facility, and began to experiment with an unheard-of concept called ‘gene splicing.’

  The original animals used were mice and the experiments failed horribly. They could not get the spliced DNA to produce living organisms at first; prior to the experiments, splicing was solely used for creating medicines and chemicals for the treatment of disease. Because chickens had already been attempted in life splicing due to curiosity caused by successful splicing of bacteria and chicken DNA, it had already been discovered that chickens (for one reason or another) were inferior specimens for the purposes of these projects.

  The next attempted mammal was the rabbit and this was solely because of their rapid rates of gestation; test subjects could be reproduced quickly and in abundance, giving them a steady amount of DNA for testing. The scientists themselves lent their own DNA samples to the experiments although no humans were injected with spliced DNA. The number of scientists that were privy to the knowledge of the project’s existence as well as enforcing isolation through the duration of the project made human experimentation less desirable. Human women were eventually introduced to impregnation (on a non-voluntary basis —they had opted to kidnap fertile females of no consequence to society: prostitutes, orphans, runaways, and so on). Infertile females were terminated to preserve the secrecy of the project. This included the ones who began fertile but became sterile. Eventually all surrogates were terminated.

  Impregnation began with many miscarriages; even under ideal care conditions were the mother was placed under sleep and given the optimal injections and health considerations (essentially used as an incubator), miscarriages had begun at 100%. It was necessary to adjust splicing methods to strengthen the make-up of the embryo. The first successful birth resulted in a female they had coined “Eve.”

  The child had been a wretched sickly thing with complications both known and unknown. The natural structure of the thing was sound but the genetic make-up of human and rabbit was in direct contrast and the problem seemed to be that the instructions on the DNA were too “pure” to cause anything but conflictions. To solve the problem, the scientists had decided to take the DNA from Eve and figure out how to specifically assign rabbit and human traits while keeping the life form mostly humanoid, including reproductively, since the reproduction of animals in a humanoid form would cause multiple birth rejections.

  Eve died at 6 months, but her DNA is the base of all Bryfolk in existence.

  First successful RBHM (later Bryfolk) created 2 years later; named RBHM-001, male, sterile. No sperm detected. First successful reproductive male, RBHM-007. Females experienced reproductive failures, early term miscarriage. First successful reproductive female, RBHF-025. Much more difficult to produce a viable breeding female. First successful parents, RBHM-009 and RBHF-0025. First natural birth child RBHF-029. RBHF-029 inbred with RBHM-009; no genetic mutations detected. (Krose had to skip past these parts quite a bit; these were logs of successes and failures, but none were given actual names and it creeped him out. It also explained how scientists were able to rationalize their debasement and ill usage of the life forms.)

  Success with rabbits led to introductory experiments for: predatory birds, big cats, foxes.

  Traits of focus—

  Big cats: powerful running legs, hearing, retractable claws, night vision

  Rabbits: powerful legs, superior hearing, burrowing, smell

  Birds: flight, lightweight bodies, increased muscling in chest and back for lift (hollow bones caused substantial pain in subjects)…

  A census was taken for all animals prior to their escape, 100 years following their first life form Eve. No less than 100 of every genus type. Genera for: 15 varieties of predatory birds, 15 varieties of large cat, 5 in Canidae family (foxes only—dogs and wolves were unsuccessful), Lagomorphs (rabbits).

  Casualties for Folk on escape: negligible…

  “Hey, Dinsch, what’s a genus?” Krose asked.

  Dinsch frowned at Krose. “What exactly are you reading?” “A bunch of scientific crap,” Krose vaguely supplied, which

  is pretty much how it panned out.

  “Genus is… well, it’s how you separate a species? Like…

  you probably don’t know much about rabbits, but it’s easier to

  explain with cats. There are big cats, you know, that… well, they

  aren’t the same. If you take the cat family and divide them into

  genera, you get lions, tigers, leopards… But genera have

  genotypes to divide them more, like leopards have…” “Snow leopards…” Krose said teasingly, but something was

  bugging him.

  Krose flipped to the table of contents at the front and turned

  to the Felisfolk section. He was more than over the scientific

  babble part and wanted the history that the book had promised. Once there, he read carefully.

  Felisfolk (the cat Folk) are the second largest of the Folk groups, as well as the second oldest, following the experiments with rabbits. The genera/genotypes of the cat families bred were: lions, jaguars, leopards, snow leopards, tigers, servals, ocelots, cougars, lynxes, clouded leopards, caracals, margays, bobcats, and cheetahs.

  Blah, blah, blah…

  Before the exile of Felisfolk to the Wheryf continent, lions, ocelots, and snow leopards were the most abundant at over 300 of each kind. Where lions were often drawn to leading their societies, snow leopards had become assassins…

  A cold shiver rippled through Krose with that last word: assassins. Kahtya had been adamant about the low numbers of snow leopards. This wasn’t an old book either. Krose read ahead.

  Only snow leopards are sent from Wheryf…

  No Felisfolk other than snow leopards are sent from Wheryf…

  Krose’s head was feeling heavy as he took all of this in and closed the book. He looked ahead to see they were already approaching Mythec and Dinsch had frozen his steps beside him, grabbing Krose’s arm to stop him from walking. Krose saw the magic of Mythec’s gates bending as Kahtya was coming back through them, running all fours, not realizing she was passing back through a city she couldn’t see.

  “Bad news, buddy, this bitch is a spy,” Krose said. Since Kahtya had a cat’s hearing, her naïve pouncing turned into a full force run as she headed for Krose, her face dark with hate.

  Before he could react, her claw punched into his rib cage, shattering several ribs and puncturing his lung. He stumbled back, spewing a thick wad of black blood from his mouth and crumbling to the ground. Dinsch roared his rage and he and Kahtya became a blur of motion and limbs.

  Dinsch already knew Kahtya could slice him up good, so he took his time to avoid her claws and waited for an opportunity.

  “How the hell did you set up that little ploy? You really had us fooled!” Dinsch said between dodges.

  “You think you’re the only one with the power of earth? I don’t have Girdinus, but it doesn’t take my elemental much time to grow a few vines,” she hissed, nearly catching his face a couple times there. Dinsch wondered in passing if Girdinus had known and inconveniently forgot to tell him. He did not put it past the gnome to let an important detail slip.

  “How the hell did you know we were coming?” Dinsch a
sked, her claw nicking his chin a bit.

  “Because I planted the seed in your head; it was only a matter of time. How did you find out I was lying?” she hissed back.

  “You can’t get into our city if you’re with the enemy!”

  Kahtya over swung and that was all it took. Dinsch had rolled onto his back and threw his legs towards her head as hard as he could. He heard her skull crack and that was all it took—she was dead before she hit the ground.

  Dinsch cried out again, this time from sadness. Regardless of the betrayal, she couldn’t have faked the deflowering. Evil or no, she had been both young and virginal and he had even started to like the girl. He used his powers to dig a hole in the ground, set her in it, and pushed the dirt back into place. The ground sparkled and new grass returned as if it had never been disturbed and Dinsch hurried over to his friend. Although the whole of the betrayal and battle had passed quickly, in Dinsch’s head, it was painfully slow yet urgent as his friend lay dying.

  Krose was bad off; he was gasping and choking on blood. Dinsch was terrified—he picked up Krose and ran for the gates, screaming for help.

  Chapter 9: Hell’s Bells

  Wraith’s Wall seemed to be a seamless stretch of matte black stone on the horizon. Although the horizon was a purple mass of impassable mountain barely topped by a sickly sky. Pierait knew that something on the other side of that Wall was changing him, but he also knew that other Soulless had known it too and never came back. However, they probably did not have this as part of their Purpose. The pull was strong for him so he knew that it was no less alluring for any other Soulless. However, if they had given up their Purpose for even a moment to be lured in, it would have been anguish and confusion. At least in Pierait’s case, the confusion was only based on the possibilities it planted in his otherwise black-and-white mind. For any other, they would have felt tormented and demented with the need to live for their Purpose, coupled with the saccharine pull of what lay beyond the Wall making it impossible to resist. It would be like dragging your prison behind you with the promise of freedom.