The Other Kind (The Progeny of Evolution Series)

by Arsuaga, Mike

  I told her how as she and her kind believed vampires were a myth so I and mine thought the same with respect to werewolves. The situation reminded me of the commercial playing, usually around the holidays. In it, two M&M candies run into Santa Claus. Each party backs away in shock and gasps, “You are real!” before fainting dead away.

  “If I hadn’t focused so hard on making you prey I would have taken better notice of how closely your “theories” about life as a vampire matched life for my kind,” Sam said. “When you talked of integrating with humans and reproducing, well, it struck a chord.” She uncrossed and re-crossed a pair of creamy and well-shaped legs. I couldn’t help staring at the scented, glistening pink petals where they joined, as the urge returned with a vengeance.

  “Do you emerge?” I wondered aloud.

  “Oh yes,” I watched her steal a glance of her own at my stirring manhood. “We emerge at nineteen or so and, based on your description, with a lot more drama. Morphing has nothing to do with phases of the moon. It starts with Emergence.”

  I sniffed the cup of tea she offered and put it back on the coffee table. “Vampire emergence comes after puberty and is triggered by sexual arousal and climax. What about you?”

  She shifted position, sitting erect with a deep arch to her back, and presented a pair of firm rose tipped breasts. “It’s kind of the same. Most emergences happen like yours do, begun by first sexual climax, but sometimes, emotional trauma can also do it, as long as the pre-emergent was sexually mature. Traumatic stress started mine. Until recently, the majority of young lycans didn’t live beyond the initial morph. If it came upon them with their first successful sexual encounter, usually they killed or seriously injured the partner and were hunted down by the victim’s family or friends. It wasn’t much different for those who emerged during, say, a beating. Those fortunate enough to escape went underground until they understood their new condition.”

  “Do you have a networking and mentoring system?” I asked, forcing myself away from her freely displayed breasts to concentrate on the exquisite face, held high with a level and slightly inquisitive expression, surrounded by a cascade of ruddy hair.

  Sam frowned, mildly offended. “Of course we do! We are not mindless beasts.” Her tone softened as she added, “I have to admit we didn’t use drugs for killing prey as soon as your kind invented Kutzu. Until 1920 or so, we fed like they show in the movies. As with you, arguments run on among us over new versus old ways of feeding. It’s our most controversial subject, too.”

  My eyes cut to the freezer and she turned to follow my stare. “Now I understand.”

  “Well,” she answered, again getting a little defensive, “We don’t have wonder drugs allowing us to hang them in a closet like a smoke house. We dissect and freeze like any good butcher.”

  As Sam brought me over to the freezer and opened it I remembered the inopportune phone call and the loving it forced us to miss. Motivated to make up for lost time, my interest centered more around getting her back in bed than peering into a frosty hole, but she insisted. The last few cuts from her previous kill huddled in a corner. I caught sight of the ice crusted shapes, incompletely wrapped in aluminum foil with freezer burn on the exposed parts.

  “And by the way,” she informed me, rubbing a satiny flank against my rougher thigh, “We prefer to be called lycans. Werewolf sounds too bestial.”

  Evading my embrace with the slippery quickness of a minnow, she smirked and gave my hard shaft a sidelong glance, determined to show me the apartment before resuming sex. Opening a wide drawer in the battered old bureau near the bed, she pushed aside layers of neatly folded blouses and T-shirts and took out a polished wooden case. She opened the hinged top to reveal a comprehensive set of cutlery. Each piece rested in its own carved cradle. “These belonged to my Papa,” she explained with a hint of pride. “He owned a butcher shop in our village.”

  “Did you live near the city of Ypres?” I asked.

  “Yes, just across the border in France. How did you know?”

  “The name of the town was on one of the pieces of your tea set.”

  Sam’s face took on a faraway expression as she recalled memories nearly a century old. “The village, Maison Blanche, was near the front during The Great War.” She returned the case to its place and passed ahead of me to cross the room. In the process she took care to brush my ever more impatient sinewy rod with one of the more curvilinear parts of her soft creamy anatomy. “Besides Papa’s tools, the tea set is the only memorabilia I have of my village and childhood. Gran bought it for Mama to mark my birth.” But I didn’t pay attention. The delicious motion of her behind as she traipsed ahead held me enthralled.

  The little minx enjoyed putting me through such exquisite torture.

  She stopped in front of a night stand. On it, almost invisible in the dark, I spotted a laptop computer. When she opened it the room brightened. The monitor displayed her Facebook page.

  “I network with three others like me,” she explained. “Two are far away, but Cynthia lives on the coast. She’s only nineteen and is near emerging. I work with her to make the passage as smooth as possible, but she is extremely headstrong. Whatever you do, don’t call her Cindy. It’s always Cynthia.”

  “What about prey? Do you have a system to screen them?”

  She turned and faced me. All of my olfactory sensors overloaded on her luxurious cinnamon scent. “Like you screened me?” she asked and smirked.

  “Sorry, but yes, for a while I thought of you as prey. I screen all of them unless I go somewhere far away. In those circumstances no one knows me and there are plenty of whores and homeless to choose from.” She turned back to the computer and leaned slightly forward to do something with the mouse. I heard opportunity knocking and trapped her against the night stand.

  She took no apparent notice of my rigid maleness fumbling its way around her lower back and buttocks in a blind search for a warm and wet haven. On the computer she summoned a screen with my picture. “I looked you up,” she admitted. “You have no family, an absolutely necessary requirement when screening prey. Having a pack of relatives snooping around is the last thing I need. I check for other qualities, like diseases. HIV can kill us. Diabetes makes us sick. Those, as well as cancer, I can detect through smell.”

  Despite my arousal I admired her thoroughness. “My prey is almost entirely women,” I stated. “What about you?”

  “I killed only one female. Men are so much easier. Many are homeless or loners or dysfunctional and can’t believe their luck when I ask them to come home. They’re not going to fear a five-foot, two-inch, hundred pound woman. If anything, most of them have plans to misbehave with me. So I give them the hottest sex of their lives. The tea does the rest. It’s better than making a bloody mess. I burn the candles to mask the sharp odor of the drug. I don’t really like the smell of the wax.”

  I laughed and told her how it affected me. She thought it funny and I added, “Since we both need to find prey and our last targets fell through, why don’t we work together?”

  She raised her face considering the idea while holding me in the level gaze I’d come to know. “Yes, it sounds like fun.” She said at length, rubbing her pelvis against me. I felt her cleft all warm and wet with a slight pubic bristle sliding back and forth against my bare thigh. It offered promise to at last end the agony of my unrequited loins. “But right now we have more interesting things to do,” she teased and led me to the bed.

  * * * *

  After the evening class, it never occurred to me to go anywhere but back to Sam’s place. My heart raced with excitement in anticipation of what lay ahead. The sex exploded in my life like a hydrogen bomb. It alone could keep things going between us for a long time, but a relationship with Sam offered more, much more. I didn’t have to hide my nature. We could hunt and mentor together. As the only lycan-vampire couple in the world, many possibilities stretched before us.

  By the time I returned, Sam opened the windows an
d aired the apartment out. She put away the candles and turned the lights on. The cranky air conditioning unit rattled and wheezed at full speed. It reduced the wax smell, but I caught the other scents. They piled one on top of the other, not mixed but separate like cards in a deck. The most prominent were of our lovemaking. Beneath those, layers of her different personal scents, various cooking and toiletry odors, and the spoors of a few small animals, probably mice. Faintest of all, the lingering essences of men who preceded me and not lived to tell about it. There were a lot of them.

  “You should change the sheets on the bed,” I suggested when I recognized them as the source of the scent from other men.

  She glanced in the direction of the bed. At first my proposal confused her. Then an expression of comprehension crossed her face. “You know,” she said, stripping the coverings and throwing them into a hamper. “These men were nothing to me but prey.” Her expression said she fervently wanted me to believe her.

  I opened my arms and invited her to tuck in close. “I understand,” I said softly and thought how well we fit together. “I believe you,” I added. She regarded me with the green untamed eyes, the cheekbones, and the wide mouth which made the kind of smile a woman saves for occasions when she feels understood. “I believe you,” I repeated. Overcome by the moment I gently pressed her head to my chest and kissed its crown, savoring the rich smell of her hair.

  We spent the rest of the evening cleaning up. When we finished, darkness had slid in like a black sheet. The apartment appeared and smelled downright homey. Earlier Sam brought a wash load to the coin laundry down the street. I suggested I go with her. Despite proximity to the campus, Sam’s neighborhood owned its share of junkies and vagrants. As a minimum they panhandled aggressively, but to a female alone, even one with Sam’s abilities, could be much worse.

  “You forget who you are talking to,” she scoffed with good humor. “I can take care of myself. If nothing else, I can out run them.”

  “I tell you what. I’m starving.” I proposed as a compromise. “Let’s get the clothes and make tonight our first hunt together.” No matter how fast or strong Sam was, an assailant with a gun or even a large knife posed a grave threat.

  We didn’t have to leave the laundry to find Sam’s next kill. When we arrived the clothes were not completely dry. We paid for another fifteen minute dry cycle and sat on the hard yellow benches across from the folding tables. While we waited, Sam cooed and played with a baby one of her neighbors brought in. The squally little pink bundle fussed in its stroller when we arrived. Sam swept it up and cradled it. The child, wrapped in a blanket, appeared almost too large and heavy for her slight arms, but those wiry appendages could clean jerk probably four hundred pounds. She put her face close to the baby’s and teased it with the silly noises a person makes to please infants. After singing a lullaby in French she handed it back sound asleep.

  “Sam, you are so good with little Sophie,” the mother said, slipping the infant into a stroller. “You would make a perfect mom.”

  “Thank you,” Sam’s tone became gravely quiet. I sensed the woman had stumbled across a major regret. Observing the mother and child preparing to leave, Sam added. “There is no telling what kind of creeps are around, Jamie, let my friend Jim walk you home.”

  My head snapped around in surprise. Being volunteered didn’t set well with me. The task wasn’t objectionable. Her casual presumption of my compliance irritated me. I opened my mouth and doubtlessly would have made a stupid remark, but Sam faced me with an imploring expression, both requesting and giving promise of pleasurable compensation.

  I’m no fool. “I’d be happy to,” I answered, smiling.

  When I returned, a skinny young man had joined Sam in the laundry. He wore old filthy clothes, several sizes too large, and tennis shoes on their last legs with partially detached soles that slapped the floor with each footstep. A week’s growth of beard darkened the lower half of his face. An aura of bad breath, dirty underwear, and unwashed armpits surrounded him. He might have been young, but drugs, alcohol, and God knows what other risky lifestyle choices, turned him into a dissipated wreck. He surveyed the room with small hazel eyes set in swollen red sockets. Noting we were the only ones there besides him he approached.

  “Any spare change for a war vet?” he rasped, barely above a whisper.

  War vet, my ass!

  Sam and I examined him and exchanged glances of mutual understanding. We recognized he might be a good candidate for her freezer. Lack of personal hygiene never disqualified potential prey. As one of the homeless, he remained constantly on the move so even if someone missed him the presumption by the family and police would be he relocated or didn’t want to be found. He had no diseases of concern to either of us.

  “You poor dear; you look like you haven’t eaten in a week,” Sam patted the sleeve of his canvas trench coat and crossed the room to a vending machine. Our homeless friend might have been physically rundown and hungry, but he still appreciated the sight of Sam’s moves as she made the round trip, returning with a couple of bags of chips and a soda. Her jeans stretched across and furrowed into her body in all the right places, like skin on a grape. Offering a candy bar, chips, and a small carton of milk, she said, “This will hold you for now. We don’t live far. Why don’t you come to our place? You can clean up, too, if you want.”

  Cocking his head to one side, confusion swept over the dissipated face. I practically read his mind. He couldn’t believe his luck. Two Generation-X nitwits offered to bring him home. He silently counted off the opportunities the situation presented. Rob them. Case the place and come back later. Maybe even catch the fine little piece at home and have some fun with her. On the other hand, this all appeared too good to be true. He might have momentarily speculated regarding possible ulterior motives. I imagined a small voice from the deepest and most primal part of his mind, based on experiences learned from before Mankind left Africa screaming a warning not to go, but the higher more rational parts argued how a geeky Ivy League-looking professor and his diminutive companion posed no logical threat.

  Finally he said in his best visit-with-the-parole-officer polite voice. “I’d be much obliged to come with you ma’am.”

  As we started for the door a couple of women entered. They nodded, recognizing Sam from previous laundering encounters. Sam and I realized we had to abandon the target. If he went missing the women might remember us in a subsequent investigation. Sam acted first. “I’m sorry. I remembered an errand we have to run. We can’t take you with us. Here is ten dollars. Get something to eat.”

  The young man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not taking me home now?” he demanded loudly, moving belligerently toward Sam.

  “That’s right,” I said, sliding over to partly block his advance. “Take the money and leave.”

  Reaching around me, she held the bill out to him. With a frown he snatched it and departed, a trail of obnoxious odors swirling in his wake. We waited a few minutes, chatting with the two women before heading home. The soft warm night breeze and the smell of gardenias filled the air with a cloying sweetness. I expected to spend another night of passion with Sam. Only this would be better because we had nothing to hide and less smell of damned church candle wax to interfere with her scents.

  On the sidewalk in front of Sam’s apartment she suddenly stopped. In the next block a set of car headlights swerved into view and momentarily highlighted her face a creamy white. “Oh dear,” she said as the light passed and she faded back into the dark. “If we’re to hunt tonight, we’ll need a few things. Be a darling and pick up a box of Earl Grey tea and clothesline from the convenience store at the corner. Here, give me the laundry.”

  I backtracked for a block. Halfway to my destination, I turned to make out Sam’s slender form under the streetlight hauling the basket of laundry up the stairs toward the dark vestibule. It took longer than I expected at the store. Some fool couldn’t make up his mind about what lottery game to play.


  When I returned the lights burned in the front room. The windows were closed and the curtains drawn again. The limited yellow light radiated a warm and inviting glow. I threw open the unlocked front door and stepped in to a scene I never expected. The coffee table sat in the middle of the room. Sam lay on top, naked and on her stomach. Her arms and legs straddled it. They had been pulled underneath and tied to its legs with plastic fasteners. Her hair fell straight down and dragged on the floor. It framed her face which stared straight at me when I entered. Butt cheeks floated above and behind her head like a set of oval balloons. The light gave Sam’s whole body tan a uniform coppery tint. Perspiration covered her with a light sheen. The man from the laundry stood behind her, naked, too, and preparing to address his penis to her exposed vagina. His various unclean scents dominated the room. He pulled her head back by the hair stretching her neck to its full arch and put a large hunting knife to her throat.

  I wondered how he managed to get the jump on her. After all, she could morph instantly into a creature stronger than any human. Quickly I had the answer. I spotted, sticking out of the pocket of his smelly coat, the butt of a stun gun. Sam told me how nothing puts a lycan down faster than one of those. One zap immobilized her for several minutes, enough time to bind her to the table. It’s funny how they have exactly opposite the effect on vampires.

  “Sit down and get comfortable,” he growled at me. “I’ll be busy for a while.” I hoped he wanted to tie me up. That required him to come close. If he got within reach I could have taken the knife away and snapped his wrist like a carrot, but his attention focused on her. He left me unbound and what he presumed to be a safe distance away.