The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution) (8 page)

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, another 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.