Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten (29 page)

“Yeah, my cousin flew into town just last night to spend the summer with us.”  There was no need to spread Katie’s business all over town. 
A little white lie here and now, never hurt anyone.

“Oh, Katie,” she said through a catch in her breath, bringing her eyes back to mine.  “She’s here the whole summer, huh?”

“Yeah, she needed to get away from some things in Oklahoma,” I clarified, feeling like I was suddenly standing on shaky ground.

“…or get into new ones…,” she murmured so lightly I wasn’t sure I had even heard her right, but she covered it almost immediately.  “Well, will you let people know to keep an eye out?”  I nodded.  “And, yes, I think it would be a good idea for Jacob to ask around a bit, as long as he doesn’t get into any trouble or anything.  You know how some of
those
kind of people can be, always spying, looking for the next ‘diseased’ person.”  She said it with raised eyebrows and then smiled wanly.  She tapped her mother on the arm, who was still cursing under her breath.  “We can go now, mom.”

“Bye Tirza, we will do what we can ok?  If we find anything out I’ll call you, I promise,” I reassured her, then gazed passed her.  “Bye Mrs. Cardenas, we’ll do what we can.”

She was trying to be strong and not cry, but she wasn’t having much success when she waved a small wave at me.  “Ok, Eff, you tell your momma I said hi for me, ok?”

“I will.”

“Thank you, Eff, call me if you find out
anything
,” pleaded Tirza.  Then her mother crushed the acceleration pedal and they were gone.

I walked back across the street with my head lowered, studying the ground.  I really wasn’t all sure there was anything we could really do, other than ask around. 
Two days
, she could be anywhere by now or… I just pushed those thoughts to the side, not wishing to rehash anything overly negative right then.

Yet, there was something that Tirza had said that sparked a thought, a train of thinking that burned brightly for a moment or two and then fizzled out.  Now, I couldn’t quite focus along the same train of thought.  It eluded me. 
What had she said?
 
“…the next ‘diseased’ person…”
 
Why did that resonate?  Why was that important?

“What’s going on?” asked Katie, which brought my head up.  I hadn’t realized her and Ramona had walked from the front steps of the house and had intercepted me half up the walkway.  There was empathy in her eyes, her voice subdued and calm.

My thoughts scattered.  It still took me a few moments to recover.  “Like Ramona said, Tirza’s little sister is missing, she has been gone for two days now and nobody seems to know where she went, not even the school where her mother dropped her off.  Everyone there is saying she never made it to school, but Mrs. Cardenas says she dropped her off and saw her walk onto the campus grounds.  So, Tirza and her family are all freaking out as you can well imagine.  The cops are all over the school like ants, but still no sign of her,” I explained as coolly as I could manage, attempting to keep what I felt in my heart right where it belonged – buried.  I didn’t want to break down.

“That sounds awful,” Ramona commented, coming about to put her arms around my waist, trapping one of my own within her grasp as she gave him a long squeeze.  “You ok?” she asked
, knowing how much I liked the little girl.

I nodded.

“You sure, ‘cuz?” was Katie’s question as she gently touched my cheek, a slow, tender caress.

I smiled dejectedly.  “How could I not with you two around?  You guys make me feel like a king.”  I tried to sound light, but I know I didn’t succeed.  I hadn’t really tried hard enough.

“You see,” began Ramona with a little mischief in her grin, “they were right, Estefan.”

“No they weren’t,” I muttered derisively.

“Yes they were.”

“Who was right?” asked Katie.

“The girls at our school,” began Ramona, gazing across me at Katie.  “If you ask them about Estefan - how he is, what he’s like, etc.  They all pretty much say the same thing.”  There was wicked delight spreading across my girlfriend’s face.

“And what is that?”  Katie’s tone dropped a few octaves.  She had obviously formed an opinion of her own.

The other teenager chuckled.  “They say he has ‘powers’.  They say if he puts his mind to it, he can get any girl to go out with him or kiss him - a select few even said he could get girls to sleep with him if he really tried.  They say he accomplishes this by saying the right thing at the right time.  This apparently makes females hearts melt in droves.”

I expected Katie to laugh and say those girls were all full of shit.

She thought about it, though, the very same fingers that had nuzzled my cheek were now tapping her lips.  “You know, he kinda does do that.”

Her response floored me. 
What!?!

“Last night, I was having a tough time with things.  He had me calm and comfortable, and I swear to god more than a little moist just by what he said.”  Her eyes narrowed on me.  “Were you using your ‘powers’ on me last night, Effy?”

Ah come one, Katie, I don’t feel like brutal honestly right now, goddamn it!

“No.”  I had had about enough of the ‘powers’ bull-pucky that Ramona swore by for more than a year now.

“He might not have known it, Katie, but he was using them.  He uses them all the time, but, he thinks, it’s his natural way of being.  He just goes around being himself.  Yet, for you, it’s something else entirely.  Before
you
know it,
you
realize you’ve made decisions about him that
you
shouldn’t be making, willing to do things that
you
shouldn’t be willing to do.  That’s right about the same time you realize, he’s not a normal guy.  You see there is something about him that attracts you, and you can’t figure it out.”  She chortled seductively.  “That’s usually when you feel your panties hit the floor.”  Ramona hadn’t let go of me, and, as she finished, she shook me in her arms, rattling my brain.  “Isn’t that right?”  She licked my earlobe and made me shiver with delight despite my efforts to subdue the sensation.

“You make me sound like some hard-up vampire or something,” I quipped, but didn
’t pull away.

“Cuz, there is no way you’re
that
hard-up,  You’ve never waited one hundred years to be with the right girl.  You took every one you could get your hands on like you were sampling a box of chocolates.”  Katie winked, then laughed, walking beside me, opposite Ramona, her narrow hips rocking this way and that.

Ramona rattled with a lengthy purr.

Maybe I was in some trouble here…

“Where the hell did Jake go?” I asked
, seeing he was nowhere in sight.

“He went back upstairs,” relied Katie offhandedly.

“I gotta talk to him about lighting some fires under people’s asses in the neighborhood, see if he can turn up anything on Lisa,” I said to no one in particular.  “If there is someone out there who can stir the pot, no matter how big the damn pot - Jacob can do it.”

“You got that right,” agreed Ramona as we walked back in the house and closed the door behind us.

{ ¹Winston Churchill:
a
British
politician
who was the
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
from 1940 to 19
45 and again from 1951 to 1955; widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20
th
century. }

*****

[He breaks the surface, though his fingers never stop moving.]

Lisa was one of the first persons that we knew personally, who suddenly disappeared without a trace in the second half of that year.

There would be many thousands afterward…

~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Summer – 2018)

A Deal is Struck

[He sinks back into the mire of the past.]

It was
after dinner.   After, Katie and I had helped my mother clean up kitchen.  After, we tarried about with my siblings and my parents, for a time.  It was hours later, when Katie, my step-sister Flavia, my brother Johan and I strode up to the Loft to watch a movie my mother said was too violent for the younger kids to see.  I had frowned at her, because I didn’t think
The Hills Have Eyes VI
was all that violent.  But it wasn’t my place to decide the right time for a kid to see someone decapitated.  That was a parents’ job, not mine.  Therefore, us four, older kids happily marched up to the Loft, flicked on my 37-inch plasma, popped in the High density Blu-Ray and made ourselves comfortable wherever there was room - on my bed, on the floor.  Katie and I had scooted toward the headboard and sat leaning against my pillows, while my long-legged stepsister stretched out lengthwise across the foot of the bed.  My brother, who had brought his lounge pillow, was resting upon it at the foot of the bed, raptly watching the flat screen from a prone position.

It wasn’t
long, sometime after the main characters were introduced and the gratuitous full frontal nude scene passed when Katie yawned.  This was followed by the sweaty over edited sex montage that made Katie squirm at my side.  At first, I thought it had made her a little hot and bothered, but when I glanced over at her, I knew, she was bored.

“What’s wrong, Kat?” I wondered
, pinching her on the thigh.

She slapped my hand, giving me a warning glare, mouthing I wasn’t allowed to touch her like that in front of others.  I nodded and did it again, which made her mad.  She poked me in my side and made me jump involuntarily.  I tickled her back and made her wiggle and grunt as she tried not to laugh out loud.  My sister turned to look at us for a few seconds, then rolled her eyes.  Flavia returned her attention to the movie, flipping her long auburn hair over her shoulder as she did so.

“Stop!” Katie whispered hoarsely.

I stopped
,but left one of my hands on her thigh, just above the knee.  She glanced at it and then grabbed a hold of it and squeezed.  My cell phone chimed, disturbing the lot of us.  It was a text by the sound of the alert, so I leaned over to have a look at it on the nightstand.  It was Ramona
–
“Anything from Jacob?  FYI, everything for tonight is cool… ;)” 

I showed it to Katie.  She smiled and rubbed her hands together with excitement.  The three of us had made big plans for late
r that night.  We were eager to see if we had the guts to fulfill them.  I texted her back with Katie leaning on my shoulder, watching as my fingers danced over the surface of my phone
–
“Nothing yet!  It’ll probably take a few days.  You still gonna be here at midnight?
”
 

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked my cousin, wanting to make sure she was one hundred percent sure.  This was the sort of thing that could scar a person for life
, if they hadn’t thought it through properly.  I needed to make sure the Katie sitting next to me, right then, would be the same Katie I would awaken beside in the morning.

“Eff, I wanted this last summer remember,” she began, then she lowered her voice and spoke into my ear.  “But, we were interrupted…”

I whispered back.  “Were you really going to give my head that day?”

“Absolutely,” she answered with an affirming nod of her head.

“I knew it!” I replied huskily, a bit too loud than I wanted too.

“Hey, guys!  Will you be quiet or go somewhere else, I’m trying to watch this,” bellowed my aggravated sister, looking over at us wi
th distain in her glare.  She, once more, returned her attention back to the movie.  On screen, there was a horribly deformed man chasing a diminutive, effeminate man through a maze of tunnels, yelling something about butthole love.  I watched the back of her head for a bit, wondering if she might’ve put two and two together. Maybe she was acting like an ass, because she didn’t approve.  Would she tell her father?  I hoped not, if this were the case.

Then my cell vibrated and chimed again.  I gazed down at the text message
–
“12 midnight sharp, baby doll!  See you soon!” 

I edged myself toward the edge of the bed, pulling Katie with me.  She came willingly, entirely pliant.  I led her toward her bed on the other side of the room.  I leaned toward her and said, “Ramona is good to go, so I guess we’ll
see what happens.”

“Just be ready, Eff, because I really want it to happen.  I don’t want you to get all weirded out,” she leaned back into me.  We wove our way across the remainder of the room toward where she was supposed to sleep, but hadn’t yet.  I sat on the edge of her bed, and she followed suit.

“You sure, Kat?” I asked, speaking under the 7.1 digital surround sound of the Blu-Ray audio system playing the movie.  I wanted to make sure she was absolutely open to what the three of us had discussed whenever Jacob had walked out of the room earlier that day.

After we had made our way back to the Loft, and I had finally calmed down over the news of Lisa’s disappearance.  I
’d asked Jacob to ask around among his more nefarious acquaintances (about which he said he would).  We went back to what we had been doing before the interruption.  The girls and I lounged on the bed, where I told Katie all about Lisa with Ramona listening.

Meanwhile, Jacob went back to rolling a few joints from
his portion of the marijuana.

When I had finished answering all of Katie’s questions about the unfortunate young teen, I had got up from the bed to ask Jacob if he would roll a few for us from our stash.

He smiled broadly and said that he would, winking at me, raising his eyebrows at Ramona, thinking I was planning a fuckfest with the girl later on that night.

I just let him think whatever he wanted; keeping him off the real trail was the key at this point.  I went over to the satellite radio receiver and turned it on to the classic rock station.  At once, some old jams from way back in the heyday of Heavy Metal
¹ began to blare.  All of us liked to “rock out” now and again, even though the era was long, long gone.

When I returned to the bed, I found the girls deep in conversation.  I let them go on for a time when it dawned on me that they were
discussing the subject of sex.  I was suddenly confused.

“What’re you guys talking about?” I had asked.

Ramona had been talking, stopped and said as a matter of fact, “Our Katie has made a request.”

I jerked my head back
, chin to chest.  “Oh, and what is that?” I asked lightly, thinking Ramona was messing around.

“She has asked me very politely and respectfully, if she could make love to you tonight
.” Sixteen words that made my lower jaw drop to the carpeted floor was all it took.

Holy fuck, Katie
wasn’t messing around!

“Really?” I asked.  Then I squinted hard.  I knew I had just sounded
like I’d just entered puberty, complete with an ever-breaking voice box.  I looked from one of them to the other, my eyes as wide as saucers.

Both of the teenage girls merely nodded, Ramona gravely and Katie demurely, which was so not like
her.  It was a complete farce.

“A-and what did you say, Mona?”  My voice was mouse-sized
, still quavering, as though I was stuck in a snowstorm freezing off my ass.

Ramona seemed to wait
, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell me or not.  Then she began to speak before she looked like she was ready to make a decision.  “We laid down a ground rule…,”  she perched herself higher on her elbows as I got down on mine.  We were basically level with one another.  This allowed her to speak in a lower tone.  “We both agreed that until we really know what all of
this-
,” she gestured with her hand, moving it in a circular fashion, indicating the three of us, “-is about, we can only engage in the “act” when the three of us are together.  No pairing off into two’s, which includes a pairing of Katie and me as well.  This way no one gets jealous or feels left out.  So, if we want to do something, then we have to ask it of all three of us, so it’s fair.”

“Wow, the three of us, really, I thought you girls weren’t sure about girl on girl and all?”  I h
ad still sounded like a dweeb.  It was happening so fast and it involved one of the most serious parts of our trilateral relationship.

“We don’t have to go down on each other just because
we’re naked and with you.  Right, Katie?” asked my girlfriend of my cousin, who had been utterly still up to this point her eyes riveted on me.

She shook slightly, breaking her train of thought.  “Right…,” she said quietly, then chanced a glance at Ramona.  “But, for tonight, Ramona has agreed, since I haven’t been with you before and she has, many times as she put it, that she will only watch.  We have agreed tonight I can have you all to myself, since it will also be our ‘special’ first time.”

The rest had been a blur of planning and scheming, with Ramona trying to figure out how she was going to sneak out of her mother’s apartment and steal back to my place.  Both of them tried to figure out a good time, a late hour, but not too late.  They’d gone on and on.  I had just listened and piped in now and again.  My mind kept drifting on its own, wondering what it would be like finally to see Katie without any clothes.  What would she look like?  What would she feel like?  I kept seeing her soft, pale skin contrasting with the darker skin on the back of my hand.  I could see the difference between them as ran my palms over her body, felt her perky breasts, massaged her round ass cheeks.  What would she feel like on the inside?  What would she smell like?  What would she taste like?  What positions would she want?  Was she good at giving head?  Did she swallow or would she prefer I came inside her.  Would she tell me she loved me when she came…?  I can tell you, there were a thousand, thousand more questions and wonderings of that nature, more and more, coming to mind with each passing moment.  Every time, I glanced her way, Katie would catch me in the act, but I wouldn’t look away.  We would stare into each other for a second or two.  I could see there were just as many questions behind her orbs as there was mine.  Her mind was racing too.  Her glances were quick and furtive.  Her tongue kept gliding over her thin, pink lips. I watched every time, asking myself over and over.  What would it be like to make love to her, after so long?

Finally Katie spoke.  “I’m sure, Effy.  I have wanted you that way for more than three years now, ever since I lost my virginity and realized I had wanted it to be you instead of my boyfriend at the time.  I wanted you.  I was so disappointed in myself
, in so many ways, I think I just stopped caring.”  Her eyes were far away.  “What kind of freak wants her first cousin to deflower her, right?  I just couldn’t come to terms with it back then, but… well, you never left my mind or my heart.  Every time I tried to push you away with another boy or distract myself with some of the drugs my parents were bringing home, you came back.

“And,” she went on, ”last summer when I finally got to see your “stuff”, I was like in a trance.  I wanted it so bad – in my mind, in my heart and in my pussy.  I wanted it to rub away all the bad things I had done from the inside out.  I wanted your kiss to overlay everything I had done with my mouth, your hands to make my body clean and pure once again.  I knew then,  it was supposed to be you.  I knew it and still I fought.

“Then things got so bad at home.  My mom and dad were fucking everyone else’s mom and dad in the entire god damned city.  Caroline was acting like a bitch to everyone.  Junior began to think he was better than everyone else.  I just had it.  Marissa was lost to me.  All she ever did was ignore us – all of us.  She was always into her own damned thing.  Little James was always locked in his room, playing video games as he called it.  But that was crap!  What sort of video games involve women moaning like their getting fucked hard.  Video games my ass, my little brother - at thirteen - was already addicted to porn.  He was jerking off like six or seven times a day.  I had to get of there, Estefan.  I had to come here and be with you, forever, if it were possible.”

I raised my eyebrows at that.

She understood the cast of my visage and did not skip a beat.  “Oh yeah, Eff, I’m not going back.  I’m gonna make a deal with my aunt.  I will promise her, I will stay out of trouble, get good grades.  If she can convince my mom to enroll me in your school, I will stay here.  I will vow, the moment I screw up she can send my back to Oklahoma City next day air, if she chooses to do so.  I’m gonna do it, Estefan, for my own sanity and wellbeing.  I gonna stay here and be your girl-in-secret, and Ramona’s twin.  We will never be apart.”  She stopped and placed her hand on mine, which I was using for support while I sat on her bed.  “Don’t get melodramatic, but I’m gonna spill my guts, ok?”  She asked.

I nodded with a lame, half-smile on my face.

“If I could, Eff, I would marry you.”

My eyes bulged.  I my throat constricted, stealing my ability to talk.