The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution) (11 page)

Guide me?
Guide me to do what?

Passing the
portrait of The First Parents, Lorna asked, “What do you do for the
corporation, Ethan?”

“Whatever
Father needs. At present, my main task is participation in a
research project to investigate extra sensory abilities of our
kind. I did well on some screenings.”

Rumors about
the phenomena floated around. Once in a while a documentary popped
up on the news feeds. According to them, a small percentage of The
Others demonstrated clairvoyant or telekinetic powers. The
corporation wanted to conduct further research. CI’s tight security
lid kept public knowledge at the rumor stage. The world had more
facts to support the validity of King Arthur’s court.

“Now let me
get this straight,” Lorna said. “You are from your father’s first
wife.”

“
From
his
only
wife.
Mother was a hybrid. They were married fifty-one years. Father
stayed with her until the end. Several times, she offered to set
him free to seek a new mate, but he refused. A few years ago, she
passed away. Since then, he’s been all work. He’s driven. It’s like
there’s a countdown clock running somewhere and he has to be
finished before it reaches zero.”

The Green Room
was about forty by twenty feet. A table of black, polished wood ran
the long side. At the far end were two place settings. A massive
high-backed chair sat at the head, while a smaller, daintier one
occupied the first place to its right.

How cozy
.

Ethan stated
the obvious. “Your place is to Father’s right.”

Lorna took her
seat. For an instant, a devilish inspiration urged her to shift the
settings around, even of occupying the place at the head of the
table.

Were you
supposed to sit here? I’m so sorry.

But the
outcome of her temerity would undoubtedly be to hold some innocent
employee responsible, so she took her place.

Ethan chuckled
in a tone suggesting he understood her plot. Taking his departure,
he said, “Enjoy your evening.”

Within a
minute or so, two men dressed in formal wear threw open a set of
massive wooden doors at the other end of the room from where she
had entered.

“The Chairman
enters,” one of them announced at the top of his voice. Edward
White, CEO of Coven International—by some accounts the largest
corporation in the world—strode into the room. Even taller than she
imagined, he stood well over six feet.

Upon seeing
her, his face lit up with an anticipatory expression, the kind that
accompanied chance encounters with a dear friend or lover knowing
you have the rest of the day to enjoy each other. Why he acted this
way, she had no clue. They’d met for the first time during their
morning conversation via closed circuit television, hadn’t they?
Could she remind him of someone? Was he being polite? Maybe it’s
the magic wrought by the talents of Fairy Godmother Donatello.

Or could he be
nervous about this meeting too?

“I apologize
for the formal announcement,” he told her lightly. “It’s easier to
let them stay with habit than to retrain them for the rarity like
you.”

Lorna tilted
her head to one side. “A rarity like me? What am I, a dodo
bird?”

“Oh, no,” he
answered, nonplussed. “What I meant to say is…well…I don’t often
have guests for purely social reasons.”

Talk about a
first. A police lieutenant backed the most powerful critter in the
world into a corner.

His backing
and filling reminded her of the man from her dream. The name and
face floated on the fringes of her consciousness. A clear image,
when she didn’t think too hard about him, but when she
concentrated, the vision bolted into unexplored parts of her mind
like a deer fleeing into forest undergrowth. However, beneath the
silk shirt, gold cufflinks, and studs, she suspected there’d be a
familiar, smooth-skinned, rock-hard chest like in the dream.

A busy little
server in a white chef’s hat brought out a silver tureen containing
a mutton soup flavored with broccoli.

The waiter
placed a steaming bowl before Lorna. Dipping in a spoon, she
sniffed the soup before tasting.

“I’ll say
this,” Lorna said. “You’re good feeders.”

Ed smiled
introspectively. “We try our best.”

“Karla tells
me you’ve shipped your Aunt Claire’s letters to your
grandparents.”

“That’s
correct. And I’m sure soon they’ll express their personal
thanks.”

Lorna paused
to appreciate the fibrous salty creaminess of the soup. “Does that
mean I get kidnapped and hauled off to Mars?”

Ed chuckled.
“Oh, nothing as dramatic as that. More likely, a memento with a
handwritten thank you.”

“Tell me about
your Martian colonies.”

“There’s not
much to say. The corporation, in joint venture with General
Electronics, resumed the space program in 2046, after the
government abandoned the project. We rebuilt the space station and
the moon base. By 2060, we were ready to challenge Mars. General
Electronics opted not to participate. Weapons contracts were more
lucrative, so we bought them out. Did you know our kind make ideal
astronauts, especially for voyages beyond the moon? Were she alive,
I think Aunt Cynthia would have been the first to go. Ever the
adventuress, that one.”

“She’s Karla
and Thomas’ mother, the one who died in the Great Plague, isn’t
she?”

“Yes. From
childhood, my father adored her. Just after he turned eighteen, my
grandparents blessed a union between them.”

“And you’re
their half-brother.”

“That’s
correct. My mother is Rebecca. Before I came along, she carried
Karla and Thomas to term.”

“To carry
someone else’s children, that’s pretty unselfish.”

Ed broke off a
piece of bread to float in his soup. “That’s how much she loved my
father.”

The sincerity
of Ed’s voice confirmed a depth of character, attractive to Lorna.
Was this incident contained in a vignette of the room with the
round bed?

“Cynthia
Meadows wasn’t actually your father’s aunt, right?”

“
Correct, Cynthia was a close friend of my grandparents. She
met them in the early days before her emergence. My father and his
siblings called her
Aunt
.” Sipping
the soup, he turned an almost hypnotic green stare on her. “What
about you? What’s your life like?”

Before
answering, she took a last spoonful of soup. “You already know what
I do. I try to stay one step ahead of the bad guys, but it seems to
be a losing battle lately. The cold case files get bigger and
bigger.”

“Any
interesting cases you can talk about?”

The Gomez case
popped to mind. “Yes, there is one. Maybe with a little help from
your records, especially the DNA base, we could solve the
mystery.”

“Oh?” he
asked, leaning forward. “Tell me. I love to solve whodunit
mysteries.”

She almost
burst out laughing at the idea someone who called serious crimes
“whodunits” could contribute anything useful. “Really?” Putting the
spoon down, she wiped her hands on the napkin, and then righted her
position. “Well, we think we have a feral coven working the area.
The record shows, there hasn’t been one outside of a Third World
country in sixty years, but this one appears real. Two families,
six people are dead. All are human. The attacks appear to be made
by lycans. They abduct one member of each family, killing the rest.
A few days later, the missing one turns up, minus the parts that
were eaten.”

“Tell me, what
parts are consumed on those who’ve been abducted?”

Lorna stroked
her chin. “Let me see. The liver, kidneys, and lungs from the first
and, if I remember correctly, the eyes, liver, and uterus of the
second.”

“Were the
organs torn out, or was it a clean extraction?”

His interest
impressed her. “They were removed with almost surgical precision,
as a matter of fact. We have DNA samples from the attackers. If we
run them through your database, it’ll save time. You have a DNA
file on almost every member of the community.”

“I see. The
DNA, if it’s in our files—and it probably is—closes your case.”

“Otherwise, we
have to run the samples through larger, less-reliable bases, which
take a lot longer.”

“How
intriguing. Tell me more,” he said, with obvious fascination.
“Remind me, before you leave, to give you access to our DNA base.
Please, go on.”

“Well,” she
continued. “There’s a symbol we found, along with one of the Tenth
Legion.”

“A symbol?
What kind?”

“It’s hard to
describe. Picture two serpents. Each shaped in an ‘S’ and placed at
right angles and…”

By then, he’d
smoothed out a linen napkin worth three days’ pay, and with a pen,
drew the symbol, complete with the female outline. “Is it
this?”

“Yes, that’s
it. What does the glyph mean? Do you know?”

“Those are
representations of the goddess Mari, accompanied by her consort
Sugaar. These are pagan deities of the Basques. They predate
Christianity. My grandfather, Jim White, after spending some time
with a feral pack in the Pyrénées, translated a collection of
documents given him by Malvina Arriago.”

“Yes, I
remember. She was one of the founders of the corporation From
Basque country, if memory serves.” Another tidbit dredged up from
recent Internet searches.

“
She
lived to be almost three hundred. Throughout her life, she kept
journals and collected documents for the purpose of collating them
into a definitive history of The Others. The formal title
was
The
Other Kind
but that one
has fallen into disuse. Anyway, Grandfather Jim completed the work
fifty years ago, but he now believes there’s more to the
story.”

“More? In what
way?”

“The documents
are written in four languages, a good part of it in archaic forms.
A few months ago, Grandfather announced a discovery. In the papers,
he found what he believes is a reference to an earlier set of First
Parents.”

“How can it
be? The story’s well-known. Until Jim and Sam met, vampires and
lycans each believed the other to be a myth.”

“All true, but
there are references in Basque, as well as Latin texts, to a
couple, a vampire and a lycan. According to legend, the future
emperor Vespasian discovered them in Spain. The pair joined his
entourage and counseled some of the greatest emperors.”

“Are you
saying my kind and vampires interbred freely back then?”

“
No. The
large majority of us arrived in the old-fashioned way, by mutation.
In all the Pyrénées, there may have been three or four of each
kind. Lycans called their groups
packs
. Vampires used the term
coven
. Unaware of each other, both kinds ranged from the Bay of
Biscay to the Mediterranean. When they hunted, they also kept eyes
opened for pre-emergent children, knowing enough to take them
along. But what if a pack carried away the wrong kind? Suppose for
once, instead of using the error for prey, when they realized their
mistake, they allowed it to emerge? There are hints such an event
happened.”

“I don’t
understand the advantage.”

As he spoke,
her stare never left him. For sure, he wasn’t hard to look at. Her
impression of Ed White took a sharp turn for the better when Ethan
told her how he’d stayed with a hybrid wife until the end. Few of
The Others, especially males, showed such loyalty. The night
before, Lorna was ready to give her heart and body to a two-timing
lowlife like Jerry because he threw a few roses and a fancy meal
her way. Ed’s passion blended with the sincerity in his eyes to
create an attractive effect. She decided his chances improved by
the minute.

“If there were
hybrid children, they’d be indistinguishable from humans. They
could blend in, inoculating the human gene pool. Since hybrids are
able to breed with humans, they’d spread our genetics around the
world. The bottom line is the mutation is local to Europe, but the
inoculation isn’t.”

“How does the
symbol of the god and goddess enter the picture?”

“It might lead
to learning the identity of the earlier First Parents. At least,
Grandfather thinks so.”

“Well, he’s a
little far away to be any help, so I guess it’s up to us.”

Ed sighed. “I
have staff working on the details. My son Toby left for Mars five
months ago at his great-pop’s request to follow up, but nothing
must interfere with the Mars project.”

Wanting to ask
him why he led the corporation to put so much importance on the
colonies, instead she said, “What’s the rush? It’s not as if the
earth is going anywhere.”

“Many of us
believe our lives would be better if we left Earth to the humans.
More and more, humanity wants to blame the problems of the last
century on us. It’s easier than taking responsibility for their
mistakes.”

Her hands
pressed flat on the table with fingers splayed. Donatello dusted
each nail with a translucent pink that matched her lipstick.
Without warning, Ed covered her hands with one of his. His
manner—tentative, shy, and tense—impressed her. After she smiled in
acceptance of the trifling intimacy, the intense face relaxed. The
surprisingly light touch reminded her of Ethan’s as well as that
of…Who?

“You have
lovely hands,” Ed commented. His eyes bored into her.

Her turn to
feel awkward arrived and she sought to change the subject. “What
about my case,” she asked. “Don’t I get equal air time?”

“Oh, yes. The
solution is simple.” His hand still covered both of hers. “You
don’t have ferals. It’s a group engaged in the business of
harvesting and selling human organs.” Then he turned toward a sound
from the kitchen, adding, “Ah, the main course has arrived.”