Chapter 9

Deek rapped once on the door and came right in, trying to keep his expression neutral instead of defensive, which is how he was feeling. For a feral, he wasn't much in for the snapping and snarling, which was too bad, because those qualities might have come in handy for someone about to get his ass handed to him by an eighty-year-old man.

"I'm disappointed in you, Kid," came Rod's sharp voice, before Deek was even in the kitchen. "You may have blown it."

He couldn't help it, Deek tensed up his shoulders again, like a teenager about to be grounded. "Well, maybe if anyone told me anything," he defended, glaring at Kathy. He turned to Rod, knowing that he sounded like a kid tattling. "I didn't know who she was - I had no idea a new female was arriving, otherwise I would have been there myself to meet her first thing, instead of letting Hypno welcome her with his eye-fuck mojo."

"Linda said maybe," Kathy responded, gritting her teeth at his crudeness. "She said that it looked pretty likely that they'd come here, but definitely not a sure thing. She didn't want to scare 'em away by offering to escort them."

"Why did they refer her to come here, anyway?" Deek asked. "I mean, despite the fact that she's so alluring, she's mated."

Kathy turned to Jim. "You didn't tell him?"

"No," Jim said. "And you need to be more careful - you scared her before when you told her you knew." He jerked his head. "Tell him."

She hesitated, to deliberately intrigue Deek before her next statement: "She's breeding."

Deek opened his mouth in surprise, his subconscious supplying Ah, that's what smelled so good while the rest of him processed this new information. A fertile female mutant meant that she was here for him. Finally. It felt like he'd been waiting forever: five years.

That was when Bill and Linda had found him. Running with his sister in a forest in Saskatchewan, Deek had wound up with a deep gouge in one thigh that was too much even for his accelerated healing ability, and it became infected and abscessed. When Bill and Linda came through the area, Bill had turned his hands onto the injury and healed it, leaving only a faint pink scar behind.

Afterward, they told him about where they lived and it sounded ideal. He'd had trouble fitting in everywhere, because he was too human to be completely feral, but too feral to ignore it and embrace his humanity. He had the heightened senses of sight, smell, hearing, and was quicker to heal than regular people, with disproportionate strength and speed for his size, and he could perceive that whole pheromone spectrum that was lost on humans. Plus, you know . . . claws. But he didn't have the furry limbs (although he could rock a beard, if he did say so, himself), or the pointy teeth - not like his sister, who couldn't pass for human, and didn't want to, preferring to live in the forest. He could keep up with her on the run, but once she started taking down deer and eating the flesh raw, he had a hard time relating with her more feral instincts and base urges. But he stayed with her out of companionship as well as a bone-deep need to protect her.

His little sister had agreed to come along, though, when he begged her and told her he wanted them to move to the Island. Not only was this a place where mutants did not have to hide from the public at all, Bill and Linda had captured his interest by insisting they'd both find mates there. They'd be encouraged to mate there: it was all part of a system that "Uncle Rod" had masterminded, years ago.

Convinced of the superiority of mutant genes, Rod founded the Island as a refuge, where his kind did not have to suffer the confinement of living in a human society, and could foster future mutant generations in privacy.

The only problem was that after a few decades, population numbers had dwindled because most mutants were sterile. The Island had some mutants with human mates, people who chose to live there either because they were relatives of mutants, or were merely appreciative of the mutant nature. But they were particularly short on childbearing mutant women, and even the human-mutant partnerships did not always produce children, with only a small, random percentage of that progeny over the years born mutant.

Faced with the reality that his haven might cease to exist within another generation, Rod had started sending out emissaries, who were tasked with the impossible mission of finding more fertile mutants - females, especially - for the Island. Bill and Linda were the most suitable for this. Their traveling from town to town helping people, like they had done for Deek, that was legitimate. But they also started to scope out these crossroads and mutant settlements for new residents to introduce to the Island. They found two in Deek and his sister Tanya.

It really only took a little wheedling for his sister accompany him to British Columbia, and Deek was eager for them to settle into their new home. He was less excited upon their arrival, when he found that his sister was actually the only reproductively-fertile female mutant of the women on the Island - there was no frail for him to mate with. He knew there was a chance that mating with a human woman could yield a mutant child, since male mutants could carry the gene and pass it on, but he'd already been badly burned by that particular scenario in his youth.

That had been the usual story: boy meets girl, boy and girl become high school sweethearts . . . then boy gets girl pregnant, boy discovers he is a mutant, girl terminates pregnancy to get creepy mutant spawn out of her body, boy gets run out of town. Okay, maybe not everybody's usual story. Deek vowed that he was going to do it right the next time; one day, he'd have a child with a mutant mate, someone who'd be glad to carry his creepy spawn. Deek was even willing to wait for the right female mutant to relocate to the Island, since currently his only other possibility for a mate was Kelsey, the annoying fifteen-year-old daughter of Dan from the B&B, and obviously she wasn't of age yet.

But five years on the Island was a long time to be patient. Rod assured him that they'd find a female for him, but viable ones were rarer than gold, and even if Bill and Linda found one capable of bearing young, they'd have to convince her to want to move to the Island, without scaring her away with the "and we want you to come make lots of little mutant babies there" part of the sales pitch.

In the meantime, Deek had settled in and opened the bar, made himself part of the tiny community. After a while, Rod had tapped him to be his eventual successor as patriarch of the Island: he was smart, strong, and charismatic, with feral intuition, but not to a fault. Deek began sitting in on Rod's little conclaves with his right-hand advisors: his niece Kathy and her husband Jim, plus Linda and Bill when they were in town.

Normally, they let him in on everything, keeping him up to date on the recruiting efforts, and also on Kathy's attempts at matchmaking between the residents of the Island. They would never force anyone to mate, obviously, but Kathy certainly encouraged, even guilt-tripped, the men and women who came of age to bond in pairs that made children likely. That's how Deek's sister Tanya had ended up breeding with Blaze, even though she didn't like him.

Shaking himself out of this self-reflective reverie, he addressed Kathy, annoyed. "How could you not tell me that they'd found a fertile mutant female?"

"Because we didn't want you to get your hopes up," said Rod, "and because she's not yours, not yet. Not if you keep making immature mistakes, like you did with that stupid idiot."

Deek knew he was referring to Hypno. Dammit, am I ever going to live that down? he wondered. The one time he was invited to go out with Bill and Linda on a recruiting trip last fall, Deek had met Hypno at a bar, the tall and talkative mutant bragging about his ability and how successful it made him with women. Straight-up hypnosis was the way he did it, of course, and he just had to make sustained eye contact to get anyone, man or woman, to comply with whatever he wanted, although it only lasted a very short time out of his presence. Deek was dazzled by the idea of having such an ally, and brought Hypno back with him to the Island.

There, Hypno proved to be less than useless. He was sterile, and incapable of producing children, which suited him just fine as he worked his hypnotic way through all the human women living on the Island, earning himself enemies in the close-knit community since he didn't seem to care whether the ones he screwed were paired already or not.

"He'll come in handy some day, I swear," assured Deek, dying to hear more. "Seriously, this female, she's breeding? With that feral with the knives in his hands? Did Bill sense it or something? And what is her scent?"

"He didn't sense it, apparently, she told them," said Kathy. "And the scent is part of her mutation: she makes projections to your senses that make her attractive, almost irresistible, and she enthralls the people around her so they feel blissful."

"Like Hypno?"

"No," Kathy said scornfully. "It's not mind-control, she can't help it; it's out there all the time."

"Mmm," evaluated Deek. Nice quality to have in a mate. He'd already felt some of what Kathy was talking about, in just those couple of minutes that he'd seen the woman in the Sports Bar, before her jerk husband came in to get her.

Husband, he scoffed. What a lame human legal thing for a feral to impose on such a creature. He'd never ascribe to that kind of bullshit, when she was his. Deek felt his blood growing uncharacteristically hot, as thinking about this female stirred something deep within the animal part of his nature. He recollected the sweet scent of her, which had permeated his bar for hours afterward, and the shiny brown hair that curled around her shoulders, fantasizing about wrapping that hair in his fist and getting his tongue and teeth on her white neck as she writhed beneath him.

Exhaling with a whuff!, Deek turned his attention to Rod. "So what's your plan for the male? Kill him?" Although Deek didn't consider himself the bloodthirsty type, he was still a feral, and knew there'd be no getting his lovely future mate away from that beast, otherwise.

Rod looked pained by the stupidity of his question. "No. You want her to miscarry? We need all the pure mutant babies we can possibly get. We can't do anything that puts her at risk until the child is born."

Deek was disappointed. The thought of living with this beautiful female in his midst for months (How many?) and not having her sounded like torture.

"You need the all the time you can get, anyway," Jim interjected. "You boys really got off on the wrong foot with her - she doesn't like you. It's going to take a lot of coaxing to turn her around, so that she'll come to you after we get rid of him."

"Which I still say is a waste of a valuable fertile male," whined Kathy, looking at the ceiling. "He could sire more children with one of our humans."

"And I keep telling you," said Rod in a commanding tone. "That the woman has to be the priority. Pure mutant young will pay off more in the long run, and she may not breed with a new mate if her first one is still here.

"What you need to do now," the old man continued, "is concentrate on winning them over: get him to relax, and her to trust you. Otherwise they won't stay here. You need to apologize at the Grange tomorrow night, for starters, and keep that fucking Hypno under control."

"What's her name?"

"Lorelei - Siren." Kathy patted Deek's arm. "Only about seven more months - that's not so bad, right?"

Deek nodded. Seven more months.