Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"WHO'S THERE?" LUTHER called, getting up from where he was seated. He had been given all of Nancy's electronics by Harris before, but everything had gotten hairy, and he hadn't had much time to try to break past the various securities she had in place.

Now, he was outside Nancy's cabin, because he'd decided the easiest thing was to just use her fingerprint. He was sitting on her front stoop, all of her devices unlocked.

But he'd just heard footsteps, and someone was approaching.

It was Angela. She raised a hand, slowing as she approached. "How are you?"

"Been better," he said, sitting back down.

"You feeling like you're two seconds from snapping and filling me full of eggs?"

"No," he said, going back to the computers.

She continued her approach. "Well, do you smell me?"

"I…" He twitched uncomfortably, now suddenly aware of her approaching scent. She smelled like Angela, like Ramirez, which was strange. He hadn't been aware that he knew her well enough to know her scent. It was the sort of thing he usually only became aware of with people he lived with, truthfully. Some kind of change due to whatever he'd mutated into, undoubtedly. Great.

"Do I smell like sex?"

"Talk like that. That's helping," he said to the screen. "Seriously?"

She took out her gun.

He didn't have one. He'd decided, last night, it was better to hand them over to the women, since they were the ones who were in the most danger and since he and Jonathan didn't know if or when they would become dangerous. It had seemed intelligent and even somewhat heroic last night. Now, he felt an itchiness around the decision, something he didn't quite care to examine.

"I'm fine," he said, willing it to be true.

"You're… you know… transformed."

"I hadn't noticed." He was sarcastic. He looked up at her. "Nancy didn't tell Anderson Scott shit."

Angela stopped, still holding the gun, but pointing it at the ground. "She said all that stuff about promoting internally."

"She made that up. I don't even know why," he said. "I think she probably could have authorized the personnel changes, firing Harris, whatever. She seems to have been the one who signed off on Dr. Stine, for instance. Anderson Scott doesn't know anything that's going on down here, not so far as I can see. He doesn't ask. She doesn't offer."

"Well, maybe there's communications elsewhere and you just haven't found them."

"Oh, they've been communicating," said Luther. "Just not about this." He gestured all around at the cabins and the path to the lagoon. "I've been reading all their conversations."

"So, what do they talk about?"

"Their kid, mostly."

Angela holstered the gun and hurried over to sit next to him on the steps. "Shut the front door."

"They have a child which they gave up for adoption," he said. "It's some kind of open adoption situation where the parents send them pictures and videos every day. They have some app where they log in and see what's going on and then the two of them talk about their little girl. He makes a lot of veiled threats to her. He's kind of a dick. I get the impression he took the little girl away from her by force. He says stuff like, ‘I can get you institutionalized again' and shit like that."

"Oh, my God," said Angela, who was reading over his shoulder, pressing in against him, her shoulder touching his shoulder.

He swallowed hard. "Uh… maybe you, uh, maybe…"

She looked up at him. "Too close?" Her voice accused him.

"I'm fine," he decided, squaring his shoulders. In his pants, that thing of his was lengthening. He was afraid it was going to burst right through his clothes, but it found a way down the length of his pants leg. He let out a breath, trying to steady himself.

She got up anyway, drawing the gun. "I'm going to tell you what I told Greyson. If you try anything—"

"I won't," he said.

She eyed the outline of the thing that was lengthening in his pants leg. "It's, um, growing."

"Does that," he said.

She licked her lips, and her scent changed in a way that made his eyes cross.

He choked.

"What?" She was breathless.

"You seem to be a little worked up looking at it is all," he said. "I get that it's not the same or whatever, because if it's a physical fight between us, I can overpower you, but, uh, you do have a gun."

She shoved it into its holster. "I'm not worked up. That stinger thing is not making me hot." But she was still breathless.

"We need to consider the idea that the other guys that we work with are fucking douchebags. Maybe they raped Nancy because they were always going to rape Nancy, and maybe—"

"Greyson said something like this," she said. "Hashtag not all men, right? You're one of the good ones, Luther." Her voice was bitingly sarcastic but still breathy.

"Well, if it's going to be a gender war between men and women, and all men are the enemy, good luck continuing the human race," he said with a sigh.

"We're not exactly human anymore," she said.

Something horrifying jerked through him at her words. She was right. He grimaced. "So, back to Nancy and Anderson Scott."

"Yes," she said, "back to that."

"I can text him." He held up Nancy's phone. "I can tell him everything."

"But you haven't?"

"You think I should. Like, no question?"

She didn't say anything.

He set down the phone. "I think Anderson Scott is a bad person."

"Oh, you think." She was sarcastic again.

"I know everyone speculates that these one-percenters are sociopaths or whatever, but yeah, there's something off about him. You read these texts and you see it. So, I guess I just don't know if contacting him is the best idea. Because I think he might drop a bomb on us and wipe us out if he thinks it would be better for him."

"Oh," she said. "But at the same time, he could do that if we called anyone else, right? To get out of here, we need some organization with funds, and the best defense against Anderson Scott would be the media, but then everyone would know that we'd mutated like this—"

"You've really thought this through."

She bowed her head.

He sighed heavily. He picked up a hand and turned it over in front of his face. "I was thinking, uh, and I don't know why, but I guess I was thinking that when this happened, I'd be darker than everyone else. My scales, I mean. But it's exactly the same. Am I not Black anymore?"

"You want me to answer that?"

He looked up at the sky overhead. "You know what's very weird right now? This conversation is not making my stinger go down. Or my dick for that matter. They seem to work in tandem. They go up and down together. I could swear this conversation would make me not turned on."

"Maybe it's my scent?"

"Could be."

Another long silence stretched out between them.

She spoke, her voice hoarse. "I haven't… really seen one."

"Okay," he said and things jerked in his crotch. His balls got tight. He'd examined all this at one point, alone. The stinger was right between his cock and his balls, like an extra cock.

She got out the gun and settled it against his temple.

He went still. "Angela?"

"Show it to me," she whispered.

He grunted.

"I'm not going to shoot you unless you scare me," she murmured.

"That's reassuring," he said softly. "What if I don't want to show you? You shoot me?"

"Let's not pretend you don't want to show me, Luther," she said witheringly.

He barked out a laugh. "Okay, you got me. Uh, I think… to get it out, I need to stand up and push my pants down around my ankles."

"Fine." She got to her feet.

He did too.

The gun was at his jaw now. She couldn't reach his temple anymore. He turned to look at her, swallowing again.

She licked her lips, gazing up at him. "This some kind of striptease, Luther?"

"Just want to make sure you enjoy the show," he whispered.

"Nothing to see right now," she said, her voice going velvet. "Maybe you're shy. I could help you out." Her hand was at his crotch.

He grunted again. "I mean, you do have a gun to my head, Angela, so I can't exactly stop you."

"You can't," she agreed, trying to undo the button on his pants. She couldn't do it one handed.

He helped her out.

She got the zipper on her own.

They pushed his pants down together. The pants were practically at his knees when the stinger was finally free. It sprang out and pointed out. The air felt good on it. It pulsed. His cock was jutting out over top of it, scaled, shimmering, but otherwise human-like.

"Oh," she said. "It's really huge."

"Yeah." He liked that she was looking at him, that he was bare for her like this. He liked it a lot .

"I want to touch it," she said.

"Well, you can do what you like with a gun to my head," he managed, his voice strained.

"I won't if you don't want me to," she whispered, her voice gentle.

"Are you kidding? Please touch it," he groaned. " Please. "

Her fingers were on the stinger, fingertips grazing over it.

He jerked at the sensation.

"Is it sensitive?"

"Mmm," he managed.

"Like, cock sensitive?" She wrapped her hand around his cock, as if he needed to feel that to gauge the sensitivity.

He shut his eyes and made only garbled noises.

"Okay," she said, returning her hand to the stinger, but now jerking it off, holding it in her fist and loosely rubbing her hand up and down the length of it.

He shuddered, eyes shut, teeth gritted, overwhelmed by the sensation of that. He'd thought about doing this to himself at one point, but there hadn't been time to masturbate lately or to explore his strangely altered body like this.

"What the fuck am I doing?" she breathed.

You can stop, he tried to say, but his voice wasn't working. A strange pressure started in his balls, not unsimilar to the sensation he had before he had an orgasm, but this was different.

A jerk happened, something moving into his stinger. It felt fucking fantastic. He gasped.

He could feel it—whatever it was—moving up the thing, and he could see it, too, an oblong shape traveling through the long protuberance. He moaned, because every movement felt good, really good, like an orgasm building on top of itself, getting better and better and then—

Oh, shit, it was coming out of the tip of him, and it hurt but it felt good, too, so good, better than any time he'd ever come in his life.

The egg pushed out, the shape mashed from being inside the ovipositor but growing rounded and spherical as it emerged. It was like the ones that killed Nancy—fleshy, veined, slightly translucent.

It came free of him with an obscene slurping noise as he let out a high-pitched sound of pleasure— fuck , that was good—and then it plopped down on the ground.

"Holy shit," said Angela in a gravelly voice.

He had more of those in him, and he could tell, and he wanted to… shit, he wanted to put them in her. A shudder went through him. He panted, gazing up at the sky.

She wasn't touching him anymore and the gun wasn't on him. Instead, she'd gone down to kneel next to the egg. She poked it with her finger. It was the size of a baseball. "Huh," she said.

He pushed his stinger down against his leg and struggled to pull up his pants and cover it up again.

"Oh, you're putting it away," she breathed, looking up at him.

"You sound disappointed," he said, hoping she was.

She stood up. "I, um, I…"

"Let me," he said.

"No, are you insane?" she said. "No, we saw what happened—"

"One is not that big," he said. "She had, like, I don't know, forty of those things in her, and I'll just put one in you, and I think you want me to, and I think we both know you want me to—"

"Oh, you did not just say that," she said, gasping at him. "That is the shittiest, rapiest thing I think I've ever heard anyone—"

"Please." His voice was ragged.

"Luther…" She turned away, and she was shivering.

He sat back down on the porch and let out a long, low moan.

She rubbed her face, and then moved her hand away to look at her fingers. "Oh, oh, oh… how long have those…?" He could see the webbing there. It wasn't like his own hands. It was more delicate and it wasn't scaled, but it was there. "Oh."

"You should go," he said. "You should get away from me."

"I shouldn't have made you…" She looked up at him. "It's my fault for getting you worked up."

"Yeah," he muttered. "For smelling like sex and femininity and being fucking hot. It's definitely your fault."

She went back to the porch and scooped up the gun.

He shied from her, and everything in his crotch pulsed at her closeness.

She slammed the gun into the holster. "Let's go back to the lab. Bring everything."

"I just said—"

"You're in control of yourself," she said.

"I just begged you—"

"And I didn't say yes, and you haven't done anything, and I trust you, and let's go."

He took a breath to tell her that she shouldn't trust him and that he was not in control of himself. And then he realized that if he did that, she would probably leave him alone, and the odds that he'd get to lay an egg inside her would diminish significantly.

She was definitely into the idea of it, even if she was scared. He could convince her. He could wear her down.

If he played it right, she'd let him.

He closed the laptop. "Okay. Let's go."

"We'll talk to Jonathan and Riley and then we'll decide about making outside contact," she said.