The Crocodile Virgin Read online

  “It is the rhythm of life.” I emerged from the river, fully dressed but soaking wet. The couple of other shifters I knew said that their clothes shredded when they shifted form and that they always returned naked to their human bodies. But perhaps the foster system had inculcated in me a deep need to be clothed and safe; not to be vulnerable. Whatever the reason, since I was eleven, when I shifted form, I always returned to myself clothed.

  Paul looked at me with my heavy cotton clothes plastered to my body. “Yes. Raw magic is the ground state of being.”

  Steam should have risen from my clothes, given the heat arcing between him and me. “Where are your friends? What are you going to do to stop Richelieu?”

  “Given that the other shifters haven’t arrived yet, we have to assume that Richelieu’s people have successfully blocked them from the other entrances to Eden.”

  I squelched to him, my boots full of water. “So, it’s just you and me.”

  He smiled at me, brilliant, beguiling and rueful. “Let’s make magic.”

  Chapter 3

  Making magic might have been easier, it would certainly have been more comfortable, if my clothes hadn’t been soaking wet and sticking to me. I tried to concentrate on the symbols Paul was sketching on the sandbank with a stick, but it was hard. I pulled my shirt away from my body and it made a “pleusghk” sound.

  “You’re too uncomfortable to concentrate.” He dropped the stick and unbuttoned his shirt. “Here, I’m bigger than you. This should cover you. Strip off your wet clothes. I’ll walk up the river a bit. Call me when you’re…not naked.” His voice went hoarse.

  Getting naked when you’re near someone who makes your hormones riot after a lifetime of sedate disinterest isn’t necessarily wise. On the other hand, if I had to stay in these wet clothes in the hot air a moment longer, I’d dissolve into a puddle of sweat. “Thanks.” I accepted his shirt.

  He avoided looking at me and walked off. It was a fine view, seeing his shirtless back and muscled butt and thighs covered by his hiking trousers.

  Fortunately, physical discomfort distracted me from my ogling. Unknotting wet bootlaces isn’t easy, but I managed. I tore out of my wet shirt and trousers, debated a second and left my panties on but shed my bra. Paul’s shirt covered me to mid-thigh. And it smelled of him. It was intoxicating. “Paul?” My voice was too high as I panicked at my own sensual storm. “I’m dressed.”

  Down river, he turned around and strode back.

  For lack of anything better to do, I concentrated on laying out my wet clothes on the grass to dry. I’d have to check them all for spiders and other critters when I collected them.

  When I looked at Paul, he was staring at me. “You look good in my shirt.”

  I fidgeted with its sleeves, rolling each another turn. “Thanks for lending it to me. I am more comfortable.”

  He nodded abruptly and returned to the sandbank. “The spell I was describing…”

  I took a shaky breath and forced myself to concentrate.

  He picked up the stick he’d been using to draw in the sand. Already he’d sketched the rough outline of a bird in flight and a lion. “Symbols predated writing.”

  “I know. I studied archaeology at university.”

  “Did you?” He glanced at me, interested. “No, we’ll get to know each other later. But you’ll understand why ancient magic is encoded in symbols rather than words. We’ve lost the language the Old Ones used to create shifters, but our scholars believe archetypal symbols structured their magic.”

  A wind was rising, sweeping in, carrying the heat of a desert and setting the rushes to rustling. Birds called in the trees behind us. Paul’s shirt hem fluttered at my thighs.

  His mouth compressed. “When evening arrives here, we’re running out of time. It’s not wise to stay in Eden overnight.”

  “Why not?” I looked around and saw shadows lengthening. “If we shifted to crocodile, we’d be safe, wouldn’t we?”

  “No,” he said bluntly. “Humans aren’t meant to stay in Eden. We need to hurry.”

  He finished sketching and threw the stick away. In front of us, along the river, were the outlines of a bird, a lion, an antelope, a dolphin and a dog—either a jackal or a wolf. Paul had drawn the major shifter breeds. “It would be easier if they were all here with us, able to call their own magic, but we’ll summon it through their symbols.” Which explained why he hadn’t sketched a crocodile. He and I represented the reptilian shifters.

  He held out his hand to me. “Ready?”

  “I have no idea,” I answered honestly, even as I clasped his hand. His fingers, curling warm and strong around mine, were reassuring. “What do I need to do?”

  “We need to find where Richelieu has tapped the energy of Eden.”

  I looked around the river scene. It was dusk, now. There was movement in the trees behind us, birds calling and fluttering around, diving down to the river to drink before returning to their perches. Other creatures, I could smell them, waited and watched. Dusk brought all the animals to the river. In the distance, zebras drank and a hippopotamus wallowed.

  Then the air, the earth itself, moved.

  The animals Paul had sketched on the sandbank rose and stretched. The bird flew upward. The antelope stamped a hoof and lowered its head, antlers sharp. Each shifter breed’s archetype readied itself to hunt with us. It was spooky. I could see them, and yet, I could also see through them. Spirit forms.

  “How do they know who to find?” I whispered.

  “I thought of the danger to us as I sketched them.” Paul walked northwest along the riverbank as the spirit forms fanned out. There was a track here, enough that I didn’t go back to put on my wet boots. The dirt was warm under my feet. “They all know that we’re hunting the threat to our world and our children’s world. Eden is a place of metaphors, so I guessed how to phrase things. I told them to search for the stink of metal and a sharpness beyond rocks.”

  “You think Richelieu and his magic will appear here as a machine?”

  “Perhaps. The link to robots is so wrong in this place, I don’t know how Eden might interpret it.” He halted. Dusk had vanished suddenly, giving way to twilight and the first stars. “There.”

  I followed his gaze and finally understood the primal magic of Eden. The scene had utterly changed. The river was still there, but the water had gone. The dry riverbed was a place of shadows and skeletons.

  The spirit forms of the other shifter breeds returned to us, gathering close. We were a united force.

  Skeletons and rocks in the riverbed rattled. They shook and grated over one another, crunched and seemed to struggle with unnatural life. They strained toward living.

  Beside me, the lion spirit roared.

  The bones and rocks exploded upward and fell down in a wall across the riverbed. It was like a dam, except no water ran.

  “Richelieu!” Paul shouted.

  Inside me, my secret self slapped her tail and stalked. She hated the dry riverbed. She hated the alien wrongness of the dam.

  As crocodiles we were the oldest of the shifter breeds. Crocodiles had seen out the dinosaurs. We were ancient survivors, but also guardians. The Ancient Egyptians had understood. They’d worshiped a crocodile god as a fierce protector. Sobek.

  Perhaps that was the truth of why Paul and I, of all the shifters who’d attempted to enter Eden, were the only ones who’d made it. We were guardians and it was our role to fight this threat. I shifted into crocodile form, but stayed beside Paul.

  A human hand appeared at the top of the bone and rock dam wall, then a second hand, before the whole man hauled himself up. He was skinny and bald, giving off the vibe of a fanatic, all mad, compressed energy. “I am building a new world. Go away, animals.”

  I hissed.

  The last of the daylight vanished. The clear darkness of a wild night claimed us.

  Richelieu pulled a femur from the wall, muttered something, and the end of it burned, providing him with ligh
t.

  As shifters, we didn’t need the additional light. Day or night, the world was ours. And I could feel the wrongness of burning a bone. He was exploiting the raw resources of Eden and disrupting the natural cycle of life, death, decay and new life.

  The bird shifter swooped down and, talons extended, wrenched the flaming femur from Richelieu.

  Rocks shot up from the wall, targeting the bird; hitting it, too. The bone dropped, flame extinguished, into the dry riverbed in front of the wall. The bird landed near me. More rocks pelted it and me.

  There was no word, no command, no signal, we just ran as one. All the spirit forms, Paul and I charged the dam wall. Magic wasn’t spells and incantations. It was passion and need. It was connection.

  The wall of bone and rock shook.

  Richelieu jumped down on the far side of it. “Stop! You don’t understand. Your time is over. Now is my time, the age of the machines.”

  Paul scaled the wall, jumping from the lion’s back—somehow solid for an instant—to reach the top of the wall. It shuddered beneath him. The stars whirled above him in the night sky, spinning into new patterns.

  The sight made me dizzy, or perhaps that was worry for Paul. I slapped the wall with my tail; hard, solid, damaging blows that ignored the fall of rocks.

  The ground beneath my feet went muddy. Water began to flow through the wall, dislodging bones.

  “No! No! You, animals!” Richelieu shrieked.

  “Run to the bank, Nadia!” Paul shouted. He ran along the top of the shuddering wall. I ran after him, along the riverbed, across the mud, and up the bank.

  The dam wall burst and water torrented down the river, carrying all before it.

  Paul dived in, shifting to crocodile as he did so.

  Paul! I screamed in my mind and plunged after him. I had never swum in water so fierce. Despite my secret self’s power and skill, the torrent hurtled us where it would. Paul, Richelieu isn’t worth your life. But my mate couldn’t hear me.

  The river curved and around the bend, the torrent ceased. This was Eden, with its own rules. I recognized the patch of sandbank where Paul and I had emerged from the tomb. The river was placid, again. But the night sky pressed down with alien constellations.

  I crawled out of the river after Paul, who dragged… “That’s not Richelieu,” I said, shifting to human.

  Paul released the robot he held in his jaws and shifted to human. Unlike me, he obviously didn’t retain his clothes when he shifted form. But that was an interesting ogle for later.

  “Paul, why did you save this?” I crouched beside the child-sized robot. I recognized it as a robot for all that it lacked metal. Its body was quartz that sparkled with a moon glow.

  The other shifter breeds’ spirit forms gathered around the robot with us.

  “It’s alive,” Paul said. “Richelieu is gone from Eden. It has spat him out. Maybe he’s dead, maybe he lives. But this…” He crouched beside me. “Robot, Eden has given you life.”

  The antelope stamped angrily.

  The lion tossed his mane in response.

  Paul looked at them. “Life and the freedom to live it. Robots as equals, not the slaves of humans, nor our masters.” He studied the robot that lay inert on its back. “One of us.”

  The robot’s eyes opened. They were yellow topaz, the crystal version of crocodilian eyes. “It hurts to live,” it said.

  The bird shifter squawked agreement.

  “It does.” I hadn’t meant to speak, but the words came from my soul and from Eden itself. “Life hurts, but here and now, I think you have a choice. You can choose to live and robots will, maybe not today, but one day, have a soul. They will think and feel and love. Or you can choose not to live and they will remain machines.” I touched the cool crystal of the robot’s foot, very aware of Paul’s warmth beside me. “Life is good, friend.”

  Eden waited.

  The robot sat up. It touched my hand fleetingly, carefully, before standing. “I choose life, but not yet. One day.” It grew larger.

  It wasn’t my imagination. Suddenly it was as big as me. We all stepped back and that opened a gap in the circle.

  The robot strode through the gap to the river. It simply walked into the water without looking back. “I will keep guard here for the future of my people and all of us, until one day we are needed.” The water of the shallow river somehow closed over its head. It was gone, but the robot also remained part of us.

  “Richelieu can’t control them, now,” Paul said satisfied.

  The spirit forms around us shook themselves and disintegrated, the fading light of their bodies drifting like fireflies over the river and gone.

  “Time to go home,” he said.

  “What if Richelieu’s men are waiting for us with guns?” And how would we explain his nudity and my near nudity? His shirt was wet and plastered to me. Eden sure was hard on clothes.

  “We’ll work something out,” Paul said, and took my hand.

  Chapter 4

  Paul and I stepped out of Eden, through the wall, and into a thankfully uninhabited tomb. He’d warned me that time passed at a different speed in Eden. The tomb was dark, but my nose and ears told me it was vacant.

  “Wait here.” He climbed up the ladder. The door rattled, then I heard him hit it. There was a crack, another hit, a second crack, and light poured in. Daylight. Pale daylight. “All clear. Come up.”

  I scurried up the ladder and emerged into an empty tourist site still cool from the desert night. I shivered.

  When no one shot at us, he nodded, satisfied. “The authorities must have cleared the area. Let’s hope they didn’t find my jeep, or at least, left it alone.”

  His jeep was still there and he’d thought ahead. He had a change of clothes. I got his spare t-shirt and he donned trousers. The mating frenzy was still there, drawing us to one another, but tiredness and hunger muted it.

  We had our cover story straight. I hate lying, so we’d give as much truth as we could without risking being locked up for craziness.

  Paul drove me into town to the hotel where my twenty one tourists had stayed the previous night. The hotel manager recognized me, welcomed me with a hug, and called the police.

  My story, told to the police after I’d showered, dressed and while I ate, was simple. In the gunfire I’d panicked and run (into Eden, but I let the authorities assume that I’d gotten lost in the desert fringe). Paul found me and returned me to town. He was my hero. I smiled at him as he sat eating breakfast beside me.

  “And what were you doing near the tombs?” the police officer asked him.

  “I’m a geologist. I’m on vacation and I was interested in the area. I thought it would be a safe place to explore.” And that neatly lobbed the blame back on the local authorities.

  Fortunately, no one seemed to recognize Paul as the man being shot at yesterday. We squeaked through the polite interrogation before my twenty one tourists smothered me in hugs and questions. I was relieved to learn that the tour company had flown in another guide to replace me. Jerry, the bus driver, gave me the news. I was to be paid for the complete tour, and then, fired. I understood. A tour guide who got lost in a crisis wasn’t ideal.

  “I’ll need to find a job when I get home,” I said to Paul when we were finally semi-alone, waiting for a plane at the local airport. The plane would take us to Cairo, and then, for me, back to the cold of Chicago. Unless, Paul had another suggestion. I looked at him hopefully. We were being circumspect in public, no hugs or other behaviors inappropriate for seeming strangers. It was hard, since the mating frenzy was growing. I wanted to touch him and had to settle for simply sitting close.

  “I have a house in New Orleans,” he said. “Come home with me. We’ll find you a job. The shifter network looks after its own.”

  “Does it? But I don’t know anyone, except for you.”

  He grinned at me, so good-looking that my heart skipped a beat. “They know all about you, now. I’ve been on the phone, reporti
ng our success and finding out what happened to Richelieu.”

  “What did happen to him?”

  “He had some kind of seizure and was admitted to hospital. Tests are coming back negative. His doctors think he’ll be fine.”

  “As long as he doesn’t return to Eden?” I clutched the edge of my chair.

  Paul carefully unfolded my fingers from their tight grip and held my hands between his. “I don’t think Eden will let Richelieu return.”

  “The robot will fight him if he does,” I said, suddenly sure. Then I laughed and rested my head a moment against his shoulder. “I never thought I’d say something like that—the robot will fight him.”

  “I’m glad you were with me in Eden.” He put an arm around me.

  If anyone watched us…well, a stranger might comfort another stranger. I snuggled into him just as our flight was called.

  A day and a half later, we stumbled into Paul’s house in New Orleans. It was an older house, showing signs of recent repair. That was about as much as I noticed before I crashed into bed. I find it nearly impossible to sleep on a plane, so jetlag was hitting me hard. Hard enough that the mating frenzy was more like a mosquito’s whine. It was there, but I could ignore it. All I craved—unromantic but true—was sleep.

  Paul put the air conditioning on while I showered, and the bedroom was cool when I crawled between the sheets. I woke long enough to mumble “yes” and pat the bed when he asked if I wanted to share it or not, and then, I was out for nine hours straight.