Washington, D.C.
THEY LEFT THE unconscious girl in the weeds of the garden, and Curtis Lott took him to a flophouse on Fourteenth Street, and talked to him while a working girl did her thing in the next room. He remembered little of their initial conversation, only that the tall, reddish-blonde woman with bright green eyes was absolutely intoxicating.
It was her scent, he thought, that had stopped his hands from their fateful journey earlier. Honeysuckle and musk and some sort of earthy fragrance he eventually recognized as her natural aroma, as if she were tied directly to the soil they walked upon.
It was nearly dawn when he realized he wanted to bed her more than he wanted to kill her—an evolutionary moment even he recognized.
It was like fireworks going off in his brain. He could master his urges by replacing them with others. Control his homicidal bent through sex.
He put the moves on her then, clumsy adolescent fumblings she endured with a brief smile before she took his hands, set them in his lap and said, “Let me.”
In his bloodlust over the past year, he’d forgotten he was still a virgin. Curtis fixed that, carefully showing him the things she wanted him to do to her, explaining with her body and lips what men and women did together in the dark. When they were done, indecently quickly in his mind, he felt a sort of peace he’d never experienced before. This, being inside this woman, was more than sex. It was truth.
“I would do anything for you,” he murmured into her hair, knowing it sounded romantic, and meaning it.
“That’s good, Adrian, because I have some things I need you to do.”
*
Curtis was twenty-two years older than Adrian, and worldly. She had an air about her, weary, torn, yet joyous and impetuous, that he found mesmerizing. She wouldn’t tell him where she came from, only that she’d been put on earth to find him and take him home.
And she did so the next day.
Home was Eden, a small farm in western Fairfax County. The acreage was put to sustainable farming that served a group of people known as the Edenites. There was no electricity, but they did have running water from a pump to maintain the crops. On the drive there, Curtis talked of a happy place where each person had a role, all were considered equals, and how her people, the Edenites, were special. She’d handpicked them all—he was too young, too inexperienced, to realize this meant they’d each been seduced in a small room by this glorious woman before being brought here—that realization came later, when he wasn’t cloudy with love.
Adrian drove his beat-up pickup truck through the gates, thrilled to be in the company of the woman sitting in his passenger seat. She was his. He’d claimed her.
When he pulled up in front of the farmhouse, several people came to meet him. They gave him sips of homemade spruce beer, and small corn cakes, an offering from their own hearts to make him welcome. He ate and drank and accepted their gentle touches. Lost in the sea of friendly faces and smiles and polite greetings, he had eyes only for Curtis.
After the Greeting, as it was called, she brought him into the house, into her rooms. There was a small antechamber, the reading room, she called it, which housed her texts, row after row of mystical and spiritual books, unlike anything he’d ever seen before.
The reading room opened into a large square bedroom with two windows on the far wall, sunlight spilling onto an unmade king-sized bed. The room smelled of sweet incense and even sweeter honey. Without saying a word, Curtis shut the door and began removing Adrian’s clothing. He was desperate to be with her again, to feel the softness between her thighs, and she was happy to oblige him. He didn’t care about the other people around hearing him; he knew no embarrassment when he was with her. And when she cried out, and he knew he’d pleased her, he swelled with pride.
It was known as the Seasoning. In the subsequent years, he’d managed not to kill the men who came after him, who were led into that sweet sanctum with dazed smiles on their faces, who made Curtis cry out in pleasure. But only because by then, Curtis had taught him how to channel himself. His murderous impulses were put to better use in service of the Mother.
After the Seasoning, which lasted a week and a day, he emerged, drunk on love and sex and power, meaning every word of his foolishly romantic statement after their first encounter.
He would do anything for Curtis. And he did.
Anything, and everything.
*