Crazy Seduction(erotica)

Camila frowned as she looked at her two friends. “I feel like we messed up in protecting Henry but how could we have known the legal representative the Council appointed would try to assassinate him?”

“Ay, we couldn’t. Sometimes luck plays a greater part than strategy. And luck, good and bad, circle the lad like vultures.” Roy said with a scowl and took some deep breaths to settle his nerves.

Camila nodded. “Ok, put some thought into how we can get the Hidden Race Council to back off on their conditions. We will meet again at the end of the day to brainstorm.”

Roy and Sigrid nodded, and the three headed upstairs to begin their regular duties.

It was just a regular business day after all.

**********

“Who’s fucking with the satellite imagery? I swear to God if the guilty party doesn’t step forward and confess to creating these creative little masterpieces I will hunt you down and grind your balls under my sharp, pointy heels!”

The room went silent. Nervous eyes looked over monitors at Janice Whetstone, Director of the Climate Research Division of the EPA as she fumed from the doorway. Half of the technicians in the room were female, and even they were worried about that threat.

“Nobody? No modern-day Rembrandts want to confess to doctoring satellite images from the last run?” Janice asked with a sweet tone that fooled no one. She noted evident shock in the eyes of several of the techs as they heard the crime. She frowned when she felt the light touch on her arm. She turned to see a messenger in the hall. He handed her a folded piece of paper and made his escape. Janice read the paper, and her frown deepened.

When she turned her attention back to the team, they hid a little farther behind their monitors.

“I was just informed that some older images as far back as three weeks ago show the same doctoring. All images are now being reviewed to determine the true scope of this little sabotage!” the Director raged.

“Director Whetstone! Please join me in my office,” a voice said from behind her.

She turned to see Rick Mondeyo, the department manager standing behind her. He was a big man and very dark skinned. Handsome in a swarthy ethnic way. The man was in jeans, a t-shirt, and sandals. Not office attire but then she recalled he was off this week.

“Aren’t you on vacation?” she said tersely, doing her best to ignore his dark eyes, sexy mouth and how tight those jeans were!

He nodded and gestured for her to precede him down the hall. He leaned in the doorway and saw many grateful smiles.

“Debs, join us please.”

The tech in question gave him a deer in the headlights look as all eyes turned to her. He shook his head reassuringly and gestured for her to join him. She popped up from her chair and rushed after him and the Director who was almost at his door already.

Rick let them inside, flipped on the light and moved around his desk to turn on his computer. He gestured for Janice to take a seat and indicated to the tech to stand by. He logged in to his PC and got it into the Archive application. Then he turned his attention back to the Director.

“I have access to the raw files that immediately go into the archive. They are undoctored files. The files you and the other directors receive have been processed but never doctored.” He held up his hand to forestall her protest. “Please give me the file ID so I can find the source file.”

She read out the ID, and he ran a cross-check to find its source. He then pulled a copy of the raw file to his local desktop. He also copied the digital version of the file she had in her hand.

“Could you get the light, Debs?” he asked as he turned on the ceiling mounted projector which lit up one of his walls. His desktop projected on the wall. He opened the raw image file in his editor then the processed one. Next, he gestured for Debs to sit at his desk before the PC.

He looked to the woman seated across the desk from him. “Which quadrant of the image had the anomalous artifacts?”

Janice snorted at his dancing around the issue, but she looked to the photo and read out the numbers.

“This is the digital file which produced the photo you hold,” he said then turned to his tech. Receiving a nod from Rick, Debs pulled up the area of the photo and made a noise of surprise. There in the sky above southern Missouri was a strangely crooked rainbow giving birth to a bright white cloud. To the west of the rainbow, open skies. To the right were several big fluffy white clouds spreading out in a triangular formation.

“Magnify this quadrant to look for artifacts,” Rick said to the tech.

“Artifacts?” Janice asked.

“All of the tools used for manipulating digital images leave some form of ‘evidence’ behind-”

The tech was shaking her head. “I don’t see any artifacts, but someone could have pixel painted these, sir. That doesn’t leave artifacts.”

Rick looked at his worker doubtfully.

“Well?” Janice asked belligerently, hearing a possibility of sabotage.

“Debs, how many pixels in the affected area of this image?” he asked.

She zoomed out and selected the area containing the anomaly. “Oh.”

“What does ‘Oh’ mean?” Janice said testily.Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

Debs looked up at her boss. “Too many pixels to have done it manually.”

“Exactly. There would be no way someone could have used that method to alter the images in the time between image capture and archiving. These are unaltered files. The anomaly is there, and the image you are seeing is a faithful copy of what was happening in the sky over Missouri. No one doctored the images you reviewed. I can’t explain what you see but- it is what it is!”

Debs snorted at her boss’ weak joke then wiped the smile from her face seeing the hostile frown on the Director’s face.

Janice huffed. She’d wanted to get to the bottom of this and return to her superiors with a simple answer. She also really wanted to dish out some punishment. Frustrated, she turned her attention to the hunk of manliness next to her. She didn’t have to leave empty-handed. She opened her mouth to invite him to dinner.

“If that’s everything, I have to get back to my niece’s birthday party. My boyfriend was so upset that I left it to come here,” Rick sighed.

Janice’s mouth snapped shut as her expression soured. With a brief nod, she quickly walked from his office to head back to hers.

Debs was looking up at her boss in surprise. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend!”

Rick leaned over to shut down his PC, gestured for the woman to proceed him out of his office, and locked the door. Then he turned to face her.

“I don’t. Janice isn’t worthy of this,” Rick said, gesturing to his body with a coy smile and headed home. Debs aimed her enormous grin at his back.

She turned and sprinted back to her team. She just had to share.

-=-

Sigrid was worn out after a long day. The encounter with Ms. Chandra at the exec meeting had been stressful but trying to work out a solution to get the Council to back off on putting conditions on Henry’s freedom had been worse. They hadn’t made any progress in their brainstorming session in Camila’s office, so they decided to call it a day.

She smiled to herself as she climbed the stairs to her home. It was no longer a big empty home.

She opened the door with her key and smiled at the young woman standing in the entryway.

“Good evening, Meixiu.”

“Good evening, Sigrid,” the petite Chinese woman said with a smile and a bow. “How was your day?”

Sigrid locked the door and smiled at the seemingly young woman before her wearing her new favorite garb, an oversized t-shirt and yoga pants. Meixiu had the outward appearance of someone in her early 20’s, but she’d been alive since sometime in the late eighteen hundreds. As a vampire, she was ‘gifted’ with an extraordinarily long life.

Walter Zhao, VRL’s previous legal representative, had been a dragon, another long-lived race. He’d accepted Meixiu as a gift from her parents when she was a young child. He proceeded to bring her to America, enslaved her in his mansion, and trained her to be his servant. When she reached her twenties, he’d arranged to have her infected with a vampire virus to lock her biologically at his preferred age. That process was horrifying and excruciatingly painful but Walter wanted it, so it was done.

The virus was the last vestige of an extinct Hidden Race. While only Humans could be infected, it was the virus that linked the host to the realm of magic and gave them abilities and long lives. The moment Walter was sure the infection had taken hold, he’d placed a curse upon her to take away her sight. She’d spent the next century in the dark.

Some of the… tasks Walter had given her during that time horrified Sigrid when she’d heard of them. Each time she recalled them she replaced the thoughts with the satisfying memory of driving her spear through Walter’s brain and watching the life fade from his eyes.

For all the horrors she’d been through, Meixiu was a kind and gentle soul. She’d never let Walter change her basic core values, and as long as she was obedient, he didn’t care what she did or was.

Sigrid had been introducing her to present day life and guiding her in how to function in it in the hopes she might learn to be independent.