Beetle Juice (16 page)

Courtship?

“The man woos the woman,” Vanja explained. “He flatters her, so that she will give him sex. She knows that's all he really wants, but she likes his attention anyway.”

Even if she is a virgin?

“Even then, normally. Why virgins don't want sex with were-unicorns is a mystery.”

Because they know they will lose their virginity and his interest. So they make him work for it, giving them more attention than they would have otherwise.

“Mystery solved!” Vanja said appreciatively.

An insect had quickly solved a riddle Wetzel had not fathomed with all his thought? Maybe it came with the territory of being virginal or dead.

May I borrow your body?

Vanja smiled. “That depends on what you want to do with it.”

Not to do; to feel. I want to feel your feeling while you do the sex.

“Welcome.”

Thank you. I will reach for you with Wetzel's telepathy, which is far stronger than mine.

Then something subtly changed. Vanja remained the same, physically, but her mood shifted. “Well, now,” she murmured. “That is strange and wonderful.”

Wetzel, still holding her, suddenly realized what it was. “You're a virgin!” he exclaimed.

I am,
LadyBug thought.
Her body is not, but I am.

“It is the emotion that counts,” Wetzel said, his interest intensifying. “I pick it up telepathically.” He was embracing a virgin in spirit!

“Take it, LadyBug,” Vanja said, intrigued.

I do not know what to do. I thought only to watch and learn.

Vanja, reveling in the feeling, neither acted nor spoke. She was being a passive virgin, a prohibitively rare experience for her. She was largely lost in the wonder of it.

“I do know,” Wetzel said. “You can experience the sex for yourself.” He slid his hands down to Vanja's sculptured bottom, squeezing the buttocks. “The feel of her flesh excites me,” he said, though LadyBug was surely reading that directly. “It makes my copulatory member swell.”

She was reading it.
That excites this body too.

Then he drew back and put his mouth to her breasts, kissing the nipples. “This turns me on further.”

I do not know what that flesh is, or what it does, but your caress generates a hunger I have never before felt.

Then, unable to delay longer, he guided Vanja to the bed, laid her on her back, mounted her, and carefully entered her. “I am causing that member to penetrate her body. I am inserting it to its full length.” He kissed her as he drove into her core and spurted. “I am ejaculating!” he gasped. “The reproductive fluid is passing from me to her.”

Glorious!

“Glorious,” Vanja echoed, experiencing his orgasm via the telepathic connection. “So urgent! So robust! I never felt what a male feels.”

What does a female feel?

“We'll show you,” Wetzel said. He withdrew, then moved down to put his face on Vanja's cleft. He tongued it.

She was already well worked up. In moments she went into her own orgasm, her thighs clamping on his head. It was less intense than his, but lasted longer, and was fully as satisfying.

I am ready to die.

Both Wetzel and Vanja reacted with alarm. “Mating makes you fission!” Wetzel said.

I did not breed. I experienced your mating. I have no maleseed. I can't fission.

They relaxed. “And we must find a scarab male for you to breed with,” Wetzel said. “And a safe haven for that breeding to occur. That is our mission.”

They lay for a while, the three of them savoring the experience. Then Wetzel thought of something. “You're not a virgin any more, LadyBug,” he said regretfully.

But I am. My body has not been bred.

“But you just experienced two orgasms.”

They were yours, not mine. When I get mine, I will happily fission and die. At least now I know what it will be like.

Wetzel checked her mind. She was now that anomaly, an experienced virgin. “Amazing.”

“Wetzel, you have your permanent virgin!” Vanja said.

That made him pause. Could it be? But he realized that it wasn't. “It is a mock-up, fashioned from a vampire and a beetle. Not someone I can marry and sire children with.”

“I could bear you babies.”

“But after LadyBug passes from the scene, either by breeding or old age, then the virginity would be gone, and I would have little interest in remaining with you, or you with me. We're not for each other Vanja, in that manner.”

She sighed. “We're not.”

We're not,
LadyBug agreed with similar regret.

“Meanwhile we still have serious problems to work out,” Wetzel said. “Such as how to find a male scarab, and how to locate a poacher-free world that is suitable for scarab reproduction.”

“Which do we do first?” Vanja asked. “Neither one is much good without the other.”

“Maybe the others can figure that out,” Wetzel said. “We'd better go rejoin them.”

He and Vanja transformed, and he galloped back along the path. It had been an interesting diversion, but now they did have work to do.

“What business do you have with the villagers?” Wetzel asked LadyBug, mentally vocalizing, as he could not speak in this form. It seemed to work well enough; it was the thought that counted, not the sound. “They avoid sex in the village so you won't be repelled, but why should you go there anyway?”

When we die of old age or injury we go there. Ordinarily we would linger and be uncomfortable. They kill us quickly and painlessly. In return they get to squeeze us and use our shells.

“They get your juice?” he asked, surprised.

Yes. It is valuable to them.

“It is. They get a lot of money for it.”

Money?

“Wealth. They can buy many things they want.”

Buy?

Wetzel tried again. “The way you want to breed and fulfill your destiny, they want to get money. That is their fulfillment.”

Strange.

“We are not like scarabs,” he reminded her. “The poachers want money too. That's why they chase you.”

We thought they just hated us.

“No, it's for money. Money drives human cultures.”

Maybe in time, with your mind, I will comprehend that.

Wetzel changed the subject. “Why are there so few scarab males?”

It is our way. One male breeds many females, so we need few males. We do not know who they are until the fourth molt. Maybe it is not decided until then. By that time only one in ten of us survives, and often there is no male left in that brood. There was none in mine. Of course I would not breed with a male of my own brood, but with a male of another brood. But they all bred elsewhere and none was left for me.

“So it may be hard for us to find a male.”

Very hard,
she agreed.

“Those molts,” he asked. “What is their nature?”

They define the four stages of our existence. When we first appear, the result of the fissioning of our parent, we are very small. We float in air, drifting with the winds, eating what we encounter, slowly increasing our mass. It is our amoeba stage. When we become too large to float, we land on the ground and molt, assuming our second form. We are in our slug stage, crawling on slime to reach the flowers. We must find pollen to feed on so we can survive and grow. When we are large enough, after two or three years, we molt and form into our third form, caterpillars, with many legs, and can travel much faster and feed better. We grow again, and in another two to three years we molt and assume our adult form, with wings and shell. By ten years most of us are full scarabs. This is when we become male and female. We can breed at that point, immediately or any time before we die of old age. I am thirty; I have ten more years to breed if I am going to.

This is remarkable
, Vanja thought. Wetzel had included her in the dialogue, but in bat form she could not speak in human language.
LadyBug is a middle aged female.
Then, to LadyBug:
What are your males like? How do they breed you?

Wetzel kept mentally silent. Naturally the vampire was interested in sex, however it occurred. But he was curious too.

The male scarab is like the female, but larger. That makes him more obvious, and the poachers catch males more readily. To breed a female he pokes his snout into her nether crevice and pumps her so full of semen that she explodes.

“That must be a lot of semen!”

It almost matches her mass. That's why it takes him a year to build up another load. She inflates, her every portion swelling, and holds together until the internal pressure is too great, then lets go and gloriously fissions.

“To receive that much ejaculate!” Vanja subvocalized, now emulating Wetzel's technique in bat form. “That must be some thrill. I envy you that experience, LadyBug; no male I know puts out volume like that. But couldn't you stop partway through, so as not to detonate?”

Why would I want to? It is the fulfillment of my destiny.

“So it seems.” Vanja paused, considering. “Wetzel, if I assumed human form, and you assumed unicorn form, how much ejaculate could you squeeze into me?”

What a notion! “Not enough to make you burst. It would leak out, because your channel doesn't lead to your interior body in that manner.”

“Well, if you put it to the hole that does lead there—”

“No.”

“You're a damned prude.”

Wetzel realized he was. So he changed the subject. “LadyBug, is the special nature of your—your juice—something that develops in your maturity? So that you aren't so much at risk as you grow?”

No. It is viable throughout our life cycle, and our young forms are easier to squish. But at first we are too small for the poachers to catch, so we survive. But by the third molt we are easy prey. They pick us up from the ground and trees, and we can't avoid them. Only as adults, when we can fly and broadcast Leave-Me-Alone thoughts, are we able to avoid them, and then imperfectly. They have developed immunity to our repulsion thoughts. They set traps to snare us, and they set fires to drive us into their nets. We are helpless before them.

“We have to find you a safe refuge,” Wetzel subvocalized.

“Amen,” Vanja agreed.

They reached the town, transformed, and reentered the house.

“How was it?” Veee asked.

“Amazing,” Vanja said. “LadyBug shared the experience.”

“She what?” Tod asked.

“She linked with us mentally, and felt our orgasms. She loved it.”

“But she can't have sex!” Tod exclaimed.

“Mentally she can,” Wetzel said. “It's the actual breeding with a male scarab that causes her to fission. That's a—a physical thing, rather than a mental or emotional one.”

“Oh, vicarious,” Veee said.

“Not exactly, but close enough. So she enjoyed our activity without suffering damage.”

“Meanwhile, while traveling, we learned more,” Vanja said. “We've got to find a suitable refuge for the scarabs, and put some males in it.”

“That, I think, is our first priority,” Tod said. “The refuge. Finding males will do no good unless we have a safe haven for them, where they can breed.”

“And we have no idea where it may be,” Veee said.

There was a knock on the door. Another comely young woman was there, featuring deep red hair, with matching red pupils. It was the red-ant girl who had approached him the night before, shapely and sure of herself. “I am Paige. I would like to ride the unicorn,” she said.

Wetzel read her mind. It was a figure of speech. She did want a ride, but she also wanted sex. She was not a virgin, as she had told him before. But he was tired, and though she was lovely, she did not appeal to him the way a virgin did. “I regret, no.”

“But I can pay for it,” Paige said. “I have information I think you need.”

“What would that be?” Wetzel asked.

“The location of the access to a world where scarabs might live.”

Suddenly she had the attention of all of them. Wetzel glanced at Tod. Tod nodded, his mind emphatic.

“Give her the ride,” Veee said.

They knew that such close contact would enable him to read the girl's mind and get her information. Giving her what she wanted would be a fair exchange.

“It's a deal,” Wetzel said, his tiredness dissipated.

They went outside, Wetzel transformed to unicorn, and Paige lithely leaped on. He read it in her mind: she had ridden horses. He also read her slight disappointment that she had not been able to seduce Tod; for one thing he now had ants, as she did. But the prospect of trying for a baby excited her more.

As he trotted toward the Love Nest he read more: she did know of an access to a special world where scarabs might prosper. The women knew about it, but for some reason dismissed it as a prospect. Why? Wetzel could not fathom the reason, because it was not in her conscious mind at the moment. She was merely using the information as a way to get sex from him, having had the wit to think of this when the other women hadn't. He had to respect her smartness in this respect.

They arrived at the Nest. Paige dismounted, he transformed to manform, and they entered the house. She immediately stripped naked, completely ready for action.

“First things first,” Wetzel said, though her appearance and eagerness did turn him on, as his rising penis showed. Non-virgins did have their points, especially when they were as young and pretty as this. “Where is this access, and how do you know scarabs might prosper there?”

“How about this deal: do me this instant. Then I will tell you all about it. Then you can do me again before we go, to increase the likelihood it will take.”