Baser Instincts Ch. 03

He ruffled her ears. "I will be, Penny."

A little while later, Kost sat in his car, the vehicle on but not running, just so he could blast the air conditioning in his face with his eyes closed. He'd left the girls in their dorm room, Penelope with a notepad and pen so she could try to wring some details out of Cinthia before she headed off to the library. Part of him felt he should have stayed to get the otter's perspective on what had transpired between them, but deep down he knew it would make him uncomfortable.

Somehow, he became aware of a presence in the backseat. At this point, he knew who it was. "What do you want?" he asked.

"You know, your daughter is quite something," the linsang purred from the backseat. Kost opened his eyes to find that smug face staring at him in the mirror. "She's got the makings of a great scientist."

"Yes, she does. Takes after her mother in that regard."

If the linsang was surprised at him being nonplussed, he didn't show it. "For the record, and feel free to pass this along to her, her being asexual has everything to do with why she's not affected by this. If she was a lesbian, it would be the same. But if she were straight... well, lots of things were kept in the family in the past."

Kost suppressed a shudder of revulsion. To think that chance had been all that stood between him and... he didn't want to think about it.

"I'm interested to see what she manages to dig up," the linsang continued, idly studying his claws in the backseat. "And if you can actually find a way to suppress the primal instincts I've awakened in you. Gonna take a lot of tranquilizers, just to start."

"She'll find a way," Kost said. "If there's one person who can help me, it's Penelope."

"And annoyingly enough because she doesn't experience sexual attraction I can't mess with her myself." The linsang sprawled across the backseat. "It would be so easy just to flip the switch in her own head."

"If you even think about doing anything to her," Kost snarled. Even he was surprised by the venom in his voice.

"Relax, Kost buddy." The linsang tweaked his ear. "You're my pet project now, buddy. You've shown a remarkable amount of resistance to the primal part of your soul, far more than I would've expected from a widower pining for any kind of sexual contact."

"I wasn't pining for anything like that," Kost muttered, looking back over his shoulder. To his surprise, the linsang was actually in his back seat this time, close enough for him to touch if he wanted to. "I was just fine. All I ever wanted was to live my life and be a good father to Penelope."

"But were you really living?" the linsang said, gold eyes flashing. "Penelope has a point. The wake up, work, go home, sleep cycle isn't living. It's barely even surviving."

"It's all I have," Kost said. "There will never be another woman I love as much as I loved Trisha."

"See, that's just shooting yourself in the foot," the linsang said. "Billions of people on this planet, and you can't imagine any single one of them would make you happy again? Come on, man. Math is the worst, but even I know that your numbers are off there."

"And who are you to judge me for it?" Kost turned his body around in the seat. He could smell the linsang now, the scent surprisingly faint. It was like nothing he'd ever smelled before. The scent was somehow ancient, old, like a library hidden away for hundreds of years. "It's my life. I get to make that choice."

"Maybe." The linsang's reply was chilly. "But did you ever stop to consider you might be making the wrong choice?"

Kost's claws curled into the fabric of the seat, stopping just shy of punching holes through it. "You're lecturing me about choice," he scoffed. "When you give me 'powers' that take away my choice and the choice of any woman who gets within five feet of me."

For the first time, the linsang didn't have a snappy comeback. He just stared out the window, still as a statue. Then he laughed, once. "How interesting! You've given me something to think about."

Kost blinked. "I did? Hey!" In the time it took him to blink, the linsang had vanished from his backseat. The wolf grumbled and turned back around. Seemed he wasn't going to get anything else out of his mysterious taunter.

As he did, he realized that on the curb in front of him was a black SUV that hadn't been there before. The windows were tinted, so he couldn't see inside. The car moved forward, out of his line of sight down the street. Thinking nothing of it, Kost pulled out of the parking spot and drove off the campus, determined to find a way to get the better of his unwanted abilities for real this time.