Lavabull

  LAVABULL

  A Novel by

  PIERS ANTHONY

  J.R. RAIN

  Acclaim for J.R. Rain and Piers Anthony:

  “Anthony’s most ambitious project to date. Well conceived and written from the heart.”

  —Library Journal on Piers Anthony’s Isle of Woman

  “Be prepared to lose sleep!”

  —James Rollins, international bestselling author of The Doomsday Key on J.R. Rain’s The Lost Ark

  “Piers Anthony is a writer of passion. Volk is a masterpiece.”

  —Brad Linaweaver, author of Moon of Ice

  “Dark Horse is the best book I’ve read in a long time!”

  —Gemma Halliday, award-winning author of Spying in High Heels

  “Piers Anthony is one of the more colorful personalities in the SF world.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle on Piers Anthony’s Bio of an Ogre

  “Moon Dance is a must read. If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, be prepared to love J.R. Rain’s Samantha Moon, vampire private investigator.”

  —Eve Paludan, author of Letters from David

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  PIERS ANTHONY AND J.R. RAIN

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  Lavabull

  Jack and the Giants

  Dolfin Tayle

  Dragon Assassin

  THE ALADDIN TRILOGY

  Aladdin Relighted

  Aladdin Sins Bad

  Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman

  Lavabull

  Copyright © 2015 by J.R. Rain and Piers Anthony

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold.

  Lavabull

  Chapter 1: Lavender

  Lavender looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a solid girl of 18, with an ample figure and hair so thick it was like a mat. Her eyes were like burning pits, her teeth like faceted stones, her hips like shapely anvils. So why were boys afraid of her?

  Oh, she knew, really. She was hot, literally, especially in her core, and any young man who tried anything funny got burned in a very tender part. When she was a child the boys had tried to beat her up, and she had picked one up and hurled him into the sea. She read the minds of the others and prevented them from playing any nasty tricks on her. After that they had been more cautious, but when years later she grew breasts and hips, matching those of the other girls, they still had not wanted to date her despite her interest in socializing. It was frustrating. She was simply too much girl for the average boy. They preferred the soft, meek, shy, fragile efforts of the human girls. Lavender was something else.

  She paused, remembering the story of her parents. Her father was Jarvis, of human stock, who at age 28 had visited the volcanic island and encountered her ageless mother Lava. Lava was made of molten rock from the local volcano. She could read minds and shape herself into any form she chose. She was lonely and craved companionship and appreciation. So she catered to Jarvis, forming into a nymphly shape, fulfilling his dreams, and he promptly fell in love with her. Men were manageable, when a woman put her mind to it. Now they had been married 19 years and remained happy with each other, maybe in part because Lava remained as lovely as ever and constantly obliged his wishes before he even formed them. She didn’t have to be burning hot, just hot enough to function comfortably for him.

  That left Lavender, who was bored. She had no trouble with school, because anything she needed to know she read in the minds of the teachers and parroted back to them. She knew she wasn’t actually very smart in the human fashion, but she didn’t need to be as long as there was a smart human near. She could have fit in perfectly. She could have rendered herself all soft and cuddly and porous for a boy to handle, and cooled her core enough. So why hadn’t she? This was where she differed from her mother. Lava was entirely shaped by Jarvis’s desires, completely malleable. But Lavender was half human, and she had some human orneriness and ambition. She wanted to be someone in her own right, not just a sop for male interests. She could have faked it, and gotten along fine. But she was at least the equal of any of the local boys, and wanted them to know it. Unfortunately the process of making them recognize it had also eliminated her as an object of romantic interest. She didn’t have to guess at this; she read it in their minds. If she had wanted to become an endlessly obliging housewife like her mother, she had blown it. She wasn’t really sorry.

  And there it was. She was not like Lava. She had too much human orneriness in her. She wanted adventure, recognition, and romance, in that order. With a man who had similar ambitions. Yes, of course his first priority would be sex; that was simply the nature of the beast. She could handle that aspect. But then he should have the desire for adventure and recognition. He also needed to be powerful physically and forceful emotionally, with maybe a volcanic temper. Her grandfather was a volcano; she liked the type. And she wanted him to worship her much the way her father worshiped her mother, without being any less of a man. Was that such a tall order? It seemed it was, here on the island.

  She turned away from the mirror and put on some clothes. She picked up a magazine her mother had been looking at. And saw him pictured there. The ideal man.

  She promptly read the article. It seemed that this human man named Carl Gray had been a rodeo clown, distracting the bulls when they threw off their would-be riders. Then he had gotten caught by a bull, El Diablo, as a storm approached, and lightning had struck and fused them together. Now he was called The Bull. He had horns and a tail, was big and powerful, and it was said, ornery as hell. But his love life wasn’t much. It seemed the women preferred to have pieces of tail apply to them, not to their boyfriends.

  She knew it instantly: that was her man. But there was a problem: he lived in Rustic City, Arizona, while she lived on a Pacific volcano island. He didn’t know she existed. So she would have to go to him.

  She went to the kitchen where Lava was making a meal for Jarvis. “Mom—”

  “Of course, dear,” Lava said, knowing exactly what was on her mind. “I will persuade your father.” Because he could not read minds and would be slow to understand.

  “You want to go to the faraway mainland?” Jarvis exclaimed. “No way!”

  “Dear,” Lava murmured.

  “But she has no connections there, no experience!”

  Lava kissed him, then took him into the bedroom while Lavender took over the pot stirring. In fifteen minutes they emerged, and Jarvis gave his blessing. Lava’s soft as putty persuasion invariably made him soft as putty too.

  Armed with a change of clothing and a credit card, Lavender caught the next tourist ship and sailed for the mainland. She faked eating, taking very small portions as if dieting. She could eat and drink the human food, but did not need to, and there was no nutritive value in it for her. Not to mention the messy inconvenience of ejecting it from her body later. She did not advertise her nature, which meant that the men aboard saw her as a young pretty woman and promptly got the usual idea. When one corralled her in an isolated nook and angled for a kiss she did what she had to do. “I’m so sorry, but I have a bad skin malady where it doesn’t normally show.” She lifted her skirt to show a burning red rash on her bottom. She then superheated her lips and gave him a searing kiss he would not soon forget. He dashed off, yelping.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t have accommodated him. His mind showed her exactly what he wanted her to do, and she had made her core cool enough for this journey, as she didn’t want to set fire to the bedsheets. It was that now that she had seen The Bull, she wanted to save her virginity for him alone. She let the rash fade out; it had served its purpose.

  In due course the ship reac
hed the port, and she caught a plane for Arizona. It was routine, until she picked up a mental distress signal. The pilot was going into a blackout. He didn’t know it, but she did. She hurried forward, passing the plane’s bathroom, where the copilot was having a siege of indigestion. She couldn’t send her thought to warn him, but could read his knowledge of the plane. She kept that line open as she used the pilot’s code to open the door, forged inside, and put her hands on the pilot as he lost consciousness. She lifted him out of his seat and set him on the floor beside it. Then she got in herself and used her mental line to the copilot to ascertain what to do. She put the craft on autopilot before it could go wrong.

  The copilot returned. “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “He blacked out. I put it on auto,” she said, rising from the seat.

  “But you’re no pilot!”

  “True. But you are.” She left the cockpit and returned to her seat in the body of the plane. No one had noticed her excursion except the stewardess, who had thought she might be in another kind of business with the pilots and kept her mouth shut.

  When the plane landed without further event, she knew the copilot wanted to talk to her, so she waited until the craft emptied. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Just a passenger.”

  “You may have saved all our lives.”

  “Please, I do not want notoriety.”

  “Neither do we,” he said. “That was one close call. No one knew what was going to happen to him, least of all himself. We are getting him to the hospital now. You did exactly what was needed. The management will want to reward you.”

  “Please, no.”

  “But we owe you!”

  “Please.”

  He gazed at her. “If word got out about this, there could be repercussions. Safety is our prime concern.”

  “I will say nothing.”

  He shook his head. “Silence suits us all. But if there is ever anything I can do in return, well, here’s my card.” He gave it to her.

  “Thank you.” She tucked it into a pocket and left the plane. She doubted she would ever call him, but who knew for sure?

  She took a taxi to the address of Carl Gray. Then she went to the door. She could tell by his mind that he was inside.

  She paused to focus on her body. She could not change her shape instantly the way her mother could, because she was only half lava, but she could do it slowly. She sprouted a petite set of horns and a tail that showed under her skirt. She enhanced her bosom and broadened the spread of her hips. She dulled the fire in her pupils, as there was no need to reveal her inner fire. She was ready. She knew that The Bull’s first impression of her would count for a lot. She wanted him to know instantly that she was his kind of woman. The details could come later.

  When the door opened, she stood as a solid cowgirl, literally. She smiled.

  Chapter 2: The Bull

  I was almost drunk.

  Almost drunk wasn’t going to do it, not when you’ve had the day I had. No, I needed to be all-the-way-drunk and forget this day ever happened. Which is why I fished out another beer from the case propped open on the floor next to me. A stack of similar cases sat in the far corner of the room. I had them shipped here weekly, brought in by two burly guys, who stacked them in piles of two, nearly up to the ceiling. Guys who stared at me the entire time. Guys who almost never made small talk with me. And if they did, it was often one-word answers. When they were done unloading, they got the hell out of here. I was even willing to bet they demanded hazard pay, too.

  Not that I would hurt any of them. At least, not intentionally. This year alone, I had accidentally gored two people at a local feed store. Yeah, that’s right. I buy my food at a feed store. You got a problem with that?

  Luckily, beer goes down just fine. Maybe it’s all that barley in it.

  Despite my best intentions—and despite the copious booze already consumed—I found myself reviewing the day’s events anyway. The day had started like any other: I had awoken in my living room, hung over and nearly buried in empty cans of beer. On this morning, my right horn had caught in my couch’s arm, and I had spent a half minute trying to work it lose—that is, until my short temper had kicked in and I had ripped it free, veritably flinging the couch halfway across the room in the process.

  In case you haven’t guessed by now, yeah, I’m half bull and half man. The half-bull part is pretty obvious: I have a wide set of horns and whip-thin tail that, amazingly, I can control as surely as if it were any arm or a leg, a tail that sometimes seems to have a mind of its own.

  This morning, as I stood among my dozens and dozens of empty beer cans, with my couch leaning against the far wall, I was vaguely aware of my tail absently reaching for nearby cans and tossing them into the empty beer case. My intention had been to clean the mess... and so my tail had begun the chore of doing so, even when my mind was, in fact, on my nearby cell phone. It had been my phone that had awakened me from my deep slumber. It had, I was certain, rang numerous times. Perhaps even dozens.

  Grumbling, I crunched over empty cans to the low bookcase where my cell had been charging. I had long ago removed anything in my apartment that could break...or get caught in my horns. Nothing was on the walls, and no furniture was higher than my waist. I’d learned that lesson after going through three TVs in a month. Literally through. In fact, my entire apartment is crisscrossed with gouges and punctured with holes. Truth was, I had no business living in a small apartment. Not with this huge set of horns. Unfortunately, a bat cave didn’t come with my condition, or a Fortress of Solitude. Sure, I might be one of the world’s most recent superheroes, but I was presently living off my savings—savings that were drying up fast. I might be supernaturally strong and people had no problem calling on me for help, but they sure as hell didn’t pay me for my time or help.

  Which brings me to this morning. As I snatched up my phone, looking down at it in such a way that my left horn gouged a deep furrow along the top of the bookcase, I saw that I had missed, exactly, nineteen phone calls. Sighing, and using fingers that had, mercifully, remained human—I fumbled through the phone until I found the voice mail feature, and played back the messages. They were from, it turned out, the same woman. Requesting my help, over and over. Each message sounded more desperate than the last. Story of my life.

  I clicked off the phone and set it down, rubbed my face. I looked like hell, I knew. Truth was, I looked like the world’s biggest freak, with these horns and tail and hooves for feet. That lightning strike a few years ago had done a number on me. Not only had it seemingly fused me with the bull I had been wrangling, it had given me supernatural strength. Not just the strength of the bull, but ungodly strength, too. Or, perhaps, god-like strength. The horns might as well have been made from the hardest stuff in the known universe. The tips were so sharp as to cut through, literally, anything. Cut through, puncture through, tear through. I had done it all. My tail could often extend as far as I reasonably needed it to, easily four or five times its actual length. It served as a wonderful whip. And then there was my upper body strength, which was matched by only a few on this planet—and all were either superheroes or supervillains. Of course, my strength was enhanced even more when I actually charged—that is, when my back hooves kicked up a cloud of dust and undeniable rage filled me. Jesus, when that happened, I don’t think anything on this planet could stop me. No wall. No fortified fortress. Maybe not even the big green guy, the Hulk. Certainly not any creep who threatens innocent people.

  Which had been the basis of the panic calls this morning, the last of which had been just a few minutes ago. Some asshole was threatening his girlfriend. Threatening to kill her if she ever left him. And he was on the way to her house now. I had to replay one of the messages to remember the address—unfortunately, I wasn’t given a super memory in the lightning strike—and then I was off. I charged down the center of the street, dodging cars, running faster and faster the angrier I got. And I was getting damn a
ngry thinking about this asshole punk hurting this innocent girl. At least, she sounded innocent.

  I rarely drive these days, although I have been saving up for a convertible, for obvious reasons. No, when I’m getting around my small town, I don’t need to drive. I can run as fast or faster than most cars, especially in a lazy town like Rustic City. In no time at all I was at her small house on the edge of town. I slowed and assessed the situation.

  The place was quiet. A truck was parked haphazardly in the driveway. Its driver’s side door was open. So was the front door, from which issued a blood-curdling scream—and I was charging again.

  This time through the front door, my wide shoulders shattering the door frame, and my even wider horns leaving two long grooves to either side of the door.

  Snorting and my tail snapping this way and that, I found myself in an empty room. No, not entirely empty. I saw the cameras. Everywhere. High up in the ceiling. On tripods down hallways. On the kitchen table.

  I had only recently learned that videos of me often go viral. As I break up a street gang or stop an armed bank robber or save a family from a fiery building—right, my thick bull hide is nearly impenetrable—video of my heroism spreads like a different kind of fire—wildfire. Apparently, I’m somewhat of a sensation on YouTube. All superheroes are.

  As it turned out, I had been set up that morning by some college punks hoping to upload the next video to go viral. There had been no one in danger. No murderous ex-boyfriend. And so I gave them an eyeful. In a few minutes flat, the home was leveled and their cameras were destroyed, although one or two survived, somehow.

  After all, that’s the video I’m watching now on my laptop—myself destroying the home in a fit of rage—when there comes a knock on my front door. Now who the hell could that be?