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FOX Academy VI - Unnatural Selection

Chapter 4 - Behind the Eight Ball

There were eight witnesses to the accident, and one victim. Rasielle, the smallest of the witnesses, ran to the nearest occupied building to summon help. The remaining seven strained to lift the huge branch off the back of Sam O'Leary and save his life. They succeeded with the former, but could not accomplish the latter. O'Leary's spine had been severed and his vital organs smashed by a few hundred kilograms of red oak dropped from the height of five metres. He was dead before they could get him to the infirmary.

Anabel Balfor was kept at the medical facility to be treated for shock. She had been leading the group of students and had been mere steps away from jumping into Sam's arms when the limb crushed the life out of her first and only lover. The remainder were questioned quickly and then sent back to their rooms, confined to barracks.

The administrative machine that deals with death in an institutional manner had barely slowed down from the previous fatality and it went smoothly back into high gear. An autopsy was ordered, forensic teams were summoned, and the Chief of Staff was notified. From the lowest security guard to the senior duty officer almost all of the staff at the Academy was involved in one way or another; but not quite all. In a basement room under the Operation Centre a lone technician on duty noticed a needle jumping against a gauge that indicated an unauthorized signal somewhere on the grounds.

It could be one of the guards using the wrong frequency, he thought, or maybe one of the staff had forgotten to turn off their personal cell phone before going into the restricted area. It could even be some local kids playing with short-range radios in the nearby parkland. If any of those scenarios were the case it would be a clear signal and it would be forwarded it to the head of security to deal with it. If it was an encrypted signal, a burst transmission that hopped from frequency to frequency like the most modern espionage agencies used, it would be sent for analysis to the agency that dealt with Signals Intelligence.

The equipment that had picked up the signal automatically recorded it. The technician, a former intercept operator for the Army, plugged in his headset to listen to it out of interest. He was surprised to find out that not only was it encrypted, but that he could decipher it in his head. It was an old KGB code, last used in the days before the Soviet Union collapsed. The tech had heard it many, many times when he was a young badger deployed with the army in what was at the time, West Germany. They had broken the code two years before the wall came down and in the old days he could translate it on the fly.

He still could. The short message read: "I am in. Two dead already. Send instructions."

* * * * * * * *

Silver had the accident scene ringed with floodlights and screens. The lights were so he could personally examine the site without waiting for dawn. The screens were to keep curious onlookers, or the press, from seeing him doing it. Stanchions warning of a gas leak and vans with gas company markings were parked in plain view.

Silver tried to read the ground, calling on skills honed in an army special reconnaissance unit when he was young, oh so long ago. It was no use. The ground had been trampled by the students in their attempt to save O'Leary and soaked by the thunderstorm. He examined the branch next. The end formerly attached to the trunk of the massive oak was freshly broken, but grey wood on the edges indicated that it was already cracked before this. Probably in the severe wind storms that Ottawa had suffered in April, when several thousand citizens had been without power for several days after a near hurricane swept through the valley unexpectedly, taking down hundreds of trees and knocking off a high number of weak limbs.

But did the thunderstorm earlier finish the job, he wondered? There was no other damage in the area; not even any smaller branches from this tree scattered around. It must have been one hell of a concentrated micro-burst, Silver supposed. Still, weirder things had happened. He wondered if he was just naturally suspicious. But then again, all of his former colleagues who were not as paranoid were now dead, so perhaps it was best to just go with it until he had checked out every angle.

He summoned Joel with his Blackberry and instructed him to bring one of his wireless laptops with access to the security system. Then he summoned Bill Hanlan, because 'The Professor' knew a lot about many things, and perhaps horticulture was one of them.

Joel arrived sheltering the laptop under his raincoat just a step ahead of Hanlan. "Jesus Silver, doesn't the rain bother you?" He asked, seeing the Chief of Staff in nothing but a sodden sports coat, slacks and loafers.

Personally, Silver hated the rain. He would rather be up to his ears in snow or mud or baking under the desert sun than standing in the rain without a building around him. But he had overcome his aversion through training, discipline, and focus, a lot of focus. It helped to have something to concentrate on, like a second death in as many days.

"Did you move the cameras like I asked?" The old fox asked, ignoring both the rain and the question about it.

"Sure thing. Got a couple pointed right at this group of trees." Joel put the laptop on top of the killer branch and flipped it open. In a moment he had a split screen display showing the feed from the two cameras in question. He adjusted the time and ran them from the point where all of the students came into the field of view.

"You can see O'Leary coming in from the left in both shots, at a little more of an angle in this one." Joel pointed out. In the same shot the older Red fox, Muzzle, appeared with his back to the camera, having come from the building it was mounted on. In the other shot, taken from a point just above the dorm exit, the group of seven students could be seen jogging toward O'Leary, with Balfor slightly in the lead.

"All the students are accounted for." Hanlan pointed out.

Silver grunted and watched as they all converged on the trees. "How come the picture cuts off at the lowest branches?" He inquired.

"The swaying branches and movement of the leaves would cause that glitch I mentioned yesterday." Joel pointed out, shivering as a large drop of chilly water rolled off the leaves above and right into the gap between his neck and the raincoat. "Look, you can see the big branch causing them just as O'Leary gets under the tree."

Joel slowed the digital image down until O'Leary seemed to float along. Above him, at the top of the screen, the lower part of the offending branch dipped in and out of the frame several times. As it did the same black triangular anomalies could be seen briefly on the edge of the screen. O'Leary stepped forward in slow motion, looked up, and threw his paws above his head as the branch came down. Living wood is flexible, to a degree, and instead of simply smacking O'Leary down the bough recoiled when it hit the ground and bounced up before coming back down on the Arctic wolf again, and again. Hanlan and Joel looked away, Silver merely squinted as the digital phenomena appeared one last time before the limb had finished bouncing.

"Take a look at this Professor." Silver pointed to the broken end of the branch.

"Already cracked," Hanlan noted as Silver had done, "but still living. If it had not come down it probably would have healed, grown scar tissue like you or me. Well, like you anyway." He added, glancing at the old puckered burn on the back of Silver's paw. He did some quick calculations on Joel's computer. "It would have taken a couple of hundred kilos of pressure to bring it down. That branch would have held two or three people with no problem." He informed Silver.

"Why was it the only branch we saw moving?" Silver wondered out loud.

"It was partially disconnected." Hanlan pointed out.

"And it was the lowest." Joel interjected. "All the ones above it could have been doing the funky chicken too but we couldn't see them."

Silver did not respond. He studied the break. He looked at the scars the impact had made in the ground. He looked up at the rest of the branches. Finally he stood up and took off his wet jacket and soaked shirt. Bill Hanlan took a step back, he had never seen the infamous scars Silver bore on his chest and back before. The one on his chest was shaped like a crooked letter 'Z' that intersected where one of his nipples used to be. They were long, wide swaths of hard pink flesh where fur would no longer grow. The cuts that caused them must have gone down to the bone when they were inflicted, Hanlan thought. The criss-crossed lines on Silver's back were worse.

Silver slipped off his loafers and stepped up to the trunk of the oak. It was over two meters across. Digging his claws in to the wrinkled bark he sought out paw holds and toe holds as he shimmied up the side of the great trunk. Soon he had reached the stump of the fallen limb and swung himself up onto it. He took out his Blackberry and used the light for the camera to search the trunk and nearby branches. Something caught his eye, a mark in the bark about chest level with him. He took several pictures of it with the device before dropping to the ground. He landed lightly beside the others in a crouch.

"If that ground wasn't so soft from the rain you would be on your way to the infirmary with a broken ankle." Hanlan scolded his boss. "And knowing you, you would probably walk there."

"Look at this." Silver brushed the criticism aside by holding out the Blackberry, the screen toward Hanlan and Joel. The screen was filled with a freshly carved image, its curved lines showing red against the greyish bark. It looked like a crescent moon.

"Joel." Silver said to the stunned lemur. "Aim the cameras higher."

* * * * * * * *

There was a common room with a television in the student dorm but it was turned off at the moment. Still suffering slightly from the shock of seeing their classmate squished, the seven students that were not dead or hospitalized sat there silently, each waiting for one of the others to start talking. It was the blue vixen, Aglaia, with her need to talk incessantly overcoming the shock that broke the ice.

"Hell of a way to go." She noted. "Killed by a red oak."

"Somehow I expected bomb defusing or mountaineering training to take more lives than the local flora." Grey commented.

"The specific gravity of fresh red oak is point-nine-eight." Sanmer said from where he sat at a reading desk covered with gun and martial arts magazines, apropos of nothing. "It barely floats." The Asian husky rearranged the reading material for the tenth time since sitting down, grouping them by subject.

"A bad end for an Asatruist." Ansin added. "He should have had a warrior's death."

"Yes." Thomas agreed. "Dying in an accident, even during dangerous training, sucks. Now we've lost two for no reason."

"Would Charlie's death be listed as accidental or misadventure?" Zac wondered out loud.

"Or suicide." Aglaia said flatly. "What?" She asked the group when Grey and several others frowned at her bluntness. "It happens. He was far from his home, friends and family and he looked preoccupied at the party. Like there was something on his mind."

"Charlie would not have killed himself." Saira shot back. "No more than you would Missus 'Jones'."

"And why not?"

The catbat that the rest still thought of as male gripped his knees to his chest and looked thoughtful. "Charlie was a good person. He deserved to move on to the next level of existence."

"So he got impatient." Aglaia sneered.

"Committing suicide is a character flaw that would prevent one from moving on." Saira continued persistently. "And Charlie had the kind of spirit destined to come back on a higher plane. Therefore he did not commit suicide."

Grey interrupted before the two could escalate the argument. "I've always had a fear of dying senselessly like that." He said solemnly.

"Me too." The tall wolf added to keep the conversation away from suicide or the afterlife. "I want to go down fighting for control of my chopper or with my paws on the throat of whoever is trying to kill me."

"I was thinking more along the lines of having a heart attack while yiffing a pair of Siamese twins." Grey clarified. Tense laughter erupted from several of the students.

"I'm afraid of being late." Sanmer, one of the few not laughing, said. "If I think that I'm going to be late I get all tense and start to sweat. It's almost paralyzing." He gathered the magazines and started to lay them out again, alphabetically this time.

"I'm afraid of flying, because it makes me nauseous." Ansin said. The others stared at the bat in surprise. "No, really." He went on. "I puke every time I take off. I tried an airplane but it was the same. I get this woozy feeling and then everything comes up. I had to travel here by train."

"Jesus, I'd love to have wings like you." Thomas said. "Zooming along under your own power, the sun to your back, the wind in your hair."

"The bugs in your face." Ansin said with a scowl. "Yechh! I hate bugs, hate them. Nasty dirty creepy things."

"Amen to that." Aglaia muttered.

The conversation broke up into several sub-topics. Grey was relating a story he claimed to be true that involved Siamese cat sisters to Thomas and Zac. Saira and Sanmer were discussing the afterlife. Ansin leaned over to where Aglaia sat looking pensive and swivelled his ears toward her.

"You are afraid of bug too." It was more of a statement than a question.

"What? Me? God, no. I've got no problem with bugs." She replied, a little too forcefully.

"Yes you are." The bat replied calmly. "I can tell by the way you are whipping your tail about. It disturbs the air around you and sends out shock waves that I can read."

Aglaia waved one of her paws slowly in front of the bat that was supposed to be almost totally blind. His head followed its movement with no problem, but his eyes were not focused on it at all. It was his long ears that homed in on it. She tried making a few bizarre expressions. She pulled a macabre grin, rolled her eyes and flared her nostrils. Ansin did not react. She tossed her head, sending her two long tresses of blue fur flying around her. Ansin's ears jerked from where the tip of one swung to the other. In a flash his paws shot out and caught both in mid air. He rubbed them between his digits to determine what they were before bringing one right up to his thick lenses to examine it.

"Blue." He said, dropping the braids to her lap. "Pretty. I can see things up close, and make out colours." He explained. "But anything more then a couple of centimetres away is just a blur."

"How did you catch them then?" Aglaia asked, intrigued.

"Echo location. It's great up close, so I am really looking forward to the martial arts classes, but it fades as the distance increases. I can use paw-held weapons like knives, batons, escrima sticks and sai very effectively, but I can't shoot worth shit so I don't know how I'm going to pass the combat range test."

"Use a shotgun, like Wild Bill Hickock did when he started to go blind." Aglaia suggested, puffing out her chest with pride from the excellent idea. The movement caught Ansin's eye, or rather, his ears. He aimed them at her and emitted a series of high pitched squeaks as they rotated back and forth, like they were scanning her. While he was occupied Aglaia scanned him back, moving her eyes but not her head so he would not know that she was checking him out.

He was a skinny fellow, but with wide shoulders for flying. He had a small tail, which was a disappointment for her; she preferred long puffy ones. His leathery wings were bound to his arms at the moment, to keep from getting in the way she supposed. He had black fur with a slight blue tint except on the top of his head, where it was red. He kept it cut short, high, and tight, like the US marines. Above the vee-neck of his shirt she could see a number of shallow scars, and there was more scaring on his arms. Aglaia smiled, knowing where scars like that came from and mistakenly assume something about his sexuality from them.

She also noted that the focus of his ears seemed to have settled on her chest area. She was used to males staring at her large breasts, but not someone who couldn't actually see them. Two small movements caught her eye. The first was that his paws twitched and hung in mid air halfway to her breasts, as if he was about to repeat the braid trick but had second thoughts. The second was a sudden bulge in his pants that had not been there a moment ago. His tongue was hanging out too.

He will do just fine, she thought to herself as her smile broadened, just fine.

Taking Ansin by the paw, slowly so as not to startle him, she guided him to his feet and led him to the door.

"Come with me to my room." She whispered as they left the other students behind. "There is something I have that should be just perfect for you." Ansin, suddenly shy but excited at the same time as evidenced by the growing protrusion in his trousers, followed eagerly.

Thomas Roark, who had been sitting next to them and listening while he pretended to be paying attention to Grey's stories of sexual conquest, was the only one to notice them leaving. After giving them a minute's head start he too slipped from his chair and followed them.

* * * * * * * *

In the infirmary Silver conferred with the chief surgeon, Doctor Jones, the albino wallaby that now had Aglaia as a namesake thanks to Rusty. Silver did not get along with the Doctor any better than Rusty did, but as Chief of Staff he had to work with the head of the infirmary on a regular basis. Still, the old fox had a grudging respect for the doctor that had saved his life on more than one occasion, but he refused to let Jones know it.

"So the autopsy on Matty is inconclusive." Silver said after listening to a long technical explanation of the kit fox's injuries.

"It is not 'inconclusive'." Jones shot back. "He definitely died of a broken neck suffered from a fall of ten to fifteen metres, roughly the height of the building he was found beside. But there is no evidence of his climbing the ladder attached to the building or being on the roof. But since he couldn't fly we can assume that he fell from there."

"What about the scratches and DNA analysis?" Several foreign hairs and flakes of dander had been recovered from Matty's clothes and fur.

"The DNA was degraded but matches one of the other students, Rasielle your 'catbat', at several key markers. The claw marks on the shoulders of his shirt and around his neck and head are consistent with those of Rasielle also. But I understand that there is an explanation for their presence?" Jones lifted his brows inquisitively.

"Matty and Rasielle had intercourse earlier in the evening." Silver confirmed. "Their, uh, coupling, was captured on video and it appears that the transfer of material and the scratches came from ... intimate contact."

"Oh." Doctor Jones had examined all of the candidates in the week leading up to the course, and was familiar with Rasielle's condition. He wondered whether the intersexed hybrid had performed as a female, a male, or both. The data would be useful for a paper he was working on about agent sexuality. "You would think that he would have showered after. I don't suppose I could see those videos?" He inquired.

"No." Silver replied flatly. All that he needed was to have the Doctor who didn't like him find out about Joel's unauthorized camera network. "Can you tell me anything about O'Leary's death yet?"

"Well, he was crushed by a log." Jones began sarcastically, but soon became professional again. "I found the same sort of scratches on the log as I did on Matty, along with those of several canines."

"The other students pried the branch off O'Leary and tried to revive him." Silver explained. "Rasielle and Faraday's claw marks would be all over it."

"Did they use their feet to roll it off?" Jones wondered. "Because many of the non-canine claw marks were from bat or bat-like feet. You can tell by the angle and spread of the claw marks."

Silver recalled at least one of the students in the video on the ground pushing up on the log with his or her feet, but seemed to recall that it was one of the wolves. He made a mental note to check the video again.

"Let me know if you find anything else." He said as he turned and left the hospital.

* * * * * * * *

Ansin wished that he could see the vixen's room when she led him there, but the best he could do was make a echo map of it. The nature of the posters she had hung on the wall would be forever denied him, and the purpose of a tubular structure against the far wall could only be guessed at. From the cables and what appeared to be handles he supposed it was some kind of portable exercise device, but not one he was familiar with.

From applying his sonar to her body he could tell that she was nicely shaped, but did not have the muscle density of a dedicated athlete. Toned would be a better description, so he did not think that she had brought him here to work out with, not in that sense. A dozen scenarios based on another sort of physical activity ran high-speed through his head, fuelling his aching erection.

Ansin was very socially awkward, and the next best thing to being a virgin. It was because of his strange upbringing. Ansin's mother, a graceful bat of Norse origin, had been in the CIA, as an undercover agent in what was at the time Stalingrad. She was captured in the chaotic days at the end of the Cold War by the failing Soviet Powers and sent to a secret KGB interrogation facility. In the confusion of regime change her records were lost, and she was mistaken reported as killed when the Americans came looking for her.

The former KGB agents running the centre turned to a life of crime, keeping the American bat drugged as a sex toy for them and their friends. In the second year of her captivity she became pregnant by a bat from India that brought in opium to be converted to heroin. He was amused by her pregnancy and asked the mobsters to allow her to go to term. She subsequently gave birth to twin boys. The Hindi drug runner named the elder boy Shyam for his black-blue colouring and the younger Ansin, meaning son of the graceful one. He planned to let her wean them for a year or two and then to sell them to species traffickers for the black-market adoption trade.

But Ansin's mother had been taken off her diet of drugs after the pregnancy was discovered, and managed to get a short message to an old CIA contact. But because the message was coming from one presumed dead the agency took a full year to act. After a reconnaissance team confirmed her identify they sent in wet ops team to clean up the ex-KGB agents. They smuggled the family of bats out and resettled them in Georgia, where the Russian mobsters they had been slaves to were unlikely to find them.

Raised by their mother as Asatruists, the two young bats did not fit in to the deeply Christian south. Shyam, more confident and a bit more stable than Ansin, learned languages and joined the NSA, going almost immediately under deep cover. Ansin tried to join the Marines but was denied, probably because of a tendency to handle adverse situations more violently than necessary. He then joined the CIA to train as a wet work agent, but was dropped from the program due to his slight mental instability and a fascination with blood that disturbed even the agency's assassins. Plus the fact that they felt he was using the clandestine wet ops division to get into the undercover world that his brother had disappeared into.

Ansin finally gave up on his native country and immigrated to Canada to try and join the RCMP as a way of tracking down his brother. It was after repeated attempts to do so that a mysterious application for FOX appeared in his mailbox. He had been puzzled, and not hopeful.

Ansin was the next best thing to a virgin. He had a preference for vixens, with their big, fluffy, expressive tails but his appearance turned a lot of them off, and the ones that weren't had problems dealing with his blindness. He had found willing partners on three occasions, but the first two ended in disaster. It seemed that females who could overcome his looks and eyesight could not forgive premature ejaculation. On the third attempt, after almost putting himself in a coma from excessive alcohol intake first, he managed to at least get it in before he came. But the third volunteer was equally unimpressed.

But now here he was, studying to be an agent in and alone in a female's bedroom on only his third day of training! Who said espionage was no fun these days?

Any doubt as to why Aglaia had brought him to her room was dispelled as the door clicked shut. She immediately grabbed a double paw-full of his shirt, spun him and slammed him against the wall of the dorm room. Then she clamped her snout on his face, locking her lips on his, forcing his mouth open to accept her questing tongue. The sudden movement and the noise of the impact masked the sound of the door to the next room opening and closing, even from the bat's sensitive ears.

Aglaia broke off the kiss and studied Ansin's reaction. He had a stricken look on his face and the bulge in his pants was even more evident. He was breathing in short sharp gasps and waving his paws about helplessly.

"What's wrong?" She demanded, leaning in so he could see her flashing eyes. Doing so brought her soft snout up against his cheek, and squished her firm breasts against his chest. Ansin stopped breathing altogether.

"Oh the gods, I'm going to ... I'm going to ... NO! I must hold back!" Ansin grit his fangs and squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to prevent the impending eruption in his shorts.

Aglaia assessed the situation quickly and correctly. She reached down and gripped Ansin's balls with an expert paw and squeezed ... hard. Ansin screamed.

"Did that make the urge to come go?" She asked sweetly as she released her grip and took a step back. Ansin slumped against the wall, cradling his bruised testicles, but his breathing was back to normal.

"Where the hell did you learn that?" He asked, wondering how long it would take for the pain to subside.

"US Army Special Ops." She replied as she rummaged though her dresser. "I was with them for six years. I'm an American too, but my father was from Greece. He was a politician and he met my mother when she was stationed in Athens with Military Intel. He had to flee when the regime changed and she married him to get him into the States. They loved each other, I suppose." She found what she was looking for and turned back to Ansin.

"Here, this should fit you. Put it on."

"What is it?" He asked, rubbing the silken material she had thrown to him between his digits.

"It's a surprise. You like role play, don't you? Put it on and I'll do something special for my shy bat boy. Okay?" she crooned. Ansin sensed her tail waving seductively and even anxiously behind her. He had never role played before, but if there was even a five percent chance of getting laid from it he was all for it. He hurriedly stripped off his clothes, the pain in his balls forgotten.

"Anyway," Aglaia continued with her story as she watched the skinny bat change, "certain people in the communist party over in Greece found out about Mom's 'activities' and sent some teams over for a revenge killing. The Army sent them to Canada to hide out, and we all got dual citizenship under our new identities. I went back to the States to follow in Mom's pawprints, but I ended up in Special Ops instead. Here, let me fix that." Aglaia stepped forward, careful not to let her breasts brush against the easily excited bat and adjusted the clothing she had selected for him.

"The Commies were pretty persistent, and they finally tracked Mom and Dad to Canada. I managed to get assigned to their close protection team in a counter sniper role." She placed something light and lacy on Ansin's head and tied it under his chin with a small bow. "They hired a professional, some guy called 'The Perfect Stalker' to do the job. I had the bastard in my sights when he fired. Prick put an armour-piercing shell right through the wall of the house and into Dad's chest. Must have had one of those new ultra-sonic sights." She mused as she straightened the headpiece.

"Then he ducked just as I pulled the trigger. The bastard got away." She clicked her tongue regretfully. "The guys on the team never forgave me for that. The teasing got worse than it ever was about the sex thing. I took the blame for blowing the operation and took a discharge rather than fight it any longer. Then I came up here to look for the sniper. I have information that this Stalker guy has a contact in Ottawa and I intend to track him down."

"That is horrible. You must be devastated." Ansin exclaimed understandingly. "And I can sympathize with the teasing. Special Ops is such a canine-male dominated bunch, it's ridiculous. It's bad enough being a skinny bat with a fear of flying, I'm sure they gave you quite a hard time about being female, and so lovely." He added in a softer voice.

"Yeaaah, something like that." Aglaia surveyed her work. Ansin, unbeknownst to him, was now dressed in frilly white panties, a short black dress with a ruffled skirt that exposed said panties, and a white maid's bonnet. She passed him a feather duster whose wooden handle was actually a dildo.

"What's this?" Ansin asked. Having never seen or held a feather duster before he was having trouble figuring out what the function of the object was. He brushed the tips of the feathers over his paw and jerked it back from the sensation. "Ooh! You like being tickled? So do I!" This day was getting better and better, he thought.

"Oh, I'll tickle you." Aglaia guided the nearsighted bat over to what had once been a portable gym, before she changed the paw grips for leather cuffs and shackles. Several whips hung from the frame and as she manoeuvred Ansin into position she looked from one to another. Decisions, decisions. "Just let me secure you to my ... tickle track." She giggled.

Aglaia took the dildo-duster from his paw, she would need it later. She took him by the wrists and lifted them up in line with a pair of spring-loaded shackles. When she pressed his arms back against them they snicked shut with a pair of loud clicks.

"What the ...?" was all that Ansin managed before she bent and clamped a pair of chrome cuffs around his ankles. With a tug on the chain they were all attached to she had spread his legs and suspended him several centimetres off the ground.

"Hey, don't!" Ansin gulped as he swayed in mid air. "I'm going to puke, please."

"Quiet, slave." Aglaia said absently as she tried to decide which whip to start with.

"No, really I ..."

"Quiet!" Aglaia pulled a whip at random and lashed out at his thighs. There was a satisfying crack as leather struck fur and skin. Ansin cried out. She reversed the swing and struck his other thigh. This time he remembered not to open his mouth, and merely whimpered.

The high-pitched whimper bounced off the far wall. Some was absorbed by the frilly outfit, some bounced off the wall behind him before returning in reverse order. When it got back to his sensitive ears it formed a mental image of what he looked like. He recognized the scene from some magazines he had studied with a magnifying glass and he whined louder.

"Quiet I said." Aglaia swung the whip lightly around his torso, but the tip accelerated as it was pulled into him and bit his left breast through the thin material. Ansin grit his teeth and tried not to make as much noise. He reminded himself that, according to the literature he had read, he would be rewarded with sex after allowing himself to be dominated. He hoped it would be worth it.

Aglaia pulled the rack out from the wall and circled it as she dealt out short sharp strokes of the whip. Ansin held his tongue as long as he could, but could not help but let the occasional cry out. When he did Aglaia gleefully laid the whip on heavier, but she was not inflicting any real damage. An expert at this, she made sure that Ansin would have no more than a few welts when she was done.

After twenty minutes Ansin was hanging limp in the shackles. Aglaia put the whip down and picked up the feather duster. She trailed it over his exposed fur, traced his jaw line with it, and tickled his snout, watching for any reaction. If he was faking exhaustion he would surely do more than twitch like he was doing now. Satisfied that he was genuinely spent she reversed the duster and ran the blunt end of the dildo-handle down his spine and under his short tail. There she paused and poked him hard in the tailhole through the frilly lace of the panties. He barely jerked.

"I think that you have had enough Ansin." She crooned. "There won't be any premature ejaculation problems now." She pressed herself up against his back and reached around to grab his penis through the material. "But I promise you that you will come." She hissed as she squeezed his limp member.

Ansin grinned weakly. It had been tough, but the reward was in sight, or hearing as the case may be. He released a short tone toward the far wall and was graced with an image of the vixen with her tail high and her buttocks exposed. He could feel the hard nipples of her big breasts pressing against his back.

Aglaia stepped back and took a tube of lubricant off the rack and squeezed a healthy dollop onto the dildo. She worked it around with her paw while Ansin sent whistles and squeaks to refresh his sonar image. He figured out what she had in mind when she put a paw on the back of the panties he wore and prepared to pull them down and expose his ass.

"No! No!" He wailed. "I don't need more ... stimulation. I want to feel fresh on flesh. I want to feel your body against mine. I want us to be locked together, one in the other, until the hot spooge burns us both. Please?" He hoped that he sounded submissive enough.

"Alright." Aglaia relented, putting the dildo-duster back on its hook on the rack. "You have been a very good boy, especially for your first time. So I'm going to grant your request." She stepped up and flicked a switch that lowered him to the floor and released the shackles from his wrists. "Take the ankle cuffs off while I get ready." She instructed him.

Unable to focus on the hardware, Ansin bent down to feel out how the cuffs worked. It took a minute to figure it out, but he managed to open them. He remained down to rub the circulation back into his feet. When he straightened up he could see a blue blur before him. He whistled and clicked to create a sharper image of her. By directing his sounds to the three walls of the room to each side and behind her he managed to build a three-dimensional picture or the lovely vixen.

Her ears were up and forward, still in a dominant sexual position. Her long blue hair was tied in two ropes down her back. Her breasts were round and firm, tipped by nipples that stood out a good centimetre from the fur that covered them. Below that her waist was slim, her tummy flat, her hips well rounded. Her tail was still up, and it was waving back and forth in a pattern that Ansin interpreted as 'come hither'. Her buttocks were exposed, as round and as firm as her breasts. Her thighs tapered nicely down from them as she stood with one knee slightly bent, balanced on the digits of that foot with her paws held coyly in front of her. She was rubbing something with them

Something was wrong with his image. He was sure that she had put the dildo down before getting undressed. Why would she have it back in her paws? Ansin sent out his best signal to define the image.

There was the feather duster with the dildo handle hanging on the rack beside him. There was Aglaia with her tail high, high enough to expose her tailhole and the slit of her cunt from behind, where the signal was bouncing between her and the hard surface of the wall. From the front it was a little fuzzier, with a lot of it being absorbed by fur, flesh and whatever it was she was rubbing the lubricant into. He turned up the intensity, just as she dropped her paws and turned forty-five degrees, giving him another angle to build a three-dimensional image with.

Ansin rubbed his ears. It appeared that Aglaia had a rather large, rather erect penis between her legs. A pair of testicles hung below it in a soft blue sack. The lube made the light shine off it in a way that even the nearly-blind bat could see.

"Bend over the dresser and pull those panties down, bitch." Aglaia sneered as she stepped toward the confused bat. "Daddy's gonna grant your wish and fill you with the hottest spooge you ever felt." The knob of her cock swayed, its slit end seemed to grin evilly as she approached.

Ansin screamed and ran for the door. He used the echo of his shriek to locate the handle and he grabbed it, turned it, pulled the door open and slipped though it all in one smooth motion. He fled down the hallway without caring where he was going. Sensing the exit door he ran for it, imagining Aglaia chasing him with a whip in one paw and her angry blue prick in the other. He hit the door running and dove out into the cold night air, right into the arms of Anabel Balfor, who had just been released from the hospital. She had been given a paw full of drugs and told to go back to the dorm to rest. Rest will help to get the image of Sam's brutalized body out of her mind, the doctor had said.

Unfortunately for her it had now been replaced by the image of a crying bat in a French Maid outfit bearing down on her.

Ansin forgot his shame as he helped the screaming, babbling canine to her room.

* * * * * * * *

In his room, the one next door to Aglaia's, Thomas Roark could barely contain his laughter. He knew her not-so-little secret. The vixen with a penis had a habit of leaving her door ajar, and he had spied her through it the first day. He had kept the information to himself, suspecting that something like this would happen sooner or later. So when he saw Aglaia leave with Ansin he had followed and listened to the action through the wall.

It had gone better than he had hoped. The poor bat had taken a lot of punishment before discovering her true nature. It sounded like he almost got pegged in the process. When he screamed and ran off Thomas had almost wet himself, it was so funny, in a sadistic kind of way. But he would keep Ansin's embarrassing episode to himself; he was not cruel enough to humiliate the bat by making the story public.

He did, however, think that it was about time he introduced himself to the intersexed vixen.

Thomas got up and left his room. Aglaia's door was still hanging open. He looked though it and saw her sitting naked on her bed, the deflated penis hanging between her legs dejectedly. She looked up as he stepped in.

"I'm afraid of bugs too." Thomas said. "Especially Spiders. They turn me to jello. I can never get past the part in 'The Lord of the Rings' where the spider attacks Frodo. Uggggh!" He shivered as the thought of them came back to him.

"Why are you telling me this?" Aglaia, for once at a loss for words, asked.

Thomas pulled the door closed behind him. "Just to let you know that we share at least one thing in common." He said as he slipped out of his shoes and undid his belt. "And to tell you that I am not afraid of a little light bondage." He stepped out of his pants and shorts and pulled his shirt off over his head. When he was done he stood in the rack and lifted his paws to the shackles. With deliberate slowness he activated the closures on first one then the other.

"And I'm not afraid of a penis, either." He said as his own twitched in anticipation.

Aglaia smiled and stood up. But instead of reaching for a whip she turned and reached for her laptop. She looked back at him as the screen came to life.

"Just let me send an email and I'll be right with you big boy."

* * * * * * * *

The analysts had confirmed what the technician suspected of the mystery signal. It was an old KGB code, used by deep sleeper agents. The network had been state of the art, back in the seventies that is. It had an elaborate pattern of set frequencies, codes and timings. But that network had been dismantled when the KGB was disbanded after the Cold War, hadn't it? Silver had always wondered if one or two of the really deep agents, second generation sleepers trained by their parents in the West, were not still out there.

This signal seemed to confirm that at least one of them was still active, and had successfully penetrated FOX. That fit the message that Tanner had showed him when he returned from Venice. The note had been based on intelligence from a system so clandestine that only a dozen creatures in Canada knew of its existence, and only two of those knew how it worked. It had declared that one of the students was not what they claimed to be, and they were after FOX's secrets.

Good luck with that, Silver thought. It was not until he was a senior agent with the help of an inside source that he was able to get at any of FOX's real secrets. These ten students, eight he corrected himself, would have to wait another ten years before they were in that position, if ever.

Not that it mattered now, he supposed. The workings of the sleeper network had been revealed by ex-agents who needed money to survive in capitalist Russia. The known sleepers had been rounded up, and the network was assumed to be shut down. But like any good intelligence agency FOX never threw anything away, and they were able to pull up the records quickly thanks to a database system that Kain Algorath had designed for them.

The sleeper agent would send another message on a different frequency if their first message was not acknowledged by a certain time. Since there was no more KGB to answer them that meant that there would be another signal, and FOX would be ready for it. Silver had deployed two portable signal interceptors at the far corners of the Academy so they could triangulate the next transmission. It was due in just a few minutes.

Silver decided to go down into the subbasement intercept room so he would be there when the signal was intercepted. And after that, he would lead a team to capture the agent who had sent it.

Out of habit, Silver checked the load on his old favourite, an original issue Glock-17 that had been modified to take a silencer. Then he turned out the light on his desk and headed down to the intercept room.

* * * * * * * *

After she had shut down her laptop Aglaia did not whip Thomas as long or as hard as she had Ansin. Partially because she ached to get down to business but mostly because he had set limits on what she could do to him. And you don't cross a six-foot-ten two-hundred and twenty pound wolf; at least, not on the first date. But she did give him a good going over with a soft suede flail to get his blood circulating, as well as hers. The circulation seemed to be concentrated on a particular organ, however, judging by the size and hardness of their mutual erections.

Aglaia dropped the flail when both of their erections began to leak that sweet male juice some called pre-cum. She knew that it could be used as a lubricant for vaginas that had not been properly stimulated, familiarity with the female structure being one of the advantages of having one of your own. She also knew that it could be used at the entrance to the anus, a passage she found more to her liking. Especially if the owner had a cock she could hold on to while she pumped his puckered hole.

Thomas had said that he didn't mind being tied up, so she left him in the shackles and cuffs, but she needed to re-position him. He was far too tall while standing for her to reach. By drawing in the ankle cuffs and lowering the cross bar she was able to bring his hips to her level, suspending him at a forty-five degree angle.

"Comfy?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Shit. Let me adjust this some more." Aglaia cranked the wheel that controlled the spread of his arms until she could see him straining but stopped short of dislocating his shoulders. "How's that?"

"Perfect." He grunted. There was just enough discomfort to keep his mind off coming without being actually painful. Of course if she walked out and left him in this position for any length of time the ache would soon become painful and than excruciating. Eventually his chest muscles would seize up and he would stop breathing and die. That element of danger was half the fun of course.

Aglaia did not leave him hanging. She stepped up behind him and dragged her claws across his chest, leaving trails of disturbed fur and raised red skin as she did. She traced the mid line of his abdomen down as far as the base of his cock with one paw and then veered around it to scrape his inner thigh. With the other she went up to the nape of his neck before wrenching his head around to meet hers. She pressed her maw to his and forced his to open. Then she sucked his tongue into her mouth as if she was trying to pull it out by the roots.

His tail was up along his spine, and she luxuriated in its silky feel. It was much more pleasing than Ansin's stubby, leathery appendage. And Thomas was so tall that he looked underweight, or so she could pretend. She wondered if he would consent to wearing one of her costumes next time?

With his tail up his tight tush was begging to be spanked, and the position of his knees, up and spread, gave her free access to all his tender spots. She explored them with one paw while her tongue fought his. She used both when his mouth rolled willingly against hers.

She drew her claws across the insides of his thighs and traced the line between tailhole and testicles. She grabbed his butt and pinched the tendon that ran just below his cock. She spread his cheeks and rubbed her erection against his tailhole, squeezing it between the globes of flesh. She brushed his sack with the back of her paw, lifted it and then rolled the tender balls against each other. Finally, she wrapped one paw around his shaft, just below the head.

Her cock was still slick with the lubricant she had applied for Ansin, but he had only the dripping male-juice to lubricate him. Aglaia used it to moisten the base of his knob so she could twist her paw like she was revving a motorcycle. But whoever or whatever had created them, God or evolution, had not designed the sap from the males shaft to stay slick in the open air, and it soon grew sticky. Aglaia reached over to where her tube of lube sat and squirted a dollop on his cock before returning to rub it in. Thomas shivered at the cool contact of the lube and the warm touch of her paw.

"How does that feel Tommy Boy?" She whispered in his ear as she stroked the gel into the taut skin of his cock.

"Like a slow fire, glowing deep in the dark." He could see it in the back of his mind as he stared unfocused across the room. "A big bog fire just waiting for someone to turn it over and let the oxygen at it." Then it would burst into flames.

"Let's see if we can't heat things up a bit then." Aglaia grinned evilly. Then she slid her paw down his shaft, across his balls and up under his tail. She reached around to take over stroking with her other paw as the one between his butt cheeks traced the edges of his tailhole, making little circles that grew smaller and smaller until her slippery digit was poised at the entrance to his hole. Then she pushed it slowly in.

Thomas gasped as his anus spread to accommodate her digit. When it was in to the first knuckle she gave it a twist and pulled it back again, but not all the way out. The nest thrust drove in a little deeper, and the one that followed went deeper still. She kept up the long slow strokes on his penis while she digit-yiffed his ass.

When he began to gasp in short sharp breaths she pulled her digit out and released his prick. She rubbed his back with her firm breasts to calm him down while she rubbed her own erection back to maximum strength, refreshing her lube at the same time. When she was ready she took a buttock in each paw and spread them while she rubbed the tip of her cock on the hole that was slowly closing back up. A shift of her hips, a half step forward, and the tip of her prick forced it back open again.

Now it was her turn to moan as his tight ring spread slowly to engulf the head of her cock. It was blue, like her fur, and would have been impressive even on a large male like Thomas. It glistened in the artificial light of the dorm room as his sphincter sealed itself around the base of her knob. Another push and a little more disappeared. She kept pushing until she heard Thomas gasp. She pulled back until the head was all that was left inside and then pushed again, driving in a little further.

Thomas groaned as his hole was stretched wider and wider. The more she pushed the more it opened and the more it opened the greater the area of sensitive anal tissue in contact with her hot cock. Each thrust felt like it would tear him apart, and yet she still had more to give him. There were a dozen more thrusts before he felt her fuzzy balls slap against his.

Because Thomas was suspended Aglaia did not have to move her hips as much to use the full length of her cock on him. She soon settled into a rhythm of pushing him out while she pulled back and releasing him as she drove forward. Her thrusts and his weight brought them together with a satisfying smack each time. She continued this way for several minutes, relishing the grip of his ring sliding so tightly along the length of her cock and the warm soft tissue inside.

Thomas was enjoying it too, but he was struggling to keep from coming as her cock massaged the gland just behind the base of his prick. Each passage excited it more, until it was sending out pulses of pleasure that grew in intensity as she went on. Even the ache in his wrists was disappearing as the warm glow spread though him. He bore down with his pelvic muscles to try and squeeze the channels shut and keep the spooge in for now. That just tightened his grip on her cock and added to his own pleasure.

It added to hers too. Feeling him clamp down on her took her beyond the routine hole pumping and into a race for the finish line, one she did not want to be the first to cross. In order to spur him on she reached around, gripped his prick, and began stroking it like she was pumping for water in a dry well.

Thomas tried to resist but her greasy paw on his slick dick was too much. And with his own paws shackled to the frame there was nothing he could do to stop her or speed her orgasm. Thomas relaxed and surrendered to the sensation.

Aglaia was pounding his tailhole so hard now that her prick was coming out with each stroke. But his anus was stretched to the limit and it could not close before she back inside again. The responsive skin around the head of her cock, taut and exposed by the strength of her hard-on, was teased by the passage in and out of the tender hole. Aglaia inadvertently switched to short shallow stokes that eased the pressure on Thomas while bringing her closer to ejaculation.

Later Thomas would claim that she had come first, and that the splash of molten male juice inside his rectum caused him to follow soon after. Aglaia claimed that he had spurted his seed first, and that the spasms his sphincter went through during his orgasm caused hers. Whichever I was, his howls of ecstasy and her yips of pleasure were heard by the few students who were still in the lounge and picked up by the sensors in the hallways.

* * * * * * * *

In the tech lab the monitor automatically switched to the camera nearest the source of the sound, one of the legitimate ones that only showed the hallway. Joel, who had been helping with the intercept efforts, heard the howling and wondered what he had missed.

* * * * * * * *

Aglaia pulled her aching cock out of Thomas and turned the crank to bring the tall wolf back to his feet before his circulation was cut off. When he was steady she released the cuffs and shackles and helped the weakened wolf to the bed. Thomas collapsed gratefully onto it. Aglaia went to the desk instead, leaned down to rest her elbows on it, and pressed the button that would start the laptop up again. It slowly came back to life.

A few feet away in the bed, Thomas was also coming back to life at the sight of her firm ass and female parts that were exposed by her pose. His cock, although not as hard as before was still swollen with blood. It twitched at the sight of her blue-trimmed slit and tailhole. Thomas reached out to brush her butt cheek and let his claws trail down across the mound of her other sex.

"My turn to pick the position, and the hole." He told her in a firm voice.

Aglaia preferred to act the male on another male, as she had just done, but fair was fair.

"Okay Tommy boy, but first I want to check for a reply to my message." She gently pushed his paw away and then sat down in front of the computer.

* * * * * * * *

The signal came in loud and clear, obviously originating from somewhere very close to the headquarters. Somewhere on the grounds of the Academy itself.

The other two stations reported in immediately, they too had strong signals. That meant that the triangulation would be very accurate, to within a few metres. By linking the result to a high definition map of the facilities they would be able to determine which room the signal was coming from. The solution was calculated in a millisecond, and recalculated several times to confirm it before it was displayed on the screen. As he had suspected, the red dot representing the transmitter was glowing in the middle of one of the Student's dorm rooms.

Silver loosened his gun in its holster. He left the sub-basement and took the stairs to the lobby where a small team of guards in tactical gear waited for him. He gathered the team around the reception desk and laid out a map of the Academy. They spent the next twenty minutes discussing the situation and developing a plan of attack. One of the guards monitored the interior cameras of the dorm to alert them if anyone entered or left the room in question.

They moved out quickly and silently. Silver, wearing a black turtleneck, dark pants and shoes lead them swiftly to the dorm. He used his pass card, one of the two that opened every door in the Academy, to gain entry. They spread out inside, some taking positions at the hallway intersections to keep other students back, some laying in wait outside the target room in case anyone came out. The one that had been monitoring the cameras held a device up and studied the screen. He pushed a button to freeze the picture and then showed it to Silver.

It was an infrared image of the interior. The room was occupied.

They had discussed various options for the attack depending on how many creatures were present and where they were in the room.

"Three-A" Silver signalled the rest with his left paw as he pulled his Glock with his right. They shuffled into position and tensed, waiting for Silver to make the first move.

* * * * * * * *

Aglaia looked at the screen and frowned. She raised a paw to the keyboard but just then the air was rent with the sound of splintering wood. Aglaia's paw closed automatically on the nearest object that could be used as a weapon, a portable aluminum curling iron. She raised it as she spun to face the door.

* * * * * * * *

Silver stood and moved toward the door. One of the team swung a heavy batting ram at the hasp and the door flew open with a crash. Silver stepped in, staying upright because a professional waiting in ambush would shoot low, expecting the assailant to be crouching in the entrance. This way he would only get shot in the leg or knee. He immediately spotted the subject and aimed his Glock on the centre of mass.

The subject had started to stand and turn toward the door at the sound of breaking wood, paws raised. Whether they were raised defensively or offensively was difficult to tell. All Silver knew was that there was something long and metallic in one of them and he did not want to wait for it to be pointing at him before he acted.

Silver, the best instinctive shot in the Academy's history, adjusted his aim as the target moved and squeezed the trigger, sending one hundred and twenty-four grains of copper and lead flying across the gap between the student and him at the speed of sound.

* * * * * * * *

To be continued ....

The FOX Academy series:

Book I - The New Breed

Book II - The Werewolf of Odessa

Book II.5 - The Love who Spied Me

Book III - The Curse of the Yellow Monkey

Book IV - Wait for No One

Book V - Dawn of Vengeance

Kain Algorath © Marcus X Light

Ophelia Cassidy Sommer © Devil Kitty

Joel Grigori © Joel the Lemur

Geno © Coyotek

Dongo Fett © Dongo Fett

New Characters Appearing in this Book:

Saira Rasielle © SilentRampancy

Sanmer Soon © Sanmer

Zachary Ember © EmberWolf

Thomas Roark © That Creepy Guy

Charles Matty © Lonewolf17 R.I.P.

Anabel Balfor © Devil Kitty

Aglaia © Aggy

Ansin Faraday © Ulrik the Fell Handed

Sam O'Leary © Commander Eagle Sam, we hardly knew ye

Grey Muzzle © Grey Muzzle