The Reptilian Lounge Nightclub in Dallas, Texas was in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of the city, a somewhat rundown though still vibrant district separated from the high-rises of downtown by the elevated lanes of the North Central Expressway. It was a humid, sticky Friday night in late summer and at thirty minutes to midnight the three-story club was packed to well beyond legal capacity, mostly with twenty-one to twenty-five year old men and women, most of whom were provocatively dressed, most of whom were enjoying some degree of intoxication.

On the ground floor of the club, the largest of the three levels, the circular dance floor was the dominating feature. Multi-colored lights flashed back and forth and lasers pulsed above, bathing the two to three hundred men and women moving their bodies to the beat of modern techno music around its polished surface in an eerie glow. To one side of the dance floor was a bar that ran the length of the room. Here, eight bartenders were on duty, every one of them scrambling endlessly to keep up with the demands of the thirsty patrons who were lined up five and six deep. Directly across the dance floor from the bar was the entryway, where a steady stream of new customers made their way into the loud, dimly lit meat market after clearing the identification checkpoints and the metal detectors. North and south of the dance floor were dozens of cocktail tables, most capable of seating four to eight but a few—usually off in the corners—tiny and only designed for two. In the spaces between these tables, cocktail waiters and waitresses circulated with trays full of drinks and patrons walked back and forth, heading to and from the bar, to and from other tables, to and from other levels, and to and from the dance floor entrances. Many of these patrons simply stood in the open areas, unable to find seats, or perhaps preferring to stand and mingle more intimately with the press of humanity. Sometimes they gathered in clusters that had to be broken up by the bouncers in order to keep the traffic moving along. Amidst this mass of drunken, partying youngsters were a male and a female who seemed to fit in quite well in this environment but who were not, by any stretch of the imagination, what they seemed to be.

The male was named Ken, although his mother and grandparents called him Kenneth. He was dressed in a tight black button-up shirt, un-tucked as was the current fashion, and a loose-fitting pair of jeans that sagged just enough to show the top of his boxers. His hair was brown and thick, his arms well-muscled, his abdomen without the slightest trace of a beer belly. The female was named Meghan. She was a stunningly cute brunette with green eyes a man (or even a woman) could drown in. She wore a tasteful yet sexy one piece dress. Black in color, it was sleeveless up top and designed to accent her breasts, which were of the sort men would sell their souls to touch. Down low, the hem fell to about mid-thigh, accenting her bare legs, which were of the sort men dreamed of feeling wrapped around their backs.

Ken and Meghan were married to each other though neither wore a wedding ring or any other kind of jewelry and both had been freely dancing, flirting, and even occasionally kissing or groping other patrons of the club all night. They were both physically attractive specimens of their sex whose outward appearance would lead anyone, even the most careful observer, to believe they could be no older than mid-twenties. In fact, however, in terms of chronological time on Earth, both were about twenty-five years older than they looked. And, no matter how many years passed, they would continue to look this way until they decided to reproduce or until they died. Ken and Meghan were members of a special breed of human, a breed that virtually all modern humans thought nothing more than a myth, a breed that had lived alongside human society for more than five thousand years and went to great lengths to conceal its existence. They called themselves the Cognate, though in human myth there were other, less kind words for them.

They sat in the northeast corner of the room, at the most isolated of the tables for two. They had encountered no difficulty whatsoever in securing this table for their use. They had simply asked the young couple sitting there before them—a couple who had met each other an hour before out on the dance floor and had become convinced (thanks to six Captain and Cokes apiece) they were each other's soul mate—to please leave. The couple left without argument, both thinking it was an entirely reasonable request, both promptly forgetting the encounter a few minutes later.

"Did you decide which one to take?" Ken asked his wife. He spoke softly, almost in a whisper, so low that one of the human patrons would not have heard his words even if he or she had been standing right next to him.

Meghan had no trouble understanding him, however. Like any cognate, her hearing was both powerful and selective. With a conscious thought, her brain could filter out the pounding of the music and the babble of hundreds of other conversations and focus only on what it was she wanted to hear. "I think so," she whispered back, her words just as inaudible to normal human ears, her mouth forming a naughty smile. "I'm kind of taken with Reg over there. The one I was dancing with last round."

Ken let his brown eyes track across the room to one of the eight person tables next to the railing that divided the dance floor from the table area. There, three young women and five young men were drinking bottles of light beer and laughing together. Three members of this party were wearing purple and white T-shirts with a caricature of a horned frog on them. These were the colors and mascot of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. The young man of whom Meghan spoke was one of the T-shirt wearers. He was maybe twenty-two years old, aristocratically handsome in the face, but a bit on the thin side—certainly not a TCU student attending on an athletic scholarship. This was slightly odd. Meghan had a bit of a thing for men—and women for that matter—with athletic bodies and attitudes. "Hmm," Ken said, raising his eyebrows a bit. "Not your typical conquest."

"True," she agreed cordially enough. "There's something about him though. He seems ... oh ... innocent."

"Innocent?" Ken scoffed with a little laugh. "In this place?"

She gave him a very wifely look. "Don't you go mocking me," she said. "I know what I felt when I was dancing with him."

Ken took a sip of his drink. It was a seven and seven, heavy on the first seven thanks to an in-the-closet male bartender who had reacted very strongly to Ken's presence. He had consumed five of them in the past ninety minutes but was not the least bit intoxicated thanks to his cognate physiology. "I don't know what you felt," he told his wife with a smirk, "but I know what he felt. Once he got his hand on your left tit you had to damn near pry it off with a crowbar."

Meghan giggled, knowing that her husband held no jealousy in his heart over the incident. It was, after all, what they were here for. "He almost came in his pants while he was feeling me up," she said. "That's what's cute about him. I don't think he's ever ... you know ... gone all the way before."

Ken found this very hard to believe. "A virgin?" he asked. "Here?"

"I think so," she said, the naughty smile back on her face.

Ken shook his head sternly. "No way in hell," he said. "It's not possible for a man to spend two years in an accredited university without getting laid. Even if it is TCU."

"Wanna bet?" she asked sweetly.

"You're on," he said. "What are the stakes?"

She reached out and touched his face, sliding her soft fingertip from his ear to his lips, sending a chill through his body. "Winner gets the prize," she suggested. "Loser ... well ... loser doesn't."

He grasped her by the wrist and brought her fingertip back to his lips. He kissed it gently, looking in her eyes as he did so. "You're on," he said, confident that he would win.

A minute later, Meghan was up and working her way through the crowd to the table where Reg sat with his friends. As she went on her path, nearly every man she passed within five feet of stopped whatever he was doing and turned to look at her. They did this even if their backs had been to her as she approached. They did this even if they were in the middle of conversing with someone of the opposite sex. Three of the men she passed ended up not getting laid that night because the girl they were talking to became offended by this motion. But they could not help it. Not only was Meghan attractive on the surface, she was cognate. And cognate demanded attention even when they didn't necessarily want it.

For her part, Meghan ignored the ruckus she caused. She approached the table and the conversation around it stopped as all of the men (and one of the women) turned their heads to look at her. Reg, who had been not-so-surreptitiously glancing at her ever since they'd shared a dance twenty minutes before, swallowed audibly.

"Hi, guys," Meghan greeted cheerfully, her eyes meeting each pair looking up at her before settling on Reg.

The five guys and one girl who were taken with her all chirped enthusiastic greetings in return. The two girls who were not taken with her grunted semi-hostile verbalizations that technically qualified as polite greetings.

The pounding beat of the music made small talk impossible. As such, Meghan got right to her point. She held out her hand to Reg and nodded toward the dance floor. Reg looked to where she was indicating and then licked his lips. Finally, he nodded back, taking her hand and standing up. She led him to the nearest dance floor gate, Reg's companions watching them go. Meghan's cognate hearing picked up their conversation with ease.

"Damn," said one of the guys. "Reg has got it going on tonight."

"No shit," said another.

"She's a slut," opined one of the girls, her voice dripping with jealousy.

"I don't know," said another, her voice quite dreamy, her panties quite wet. "She seems nice enough."

"She's on the prowl," said the last girl knowingly. "She must know who Reg's old man is."

Meghan tuned the conversation out and let her brain process the sound of the music instead. The beat was pounding and loud, the synthesizers and the guitars hypnotic, designed to get the pulse pounding. She led the young man she now thought of as her prey to the corner of the dance floor, out of the view of his friends and close to the exit. They began to dance. As she moved her body to the beat she brought her upper arms away from her body just for a second, just enough for a small blast of the cognate pheromones, which were secreted from glands in her armpits, to waft into the air around her.

Reg did not consciously recognize that he had just inhaled a potent mind-altering organic chemical. He had the vaguest sense that the beautiful young brunette woman he was dancing with (he did not know her name as she had yet to introduce herself on that level) smelled really good—kind of like a combination of fresh oranges and limes—and then he was nearly overwhelmed with a sensation of lust for her. It was not simply physical attraction that rippled through him. He had been attracted to her ever since spying her from across the room more than an hour ago. Nor was it simple fantasizing or infatuation. He had been experiencing that ever since she'd asked him to dance twenty minutes ago. No, this was full-blown lust on a scale he had never experienced before, not even during the hottest, heaviest make-out sessions with Candy, his fiancée. He wanted the young woman like he wanted to breathe, like he wanted water when he was thirsty, food when he was hungry. In his pants, he felt his penis stiffen from a nervously shriveled noodle to a full-blown turgid erection. He felt his face flushing, his breathing pick up. He looked at her the way a man looked at a pornographic picture, his eyes tracking up and down from her face to her neck to her cleavage to her legs and then back. He could perfectly envision touching, tasting, possessing every inch of her smooth, sexy body. He was not so far gone that he would attack her, but given the slightest bit of encouragement he would go as far as she would allow him and would not spare so much as a single thought for the consequences.

Meghan's smile widened as her pheromones went to work on her prey. She did not need to look down to see the bulging erection in his pants. The cognate olfactory sense was extremely acute, acute enough to use as a navigational tool in pitch blackness if necessary, acute enough to inventory a room one was not even in, acute enough to identify individual humans from each other from more than a hundred yards without assistance from sight or hearing. She could smell the sudden spike in his arousal as plainly as a human could smell a bag of coffee being opened, or bacon being cooked, or garlic and oregano being simmered. More importantly, she could smell the effect she was having on the other humans nearby. All of the men in a six foot circle around her were being affected minimally by her presence and had been since she and her prey had settled here. That was to be expected. Her armpits were bare, she herself was more than a little sexually aroused, and, most significant, she was hungry. Under these circumstances a certain amount of the pheromones would percolate out into the surrounding air no matter what measures she took to prevent it. The submission reaction, however, was something different. Not so long before, she would not have dared direct a blast of pheromones at someone in so crowded an environment. Now, however, she was learning to use the tools of her species more effectively. No one but Reg had been hit full force. True, a few of the closer guys might find themselves with a strange lapse of memory for the last few minutes, but none would try to physically accost her.

Use your pheromones like a scalpel, her mother and grandmother always told her, not like an axe. That was wise advice indeed. Advice that was serving her well just now.

She danced around behind her prey, so she was gripping his waist from behind, her breasts pushing into his back, her lips near his ear, close enough he could feel her breath upon it. She was careful to keep her upper arms pinned against her body. "You said you have a car out in the parking lot?" she whispered to him, just loud enough that only he would hear her words.

"Yes," he said dreamily, nodding, his body still swaying to the music, his hands dropping to hers, caressing them.

"Good," Meghan whispered. She had already known the answer to this question, of course. She had asked him this earlier, during their first dance. It was, in fact, the only thing she had asked him, other than his name. "Why don't you take me out to see it?"

"To ... to my car?" he asked, another burst of arousal scent blasting into the air at this suggestion.

"Yes," she whispered, her lips actually touching his earlobe now. "To your car." She could take him here and now if she was so inclined, but she wasn't. That would be madness. There were too many people here, too many security cameras. Cognate preferred to take their prey to dark, secluded places in order to maintain what was known as The Subterfuge—the masquerade that allowed their kind to exist alongside humans without detection.

"Oh ... okay," Reg said, shuddering a little. "Let's go."

"Lead the way," Meghan told him.

He led the way, walking quickly, purposefully to the dance floor gate nearest the exit. From there, he began weaving in and out of the throngs of young people gathered at the door. Meghan stayed a few paces behind him, not touching him, far enough back so anyone who happened to be looking at them, either with their own eyeballs or through the lens of a security camera, would not be able to say for certain if the two of them were leaving together or just leaving at the same time. Her eyes tracked back, forth, up, down as they went, looking at the position of the cameras, the locations of the bouncers. Her ears listened for any snatch of conversation that concerned the two of them. Her nose sampled the thousands of scents in the air, her brain scanning them for anything that could be categorized as dangerous. Everything seemed as it should.

They reached the exit door. A bouncer looked them up and down for a moment, his eyes lingering considerably longer on Meghan's breasts than was considered polite.

"Everything okay?" Meghan asked him, her voice conveying just a hint of irritation.

He jerked a little. "Uh ... yeah ... just fine," the bouncer said, blushing. "I was ... uh ... just making sure you had your band on so you could get back in."

"Of course," she said, diplomatically not mentioning that the band in question, which she had paid a five dollar cover charge for, was on her wrist, not on a necklace chain on her chest. "Thank you for your concern."

The bouncer mumbled something in reply, something her cognate hearing could not even make out, it was so inarticulate. He bothered her no more.

"Which way?" Meghan asked her prey once they were through the door. She moved a little closer to him and let just the tiniest blast of pheromones slip out into the air.

"Oh ... wow," Reg said, nearly drooling at the sight of her now. "You are so ... so ... pretty."

"Thank you," Meghan said. Oops, maybe that last blast wasn't really necessary. He's getting loopy. "Now which way to your car?"

"Oh ... yeah, my car," Reg said. He looked around the parking lot for a moment and then pointed off to the north. "That way. Out toward the back."

"Very good," Meghan said. "Take me there and I'll give you a surprise."

"I love surprises," Reg said. He began to walk again.

Reg's car actually turned out to be a truck. It was a 2010 Ram Big Horn extended cab, cherry red in color, four wheel drive, with extra-large tires and rims that had probably cost more than she and Ken had paid in rent the last three months. On the bumper were two stickers. One was the official Texas Christian University logo that was available only to students and alumni. The other was a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish with the word TRUTH printed next to it.

"Nice truck," Meghan commented. "I hope it doesn't mean you're compensating for something."

"Compensating for something?" Reg said. "No ma'am. My daddy paid cash for it."

Meghan smiled. "Of course he did." She took another survey of her surroundings, casting her special senses about. There were no security cameras nearby—a recon of the area when they'd arrived had already established that. They were in a dark part of the parking lot, a part where ordinary human eyeballs would not be able to see through the truck's windshield unless they were closer than twenty feet or so. She could smell a small crowd lingering near the front door of the club and twenty or thirty random humans scattered throughout the parking lot (including a man and a woman who were getting hot and heavy in a Ford Mustang out toward the west side) but none were within sixty yards of them currently and none were heading in their direction. There was one figure ambling in their direction but it wasn't a human. It was Ken. Even if she didn't know his scent quite intimately, she would have known he was cognate if nothing else. The licorice-peppermint odor of male cognate pheromones was unmistakable.

"Would you ... uh ... like to see inside?" Reg offered, a bit of his shyness returning as he was exposed to the fresh air.

"I would love to," Meghan told him. "Why don't we start with a tour of the back seat?"

Reg gulped nervously, his face flushing again. "Umm ... uh ... okay," he said. He took his keys from his pocket and pushed the electronic lock button. The truck chirped, its lights flashed twice, and the door locks shot up. Reg opened the rear door for her and she climbed inside. He followed quickly behind.

The back seat was actually quite luxurious. Large enough to carry three passengers in comfort, the seats were leather and there was plenty of leg room. Meghan smiled at her good fortune. She hated to be cramped when she took her prey. There would be plenty of room for everything she wanted to do ... assuming, of course, that she won her bet and earned free reign to do that particular everything. She was pretty confident she was right, however. Her prey just seemed too inexperienced to be anything but what she suspected.

"Um ... uh ... so what would you like to see?" Reg asked her, his tongue obsessively licking his lips as the odor of her pheromones in the closed cab began to work on him in earnest.

"I'd like to see everything," Meghan told him, her fingertips touching his leg just above the knee. "But first ... how about we talk a little?"

"Talk? Uh ... sure, I can do that."

"I like to talk," Meghan said. "But maybe I can sit on your lap while we talk. Would that be okay?"

Reg nodded so fast he might have sprained his neck. "Yeah, sure," he said. "That would be nice. You sitting on my lap that is. I mean ... if you really want to."

"I really want to," Meghan said. With that, she scooted over until she was next to him. With a quick maneuver, she spun herself around, swinging her left leg over his lap. She sat down, her bare legs straddling his thighs, her breasts just about even with his face. She opened her arms a little, releasing more pheromones into the air. She began to stroke up and down his bare arms, softly, sensually. "Can you hear me well?"

"Uh ... oh ... yeah," Reg gasped. "I hear you very well." His hands had gone to her waist. He was moving them up and down, feeling the curves and softness of her body.

It had not been Reg that Meghan had been asking that question to. It had been Ken. She could smell him out there, about ten yards away, standing in the shadows, ready to run interference for her if someone should head in her direction. Faintly but clearly, her ears picked up his reply. "I hear you. I smell you too. I wouldn't get too comfortable up there. It'll be harder to get down when you lose."

"Let's just see whose gonna lose tonight," she said.

"Prob'ly the Rangers," Reg said thickly, his fingertips now running all the way down to Meghan's upper thighs, just to the point where he was touching bare flesh. "They kinda suck this year."

"Right," Meghan said with a chuckle. Faintly, she heard Ken give a little bark of amusement as well.

"You really are sexy," Reg said, his fingers now sliding under Meghan's skirt a little. "What did you say your name was?"

"Meghan," she replied, sliding her fingertip over his shoulder and up to his face. She touched his lips for just the briefest second.

"I like that name," Reg said. "I like everything about you."

"That's very nice, Reg," she said. "Tell me something. Do you have a girlfriend?"

He nodded without hesitation. Humans, when under the influence of pheromones, found it very difficult to lie. They, in fact, had a tendency to volunteer information—sometimes information a cognate didn't really want to hear. "Her name is Candice ... Candy for short. She's almost as pretty as you are."

"Is she now?" Meghan said. "Do you like to touch her thighs the way you're touching mine?"

He nodded. "Oh yeah," he said, digging his fingers into her thighs just a little. "I don't do it too often though."

"You don't?" Meghan said. She was now scratching lightly at the back of his neck with her left hand. Her right was twirling around inside the collar of his shirt, touching his warm skin. "Why not?"

"Too much temptation," he said. "I might ... you know ... want to do more with her."

"What's wrong with that?" Meghan asked.

"We're not married yet," he said, his fingertips now touching her inner thigh, about half an inch away from the elastic band of her pink lacy panties. "God you smell good."

"I do, don't I?" Meghan said, leaning forward and kissing his forehead with her soft lips. "You can touch me there, you know. I like it."

He shuddered beneath her. His fingers moved forward, burrowing beneath the crotch of her panties. She felt his middle finger probing and pushing until it finally encountered the wetness of her slit.

"Mmmm," she said. "So eager. Why don't you put two fingers in?"

He did, pushing them in well past the second knuckle. He began to move them in and out. Meghan began to rut her body against him, clenching and releasing.

"Okay now," Ken's voice told her. "We haven't established virginity yet."

She cast an evil look in his direction, knowing he could see her perfectly with his cognate eyes. She turned back to her prey. "So you're not planning to have sex with Candy until you're married?" she asked.

He was almost too far gone to answer her. His own natural sexual arousal and the constant exposure to her pheromones had almost taken him away. But not quite. "No," he panted, his lips now kissing her exposed shoulder, putting his nose even closer to the source of her control over him. "I'm ... I'm a good Christian. I ... I would never ask her to ... to..." He inhaled deeply. "Oh, Lord you're so sexy."

"Yes ... I am," Meghan said. Her right hand had dipped down low, under the hem of his shirt. She was caressing the bare flesh of his stomach. "But let's go back to Candy for a moment. You've never fucked her?"

"No," he said. "I sucked on her titties one. And I jacked off on her stomach. I was really drunk that night. I shouldn't have done it. God forgives me though. I was repentant."

"I'm sure you were," Meghan told him. Her fingers were now touching the waist of his jeans, sliding over the buckle of his belt. "What about other girls? Have you ever fucked anyone before?"

"No," he said. "Never. It's ... it's a sin to do it before marriage."

"Son of a bitch!" she heard Ken's voice bark.

"Looks like I have a winner here," Meghan said, her fingers sliding the end of the belt out of the buckle.

"Thank you, Meghan," Reg said, unaware she wasn't talking to him, also unaware of the irony of his statement. "The Lord will reward me come the rapture."

"I have no doubt he will," Meghan said. She was about to open Reg's pants and take her prize but something occurred to her. What if Reg and his girlfriend were in a correct destiny relationship? A correct destiny—meaning a relationship in which both parties were mutually in love with each other—was a rare thing among humans but it did happen from time to time, usually through blind chance. Interfering with a correct destiny was forbidden by the Fifth Commandment of cognate law. And while it was true that simply preying upon one member of a correct destiny relationship did not technically constitute interference in and of itself, knowingly doing so was starting to edge into the gray area on the fringes of the line. Meghan was a very young cognate. She and Ken had been propagated (as the term went) less than six months before. She had gotten over such silliness as worrying about whether her prey was married or not but she still felt very uncomfortable at the thought of entering the gray area. Penalties for cognate who violated cognate law were understandably severe.

"Your pussy feels so ... so... tight," Reg exclaimed. "Do they all feel like this?"

"I don't know," Meghan said. "I haven't felt them all."

Reg giggled like a child.

"Listen, Reg," Meghan said, reaching down and grasping his wrist, stopping the thrusting of his fingers in and out. "Let's talk a little more, okay?"

"Talk?" he said, struggling a little against her restraining hand. He was no match for her cognate strength, however.

"Yeah," she said. "Just for a second. You and Candy. Are the two of you happy together?"

"Happy?" he said, puzzled, as if he was unsure just what she was talking about. "What do you mean?"

"I mean do you love her?" she clarified. "Is she the woman who makes you happy?"

"Well ... she's beautiful," he said slowly. "She's the most beautiful woman I ever hooked up with. And she doesn't mind that I won't go all the way with her."

"Yes," Meghan said, "but do you love her?"

"My dad thinks she's a gold digger," Reg said, not answering the question. "He never told me this—he says he likes her and that she'll make a fine addition to the family—but I overheard him telling my uncle what he really thought one night when Candy and I were visiting."

"I see," Meghan said. "And..."

"My friends don't really like her much either," Reg interrupted. "John and Steve—those are my two best friends—told me she's just trying to marry into a rich family too. Steve even told me that ... well, it don't matter."

"Yes, yes it does matter," Meghan told him. "What did Steve tell you?"

"He says he heard she's sleeping with other guys ... like the jocks you know, and one of the professors."

"Hmmm," Meghan said. "And do you think that's true?"

"I told Steve there's no way in hell Candy would do something like that," he said, his voice cracking a little.