FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Before we begin: I'd like to say that questions, comments, suggestions and ratings are heartily encouraged. It's what lets me know I still have people reading this! Thanks.

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She wouldn't have guessed it, not in a thousand thousand years. Through all the possibilities swirling through her mind, "cult of murderers" would not have occurred to her. He was too kind, too gentle. Although perhaps his was the instinct of the super-religious--those righteous lunatics who took murder as a good, wholesome and necessary part of their beliefs. She sure as hell didn't think he could have been faking it all...

The blood saturated the thick white carpet; one of the wolfdogs had wandered through it earlier and left thick red tracks along the part that had still been clean. Beside Veronica, lying in the soaked rug, with two warm-bodied wolfdogs lying alongside him for warmth, lay Xavier. His black leopard's features hadn't stirred once since the thugs had dragged him in, trying to save him. His great black-feathered wings lay against him loosely, like the shadows of approaching demons. He had lost a great deal of blood, and Veronica just wasn't sure he could survive.

Tom, the ill-at-ease human still standing awkwardly in Xavier's living room, had remained silent for the last fifteen minutes. She imagined he was still somewhat afraid that she would lose it and attack him--after what he'd just told her, she didn't blame him.

The Order of the Seraphim.

She looked thoughtfully up at the human in his black suit, pulling the bits and pieces back from long-forgotten memory--what she'd heard, what the rumours had been.

The Order was supposedly something between an underground crime family and a zealous, sacrificial Cult bent on retaining human dominance of Earth. They were compared to (and supposedly believed themselves to be) fallen angels making things (their shade of!) right in the world, so that they could ascend again--whether this was literal or figurative was never really specified. It was said that they truly believed that Furrs were not advanced enough to take over Earth--that their animal sides were still too strong, and too present in the genes. That if Furrs took over, they would degenerate quickly, turning feral and fierce and losing all semblance of civilization. That if this happened, mankind and Furrs alike would be wiped out entirely, or at least mankind and all sentient Furrs.

It was, of course, so much bullshit. Furrs were more human than anything else--and had in them a natural instinct to "get along" with all other life, meaning they did not have the "let's dominate the Earth" urge that humans so often displayed. At least, most of them didn't--there were, of course, always exceptions, especially when one considered just how much Furrs were human in their blood. Aside from their general appearance and latent instincts and senses (and even these were generally very diluted), Furrs were every bit as "human" as their creators.

Supposedly, though, in the Order's belief system, Furrs had to be culled carefully and taken down in numbers; supposedly any Furr showing desire to be in any position of power at all--even those who were doing it to help the masses of either race--were killed. Supposedly those who exhibited more "animalistic" features--those who resembled ferals more than humans (often botched genetic engineering jobs, and very rare now that the technology had been nearly perfected), or those Furrs who did things such as wandering off into the forests to "camp" with no tents for a month--those who seemed more animal than their peers--were assassinated by the Order, "for the good of all." This was rumoured to be their creed.

Looking at this human in front of her, though, the frazzled-looking white tigress could not imagine a religious fanatic. This fellow did not look half crime family and half cult--rather, he looked half crime family and half government goon.

After a time, contemplating what she "knew" and mulling over her impressions of this man and his company (professional, careful, polite, seemingly sane) she decided it all didn't quite match up. She hadn't wanted to know, not really, but she felt it was important. She didn't know if she could ever trust Xavier, didn't know if he was a psychotic killer instead of the calm friend she'd thought she'd gained, but she had to give him a chance.

"Tom," she said at last, voice hoarse after the clamor of the evening. "Exactly what does the Order of the Seraphim do?" She turned and glanced down at Xavier's twisted face, frozen in a half-snarl, perhaps forever. She missed Tom's "Oh hell" look--he obviously had been hoping she wouldn't ask.

"You have to swear you won't tell a soul."

She turned and looked at him, hard; he expressed only a very stark sincerity. She didn't know what the punishment was for telling all, but she was willing to bet it involved never being seen again.

"I won't tell a soul. I just want to know about Xavier," she said softly. Her voice itself expressed a cold clarity--she needed to know, and that was that.

The human sighed, and ran a hand through his dark, slicked-back hair. His tie dangled, pointing toward the carpet as he bowed his head in pursed-lip thought. Then he kicked off his shiny black loafers and plopped down on the white sofa behind him.

Leaning his elbows forward onto his knees, he crossed his hands and looked at Veronica intently. His dark eyes bored into her glowing green ones, as if trying to figure out her mind before he began. Then he took a breath, and plunged into it.

"Most of the rumours you may have heard aren't true," he began. She exhaled air she didn't realize she'd been holding in, but remained somewhat tense. "Our organization isn't some kinda crazy religious Cult. We also aren't the Mafia, or anything like it really. We're perfectly legal, in fact." She gave him a hard look. "Yeah, fine, we're the government," he sighed, then leaned back.

"About twenty years after Furrs started getting rights within the general human population, it was noticed by some young upstart in the FBI that some prostitute-murder cases were showing signs that the police investigations weren't quite accurate. I mean, it looked to him like some things were getting badly misinterpreted. He had been going over some files that crossed from the New York to the New Jersey state line--and thus were in FBI jurisdiction. He noticed that six cases of prostitutes being found dead, murdered with what appeared to be a large knife, and which were considered possibly--maybe probably--linked, were also showing signs of animal carcass consumption after the fact. The problem was, in three out of these four cases, the bodies had been found at most twenty-four hours after death, and in very urban places. The likelihood of a large predator--aside from maybe a stray dog--doing this three times in a row, across a state line, was slim. It bothered the agent.

"He took it upon himself to head down and have one of the bodies exhumed. He picked the one that would provoke the least protest and spark the least interest, and managed to have an FBI medical examiner get a good look at the corpse. It has been a closed-casket funeral, both because she'd had no family to look at her, and because her body had been badly mangled. Sure enough, the conclusion was reached that not only was the "scavenger" damage done just before or after death, but that the "knife" wounds were very obviously not knife wounds.

"They were claw marks.

"The young agent wasn't happy about this; the medical examiner had explained that, unless the coroner involved had been an idiot or a trainee, the body's damage couldn't possibly have been mistaken for knife wounds and scavenger marks. The body was extensively photographed, a report done, and it was reburied. Then the young FBI agent went to visit the officers involved.

"The officers who had investigated the crimes expressed ignorance; they just mopped up, they didn't investigate the body itself. This was left to the coroner. The coroner, it just so happened, was a Furr--a dog. When confronted, he didn't flip out, as the FBI officer had feared--rather, he exhibited a strained sort of relief. He admitted he'd hid the results--but said that he had good reason.

"Humans about the area lately had been looking for an excuse to start an anti-Furr campaign. For the good of all Furrs, he'd covered it up--but he'd also alerted a few friends on the police force. Apparently one of those friends was the "tip" that had drawn the agent himself out to the area. The agent reported back to his superiors, who turned to the government agency--USMHC, or United States Military Hybridization Centers--for guidance.

"Furrs in those days were still counted carefully, and tabs were kept. It was agreed that, despite his foolish reactions, the dog coroner had not been exactly misguided. For the good of all, it had to be kept quiet; and thus, in order to investigate this and all possible future crimes commited by Furrs, a new organization was formed. It was called, at first, First Adjunct to FBI and USMHC Relations, and was mostly paperwork, gruntwork and investigating. Two or three other serious cases involving Furrs were found.

"Around the time the culprit of the prostitution attacks--a lion--was found, and quietly disposed of, a new problem arose. A bear by the name of Ursur had started a small, pamphlet-waving group called Ferals Forever. They wanted to be able to slip off into the wilderness and live like animals, or like cave men. At first they were borne with patience; after all, it was their right to do so. But naturalists pointed out that it would force the real animals out of the area--that Furrs were too much competition. So the US Government agreed to their "going feral," on the condition that they did so on privately-bought tracts of land that would be sold to them very cheaply. This was agreed upon, and most of them disappeared into that wilderness. Ursur, however, was furious; he claimed that they were being soothed by a government who wanted them to keep quiet. He was, in all honesty, a little insane.

"It was soon exposed that Ursur had more than a little problem with 'human' living. He couldn't use utensils very well, and had a raging temper and an absolute fury around wolf and cougar Furrs, along with most large predator Furrs. He was larger than most Furrs too, even ursine ones, and it was soon realized that in his genetic manipulation something had gone very wrong.

"The Adjunct was called in to investigate; this fellow was being more aggressive and more destructive to Furrs and their reputation than any mass uprising could have done. The media ate him up; he was on all the major news channels, who touted the headlines "The New Way of Life?" along with images of half-eated carcasses and wild animals fighting.

"The Adjunct looked into paperwork provided by USMHC. It was found that Ursur had three "relatives." One was the human female who had provided the donor egg. One was the bear whose DNA had formed him. The third was a sister, a bear Furr living in Arizona.

"The she-bear, Sasha, was perfectly normal and well-adjusted. She was something of a housewife, bustling around a little house with two bear Furr cubs and her husband, making food and cleaning up house, and seemed lovable and friendly. The mother human who had provided the egg was, likewise, stable; she had been psychologically screened of course, like all humans to enter the program.

"The bear, though, was another story. Apparently he'd been just a cub when his blood samples were taken; his temperament had shown all the signs of calm friendliness, and his parents and grandparents had been carefully selected for the program. However, as he matured, ludicrously high levels of testosterone developed in him. He became entirely unmanageable. He'd eventually been put down, living miserable and vicious in his small cage. Video, though, was available, and it showed.... insanity, really. I saw the tape myself; the bear just paced, snarling, swatting at the walls. He'd had a decent-sized enclosure and plenty of mental stimulation but attacked everything around him, until he'd been put in a smaller cage while they tried drug remedies.

"For whatever reason, his body just produced MORE testosterone when drugs were given to him. The Adjunct investigators--led by that young FBI agent--moved on, asking for blood samples from Ursur. It took a week; he was called in by his doctor. He'd luckily recently had a checkup, and the doctor feigned concern over something or other and managed to draw some blood. It showed absolutely insane levels of testosterone, something approaching that of a bull shark.

"Knowing drugs wouldn't work, the Adjunct got the doctor to try to talk to Ursur over the phone. The bear roared that he was how nature made him, and then he broke the phone in half. He went on a rampage then, breaking everything in his home, tearing out of his house and ripping the door off the surveillance agent's Ford.

"He dropped to all fours and charged down the road, roaring incoherently, causing four major car accidents and managing to corner a lone woman who'd been grocery shopping. At that point our people caught up, along with a local squad car. Thirty seconds later, Ursur was shot dead with a rifle while advancing on the woman. The Adjunct was thorough in covering this up, and even offered free counseling and drug therapy in advance to Ursur's Arizona sister, for her male cub, in case he showed the same tendencies down the road."

Tom coughed lightly, and furrowed his brows, motioning toward the kitchen. "Can I get some water?" he asked. "Talking this much has dried out my throat completely."

Veronica blinked, coming out of her listening trance, and nodded. "Sure," she said softly.

She sat blankly for a moment, mulling it all over. So far, from what she gathered, Tom had told her nothing of the Order--he was going back over history, to why and how it'd been created. Nothing yet about a psychotic religous order or Mafia hitmen.

She turned to Xavier, who hadn't moved. His eyes seemed to have slipped shut, but his jaw still hung half-open, his black fur still slicked with blood. The wolfdogs lying beside him shifted to look up at her, sensing her gaze, and wagged their tails encouragingly, tongues lolling. She gazed into the middle distance for a time, overwhelmed by feelings of exhausting magnitude--despair, hope, fear, betrayal and most of all confusion.

From the kitchen came sounds of drawers opening and closing, silverware clinking, liquid pouring into glasses. The microwave whirred, and beeped, and was slammed shut; a moment later Tom emerged from the kitchen bearing a tray laden with food and drink. He spoke as he handed her her share.

"You looked a little exhausted," he explained. "Warm milk to calm you--don't look at me like that, humans drink it for the same reason," he said with a wry smile. "Bologna and cheese and mayonnaise and mustard--yeah, I'm a real professional chef, don't know if you knew or not." He winked. "There was a salad in there, so some of that on the side." Hence the forks then. Lettuce and tiny tomatoes and little white mushrooms--something Xavier must have picked up from the store at some point. Veronica sniffed the food and milk surreptitiously; free of any "calming" drugs Tom might have decided necessary, from what her nose could detect.

"Anyway," he said as he sat back down on the couch, balancing his own plate and giving the overly-attentive, salivating wolfdogs a wary glance, "The rest of it is pretty simple." As Veronica hungrily devoured the food--she'd been so upset that she didn't realize how hungry she had become--Tom began to tell the rest of the story between bites.

"The rest actually kind of just happened, fell into place like one of those" --bite, chew, swallow-- "Tom Clancy novels. Or John Grisham--I dunno, I don't read much." Bite, chew, swallow. "Anyway, the leaders of USMHC and the FBI, as well as the Adjunct officers, all had a major meeting. To everyone in the FBI and Adjunct's surprise, seven Furrs attended the meeting. There was a lioness, a rat, a fox--and oh, a rabbit and I don't know what else. They all talked about what had happened, about the impact a single deviant mind--or in this case, badly-engineered body--could have on the Furr community, and on the human one. It was expressed that mankind and Furrs had to both continue to exist--Furrs were not created to replace humanity, and humans were not to become frightened and wipe out their creations. The significance of one errant creature, one feral coming into the community and killing, would be awesome. The effects could be devastating; if things like this happened even only once every five years (and given the large amount of Furrs in existance and being created, the relative newness of the technology and the problems many were already having adjusting, this was more than reasonable--maybe even conservative)--if it only happened once every five years, the media frenzies would still be more than enough to keep the races from properly mixing, in the social sense."

Here Tom leaned forward, setting aside his empty plate, sipping down the last of his milk and looking hard at Veronica.

"If the races lived seperately, worked and socialized apart, no good could come of it. There would be fear, resentment, hatred, and people and Furrs sharing these would organize and take a stand. Then anything from civil unrest to wars could result. One race or another would have to fall, or at least lose America, abandoning it and moving on. That was the best-case scenario though, the no-deaths one. Actually the social scientists brought into this meeting from both sides agreed that much violence could result as a backlash--the media hyping up the danger of Furrs, Furrs resenting this, perhaps even becoming ferally violent as a direct answer to it. There would be tension and--hell, you get the point," he sighed, scratching one ear.

"Anyway, it was also decided that something had to be done. First it was decided that the Adjunct should become its own organization--one employing humans and Furrs. It should have to answer both to specially-selected FBI officials and head USMHC honchos, but otherwise be kept very secret--for if it was known that the Adjunct was even necessary, the outcry from the humans would be unbelievable.

"It was decided that this organization should have three goals: to keep careful track of all Furrs, as much as logistically possible, keeping track of their goals and social lives and even more importantly keeping a close watch on those who deviated. Secondly, it would judge when "deviant" became "dangerous to the cause," and would act quickly, secretly and within reason to quell the problem--whether that was calling in a psychiatrist or assassinating a prominent but deviant Furr. Morals were drilled into the meetings' attendants as being very important; the group formed could not kill as it pleased, but would rather have to follow a strict code or at least set of criteria as to how much force was allowed in any given situation. Thirdly, the group would have to cover up its actions, as well as any deviants' actions that could threaten the social infrastructure of the Furr-Human world.

"I think Seraphim was suggested first by the rat Furr, though I could be wrong. What I do know was that it's supposed to be a constant psychological reminder to its members that their purpose is to do GOOD in this world; that it's supposed to help them keep from getting disillusioned or caught up in an image of powerful underworld goings-on. A couple of agents have already been kicked out, though none have really gone bad. I guess the program's not old enough for that," he added drily.

"In any case, that's what we do. If some stupid Wolf Furr somewhere starts getting ahead of himself and insisting his bloodline's superiority to other Furrs and humans, we'll have a talk with him. If there's a lion somewhere running a secret underground organization of Furrs that selectively kidnaps, rapes, and kills various humans for "hunting pleasure" and "breeding programs," then we hunt them all down and kill them, one by one."

Veronica sat back with a start--Tom's face had gone suddenly, coldly dark.

"That exists?" she asked, wide-eyed.

He turned toward her, gave her a curt nod and took a deep breath. "Yeah," he replied. "It's what we were after last night," he added, gesturing toward Xavier's still form. "We almost had the fucker, too. Stupid Jason..." he sighed, looking at the carpet and running his hands through his hair.

"Hey," she said softly. He looked up, and she reached out, over the black leopard's chest, and took his hand, giving it a warm squeeze. He gave her a surprised look.

"What...?" He looked confused.

"Thank you," she said quietly. She gave him a meaningful look, and continued. "I don't know how much, if anything, Xavier said about me. But he rescued me, and was taking care of me, and for the first time in my life I had someone I thought I could trust--really trust. When you said "The Order of the Seraphim" I thought I would fall apart. What you just told me fixes it--all of it. I think you're all doing the right thing, if it's any consolation."

Tom just looked at her, then nodded his thanks and looked down again. Throughout his tale, his features had been crossed with everything from dismay to sadness to guilt. She could tell the agents of the Seraphim did not like their jobs--how could they? Betraying and killing their own kind in total secret--or in the case of the humans, helping the Furrs to do so. Keeping a secret, especially one so hard, had to eat away at one's soul...

Veronica sighed and looked down at Xavier, leaving Tom to contemplate his own dreary thoughts.

She peered down at his face, so obviously straining for life, holding hard to the last thread of survival it could. His body hitched for breath, but quietly and slowly; his heartbeat was still shallow and rapid. She sighed again and gently nudged one of the wolfdogs out of the way, and slid down beside Xavier, her white coat smearing into the blood-soaked carpet. She wrapped her arms around him, cradling him, holding him...

Exhaustion took over, and she soon slipped into an uneasy sleep. Tom waited for a time, then took a throw blanket from the couch behind them and spread it gently over the pair. He watched them for a time, the idle thought "This is what we work for," crossing through his mind as he turned to search the big house for a bed he could collapse in. He settled on the couch in the entryway--he would be within hearing if Veronica called, and able to guard the broken front door too. He turned the couch so his sleeping form wouldn't immediately be visible, and laid down on it, tossing his tie and suit jacket and blood-smeared dress shirt on the floor next to the wolfdog that trailed around behind him.

Time to sleep, he thought. Time for all of them to sleep. Sunrise tomorrow would come soon, and a new day; and they would see what that day would bring.