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Introduction:

The continuing adventures of... well, you know who they are, by now.

Hey guys, this is really long, so if you want a quick fix, read something else!

The Adventures of Béla, the Vampire Girl
Book 4: Time Walker
Part 2a
Chapter 1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She was riding on his hard cock, another orgasm starting to explode between her thighs and up into her belly. Her eyes were closed, wanting nothing more than to live forever in the next orgasm, never having to face the awful realities she fled from in her ecstasy, wishing it all to be far behind her. Her orgasm exploded, devouring her alive…

She was floating in space – her body suddenly ravenous for sustenance and sucking her dry in restitution for the energy she’d used. She opened her eyes as her existence became more agonizing, not understanding what was happening to her.

She was stunned by what she saw. She was floating in the air high above the ground, which extended around her in every direction. But she was more astounded by what she didn’t see. She could feel Jake beneath her. She could feel the bed against her knees and his hard dick still moving inside her, but there was no one there!

He didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t there – wasn’t solid and impaled on him. She realized that she must be asleep. She’d fallen asleep while he was fucking her. She smiled, realizing that this was just a dream.

“Where are we?” she asked, looking around, astounded and confused by what she was seeing. Then she remembered – she’d been here in Béla’s mind, when she was initiated and introduced to her immortality.

“I don’t know,” Jake’s thought echoed through her mind. “I found this place in your mind. It must be what you believe to be ‘heaven’.”

Jake was starting to become more solid. Tabatha, suddenly terrified, pushed against his chest, pushed him away from her.

“What is it?” he asked.

Then he opened his eyes. He grabbed her tightly by her hips and thighs to keep her from floating away.

In her amazement, she realized that they were fucking in the middle of the sky, in the middle of a huge, hollow sphere, millions and millions of miles from earth. Her vision began to tunnel as hungry cells sucked the nutrients and oxygen from her blood.

‘No wonder I’m hungry,’ she thought to herself, realizing that somehow she must have teleported all that incredible distance. Then Jake was coming inside her. She could feel it –his beautiful dick pulsing, the hot cum gushing out and coating her insides. She felt her pussy twitch, giving off one small orgasm – all she had strength for.

Then she was too weak to even see where she was. Faintly she could hear Jake talking to her. She wanted to tell him everything would be okay, now, but she couldn’t get her body to work right. She felt him moving away, floating out from underneath her and wanted to tell him to hold her – hold her tight so she wouldn’t fall.

“Well, that’s quite fascinating,” Elaine said caustically, breaking mental contact with Tabatha. She sounded disinterested – almost spiteful. Tabatha blinked at her, not understanding the blond girl was upset.

“We’re in the future, then?” Tabatha asked the Golden-haired Goddess (she wants to be called).

“Yes! Of course you are!” Elaine snapped at her. “Why did you come here? What were you hoping to find?”

“I was…” Tabatha stammered. “I didn’t come here on purpose – I was trying to find a peaceful place where I didn’t have to face all these terrible problems. I thought I was just dreaming.”

“Earth girl!” Elaine accused her. “I looked you up in the Praetor’s database. You and your… life-mate… disappeared over two hundred years ago. You’re probably the one responsible for the Disaster!”

“What disaster?” Tabatha demanded to know. “What happened after I left?”

“Your son’s grandparents, Alicia and Walter Madison, adopted your son,” Elaine told her. “Then, two years after you disappeared, Madison had his wife arrested for embezzlement and took over all her holdings. Jake Hedron’s security division was part of those holdings. His mother had been running it in your lifemate’s absence.

“There must have been information that detailed the weaknesses of her family on file, because by searching through the data at Tomlin Security, Madison discovered the truth about my sister, Béla, and her daughter and all the rest of you.

“One by one, he drugged and captured every member of Béla’s Earth family, including most of Hedron’s relatives, using the security division’s own personnel. Béla’s daughter escaped for awhile, but turned herself over to them after Madison had Hedron’s grandparents executed and threatened to do the same to Béla and her father.

“Once he had them all, they were drugged and executed as enemies of the state,” Elaine said, her voice quivering with emotion. “He kept them drugged. They never had a chance to defend themselves.”

She glared at Tabatha with undisguised hatred. “They searched for you and your husband for a long time. But they gave up when earth civilization went into its final collapse. Alicia spent the rest of her life in prison. I imagine she eventually starved to death when there was no one left alive to bring her food or water.

“So you got your wish, Time Walker,” Elaine said, getting up to leave. “All of your petty little problems are behind you – hundreds of years behind you.”

She stopped at the door and turned around, her white justice’s robe flowing around her feet. “You’ll be expected to report to the university. You’ll have to learn a skill that is compatible with our society. Everyone pulls his or her weight here. Neither you nor your husband will be given any special dispensation simply because you have Béla… my… dead sister’s blood in your veins!”

She turned and left the room, tears streaming down her face as she fled down the hallway. A servant came around the corner. Elaine teleported up to her room before the serving girl could notice her distraught condition.

The girl continued on down the hallway and stopped at the guest quarters where Tabatha was sitting on the bed.

“I brought you some soup,” the girl said. “You need to get your strength back.”

Then she noticed the tears steaming down Tabatha’s face. Tabatha didn’t even seem to see the girl. Knowing her duty, though, the girl sat the tray down on the dresser, came over to the bed and sat down next to her new charge. Gently, she began to wipe the tears off Tabatha’s face.

After a moment, Tabatha blinked, finally noticing she wasn’t alone.

“Who are you?” she asked, confused.

“I’m Sabrina,” the girl said. “I’ve been assigned to take care of you while you recover from your journey. Do you know what’s happened to you?”

Sabrina smiled, hoping she could make friends with this young girl in her charge.

“Everyone’s dead,” Tabatha murmured. “It’s not supposed to be this way.”

“If you mean everyone on Earth, yes,” Sabrina agreed. “I suppose they are. From what I understand, the radiation there is lethal to humans like me. But they’ve been dead for a long time – since before I was born, even.”

“There are still a few fish, though,” she said, trying to help improve Tabatha’s mood. “And insects – lots of insects. They seem to be doing quite well, even.”

“How do you know?” Tabatha asked, surprised that this serving girl could be so well informed about a dying world millions of miles away.

“The Praetor on Earth, of course,” she said simply. “It still transmits data occasionally. Besides the one at the university, it’s the only Praetor left. It hasn’t transmitted for awhile, though. There’s not much going on down there anymore. Just lots of bugs running around. The last human died at least fifty years ago. He was a long-lifer, like you.”

“Like me?” Tabatha asked, anxious to know anything more about her departed family. “Do you know his name?”

Sabrina smiled and began smoothing out Tabatha mussed-up hair. “No, he wasn’t one of Princess Béla’s group. I don’t know who he was, or what really happened to him. He was there, then he was gone. He must’ve died, probably trapped underground somewhere trying to get out of the sun.”

“Is Earth a hobby or yours, or something?” Tabatha asked, wondering how the girl seemed to be so knowledgeable on the subject.

“Well, yes, in a way,” Sabrina explained. “We all come from there, of course. My duties at the university include looking after the preservation of the database. When I was a student, I invented a computer that could link directly with the Praetor’s data banks.

“Twice a day, I have to feed my computer a fresh disk to copy more data on. I always look over the finished disks to make certain that the data is good. Sometimes I get… involved? I guess that’s the word – I get involved in what’s stored on the disk. A lot of it’s quite fascinating. History, I mean.

“Did you know my grandmother developed a technique to reconstitute bodies like the ones the goddesses have?” Sabrina asked. “The bodies she developed were to be used as replacements for members of the old race. They’re all gone now, too – the old race, I mean. I never got to meet any of them. Most of them died when the ship was lost. That was almost two hundred years ago. But the last one died only a year before I was born.”

“Only a few took the option of becoming princes of the realm. I’ve talked to some of them, but they don’t remember much. I guess switching bodies affects your memory,” Sabrina concluded. “But you’d know something about that, wouldn’t you?”

“What?” Tabatha asked. “Oh, you mean the Praetor has data about me being Katie?”

Sabrina nodded, hoping her new charge would say more.

Tabatha grinned slightly, glad to have something to think about besides the fact that her whole world was dead.

“Well, I don’t remember much,” she admitted. “Even when I was Katie, I had amnesia from being caught in an explosion or something. I spent most of my life thinking I was some kind of divine being.”

“Kind of like the goddesses?” Sabrina said, grinning at her.

Tabatha grinned back. “Yes, but I didn’t have the powers Béla does… did.”

Mentioning her blood-sister’s name in the past tense brought everything flooding back into her mind – her grief, her pain. Tears flooded her eyes once more.

Sabrina was quick with the satin cloth, daubing her new friend’s face clean almost as fast as Tabatha shed new tears.

“Ah! There you are!” Tabatha heard her husband, Jake, enter the room. “They wouldn’t let me see you until you’d recovered a little. Did you know that we’re more than two hundred years ahead of where we were? That’s incredible! I…”

He noticed his wife’s condition. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked the girl attending her.

“Shut your yap and open your mind to her!” the girl declared, glaring at him for interrupting. “Even I can see the images she’s projecting. She's grieving! Let her be!”

Sabrina practically ran Tabatha’s husband out of the room, then turned around and gazed lovingly at the strange, red-haired girl on the bed. She was a treasure trove of information about earth life. Even the images she’d picked up from the girl’s grief gave her more data about living on earth than she’d ever had before. Sabrina was definitely glad she’d volunteered to take care of this wondrous prize, this walking data bank of earth life, this… time-walker!

Chapter 2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The earth was shaking. The violent bouncing shook Béla awake. Jake was already trying to sit up and was shouting at her. Béla managed to crawl over to him and grab his leg just as the ground beneath them fell away. Then there was nothing beneath them. Jake and Béla were tumbling into the dark maw of the crater surrounding them.

She reached into the teleportation zone, desperately hoping there was no fire there. There wasn’t. An instant later, she pushed Jake and herself out onto their own bed.

“Wow! What the hell happened?” Jake asked, still stunned.

“I think our little pinnacle of earth collapsed,” Béla told him. She pushed herself off the bed, suddenly noticing how badly she stank. “I’m for the shower. See you later!”

“Hold it!” Jake called out as she vanished through the bathroom door.

She stuck her head back in to see what he wanted.

“I don’t know when it’ll be that I see you looking and smelling like you do right now,” Jake began, “and I want to take advantage of it while I can…”

“You want to fuck me?” Béla asked, not believing his audacity. “Like this? I don’t believe it! I’m filthy dirty, I stink, I’m covered with dried piss! What could you… Oh, no!”

He was coming toward her. He was radiating lust. He wanted to fuck her. Right now!

“Jake,” Béla began, “I don’t… please… Oh, God! This is so disgusting!”

He was kissing her and rubbing his hands all over her filthy breasts. Béla moaned as she realized her body liked it. Her body liked being filthy dirty. It liked being wanted when it was filthy dirty. Her cunt added another aroma to her already over-aromatic scents.

Then she noticed that he smelled almost as bad as she did. He was filthy dirty, too, and she was responding to his smell. Béla was appalled that her body would betray her like this. She’d always kept herself as clean and fresh as possible. Her foster mother, Enheduana, back in Sumer, had taught her the divine purity of cleanliness. As a temple priestess, she had to keep herself immaculately clean, and always tried to maintain that level of physical purity in memory of her.

But her body – that fickle piece of flesh designed in a lab by her father – had other ideas right now. It wanted fucked. Not only did it want fucked, it wanted fucked by something dirty. It wanted Jake’s dirty, smelly cock inside it. And that wasn’t all it wanted.

“Oh, God, No!” Béla moaned as she suddenly realized that she was right back where she’d been this morning – needing Jake to open up to her, to take her like she needed to be taken – to do to her what he’d done to Foxy.

Jake was halfway straddling her now, right in the middle of the bathroom. He backed her toward the shower stall, practically carrying her as she held herself up against his onslaught with her arms around and hanging onto his neck. His cock was stabbing her in her pelvis and lower stomach as he walked her backward.

Béla slammed her mind shut against his questing, fearful that he might see her need. She didn’t want to go through another day like the day she’d just had. She would rather live with that particular desire unfulfilled than threaten the uneasy truce she had with her beloved Jake right now.

He roughly shoved her back against the shower wall, still kissing her filthy, sweaty neck and mauling her tiny tits. He took a second or two to lift her up off her feet and slide her down his body. He tightened his grip, stopping her when her butt crack touched his hard cock.

From here, Béla knew the routine. She raised her legs and arched her back, catching the head of his cock with her pussy lips. Then she jutted her pelvis forward again, wrapping her legs around his waist. His cock disappeared into the folds of her labia. He was finally fucking her!

A few seconds later she was luxuriating under a hard spray of water pummeling her head and back as the shower came on. She gasped as the water turned hot and scalded its way down her back. She didn’t know which she liked better right at that instant – that wonderful shower spray blasting the grime off or Jake’s cock hammering away inside her. The combination was driving her rapidly towards orgasm.

She came, squirting her juices against Jake’s cock as he thrust up and down, jarring her entire body as her full weight rammed against his cock with every thrust. She felt more ecstatic right now than she had for several days. There was just one nagging little thing missing…

She straightened up and pushed her head and shoulders back to look at him. He was grinning at her, her eyes growing wider. Her cunt was hot, and wet. And full! And getting fuller! He was filling her up! He was really pissing in her cunt! Her cunt began to flood her body with wave after wave of orgasmic sensation. She trembled and shook, unable even to breathe as orgasm after orgasm swept through her body.

She could feel the hot liquid splashing out of her as his cock rammed in and out. She knew it was running down Jake’s balls and down his legs. She could smell it, even as it washed down the drain, the hot steam carrying the acrid scent back up to her nostrils. Then Jake was coming, squirting something else up inside her. She could hardly feel it, but she felt his cock twitching, and she could feel the sensuous wave of orgasmic saturation that he radiated through her.

As he lowered her down so she could finish her shower, Béla realized that he would probably never do that to her again. But, somehow, he had seen the need for it now. His insight amazed her sometimes. She had needed him to withhold nothing from her, and he had provided her with that need. There was nothing separating them – no lies, no unshared experiences.

Extremely satisfied, but somewhat wobbly, Béla turned her attention to the hot shower-water cascading down on her. She soaped up and scrubbed fiercely at the stench of the last fifteen hours, scrubbing it off her body, out of her hair and out of her mind.

Twenty minutes later, she came back into the bedroom.

“How did you get us home?” Jake wanted to know. “I thought Lisa booby-trapped the ‘zone’.”

“The little minx faked me out,” Béla admitted. “She probably just dream-walked in front of me and threw fire in my face when I tried to teleport earlier. I imagine we could’ve come home any time.”

“I’m glad we didn’t,” Jake admitted. He watched as Béla found something to wear and put it on. “Going somewhere?”

“To check on Lisa and Alicia,” Béla told him. “You should probably call Frank and Tanya to see how the meeting went today.”

“Sure,” Jake said. “But I’m going to finish my shower first.”

He watched her walk out the bedroom door.

Béla was halfway down the stairs when Lisa looked up at her.

“That guy Frank called,” Lisa said. “The one with Tanya. He wanted to know where you were.”

“Did you tell him?” Béla asked.

“No, I let Alicia talk to him,” Lisa told her. “He came over and took her with him.”

“You’ve been here alone all day?” Béla asked, surprised that the house was still in one piece.

“No, just a few hours,” Lisa said.

She was getting bored with this conversation and definitely had more interesting things on her mind. She got up and put her hand on her mother’s arm.

“I want to show you something,” Lisa told her.

The room vanished from around them.

Béla recognized where they were. They were in Frank and Tanya’s bedroom. Frank was fucking his wife. There was something snakelike practically covering Tanya’s torso and coiled around both her breasts. Frank lit it. Tanya went wild, screaming at the top of her lungs and radiating orgasmic sensation through the room as what Béla recognized as a long fuse hissed and sizzled across her belly.

Béla grabbed her daughter and pulled her back into her own living room.

“What was that all about?” Béla demanded, frowning at her daughter.

“Be quiet! You’ll wake us!” Lisa whispered loudly.

“What do you mean?” Béla wanted to know.

“I was showing you what happened to Tanya this morning! You didn’t return to the right time! Alicia and I are still in bed, upstairs!”

Béla looked around, seeming confused.

“Here,” Lisa said, totally disgusted, now. “I’ll do it!”

She grabbed her mom’s arm. Nothing happened. “Alright, we’re back.” The ever-so-slight difference was simply the temperature of the air, or maybe the barometric pressure.

Béla glared at her daughter. ‘What was that all about?’

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Lisa replied. “I sort of remember doing stuff like that – with you, but you weren’t my mother, then. You feel different, now. I feel different, too. About you, I mean.”

“And you want me to explain it to you?” Béla asked. “What! Vampire sex? I seem to recall it was you that scared the hell out of your dad yesterday with that gunshot. What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking!” Lisa said, starting to yell. “God! I’m trying to talk to you! I need to know what’s happening to me!”

She was shaking in her fury. She was sure her mom knew exactly was going on and she didn’t want to tell her.

“All right, honey,” Béla said, suddenly more calm. “Let’s sit down. These new feelings you have are symptoms of your body growing up; that’s all.”

“What do you mean?” Lisa asked, puzzled. “I’m grown up? What do I do now?”

Béla smiled, suddenly realizing that her daughter didn’t know why she was here. Human children, at age five, didn’t think about things like that. They were still learning how to live. Lisa was a hybrid. At age five, she was an adult – an adult with no experience in living.

‘No wonder she’s so scared…’

“I am not scared!” Lisa insisted, reading her mom’s thought. “I just don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do? Why did you have me?”

“Oh, darling!” Béla cried, laughing and hugging her daughter tightly against her. Memories flooded through her mind.

That first night with Jake, actually standing in front of him after all those years of dreams and frustrations, yearning to complete what was begun a century earlier. A baby-murdering monster interrupted her life, then it was interrupted again the next day by that stupid, stupid car bomb and a jammed seat belt.

“You weren’t thinking of me at all, then, were you,” Lisa quietly accused her mother. “Just your own self-gratification.”

“What?” Béla asked, stunned by her daughter’s thought processes. “I made a body! I didn’t make you! You chose me! I distinctly remember your flamboyant arrival. You set my house on fire!”

Béla showed her the memories of Beth’s arrival.

“That was real?” Lisa asked, suddenly frightened. “I have nightmares about that! I blew up a city!”

The room was suddenly about forty degrees hotter.

“Wait, Darling!” Béla exclaimed. “You didn’t blow up a city! It’s still there!”

“But I remember!” Lisa cried out. “I died in that fire! I was glad I was dying! Why am I here now?”

Lisa was sobbing and the room was getting even hotter.

“You’re here because you can’t die, darling,” Béla said, soothingly. “None of us can. You can only move on and forget. But usually, even that doesn’t help. You carry your dreams and desires with you forever. They’re a part of who you are regardless of how you identify yourself or what you look like.

“You blew up a building,” Béla continued. “The energy that would have destroyed the rest of the city was never released. You captured it somehow and it’s still in your mind. That’s why you have the white fire trapped inside of you. You stopped the city from being destroyed.”

She gratefully noticed the room beginning to cool down.

“So,” Lisa said, somewhat less upset. “What now? What am I supposed to do?”

Her voice was still a little shaky.

“Nothing,” Béla said, “Everything. Your life will be whatever you make it. The strange feelings you have inside are sexual feelings. They have to do with reproduction of the species. Although, by telling you this, I hope you don’t decide to go out and get pregnant.”

“Mom…” Lisa said, actually sounding embarrassed.

“I not kidding!” Béla insisted. “That’s was most earth girls do. They go out, exploring their bodies, exploring the marvelous sensations that life offers them, and they get pregnant. For you, it would only be a delay in your life of about five years out of the thousands of years that you will live. But it takes twenty years to raise a human child. Twenty years is a long time for a human girl, and suddenly discovering you’re pregnant can be devastating when you realize that your entire youth will be spent raising your child.”

“That sounds awful,” Lisa said. “Why do they do that? Get pregnant, I mean.”

“Well, most of them don’t intend to when it happens, Hon,” Béla replied. “But after they get used to the fact that they’re going to have a baby, some of them actually decide they like the idea – not that they have much choice in the matter. That’s why Body Monitors have become so popular, especially among the female humans. They can be set so that their bodies are infertile.”

“Hmm!” Lisa said, thinking for a moment. “So this tormented feeling that I get. That’s just sex? That’s it?”

“Well, maybe not for you, darling,” Béla replied, deciding to be perfectly candid with her daughter. “You were pretty tormented when I knew you before. I’m not sure how we should address that.”

“We?” Lisa asked. “You’d help me with this?”

“Of course,” Béla replied. “Why would you think other…”

The image struck her right in the center of her skull.

“Oh, no!” Béla said adamantly, shaking her head. ‘My daughter wants to make love to me!’

“Yes, mom,” Lisa insisted, happily hopeful. “You said you’d help… Show me what it’s like.”

“Oh, God,” Béla murmured, almost to herself. “Jake said this would happen.”

“Honey,” Béla began, then her daughter let her mind open up.

Béla watched Lisa spying on Frank and Tanya. Then she’d come downstairs and seduced Alicia, her evil stepmother.

‘My daughter is already sexually active! She plans to make love to everyone she knows! Starting with me!’

“No,” Lisa gently corrected her mom. “I started with my step-mom!”

‘You would’ve been first when I went to find you this afternoon if you’d smelled better…’

Chapter 3 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The night before:

Jake had disappeared somewhere after a private little conversation with his wife, who was leading Alicia upstairs.

“Where’s Jake going to sleep?” Alicia wanted to know.

“Don’t worry about Jake,” Béla said, non-commentally. “He’ll be fine.”

They reached the top of the stairs and went right – the opposite direction from that which the wild-looking, flaming young girl had appeared from and vanished into. A faint smell of scorched cotton came from that other direction.

Béla opened her bedroom door and, smiling, invited Alicia in.

“Do you have any luggage?” Béla asked, “Clothing, accessories?”

“I packed a bag,” Alicia told her. “It’s at my folk’s house.”

‘Why would she wait until she’s getting ready for bed before asking a silly question like that? Does she expect me to go get it?’

“Make an image of it in your mind,” Béla suggested. “Include its location – where you think it might be.”

“What?” Alicia asked, not understanding.

“Where’s your bag?” Béla asked. “Is it still packed?”

“Well, no,” Alicia said, trying to remember where it was the last time she saw it.

Béla watched while Alicia remembered. Then the bag was on the bed in front of her.

“Well!” Alicia said, surprised. “That’s a neat trick!”

Béla smiled at the complement. “You need anything that’s not in the bag?”

Alicia thought for a moment, then remembered stuff she’d put in her mom’s bathroom. It was suddenly on the bed next to her bag.

“You’re hired!” Alicia said, grinning. “Come with me back to the Hub! I’ve got plenty you can do there!”

“No, thanks,” Béla replied, grinning back. “I have a job, here – raising the flaming tornado down the hall.”

“Yes! That’s amazing what she can do!” Alicia said, animatedly. “How do you control her?”

“Control? Her?” Béla asked, raising her eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Why? Is she that difficult?” Alicia asked.

“Well, not really,” Béla admitted. “Not after we started communicating with each other. But she could teleport the day she was born. In fact, I actually didn’t have her – she came out on her own and landed right in the middle of the floor.”

“God!” Alicia exclaimed. “I’ve had nine children, but I’ve never had one that did that!”

“Creating a vacuum like that, right in the middle of my tummy, just about killed me,” Béla admitted. “But, luckily, your brother was there to help.”

“Yes, we’re lucky that he decided to become a doctor,” Alicia admitted. “That way, our little family secret stays secret!

“So, where do you want me?” Alicia asked, walking toward the bed. “You said I was sleeping with you, and that seemed to upset Jake. Is there something… um, sexual… that you’re expecting?”

“What?” Béla asked, surprised. “No, it doesn’t have to be sexual… Although, regardless of the gender of the person I’m merging my mind with, it often becomes sexual. We are all sexual creatures, after all.”

By this time, Béla was completely undressed – that is to say – naked. She walked toward the bathroom.

“Would you like to share the Jacuzzi with me?” Béla asked. “We can talk some more, if you like.”

‘Relax, will you?’ she thought into Alicia’s unsettled mind.

Alicia hesitated. She wanted desperately to know everything that was in Béla’s mind, and get Béla to help her as much as possible. But, she wasn’t really interested in sharing anything with another female, especially her body. It was bad enough that Béla had Jake.

“Ah… okay,” Alicia agreed, reluctantly. “We can talk some more…”

She shed her gown and carefully hung it on the rack the closet presented to her, and tossed her undies into the hamper. It actually acted annoyed that someone hit it and made a sound like it was shredding her undergarments.

Alicia found it surprisingly easy to make light conversation with Béla in the Jacuzzi, telling her a little about the work she did, and the underground city she was having constructed in Colorado – nothing that Béla wouldn’t have found out anyway when they merged later that night.

Finally, unable to put it off any longer, she crawled into bed with the strange, dark-haired alien girl that had stolen her first love’s heart before Alicia had even been born.

“How do you want me?” Alicia asked nervously.

“Well, it helps if we’re in full body contact,” Béla instructed, “but you can leave your nightie on if you’re more comfortable that way.”

Alicia smiled in gratitude. Although she usually slept nude – especially on nights that her husband was home. This night, she left it on.

Béla’s body felt uncomfortably warm against her skin, especially after the Jacuzzi. Béla, noticing the claustrophobic, clammy feelings emanating from her guest, had the room’s air circulator, normally retracted behind its ceiling panels, lower itself and begin ionizing the room with its slow, silent air currents. Within a minute, she noticed Alicia relaxing.

‘Hello, darling,’ Béla said into Alicia’s head.

Alicia blinked, startled, then stared into Béla’s eyes.

‘Did you just say that?’ Alicia thought back.

‘Yes,’ Béla admitted. ‘Has anyone ever talked to you this way before?’

‘I think that we have met like this before, Alicia thought back, trying to remember, but I don’t know where, or when…’

‘D? vu,’ Béla thought at her. ‘There are other realities besides ours. You think of time as an absolute, but it’s not. Let me show you…’

‘Images appeared in Alicia’s mind – the nightmare that she sometimes had of her son, Jake, dying in a nuclear accident that destroyed a city – of her meeting with her family for his wake in his father’s cabin and finding her son still alive.’

“How did you know about that dream?” Alicia demanded, half sitting up in bed and breaking the mental contact.

“Because I was there, too,” Béla said. “It really happened – in another reality. But that reality was written over by the one we remember with our conscious minds. Different people lived and different people died each time. The first time, your sister lived, and your son died. This time, your son lived, but we both lost a sister.”

“And the city in my dream – the one in the Painted Desert – it’s still there?” Alicia said, finishing the thought.

“Yes,” agreed Béla. “I suppose a sister is a small price to pay for a whole city.”

“Speak for yourself,” Alicia said, sounding a little upset. “I’d rather have my sister back – and I don’t mean Bratty Tabby!”

Béla smiled at that, not having decided who she preferred – her sister and lover, Beth – or her wild, but completely lovable fire breathing daughter, Lisa; not that her preference would matter…

“Come back to bed,” Béla said quietly. “There’s more I would show you.”

“I’m not really certain we should do this,” Alicia said nervously. “I’ll confess something to you. I’m not really keen on someone sorting through my mind, learning all my little secrets – even when it’s you.”

“You asked for my help,” Béla replied gently, sitting up beside Alicia. “The only help I can give you is knowledge. I know what’s going to happen here. You need to know, too.”

“What do you mean, happen?” Alicia asked, more upset, now.

“Come to bed,” Béla implored her. “You will learn what you need to know. I’m not interested in your secrets. I have too many of my own.”

The idea that Alicia might learn some of Béla’s secrets convinced her to lay back down.

‘Ready?’ Béla asked in her mind.

‘What should I expect?’ Alicia wanted to know.

‘An adventure, perhaps, or a nightmare,’ Béla replied frankly. ‘Maybe both.’

An image of the earth whirling madly around the sun assaulted Alicia’s senses. In her mind, she could see what she already knew – radiation from the sun’s increased output was frying parts of the earth even now. As the years swept by, the polar caps began melting more rapidly. Soon, in the coastal cities, buildings stood in fifty feet of seawater. No one could live in them, but it didn’t matter anyway. There weren’t that many people left.

Another century passed. Most of the cities on the planet were destroyed in tiny sparks of nuclear fire that demonstrated the total collapse of civilization as she watched from the safety of her detached view of the planet. The survivors of the holocaust that didn’t die from radiation poisoning were cooked by the sun’s increased anger that seemed directed at the folly of mankind.

Within the next ten years, every living person on the entire planet died. Then, incredulously, the sun expanded and ate Mercury. Alicia watched, stunned as an entire planet, albeit a tiny one, was absorbed into the fiery depths through the sun’s demonic surface.

After that, the sun seems to become more disturbed, almost like Mercury had given it a bad case of gas. The sun expanded again, reaching within ten million miles of Venus. The clouds were blown off of shrouded Venus and vaporized by the intense heat and the solar winds – the atmosphere of the sun. The planet itself cracked into several pieces and, over several months, followed Mercury into the sun’s fiery depths.

The sun tried to expand again, but its mass was no longer great enough to sustain its size. Most of the mass of the sun fell inwards on itself. The thin fiery surface blasted outward in a horribly expanding bubble of fiery, brilliant destruction, dissipating somewhere between Mars and the asteroid belt.

The greater mass of the sun splashed down into itself, then roared outward in a gigantic explosion at a quarter of the speed of light, devouring what was left of the earth, which had already lost its atmosphere and its beautiful blue oceans to the first hellish wave of starfire.

Alicia’s point of view was backing up quickly, trying to stay ahead of the rapidly expanding surface of the sun. Earth exploded on impact like a tiny firecracker thrown into a forest fire. Mars followed a few hours later.

The nova spread outward though the solar system over a period of several hours. The asteroid belt was consumed – an entire planet’s worth of mass broken up millions of years ago in an earlier, comparatively less eventful holocaust.

The sun’s expanding surface was breaking up, now. There were too many masses traveling at too many different speeds to maintain any cohesion. A large mass struck the gas giant, Jupiter, dwarfing its incredible gaseous mass as it flooded over the planet and ignited the remainder of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

Jupiter’s moons spun off in several directions, like particles of sand being struck by an ocean wave. Jupiter itself seemed to become a huge comet – its tail extending out millions of miles behind the planet as the surface of the sun passed on by, leaving its first survivor behind.

Hidden behind Jupiter and completely surrounded by the largest aurora borealis ever recorded was Béla’s home – a small, artificial planetoid – giant magnetic engines attached to each pole striving at full power to hold it in orbit while Jupiter danced across the uneven surface of the nova like a stone skipping on water.

People were dying there, too – some being thrown hundreds of feet into the air and smashing back down against the inner surface as the artificial moon bounced in its orbit. Much of the population was collected in the hollow center, protected with a fragile force field generated by the minds of a few dozen beings like Béla and her daughter.

Alicia sat up, terrified and stunned, breaking mental contact with her tormentor once again.

“That’s your plan?” she cried, accusingly. “An artificial moon?”

She looked at the strange, alien woman in bed with her.

“We don’t have time to build something like that!” Alicia cried out. “We don’t have the resources, the money, the technology… Wait! That’s what you wanted to let me know! You have the technology to build something like that!”

“No,” Béla said quietly. “Not anymore. But it doesn’t matter. It already exists. It took my father’s people four thousand years – but it’s already been built.”

Alicia laughed, sounding a little delirious. “So we just have to… Who’s going to… What? I can’t even comprehend…”

She finally just stared at Béla.

“My father’s ship is coming in, oh, maybe ten, fifteen years,” Béla said quietly. “They’re coming to take me away. It’s a huge ship, and it will be almost empty. It can hold several hundred people. I plan to take everyone I know with me, and anyone they want to bring.”

“Everyone you know?” Alicia asked, incredulously. “I have three, no! Four families! What about them?”

“They can all come,” Béla said, inviting them all. “There’s plenty of room.”

“If others find out,” Alicia told her, “there won’t be enough room. The whole planet will want to go.”

“That’s not possible,” Béla told her. “There’s only enough fuel for one, maybe two more trips. Besides, New Eden isn’t large enough to support more than a few thousand humans.”

Immensely relieved, Alicia leaned over and hugged Béla. She was surprised to actually feel tears in her eyes at the emotion she felt. Then she remembered.

“What about my husband, Walter?” Alicia said, suddenly a little more distraught. “He’s dying. You can save him – like you did Mom, before.”

“I don’t know if my blood can cure cancer, darling,” Béla admitted. “What my blood does to human cells is make them grow faster. A cancer is nothing more than human cells that have forgotten where they’re supposed to grow. By offering him my life-blood, I could be worsening his condition. The cancer could consume him in mere hours. I don’t know what he might grow into.”

“But you have to help him!” Alicia cried.

Watching Béla gaze up at her with her dark, regal eyes, Alicia realized that Béla didn’t have to do anything. She tensed as Béla gently reached out her hand and stroked Alicia’s cheek. An incredible calm flooded through her mind at the vampire’s touch, and she realized that Béla was drawing off the fear and the anger she felt – discharging it like she was simply an energy cell and her overwhelming emotion was simply energy that could be drawn off and grounded out.

“I’m sorry,” Alicia whispered.

Alicia had apologized for something she did maybe three times in the last century. This was the first time she’d ever meant it. Béla smiled at her, recognizing what it took for Alicia to say those simple words.

“Go talk to your brother tomorrow and work out what I tell you,” Béla suggested. “Have your husband see him – call Doctor Frank some kind of cancer specialist if you want, but get your husband to go. Your brother has samples of my blood. He’s been running tests; trying to discover what makes cells heal. If Doctor Frank decides that my blood can help, he can administer it himself as a ‘experimental’ test of a new cancer treatment. If your husband agrees, of course.

“That way, the secret of our longevity is still safe,” Béla told her. “When and if your husband begins to notice that his own life-span in increased, you may tell him then – or not. Depends on how you feel about it then.”

“Béla, you’re wonderful!” Alicia exclaimed, hugging her host tightly.

Then suddenly stiffened up as she realized she was becoming aroused in the presence of this seductive, alien creature. She held Béla away at arm’s length, staring into her soft, dark eyes and hoping that she wouldn’t be offended by her rejection.

Béla smiled and tossed a shoulder. “It’s all right. Just go to sleep. Tomorrow, everything will work itself out.”

“Thank you,” Alicia replied, grateful that she wasn’t going to have to make love to her main competition for Jake’s affection. She also realized that Béla had made it possible for Walter to be saved without spending a night with Béla while she initiated him into their family.

‘No wonder Dad admires her so much. She always seems to have the right answer for everything.’

Then she was asleep. When she woke up, it was daylight again, and the other half of the bed was cold and empty. Béla had left hours ago to handle other things…

‘Perhaps she’s gone to make amends with Jake for not being with him last night. I really shouldn’t be jealous – they are married, after all…’

She went downstairs.

“Where is everybody?” Alicia asked no one, walking into the kitchen.

‘Oh, well. It’s Jake’s house – and I’m alone. Why am I surprised?’

She began checking through cabinets in the kitchen, hoping to find something she could eat that wasn’t too difficult to fix. She stood, looking at a box of pancake batter, trying to read the instructions. She grinned in irony as she remembered the first time her dad tried to teach her how to do pancakes.

“Who knows, sweetie,” her dad said. “You might be in a fix someday and all you have to eat is pancake batter. You should know how to fix it!”

“Well, Dad,” Alicia murmured to herself. “You were right, once again. All I have to eat is pancake batter and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Add water and mix,” a sarcastic voice sounded from behind her.

Alicia jumped and dropped the box. It landed with a soft powdery ‘poof’ on the floor. Her son’s half-sister Lisa was standing in the doorway. They both looked down at the box and the lovely oval pattern of fine powder extending out across the floor from where the box had come open when it hit.

“Crap!” Alicia said.

She picked up the box and looked around for a broom or something.

“Walk this way,” Lisa told her, sounding mildly anxious.

As Alicia began to walk toward the kitchen door, she was almost tripped by a small vacuum that popped out from beneath the counter she’d been standing next to. The vacuum noisily began to erase the oval pattern of pancake flour off the floor.

Lisa reached out and took the box from her stepmother’s hand. She loosely poured some into a bowl she got down and added some water. Mixing it up, she decided she needed more water. In the meantime, Alicia was playing with the stove, deciding to have some fun with this, too. She managed to get the griddle to come out. Lisa had to show her how to heat it up.

The pancakes were thin and almost tasteless. Neither of them knew what Jake did to make them more palatable. They playfully argued back and forth about who was the worst cook. As a result, they found something else to do with the remaining batter.

“I am not!” Lisa exclaimed, taking a spoonful of batter and spackling her stepmother’s blouse with it.

Alicia shrieked, then reached her bare hand into the bowl and, taking a dripping handful of pasty goo, smeared it on the little brat that just ruined her blouse. They were fighting almost like sisters.

Instead of getting mad, Lisa licked a finger full of goo off her smeared nightshirt.

“Tastes better raw,” she declared.

Alicia tasted some too.

“You’re right, it does!” Alicia exclaimed. “Have some more!”

She flung a handful of batter at Lisa. Lisa opened her mouth. Alicia’s aim was close, but not close enough. The batter spackled Lisa’s face. Grinning evilly, Lisa grabbed the bowl and dumped it over Alicia’s head, both girls shrieking wildly at the top of their lungs. They both slipped on the messy floor and fell flat on top of each other.

Somehow, Alicia’s blouse had come unbuttoned and Lisa was licking pancake batter off her bare tits. She was sucking more than she was licking.

Her tits hadn’t been sucked on since she’d weaned her son, Zachary. During that time, her (first) daughter, Jackie, had informed her of the impending calamity regarding the future of mankind, and Alicia had instructed her body monitor that she didn’t want any more kids – at least, not for awhile. In addition, her constant worrying had ruined her sex life with her husband.

Overwhelmed by the sudden lust in her body, Alicia arched her back, shoving her tender tit further into Lisa’s mouth before she consciously realized what she was doing. She was almost to orgasm before she realized that Béla’s daughter was seducing – no, raping – her!

“Stop!” Alicia cried.

Lisa raised her head from her stepmother’s breast, surprised. Alicia could feel her body being inspected from head to toe by the mind of the alien girl on top of her. Suddenly Lisa’s hand was between her legs, pushing her over the edge, making her come. Alicia cried out, both in orgasm and protest.

Lisa smiled down at her. “Now you do me,” she said, grinning like an elf.

“No! Absolutely not!” Alicia exclaimed.

She started to get up. Lisa slammed her back down on the floor, both hands on her shoulders.

“Why not?” Lisa demanded to know. She sounded hurt and confused. “I did it to you – now you do it to me! I want it to happen to me, too!”

“It’s not right!” Alicia exclaimed. “Girls don’t do that to each other!”

She suddenly felt her mind merging with Lisa’s. Lisa’s mind was wide open – powerful – simple – easy to read.

Alicia could see that Lisa truly didn’t understand sexual relationships. But she was obsessed with sexual feelings. There was even an image in Lisa’s mind of Alicia’s parents doing something really wild – scorching the hell out of her mother’s body just to increase her sensuality while they made love. That scene was confusing, but incredibly arousing to both of them.

“See?” Lisa said earnestly. “You like it, too! Do that to me!”

Alicia moaned, realizing that it would be incredibly easy to accept Lisa’s simplistic view of the world and forget her own moral complexities – at least for an hour or so.

Lisa, taking that to mean ‘yes’, flooded her stepmother’s body with wanton abandon; the same emotion that was driving her own soul right now. Moaning their need to each other, Alicia and Lisa embraced on the floor, kissing passionately and undulating their bodies against each other.

“No,” Alicia managed to whisper – one last feeble attempt to retain control of her senses.

Lisa would have none of it. She simply took over her stepmother’s mind – overloading her sensory capacity with pure lust. Now, all either of them could think about was completion and making her lover feel complete. They ground their pelvises into each other’s hips, their mouths finding each other’s necks.

Then they were both in full Sapphic vampire mode, each biting into the others’ neck and sucking joyfully as they humped their pelvises against each other. They weren’t even fully undressed, they were so eager for release.

Their minds were merged together as tightly as their bodies while each experienced what the other was feeling. Was that Alicia’s nails clawing Lisa’s back? Or the other way around? It didn’t matter. They both experienced the tearing sensation of hot flesh under sharp nails. Then they were both screaming and humping against each other as hard as they could.

Lisa lay on her stepmother, trembling and weak from their shared orgasms. Alicia, finally in control of her own mind once again, shoved the alien girl off her without any preamble. Her bare tits heaved at the ceiling as she caught her breath. Her body tingled strangely. She felt both invigorated and exhausted at the same time. But what she felt most was rising anger.

“That’s called rape!” Alicia exclaimed, still breathless, still staring at the ceiling.

“Maybe,” Lisa admitted, also breathless and lying unseen on the floor next to her. “But you liked it…”

They both managed to get to their feet after several minutes. They staggered into the living room and onto the couch. They both lay, exhausted and weak, unable to speak for several more minutes. Lisa recovered first.

“Wanna go again?” she asked, still breathing heavily.

“What?” Alicia asked, dumbfounded.

“We’re still conscious,” Lisa explained, gazing at her stepmother. “We should do it until we aren’t.”

Alicia managed to sit up, staring in disbelief at the alien girl who claimed to be her stepdaughter.

“Our worlds are so far apart that I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong what you did to me was,” began Alicia. “You violated my freedom of choice, you enslaved me to your will. You raped me!”

She was almost shouting by the time she finished.

“Crap! You liked it!” Lisa cried defensively. “You sucked as much blood as me! Don’t act like you’ve never had sex before! It’s never been that good for you! I could see it in your mind! I made it happen for you better than anyone you’ve ever known!”

“That’s not the point!” cried Alicia angrily. “I didn’t want to! You forced me! You didn’t have my permission to use me like that!”

“You liked…” Lisa’s defiant response was interrupted.

“Incoming message from Frank Tabor. Connect call?” the wall unit said.

“Crap!” Lisa said. “Yes! Connect!”

“No!” cried Alicia. “Video off!”

They were both still naked from the waist up. From head to toe, they were covered with pancake batter and drying blood.

“Hi, Lisa,” Frank said. Then he frowned. “Are you okay? It looks like you’ve been fighting!”

“Video off!” cried Alicia.

The unit, not programmed to her voice code, ignored her. But the unit at her father’s house heard her and shut off its video. They could no longer see him.

Alicia, realizing what had happened, changed tactics.

“Video on! Incoming video off!” she cried.

Now she could see her father, but he couldn’t see them – hopefully.

“What the hell is going on there?” Frank demanded to know. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Alicia called out from across the room to the console. “We’re fine. We’re not decent right now. Can you call back later?”

“No,” Frank said, making up his mind. “I’m coming over.”

“Oh, crap!” both girls said together.

“Transmission terminated,” the wall console said.

“You think he heard us?” Lisa asked, meaning the bad word they’d both said.

“Probably,” Alicia said.

She felt like a little girl waiting for her parents to find out how bad she’d been.

“Shower time!” she exclaimed. “That’s the fastest way to get this shit off us!”

Alicia jumped off the couch and started running up the stairs. She slammed into the bathroom wall as Lisa teleported them both into the master bath.

She bounced off the wall and landed on her butt, then slid across and hit the back of her head on the sink.

“Ow! God damn!” Alicia exclaimed.

As she felt around her head, she realized she’d broken her nose when she hit the wall.

“You little bitch!” Alicia cried. “What the hell’d you do that for?”

“Sorry!” Lisa exclaimed. “I thought I was helping… But since you’re just sitting there, I’ll shower first!”

Lisa dove into the shower. Alicia climbed to her feet using the sink to pull herself up. She looked in the mirror.

‘Fuck! It’s not straight! My nose is crooked!’

She blinked in pain as she tried to straighten her nose. It was already healed in its new position.

‘Crap! I’ll have to break it again! What’s wrong with me? I’ve never healed this fast before! Even the teeth marks that little alien bitch left in my neck are gone.’

Taking her nose in her hand, she cried out in agony as she forced it back into position, breaking the cartilage again. She held it in place as it healed, hoping that it was centered, since she couldn’t see right at the moment with her eyes filled with tears like they were.

She could actually feel it healing. That’d never happened before, either. In less than a minute, her nose was healed and all the pain was gone. She stared in the mirror in amazement, then remembered why her nose had been broken in the first place.

Suddenly angry again, Alicia stormed toward the shower stall. She opened the door and opened her mouth to shout at Lisa. Lisa jumped, startled by the sudden door opening. She took one look at Alicia’s furious, bloody face and disappeared.

“Damn that girl!” Alicia said angrily, heaving a great sigh. “Well, since the shower’s empty…”

Alicia stepped in. The water was perfect. She stuck her head under and soaped up her sticky hair. Suddenly, she was standing in Béla’s bedroom, with soap running down into her eyes.

Snarling in rage, she stormed back into the bathroom. Lisa was back in the shower. Alicia opened the shower door and yanked Lisa out.

“Hey!” Lisa cried. “I wasn’t finished!”

“Neither was I!” Alicia screamed at her. “I have soap in my eyes, you little bitch!”

“Well lemme fix that!” Lisa hollered back.

Alicia tried to duck, but she slipped and fell. About two gallons of very cold water splashed down on top of her. As she sat in the middle of the bathroom floor, gasping at the sudden temperature difference of the water, she could hear, over the sound of the shower, which Lisa was in once again, that the toilet tank was refilling.

No one answered the door, so Frank used his voice code to get in. He was glad he only lived a few minutes away.

“Anybody home?” he asked.

He looked around. The kitchen was a royal mess. He could smell pancakes. It looked like someone had filled a salad shooter with pancake batter and just spattered it all over the kitchen.

There was a loud thump against the ceiling. In a distant part of the house, he could hear shouting. He grinned as he remembered the wars that Alicia and her younger sister, Katie, used to get into when they were kids. He remembered that Alicia, although six years older, usually lost. Katie had been the real scrapper in the family.

Sighing as he missed his younger daughter yet again, he followed the sounds of battle up the stairs and into Béla and Jake’s bedroom. The carpet was wet. The screeching and shouting was coming from the bathroom.

‘I feel like I’m home, again,’ Frank thought as he sighed, happily. ‘I didn’t realize how much I missed having the kids around…’

He opened the door. Lisa had Alicia in a headlock. Alicia tripped Lisa and they both fell. The shower was running. There was water all over the floor.

“Hey!” he shouted, unable to keep from laughing at the hilarious scene laid out before him.

Both girls jumped away from each other. Lisa took a quick look at him.

“Oh, fuck!” she exclaimed.

She vanished. Alicia slipped one more time and fell to the floor. She looked around for her antagonist. Not seeing her, and seeing Dad, instead, she shrieked in outraged frustration and pulled her own hair.

Alicia sat on the wet bathroom floor crying her eyes out. Frank waited patiently. He was enjoying this scene too much – not in an incestuous way, although Alicia was naked and finely built, just like her mother.

Alicia stopped crying as she heard her father laughing.

“What’s the matter?” she cried at him. “Why are you laughing at me?”

“I’m not laughing at you, sweetheart,” he said, finally bringing himself under control. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen a good cat fight…”

That was what he called the squabbles that she and Katie used to get into – catfights. He never defended or reprimanded either sister for starting the fight, and they’d both loved him for that, although each privately believed that he should have supported her against the other sister.

“Cat fight?” Alicia asked, looking up at him. “That means you’re not even going to ask who started it, are you?”

“Course not!” Frank exclaimed, still grinning. “Now get dressed. I’ll wait downstairs.”

He blew her a kiss and turned away, heading back toward the stairwell.

Alicia heaved a great sigh, audible all the way to the stairwell.

‘Little Miss Sophisticated,’ Frank thought happily to himself, hearing her. ‘She's still just a little girl inside. My little girl!’

He started down the stairs, then changed his mind. He opened the door to Lisa’s room without knocking. Lisa was hovering in a lotus position two feet above the bed. She was naked. She was wet. There was a thin ring of fire surrounding her and water dripped down onto her bedsheets. Except for the water, she reminded him of the planet Saturn surrounded by its delicate rings.

“You might want to clean up the kitchen a bit before your parents come home,” he suggested, ignoring the exotic sight before him.

As he closed the door, something large and solid struck the other side and bounced off. He grinned again and went downstairs.

‘I really miss being a parent…’

Chapter 4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I don’t believe that I should be the justice in this case, since I’m the one pressing charges,” Elaine explained to the Bard Geoffrey. “This time-walking woman abandoned her family when they needed her the most. They all died because of her!”

“You don’t know that for certain,” Jeff said, more quietly than the Golden Goddess had been speaking. “She may not have had anything to do with it.”

“But she did!” the goddess insisted. “And she knows it! In her own mind, I saw the images she used to escape her past and come here. She did it on purpose! She wanted to get away!”

“That’s not a crime,” Jeff told her.

“It is when you take the only person who could have protected her family with you,” Elaine replied. “Her husband was in a position where he was protecting my sister and her Chosen People! This… witch… brought him with her from there to here! Without his protection, they were discovered and killed – every last one!

“She is responsible for the death of my sister, Béla, and my sister, Beth,” Elaine said icily. “She even remembers killing Beth. I want her tried, and I want her executed.”

There were tears in her eyes.

“We don’t execute people for what they do,” Jeff explained. “That was the Goddess of the Land’s edict. Would you go against your dead sister’s wishes to avenge something that happened two hundred years ago? What would she think?”

“I don’t care what she would think!” Elaine was crying openly now. “I only know what I feel! That woman has to die for what she did!”

She allowed Jeff to hold her while she cried into his shoulder.

In another part of the house, Tabatha and Jake Hedron, who was her husband and also was the son of Jake Pestova, who had been Béla’s husband, sat together on the bed.

“So you’re under house arrest, then?” Jake asked.

Tabatha nodded, her mind numb with the new knowledge of the terrible charges that were being leveled against her. That, on top of the grief of finding out her entire world was lost to her, made her almost catatonic.

“She wants to reinstate the death penalty just for me,” Tabatha said numbly. “For me!”

She broke down into tears again. Jake held her against him, not saying anything. Jake didn’t understand how they had gotten here, or why they had come here at all. From what little he knew of Tabatha’s history, she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. She’d saved his life, after all. He’d been shot in the head and dumped in the desert by that mutinous bastard Blacker and somehow, Tabatha had known where to look. She hadn’t even known him then, or even who she was looking for. But she had found him, rescued him, and personally nursed him back to health.

‘But why would she come here?’ he asked himself, over and over. ‘There’s got to be something here that can help us back there!’

Jake spent most of his time at the university, a few buildings away from his captive wife. There was an incredible amount of data available there, and it was all free for anyone who wanted to study it.

What Jake was interested in most, of course, was legal precedence. He had only four more days before his wife went on trial for causing the deaths of two immortal goddesses. One of the first items he found was a record of the only other execution that had taken place after the instatement of the present judicial system. Someone had attempted to kill a goddess. Not just ‘a’ goddess, but Béla, herself.

It was difficult to read, as this was a handwritten account by the Great Bard Geoffrey. But, enraged by the attempted assassination, the other goddesses and most of those present during the brief trial had demanded the woman’s death. She was executed mere hours after her attempt on the life of the Goddess of the Land.

And now, his beloved wife was being accused in the death of two goddesses, one of whom was Béla, again. The terrible feeling in his stomach as he read through various edicts was that his wife didn’t stand a very good chance of surviving the coming judgement.

The one positive thing that had come from the death of humanity was that the fragile paradise he found himself in was orbiting Jupiter once every thirty hours, now. Normal days and nights had been reestablished a little over a century ago, now that there was no one on earth to view them.

He thought it strange that there was a morning sun and an afternoon sun, but never a ‘noon’ sun. For a couple of hours each day, both the northern and the southern sun were lit at the same time. That was as close to ‘noon’ as it got.

There were hundreds of disks of data to sort through. Sabrina had evidently spent several years downloading data from the last remaining Praetor. Most of the disks were labeled in her handwriting. They weren’t in the pristine order he would prefer, but after a day of sorting through and reestablishing a semblance of order to them, he knew which ones to study.

It had been two days now since he’d seen his wife. It was two more days before her case was to be brought before the justices. But he had to take a break. Jake was so exhausted he couldn’t even operate the primitive computer to read the data he needed to know and Sabrina was off taking care of his wife, as usual.

Tabatha looked up as Jake came into her room. She cried out joyfully and fled into his arms, sobbing hysterically. Finally getting herself under control, she merged her mind with his, discovering that he had not found anything that could help save her.

“It’s all right,” she cried softly, sniffing back her tears. “Just make love to me. Make love to me and never stop. Make me forget. God, I’ve missed you so…”

He kissed her wet face passionately. For some reason, he didn’t feel aroused like he normally did when he was around her, but he used his hands and mouth on her, making her cry out her orgasm to the uncaring walls and the cold stone ceiling surrounding them.

As she lay on the bed, breathing heavily from her efforts, Tabatha mind-linked with him again to let him know how much she appreciated his company. They both felt his exhausted body finally begin to respond to her presence. She twisted around and started undoing his trousers. He helped her get his clothes off, then climbed into bed, his head buzzing from lack of sleep.

He knew he couldn’t give her the loving she deserved – the loving she so desperately needed to forget she had no future – but he would do the best he could.

Tabatha reached for him and kissed his growing member. She sucked him into her mouth, moaning with her pleasure at having him in her bed again. Her mind was open to his and he could feel the thickness of himself in her mouth – the eroticism of sucking him into her mouth that made her feel so vulnerable, so ready to be taken by him.

She knew when he was ready, and released him, lying back on the bed to make her body available for his pleasure. Jake climbed on top of her and shoved his cock between her legs. He could feel her sensations as well as his own as her body opened up, expanding to accommodate him. Then they were fucking as one – a single sexual unit thrusting into itself and receiving itself in ecstasy.

In only a couple of minutes, it was over. He rammed his pelvis against hers and pressed as hard as he could as he pumped his semen into her. Tabatha was coming, too, arching her back, lifting him into the air as he lay on top of her, trying her best to make their bodies become one with each other as she came.

They collapsed down together, his heavy weight crushing her into the primitive mattress of the cot. In seconds, he was asleep, snoring on top of her. Tabatha lay like that for hours, barely able to breathe under his weight as tears streamed down the sides of her face and into her ears and hair. Instead of pushing Jake off, she held him as tightly as she could until she finally fell asleep, still lying beneath him.

Chapter 5 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So, what’s going on between you and Lisa?” Frank asked his daughter. There wasn’t anyone near them on the walkway, so he felt free to talk to her as they traveled.

“Well, she was trying to show me how to make pancakes,” Alicia explained. Her dad looked at her sideways, trying to keep a straight face. “And we kind of got into a food fight.”

She decided to leave out the vampire sex part, not certain if her dad would understand or not.

“Anyway,” Alicia continued, “you called and we were trying to clean ourselves up before you got here. I didn’t know you lived this close. I thought we had more time.”

She sighed, knowing that she’d just lost at least fifty years of kudos from him.

“That doesn’t sound anything like what I saw,” Frank told her, grinning at her. “You’re leaving out a lot, aren’t you?”

She started to reply, but they were at her dad’s house, now. Frank stepped off the walkway and grabbed his daughter’s hand to help balance her so she could swing off, just like she always did. This time, she lost her balance and fell into his arms.

“Whoops!” she cried, then she grinned up at him, wrapped tightly in his arms.

Daddy’d caught her again. His cheerful mood was infectious and they were both laughing by the time her mom opened the door.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Tanya said, hugging her daughter.

Frank stood back and watched the two of them; mother and daughter. They looked so alike they could be twins. Finally, they all went inside.

It had been Tanya’s turn to cook, now that all the kids were home – at least, it felt like they were. Alicia and her brother, ‘Doc’ Frank, and Alicia’s daughter, Jackie, were there. The body count was correct, anyway, and they were still all family.

Tanya began clearing the table. Alicia had been explaining Béla’s plan to her dad and her brother.

“So, tomorrow I’ll go back to D.C. and tell Walter about you,” Alicia was saying. “I mean about the new ‘Cancer Specialist’ I discovered.”

“Okay,” Frank Junior said. “I can take some samples and run a few tests to see whether Béla’s blood will suppress his cancer cells. But remember, Béla said not to be too hopeful. Her blood could just as easily cause the cancer cells to run amuck through his body. They could eat him alive. I’ll rent an office tomorrow and get nephew Jake to handle the paperwork.

“That reminds me, Dad,” Frank Junior said. “Why aren’t Jake and Tabatha here?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said, frowning. “I’ve called them several times. They’re not responding. I was going to wait until after dinner and run a security check on their residence.”

“Well, it’s after dinner,” Frank Junior said candidly.

“So it is,” his father agreed.

They both rose from the table and went into his study.

Tanya came back from the kitchen. “Where’d the boys go? There’s ice cream…”

“They’re checking on Jake and Tabatha,” Jackie volunteered.

“More for us, then,” Tanya said cheerfully.

She went back into the kitchen. Moments later, she reappeared with three small bowls.

Tanya sighed as she sucked on a spoonful of vanilla and gazed at her daughter and her granddaughter.

“What?” Jackie asked, intrigued by her Pollyannaish expression.

“You two could be twins,” Tanya said, grinning sappily.

“I was just thinking the same thing about you and Mom, Grams,” Jackie admitted.

“We could all be triplets,” Alicia said, smiling. “Remember when we used to go out and raise all kinds of hell – the three of us together?”

“Boy! That was a long time ago,” Tanya laughed. “The news vids called us the Terrible Tabor Triplets!”

She sighed. “They probably don’t even remember us now.”

Alicia sighed, imitating her mom.

“Well, We’re all together now,” Jackie said, grinning wickedly. “We could hit the clubs – make a new reputation right here in Boston!”

All three laughed. Then Frank was standing in the doorway. He looked upset. He motioned to Tanya. In the apprehensive silence his presence cast over the room, Tanya rose and walked over to him. He led her into his study.

As Tanya walked into the room, she could hear a young child crying.

“Where is it?” she asked, looking around. “And who?”

“It’s Ethan,” Frank said quietly.

Tanya looked at him. She could see he was sick with sudden worry. The sound was coming from the wall console. Tanya read the location on its display.

“I’ll be right back,” Tanya said.

Then she vanished.

The house was dark. Tanya could hear Ethan crying.

“Lights on,” she said.

The room became brighter.

“Jake? Tabatha?” Tanya called out, not too loudly.

She took a deep breath. The only smell in the air was Ethan.

“Well, at least, they’re not dead,” Tanya said, more to herself than anyone else. “I hope…”

She knew that Frank and her son, and probably the rest of them, could hear her through the security system that Frank had connected into.

“There’s no one here,” she said, looking around. “I’m going to get Ethan and bring him back with me.”

Following the quiet sobbing her grandson’s son was making, she soon found him in his own bed and picked him up.

“Hi, sweetie,” Tanya cooed. “What’re you doing here all by yourself, huh? Ooo. You’re all wet!”

“Frank,” Tanya called out, “Call Béla and have her come over. Maybe she can find out where they went.”

She put Ethan back down and searched around for some clean clothes for him. Finding some, she helped him take his little shirt off and then his pants.

The more clothes that came off him, the riper he smelled.

“Young man, you are going to get a bath, okay?” she said, grinning at him and trying not to gag.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Where’s Mom?”

He wasn’t an infant anymore. He was already four – and a half, of course.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” Tanya admitted, “but I’m here to baby-sit. Is that okay with you?”

“Yep!” grinned Ethan. “I’m hungry.”

He wasn’t scared anymore. Grammaw was here. He liked Grammaw.

“Bath first, then food!” Tanya exclaimed.

Having found everything she needed – clean clothes, towels, etc., she picked up little Nathan and carried him off to the bathroom.

Frank was calling Béla. The wall screen brightened. Béla and her daughter appeared.

“What!” Béla snarled into the wall console.

She was naked. She had her daughter in a half nelson. Alicia shrieked in hilarity as she realized what she was seeing. Lisa tripped her mother like Alicia had tripped her earlier that afternoon when they had been fighting in the bathroom. Even Frank laughed with glee when both vampire girls fell in a heap on top of each other.

“We’ll call you back,” he said, laughing into the console.

“Disconnect,” he said to his desk console.

He looked at his daughter.

“Does that have anything at all to do with you?” Frank asked, raising his eyebrows.

Alicia’s silly grin vanished. “Me? Of course not! It’s not my fault she tried to seduce her own mother!”

“Seduce, huh? Did Lisa try to seduce you?” Frank asked.

He didn’t need an answer. Alicia flushed bright red, from her forehead right down to her toes.

“I’m going to bed, now,” Alicia said, suddenly getting up and leaving the room.

After a moment she came back. She walked in very quietly and waited until she was noticed.

“Do I have a room here?” she asked, very subdued now. “I never lived here…”

Chapter 6 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“What do you think you’re doing?” Béla yelled.

First Frank had called and caught her ‘disciplining’ her daughter, and now Jake was recording it from the top of the stairwell.

“Sorry, Hon,” Jake shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. You two just looked so sexy wrestling around down there…”

Lisa glared at him. The recorder was suddenly very hot. Jake let go with a yelp. The recorder fell to the wood-grained ground floor and shattered.

“Well, that’s that,” Jake sighed. “What did I miss?”

“You missed your daughter’s coming out performance,” Béla said, panting heavily.

Jake watched them glare at each other.

“Dad,” Lisa began anxiously.

Jake held up his hand and Lisa shushed right up.

Béla looked at Jake with amazement. ‘How did you do that?’

“I told you to expect this,” Jake said, admonishing his wife. “Why are you surprised?”

“Well, I just…” Béla tried to explain. “I didn’t… God! I just didn’t expect it today!”

“Well, she’s grown up,” Jake told her.

“Dad, I’m right here,” Lisa said scornfully. “Why do you two always talk like I’m not here or that I can’t hear you? Am I, like, not real or something? Just a figment of your lust? You stick it in Mom and ‘pop!’ Here I am!”

“Lisa!” Béla and Jake both said sharply.

“No!” Lisa demanded. “I want you to love me like you do Mom! I want you both to love me. To make love to me! I want to feel like Mom does after you’ve made love to her…”

“Ohhh, boy!” Jake said quietly, almost to himself. “She's been watching us…”

“You’re doing it again!” Lisa yelled, stomping her foot. “Talk to me! I’m right here!”

Jake came down the stairs and sat down in the middle of the couch. Looking at the female members of his family, he patted the cushions on each side of him, inviting them both to sit.

Béla got up off the floor and flounced down beside her husband. Jake smiled. He could feel her ire. Surprisingly, she wasn’t angry with her daughter. She was angry with herself.

Lisa watched her dad sit down and her mom join him.

‘It’s now or never!’ she decided.

Lisa walked over and stood in front of him. Slowly, starting somewhere below her knees, a sensuous wave of radiant blue fire caressed her skin. It traveled up her body touching her thighs and her pelvis. It rippled up her belly and caressed her breasts.

Jake noticed for the first time that his daughter's breasts were more fully developed than her mother’s were.

The wave of blue fire increased in brilliance as it reached Lisa’s face and hair, although her hair and eyebrows somehow, magically, didn’t even singe as the fire enveloped her face and disappeared into a halo above her head.

Jake blinked as he felt his daughter’s mind merge with his. She shared the sensuality of what she’d just felt with him. He was amazed at how fast his body responded to her.

Lisa leaned forward, almost falling into his lap. She guided one magnificent bare leg between both of his with more expertness and dexterity than she should have known how to do and sat down, straddling his left leg. She arched her back, pressing her pelvis into his trousered thigh and her left breast into his face. Placing one hand on each side of her father’s head, she guided his mouth to her tingling nipple.

“Love me, Daddy,” she moaned fervently.

She could feel his arousal in her mind and body as he reacted to the wave of lust she radiated through both her parents. She pressed forward a little more, jutting her hip into his ‘hard, chewy center’, grinning as she remembered the Tri-d commercial.

Lisa felt someone think ‘I’m ready.’ She backed off her fierce ride and stared down at him.

“Show it to me,” she whispered.

Jake seemed confused and not certain of what she expected him to do. Béla, as much under Lisa’s spell as her husband, reached over and pulled on Jake’s belt. It came loose, surprising everyone, especially Béla.

The pink fleshy head of Jake’s cock stuck out of the ‘V’-shaped opening of his jeans. Lisa surrounded it with a tingling band of blue fire, then bent over almost double and sucked the fire into her mouth. She continued on down until her lips surrounded the end of her father’s cock and breathed in through her mouth, creating a suction that pulled her dad’s cock further out of his jeans.

Moaning happily, Lisa began moving her head up and down on her dad’s cock, fucking her own face with it. After a moment, Jake put his hands on her head, helping her to fold her body more tightly together so she could take more of his cock into her mouth. Then he was spurting his load into her mouth, coating her tongue and throat.

Lisa sat back up; a triumphant grin on her face. Her lips were slippery with her dad’s cum. She pressed forward, kissing him full on the lips and forcing her tongue against his closed mouth. It took a few seconds to worm her way into his mouth with her cum-slicked tongue. She wanted him to taste what he did to her – what she made him do – what she knew he wanted to do.

The spell seemed to be broken now. Jake blinked several times as he tasted his own cum on his daughter’s tongue. He took her by the arms and pushed her back so he could look at her. His emotions were in turmoil at what he’d done.

“Is this when we fight now?” Lisa asked, sounding disappointed. “Mom and Alicia both wanted to fight with me afterwards. Do I have to fight with you now?”

“Lisa… baby,” Jake said unhappily, “There’s so much you don’t understand…”

“Yeah, I know,” Lisa said, surprisingly agreeable. “That’s what Alicia said. But she still wanted to fight.”

“You can’t just manipulate someone’s mind up like that,” Jake told her. “You can’t just over-whump somebody to get your way just because your will is stronger than theirs.”

“Why not?” Lisa asked innocently. “You enjoyed it. I could feel you. Why does everyone want to fight afterwards? Why do you pretend it wasn’t good?”

She was almost wailing, now. Jake noticed that the room was getting warmer – a lot warmer.

To calm his fiery little phoenix down before she set the house on fire, Jake pulled her overheating bare body against him, hugging her tightly.

“I love you, Honey,” Jake told her. “I’m not going to fight with you. I just want to talk. Okay, Hon?”

He felt her nod her head against his shoulder.

“You do me now?” Lisa asked, almost whispering in his ear.

Jake suddenly realized that this was the point where Alicia and Béla had turned, rebeled against Lisa’s mental control and, becoming unreasonably enraged, assaulted the girl.

And Lisa didn’t have a clue as to ‘why!’ As far as Lisa was concerned, she was giving and her sexual partners were taking – but they weren’t giving anything back except anger and war. Her frustration was driving her insane.

Béla, also released from Lisa’s control after Jake came in their daughter’s mouth, had been watching and listening, her mind merged with her husband’s in her effort to understand what was happening. For some reason, Béla realized, Jake had a better grasp of how Lisa’s mind worked than she did. She watched his thought processes as he worked out what was happening with Lisa.

“Oh, my poor baby,” Béla murmured, reaching out and hugging her daughter as Lisa turned her head toward her mother, her attention attracted by her mother’s voice. Lisa was still nakedly wrapped around her father, hoping that someone would please finally fuck her.

“Yes, darling,” Béla said, speaking for both Jake and herself. “We’ll do you now. Come on upstairs.”

Grinning hopefully, Lisa twisted around, still straddling her father, and hugged her mom. She radiated gratitude as well as sexual frustration at them both.

Béla and Jake both looked at each other, each one realizing that they had a monumental tutoring job ahead of them in the next few hours. But first, they had to sate their daughter’s sexual desires so that she would be in a better mental state to listen to them.

Then they were going to have to teach her not to mentally overpower and rape people simply because she thought they might like it.

Once upstairs, Lisa climbed into the middle of her parent’s bed and waited. Jake and Béla settled in, one on each side of her. Jake patted the pillow, inviting his daughter to lay back. As he began caressing her breasts, Béla talked to her.

“What do you do, sweetheart,” Béla asked her daughter, “when you’re by yourself and these feeling come over you?”

Lisa was lying back, her eyes half-closed, enjoying her dad playing with her breasts.

“Oh, lots of things,” she murmured. “Sometimes, I set fire to myself between my legs. Sometimes I burn my titties black.”

She smiled as she remembered other things.

“I used a broom handle once,” she admitted, sighing as her dad moved his hand around on her tummy.

He was still suckling on her right tit. It was starting to feel like it would burst.

“Oh, Daddy,” Lisa sighed. “That’s the best I’ve ever felt without setting myself on fire…”

She arched her back, pressing her tit deeper into his mouth.

“What about using the broom handle?” Béla wanted to know.

She was trying to have a conversation with her daughter while her husband seduced her. She was also trying to believe that all this was really happening.

“Broom handle?” Lisa asked. “Oh. I guess I got a little excited. It caught on fire. Not the first time, but afterward. The first time, it hurt too much. Did you know there’s this neat little place to put stuff in down there?”

‘So, she’s not a virgin,’ Béla thought into Jake’s mind. ‘At least, not technically…’

“What all have you put in there, Baby?” Béla wanted to know.

“Not much,” Lisa confided. She was breathing more heavily now that her dad’s hand was moving up and down, caressing that sensitive area between her legs. “A broom, the bed post – I sat down on that, Dad’s rifle…”

“I heard about that,” Béla murmured. “What possessed you to fire a gun up in there?”

“I didn’t mean for it to go off,” Lisa admitted. “It just got too hot… It surprised me. It really hurt, too.”

Béla smiled at that, and showed her daughter her image of the first time Jake had shot her in the cunt. Lisa grinned, more than a little distracted by her dad licking her tummy and sticking his finger in that special place that felt good when she put things in there.

“What else do you do when you’re by yourself, Baby?” Béla asked.

She was astonished at her daughter’s sudden willingness to talk to her. She’d been so secretive all her life that Béla often wondered if they’d ever learn to get along.

Lisa grinned as she remembered something. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate. Her hips were twitching back and forth as her dad fingered her. He was licking and chewing gently on her inner thighs, now. She was getting close to that wonderful, explosive feeling.

“What were you thinking about?” Béla asked, noticing her daughter’s smile.

“Fire…” Lisa whimpered. “The kitchen stove. I’d cook myself… between my… legs… until I, until… Oh God! That feels so good!”

Jake was licking his daughter’s clitoris, now. As she came on his finger, he bit down gently, sending her further over the edge.

Lisa squealed in orgasm, arching her back into the air, her pussy trying to suck more of her father’s finger inside her.

“Harder, Daddy!” Lisa cried out as she came again. “Do me harder! Make it hurt! I need it to hurt, Daddyyyy!”

She squealed and squirted on his finger again as he turned his hand around. His index finger was inside her pussy. His thumb was on her clitoris. He pressed his index finger and his thumb together as hard as he could.

Lisa’s orgasmic wail was higher pitched than any sound Jake had ever heard come out of a human throat. It actually numbed his eardrums. He put one hand on her tummy to hold her down as she thrashed about on the bed. Then she was lying more quietly. She was covered with a thin sheen of sweat and breathing heavily.

Despite the fact that Lisa was happier now than she could ever remember being, she still had questions floating around in her head. Why did people get so angry with her when she tried to make them feel like this? And why weren’t they willing to help her to achieve this state of bliss she was currently enjoying?

This state of mind was what Béla had been waiting for. Seizing the opportunity, she mind-linked with her daughter. With Lisa’s permission, they both began sorting through Lisa’s memories. Béla was surprised to find that, up until Lisa became obsessed with sexual stimulation, she’d spent a lot of time mind-linked with the Praetor, mostly studying the history of the people she knew.

Béla had brought the Praetor home from Tanya’s where she’d discovered it when Tabatha had met her and the Tabors. Béla often linked with the Praetor, mostly to record her observations about the oddities of humanity and living among them.

‘Lisa, your mental power is greater than any I’ve ever encountered, Darling,’ Béla thought into her daughter’s sated mind. ‘But you must remember to get a person’s agreement before you open your mind to them and flood their sensibilities with your emotions and needs. Your will can easily overpower a normal mind. No one can resist you.’

‘I know,’ Lisa thought back at her, radiating her sensual satiation. She seemed surprisingly agreeable, making Béla a little suspicious of her daughter’s motives. ‘I have your agreement now. I want to love you – forever…’

‘Uh-oh,’ Béla thought to herself. ‘Jake was right. That’s really Beth in there. There’ll be no stopping her with the power she has! She has to learn self-control!’

‘Why do you want to stop me, Mom?’ Lisa asked, becoming more aware of her surroundings again.

“I don’t want to stop you, darling,” Béla clarified. “I just don’t want you to force others to your will. This is something you have to learn to do. If you don’t learn this lesson yourself, the fighting with the people you seduce will continue.

“You must get their agreement,” Béla said. “I don’t mean looking into their minds and ferreting out their hidden desires. Everyone has hidden desires that they hide even from themselves. If someone doesn’t consciously agree to be seduced, they will get angry and upset afterwards – no matter how much they liked what you did to them.”

“I don’t understand,” Lisa murmured.

“It’s a ‘human’ thing,” Béla told her finally, unable to come up with any other reason that Lisa would understand. “They’re different. They don’t really think. They usually only react to stimuli. And they are very, very stubborn!”

“Gee, thanks!” Jake said from the bottom part of the bed. “I love you, too.”

He grinned at them both, letting them know his wife’s description of his species mentality didn’t really upset him.

“Lisa,” her father said from the other end of her very satisfied body, “most everyone believes that bowing to someone else’s will is a form of slavery. And they like to think that they’re independent and free. They usually only get upset when you threaten that fragile control they believe they have over their lives.”

Lisa was more relaxed now, and her thinking was clearer than it had been for several weeks, which, for her actual age, was a pretty long time. She decided it was time to broach a subject that occurred to her a few days ago.

“I think I should go out and explore,” Lisa suggested. “I want to live among the humans – learn more about them, experience them firsthand, um, for myself.”

“You mean leave us?” Béla asked, sitting up on the bed. She was shocked by her daughter’s request. “I don’t want you to leave! You have to stay here!”

“Why?” Lisa asked, protesting another of her mother’s arbitrary decisions.

“Because you don’t know enough to live on your own!” Béla told her.

“What’s to know?” Lisa asked. “I can go for weeks without food. I’m pretty enough that I won’t have trouble finding a place to live. I’ve checked with the Praetor on that. I can trade sex for a bed. It’s a common practice among humans. And besides, being on my own, I can practice controlling myself – the way you said a few minutes ago.”

“No!” Béla exclaimed, putting her foot down. “You can’t leave and that’s final!”

‘You can’t stop her if she really wants to go, darling,’ Béla heard Jake project into her head. ‘If you give her your permission, she’ll still feel welcome here. She’ll come back to you.’

Béla sat, stunned and uncertain. Her daughter wanted to leave home. She realized it was inevitable, but had never really believed it would happen.

‘She’ll come back to you,’ she heard Jake’s voice say in her head, again.

Béla looked at her daughter. Lisa was watching her make up her mind. Béla realized that she could hear what her father had said inside her mind. Lisa was waiting for the decision that would start a war between them that could last centuries, or for her mom’s blessing and permission.

Béla reached down and embraced her daughter tightly. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“All right,” Béla said, her voice shaking with emotion. “Where will you go?”

Lisa squealed and hugged her mother happily. A deluge of images flooded into Béla’s mind. Lisa wanted to start on the other side of the continent and work her way back home, fucking her way across America – from California to New York. Then she would decide if she wanted to go again, starting in Miami and fucking her way to Montreal in Canada.

“There’s a whole world of people to fuck out there!” she exclaimed, ecstatic at the prospect of actually beginning her great adventure.

Both her parents stared at her with their mouths hanging open. There were no thoughts emanating from either of them. Their minds were numb with shock and surprise.

“Well, that’s was you did when you left your foster mother,” Lisa explained, as though that was where she got the idea.

She was trying to impress them with the realization that she was just trying to be like Mom.

Béla laughed. It was more of a single short sound of disbelief, actually, as she suddenly remembered her last argument with the temple goddess. When she’d left Enheduana, she’d been in a furious state of mind and had angrily intended, indeed, to go out and fuck every man alive.

“See?” Lisa said hopefully as she noticed the image playing in her mother’s mind. “It’s what you did! It’s perfectly okay! And I promise not to rape anybody!”

Béla looked helplessly at her husband. “Jake, say something!”

“Have a good time,” Jake said, cheerfully. “Keep in touch and let us know where you are.”

“Not that, you idiot!” Béla practically screamed at him. “Tell her she can’t go!”

“You tell her,” Jake replied quietly. “Stop her if you can. I know you can’t. So just let her go. Love her, but let her go.”

“Jake,” Béla was actually crying now. “Help me. I want her to stay.”

Both Jake and Lisa reached out to hug her.

‘She can’t stay, darling,’ she heard Jake in her mind. ‘Lisa owns the world and, like all young of every species, she wants to go out and explore her domain. Let her go! That’s the only way she’ll come back. Force her to stay and she’ll leave you forever.’

“You’re so certain in your mind,” Béla said, sniffing back her tears.

She could feel his thoughts. Jake’s mind was in turmoil. He didn’t want his daughter to leave either, but he understood what was needed.

“All parents face this,” Jake told her. “Some are actually happy to get rid of their offspring. When that happens, oddly enough, it’s usually with an offspring that doesn’t want to leave.”

“You have all the answers, don’t you?” Béla said, deciding to trust his human judgement.

“I spent a hundred years without you,” Jake replied lightly, leaving the agony of his emotions out of the simple statement. “I had a lot of time to think.”

Béla looked at her child sitting naked on the bed next to her.

“Come back to me,” she instructed her. “At least to visit, okay?”

“Sure, Mom,” Lisa grinned, hugging her mother tightly.

Instead of rudely teleporting out of her parents’ presence like she usually did, she hopped off the bed and skipped lightly to the door, going to her room to decide what she wanted to take with her.

“My baby’s leaving me!” Béla sobbed, completely breaking down, now.

Jake held her in his arms and pulled her down on their bed. She lay, crying into his shoulder for some time. Jake gently stroked her smooth back and shoulders, his face buried in her silky black hair. Even in her despair, she smelled wonderful.

Jake held her close, trying to surround his wife with the energy of his love for her – to protect her from the emotions that shredded her soul. He kissed her hair and lovingly stroked her back. He massaged her shoulders, the back of her neck. He kissed her temple and her forehead.

At last, Béla began to respond. Perhaps her body was betraying her; perhaps she really needed him. Whatever the reason, she moved her head so she could kiss him full on the lips. Then she pressed her body against his in a more sexual manner. Jake felt his body respond instantly as his cock began expanding into the space between her soft, warm thighs.

Béla noticed it too, and spread her legs, straddling him so that the tip of his cock rubbed against the folds of her pussy lips. She rolled Jake over so that she was on top of him and shoved herself down on his growing cock. Jake couldn’t tell what she was feeling. Béla’s mind was closed to him. But he could feel what her body was emanating – her lust, her need for his seed inside her.

She stretched her arms wide, forming her wings, reverting to her natural vampiric form. Her wingspan seemed huge in the bedroom and her wingtips brushed the opposing walls. She gazed down at him like a wild bird of prey, only now opening her mind to him. She intended to have another child. All he had to do was come inside her. In her natural state, she was fertile. She would be pregnant when they finished what they’d started.

“Wait!” Jake cried out. “Wait awhile, darling! You’re not thinking this through. Let’s get into the routine of not have her here, then decide.”

Their minds were merged together. He could see her thoughts and she could see his. Jake wanted to spend some time with her alone, just the two of them, making love and cementing the fragile bond between them that seemed to rip apart so easily into the shouting matches they often had with each other.

She smiled down at him and reformed her arms so she could touch his face with her fingers. His love almost filled the gap in her soul that her daughter’s leaving had torn there. Almost, but not quite. But she knew that, with Jake, she would recover.

Having made up her mind again, she put her attention on the task at hand. Béla tightened her pelvic muscles, squeezing his hard dick inside her and began moving up and down, fucking her loving husband in the sterile manner of the humans. It was enough, for now.

Chapter 7 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The wind howled across the hot, dead landscape. The wind was always howling. Even amidst the burnt out buildings, there was little protection from it. Something large with metal edges rolled over her – a piece of sheet metal, probably torn from a billboard, or maybe it was once the sleek skin of a flitter. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. What she noticed was that it hurt when it rolled over her.

Awake now, Tabatha felt her body renewing itself where the metal had gouged into her back. She took a deep breath of hot, steamy air. It was incredibly humid. That was probably because most of the oceans had evaporated by now.

She looked around, trying to remember where she was – how she got here. There had been a trial, or the mockery of one. She’d been found guilty of abandoning her family and taking the only protection they had away from them.

She hadn’t even known she could be charged with something like that. But with the strange judicial system on the little artificial world where she’d spent only a few days, a person could be charged with negligence and lack of responsibility – especially if it could be demonstrated to have caused damage to property or the death of one or more individuals.

By bringing her husband, the Chairman of Tomlin Security, into the future with her, she’d inadvertently caused the deaths of everyone in his entire family, even the immortal ‘goddesses’ Béla and her daughter, Lisa.

Tabatha’s accuser, the justice and local goddess, Elaine, had even tried to have the death penalty reinstated specifically for this case. The justices who heard the case, Bard Jeffrey and the Goddess Jolene, were the only justices who had ever sentenced someone to death for their crimes.

But they didn’t sentence her to death. Instead, they did something much worse. They exiled her – to Earth, to live out the rest of her days in planetary isolation. Her husband, Jake Hedron, had not been permitted to share her exile. He was still in New Eden.

‘Get up!’ she heard in her mind. ‘Get moving! You have much to do!’

Tabatha moaned wearily. This was her third month in exile. She didn’t know how she kept track of the days, but something in her mind always let her know what day it was. She was alone on a dead world, and she knew it was Tuesday, not Wednesday. She didn’t know what year it was, but she didn’t care.

The voice had been driving her for over a month now. It had shown her where she could find caches of stored food. Not all the food was contaminated by radiation or age. Canned goods were the safest. Even if the cans were radioactive, her body handled radioactivity the same as it did the fierce burning rays of the sun. Too much would make her sick, but at night she would recover.

Water was scarce here. Even so, she didn’t want to leave this spot. There was enough food stored nearby to last for several years. She could put together collectors to catch water from the fierce thunderstorms that swept over her every other day or so.

‘Get up!’ the voice told her again. ‘You are almost there!’

‘Where?’ she cast out with her mind.

Instantly, she shrieked and grabbed her head, rolling on the ground in her agony. The ‘goddesses’ had done something to her, inside her mind, so she couldn’t use her abilities. Then, immediately after her sentencing, they had surrounded her and sent her here. She could no longer teleport. If she wanted to go anywhere, she had to walk – not that there was anywhere to go, on this hot, dead world.

She couldn’t even use telepathy to communicate with the voice in her head. She realized that it was probably imaginary, anyway – a delusion of her madness and her unwillingness to be the only living creature on an entire planet that had once contained twelve billion of her kind. Of course, that had been before the plagues and the wars – before the final end of days.

Sobbing, but not crying – she had no tears left for crying, Tabatha staggered to her feet and looked around. She didn’t know why she’d fallen asleep outside. Perhaps she’d been afraid of the wind blowing a wall down on her or something.

Then she remembered. Something had struck her in the head, knocking her to the ground. She looked around. There was debris everywhere – no telling what the object might have been. The fierce wind carried whatever it could pick up and tossed it where it would.

Tabatha walked unsteadily into the building where she’d discovered the stash of canned goods a few days ago. She’d found an old rotted backpack just before dark yesterday and planned to fill it before she continued on. The longer she stayed here, the louder the voice in her head insisted that she continue wherever it wanted her to go.

Filling the pack, she threw it over her shoulder, only to have the rotted material come apart and spew the cans out on the ground behind her. She turned and stood staring at them for a few minutes, then turned and walked unsteadily away, leaving them all behind.

There was an elevated expressway about a mile off in the distance. It looked like it was intended for ground vehicles. There was a long gouge in the ground that the expressway went over. It looked vaguely familiar, somehow. She tried to imagine the scene teaming with humanity and with the great gouge filled with river water.

A sharp warning pain triggered in her head. She stopped trying to imagine what the view in front of her had once looked like. Whatever the justices had put into her head also prevented her from creating images she could use for teleporting. They definitely didn’t want her to escape.

The expressway was farther away than she’d originally estimated. It took her ’til midmorning to reach it. She was glad it was overcast. The clouds held the heat in, but kept the worst of the sun’s rays off her. Her bare skin was burning black anyway, but it didn’t matter. At night, it always healed.

As she staggered on, she wondered how many years she would survive in this desolate world. Killing herself simply wasn’t an option. She couldn’t do herself so much harm that she wouldn’t recover.

‘There’s no hurry… I’ll die soon enough…’

Tabatha climbed up the steep, bare-earth embankment until finally she was standing on the expressway. It was long and straight and twelve lanes wide. She didn’t see any vehicles on it at all. She wasn’t too surprised. The wind and the violent storms probably blew them all away. The few vehicles she had found were completely destroyed and rusted away, having spent dozens of years exposed to this wild weather.

Up here on the expressway, there wasn’t much protection from the constant wind. Her bare flesh received a continuous barrage of dust, sand and dirt as it whipped by her. She didn’t mind, though. The pain from the constant abrasion kept her awake and thinking. It did dry her out more, however, under her arms and breasts, and especially between her legs. She used that pain also, as her skin cracked and bled, to keep her awake and alert. Not that there was anything she needed to be alert for, except the odd pieces of buildings and scraps of sheet metal that the wind carried with it.

There was a small sign some distance off. Somehow, the wind had missed tearing it off and carrying it away. There was a diamond design on it. Her eyes were so dry she couldn’t focus. She walked closer until she could read it.



Mystic River Bridge

Express Exit – 2 mi.



Tabatha stared at the sign, slowly churning the words around in her mind.

‘I know where I am!’ she suddenly realized. ‘The voice! It’s taking me home!’

She knew now that the voice in her head was completely imaginary. Somehow, the part of her mind that always knew where she was had invented a vocal illusion to tell her how to come home. She was surprised at the pain in her dry throat as she laughed. She was even more surprised at the gurgling dry rasping sound it made. She walked on, more briskly than she had for many days.

In the afternoon, the clouds vanished and Tabatha realized that she would have to leave the easy passage of the expressway. The afternoon sun was too hot and the wind was too fierce. She was badly dehydrated and needed to find water. The expressway didn’t cross the riverbed, anyway. It had collapsed, destroyed either by man or nature, many years ago.

An hour later, she was walking across the dried, caked river bottom. There were only a few patches of mud. Tabatha checked a couple of them out only to discover that she couldn’t dig far enough down with her bare hands to find drinkable water. She kept walking, following the riverbed, now.

Another hour and another bend in the dry riverbed led her to a fork. She turned west toward the late afternoon sun and kept walking. It was beginning to get dark. There was no moon, but the northern lights danced their brilliance across the sky, illuminating even the darker parts of the riverbed.

Some time later she actually found a stream that emptied into the dried up river. She found it by accident, falling face first into the muddy streambed when her right foot suddenly sank into it halfway up to her knee. Crawling and half-walking, half-insane with thirst and forcing herself not to try drinking the mud she found herself in, she followed the muddy flow to the edge of the riverbed and a trickle of comparatively clean water. She drank until she was sick, threw up, and then drank again.

Once revived, she wallowed in the mud, luxuriating in the feel of it on her scorched, cracked skin. She was covered with it, now, as she continued her journey along the desolate riverbed. Except for an occasional crack of what sounded like thunder, the only sound was the howling wind. Even the demanding, driving voice in her head had vanished once she realized where she was. But, it had been imaginary, after all, and had served its purpose.

The moon showed itself, large and swollen on the horizon, its light dull and pale compared to the brilliance of the intricately colored waves of light dancing across in the sky, eerily lighting the landscape around her.

Tabatha kept walking. The constant, dizzying motion as the waves of light swept over her enforced the stark reality of nothing moving on the ground except her. Everything else, every one else, was dead and dust.

She doggedly put one foot in front of the other. She just kept doing that. After some time, a large structure loomed above her. She looked up, almost falling over from her change in perspective.

‘That must be the Washington Street Bridge,’ she thought to herself. ‘Even walking, I should be home in an hour!’

She turned left toward the riverbank and followed the bridge out of the riverbed and into the ruined city.

Remembering her way around on foot was a lot different than crossing the city in an airbus. When she didn’t simply teleport where she was going, the airbus was generally how she got around. She wished fervently for one now as she walked through the dead, burnt-out, debris-filled streets.

Eventually, she came to what she believed was her own residential area. Tabatha realized that she was either a lot more exhausted than she thought, or she’d completely lost her way. She should have been home an hour ago, but nothing looked familiar.

What was left of most of the housing structures were burnt out walls, shining eerily white in the pale light of the moon. The Boston skyline was unfamiliar now, with many buildings completely missing. It hadn’t looked like that when she’d left.

“Where the fuck am I?” she asked herself, out loud, looking around.

Something old – an ancient intelligence brushed against her mind. The hairs on her neck stood straight up right through the soothing layer of dried mud.

“Who’s there?” she cried, looking around wildly, her voice cracked and hoarse from disuse and dehydration.

‘Who are you?’

She distinctly heard something that time. She tried to answer it mentally, but cried out as the agonizing energy in her mind erupted to prevent her from using her powers to visualize anything.

‘There is someone still alive,’ she heard it in her mind.

Tabatha suddenly realized she could still receive telepathically – she just couldn’t send!

“I have to talk out loud,” she said, raising her voice so that (whatever it is) would possibly hear her. “They did something to my mind so I can’t answer you. Can you hear me?”

That last bit was starting to sound frightened. Tabatha realized she actually was frightened. She was scared she was losing her mind.

‘I can hear you,’ the voice responded. ‘What is your function?’

“My what?” Tabatha cried out. “I’m lost. I’m trying to go home.”

‘Your home is not in this place, nor in this time. Why do you disturb me? My energy runs low. I must conserve what remains while I wait.’

“Who are you?” she called out. “How do you know where I live? You don’t even know who I am!”

‘You are recorded in history, Time Walker. You are far from where you belong. Why are you here?’

“I can’t leave!” Tabatha cried out. “I’ve been exiled here! Who are you? Why won’t you tell me?”

An image appeared in her mind. She recognized it, having seen it before. It was Béla’s Praetor. The ruined, dead structure she was staring at had to be Jake and Béla’s home. She cried out in sudden grief as the death of her blood sister and benefactor struck home to her soul. She felt tears running down her muddy cheeks. Her body had enough moisture to provide them, now.

She entered the remnants of Béla’s house, climbing over a half-crumbled wall. After searching for some minutes, she found the Praetor, half buried in the rubble. Triumphantly, she dug it out and placed it in the middle of the destroyed room. Exhausted, she curled around it protectively and went to sleep.

Chapter 8 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She was walking along the beach, admiring the lights dancing across the northern horizon. This was Lisa’s first official day of freedom. She had teleported here yesterday afternoon from her home on the opposite coast, choosing a random spot on the West Coast to push herself back into the physical universe.

She watched and listened for most of the first evening and then realized, as others left for their homes, that she didn’t have a place to stay yet. So, like hundreds of other homeless people, she spent the night on the beach. Last night, she’d slept alone in the brush and awoke this morning, cold and shivering. She was glad of the nuclear fire she kept banked in her mind as she released a molecule of it to heat up her shivering, damp body.

As she stretched and scratched, she decided that, this night, she was going to seek out company. There were hundreds of people out here. It should be easy to find at least one willing to share his warm body with her.

She trotted down to wade in the crashing waves in the early morning light. There was no one around that she could see or feel with her mind. If anyone was around, they were still asleep. She pulled her soiled shirt off and dropped it on the sand. He shorts quickly followed, then she splashed around in the foamy surf, cleaning the sand and dirt off as best she could in the sandy water.

Wading back to her little pile of clothes, she picked them up and grimaced.

Jeez! I can’t put these back on, she realized. They’re filthy!

She formed an image of her closet and tossed the used garments into her clothes hamper for Mom to wash, then grabbed a colorful T-shirt and another pair of shorts. To anyone watching, it would appear that she was reaching into an invisible space and trading dirty clothes for clean ones, magically pulling them out of thin air.

She pulled her hot-pink T-shirt on over her head and was forced to drop her dark brown shorts in the sand as a seagull tried to take it away from her. As it realized she didn’t have any food, it squawked angrily at her and, flapping its wings noisily, flew off, still in search of its breakfast.

Swearing to herself, Lisa picked up her shorts and brushed the sand off. There were only a few spots of water on them, so she slipped into them anyway. They were a favorite pair, but she’d grown a bit since she got them and they clung tightly to her butt and squeezed around her upper thighs almost too much.

‘Wow! I could orgasm just walking in these,’ Lisa thought, smiling to herself. ‘Good thing I’m not wearing panties, these would never fit!’

She walked along the beach a ways, just listening to the lapping waves as the tide went out and watching the seagulls and other birds she didn’t recognize as they flew search patterns over the receding waves. Occasionally some stranded, unlucky creature would be spotted in the surf by the militant gulls and quickly, if noisily, devoured.

A motor roared in the distance and Lisa cast out with her mind to see what made the noise. A pickup truck was pulling a boat trailer up the road. She could see in the mind of the driver that he would be stopping very near to where she was right now.

‘I think I’ll wait,’ she decided. ‘Maybe he has food. If not, maybe he’ll take me for a ride on his boat.’

In a few minutes, the truck pulled up and circled down onto the beach. Lisa stood at the edge of the splashing waves, staying out of the way as he maneuvered his rig around and backed the boat down to the edge of the ocean and right into the water.

Lisa had never seen a boat being launched before, and watched curiously as the driver got out and released the cable. The boat slide backward off the trailer and was floating free in the water.

“Hey, you!” the guy hollered.

Lisa jumped, then realized he was calling out to her.

“Yeah?” she asked, acting a little put-off by he forwardness.

“C’mere,” he said, moving his head back.

Lisa walked toward him and stopped a few feet away.

“Hold this,” he said, handing her a rope.

She reached out and took it. The guy turned away and hopped back into his truck. Starting it, he drove back up to the road and parked, then trotted back to where she waiting, still holding the rope. Lisa was playing with it, pulling on it, then releasing it, watching the boat as it bobbed on the surf and the rope as it moved up and down, in, then back out of the water as she pulled on it.

“Don’t take much to keep some people happy,” he observed as he approached her.

Sheepishly, she handed the rope back to him.

“Going fishing?” she asked.

That was the image in his mind, but it was being overlaid by more sensual images that included her.

“Yeah, how’d ya guess?” he asked, standing there and bobbing his head up and down.

‘God, he thinks I’m stupid,’ Lisa realized as she picked up what he was broadcasting. ‘Just fresh meat for the fucking! Okay, I’m game. Let’s fuck!’

“Can I come with you?” she asked, smiling. “I’ve never been on a boat before.”

“Listen, girlie,” he sneered at her. “This is a little boat and those waves can get pretty frisky. I wouldn’t want you puking all over getting seasick.”

“I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning,” she admitted, “so I probably won’t get seasick. Can I come?”

He laughed. “You land lovers are all the same. You think it’s a full stomach that gets you in trouble. It’s the empty stomach, girlie, that gives you cramps and what makes you seasick.”

“Oh,” Lisa said, properly chastised.

‘I hope he’s buying this innocent crap! But if he calls me ‘girlie’ one more time, I’m going to bite him!’

“Do you have anything to eat, then?” she asked.

He snickered and just shook his head, putting his hands on his hips. Then he raised his head and stared up and down her body.

“You’re some piece of work,” he said.

Lisa was uncertain what he meant, but was pretty sure it wasn’t a complement. She couldn’t figure him out. He was disgusted with her, but he wanted to fuck her. Go figure.

“I guess that means ‘no’, huh?” Lisa murmured, then turned away and began walking up the beach, back the way she came.

She could tell he was staring at her brown shorts and appreciated the way they clung to her butt. She kept walking, swaying her hips, now.

“Wait a minute,” he called, suddenly realizing that an opportunity for a good time was leaving. Lisa smiled to herself before she turned around. When she faced toward him, her face was her usually sullen expression. She waited with the instinct of a hunter, silently watching the prey take the bait.

“I, uh… Yeah,” he stammered. “I got some… I got enough food. I guess you can have some.”

Lisa grinned and trotted back down to where he was standing. He pulled the boat up a little closer, then waded out to it. Lisa waded out with him, soaking her tight shorts. He helped her up into the boat. As he released her, he ran his hands down her waist and squeezed her hips, admiring her tightly clad, wet rump right in front of his face.

“Where is it?” she asked, looking around as he clambered aboard.

There were two ice chests in the boat taking up most of the floor space. She grabbed hold of the side as the boat rocked wildly and quickly sat down as the man hopped aboard.

She watched as he pulled an oar out from under the seat she was sitting on and leaned precariously over the side. After a few pushes against the sand and some more wild rocking, the boat was no longer pointed inland. He nicked her ankle as he shoved the oar back under her seat, then pointed to the nearest ice chest.

Lisa scooted over and began figuring out how the catches worked while he started up the boat. As the boat surged forward, Lisa yelped as she fell backward, pulling the lid off the ice chest as she slipped.

“You make a mess back there you’ll clean it up!” he hollered over his shoulder.

Lisa picked up his thought more than she heard his words over the loud noise of the outboard motor.

She failed several attempts to get up because of the pounding and rocking as the boat raced headlong through the waves. Finally scooting over against the side of the boat, she sat on the floorboards and watched the shoreline as it bobbed further and further away.

After a few minutes, she remembered the ice chest and looked around for the lid. Finding it, she crawled over, getting used to the pounding and rocking of the tiny boat, and pushed it back down on the chest. She didn’t bother to look inside for something to eat. Her stomach was too upset.

After awhile, the motor stopped. In the deafening silence, Lisa could feel her body still vibrating in shock. She could feel every little movement of the boat as it bobbed up and down in the water. She looked up to see the guy clambering over the seats toward where she was sitting on the floor of the little craft.

He grinned when he saw the color of her skin and the way she was holding her stomach.

“Boats ain’t fer little kids,” her reprimanded her, “and yer gonna hav’ta perform for your meal.”

“I figured that,” she admitted, grimacing up at him. “Can I eat first, or after?”

‘I’m finally gonna get fucked!’ she thought, swallowing her stomach. ‘I wish I felt better about it…’

“After,” he said, unzipping his jeans. He sat down on the seat that she’d slid off earlier and pulled out his flaccid dick. “You get to eat this, first, so actually, yer getting’ two meals.”

He laughed, thinking that was funny. Lisa swallowed her stomach again and got up on her knees facing him. She leaned forward and took hold of his penis with one hand, pulling on it a little.

“Hey, bitch!” he hollered down at her. “I ain’t no cow! You don’t milk it, you suck on it!”

“Alright, don’t be so bossy,” Lisa muttered.

Then she bent down and licked her tongue along the top of his dick. It didn’t do anything. She could see in his mind that he had a hard time getting it up and, in his opinion, it was always the girl’s fault.

“You queasy little cunt,” he complained at the back of her head. “Take it in yer mouth and gimme a goddamned blowjob!”

Lisa curled around her knees, sitting in the bottom of the boat.

“Don’t yell at me!” she cried helplessly. “I’m sick and I’m hungry. I’ll try to be good, but you have to be nice to me.”

“Nice?” he exclaimed, rising over her. “Nice?”

He stood over her for a moment, not knowing what to do. He wanted to give her a good, swift kick, but figured that probably wouldn’t help him get his blowjob.

“Alright, you can eat first,” he said, compromising with her.

He pulled the lid off the ice chest to see what was packed. There were sandwiches and beer. He grabbed a sandwich and handed it down to her.

“You eat that!” he commanded. “If you throw up, you’ll lick this deck clean with yer tongue! Got it?”

Lisa nodded mutely and slowly unwrapped the sandwich.

“Why don’t you like me?” she asked, after a couple of mouthfuls of bread and cheese.

“Like you?” he asked.

Lisa noticed that he had a tendency to repeat everything she said.

“What’s to like?” he continued. “Yer just another dumb cunt runaway thinks the world owes you everything ’cause yer young and good lookin’. Those smooth hands hain’t never picked an orange off a tree or a bushel of strawberries off the ground. You ain’t never worked a day in your life, but yer ready t’ take what other people have worked for. You just bat your eyes and expect ’em to hand it over to ya.”

“Now, I’m down one sandwich and ain’t caught no fish, yet,” he concluded. “And you still owe me a blowjob.”

Lisa had finished her little sandwich while he lectured to her. She thought what he said was interesting. She realized there was some truth to what he was telling her. The world did owe her a living, didn’t it? Ha. Fat chance.

“I feel better now,” Lisa said quietly. “Thank you.”

She clambered back up on her knees without him telling her to and took hold of his still flaccid cock. She rubbed it with both hands for a moment, then, lowering her head down, kissed the tip of it. Still nothing.

“I’m not sure, but,” Lisa mentioned, looking up at the man, “isn’t it supposed to get hard, or something?”

“What’d’ya mean, ‘yer not sure’?” he asked, his eyes widening. “Ain’t you done this before?”

“Well,” Lisa hesitated. “Once.”

“What?” he yelped, his voice an octave higher. “How old are you? Are you eighteen?”

Lisa shook her head, and chewed on her lower lip trying to look innocent.

“Oh, Christ!” he complained to himself.

He pulled himself back together and clambered back up to the front of the boat. In a few seconds, the noisy motor rumbled back to life and they were headed back to shore. The tide was almost out and the wet sand doubled the amount of shoreline visible as they approached.

He turned the boat broadside to the shore and ordered her out, practically throwing her over the side and into the surf. Then he gunned the boat and turned back out to sea before the shallow waves could swamp him or drive him ashore.

‘It’s harder to get fucked than I thought it would be,’ Lisa thought to herself as she dragged herself ashore.

Her clean clothes were soaked through (well, her shorts were already wet from earlier). She climbed up the beach to where the dry sand was and sat down.

“Thanks for the sandwich,” she called out quietly and sarcastically.

She was disgusted, a little seasick, and very wet. But the morning sun was warm and the breeze was brisk (It was always brisk, which surprised her as the East Coast sea breezes were usually much gentler in the summer except during a squall), and her skimpy clothing dried rapidly.

Realizing she had all of eternity to do whatever she wanted, she lay back in the sand and just relaxed for most of the entire day. Several guys approached her and a pair of girls, but as soon as they realized she wasn’t local, they quickly left her alone.

‘What’s going on here?’ Lisa thought to herself, confused by the mixed attitudes.

‘This much rejection can’t be just me. I know I look better than that!’

The sun was finally setting and people were leaving. She was once again left behind. She lay for awhile longer, playing with the fire in her mind to keep her warm, forming an invisible wall of heat to warm the breeze that constantly whipped around her.

It was nearly dark when she noticed a small group of teens gathered further up the beach. More than a few knew she was lying there in the sand. There were mixed feelings coming from the group – some upset and a lot of hostility toward her and toward white people in general.

She got up and began to walk toward them. She could feel in their minds that they saw her coming and were waiting for her. They were all young, and they were all Latin males. The young men expected her to be afraid as she noticed them. Most halfway intelligent gringo girls were afraid of any group of three or more Latin boys at night, whether they were members of a gang or just hanging out.

Lisa listened to the minds of the boys she was walking toward. They expected her to turn and seek an avenue of escape, so she decided to play their little game. She stopped and looked behind her. There were also several boys following her. They had surrounded her before she’d even gotten up.

Lisa grinned, recognizing the predatory nature of animal minds in young human bodies. She knew the contempt her mother felt for people such as these. These people preyed on the weak and the helpless. She was neither, but she knew what her mother expected her to do if she found animals hiding in human bodies. She wondered if her mother would expect her to kill all of them.

Remembering her promise to her folks about not using her power to overwhelm the free will of those around her simply for self-gratification, she walked toward the small group ahead of her. She never promised not to seek out those who would prey on her – those who would force their sexual will on her, not knowing that it was she who hunted them.

“Ola, Chiquita,” one called out to her, stepping out from the group. “You are a long way from the safety of your white-picket-fence casa.”

It was too dark to see his evil grin, but Lisa felt it in her mind. She smiled back, knowing he couldn’t see her well, either. Looking into his mind, she could see how she looked to him – a slender silhouette, weak and female – a few hours of torture and diversion for he and his friends, with maybe a little something left over to bury in the sand, later.

“Perhaps you can show me the way, Signor,” Lisa suggested, deliberating baiting him by mispronouncing the word.

“Perhaps I will show you something,” he agreed. The others behind him laughed evilly. “What is your name, Juarista?”

“No, it’s Lisa,” Lisa told him. “I don’t know anyone named Juarista. Are you looking for her, perhaps?”

Her ‘accidental’ misunderstanding of what Juan had called her made the others laugh. They all knew only too well how it felt to misunderstand something simply because they didn’t know the right words. In their twenty-second century Latino slang, a ‘juarista’ was the Spanish equivalent of ‘slut-bod’, or just plain ‘slut’.

“Always looking. But, perhaps you will do,” the young Latin informed her. “You will make a very good juarista.”

Lisa watched them, inside their minds, enjoying their belief that they were frightening her.

Lisa was close enough now. He reached out, lightening quick, and snatched off her T-shirt, tearing the material right off her.

“Ow! Hey!” Lisa cried, pretending upset. “You owe me for that!”

She didn’t seem to notice that her breasts were exposed, or that the young men who had been following her were now standing behind her. She didn’t seem surprised when they grabbed her either; actually holding out her arms to each side so they could grab her more easily.

She wriggled in the embrace of the young man holding her from behind – not because she was frightened, but because she was ticklish. She laughed and writhed in his arms as he held her, grasping her more tightly so she wouldn’t slip out of his grip.

“You don’t seem very frightened, little Puta,” their obvious leader said to her. “Aren’t you afraid of what I might do to you?”

He grinned. He was close enough now so she could see him in the twilight. He wasn’t very pretty. He’d been in a lot of fights.

“I was looking for what you might do when I came this way,” Lisa admitted, smiling back.

She could see he didn’t like willing girls, especially Gringo whores. He preferred everyone to be frightened of him. His leadership depended on terrorizing others. And this gringo girl wasn’t acting very terrorized.

“Maybe you’ll be more afraid of this!” he snarled at her, pulling out his blade.

Lisa’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. She licked her lips in anticipation.

“Oh, yes!” Lisa practically drooled. “That simply terrifies me!”

Her body trembled. She couldn’t help but tremble. She was too horny to stand still. Something in her voice made Juan realize she was taunting him. He swung the blade in front of him, slashing her across her ribs. He loved the cry she made. She wasn’t laughing at him, now. But, he realized as he stared into her dark eyes, she still wasn’t afraid of him, or any of them, for that matter, even though her blood flowed freely down her front.

He reached down and shoved his fingers down inside the waistband of her shorts. Lisa actually spread her legs, thinking he might be going there, but he wasn’t; not yet, anyway. He quickly slashed through the elastic strap of her waistband and pulled hard, tearing the material and exposing her bare pussy.

He chattered something in Spanish. The others laughed. Lisa could see in his mind what he’d told them. ‘We have a young one – she hasn’t even grown her beard yet!’

“Hair doesn’t grow down there on my people,” she told him, letting him know that he was molesting someone special who also understood him.

That she answered in English seemed to anger him, as she expected it would. She gloated to herself as she watched his anger rise. Even though she hadn’t interacted much with others during her short life, she could read people really well. Her only mistake with handling her step-mom and her parents was that she’d psychically forced them to have sex with her.

“Your people?” he spit on her. “You think you’re some special fucking Indian? You deserve special treatment? Here’s some special treatment! This is what you deserve, Indian bitch!”

He slashed upward, burying his knife up to the handle in her left breast.

Lisa gasped at the wonderful, white-hot sensation. It took every ounce of her will power to keep from ‘flaming’ with her orgasm as she cried out and writhed in the strong arms holding her.

She was more frightened now. She’d almost cooked them alive. She didn’t want to kill the weak little humans – she only wanted to play with them, and have them play with her. If any tried to kill her, she would, of course, follow her mother’s wishes. As a member of a superior species, she was expected to protect the weakling humans – the good ones, anyway.

The man holding her with one arm around her neck said something. Lisa looked into his mind to see what it was. ‘Leave something for us, Juan,’ he’d said. He was actually concerned for her, probably because he was already in full body contact with her naked backside and wanted to fuck her himself.

‘This one’s not a murderer. I will spare him if he lets me…’ she decided.

She could feel his hard cock rubbing against her butt cheeks as he held her. She decided to reward his brave, but momentary and ineffectual attempt to protect the weak, captive girl. Somehow his cock was freed from his trousers and found itself happily rubbing between her legs, helped somewhat by her hands, which were being cruelly held behind her. Then it was nudging its way into her tight little ass, once again guided by her hot little hands.

Lisa moaned quietly and closed her eyes to keep from giving away her ecstasy at being reamed in the ass right in front of twenty guys while none of them even realized it, except the one with his big cock in her ass.

“You can’t hide by closing your eyes to me, Puta bitch!” Juan snarled.

He backhanded her across the face. It felt painful! It felt wonderful! Lisa added it to the marvelous sensations her body was experiencing along with the two knife wounds – one almost healed now – and the big cock slowly working its way up into her tight, dry ass. The head of his cock was almost past her splincter. She squirmed, trying to get it in deeper.

“Look at me, whore!” Juan shouted.

He pried her eyes open. They gazed at each other. She couldn’t hide it, anymore. He could see the lust in her eyes as she felt the man holding her come, shooting his hot sperm into her ass. She could feel the sweet warmth of his cum as the cock hidden halfway up her ass jerked again and again.

Juan laughed. It was an evil sound.

“She likes what we’re doing to her! She lusts!” he cried out. He said some more in Spanish, ‘She smells as though she were in heat! Have at her!’

Then everyone surged toward her and began groping her. Lisa fell to the ground as someone tried to pick her up by her legs. The man who had tried to ream her ass disappeared into the mass of bodies surrounding her, probably to cover up the fact that he’d already secretly fucked her ass.

Someone was holding her legs apart – probably one person on each leg. That would account for the weight on them. She could see one person on each arm holding them down. They began fucking her, one person holding down an arm or a leg, one person in her cunt, and one person shoving his salt water scented cock into her mouth.

Excited beyond reason at finally being fucked, Lisa twisted and jerked her pelvis around, joyfully participating in her gang rape as much as they’d let her.

Surprisingly, no one out of this unimaginative bunch wanted to fuck her in the ass. One by one, they fucked her cunt or they fucked her mouth. Some did both. Once each one pumped his cum into her, that person seemed to disappear.

Although Lisa was shielding her mind so that she wasn’t overwhelmed by the onslaught of animal lust these boys generated, she could tell that quite a few of the boys who fucked her and fled were more upset than they were sexually satisfied. Each seemed to believe that this beautiful, hot-pussied little gringo girl wouldn’t live until morning. The thought upset many of them, but not enough to try to save her. This should have troubled her, but Lisa was having too much fun being fucked to be concerned about it.

Lisa was certain everyone had fucked her at least once. It was hard to count how many she'd fucked tonight because her rapists kept leaving and new ones kept coming. Then Juan had his trousers off and was kneeling down between her legs in the sand. He had his cock out. It looked bigger than her dad’s. She jutted her hips upward, ready to receive him into her cum-filled cunt, hoping he rammed it in hard.

Then her vision was blocked as someone kneeled down with one knee on each of her shoulders. The new intruder squashed her tits with his big ass. Then he was trying to shove his hard cock into her mouth. The angle was all wrong and she couldn’t raise her head enough to accommodate him because the moron’s knees were holding her shoulders down.

‘I can’t reach you, you idiot,’ Lisa thought into the guy’s head. ‘Move up more and get your damned knees off me!’

Her whole body shook as Juan rammed his cock up into her slippery, wet cunt as hard as he could. She was wet enough so that it didn’t rupture her pussy walls, but it was still wonderfully painful. The guy on top of her lost his balance and slid forward on her cum-slicked body. His hard knees slid painfully off her shoulders and down into the sand, one on each side of her head and painfully pinning her down with her own hair. His thick cock slid forward into her mouth and rammed against the back of her throat.

The newcomer’s big cock was jammed down her throat. Lisa couldn’t breath, but she didn’t care. She was being fucked! And she was being fucked a lot! The big guy with his cock in her mouth finally moved. He began to fuck her face as he lay on top of her with his face in the sand. Lisa picked up the image of him fucking his pillow exactly like he was fucking her face.

‘Pillows don’t bite when they can’t breath, dummy,’ she thought at him, gently raking her teeth against the smooth, silky flesh of his hard-on.

He froze for a moment with his cock barely in her mouth, allowing Lisa to take a breath, then continued as he felt her swirl her tongue around the end of his cock, teasing him. A second later, he came, flooding her mouth with salty, bitter tasting cum.

As soon as he climbed off her, Lisa turned her head and spit it out. She barely had time to take another breath before someone else dropped down into the sand next to her, splashing sand in her eyes and shoving a cock into her mouth.

She couldn’t straighten her head to get the kink out of her neck, but at least she could breath with this one. If it wasn’t for the marvelous sensations of Juan royally fucking her with that big cock of his, Lisa realized she might be just a little annoyed at the way these jerks were treating her. After all, her parents had told her not to force her will on the weak-minded humans, but that seemed to be what they were doing to her – not that she minded. She was finally getting all the sex she wanted. She wished the humans would see it that way when she did it to them.

As the man kneeling in the sand fucked her face, Lisa felt the warm radiation of Juan’s approaching orgasm flow through her body. She reflected it back to him, uncertain of what would happen, but it seemed normal to do that.

Suddenly all the air was crushed out of her lungs. Stuff was being forced out of her mouth and nose. She was spitting up all over the dick in her mouth. Liquid was being squashed out between her legs and she realized that she was pissing on Juan’s hard cock, buried to the hilt inside her.

Lisa lay, gasping like a fish, unable to draw a breath and feeling like she’d been broken in half. The man who’d been fucking her face backed away in disgust at the mess she threw up on his cock. In agony, she looked up at the tall man who had stomped on her belly. He was almost starving-thin, and his unkempt beard almost hid his entire face.

She could feel in his mind that he’d stomped on her stomach because he liked to watch beautiful, sleek female muscles working in sexual abandon and then rupturing them mid-stroke with his foot, or worse, with a large sledge. He preferred using his feet because it was more personal that way. Also, Juan had discovered that he liked the way a girl’s cunt clamped down on him while she was being stomped on by his cohort.

As Lisa stared in shock at the young men’s faces, she realized that Juan intended to fuck her while his friend stomped her to death.

The fun was over. The man stomped on her stomach again as Juan came into her piss-filled cunt. They were going to kill her. Lisa was enraged, now. She reached out with her mind and simply vaporized the bastard standing over her before he could stomp on her a third time. It happened so quickly that he didn’t even have time to scream. Then Lisa turned her attention on Juan.

‘All I wanted was a good fuck!’ she exclaimed into his mind. ‘You’re a sick bastard and you have to die, but first I intend to get what I came for!’

Juan had pulled out and away from her when Felix vanished in a ball of fire, preparing to flee this demon who had just vaporized his friend. As he heard her words in his mind, he realized that she still offered her body to him despite what he’d done to her. She was offering him ultimate pleasure. He grinned, and moved forward, allowing her to guide his sticky, half-hard cock back into her. He knew who would die tonight, and it wasn’t going to be him.

After what this bastard had done to her, Lisa didn’t feel the least compelled to follow her parents’ wishes regarding mind control. She flooded Juan’s mind with her need for more sex. His cock hardened almost instantly, growing inside her to even larger proportions than before. Juan began pounding her soft, bruised stomach with his fists while he pounded his cock into her cunt, luxuriating in the twitching of her cunt with every blow he landed.

“Stop!” Lisa cried out after being punched in the gut several times. She was getting tired of having to dissipate the pain from each blow. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t we just fuck like normal people?”

Wrapping her mind around his, she forced her way inside. Juan may have been human once, but now, his mind was full of rage and hate. He hated women. He hated Gringos. He hated Latinos. He hated life. There were over a dozen young girls buried in the sands along this stretch of beach that he, personally, had murdered for his sadistic pleasure. He had murdered dozens more and fed them to the ocean. He planned to add her to his special ‘collection’ in the sand.

Lisa pulled him down against her so he’d stop hitting her. Juan began fucking her harder and gouging her in the ribs. She closed her eyes and arched her back in orgasm. As soon as she wasn’t watching him, he leaned over to his trousers and fished out his hunting knife. When she came again like that, he was going to split her belly wide open.

His orgasm was getting close. Lisa’s body was feeling warmer, hotter than before. Juan had never felt this good about murdering a young girl. His dick was positively on fire now. The girl was so hot inside, she must be getting ready to come, again. When she arched her back into the air this time, that was when he would do it. His orgasm approached rapidly as he imagined how her hot, wet cunt would feel clenching his cock in the agony of her death throes.

It was almost time! She was arching into the air! Her cunt was so hot! So burning hot! He was coming! He was burning up! As he plunged the knife into her upraised belly, he realized this was the most incredible orgasm he’d ever had.

Lisa cried out in orgasm, and then in agony as the knife sliced into her belly. Then Juan was screaming in orgasm – screaming as he came into her scorching hot cunt – screaming as his body ignited and vaporized into a white, powdery ash that burst out like confetti and floated down over his victim.

Lisa crashed back down to the ground exhausted from her overwhelmingly powerful orgasm. She hadn’t actually intended to burn her new lover up, but in her ecstasy she’d lost control of the nuclear fire in her mind that she’d angrily set free against the ‘stomper’ a few moments earlier. The hot knife in her belly was what did it. If Juan hadn’t tried to kill her, she wouldn’t have cooked him.

Exhausted and extremely satisfied, she fell asleep where she lay; covered with sperm and the dusty remains of the two men she’d vaporized with her personal little nuclear furnace.

In the morning, she was awakened by the loud screech of a dive bombing sea gull. There were dozens of them surrounding her. They seemed quite surprised when she moved. Lisa laughed as she watched them fly. They were so big, so close, so beautiful. She felt the sudden urge to soar in the air, although she never actually cared to fly, before, since it was easier to simply levitate. She had never felt a need to fly, even though she had always known how.

Standing up, she cast around with her mind, searching for anyone who might see her. But everyone had fled when the stomper, Felix, had appeared on the scene last night. There was no one close by, so she flung her arms back behind her, forming her wings. Taking a running jump, she launched herself into the air, beating her wings furiously for altitude.

She circled around, playfully chasing the gulls for a few minutes, quickly becoming winded from her efforts. When she was younger, and smaller, she’d flown some with her mother. Her mom luxuriated in the power of flight, and could stay aloft for hours at a time. Lisa usually cheated, levitating alongside her mother instead of using her wings.

The difference in the stamina between mother and daughter was presenting itself now. Lisa was exhausted after only five minutes in the air. She circled back toward the beach, only to discover that there was someone walking the beach where she’d awakened. She couldn’t fly back and land without being seen. She would have to swim back to shore.

Soaring down near the surface of the water, Lisa folded her wings behind her, reforming her arms, and plunged into the icy water. The short fall drove the air out of her lungs and she struggled madly toward the light above her, every nerve in her body screaming and complaining about the sudden and drastic temperature change. She burst through to the surface, gasping for air.

Last night, she’d been gang-raped. This morning she’d flown with the gulls and now she was swimming in the icy Pacific. As she churned up the water, trying to swim to shore, she realized she had never felt so alive. She was free. She was immortal. She was experiencing life. She was happy.

She was drowning! She’d never swum before. She was just catching on to paddling around when she noticed someone, or some thing, had its attention on her. And it was approaching fast. Lisa picked up an image of her feet churning in the water. Along with that image was the knowledge of how wonderful her twitching legs were going to feel sliding down its throat.

‘Holy shit!’ Lisa thought, and frantically levitated straight up out of the water.

She looked down to see a huge, tooth-filled mouth following her up, up, out of the water! Terrified, she continued levitating upward. The tooth-filled mouth slowed, then fell away, revealing a long, black and white shark plunging back down and smashing into the water sideways.

She could feel its disappointment. It was used to being fed at least once a week. Some struggling, bleeding girl would be dangled above the water just about where she was right now. It would devour her alive. Usually, there were others like her around, watching from the safety of their craft. It remembered feeling the admiration and awe that radiated from the warm-blooded ones as it fed on their offering.

So that’s what happened to the girls he didn’t kill outright, she realized, stunned. They were fed to the sharks!

She felt less guilty about killing Juan, but now she had to figure out what to do about the shark. It would probably hang around until it found someone like her, too far from shore to reach safety in time, and ate her, or him.

The shark dove down thirty feet to the bottom, then rushed back up, breaching the surface again and arching into the air in a futile effort to reach her. It didn’t understand why she was so high out of the water. Usually, its meal was dangled only a few feet above the water so its admirers could watch as it tore its wriggling, squealing, juicy meal apart.

Lisa wrapped her mind around the beast’s tiny brain. It was a natural predator, but it was also extremely paranoid. It didn’t really trust the warm-blooded ones who had been feeding it their defective offspring. But until now, their offerings had been extremely pleasant, squirmy things to devour, and very filling.

Now Lisa reinforced that paranoia, convincing it that the feedings had been a ruse, a trap to trick the shark into a routine so it could be caught and pulled from the water to die in the thin, lifeless air above. It knew about that. It had noticed that happen to others like itself. It fled, convinced of her lie. She didn’t believe it would come back.

There was a boat approaching. Lisa dropped down into the water and reached out to feel the minds on the boat. They hadn’t seen her levitating and passed on by, not noticing her bobbing in the water. She let them pass, not certain how she would explain her presence this far from shore. She began paddling toward the shore again. Her body was getting used to the temperature of the water.

She found that it was pretty easy to float, so when she tired of paddling, she simply floated for awhile until the burning left her arms and legs. Then she would paddle for awhile. The shoreline seemed to be getting nearer.

The sun was up, now, and buzzing in her head. Almost automatically, she shielded her mind from its annoying roar. She didn’t really know how she did it, and had tried to teach her mom once, but her mom couldn’t generate enough power to neutralize the noise of the sun in her mind.

As she paddled, Lisa wondered if she was perhaps another advancement in the species. Her mom could do lots of things that normal humans couldn’t, but Lisa could do a lot of things her mom couldn’t do, like levitate, and burn things just by looking at them.

The waves were suddenly a lot higher. Lisa looked around, trying to figure out why. The ocean bottom was a lot nearer to the surface now. Maybe that was it. As she floated, wondering about it, she was lifted high into the air. Amazed, she looked around. There was water above her and below her. In addition, she was floating sideways in a vertical wall of water connecting the water above and below her. Then, she was upside down and falling down, out of the water – and back into it, below her!

As she fell, she discovered she was completely surrounded by water, except for a long, airy tunnel, stretching off in opposite directions. Then she was in the water again, tumbling wildly as the tunnel of air tightened around her. In seconds, her tiny tunnel of air was completely gone and she was slammed violently into the sandy bottom by tons of water falling directly on her.

Barely conscious, she felt herself being shoved along the sandy bottom by the violent forces surrounding her. There was no air in her lungs – the force of the water had flattened her that much. In a moment of comparative calm, she shoved away from the bottom toward the light above her.

As she breached the surface, gasping for air, she felt herself being pulled away from the shoreline. She looked around. Another towering wave of water was plummeting down directly at her. There was no way she could escape it. Before she could even think of a location to teleport into, it dropped down on her, slamming her back down against the bottom. This time, she hit a rock. Everything went dark.

Time passed.

Lisa became aware of water rushing around her – sandy water that filled her mouth with grit and got into her eyes, even though they were closed. Someone was dragging her through the sandy water. Then she was being dragged across hard sand. It burned her breasts and belly as she was dragged over it. Her legs, her knees especially, were being scoured raw. Then the hands let go and dropped her.

She felt someone pressing hard against the center of her back, over and over, again. The fierce, insistent pressure was hurting her rib cage. Then she was convulsing, spitting up water. She was surprised to find that her lungs had filled with water. It burned terribly as she spewed it out, choking and gagging violently.

“Well, you’re alive!” a male voice said, sounding relieved and breathing heavily from rescuing her. “I don’t know where your board’s at. It’s probably broken, though. Those waves are pretty fierce today. I’d never go out in surf like that.”

Lisa tried to struggle upright, pushing against the hard sand, but her arms were too weak to support her.

“I should tell you, before you turn over,” her savior said, his voice almost laughing cheerfully, “you lost more than just your board out there. The waves took your suit, too.”

“Huh?” she asked, then realized he meant that she was naked. “Oh.”

She dropped back down onto the sand. She felt his mind gently nudging against hers. She was still shielded against the sun. Not even her mother could penetrate that shield, and her mother was the most powerful telepath in the world. She wasn’t worried about him getting through and reading her.

Lisa’s mind was working better now. She could think again. In the last few hours, she’s been almost killed four times. Now she was lying in the sand, naked, next to some boy who’d pulled her out of the ocean. She realized that she possibly wouldn’t have awakened in time to save herself without his help. And he was afraid she’d be upset if he saw her tits.

“I owe you at least one good look,” she said, still breathless from her ordeal.

She turned over, exposing her breasts and belly to him. That wasn’t really why she did it. She wanted to turn over so she could see who had saved her.

They stared at each other with recognition in their eyes.

“It’s you!” they both said together.

“I’m sorry…” he began.

“Thank you,” Lisa said, interrupting him. “You were the one good thing that happened to me last night. And today, you saved my life.”

“About what happened,” he said, concern written on his face. “Last night. I know what he does to girls. But, Juan owns us. If we don’t do what he says…”

An image of a young girl, his sister, flashed across her mind.

“You don’t have to worry about Juan,” Lisa assured him. “Or his big stomping bastard friend, either. Not ever.”

“What did you do?” he asked, worried now about what would happen if someone angered Juan.

People got hurt when Juan was upset – innocent people – family members in the community, usually.

She looked at him. “He’s dead. Does it matter what I did?”

Lisa could see her savior was still worried. “He has two brothers. They will avenge him. If they can’t find who did it, they will start killing us until you are turned over to them.”

“Was one of his brothers the ‘stomping man’?” she asked.

He shook his head. “They were friends. I think they were maybe more…”

“That would explain his love for women,” Lisa said thoughtfully. “No matter now, though. They’re both dead.”

“What? How?” he wanted to know.

Lisa held up a finger to his lips. She could feel that he urgently wanted to tell her something.

“Okay, I’m waiting,” she said.

She closed her eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the sun as it finally was beginning to warm her cold, nearly drowned body. Also, her new friend seemed to be more nervous talking to her while she watched him trying not to stare at her naked body.

He was silent. Lisa opened her eyes. He was looking out over the ocean. It seemed peaceful on the surface. Even the waves crashing into the sand seemed deceptively peaceful – timeless.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “I’m Lisa. Pestova – Lisa Pestova. Elizabeth, actually.”

He looked at her, then noticed she was watching him – watching his reaction to her nudity. She seemed – pleased – that she made him nervous.

“Mac,” he said. “Call me Mac.”

“Not much of a name,” Lisa said. “Did you just make that up or what? I’d like a better name than that for the first guy who ever shoved a dick up my ass.”

“Macario,” he said, unable to keep from grinning at her remark. “Macario Sebastian Martinez. At your service.”

They grinned at each other.

“Macario,” Lisa said, letting the word slid over her tongue. “I think that’s the prettiest name I’ve ever heard.”

She smiled as she watched Macario blush.

“Does it mean something special?” she asked. “A name like that has to mean something…”

She waited, oddly entranced by this young Latin boy sitting in the sand next to her.

He smiled, still embarrassed. “In English, it means, ‘happy’.”

They sat, silent, for a moment. He seemed to be getting more comfortable in the presence of her nudity.

“An odd contrast,” Lisa observed, “between the man and the name. You seem tortured by something.”

Macario frowned, blinking several times. “Our lives here are not…”

He sighed, not understanding how to tell this beautiful gringo girl what the lives of his people were like. Then he remembered – she wasn’t a gringo! Last night, she’d used the phrase, ‘my people.’ Perhaps she could understand, after all.

“Who are your people?” he asked her.

Lisa saw in his mind where the question had come from. She smiled, not knowing how to tell him.

“My people are not native to this land, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied. “More than that, I’d rather not say. Please don’t be offended. Our secrets keep us alive.”

“Then there are not many of you?” he asked.

She shook her head, agreeing with him. He cleared his throat.

“My people will be harmed if I do not give you to Juan’s brothers,” he explained. “It makes me unhappy to sacrifice one so beautiful as you. You should run – far away. Forget about us.”

“I can’t forget,” Lisa explained. “You saved my life. In my world, I am indebted to you. I would help you, if you let me.”

“You will simply die,” Mac explained earnestly. “And my saving you would be wasted. Leave while you can.”

Lisa sighed. “Sorry, I can’t. Let’s go meet Juan’s brothers. Shall we?”

“You’re willing to die for people you don’t even know?” he asked, simply not believing it.

“You’re willing for people you know to die for me,” Lisa explained. “How can I do less for you? Besides, how do you know I will die? You thought I would die last night.”

“Yes!” Mac said, pouncing on something more tangible to discuss. “How did you survive? Either he butchers the girl himself, or he lets his faggot lover stomp her to death. If she’s still alive in the morning, she gets fed to the sharks.”

Lisa grinned. “The shark won’t be back, either.”

She laughed at his surprised expression.

“You killed a shark?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

He looked her over quickly. There was not a mark on her perfect body. Even the gash on the side of her head and the wound on her shoulder from where she hit the rock was healed.

“I don’t understand,” he said, finally. “Who are you? What are you? I pray daily for an angel to deliver us from the Verdugo Brothers. Are you that angel?”

Lisa had no idea how to answer his soul-rending questions. She sat silently, gazing at him. She didn’t know how her mother calmed the people she helped, but she tried radiating ‘calm’ into Macario’s mind. Surprisingly, he noticed her mental touch.

“I felt you touch my mind last night,” he confessed to her, “and I fled. After I left you with that butcher, I went to confession. I knew it wouldn’t help you, but I needed to unburden my soul. I’ve helped him to kill so many…”

There were tears in his eyes. “I walked the sands this morning, searching for your remains. The gulls always come to this beach. His victims draw them. Part of what I do to protect him is make certain that the remains are covered and out of sight of the turistas. I was glad when I didn’t find you.

“But I saw the gulls flying over the ocean,” he said. “That happens when he feeds the shark. But I swear, as I squinted out to see the gulls – to see if they were diving for food or just flying – I swear I saw an angel flying among them.”

He stared at her intently. She looked away, afraid of his next question – afraid of her answer. She was discovering that she was strongly attracted to this young man, this handsome Latin whose name means ‘happy’ and who was the most tormented, tortured soul she’d ever met.

“Are you that angel?” he asked quietly, hopefully.

She looked up at him, her mouth open, uncertain what would come out.

“I’m not an angel,” she said quietly. Then she added, “but I do know how to fly. Although, I’m not very good at it.”

She sighed, hoping that he wouldn’t flee in terror. She had no idea why she told him that. She felt she couldn’t withhold anything from him. She never felt that way before, not even with her parents. Especially not with her parents!

“Well, angel or not,” he said, confiding in her, “you are special! I felt that last night. Your people must be special people who go where you are needed. And you are desperately needed here.”

“Then, I suppose,” Lisa finished his thought for him, “I suppose we should go met the Verdugo Brothers.”

She rose to her feet. She felt strangely calm – relaxed, even. She didn’t remember a time when she wasn’t tortured about something – fire, sex, parents, whatever.

“We should find you something to wear,” Macario suggested.

‘She's really going to go through with it!’

“How many secrets can you handle in one day?” she asked, cryptically.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I saw you fly, and your people are not indigenous to this place. What other secrets do you have?”

Lisa held out her hand. In her mind, she was visiting her bedroom, picking out something nice to get murdered in. A pair of jeans and a cut-up T-shirt with a Suicide Girls emblem on it appeared in her arms. She quickly put them on.

“Ready,” she said, grinning up at him.

Mac read the T-shirt. “Very appropriate. Let’s go.” He didn’t smile.

“You know a lot of big words,” she said, liking the way he talked.

They walked along the beach for awhile, then up to the road and across a gravel parking lot. Mac noticed that the girl didn’t seem to care that she was walking barefoot on very sharp, hot gravel. His feet were tough, but even he would wince if he were walking barefoot here.

“Do you eat?” he asked. “I mean, are you hungry?”

“Do I eat?” she asked, laughing. “Do I look that much like I come from another planet?”

Macario couldn’t believe that, after she’d just admitted and demonstrated that she was much more than a mere human, she would ask such a question.

“I know you’re from another planet,” he admitted. “I just wanted to know if you’d like to eat before you sacrifice yourself.”

Lisa laughed at the way he said that. “I not going to sacrifice myself.”

“What are you going to do then,” he asked. “Kill them?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Do you think I could ask them not to bother you and your friends any more?”

He laughed at that. “Reasoning with the Verdugo Brothers. That’s a new one. Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” she confessed. “What are my choices? Human or animal?”

She was teasing him, now. He laughed again, less forcefully, this time.

“Animal, I suppose,” he said. “Do you eat humans?”

Lisa smacked him on the arm.

“Not before last night,” she confided in him.

“So, you’re new to this orgy-type thing, then?” he asked, hopefully.

“Well, yes, I guess so,” she admitted. “I’ve never been fucked before. It was fun. At least it was until ‘Stomper’ showed up…”

“You really are an angel,” he said, grinning at her.

Lisa just glared at him. They walked along the road for awhile.

“So I was your first?” he asked, wondering.

“Yeah,” she admitted, “You were the first one back there.”

“You should have stuck around,” she continued. “You could have been the first one in the front part, too. That would have been nice. As it is, I don’t know who was the first one in there. But I remember the last one…”

“But I was your first ever?” he asked again.

She stopped and looked at him. “What kind of a question is that? You humans are really weird. Why would you care if you were my first?”

“Us humans?” he asked, laughing. “And you think I talk funny.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said, puzzled.

“No, but you thought it,” he said.

Lisa stopped in her tracks, stunned. “Can you read my mind? Do you know what I’m thinking of? How did you get through my shields?”

“Your ‘shields?’ You sound like somebody from Star Trek,” he said, almost laughing. “I can only tell what you’re thinking when you’re thinking about me. Okay?”

He turned to walk further up the road.

“You’re an Empath!” she accused him, taking a couple of long strides to catch up.

“I wasn’t before you came along,” he confided in her. “I can only read you!”

“Wow!” Lisa said. “I’ve never had that happen before. At least, not with a human – a human male, that is. Not in this lifetime.”

“You keep qualifying everything you say like that,” he told her, “and I’m going to start believing you’re really a Sapphic goddess from another planet that’s reincarnated into an earth body to save the planet or something.”

Lisa stopped in her tracks again, stunned. She stared at him, her mouth hanging open.

“Oh, God!” he exclaimed. “You are? I don’t believe it!”

“Okay, good!” she replied. “Don’t believe it! I didn’t say it anyway!”

She started walking again, getting ahead of him.

‘God! No secret I have is safe with him!’

“Yes it is,” he responded, trotting to catch up. “Your secrets are safe. I won’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me, anyway?”

She didn’t answer. They walked another half mile.

The road was paved now, and there were low, single-story buildings across the road from them as they walked. There was still no traffic, so they walked on the blacktop. Mac noticed that the girl ignored the hot tar on the road they traversed just like she’d ignored the sharp gravel earlier.

Lisa suddenly noticed that Macario wasn’t beside her anymore. He’d stopped walking. She turned around. He was about ten paces behind her, just standing. She walked back to him.

“What is it?” she asked. “Are we there yet?”

He nodded. Lisa looked across the road. There was a gravel driveway and a tumbledown shack about two hundred feet off the road. She heard him sigh and looked up at him.

Macario gazed down at her. “Don’t go in there.”

“You know I have to,” she replied. “Perhaps they’ll listen to reason.”

She tried to sound hopeful.

“I’ll go with you,” he said gallantly.

He knew that, if he went in there, the chances were good that he would be carried out.

“You don’t have to,” Lisa said, trying to spare him.

“Yes he does,” a loud voice said from behind them.

Mac whirled around. “Carlos! Um. Yes. Carlos. Good to see you.”

He felt terrified. Not especially for himself, but now, there was no backing out. Up until the time Carlos Verdugo appeared behind them, he was hoping to talk Lisa out of her suicidal venture.

“Hi! I’m Lisa!” Lisa said, perkily. “I killed your brother, Juan, and his lover, that ‘Stomper’ fellow. I’ll kill you too if you don’t leave Macario’s people alone.”

She smiled up at him. Macario felt faint. The girl had just signed their death certificates with her idiotic words.

“I also chased away your shark,” she added, just for good measure.

Carlos snarled at her. He reached out, grabbed Lisa around her throat, and lifted her off the ground. He grinned as he began to squeeze her throat shut.

‘I suggest you put me down before you lose an arm,’ both men heard in their heads.

Carlos squeezed harder. Macario could hear cartilage being crushed in Lisa’s throat.

‘I’m losing patience. Put me down!’

She sounded more determined, now.

Suddenly Carlos cried out, and backed away from them. Macario didn’t believe what he was looking at.

Carlos’ arm was simply gone from the elbow down. He wasn’t even bleeding. The intense heat of his arm being vaporized had cauterized the wound. Strange, whimpering, animal sounds were coming out of Carlos’ throat. Then Carlos fainted dead away from shock.

Lisa lowered herself gently, her hands held out parallel to the ground with her fingers gracefully extended, as though she was controlling her downward levitation with her hands. Mac thought she looked like Peter Pan with long dark hair and luscious breasts that were scarcely hidden behind that thin cut off T-shirt.

“Where’s the other one?” she asked cheerfully as her feet touched the ground.

Mac mutely gazed toward the old shack. Lisa began walking up the driveway. Mac hesitated for a moment, then hurried to catch up with her.

“That’s far enough!” someone inside said, stopping them both.

Then Lisa took a few more steps. The ground erupted in front of her. A gunshot rang in both their ears.

“I said…”

“I heard you,” Lisa called out. “I’m coming in anyway, so you may as well invite me in…”

She began walking again, then turned her head back toward her beautiful Macario.

“Stay there,” she told him.

“Like hell!” he exclaimed.

He ran up beside her. He heard another shot ring out, but didn’t see where it hit. The air in front of him was all sparkly and full of smoke. He heard Lisa sigh, and realized that she had somehow prevented him from being shot.

Lisa stepped forward again. Mac hesitated only a second, then strode to catch up with her. Lisa staggered back a step as another shot was fired from the old shack. Mac realized that she hadn’t even bothered to protect herself like she’d protected him. He looked at her. There was a hole in her chest, right where her heart was. It didn’t seem to be bleeding much.

“Fucker,” he heard Lisa say.

She stepped forward again. The stranger in the shack shot her again, this time in the stomach as he realized that she must be wearing armor under her innocent-looking T-shirt, but he see her bare belly and he put a good-sized hole where her belly button had been with his shotgun.

Lisa staggered backward, her hand not quite covering the shredded, bleeding hole in her stomach.

“Fuck! That hurts!” she exclaimed. “Stop shooting me and let me in, you asshole!”

She walked forward again. The next shot got her in the hip. Evidently, Mac realized, the remaining brother had decided that, since he couldn’t kill her, perhaps he could cripple her so she wouldn’t come any closer.

“That does it!” Lisa cried out. “Fuck this!”

She glared up at the shack. The walls suddenly ignited. There was a single terrified scream from inside, then the entire shack collapsed inward, burnt to a crisp.

They were both knocked flat on the ground as a half case of dynamite that was stored inside went off blasting the remains of the shack high into the air. Boards, splinters and other bits of shrapnel fell everywhere. Some of it seemed to burst into powder as it came down over their heads. Macario decided that the girl really did have one of those Star Trek shields.

As he and Lisa picked themselves up off the ground, he thought he heard her murmur, “Oh, that’s what those little rods are for…”

Mac staggered over to her to check out her wounds. The one in her chest was already healed and her stomach was barely bleeding now. The ten-gauge hollow point shell that struck her hipbone, however, had done a lot of structural damage. She couldn’t walk.

Mac realized that Lisa could actually handle soft tissue damage better than bone crunching damage. She seemed to have limits, after all. The thought that she could actually be hurt struck a tender chord deep in his soul. He felt himself wanting to protect her, which was ridiculous, on the face of it. It was she that had protected him and kept him from being shot.

Macario bent over to help her get her jeans off so she could tend to her shattered hipbone. Suddenly Lisa grabbed him and pulled him to one side, rolling over on top of him. He heard her grunt as she jerked violently several times. Carlos was on top of them both, stabbing her in the back, over and over.

“Die, you witch! Die! Die! Die!” Carlos kept shouting, over and over with each downward stroke.

Mac couldn’t stand the heart-rending grunts and gurgles that were coming from Lisa’s throat as her body jerked with each violent stab into her back. He was finally able to leverage Lisa’s shuddering body over.

He rolled over on top of her to protect her from any more stabbing wounds and kicked at Carlo’s legs. Luck must have been with him. He actually connected and Carlos toppled over. But he got up quickly and attacked Mac, now.

Mac tried to roll Carlos on the ground, but the mean bastard was a savvy brawler. Even though Carlos lacked a forearm, Mac was completely at his mercy, and Carlos didn’t have much of that to begin with. He stabbed Macario twice in his upper chest, just to show Mac that he could, then raised his blade over his head preparing to cut his head off.

The knife evaporated, going from a solid to a gaseous state in less than a second. The white fire continued on up Carlos’ hand, burning it to powder – even the bone. Carlos was screaming, now. The flame reached his elbow. Macario, watching in awe, expected it to stop there. It didn’t. It continued on up to Carlos’ shoulder. His clothes were on fire now from the fierce, bone-dissolving heat. Carlos fell to the ground, shrieking and flaying his legs and his remaining stump of an arm around.

Lisa finished him quickly, dissolving his entire body into white powder in the next second or two, finally feeling some mercy, or maybe she had simply waited until Carlos was safely away from Macario, or perhaps she just got tired of listening to Carlos’ screams.

“Why do they always insist on being killed?” she asked no one in particular.

She coughed. Blood appeared in her mouth and she spit it out. Man and woman, they crawled toward each other, seeking comfort and to check out each other’s wounds.

“God!” Macario gasped, coughing blood himself. “Are you… Let me see… Your back…”

He swallowed a mouthful of blood, realizing that one of his lungs had probably collapsed.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Lisa demanded, her eyes tearing up. “Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

She was looking at his chest wounds, probing them with her fingers, trying to get inside with her mind. But close cellular work was a talent of her mother’s. Lisa’s mind contained too much power for close work.

“I couldn’t let him hurt you any more,” Macario said, sounding much weaker, now. “I realized that I’d fallen in love with you. I’d rather die than have him strike you one more time.”

“Macario,” Lisa sobbed.

He was going into shock. She could feel him growing weaker by the minute.

“I love you, Elizabeth Pestova,” he said, gasping. “Remember me, will you?”

Lisa couldn’t see him for the tears in her eyes. She realized that, in the short time they’d known each other, he had demonstrated the noblest qualities that humankind had ever strived for. She suddenly discovered that she loved him.

“Macario,” she said quietly.

Mac opened his eyes and gazed wearily into hers.

“Macario, I’m a vampire. Do you know what that means?”

Mac nodded, then coughed. “If you were the most evil demon from hell, I would still love you.”

He coughed again. This time more blood came up.

“You’re not just saying that because you know I can save you?” she asked, candidly.

She already knew the answer. She could see it in his mind. He smiled at her, then coughed more blood.

Lisa sighed and looked around for something to cut herself with. Her wounds had healed in the short time since the shack blew up and she needed to make another hole in her body to bleed from. The ground was littered with rusted nails from the roof of the shack. She picked one up and casually slashed the vein in her wrist with it.

“Here,” she said, trying to sound bored. “Have some lunch.”

She held out her arm. He began sucking. After a few minutes, the wound on her wrist healed, and his lips began moving up her arm. He was radiating sexual desire. She expected it. Rejuvenation always made people horny.

“Whoa, big boy,” Lisa exclaimed. “Let’s check you out, first!”

She looked where the horrid knife wounds had been in his chest. Not believing they were entirely healed, she made him cough, several times. Then she kissed him. When he kissed her in return, her toes curled.

Then he was kissing her neck, sending chills up and down her naked body. When he reached her breasts with his tongue, she was practically orgasmic. It only took him a second to pull off his jeans, then he thrust his hard cock inside her. Lisa orgasmed before he had it in all the way.

“How’s the front part feel?” she asked him when she could speak again.

“Feels great!” Mac exclaimed, grinning at her. “It’s a lot wetter!”

He thrust into her again. Lisa was surprised that they weren’t just fucking. He had his cock inside her, of course, but they were moving their entire bodies against each other. They loved each other with their entire bodies, writhing against each other and trying to merge their bodies together into a single orgasmic unit.

When Lisa came, her orgasm took over her entire body as well. She trembled and arched her back and pressed herself against him harder, again trying to merge her body with his. She was very careful not to burn anything as she felt him join her with his own orgasm. They lay together in each others’ arms, in the middle of the dirt and gravel driveway under the hot, afternoon sun, surrounded by shrapnel and debris from the shack she’d blown up.

“How does Elizabeth Pestova Martinez sound?” he asked her.

“That sounds terrible!” Lisa exclaimed, laughing in surprise. “Especially that Pestova part!”

It was at least an hour since Lisa had blown up the Verdugo Brothers shack. Still, no one had come to check out the explosion.

“That had to have been heard for miles!” Lisa exclaimed. “Where is everybody?”

“People around here know,” Mac explained. “If there’s something going on with the Verdugo Brothers, you run the other way. It’s a survival tactic. You learn it early.”

“You didn’t run the other way,” she reminded him.

“That’s because you didn’t!” he clarified.

“That’s no excuse,” Lisa told him. “I wasn’t raised here. You can’t expect me to know your local survival tactics.”

“Local?” he asked. “You weren’t even raised on Earth!”

“Yes I was,” Lisa insisted. “This time, anyway.”

They began walking back.

“So, about this ‘vampire’ thing,” Mac asked. “How is it that you can stand the sunlight and throw fire and stuff. Vampires can’t do that.”

“You read too much. Besides, I’m also a Phoenix,” she confessed. “Didn’t I mention that, along with all the other space opera stuff you told me I am?”

“So you can come back from your own ashes, and control fire and stuff like that?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she admitted, “but I’ve only come back from my own ashes once. My mother is the real Phoenix. Her body was completely reconstructed from her own ashes. I was born with this body.”

They walked for awhile longer while Mac digested what he knew about the fantastic young girl he’d fallen head over heels for.

“So you can fly,” he said, counting on his finger the things that normal people couldn’t do, “you can throw fire, you can heal the dying. What else… Oh, yeah! I saw you float in the air back there when Carlos lost his arm. Is that part of the flying?”

“No, that’s something else,” Lisa told him. “It’s called levitation. I’m the only one I know who can do that.”

“What about that ‘force field’ thing?” he asked. “How did you do that?”

“Throwing really hot fire, really fast,” she told him. “You have to stop time to do that.”

Macario stopped walking. “You can stop time?” he asked, incredulously.

Lisa sighed. She turned back to look at him. “Well, yes. I can stop time. But only for a second or two.”

She stared at him for a few seconds, then was unable to keep from grinning at her little joke. It took him another moment to realize that he’d been had. You can’t stop time for a second. A second is how you measure time.

They both walked a bit farther. “What else can you do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What have we covered?”

“Let’s see,” he murmured, almost to himself, but loud enough for her to hear. “What’s special about you; walking, talking, fucking, loving me, um, throwing fire, stopping time, healing, living forever, uh, levitation, roasting people you don’t like, hum. That’s about it, I think.”

“I can teleport, too,” she said.

She was suddenly walking on his other side. Mac actually tripped and fell, stumbling over his own feet. Laughing, Lisa helped him up.

“Does it bother you to run around naked all the time?” he asked, surprising himself with the idea that someone seeing her might be offended by her nudity.

“And how is it that walking on hot tar roads and gravel doesn’t bother your bare feet?” he asked, before she could address the comment about her attire.

“Come here,” Lisa said, stopping and motioning with her hand.

Mac stopped and walked back to her.

She held out her arms, stiffly, straight out from her shoulders. “Pick me up.”

Gazing happily at her bare breasts, he carefully grasped her just under her rib cage and he lifted her. He almost fell over as he launched her into the air. She laughed as she levitated back down to the ground.

“You only weigh about ten pounds!” he exclaimed. “You were a lot heavier in the ocean!”

“That’s levitation, too,” she explained. “Ten pounds of pressure on the bottom of my feet when I’m walking on gravel or hot blacktop doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my full hundred pounds would.”

“You cheat!” Mac accused her.

He laughed and tousled her hair.

Lisa finally noticed signs of another group of people as they neared the beach. She stopped.

“I should probably put something on,” she explained.

She did the same routine of pulling, that is, teleporting, something to wear out of her bedroom closet. This time it was one of her mom’s silk sarongs that she’d swiped and never returned to her. Mac thought it looked short and sexy. In other words, he loved it.

“One more question,” he said.

She already knew what he would ask, but waited anyway.

“Where do you keep your clothes?” he asked. “Some extra-dimensional pocket of inner space, or something like that?”

Lisa shrugged; a motion that she’d seen her mother do a lot. She decided it had a place in her body language vocabulary. “Something like that.”

“So, where is it?” he asked. “Does it exist somewhere in real space and time?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

She could feel his question burning right through his skull into hers. She finally stopped and faced him. He almost walked right into her. “It’s in my room. Okay?”

“What? You mean your extra-dimensional pocket of inner space is in your room?” he asked, disbelievingly. “Where’s your room?”

“It’s on the second floor,” she quipped.

“Oh, no!” Mac exclaimed “You’re not getting me with that! What geographical location is your room in?”

“Well, I tried,” she said, finally being straight with him. “I keep my clothes in my clothes closet in my upstairs room in my parents’ house in Boston. I just teleport stuff from there when I need it.”

She grinned at him. Finally all of his questions about her were answered. She thought.

“You live with your parents?” he asked.

“I did until three days ago,” she informed him.

“How old are you, anyway?” he asked.

She swung around, facing him again. He almost walked into her, again.

“I’m five!” she exclaimed. “Okay?”

She knew it wasn’t okay.

“Five what?” he asked. “You’re a Phoenix and a vampire. You could be five hundred, even five thousand!”

“I’m five years old,” she explained carefully. “Almost six!”

“You’re just a baby!” he cried. “God! Talk about cradle robbing!”

“I’ll have you know I’m fully grown!” Lisa declared. “I will never look any older than I do right now, not even when I reach five thousand!”

She turned around and walked down onto the beach. It was dusk. The sun vanished behind the Pacific even as she walked along the beach. She stopped, realizing this was where she’d started two days ago. She turned back around. Macario was following her.

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked.

“I dunno,” he said, “I’m just following you.”

She growled at him.

“Well, where do you live?” she asked, forcing herself to be polite.

“A half mile farther up from the old Verdugo place,” he confessed.

He didn’t understand why he was suddenly lying on the sand trying to protect his face with his arms while Lisa sat on his chest and beat him about the head and shoulders, calling him bad names.

“Why didn’t you ask me where I was going, you idiot?” she hollered into his face when she finally stopped hitting him. “You asked me everything else!”

“But I already knew where you were going,” he cried out in his own defense. “You were going to the beach…”

She hit him again. “You never fed me, either!”


End part 2a.

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