Timewalker pt 1a by dank

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

“I don’t care!” Tanya cried out. Frank held her tightly while she beat on his chest with her fists. “That’s my daughter in there!”

She broke down again, weeping hysterically. She allowed Frank to hold her tightly while she sobbed.

‘This whole family has gone fucking nuts!’ Frank thought to himself, furious and upset and not knowing who to blame.

His grandson’s new wife had collapsed while she was being introduced to Jake and Béla, and now Béla was acting almost as weird as Tanya. She was completely unwilling to help anyone while she guarded her ‘grandmother!’

Finally, Béla allowed her husband and her stepson to carry Tabatha inside. Béla and Tabatha were alone in the bedroom now, Béla having chased everyone else out. She sat, perched in the middle of the bed, protecting Tabatha until she awakened.

Suddenly, Frank Junior burst through the front entrance and into the living room where the others were gathered.

“I got your call, Dad,” he said hurriedly. “I got here as fast as I could… What happened? Is Mom all right?”

“Son, I don’t even know where to begin,” Frank said, feeling helpless. “I suppose you should go and check out your nephew’s wife first. Her name is Tabatha and she’s in the bedroom. And be careful! Béla’s on the warpath! She won’t let us near her!”

“She’ll let me,” Frank Junior said. “She trusted me with her childbirth – she’ll trust me with anything!”

He walked quietly to the bedroom door and tried to open it. It didn’t open. It wasn’t locked. The handle turned – it just didn’t open.

‘Béla’s holding it shut with her mind,’ he realized.

Doc Frank knocked gently. “Béla, sweetie, open the door. It’s Doctor Frank. Remember me?”

There was movement inside, then the door opened a crack. It closed in his face, then he vanished!

Frank, Tanya and both Jakes heard a startled yelp from inside the bedroom as ‘Doctor Frank’ rematerialized on the other side of the door.

In the meantime, Tanya had stopped her hysterical crying. Frank gently lifted her head off his shoulder.

“Hey, honey,” he said, quietly. He kissed her tear-streaked cheek.

“I’m all right,” Tanya said quietly, her voice sounding weak and shaky.

“Wanna talk about it?” Frank asked.

“Talk about what?” Tanya asked, belligerently. “You saw what happened! She fainted and I leaned over her and she opened her eyes – Katie’s eyes – and she called me ‘Mom!’

Tanya was started to tear over again, and her voice was rising, sounding more hysterical.

“And then in my head she asked me to sing to her and make it feel better!” she sobbed. “She didn’t remember who she was!”

“No, darling, please,” Frank pleaded as he held her tightly against him. “You don’t remember who she is…”

“No!” Tanya screamed and struck him on the chest with her fist. “She asked me who she was! She didn’t know! But she remembered I used to sing to her when she was hurt…”

Tanya sobbed against his chest.

Frank held her tightly, not speaking.

‘Everything I say makes it worse,’ Frank realized. ‘All I can do is give her my support.’

“That’s all she wants, Frank,” Jake, Béla’s husband, said.

‘Your support – your love – That’s all she’s ever wanted from you, and you’ve always provided it.’ The words sounded in his mind, but not in his ears.

‘Are we mind-linked now?’ Frank asked, not knowing if he should be annoyed. ‘I can hear your thoughts. Why can’t I hear Tanya’s?’

‘The Praetor must be nearby,’ Jake told him. ‘I was thinking about how I could talk to you privately. This is evidently what it thought I meant.’

‘Yes,’ Frank thought. ‘The Praetor’s in our bedroom. It showed up a couple of days ago.’

‘It’s in the same room with Béla?’ Jake asked, suddenly more concerned.

‘Yeah, I guess it is,’ replied Frank. ‘Is that important?’

‘No. Maybe. I don’t really know. That could be part of the reason she’s acting so weird. That thing talks to her in her head and gives her information that the rest of us don’t have.’

‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’ asked Frank, referring to Jake’s explanation as to why they were mind-linked.

‘Béla told me that your daughter, Katie, was lost in time and that bringing her back to the present would somehow destroy her entire world. Without Katie’s influence, Béla said, she would have died back in the seventeenth century.’

‘That sounds pretty wild,’ Frank replied. ‘How did she arrive at that conclusion?’

‘Believe it or not,’ Jake began, ‘one of her sisters – the blond one – came from the future to warn her. Whatever it was, it made such a violent difference in reality that the sister actually disintegrated right in front of Béla and Lisa.’

‘What’s your point, Jake?’ demanded Frank. ‘Do you mean I’ll never see Katie again? I’ve already accepted that. Why are you telling me this?’

‘If Katie was trapped in the past,’ Jake replied, thinking slowly to get it straight, ‘her ‘soul’ would eventually ‘live’ its way back to the present. It’s actually possible that Tabatha is, or rather, once was, Katie. She would have lived out her life back in the distant past, maybe more than one life. As time progresses forward, it’s logical that she would be alive somewhere, living another life, now. Perhaps even in that bedroom…’

‘That’s ridiculous, Jake!’ Frank fumed. ‘That girl in there is at least twenty-five! Katie’s only been dead a few months. She’s gone! Stop torturing me and let it be!’

‘Don’t take me for stupid, you jackass!’ Jake snarled in his mind. ‘You’re thinking in linear terms. There’s a time loop involved here! From what Béla’s told me, there is probably more than one loop. What happened a few months ago to us happened a thousand years ago to the girl in that room!’

“Stop it!” Frank cried out.

Tanya jumped back and snarled in rage, thinking he meant for her to stop sniveling about Katie.

“How dare you!” she screamed, picking a new target for her misery.

Enraged, she launched herself at Frank.

“Mommiiieeee!” Lisa shrieked, in their minds and in their ears. Terrified, everyone instantly stopped moving!

Béla appeared next to Lisa, crouching protectively. She looked around quickly to determine what might be threatening, then put her attention on Lisa.

“What is it, baby?” she asked anxiously.

“Mommy, make them stop!” Lisa cried.

“What are you doing to her?” she snarled at the men.

“They’re fighting about Tanya’s lady,” Lisa explained.

Each person in the room felt Béla’s cold and angry mind brush against theirs as she looked at each one in turn.

“Fools!” Béla spit at them.

Then she vanished, taking Lisa with her. She reappeared a second later, and took Tanya.

“Well, I guess that’s that!” Frank exclaimed, and sat down.

He was actually relieved that Béla took Tanya off his hands for now. He was fighting a losing battle with his own sanity trying to handle her grief and upset.

“What do you mean, Gramps?” Jake Hedron asked.

“She’s gone off the deep end,” Frank explained with a sigh. “They’ve all gone nuts!”

Jake Pestova laughed. “You think so? I think Béla was restraining herself admirably! She could have killed all of us just by thinking it for threatening her daughter!”

“How do you live with that?” Frank wanted to know. “Don’t you worry that you might find yourself enslaved? Or even worse? Her powers have become godlike!”

“I love her!” Jake protested. “And even though I know that wouldn’t protect me if she thought I needed to die, I’m not about to leave her – I’ve been without her too long!”

“Besides,” he continued. “Béla fought for dozen of years to come back to me. And I don’t think she’d actually hurt any of us. She considers us her family.”

“She fought for dozens of years to come back to you,” Frank began. “And if I believe you, then Katie’s fought for a thousand years to come back to us.

“Tell me,” he said, talking to his grandson now. “What do you think about all this? The girl is your wife, after all.”

“You’re asking me?” Jake Hedron asked. “I don’t have a clue. It’s… possible, I suppose. I mean… if you look at it in the proper perspective. Tabatha is an Empath. Something told me right then that she was special. She even told me she’d been looking for us – this family – her entire adult life.

“I’ve met Aunt Katie,” Jake continued. “I didn’t know her well, and I never noticed a similarity between Tabatha and Aunt Katie. But, I suppose it’s possible…”

“That is the most lackluster bit of non-reasoning idiocy I’ve ever heard!” Frank exclaimed. “How did you ever become Chairman of Tomlin?”

His grandson, not offended at all, actually laughed. “I knew it sounded atrocious when I said it. I’m good at what I do, but this… This is straight out of a sci-fi Tri-d. I’m not going to pretend I understand it!”

Just then, Frank Junior came out of the bedroom.

“What were you guys doing out here?” he asked. “Béla’s so furious she’s cross-eyed!”

He sat down on the couch next to his father.

“This is going to be fun,” Jake Pestova said cheerfully. “We have two Franks and two Jakes – one father and one son, each.”

“That’s only a problem if you’re writing a story,” Frank Senior said sarcastically. “At least, you two have different last names.”

“Yeah, thanks to your daughter, Alicia,” Jake Pestova said.

“That’s my mother you’re talking about!” the other Jake said.

“Yeah,” Frank Senior said. “You could have married her, you know. Tanya and I didn’t have any objections. We knew Alicia was sneaking into your bedroom every night. She even asked her mother for advice on sexual techniques, so she could better please you.”

“Gramps!” Jake Hedron protested. “That’s my mother you’re talking about!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Frank Senior asked his grandson. “You think your mother’s not sexual? Even Grams and I ‘get it on’ every once in a while.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jake Hedron replied, suddenly grinning. “I’ve got the goods on Grams.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let me ask you a question,” Jake said. “Did Grams go out a little while back and come back home… oh… a little messed up?”

“Yeah, she sure did!” Frank Senior exclaimed. “She was horny as a wildcat in heat, too! And stinking filthy dirty – like she’d been rolling in it!”

They all laughed.

“If you want, I can show you what she was doing that night before she came home,” Jake Hedron offered. “Tabatha has a Search on her console that picks up weird stuff like that.”

“Speaking of Tabatha,” Frank Junior butted in. “Since you called me halfway across the country to check her out, I thought you might like to know how she’s doing – if I’m not interrupting something important…”

Everyone tried to apologize at the same time. Doctor Frank held up his hands in front of him to quiet them down.

“First off, Jake,” Frank Junior began, “Tabatha is fine – at least, she will be. She’s actually awake, now.

“Wait…” he said sharply, stopping Tabatha’s husband from leaping up and going in to see her. “There’s more. Let me explain first what’s happening.”

Frank Junior took a deep breath to steady himself.

“We’re all family, here, so I’ll be blunt. Tabatha was recently pregnant and she had her body monitor abort the fetus.” He looked directly at Jake Hedron as he spoke. “I assume you already knew that.”

“Yeah,” Jake confessed. “We had a fight, and… well, it was pretty bad.”

“Yeah, right. Well, she somehow jammed her body monitor in ‘abort’ mode, and for the last several days, it’s been flooding her system with hormones, trying to abort the fetus.”

“What do you mean, ‘trying?’ to abort…” he couldn’t say it. It was his child they were discussing so coldly.

“What I mean is – the fetus wasn’t aborted,” explained Frank Junior. “For some reason, her body is refusing to abort. She’s still pregnant!”

“What?” Jake Hedron cried, half-rising off the stool he was sitting on. “Why that’s… it’s… wonderful! I think… Is she all right?”

“Yes, I disconnected her body monitor for the time being until it resets. But it registers something that I swear I’ve seen before, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember where!”

“What is it?” Jake Hedron asked nervously. “Is it bad?”

“What? Bad? Well, no,” Frank Junior said. “It’s just that, Tabatha’s brain activity is registering at near fifty percent. That’s forty percent more than what a normal human brain registers. It bugs me. That girl is spooky!”

“What do you mean, spooky, son,” his father asked, deadly serious. It was time to test Jake’s theory. “Do you think you know her?”

“Dad, you won’t believe this,” Frank Junior said, his voice shaking. “When she woke up, she looked at me and said, ‘Hey, I know you.’ Then she grinned, just like Katie used to, and said, ‘Hi, Frankfurter.’ I tell you, Dad, she scares the hell out of me!”

“Oh my God! Jake,” Frank Senior said, tears coming to his eyes. “You’re right! That can only be Katie in there!”

Frank Junior looked from his father to Jake Pestova and back, not understanding. Jake spoke up to help him out.

“I was explaining to your father about a time loop we got stuck in concerning the events in Albuquerque.”

He didn’t have to clarify what events. They all knew.

“The reason Katie was in Albuquerque was because you brought her with you when you came to take care of Béla during her pregnancy. That was the first time loop.”

“What are you talking about,” Frank Junior asked, confused. “What time loop?”

“Don’t argue with him, son,” Frank told him. “Just listen!”

“The first time through, Albuquerque was destroyed by a nuclear explosion!”

“I knew it was nuclear!” Jake Hedron exclaimed, interrupting them all. “It started – and then – it just… backed up! I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Well, Jake,” his father said, “What you saw was a time loop reversing itself. From what I understand, Katie and Beth went back in time and stopped Albuquerque from being nuked.”

“But I thought Beth was already dead,” Frank Junior said.

He sounded confused.

“I don’t understand that part, either,” Jake Pestova replied. “That’s why I think there was more than one time loop. During at least one of those loops, Beth was alive and somehow, she and Katie met.

“Here are some things that have happened that don’t seem logical because these events occurred in different time loops – you left Katie behind on the East Coast and she somehow appeared in Albuquerque just in time to get herself killed – Tanya suddenly knows how to teleport – Beth becomes my child, Lisa – and finally, Katie’s soul is in Tabatha’s body.

“These things didn’t occur in this… Oh, how does the Praetor phrase it… a recording of history! We evidently lived through this period at least three different times – something different happening each time, but only the last loop is remembered as ‘history’.”

“That would explain a lot,” Frank Junior murmured. “I know I would never abandon Katie. But somehow, I did. And I don’t know how it happened.”

“That’s because it didn’t happen, Doc,” Jake Pestova said softly. “Some of us have memories of the earlier loops – specifically Lisa, and Tanya. And Katie, I mean, Tabatha, of course. They were the ones most affected by the changes.”

“But how is it that Katie is Tabatha?” Frank Junior asked. “They were both alive at the same time.”

“Not according to Katie, I’ll bet,” Jake replied. “She’ll probably tell you about being Katie a thousand years ago. Béla says Katie was thrown back a thousand years in time. She’s had to live her way back to us. While Katie was alive only a few months ago to us, that was a long, long time ago, to her.”

“That makes sense,” Frank Junior decided. “We measure time linearly in our minds. If Katie went back in time, from her point of view, the year 2080 occurred before the year 950 – or whatever. And by the time she gets back to 2080, it’s a thousand years later. For her, there are two 2080’s.”

“Right!” Jake crowed, raising his hands high in the air. “Somebody finally understands!”

He sighed happily, and sat down.

“So,” Jake Hedron said unhappily. “What do we do, now?”

“What’d you mean?” Frank Senior asked.

“Well, if she’s Katie…” Jake said, sounding forlorn. “She’s my aunt, not my wife.”

“You forget,” Jake, his father said. “She was Katie. Now, she’s Tabatha. She’s lived her whole life as Tabatha. She married you as Tabatha. She is still your wife.”

“This is awfully confusing,” Jake Hedron sighed, sounding tired. “Can I see her?”

Doc Frank grinned. “Sure! Com’on. I’ll… Let me introduce you to your wife!”

He laughed as Jake Hedron grinned nervously.

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

“Gentlemen, we will be prepared to start the bidding shortly. But first, allow me to present tonight’s entertainment and the treasure you will be bidding on!”

He made a wide, sweeping gesture toward a curtained-off square on the stage. The thirty to thirty-five men in the audience of the auction house applauded as the curtain was drawn back revealing an eight-foot tall glass case.

Chained inside the case was a gorgeous blonde. She was terrified and struggled wildly to get free. She began screaming, pleading for her life in English. Except for the chains that were holding her, she was completely naked.

“As you can see, and hear, we have an American girl, plucked from her rich life in a big American city. We present her now for your enjoyment.”

He stepped off the stage and the lights darkened. Two spotlights remained on the glass cage, brightly illuminating the incredibly beautiful creature trapped inside. The group of men sitting in the room applauded and nudged each other, expecting a good show.

The blond girl’s screams suddenly became louder and more frantic as water began drizzling down on her head. She cried and sobbed hysterically as the glass case slowly filled. As the water neared her bust line, it began to turn pink. The girl had actually managed to tear one arm free from her manacles and bent down into the water, trying to free her legs.

“Drown, you American bitch!” someone cried out, spurred by terrified blonde’s frantic efforts to free herself.

Other men laughed and shared his sentiments, cruelly calling out their wishes for the demise of the poor little rich, drowning American.

She couldn’t hold her breath long enough and couldn’t get any leverage on the clasps around her legs. She finally straightened back up, only to discover that the water had risen too high for her to raise her head high enough out of the water to breathe. The cold-hearted men watching cheered enthusiastically as they realized her predicament.

It only took another moment of frenzied thrashing, and then she was still. As the tank continued to fill, her hair flowed about her head creating an ethereal, angelic effect.

The men applauded, congratulating their host for a magnificent performance as a spotlight suddenly lit up the podium informing them that the emcee had returned to the stage.

“And now, gentlemen, we will begin the bidding.”

The house lights came up so that the emcee could see who would be bidding on the glass case and its macabre contents.

Someone suddenly yelled and pointed at the ceiling. The emcee looked up. His eyes suddenly widened in fear and consternation.

There was a fiery angel simply hanging in the air with her wings spread wide, glaring down at them.

“Is this some sort of trick?” a Latin plantation owner snarled.

He pulled out his pistol and began shooting at the angel over their heads. She turned her head and looked at him.

He burst into flames! He screamed and slapped at the flames with his hands! He fell to the floor!

In less than thirty seconds, his body had turned to ash! The fire had been so intensely hot that not even a skeleton remained.

The fiery angel looked around at the walls. Wherever she looked, the walls burst into flames. She looked at the glass case where the drowned girl floated. The glass began to melt, then shattered into millions of pieces under the pressure of the water. Water flooded down off the stage. The angel vanished.

After several minutes, a few members of the cartel managed to break down a door, then they crowded through. The first one out found he faced a dozen Tomlin agents armed with energy weapons. He drew his pistol. He never got the chance to fire it. His body was cooked, medium-well, before he hit the ground.

Several miles away, two guards noticed a dark-haired beauty walking toward them. She was completely naked.

“Stop! You are not allowed in the hacienda!” one called out to her.

‘I go where I will! No man commands me!’ they both heard her proclaim in their minds.

One of the guards leveled his automatic weapon at her.

“I’m warning you! Stop!”

He really didn’t want to kill her – least not until he’d fucked her first. He imagined how it would feel to choke her to death while his dick was still in her.

He dropped to the ground, dead. His eyes were wide open in terror from the instant of pain he felt when Béla teleported the bullet in the chamber of his weapon into his brain.

The other guard opened fire, grinning as he watched the dark witch-woman fall backwards, her belly and breasts ripped open from the twenty rounds he fired into her. She twitched on the ground in obvious agony from her wounds. The guard, surprised that she was still alive, walked over to her while loading a fresh clip into his weapon.

Béla regained control of her orgasmic body long enough to look up at him as he leveled his weapon at her again. Then he also fell to the ground, dead. Shaking and unsteady, Béla got to her feet and looked around. The servants had all come out of the house to see what was happening. They all stared at her, watching her heal. After a moment she spoke.

“Your master is not coming home!” she informed them. “I suggest you find a different line of work…”

She formed her wings and launched herself into the air, terrifying the hired help. Circling the ranch house, she spotted a propane tank behind the structure and teleported a section of it away. A few seconds later, it blew up. In less than ten minutes, the entire structure was ablaze.

Several miles away, automatic fire could be heard echoing through the hills. Another plantation was under siege by another group of Tomlin agents. The small army protecting the ranch house outnumbered the besieging agents and had them pinned down.

Inside, the captain of the guard was at his radio when his master suddenly burst into the guard station. Held tightly in his grip was a young, flame-haired girl.

“You let this one get past you!” he snarled at the guard captain. “She was setting a bomb!”

He threw the cylindrical device down on the desk next to the Comm console.

The girl became violent, surprising the master of the house and throwing him off to one side. She attacked the guard captain, chopping him in the throat with her fingers and cutting off his breathing. Then she began ripping out wires to disable the radio so their defensive efforts couldn’t be coordinated.

A shot rang out. Tabatha straightened up in sudden agony as a bullet splatted into her back and tore into her stomach from behind. Gasping, she turned around. The drug lord was pointing an old thirty-eight at her. He cocked the gun to pull the trigger again. She rolled to one side and grabbed the device she’d been carrying earlier. She pushed a button on it and tossed it to him.

His eyes widened as she vanished. He didn’t understand the strange longing he could see in her face just before she disappeared. Then his world was filled with a violent fireball that threw him backward into the wall and vaporized him along with the rest of the building.

~~~~~

Tanya’s whole body hurt terribly, but most of the agony was in her left wrist. She forced her eyes open to find the floor only a few inches away from her face, brightly sparkling with water and broken glass as the fire surrounding her engulfed the walls of the meeting hall.

Suddenly frightened, she looked around at the conflagration and gasped – or tried to, anyway. Instead, she gagged in pure agony and expelled bloody water out of her lungs, then, still hanging by her left wrist, coughed and gagged for another minute or two until she realized she could breathe again.

Pulling against her still shackled wrist, she forced her body into a more upright stance, then realized she was still shackled into the now shattered death trap where she’d been drowning earlier. Both her ankles were sprained from the way her body had collapsed when the tank sides shattered, and they hurt terribly as she tried to stand.

As she gazed around the flaming room, Tanya saw someone walking toward her. Then the shackles were gone from her left wrist and her ankles, allowing her to fall to the glass incrusted floor. As she collapsed down off her swollen ankles, Tanya gasped in relief, then pain as the broken glass surrounding her sliced hundreds of tiny cuts into her soft, wet flesh.

She was trying to ignore the pain because there was someone else there. She knew she wasn’t out of danger, yet, despite the fact that she now knew she wasn’t drowned. Gasping and weak from her ordeal, Tanya forced her arms down against the broken glass and raised up to see who was threatening her, now.

“Lisa?” Tanya gasped, her throat raw from breathing all that water. She coughed a few times before she was able to say anything else. “Baby, what are (cough!)… you (cough! Cough!)… doing… here?”

The small child just stared, not seeming to comprehend her surroundings.

“Baby,” Tanya said, her voice stronger now, “talk to me, sweetie. What are you doing here?”

“I was watching,” Lisa said, her young voice very solemn and perhaps a little angry. “Those men were bad. They hurt you. I burned them. Nobody should hurt you. Nobody should hurt anybody.”

Then she ran forward and hugged Tanya, wet, bleeding body. Then both sat on the floor in the water and the broken glass and cried, holding each other tightly as the flames surrounding them grew ever higher – and hotter.

Lisa and Tanya’s minds merged together and Tanya could feel the need Lisa felt to be a part of… Well, the child wasn’t sure what it was she needed to be a part of, but with Tanya’s warm, loving mind right there with her, Lisa found the word she was looking for. She wanted to be part of The Team!

Tanya laughed, surrounding the child with pure love as she realized that there was no way that this child was going to allow anyone to restrain her from helping.

‘Your mother’s going to be furious!’ Tanya thought at the very adult little girl in her arms.

“Come in, baby,” Tanya whispered, finally noticing how hot it was getting. “Let’s go home, now.”

They vanished, and a moment later, the fiery ceiling crashed down onto the stage where they’d been sitting and consoling each other.

~~~~~

“You weren’t supposed to get shot, bug,” Frank Junior said cheerfully as he dug into the hole to get the bullet out.

He was having trouble because the wound kept healing around his instruments.

‘There! Got it!’

Tabatha grimaced as he delicately pulled the mangled shell out and held it up, gazing at it closely.

“Ugh! Hollow point,” he said, disgusted. “I’ll bet that hurt going in! A normal bullet would have gone clean through your body, but the damage wouldn’t have been so bad.”

~~~~~

It was morning in Boston. Chairman Hedron walked into the briefing room at Tomlin headquarters. There were about forty field agents seated inside. Along the wall were four seats where Tanya, Béla, her daughter Lisa, and Tabatha sat comfortably waiting.

The Chairman walked to the podium.

“Thank you for coming, gentlemen, and ladies,” he greeted them, including his familial females. There were other female agents in the room as well.

“First of all, I would like to commend you on our strike against the drug cartel in Venezuela two days ago. That operation was a complete success and those criminals that survived are now in USN custody and awaiting trial. We are shipping food and supplies to the indigent population that the drug cartel supported and will be helping them to become a financially viable community, farming crops that are more acceptable to the rest of us.

“Secondly, I extend my regrets and sorrow to the families of the three agents we lost during that operation. Services will be held tomorrow morning here in the chapel.

“Now, for those few who have been on other assignments and were unable to attend the last two meetings, I’d like to introduce our elite assault team.”

He gestured toward the four slender, not very dangerous looking girls seated against the wall.

Lisa grinned, somewhat self-consciously, and wiggled her fingers in greeting at the roomful of agents.

“Closest to the front of the room is Tanya. She acted as bait for our operation so that we could get all the cartel members into the same room. Next to her are the team leader, Béla, and her daughter, Lisa. And of course, you all know my wife, Tabatha. Tabatha actually took a bullet attempting to capture the one member of the drug cartel who wasn’t at the little ‘auction’ we found out about.”

A hand went up. “Yes?” the Chairman said, acknowledging the agent.

“Uh, yes, Mike Halleyman, sir,” he said, standing up. “Don’t you think it’s a little dangerous having a ten-year-old girl on the team that’s going to be ‘at point’ for many of our more overt operations?”

Chairman Hedron smiled. Lisa was frowning. Half the room watched as mother and daughter looked at each other for a moment. Then Lisa got up and approached the podium.

“Agent Halleyman,” the Chairman said calmly. “Would you please step to the front of the room?”

Halleyman was a little nervous, knowing somehow that he was going to be part of an uncomfortable demonstration. Mincing his way past knees and chairs to the aisle, he came to the front of the room. He stood there trying not to look nervous. Lisa looked over and smiled at him for a moment. She seemed very disarming.

“Now, Agent Halleyman, would you please shoot Lisa?” the Chairman requested.

“What?” Halleyman exclaimed. “I’m not going to shoot a little girl!”

“Well, I would suggest you do something to protect yourself before she gets to you…”

Lisa was walking across the room toward him. She was still smiling – like she had a secret she couldn’t wait to tell someone.

Halleyman looked at the approaching girl. She was cute and looked disarmingly charming. He simply didn’t believe she could hurt him.

“At least take out your gun. Pretend you’re going to do something with it,” suggested the Chairman.

Halleyman shrugged and pulled his weapon. Then Lisa was in front of him. She put her hand on the gun. Halleyman suddenly jerked his hand away from the weapon as though it were red hot.

It was. Seconds later it was glowing! Then it was melting in her hand.

“I’ll take that, Lisa, dear,” the Chairman said.

Lisa turned and smiled at him. Then she handed him the molten piece of metal. He held it up in his hands. It was already cooled off. She went back and sat down next to her mother. Béla smiled and kissed her on her forehead.

“That’s incredible!” Halleyman said.

“Yes, and if she were a foreign agent, you might be dead,” the Chairman stated flatly.

“But, sir, why didn’t the bullets explode?” Halleyman asked, needing to understand.

To answer his question, Béla rose and held out her hands. She was holding the loaded clip from Halleyman’s now melted sidearm.

“Other questions? Comments?” the Chairman asked as Halleyman returned to his seat. Another hand went up. “Yes?”

“I’m James Banner, sir,” he stated. “I hope my question doesn’t involve having to requisition another personal firearm.”

A small tittering of laughter floated around the room.

“Agent Banner,” Chairman Hedron announced.

“Well, sir, I recognize the young lady you introduced as ‘Tanya’. She used to be a rather… well, a wild party girl – wearing outrageous costumes and generally demonstrating her complete lack of… um… well, morals. Why did you decide to recruit her and, uh, put her on your elite team?”

“A good question, Agent Banner,” Chairman Hedron said and grinned at Tanya. “Tootsie, would you care to respond?”

Tootsie – Tanya stood up and began modeling her dress.

“Do you like my outfit?” she asked in her best Tootsie voice. She touched a finger to her belt, then said, “Fiber optics. What’d’ya think?”

Colored bands of light flowed up and down her body. The dress was practically invisible, now – the bands of light highlighted her sexy curves, but hid the details of her form.

Several men watching were grinning with pleasure. Tanya blew them a kiss, then pointed toward Agent Banner. Béla was standing next to him.

“You lose this?” Béla asked, handing him back his gun.

Stunned, he took his weapon from Béla’s hand. Tanya blew him a kiss.

“I’m the ‘bait’, darling,” Tanya told him, smiling. “I create the distraction.”

“And she’s very distracting, don’t you agree, Agent Banner?” the Chairman asked. “But that’s not the reason I… we… recruited her. My wife brought her to my attention some time ago when she came across this security recording.

“Tanya…” he gestured.

Tanya turned on the Tri-d and stood off to one side so as not to block the view.

They watched a silent, edited flatscreen video of Tanya being captured by a gang of hoodlums and then fighting her way out. The tape ended before she teleported out.

The group applauded as Tanya went back and sat down.

“As you can see,” he continued, “she’s also a real scrapper.

“So, that leaves Tabatha, my wife,” Chairman Hedron concluded. “Any of you who don’t know the role she played during the Blacker incident, simply ask the person sitting next to you.

“And now I’ll turn the floor over to your regional director, Miss Hillman, to bring you up to date on our next operation and to reassign the agents who were pulled from their regular duties to assist in the drug cartel cleanup. Those of you who are up for some ‘down time’ be sure to mention it to Miss Hillman. You all certainly deserve it.

“Again, I thank you,” Chairman Hedron stated. “Good day.”

He stepped down from the podium to applause. His elite assault team followed him out the door.

Tabatha was the last one out. She closed the door behind them. Then they were all laughing, cheering, and jumping up and down.

“Hey! Quiet, kids!” Jake Hedron yelled. “There’s still a meeting going on in there!”

They quieted down with murmurs of ‘Oops, sorry,’ and ‘I forgot’.

“That man thought I was ten!” exclaimed Lisa happily.

“Yes, I know, dear,” Béla said. “Let’s go home, now. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lisa said. “Can I do it?”

Béla smiled down at her. “Yes. Of course you can.” Lisa closed her eyes and concentrated. Then they vanished.

Tanya looked at Jake and Tabatha. She smiled.

“Hurry up and have another grandkid for me,” she grinned. Then she vanished. Her fiber-optic dress fell to the floor. She’d teleported right out of it.

“Well, Frank will be happy to see her,” Tabatha mused.

“Yep! And he’ll get to see all of her!” the Chairman agreed.

They both laughed.

“Well, I’d better go, too,” Tabatha sighed and smiled. “Someone’s waiting…”

Jake kissed her on the lips. Then she vanished, too.

The Chairman looked around the empty hallway. Inside the conference room, they were cheering about something. He smiled to himself and started back toward his office.

‘At least we’re all close to each other now. No more trips halfway across the country every time there’s an emergency…’

Jake and Béla, realizing that their two-year-old needed to grow up in a more sociable environment, moved to the East Coast so they could be near Frank and Tanya, who had moved to Boston to be near their grandson while Tabatha was pregnant.

Six months ago, Tabatha gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. Once Tabatha was no longer pregnant, Béla initiated her into the family and began training her. No longer pregnant and with Béla’s blood mixed with her own, Tabatha could once again tolerate the energy drain on her body that teleportation required. Now, she could teleport again, just like she remembered she could when she was Katie. But before Béla initiated her, she made Tabatha promise not to jump through time anymore, not even to rescue Beth!

That was the only thing still wrong with this reality. Béla missed Beth – both as a sister and as a lover. She loved Beth, or rather, Lisa, as a daughter, but she didn’t consider that she could ever have vampire sex with her own offspring. If she permitted Tabatha to rescue Beth, then the second phoenix, as the Praetor called her, wouldn’t be her child – her child would be someone else – a stranger! That thought disturbed her a lot more than the fact that her dead sister was now her daughter. At least, they were still together…

Béla jumped as Jake wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tightly. He kissed his way down the side of her neck, giving her goosebumps.

“Hmmm,” she sighed as he tightened his arms around her.

“Welcome home, honey,” he whispered.

Béla twisted around in his arms so she could return his ardent kisses.

“Mom,” Lisa said, breaking their mood. “I’m hungry.”

Jake and Béla tried to keep kissing, but they were smiling too hard. Lisa was always hungry after she teleported.

“Alright, honey,” Béla said. “We’ll eat in just a moment.”

She kissed Jake again.

‘She doesn’t have that much body mass yet. She really notices when she uses some of it up by teleporting.’

“Mom,” Lisa whined. “Now!”

Béla sighed and pulled loose from Jake’s embrace.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was jealous,” Béla said.

“I do know better, and I’m sure of it!” Jake responded, chuckling.

He knew that Beth and Béla had been sexual with each other. Lisa wasn’t developed enough yet to think about sex, but when she was, he expected the two of them to continue where they left off. He just hoped they would leave him out of it this time.

‘It would really feel strange shooting holes in my own daughter…’

‘Do you really think she will?’ Béla asked, reading his mind.

‘That’s still Beth in there, regardless of what she calls herself. She used to blow herself up for fun, remember?’ Jake admonished her.

‘I think after that last time, she may have learned some temperance,’ Béla replied.

‘One can only hope,’ Jake thought at her.

“What’s for supper?” he asked, out loud.

“You didn’t fix anything?” Béla asked lightly, but not entirely in jest. ‘What have you been doing all day?’

“We live in town, now,” Jake replied. “We can order food! What would you like?”

“Can I have pizza?” Lisa asked, hopefully.

“You don’t even know what pizza is,” Béla replied. ‘They still make that?’

“Yes I do!” Lisa insisted. “I saw it on the Tri-d! I even know how to order it!”

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Jake replied. “Order us a pizza!”

“Jake!” Béla reprimanded him. ‘That stuff will make her sick!’

‘Don’t be silly! If she can eat my cooking, she can eat pizza!’

‘You may have a point. Did you call the baby sitter?’

“A large juicy pizza with everything, all hot and ready to eat!” Lisa said into the console, mimicking the advertisement she’d heard on the Tri-d.

‘Of course I did. Do you think I’m totally lame? I might have forgotten to fix supper, but I’m not going to screw up the chance of spending a night on the town with you!’

“Daaad, he wants to talk to yooou,” Lisa called.

Jake laughed and sat down, hugging his daughter. He kissed her on the cheek, then looked into the monitor.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, cheerfully toning down his exuberance to an adult level.

“No problem – the order’s fine. Where do you want me to send it? We don’t deliver to New Mexico.”

Jake laughed, and squeezed his daughter tightly, making her squirm. He gave the pizza guy his address.

“Honey, we don’t live in New Mexico any more,” Jake explained to his daughter. “We live in Boston, now.”

“Oh,” Lisa said, frowning. She thought for a moment. “Will you come visit me?”

Jake heard a peep from Béla and looked up. Béla was curled over and leaning against the wall, one hand on her stomach and one hand on her mouth. She seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“I’ll tell you what,” Jake replied, smiling. “Would you like to live with us?”

“Yes!” Lisa yelled, jumping up and down. “We’re gonna live in Botsun! We’re gonna live in Botsun!”

“Yes, yes!” Jake said, holding her down by her shoulders. “We are already in Boss-Ton.”

“Boss-Ton,” Lisa repeated with a good deal of exhilaration. “Botsun!”

“Wait ’til she tries to learn ‘Massachusetts’,” Béla thought gleefully into his head. ‘Even I have trouble with that one! And I lived with the natives here!’

‘Really? When was that?’ Jake asked, curious.

‘Long ago, darling – I burnt down a town and went into hiding for awhile. They took me in and took care of me until I was well again.’

‘You were sick?’

‘No, sweetheart, I was insane. I’d just killed everyone I loved. Can we skip the rest, please?’

“Mommy’s sad,” Lisa said solemnly.

She walked over to where Béla was still leaning against the wall.

“You can come and live with Daddy and me,” Lisa proclaimed. “We’re going to live in Botsun.”

“Boston,” Béla said, quietly correcting her.

“Boss-Ton” Lisa said. “Boston.”

She smiled.

“That right, dear,” Béla smiled back.

She picked her daughter up and sat down on the couch with her.

“Do you know what school is?” Béla asked.

Lisa nodded.

“Where did you find out?” Béla wanted to know.

“I saw it…” Lisa began.

“On the Tri-d!” they all said together.

Jake and Béla laughed.

“What do you know about school?” Béla wanted to know.

“You have to go there and get eddy…” Lisa frowned, frustrated about not remembering the word.

‘I should know this!’ the childish thought thundered through the room.

‘Education, darling’ her mother thought back at her.

“Edge…”

Edge-you-cach-un.

“Edge-you-cach-un. Education!” Lisa said proudly

“Good! Do you know what that is?” Béla asked.

Lisa shook her head. ‘Not a clue, Mom!’

‘Where did you learn… Never mind! God! I have a two-year-old teenager.’

“I’m almost three!” Lisa said, correcting her mother’s thought.

“Yes, you are!” Béla agreed. “Now. An education happens when you go to school and learn something.”

“Learn what?” Lisa wanted to know.

“Oh, lots of things,” Béla said, totally caught off guard, “like, how airplanes fly, how many letters there are in the alphabet…”

“Twenty-six!” Lisa crowed, certain of her fact.

‘She can count? To twenty-six?’

“How many is twenty-six?” Béla asked, just checking.

Lisa shrugged her shoulders.

“Do you know what twenty-five is?” Béla asked.

Lisa shook her head.

Béla sighed. “So, now we understand the limitations of Tri-d education.”

“You should start with one to ten,” suggested Jake.

“You have a visitor,” the wall console said.

“Well, I assume that’s where the teacher will start,” Béla stated.

She got up to answer the door. It wasn’t the teacher. It was the pizza. She was back a moment later and passed out slices of pizza. A moment after that, Lisa threw up all over the floor.

‘She doesn’t like pizza.’

‘No kidding!’

Béla teleported the mess outside. ‘Next time you want something you can’t eat, you get to clean it up!’

A moment later, the babysitter arrived.

“Lisa, honey,” Béla said, introducing her to the lady. “This is your teacher. Her name is Missus Honeywell. She will be teaching you, tonight.”

“Will you teach me what twenty-five is?” Lisa asked.

Mrs. Honeywell smiled widely. “What a charming child. We’ll get along famously.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Mrs. Honeywell,” Béla said. “If she gets mad, you might find yourself on an airless planet.”

“Mrs. Pestova, I’m familiar with your daughter’s history,” Mrs. Honeywell said. “I work for Tomlin, remember?”

“Of course,” Béla said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t realize you might think I’d hand our daughter over to a total stranger!’

They were finally out the door. ‘What’s his tree?’ was the last thing they heard as the door closed.

‘His tree?’ Béla wondered to herself, then remembered what was said. ‘Oh! History!’ Then they were in the limo – also courtesy of Tomlin.

“Where’s the nightlife in Boston, if I’m not being too forward,” Jake asked the limo driver.

“Well, it depends on the type,” the driver replied. “There’s dinner, live theater, dancing clubs and drinking clubs. Then there’s Sam, Fem and Suicide clubs.”

“Sam clubs?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, Sam,” the driver replied. “S and M.”

“Oh,” Jake said. ‘Wanna go get tortured?’

‘Only by you, darling…’

“Well, dinner, I guess,” Jake sighed. ‘Do you dance?’

‘I was a stripper when we met, remember?’

“Steak?” he asked. ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of dancing.’

“Anything,” Béla replied. ‘I learned how to waltz a couple of years ago…’

‘Sure you don’t want to go get tortured?’

‘I’ll think about it. Does the name ‘Torquemada’ ring a bell in there somewhere?’

The limo took them to a good steakhouse. The steakhouse, of course, being on the East Coast, specialized in lobster.

“It’s been a hundred years since I’ve had lobster,” Béla said thoughtfully. The waiter thought she was exaggerating, of course.

So Béla had lobster and Frank had a butterflied filet.

“Okay, now I’m ready to get tortured,” Béla told him.

‘What about your memories of Torquemada?’ Jake silently questioned her.

‘I fucked him, too! Do you want to do this or not? Realize you’ll probably have to share me with a roomful of men once you get me fucking ‘en mass’ again…’

Upon questioning the limo driver, they decided on a small, intimate S&M club on the outskirts of town. When they got there it looked like a motel.

“It is a motel,” the driver told them. “There’re different rooms for different services. The desk clerk will acquaint you with their features.”

They let the limo driver off for the rest of the night, deciding that they’d teleport home when they were ready. Then they went up to the desk.

“First timers, huh?” the guy at the desk said. “Well, we have a special…”

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

It had been five years since the great ship had taken Béla and Beth away from her. According to the Praetor, the ship had just left Earth and was finally returning to Deimos for the last time. It would still be almost four more years before it arrived with its load of fresh earth, water, wildlife, grain and the remaining population of Deimos.

And Father…

Mikhail, Hank and Melinda’s son, was fully-grown now, although he was not quite four years old. He was infatuated with Elaine – mostly because of her unusual blond hair – and was constantly trying to convince her to become his lifemate.

The idea was attractive to Elaine – mostly because, except for his father, Hank, Mikhail was the only male of her species that existed anywhere.

Elaine knew that Mikhail couldn’t possibly know what he wanted in a lifemate and probably wouldn’t for at least another hundred years. Besides that, he constantly demonstrated his true age with his jealousy regarding her weekly services and the fact that she liked having the attentions of a dozen men at a time.

She had to admit, though, he was an incredible lover. They would fly up and make love high in the air for hours at a time; Elaine in her human form with arms and legs wrapped around him, depending on his powerful wings to hold them aloft.

She loved the strength and feel of his powerful body as he beat his wings to hold them aloft while they fucked. She also knew that she wouldn’t get pregnant in her human form, so she always made certain that she stayed human for several hours afterward, until she could clean up. That was standard hygiene for all the goddesses, unless, of course, one wanted to become pregnant.

Elaine knew that the day would come when she’d make love to someone special in her natural form, but that day was not yet near. And she had no idea who that special person would be.

There were two passions she and Mikhail shared – sex and flying – not enough to base a lifetime relationship on, but enough for a summer or three of mad lovemaking to help pass the warm, summer days.

Elaine stepped out of her water room smiling with satisfaction. She could still feel the warmth of the Southern sun on her skin, even though she’d just spent the last ten minutes in the shower so she’s be more presentable for dinner.

The twins would be joining them tonight to celebrate their second birthday. She wished that Béla could see the Bard Geoffrey’s children. They were delightful to be around. The best part, of course, was that the children weren’t hers. They belonged to Jeff and Terri. So when they misbehaved, of course, ‘Auntie’ Elaine could flee to her sanctuary on the third floor, where children were not permitted.

Dinner went reasonably well. The twins, Edward and Emma, realizing they were the main attraction, wasted little time demonstrating how spoiled they could be. Within the first half-hour of dinner, Terri was forced to remove them from the dining hall. She returned a few moments later, full of apologies, without the twins.

It was customary for Bard Geoffrey to invite to dinner the students with the most outstanding progress or performance each week. For the students, it wasn’t just the prestige of dining with the Great Bard at his table or the excellent food. The real prize, at least for the male students, was a night with the Golden Goddess – Elaine.

There were very few female students, as this was basically an agricultural society. The various roles of family members were, necessarily, very well defined. The few women who succeeded in breaking out of their role models were superior in intelligence and showed aptitude in the more advanced sciences.

Medicine was not particularly addressed at the university, as the goddesses kept everyone healthy. However, Genetics, Bioengineering and Astronomy were high-interest subjects, especially among the female population. Mechanics and Architecture were popular among the men. A small mixed group of men and women had decided to build a telescope at Northern Depot and were studying lens making, robotics and microelectronics.

The university buildings were complete, now, and had been for two years. An additional building was being added this year to house the Bioengineering Department. A separate building was going to be necessary because of all the additional equipment and the unused Martian drones that would be arriving with the great ship, along with their coffin-like storage units.

Elaine smiled as she thought of seeing her father, Sibilius, again. That event was still years away, so she decided to concentrate on who had joined them for dinner, tonight.

This night, there were actually two Elaines at the dining table. Elaine Chiapanni was the first student to successfully duplicate Sibilius’ Hybrid project. The very first homegrown hybrid was now growing in a tank in the Bioengineering Department, a major step forward for Project Standby, Elaine’s brainchild idea for salvaging members of the old race as they died off by having already grown adult hybrid bodies ready for them to inhabit. Not the clumsy Martian Drone type, but hybrids like the goddesses, with fully functional nervous systems. They would even be able to fly!

The Golden Goddess had promised Miss Chiapanni some alone time with her after dinner – not for sex, surprisingly. The biogenetic student wanted to study the goddess and had brought a bag full of medical instruments with her for that purpose.

There was one other student at the table. Jacob Madison was a student of mechanical engineering. He was one of the students working on the Telescope Project, and had designed a new gliding mechanism that was capable of much smaller adjustments than the original design. This would help in aiming the telescope, once it was built, at distant stars and galaxies.

The goddess Elaine put the thought into Jacob’s head that he would be spending several hours with Bard Geoffrey in his study, talking and enjoying the marvelous wine the Bard had available while the student Elaine examined the Goddess. She promised Jacob that she would visit him in his guest quarters and make up for any disappointment he felt for having to wait.

After dinner, she and Elaine, the student, took the bag of goodies and went upstairs. A half-hour later, she wished she’d never met the girl.

“Hold still, goddess,” Elaine complained, poking yet another flex-cable into her. She ran it through a vein up the goddess’ leg and into her abdomen. From there, she could explore the goddess’ liver and blood filtration system. The Golden Goddess had never considered that any kind of penetration could be undesirable, but being probed like this was taxing her magnanimous nature. She sighed, causing the student to sharply clear her throat.

‘Your bedside manners are appalling!’ the goddess thought at the student.

‘I apologize, goddess,’ Elaine, the student, replied mentally. ‘If I seem abrupt, it’s because I can’t believe you’re really letting me do this. I fear you’ll dismiss me at each request I make of you. In addition, I confess that I am fighting to ignore certain other concerns that I have.’

‘What concerns could those be, girl. Are you having trouble with someone at the university? You should, perhaps, take your problem to the Headmaster.’

‘My ‘problem’ is not someone at the university, goddess. I would prefer not to discuss it further. It is extremely personal and very unprofessional.’

The student’s mind wasn’t nearly as trained or professional as she would wish it to be. A brief image leaked out as she separated herself mentally from her goddess.

‘She wants to make love to me!’ Elaine realized.

The Goddess was actually pleased that, even with all these gross internal observations that the student Elaine was performing, she still found her body desirable. Suddenly, the goddess didn’t mind all the probing and examining so much.

“Okay, I pretty much know what to expect from my project,” Elaine the student said after another ten minutes of probing. “I sincerely appreciate your assistance. Let me get you disconnected from all this stuff!”

The young student, behaving in a very professional and caring manner, pulled the three flex-cables out and disconnected the heart and brain wave monitors. She watched, fascinated, as the tiny wounds healed, unable to resist gently touching them as they closed.

Realizing what she was doing, the student Elaine was suddenly terribly embarrassed. She bent down and began stuffing her equipment back into her bag, heedless of the damage she might be doing in her effort to withdraw quickly from this embarrassing moment.

‘Peace, child,’ the goddess thought at her. ‘You have done nothing to be ashamed of. Your touch comforts me.’

Startled, the girl looked up to find the Golden Goddess gazing down at her. Terrified more of her own mixed up feelings than of the goddess, she fell backwards and tried to scoot away.

‘Are your frightened of me?’ the goddess asked.

The girl stopped, uncertain of how to answer. She didn’t understand, herself, what she was experiencing.

‘Let me into your mind, and I will help you come to terms with your emotions,’ the goddess suggested.

She wasn’t about to raid the girl’s mind. That was extremely unethical. As a justice, the Golden Goddess only raided someone’s mind if the circumstances were extreme and the litigant uncooperative. She had discovered, early in her judicial career, that ‘uncooperative’ usually meant ‘guilty as charged’.

Ten minutes later, the Golden Goddess was furious! The student Elaine hadn’t been uncooperative. She was simply scared! After scanning over Elaine’s experiences of the last few years, the goddess uncovered a series of harsh and cruel events that had occurred to the student in her middle-teen years.

At that time, her older sister, Beulah, upon discovering Elaine’s preference for girls over boys, began to torture and abuse her sexually. On several occasions, Beulah tied her up and beat her, bruising her breasts and pelvis until they were black and blue and shoving objects up between her legs until she bled. Elaine’s parents, the two people in her world who were supposed to cherish her and protect her from that kind of abuse, looked the other way, hoping that Beulah’s therapeutic sessions would set their younger daughter straight.

To Elaine’s great relief, Beulah married when she was nineteen and moved to live with her husband some distance away. Her relationship with her parents was strained, to say the least, and the three of them mutually agreed that she would be fostered out to a family in another district.

Her foster parents, having no children of their own, were much kinder, and encouraged Elaine to explore her differences and independence. She stayed with them for three years, then came to the university a year ago to continue her education.

‘Do you wish to press charges?’ the goddess asked, herself furious with the treatment the girl had received from her true family.

“No, of course not!” Elaine protested. “I love them! I just can’t stand to be with them!”

The goddess grinned at Elaine’s candid remark.

“Can you stand to be with me?” the goddess asked. “I have things to explore besides blood vessels and organs…”

Image of the two Elaines embracing each other tenderly – kissing – fondling – making love…

The student Elaine flushed, then smiled, acting a little shy. She had only been with two other women. Both times had been disastrous, and she had decided to adopt the life of a professional geneticist and ignore her personal needs completely. But the closeness of the goddess’ female form while she’d been examining her was impossible to resist any longer. She got up off the floor and gratefully hugged the goddess.

Their lovemaking session was somewhat awkward. Both her earlier partners had convinced the girl that everything she tried to do sexually was wrong. Finally, the goddess began suggesting moves in the girl’s mind and heavily reinforcing the idea that she could actually initiate a sexual encounter. After that, it went better, but the goddess felt that, since every move was thought of and transferred into the girl’s mind, she would have better enjoyed simply masturbating, instead. This was too disturbingly close to robotics for the goddess to thoroughly enjoy.

Finally, the girl, Elaine, was asleep. The Golden Goddess slipped out of bed and teleported down to the guestroom where Jacob was waiting. He’d fallen asleep while waiting for her, partially due to the late hour and partially due to the wine Bard Geoffrey had encouraged him to imbibe.

The goddess Elaine walked over to the bed and climbed in beside him. Jacob groaned in his sleep as she jostled him while making herself comfortable. She snuggled up to him, breathing his youthful scent in through her nostrils. Then she began kissing his chest, his nipples, and down toward his stomach.

By the time she reached his lower belly, the sheet was being held up out of her way by a mysterious tent pole which had grown there sometime after she started kissing and licking her way toward it. She felt a hand on her head exploring her hair, then gently stroking her head.

Jacob smiled, having been awakened by the Golden Goddess. He never expected her to be so… personal. From all the stories he’d heard, he was certain that the only way he would ever have her sexually would be in a crowded room where he would wait his turn to spend a few seconds worshipping her body with his, then make room for the next parishioner.

And now, she had come to him! Alone, in the middle of the sleep period – although the crystal sun was shining outside, like it always did. He was glad he’d pulled the heavy curtains earlier, shading the room. It seemed more private, now, with the beautiful blond goddess licking and kissing his shaft.

She stopped her ministrations and sat up on her knees. She looked at him, realizing that he was luxuriating in their role reversals; she was worshipping his body, rather than the other way around.

“You’re awake, I see,” Elaine said quietly.

She smiled at him, putting him more at ease with her, then put one leg over him, climbing up to impale herself on his long, hard shaft. Jacob put his hands down to hold it steady while she moved back and forth, caressing her pussy lips with his cock head. After a few seconds, Jacob could feel her girl-flesh becoming slicker as her natural lubrication coated the head of his cock.

Then she sank down with a quiet moan. It took three movements up and down for her to get his entire length inside her. Jacob marveled at her capacity. He generally wasn’t able to get his entire cock into anyone. He reached up to touch her – to caress her breasts as she moved up and down. She leaned forward to make herself more accessible to him. Then she opened her mind and let him know what she was feeling.

Jacob was awed and overwhelmed. He had never considered that the female body was that sensitive! He could feel his every touch inside her – the way he stretched her out between her legs, the way his hands felt on her breasts, the scent of his freshly washed body. He intoxicated her, and she wanted him to know it.

When she orgasmed, she radiated her sensations down through Jacob’s body, causing him to come, pumping his load deep inside her. Then she relaxed and lay down on his chest and stomach; still coupled with him. They lay like that for hours, moving just enough to keep their love juices from gluing them to each other – just enough to keep the sexual arousal going – while their minds merged and they explored each other’s memories.

The Golden Goddess had never met a man who smelled as good as Jacob, or who felt as comfortable inside her mind.

‘Maybe he is the one I’ve been waiting for. One day I may take him flying with me…’

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

Béla squirmed, trying to relieve the pressure of the ropes on her wrists as the hooded ‘executioner’ turned the crank another half turn, bending the beam she was tied to a few more degrees, forcing her to arch further back, better displaying her tiny breasts, rib cage and slender belly. She was now bent so far backward that her rib cage jutted out further than her little tits.

She was blindfolded and gagged, so she couldn’t see or talk. Being mind-linked with Jake, though, she wasn’t completely isolated. She could see what she looked like through Jake’s eyes.

‘Well, I’m glad you like the way I look – this is damned uncomfortable!’ she thought into his head.

‘Wait’ll they start dripping hot wax on you and whipping your tits. Oh, never mind, I forgot. You’ll probably like that. The ‘executioner’ is picking up a long, narrow candle and looking at you…’

Béla was breathing rapidly through her nose, trying to get enough oxygen into her excited body so that she wouldn’t pass out. She screamed through her ball gag and writhed violently as a trail of candle wax was dribbled onto her left tit and across her nipple.

‘Wow! You look so fucking fantastic!’ Jake exclaimed in her mind. ‘There’re people fucking each other and just watching you!’

‘Tell him to ram that fucking candle up my cunt! I really, really need something hard in there!’ Béla thought back at him, radiating her frenzied excitement though Jake and everyone around her.

Béla continued to squirm and squeal as the black-hooded executioner continued to dribble melting wax across both her tits and down her belly. Then she heard him turn and step away for a moment.

‘What happened?’ she asked anxiously. ‘His candle burn out?’

‘Nope, he’s just getting a bigger one. Uh-oh, you’d better brace for this one…’

‘Why?’

Then she screamed as loud as she could through the ball-gag and bucked so hard she broke something holding her little torture chamber together. The entire section holding her shifted to the left about a foot, then jarred to a halt. The executioner jumped out of the way, spilling some of the hot wax he’d just splashed on her onto himself. Cursing in pain and anger, he dropped the candle and slapped at the hot wax hardening on his legs.

‘Holy Shit!’ Béla cried in Jake’s mind. ‘What the fuck was that? – Hurts worse than being shot with your rifle!’

‘One of the larger candles collected a lot of melted wax in its center, Darling. He just poured it on your tummy.’

‘Hey! He’s untying me!’

‘Relax. You broke his machine. He has to get you off to fix it.’

Suddenly Béla could see again as the dark-hooded man pulled her blindfold off. She lifted her head and he grabbed the back of the rubber strap holding her ball-gag in place and pulled it over her head.

“Hey! Watch the hair!” Béla yelped as several strands caught in the straps and were yanked out of her head.

She stood up unsteadily and held his arm as she stepped down off the platform. She looked down at herself, not recognizing exactly what she was looking at. Then Jake was there, hugging her lumpy, waxy body against his.

“Wow! You looked fantastic!” Jake exclaimed. “The way every muscle in your body went taut when he poured that wax on you. I’ve never seen you look so sexy! This is really different than watching you twitch over a rifle sight.”

He let go of her and began stripping off his shirt.

“What’re you doing?” Béla asked, interested, but somewhat confused.

There were a lot of sex waves bombarding her, but she was trying to concentrate on Jake.

“I’m going to fuck you, Darling,” Jake announced, grinning at her. “In case you haven’t noticed – we’re standing in the middle of an orgy, and you started it!”

He opened his belt and let his pants drop to the floor.

“Well, you were the only one still dressed, anyway,” Béla conceded, smiling and pressing her wax-coated tits up against his chest. “Like my ‘armor’?”

Jake grinned and began helping her pick and peal the wax off her tits and belly. The big splash of yellow wax from the thick candle came off mostly in one big piece, taking several darker droplets of older wax with it.

“If I hadn’t broken his machine, how much more do you think he’d have done?” she asked, curious.

She looked into Jake’s mind and saw:

The ‘executioner’ was pouring hot wax over her entire body from her tits to her knees, with concentrated buildups of wax over her nipples and her pussy. The finale would have been to break away the wax buildup around her cunt, insert a lit candle in there backwards and let the candle melt as much of the wax off as she could stand before screaming. Then he would blow it out before she was burned too badly. The coup-de-gras would be pulling the candle out, sticking his dick in and fucking her right in front of everyone.

“I guess I ruined his night, huh?” Béla asked, stroking Jake’s cock.

She put her arms around his neck and pulled herself up his body. Then she wrapped her legs around him and tucked her belly back just enough to trap his dick right up against her pussy lips. Excitedly worming her way up his body, she managed to get her cunt lips wrapped around the head of his dick without using her hands, then slide down so that he was inside her. She sighed and pressed her body against his, embracing him tightly.

“Wow, you are one wet pussy,” Jake excitedly whispered into her ear.

“Hmm, just like old times,” she murmured, as she began undulating her body, increasing the length of her stroke up and down his hard shaft.

Jake stood carefully balanced as Béla humped up and down on his shaft as fast as she could manage. Then she was twitching and grunting as she came.

Gasping for breath, she unlocked her legs and slid down, letting Jake’s cock slide out of her and rub dry against her belly. Looking around at the undulating bodies surrounding them, she decided to stay where she was and took Jake’s hand to pull him down to the floor with her.

She turned away and knelt down on her hands and knees. Jake took hold of her hips and guided himself up between her legs. His cock seemed to know its way back inside her hot, willing pussy, and, in seconds, they were pounding away at each other again.

Béla looked around, watching the show. The sensuous writhing of all these bodies around her, the smell of sex, the images of her – bound and gagged, writhing in agony, assaulted her senses. Many of the people fornicating around her were using her and what they imagined she experienced to enhance their own sensations. Some of them were imagining things they’d like to do to her while she was bound and gagged that she hadn’t permitted – like choking her while they fucked her, or fisting her…

‘This is a strange place to be missing Beth – she would have loved this and led them all to even deeper depravities…’

Dazed by the sexual overload of her psychic senses, Béla shook her head to clear it. She began watching the ‘executioner’ as he repaired his bondage platform. His anger and disappointment helped her stabilize against all these raging, horny images that assaulted her senses.

She felt Jake radiate his orgasm through her as he came. Her body responded to him with a small orgasm of its own. Then she squeezed her cunt muscles against his cock to squish out all her juices. Jake liked that – knowing that he could make her so wet that she couldn’t contain it inside her.

She smiled as she remembered the first time Jake had made her squirt. Now, he seemed to expect her to at least be ‘extra wet’ after every fuck session. If there’d been fewer people around, she could unshield and merge her mind fully with his while they made love. But as it was right now, she had to be content with playing ‘human’. She didn’t mind. She liked being the sexual object instead of the sexual predator once in a while.

Rising up on her knees, she twisted around and kissed Jake, lightly locking her lips on his neck.

“I’m going to go play, now,” she informed him.

He knew what she meant. After all, he’d brought her here to have fun. Jake watched her rise up and walk away, admiring the sultry sway of her bare hips and the shiny wetness running down the insides of her thighs as he gathered his clothes.

“Wow! Your wife is so sexy!” a young female squealed into his ear. “You are so lucky to have her! Where’s she going, anyway?”

The young girl actually looked concerned as she watched Béla walking over to the bondage platform.

“I think she’s probably going to fuck somebody,” Jake suggested.

He looked at the young girl. She had at least twenty piercings, if you included her ears and eyebrows. She had heavy pieces of ‘jewelry’ pinned to the flesh of her breasts and rib cage. He looked down further and saw that she’d had several large rings surgically inserted in various places along the length of her torso.

“What’re those for?” he asked innocently, indicating her heavy, surgically inserted belly rings.

“Oh, those are for hanging me up,” she replied cheerfully. “My mast… boyfriend… hangs me up on ropes so he can fuck me while I’m just hanging there in the air. He can spin me around, and stuff. It’s a lot of fun…”

“So, what’s your, um, ‘boyfriend’ doing now?” Jake asked, curious.

“Oh… he’s around somewhere,” she replied, evasively.

She looked around to see if she could see him. It occurred to Jake that she wasn’t very interested in finding him right now. He suddenly noticed two more large rings surgically implanted deep in the muscle tissue behind each of her breasts. He hadn’t noticed them before because the rounded contours of her boobs hid the exposed halves of the rings that lay against her rib cage. The thought of her hanging by her breasts and belly in front of him as he fucked her made his half-softened cock jerk, beginning to awaken again.

“Would you like to make love without hanging in the air?” he asked, candidly.

While Jake was talking to the girl, he noticed that Béla was talking to the big guy who was working on the bondage machine, so he figured the ‘executioner’ was probably the one she intended to offer herself to. In addition, Jake really wanted to play with all of this girl’s wild piercings.

The girl smiled at him, then looked around one more time for her master – make that, ‘boyfriend’. Then she was down between his legs, licking and kissing his cum-soaked cock, making it hard again.

“Your wife tastes really good,” she said between tongue licks.

Then she began seriously sucking on his cock.

Béla bent down to watch the guy working on the bondage platform. One of the platform legs had become dislocated and the gear mechanism that moved up and down on it had slipped down. The brawny fellow was having trouble pushing it back into place. Béla crawled under with him and pressed her back against the underside of the leg support. With both of them pushing on the support, he was able to reposition the gear into its proper niche. It popped back into place suddenly, pinching the skin on one of his fingers.

“Ouch!” he exclaimed, shaking the pain out of his hand.

Béla reached out and pressed on his pinched finger, causing a tiny drop of blood to well up. Grinning slyly at him, she pulled his hand down and sucked the blood off his finger.

“Thanks,” he said, his eyes traveling over her slender frame. “You don’t look that strong…”

He meant he was surprised at her ability to warp the frame she was tied to as well as the strength she’d displayed just now helping him fix it.

“Well,” Béla said softly. “You gave me a terrific orgasm. I didn’t mean to break your machine. Can I make it up to you?” She reached out with a finger and caught some sweat on his eyebrow that was just about to drop down into his eyes.

He watched as this strange, dark-haired girl who’d crawled under the table with him licked his grimy sweat off her finger.

“You taste good,” she said suggestively. “Why don’t you just lie down and let me…”

She stopped as she felt his mind close down. The image that she received explained the problem.

‘He can’t get it up unless the girl’s tied down and helpless. By breaking his big toy, I’ve pretty much wrecked his whole evening. I figured as much…’

“Would you like to tie me up again?” Béla casually suggested. “I’ve never had that done before – it was kind of exciting…”

She smiled as he opened up to her again. He indicated that she should crawl out from underneath the contraption so he could get out.

Béla walked timidly around to the front of the bondage platform again and waited. The man got a new rope and came around, then indicated that she should lie back on the post like she had before. He began tying her down, his movements very efficient.

“Yer the new girl – came with the husband, huh?” he asked, attempting to make conversation. “Both of ya new t’ bondage?”

“My husband’s tied me up before,” Béla admitted, “but I’ve never been publicly bound… not for sexually pleasure, anyway.”

He finished tying her hands and feet together, then tightened the knot against her wrists with a final jerk on the rope. Béla drew in her breath at the suddenly constraining position, surprised at how arousing was the exposure of her belly and cunt to the entire room.

“What’s next?” she asked, noticing that her would-be dominator wasn’t hard yet. “Do you do other things besides wax?”

He nodded. “I have this.”

He presented a small device with a little wheel on it that spun around. There were sharp little teeth on the wheel. He began running it gently up and down the front of her body, making her twitch with the wild sensations it gave her. It felt like her skin was being filleted, but it didn’t leave a mark on her. She lay her head back and, breathing deeply, let the sensations he was creating in her run rampaging through her body.

She gasped as he ran the little wheel over first one nipple, then the other. She was sure he was slicing her open, but when she looked, she was still whole. Then she closed her eyes while he ran the device over her face. It traveled around her forehead, back down the other side, up and down her cheek, up the bridge of her nose and back down, and up and down her other cheek.

This is so relaxing; I could go to sleep…

After a moment, he stepped away. Béla lay with her eyes still closed, not wanting to interrupt her sensual mood. Then she felt hot wax dripping on her tits, again. She moaned slightly and moved, reacting to the wax like he expected.

Then he was shoving his dick inside of her, moving in and out as he dribbled wax across her breasts and belly. After a moment, she began to move her torso in rhythm with his movements. It was difficult because of the way she was tied. Her range of movement down there was almost zero. She settled for being able to squeeze her cunt muscles with each inward stroke he made, increasing whatever amount of sensation her slippery, well-fucked pussy could offer him.

He slowed down and leaned back, still buried inside her. Béla opened her eyes and saw that he was about to dribble hot wax down between her legs, to fuck her with his cock coated with hot wax.

Her whole body trembled with anticipation. ‘This should be interesting…’

He began slamming against her harder. The wax from the candle dribbled down on her belly and stuck to both of them as he continually shoved in and out of her. After a few seconds, he had his target, and Béla felt the hot wax on his dick squish up against her pussy lips and clitoris, sending incredible waves of hot new sensation through her belly. She began to buck harder, feeling her orgasm start to flare.

She felt him jam his dick hard into her in an orgasmic spasm. She arched her back to meet his orgasm with her own, her pussy quivering with sensation as she added her juices to what he spurted inside her. Then she lay, gasping and sweating with dozens of little droplets of hardened wax where he’d dripped them all over her.

He walked away and left her tied. Béla was surprised at his abandonment, at first, then realized…

‘This is bondage! Being bound and helpless is what it’s all about!’

She waited to see what would happen. Within minutes, someone came up and began fingering her pussy.

“Nice!” he said. “Really wet!”

He bent down and began licking and sucking the juices out of her cunt. He even swallowed the cum-slicked wax.

‘That is one sick little boy…’

She was fucked six more times – twice by girls with strap-on dildos, before Jake came over and cut her loose. That was something new. Béla’d never actually been fucked by a girl, before. The movement wasn’t too dissimilar from a man’s. The pressure points of their actual sexual organs were different, of course. The girls were more interested in the strap-on’s pressure against their clits, while the guys tended to concentrate on the thrusting sensations they could feel with the lengths of their cocks.

Once free again, she found a freshly unoccupied bed (it wasn’t very fresh anymore) along the wall. She pulled Jake onto it and fucked him again. It had been a century since he’d been able to fuck her when her cunt was full of someone else’s cum, and he was so aroused, feeling the warm, slippery cum surrounding his cock as he splashed in and out of her, that he came in less than a minute.

Then she pulled him down on the bed and willed him to sleep. She fell asleep a moment later, cradling him in her arms, totally satisfied. The orgy continued around them, gradually winding down.

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

“We don’t have much time,” Tanya said hurriedly as she walked quickly into the room.

Frank was checking some figures on his work console. He’d heard her fly overhead and land outside. Then she’d come in and disappeared for awhile. That had surprised him – she’d been gone for ten days this time. Usually the first thing she wanted was to be reamed, just as hard as he could give it to her. Now, here she was, totally naked and crawling right over on top of him.

“Hey, at least let me get undressed,” he joked, wrapping his arms around her hot, naked body.

She kissed him passionately, but hurriedly, on his cheek and neck. “No time! Just hold onto me!”

She wrapped herself around him as tightly as she could and buried her face against his neck and shoulders. He tightened his embrace, holding her close against him.

‘She’s done something – put something nasty up inside her that’s going to…’

He heard a muffled ‘thump!’ and felt it deep inside Tanya’s body as she shuddered. She let loose a gurgling scream. Every muscle in her body was tense. Then she was shaking, trembling and whimpering. He hoped she was having an orgasm. If not, then she was in incredible agony from whatever had just exploded inside her cunt. As least, with Béla’s blood in her veins, she wasn’t going to die, no matter what she did to herself.

After a moment, Tanya relaxed. She was slippery with sweat from her self-induced torment. Soon, she was breathing normally, again.

“So, how was your trip?” Frank asked quietly.

He referred to her little ventures away from home as ‘trips’, simply to have something he could call them. He’d kept track of her movements, of course, accessing her data uplinks from her body monitor. Then six days ago it stopped broadcasting her location. Frank wasted no time contacting Tomlin Security and his grandson (the Chairman), only to find out that Tanya was actually on a secret mission with the Chairman and several other special operatives.

“Oh, fuck!” she whispered, hoarsely. “I’ve been so horny for the last two days. Those bastards fucking drowned me! Just for fun! I guess I can tell you about it, now…”

Her tale began with a visit to the Fetish Fair, which she somehow seemed to have missed back in Bozeman. She had been surprised to discover it coming to Boston, but she remembered something she’d done before, in an alternate reality where Katie and Beth were still alive.

She’d found Abdullah’s booth and set up a later meeting with him. Then she’d visited her grandson’s office at Tomlin Security. In less than an hour, they hatched a wild plan, with Béla and Tabatha as part of a special advance team, to shut down his white slavery ring once and for all. Then she’d gone back and gotten herself kidnapped. That was nine days ago.

“I would’ve let you know,” she insisted, “but they monitored their systems too closely. And I forgot that in the alternate reality the drugs they used on me kept me from being able to teleport. That’s how the bastards were able to kill Beth, you know. They used the same drugs on her!”

“Anyway, I was able to mentally influence them to choose me out of the fourteen girls they’d kidnapped for their little monthly auction. I knew I was going to be auctioned off. I had no idea they were going to kill me right there on the stage and auction off my body! But when I figured it out, I gave them my best performance, hoping that somebody would come along and rescue me.

“With the regenerative abilities Béla gave us, way back when, I could probably have lasted fifteen or twenty minutes underwater before I actually croaked. It was really pretty exciting. And I need to tell you something and I don’t want you to get upset. I really miss working full time in the field, especially now that I can pull off crazy stunts that would’ve gotten me killed before. I want to go back into the field full time. I’m not now or will ever be a housewife and I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel. Please? I really need this!”

“Well, if that’s what you want to do,” Frank began. ‘I just hope you don’t kill yourself…’

“You mean you’re not going to fight me on this?” Tanya asked, surprised.

“Little Jake called me yesterday afternoon,” Frank told her. “He wanted to make you a part of their ‘Elite Assault’ team, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Assault? Really!

“I told him it was up to you,” Frank continued. “I don’t really like the idea of you putting your life on the line. But if, when you come to visit me, and I hope you do, you’re so horny you have to blow up your cunt, I hope you save some for me next time.”

“You’re sweet,” Tanya said, “and I love you so much! You’re the best husband a homicidal girl like me could ask for.”

She curled up in his lap, her arms still around him. Frank started drawing circles around her right nipple with his finger. In a moment, little goose bumps appeared on her breast and arm. She shivered, trying to control her nerves.

“It’s pretty messy down there right now,” she admitted. “Maybe you’d like to hose me down…”

“You needed hosed down the moment you got here,” Frank interrupted cheerfully. “And if I’d’ve been on the ball, you wouldn’t have needed a firecracker in your pussy to get my attention.

“But, in anticipation of your safe return,” he continued, “I bought a vest, well, a harness, actually. It’s for me to wear when I’m making love with you. Like to see it?”

Tanya hopped up, holding her legs together, then realized that her body, in healing itself, had used up most of the excess fluids between her legs that the cherry bomb created to regenerate her damaged cell walls. No longer worried about leaking a bloody trail, she happily followed Jake into their bedroom.

Frank went to the closet and pulled out a black leather harness. It had large silver decorations that she couldn’t really see in the dim light of the bedroom. He tossed the black leather on the bed and took off his shirt. Tanya stepped up and began working on his pant fastenings. In a moment, she had them down.

Tanya picked up the harness and looked at it more closely. The front part was decorated with silver studs. That wasn’t too unusual. What was unusual was the front of the stud was pointed and very sharp.

‘Wow! I can really slash my tits up on that!’ she thought excitedly.

“We can’t use this in here,” Tanya mentioned. “You know how I bleed. We’ll mess up the bed something awful.”

She looked around the room for something to put on the mattress to protect it, and then she noticed something.

‘This is a different bed!’

“This isn’t our bed,” Tanya murmured, sounding confused.

She watched as Frank pushed a button on the headboard. A thick plastic sheet floated out on a cushion of air and settled over the bed, protecting it.

Taking the lead, Tanya leaped up and landed on her side in the middle of the plastic sheet. She clambered up to the headboard and got a bottle of baby oil, then she stretched out across the plastic sheet and began smearing it on her tits and belly.

When she was alone, she usually just poured a dab on her cunt to masturbate with, not wanting the ruin the bedsheets. With the plastic on the bed, she didn’t have to worry about how much she used, now.

“You have to stand there and watch,” Tanya told him.

She finished oiling up her tits and belly and smeared baby oil on her legs. She was now glistening in the dim light of the bedroom. She poured some more in her hand and began rubbing it into her crotch. She knew that Frank liked to watch her work her body when they were in her little sanctuary. Now, he would get to watch her masturbate on their bed.

Finally, Frank was starting to pay attention to what she was doing instead of thinking about her getting killed off in some covert security operation. She could see his dick responding to her visual stimulation as she furiously fucked her slippery, oiled up cunt with her fingers.

“Okay, it looks like you’re ready,” she told him. “You can oil my back and legs. She easily turned over on the neoprene sheet in the little pool of oil that had collected around her rump. She gave Frank the bottle and he poured some on her back. As he rubbed it on her, he realized that he’d used way too much.

Soon, he had her entire body oiled up and he was hard as a rock from the feel of her firm, slippery, female flesh beneath his hands. He massaged Tanya’s buttocks and ran his hand down between her slippery ass cheeks. Then Tanya turned back over so he could play with her belly and breasts. In a moment, Frank put his whole hand up inside Tanya’s well-oiled pussy. She lay back, squirming in the slippery oil, as he stretched her freshly-regenerated cunt, opening his fingers and spreading them out as wide as he could stretch her, then folding them back into a fist again and moving it up and down inside her.

After another moment of this, she added her own sticky juices to the oily lubrication coating Frank’s hand. She smiled as she realized that her pussy was too loose and juicy now to satisfy him. He would have to butt fuck her. She reached down and ran her hand up and down on his hard dick. He was ready.

“Shove it in my ass, darling,” she said, surprising herself with the low, sultry sound of her own voice.

Frank grinned and positioned himself between her legs while she jutted her pelvis upward. She wanted to be taken from the front so she could enjoy hugging those lovely spikes on his harness against her tender flesh while he reamed her.

There had been enough oil on her hand when she checked his hardness a moment ago so that his cock slid into her anus very easily. Tanya gasped as she felt her splinter muscle expand to accommodate him, then he was shoving in and out, teasing her splinter by completely withdrawing from her at the end of each stroke.

Tanya growled and reached up, grabbing his harness and pulling him down to her. She hissed in pain as his body fell against hers and the sharp little silver studs cut into the flesh just below her breasts. Frank sucked on one of her nipples for a moment, then stopped.

“Too oily,” he complained.

He continued to fuck her ass as she considered what to do about the position they were in. She needed to be face to face for him to work the magic of the harness on her, but because her cunt was so stretched out right now from overuse, her ass was the only viable hole Frank could get any enjoyment from.

Finally, in frustration, Tanya rolled him over onto his back and lay down on top of him. In this position, he couldn’t penetrate very far into her butt hole, but she could rake her nipps at will across the silver studs on his harness. So, she’d spend a minute pressing against him and perforating her boobies, then sit up to get better penetration into her ass while bleeding all over the both of them.

‘This is getting to be too much like work!’ she decided after about five minutes.

Finally, she just settled for getting fucked in the ass. Her boobs kept healing too fast. Those little studs on Frank’s harness didn’t do enough damage to count for anything. She closed her eyes and thought about the iron maiden he gotten her a few weeks ago. Although they’d only used it once, the orgasm she’d had when he closed the front of it and all those wonderful iron spikes penetrated into her had been incredible.

She began flashing memories of incredible orgasms through her mind, trying to make up for the disappointing results from the silver studded harness that Frank had bought. There was the first time she’d used the flame shower to exfoliate between her legs, then the magnifying lens with its concentrated sunlight.

Switching to her memories of the alternate reality, which was how she thought of her memories of Katie and Beth still being alive, she remembered that huge contraption that Abdullah had spread-eagled her in and the fantastic orgasm she’d had when he closed the trap up with her inside it, completely perforating her body in a dozen places.

But her biggest orgasm that she could remember was three days ago when her lungs were filling with water, and she was fairly certain that she’d already breathed her last breath. As she came again, thinking about it, she felt Frank’s cock jerk. Then he was pumping hot, stinging semen up inside her ass. The sensation helped to lengthen her orgasm a little.

She knew that Frank was worried about her getting hurt or even killed on future missions working for their grandson. She was concerned about that herself. Not because of the actual danger that she might find herself in, but well, the simple fact was that life-threatening danger made her incredibly horny. And it disturbed her to think that she might get so aroused that she’d trade her life for a moment of sexual satiation.

Frank had taken off the sex harness, so Tanya lay down beside and still half on him. He went to sleep quickly while Tanya lay awake for hours wondering what was going to become of her. After a long night of indecision, she finally fell asleep. Whatever happened to her in the future, she was pretty sure she’d be having an orgasm when it did. She would go out with a bang!

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

“He’s asleep,” Tabatha whispered, referring to their seven-month-old boy. His name was Ethan, named after her husband’s father, or rather, the man his mother married that had believed he was Jake’s father. She slipped into bed next to her husband.

“Turn over and let me see,” Jake said, concerned.

They’d been so busy that he hadn’t even had a chance to embrace his wife properly for several days, but first, he had to see her back where she’d been shot. There wasn’t even a slight scar.

“Well,” Jake conceded, “You heal even better than I do. Is the bullet still in there?”

“No, silly, Hot Dog took it out,” Tabatha replied, then realized she’d used Katie’s memories of her brother to describe him.

“It feels strange, you know,” Jake confessed. “I knew you when you were my aunt! And now, you’re this vivacious, dark-haired girl…”

He sighed, not knowing how to continue.

‘My memories of being Katie are still somewhat occluded, darling,’ Tabatha thought into her husband’s mind. ‘It was the people – Mom and… I mean, Grams and Béla – who awakened those memories. And I remembered another completely different life where I met Béla before. I actually adopted her as my granddaughter. I called her Maria.’

“But now, I’m Tabatha,” she said softly. “I like being Tabatha. And I really like being in love with you.”

She kissed him. As he kissed her in return, Tabatha moaned softly, deep in her throat. They embraced each other tightly, caressing each other with their entire bodies.

As Tabatha felt his insistent nudging between her legs, she raised one leg over his hips, allowing him access to her tight little koos. She smiled, wondered how she had thought of calling it that. Nobody she ever talked to referred to it quite that way.

‘Koos’ is original. That makes it mine. I like that…

Then she remembered. She’d been twelve when she was sexually awakened. She was in the school gym, working out on the balance bar. Well, actually, she’d just finished working out and was sitting, straddling the bar, talking to a friend. She was swinging her legs back and forth, and talking. She couldn’t remember what they were talking about, but she remembered how pleasurable it was, pressing her little koos against the hard, smooth bar. It felt so good that she hadn’t even minded the edges of the balance beam that were cutting into her inner thighs.

Her first orgasm took her completely by surprise. One moment, she was sitting there talking, getting a nice buzz from ‘down there’, and the next, she was totally spastic, unable to talk or hardly breathe as waves of sensation shot through her belly.

“Are you all right?” Lorraine asked, then she realized what had happened.

“Ohmygod! You just had an orgasm!” she whispered loudly. “And right in front of me, too!”

She held her hands over her mouth and grinned up at Tabatha conspiratorially.

“I do it, too!” Lorraine said, moving closer to Tabatha so no one would overhear. “Sometimes when I’m exercising, I’ll just lock my legs together and hold them a little off the mat. After a few minutes, my legs start to feel like they’re burning, but I get a fire in my ‘cunnie’, and then, ‘it’ happens!”

“It hasn’t happened before,” Tabatha admitted, beet red and feeling really embarrassed. “This is the first time!”

“Really?” Lori asked. “You were very discreet. I didn’t even notice what you were doing until afterward…”

“I wasn’t doing anything, Lori,” Tabatha insisted. “This has never happened before! Please believe me!”

After that, she and Lori became study pals. But mostly, what they studied was different ways they could masturbate in public and not get caught.

One day, Tabatha went to Lori’s house after school. Lori had skipped her afternoon classes and Tabatha was worried sick, certain that something was seriously wrong. Lori’s mother met her at the door.

“She’s confined to her room,” her mother told her. “She isn’t to see anyone!”

“But I have her… our… work assignment, Mrs. Marcus,” Tabatha explained innocently. “We have a project we’re working on together. I need to discuss it with her.”

“No!” Mrs. Marcus said curtly. “Absolutely not! You can’t see her!”

The door slammed in Tabatha’s face. Tabatha went around behind the house. It wasn’t the first time she’d sneaked in and out of Lori’s second story window. She climbed up on the back porch railing and tapped on the glass.

“Lori, it’s me,” Tabatha whispered. “Open the window!”

The window opened and Tabatha was pulled inside. The window slammed shut behind her. She stood up and looked at Lori standing next to her. Lori wasn’t standing up straight and she was holding her stomach. There were bruises on her face and arms.

“What happened to you?” Tabatha cried in a loud whisper, worried that her friend was sick.

“I was masturbating,” Lori confessed, “and Mom caught me. I guess I made too much noise.”

“That’s terrible!” Tabatha replied, still worried. “What’d she do?”

“She… she hit me!” Lori said, as though the fact still surprised her.

“Hit you?” Tabatha repeated. “That’s against the law! How are you going to hide those marks all over you? Are you going to report her at school?”

“No, Cat, I’m not,” Lori said. She sat down on the bed, still holding her stomach. “There’s more – lots more.”

“Well tell me, darn you!” Tabatha exclaimed, worried so much her stomach was in turmoil.

She sat down on the bed next to her obviously sick and definitely beaten friend.

“I hit her back,” Lori explained. “I was just so surprised that she struck me – I was surprised at how it felt!”

“I can imagine!” Tabatha agreed, trying to sympathize with her.

She really couldn’t imagine actually being provoked enough to strike her parents, if they had still been alive, that is.

“No, you can’t possibly imagine!” Lori exclaimed, almost sneering at her friend. “I liked it! I wanted her to hit me again. And she did! And I fought her until she beat me senseless!”

She was trembling now, either in fear or shock – perhaps both.

“God!” Tabatha said. “Are you going to be okay?”

She took hold of Lori’s shoulders and gazed at her face.

“I’m worried,” Lori confessed, unable to make eye contact. “I think I’m going to burn out early, Cat.”

“What do you mean?” Tabatha was really starting to worry, now.

“I discovered I like pain so much that,” Lori began. “Well, let me show you…”

She began unbuttoned her colorful blouse. As she did, Tabatha noticed that the material was damp, especially around Lori’s titties.

Then Tabatha gasped as Lori displayed what she had done to herself.

“I scoured my room,” Lori explained, watching the shock register on Cat’s face. “Everything in this room that’s sharp is right here…”

Lori smiled. It was almost a painful grimace. She was trembling harder.

Tabatha gazed, mesmerized, at Lori’s tits. There was almost no skin visible at all. There were tacks, pins, nails and pencils perforating her tiny tits. The two pencils, jabbed in sideways, were still leaking blood. That’s what had made Lori’s blouse damp.

“I know it looks awful,” Lori said, trying to console her shocked and grief-stricken friend, “but it feels really great!”

“Lorraine,” Tabatha began, her voice shaking. “I… you can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’ll die!”

“Remember I said I’ll probably burn out early?” Lori asked, grinning weakly.

Her voice was more unsteady and weaker than before. She moved her hand away from her belly.

Tabatha’s eyes widened. She gasped and turned away quickly to throw up over the end of Lori’s bed. Then she steeled herself and looked back at her lost friend. She trembled in horror as she stared at what Lori had down to herself.

There were a couple of centimeters of wire sticking out from Lori’s belly button. Her skin was distended and purple. She’s taken an old wire coat hanger and skewered herself in her quest for the ultimate pain.

“OhGodOhGodOhGod!” Tabatha cried out, shaking. She leapt up and fled to the door. “Mrs. Marcus! Mrs. Marcus! Oh my God! Call an ambulance!”

She turned around and watched as Lori slowly collapsed down on the bed.

They didn’t find the wire hanger Lorraine had shoved up her ‘cunnie’ until it was too late. She died two days later. Her mother, Mrs. Marcus didn’t come to her daughter’s service. A month later, on Lorraine’s next birthday, Mrs. Marcus disabled the safeties on her flitter and flew it into the Great Wall Mountain at Mach II.

Sometime after that, Tabatha noticed that she could feel what was in other students’ minds. That was when her empathic abilities began to emerge.

Tabatha shook her head to clear it of old, unhappy memories, wondering at the things that having sex made you think about.

“Are you crying?” Jake asked, suddenly concerned about the wetness that was leaking from the side of her face and onto his. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

Jake was concerned about his wife. Usually during sex, she opened her mind to him, letting him feel what she was feeling, and experiencing the sensations he was experiencing. This time, she hadn’t.

“I’m sorry, Hon,” Tabatha explained. “I’m not used to killing people.”

She was referring to the botched attempt to blow the drug magnate out of his house. She’d killed his guard with her bare hands, then tossed a bomb right into his lap and blew him up, barely able to teleport to safety in time with a bullet in her back.

“I shouldn’t be allowed to feel this good,” Tabatha berated herself.

She was weeping openly, now.

“Where did that come from?” Jake wanted to know. “If you don’t want to do field work, I can let you do coordination like you were doing before.”

“No, that isn’t it,” Tabatha said quietly. “I think I might burn out early…”

She could hear Lori’s ghost saying those fateful words with her in her mind.

Images appeared in Jake Hedron’s mind of Tabatha being caught and dragged to the guardhouse. He felt her gleeful excitement and sexual arousal from the danger she was in and how much she had loved being in the cruel grip of the drug magnate. He felt her elation at shoving her fingers into the guard’s throat. He felt the orgasmic sensation of the bullet penetrating her back. He felt her sadness that she couldn’t stay and experience the incredible sensation of being blown into little pieces.

She was trembling in his arms, the orgasm she’d just had still quivering in her belly.

‘I feel so helpless against the sensations I want to experience.’ Tabatha whimpered into Jake Hedron’s mind. ‘They overwhelm me sometimes. I fear that if they overwhelm me too much, I might give in – I might not come back to you…’

“It was knowing how you’d feel that made me teleport out,” Tabatha confessed. “I don’t want to make anyone feel that bad, especially you.”

“It’s the vampire blood in you,” Jake explained. “Béla likes to court death, just like you’ve begun to feel. It isn’t general knowledge, but you weren’t the only girl shot. Béla took a full clip right in the belly. According to witnesses, she just stood there and let him do it.

“And,” he continued, “from what Gramps has told me, Grams has had the same problem off and on again. When they built their new house, he built in a soundproof torture chamber for her to work off her excesses. And, of course, you saw in her video what she does to blow off steam.”

“Well, I guess it’s nice to know I’m not the only one torturing myself this way,” admitted Tabatha. “Maybe Tanya will let me prowl the streets at night with her.”

Jake grinned. “Just what I need for my undercover operations – another vigilante. You’re coming along nicely, Hon. Soon you’ll be a full-fledged assassin, just like Grams.”

“Grams has assassin training?” Tabatha asked, incredulously.

“Yep! I’ve looked up her records,” Jake told her. “When she and Béla first met, Grams’ was on a mission to terminate Béla for murdering another MI agent.”

“Well,” Tabatha mused, “I’m glad she didn’t. Otherwise, I’d’ve never met you!”

Tabatha leaned over and began kissing and licking her way down Jake’s chest and stomach. Soon, she had his cock in her mouth. Just before he could come, she stopped and spit his hard dick out of her mouth.

“Okay, bub,” she said, imitating her favorite gangster voice. “Here’s the deal! You give me all the solo work I can handle and I won’t bite your dick off.”

She sucked his cock back into her mouth and twirled her tongue around its end. In a few seconds, he spurted his load into her mouth, coating her tongue and throat.

“Deal?” she said, clamping down gently on his dick with her teeth.

“Okay! Deal!” exclaimed Jake unhappily.

He didn’t really believe she’d bite his dick off, but she acted very convincing. He hoped she liked working solo, because, since good solo agents were so hard to keep, she would have a lot of work. He hoped she lived through it.

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

Zachary was annoyed. Mom and Dad were completely ignoring him, leaving him strapped in this stupid chair. He let out a loud yell.

“Zack!” Alicia admonished him. “Do you remember your promise? That you would behave and be quiet for one hour while daddy and I work?”

Zachary sulked. Usually he didn’t have to be here where his dad worked. Nanna would always take him to the park and get ice cream. But Nanna wasn’t here today. That troubled him. He knew that Nanna wouldn’t stay away from him if she were okay.

“Why is Nanna gone?” he asked. “She won’t come see me!”

Alicia sighed. Zack was almost four now. It had been four years since she had been forced to deal with death. Four years since her younger sister, Katie was killed in some freak explosion in Albuquerque. There wasn’t even a body to bury. The fact that one of her true family had actually died shook her more than she cared to admit. Now, her son’s caretaker was dead – killed in a stupid accident when her bus fell out of the sky.

Alicia knew that, for her son’s proper development, she should take the next couple of years off and raise Zack herself. That would surely lessen the blow of his losing Nanna, and establish a deeper bond between mother and son that she would need later.

That was actually what she and Walter were working on this morning – her ‘unofficial’ retirement. For the last year they had been discussing it, and she should have taken these steps earlier, but Zack and his nanny were getting along so well that she had been unwilling to break them apart.

Now, she had to rush things through, hoping that there wouldn’t be too big a crash when she turned her proxies over to someone else. Walter, her husband, was as anxious as she that the turnover occurred smoothly, but he was relieved to know that it would be Alicia that directly guided his son’s development now.

Finally, they were finished, and had gotten the responses they were hoping for. There would be some loss of capital during transition, but everything should stabilize at ninety-three percent, and then begin expanding again.

Walter leaned back in his chair and sighed in relief.

“Well, that’s it,” he said to his wife. “You’re now officially unemployed.”

He smiled as he realized that, even ‘unemployed’, his wife controlled more assets right now than he ever did.

“Can we go now,” Zack whined. “Nanna always gets me ice cream after lunch.”

“Lunch?” Alicia asked, sitting up. “Who’s hungry?”

‘I may as well start now with this new/old role of raising babies.’

“Me!” Zack cried out, holding up his hand.

“Well, then,” she replied, picking him up and kissing his forehead. “We should go eat, then. What would you like?”

“Hot dog!” Zack cried out cheerfully. “We always get hot dogs! And ice cream!”

“He’s going to be very spoiled for a while, I’m afraid,” she apologized to her husband and the two attorneys with him. “Gentlemen, I bid you ‘good day.’ What would you like for dinner, my love?”

“Um, anything would be fine,” Walter said, caught off guard. “Is the cook gone, too?”

“No,” Alicia grinned. “I was just curious about how the system works. But never mind, I’ll pester the cook about it. That’ll be my job now – pestering the hired help!”

She laughed and waved ‘goodbye’ to Walter with Zack’s hand, then carried Zack out the door. The three men watched the door close behind her.

“You’re going to have to tell her, Walt,” his oldest friend, Amos McCain, told him. “She deserves to know.”

“I know, Amos,” Walter replied, still staring at the door. “I just remember the pain in her eyes when Ethan was dying. I don’t want to put that pain back in her eyes again. I like to think that I rescued her from a sorrowful oblivion. But the truth is, I think she rescued me. She deserves so much more than I can ever give her, now.”

The other attorney, Marcus Edda, cleared his throat.

“I think, perhaps, she already knows,” Marcus suggested. “I noticed that it was your holdings she liquidated this morning. Her control was proxied out. She can retake it at any time. And if she decides to, she could still take control of everything you own!

“Smart woman,” he continued, chuckling. “She didn’t get where she is by being sentimental. Ethan Hedron may have broke her heart, but she managed to keep everything he controlled in the family – most of it going to their first-born son, Jacob.”

“You seem to know a lot about her, Marcus,” Walter said, a little too politely.

“I do, don’t I,” Marcus replied, amused by Walter’s typically protective stand. “She has ambition. And even ‘unemployed’, she has enough controlling power to try for a seat on the Supreme Board. I’ve been studying her for over a year, now. I’m thinking of nominating her. If she looks as good in two years, I’ll give her my support in her bid for the next open seat.”

“Well, I see why she suggested you for her counsel,” Walter said. “But what she did or didn’t do today won’t matter in a hundred years, so why make a fuss?”

He sounded tired and wanted to be alone.

“You wouldn’t have said that six months ago, Walt,” Marcus said, rising from his seat. “I’ll take my leave, now. I prefer to remember you as a fighter.”

He shook hands with Walt and his lawyer friend and walked out the door, cane in hand.

Alicia and Zack sat in the park at the edge of the pond feeding ducks. She watched as his tiny little hands learned to tear the thick pieces of bread into crumbs small enough for the ducks to eat.

‘He’ll probably live long enough to see the decline and fall of all humanity,’ Alicia mused sadly.

Alicia was one of the very few people who knew what was happening to their world. Her first-born daughter, Jacqueline Burke, was head of Camden Research and Development. Jackie kept her informed on events and new developments.

But this development was out of their control. The northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, were easily visible even from the well-lit streets of Washington D.C. at night. The life giving sun was constantly eating away at the protective layers surrounding Earth. In a hundred years, maybe less, it would be completely gone. In the last two years alone, about fifteen percent of the planetary population had become sterile. And new cancers caused primarily by the unaccustomed radiation were becoming more common.

The truth, she realized, could never be told to the general population. If that ever happened, civilization would vanish overnight and all that would be left would be burning cities and millions of dead bodies. That would happen anyway, eventually. The only way to survive the changes that were going on with the sun was to dig a very deep hole, crawl in and pray.

That was what she’d begun two years ago. The abandoned strategic military facility in the mountains of Colorado was deep underground and large enough to house a small city.

In another eighty years, Jackie had estimated, half the population would be sterile. The ‘normal’ life expectancy would be somewhere around sixty years, and civilization would be in chaos. In a hundred and fifty years, only people living underground and people like herself who could regenerate fast enough to counter the effects of the sun’s lethal radiation would still be alive.

The problem with her plans for an underground city was storing enough food to feed everyone. The radiation would undoubtedly affect plant life, too. Also, some people would have to go out and expose themselves to plant and harvest every year unless they figured out how to farm at night.

She was beginning to seriously doubt the possibility of humans surviving this cheerful little burp of solar indigestion. The problem was that no one, not even Jackie, knew how long this would last before things returned to normal or even if they ever would.

‘How much time should I plan for? Is this how the dinosaurs died, cooked by their own sun? What if this lasts for a thousand years, or a million? Even two hundred years is too long for fragile humanity to survive. God, what are you thinking?’

“She isn’t coming back, is she, Mommy,” Zachary asked, breaking her train of thought. Alicia blinked and looked down at her son. He was standing in front of her.

‘When did he get up?’ she wondered.

“Hum? Um, what?” she asked, confused for a moment.

“Nanna,” Zack repeated himself. “She isn’t coming back.”

He looked very serious.

Alicia sadly shook her head. “No, sweetie, she isn’t. But how did you know that?”

“Because,” Zack said, climbing up into his mother’s lap. “She tol’ me.”

“Told, darling,” she automatically corrected him. “When did she tell you this? I didn’t find out until today.”

“Last night,” Zachary said. “She woke me up and said she loved me. And she was going on a trip and she’d be gone for a long time.”

‘Last night? But she was killed yesterday afternoon!’

“Yes, she went on a long trip, darling. Eventually, everyone goes on that long trip. And usually when they get there, they like it there so well that they never, ever come back.”

“Are you going to go there, Mommy?” Zack looked up at her face.

Alicia kissed his forehead and sighed. “Someday, I suppose. But not for a very long time, darling. I like it here, better.”

‘Why do I feel so cold? I can’t stop shivering!’

“Will I go?”

“Maybe,” she told him. “I suspect that, by the time you’re ready to go, most everyone else will already be there, waiting.”

‘Why is my face wet? Is it raining?’

“Mommy, why are you crying? Please don’t be unhappy.”

“Oh, my little darling!” Alicia gasped, hugging her child to her.

She got herself back under control. She was one of the powerful women in the world, but she seriously doubted her ability to save even a single soul. She didn’t believe that humanity would still exist in a thousand years. The earth was going to have to invent a new dominant species…

‘One with more survival potential than we have…’

Walter got home late that night. As he entered, Alicia was coming out of Zachary’s room. Startled, she looked up suddenly.

“Oh! You’re home,” Alicia said anxiously.

She stepped over and kissed him hello.

‘Oh, God! She has that look on her face,’ Walter thought to himself. ‘Does she already know?’

“This has been one of the most depressing days I’ve had for awhile,” she explained. “It seems that Zack already knew Nanna was… What’s wrong?”

“Huh?” Walter said, startled. “What do you mean?”

“That look,” she told him. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something terrible. What is it?”

“Nothing’s wrong, darling,” Walter insisted. “Everything is just… just fine.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” she accused him softly. “Tell me what… Oh, no! Jackie said people were already getting… Not you! It wasn’t supposed to be you! Not yet…”

She broke down and sobbed on his shoulder. He held her while she got control of herself again.

“What are you talking about?” he asked as he massaged her shoulders and back, trying to console her. “Who’s Jackie?”

Alicia didn’t answer. She was thinking. Always before, when this happened, she would bite the bullet, or take it in the gut while she, once again, watched the man she loved waste away and die.

‘It doesn’t have to happen this time!’ Alicia resolved. ‘I’m tired of watching my men die!’

Alicia took a deep breath, composing herself to face him. Maybe she was wrong…

“How much time do we have left?” she asked him, her voice trembling only a little bit.

“I don’t know. They don’t know. It’s something new,” he confided in her. “A few months, maybe a year, maybe two, if I’m lucky.”

“How about forever?” she asked, gazing into his eyes.

“I’d love that… Wait! I’m not going to agree to a suicide pact with you!” he declared, beginning to get angry.

Alicia blinked several times. “Suicide? I’m not going to kill myself, no matter how bad I feel – I love Zachary too much to abandon him now, even for you!”

“Well, that’s nice to hear, I suppose,” Walter admitted. “Who’s Jackie? It sounded like you know something. Is there going to be some kind of epidemic?”

“Jackie is…” she hesitated, thinking about her options. “She’s someone I have to go see.”

She turned away, then stopped, turned back and kissed him, then turned away again.

“Right now?” he asked, surprised as she disappeared into her word-study.

“No, but shortly,” she called out, then turned back and looked at him from the doorway. “Very shortly. I’ll see you when I get back.”

Then the door was closed and Walter was standing alone in the hallway.

‘Well, now she knows.’

‘What is it she knows?’

‘I don’t have a clue. She acts like she can fix this.’

‘It’s going to kill her to find out there are some things even she can’t fix. There’s no hope for a cure – ‘

‘No, not this late in the game… But she’ll keep fighting – right down to the last hurrah.’

‘The last Hurrah? Very funny!’

Walter frowned. Sometimes the voice in his head said things he didn’t understand. But the voice in his head had led him to Alicia. And she was truly the treasure it had promised she would be.

Quietly, he opened the door to Zachary’s room. He watched his son sleeping.

‘Take good care of her, son. She’s priceless. And she’s going to need your love and protection.’

He closed the door gently and went into his bedroom to prepare for sleep. He could hear his wife’s voice indistinctly through the walls of her study. He couldn’t make out the words, but she was talking to another woman. She sounded agitated – the way she sounded when she was pushing through some important project.

‘It’s nice to know I’m important to her. I wish she’d realize that I don’t want her help – I only want her love.’

‘You have her love. If she succeeds, you may even have a future…’

He slept alone that night. The next morning she was gone, but there was someone there to take care of his son. After verifying her credentials, he left them both and went to work.

‘She didn’t even say ‘goodbye’…’

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

The convention hall was crowded with booths and chattering people. Frank and Tanya were with Jake and Béla, making their way slowly through the maze.

“So, why did you bring us here again?” Tanya wanted to know.

She looked at Frank, her husband, with some trepidation.

“It’s a party!” Jake told them both. “This is where all the SAM clubs get together every year. Me and Béla became members of one a couple of years ago. Béla likes this better than the Target Club she used to have. And the sex is incredible!”

“Well, if there’s incredible sex going on, Béla will sniff it out,” Frank mused, then he smiled nervously at Jake, realizing he’d just called Jake’s wife a slut.

“You should know, old boy,” Jake said, smiling, rebuffing him. “You had her for thirty years before I met her. But it only took me one day to steal her away from you.”

He grinned at Frank, daring him to contest his little truth.

“Well, I’m glad you took her off my hands,” Frank said, rising above the T-juice that was starting to flow between them. “Look what I have now!”

They both looked at Tanya. She had the decency to blush. Frank grinned, feeling smug and pleased.

‘I’ve had Béla, but you’ll never have Tanya…’

“Look,” interjected Tanya, “I know you two don’t really get along, but we came here to enjoy this little affair. So let’s! Shall we?”

“Would you like to check out the new bondage products with me?” Béla asked.

Frank and Tanya both agreed. They waded through the crowd toward one of the booths on the far wall that was displaying a sign high above it that said “Skewer-Bot”. On the way, Jake spotted someone he thought he knew and begged off.

‘Where’s he going?’ Tanya thought at Béla. ‘He’s broadcasting a really weird sex flow.’

‘He knows one of the bondage slaves,’ Béla thought back. ‘He has a crush on her. If she’s here he’ll probably fuck her.’

‘That doesn’t bother you?’ asked Tanya.

‘Of course not!’ Béla replied. ‘He wants me to meet her, too. Besides, let me show you something… ‘

Béla remembered what had happened during their very first visit to a bondage club and broadcast the image to Tanya.

“Wow!” Tanya said, out loud. “That’s incredible! I’m really jealous!”

“What?” Frank wanted to know.

Tanya had Béla show him, too.

“You want to do that?” Frank asked. “You ought to invite her over to try out your iron maiden.”

“Yes,” Béla said, “I definitely want to finally visit you guys and play in Tanya’s little sanctuary – only one man allowed in at a time, though.”

That was the problem. Tanya and Béla couldn’t get together and play because that would leave Frank and Jake together. It just wouldn’t be fair to tear each other up having vampire sex and then find out that Jake and Frank had gotten into each other, too – with their fists.

In the meantime, Jake was wandering through the section where different bondage techniques were being demonstrated. There were naked girls everywhere, tied into various positions. Some were hanging from beams constructed solely for the purpose of hanging up bound girls. That was where he found Foxy.

She was hanging by the metal rings surgically implanted deep into her body. Someone wearing a rubber body suit that was only displaying a single area of flesh – his dick – was fucking her.

Jake watched as the man’s pounding viciously jarred Foxy, her rings cruelly yanking on her breasts and belly where they were mounted. Jake was surprised that they didn’t simply tear out of her. He looked at her face as she hung helpless, with her hands cuffed behind her. Her neck was completely relaxed, letting her head fall back at right angles to her back. Her eyes were wet and there was drool coming out of her mouth as her head shook limply back and forth from the pounding she was getting.

After a moment, the ‘rubber man’ was finished with her. She hung there, gasping and sobbing for a moment, trying to get her tortured body to relax. Then, her pain-filled eyes slowly focused on Jake. She tried to smile.

“Hi, Jake,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “You upside down.”

“So are you, Foxy,” Jake replied, grinning at her. “How long you been hanging there?”

“I dunno,” Foxy said. Her throat sounded dry and her words were somewhat slurred. She was too exhausted to put much effort into pronunciation. “All day. Hung here this morning.”

“Good God!” Jake exclaimed.

“Wanna fuck me?” Foxy asked. “Won’ feel so bad knowin’ it you down there…”

“No! Yes!” Jake exclaimed. “I want to get you down!”

“Please don’t,” Foxy pleaded. “ ’f he’s watching he’ll punish me. He always punish me when you nice to me…”

Her voice was so… disembodied… that Jake’s stomach was starting to churn with his concern for her.

“Then why are you always so glad to see me?” he asked, confused.

“Cause, it means I matter,” she sighed. “You fuck me now. Don’ be too gentle.”

“I can’t,” Jake confessed, blinking back his tears for her.

“Please,” she pleaded. “He’ll beat me…”

“Foxy,” Jake started to explain.

“Then feed me,” Foxy said, still pleading. “You can do that without being hard. I’m thirsty anyway.”

“What?” Jake asked.

He didn’t believe what he was being asked to do.

“Put you dick in my mouth and jus cut loose,” she explained, putting more effort into getting her words understood.

He hesitated. Foxy could tell he was preparing to flee.

“It’s the only thing I’m permitted to drink while I’m hanging here,” she cried. “Please, I’m so thirsty…”

Jake was so disgusted with himself. He knew he was going to do it. Foxy actually wanted him to.

‘To relieve her thirst!’

He walked up to her and opened the front of his pants. Then his soft dick was in her mouth. She expertly massaged it with her tongue, being unable to move her head much because of the way she was bound. Then she gently gripped his dick with her teeth and jerked her head slightly sideways.

The sudden pain caused him to jerk, then he was pissing into her mouth.

‘Holy Christ! She’s swallowing it!’

He listened as she made little grunts of pleasure with each swallow. He concentrated on stopping the flow of his urine. She repeated her nipping and jerking action to get him started again with a growl of frustration coming from her throat.

‘She likes this!’ he realized, feeling sick, inside. ‘She likes the way she’s treated. When she’s beaten, she believes it’s because what she does is important to her master.’

After a moment, she released his dick from her mouth. He looked down. Urine had dribbled out her nose, out of the sides of her mouth and up into her eyes and hair. She was blinking the sting of it out of her eyes as he watched.

“Goodbye, Jake,” she said, her voice much stronger. “I’ll remember you were nice to me.”

“What makes you think I won’t come back?” Jake asked, not understanding how she knew.

She didn’t say anything until he turned to go.

“They never come back,” she whispered sadly, almost too faint for him to hear.

~~~~~

Frank and Tanya were gazing raptly at the stage. Béla grinned, watching how excited they were. She could easily see the thoughts in each of their heads as they imagined how they could put the device that was being demonstrated to use.

‘They truly are a perfect match for each other,’ Béla realized as she watched her dearest friends holding onto each other.

Béla allowed herself to feel sad for a moment, wishing that she and Jake were a better match. She truly loved him, and didn’t live well without him. But, except for his understanding of her sexual needs and his willingness to mutilate her, they had practically nothing in common.

‘Except for Lisa. We both love Lisa.’

“You have to get me one of those,” Tanya insisted.

Then the demonstrator asked for a volunteer.

“Me!” Tanya yelled. Several other people were hollering, too. He looked over the crowd, then spied Tanya’s bouncy blond hair, her goofy grin, her fabulous boobs bounding up and down inside her blouse and her waving arms. “Me! Me!”

“Come up here, little lady!” he called out.

He reached down and Tanya grabbed his arm. Frank helped to boost her up to the stage. He grinned widely at the demonstrator, letting him know it was all right for him to use his girlfriend to demonstrate the sex robot. The demonstrator gave Frank a strange, confused look.

“You sure she wants to do this?” he asked, oddly concerned, seemingly for her safety.

“Sure!” Frank said, smiling. “She wanted to do it the instant she saw that thing!”

The demonstrator shook his head and turned back to the crowd.

“Do I need to do anything?” Tanya asked, jutting her breasts out and using her best ‘Tootsie’ voice.

“You just stand there, honey, and make everybody happy.” The crowd laughed.

Frank laughed too, realizing that Tanya loved to play the dumb blonde who’s too sexy for her own good.

“Okay,” she grinned out at the audience.

There was a smattering of applause. She actually curtsied.

“Now, gentlemen,” he said, then including Tanya, “and lady, of course. This debonair young femme fatale is going to be ravaged and then skewered by yon robot. Pay attention, gentlemen, this could be the beginning of the end of any use that women have for men.”

More laughter.

“Robby, come over here, will you?”

The robot rolled forward.

“Disrobe that lovely creature.”

The robot turned and rolled toward Tanya, who, pretending nervousness, minced backward a few steps.

“Relax, honey,” he said magnanimously. “It’s only sex right now. With a figure like yours, I’m sure you’re familiar with it.”

Tanya stood still, poised like a startled deer, and then slowly pushed her chest forward, inviting the robot to disrobe her. The crowd went nuts with lewd yelling and whistling.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please. Contain yourselves,” said the demonstrator into the microphone. “I would hate to have the show closed for disorderly conduct before the skewer-bot has even disrobed the lovely young lady…”

The crowd immediately calmed down. Béla laughed.

“What is it?” Frank asked.

“These perverts want to see the robot take Tanya apart,” she mused, “not just take her clothes off. That announcer knows that, too. Should be an interesting show.”

The robot had Tanya’s blouse unbuttoned. It was having trouble getting the blouse off. It kept getting snagged on her bra cups.

“Oh, good grief!” Tanya exclaimed, yanking the blouse out of the robot’s mandibles and taking it off. “You’re almost as bad as a man!”

The crowd laughed at the jest on themselves.

“You probably won’t be able to manage the shorts, either,” Tanya said, sliding them down.

She wiggled her legs and hips to keep her shorts from turning inside out as she lowered them. She got lots of whistles and cheers. She smiled and waved her fingers at the crowd.

The robot reached out a mandible and began manipulating her breast.

“Hey!” Tanya yelled and slapped the robot arm away. “Watch it!”

“It seems the Robby isn’t having any more success than any of you would,” the demonstrator mused into his microphone. “That’s probably why she wants to do this.”

Then the crowd realized what had upset the gorgeous, nearly naked blonde. She was still wearing her bra-cups. She pulled off the one the robot had damaged and tried to straighten it out. It was ruined, so she threw it away.

Tanya noticed the scramble of bodies trying to catch the bra-cup as it floated through the air, so she reached up and took hold of the other bra-cup.

The crowd started cheering, “Take it off! Take it off!” Tanya grinned, then popped the second bra-cup off.

Now, she was topless in front of everyone. Everyone cheered. She tossed the bra-cup out into the mass of people in front of her. There was pandemonium where the bra-cup vanished into the mass of bodies.

“Take off the panties!” someone shouted.

Tanya suddenly seemed to realize that she was naked in front of everyone, and shrank back, trying to cover herself with her arms.

“Good act, huh?” Frank asked Béla. “She’s about as shy as a bull elephant.”

“I know,” Béla replied. “She used to work for me as a stripper, remember?”

“Gentlemen, please,” the demonstrator called out. “Allow Robbie to do his job.”

The crowd quieted down and watched, mesmerized by Tanya’s fantastic body quivering in the middle of the stage in front of the big metal robot.

The whine of a small motor as the arm of the robot extended could be heard in the sudden silence. Tanya, unable to help it, flinched away slightly, as the metal mandible delicately grasped the top of Tanya’s pink panties. It pulled one side of her panties down her leg.

Béla shielded her mind against the thick sexual static everyone was broadcasting. She sighed in relief as her body relaxed a little.

‘There’s time enough for sex, later,’ she told herself.

The crowd burst into applause as the robot lowered the other side of Tanya’s panties down, revealing her hairless pussy. Then Tanya stepped out of her panties. The crowd cheered. Then began chattering excitedly.

Tanya looked around to discover what was attracting their attention away from her.

‘Holy fuck! There’s a big, long rod extending from the robot – from where its dick would be if it was a man.’

“It’s got a light on the end of it!” she heard someone yell.

Then the crowd laughed. A louder whirring sound attracted Tanya’s attention. Something was moving on the front of the robot.

‘It’s a seat,’ Tanya realized as she stared at it, ‘a padded seat. It’s inviting me to sit down?’

Tanya gingerly sat down on the extended cushion and looked at the robot.

“What’s next?” she asked the announcer.

The extended cushion was still vibrating. A large clamp was unfolding from beneath the seat and rising up behind her. Tanya didn’t notice it until it clamped around her waist.

She shrieked, then realized that she was the only one who hadn’t seen it coming. She smiled nervously at the crowd, trying not to become the victim of her fear. Part of the clamp continued to unfold and clamped itself over her shoulders. It felt pretty sturdy. Tanya tested it, leaning back gingerly until it was holding her full weight. She began to relax a little while she leaned back.

‘Good! Now I don’t have to worry about falling off this contraption. I can brace against…’

She felt another extension traveling back behind her from under her armpits. She was now securely fastened to the seat. She couldn’t escape if she wanted to. Then she noticed that her feet were manacled as the robot spread her legs apart.

The crowd was cheering, now. They couldn’t wait to see it stick that long rod up into Tanya’s little shaved twat.

Tanya gave a yelp as the robot adjusted the seat so that its shaft could enter her vulva more easily. The bright light attached to the end of the shaft disappeared into her cunt.

“Hey! It’s warm!” Tanya announced, acting relieved that she wasn’t being hurt.

Then the seat began to move back and forth so that the rod was moving back out of her, then in again.

“It’s just like fucking!” she squealed, her excitement taking over her sensibilities.

Then the demonstrator began talking again. “There are several different positions, for the volunteer’s final entertainment. Allow me to demonstrate…”

He twirled a dial around on his remote. Tanya shrieked as the entire robot mechanism turned over on its base.

“Frankiiieee! Get me down!” Tanya cried out as her seat turned over with the rest of the robot.

Everything was still in the same position, only now it was upside down. Tanya was, too. And the damned robot was still fucking her!

“Hey! That’s Tootsie!” someone yelled.

Everybody who wasn’t already recording the event got out their recorders and began taping.

“Hey, Tootsie,” someone else yelled, his voice nearly lost in the noise of the crowd. “When did you join the Suicide CluBéla”

‘What?’ Béla asked herself.

Turning around, she spotted the man who’d shouted. She raided his mind. Her eyes widened in sudden alarm.

“Frank!” Béla shouted into his ear. “We’ve got to get her out of here!”

“Why? She’s really having fun!” Frank hollered back, a sappy grin on his face.

“They’re going to kill her!” Béla yelled back. “That thing is going to ram that rod right out the top of her skull!”

“What?” Frank shouted.

He didn’t believe her.

“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” the crowd was shouting.

Tanya cried out as the rod rammed deeper into her cunt with each thrust.

“Are you ready, my dear?” the demonstrator asked, a strange smile on his face.

She looked at him, confused.

“Do you want to come, first?” he called out to her, his voice easily heard above the chanting crowd.

She understood that. She nodded.

He adjusted the controls. The heat from the light became a little hotter, and the rod began vibrating. She smiled and nodded as her pussy began to respond to the stimulus. Soon, she was crying out in unison with the crowd, in unison with the thrusting of that magnificent glass and metal cock pummeling her.

Tanya threw back her head and cried out in orgasm. Her cry turned into a gurgle as the metal shaft suddenly rammed its way up inside her torso, tearing through her guts, her abdomen, through her right lung and out through her right collarbone. She stared, shocked, at the rod sticking out more than a foot above her very visible, broken collarbone and only a few inches from her head. The crowd went silent.

“You’re still alive?” the demonstrator asked, sounding surprised. “How did that feel, my dear? Everyone will want to know.”

“You… are one… sick… pup… y,” she gasped.

Then she passed out. Frank stood, staring in disbelief at his wife, dangled upside down and skewered like she was being prepared for a barbecue.

‘That’s what they did last month,’ Béla thought into his mind. ‘They held a lottery and the winner was gutted and barbecued alive. They ate her!’

“We have to get her down or she’ll die,” Frank whispered, realizing that they were the only ones interested in saving her. “She won’t be able to regenerate with that rod inside her.”

“Gentlemen,” the demonstrator said softly into the microphone. “It seems our volunteer suicide had passed on to the great beyond. I can, however, still demonstrate a couple of features that the circumstances didn’t warrant before.

“Observe,” he said, then began to adjust the controls again.

‘What’s he going to do to her?’ Frank anxiously asked Béla in her mind. ‘She’s pretty well maxed out already.’

‘Relax. We’ll get her out,’ Béla replied. ‘But if I teleport her off that pole, she’ll bleed to death before I can do anything.’

‘Can’t you teleport the pole, too?’ Frank asked in her mind.

He was more than a little worried. Although he had done similar things to her in her little sanctuary, he hadn’t done anything to her anywhere near that magnitude of pure physical destruction of internal body parts.

‘Moving her will kill her! Just wait!’ Béla insisted.

The light on the rod began to glow brightly. The stage lights were dimming at the same time. Then the rod began to move backward. The bright light at its end disappeared into Tanya’s body.

“For those of you with more morbid tastes,” the demonstrator said, “you can see where the end of the rod is.”

A reddish glow was visible inside Tanya’s chest. A little smoke snaked out of the exit wound in Tanya’s shoulder.

“As you can see, the light is bright enough to be visible right through her flesh. And it’s also hot enough to get her done inside. If you can observe the smoke, you can see that she’s actually cooking right now. You won’t have to worry about your next month’s volunteer not getting properly done in the middle, if that’s how he or she decides to go.

“In addition, there is a special feature to prevent the buildup of gasses inside the body. Observe.”

He pressed a button. From where the base of the light was evident, glowing through her chest cavity, three fork-like objects suddenly burst out through her torso. Tanya convulsed in agony, the fresh torturous pain bringing her back to consciousness.

“Well, it appears that she’s isn’t quite done, yet.” The demonstrator chuckled.

Several people in the crowd chuckled with him.

“Can you hear me, my dear?” he asked. “Can you talk? We would love to know how you feel.”

Tanya’s head lifted slowly and rolled unsteadily as she gazed down at them. “ ’uk qu,” she rasped.

Then her head fell back and she lost consciousness again. The demonstrator bowed his head for a moment, then turned back to his audience.

“Gentlemen, and lady,” he said, acknowledging Béla’s presence. “Thank you for your kind attention. The bidding for the remains will now begin.”

“Sorry,” Frank called out, “But, since she was my slut-bod, I’m taking her with me. Kindly get her down.”

“Hey! Look! It’s Frankie the Third!” someone yelled.

“Sir,” the demonstrator declared, “as a member of the Suicide Club, her remains will be auctioned to the highest bidder. Those are the rules. As a member, she agreed to them.

“Tootsie wasn’t a member of your club,” Frank explained politely. “She was just looking for a good time riding your ‘skewer-bot’. Now, if you don’t want to be arrested for murder, I suggest you get her down. Now!”

“Mr… Frank,” the demonstrator said, nervously, “If she isn’t already dead, she soon will be. Modern medicine isn’t nearly advanced enough to repair that kind of damage. You may as well let me auction…”

“Now!” Frank demanded.

Béla had come up on the stage with Frank. The three security guards approaching them suddenly stopped, mentally convinced by the dark-haired little vampire that this was all part of the show.

Frank fearfully looked up at his wife. She was hanging limp, upside down, still skewered, still glowing. Still cooking nicely.

“And turn off that damned light!” he demanded angrily.

“No!” Béla interrupted. “Leave it on, but retract it slowly. It will cauterize the wound.”

The show was over. The curtain was drawn across the stage. Tanya was lying limp and unconscious on the floor. Surprisingly, she wasn’t bleeding. Béla scanned through her body moving damaged or cooked tissue out of the way of necessary blood and bodily function flows. The most difficult part was mentally reconnecting her damaged and crushed intestines.

“It’s unbelievable that she survived my skewer-bot,” the demonstrator sighed, obviously disappointed.

“She’ll be all right, Frank,” Béla said.

‘Distract him and I’ll take her home.’

“Perhaps if you added an electrical current to run inside the pole,” suggested Frank.

The demonstrator turned and looked at his creation.

“Yes! Of course!” he exclaimed. “Instead of grounding everything against the rod, the rod would be the conductor! That would improve the efficiency of the cooking process, also!

“And, of course,” he added, “I’ll have to add a headrest to keep the volunteer’s head in position so that, when she has her orgasm, she won’t be able to mess up the trajectory of the rod.”

“The trajectory was messed up when she arched her back,” Frank told him candidly. “You may have to accept that not every skewer is going to be perfect. If you’re compassionate enough to let your suicide orgasm, you may have to skewer her more than once. Of course, you could always ask her to keep her torso and head lined up…”

“Well, Mr… Frank,” the demonstrator said. “Thank you very much for your input, and, of course, the use of your slut-bod for my demonstration. This has been an educational day for me.”

“For us all,” Frank agreed.

He turned around and left the stage.

“Hey!” the demonstrator called after him. “Where’d they go?”

Frank turned back and smiled at him. Then he turned and walked away.

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