Timewalker Pt 1a free porn video

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 th