The Adventures of Béla, the Vampire Girl
Book 1: Target Girl
Part 4
Chapter 1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The board over the pantry door creaked as the rope tied to the inch thick ‘eye-bolt’ imbedded in it was yanked downward. Béla dangled from the other end of the rope, secured by a tight knot around her wrists. She was naked and bleeding from several cuts in her body.

As she twisted back around, Jake carefully aimed another dart at her tiny breasts, then threw it.

“Ah!” Béla yelped as it stuck right in the middle of her left nipple. “Bulls eye! You have to fuck me now!”

“Not just yet,” Jake announced, reaching into the utensil drawer. He pulled out a new set of carving knives that he’d just purchased. “These were on sale at the checkout line. I couldn’t pass them up!”

“No!” Béla yelled. “No knives!” She looked upset. “Let me down!”

Jake tossed the package on the kitchen counter and walked over to where she dangled. He pulled the darts out of her skin so she could heal and tossed them on the floor.

“What the matter with you?” Jake asked. “You used to love being gutted with a knife.”

“I do love it,” Béla admitted. “Just… not today, okay? I feel a little… off.”

Jake ran a finger down her front, following a rivulet of blood from that last dart he pulled out of her.

“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.

“I’m not up for any heavy mutilation,” Béla grinned at him, “but those nice jagged nails of yours look pretty inviting…”

Jake looked at his naked, bleeding vampire hanging down in front of him, her wrists secured over her head. She suddenly grabbed him around the waist with her legs, completely taking him by surprise.

Tightening her legs around his torso, she pulled him close enough to kiss.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, kissing him gently.

“You want down?” he asked.

“Your choice,” she replied. “Can you reach me?”

“Oh, yeah!” Jake said, grinning. “I can reach you.”

Wrapping his arms around her waist, he pulled her against him, kissing her lips, then began kissing his way down her chin to her neck, listening to her giggle as his lips and tongue tickled her sensitive skin.

When he got to her punctured breasts, he examined them closely, then gently sucked and bit on them for a moment after not finding any wounds beneath the blood. Béla squealed and writhed on the rope, trying to free her tender tits from his gentle, torturous mouth.

“I think all these dart games are good for you,” Jake said, coming up for air after almost sucking her nipple completely off.

“Why?” Béla asked, gasping in relief from the sensation he was giving her.

“I think your tits are getting bigger,” Jake observed.

Béla laughed nervously. “That’s because of all the vacuuming and sucking you do on them! See how much smaller the one you’re ignoring is?”

Taking the hint, Jake began sucking madly on her previously ignored right tit as Béla squealed and pretended to try to get away from him again.

At two months, Béla’s pregnancy wasn’t showing yet – at least not in ways that people normally notice pregnant girls. She was hoping to hold out and tell him the good news on Halloween. Today was Friday, the 22nd. Halloween was still nine days away. She hoped Jake wasn’t so observant that he’d figure it out before then. But until she had her baby, she wasn’t going to permit any knife or gunplay. After four thousand years of sterility, she wasn’t taking any chances that her baby might get hurt by their savage horseplay.

She tightened her legs again, trying to take some of her weight off her wrists because her hands and arms were getting numb. Jake, noticing her struggle, reached up and pulled the release on the knot, getting his arm back down just in time to catch her as she slipped down and right into his arms.

Reaching down, Jake swooped Béla off her feet and carried her into the bedroom, dropping her unceremoniously on the bed. Falling on top of her, she scrambled so that his weight was on her chest and not her belly, both giggling as they played with and tickled each other.

“Whew!” Jake laughed, gently pinching her midriff. “You’re getting fat and lazy! Domestic life is doing you good.”

“What domestic life?” Béla asked, smiling at him. “You do the cooking and the cleaning. I’m just here for you to fuck!” She reached out and felt his hard-on through his jeans.

“That’s the domestic life I mean!” Jake laughed.

He straightened up as Béla tried to undo his belt, deliberately tightening his belly against his belt line so that his buckle would be hard for her to undo.

After a moment of frustration and a broken nail, Béla exclaimed, “Help me, damn you! You know how I hate pants!”

Jake laughed and pulled on his belt. Béla watched, disgusted, as it unfastened almost by itself. She satisfied her frustration by unfastening the button at the top and unzipping the rest.

Leaning forward now, she began chewing her teeth against the hard mound of flesh still hidden by his shorts. Jake felt his cock respond to her warm mouth and restrained himself from rubbing it a few times to ease the intensity of his sensations. Then Béla had it free and dangling out of the slit in his shorts.

“Ah-ha!” Béla crowed. “There you are!”

His cock jumped as she noisily kissed the tip. She started running her lips and tongue along one side, making it grow nicely.

“Pretty, pretty cock,” cooed Béla as she caressed it with her mouth. “Fucking nice cock going to fuck me ‘til I can’t see straight – fuck me ’til I scream…”

“Well,” Jake said, probably ruining her mood, “You’re really a dirty little girl tonight, aren’t you?”

Béla raised her eyebrows and gazed up at him, then opened her mouth and gently clamped down on his cock with her teeth.

“Good girl,” Jake said quickly, gritting his teeth against the sensation of Béla’s sharp little teeth on his cock. “Nice girl – sweet, gentle…”

Béla chuckled loud enough for him to hear, then sucked his cock into her mouth. She began moving back and forth, letting his cock fuck her face for a minute, then lay down on the bed.

“Fuck me now?” she asked, for probably the forth or fifth time.

“Definitely!” Jake said, dropping down on the bed between her legs.

He buried his face in her crotch for a moment, making her squeal again as he made sure she was wet enough. Then he rose up on his knees and waddled his way up to where he could reach her.

He pushed his hard cock down so that it brushed against her pussy lips. Anxiously, Béla scooted down so that the head of his cock was inside her. They gazed at each other in triumph.

Contact!

Laughing at her mental image, insert tab ‘A’ into slut ‘B’, Jake leaned forward, going deeper into her wet, warm pussy. Béla caught his fall, her hands on his shoulders and eased him down. Jake gave her a violent thrust, imbedding his cock deep into her wet cunt.

“When did you get so gentle, babe?” he asked, deliberately laying his weight down on her and nuzzling her neck.

Béla laughed and twisted out from underneath him, then rolled him over and skewered herself on him again. She sat, perfectly mounted like a jockey on a racehorse, and grinned down at him, her pussy completely enveloping his cock all the way down to his balls. She slowly began moving up and down, pushing back as well to give her clitoris some of the wonderful sensation the inside of her cunt was feeling.

“Just when you think you know a girl,” Jake said, “she changes everything around, including how she wants to make love. You sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” Béla grunted, pushing up then dropping down on him.

After a few minutes, Béla closed her eyes and started whimpering with each drop onto Jake’s cock. Jake started kneading her soft belly with his fists, knowing that she was getting close to orgasm. Startled, Béla opened her eyes and leaned forward, preventing him from pounding on her stomach until she came, like he usually did.

Sighing in frustration, Jake wrapped his arms tightly around and hugged her. “I love you, babe, but it looks like I get to learn you all over, huh?”

Béla raised her head up to look at his face and smiled. “I love you, too.” Then she lay back down on top of him, letting him do most of the work of thrusting up into her now.

Soon, she was nearing orgasm again, her high-pitched whimper betraying her body. Jake gripped her hips tightly, digging his fingers into her undulating flesh and hanging on for the ride. Béla arched her back and cried out – finally, happily, reaching orgasm. Jake was only a few seconds behind her as he held tightly onto her twisting hips and sank his cock into her as deep as he could and spurt his cum inside her.

Béla collapsed on top of him, breathing rapidly, sated and content.

“Well,” Jake mused after a moment to catch his breath. “That’s something you still like. I can still crush your hips.”

“Um,” Béla moaned pleasantly.

‘I hope I can last ’til Halloween…’

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

That night was Béla’s stage night. Her signature performance, her shaving and masturbation routine had become so popular she was pulling business from the Pussycat Club in Bozeman, fifty miles away. Tonight, Jake was turning away customers for the first time since he had been working as doorman and bouncer there.

As she tossed her top to one of her fans, Béla felt a cold breeze waft across her near-naked body and looked toward the door to see if someone had left it open. Jake was letting someone in who wore a long coat and a really ratty cowboy hat. The newcomer looked dirty, and felt that way in Béla’s mind. As she gazed at him, Béla felt a blackness so thick it was almost visible surrounding the stranger. Jake was talking to him, pointing toward her. The man tipped his hat. She saw his lips say, ‘Thank you.’

She watched him cross the floor, looking for an empty seat. He sat down near the back of the bar in the shadows, two other customers cheerfully making room for him, and ordered a beer from Jessica.

Something bounced off her stomach and fell to the stage floor with a clink. She looked down and saw a fifty-cent piece. The customer who tossed it at her was calling her name.

“Come on, Béla, darlin’, do yer stuff!” he shouted. Other shouts of “Yah! Baby!” and “Do it!” supported his enthusiastic request.

She smiled and blew him a kiss. Her hands caressed her breasts, then smoothly felt their way down her almost naked body to her hips. Her right hand continued on down the side of her leg until it found the leather knife holster strapped there. It and a black G-string were the only things she was still wearing. Her customers grew more boisterous, knowing what was coming.

She unfastened the leather snap that held the knife in place and, crouching down into a fighting stance, drew the knife from its holster, looking like she was ready to fight someone. The look of desire on her face told her audience she wanted something else.

Béla gazed hypnotically at the knife as she drew it closer to her face. She kissed the blade passionately, then licked her tongue along the sharp edge of the blade as though it was a giant cock. The blade left a thin red line down the center of her tongue. She licked her lips, darkening them with a thin coating of blood from the fresh cut in her tongue. She had practiced that in a mirror for hours before she finally got the exact effect she wanted to project.

She looked out at her audience. They were mesmerized by her actions. She had actually blooded herself just to entertain them. She’d actually done it to show them the blade was damned sharp after someone the week before had suggested it was a fake.

Béla caressed her breasts with the blade and slid it down the front of her body. The noise in the room doubled the instant the cold, steel blade touched her bare flesh, and Béla smiled.

Humankind hadn’t changed in more than two thousand years. Men still got excited with the idea of cold, hard steel against soft, feminine flesh. Well, that was all right, she got pretty excited about that, too.

Pointing the blade downward, she pressed it flat against her belly, sucking her tummy in so that her skin slid smoothly beneath the sharp point of the knife. She slowly slid it down between her belly and the top edge of her G-string; its outline visible behind the thin material as it slid down in front of her pelvis.

She stopped when the knifepoint poked through the bottom of her G-string, making a small hole. Turning the blade so the sharp edge was pointing away from her belly, she began moving her torso back and forth in a fucking motion while holding the knife in place so that it slowly sawed through the front of her G-string. It was almost like watching the knife take her virginity as it sliced through the thin fabric.

As Béla moved her pelvis back and forth against the knife blade, she let a trickle of blood run out of the corner of her mouth. Her tongue had already healed, but her audience wouldn’t know that. She’d had to bite her tongue to get more blood for this effect. The men stared at her undulating body, mesmerized by the effect she was creating – blood, sharp knife, soft flesh…

She decided that next week, for her final performance before she announced her pregnancy and retirement, she was going to dress up for Halloween like that vampire girl, Debra whoever on the late, late show, and have men come up from the audience and cut the costume off her body, piece by piece.

The knife cut through the top edge of the G-string and it flipped open, away from her body, exposing her bare pussy for all to see. The bar exploded into yelling and cheers. People were throwing dollar bills at her feet.

Béla gazed down at the front row, picking out a face she didn’t recognize. She looked at him for a second or two. The feelings ‘Birthday Boy’, and ‘Another beer and I’m gonna be sick’ and ‘Oh, Sweet Jesus! She’s looking right at me!’ swept through her mind.

‘What a sweet, horny boy!’ Béla thought, and smiled at him.

Béla decided not to pull the G-string loose like she usually did. Instead, she strutted up to the front edge of the stage, right in front of the ‘Birthday Boy’ and turned around, her G-string dangling from the crack of her ass. She swung her rump from side to side, whipping the G-string back and forth like a tail until somebody reached up and grabbed it, pulling the remnants down her legs.

Béla stepped out of it and spun back around, dropping to her knees. It was the ‘Birthday Boy’ who had actually gotten up the nerve, egged on by his celebrating companions, to reach up and pull that G-string right out of her bare ass. Laughing, she reached out, took the G-string away from him and tied it around his head like a bonnet. Then she pulled his face against her chest and rubbed her tiny tits against his forehead. Finally, she bent down as far as she could and kissed him full on the lips. Everyone cheered. His friends who had evidently brought him here pounded him on the back in congratulations.

Béla rose up and pranced back across the stage while listening to someone explain to him that he had just been awarded first place in line to the Target Room that night. That meant he got the first fuck after the show. Listening to the young boy’s drunken friends tease him with their little lies, she thought it might actually be a good idea, and decided to make sure she had him before she allowed anyone else to fuck her tonight.

Be careful what you wish for, boys, she thought to herself, it just might come true.

As the thought ran through her mind, she chuckled to herself, changing the word from come to cum, making it a double entendre. The young boy was going to cum before anyone else.

The young lad stared at the stunningly naked young girl prancing around on the stage, fascinated and terrified, not really believing what these two clowns, his older brothers, had told him.

Swaying her rump in an exaggerated manner, Béla waltzed back and picked up the knife where she’d dropped it when she decided to ad-lib that last bit with the G-string. Kicking off her spike heels, she braced one bare foot up against the dancer’s pole and proceeded to ‘shave’ her inner thighs and her pussy.

Tonight, her skin was really glistening under the hot lights around the stage and the knife blade was picking up a lot of moisture as she scraped it along her inner thigh. The moisture running down the handle gave her another idea. She was feeling really playful tonight, so she scraped up a blade-full of moisture along her inner thigh and flipped the knife blade at the crowd, spackling them with her perfumed sweat. Her fans enjoyed pretending to wipe it off their faces and lick it off their fingers, letting her know what delights awaited her if she got close enough.

When she got to the part where she masturbated with the knife handle, she started in the middle of the front row; her legs spread wide in front of her chosen ‘Birthday Boy’. As the boy stared at the knife handle moving in and out of her wet cunt, Béla picked up ‘Oh, Lord, I’m not going to make it to the end of her show!’ from him. She could smell male sex in the air and realized that men were already coming in their pants just from watching her.

She decided to cut her act short and hopped off the front of the stage, right next to her chosen first. Her unexpected action created a roar of ‘Boo’s’ from everyone around her.

Taking her new conquest by the hand, she led him, half dragging him, toward the Target Room. The ‘Boo’s’ turned to cheers as her audience realized she was enthusiastically dragging that poor lamb to the slaughter and they began shouting, “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”

As the door closed behind them, they were both surrounded by an almost total silence, disturbed only by the bass woofer of the jukebox, faintly vibrating the soundproofed walls of the room.

“Relax,” she said, leading him to the table in the center of the room. “Everything will be fine.”

“Did, uh, did my brothers put you up to this?” he asked, nervously. “’Cause, if they did, it’s okay if you don’t really want to, um, want to, you know?”

‘My goodness!’ Béla realized. ‘He’s a virgin! He probably thinks I’m a prostitute hired to bust his cherry. How sweet.’

“No, sweetie,” Béla told him, “I haven’t met your friends. Sometimes, I just randomly pick someone out to be the first one,” she lied, then she hesitated.

‘How do I tell him his very first one ever is just my first one of the evening?’ she wondered.

Béla sighed. “Come here.”

She moved her fingers for him to come to her. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts. After a moment, she squeezed his hands with hers to give him the idea that he was supposed to do something with her breasts besides nervously hold them. He began gently squeezing them with his fingers.

“They’re really soft,” he whispered in awe. “I’ve always imagined…”

He stopped, realizing he was giving away too much of himself to someone he wasn’t sure he could trust. Béla realized that he was comparing her body to how his own felt.

“They’re much softer than a man’s breasts,” she said as she leaned forward, enjoying his gentle squeezing.

“And, when the girl likes what the man is doing,” she continued, pressing her nipples into the palms of his hands, “the nipples get real hard and bumpy.”

His focus changed from rubbing her breasts to caressing her hard little nipples with his fingers. He smiled and continued to play with her nipples as tiny hard bumps suddenly appeared in her darkened areolas.

“They also like to be kissed…” Béla suggested.

To demonstrate how he should continue, Béla took his right hand in her hands, raised it to her lips and kissed the end of one of his fingers.

“Like this…” she continued, flicking her tongue against the end of the finger she had just kissed.

The young man got the idea and lowered his head, kissing and sucking on her horny little nipps while cupping her breasts in his hands. Her nipples got a lot harder.

Béla moaned in pleasure. ‘My, what a fast learner,’ she thought.

She put her arms over his shoulders and laid her cheek against the side of his head, nibbling lightly on his ear as he continued to attend to her breasts.

Then he started exploring further with his hands, moving them abruptly down the sides of her rib cage. She squeeked and jumped lightly in surprise.

“That tickled,” she explained, when he raised his head, worried that he’d done something wrong.

As he stood there, evidently waiting for something magical to happen, she reached down, took his hands and placed them back on her body. He embraced her delicately. Béla’s skin positively crawled at young boy’s touch.

‘This is not working out,’ Béla realized. ‘He is simply too terrified!’

She hopped down off the table, sliding her naked body lightly down through his loose embrace, and led him over to the leather couch against the wall. She rarely used it with most of her fans, having determined that she was more accessible when she was in the center of the table in the center of the room, like the main course at Christmas Dinner. She liked being accessible. As she thought about it, she decided she liked being the main course, as well, especially for a large group.

But in this particular case, she was going to have to be more intimate, else there was a good chance she would scare this boy off girls forever and he’d end up at age forty, still living with his mother and masturbating secretly in the bathroom, hiding his sexuality from everyone.

“Believe it or not,” she told him as she dragged him across the floor, “sexual responses are not natural. They are learned.”

She sat him down on the couch.

“It’s similar to learning to like coffee, or beer,” she said. “A man has no idea what a woman feels like if he’s never touched one. He can imagine forever and never know until he actually touches a real, live girl.”

She picked up his left hand and placed it on her breast, like she had earlier.

“To you, I know this doesn’t feel very sexy,” she explained. “The first time a man touched me there, I was frightened near to death. I didn’t like it at all.”

The boy self-consciously started to move his hand off her breast since the girl had just said she didn’t like it, but Béla held it in place.

“But,” she continued, “I learned to like it. It was a learned response. To you, holding something in your hand that feels like a half-filled water balloon isn’t very sexy. It’s not what you thought a girl would feel like; not what you expected.”

She reached forward and caressed his chest, her hand cupping his chest where one of his breasts would be.

“A man’s body is a lot more muscular,” she said. “It feels different. A woman’s body is very soft. You expected my breasts to be firmer, I know, but there’s no muscle tissue in them. After all, they’re just lumps of warm fat. That’s why they’re so squishy.”

She chuckled as he squeezed her breast, gently exploring. At least he wasn’t trying to flee.

“With experience,” Béla continued, “you’ll even learn to like how a woman’s body feels, and even enjoy touching them.”

“I like touching you,” he said quietly, moving toward her and running his fingers down the front of her breast and her tummy.

“You really are soft,” he said, once more in awe of her femininity.

He was moving his hands around on her breasts and tummy, tentatively exploring this fragile female creature sitting next to him.

Béla sat up, holding her arms out to the sides, allowing him to explore her waist and back. This time, she didn’t feel the negative energy he was unknowingly projecting through his fingers earlier. Her skin didn’t tingle like when Jake or Frank touched her, but at least it wasn’t trying to crawl away now.

Experimentally, the young man stroked her rib cage in the same spot that had made her jump earlier. She jumped, again, twice surprised. He chuckled, nervously, as she pretended to glare at him.

‘I have to be very careful,’ she realized. ‘I could still scare him off.’

Laughing, she reached forward and tickled his ribs. He sat still, gazing into her face, trying not to smile.

“I’m not, um, not ticklish,” he said, seeming a little shy. “I have two older brothers, so I learned not to be ticklish a long time ago.”

“So, are they here with you, on your birthday?” she asked.

“Yeah, they’re out there, waiting on me to, um,” he said, then puzzled by her question, added, “How did you know it was my birthday?”

Béla laughed. “They talked very loudly,” she told him. “I could easily hear what they were saying to you.”

“Oh. Then you heard them explaining about… that kiss…”

He blushed, remembering them telling him that he had won her for the evening, and realizing that she’d heard the whole thing.

Béla nodded. “I decided to make their little jest come true. I know what it’s like to be teased. I heard everything except your name,” she said, smiling at him.

“Oh,” he said again.

Then he suddenly realized that this lovely naked creature, who was being so open and honest with him all about how men and women really feel about each other and about how she felt about it all, didn’t even know his name. And still she trusted him with all this intimacy.

“My name’s Sean,” he told her. “McGuire. Sean McGuire. My older brothers out there are Mike and Pat.”

He held out his hand. Then laughed sheepishly and put it down.

‘Shaking hands with a naked girl who’s already let me play with her breasts?’

“Well, Sean,” Béla said, pulling herself up so they were sitting face to face, “I hope we have a pleasant evening.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. After a moment, she felt him put his arms around her. After another moment, he finally began kissing her back. Several moments after that, they came up for air.

“This is nice,” Sean told her, a pleased quality in his voice.

“I know,” Béla said, dreamily. “Sometimes making out is the best part of sex.”

She felt him tense up at the word ‘sex’. She forced herself to smile and kissed him again, trying to get him to relax.

‘This is going to take all night!’ she realized, thinking about the gang bang she’d postponed by dragging Sean in here and trying not to be annoyed with his slow progress. ‘If I’m to get any satisfaction at all, I’m really going to have get him up to speed!

“Are you nervous, holding a naked girl in your arms?” she asked, teasing him. “This naked girl likes the way you hold her…”

She kissed him, again.

Nothing.

Béla sighed.

Desperate to get things moving, she decided to try the old tactic she used to get the sub-human life forms that often came into her bar to open up to her.

“What do you think about,” she asked pleasantly, “when you’re alone, in the middle of the night? Do you think about girls? A particular girl, maybe?”

“Well, no, yes,” Sean said, uncertain of what she wanted to hear. “Sometimes.”

Béla gazed into his eyes. She had his trust, at least for the time being, and so long as she didn’t surprise him.

As he held her, Béla picked up the thought, I didn’t know girls were this heavy.

The thought surprised her. ‘I only weigh forty-seven kilos!’ she thought, insulted.

Then she realized he had probably never held a woman before and evidently didn’t realize that there was actually some effort involved.

‘Sean is definitely not a ‘hands-on’ type of guy!’ she decided.

She was beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake bringing him back here. Things could get even more awkward than they already were.

‘Patience is its own reward,’ she reminded herself. ‘More like it’s its own penalty!’

She knew, for Sean’s own sake, and for the sake of his pride, so he could at least honestly face his older brothers after spending, what? almost an hour with her, now? She was going to have to get him to fuck her somehow. He would never be allowed to live down his failure to perform, otherwise.

‘Let’s see, now. Where were we?’ Béla wondered.

“Do you think about any particular girl?” she asked again.

“No, not really,” Sean said, almost too embarrassed to discuss it, “just a girl…”

Béla smiled at him. “What are you doing with this dream girl of yours? Are you touching her? Kissing her? Making love, maybe?”

She radiated calm into his mind as hard as she could, trying to keep her own upset with him off the line entirely. She felt his nervousness ‘pop’ into non-existence as he finally decided he could trust her with his dreams.

Béla relaxed, realizing she had begun to sweat with the effort of practically surrounding his whole body with her energy just to get him to open up enough to talk to her. An image presented itself in her mind as Sean began describing it to her.

“I’m kissing her,” he said, “and running my hands up and down her body.”

“Show me,” she whispered to him.

He bent over and kissed her. Béla stretched and moaned softly, carefully reacting exactly like the woman in the image he was unknowingly projecting to her.

‘Much better!’ Béla thought as Sean caressed her. ‘Now, we’re getting somewhere.’

She began touching him back, projecting into his mind that this is what his dream woman would do. She kept her mind open to his, carefully defusing the little red and orange flare-ups of his insecurity as they occurred.

“You’re so warm!” Sean exclaimed, embracing her tightly.

Béla laughed a little under her breath and began kissing his face and neck. Reaching up, she began unbuttoning his shirt, making sure to suggest, in her mental connection with Sean through his dream image, that it was something his dream girl would do.

“Parts of me are positively hot,” she whispered to him, breathing her warm breath into his ear, “as I’m hoping you’ll find out.”

She stayed with him in his mind, becoming more assertive in her actions as his trust in her gradually allowed him to let her take more control.

Sean began helping Béla undress him. His body was finally emitting male pheromones that indicated he was sexually aroused. Since she had tied that silly G-string around his head and kissed him, he had been radiating varying degrees of terror mixed with sexual anxiety until now.

Béla let him take his own trousers off, knowing that her dislike of male clothing in general could cause her to lose her concentration and control of the experience they were sharing.

Showing him in her mind that it was the natural thing to do, she reached down and touched his half-hard penis, stroking it gently with her fingers, careful not to embarrass or upset him. She kissed her way down his chest and belly, making sure his dream image showed him it was the way things were done.

When she reached his penis with her mouth, it was nice and hard, standing straight out from his young, muscular belly. This was where he usually started masturbating, so she slowly moved her hand up and down on his cock, like he was doing in the image he was projecting. Then she added her lips to the motion, still making sure this was occurring in his dream vision.

The surprise Sean felt as the wet warmth of Béla’s mouth surrounded the head of his penis for the very first time almost shocked him out of their mutually created dream world. Béla had to turn most of her attention back toward keeping him calm and relaxed while simply squeezing his cock in her hands so that he remained aroused.

Finally, she was able to put all of her attention on sucking his cock. After a moment, she could feel he was getting ready to come. She stopped sucking on him and sat up, releasing his mind from her control.

Becoming Béla, again, and not Sean’s dream girl, she gazed into Sean’s eyes. His suddenly freed mind caused images to swirl around him, making him dizzy for a moment. Then they faded, leaving him aroused and hungry for completion. He gazed into Béla’s dark eyes a few inches in front of him.

“Would you like to make love to me?” she asked him, softly caressing his face with her warm breath.

“Yes?” he answered, not certain of what he’d just experienced.

The warmth of her mouth and the way her tongue tickled him when she licked his dick and his balls had fascinated him. He had never imagined anyone even wanting to do that to him, even though that insulting term was one of Mike’s favorite cuss words: Cocksucker!

From now on, he would have a very different opinion of what a cocksucker really was. It was definitely not a cuss word! Oh, yeah! If it was applied to a guy – yeah – then it could be a cuss word… Hmmm…

Béla lay back on the couch and pulled Sean down to her. As he moved his body against hers, she reached down between them and guided his cock up between her legs. He began moving his hips back and forth, simulating the action he had seen in movies and on late night TV. After a moment, Béla got him to penetrate her, grabbing him by his ass and pulling him further up on her body until he – For God’s Sake, finally! – ‘hit the mark’.

Sean’s eyes opened wide as he felt the moist heat of her insides suddenly surround his hard-on. The sensations down there suddenly switched from dry skin rubbing on soft warm flesh to slippery wet heat as he entered her. He grinned and forced himself deeper into her insides, catching on to the back and forth, in and out motion of it all.

“God, that feels so good!” he exclaimed. “You’re so hot in there!”

He kept humping away, amazed at the sensations he was experiencing for the very first time and the tight, slippery heat of her body as he moved in and out of her. It was a completely different feeling than masturbating.

Béla would have agreed if she could have, but she was too busy working on her own orgasm. Seconds later, Sean came in her hot insides, making it feel all slippery in there and much looser.

He collapsed down on top of her, crushing her body into the couch. Béla grunted in protest, then decided that his weight on her wasn’t harmful since it was mostly on her hips and chest, and not her stomach. Besides, being inconsiderately used as a mattress after sex was something she was used to. The important thing now was, Sean was no longer a virgin.

Afterwards was a little awkward. She got him to get off her without making him feel like he’d used her by kissing him and telling him how nice it was.

“That was good,” she said, smiling sweetly. “You made me come.”

The truth was, she’d worked like hell trying to come in the forty seconds he was actually fucking her, but she’d managed to do it.

“But now,” she added, “I need a towel or I’m going to leak all over this nice leather couch.”

Sean jumped up, willing to get her anything that she wanted. This was all new territory to him. He never considered what you would do with a girl after you had sex with her. For as long as he’d been a teenager, his only fascination with girls was sexual. He actually had no idea what else you might do with one.

“There’s a towel rack on the wall at the other end of the couch,” she called out. Sean brought one back and stood next to her, uncertain of what to do next.

“A gentleman always cleans up after himself,” she suggested, and spread her legs.

She giggled as he looked down at her. He was clearly embarrassed, looking at the mess he’d made.

“Here,” Béla said, and took the towel from him.
She wiped thoroughly between her legs and then wrapped a handful of towel around his limp penis. She twisted the towel with her hand a couple of times, then tossed it over the back of the couch. After that, she sat him down on the couch and began to help him dress.

“You will have to learn to clean up after yourself, you know,” she admonished him. “A girl always likes to think she’s appreciated. If she has to clean herself, she usually feels like she’s been used and discarded.”

He was still buttoning his shirt as she guided him to the entrance. The noise and bustle of the bar assaulted their ears as Béla opened the door. They were met with Sean’s brothers and several other club patrons cheering Sean’s entrance into the adult world. His brothers hoisted him up on their shoulders and carried him away to the bar.

Béla reached over and flipped the light switch on the inside wall of the Target Room, turning on the new rotating red light Frank had installed above the door. There was a general cheer that momentarily drowned out the ‘hip-hip-hoorays’ of the McGuire clan as they continued to celebrate Sean’s birthday. Men got up from all over the bar and headed her way. They had waited patiently for her to pop the young boy’s cherry. Now it was their turn.

Béla led the way back to her table and climbed on. Looking around at the undressing men, she selected one with a nice, large hard-on. Hopping down off the table and dragging him with her, still half-dressed, she shoved her hand into the jar of Vaseline she kept at the table. She smeared the gooey stuff all over his dick and bent over the table, presenting him with her ass.

“Stick that thing in there as far as it’ll go!” she commanded him.

She braced herself against the table and waited for his assault. Béla had a lot of frustration to get rid of, and she was going to get rid of it all, right now. She cried out, both in pain and sexual relief as Adam rammed his big cock up her ass just as hard as he could.

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

Sean’s two brothers and Frank were singing.

“For he’s a jolly good felll-oooooow, which nobody can deny! Yaayyy!”

As the song finished, Sean was forcing down a big gulp of beer, trying not to make a face at the sour taste of it. He could hear Béla talking in his mind.

‘It’s similar to learning to like coffee, or beer,’ he could hear her saying, as his mind replayed the scene. He hated beer, and doubted he would ever learn to like it.

He anxiously looked over toward the blue door with the flashing red light over it. More men were going in through the door where Béla was. A woman’s scream was cut off just as the door to the soundproofed room closed. He jumped up and headed toward the Target Room door. Pat, his oldest brother, grabbed him.

“Hey, where’re you goin’, li’l buddy?” he asked, slurring his words. He and Mike had consumed at least two pitchers of beer while waiting on their little brother to lose his virginity.

“She’s hurt!” Sean exclaimed. “Somebody’s hurting her!”

He tried to pull free and go rescue Béla.

“It’s Okay, li’l buddy,” Pat said, holding on tight, “it’s what she does. Right, Mike?”

Mike nodded agreement.

“But she’s in there alone! With all those men…” Sean cried, then suddenly stopped, realizing his brothers were right.

‘It’s what she does…’

He wondered if the fascinating, fragile woman he’d met and talked to and made love to for the last hour or so was real, or just an illusion. She actually looked younger that he was. How could she be so much more knowledgeable in certain areas than anyone he’d ever met before? How could she be so caring and fragile, and still be able to do that with ten or twenty men at a time? He’d heard his brothers talk about her before. Was this the same ‘hot babe’ they bragged about making ‘airtight’ last week, whatever that meant?

“Uh-oh,” Pat said, noticing the strange look on Sean’s face as he tried to grasp the reality of things. “Li’l buddy’s in love…”

“What? You mean with Béla?” Mike asked.
He pulled his kid brother close and gave him a hug. His breath smelled like stale beer. “It’s alright, kid. We all love Béla.”

He held onto his little brother, nearly crushing Sean’s shoulders in his brotherly embrace.

“And she loves all of us!” Mike shouted, raising his mug in the air, splashing beer everywhere.

“You’re all sick!” Sean cried, furiously breaking free of Mike’s grasp.

Sean backed away from his brothers, spitting his words at them.

“You jack asses can’t see what’s right in front of you!” he screamed. “To you, she’s just a whore! Something to stick your filthy dicks into! She’s not…”

Sean stopped, running out of words to express himself.

“She’s a person,” he whimpered. “Can’t you see that? She loves and cares about people just like you do…”

He stopped, and heaved his guts all over the floor.

Pat and Mike looked at each other, both shrugging their shoulders.

“Li’l buddy can’t hold his beer,” Pat said, handing the bartender a twenty. “Keep the change. Sorry about the mess.”

They each took one of Sean’s arms and, half walking and half carrying him, led him out the door. As they left, Frank brought out a mop and began cleaning up the mess on the floor.

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

Béla lay naked on the table in the Target Room, recovering from her orgiastic ordeal. There was cum in her ass and her pussy, as well as all over her stomach and back. It coated the inside of her mouth and throat. Her hair and face were speckled with it.

This was the first time that she’d ever felt that her weekly gangbang was an ordeal. Her body was still tingling, a happy receptor of all of that wonderful, energizing cum, but she, herself, felt depressed and unfulfilled. She was glad there were only twelve or fifteen customers who had waited around for her to deflower her virgin.

‘I wonder if my pregnancy has anything to do with the way I feel right now?’ she asked herself.

Hearing the door open behind her, she slowly slid her body around on the cum-covered vinyl tabletop.

“Hi, Jake,” she said, wearily. “Can we just go upstairs, tonight? I really need the Jacuzzi…”

She saw who was standing there. It wasn’t Jake. She sighed.

‘It’s only one more,’ she thought to herself. ‘It won’t take long.’

“If you want to clean me up, first,” she told him wearily, “towels are over there.”

She pointed. The stranger walked over to the towels and picked one up. He began carefully and tenderly wiping cum off her face and hair.

“I’ve been waitin’ for ya,” he told her. “It’s hard to catch ya alone.”

He continued cleaning her off. Béla was picking up strange intentions from his mind. The clearest one was he felt very affectionate and didn’t intend to hurt her, so she wasn’t too concerned. The oddity was he didn’t intend to fuck her, either. She probed a little deeper, as he carefully turned her over, wiped down her backside and began cleaning between her legs.

‘He intends to take me somewhere!’ Béla realized, as the image smacked her in the face. ‘He plans to kidnap me! He wants to keep me!’

She wrenched her legs out of his grasp, losing her balance and slipping off the table. She crashed to the floor with a thump. Her elbow hit first, sending a shock wave of electricity through her entire body. She lay on the floor for a few seconds, stunned by her fall. She could feel her cracked elbow renewing and repairing itself with the fresh cum she had absorbed through her skin.

Béla watched her would-be kidnapper come around the table toward her. The panic button was concealed under the other side of the table and she couldn’t reach it from where she was. She scrambled back, trying to keep end of the table between her and her would-be kidnapper.

Grinning at the little slut’s feeble attempt to escape, the stranger suddenly jumped over the table, intending to land right on her, knock the fight out of her and pin her to the floor. Seeing his intent, Béla rolled backward and met him with her feet. She pushed her legs against him as hard as she could, sending him flying against the far wall, much further than he’d planned on traveling. Continuing her roll, she came up on her feet and bolted for the door.

She could feel his mind as he rose up to stop her – his tightly controlled anger, the cold, comfortable feel of the gun in his hand…

‘Holy shit! He’s got a gun! Get ready to duck…’ Béla thought as she watched him squeeze the trigger in her mind.

‘Now!’

She dodged sideways. The bullet nicked her leg.

‘He’s shooting at my legs! He’s trying to cripple me!’

She caught her balance and reached for the door. She could feel him aiming at the door handle and knew what would happen to her hand if she touched it. Her body slammed against the door and she stopped, acting terrified. She needed him to let his guard down. If he thought she was beaten…

“Well, I’m impressed,” the stranger said, his voice sounding too smooth and oily. “The master said you were good. Watching you changing your mind so often on the stage out there, I believed he was mistaken.”

Breathing heavily, Béla watched him walk toward her as she pressed her back against the door. Fifteen feet, twelve feet, ten, eight. He stopped, still pointing the gun at her.

‘He thinks he’s still out of my reach!’ Béla realized. ‘How about a little vampire surprise, buddy…’

Shifting her shoulders back, she formed her wings and smacked them together with a loud ‘crack’, his head between what had been the palms of her hands. As he dropped to his knees, stunned, Béla reformed her arms and bolted through the door. A small part of her mind noticed that the door handle was wet and sticky. It hadn’t been, before.

Béla headed straight for the stage, where she’d left the knife a couple of hours ago. Now that she was loose and had some options, she was furious and ready to fight.

She stopped and looked around. The stage had been cleaned up and the damned knife wasn’t there. It had probably been returned to the dancer’s dressing room.

Frank looked up at her as she rushed past him. He looked astonished.

“You’re bleeding!” he exclaimed, looking at her naked chest.

Béla stopped in mid-stride and looked down at herself. There was blood running down her belly from a half-inch-wide hole just under her rib cage.

“The son-of-a-bitch shot me!” she exclaimed.

‘It must have happened when I clapped my wings together on his head!’

“Who shot you?” Frank asked, anxiously looking around the bar. He saw someone moving quickly toward the entrance. He was heading away from the Target Room.

“Jake! Stop him!” Frank shouted, pointing at the swiftly moving stranger.

Jake turned toward the man coming at him. The stranger reached into his coat for something. Then he was pointing at Jake. Jake grabbed his stomach. As he fell, Jake looked toward the bar at Béla, pain and shock written on his face. The man turned and began striding across the bar toward her. He was pointing at her, now. It was too dark in the bar for Frank to actually see the gun the stranger was holding.

Frank heard Béla scream in rage, then his view was blocked like a curtain had just been pulled across the middle of the room. He heard several popping sounds that he recognized as gunfire, then the strange curtain across his vision was gone. He saw Béla knock the stranger down, shoving him hard, then she was bending over Jake.

How the hell did she get clear over there? He thought, astonished by the events happening around him.

People were screaming and trying to hide behind chairs and tables. Frank saw the man get up that Béla had knocked down, then little dots were appearing in her naked back as she held her body between Jake and the stranger.

‘Holy shit! He’s shooting her!’ Frank realized, suddenly fearful for her.

He reached under the bar for the hundred-and-fifty-year old Peacemaker he kept there. He’d never had to use the ‘Gun That Tamed the West’, and had believed, until now, that he’d never need it.

Frank watched as Béla protected Jake from the bullets. Then their attacker threw the empty gun down and reached into his coat, again. He pulled out a long, sharp piece of wood.

‘He’s after Béla!’ Frank realized with new shock. ‘He knows what she is!’

Béla hugged Jake as tightly as she could, trying to protect him from the bullets; not even realizing she was sobbing from the pain that numbed her back. She couldn’t get her breath. It was hard just to hold her arms up. Then someone grabbed her shoulder, painfully jerking her around.

She looked up into a face full of hate. The stranger’s arm was raised over his head. She saw the stake in his hand. Unable to move her arms to protect herself, she collapsed back against Jake and waited for the stake to descend and end her life.

She looked into the stranger’s face, trying to understand, too terrified to connect with his mind. She watched the stake begin its descent, then the man’s face exploded, covering her naked body with blood and brains. He fell forward against her, the stake gouging a deep path from her shoulder down the inside of her arm. He slide down her naked body, his shattered head getting wedged between her legs, brain tissue and blood spilling out over her bare belly.

Frank could no longer hear the screams and shouting of the patrons as they fled or hid from the gunfire. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears created by the smoking .45 he held in his hands. Both his wrists hurt from the kick it gave him when he’d so very carefully sighted down almost six inches of barrel and squeezed the trigger.

He looked dispassionately at the pile of bodies on the other side of the room. No one was moving. Putting the gun back under the counter, he walked over toward them. He wasn’t too worried about Béla; if she wasn’t staked, then she’d probably be all right in a little while. He needed to find out how badly Jake had been shot, and, most importantly, discover who this Vampire Hunter was, or rather, had been.

Moving the large stranger off the top of the pile, Frank reached down to Béla. She was conscious. She looked up at him, trembling and terrified.

“It’s all right, Béla. He’s dead!” her told her. “He can’t hurt you, now!”

He noticed that most of the blood on her body wasn’t hers, at least not on the front half.

“Can’t move!” she gasped.

Frank turned her over to check her wounds.

“One of the bullets hit your spine,” he explained. “You being you, it should heal shortly.”

Frank turned to Jake. He was unconscious. Blood covered the front of his shirt. Most of it was Béla’s, from when she fell back against him. Frank tore Jake’s shirt open and found the hole in his stomach.

“Jessica! Call an ambulance!” Frank called out, “Jake’s been shot!” There was no answer.

“Jessica!” he shouted, angrily. He heard movement somewhere near the bar, then Jessica’s distraught voice was talking into the phone.

“…an ambulance. … No. At the Target Club. On Fremont. Please hurry! I think they’re all dead! … No. There was a man with a gun. He just stood there and he shot her and shot her and shot her!” Jessica dissolved into tears and collapsed to the floor, dropping the telephone.

“Jake…” Béla whispered.

She was lying face down where Frank had left her. Her face was turned sideways, but in the wrong direction to see Jake. She still couldn’t move.

“He’s alive.” Frank told her. “He’s unconscious, but he’s not bleeding much. There’ll be an ambulance here shortly.”

Béla closed her eyes and lay on the floor, forcing herself to breathe quietly as the hole in her lungs healed.

Frank turned his attention to their attacker and began going through the dead mans’ pockets. He found a key to Number 6 at the Motor Inn. He put the key in his pocket as he heard a siren and shouting near the door.

“This is the police! Everybody in there come out with your hands up!”

“It’s okay!” Frank called out to them. “The gunman is dead!”

The police came in, one at a time, behaving suspiciously toward the two or three patrons still hiding behind tables.

“We’re over here,” Frank called from behind the door.

The nervous policeman swung around, gun in hand, pointing it at Frank.

“Will you help us, please?” Frank asked him, plaintively.

He knew how dangerous it was to upset a cop with a drawn gun.

“Jesus, what happened here?” the officer exclaimed, staring wide-eyed at the pile of bloody bodies.

“He shot them, I shot him.” Frank said, pointing to the respective bodies as he spoke.

“God Almighty!” the officer said, noticing Béla’s bare, bullet-riddled back. “Is she still alive?”

He knelt down and put his hand on Béla’s neck. She lay still, not moving when he touched her.

“She has a good pulse,” he exclaimed. “It’s amazing she’s not dead!”

“Henry!” a voice called from the door. “The ambulance is here!”

“Okay!” the officer, Henry, called out. “We have two shooting victims, one with multiple wounds. You should take her first. Get another ambulance down here!”

The medic bent down and began checking Béla’s wounds. There were five gunshot wounds in her back. At least one had punctured her lungs and one had shattered her spine. None were bleeding as though an artery or vein had been ruptured. He gently turned her over, preparing her for the gurney. His eyes widened as he recognized the woman he constantly fantasized about. For the last month, he had spent every Friday night he was off duty here, in this club, watching her dance.

He couldn’t believe she was actually conscious. Astonished, he discovered four more bullet wounds in her front; two in her chest and two in her stomach. He knew, with that much damage to her body, she would probably bleed to death internally before they reached the hospital, and if, somehow, they did manage to save her, she would never walk or dance again.

“I’m so sorry,” he said softly, gazing into her pain filled eyes.

He and the driver loaded Béla’s limp form onto the portable gurney and then rushed her out. He was glad he didn’t have to drive. It was hard to see with his vision blurred like it had been for the last few minutes. But he hated the fact that he was going to be the one to sit in the back of the ambulance and watch this beautiful young girl bleed to death. The siren blasted through his thoughts and the ambulance jumped forward, beginning its imperious journey to the hospital.

He put an oxygen mask over Béla’s face.

“Try to breathe normally,” he told her.

She nodded.

He stabbed the end of an artificial blood pack into her arm to try to keep enough blood in her system to keep her heart beating. She didn’t flinch. He wondered, with her back shattered between her shoulder blades, if she even felt it.

Back at the Target Club, Jake was waking up.

“Oh, God! That hurts!” Jake mumbled, then held his stomach tightly and tried to sit up.

“Stay still!” the officer commanded. “There’s an ambulance coming! I don’t want you rupturing anything, okay?”

Jake lay against the wall, gasping, relieved that it was okay for him to just stay where he was.

“Where’s Béla?” he asked Frank.

“The ambulance took her to the hospital.” Frank told him.

“That was Béla?” the officer asked, shocked.

Because of all the blood, he hadn’t even recognized her. The sick feeling he already had in his stomach suddenly got much worse.

“I’ve seen her before,” he said. “God, I hate to see that happen to her.”

“Me, too,” Frank said through clenched teeth.

He didn’t want the officer to say anything more. In fact, he didn’t want to discuss it at all, with Jake right there! But it was already too late.

“Is she all right?” Jake asked anxiously, still breathing heavily as he tried again to sit up, upset from listening to them talk.

“No.” Frank said. “She’s not.”

He was worried. Not just about Béla’s condition, but what they would do to her if someone discovered her secret. Her wounds were so severe that it would probably take her awhile to heal, so probably they wouldn’t notice her difference at first.

In another minute, the second ambulance pulled up and, loading Jake, took him away, siren wailing.

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

The ambulance pulled up at the emergency room entrance of the Memorial Hospital. The driver hopped out, ran around and opened the rear door.

“Go in and get some help out here. I need someone to carry the I.V. and oxygen,” said the medic in the back.

The medic that had ridden with Béla was joyfully amazed that she seemed to be doing so well. Her blood pressure and pulse were weak, but steady, and, rather than going into shock and cardiac arrest as most anyone in her condition would, she was conscious and even trying to talk.

“Don’t worry.” He told her as she lay there, the blood pack inserted into her arm and her face covered with the oxygen mask. “You’re gonna be all right.”

But his gut told him that she would never be all right. Even if the girl lived, she would be chair-bound for the rest of her life. The thought made him feel sick inside.

He hopped out of the back of the ambulance, pacing back and forth.

‘What’s taking Doug so long?’ he thought, impatiently. ‘Christ! It’s freezing out here!’

Seeing Doug, the driver, coming back out with two orderlies, he walked around the side of the ambulance toward them.

“It’s about time you guys got out here!” he admonished them. “We got a multiple gunshot victim here! She could bleed to death any second!”

He turned back, leading the small group of orderlies around behind the ambulance and was almost knocked over by a fierce blast of winter wind that blew his cap completely off. He climbed in the back, then suddenly stopped.

“Holy shit! She’s gone!” he cried out. Stunned and surprised, he backed out of the van and looked around wildly.

“Somebody’s taken her!” he yelled. “But that’s impossible! I was right here the whole time!”

Still looking around, he noticed a bloodstained sheet blowing across the lot behind the vehicle.

“She must have gotten out!” he exclaimed. “Come on! Look around for her! If she’s walking around loose, she’s probably delusional! We gotta find her before she bleeds to death!”

The men scattered, searching the grounds and the nearby parking lot. They didn’t find her. No one had noticed the few tiny drops of blood that had rained down on their white uniforms while they were standing by the ambulance, moments earlier.

Back at the Target Club, Frank and Jessica were each telling the police their version of what happened.

“That evil sick bastard killed her!” Jessica was saying She was angry and upset, her voice shaking. “He just stood there and shot her to death. Then Frank blew his goddamned head clean off!”

The police officer made Frank turn over his beautiful long-barreled .45 that Béla had gifted him with shortly after they’d met.

“Well, alright,” the officer said. “As soon as we finish our investigation of the scene, we’ll be done here.”

They looked around the room. Tables and chairs were turned every which way. Many were broken into pieces on the floor. Some people Frank didn’t know were carrying out the covered remains of the gunman.

“Can I take Jessica home, officer?” Frank asked, “She’s been through a lot. Well, we both have. And…”

“Sure. Go ahead,” the officer, Henry, told him. “Are you coming back?”

“Well, somebody’ll have to clean this up…” Frank murmured.

Frank got car keys from the office, then took Jessica outside, leading her to Béla’s little sports car. She’d just bought it last week and was very much in love with it.

“Why don’t we take your car?” Jessica asked, uninterested in being cramped into the passenger side of a tiny, foreign car and freezing to death.

“I’ve got a headlight out,” he answered. “Besides, I’ve been dying to try this little baby out…”

Privately, Frank wanted a car that would be easily recognizable and stood out, even at night, just in case…

“Besides,” he added, “I’ve been dying to try this little baby out.”

Bastard Asshole! Jessica thought, furious with him, Béla’s been murdered and all he can think about is driving her hot little sports car! God! Men suck!

She decided that the next time she saw him, she was going to spit in his face and quit! But right now, she was too upset.

After taking Jessica to her apartment and helping her inside, he assured himself that she would be alright, then left. He looked at the address on the motel key he’d picked from the dead man’s pocket, then drove out to the Motor Inn.

He parked Béla’s car in the back lot of the motel and walked around to room number six. Inserting the key, he let himself inside, closed the door and felt the wall next to him for a light switch.

Turning on the light, he began searching through the room, wiping his fingerprints off everything he touched. Searching the sparsely furnished room twice and finding nothing, he started through a third time, checking around and under absolutely everything.

Bingo! he thought, hoping that the piece of manila sticking out from under a suitcase was what he was looking for. He picked it up. It was a thick manila envelope full of unevenly folded papers.

Sitting down at the dimly lit table next to the bed, Frank pulled out its contents; a bunch of old newspaper clippings, hand-written notes, a map with a several little red X’s on it. There were dates written next to each of the little X’s. That got his attention.

The earliest dated ‘X’ was marked next to Chicago, dated July 17 ’32. The X’s trailed across the country, each one marked with a more recent date as they moved away from Chicago. There were two X’s over Hacienda Heights. The dates recorded next to the X’s were April 4 ’93 and May 16 ’94. They were the most recent dates on the map.

‘What happened here on those dates?’ he asked himself.

The other papers were old newspaper articles each about a bizarre unsolved death. The dates of the articles matched the dates written on the map. Included in the articles was the story of the serial killer who was killed by a wild animal five months ago. The animal had then apparently dragged away the serial killer’s last victim. Who the victim had been was still a mystery, as the body was never found.

Frank knew who the victim was, and who had actually killed the serial killer.

The other story was about a man who was found outside of town by a farmer while doing his spring plowing. The body, finally identified as a local recluse, had been lying there covered with snow for several months, and had evidently been torn up by wolves or wild dogs. The story went on about an unsolved rash of rapes that had occurred in October and November the previous year, then stopped as suddenly as they had begun. The perpetrator was never caught. The article hinted that the deteriorated remains that were found in the spring might have been the serial rapist, himself, or one of his victims.

‘Béla killed him, too,’ Frank realized, becoming more troubled as he remembered confronting her about her nocturnal activities.

As he continued to read, he discovered the one thing in common with each of the deaths the articles described:

‘The blood had been drained from the bodies of every one of them!’

‘Somebody is tracking Béla!’ Frank realized. ‘Was the hunter I killed working on his own, or was he working for someone else? And if so, how much information did he pass on to whoever hired him before tonight?

He checked the envelope and the papers inside, but no names or addresses could be found. Quickly stuffing the papers back into the envelope, Frank shoved the envelope into his coat and left.

He drove back toward the Target Club, then realized he should be at the hospital. Béla was going to need him to run interference for her, if he was going to get her out before they realized she was ‘special’.

Frank quickly U-turned and headed for Memorial Hospital. Parking Béla’s car in a darkened area of the lot outside the Emergency Room Entrance, he got out and looked around, not really expecting to see her just standing there waiting for him, then hurried inside, leaving the keys in the ignition.

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

Officer Henry felt sick to his stomach. It was just last Friday, a week ago, when he and his two best buds had gone bar hopping to celebrate one of them getting engaged.

“Aw, Com’ on, man!” Jesse was saying, “The Target Club ain’t that exclusive! They ain’t no cover charge – you ever hear of a strip club with no cover charge? Huh? An’ they got this hot girl, she does things with a knife that you just ain’t gonna believe, man!”

So Henry, the designated driver, let himself be led into the club by his two drunken friends. He had to admit the place was pretty laid back for a strip joint. The customers were well behaved and the two bar girls were more than a little friendly, encouraging the customers with little hugs and getting a little too close when taking their orders. He was sure it increased their tip money. It occurred to him that they might be prostitutes, but as a police officer, he hadn’t heard of any vice activity around the Target Club. He had, though, heard rumors of a private sex club on the premises, but, so far, they were just rumors, not complaints.

The drinks were more than reasonable at a buck and half each. He didn’t notice anyone giving lap dances, which was also unusual for a strip club. A hot stripper could make several hundred dollars in one night doing lap dances after each show, but maybe the stripper was just taking a break.

Jesse gouged his arm with his elbow.

“Hey! Hey!” Jesse said, excitedly. “That’s her! The girl with the knife act!”

The loudspeaker blared, announcing the ‘beautiful, exotic Béla’.

‘What an unusual name,’ Henry thought.

He watched her step up on the stage and told Jesse, “She looks pretty ordinary to me.”

“Just shut up and watch, man!” Jesse said, “She’s incredible!”

Henry shut up and watched the show. The girl didn’t seem to have much of a figure, no tits, skinny ass. She was wearing a camouflage mini-skirt and top. The top fastened between her breasts with a knot in front. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry, but strapped to her right leg was a camouflage leather knife holster.

So, Henry thought, smiling and looking at the stage, ‘She’s Little Miss Special Force’s stripper.’

The scrawny-looking girl started dancing and began discarding the pieces of her costume pretty much the same way he’d seen a dozen other strippers do.

Then she unfastened the top of the holster and pulled out a wicked-looking blade. She rubbed it across her bare breasts and belly, almost making love to it. Then, jutting her pelvis forward, she slid the blade down the front of her belly, beneath her skimpy G-string. She grabbed the front of her G-string with her other hand and pulled it up tight against her body, the lower part of it disappearing into the folds of her pussy lips.

Still delicately balanced on her spike heals with her pelvis jutted forward, she turned the knife blade so that the sharp edge was away from her skin. She looked out at the men standing up from their chairs, cheering her on, and sliced off her G-string!

‘Wow! She’s got my attention, now!’ Henry thought as he stared at the exotic girl stepped out of the ragged remains of her G-string and strutted across the stage. ‘Whew! Kinky!’

The stripper spotted someone in the crowd and flipped him the ripped G-string.

Annoyingly, Jesse was poking Henry in the arm, again.

“See? See, man? What’d I tell ya!” Jesse was losing control in his excitement.

“Stop it, man,” Henry told him, batting his arms away. “I wanna watch!”

He stared, mesmerized, as the slender, dark-haired girl on the stage transformed herself into the most incredibly exotic female he had ever seen. She simply radiated desire.

Henry looked around the bar. From the looks of rapture on the faces he saw, her audience wasn’t just lusting for her, they were all in love with her.

He watched as the exotic stripper placed one bare foot against the dancer’s pole and proceeded to ‘shave’ her inner thigh with the wicked-looking blade. Although he figured the knife was probably rubber, it was an incredibly erotic show.

He wished he could stay and watch the whole thing, as Béla was the most alive girl he had ever seen. He knew it was just an illusion, but he also knew he would be thinking about her for weeks. He also knew he would probably come back to see her, again – without Jesse. But now, He had to go on duty.

As they left, Jesse kept talking about what he’d ‘like to do to her, man’.

“An’ ya know what,” Jesse was saying, “I hear-ed they got a private room where she goes and inner-tains the customers after her show, if ya know what I’m sayin’, man?”

“Why don’t you go back there?” Henry finally asked him, exasperated at having to listen to Jesse’s total lack of appreciation of female beauty.

“Huh?” Jesse asked him.

“Why Don’t You Go Back and try to get in to her Private Little Show?” Henry said through his teeth, emphasizing every word.

“Uh, yeah!” Jesse said, sounding confused, wondering why Henry seemed so upset. “I think I will!”

Jesse turned away from where they’d been standing by the car and trotted back toward the Target Club. Henry hoped Jesse got the worst case of blue balls he’d ever had.

‘And now, she’s bleeding to death in some damned hospital because some pervert couldn’t stand to see that much unrestrained sexuality!’ he thought to himself. ‘Control! That’s what it’s all about. People kill the people they can’t control! And then we kill them!’

The radio blared. He picked up the microphone.

“Car 9,” he said, curtly.

“Car 9 proceed to Emergency Entrance Memorial Hospital, we have a missing person report on a patient,” the dispatcher told him.

“Missing from the hospital?” Henry queried.

“That’s a negative. The missing person is a shooting victim that was being transported to the hospital.”

‘What?’

“Roger that. ETA in about four minutes.”

‘What’s going on, now? Which one was missing? Did some sick pervert steal Béla’s corpse for…?’

He didn’t even want to think about what some sicko might do with her dead body. It was just six months ago that another stripper had been cut up into little pieces and dumped at the side of the road.

‘Gallatin Heights, a peaceful community. My ass!’ he thought angrily. ‘This is a sick world!’

It wasn’t the first time he’d thought that.

~~~~~

Béla watched people come and go from the roof over the Emergency Room Entrance. When the attendant had opened the rear door to step out, Béla was already stripping off her blood sac and mask.

He had stepped out and suddenly turned back. Béla froze, already half off the cart, and waited for him to pace the width of the ambulance and turn just as suddenly to pace back.

Then he evidently saw his companions and went around the side of the vehicle to greet them. Béla quickly, if unsteadily hopped down to the cold pavement and formed her wings.

When she’d launched herself upward, she was so weak she almost dropped on top of the group of orderlies coming back around to get her, her bare feet narrowly clearing their heads as she flew desperately upward to get above the lights of the hospital entrance.

‘That would have been the end of it,’ she thought, amused about it now, ‘crashing into them with these wings out.’

Too weak to stand for more than a minute, she lay on the slanted roof with her head at the edge of the wall so she could still see down. She desperately wanted something to drink – blood, cum, even water would be acceptable.

‘Some clothes would be nice, too,’ she thought, shivering as another late autumn breeze icily whipped around her bare body.

It occurred to her that her wings would protect the rest of her from the biting wind, but she didn’t trust herself to stand upright in this brisk, unsteady wind so she could properly wrap herself. Then there would be the problem of lying down without using her arms… So she just lay there, weak, thirsty, freezing, and waited. In her long life, she had spent a lot of time, waiting. She was very good at it.

The second ambulance arrived and she watched them take Jake inside. She was relieved to see that he seemed to be conscious. She tried to make eye contact with him as the orderlies rushed him through the brightly lit doors beneath her.

She hoped he would be all right. It would be difficult for her to see him again, at least for awhile. She dozed off for a few minutes, waking up when she heard another car pulling in to the parking lot.

‘That’s my car!’ Béla realized, shivering excitedly. ‘Somebody’s coming to rescue me!’

She watched, excitement and frozen ice almost causing her to roll off the roof. Frank got out of the car and stood, looking around for a moment, then, walking briskly, disappeared into the Emergency Room Entrance.

There was one extremely vital thing she noticed.

‘The lights didn’t blink when he left the car! It’s still unlocked! I can hide there!’

She stood up, unsteadily, and tensed herself to leap off the building. The sound of another car stopped her. She dropped, half-falling and slipping, back down into a prone position and watched.

‘Damn! It’s a police car! Hurry up and go away! I’m really, really cold!’

She watched as the policeman got out and was met by several people dressed in white. She thought they were probably the same group of orderlies that she had evaded earlier. They talked for a few minutes, then went over to the ambulance and talked some more. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could feel they were upset about misplacing her. Finally, they all went inside.

Forming her wings, Béla dropped off the roof and glided down to her car. It was unlocked. Best of all, the keys were still in the ignition.

‘Ahhh! Heat!’ she thought as she fired it up, ‘Frank, I love you!’

Squealing her tires, she spun around in the parking lot and headed out of town, escaping toward the mountains and her cabin.

~~~~~

“Hi. Excuse me. Have they finished processing Miss Wilson, yet?” Frank asked the nurse behind the glass partition.

“Um,” she said, pretending to look at the admissions list. “Are you a relative or a friend of the family?”

“Why?” Frank asked, suddenly concerned by her stalling. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

‘God! Did they find out already? They must have her locked down tight somewhere! I’ve got to get her out or she’ll never see daylight, again! They’ll dissect her into little pieces!’

“Where is she!” he demanded, enraged.

“They, um, lost her,” the nurse said, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry, she’s gone.”

“What?” he demanded, trying to stay angry enough to quell that sudden stab of fear. “Do you mean she’s dead?”

“No-no-no!” the nurse told him, trying to ease his upset a little. “She not dead. At least, I don’t think she is.

“I… she never…” the nurse composed herself. “They never brought her in. She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.

“Mr…” she started to continue. “What did you say your name was?”

“I’m sorry,” Frank said, apologizing. “I’m Frank Tabor. Miss Wilson is my boss, and a very dear friend.”

“Mr. Tabor,” the nurse said, coming around from behind the partition, “I don’t really know how to tell you this, but, well, Miss Wilson is missing.”

Frank stared at her, not comprehending, at first. Then he turned and ran toward the exit, laughing.

“Mr.… Mr. Tabor, Wait!” the nurse called after him.

Frank reached the door and almost ran into the policeman who had been at the Target Club earlier. He was suddenly surrounded by orderlies entering the building, stopping his progress. The nurse was chasing along behind, calling after him.

He pushed his way through the orderlies until he could see the parking lot. As he looked out, he saw Béla’s taillights as she peeled around the corner and spun completely around on a sheet of ice.

‘Ha! She got away!’ he thought, exuberantly bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet as he watched her disappear down the road. He wasn’t worried about her, now. If he had to find her, he knew where she’d be.

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

Béla perched, bare toes in the snow on the roof of her cabin, and watched the sun come up over the mesa. She waited patiently for the intruder in her cabin, whose mind she had detected as she approached, to come out. He would have to, eventually, unless he was using the kitchen sink as a waste disposal unit. It was almost winter now, and he just might do that.

The squatter had been asleep when Béla arrived. Probing his dreams, she picked up odd images of impossible memories for a person who had lived but a single lifetime. She had hoped he would wake before the sun rose, so she could press further into his mind and find out what he was doing here. Plus, it would be nice to get out of the cold.

With the rising sun, her abilities to feel others faded into the background static that had been with her during every day of her life for the last century or so, with the occasional momentary relief she experienced during a solar eclipse.

Every ten years or so, the noise in her head got so bad it gave her daily headaches for the next year or two. That had only begun happening around the turn of this last century. It had been nine years since her last headache. She calculated she had another year or two to go, then the following year or two was going to be pure hell, again. If she could, she would spend most of it in a basement, or somewhere underground.

There was no wind, so she spread her fragile wings toward the sun, seeking what little warmth she could get. It was pretty stingy with its heat when it was this close to the horizon.

Her reverie ended abruptly with the slamming of the screen door below her perch. She folded down her wings and became ‘human’, again.

An old man stepped out through the cabin door and waddled unsteadily toward the outhouse. The morning sun made the frozen ground glitter, showing him where the slippery spots were. He walked carefully down the uneven pathway.

‘Mr. ‘Belview’, I presume?’ Béla thought to herself. ‘Why are you still here?’

She dropped down behind him to announce her presence.

“You’re still here,” she said, folding her arms across her cold tummy.

Startled, the old man turned around awkwardly, looking for the person who had addressed him.

“An’ yer still naked!” he said, once he spied her. “Is that yer normal condition?”

“It’s my traveling condition, when it’s necessary,” Béla answered, impressed by this old coot’s ability to recover from a surprise.

“Well, good fer you,” the old man said, “I thought you might come back. Now, if’n you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way to the crapper!”

He turned away from her and waddled toward the outhouse, waddling faster as he got closer to it.

Instead of going into the warm cabin to wait, Béla followed him. Holding the door open behind him, she watched unashamed as the old man dropped his coveralls and sat down, heavily, on the wooden seat.

“You gonna watch?” he asked, sarcastically mimicking her.

Béla didn’t answer.

“Suit yerself!” he told her, then cut loose with a huge amount of gas, making the boards rattle.

Once the pressure was down to a comfortable level, he looked up at her amused face.

“I know what you are, you know,” he said. She raised an eyebrow and waited for him to continue.

“Yer one o’ them magical creatures,” he said, looking her in the eye, half-laughing as he spoke, “like one o’ them Wood Sprites. Whenever they use magic to transport themselves, whatever they’re wearin’ gits left behind. They can only travel naked, like you. And, also, like you, they like to run around and dance naked in the snow.”

Béla briefly wondered if there was actually a species like that on this planet, one that she’d somehow missed, then realized he was pulling her leg.

“So you think I’m a Wood Sprite?” she asked, starting to grin.

“Well, how else did you get behind me like that?” he reasoned.

She shrugged, making her breasts bounce. “I just dropped in.”

He grunted. He sounded gruff, but his expression told her he liked looking at her bare breasts. She folded her arms more tightly against her ribs, pushing her tits up and closer together, deciding to talk to him for awhile. Maybe he could tell her something interesting, like…

‘Why are you still here? There are no supplies – you would’ve starved to death before spring, trapped in forty feet of snow.’

Instead, she asked, “You need any help in there?” mockingly waving her hand in front of her nose to dissipate the odor of his board-shaking release.

“Nope,” he told her.

At his answer, she pivoted around, leaving the outhouse door to slam shut behind her, allowing him his privacy and some protection from the fresh gust of wind that just whipped through.

“You helped me enough the last time you was here,” he continued, talking through the closed door. “Now I got an arrest record.”

“You already had an arrest record,” she told him, turning her head sideways and talking to the door behind her. “Besides, you didn’t give them your real name, ‘Mister Belview’.”

A few seconds later, he was grumbling out through the outhouse door, talking as he sidestepped down the uneven path.

“I didn’t have to,” he grunted. “They tol’ me who they thought I was, so who am I to argue with the sheriff – ‘s a good way to get shot.”

Béla laughed. “That’s because somebody looked up the name of the owner on record before they came out here. This place is registered to Belview Estates. Betty Belview, to be specific.”

They traveled back toward the cabin, Béla matching her pace to his shuffle.

“So, I imagine that would be you?” he asked, looking up from the rocky path for a moment. “They told me they were looking for somebody named Béla.

“Wilson, wasn’t it?”

“You have a good memory,” she complimented him.

“Yeah. I had an overnight stay, complements of the local sheriff, and didn’t have too much else to think about,” he told her. “Then when you didn’t show to press charges, they had to let me go.

“I suppose I should thank you fer that, anyway,” he added, hopping ahead of her and opening the screen door like a true gentleman.

Then he raised his left hand to an imaginary rim on his hat and drew little circles in the air with his fingers as he dropped his hand back down. Béla smiled at his quaint gesture.

“And you came back here,” she said, not quite asking a question.

“Yep, and so did you,” he replied, straightening up and looking directly at her. “And probably for the same reason – to get away.

“So, what is your name, anyway?” he asked. “Is it Béla or Betty or something else? I don’t think it’s really Béla. Where did you get a name like that?”

“Oh, I saw an old vampire movie a few years ago,” she told him.

As she spoke, she realized that it was over fifty years when she saw that movie,

‘A few years ago… a century… just the other day, wasn’t it?’

“Bela was the name of one of the players,” she continued. “I liked his name, so eventually, I took that name as my own and made it a little more Rumanian – Byla – like a Gypsy. But ‘y’ doesn’t sound like ‘e’ anymore, and nobody pronounced it right, so I just added an accent to Mr. Lagosi’s first name.”

“Haw!” the old man barked. “Clever! So something I wrote actually affected the fabric of reality!”

Béla looked at him, puzzled by his words, as he gestured toward the cabin door, inviting her in, once again.

“By the way,” he asked, “What happened to that mouth you had on you, anyway?”

Tired of standing naked in the freezing cold, she pushed her way in front of him and through the cabin door.

“Somebody shot it off!” she said sullenly as she passed him into the warm kitchen.

Admiring her naked body as she pushed past him, he saw the still-healing scars of the gunshot wounds on her back.

“Hooee! I guess they did!” he cackled.

He followed her in, watching her bare butt swing back and forth as she crossed the room. She twisted her body around and landed on the couch, wincing at the pain in her back.

“Why are you in my house?” she asked, looking up at him.

Moving slowly, he raised the lid on the iron Franklin and dropped a log onto the dying embers of last night’s fire.

“You’d have a hard time,” he said, frowning and trying to look stern, “proving this place actually belongs to you today, Béla, or Betty, or Bee-Bee, or whatever your name is, Betty ‘Boop’ Belview.”

He carefully sat his old body down in the stuffed chair across from her and looked at her, feeling smug.

Béla looked at him for a moment, deciding what to say next. This old coot knew who she was, and she had no idea who he was. She decided he was someone from her old Chicago days who have finally tracked her down.

“If you’re looking for the money, it’s gone,” she told him, flatly. “I spent it.”

“Haw!” he laughed, again, “so that’s what that was all about.”

Béla wondered what he meant. She waited, knowing she’d have her answers soon enough.

“No,” he continued, “I’m not looking for your gangster boyfriend’s money. I don’t care about money. I came here specifically looking for you, magical creature that you are.”

Béla smiled, suspicious. “You don’t seriously think I’m a Wood Sprite…”

“No, I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t think I’ve said your real name, yet, either, Betty, or Béla. What is it, anyway?”

She decided to tell him, “Hethemtima. My friends called me ‘Hattie’.”

“Sounds Arabian,” he said.

“Sumarian,” she corrected him.

“So,” the old man conjectured, “you’re a little older than you look. Well, so am I.”

Béla wondered how he could look any older.

“Humph. I knew a woman like you, once,” he said, clearing his throat like he was starting to tell a long story.

‘At last, maybe some answers from this old codger!’ Béla thought to herself.

She shivered involuntarily as her bare body warmed up and hoped his story would be entertaining. She was starting to feel a little light-headed. She needed more energy than she had readily available to finish healing, and was starting to feed on her own living tissue.

“She was murderously insane, though,” the old man continued, not seeming to notice his vampiric guest’s dangerous, near-starved condition.

“Really? In what way?” Béla asked him, keeping her conversational tone light.

“She needed to kill, violently, every day,” he said, “she also needed hard, rough sex, and she needed it to really hurt. In me, she found someone who was willing to hurt her just as much as she wanted. I think she kept me alive just for that. In return, I helped to make sure she got as much sex as she wanted and made sure she had someone available to butcher when she needed to.”

‘That sounds a lot like me,’ Béla thought, ‘except for the murdering bitch part.’

Béla had always been addicted to sex, but couldn’t remember exactly when she’d become fascinated with the violence she now seemed to crave. She could only narrow it down to late fifteenth century. Her memories of that time period were foggy and confused, with nothing specific coming to mind.

“Fascinating,” she said, trying to be interested in what the old man was saying. “She liked hard sex, huh? What was her favorite toy?”

“Toy? Why?” he laughed. “Are you bored? Looking for some diversity?”

“Um, maybe,” she shrugged, then winced in pain.

“She liked red-hot pokers,” the old man sneered at her. “What’s your favorite toy, Hethemtima?”

“I prefer ‘Béla’, now,” she told him. “No one else knows my real name, at least, no one alive today. And this is the first name I’ve ever had that’s related to my feeding habits.

“How did your murderous mistress get away with all that butchery?” she asked, changing their conversation back to the earlier subject. “Something like that would be hard to hide, these days.”

“We were in Espania,” he said. “They call it Spain, now. She was Spanish royalty – even had her own castle!” He laughed. “We thought we would live forever.

“You know, she wanted to make me a King to her Queen; to help her take over Isabella’s throne, then conquer the world for her. But then the judgement came and destroyed her.”

“The judgement?” she queried, then believing she knew what he meant, asked, “What language was that in?”

“Romulan,” he told her, “Sorry, they call it ‘Latin’, now.”

“I know that,” she told him, getting a little testy.

She wasn’t shaking from the cold, now. She was shaking from hunger.

‘So, I once had an insane sister,’ Béla thought, ‘I wonder if murderous insanity runs in the family. I might find out, soon, if I don’t get some food…’

“So,” she continued, “the Praetor came and judged her and evidently found her wanting.”

“You know about the Praetor, then,” he said. “Have you been judged by it?”

“The Praetor is wielded by my father,” she said, casually. “I just spoke to him not too long ago.”

They sat, looking at each other for several minutes.

“What happened after that?” Béla asked, curious. “After your mistress was, um, taken?”

“Oh, I wandered the known world for the next couple hundred years,” he said. “She’d told me she was the last of her kind, and my only hope for eternal life. When the Praetor took her, the being of light, I’m guessing that would be your father, told me to ‘go and live my life, and say not what happened here to any man’. I actually was not physically able to talk to people about it; his command was that powerful.”

‘Hundreds of years?’ Béla thought, more interested now. ‘How did she give this old goat eternal life?’

“Eventually, several hundred years later, I found that I could write about it,” he continued. “But I ended up having to change the gender, because no one was interested in the idea that a woman could have that much power. Then, I also had to change the location, since there was a general consensus that the Great Inquisition never happened and the church really didn’t butcher a half million women. So I moved the location to Transylvania and renamed the main character in the book after a magnificent warlord who had existed several hundred years earlier in that part of the country. My book, The Undead, was very successful.”

Béla sat staring at the dirty old geezer, eyes wide open.

“You’re Bram Stoker!” she said, astounded.

He bowed to her from his seated position in the chair.

“And you are a vampire,” Bram said simply

“So, what put you onto me?” Béla asked, totally absorbed and forgetting caution in her idolatry. “I’m really careful about who knows what I am!”

“I believed that My Lady was truly the last of her kind,” he sighed, continuing his story, “that is, until you butchered that dock worker in London, three hundred and… let’s see… seventy one years ago.”

‘He’s been following me for over three hundred years?’

“He deserved it,” she told him, remembering the incident quite well. “He slit the throat of a fifteen year old girl simply because she asked a half penny for her services.”

“He must have given you quite a fight,” Bram said quietly, “for you to need all of his blood.”

“We had a bit of a row,” she told him, remembering. “He was awfully good with that knife.”

Her eyes were beginning to glisten with desire. Her body was hungry and it needed fuel. She was trying hard not to look at the old man as her dinner, especially now that she knew who he was. She also needed to know how he became immortal, for her sake and for Jake.

“So, is the ‘knife’ your favorite toy, Béla?” he asked her. She looked up at him.

‘God, he knows a lot about me…’

“Recently, I’ve become fond of kitchen utensils,” she told him.

Bram smiled at her response. “Very quaint.

“You were hard to track, you know. You don’t leave a trail of butchered bodies behind you. It took me a long time to realize you must have crossed over to the Colonies. A little incident at Parson’s Landing let me know where you were.”

Béla was silent, the horrifying memories of what she did there stirring through her consciousness.

“I don’t like to kill,” she said quietly, after a moment.

She had butchered more people in that one single night than she had during her entire earlier existence. She had lived in repentant remorse ever since.

‘Never, again!’ she swore to herself, silently renewing her pledge to her friends and the families she had murdered during that night of insanity so long ago.

“That’s good, because I wouldn’t like being killed,” he replied. “Imagine: a vampire that doesn’t like to kill. You are probably the only one that was judged fit to survive.”

‘Right on the money,’ she thought, troubled by his accuracy. ‘Next you’ll be telling me that you have a cure for my current situation…’

“You need sex, you know,” he told her.

“What?” she asked.

‘Am I supposed to act offended, or what?’ she thought to herself.

“You are wounded,” Bram explained. “Sex will make you heal faster. I have been sitting here, admiring your figure for some little time, and would like to make myself available for your services.”

‘Jeez! He makes hitting on a girl sound like a formal invitation to take me to a dance,’ Béla thought, once more amused by his quaint manner.

She remembered that his last performance hadn’t been all that great, but at least this time, she wasn’t tied up.

‘Cum is cum, after all, and he’s right. I need some, badly…’

Even with the head start Béla had had from her earlier orgy, she’d used up almost all of her rejuvenative energy healing her insides. Her skin was still pock marked from the entry wounds and was healing, for her, much too slowly. She could detect in her own body odor that she was slowly burning herself out.

“I would be pleased to accept your services, kind sir,” she replied, quite formally, then laughed.

She gracefully presented her hand toward him. He stood up and gracefully acknowledged her by again swirling his hand from his head downward. Then, taking her by the hand, he led her to the bedroom and pulled down the bedclothes. Béla sat down gingerly, her back still stiff with pain, and waited while he undressed.

“Could I have something to drink, please?” she asked him, as he undressed. “I would hate to get carried away and imbibe on a beverage that perhaps I shouldn’t.”

She smiled up at him. Bram looked down at her, thoughtfully. “Yes. Quite right.”

He folded his coveralls over the foot of the bed and waddled out to the fridge. He came back with a bottle of grape wine and two glasses. He filled one half-full and handed it to Béla. She looked at it, then looked at Bram and held her glass out. He smiled smugly at her, half bowing, and filled it the rest of the way.

“Thirsty, are we?” he asked, as Béla downed the entire glass.

Béla finished the glass, then took a deep breath and announced, “I’ve been through bloody hell today. It will take more than one glass of port to satisfy my throat.”

With that, she held the glass out for more. As she was swallowing the second glass in her very unladylike manner, she heard Bram talking. He sounded very far away.

“Yes. My man Cooper flushed you out right proper, he did. I gather, from your wounded condition, that your abduction didn’t go quite as planned. I don’t imagine he survived the encounter. Shame, really, he was quite useful, for a mere mortal.”

Béla dropped the glass onto the bed, her numb fingers no longer able to hold it. Confused by what Bram had just said and her sudden dizziness, it occurred to her that he had never answered her question.

“Why?” she asked, trying to focus her eyes. There seemed to be two of him.

She felt herself fall into the pillow, unable to move her arms to catch herself. The room was turning slowly like one of those merry-go-rounds she’d seen at fairs.

“Why what?” she heard him say, “Why was I looking for you? Because, my dear Hethemtima, you are the Fountain of Youth! Didn’t you know?”

She slept soundly, unmoving, her body paralyzed from the drugs laced in the wine.

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

Mike Tannenger was having a bad day. Not only was he called in on a Saturday afternoon when it wasn’t his weekend to cover Homicide, but the ‘last-barbecue-of-the-year’ he was hosting had turned into a disaster when another couple he was friends with had brought their ten month old Dalmatian with them. Their totally-out-of-control and much-too-excitable ‘darling’ nipped his kid because he’d pulled its tail and ended up knocking over the barbecue grill and ruining thirty dollars worth of meat, much of which it ate.

He threw his hat onto a cabinet next to his desk.

“Okay, Sarge, what’cha got?” he demanded as he sat down heavily, rolling the desk chair backward a foot.

“Well, there was this shooting last night,” Sarge said, dropping a folder onto the desk in front of Mike. “It was an attempted homicide. One of the victims has disappeared. Her name’s Béla Wilson.”

“Béla Wilson?” Mike replied. “We’ve met. Young girl. Owns that strip joint over on Fremont.”

He looked through the file, quickly absorbing the basic facts.

‘How does a woman, badly wounded, lost a lot of blood, just get up and walk away?’ He thought, trying to assess what he was looking at. ‘Why does that sound so familiar?’

Then he remembered. There had been a weird case, months ago, that was still partially unsolved – they’d found the killer but not the victim. A wild animal had mauled and killed a serial killer. The victim had disappeared, presumably dragged off by whatever or just walked away. He or she was never found.

That’s still impossible! he thought.

But yet, it had happened. And now, a badly wounded victim of another attempted murder had disappeared. Again. A possible answer occurred to him. He picked up the phone and dialed four four.

“Charlie,” he said into the phone, “Do you have the victim’s clothing from the shooting last night? … No. The lady that disappeared from… Yeah. That’s right. Was a blood sample taken at the scene? … What? … It was typed at the hospital? … Why would they do that? … Huh. Makes sense.

“The other thing I need,” he continued, “is the blood type from the May killing where the victim disappeared… You remember that one? … What was unusual? … Okay, thanks.” Mike hung up the phone.

A few minutes later, Mike hung up the phone, again, after having called the hospital and gotten the results from their typing of the missing victim’s blood. They had used samples from the gurney in the ambulance, typing it so they would be ready to take care of their missing transport when, and if, she was ever brought in.

Mike Tannenger sat at his desk for several minutes, his mind working to fit a puzzle together that was starting to have too many outside edges that didn’t fit together.

‘The blood types of both victims were the same: O Rh negative,’ he thought. ‘Could it have been the same victim both times? The only difference in the two blood samples was that the second victim, Béla Wilson, according to the hospital, was pregnant.’

He remembered talking to Béla Wilson a day or two after the May incident. She certainly didn’t look like someone recovering from multiple stab wounds, but her blood type was the same as the missing victim’s.

‘The ‘first’ missing victim,’ he corrected himself. Now, she was missing, too.

‘Or, was she missing – again?’

‘It isn’t possible,’ he decided, again. Maybe they were related. It was possible that one was protecting the other. ‘But, why? Does she have a sister?’

Picking up the phone, he dialed the lab a second time. ”This is Mike again. Were fingerprints taken from the ambulance last night?

“Damn. Okay, thanks.”

He got up from his desk and grabbed his coat. It looked like he had some legwork to do. He drove down to the Target Club.

He stepped over the yellow ‘Crime Scene – Do Not Cross’ tape, past a paunchy, middle-aged man setting up a small folding table on the sidewalk. On the ground, waiting to be put on the table were some candles and a photograph of the Wilson girl in a skimpy costume.

He stopped, and watched the man work. The man, noticing Mike standing there, stopped working and looked at him. His eyes were moist.

“I’m settin’ up a little memorial for Miss Béla,” he explained. “I seen people do it on TV for some kid that got hisself killed. I figure this is the least I can do.

“She didn’t deserve what happened to her,” he said. “She didn’t deserve a lot of things that happened to her.

“I watched it happen, you know,” the old man continued. “I… I’ve treated people mean before, but this was just plain murder. How could someone get any pleasure from doing something like that?”

Mike thought the burly old man might completely break into tears.

“We haven’t found her yet,” he said, trying to console the old man. “She might still be alive.”

He gripped the old man on the shoulder for a moment, then turned and went inside, looking for Frank.

“Mr. Tabor,” Mike called out. “You in here?”

“Back here,” a voice came from behind him.

He turned around.

“Oh. Hello, Detective,” Frank said. “What can I do for you? Have you found Béla yet?”

‘I hope not,’ Frank thought to himself.

“Nope, I’m just here to look around,” Mike said, “to see if anything’s been missed.”

‘There’s been a lot missed,’ Frank thought to himself, ‘and I hope it stays that way!’

“Feel free to look around,” Frank said to him. “I’m just trying to clean up this mess.”

“Oh, by the way,” Mike said, “there’s an old guy outside setting up some kind of memorial for Miss Wilson.”

“Um,” Frank said, thinking. “That must be Adam. He came in a while ago asking for a photograph of Béla. He was one of her rehab projects.”

Frank hated having to talk about Béla in the past tense.

“Rehab projects?” Detective Mike asked.

“Yeah,” Frank replied. “She was always taking in these low-life’s and helping them act out their sick fantasies. She said it kept them from abusing innocent people on the streets. She used to encourage him to beat the crap out of her. Said it was good therapy for him.”

“For real?” Mike replied, shaking his head.

‘The more I hear about this woman, the stranger she sounds!’ he thought to himself. ‘She certainly didn’t look like someone who got beat up a lot…’

Detective Mike looked around, mentally cataloging where everything was in the bar.

“She was on the stage?” he asked.

“No,” Frank told him, “she was standing next to the stage, near the bar.”

“And the gunman was here,” Mike continued, “shooting Mr. Pestova.”

“I wasn’t watching at the moment,” Frank said, “but it appears that’s what happened.”

“Then how’d she get clear over here,” Mike pondered, “across a room full of people, in time to get in front of Mr. Pestova before the assailant could fire a second shot? In time for the assailant to empty his clip into her body?”

“I have no idea,” Frank said, “She would have had to fl…”

‘She tried to tell me she could fly!’ he suddenly realized. ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell me she flew across the room right in front of everybody! How many people saw her do it?’

“Are you okay?” Mike asked, noticing the abrupt termination of Frank’s sentence.

“I… I have to sit down,” Frank said, feigning sudden illness.

‘Think of something fast, you fool!’

“It’s probably just my ulcer,” he said, hoping he sounded convincing.

Detective Mike looked around some more. “It seems likely that she distracted the shooter, somehow. Did you know she was shot four times in the chest and stomach?”

“What?” Frank asked. He knew about the first one, but three more times?

“According to the report, she was shot twice in the chest, twice in the stomach, and five times in the back. One bullet shattered her spine and probably two punctured her lungs,” Mike said. “It seems reasonable to assume that she got the first four rounds charging right into his gun. She took the five shots in the back shielding Mr. Pestova with her own body. At least, that’s what happened according to your waitress.”

Frank grunted agreement. “Well, Jessica wouldn’t lie.”

“Is this her office, back here?” Mike asked.

“Yes,” Frank said, holding his stomach.

It was just like Béla to charge right into a firing gun to protect somebody she cared about.

“Mind if I look around in there?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know why you would need to,” Frank said, acting annoyed, “but, go ahead.”

He had already searched through the office and removed the two bankbooks he’d found and the notarized papers she kept ready for ownership transference, in case she had to jump ship in a hurry. He wasn’t too worried about what the Detective might find.

Once alone in Béla’s office, Mike took out his fingerprint kit and took several sets of prints from the wall around the light switch and her desk. Then he quickly put the kit away.

“Nice computer,” he called out. “What kind is it?”

“What?” Frank asked, coming to the doorway. “Oh, that’s an IBM 386. It’s their new model with a monstrous forty meg hard drive. Cost about four grand, and that was discounted because they’re saying something about a Pendulant or something coming out next year that’ll make everything else obsolete.”

“Hum. I’m not into computers myself,” Mike replied, “although our precinct just got a Mark Two Thousand, or something, which keeps crashing.

“Well, that looks like about all,” Mike said, walking slowly toward the door, not wanting to look too obvious.

“See you around,” Frank said, watching him obviously not being obvious.

After Detective Mike left, Frank went into Béla’s office, wondering what the detective had found. He knew something had been found, he just didn’t know what.

He looked around the room, immediately noticing the dusting of powder on the wall switch. The sinking feeling in his stomach got worse.

‘Béla, darling, if you haven’t been very, very careful to conceal your past, your life is about to get even more complicated than it is now.’

Chapter 9 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He was lying on his back on a litter; the small, hard wheels digging into little ruts in the concrete as it moved jarring his shoulders. There were white uniforms all around him. He stared at the darkened sky as he was swept along. Béla’s face appeared in the sky above him. She blew him a kiss.

‘Goodbye, my love! I’ll miss you terribly!’ she said, then disappeared behind a blinding light.

He knew then, deep in his soul, that she was dead – he would never see her again.

Someone jabbed him in the arm. A voice said, ‘Take him straight to X-Ray. Dr. Patterson’s waiting for him there.’

Sunday:

Jake was sitting up in bed having lunch. It was his second day in the hospital. He had finally convinced the doctor to let him have solid food, although he was discovering that the cottage cheese, jello and juice diet he’d been on actually tasted better than the stuff in front of him.

The doctor and Frank were discussing him.

“I’ve never seen anyone recover so fast from a gunshot wound in the abdomen. He is remarkably healthy,” the doctor was telling Frank. “After a few more tests, we should be able to release him, probably by tomorrow afternoon, unless there are complications.”

Frank didn’t think there would be any complications. He had found out exactly what was needed regarding dressing Jake’s stomach wound and made sure that fresh surgical gloves were available for the interns and nurses who attended him, after noticing that one or two of them weren’t too careful regarding personal hygiene while attending their patients. He double-checked the medication that was left on Jake’s side table to make sure it was correct. He also talked Jake out of accepting the Morphine Machine that an intern had wanted to hook up to his I.V.

“They’re taking my stent out this afternoon,” Jake told Frank. “It’ll be great to be able to get out of bed and pee like a normal person, again.”

Jake kept nervously chattering about every little thing he could think of. Frank knew it was because he was worried sick about Béla.

“She’s all right, Jake,” Frank said, quietly for probably the fiftieth time. “I saw her drive away. She’s probably up at the cabin, recovering from her own wounds. She’s been on her own for a long time. She knows how to take care of herself.”

Frank didn’t suspect that, for most of Béla’s long life, she had searched out other people to take care of her, precisely because she wasn’t good at doing it herself. What she was good at, on her own, was getting into the worst kinds of trouble. He was going to find that out.

“I’ll just be glad to get out of here and go find her,” Jake said, pushing his wheeled side table away, his lunch only half eaten.

“Me, too,” said Frank. He looked at the unappetizing remains of Jake’s lunch. “When I come back tonight, I’ll sneak in a slice of pizza for you.”

“Make it a Corned Beef and Pepperoni Hoagie with Mayo and mustard and you’ve got a deal.” They both laughed as Frank left.

Monday:

It was late in the morning. Mike Tannenger was at his desk chewing on a plain cold bagel. He pressed the rewind key once again to watch the tape from the security camera at Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Entrance.

‘The ambulance pulls up to the door. The driver goes around behind the ambulance. The rear door swings open.’

From the angle of the camera, Mike couldn’t see the rear of the ambulance. He could tell that the driver had opened the rear door because it swung into view when he did it.

‘The driver trotted around the van and went inside. A moment later, he could see the other attendant pacing behind the ambulance, then he walked around to the side. Other attendants joined him and he turned around.

‘Something reached down from the sky and knocked his hat off!’

Mike paused the tape at that point, just like he had the last ten times he looked at it.

‘It looks like a foot,’ he thought to himself. ‘It looks like a human foot.’

The image was only in two frames of the tape. If it hadn’t knocked off the orderly’s hat, he would have ignored it entirely, believing it was an imperfection on the tape. He wished that both the camera and the lighting had been better. If it occurred in the daytime instead of the middle of the night…

Sighing in frustration, he popped the tape out and put in the tape from the Emergency Room Parking Lot security camera and pressed ‘play’.

‘Okay, here comes the red sports car. It makes a circle in the center of the almost empty lot, then parks under a burnt out lamp near the edge of the camera’s viewing range. A man gets out and stands next to the car, looks around, looking for someone(?), then walks across the lot.’

Mike had already looked it up and knew the car belonged to the missing victim. When he matched this tape to the security tape at the entrance of the hospital, he recognized Frank Tabor, an employee of the missing victim, as the driver of the car.

He fast-forwarded the tape five minutes ahead and pressed ‘play’.

‘There’s the car. Nobody around. Her body white against the darkness, a girl suddenly appears like she just dropped off the pole that Frank had parked beside.’

Mike pressed the ‘pause’ button and backed up the tape, frame by frame.

‘She’s standing next to the car. Before that, she’s halfway stooped over, like a runner at the starting line. Back one more, she’s down on all four’s, Back again, she’s standing on her toes with her arms straight out sideways. Before that, there’s a pale blur several feet above the hood of the car.’

Mike had no idea what that may have been. In the next earlier frame, the entire front end of the car was obscured. The first time he had viewed the tape, in the security room at the hospital, the security officer had told him that, often, when birds fly right in front of the camera, you get that effect.

He pressed the ‘next frame’ button, going forward this time.

‘There’s the pale blur over the car. There’s the girl standing straight up with her arms out. No, the length of her body is all wrong. She’s way too short. She has to be standing at an angle.’

Mike pictured the image in his head, turning the image sideways to determine the angle the girl was standing at.

‘That angle is impossible!’ he realized. ‘She would fall backwards on her ass!

‘Unless she jumped there from somewhere!’

He backed the tape up again, and watched, forwarding it frame by frame.

‘There’s the car. There the front half is obscured. There’s the blur. That has to be the missing victim, jumping down from somewhere. There she is on her toes, arms straight out. Now she’s bending forward. Now she’s down on all fours catching herself and stopping her forward motion. Now she’s rising up again. Now she’s standing next to the car.’

At least, now that part made sense. He pressed the ‘play’ button and watched her get into the car and speed away.

‘Okay. She jumped down to the car from somewhere. Where? There are no buildings nearby and she wasn’t up on the light pole – the angle was all wrong for that.’

Mike knew Frank Tabor had helped her, somehow. He had parked the car where she could get to it. But when he’d matched the time stamps up between the parking lot tape and the interior Emergency Room tape, Tabor had been standing inside the Emergency Room, watching her drive away. The time stamps, when he’d checked them, were within a few seconds of each other.

There were several things Mike didn’t understand. He listed them out:

1. How did she get out of the ambulance?
2. How did Tabor know where to park the car so she could get to it?
3. How did she get to the car? Jump? From where?
4. How did she do any of that with a broken back and bleeding from nine bullet wounds?
5. Was that actually the Wilson girl getting into the car or someone else?
6. If it was someone else, where is the Wilson girl?

Someone walked up to his desk and dropped a file on top of the paper he was writing on. Startled, Mike looked up.

“Charlie,” Mike said, glad enough to see him to forgive the interruption. “Did you run the prints I sent down to you?”

“They’re right in front of you,” Charlie said. “I thought I’d bring them up personally.”

‘Hmm, “Personally” means he doesn’t trust anyone else to handle this,’ Mike thought. ‘This should be interesting!’

He opened the file and read it. Not understand what he was looking at, he looked up at Charlie.

“What is this?” he asked.

“That’s the results from running the prints you sent me,” Charlie replied, looking smug.

“This woman’s been dead for over sixty years,” Mike said.

“It gets even better,” said Charlie. “Look at the next page. I took the liberty of checking out the Internet to see if I could get more info. That’s what I found.”

Mike turned the page over and started reading. There was a photo of a handsome couple taken by the Chicago Tribune. The date was 1928. The accompanying article identified them as Johnny ‘the rat’ Dombrosky and his moll, Betty ‘Boop’ Belview. The article stated that he had been arrested for her murder. Although her body was still missing, enough blood had been found in her apartment to indite him for manslaughter.

‘Another bloody corpse missing!’ Mike stared at the article, mute with amazement. He looked at the photo. There, standing next to Johnny Dombrosky, in a flapper hat, stood Béla Wilson.

“This is impossible!” he exclaimed, looking up at Charlie.

“There’s more…” Charlie said, a strange smile on his face. “Look at the next page.”

There was no photo with the next newspaper article. It was dated July 17,1932.

‘Johnny ‘the rat’ Dombrosky, minor gangster in the late 1920’s, was found dead this morning in a tenement apartment building on East 61st Street. The tenement apartment was registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Palinni, who are currently being sought by Chicago police for questioning. Dombrosky’s body was badly mutilated, possibly by a large dog.

‘Dombrosky was released from prison three months ago after serving almost four years for manslaughter for the presumed murder of his girlfriend, Betty ‘Boop’ Belview. Miss Belview was suspected of stealing half a million dollars from the crime syndicate in Chicago. Her body was never found, availing Dombrosky to appeal for early parole.

‘Police had been trailing him, hoping he would lead them to the missing mob money. Dombrosky disappeared several days ago. An unidentified cleaning lady discovered his bloodless corpse in the early morning hours of…’

“What the hell!” Mike said angrily, looking up at Charlie. “What’s going on? Did you make all this up?”

“The prints match, Mike,” Charlie said, leaning down and whispering conspiratorially. “The girl in that photograph and the person you know as Béla Wilson are the same person!

“We’ve got to find her, Mike,” he urgently insisted. “Somehow, this woman has discovered immortality!”

‘She’s in hiding!’ Mike suddenly realized, stunned. ‘That’s why she’s missing, and no wonder. I’d hide, too, if I had a secret like that!’

He looked up at Charlie. The expression of pure greed and malice was evident in Charlie’s face.

‘It’s people like Charlie Blacker she’s hiding from!’ he realized, feeling angry.

Taking a deep breath, Mike said, “Find out what you can.”

‘I’ve got a job to do,’ Mike told himself, ‘and I hope I don’t succeed in accomplishing it.’

“Oh, Blacker,” Mike called out as Charlie reached the door. Charlie turned around.

“If we do find her,” Mike told him, “you know she won’t belong to us. The Feds will take her from us and keep everything for themselves. You know that, don’t you?”

“Then we’ll just have to find out what she has before they take her, won’t we?” Charlie replied. The way he said it, it wasn’t really a question.

Mike felt a chill run down his back. It occurred to him that Charlie Blacker, good old Charlie, was not the nice person he pretended to be.

‘This is going to get nasty…’

Chapter 10 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Béla was awake. She tried to focus her eyes and failed the first time. She was able to blink, though. That’s better than before, when she was so drugged she couldn’t even do that.

She itched between her legs. She tried moving her legs to relieve the itching sensation. She felt fluid running down the crack of her ass.

‘That bastard fucked me AGAIN while I was unconscious!’ she thought, furiously. ‘What the fuck does he have against free will fucking?’

A large figure suddenly loomed over her. She felt a hot, pricking sensation in the side of her neck, then it was gone.

The figure backed up and came into focus. It looked like Bram, but somehow much younger.

“Ah! You’re awake, I see,” he said, cheerfully.

He held up what he had stuck into her neck.

“Hypodermic needle!” he explained. “It’s so much more hygienic than sucking blood directly from your arteries. And so much of that gets wasted during the digestive process, don’t you think?”

As he stuck the needle into his arm, he said, “Also, this is much more powerful a stimulant if pumped directly into my veins. There’s nothing wasted, you see.”

As she watched, he turned visibly younger in just a few seconds.

‘So that’s how it’s done!’ she realized for the first time. ‘That’s why Jake was still alive after that fall! He drank my blood! It didn’t need to be my ‘heart’s blood’.’

“Fuck…” she managed to say.

“What?” he inquired. “You seem to be recovering faster than I thought. You’ve only been asleep for two days. But, it’s your own greedy fault. I didn’t intend for you to drink that much wine. However, as much as I’d love to, making love to you now is simply out of the question. You’d recover much too quickly for me to make my escape.”

He saw her eyes widen slightly at his words.

“Of course I’m going to let you go,” he said, presuming he understood her question. “Did you think I was going to kill you? I made that mistake seven hundred years ago. To do it again would be like killing the Golden Goose, don’t you agree?

“Please,” he continued, acting very foppish, “consider that you are a wild eagle that I have captured. I simply want a single feather from your wing so that I may fly as you do. When I have my feather, you will be released, unharmed, back into the wild.

“An eloquent description, don’t you think?” he asked her, almost laughing.

“Oh, dear,” he said, sniffing the air. Pulling back the light blanket that covered her, he continued, “You seem to have messed yourself. I supposed that’s one of the problems of being paralyzed; not being able to control your bodily functions.”

He deftly pulled the bedsheets off the side of the bed she wasn’t lying on and laid out several towels over the mattress. As he rolled her over on top of them, she could feel that they were cold and wet against her bare skin. He pulled the rest of the bedsheets off the side of the bed she had occupied.

“Bath time, Hethemtima, my little Fountain of Youth,” he said, cheerfully.

He began cleaning between her legs, using up one damp towel at a time. Béla noticed that, for the first time in her entire, long life, someone was handling her pussy and she wasn’t getting horny.

“Well,” he said as he cleaned her up, “There seems to be more than one difference between you and My Lady besides your sanity. She didn’t have a monthly cycle and you, apparently, do. How very interesting. Do you know how beautiful your labia is?”

He cheerfully continued cleaning her up, chattering away, not noticing the flood of tears that suddenly began streaming down her face.

Chapter 11 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank dropped Jake off at his apartment after obtaining his release from the hospital, with the promise that if his almost-healed stomach wound started turning red around the stitches, he would come right back. Nobody could tell that the only part of the wound remaining was the stitches, themselves. Not even Frank knew.

Afterward, Frank had driven around aimlessly, not wanting to go to the Target Club while the work crew was there. While Béla was gone, he’d decided to close the club for a couple of weeks and do some renovations.

He eventually found a small diner and had something to eat, then walked the long way around the block back to his car. The walk helped clear his head a little.

By the time Frank got to the Target Club, it was dark and the workmen had all left a couple of hours earlier.

He walked around, looking at the work-in-progress. ‘There’ was where the new stage was going to be, with two dancing poles, completely out of sight from the door. There was going to be a mirrored wall behind the dancers so they would be nakedly viewable from every angle. The bar was going to be expanded to include a frozen drinks section, as more and more customers had been asking for daiquiris and margaritas recently.

He heard the door open and turned around.

“Hello, Detective,” he said, when he recognized who it was. “How’s the case going?”

“You can cut the act, Mr. Tabor,” Detective Mike said, his voice sounding very sober. “I’m on the inside, now.”

Frank waited, silently.

“I brought your gun back,” Mike said, holding it out by the barrel. “You should keep it loaded.”

“Thanks, Detective,” Frank said, smiling and taking his beautiful .45 back.

He walked around behind the counter and laid it down where he had kept it for the last several years.

“Someone is going to come after her,” Mike said. “Too many people have learned what she is – and they want what she has.”

“So, you know what she is, whatever that means,” Frank said, “and you’re here to warn me? And what am I supposed to do? Run out and lead you to her? You think I know where she is?”

“I know you know where she is,” Mike said. “And I know you’re not stupid enough to lead us to her. I watched the security camera tapes from the hospital. You aided her escape. The tapes don’t show how you got her from the ambulance to her car, but I know somehow, you managed it.

“Please believe me, Mr. Tabor,” he continued, “I’m not here to trick you. I’m here to tell you to be careful. You’re going to be under surveillance, both you and her boyfriend. You mustn’t go near her. Someone wants what she has very badly.

“It’s odd that you would tell me not to help you find an missing person,” Frank mentioned, keeping his voice causual.

“This isn’t an missing person investigation any more,” Mike warned him. “It’s a witch hunt. Her paper trail gets more visible every day. We even know about the gun that was used to fake her murder back in 1928. Surprisingly, her current boyfriend owns that same gun, now. We know about the stolen mob money that she used to set up this business and others. We know about the properties that she owns under her various aliases. We’re having them checked out as we find more of them.

“If you try to help her,” Mike concluded, “you will simply end the witch hunt that much sooner.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Frank asked him. “What’s in it for you?”

“I’m just trying to even the playing field a little bit.” Mike admitted. “Somebody I trusted with too much information went out and started his own covert operation. What he’s doing is illegal, and he’s using rogue agents, but it doesn’t matter. To these people, the end justifies the means. And they will use any means to get what she has.”

Detective Mike walked toward the door. At the doorway he turned around and said, “Well, Mr. Tabor, if you hear anything, call me.”

Frank followed him to the door. “Yes. I certainly will.”

Detective Mike walked back to his car and Frank stepped outside and looked around for a moment, then went back inside and locked the door behind him. There had been a car parked down the block with the silhouettes of two men inside. He was already being watched. He took the gun upstairs and loaded it, then put it under the pillow in Béla’s bedroom. If she came back, she might need it.

As he came downstairs, the phone rang. He walked behind the counter and pressed the ‘TALK’ button.

“Target Club,” he said.

“Hi, lover-boy,” a familiar voice spoke out of the speaker box, “Is Béla there? Hey, it sounds pretty quiet. Are you open?”

“No. Tanya?” Frank said, wondering what to tell her. “We’re closed for renovations. Béla isn’t here.”

“Oh, sorry,” the voice in the speaker box said, “I thought she lived there.”

“Well, she’s, um, she’s on vacation this week,” Frank said.

‘Jesus! Is that the best you can come up with?’ he thought to himself.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Tanya sighed, “I just finished four days at the Pussycat Lounge and thought since I was so close, I’d come up and spend a couple of days with you guys. I really miss you, you know.”

‘Is that a trick of some sort?’ Frank wondered. ‘She just e-mailed me yesterday that she was in Seattle!’

He and Tanya had been e-mailing each other constantly ever since her last visit. He knew her schedule and the Pussycat Club (not Lounge) wasn’t on it.

‘I get it,’ he realized. She was letting him know she already knew something was wrong. ‘We can talk in code…’

“Well, we miss you, too,” Frank said. “I wish I could tell you more, but I’m tapped out from working on that, um, Woodpecker project.”

‘Jeez! How lame is that?’

“Woodpecker project?” Tanya asked, “Oh, I remember. Well, I’m glad there’s nothing wrong. If there was, you know, I could be there in a hour.”

“Yes, you probably could,” Frank told her, “but you may as well wait until two pm tomorrow. If you come any later than that, you’ll have to park your two little hooters too far down the street.”

‘Her marvelous hooters are anything but little!’ he thought to himself, smiling. ‘But I hope she picks up that there are two thugs down the street watching this place…’

“Gotcha back, buddy!” Tanya said, “I’ll see you two-morrow! Bye!”

‘Lord! Tanya’s on her way. I hope she understands what she’s getting into.’

Frank opened a bottle of bourbon and settled down to wait. Then he went back upstairs and brought down his beautiful replica of the ‘Gun That Tamed the West’, now loaded.

An hour and a half later, he heard the clip-clop of spike heels coming up the sidewalk. It was after midnight. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“You know,” Tanya said, “there’s two little hooters sleeping the night away just down the street.”

She held up a small hypodermic needle and smiled.

“It’s just amazing what people will do to help a lady in dis-dress,” she laughed.

Frank looked at her dress. It was skintight and almost completely transparent, hiding nothing. He hugged her, then kissed her passionately, forcing his tongue into her mouth and squashing her big boobs almost flat against his chest.

“Whew!” she sighed when he released her. “Well! I missed you, too!”

“I’m glad you got my message,” he told her.

“Yeah, well, that ‘woodpecker project’ thing threw me for a minute,” she explained, “until I put it together with ‘tapped out’ to mean the phone line was tapped and you’ve somehow got your little pecker in trouble. So, what’s the problem?”

“Oh, it’s really very simple,” Frank said, “the government’s found out what Béla has and they want it.”

‘The government?’ Tanya thought to herself. ‘It’s not the government, or else I’d be the one after her! But maybe that’s why they called me in…’

“Oh, God!” Tanya said. “When I heard about the shooting, I knew this could happen. That’s really why I called. Where is she? Do you know?”

“Well, I think she’s up at her cabin, recovering from her wounds,” he said, “but I’m not sure.”

“Well, let’s go find her,” Tanya said, and headed out the door.

“Wait,” Frank said, “We can’t do anything tonight. If we leave around four in the morning, we’d get there right at dawn.

“I don’t think we should stay here,” Tanya said. “Those two goons are gonna be pissed when they wake up…”

“You’re right,” Frank told her. He went behind the bar, picked up his big .45, and followed Tanya out the door, locking it behind him.

Nobody noticed the tiny red light that had been blinking on the answering machine all evening.

“We can go to a motel,” he suggested as he held the car door for her and ogled her fabulous, busty body as she climbed in.

“Sounds great,” she replied. “Then I can show you how much I’ve missed you!”

Grinning with boyish excitement, Frank slammed the car door and ran around to the other side.

Once in the motel, he held the door like a true gentleman, then followed her in, bumping into her as she turned around.

“That’s enough boys scouts for one night,” Tanya whispered, putting her arms around his neck. “You’ve been promising me a lot and toying with my passions with those naughty little e-mails…”

“I’m not the one who wrote ‘have the saddle ready and be on your hands and knees’ where the words ‘cordially yours’ usually goes,” Frank murmured back.

As they kissed, he began backing her toward the bed, then they both fell across it, Frank making sure to land on one side instead of on top of her. They both tried to continue their kiss, giggling through the rough landing on the bed.

“Lord, I’ve missed you,” Frank whispered. “I wasn’t looking forward to three more weeks before you came this way again.”

“Béla’s not keeping you happy?” Tanya asked, grinning at him.

Frank’s opinion of Tanya went up another notch as he realized that Tanya probably didn’t have a jealous bone in her sexy body.

“Béla paired off with Jake,” he said. “I never see her anymore except on Fridays.”

“Aw, poor baby,” Tanya cooed. “Let’s see if I can make that up to you…”

Sitting up, she reached over and behind her shoulders to unsnap her transparent dress, then turned her back toward Frank.

“Unzip me?” she asked and wiggled her shoulders at him.

Frank unzipped her and, grasping her shoulders, pulled her back until she was laying across him. Gently, then more firmly, he pulled the dress down around her waist, exposing her large, firm tits.

“Ah, there they are,” Frank whispered at them. “I’ve missed you, my little puppies.” He kissed the nearest one and bit her nipple.

Tanya swatted him and laughed. “You pervert.”

She struggled loose and pulled her dress off over her head.

“My luggage is in my car,” she told him. “Since this is all I have to wear, I don’t want you tearing it off me like you did the last one.”

Frank sighed and waited for her to return to bed.

“You’re not getting undressed?” Tanya asked.

“Oh, yeah!” Frank muttered, properly chagrined.

Stripped down to his boxers, he lay back down on the bed, waiting for Tanya to finish playing with her hair in the bathroom. After a moment, she came back in and started to join him on the bed.

“Off!” she ordered, kneeling on the edge of the mattress and looking at his boxers. “Everything comes off!”

“Why?” Frank asked, smiling up at her. “It’ll be more fun if you take them off me.”

Tanya looked at him for a moment. “Sorry, I guess my profession makes me always act like I’m in a hurry – speed stripping, you know?” She laughed, oddly nervous.

“I remember you saying something about ‘more boyfriends that James has Bond girls,” Frank said, trying to get her attention off of whatever was going on in her head. “I don’t mind if you add me to your ever-lengthening list of boyfriends. In fact, I hope you do.”

As Tanya lay down across him, Frank raised his arms to let her nestle in against him. He noticed that she didn’t feel much like chatting for some reason but he knew better than to push it by saying something stupid. He started over, gently kissing her and caressing her shoulders. Soon she was responding, caressing his lips with her tongue, asking for entrance into his warm mouth.

A few minutes later, they were writhing passionately on the bed, still no spoken word between them. Gradually, Frank moved down and began licking, kissing and nibbling on her fabulous fake boobs, treating them just a little rough because breast enhancements generally made them less sensitive and he wanted her to feel aroused with his breast play.

He idea seemed to work. Tanya was moaning and rolling her head back and forth as he gently bit and sucked on her long, hard nipples. He went lower, nipping, kissing and licking his way down her ticklish belly. As he began to suck on her navel, Tanya put both hands on his head and shoved him down farther, spreading her legs as she did so.

Chuckling to himself, Frank found he was gazing at a beautiful tuft of soft, blonde hair. Unable to resisting teasing her at this point, he kissed her muff.

“I’ve missed you, my little Pussy Galore,” he murmured and blew gently on her soft pussy hairs.

Tanya tensed up and looked down at him for a moment, then relaxed again.

‘Wow! She’s really wound, tonight!’ Jake decided.

Scooting down a little farther, he gently ran his tongue over the hood of her ‘secret spot’ – that little hot nub of sensation that he’d discovered on Béla over twenty five years ago. Tanya shuddered at the touch of his warm, wet tongue on her clit.

Chuckling to himself again with self-satisfaction, Frank began licking her warm, musty slit up and down with his tongue and listening to Tanya quietly moan her approval. After a few minutes, her leg muscles started to twitch and she couldn’t seem to hold her hips still.

‘She’s primed and ready to fire, Sir!’ Frank thought cheerfully to himself.

Sitting up, he maneuvered his legs and hips around so that his cock was aimed at that wonderful slice of wet warmth between Tanya’s legs. Tanya grinned down the length of her fabulous body, pleased with how much Frank seemed to be enjoying her. Then she closed her eyes and gasped, pleased with how much she was enjoying him as he stretched her insides, slowly pumping deeper and deeper with each shallow stroke. Then he was inside her – his hard, tingling cock tightly gripped within her hot, wet pussy.

Tanya straightened her body out and wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him in a little further, sighing with pleasure as she did so. Frank gazed into her face, pleased at the sound she made. Most girls giggled – a very annoying sound that would distract him from his lovemaking.

“I could do this forever,” he said, still gazing into her light blue eyes.

“I doubt that,” Tanya grinned back at him, “but thanks for the thought…”

She tightened her pelvis and squeezed his hard cock buried inside her, chuckling as she noticed his pleasantly surprised look. She squeezed him again and he began ramming her a little harder.

“You ride often?” he asked, trying to keep from misfiring to quickly. “Horses, I mean?”

“I ride whenever I can,” she asked. “Why?”

“Just wondered,” Frank replied. “You have wonderful control.”

“And I’m guessing you don’t?” she said slyly. She squeezed him again.

“Not if you keep doing that,” he answered, slowing down his pumping action as his cock began tingling a little too much.

As he slowly moved his cock in and out of her, his control seemed to return. His cock felt so solid now that he was sure he could hit it with a hammer and not hurt it. He picked up the pace a bit, causing a pleased moan to escape Tanya’s lips.

“You feel really good in there,” Tanya said quietly. “Fucking my pussy like that.”

“You like my cock in your cunt?” Frank asked, knowing that Tanya liked to talk dirty.

She didn’t answer. She squeezed him again, instead.

“You keep doing that and you’re going to end up pregnant,” Frank said, hoping to make her stop so he wouldn’t lose control.

It didn’t work. She started squeezing him with every thrust he made into her hot, wet and willing cunt. She was grunting with each thrust, now. Frank remembered something from the first time they’d made love several months before, and began kneading her soft stomach with his fists.

Two thrusts later, she almost bucked him off as she came, grunting and arching her back into the air. Frank’s cock was tingling so much he almost couldn’t tell if his was coming or not. Then he started to come, and he knew. He cried out, his orgasm so powerful that he was sure he’d just blown the end of his dick open. He spurted again, and felt Tanya’s quivering pussy respond as she twisted and writhed beneath him, crying out with another orgasm of her own.

They shuddered together for several minutes, slowly coming down from that incredible sexual high. Frank lay on her stomach and breasts, barely able to hold any of his weight off her with his arms as they both lay gasping for air.

Then he slid off to one side and they both slept for awhile. A tinny beeping sound woke Frank sometime later, and he woke Tanya, not knowing where the sound was coming from.

“Oh, my watch,” Tanya sighed, then she moaned as she tried to move. Her arms and legs were frigid and stiff.

“We forgot to turn the space heater on,” she groaned as she sat up, stretching her stiff legs in front of her.

Suddenly anxious, Frank sat up in bed. “What time is it?”

“Four,” Tanya replied. “I set my wrist alarm.”

Frank relaxed, knowing they had time to get to Béla’s cabin by morning light.

“I suppose we should go,” he said, not wanting to get up and end this erotically enchanting tryst.

Tanya sighed and Frank knew she felt the same way.

‘I think maybe she loves me… I hope so. God, I’ve fallen head over heels for her…’

Frank crawled off the other side of the bed and walked around to where he’d thrown his clothes. Tanya got up and ducked into the bathroom where she’d hung her transparent dress.

When Frank was dressed, Tanya was still in the bathroom.

“I’ll go warm up the car,” Frank called out, knowing that she’d freeze to death in that outfit otherwise.

“Okay,” he heard from behind the closed door. “Out in a minute.”

Chapter 12 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Earlier that afternoon…

Frank helped Jake through the door of his apartment.

“Ah! Home at last!” Jake sighed. “It’s feels great to be out of that hospital!”

“You have to take it easy for awhile, you know,” Frank told him.

“I want to go get Béla,” Jake replied.

His vision of Béla in the night sky kept replaying in his mind. He desperately needed to see her to know she was all right.

“Not now,” Frank said, “I want to be sure you’re ready to travel. Another day of rest will be better for you.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said, defeated.

Frank left, promising to be back first thing in the morning, then they’d go look for Béla.

Jake went into the empty kitchen and looked around. There was the dartboard on the wall, the refrigerator, a sink full of week-old dishes, the dried bloodstains on the floor from their rough lovemaking…

He opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of orange juice he’d made for breakfast last Friday morning and swirled it around. Deciding it was still good, he poured a glass, went in and sat down in front of the TV, and pushed a button on the remote. Before he found something actually good to watch, he fell asleep.

‘Béla!’ Jake screamed her name as he jumped out of the car. He ran over to where her lifeless body had dropped and bounced after he had slammed into her at fifty miles an hour.

He tried to pick her up. He could feel her bones moving where they should be stiff. There was blood seeping out of her ears, both eyes and her nose. He put his ear to her breast, trying to hear her heartbeat. Her ribs were crushed. She wasn’t breathing and he couldn’t hear her heart.

Trembling with terror, he tried to straighten out her broken body. Her hips had been twisted almost completely around and her legs bent where they shouldn’t.

‘Béla! For god’s sakes! Please wake up!’ he cried. ‘Oh my god! She’s dead!’

Trying to control his panic, he tried to think what to do. He pushed on her chest, trying to get her to breathe. As he pressed his hands up and down, her ribs crackled and crunched sickeningly, panicking him even more. He started to give her mouth to mouth, trying to remember how to do it. He pinched her nose shut and pulled her mouth open. Her jaw was smashed and broken. He threw up all over her hair.

He started to give her mouth-to-mouth, trying to remember how to do it. He pinched her nose shut and pulled her mouth open. Her jaw was smashed and broken. He threw up all over her hair.

Forcing himself to touch her smashed corpse again, he put his lips against her broken face and exhaled into her mouth. Her chest didn’t rise.

‘Something’s blocking the air passage!’ he realized. ‘If I breathe into her harder, it will just force the blockage deeper – like water into a drowned man… I’ve got to get the blockage out!’

He turned her on her side, nausea almost overpowering him again as he felt broken bones moving inside her too-limp body. Forcing his arm underneath her side, he locked his hands together across her stomach and squeezed as hard as he could. He stopped when he heard her sudden exhale as he squeezed air and blood out of her lungs.

Rolling her onto her back again, he began pressing down on her diaphragm. He could push there and not press down on her broken ribs.

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’

He leaned down, pinched her nose shut and breathed into her mouth. Her chest rose. He pressed back down on her diaphragm, repeating the cycle.

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

As he began to press down on her diaphragm again, he saw her chest rise slightly. Not daring to hope, he pressed his head down between her breasts, ear against her shattered breastbone.

‘I can hear her heartbeat!’ he realized, and let out a “Whoopee”, overjoyed that she was alive.

If her blood was circulating, she could heal herself. Overcome with emotion, he sat there and wept uncontrollably.

After a few moments, he looked up; trying to discover where all the shouting was coming from.

“And now for the Five O’clock News!” Jake looked around the room, then finding the remote still in his hand, pressed the ‘volume down’ button.

‘I must have pushed the volume control in my sleep,’ he realized.

He wondered briefly why his face was wet.

“In other news, a Bozeman businessman, Joseph Palinni, was found dead in his apartment this afternoon by a neighbor returning home from work. Mr. Palinni had apparently surprised a burglar in his apartment and was shot to death.

“Mr. Palinni, owner and manager of ‘B.B’s Exotic Weapons’ in nearby Bozeman was seventy four years old. He left no children behind.”

A cold chill went down Jake’s back. He knew Béla had known Joseph Palinni.

‘He’s the guy that sold us that pistol! He was the one Béla was with before she was with Frank!

Shit! That can only mean somebody’s after Béla!’ he concluded, beginning to panic.

Quickly, Jake picked up the phone and called the Target Club. The phone rang and rang.

‘For God’s sake! Frank! Somebody pick up!’ he thought to himself.

After ten rings the answering machine finally turned itself on and started bleating out its message. Barely able to contain his patience, Jake waited for the ‘beep’.

“Frank! This is Jake!” he spoke urgently into the phone. “Somebody murdered Joseph Palinni! They must be after Béla! I’m going to go get her!”

He hung up and headed for the door, holding his stomach so he wouldn’t tear the skin around his stitches. Then he turned around and went into the bedroom. His little automatic pistol that Béla had given him was exactly where he had left it. He wished he had more than just the one clip of ammo.

He tucked the gun into his pocket and closed the door behind him.

Still earlier that day, in the morning, Béla was dreaming…

Maria quietly sneaked out of her wagon. She moved stealthily, avoiding the slightest creak or swaying motion that might awaken her foster grandmother. It took her a full twenty minutes to finally reach the back of the wagon. Lowering herself carefully to the ground so that the wagon wouldn’t move with the loss of her weight, she sped away to meet her new love, Raul. It seemed her bare feet were hardly touching the ground in her excitement.

He was by the bridge where he had promised he would be. She fled into his open arms, crushing her lips against his and squeezing him tightly. His enormous cock pressed against her belly.

She reached down; pulling at the knot in the rope that held his pants up.

‘Hurry!’ she told him urgently. ‘You are so beautiful, I can’t wait!’

She gave up trying to undo the knot. ‘Help me, dammit!’ she cried, desperate with her need.

Raul pulled the end of the rope and his trousers fell around his ankles, exposing his huge cock. He was used to girls treating him this way. The reputation of his size gave him access to many beautiful young girls and almost as many appreciative, lonely, rich wives. He took advantage of his reputation as often as he could. So far, none were disappointed with him.

Maria dropped to her knees to worship his organ, running her lips and tongue up and down the sides of his magnificent shaft, breathing, sucking and licking until she could feel the thick vein along the underside of his shaft filling with fluid.

‘Maria Conchita Velasquez, I love you!’ Raul proclaimed.

They both knew he didn’t mean it. He said that to every girl.

‘Now lay down, my love,’ Maria whispered, breathlessly, staring in awe at the flesh-encased weapon between his legs, ‘and let me split myself in half on your beautiful shaft!’

She lowered herself slowly down, her labia stretching painfully to encompass his girth. Her head was thrown back and a high, keening sound was issuing from her throat as she slowly impaled herself on him. She stopped as she felt him completely fill her pussy with his length and looked down.

He was only halfway in her!

Determined to take him completely into herself, Maria lifted her hands off his chest and sat straight up on him, letting her weight drive her down further. As his enormous shaft ruptured her uterus, she cried out in agony. Beginning the mental exercise she’d found when she had mind-linked with her foster grandmother, she entered that special place in her mind for the very first time; that place where she could separate herself from her pain and let the energy disperse and dissipate it throughout her body. At the sudden discharge, a tingling sensation swept through her as every nerve in her body, including those in her breasts and between her legs, responded.

‘It actually works!’ she thought excitedly as the orgasm swept through her.

Breathless now, and sweating with her excitement, Maria lifted her legs off the ground, forcing herself further down on her lover’s beautiful member. Blood and girl-cum mixed together forced its way out past her torn labia as she rode his enormous cock, achieving orgasm after orgasm from the incredible pain and sensation that continually swept through her body.

She collapsed onto Raul’s chest, exhausted from the pain of her orgasms and bleeding profusely from her torn cunt.

‘I have a present for you, Beautiful Puta,’ Raul whispered to her as she lay on top of him gasping for air. She half-raised up in response, waiting for him to continue.

‘What is it?’ she finally asked him when he didn’t say anything.

‘My brother,’ he told her, smiling wickedly at her.

‘Paul!’ Raul called out, ‘You can come out from watching us, now.’

‘We were being watched?’ Maria asked, starting to get upset.

‘Shhhh! My darling!’ Raul said, laughing and holding a finger up to her lips. ‘This is simply more pleasure for you!’

Paul came out from hiding in the shadows. He was already naked. The activity he had witnessed a few minutes before had aroused him so that he was already hard.

Maria watched him approach, a smile beginning on her face. Then she leaned down and kissed Raul fervently.

‘Gracias, mi amore!’ Maria whispered into his mouth. ‘I shall treasure this moment, forever!’

She sat back up, still impaled on Raul’s huge cock. He hadn’t come yet, but he was patient. They had all night. He had never had a girl so fearless as to impale herself all the way onto his cock. He knew she would probably die from it shortly. He intended to enjoy her sacrifice as long as he could before she did. To do otherwise was a terrible waste.

‘Come here, dear boy!’ Maria said to Paul. ‘Let me see you! Have you ever been kissed down there?’

He shook his head. Maria motioned him to come closer. She reached out and touched his hard cock. It was smaller than Raul’s, but was larger than any other she’d seen for awhile. She stroked it several times, then puckered her lips and kissed the end of it, slowly sucking it farther into her mouth.

Before the tip of his cock got past her teeth, he squirted into her mouth. She thought he tasted young and wonderful. He backed away, embarrassed by having sprayed his evil spunk into her pretty mouth.

‘Wait!’ Maria cried. ‘Don’t go! Stay with me! What you did was good! I liked it!’

He continued backing away.

‘Por favor,’ she begged him, gazing into his eyes, ‘if you run away now, you’ll never get the courage to try again. I want you to stay. For me?’

He hesitated. She held out her hands, imploring him.

‘Jezebel!’ Paul hissed at her, then fled into the night.

An insect landed on her neck and stung her.

Béla woke up. She had been turned on her stomach again and could feel a light blanket covering her. The stinging sensation in her neck that woke her was gone, now. She could see Bram Stoker injecting himself with the blood he had just taken from her. She could still feel the warmth inside her from fucking Raul.

‘It was just a dream,’ she thought to herself, ‘just forgotten memories come back to life.’

But, if that were so, what was causing the warmth in her belly? She wiggled her toes under the covers.

‘I can move!’ she realized, excitedly. ‘The drug must be wearing off!’

She lay still on the bed, intently watching Bram. He looked very young now, almost boyish.

“Well, my dear Hethemtima,” he said, “I will take my leave of you now. It’s a lovely day for a hike.”

He strapped a pack onto his back and began walking out of the room.

“You should be able to move by tomorrow morning,” he continued. “It’s been a real pleasure to finally meet you. I’ll be sure to look you up again in a few hundred years when I need a booster shot.”

She heard him laughing as he walked out of the room. She would wait until he was outside. She didn’t want blood his blood all over her floor.After a moment, she heard the outside door close.

She threw off the covers and got up to follow him out, falling on the floor when her legs refused to cooperate.

‘All right! I’ll give him a head start!’ she decided, furious that her legs were still asleep.

Chapter 13 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank turned his car onto the two-lane blacktop. From here it was a two-hour drive to the mountains, then a two-mile hike up to Béla’s cabin. As they drove, he filled Tanya in on what had happened in the last several days, including his finding the map and old news articles and Detective Mike’s nocturnal visit last evening. As he talked, Tanya sat half turned around with her chin resting on the back of her seat. She liked traveling backwards, she said, when Frank asked her about it.

“So she really is a vampire?” Tanya asked, “Like what you see on TV?”

“Yes,” Frank answered, “she is really a vampire. No, not like what you see on TV. She’s a sex vampire. She feeds on sex. Although in the last half-century, she has fed on blood a few times. From what I could figure out from those old newspaper articles, she killed and fed in self-defense or in revenge for someone having been raped or murdered.”

“Like the last time…” Tanya said, suddenly saddened with the memory of her lost childhood friend. “That butcher deserved what he got. I hope it took him a long time to die.”

The sound of the engine and the tires on the desert highway filled the silence between them for the next half-hour as they sped through the night.

“Frank,” Tanya said, causing him to jump slightly.

He thought she had gone to sleep. He looked over at her, seeing her beautiful face framed in the dim lights of a distant car behind them. Her body was still turned sideways in the seat with her breasts pressed up against the seat back and her legs folded under her. Her arms cradled her head as she gazed through the back window.

“What?” Frank asked, his voice sounding strange, as if disrupting the background sounds of the road beneath them had annoyed some deity of travelers.

‘How can she sit like that for so long without getting cramps in her back?’ he wondered.

“We’re being followed,” she said quietly.

“How can you tell,” he asked. “That might just be somebody using the road, like we are.”

“They’ve been there for twenty minutes,” she said, “almost exactly a mile behind us.”

“Oh, come on!” Frank said derisively, “How could you tell?”

“I counted the distance, from hill rise to hill rise, ten times,” she stated flatly, looking at him. “They are fifty seconds behind us. You have the speed control set on seventy five miles an hour. That comes out to a distance of one and maybe two hundred feet.”

“Well!” Frank stated, having no idea how correct her math was, “a dumb blonde, you’re not! Any other secrets I don’t know about?”

He smiled at her. She smiled back, a smug look on her face.

“That’s on a ‘need to know’ basis, darling,” she told him. “After we crest the next hill, stop and get off the road. Keep your speed steady until then.”

“Sure thing!” Frank said.

He left the speed control on, allowing it to control the car’s forward motion. The distant headlights of the car behind them vanished behind the crest of a hill.

“Now! Hit the brakes and pull over!” Tanya told him.

He did.

“Drive over behind that grove of trees and kill the lights!” she said, pointing off to the side of the road.

They sat in silence for several minutes before Tanya spoke again.

“It’s been over two minutes,” she said quietly. “They should have passed us by now.”

“Maybe they turned off,” Frank suggested.

“Where?” Tanya asked. “Did you see any roads back there?”

“No,” Frank admitted.

“Well,” she said, “Let’s go!”

Frank started the car. It sounded deafeningly loud after the silence they had been sitting in. He squinted as he turned on the lights, illuminating their surroundings brightly. He drove the car back onto the highway and, speeding up to seventy-five miles an hour again, set the speed control and relaxed.

After ten minutes of driving, Tanya quietly cooed, “Fraa-aank.”

“Hmm?” he answered, knowing what she was going to say.

“They’re baa-aack…” they both said it together, imitating the little girl in the horror movie.

“Hold your speed steady,” Tanya said, then started squirming around in her seat.

Frank kept shifting his eyes between watching the road and trying to figure out what she was doing. By the time she had finished maneuvering her body around, her long, bare legs were over the back of the seat and her head was under the dashboard on her side of the car. From somewhere, she had produced a penlight and was shining it under the dash. Her filmy, transparent skirt had hiked around her waist and she wasn’t wearing underwear. Frank nearly ran off the road and corrected the car’s direction abruptly.

“Hey!” Tanya yelled, her voice sounding muffled under the dash. “Keep your mind on your driving! You’re not Fred!”

“Fred?” Frank asked, not understanding.

Tanya hummed a few bars, ‘Keep your mind on your driving, keep your hands on the wheel…’

“Oh, that Fred.” Frank said, then laughed, embarrassed.

He still kept shifting his eyes between the road and her magnificent golden-haired pussy softly lit by the dashboard lights.

He grinned as he remembered another song, ‘Heaven by the Dashboard Lights’, and decided that Steinbeck wouldn’t have been so caustic if he’d had this view of heaven…

“What are you looking for?” he asked as Tanya started shifting her shoulders over the transmission hump to his side of the car.

“Cockroach,” she replied, not bothering to explain further.

“What?” he asked, moving his feet as she crawled over them.

“Hey!” he told her as the car suddenly accelerated, “Get off the gas pedal!”

He felt her weight shift against his leg and the car slowed back down to seventy-five.

“Hello, baby…” he heard her say, “Come to Mama… Shit!”

“What?” he said, startled.

“It’s magnetic!” Tanya muttered and scrambled out from under the dashboard,

She looked around in the car. “I need a piece of metal… something iron, or tin.”

She continued looking, tapping various surfaces with her long, fake nails.

“Ah!” she said brightly, and with more strength than Frank would’ve expected her to use, she ripped off the front of his glove box.

Folded papers and maps fell onto the floor of the car.

“Hey!” Frank cried, objecting to her sudden, unexpected violence against his innocent car, “What am I supposed to use for a glove box?”

“Tell the insurance company you were vandalized,” she said as her top half disappeared and her beautiful bare legs and pussy became visible once again.

“Okay, baby, come to Mama…” she cooed from under the dashboard, between his legs.

‘I’d love to,’ Frank thought, glancing at her bare pussy once more. ‘You wouldn’t think I’d still be so horny with all the sex we just had…’

Tanya scrambled out from under the dash with much less fervor than before, holding the glove box door steady and level as she moved.

“Here it is!” she said, triumphantly, holding it up near the steering wheel so Frank could see it and still drive.

Frank glanced at what looked like a large watch battery. “What is it?”

“Location beacon,” she stated, “short range. It only lasts a couple of days before the battery dies. This model only transmits when magnetically attached to something. The car is part of the circuitry.”

She smiled at him. Her thick, blonde hair was in total disarray and her transparent dress was twisted almost sideways. She looked magnificent with her left breast nearly popped out like that.

“So, what do we do with it?” he asked her.

Tanya looked back through the rear window, then looked ahead, down the road.

“After we crest the next hill, stop like we did before…” she said, coyly.

Frank got the idea.

After laying the glove box door gently on the ground at the edge of the highway, they sped away. After ten or fifteen minutes, he heard Tanya chuckling to herself as she gazed out the rear window. He looked at her and they both laughed, thinking about their mysterious shadow, parked at the side of the road a mile behind the transmitter, patiently waiting for it to move forward again.

‘They probably think we stopped for a quickie… not a bad idea, actually.’

“Um,” Frank said, finally.

“What?” Tanya asked. “Twenty questions?”

“Well, I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth…” he admitted, “but… are you after Béla, too?”

“No, we already knew about her,” Tanya admitted. “I’d like to recruit her. She’d make an excellent agent. But, no. We’re after the rogue agents who are after her.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Frank asked, disappointed that he had guessed correctly.

“Military Intelligence, of course,” Tanya explained. “Did you know the last time I was here, you finally got the wish you most expressed when you were in the military?”

Frank remained silent; looking disgusted, waiting for the answer. Tanya laughed at his presumed embarrassment.

“You finally got to fuck a Major in the ass!” she said, laughing. “And the Major loved it!”

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He pushed her away, still acting disgusted.

She laughed, again.

“You can trust me, Frank,” she said coyly. “I’m a member of the club.”

She tapped the side of her neck. Frank understood the gesture. Béla would nip people she wanted to be able to trust. There was probably something in her saliva that made the people she nibbled on want to protect her.

It was a vampire thing, Frank presumed. He was willing for it to be that way – he’d loved her before she bit him.

“So, all of the stuff I’ve been explaining to you…” he said.

“Well, we knew some of it,” Tanya admitted. “You helped fill in some blanks. We didn’t know that she was an actual vampire.”

“So, next question,” Frank continued. “What brought you here the first time? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“I was investigating the loss of one of our new agents,” Tanya said.

“So, that was Angela?” Frank asked.

Tanya nodded.

“Then all that guff you told us about her being a old friend…” Frank began.

“That part was true!” Tanya interrupted him, missing her friend, again.

They drove on in silence for another half-hour.

“Why was Angela there?” Frank asked.

Tanya only sighed and smiled sadly at him.

Frank realized that she had been assigned to watch and report on Béla. When Angela had been killed, Because of the way Angela had been butchered, MI had presumed Béla had done it. That was why they had sent Tanya. If Béla had, in fact, been the murderer, Tanya would have been ordered to terminate her, if she could.

That meant that sweet, sexy, very talented Tanya, this no-so-innocent woman he was falling in love with, was more than just a typical field agent for MI. She was…

He didn’t want to think about it.

“It’s getting light,” Frank said. “We should be there by dawn.”

“Umm,” Tanya answered.

She looked at her fancy little watch and pushed the button on it, lighting up the face to see what time it was. Pushing the button also turned on the GPS system built in to the side of her purse. She wasn’t going in without backup.

Chapter 14 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bram Stoker was thinking about possibly hitching a ride to the coast. He hadn’t been to San Francisco for fifty or sixty years and he wanted to see how it had changed. He had been almost as old and weak-legged as he was last week when he was there before. He couldn’t really enjoy the sights as much as he wanted because it had been so hard to get around in his aged condition.

He loved being young, again. He had been hiking for two or three hours and still felt refreshed. Having come upon the road leading up the mountain, he walked briskly down it, knowing it would lead to a major blacktop. He had hiked up this way, in his old body, after all. He didn’t really need the cane he carried now, but it had been a special gift to him from his publisher, a hundred and fifty years earlier, and, it was very useful for other things besides walking.

Circling high above, Béla spotted him on the road leading down to the highway. Seeing him walking along so carefree and happy enraged her all over again. She hovered over him, then dived.

‘Just like hunting rabbits!’ she savagely thought to herself.

She was going to kill one very big rabbit!

The wind began whistling in her ears as she dropped. She flexed her wings, making them arms again and dropped even faster. No longer able to control her emotions, she screamed in rage. Then she struck him!

Bram heard a scream from above him and, with reflexes that surprised even him, ducked to one side. Béla nearly missed him; her arms tore down one side of his body as she twisted to grab him. She landed hard on her head and shoulders, pinning his legs under her as she slammed into the ground.

Bram whacked her several times with his cane, trying to get her to move her weight off of his painful, broken leg. Then he noticed she was out cold.

As she came to, Béla discovered that she was tied up.

‘Again? Damn!’

“Well, that’s something else that’s different about you,” Bram said, noticing her movement. “My Lady couldn’t fly, either. How did you do that?”

Despite the fact that her hands were tied behind her, Béla rolled up into a kneeling position and launched herself at him, snarling. Surprised and caught off guard, Bram was still able to sidestep her attack and whack her in the side of her head with his cane as she went by.

“That, young lady, was totally uncalled for,” Bram told her, in an imperious manner. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

“Killing you!” Béla snarled, swinging her legs around, and knocking him down.

Bram fell, favoring his freshly healed leg and Béla rolled over on top of him, aiming for his throat with her teeth. Something hot and sharp pierced her belly, traveled all the way through and out her back. Despite the incredible pain, she still managed to sink her teeth into the side of his neck, missing his jugular by only an inch.

In a rage, Bram threw her off him, pinning her to the ground with the short sword he’d pulled out of his false cane. He leaned hard on the sword, holding her down, so furiously that he actually drooled on her with pure rage.

“Do you know how much I want to cut off your head right now?” he raged at her, blood dripping from his neck onto her naked breasts.

Béla struggled beneath him, unable to move. She tried to kick him again, but she needed her stomach muscles to pull her legs up, and they weren’t working right now with that damned sword stuck in her. In a fury, she bit at his face.

“You killed my baby!” she screamed at him as he held himself just beyond reach of her teeth.

He smiled at her and said, “Really?” cocking his head and beaming with immense self-satisfaction.

“Bastardo!” Béla cried and burst into tears, defeated again.

“Oh, I am so much more than just a bastard, Maria,” he said, menacingly.

Béla looked up at him, confused, both by his familiar face and the painful but also familiar pain in her gut.

“You don’t remember the first time we met?” Bram inquired, moving his face closer to hers. “The last time we were in this position, it wasn’t a sword I put through your sweet belly. Do you remember now?”

Her eyes widened in horror.

“Yes, Maria, I see you do,” Bram said, satisfied that he was finally recognized.

“Tomas,” Béla whispered, shaking in terror.

She remembered him searing her vagina with red-hot pokers. She remembered him destroying her breasts with giant tongs used for picking up hot coals. She remembered him running her through, then searing her wounds with hot iron so she wouldn’t bleed to death, enraptured by her screams until she’d passed out, unable to control her pain any longer. Believing that he’d killed her as he had so many others, he’d had her thrown over the castle wall into the moat.

But, before all of that, he had made her watch her lover, Raul, get covered with coal oil and burned alive, after he had been used by one of the ladies of the royal court. It was the lady who had poured the oil onto Raul and lovingly rubbed it into his skin, arousing him so that his majestic cock stood proudly forward. After she had enjoyed him, she had taken a torch off the wall and lit his penis, then stood back, laughing as he burned to death, screaming until his lungs and throat were too scorched for him to breathe.

She was looking at the inquisitor-general, Tomas de Torquemada.

The fight was gone out her. Listless, she let him tie her up against a scrubby little tree at the side of the road. As he worked, he railed vehemently at her.

“I would love nothing more than to cut you into little pieces, listening to you scream your heart out,” he snarled as he tightened the ropes around her, “but I need you alive, you stinking, half-starved Puta! I was at death’s door before I found you this time. I don’t intend to wait so long next time!”

He finished tying her up.

“Hasta otra vez satisfacemos,” Torquemada said, his affected eloquence barely shading his hatred of her. “Until we meet again, Puta!”

Torquemada raised his hand to his head, then moved it downward, drawing little circles in the air, a mannerism of the royal Spanish court.

Béla collapsed against the ropes, totally defeated. She had been outsmarted, outfought and outmaneuvered at every turn. Her antagonist had played mind games with her, giving her clue after clue to his true identity and she’d missed every one. She had believed she was so clever and she had not done one thing right. And she had lost her baby as a result. Alone, defeated, friendless and half-starved, she wished Torquemada had really killed her. She couldn’t even cry.

~~~~~

The sun was going down. Jake turned on his headlights. Traffic was getting lighter now that darkness was approaching. Despite the traffic, he had made good time getting out of town. He moved the speedometer up to eighty, wishing he dared to go faster, but he didn’t want to attract a cop, especially with an illegal automatic weapon in his pocket.

It was after seven p.m. when he turned off the highway onto the blacktop leading out toward the mesa where the cabin was. He could see its bulk on the horizon, its mass appearing slightly darker than the star-lit sky.

Finally, he was heading up the mountain on the dirt road he knew so well. After a few minutes of driving up the twisty turns, his headlights flashed across a figure at the side of the road.

‘Somebody put a scarecrow up… That was a body!’

He slammed on the brakes, and backed carefully down around the last curve until his lights shown on the specter he’d thought was a scarecrow. A thin and emaciated body was roped around some brush. He could see its ribs through tightly stretched skin. Two tiny breasts hung shapelessly above the ribs, indicating the body was female. Its head had fallen forward against its chest so he couldn’t see the face.

Who would kill a half-starved old woman and hang her out here? Jake wondered.

He got out of the car, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. As he approached the specter, it raised its head and spoke, its voice a gravelly whisper.

“Have you come back to kill me?” Béla whispered to the dark form in front of her.

“Béla!” Jake cried. “Oh my God!”

He grabbed her by her shoulders and stared at her thin face. She looked… old.

He hugged her face to his neck, pressing the back of her head to force her lips against his skin. He felt her teeth as they pierced his skin, then she was sucking on the side of his neck.

“Oh, God!” he cried, as she fed, “Who would do this to you?”

When he started feeling dizzy, he pulled away from her. Béla hissed at him, blood running down her chin.

‘She’s delirious,’ Jake realized. ‘She doesn’t even know who I am!’

As he unwrapped her from the ropes that bound her to the tree, she kept trying to reach him, her eyes gleaming red in the headlights of the car, her thin, bony face filled with hate. Jake decided to leave her hands tied behind her until she realized she was safe.

‘Safe?’ Jake thought, desperately, ‘Where could I take her where she’d be safe?’

He decided to continue on toward the cabin. It had always been their sanctuary, with only one road that went in and out. Having made up his mind on their destination, he picked Béla up and carried her to the car. As he carried her, she sank her teeth into his shoulder, sucking greedily at the few drops of blood that soaked through his shirt.

When Jake got to the pickup, he stood Béla on her feet and leaned her body against the side of the pickup. She tried to bite his face, almost falling over from the attempt. Jake got the door open, picked her up again, and put her in the passenger seat, accidentally banging her head on the roof of the vehicle.

As he sat her down, she looked up at his face, illuminated by the interior lights. She slowly relaxed as she recognized him.

“Jake?” she asked, her voice sounding weak and helpless.

Then she closed her eyes. He heard her groan weakly. Then she relaxed in her seat, her eyes closed.

‘She’ll be all right, now,’ Jake thought, relieved that she finally knew who she was with.

No longer attempting to fight him, she allowed him to bend her forward against the dash and pull the ropes off her hands. Then she fell back into the seat, her arms hanging listlessly at her sides, her eyes staring, unseeing, through the windshield.

Jake closed the passenger door, then ran around and hopped into the driver’s seat. Putting the truck in gear, he sped up the dirt road, leaving a huge cloud of dust behind him when he peeled out.

Moments later, as the dust cloud slowly dispersed, a black sedan drove through it, dispersing the dust further as it traveled slowly up the mountain road.

~~~~~

Jake was sweating profusely when he sat Béla down on the steps leading into the cabin. It wasn’t just from the blood he’d let her have earlier. It was that, combined with trying to climb up a steep trail carrying her at night. He was cold and his stomach hurt where the damned stitches pulled on his flesh.

He’d fallen and dropped her four times in the last hour and a half. Every time that happened, he fell on her. The only thing that was better than the last time he’d carried her up here was that, this time, she was able to help hold herself up with her arms around his neck. The previous time, she’d been a limp sack of broken bones.

Finally arriving at the cabin, he shoved open the door, then staggered back a step to pick Béla back up.

“It’s alright, Jake,” she told him. “Just help me up.”

She held out her arms. Helping her up, they continued on into the cabin. She leaned against the inside wall and flipped on the light switch. Jake opened the refrigerator door and pulled out an open bottle of wine.

“No!” Béla cried, as Jake raised it to his lips.

He jumped, dropping the bottle. It hit the wooden floor, spilling some of its contents as it rolled. Jake started to pick it up, intent on quenching his thirst.

“Jake! No!” she cried, again. “It’s… It’s drugged or something. It’s been poisoned.”

“What?” Jake asked, turning to look at her. In the softer light from the ceiling bulb, she didn’t look as haggard as she had when her figure had been so starkly illuminated by his headlights.

“It was poisoned,” Béla explained. “I came here to hide. It was a trap. He was waiting for me.”

“Who?” Jake asked, then said, “Wait. I need something to drink. You need, well, something. Let’s get ourselves sorted out, then you can tell me.”

Béla agreed.

“Is this okay?” he pulled out a pitcher and sniffed it, then dumped the moldy juice into the sink.

“It looks like water, for me,” he said, refilling the pitcher.

“I’ll have some,” Béla said.

Jake knew she needed more than just water. He hoped he could provide it.

They ended up with Béla on the couch and Jake on the old, overstuffed chair. She remembered the last time she sat here naked and injured, talking to a man.

‘D? vu?’ Béla thought, but she felt a little safer, seeing it was Jake sitting there.

Weak, but feeling better than she had the last time she sat there, she simply sat, her legs folded demurely beneath her, content to wait until he asked her something. Still, she felt uneasy.

‘But this is Jake,’ she reminded herself, ‘and that was days ago. With no food, no water, and, most important, no sex.’

“Béla, sweetheart,” Jake asked, “what happened here? Why was the wine poisoned? Who tied you up?”

Béla thought for a moment, not wanting to have to explain more than she needed.

“There was another vampire,” Béla began, “like me, a long time ago. Hundreds of years ago.”

Jake nodded.

“She make her lover immortal,” Béla continued, “like her, so that they could be together for all time.”

“You can do that?” Jake asked, surprised at the concept.

“I already have, Jake,” she said, softly. “Don’t you feel a difference?”

Jake thought about the way he’d been feeling since the last time they were here.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jake admitted, “but, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t know,” she confessed. “Your drinking my blood healed your injuries. I didn’t know it changed you in any other way. I learned that from the… person… who was here, waiting for me.”

She took a deep breath, still feeling shaken when she thought of him.

“So, why was this guy, this vampire lover; why was he here?” Jake asked, not understanding. “Who was this guy, anyway?”

She answered his second question first. “He was Evil Incarnate!”

Béla was visibly shivering, now. Jake could hear the hatred in her voice. But, more than that, he could hear her fear. Her eyes were unfocused, her attention trapped by something only she could see. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.

“Béla!” Jake said, snapping his fingers. “Look at me!”

Startled, she looked up.

“He’s not here, now,” Jake continued. “Look around you. He’s gone!”

Béla looked slowly around the room, becoming visibly more relaxed. She took a deep breath and leaned back against the arm of the couch.

“He was getting old,” she said. “He needed to find another vampire. That’s why he was here; to rejuvenate himself. That’s why he…”

Her words became a sob, and tears suddenly erupted from her eyes. Then Jake was there, hugging her tightly against him.

Her mouth sought out the almost healed wound on his neck she’d made earlier, and began to sink her teeth into him, again. Realizing what she was doing, she pulled back, abruptly, frightened of hurting him.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” Jake told her, “I let you have some, earlier. Do you remember?”

Béla backed her face away so she could see him. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes closely studying his face.

“I thought you were Bram,” she said, finally.

“Bram?” he asked.

“Bram Stoker,” she explained, much more calm now. “That was one of his names.”

‘The Vampire guy?’ Jake thought, ‘Well, I guess that makes sense, a vampire’s lover writing about vampires.

‘One of his names?’

“What other names did he have, Béla?” Jake asked.

He seemed to realize that he needed to purge this other person’s control from her mind. This person had evidently been able to traumatize her to a degree he wouldn’t have believed possible for someone as strong-willed as Béla. He must have completely crushed her will to survive, somehow.

“Tell me, Béla,” he implored.

She was trembling again, and shaking her head.

“Name him,” Jake told her, “and his power over you will be gone.”

He didn’t know if that was true or not, but if she believed it, it would become true.

Béla stopped trembling and looked into Jake’s eyes. He could feel her breath on his face. From her scent, he could tell she was burning her own muscle tissue to renew herself, and probably had been for some time. The last time she had smelled like that was at the top of the cliffs, after she had hauled him almost half a mile straight up.

‘That would explain why she looks so gaunt,’ he realized, ‘but, how did she get into this condition, and who could she hate so single-mindedly that she would completely ignore her own needs?’

“His name was… Torquemada,” she said, finally, her voice unsteady. “Tomas de Torquemada.”

Jake sat and looked at Béla, stunned. Torquemada, the Inquisitor, was one of the most evil men to exist in the last thousand years.

‘And, apparently,’ thought Jake, astounded by her words, ‘he still exists!’

Jake pulled Béla against him and hugged her. He could feel her mind opening up, weakly trying to reach him. For once, his mind was the stronger, and he could easily see into hers.

She was starving. her body had been feeding off her own living tissue for the last three days. She needed sustenance, in the worst way. Her body, poisoned and starving, had even consumed her own…

Béla savagely broke the contact she had with him. They stared at each other for a few moments. She was shaking violently with emotion, her mind closed solid against him. Stunned, Jake wondered what it was she so desperately didn’t want him to know.

Rising, he led her into the bedroom. Making her lie down on the bed, he quickly discarded his clothes and climbed in with her.

Hugging her closely, he guided her mouth to his neck. She bit into him, and slowly, pacing herself, began sucking on his neck. He felt himself getting aroused at her closeness, her soft breasts and torso pressing against him. She made a quiet, almost purring sound as she fed.

She felt his growing need pressing against her belly. She removed her lips from the wound, lapping at the little trails of blood as they traveled down his neck until his wound clotted. She pressed her pelvis against him, moaning softly, a creature of sex beginning to feel the fires of her own need.

Stronger now, Béla pushed him back on the mattress, sliding her legs around him. Still keeping the length of her chilled body in contact with his warm one, she pulled herself up until his cock was no longer trapped between them, then slid down, capturing it between her thighs. She squirmed around until the head of his cock pressed against her labia, then worked it inside of her.

After she was comfortably impaled on his cock, she lay beneath the heavy quilt, hugging her body against his, moving just enough to keep them both aroused. After awhile, she climaxed quietly, then felt a slipperiness inside her that told her he had done the same. She felt the warmth and energy from his cum spread through her belly and sighed contentedly. She slept soundly until daylight.

Jake lay holding her in his arms, listening to the occasional cry of a night bird as it went about its unseen, mysterious life. Every once in a while, he would hear the generator kick on and run for a few minutes, feeding the refrigerator and the storage batteries with its essence.

‘Much the same way Béla and I feed each other,’ Jake thought to himself, contented.

Eventually, he slept.

Chapter 15 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank and Tanya pulled up to the end of the road. The sky was already light. The sun would rise late over the mountain.

“That’s Jake’s pickup!” Frank exclaimed, getting out of his car. “What the hell’s he doing here? I told him to wait’ll this morning to come and look for her.”

“It looks pretty busy up here today,” Tanya said, looking around.

Béla’s little red sports car was parked half hidden in the brush off to one side, partially covered with a thin sheen of frost. Jake had parked halfway up the trail leading up the mountain, partially blocking it. A black sedan was parked behind him.

“Frank,” Tanya called out, examining the sedan.

Frank turned around, hearing the alarm in Tanya’s voice. “What is it?”

“We need to be very careful,” she said. “This is a government car. This means they’re ahead of us, now.”

“They must have followed Jake,” Frank said. “Detective Mike told me people would be watching us.”

“Maybe we should wait here,” Tanya suggested, “and see who else shows up.”

“No.” said Frank, “If there are rogue agents following Jake, then he may need our help. We just need to be very careful not to run into them coming back down as we go up.”

They began climbing up the trail. They were within a half-mile of the cabin when they heard distant gunfire.

“That sounds like a pistol.” Tanya said.

They listened as someone emptied their gun at something. They started running toward the cabin.

A half-hour earlier…

Béla awoke feeling relieved and refreshed. The last few days were receding into unpleasant memories. She reached across the bed to Jake. He wasn’t there. She opened her eyes. Maybe he was out getting firewood.

“Jake,” she said, sitting up, “I’m still horny, baby.”

“Aw, ain’t that sweet!” an unfamiliar voice said from the other side of the room.

Startled, Béla’s senses were immediately alert. She saw a man in a dark suit, sitting backward in a chair he’d brought in from the kitchen. He was loosely holding a snub-nosed .38 in the hand dangling over the back of the seat he was leaning on. Jake lay on the floor unconscious with his hands tied behind him. Another stranger walked in from the kitchen. Both men stared at her naked form as Béla slowly sat up in the bed.

‘I have them both!’ she realized, as a sweetly vicious sensation came over her. ‘I am tired of being hunted!’

“It looks like you have me,” she said, softly.

She pulled the covers off her bare legs and put one foot on the floor.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked, running a hand casually along her bare thigh.

She watched them carefully, making her best bedroom eyes at them.

“Oh, holy crap!” the man in the doorway said.

He was ready to do her right now. Béla could feel his desire even through the static that the sun made in her mind.

“Be careful, man,” his accomplice said. “Charlie said she can move like lightning. And she can’t be killed. Some goon emptied a whole clip into her last week, and you can’t even tell she’s been shot.”

‘So, they know something about what I am,’ Béla thought, forcing her body to relax from the fury she felt. ‘That should make the game more interesting…’

She lay back down across the bed hoping to get them to relax a little, making sure they could see her naked breasts and bare pussy. She sighed, running her fingers up and down her belly and hips.

“I’m still horny,” she said, and pursed her lips as it to kiss the man nearest her. “If you don’t trust me, one of you good-looking gentlemen could do me while the other holds your nasty little gun…”

The stranger in the chair didn’t take the bait, so Béla gazed up into the eyes of the man standing in the kitchen door. Most of the desire in the room was coming from him, anyway.

“You first?” Béla asked, moving her hand down between her legs.

She rubbed her slit for a few seconds, then raised her fingers to her lips and sucked on them, one by one. No one moved toward her.

She sighed.

“One of you is eventually going to have to come over here,” Béla explained, her voice sounding girlish. “Otherwise, how are you going to get me to go with you?”

“I told you we should have ’cuffed her while she was asleep!” the guy with the gun said.

“Oh, come on,” Béla pleaded with them. “All I want is one of you, right here…”

She rolled her hips back, spreading her legs. Then she moved her hand down and began rubbing her pussy lips again. After a moment, she stopped.

“Alright, here!” she said, sounding more annoyed as she decided the two men needed more of an advantage before they’d play with her.

She turned onto her stomach, and lay flat on the bed with her hands outstretched past the footboard.

She held her wrists together and told the one standing, “Go ahead and ’cuff me! Then you can fuck me without any worries!

“Please?” she added, rolling over onto her back, displaying her naked breasts and belly as she held her wrists up for him to capture.

The stranger grinned down at the slender, naked girl, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his handcuffs. He snapped them around her wrists and tightened them.

“Feel safer now?” she asked him, gazing at him from her upside down position on the bed.

He stood, moving his gaze up and down her slender, naked body. Béla knew her pheromones filled the air. She wasn’t kidding about being horny. She really wanted to fuck them both. She needed their cum inside her to help feed her starved body; their cum and their blood…

Jake was unconscious on the floor and they would both pay dearly for touching him. She did not intend for either of them to leave the room alive. The man who’d handcuffed her grabbed her wrists and pulled her toward him, sliding her farther down toward the foot of the bed.

“Oooh. You’re strong!” Béla cooed.

Her head was now hanging upside down over the bottom of the bed, the baseboard supporting her neck. She knew what position that was good for. She reached for the bulge in his pants and caressed it with her fingers. Then she started to work on his belt buckle. She fumbled with it for a moment, but the fastening continued to defy her attempts to open it.

‘You’d think, by now, I’d have figured these things out!’ she thought, becoming more and more frustrated as she worked on it from her upside down position.

Finally, she growled, “Help me, dammit!” and pulled helplessly on his belt.

The agent reached down and unfastened his belt, letting his trousers drop down around his ankles. His partner in the chair watched her guardedly, gun in hand.

At last, Béla had a cock in her hands. She caressed it with her fingers, then wrapped her hand around it, pumping up and down. Then she arched her back, trying to reach it with her lips. It was too high, so she turned on her side, raising herself up on one elbow to gain the extra height she needed in order to reach him.

She got him into her mouth and happily sucked away. She played with her breasts, pinching her nipples as she worked on his cock. She would have played with her pussy, but, being handcuffed, she couldn’t reach it and still hold herself up. She had to be content with squeezing her legs together and sliding her thighs together as sensuously as she could. With each breath she took, she moaned erotically.

‘Don’t overdo it,’ she thought to herself. ‘This has to be convincing… I need them both over here.’

She sucked on the man’s cock more and more frantically, getting more excited every moment. Finally, she pulled her head away, freeing her mouth for a moment.

“Oh, God!” she panted, seeming totally out of control, “Please somebody fuck me!”

She sucked her captor’s dick back into her mouth, swallowing the head of his cock down her throat until he groaned.

“Jesus! You’re so hot!” he grunted, starting to pump his dick in and out of her mouth. “Can I come in your mouth?”

‘Oh, my!’ Béla thought, ‘He’s so polite! It’s a shame to have to kill him!’

She continued sucking on his cock and nodded her head, letting him know it was all right.

Almost immediately, the man grabber her head with both hands and jammed his cock in as far as it would go. He shot four big spurts down her throat, choking her with the huge amount of sperm he released with each heaving spurt.

Furious, Béla exercised every ounce of her will to not bite his dick off.

“After all,’ she reasoned with herself, ‘I did give him permission…’

She also knew her body badly needed the regenerative energy that his cum would provide.

She felt someone touching her leg, then a hand was sliding between her legs, caressing her dripping pussy. Béla moaned, loudly, letting her unseen captor know she liked what he was doing. She felt fingers moving in and out of her.

She knew the man would be able to tell she wasn’t faking about being horny. Her pussy was sopping wet with desire. Moaning loudly, Béla squeezed her pelvic muscles, gripping his fingers so tightly he couldn’t move them for a moment. She knew he would want to get his cock in there as fast as he could, now. He pulled his fingers back out of her.

Then she was pulled backward until her legs were dangling over the far side of the bed.

‘Round two!’ she thought, as her pussy was penetrated by the man who had been holding the gun.

She wondered where the gun was, now. She grunted in pleasure as he rammed his cock into her as far as it would go. As they fucked, she gradually was able to twist her body around and swing her leg over so that she was facing him. She reached up with her handcuffed hands, imploring him to lift her up so that she could impale herself deeper onto his cock.

The man pulled her up by the chain between her wrists and helped her put her arms around his neck. She pulled herself up further and wrapped her legs around him, squeezing his cock with her cunt muscles in gratitude for his help. She moved her pelvis back and forth, tightening and loosening her cunt as she did so, intending to give him the best fuck of his life. As he came, shooting his cum into her pussy again and again, he lost his balance and they went crashing down onto the bed.

As Béla recovered from the orgasm she’d just shared with him, she whispered into his ear, “Was that good for you?”

“God, yes,” he sighed.

“Good. I’m glad you liked it,” she whispered passionately.

She bit down hard and tore out his throat. As his blood sprayed into her mouth and all over the bed, she figured she had time for two or three good swallows before her other captor reacted.

As she finished her fourth swallow, she heard the hammer of a gun being pulled back.

‘Oops!’ she realized. ‘That’s what I get for being greedy!’

Growling, Béla raised her head to locate her opponent, blood running down her chin in true cinematic vampire style.

The first two slugs caught her full in the chest. The next four entered the dead agent’s back as Béla rolled away, pulling him over her. Then she rolled forward, raising her cuffed wrists from around the dead man’s head, freeing her from his corpse.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, as she rose up on her knees. “Your manners almost gave you an extension on your life.”

She coughed, spitting up some blood. One of the bullets had penetrated her lungs.

‘If I play this right,’ she realized, ‘I won’t even have to chase him.’

She fell back against the headboard, coughing up more blood and pretending to be a lot weaker than she felt.

“I thought you were immune to bullets,” the man told her as he approached the bed.

He examined his dead partner, nearly throwing up as he gazed at the still seeping, savage tears on his neck.

“Jesus! You’re a monster!” he snarled, his face contorted with a mixture of fear and hate. “I should just stand here and watch you bleed to death!”

Béla reached out and grabbed his collar. With a surprising amount of strength, she pulled herself up level with him and pressed her lips against his, forcing her tongue into his mouth. He could taste his own cum and his partner’s blood on her lips. She held him close, their faces a few inches apart.

“Watch!” she commanded him, almost snarling. “And learn!”

As she held him in front of her, the bullet wounds in her chest stopped bleeding and began to shrink as the fresh blood and cum she’d just absorbed regenerated and healed the cells in her body.

Terrified, her captor turned captive struggled to get away. Béla released her hold on him and he fell backward over the bed and his dead partner’s body. She pushed herself forward, putting her cuffed wrists over his head and around his neck. He tried to fend her off, grabbing her neck with one hand and squeezing tightly while his other hand frantically felt around his partner’s holster for his gun.

He found it and emptied it point-blank into her belly. The look of shock and agony in her face gave him an immense feeling of satisfaction. He backed out from underneath the vampire’s arms and off the bed, still pointing the empty gun at her.

“Run while you can,” she gasped, holding her belly. “What you just did won’t save you!”

Béla moved toward him across the bed on her hands and knees. She knew she wouldn’t be able to reach him until her stomach muscles began to heal, but she was going to terrorize him as much as she could.

Thunder shook the walls. Her ears rang. She covered them with her bloody hands and tried to focus on her enemy. There was blood coming out of the front of his shirt. His face registered shock and surprise, then he fell forward, breaking his neck on the footrest at the end of the bed.

Chapter 16 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank and Tanya reached the steps leading up to the door of the cabin. Frank stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Tanya caught up with him and waited, panting, her beautiful breasts heaving up and down against the sheer, transparent fabric of her blouse. Her body was heated enough from the exercise of climbing for the last two miles, but her nipples were hard from the cold air and almost poking through the fabric.

Six more shots came from inside. After ducking down, they realized they weren’t the targets.

Pulling his big .45 out, Frank burst through the door into the kitchen. He saw someone backing out of the bedroom holding a gun. Beyond him, he saw Béla sitting on the bed, holding her stomach and bleeding profusely through her fingers. Her face was full of rage. She began crawling toward the gunman.

‘Jesus!’ Frank thought, amazed at the sight of her moving with her belly tore up like that. ‘She has absolutely no fucking sense of self-preservation!’

He raised his Peacemaker and fired two rounds into the man’s back.

Frank and Tanya rushed into the bedroom. Frank looked from Béla to Jake.

“Béla! Jake!” he yelled. “Are you two alright?”

‘Jake?’ Béla thought, suddenly alarmed.

She looked over at him. Sometime since she last looked at him, Jake had regained consciousness and pulled himself into a sitting position against the wall. He was staring at her, now, horror written on his face.

“No!” Béla cried. “Jake?”

‘How much did he see?’ she wondered, terrified of the answer.

She felt light-headed and the room began to spin. The look of horror on Jake’s face hurt worse than the bullets in her belly.

‘This would be a good time to faint!’ she decided, and collapsed onto the bed, unconscious, unwilling to endure any more agony.

Tanya rushed over to the bed and turned Béla over, exposing her ripped-up stomach.

“Oh my God!” Tanya cried, “Her guts are hanging out! Help me, Frank!”

Frank was untying Jake. He looked up.

“She’ll be alright in a little while, Tanya,” Frank said, trying to soothe her. “She can’t die.”

“Yes,” Jake said, still staring at the monster he had once loved, “she can. If you smash her head in, she will die.

“And you should do it before she wakes up!” he continued.

He began to shake, then turned away from them, heaving his guts out onto the floor.

Frank waited patiently until Jake had finished throwing up, then pulled him roughly to his feet. He savagely backhanded Jake as hard as he could with his fist. Jake slammed against the wall, blood and vomit flying across the room.

Shocked, Jake stared at Frank. He’d never seen Frank look so enraged. Frank struck him again, knocking him against the other wall. Jake crashed to the floor, then Tanya was between them, screaming at them both.

“Stop it! God dammit! Both of you!”

She turned on Frank. “What the Hell’s the matter with you?”

Frank shoved Tanya out of the way. “I won’t hurt him anymore,” he told her.

He reached down and pulled Jake to his feet, his face full of disgust.

“I’ve known Béla for thirty five years!” he snarled into Jake’s face. “She’s never done anything savage unless someone she loved was hurt!”

He shoved Jake back against the wall. Then grabbed him, again.

“If you can’t stand watching what she was willing to do because she thought those men hurt you, then you don’t deserve her!”

He spat into Jake’s face, then turned away. Then he turned around, again.

“She loves you more than she loves her own life! If you do anything to hurt her, either emotionally or physically,” Frank continued, his voice quieter, but sounding more deadly, “I’ll kill you myself and face her wrath! And she will kill me just as certainly as she murderously butchered that man on the bed!

“For you!”

~~~~~

Béla lay curled up on the bed, staring at the far wall. Frank had field dressed her stomach. He knew that would be enough for her to heal herself. It was the first time he’d actually had an opportunity to look inside of her. She had a lot less intestines than a normal person would have, and most of her abdomen, surprisingly enough, was muscle tissue. It was almost like she was another species. He would love to dissect her, but she probably wouldn’t appreciate it.

He had only been able to find two bullets inside of her. They were both pitted and scoured, like they had been dropped into acid. It was almost like they were being digested. Another thing about her that he thought was fascinating; her blood, deep inside her body was much more acidic than the blood near her skin. He had to wash it off his hands because it stung his skin like a jellyfish, only worse.

He concluded that her entire torso was capable of digesting anything that managed to get inside of her. He also noticed that when the acidic blood deep inside her body mixed with the blood near the surface, it clotted almost instantly. Short of completely severing an arm or a leg (or her head), it would be almost impossible for her to bleed to death.

Frank and Jake weren’t speaking to each other, mostly because Jake was embarrassed, believing his love for Béla wasn’t strong enough to accept her willingness to butcher so casually as he’d witnessed her do. That she did it for him, he didn’t doubt. But the cold-blooded violence she was capable of frightened him beyond reason.

Tanya left the kitchen, stepping outside to go to the outhouse. She was glad to get away from the oppressive emotions the others exhibited. Suddenly, she tripped. She tried to catch herself, but her legs weren’t working right. As she fell, she looked down at herself. There were two expanding red spots on her abdomen.

I’ve been shot! she realized.

She pressed the light button on her watch three times, then passed out from the sudden pain.

~~~~~

Frank finally convinced Béla to get up. He took the bandages off her stomach. There was scar tissue, but other than that, she was healed. He helped her dress and guided her into the kitchen with the others. She didn’t want to go.

“Jake’s in there,” she explained, frightened of his earlier reaction.

“That’s all right,” Frank told her, “I told him I’d kill him if he didn’t behave.”

Béla looked up into Frank’s face. He looked down at her.

“You’ve always been so good to me,” she said, “and I’ve let you down so badly.”

She hugged him tightly for a moment. Frank wished she still loved him, but now, finally, he had a girl to love who did love him. He guided Béla into the kitchen.

“Jake, fix us something to eat, will you?” Frank asked.

“Sure,” Jake said.

He got up, not looking at Béla and began getting cans down to prepare a meal.

“I will do it!” Frank told him quietly.

Jake didn’t answer.

“What’s that beeping sound?” Frank asked, distracted. A high-pitched beep was coming from Tanya’s purse.

“I don’t hear anything,” Jake said, his mind in too much turmoil to hear much of anything outside of his own rampaging thoughts.

Then he heard it, too. He walked over to Tanya’s purse and picked it up. He handed it to Frank.

“She must have a beeper,” he said.

“There’s no service up here,” Frank told him, opening the purse and looking inside.

Nothing inside the purse was beeping. It was the purse, itself.

“What the hell,” Frank said.

He pulled on a thread, opening a hidden compartment. Frank reached inside and pulled something out. It looked like a circuit board for a computer. A light was flashing. As the light flashed, it beeped.

“It’s a bloody transmitter!” he said, angrily. “Tanya’s given away our location!”

He looked around, angry at her seeming betrayal. “Where is she?”

“I think she went to the crapper,” Jake said.

Frank stormed out of the cabin and into the yard, stopping suddenly when he saw Tanya lying on the freezing ground, her transparent blouse soaked with blood.

A mosquito whizzed by his ear. It had been a long time since he heard a sound like that, and although he knew it was a useless gesture, he ducked anyway.

As Jake started out the door, Frank yelled, “Stay inside! Somebody’s shooting at us!”

Jake stopped and backed up just as something smacked loudly into the doorframe right next to his head. He ducked back inside the cabin.

“What’s going on?” Béla asked him, frightened of how he might treat her, but also needing to hear his voice.

“Tanya’s been hurt!” Jake said, still staring out the screen door. “She’s lying on the ground out there and Frank can’t get to her. Somebody’s shooting at us.”

Béla looked out the door. Frank was behind a trash barrel, trying to get to Tanya. Before Jake could stop her, Béla discarded her robe and was out the door. She disappeared from sight. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

‘Dear God!’ Jake thought, suddenly filled with anxiety. ‘She’s going to murder someone!’

He hoped she succeeded, but he couldn’t help feeling sorry for the horror the victim was about to experience.

Less than a minute later, he heard her calling from the edge of the woods, “Frank, it’s safe now! Get Tanya inside!”

Frank picked up Tanya and ran back toward the door. As he reached it, Béla dropped down beside him, her wings already folded back into arms.

“So. You can really fly,” he said, still not believing it.

He carried Tanya into the bedroom. Jake got towels and Béla got a basin of water, working together as if they were mentally connected.

Laying Tanya gently on the bed, Frank pulled loose the filmy material that stuck to the drying blood on her skin. Jake dipped a towel into the basin of water and handed it to Frank. As Frank cleaned the blood off Tanya, he groaned. Her skin was bright purple around her abdomen and back.

“The bullet’s hit a vein or an artery,” Frank said, feeling sick. “She’s bleeding internally.”

“Jake,” Frank said, his eyes watering over. “She’s not going to make it. There’s no way we could get her to a hospital in time.”

“If we could cauterize the wound with a…” Béla stopped and shuddered, realizing she had almost said ‘a red-hot poker!’

“Frank,” Jake said, “Béla can save her. Her blood can heal people.”

Frank looked at Béla, desperately. “You can do this?”

“I… ” Béla began. Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. “I… I can’t.”

“There’s not enough time for it to work,” she explained. “She would bleed to death before the blood got out of her stomach…”

She brightened up, suddenly. “If we had a hypo – a hypodermic needle! We could inject my blood directly into her veins. It would work immediately.”

“Where would we get a hypodermic needle?” Jake asked.

“Tanya has one in her purse, believe it or not,” Frank told him, suddenly standing up.

He ran out to get it, then came back and handed the needle to Béla. She jabbed herself in the chest, pulling blood directly from as near to her heart as she could get it. She wanted the blood to be as pure as possible. She leaned forward, then stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Frank demanded, “Go ahead and do it!”

Béla sat back on her heels, shaking her head. Tears streamed down her face.

“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t do that to her!”

“Do what?” Frank shouted at her. “Give me the damned needle!”

“No!” Béla screamed, pulling away from him.

“Why?” Frank cried, “Why won’t you help her?”

“Because, Frank,” Béla sobbed, “This will do more than just heal her.”

She looked at him, tears running down her cheeks. “It will make her immortal. It’s too cruel. I won’t do that to her. She will live hundreds of years. She will outlive everyone she loves. Then she will fall in love again and outlive them. Again and again, over and over, until she only wants to die. And she won’t even be able to do that.

“I won’t do it,” she said with finality. She raised the hypodermic needle up to smash it down on the floor.

“Béla!” Frank cried. “I love her. I don’t want to lose her! I haven’t loved anyone for thirty-five years except for you. Please don’t take her from me…”

Béla looked at Frank for a moment. She thought of a solution. “You have to make a commitment to her.”

“What do you mean?” Frank asked her.

“You have to become immortal, too,” she told him, simply.

“You have to offer more than just the rest of your life to her,” Béla explained harshly. “That’s a shitty deal! You have to offer her your eternity.”

She looked at him. “Can you do that?”

Frank thought for a moment, then held out his arm. Béla inserted the needle into his arm. Looking into his eyes, she pressed the plunger halfway down.

The effect was almost immediate; actually taking about thirty-five seconds. Frank’s appearance became fifteen to twenty years younger. He felt incredible. Energy surged through his body as Béla’s blood flowed through and regenerated all the dead cells in his body.

“This is fantastic!” he exclaimed.

“Tell me about it,” Jake said, pretending to be bored.

“Now do Tanya!” Frank exclaimed happily.

Béla inserted the needle into Tanya’s arm and pressed the plunger the rest of the way down. As she did, Tanya’s body began to convulse.

“My God!” exclaimed Frank. “She’s having a heart attack or something.”

“It won’t work if the blood doesn’t circulate!” Jake exclaimed.

Pushing Béla to one side, he knelt down beside Tanya and began pressing down on her chest.

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’

He leaned over and pinched Tanya’s nose shut, opening her mouth with his other hand. He took a deep breath and exhaled into her body. Her chest rose as he breathed in, then fell. He went into a rhythm.

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

“We just need to keep the blood circulating until Béla’s blood reaches her heart,” he told Frank.

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

‘1-…’, ‘2-…’, ‘3-…’, ‘4-…’, ‘5-…’ Breathe!

Tanya began to look younger.

“It’s working!” Frank said excitedly, grinning like a young boy through his tear-streaked face.

He leaned down to listen for Tanya’s heartbeat. “She’s alive! She’s alive!”

‘There should be thunder and lightning and electricity crackling,’ Béla thought as she remembered an old black and white film starring her namesake.

Frank hugged Béla so hard he cracked one of her ribs. When he pulled away, tears were flowing freely down his face. Then he turned his attention to Tanya. He looked for her bullet wounds, but couldn’t find any. The purplish texture of her skin gradually faded.

Jake looked at Béla. She was watching him with a strange expression on her face.

“What?” he asked her.

“You count like that sometimes in your sleep,” Béla said, quietly. “Who do you dream you’re doing CPR on?”

Jake looked at her and reached up to touch her cheek. She took his hand in hers. Holding his hand to her lips, she kissed it gently.

“You,” Jake told her.

“Me?” she inquired, surprised. “When did I ever need CPR?”

Her breath felt hot on his fingers. Jake looked at her for a moment. Then decided to tell her.

“When I hit you with the car,” he said.

She gazed at him, remembering their conversation about that.

‘How did I get back to the cabin?’
‘Oh, I just tied a rope around your leg and dragged you.’
‘That was sweet of you. You could have just left me there.’
‘I did, but I had to come back.’
‘Ha, ha! Felt guilty, did you?’
‘No, I was horny and needed something to jack off on.’

Béla was beginning to realize that Jake made light of things he felt serious about. He didn’t like exposing his feelings to others, even her. It made him too vulnerable. She looked at him with that new insight.

“That’s one of the ways you can actually die,” Jake was explaining to her. “You can be crushed.”

“Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” Béla quipped. “Again.”

“But,” she added lightly, “if it does, you can jack off on me any time.”

Jake held her face in his hands and kissed her, gently. Then they were both hugging each other and crying.

Chapter 17 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“This is P.G. Talk to me, Bret,” Tanya said, talking at the circuit board Frank had torn out of her purse.

Her sexy but now-ruined clothes had been discarded and now she wore an old shirt and a pair of pants that Frank had left up here years before.

‘P.G.?’ Frank thought to himself, not believing what he just heard. ‘It’s not possible!’

He looked at Tanya to compare her. With her hair trimmed in that style, and with her secret agent status, ‘P.G.’ could mean only one thing: ‘Pussy Galore!’

Frank sprayed the air in front of him suppressing his laughter.

“Hey, Pus! You’re okay!” said a thin voice coming from somewhere on the circuit board. “We got your ‘Agent Down’ signal an hour ago and just now have a satellite positioned over your area.”

“Yeah, well, you can thank our little ‘X’ file for my health,” Tanya said. “I need to know what’s out there shooting at us.”

“X’ file?” Frank asked.

Tanya nodded toward Béla, indicating that she was the real ‘X’ file and not the TV show.

“There are six bogies within two hundred yards of your location,” the tinny voice said. “Impossible to tell what kind of armament they have.”

“We need extracted,” Tanya said. “Do what you can. Out.

“Damn!” Tanya said, frustrated.

She looked around the kitchen at the somber faces waiting for her to rescue them.

“We’re trapped up here,” she told them. “We can’t get out. There’s a helicopter available, but they won’t land as long as those rogue agents out there could shoot them down.”

“Well,” said Béla, “We’ll just have to take them down ourselves.”

She headed for the door, stripping off her shirt as she walked.

“Hold it!” Frank said, grabbing her by both arms from behind and nearly lifting the little vampire off the floor. “I know you’re brave enough and dumb enough to walk right up to a cannon and dare the guy to set a torch to it, but we need to come up with a plan we can all live through.”

Béla made a face.

“Don’t be rash, Béla,” Jake said, coming up and putting his arm around her naked waist. “We all have to make it. That includes you.”

Béla permitted him to kiss her cheek, fuming. “They don’t have any right to threaten any of you!” she told them, furious about what was happening to them. “It’s me they want. I’m willing to let them see if they can take me!”

“I’m not!” exclaimed Jake.

“Me, either!” Tanya added.

Frank said, “May as well make it unanimous.”

“Don’t I get a vote?” Béla whined, knowing they weren’t about to let her loose on those rogue agents all by herself, even though she was certain she could take out the whole bunch without any help.

“So, what are we going to do?” asked Jake, ignoring her even while holding her tightly in his arms so she couldn’t get away.

Béla squirmed out of Jake’s loving embrace and walked around the kitchen – not trying to escape, but looking at the ceiling. “I don’t remember where the attic entrance is. It’ll be dark, soon. I imagine that’s when they’ll strike; when they think we can’t see them. We need to be somewhere they can’t find us.”

Everyone started looking around for the attic entrance and Béla found herself in the bedroom closet looking at the ceiling. “Here it is! Okay, everybody, let’s get up there!”

Squatting down, Béla leaped up and slapped the door upward and into the attic with her hands. With her second leap, she got one hand on each side of the attic entrance, hoisted herself up through the darkened square and disappeared.

‘Impressive,” Jake said, grinning up at her bare legs as she clambered through the narrow opening.

“Ptthew! Damn cobwebs!” they heard her exclaim. “Hey, it’s warm up here. Now I know where all the heat goes…”

Jake helped boost Tanya and Frank up, then Frank reached down and pulled Jake up. All four of them looked around the tiny space, unable to stand upright.

“There’s the way out,” said Tanya, indicating a small square air vent at the end of the attic. “That should be the rear of the cabin.”

“Makes sense.” Frank added. “When we hear them come in the front, we go out the back.”

“Even better,” Béla suggested, “if we go out now, while we can still see…”

“What about your guys, Tanya,” Frank asked.

“Well, they’re watching us on satellite,” she said, not sounding too hopeful. “If they can get to us, they will.”

Frank heard a sound he didn’t recognize and looked around, searching for it. Béla was tearing the screen off the attic air vent. Before he could reach her, she was outside. It sounded like several rocks suddenly hit the side of the cabin. He thought he heard a ‘yip’, but he couldn’t be sure.

‘Be careful, Béla,’ he thought, worried sick about their situation. ‘This could be Waterloo and you could be the Light Brigade.’

They heard small arms fire, then a scream. It was a man’s voice. The three of them looked at each other.

‘One down, five to go!’ Tanya thought, elated. ‘You rock, girl!’

Then Béla was back at the attic vent. “It’s clear! Get out here!”

They all scrambled through the vent, stepping down to the shed roof and dropping to the ground.

Even in the twilight, Frank could see the dark red streak decorating Béla’s side and running down one leg. He shook his head, knowing she’d flown straight into the gun muzzle of her target, consumed by her murderous intent. He felt sick in his stomach, knowing she’d probably do it again before this night was over.

Minutes later, they were in thick brush somewhere behind the cabin. Jake had no idea where they were in relation to their enemies or the trail leading out of here.

Béla scampered up a tree, leaped into the darkening sky and disappeared. Jake knew how dangerous it would be for her to try to land again in this brush. Béla didn’t have night vision and there was, as yet, no moon. The sky provided less and less light with each passing moment.

After two or three minutes, they heard branches breaking above them and looked up. Béla’s pale form was visible in the top part of a tall, slender tree, hanging on tightly as it swayed back and forth wildly from her sudden landing on it.

She pointed in a direction. ‘Go that way!’ Jake heard her say in his mind.

Then she was gone, again. Jake didn’t see a path, but he told the others and they pushed their way through the brush in the direction she had indicated.

Frank, leading the group, was appreciating the fact that the scratches and tears in his skin healed rapidly, but they still hurt when he gouged himself on something.

The sudden sound of automatic fire erupted not too far behind them, making everyone jump. Frank prayed Béla hadn’t charged down the barrel of another gun. He didn’t think she could handle being hit with those wicked, hollow shells that M-16s fired. Another burst of gunfire announced that she had survived the previous one.

After twenty minutes, they fell out of the brush and down a dozen feet to the rocky path that led up to the cabin. The haggard group traveled down the path about twenty minutes further when they were suddenly surrounded by dark figures holding automatic weapons. Jake and Frank raised their hands, backing up slowly.

“It took you boys long enough to get here!” Tanya scolded them.

As Tanya and the newcomers discussed tactics, it became apparent that their MI rescue chopper had landed in the clearing at the end of the road below them and they had been hiking up the path to meet them, guided by the military satellite high above. Their discussion was interrupted by a fresh burst of gunfire far behind them.

‘She’s still out there!’ Frank thought, still praying anxiously for her common sense to kick in before she got herself shredded into little pieces.

“We still have an operative engaging the rogue agents,” Tanya explained to the squad leader. “Try not to shoot her. You don’t want to piss her off!”

“An operative? Her?” the squad leader asked, “Do you mean the ‘X’ file?”

“That’s the one,” Tanya confessed.

“Damn!” the squad leader said, “Besides you, sir, she’s the one we’re ordered to protect!”

“Then you’d better get up there,” Tanya told him.

The squad leader saluted, then led his men up the trail. They left as silently as they had approached, heading up the path toward the cabin.

“How will they find these rogue agents?” Frank asked Tanya.

“Infrared satellite,” she explained, “The same way they spotted them earlier.”

“Infrared? That means they can track Béla,” Frank said, sounding worried. “If they wanted to, they could take her, too.”

“Wait a minute!” Jake said, “With all these new operatives showing up, how will she know who the friendly ones are?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I saw them landing,” a familiar voice said from behind him. “That’s why I pointed you in their direction.”

Béla stopped talking and hissed as Jake embraced her tightly. He let go, instantly alarmed at the sound. “Are you alright?”

He looked at her. In the darkness, he couldn’t tell if all the blood on her was hers or was from her recent targets with the rogue agents.

“One of those fuckers hit me with a tracer,” she told him and raised her arm to show the scorched hole in her side, just under her rib cage. “A little higher and he would’ve burnt my lungs out. I couldn’t maneuver any more, so I came back here to check on you guys.”

“We’re fine!” Frank told her, earnestly. “We got you back! Now, let’s get the fuck out of here!”

They all agreed and started down the trail toward the road.

Chapter 18 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Tell me again why we need a helicopter,” Béla was asking as they hiked down the dark trail.

Tanya said, “They were supposed to rescue us at the cabin, but since there were unfriendlies in the area, they didn’t want to risk losing their aircraft and all the people in it.”

“Okay, I got that,” Béla told her. “Now, seriously. Why do we need a helicopter?”

Tanya sighed. “Frank, a little help here?”

Frank was leading the little band down the rocky path toward the road. Since he was in front, he got to light up the trail for the rest of them with the single flashlight they had among them.

“Don’t ask me,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m with her.”

He stopped and waited for her to catch up.

“What?” Tanya called back up to him, getting more and more frustrated.

“Personally, I plan on driving back,” Frank said as she reached him. “I was hoping you’d come with me. You need to be made aware of some changes that have been made.”

Tanya stopped and looked at him.

“Wordy, isn’t he?” Béla said, grinning at the secret that Frank was about to tell her.

She pulled on Jake’s hand leading him off the trail while Frank caught Tanya up on her new condition.

“What?” they heard her say.

Jake and Béla walked in the shadows for a moment. She stopped and turned around to say something. Jake pulled her to him and kissed her, ignoring the blood of her victims on her face, breasts and belly.

“I don’t ever want to lose you,” he told her.

“That’s rather selfish of you, isn’t it?” Béla asked, breathing into his mouth as they kissed, again.

Jake stopped kissing her and held her face with his hands. “I was listening to you tell Frank what it’s been like for you. I don’t ever want you to be…”

Béla pushed her head forward through his hands and kissed him, causing Jake to stop speaking for a moment.

“I just want to tell you…” Jake began again.

Béla kissed him again, shutting him up, again. Then she began pulling on his belt buckle, trying to get it to open.

“Alright, I get the message,” Jake said, realizing that she understood only too well what he wanted to say and didn’t want to get that depressed.

He pulled her against him and kissed her again, hugging her naked body against him and nearly puncturing her belly button with his half-open belt buckle.

“Now is what matters,” Béla whispered, grateful that he finally understood.

She bit his chin playfully when his tightening embrace noisily cracked one of her ribs.

‘Ow! Again? Maybe I should take that old lady’s advice and start eating chicken bones for extra calcium…’

Frank was trying to explain the side effects of Béla healing Tanya’s gunshot wounds. “If you looked into a mirror, right now, you’d see a twenty year old girl,” he said to her.

Tanya looked skeptical.

“Look at me!” Frank insisted. “Don’t I look younger?”

“Yeah, you look great!” Tanya agreed. “I noticed that earlier, but we had all that other stuff going on…”

“It’s like this,” Frank said. “Béla wouldn’t inject you with her blood unless I took the same treatment. She insisted on it. I couldn’t let you die.”

“Why would she do that?” Tanya asked.

“Well, I think it’s because of her longer life span,” Frank told her. “She said something about it being worse for you to save you because of the extended life you’d have, seeing everyone around you aging and dying and it wasn’t happening to you.”

Tanya thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I can see her point, I guess. I don’t know if I’d like that part of having an unnaturally long life.

“But,” Tanya asked, “she saved me anyway?”

“Only after I allowed her to give me the same treatment,” Frank said. “She didn’t want you to be completely alone, I guess.”

“So I get you for company?” Tanya asked, suppressing a laugh. “Well, I guess I could do worse…”

She put her arms around him and kissed him.

“Tanya, I love you,” Frank said, breaking their kiss and putting his soul on the line. “I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

“It’s nice to hear you finally say it,” Tanya whispered to him. “I love you, too.”

Frank looked around. “Where are the kids?”

“Probably doing the same thing we’re going to do,” Tanya said, pulling him over to the side of the rocky trail.

Pulling off her shirt, she laid it on the cold ground and sat down on it. Frank sat down next to her.

“I’ve been hoping to hear those words since I arrived last night,” Tanya said softly as she unbuttoned Frank’s shirt. “I knew you were the one the day we met.”

Frank looked at her, trying to remember the inane conversation and his oh-so-superior intellectual attitude that he’d displayed in his feeble efforts to show off to the busty blonde sitting at his bar that first morning.

“You liked my philosophical bull?” Frank asked, finding that hard to believe.

“No, silly,” Tanya laughed. “I liked the way you treated Béla. She did something that you thought was terribly wrong, and you forgave her. I love the way you love her. I was hoping that maybe someday, you could love me like that.”

“There’s nothing you could do to make me not love you,” Frank whispered.

“Um, good,” Tanya sighed and lay back with her arms over her head, pointing her busty boobs right at his face.

“Nice,” Frank smiled, and bent down to kiss the one he could reach.

Tanya squirmed around, trying to get more comfortable lying on his legs and finally ended up flat on the ground with Frank working his way down her stomach, leaving a freezing cold trail of wetness where his tongue had caressed her soft, warm flesh. She shivered as he reached her soft tuft of pubic hair and heard Frank chuckle.

‘He probably thinks he’s making me shiver,’ she realized and decided not to correct him. ‘Male egos are so terribly fragile, after all…’

A moment later, when his tongue reached her clitoris, she wasn’t shivering from the cold, but she was still shivering.

Frank licked his tongue up and down her pussy lips, caressing her clit every third or fourth time. After a few minutes of this torture, Tanya sat up and pushed him away.

“Take off your pants,” she commanded.

“Yes, sir, Major,” Frank said as he rolled back up into a sitting position.

In a moment he had his pants and shorts off and Tanya was on her back again with Frank’s nice, hard cock tucked away inside her.

“This better?” Frank whispered, lying on top of her and nibbling an earlobe.

“Uh!” Tanya grunted, unable to say much with Frank’s entire weight on her stomach and ribs.

Frank wasn’t ignorant of the fact that he was squashing her against the hard ground. After a moment, he changed his position so that his knees were underneath her rump and his cock was spearing into her pussy at such an angle that he was rubbing the sensitive head of his cock against the sensitive area just inside the front of her pussy. It didn’t take long for them both to come.

~~~~~

Béla was sitting on Jake and pumping up and down. Jake held onto her waist, pushing up every time she landed so that she didn’t have to work her legs too hard on the upstroke. Finally she stopped, breathing heavily. Neither of them had come, yet, but she was surprised to find she had no strength left to continue this marvelous fucking.

“I’m sorry,” Béla moaned softly. “I’m just too tired…”

“It’s all right, babe,” Jake murmured. “You still look too thin. Just relax and let’s enjoy this a little slower.”

Béla smiled, and practically collapsed down on top of him, sighing with relief. Jake was still tightly buried inside her, so he continued slowly moving his pelvis, just enough to keep her sighing with each breath she exhaled.

Now that she wasn’t working so hard for her release, Béla suddenly discovered that sensations were beginning to build up nicely – making her tremble as a sensual wave flowed gently up into her belly and down her legs.

“That’s my girl,” Jake whispered as he felt her orgasm.

She responded with a tiny whimper in her throat. Then she shuddered again. Jake could almost feel how wonderful Béla was feeling right now as she lay on top of him. She squeezed his dick with her pussy as he gently shoved up into her again, then sat up a little, holding herself away from his chest with her arms, and began twisting her hips from side to side, adding a new motion to his gentle up and down.

Soon, they were both panting as Jake rammed his cock into her harder and harder. Each was chasing that ecstatic sensation, now, determined that it wasn’t beyond their grasps. Jake came first, pumping his cum up inside her hot, hungry cunt. As her body fed on his release, Béla’s own orgasm began and she cried out louder than she intended, then instantly hoped she hadn’t disturbed Frank and Tanya.

Afterward, Béla lay on Jake’s chest, breathing heavily. Jake’s cum was leaking out of her pussy down his balls and making the crack of his ass itch.

The sensual contrast of the heat where her skin touched his and the coolness of the night air where his arms weren’t wrapped around her made her shiver as her sheen evaporated into the cool night air.

She sat up, still impaled on his softening cock.

“I don’t hear them arguing,” she said, looking around. “What I did to her must be okay.”

“Of course it’s okay, goof-ball,” Jake said, pulling on her arms so she fell back down against his chest. “You saved her life.”

“But, suppose he’s not who she wants?” Béla asked him, plaintively. “Then they’d both be stuck without anyone and I’ll have done twice the harm to both of them!”

“Béla…” Jake gave up arguing and embraced her. “They’ll be fine. Aren’t you cold?”

Béla shook her head. “I have a very high metabolism. Feel my heart?”

Jake smiled and cupped his hand around her left breast.

“Not there, silly,” Béla laughed and placed his hand against her breastbone. Her heart was racing – almost vibrating. Jake pulled away, looking concerned.

“It’s alright,” Béla assured him. “It always beats like that for a while when I’ve been flying – or fucking…”

They lay together quietly, enjoying the motions of each other’s breathing and listened to the trees rustling in the night air. They both giggled into each others’ faces when they heard Tanya cry out as she came, not too far away from them.

“Well, they seem to have bonded okay,” Béla whispered, giggling into Jake’s ear.

“Yeah, they have,” Jake agreed, hugging her scrawny body a little tighter. “And so have we.”

“Have we?” Béla asked, suddenly more serious. “You don’t really know me, and I seem to keep springing all these lovely unwanted surprises on you.”

“We always manage to get through them, though,” Jake replied, “don’t we?”

“I guess,” Béla sighed. She lay back down on him. “Together forever?”

Jake chuckled at her seeming insecurity, “Always!”

“Father was right,” Béla murmured. “I’ll never have to lose you. I love you, you know?”

“I know,” Jake replied. “And I love you.”

After a while, they heard voices in the distance. Someone was coming down the trail behind them – more than one person.

Frank and Tanya got up and quickly dressed. Jake and Béla joined them a few seconds later. Béla was in her usual condition – naked, but only partly speckled with blood now.

As the squad approached, the squad leader noticed Béla for the first time, surprised by her nudity in this chilly weather. Then he noticed the dark bloodstains on her body. He had an unpleasant expression on his face.

“We captured the two that your ‘operative’ left alive. Is that her?” he asked, nodding his head toward Béla.

“Yep!” Tanya told him, cheerfully. “That’s her!”

“Does she always fight naked?” he asked, incredulous that a tiny naked female could create so much carnage.

“I’ve never seen her fight,” Tanya admitted. “I’ve only seen the results.”

“So have I…” the squad leader told her.

Then he spoke into his radiophone. “Base, this is Alpha Squad. We have recovered four hostages and have two prisoners. We need a cleanup squad for four bodies…”

Tanya interrupted him. “Six. There are two more outside the cabin.”

“Correction…for six bodies,” he finished, giving Tanya a disgusted look.

“I won’t have that from you, lieutenant,” Tanya warned him.

“Yes, sir!” he answered, becoming immediately professional again despite his wonder that a twenty-year-old girl could hold the rank of Major in the Special Forces.

‘She has to be something special,’ the squad leader decided as they all began moving down the trail toward the road.

Béla and Jake trailed behind the others.

“I think they missed one in their body count,” Béla mentioned quietly to Jake.

He put his arm around her, sharing his shirt as they walked. “You killed more than four?”

“Uh-huh,” Béla replied, but didn’t explain any further, realizing that someone eventually would, or maybe they wouldn’t, find that last body.

After another forty minutes of travel, they finally reached the road. It looked crowded. Several military vehicles were there, a massive (at least to Béla) helicopter, Jake’s old pickup and the three cars that they and the rogue agents had used to get here.

Someone gave Béla a shirt. “Who should I give it back to?” she asked the soldier who gave it to her.

The soldier looked at her dirty, bloodstained body and said, “Keep it!” deciding that, despite the fact that the ‘X’ girl was naked, he wouldn’t want that bloody shirt back after someone like her had worn it.

He turned and walked away. Béla frowned. She wasn’t used to being looked at like that by a man – especially when she was naked.

Another half-hour went by. Tanya and the military people were all in a group discussing the operation. Béla paced slowly around behind the helicopter, shivering in the cold. Jake could tell she was depressed about something. He walked over to her and hugged her against him. She snuggled right into his warm body.

“They keep looking at me,” she said, angry and sullen. “They call me their ‘X’ file. I can feel it in their minds! They think I’m a freak!”

“We don’t have to stay here,” Jake told her. “Nobody said anything about us staying.”

“You’re right!” she said, suddenly more cheerful and definitely defiant.

Béla looked around for her car. “See you at the club,” she called back to Jake and trotted away.

Frank saw her leaving and went over to talk to her for a moment. Béla hopped into her car. A moment later, she popped the hood and hopped back out. She was under the hood when Frank reached her.

“I disconnected the battery so the GPS system wouldn’t give away my location,” she explained when she saw Frank standing there.

“They don’t intend to hold you,” Frank said, “but they would like to talk to you before you leave.”

“They should have thought of that an hour ago,” Béla fumed, slamming her hood down.

“Frank, I’m not even human to them! They think of me as some strange phenomenon – just something they want to examine – an ‘X’!”

She looked at him, suddenly petulant. “I’m sorry. I’m not upset with you.”

She reached up and kissed him. “I’ll see you in town,” she said, and hopped into her car.

“Fasten your seat belt,” Frank told her.

Béla stuck her tongue out at him. He knew she hated seat belts. They always jammed on her. Frank looked sternly at her and folded his arms across his chest. Béla fastened the damned thing around her waist. Smiling, Frank turned and started walking back to the group near the helicopter as Béla started her car.

A bright flash slammed him forward and into the ground, knocking him cold.

Chapter 19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank woke up. He was lying on a litter on the ground. The sky was lit with a bright orange glow coming from somewhere behind him. He sat up and looked around. Jake lay next to him on another litter. His face and arms were wrapped in gauze. Tanya was kneeling on the ground next to Jake, the unsteady orange glow illuminating her tear-streaked face. Frank sat up to see where the glow was coming from.

“What happened?” he asked, when Tanya rose and came to his side. “What’s wrong with Jake?

“We had to pull him out of the fire,” Tanya said, her voice breaking with grief. “He went right into it trying to get her out.”

Frank looked at Tanya. He’d never seen her look so miserable. He touched her cheek, running his finger through the mascara tracks her tears had caused. Then he noticed that her hair and face was singed. Her eyebrows and lashes were completely burnt off. Taking her by the hand, he noticed that her acrylic nails had melted around the ends of her fingers.

“Oh, Frank!” she sobbed, collapsing against him. “It was awful!”

Frank held her close and let her cry for a moment. Then he noticed something.

“Tanya,” he said, suddenly fearful. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Where’s Béla?”

Tanya stopped sobbing. She pushed herself up and looked into his face.

“She… She’s,” Tanya couldn’t say it.

Instead, she looked toward the orange glow that was lighting up the area. Frank turned around to see what Tanya was staring at. The iron skeleton of a small sports car was burning fiercely.

“She’s in there,” he heard Tanya whisper.

They held each other for a long time, staring into the flames.

A soldier, running from the helicopter toward a group of officers, attracted their attention.

“Sir,” they heard him say, “Our communications are being blocked and there’s something on the radar you should take a look at. It’s coming from the South. And sir, it’s big. I mean, really… big. Sir.”

Frank and Tanya looked up at the crescent moon that had risen a few hours earlier. It disappeared. As they watched, the stars were going out one by one, from the southern to the northern horizon.

A beam of blue-white light appeared in the center of the road near the helicopter. A white-haired man stood in the center of that. And although his lips didn’t move, they could hear what he was saying.

‘Your species has killed my son, and now you have killed my daughter, the only one, of many, who was judged worthy of preserving your future. Your species has now been judged and found not worthy of salvation. You are destined to perish in the fiery conflagration that will consume your world.’

As he delivered his message and faded from view, another beam of light lit up the skeletal remains of the burnt out sports car. The fire simply went out. After a moment, dust and ash began swirling in the air and traveling up the beam of light. When the beam of light was clear again, it vanished, leaving them in darkness.

~~~~~

Two months later:

Frank and Tanya stood together holding each other’s hand. Tanya was trembling with excitement, her stomach full of butterflies. Her teeth were clamped together and she held her mouth tightly closed to keep from grinning like a silly schoolgirl.

She looked at Frank. He looked comically out of place in the tuxedo he was wearing. Jake looked just as out of place for the same reason. She was sure she looked just as silly in her gauzy blue gown and veil. For the first time, she was glad her gown was so stiff. She felt it was the only thing holding her up.

Jake was being prompted for the ring. He handed it to Frank. Tanya held out her hand and Frank slid the ring onto her finger.

The minister said, “Repeat after me: ‘With this ring, I, thee wed’,”

Frank repeated the phrase, “With this ring, I, thee wed,”

The minister went on, “ ‘to be your companion for life’,”

“ ‘to be your companion for life’,”

“ ‘for now, and forever’.”

“ ‘for now, and forever.’ Always,” Frank added, gazing into his new bride’s eyes.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the minister said, making the sign of the cross. “You may kiss the bride.”

Organ music broke the tension with the traditional fanfare. Frank pulled Tanya into his arms, kissing and hugging her tightly. Everyone behind them was cheering and clapping. Jake’s eyes shone with unshed tears as he gazed at them during this happy moment.

The reception at the Target Club was crowded. Half the staff from Military Intelligence was there all decked out in their uniforms. Many of the patrons from the club were there as well, including Adam and his new fianc? Edith. Adam introduced Jake to her.

“I’m so happy to meet you,” Edith told him. “Any friend of Adam’s is sure to be a nice person. Adam is just so sweet and the kindest…”

They both offered their condolences and regards for his loss. As Adam shook Jake’s hand, the tears shone in both their eyes. In his own way, and much too late, Adam had loved Béla, too.

Jake left the reception early. Everything around him existed as a result of something that Béla had done. Despite the fact that she would never have believed it, she had made the world a better place to live in. And now she was gone.

The two surviving rogue agents that MI had captured fingered Charles Blacker, a Gallatin Heights police officer who worked in Forensics as the person who had put them onto Béla’s trail. Plus, Blacker’s fingerprints had been found on the unexploded car bombs recovered by the Military from beneath Frank’s car and Jake’s pickup.

In his defense at his hearing, Charlie had said he ‘wanted to make sure none of those monsters got away’. He produced the evidence he had collected as a Crime Lab Officer that the woman he killed was, in fact, a murderous monster, and an evil creature of the night.

Testimony from other police officers in his precinct invalidated Charlie’s evidence. The precinct lieutenant was able to prove to the judge that Charlie had actually contrived the evidence he had presented to protect himself.

Blacker never stood trial for Béla’s murder. It was determined that he was a psychopathic killer that had delusions of godhood and he was remitted to a state run psychiatric facility.

Charlie was, of course, delighted in the fact that he was getting off without going to prison, at least, that was how he felt until his first Electro-shock treatment. After that, he wanted to contact the District Attorney and plead guilty to all charges.

The good doctors at the mental facility, of course, wouldn’t allow him to do that, and kept using Electro-shock and psychotropic drugs on him until he actually was a psychopathic killer. At that point, they determined that he was cured, and released him from their custody.

A week later, police responding to neighbors complaining about screams coming from an ADC rental unit caught Charlie red-handed (literally) in the act of chopping up a fourteen year old schoolgirl and was taken into custody by the local police.

Charlie told the arresting officers that it was consensual sex and they couldn’t arrest him for that. The young schoolgirl was pronounced dead at the scene.

While the police were transporting Charlie to a secure facility, he was shot and killed while trying to escape. The injuries listed in the autopsy report included gunshot wounds to both knees, both his hands and his testicles. The report also mentioned six more gunshot wounds in his lower abdomen. His cause of death was listed as ‘natural causes; from internal bleeding caused by self-inflicted injuries sustained while attempting to escape from custody’. The arresting officers, one of whom was the deceased schoolgirl’s uncle, were never investigated regarding Charlie’s death.

Tanya retired from Military Intelligence to become a full-time stripper and part-time housewife at the Target Club, which they renamed Pussy Galore’s.

When she became pregnant, they sold the club and used the money from that and from the Wilson Estate (which Béla had left to Frank) to start their own Private Investigations/Bounty Hunter business, specializing in catching serial killers. In a way, they were unknowingly keeping Béla’s work alive.

Jake left after the wedding. He took on work where he could find it, wandering from town to town, not really caring what happened to him. Eventually, Frank and Tanya lost track of where he traveled, and decided to get on with their own lives.

They eventually had three children – Alicia, Frank Junior and Katherine. The kids were very active and, when injured, healed amazingly fast. They all learned, as a family, to keep their abilities secret. The children grew normally, and then each seemed to stop aging as they reached their eighteenth birthday.

Frank and Tanya eventually realized they needed to know what Jake knew about Béla and her unusual life span. It was 2017 a.d. – almost twenty years since they had heard from him. It took a little over six months to locate him using the modern resources of their company, Tabor Investigations.

~~~~~

“Well, from what she told me,” Jake was telling Frank and Tanya, “there was one person who was made immortal by another vampire.”

He hated that word. She had been so much more than that.

“The person she mentioned was transformed around 1480 a.d. Béla told me he was an old man when he found her. That would make his life span around five to six hundred years.

“Since you both have her blood in your veins, your children should live as long as you will,” Jake concluded. “If I were to get married and have children with a mortal woman, it’s reasonable to assume that my blood would be diluted and any children we had would live a lesser number of total years than I would.

“In fact, I’ve given it some thought,” Jake continued. “The only reference in history that may be a candidate for longevity manipulation by the Vampire Species is in the Bible, where the individual life spans of one man’s descendants were remarkable enough to be recorded as a part of Semitic history. If we are in the five-hundred-year life span range, we should be able to use that record as a table of reference to determine how long your children may live.”

Jake was comfortable being with Frank and Tanya again. Their grown-up kids called him Uncle Jake, although he, the children and their parents all seemed to be the same apparent age. It was a very large, close-knit family of energetic enthusiasm.

Frank and Tanya’s oldest daughter, Alicia, fell head over heels in lust with Jake. Their love affair lasted several weeks, ending only after Alicia realized that Jake wasn’t in love with her in the same way she loved him. Alicia’s enthusiasm for sex almost matched Béla’s. She couldn’t understand why Jake wouldn’t let himself love her. Their children would live almost forever.

After spending two months with Frank and Tanya and their clan, Jake decided to travel around the world, to see what there was to see. The farewell party Frank and Tanya threw was both happy and sad. They were happy that Jake was finally getting on with his life, but sad that he was leaving. At the conclusion of the party, Alicia locked Jake in the spare bedroom with her for three days, trying to get him to change his mind about marrying her and taking her with him. In the end, she was alone, and Jake was gone.

Jake didn’t make it around the world. His journey was interrupted fifteen years later – in 2034 a.d. – by the Third World War. No, it wasn’t the nuclear war that had been threatening to destroy the world for last hundred years; it was a nuclear war amongst the nations of the Third World.

Jake was in Germany at the time, and decided, now that almost a third of the planet was radioactive, to return home to the good old U.S. of A. He bummed his way from city to city, picking up odd jobs when he could.

Two years later, a plague developed in the Asian countries that were the most irradiated from the recent war. It quickly swept across the planet and struck down almost half the population. Governments were in chaos. Cities were burning. Dead bodies were everywhere. The only structure in the country that could be relied on was, surprisingly, the business structure. It didn’t take long for business to take over the government – they’d already been running things for a hundred years. It wasn’t exactly a coup. Government, more or less, simply vanished, leaving the business structure as the only viable control mechanism left.

In the years following the plague, Jake found it increasingly hard to get work in the U.S. without being identified by a company logo. Feeling frustrated with this infringement on his freedom of movement, he left the States and worked his way across the Pacific, getting odd jobs and traveling from island to island.

In 2056 a.d., Jake actually encountered Alicia again in the Aleutian Islands, almost forty years after he has last seen her. She just happened to be there, spending time getting over the loss of her first husband. She still looked twenty, and incredibly sexy. After a torrid month together, she left to resume her life back in the States. Jake declined her offer to return with her and resumed his own travels, eventually ending up in Australia.

After spending ten years in ‘The Outback’, Jake decided to rejoin society and came back to the States. He looked up the logo of the PI Company that Frank and Tanya had, to see if he could use it to find work. At one time they had told him they would leave him on their company roster, availing him of the option to come back if he ever decided to. By now, it had been almost fifty years since he had seen or heard from either of them.

Under the Tabor Investigations personnel data, Jake Pestova’s name was still active, much to his surprise. Frank had even kept Jake’s age and resume updated so that, on paper, he was always in his early twenties. He used it to get a job in personnel procurement at Tomlin Security Corp., talking to and evaluating potential employees The corporation provided security for many Fortune 500 companies. It also provided its own health services and homeowner retirement program, as most larger companies did, these days. Once hired, he set up his homeowner and retirement plan to build him a house in the high desert with all the modern facilities available. In twenty years (2087 a.d.), he could retire to his ‘dream home’ and live out the rest of his life in comfort.

Three years after Jake began working his new job, and seventy-six years after Béla’s death, the haunting dreams began:

Jake could hear someone calling his name. He got up and went outside, into the moonlight. Although his apartment was in the middle of Albuquerque, when he stepped outside his door, he was standing in the desert. A slender, pale figure was walking toward him, her outstretched wings dragging in the sand behind her.

‘Miss me?’ she asked mischievously as she surrounded them both with her velvety wings.

Jake broke down and cried. He had never cried over her before, but now, with her standing there before him, he cried.

They made love in the sand, her wings wrapped around them like a giant cocoon. Then she faded away, an anguished look on her face.

‘Wait for me, Jake,’ she cried out in anguish as she disappeared. ‘I’m coming back, I prom…’

End Part 4

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