Chapter 22

When James got up to run in the morning, waking before Zoe for once, he extracted himself from the pile of sleeping girls and stood there for a moment looking fondly at them. He couldn't help but admire the sight, three sexy, sleepy woman and he had half a mind to dive back in. He had been horribly lax in his exercise regimen though and, with a sigh of regret, he threw on some shorts, a shirt and his shoes and headed out.

As he ran on the treadmill, his mind wandered back to his discussion with Sally the night before. He was still distinctly uncomfortable with the whole idea, but Sally had a compelling argument. If he continued down this road, helping the soon to be retired detective track down monsters, he would do the same again, maybe even worse. He might even be called on to repeat what he had done in the mall on that fateful day.

It wasn't much of a leap from thinking about outright killing someone, even if they deserved to die, to the act of enslavement. Would enslaving someone against their will be better than killing them? What if the person were not wholly responsible and death was not warranted? Could he really enforce behavior patterns without going all the way?

He needed to develop some guidelines, a code to go by. Up to now, he had been winging it, deciding on the fly as the circumstances directed. Evers was a case in point. He had never considered the kinds of things he did to Evers, but at the time, it all made sense. The same with Sally, when he dove in, with the assistance of his mates, and pulled her out of her mental prison.

That brought up another conundrum. Stacy and Zoe were people, individuals with their own personalities, their own dreams and standards, yet they had deferred to him every time. If he made a decision, they were sure to back him even if they might have private reservations. Was this a by-product of the link, of him being the lynch pin in their group? Or did they defer to him because they really thought he knew best?

He found that he really needed some outside advice, some third party that could be objective about this. He wanted to bounce ideas off someone who was not intimately involved. The problem would be finding such a person, and trusting that person. Whoever it was would know the intimate details of his abilities and his links to the girls. They would be in a position to cause an inordinate amount of trouble and pain to his new family.

Where do you find a mentor when the abilities in question were not supposed to exist?

The girls were up and getting ready for the day when he finished his run, and he slipped into the shower just as Stacy climbed out, sharing a loving kiss as they passed the bathroom.

When he was clean and dressed, he went down to find that breakfast was almost ready, so he helped himself to a glass of orange juice and sat at the table, taking a few minutes to read the newspaper that Stewart had left there.

Buried beneath the fold on page two, a story caught his eyes. A homeless teen had been found dead, raped and strangled, beneath an overpass in a rundown part of town. The picture accompanying the story showed an attractive brunette, about sixteen, and something about the image made him stop and read the article again.

'Ladies, does this girl look at all familiar? Maybe from the shelter?' he sent to the three of them.

'That could be Amanda. She was there at the shelter to eat, but she left right after.' Stacy answered. She sent him a memory of a thin, waif-like girl with dirty hair tucked up under a ballcap. She was dressed in rags that had not seen soap in a long time, and slunk through the room, avoiding contact with everyone, until she got a tray of food.

James vaguely remembered seeing her, but couldn't put his finger on why this was poking at him. What about this girl was different? Then it came to him and he shivered.

He had been moving around crates of items that had been donated and he remembered feeling a prickle, a tingle in his spine that was right at the edge of his awareness. He had spun in place, still holding the heavy crate, and scanned the room. The girl had been crouched down near a stack of boxes, looking as if she was trying not to draw attention to herself. She had been staring right at him.

When he met her gaze, the girl had ducked behind the crates and vanished. He remembered shaking it off, his mind on the two dozen more crates he had to move, and he had gone back to his task.

Now, sitting here waiting for breakfast, he recognized what he'd missed the day before. It had not just been some instinctual awareness of being watched, she'd managed to touch his psi abilities somehow. He had no way of knowing if it was his own expanding ability that had touched her, or if she may have had some latent ability of her own that was triggered by proximity to another, but it had been real. And now she was dead.

He didn't mention to the girls over breakfast, not sure how to even bring the subject up. It could have been all in his imagination, after all. Still, he was going to do some checking, see if he could root out any information on the girl

As they ate breakfast, James was distracted by his own thoughts and almost missed the signs of a very intense, but private mental conversation going on between the three women at the table. They were deliberately excluding him, trusting him not to snoop when it was obvious that the discussion was private. He didn't snoop, of course, but that didn't stop him from wondering what the topic was.

Saturday was a quiet day, neither of the families had plans so, after breakfast, the quartet elected to just lay around the house, relax and watch movies. James's parents arrived just after ten though, and upset that apple cart.

After holding a whispered conversation with Sally, David gathered everyone in the Darcy family room. Sally squeezed in between James and Zoe on the couch, with Stacy also seated there making it a tight, but cozy, fit.

"I asked Sally, and she wanted you all here for this discussion." he started, then held up a sheaf of papers.

"James, your mother and I have been busy these last two weeks, and we wanted to share this with Sally. First, the police case was closed, they listed your mother's death as accidental." This news filled James with relief, though he hid it from everyone else.

"Next, we have been awarded temporary guardianship pending approval by the court. Sally, after discussing this with the judge who signed the writ, you can stay with us as part of our family for as long as you like. You cannot be forced to go with anyone else, family or not." his eyes bore in, showing Sally that he knew exactly what she feared, and he wasn't going to let it happen.

"Last, we have to make some decisions. Sally, we already made arrangement for the disposition of your mother's remains. If you would like, we can hold a ceremony, but I wasn't sure and wouldn't make that decision without you. We also want to know what you would like done with the estate. There is the house, it was in your mother's name as sole owner, a bequest from her own parents. She also has individual bank and investment accounts, separate from those she shared with your father. The shared accounts will have to be split with him, of course, but the individual accounts will be yours. Last, there is the car, also in her name, just as your father's car was in his own name."

He paused, waiting for a response from Sally, but she was looking at James.

'What do I do? What do I say?' her tone was frightened and she was pressing up close to him, almost in his lap.

James, keeping his reply audible for the parents, lifted her chin towards him so he could see her eyes.

"Sally, do you want a burial ceremony for your mother? A wake, maybe?" he asked softly.

Sally just shook her head, her eyes scanning the faces in the room as if she was afraid of how they would react.

"That's fine, no pressure on any of this, okay? Do you know what you want to do with the estate? I don't think anyone will object if you want to think about it for a while. It isn't as if it would disappear overnight."

"Can I have the car? Then we'd have two." she asked hopefully.

James glanced at his father, seeing no objection. "Sure thing, sweetie. We can do that. Why don't we let my dad deal with the accounts and the life insurance, okay? He'll have to do most of it as your guardian and as your lawyer anyway. You can decide on the house later. You might want to think about getting some of your things though, but you don't have to decide today."

"Sally, I will take care of the details and I want you to think about one thing though, okay? The insurance plus the investment accounts total up to a large sum, about eight hundred thousand dollars. I would feel much better, as a parent and as your guardian, if you would consider putting enough of that away to ensure you can go to college anywhere you desire. A good school can cost you forty to fifty thousand dollars a year, not including living expenses. Just think about it, okay?" James asked quietly.

Sally nodded at him and smiled. "Thank you for that, for everything you're doing."

"No need to thank us, dear." Ada chimed in, walking over and kneeling by the girl, giving her a hug. "Even if you weren't part of James's new family, we couldn't have done any less. You're a sweet girl and we are just glad we could help."

The rest of the day went almost according to plan, with James spending a lot of time on the computer and the girls with their heads together, continuing their marathon chat session. It wasn't at all a surprising when they pulled him aside before dinner. He knew it was coming ... all that talk had to lead somewhere!

Stacy had been elected spokeswoman, evidently, because she directed him to an armchair and sat the other two girls on the couch. She remained standing, almost equidistant between the three, and began to pace.

"James, Sally told us about her request last night." she began.

"Whoa ... I..." James began to protest, but Stacy interrupted, waving her hands for silence.

"And she told us what you said. Zoe and I agree that it would be extreme, and that you were right to hold off. We talked it over and Sally has agreed to wait. If, in a couple of months, she still feels that way, we can talk about it again as a family."

James nodded, vastly relieved.

"Next, Sally asked something that got me thinking. It might be a hard sell, but I really thing that the idea has merit. She asked if we could all move into her house and stop this shuffling back and forth between my parents and your parents every week. The house has four bedroom, four bathrooms, a two car garage and a pool. We could have our own home! I was concerned about, you know, the bad memories, but Sally said it was silly. She loved the house and wanted to fill it with good memories."

James looked thoughtful, his eyes scanning Sally, trying to read, without peeking, her state of mind.

"Is this what you really want, Sally?"

"If you think it is a bad idea, we could sell it. We could use the money to buy a house." she replied, nodding her head.

James was struck by the way she was talking. She was using 'we' and not 'I', and it warmed his heart to think that she was finally accepting her place in the family, becoming a part of the family instead of a visitor.

"Sally, did you hear what you said?" he asked. "We and not I. Does this mean you have decided that you really want to be with us, one of us?"

Sally blushed and nodded, her smile growing warm.

"Then if you want to keep the house, we keep it, and we will fill it with so many good memories it will be like we've always lived there." he said, holding out his arms.

Sally was off the couch like a shot and into James's lap, curled up and burrowing as close as possible as he rained down little kisses on her face.

Stacy and Zoe just beamed at the pair, and each other.

"Okay you two, I'd say get a room, but we just got a whole house!" Stacy said with a laugh. "Sally also wanted to give us the money, but I told her it wasn't right." she continued, looking somber.

"I thought you said we are a family?" Sally replied stubbornly, her voice slightly muffled with her face buried in James's shirt.

James looked up at Stacy with a smile and a raised eyebrow as if to say, "Well? Now what, smarty pants?"

Stacy just shook her head, looking troubled.

"Okay, even if I concede that, and we are most definitely a family, Sally, all of us, what about how it would look? Your parents take her in and she immediately becomes part of your harem, James, and gives you all of her money? I could imagine social services knocking down the door and accusing us of being a cult or something." Stacy looked genuinely worried.

"Then we give her our money." Zoe said reasonably. "Sally will control all of our funds. She will keep track, pay the bills and so on. The house can stay in her name, and the car. It might look like we're sponging off of her, but it won't look like a cult, right? Besides, I don't really care what others think, it isn't illegal and the only opinions that really matter are right here in this room. Except for the moms and dads, of course."

Stacy looked thoughtful at that, and smiled warmly and her sister-wife. "I sometime forget how smart you are, baby sister." she said thoughtfully.

Zoe stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes, then giggled at Stacy's expression.

"James, she is your slave!" Stacy said sternly, glaring at him.

"Yes she is, and I adore her." he replied, crossing his own eyes and sticking out his tongue.

It took a week of talking, discussing, arguing and haggling before the quartet could convince the parents, both sets, that this was a solution to several problems. The one major concession the parents insisted on was the right to stop by at any time, any hour and any day, to check on the "the children". They even wanted a set of keys and the alarm code.

The fiction was going to be, for public consumption anyway, that the parents would be splitting their time between the new house and their own houses. It was going to be more than a fiction, at first, until they felt more comfortable with the situation.

Sally's car was a beauty. Her mother, in keeping with what she thought was her station in life, drove a Mercedes 500SL convertible. The sweet little sports car was not the most practical vehicle, but they all had fun taking it for a spin.

Actually moving in to the house took almost a month. Discussions with Sally revealed her reluctance to even go into the house as it sat, so they decided to simply clear the place out. Sally decided to keep her personal possessions, a couple of picture albums and a few bits and bobs, like the electronics and dishes. Everything else, the entire house, was stripped to the bare walls, all of it sold off to an auction company or donated to charity. They even hired a professional crew to clean, do repairs and paint before Sally ever stepped through the door again.