Chapter 17

Rock brought me some venison stew and put it in front of me. I was alert enough to eat it and washed it down with some water. I had been sending messages to Dark Wolf of the type that seemed to come from a mysterious source: ‘The cancer is dying slowly. It’s invaded your small intestine. You need to get nourishment, but you shouldn’t eat. You can take a nourishing shake.’

I repeated that message when he was in a wake cycle, and he eventually whispered the message to Desert Flower. Within two hours, Flower and Antonia were whipping up shakes in strawberry and blueberry flavors that had all sorts of vitamins and minerals and supplements in them.

Dark Wolf sucked a few ounces down and went back to sleep. Watching, as I was, the shake was taken into his stomach, digested a little, and was squirted into his small intestine. I couldn’t begin to understand the chemical interactions that were going on.

His cancer was dying slowly, as I’d said to Dark Wolf. I did some ‘seat of my brain’ calculations, with Red’s help, and came to the conclusions that I’d be here for three or four weeks. I had to find a faster way to kill this thing off. Reluctantly, I decided to experiment with the fire I discovered I could do earlier.

I made the flame tinier and tinier. Turning it loose on my own left arm, I watched as I burned through a small area of my bicep. I got down to a small area of about one or two cells across. When I was done experimenting, the area I was working on was sore. I directed some extra blood flow to that area to clean up the dead bicep cells and to – hopefully – grow some replacements.

So ... I tried it on Dark Wolf’s tumor, that night. It worked, I think. The tumor cells burned off to a gray color and then to an almost black. The original color was a pinkish-white. My first target was the surface of the tumor that was in contact with his organs. By morning, I’d reduced the volume of the tumor by about one-quarter, and I’d also burned off the two arteries that were feeding the tumor.

Now all (ALL!?) I had to worry about was some way to vacuum up the dead cells. I shouldn’t have worried about it. By morning his body was flooding the area with new blood products that were gobbling it up. I assumed it went to his liver or someplace. The cancer was eating itself, because it didn’t have anything else to eat.

I wished I knew more about how cancer spreads – but I think NOBODY knew more about that.

My new estimate was that I’d be able to let it die by itself by noon. I didn’t have any estimate on the damage my ‘cure’ would do to the pancreas and small intestine, but it was surely going to be less than letting the cancer do what it wanted.

I was awake all night and, in the morning, I messaged Bear. ‘I know you told Crying Wolf that I was with his father in the hospital. Can you get him to come over about noon, so I can talk to him, please? Until then, I’ll rest please.’

He answered, ‘Do you want food now?’

‘I’ll eat like a mountain lion ... but later. Now, I’m just going to get what rest I can.’

It amazed me how much energy I’d used in doing this whole episode for about 24 hours.

I wasn’t doing anything, just resting. Well, watching inside Dark Wolf and repairing my own bicep. I was mostly concentrating on watching the tumor die. It was fun, actually, and I (mentally) threw up my (mental) hands and gave myself a (mental) high five when a hunk of it turned black and slid off. To the cancer: TAKE THAT!

...

You know how fast your mind can switch topics. There was plenty of ‘spare’ time between times when I looked in on the decaying tumor. I visited Tommy Sussex. Yeah, it was about 7:30 a.m. but I figured ‘what the hell,’ he’d have to get up and go to work, right?

Wrong. His mind was fully engaged in doing the nasty with a girl. Actually he was doing the nasty TO a girl. She was tied, spread eagle, face up on the bed. He had some sort of electric shock / vibrating device clamped onto her clitoris and down and into her vagina. It looked like a giant, deformed clothes pin. He was straddling her face, and as he looked down at her, she seemed to like the way she was being treated. She was blonde and looked kinda like me, in my slut disguise.

She was youngish, maybe she was over eighteen, maybe not. She had several tattoos, all of which seemed to be of the flaming devil-head type. She had a tongue stud, which Tommy seemed to be enjoying, and several facial piercings. Maybe she looked like me the way Tommy would like me to look.

Oh well, to each her own, I guess. I got off on having two guys pamper me, she got off on having a guy in her face pressing an electric button to tingle her man in the boat. I could have slid into her mind, but the way she was gagging and gyrating her pelvis I didn’t think it would give me much insight.

Tommy finished, and wiped himself on her face, and collapsed to the side of the bed. He was done and continued to press her joy button for several minutes. Before he dropped off to sleep, he scanned through what was coming up for his activities of the day. Apparently, his ‘job’ was as a drug dealer, and a sado-masochist. He spent a fair amount of his mental time, preparing for a session with Shioban later. Then he went to sleep, leaving Katy (that was the name of the girl) tied down with an inactive clamp on and in her.

God! What was I going to do with him?

Red? Does the future still depend on using him as before?

[Yes, Lexi. Although afterward there is no mention of him, it’s clear that he did his job.]

Is there any way to ... uh ... divorce him from his reliance on Shioban? She’s not doing what I hoped she would do. In fact, I think she’s blackmailing me. Or, well, planning to blackmail me. That’s got to stop!

[I think that isn’t anything I can help with. You’re on your own. But I think you can handle it. Use your tools, both mental and human.]

Mental and human? What did Red mean by that?

Red? What did you mean?

[Just that you have a lot of resources. You can get others. You’re working with people on both sides of the legal line. I can tell you only what appears in the news. There’s no news about Shioban or Tommy in the next few years. Sorry to be so ... confusing. But there’s not much I can tell you about things that don’t happen. There’s lots of things that ‘don’t happen’ as far as the news is concerned.]