Chapter 3

'I smell ... Sausage!'

After all these years, there was still nothing that would wake Katie up like Dad's fixing breakfast. She smiled and stretched, feeling like the innocent child that she'd been when she would wake up to his cooking every Sunday.

Sitting up, she looked around the guest bedroom in her parent's new house. 'Yes! I have my own bathroom!' Fifteen minutes later, she was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt and showed up in the kitchen, hair still wet, beating her mom by only seconds.

"Ha, ha, I won," Katie crowed.

"No fair!" Tanya whined. "I had more cleaning up to do than you did."

Frank looked at them both, then kissed his wife, apologetically. "I could've let you sleep," Frank suggested, almost whispering in Tanya's ear. Then he turned back toward the stove.

"You do and you'll sleep alone," Tanya replied. "I like the way you wake me up..." She hung her head on his shoulder and watched him trying to crack eggs with her weight hanging on his arm.

"Mom ... Gross!" Katie complained.

"Hey!" Tanya turned to face off with her daughter. "I may be over a hundred, but I'm still twenty, just like you!" She folded her arms across her chest and stood with one hip out, acting just like her daughter had when she was a teenager in a snit.

Katie held her hands up, readily backing down. She sat down at the table and waited. She wasn't about to get into an argument about sex with her mom. Especially not when, genetically, they were both the same age...

'That reminds me... '

"The great horny toad sez that your vampire girl is back," Katie mentioned, changing the subject. That was one of the reasons why she was visiting. She wanted to meet this paragon of immortality that had affected all their lives so dramatically.

"Stop calling your sister that!" Tanya said, getting annoyed. "I get tired of hearing it! Sometimes I wonder what nicknames you have for us!"

'Now I remember why I left... '

"I'm sorry," Katie mumbled. "I was just ... well, I was hoping to meet Béla. I mean, except for the fact that I heal really fast and I passed retirement age years ago, I've never had any proof that she ever really existed. And then the... Alicia... called and told me she was alive and living with Uncle Jake.

"Is she?" Katie asked, looking up hopefully. "Really alive? I mean ... It just seems so incredible..."

Frank swung around holding the skillet and slid the first three eggs onto Katie's plate. He was grinning happily. He turned back to start the next batch.

"Yep!" Frank exclaimed. "She's not only back, but she brought a sister with her!"

"Why didn't you tell me last night?" Katie asked her mom. "We talked for hours..."

"Honey," Tanya admitted. "Even after all these years, I'm still getting used to the fact that you hire yourself out to be killed for a living. We just didn't get around to talking about Béla. I wasn't trying to keep you from her."

Katie didn't look convinced. She looked at her eggs cooling on her plate, then picked up a piece of toast and 'murdered' the yolks. Squishing the crisp bread down into the little yellow lake and soaking it for a minute, she quickly raised it up and sucked the flavorful bite into her mouth. Half a sausage on the end of her fork quickly followed.

"Besides," Tanya continued, "I think that you should meet Béla's sister, Beth. I mean, meet her personally. Um, intimately ... She can teach you some things about mental control that just might keep you alive in a bad situation – especially in your, um, occupation."

"Intimate? Like in, sexually?" Katie asked, her eyebrows raised. "Why would you ask me to do a thing like that?" 'Are you implying there's something wrong with my sex life?'

Tanya sat for a moment under her daughter's judgmental stare. They both sat silently while Frank finished serving breakfast around the table – a plateful of sausages, several fresh pieces of toast, and a pile of scrambled eggs for himself and Tanya to divide between them.

Frank looked at his wife for a moment, then decided to help her out from underneath her daughter's condemning glare.

"Um," Frank cleared his throat. "What she means is that Béla and her sister are telepaths. They are so powerful that when they get close to you, your mind just naturally merges with theirs. It's just natural to want to have sex with them."

'I don't believe I just said that to my own daughter! Now she's giving me that look!'

"Look," said Tanya, suddenly released from her daughter's headlight glare, "We're not saying do it or don't do it. We're just saying that when you meet these girls, you'll want to ... do it..." 'I think I'll just eat breakfast, then crawl under the table and hide from her the rest of the day... '

Katie smirked. "I have never met anyone with that kind of power that they just, with one look, can make me want to hop in bed with them..."

She stopped, suddenly remembering Ronnie, her best friend back in high school and her very first ever! She smiled sadly to herself. 'She's probably died of old age by now... '

The minor parent-child tensions that had occurred during the two meals Katie shared with her parents weren't nearly as exciting as Katie's discovery of her mom's private playroom.

"How can you be so goddamned judgmental about my sex habits and what I do for a living! You had me believing that my 'career choice' was some sort of psychotic problem 'I' had!" Katie screamed into her mother's face. "You do the same goddamned fucking thing!"