Chapter 15

Jake turned off the Tri-d. He went back upstairs to check on Béla and Katie. Béla’s body temperature was almost normal, now. He knew that Katie had done something, but she was still unconscious and couldn’t be questioned yet.

Frank Junior was lying on one of the beds in the spare bedroom staring at the ceiling when Jake entered.

“Trying to figure out what happened?” Jake asked, sitting down on the bed next to Frank.

“No,” Frank admitted. “I know it was Katie ... At the same time that Béla’s unborn child stopped cooking her, Katie’s body mass dropped by six kilos. It set off her body monitor. And she’s severely dehydrated.

“The equipment I have here tells me that almost fifty percent of Katie’s brain is active, right now, while she’s apparently asleep. That’s unheard of, for a human. She’s evolving, Jake ... She’s leaving the rest of us behind and becoming something that’s never existed before.”

“So you think it might have something to do with her exposure to that machine – the Praetor?” Jake asked, pondering a possible explanation. “Alien technology designed to boost the little human monkeys up the evolutionary ladder, perhaps?” He smiled as he waited for Frank to answer. Jake loved discussions like this, but only when the subject matter didn’t get garbled up with religious dogma.

“I don’t know,” Frank replied. “She believes that. She ‘merges’ her mind with that machine several hours every day. Then she works out for another two hours to keep her body in shape. I was sparring with her yesterday and clipped her right across the face – cut her pretty bad.

“What was weird – well, the first thing that was weird was that her reflexes are a lot faster than they used to be. For ten minutes before I actually clipped her, I couldn’t even touch her. And I was really trying! Then she let her guard down, almost like she wanted me to clop her a good one.

“The other thing is, when I did cut her cheek, it healed in about two seconds. It would take an hour for a cut like that to heal on me.”

Frank laughed to himself – a private joke perhaps?

“What’s so funny?” Jake asked, curious.

“Well, Katie’s a snuff girl,” Frank said. “I imagine that, with her improved reaction time and her newfound ability to heal even better than the rest of us ‘long-lifers’, she could pull off a lot of stunts now that she couldn’t before. That is, if she still wants to pursue this lucrative, suicidal profession. She could get very rich, very quickly. People pay a lot of money to watch young, pretty girls get butchered.”

“Well, that Praetor device is certainly something I’ve not had much experience with,” Jake admitted, “although Béla seems to think it’s necessary for the very survival of her people, whoever they might be. Who knows what it can actually do?”

It was a rhetorical question that didn’t expect an answer. It also effectively ended the conversation. He wasn’t about to mention the blood smears on Katie’s wrists, but he suspected that Katie had fed Béla some of her blood in an effort to help her with her pregnancy.

“Well, I’ve got to check on the girls, again,” Frank said, stretching and getting up from his short rest.

When he entered the master bedroom, Katie was sitting up, rubbing Béla’s stomach. Katie looked up when she saw her brother enter.

“She’s asleep,” Katie said quietly, her voice sounding scratchy. “Her baby is quiet, too. It doesn’t appear that the labor inducer you gave her had much effect. Her body must have negated it somehow while it was healing.”

Katie tried to clear her throat several times, finally giving up in a fit of coughing.

“What’s wrong with me?” she groaned, her raspy voice grating against her brother’s ears.

“You’re dehydrated,” Frank explained. “And if you check your body monitor, you’ll also find you’ve lost about four pounds. Let’s get you downstairs so you can refuel that starved body of yours, and you can tell me all about whatever it is you’ve been doing in here to make your body react like that.”

Katie was so stiff and sore that she could barely lift herself up to get off the bed. Frank helped her to stand up and led her to the doorway. Then she ended up swaying wildly, high in the air, riding down the stairs on Frank’s shoulders, hoarsely yelling with fear and wild excitement, her hands tightly clasping her brother’s face and chin.

Katie was on her third sandwich and her fourth glass of juice, trying animatedly to tell them everything between huge mouthfuls of food.

“Anyway, I was ... just wringing water into her ... mouth, over and over, trying to help her ... heal. You know? The burns on her body were healing, so...”

Katie didn’t tell them about slicing her wrists and bleeding for the fallen vampire. She was certain her arrogant and overprotective older brother would harangue her for days about that. As it was, it was obvious that he didn’t believe what she was telling him, anyway.

“Beth suggested that I was just dreaming the whole thing,” Katie decided to say, placating her brother, ‘Damned Doubting Frankus!’ “Then I woke up. Béla was okay, the baby was okay, and I was four pounds lighter from working myself to exhaustion in a dream!”

“Humph!” Frank said, clearly not accepting what his sister was saying. “Well, you did something that used a lot of your energy, and whatever it was (your blood?), it seems to have stabilized both Béla and her baby. If that’s how your mind interprets what happened, I guess we’ll have to accept it – at least until we learn more about these new ‘mental abilities’ you say you have.”

‘God hath spoken!’ Katie thought, fuming. She could see the quote marks in his supercilious voice as he spoke. ‘I just told you what happened, you ... you ignoramus!’

‘What you have done is recorded and is a part of history, now, ‘ Katie heard in her mind. ‘Regardless of what your brother believes, you have accomplished something new that has not been done before. You changed the past and teleported the Princess Beth out of danger and relocated her in the present. Originally, the princess perished. You changed history that has already been recorded. You have the honor of being recorded as the first being to successfully travel through time.’

“The Praetor says that I’m the first person to ever travel through time,” Katie said smugly, unable to keep from blabbing to her unbelieving brother. “Why don’t you believe me?”

Frank glared at her for a moment, decided not to say anything about the food smeared on her face, and told her, “Well, it would be more believable if this Beth girl actually showed up...” then turned and left the room.

It was a week later. Frank and Tanya were attending a fetish fair in Helena. Béla was still pregnant but having an easier time of it, now. Frank Jr. and Katie were long gone, back to their movie lives after one more argument (which Tanya lost) about Katie’s choice of careers. Tanya lost when Katie simply vanished from right in front of her and effectively ended their ‘discussion’. An hour later, she’d called her brother from her car phone and told him she’d be in her trailer if he wanted to talk to her.

“Her car’s on the East Coast!” Frank Jr. exploded. “How could she get there so fast?”

“Well,” his father replied, simply raising his eyebrows at his favorite (and only) son, “she did say she knew how to teleport...”

Béla smirked to herself, imagining that her newfound friend would likely eat everything she could find in her ‘trailer’, leaving nothing for her brother until he went shopping. ‘It takes a lot of energy to teleport halfway across the country, after all... ‘