Chapter 17

"Hmm. Interesting," Tabatha said, talking to herself. She moved her fingers on the console and changed the display around.

"What?" Jake Hedron asked.

He was lying on the bed, spread-eagled, naked and sexually sated; at least for the moment. He'd never met anyone as sexy and as fascinating as Tabatha. The fact that she was an empath intrigued him. His real parents and his grandparents were the only people he knew who were special in any way, and they were more advanced on a physical level than on a mental one. He'd never met anyone who could read minds, before. Of course, he hadn't met Béla, his real father's girlfriend yet. That would occur this weekend. 'Gods! That's tomorrow!' he suddenly realized.

"Huh? Oh," Tabatha replied, "there was some vigilante activity a couple of weeks ago in Bozeman. That's where your grandparents live, right? Frank and Tanya?"

"Yeah," Jake replied. "Mom used to tell me stories about when she was a kid. Her folks were bounty hunters. They still are, I guess. They had, make that have, their own private investigation company.

"In fact," Jake continued, becoming more interested in telling his story, "the day after Béla came back from ... wherever she'd been for the last hundred years, Gramps and Grams, along with Béla's sister, cracked a case that I'd been working on and rescued some rich guy's kidnapped daughter.

"I'd sure like to have them working at Tomlin," he concluded. "But, they like the small town life."

"Small town life?" Tabatha asked, half-laughing. "Would you like to see this video feed? I think this is an image of your grandmother!"

Curious, Jake rolled off the bed, still naked, and knelt down next to his naked bride, who was sitting with a towel under her so as not to leak all over the desk chair. Ignoring all that, plus the way her breasts jiggled when she typed, he stared at the console with her.

"Watch," Tabatha said, then reached up and moved her fingers on the console, commanding it to replay a security tape from what was supposed to be an abandoned building.

"This is where it looks like she was taken captive," Tabatha narrated as the image on the console showed a sexy blonde being manhandled down a hallway.

"The building's used by indigents and drug users," she said as she fast-forwarded the image. They watched as the sexy, scantily clad blond was moved from the first room to a second room.

"It sure looks like her," Jake admitted. "I hope she's all right." The men in the image were slapping the girl around a lot. She looked nearly unconscious.

"Here," she said. "Watch..."

"Did she just call him a shithead?" Jake asked, incredulous. "Is she trying to get herself killed?"

Tabatha chuckled to herself and thought, 'You have no idea! Just watch!' into her husband's mind.

Jake watched. Now the dumb blonde was posing! 'She's definitely going to get herself killed! That couldn't be Grams. She's not that stupid!'

One man turned and walked away. The other reached down, grabbed the blonde babe by her throat and hauled her upright. He backhanded her, slamming her face into the wall. He reached for her again as she slid down the wall.

"Won't be long, now," Jake mused, feeling bad about what would happen to the blond. He knew how human animals like the one in the video enjoyed terrorizing and slaughtering young girls. He felt an uncomfortable tightness in his stomach as he continued to watch.

'Where's the vigilante part?' he wondered, not really interested in watching more of this cruel butchery.

As the man reached for her, the blond seemed to fall more quickly, rolling as she did so. Then she kicked him in the crotch. The thump of the impact registered on the security recorder.

'He's wearing protection, ' Jake realized. 'Now she's just dead meat... '

He felt genuinely sorry for the girl. She was a real scrapper. It wasn't going to be much fun watching this brute rip her apart. "Why are we watching..." Jake started to ask.

'Just watch!' Tabatha commanded in his mind, an odd excitement flowing beneath her thoughts. Jake couldn't help but wonder if his wife had a dark side that relished watching helpless young women get murdered...

Now, there were a dozen others in the hallway, watching the one-sided fight. Jake looked at their faces as they watched the brute launch himself at the terrified, helpless girl.

'Nobody pisses on me!' Jake heard her snarl. She sounded furious. She sounded familiar...

"My God! That is Grams!" he exclaimed, staring at the flatscreen image. He watched as the disheveled blonde stood up, proud and defiant, her naked body glistening and streaked with dirt, sweat and blood from the brutal fight. She walked away from her kill without looking back.

Tabatha paused the display.

"Well," Jake said, dumbfounded by the realization of what his grandmother did for entertainment. "I see why you said that was interesting."

"That is not what I thought was interesting," Tabatha replied. "This is what was interesting..." She reached out to the console and tapped a key to resume the video.

The dirty, wild-haired blond walked away, her voluptuous, naked body glistening in the dim light of the hallway. She turned the corner and stopped just before stepping out of the security camera's view, looked around for a moment, then vanished!