Chapter 11

Elaine lay awake in her life-mate's arms. Jacob had played for her, then he'd shown her a new set of pipes he was carving. One side of the dual-bodied pipes was much smaller than the other. When he'd shown her how it would sound, it made a high, delightful peeping sound, rather than the soft, low, melodious sound of the larger, wider pipes he'd made.

Then they had laughingly, lovingly, had sex together. Even after two hundred years, she still delighted in his company and his lovemaking. She loved his cooking and his talking as well. She'd never known anyone who wanted to talk to her, except for the Bard Geoffrey. And the great bard had been more interested in simply getting her to change her sluttish behavior than he was interested in her as a real person. Jacob had succeeded in making her a one-man woman where Jeff had failed. But, to be fair, Elaine had never loved Jeff – especially not like she loved Jacob. She'd seduced the great bard many times before she met Jacob, and Jacob already knew of her sexual reputation when he's asked her to be his lifemate.

Tonight, as in many nights before, Elaine lay awake for hours in Jacob's arms as he slept. Three months ago, she'd had a vision as her sister goddesses surrounded the little murderess, Tabatha Hedron, preparing to exile her to her home world for destroying the future of her husband's family and causing the deaths of Béla and Beth, or rather, Lisa. Once she was exiled to earth, in the vision, she would have the opportunity to correct her mistake.

Elaine didn't understand what the earth girl would do, especially with her powers bound by the image alarm placed in her brain. But the vision only required one thing of the Seeker as she held hands with her sister goddesses and aided in teleporting the murderess to Earth. The murderess needed to be dropped near where Béla had lived when she had been captured, drugged and killed.

Elaine passed the image of the location in her vision along to her sisters, and then they carried out the sentence. The space where the earth girl had stood was suddenly empty. A great cry of anguish echoed throughout the room from a single male throat. Elaine turned and watched as the earth girl's lifemate dropped to his knees crying out his denial of what he just witnessed. Watching him, she felt no emotion whatsoever. She turned and left the temple.

But every time she saw Hedron now, she still heard that haunting cry. As time passed, and his arduous efforts to seek a reprieve for his exiled wife continued, her conscience bothered her more and more. Her error was in not letting them say goodbye. She and Jacob, her own lifemate, had had their single biggest quarrel ever over that very point.

"If I was him," Jacob told her, "and it was you trapped and powerless on a dead world, I'd move heaven and hell to get you back. He's behaving much more civilized that I would. So don't complain to me that he 'bothers' you. It's your conscience that bothers you, so take it to the justices and see if you can make amends to him!"

That was the only time they'd ever discussed it. After that, Jacob was his pleasant, normal self – perhaps putting a little more effort into pleasing her, which she liked, although it reminded her that Hedron was still missing a lifemate.

Something moved in the ethereal world her mind occupied. Someone was dreamwalking in a nearby building. She recognized the aura. Furious at the murderess' violation of her exile, she dream-walked out of her body and relocated next to the earth girl. She was quietly sitting on Jake's bed, seemingly unaware of where she was. Then Jake, entering her dream, sat up and they saw each other.

Elaine's first impulse was to lash out at the errant girl and cause her to lose track of her location. That would, in effect, slap her back into her body on Earth. Something made her hesitate and she listened to the lovers talk.

"The Praetor taught me how to dream-walk," the hated earth girl was saying.

'She found the Praetor!' Elaine realized, astounded. She looked into the earth girl's mind and discovered that it had actually called out to her as soon as she was near enough to hear it as it used the last of its stored energy in an attempt to save itself. 'Why didn't it call out to me?' she wondered.

Elaine had searched Béla's house while it was still standing and not found it. She hadn't been able to locate it anywhere – almost like it was hiding from her. And it called out to a convicted murderess, instead, two hundred years later.

'It must have been commanded to respond to her, specifically, ' Elaine realized. 'But who would have given it a command like that? Everyone who had access was already dead!'

It didn't matter who had commanded the Praetor, if, indeed, anyone had. The Praetor was the final word in judgment in her society. It had given the murderess access to her dream-walking abilities, altering the girl's sentence of solitary exile. There was nothing legal that Elaine or any of the other goddesses and justices could do about that.

She returned to her body, leaving the two dream-walking lovers alone. Perhaps finding the lost Praetor was what she was meant to do.

Mentally linking up with the Praetor at university, Elaine accessed its data containing Tabatha's history and studied it closely. Tabatha, as her earlier self, Katie, was directly responsible for the death of her sister Beth. But in returning Beth to the scene of the detonation that Beth herself had caused, Tabatha, as Katie, saved an entire city from being destroyed.

Her next appearance in the Praetor's database was several months later, when Béla teleported Katie, now Tabatha, into the bedroom where the Praetor was stored. The Praetor downloaded all of Tabatha's available memories, as well as Béla's past memories of her, and transmitted them as historical data to New Eden. Elaine spent the next hour sorting through that data with the Praetor's help.

From Katie, or rather, Tabatha's suppressed memories, Katie had somehow gotten in close rapport with the earth-bound Praetor and learned about telepathy and teleportation. Somewhere along the line, Katie and Beth met and even became lovers. It was her efforts to help Beth cleanse her soul of the mass murder of Albuquerque that got Beth killed.

Evidently, in the same blast that killed Beth, Katie had been transported, literally blown by the nuclear blast, back into fourth century Italy. There, she met one of the original disciples of her brother, Hank, when he had been called Jesus. According to the Praetor, Katie was instrumental in the continuation of the community of long-lifers, which was involved with writing what would later become the 'Lost Scrolls.' 'Some sort of important religious writings, ' Elaine figured.

After that, Katie basically chased around after Béla for a thousand years until they found each other and shared their memories and abilities. Up until that point in Béla's existence, Béla had no real abilities. She was somewhat empathic. She couldn't die, although she often wanted to. That was it. Katie, in essence, showed her how to read other's minds as well as their emotions, and how to dissipate intense pain and create a sexual 'high' from it.