Chapter 2

"Gentlemen, we will be prepared to start the bidding shortly. But first, allow me to present tonight's entertainment and the treasure you will be bidding on!"

He made a wide, sweeping gesture toward a curtained-off square on the stage. The thirty to thirty-five men in the audience of the auction house applauded as the curtain was drawn back revealing an eight-foot tall glass case.

Chained inside the case was a gorgeous blonde. She was terrified and struggled wildly to get free. She began screaming, pleading for her life in English. Except for the chains that were holding her, she was completely naked.

"As you can see, and hear, we have an American girl, plucked from her rich life in a big American city. We present her now for your enjoyment."

He stepped off the stage and the lights darkened. Two spotlights remained on the glass cage, brightly illuminating the incredibly beautiful creature trapped inside. The group of men sitting in the room applauded and nudged each other, expecting a good show.

The blond girl's screams suddenly became louder and more frantic as water began drizzling down on her head. She cried and sobbed hysterically as the glass case slowly filled. As the water neared her bust line, it began to turn pink. The girl had actually managed to tear one arm free from her manacles and bent down into the water, trying to free her legs.

"Drown, you American bitch!" someone cried out, spurred by the terrified blonde's frantic efforts to free herself. Other men laughed and shared his sentiments, cruelly calling out their wishes for the demise of the poor little rich, drowning American.

She couldn't hold her breath long enough and couldn't get any leverage on the clasps around her legs. She finally straightened back up, only to discover that the water had risen too high for her to raise her head high enough out of the water to breathe. The cold-hearted men watching cheered enthusiastically as they realized her predicament.

It only took another moment of frenzied thrashing, and then she was still. As the tank continued to fill, her hair flowed about her head creating an ethereal, angelic effect.

The men applauded, congratulating their host for a magnificent performance as a spotlight suddenly lit up the podium informing them that the emcee had returned to the stage.

"And now, gentlemen, we will begin the bidding." The house lights came up so that the emcee could see who would be bidding on the glass case and its macabre contents.

Someone suddenly yelled and pointed at the ceiling. The emcee looked up. His eyes suddenly widened in fear and consternation.

There was a fiery angel simply hanging in the air with her wings spread wide, glaring down at them.

"Is this some sort of trick?" a Latin plantation owner snarled. He pulled out his pistol and began shooting at the angel over their heads. She turned her head and looked at him.

In less than thirty seconds, his body had turned to ash! The fire had been so intensely hot that not even a skeleton remained.

The fiery angel looked around at the walls. Wherever she looked, the walls burst into flames. She looked at the glass case where the drowned girl floated. The glass began to melt, then shattered into millions of pieces under the pressure of the water. Water flooded down off the stage. The angel vanished.

After several minutes, a few members of the cartel managed to break down a door, then they crowded through. The first one out found he faced a dozen Tomlin agents armed with energy weapons. He drew his pistol. He never got the chance to fire it. His body was cooked, medium-well, before he hit the ground.

Several miles away, a large plantation house stood empty, except for two women who were cleaning inside. Two guards, outside the main entrance, noticed a dark-haired beauty walking toward them. She was completely naked.

"Stop! You are not allowed in the hacienda!" one called out to her.

'I go where I will! No man commands me!' they both heard her proclaim in their minds.

One of the guards leveled his automatic weapon at her. "I'm warning you! Stop!" He really didn't want to kill her – least not until he'd fucked her first. He imagined how it would feel to choke her to death while his dick was still in her.

He dropped to the ground, dead. His eyes were wide open in terror from the instant of pain he felt when Béla teleported the bullet in the chamber of his weapon into his brain.

The other guard opened fire, grinning as he watched dark red spots blossom on the naked woman's stomach. He aimed higher, still holding down the trigger and watched the witch-woman's tiny tits dance as the metal rain perforated her body until she began to fall backwards, her belly and breasts ripped open from the twenty rounds he fired into her. She twitched on the ground in obvious agony from her wounds. The guard, surprised that she was still alive, walked over to her while loading a fresh clip into his weapon.

Béla regained control of her orgasmic body long enough to look up at him as he leveled his weapon at her again. Then he also fell to the ground, dead. Shaking and unsteady, Béla got to her feet and looked around. The servants had all come out of the house to see what was happening. They all stared at her, watching her heal. After a moment she spoke.

"Your master is not coming home!" she informed them. "I suggest you find a different line of work..."

She formed her wings and launched herself into the air, terrifying the hired help. Circling the hacienda, she spotted a propane tank behind the structure and teleported a section of it away. A few seconds later, it blew up. In less than ten minutes, the entire structure was ablaze.

Several miles away, automatic fire could be heard echoing through the hills. Another plantation was under siege by a group of Tomlin agents. The small army protecting the plantation outnumbered the besieging agents and had them pinned down.

Inside, the captain of the guard was at his radio when his master suddenly burst into the guard station. Held tightly in his grip was a young, flame-haired girl.

"You let this one get past you!" he snarled at the guard captain. "She was setting a bomb!" He threw the cylindrical device down on the desk next to the Comm console.

The girl became violent, surprising the master of the house and throwing him off to one side. She attacked the guard captain, chopping him in the throat with her fingers and cutting off his breathing. Then she began ripping out wires to disable the radio so their defensive efforts couldn't be coordinated.

A shot rang out. Tabatha straightened up in sudden agony as a bullet splatted into her back and tore into her stomach from behind. Gasping, she turned around. The drug lord was pointing an old thirty-eight at her. He cocked the gun to pull the trigger again. She rolled to one side and grabbed the device she'd been carrying earlier. She pushed a button on it and tossed it to him.

His eyes widened as she vanished. He didn't understand the strange longing he could see in her face just before she disappeared. Then his world was filled with a violent fireball that threw him backward into the wall and vaporized him along with the rest of the building.

Tanya's whole body hurt terribly, but most of the agony was in her left wrist. She forced her eyes open to find the floor only a few inches away from her face, brightly sparkling with water and broken glass as the fire surrounding her engulfed the walls of the meeting hall.

Suddenly frightened, she looked around at the conflagration and gasped – or tried to, anyway. Instead, she gagged in pure agony and expelled bloody water out of her lungs, then, still hanging by her left wrist, coughed and gagged for another minute or two until she realized she could breathe again.

Pulling against her still shackled wrist, she forced her body into a more upright stance, then realized she was still shackled into the now shattered death trap where she'd been drowning earlier. Both her ankles were sprained from the way her body had collapsed when the tank sides shattered, and they hurt terribly as she tried to stand.

As she gazed around the flaming room, Tanya saw someone walking toward her. Then the shackles were gone from her left wrist and her ankles, allowing her to fall to the glass incrusted floor. As she collapsed down off her swollen ankles, Tanya gasped in relief, then pain as the broken glass surrounding her sliced hundreds of tiny cuts into her soft, wet flesh.

She was trying to ignore the pain because there was someone else there. She knew she wasn't out of danger, yet, despite the fact that she now knew she wasn't drowned. Gasping and weak from her ordeal, Tanya forced her arms down against the broken glass and raised up to see who was threatening her.

"Lisa?" Tanya gasped, her throat raw from breathing all that water. She coughed a few times before she was able to say anything else. "Baby, what are (cough!) ... you (cough! Cough!) ... doing ... here?"

The small child just stared, not seeming to comprehend her surroundings.

"Baby," Tanya said, her voice stronger now, "talk to me, sweetie. What are you doing here?"

"I was watching," Lisa said, her young voice very solemn and perhaps a little angry. "Those men were bad. They hurt you. I burned them. Nobody should hurt you. Nobody should hurt anybody."

Then she ran forward and hugged Tanya's wet, bleeding body. Then both sat on the floor in the water and the broken glass and cried, holding each other tightly as the flames surrounding them grew ever higher – and hotter.

Lisa and Tanya's minds merged together and Tanya could feel the need Lisa felt to be a part of ... Well, the child wasn't sure what it was she needed to be a part of, but with Tanya's warm, loving mind right there with her, Lisa found the word she was looking for. She wanted to be part of The Team!

Tanya laughed, surrounding the child with pure love as she realized there was no way that this child was going to allow anyone to restrain her from helping.

'Your mother's going to be furious!' Tanya thought at the very adult little girl in her arms. "Come in, baby," Tanya whispered, finally noticing how hot it was getting. "Let's go home, now."

They vanished and, a moment later, the fiery ceiling crashed down onto the stage where they'd been sitting and consoling each other.

"You weren't supposed to get shot, bug," Frank Junior said cheerfully as he dug into the hole to get the bullet out. He was having trouble because the wound kept healing around his instruments. 'There! Got it!'

Tabatha grimaced as he delicately pulled the mangled shell out and held it up, gazing at it closely.

"Ugh! Hollow point," he said, disgusted. "I'll bet that hurt going in! A normal bullet would have gone clean through your body, but the damage wouldn't have been so bad."

It was morning in Boston. Chairman Hedron walked into the briefing room at Tomlin headquarters. There were about forty field agents seated inside. Along the wall were four seats where Tanya, Béla, her daughter Lisa, and Tabatha sat comfortably waiting.

The Chairman walked to the podium. "Thank you for coming, gentlemen, and ladies," he greeted them, including his familial females. There were other female agents in the room as well.

"First of all, I would like to commend you on our strike against the drug cartel in Venezuela two days ago. That operation was a complete success and those criminals that survived are now in USN custody and awaiting trial. We are shipping food and supplies to the indigent population that the drug cartel supported and will be helping them to become a financially viable community, farming crops that are more acceptable to the rest of us.

"Secondly, I extend my regrets and sorrow to the families of the three agents we lost during that operation. Services will be held tomorrow morning here in the chapel.

"Now, for those few who have been on other assignments and were unable to attend the last two meetings, I'd like to introduce our elite assault team." He gestured toward the four slender, not very dangerous looking girls seated against the wall.

Lisa grinned, somewhat self-consciously, and wiggled her fingers in greeting at the roomful of agents.

"Closest to the front of the room is Tanya. She acted as bait for our operation so that we could get all the cartel members into the same room. Next to her are the team leader, Béla, and her daughter, Lisa. And of course, you all know my wife, Tabatha. Tabatha actually took a bullet attempting to capture the one member of the drug cartel who wasn't at the little 'auction' we staged."

A hand went up. "Yes?" the Chairman said, acknowledging the agent.

"Uh, yes, Mike Halleyman, sir," he said, standing up. "Don't you think it's a little dangerous having a ten-year-old girl on the team that's going to be 'at point' for many of our more overt operations?"

Chairman Hedron smiled. Lisa was frowning. Half the room watched as mother and daughter looked at each other for a moment. Then Lisa got up and approached the podium.

"Agent Halleyman," the Chairman said calmly. "Would you please step to the front of the room?"

Halleyman was a little nervous, knowing somehow that he was going to be part of an uncomfortable demonstration. Mincing his way past knees and chairs to the aisle, he came to the front of the room. He stood there trying not to look nervous. Lisa looked over and smiled at him for a moment. She seemed very disarming.

"Now, Agent Halleyman, would you please shoot Lisa?" the Chairman requested.

"What?" Halleyman exclaimed. "I'm not going to shoot a little girl!"

"Well, I would suggest you do something to protect yourself before she gets to you..."

Lisa was walking across the room toward him. She was still smiling – like she had a secret she couldn't wait to tell someone.

Halleyman looked at the approaching girl. She was cute and looked disarmingly charming. He simply didn't believe she could hurt him.

"At least take out your gun. Pretend you're going to do something with it," suggested the Chairman.

Halleyman shrugged and pulled his weapon. Then Lisa was in front of him. She put her hand on the gun. Halleyman suddenly jerked his hand away from the weapon as though it were red hot.

It was. Seconds later it was glowing! Then it was melting in her hand.

"I'll take that, Lisa, dear," the Chairman said.

Lisa turned and smiled at him. Then she handed him the molten piece of metal. He held it up in his hands. It was already cooled off. She went back and sat down next to her mother. Béla smiled and kissed her on her forehead.

"That's incredible!" Halleyman said. "I'm very impressed, sir."

"Yes, and if she was a foreign agent, you might be dead," the Chairman stated flatly.

"But, sir, why didn't the bullets explode?" Halleyman asked, needing to understand.

To answer his question, Béla rose and held out her hands. She was holding the loaded clip from Halleyman's now melted sidearm.

"Other questions? Comments?" the Chairman asked as Halleyman returned to his seat. Another hand went up. "Yes?"

"I'm James Banner, sir," he stated. "I hope my question doesn't involve having to requisition another personal firearm." A small tittering of laughter floated around the room.

"Agent Banner," Chairman Hedron announced.