Chapter 6

"You called and made sure the room was ready?" Béla asked Jake as he gently slid his cock in and out of her soaked pussy.

"Um-hmm," he said. "I told them we'd be arriving shortly."

"Okay, lover. Hang on," Béla replied.

She felt Jake hugging her more tightly, sliding his arms beneath her back and practically lifting her off the sheets. She wrapped her arms and legs around him more tightly, also, then created the image in her mind of the Stanford Hotel in Seattle. After she had a good image, she imagined room 12460 and the bed behind that door.

"Here we go!" she called out as she pulled both their fucking bodies into the teleportation zone.

She shoved them out onto the bed behind door number 12460. "We're here!"

Jake opened his eyes. The room was completely different. The air smelled different and the bed beneath them was freshly made. "Neat!" he grinned down at her.

He began to increase the speed of his thrusting. Soon, Béla was grunting with each ramming thrust. A moment later, she began that wonderful keening sound indicating she was starting to come. Her arms and legs tightened around him and he began digging his fingers into her taut belly as he pounded his cock into her harder and harder. Then she was writhing beneath him, radiating her ecstasy through his body. Her teeth bit into his neck and she sucked joyfully as she came.

Jake felt his cock erupt and spew his hot, slippery cum into her grasping, hungry pussy. He cried out as he came, his head buried in her intoxicating hair and the fresh pillow beneath her head. He could feel every wonderful curve of her breasts and her body as she lay crushed beneath him. They both were breathing raggedly as their overworked, oxygen-starved muscles screamed for sustenance.

Béla licked at the wound on his neck, cleaning the blood off his skin as it healed. "I bit you again," she sighed, still breathing heavily as she lay crushed beneath him. "I'm sorry, I got carried away..." She smiled and kissed the wound as it healed. She lay patiently, waiting for him to get off her. After a moment, she felt his dick slipping out and squeezed her pelvis to push it out faster.

Jake chuckled, his breathing more normal now, as he noticed her gentle indication that he should 'get the fuck off' of her now. As he pushed himself up, he lay kisses on her neck and cheek, rubbing her hair off that was sticking to his face and that he'd breathed into his mouth.

He laughed into her mouth as he kissed her again, still laying on top of her, luxuriating in the fact that this exotic, immortal female actually loved him. He kissed her for a few more minutes, loving the taste of her soft mouth and how it felt against his. After another moment, her lips slipped down and surrounded his lower lip. She sucked it into her mouth and bit down gently with her sharp little teeth, not drawing blood this time.

"Off!" she said, letting go of his lip and grinning up at him. "I'm flat as a pancake!"

He raised up, kissing his way up her face to her nose and brow, then rolled off her. Béla took a deep breath and sighed, smiling to herself, her eyes closed. Jake watched her lie on the bed as she rested. He knew she was aware he was looking at her. After a few more minutes, she was unable to suppress her grin. "What?" she asked him, her eyes still closed.

"Um?" he replied.

"You're looking at me again," she clarified.

"Um-hmm," he admitted. He grinned, knowing that, even with her eyes closed, she knew he was smiling at her. "You're incredibly beautiful."

"Really?" Béla smiled, her eyes still closed. "What else?"

"Stunning,"

"What else?"

"Sexy,"

"Um-hmm," she agreed, "what else?"

He was silent for a moment, trying to think of something he had never told her before. She waited for a moment before she spoke.

"It has to start with a 'S'," she told him.

"An 'S'?" Jake asked, grinning at the game she'd started, wondering where it would lead. "Let's see, stunning, sexy, saucy, insat ... No, that's not an 'S'. Hmm." He sighed. She opened her soft, dark eyes and looked at him. Her eyes were laughing.

"How about 'Starving'!" she said, suddenly more animated. She snapped her teeth at him, feigning eating him for dinner.

"You just had a snack!" Jake pouted. "You're hungry again already? God, you're greedy!"

Béla growled and rolled toward him, mouth wide open. Jake laughed and met her mouth with his lips, actually managing to kiss her tongue and escape without getting his lips bitten. They both laughed.

"You should call downstairs and let them know we're here," suggested Béla. She rolled over to the other side of the bed and punched the console, looking for the room service menu.

They spent the afternoon riding the ferries in and out of Puget Sound and had dinner in the newly renovated Space Needle. "I remember the old one," Jake was saying. "It was taller, but the restaurant was smaller."

Béla ate quietly, watching the sunset's reflections off the distant water for a while, then watching the snow-capped crater of Mount Rainer as the sun painted the mountain red, contrasting it starkly against the black of the hardened lava flows beneath it. They both gazed at the magnificent mountain as their saucer-shaped room slowly turned.

"Let's go hiking tomorrow," Béla suggested, wanting to go out and walk on that beautiful black surface.

"I remember the first time we went hiking," grinned Jake. "We ended up stuck at the bottom of a ravine."

"Well, I couldn't teleport then," Béla replied softly, so as not to be overheard by other patrons. "And as I recall..."

They were interrupted by a steward's bell. "Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen," a spokesman near the entrance said.

"For your safety and protection, our armored vehicles are available to take you back to your hotels whenever you are ready. Please let your server know and your transportation will be ready when you are. Thank you."

He stepped down off his little platform and disappeared off to one side.

"Armored air cars?" Jake asked, raising his eyebrows. Béla looked at him and blinked. She hadn't ever noticed him do that before. "Somehow, I expected Seattle to be like Portland – with the main thoroughfares well protected against inner-city night life."

"I liked Portland, too," Béla agreed. "Although I didn't see much of it." They'd spent most of their time in bed. For some reason, Béla was being unusually seductive and alluring, irresistible to Jake. He couldn't keep his hands or his lips off her. Right now, watching her eat, he just wanted to drag her up onto the table and fuck her silly.

"What is it about you that makes you seem so alive?" he asked, finally realizing what was different.

He gazed at her, somewhat surprised when she seemed to become a little sad. She gazed back at him. In his mind, he saw the glorious sunset and the black lava that she'd just viewed through the glass partition.

Then he saw her flying over the grand and glorious forests outside of Portland after he'd made love to her and gone to sleep. He saw beautiful canyons filled with giant redwoods, the Grand Canyon and the desert ruins of some past civilization that had perished a thousand years ago.

These were all things and places they had visited since they left Boston. Jake suddenly realized that she was creating her final memories of Earth – the way she wanted to remember her adopted home world in the centuries to come. In a few months they would leave, and she would never set foot on earth again. None of them ever would.

He watched as she continued showing him her special places, going back centuries and across oceans and continents. Earth was her true home and she would sorely miss it when it was gone, despite the fact that she claimed her home was the mythical garden paradise of New Eden.

"I see," he said, simply, loving Béla even more for this new depth of character she'd displayed to him.

He usually thought of her as an insatiable, sex-hungry creature who needed him to give her enough sensation to let her know she was truly alive. But she was much more complex than that. She had lived for thousands of years, and Jake realized that he really didn't know who she was.

He was pretty sure he knew who she was now, but she'd not always been that person. In her long life, she had been many people and had taken on many identities. Jake only knew the 'Béla' identity. He hoped that was who she really was.

"That's really why I love you," Béla said, interrupting his thoughts.

"Why's that?" he asked, not understanding.

"You can see me," she replied, a faint smile on her lips. Her eyes glowed with her love for him. Jake smiled back, not sure what she meant, other than that she loved him because he loved her and loved who he thought she was.

'Love is very confusing, ' he decided.

The next morning, the hotel bus took them out onto the lava flow.

"Pick us up around six," Jake said, leaving his thumbprint on the primitive credit tabber. The steward gave him a little transponder so he could find them later. The airbus blasted off, leaving Jake and Béla standing alone on the uneven waves of cold, black lava. The great volcano stretched up from the horizon, impressing them both with its massive presence, even though it was still ten miles away.

"Magnificent," Jake breathed, gazing around in awe. The hard, black river where they stood stretched out before them and even seemed to move in the bright sunlight. They picked up the packs the steward on the airbus had left behind and began hiking toward the mountain.

Almost seventy years ago, back in 2034, Mount Rainer, along with a dozen other 'sleeping giants' around the world, had erupted as a result of the six hour conflagration now called the Third World War, a nuclear confrontation amongst the nations known in western civilization as 'The Third World.' The earth shaking results of detonating several hundred nuclear weapons over that small an area, in addition to completely obliterating every Semitic nation on the planet, also caused the reawakening and eruption of nearly twenty giant volcanoes all around the earth.

The lava plain that Jake and Béla was hiking on right now spread all the way from Mount Rainer to the outskirts of Tacoma. That city was destroyed not by lava, but by the terrible, suffocating, superheated dust clouds that roiled down from the erupting mountain. Most of Tacoma had been dug out and repopulated in the last half-century, but it was a different city, now, more ... subdued, perhaps, and dirty – sullen and dirty.

"It's hard to believe that this much solid rock covers the forests I used to hike through when I was young," Jake said, clambering up a 'wave' of shiny black surface to catch up with Béla.

She stopped and turned toward him. "It isn't solid. There are all kinds of holes and tunnels in this stuff. I've been noticing them as we walked over them."

"I can imagine that this is probably what Mercury looks like, close up," Jake replied. "Tunnels, huh? Wow."

Around noon, they were at the base of the mountain. There wasn't any real difference from where they stood. The black river seemed to be a steeper climb, and they couldn't see the mouth of the volcano any more. The up-thrust land blocked the view of the summit.

They set down their packs. "This looks like a good spot for lunch." Béla announced.

"Great! What do we have?" Jake asked, sitting down on a small bubble of shiny black. They both looked into the packs the steward had given them.

"I've got water," Béla announced, pulling out a liter bottle. The bottle was made of some new unbreakable glass that she didn't recognize. The new glass appeared after it was 'discovered' (read revealed) that the softer plastic containers leached oxidants into the supposedly pure, clean water that people began purchasing when it was 'discovered' (revealed, again) that most city water supplies were polluted with oxidants and heavy metals.

She tossed the bottle to Jake, remembering when Jake was in such poor condition that he'd needed several breaks per hour when he went climbing with her. She was glad to see that he was much more fit these days. Of course, he wasn't immortal back then.

"No food?" Jake asked, searching through his own pack. He found an old-style snakebite kit that he recognized as being ineffective for most poisonous snakes found in the Southwest and a thin roll-up intended for sleeping, but wasn't waterproof and didn't have any decent insulation.

"We've been set up," Béla said, standing up and looking around. "Somebody doesn't plan on us coming back. I wouldn't recommend drinking that water."

"Maybe we should," Jake replied. "I'm awfully thirsty. Plus, how will we find out who's after us if we don't cooperate by lying down and going to sleep?"

Béla grinned. "I'll lie down with you anywhere, even on these hot rocks, and I don't need drugs to convince me." She walked over to him and put her arms around his neck, pulling him down to sit with her and make out like teenagers.

"What's our next stop?" Jake asked, expecting her to exit from this uncomfortable scenario via teleportation now that she was wrapped around him.

"What? You want to leave?" Béla asked, suddenly more serious. "There's something going on here. Don't you want to find out what it is?"

Jake reached over for the water bottle and opened it, offering the open bottle to his dark-haired little wife. She looked at it, then took a tiny sip. She spat it out.

"My body doesn't like this stuff," she announced with a sour look on her face.

"Maybe someone's looking specifically for you," Jake replied. "That little cocktail might be designed to specifically inhibit your abilities in some fashion. It won't be the first time someone's hunted you."

Béla frowned and thought for a moment, then brightened up. "Let 'em look," she replied, then changed the subject. "You want to see the cone?" She looked upward, indicating the mountain they'd been climbing toward all morning.

"Well, yeah," mused Jake, "I guess. I don't really want to climb it, though."

"I'll teleport us inside if you promise to fuck me while we're in there," Béla said, grinning wickedly at him.

"I have to promise?" Jake asked, astonished. "All you have to do is offer, Babe, and I'm right there!" He grinned and pulled her closer, kissing her soft, sweet lips.