Chapter 27

Cherrill crouched naked in the dense bushes, her attention rapt upon the two men nearly a quarter of a mile away. Her sharpened senses easily detected the changes in the air currents as they talked back and forth as well as the faint noises in her head from their unshielded human minds and the slight brightness of whatever area or section of the park on which they had their attention.

Two days earlier, that darling prince, Michael, had vaporized her physical form and made love to her as only a Phoenix could. Now in her corporeal form again, Cherrill’s senses were still heightened far beyond what she had been able to see and hear – able to sense – when she’d believed she was a mere mortal.

Now the brightness of someone’s attention was sweeping this way. She crouched lower, hoping her pale, bare skin wasn’t visible in Jake’s rifle scope. Then her body almost seemed to glow as someone put his attention directly on her!

Diving to one side, Cherrill felt the splintering of wood where the rifle shell had struck as well as the pressure waves from the bullet passing in the air. Then her mind was flooded with excitement and confusion until she could shield herself from what her hunters were emoting. They were both running noisily through the brush and fallen autumn leaves toward her position.

“Did you get her?” Michael called out, knowing full well that Jake had missed.

“I dunno!” Jake yelled over his shoulder as he rushed toward where the girl had been.

Cherrill crawled rapidly off to the right, then boldly stood upright so she could watch them approach. ‘You don’t see me!’ she commanded into Jake’s mind as he approached within a dozen yards of where she stood. ‘There is no one here!’

Jake searched through the bushes, even finding where his shell had struck a tree. But he couldn’t find Cherrill, or even determine which way she’d gone. Cherrill put one hand to her face and bit down on her knuckles to keep from giggling as she and Michael stared at each other grinning like two fools, both willing for her to befuddle her hunter as she practiced a newfound ability.

“Crap! I don’t know where...” Jake began, turning back toward his hunting companion. “Christ!” he exclaimed, then just stared, open-mouthed!

Cherrill was wrapped around Michael and they were kissing each other!

“Hey!” Jake yelled, pointing his rifle at the giggling girl.

“You don’t see me!” Cherrill chirped, grinning at him. Then she disappeared.

“What the hell?” Jake murmured, squinting as though bending light around his eyelashes would help. It actually did. Now that he knew she was there, he could almost discern her outline. She was stretching her face toward Michael and giving him another peck on the cheek. Now she’s walking over toward...

Jake pointed his rifle and fired, the stock of his weapon held securely between arm and waist.

“Yahh!” Cherrill yelped, suddenly becoming visible as she stumbled to her knees with a large red splotch just under the ribs on her left side. “Shit!”

“Good shot, Jake!” Michael chortled, causing Cherrill to glare at him as she held her wounded side.

“My ass!” Cherrill growled. “How did you do that? I was sure you couldn’t see me!”

“I knew you were there!” Jake explained, reaching down to help her to her feet. “Besides, Annalisa showed me that trick last week.”

“Yeah, Annalisa!” Cherrill grumbled. “I notice you haven’t caught her, yet!”

“Only a matter of time,” Jake grinned and began scanning the countryside though his telescopic rifle sights again. “Only ... a matter ... of ... time.”

“Hrummph!” he grunted after another moment or two. “According to the rules, she has to stay close enough so that she knows where we are – line of sight visibility! Right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Cherrill reluctantly agreed, realizing that she’d been out of ‘line of sight’ a few times in the last hour or so. “I guess.”

“So, where the fuck is she?” Jake pondered, continuing to gaze through his rifle scope as he panned the countryside.

Hearing Michael sigh, Cherrill looked over at him. He was grinning. When he saw her looking at him, he raised his eyes upward ever so slightly. Cherrill immediately turned away, fearful that she’d give away Annalisa’s location.

“I don’t know where she could possibly be, Jake,” Cherrill said, trying to sound as innocent as she could.

But the tone of her voice caused Jake to turn toward Cherrill and demand: “You know where she’s at, don’t you?”

Cherrill, surprised, shook her head and tried to look away. “No, I don’t! I swear!”

She heard Michael sigh again and knew somehow that she’d failed another one of their damned tests.

‘Comportment, Phoenix, ‘ she heard Michael exclaim in her head. ‘Stand proud and truthful! And don’t betray your friends to your enemies!’

‘Comportemente... ‘ Cherrill thought to herself, remembering a lesson that Lisa had tried to ingrain within her. ‘Be true to yourself. Carry yourself proudly and without shame, do nothing that you believe not to be right, and do not react in anger. If you are brutally honest with yourself and in your dealings with others, then, and only then, can you have no shame within your soul’ – another lesson to demonstrate how a simple lie can change how one could compromise one’s self.

Cherrill straightened up and informed Michael, “Yes, you’re right, of course. I tried to lie to Jake. I should have just stood tall and proud and laughed at his accusation! I’ll try harder, I promise!”

“Cherie,” Michael replied, using his personal love-name for her, “it isn’t a matter of trying... it is simply a matter of doing. And you won’t be able to do it until you have the confidence and understanding that comes with the knowledge of who you are!”

Cherrill sighed in frustration and clambered to her feet. At one point, she brushed the inside of her arm against the blood streaking her side and looked down, surprised as she remembered the wound. What surprised her was that it was still there and bleeding, but it didn’t seem to hurt – not much, anyway. ‘My body must be adapting to all this brutality, ‘ she figured. ‘I’m actually starting to enjoy it!’

Both Jake and Michael watched Cherrill twist her sexy body around to examine the leaking hole where Jake had shot her only moments ago. As she straightened up, Cherrill frowned and twisted from side to side for a few seconds, wincing as she did so.

“The damned thing’s still inside me,” she commented, wondering how she could get it out of her. “It’s rubbing against one of my ribs and it’s really annoying.”

‘And it hurts like hell after all!’ she thought, determined not to let Michael think she was a wuss in addition to thinking she was a total klutz.

‘You are not a total klutz, ‘ she heard in her mind and looked at Michael, who was gazing pleasantly at her, having received her every broadcast thought. ‘Your powers are still new to you, and it will be some time before they become second-nature. But I assure you, beloved, that it will happen.’

‘Beloved?

‘He loves me!!!’

“Ahhh!” Jake cried out as Annalisa dropped down on him from where she’d been relaxing and watching everything from her perch in the branches overhead.

“Get her!” Michael yelled joyfully as the lithe brunette leapt to her feet and scampered off, fleeing through the leaves as fast as her bare feet could carry her and laughing over her shoulder at her would-be captors.

Jake hurriedly shouldered his rifle and quickly popped off two rounds at his fleeing wife’s bare backside, both shots missing her by a wide margin. Annalisa veered to the left and slid to a stop using her feet and both hands, then stood to face her hunters from a distance of about a hundred meters.

“Jeez, Jake,” she called out, heaving as she caught her breath, “is that the best you can do?”

Jake shouldered his rifle, took careful aim at his wife’s curvy waistline and squeezed the trigger. Just as he felt the trigger release, Annalisa swung easily to one side at the same instant the rifle bucked. “Damn! Missed!” Jake muttered and aimed at the sexy minx again.

Cherrill, with her new, ultra-keen perceptions, knew exactly how Annalisa was avoiding her husband’s bullets. She suspected Annalisa was demonstrating her abilities so that Cherrill would know better how to use them in the future.

Another crack from Jake’s rifle and Annalisa was standing in her original position, still hole-free – except for the one emitting all the noise. “C’mon, Jake-honey,” she called out. “I promise I won’t move this time, okay?” She held her hands out in the air away from her body and seductively swayed her hips from side to side.

“C’mon, Hon, you can hit this...” with Annalisa pointing to her bellybutton.

Another crack from Jake’s rifle and Annalisa went spinning down to the ground. “Got you that time,” Jake murmured, “you little vixen.”

When Annalisa stood up, a red splotch between her left breast and her shoulder was leaking a little spiral trail of blood down her side, accentuating the sexy curve of her body. She grinned, then straightened up, displaying herself for another hit.

“Try not to fall this time,” Jake called out to her.

“Try to get a little better centered,” Annalisa called back, chastising him for his poor shot.

Jake’s rifle answered her with a loud bark and Annalisa grunted and stumbled back, but stayed on her feet, a dark splotch of red leaking blood down from her midriff to her right hip. She held her hands out and away from her body, not wanting to smear the little rivers of blood flowing so sexily down her body. She looked up at Jake, smiling through her gritted teeth while she waited for the next shot.

“How many times you gonna shoot her?” Cherrill asked, not understanding the savage, sexually brutal relationship between Jake and Annalisa.

“‘Til she falls down,” Jake replied, carefully aiming his rifle.

“Why don’t you just shoot her legs out from under her, then?” Cherrill asked, wondering if she should like Jake or not, since he was acting like a total jerk – with his own wife, yet.

Jake didn’t reply, but sent another round into his wife’s sexy, bleeding belly. Annalisa grunted and grabbed her flesh around the wound this time, but still stayed on her feet.

“No extremities, no penetrating the lungs or head,” Jake replied, grinning over at Cherrill and Michael after taking his shot almost like he knew what the tall, silver-eyed Phoenix was thinking. “She only likes torso shots. And pussy shots, of course.”

“I think...” Annalisa was saying, not sounding too certain, “I can take ... a couple more...” as she painfully straightened up, her body bloodied up with her handprints now as well as the half-healed wounds she displayed.

“No breasts shots?” Michael asked in his perpetually cheerful mood.

“Nope,” Jake explained, “that’d pierce her lungs and she likes to breathe while she’s having...”

“Hey!” Annalisa cried out, and Jake shouldered his rifle and popped off another shot, hitting her low in the stomach this time, causing her to sink down to her knees.

Gasping from the overwhelming sensation of all these wonderfully sexy holes in her body, Annalisa pressed her hands against this newest wound which had punched right through her bladder and her pussy walls. She was leaking blood and stinging urine from both the hole low in her belly and from her vaginal lips.

As she orgasmed, Annalisa rolled over onto her side and lay there for a moment, she and Jake gazing at each other over the distance between them. Then she rolled over onto her stomach, her legs spread wide and her hips as far off the ground as she could manage with her mangled stomach muscles so she could display her pussy and ass as targets for Jake.

“That’s my girl,” Jake mused as he raised his rifle again.

Firing one round every few seconds, Jake pumped bullet after bullet up between Annalisa’s legs with several shots actually punching into her well-muscled thighs and butt cheeks, all the while watching with ever-increasing arousal as she jerked and cried out with each impact. After eight or nine more shots, Annalisa shuddered and collapsed against the ground. Even the males could feel the orgasmic sensations she was radiating. Cherrill whimpered low in her throat and clenched her legs as her body reacted to the psychic flood of sensation coming from the downed goddess.

Jake slung his rifle over his shoulder and, carrying it by the strap, sauntered over and sat down in the grass next to his unmoving wife. Cherrill stood, leaning against Michael as she watched all this, fascinated though appalled at how Annalisa had been treated, her own arousal surging through her body.

“Oh my God!” Cherrill whispered, turning her face into Michael’s shoulder as she realized Annalisa was dead. “That was ... so brutal, so...”

“Arousing?” Michael asked, smiling down at the red-headed Phoenix embracing him.

“Well, I wasn’t going to say...”

“But you could feel it,” Michael interrupted. “The sexuality of the goddess’ death.”

“Yes,” whispered Cherrill, not used to seeing others being so casually murdered like she had let her handler Tony do to her once or twice. “But, she isn’t a Phoenix!”

“No, not completely,” Michael admitted, “but she can heal as well as any goddess, and, if she concentrates, she can create the fire in her mind if she needs it.”

Cherrill looked over where Annalisa was lying. Jake had removed his clothing and was lying next to her. She seemed to be moving, but that could have been from Jake’s handling her body.

“I can’t feel her,” Cherrill mentioned, now that she’d noticed it. “Is she moving?” meaning, ‘Is she still alive?’

“The goddesses can shield better than we can,” explained Michael. “They can selectively communicate to another without anyone else hearing their shared thoughts. It’s part of her species’ capabilities, and, they are much harder to kill than a normal Phoenix, who depends on death to trigger her regeneration.”