Chapter 4

Tabatha joined Alana and the 'H' twins the next morning and they continued following the fairy through the forest.

"Where's Annalisa?" Alana wanted to know.

"We decided that the settlement might need some protection, so she volunteered to stay behind," Tabatha replied. "Besides, several people were still recovering, and they got nervous when we decided to follow you, ergo..."

"Annalisa stayed behind to placate them," Alana concluded. "Well, I'm happy you're here. You should have seen what happened yesterday! We actually met the dragon who had attacked..." They began walking as Alana and the 'H' twins helped Tabatha catch up on their experiences with the dragon and the fairies.

After a half-day's walk, they came to a clearing and Tabatha collapsed down into the soft grass and let out an exhausted sigh of relief. "Aaahhh, sunlight!"

"Amen to that," Holly grunted as she dropped down beside her. "Those friggin' fairies just disappeared after that wild little song. I was sure we were never gonna find our way out of that mosquito infested jungle."

Alana smiled secretively to herself and said nothing. She'd been chewed on and bitten as much as the other three, but she enjoyed offering herself up for dinner to the ravenous insects that populated the dense rain forest. For much of her nearly five thousand years, humanity had been bug infested enough that she'd learned to ignore the little pests.

"I notice that you and Haley don't have any bite marks on you," Tabatha complained to Holly, "so how can you bitch about the mosquitoes?"

"I'm not bitching," Haley grinned. "I just fried whatever touched me. Holly's just too lazy to pay that much attention all the time. A couple of those buggers got her right on her fat butt!" She laughed and reached down to smack her twin sister's thigh.

"I do not have a fat butt!" Holly griped. "In fact, my butt looks exactly like yours!"

"Except it's bigger..." Haley chuckled, then jerked back to avoid a swat from her sister.

"Is not!" Holly growled. "And if you make another crack about my butt, I'll roast you where you..."

"Shhhh!" Alana shushed them, then urgently whispered, "Listen!" The four females instantly became silent, eyes casting in all directions – including up. The dragon might still be out there, somewhere...

All they could hear was the wind picking up and whistling through the trees overhead and behind them. They ducked and hunkered down against the ground as a huge shadow passed overhead. Everyone looked up, but no one could see what had made the shadow. "It's just a cloud," Tabatha whispered. "The sun went behind a cloud, that's all..."

"It is colder," Holly whispered back, trying to agree with her friend.

"It's just a storm front – a low pressure area," Haley conjectured.

"You think it's going to rain?" Holly asked, looking forward to something that might wash the itchiness off her skin.

"Might..." Haley murmured.

"What do we do now?" Tabatha asked, bored and tired of chasing after fairies. "Go back to the settlement?"

Alana sighed, not really knowing herself what they should do. "We'll wait a while. Just relax and enjoy not having to walk for a few minutes."

"No problem there," Haley sighed, and dropped back to lie flat in the grass and stare at the sky.

"Ow!"

"Oh, Jesus, what now?" Haley asked, interrupting her reverie to sit up and rudely stare at her twin.

"Something bit me!" Holly griped, briskly brushing her shoulder with the flat of her hand.

"Something's always biting you," Haley grunted, then lay back down in the soft grass.

"You've got ants on your back," Tabatha mentioned, then snickered.

"What's so funny about that?" Holly was on her feet by now, and fervently swiping her hands all over her body to brush the tiny insects off.

"Oh, I was just thinking of M ... uh, Tanya," Tabatha chuckled.

"Yeah," Haley snorted from close by. "She likes bugs. She'll let anything crawl on her."

"I bet she'd love these suckers!" Holly griped. Finally fed up with being fed on, she closed her eyes and grimaced, forcing flame through her skin to cleanse herself of every living thing that didn't belong on her. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes and sighed in relief. "That's better!"

"Now you smell like roast bug," Haley snickered.

"You're gonna smell like roasted sister in about a minute," Holly promised, then chose a new spot of fresh grass to sit in – after inspecting it closely to see that there weren't any bugs hiding in it.

"Speaking of bugs..." Alana murmured, then casually indicated the direction with one arm. "There's that little sucker we've been following all day..." Almost too far to be easily visible, the sparkle of iridescent wings danced against the darkness of the tree line on the other side of the wide meadow.

"Okay," Tabatha sighed with determination. "My turn." Closing her eyes, she teleported the entire group right up next to the frigging fairy. The tiny creature squeeked, then disappeared. "Oh, no!" Tabatha growled. "You don't get away that easy!"

An instant later, the fairy reappeared – inside a tiny energy bubble – trapped in a time shield created by Tabatha. It vanished and reappeared, seeming to flicker in and out of reality as it tried again and again to teleport to safety, becoming more frenzied with each attempt.

"Stop torturing her!" Holly whined. "She's liable to die if she keeps doing that!"

Tabatha stepped forward and lowered the energy bubble into the palm of her hand. The fairy, seeing the giant hand surrounding her slippery prison flew into a wild frenzy, then collapsed and slid down into the bottom of the bubble.

"It's okay, sweetie," Tabatha whispered soothingly to the delicate little female. "I won't hurt you."

An angry squeak, almost like the bark of a very tiny dog, was the only response.

"I don't blame you for that," Tabatha chuckled. "I'd be mad, too. But we're tired of chasing you guys all over the place. You need to show me where we're supposed to go."

'You need to show me where the dragon goes!' The little fairy instantly began to make a series of protesting little sounds. She didn't seem the least bit interested in going anywhere near any dragon.

"What's she saying?" Alana wanted to know, fascinatedly staring at the tiny creature as avidly as Holly and Haley were.

"I'm not sure," Tabatha murmured, "Apparently, this dragon creature doesn't seem to take into account how fragile the fairies are in its dealings with them. They call it to wherever it's needed, then they get the heck out of its way before it arrives."

"Okay, that's more than we knew before," Alana grimaced. "Ask it where and when they're going to call the dragon again."

The tiny fairy made a series of sounds. Its tone was somewhat sarcastic.

"She says her name is Kiana," Tabatha grinned. "And she's not an 'it'."

"I'm sorry," Alana smiled at the creature inside the bubble, trying to keep from laughing out loud. "Kiana, when are your friends going to call the dragon again? And where will it appear when they do?"

"I wanna know why they'd call it in the first place?" Haley asked. "And did they call it to attack our settlement?"

While being bombarded with these questions, the fairy had been testing the limits of her oval prison. Having determined that, while she couldn't get out, none of them could get in, confidence in her safety improved her attitude and she folded her arms across her chest, displaying the pert roundness of her delicate, miniature breasts, and stared impertinently at her captors.

'Nothing to do with attack on hairless ones!' she sent at them, clear enough for each one to hear in their minds. 'Trogs need females – young ones! Wise One foretold females – young ones – come. Young ones came. Gift. Trogs take. Hide. Protect.'

"And you needed the dragon for ... What?" Holly growled, "Just to terrify the crap outta the rest of us?"

The fairy simply glared at her prison guard. Tabatha sighed and shrugged her shoulders. "She says we could've asked when we were talking to her clan earlier."

"What does that mean?" Holly wanted to know.

"It means she doesn't know," Haley ventured.

"She says it was curious," Tabatha added. "The Hatchling pretty much goes where it wants, except when the fairies call it to perform a Purification."

"Okay, now I'm interested," Alana spoke up. "We want to witness a Purification. How do we do that?"

A series of sharp squeaks came from the bubble in Tabatha's hand.

"We need to turn her loose and she'll show us," Tabatha told the others.

"She was loose," Holly said.

"And she didn't show us!" Haley added.

Aw, how cute is that?" Tabatha chuckled sarcastically. "She crossed her heart. She must be reading our minds, to be using our own childhood gestures so easily."

Tabatha stared intently at the bubble containing the iridescent little creature. The fairy began to choke, her eyes growing larger as she became more terrified. The fairy fell to her knees, both hands on her throat as she gasped and whimpered, her wings fluttering weakly.

"What are you doing to her?" Alana asked, consternation evident in her voice.

"Letting her know what'll happen if she doesn't take us to wherever the dragon is going," Tabatha growled. "I'm just letting the air in her little time shield move back into the present."

"You're suffocating her?" Alana cried, suddenly alarmed.

"Don't be silly! She's a Phoenix," Tabatha replied, sounding more innocent than the expression on her face indicated. "She won't die."

Suddenly the bubble burst, and the fairy squealed and fell into Tabatha's palm, holding her tiny hands to her ears and writhing in obvious pain.

"You may be immortal, but you can be hurt," Tabatha promised. "Now take us where we need to go."

It took a few minutes for the fairy to recover from having her eardrums popped, but finally she was ready. Lifting off from the palm of Tabatha's hand, she flew up a few feet into the air and headed into the setting sun.

"Let's go, girls," Alana called, standing up to follow.

It was evening in the settlement and the slow, cooling breeze wafted the smoke from the dying embers of nearby ashen huts away from the central clearing. Some of the villagers looked startled as a wormhole opened, showing the landscape of a wooded area and several people, their hands held to form a circle. Almost immediately, each member of the circle released the hands they were holding, turned around and stepped out. The out-of-place landscape vanished, leaving the newcomers in the Mesopotamian settlement.

"Looks safe enough," Daphne observed, taking in the clear sky and the mildly startled villagers, "though there've been a couple of fires, it seems."

"Wow," Vanessa ventured softly, noticing the squalid looking huts that were still standing and comparing them to the rustic but comfortable hunting lodge she'd just left, "This place is a lot cruder than the Jurassic Lodge, or even the log cabins at the Phoenix Preserve."

"Well," Tanya replied, "these people built all this themselves. They didn't have Lisa's help in shearing off cliff faces and creating hot springs. Plus, no one was allowed to bring tools and equipment into Earth's past. Everything here is hand made with stone axes and mud."

"There are hot springs nearby," Sibilius added. "That's one of the reasons the settlement is located here."

"Well, that at least explains why the people here don't stink, anyway," Sheryye remarked, getting her two cents in.

"That, and those convenient caves for food storage," Geoffrey added. "Hot water and natural refrigeration is something that most of humanity won't have for another thirty thousand years."

"The Romans had refrigeration," Daphne argued. "I remember hauling snow down from the mountains and selling it to keep their food from spoiling."

"You were in Rome?" Jake wanted to know. "Béla – Alanna, now – told me she was in the Amazon Guard during Roman times. Did you ever meet her?"

"If Béla was an Amazon, I might have seen her," Daphne admitted, "but I wouldn't have known who she was, or that she was like me." Her brow furrowed as she concentrated, trying to bring back more ancient memories of her brief time in Rome. "It seems I remember watching Amazons fight each other at the Coliseum. There was one short girl, about Béla's size, who was an excellent swords-woman. She could hold her own, even against most males. That could've been her."

"Well, Béla was pretty good with a sword," Jake grinned as he remembered their wickedly playful, bloody matches back in Solar City. "But she never could beat our daugh ... Lisa." He stopped for a few seconds, overwhelmed by the fact that things had gone so badly between them since then, and the fact that he might never see his only daughter again. "Lisa was tricky and conniving, even back then. She would do anything to win," he said, almost to himself.

Tanya put her arm around Jake's shoulder and pulled him against her side, shaking him affectionately. "I miss her too, Jake," she said fondly. "Don't worry, she'll come back when she's ready."

Jake smiled sadly, then patted the hand holding his shoulder, "Yeah, probably," then gently stepped out of her grasp. 'But do we really want her back? Do I want her back?'