Chapter 12

"What was all that squealing and crying about?" Vanessa grinned at Tanya. "Sounded like Frankie boy was killin' you!"

"He was," Tanya replied demurely. "He did."

"Did what?" Sheryye wanted to know. "Kill you?"

"Yep!" Tanya admitted, a wide grin splitting her face. "I love for him to kill me. Especially while he's fucking me, or whipping me, or..."

"Yes," Holly interrupted.

"We know..." Haley added.

"all about it..." this from Holly.

"so no need to brag," from Haley again. They both sounded equally bored, but the timing of their words made it difficult to realize that both of them were talking, unless someone was watching when they did it. Tanya smiled, knowing they were just teasing her.

"No, no," Vanessa protested. "I want to know more! What does he do to you, exactly?"

"Exactly? Ooo, this should be good," Sheryye leered at the others. "Tell us all. And be specific, s'il vous plaît.

Oh, she speaks French," Holly kidded.

"Very sophistiqué," added Haley, sticking her nose up in the air, pretending to be an aristocrat and dropping the last wisp of sound from the French word like Sheryye had hers.

"That looks really stupid when you're naked," Vanessa interjected, feeling a need to defend her friend and lover.

"Children," Tanya interrupted them all, "Enough, now."

"Yeah," Sheryye avidly agreed. "Tell us what Frankie does do you." She looked at the twins and added, "Please."

"He really didn't do anything unusual," Tanya shrugged. "He switched me a bit, then he stuck me with a..." she paused, thinking. "No, then he stuck the switch up me..."

"Inside you?" Vanessa asked, almost drooling at the very thought of it. "You mean, in your cunt?"

"Don't be so crude," Sheryye whispered in a stage voice, easily loud enough for the twins to hear.

Vanessa glanced over at the twins ... well, glared ... and saw they were just as fascinated about what Frank did to Tanya as she was, despite what they'd said earlier. "Sorry, go on..." she mumbled.

"Well, yes," Tanya admitted. "He stuck it up inside me as far as it would go. And..." she waited, watching the others lean closer so they wouldn't miss a second of her tangy tale, "it was a branch from a thorn bush."

"Oh, fuck!" Holly gasped, taking a deep breath to control her excitement. "It had thorns on it?"

"Of course, silly," Sheryye admonished the girl. "She just said it was a branch from a thorn bush."

"Yes, Ha ... Holly," Tanya answered, smiling to herself for guessing the twin's name correctly. She'd known them for decades, and was familiar with each twin's idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, though, they still fooled her. "It was pretty thorny."

"Bet that was fun..." mumbled Haley. "Remind me not to get too close to Frank." Holly turned her head to look at her twin, giving her one of those 'Are You For Real?' looks. While the twins were somewhat conservative about having objects stuck into their bodies, they'd done their share of experimenting in that area. After all, they were Phoenixes, and part of Lisa's original Six Pack.

"He could do something like that to me, anytime," Sheryye purred. Receiving a pretend-hateful glare from her lover, she quickly added, "but that's all I'd let him do ... really!"

"That's all right," Vanessa replied cattily. "If a man offered to do that to me, I'd probably let him."

"Let him do what?" Tanya asked, almost laughing.

Vanessa let loose with a long, slow sigh; "For that? Just about anything, I think. It would depend..."

"On whether or not it was Frank, I bet," Holly kidded.

"Go on with your story," Sheryye interjected, not willing to hear any more bickering between the airhead twins and Beautiful Vanessa.

"Not much to say, really," Tanya concluded. "He whipped me, he shredded my insides, he fucked me, he stabbed me, I died. The end."

"With a lot of very vocal exclamations along the way," Vanessa laughed. "We heard them all."

"Did he kill you the second time, too?" Sheryye asked, losing interest and blaming Tanya's sucky storytelling.

"No," Tanya replied, her brow furrowed in thought. "A big tiger killed me the second time."

"A tiger!" the twins exclaimed simultaneously. "Was it a Saber-tooth?"

Tanya nodded.

"Did it bite you?" Vanessa asked, breathing hard and pressing her fists against her thighs as she knelt in the tall grasses.

"He tore me apart," Tanya replied quietly. "And then, he ate me."

"Oh my God!" Sheryye exclaimed. "So you got to flare back, huh?"

"Um-hum," Tanya nodded. "And Frank was lying right on top of me. He'd collected my head, one of my arms, I think, and parts of my legs. And maybe a few ribs that didn't get chewed up too bad and put me all in a pile. Then he just curled up on top of me and waited..."

"You burn him when you came back?" Sheryye wanted to know.

Tanya nodded. The grin on her face said she did it deliberately. "Both times."

"Oh, Christ," Vanessa sighed. "Just imagine flaring, and taking your hunter with you!" She stared at Sheryye, lust obvious in her eyes. Her hunter was not who she wanted to flare with. But until this very instant, it hadn't occurred to her that she could use Phoenix fire to flare more than one body at a time.

"Yeah!" Sheryye agreed, the wicked grin on her face matching the one on Vanessa's as she misinterpreted BV's lustful stare. "Sorry-ass bastards like to gun us down and fuck our corpses, but the least little lick of fire against their hairy genitals and all that fake bravado disappears into a wounded little hurt..." she stopped, unable to decide what to call the men who like to hunt Phoenix girls.

"Puppy," Vanessa suggested, then changed it; "No, Pussies. Wounded, hurt little dickless pussies. Yep! That's them!"

"Somebody sounds..." Haley half-whispered to her twin.

"Frustrated," Holly readily supplied the missing word. The three other Phoenix girls looked at them. "Well, I call it like I see it. You two have the hots for each other so bad that even I'm getting horny just standing next to you."

"And you haven't taken your eyes off Sheryye since it occurred to you that you could fry her to a crisp!" Haley accused Vanessa. "Everyone here has that image stuck in their minds, you're so intense about it!"

Vanessa, surprised as she remembered that she was surrounded by a bunch of telepaths, took a step backward, then quickly regained her self-control. "I'll not stand here and be shamed by the pair of you! I'm proud of who I am and who I prefer in my bed. You're just jealous because you didn't think of it first!"

"Whatever," the twins said together, both giving her identical shrugs of their shoulders.

"She grew a backbone," Holly said to Haley.

"Definitely not as wimpy as she used to be," Haley replied.

"Or as whiny, either," Holly added.

"Okay, I don't know what came between the three of you when you all stayed at the Lodge," Tanya interrupted, addressing the twins, "but it's unpleasant to listen to, here. If you two can't get along with her, go on back to your 'Queen' and braid her hair or something."

The twins looked at Tanya for a moment, then at each other. Holly stepped forward to face Vanessa and said, "I'm sorry. I was out of place to talk to you like that, and to reveal what your private thoughts are to Sheryye."

"I'm sorry, too," Haley added, stepping up. "But you should really go see Elaine or Tabatha and learn how to shield your thoughts. You've grown up a lot since we were last together, but you still radiate a lot of emotion. We can't help but notice it."

Vanessa looked over at Tanya, silently pleading for help. She was having a hard time even standing near the twins, knowing that they were receiving everything she was feeling and thinking.

"Okay, girls, let's have some distance," Tanya told them. The twins backed away a couple of steps, then Tanya held out her hand to Vanessa. "Come with me. I think I can help you."

Vanessa stared, her eyes widening, at Tanya's bare body as the voluptuous blond stepped toward her, hand held up to receive her. She blushed as the image of being held against those breasts, that belly, of having those marvelously tanned legs wrapped around her washed through her. She was sure everyone, including those vile twins, noticed.

Tanya smiled, and held up her other hand. "If you wish ... I am more than willing."

Vanessa laughed, partly out of embarrassment, partly because she found it hard to believe that Tanya would want to be her lover. But after all, that's why she had followed her out here, away from the rest of the group, hoping. Then she remembered... 'Sheryye?'

She turned quickly to see what effect her eagerness to abandon her present lover for Tanya was having. Sheryye was watching her with an odd smirk on her face. "What?" Vanessa asked, needing to know what was going through the other girl's mind.

"Go, you horny bitch," Sheryye laughed. "Get it out of your system. You've had the hots for Tanya for as long as I've known you."

"But what about you?" Vanessa asked, then shuddered at the pleading, whiny tone in her own voice. 'Those goddamn twins are right! Everything I do radiates really sucky emotions. Am I really so selfish that I only think of myself?'

'Vanessa... ' her name sounded in her head. It was Tanya, speaking to her as she had believed only the Queen could. That was why Alana was Queen – telepathic, clairvoyant and all that, plus shape-shifting immortal, right? 'Vanessa, she can come, too – if you don't want to leave her behind.'

"Come with us!" Vanessa blurted out, relieved and joyful at having been given a solution. "Join me, Sheryye – we can both do her!"

"But..." Sheryye looked back and forth between Vanessa and Tanya, then shrugged. Nothing about Tanya's stance indicated that she'd reject her, so she bravely, quickly stepped forward to join them.

"Well, what'd'ya wanna do now?" Haley asked, finding herself alone with her sister.

"Let's go see if we can find that tiger," Holly suggested. "He might still be hungry..."

"I've noticed that the sexier we make ourselves," Sheryye commented as the trio walked toward the shade of a large tree, "the more eager the guys are to kill us."

"Yeah, it does seem they like to track down the prettier girls," Vanessa replied. "The more perfect the body, the more eager those jerks are to put a hole in it."

"To mar the perfection of it," Sheryye agreed, "of ... us."

"A hunter would love you, Tanya," Vanessa dared to tell her. "That perfect body of yours would make any man drool at the chance to use those mammoth boobs for target practice."

"It took a lot of convincing," Tanya replied, turning to wait for the pair, "but I finally got Frank's attitude turned around so he enjoys 'marring' me. In fact, we were married for nearly a century before we began playing around like that. In fact, during most of that time, I really didn't enjoy being injured, even if I did always heal from it."

"Really?" Vanessa asked. "What changed?"

"I met Beth," Tanya explained, simply. "You knew her as Lisa." She smiled as she watched Vanessa and Sheryye figure it out.

"But, according to what I remember," Vanessa said, thinking hard to recall her life back on Earth, "Lisa was Béla's daughter. Beth was her first sister, but she died before Lisa was born. I've heard a few stories, but I never met her. I was born after she died, too."

"They are the same person," Tanya told her. "She jumped bodies just like Béla jumped and became Alana."

"So..." Sheryye said thoughtfully, "she's a shifter, too?"

"Shifter?" Tanya asked, then gently prodded Sheryye's mind for an explanation. "Oh, you mean, 'shape shifter'? No. Neither Beth nor Béla were shape shifters. They simply picked out a new body when they died. Everyone does it; most of us just don't remember. Dying is usually pretty traumatic, you know; too much pain and trauma to allow yourself to recall, plus, being in a different environment, your memories fade quickly if there are too many differences to anchor them. It's simply easier to forget."

"So you've lived before, too, huh?" Vanessa wanted to know.

"Yeah," Tanya replied, sounding hesitant. "But I don't remember much. Elaine tells me I was a crew member aboard her space ship thousands of years ago, and I kind of can recall a bit of it, but I'm perfectly happy being who I am. I don't have much interest in who I used to be. Besides, those memories are more easily accessed in children who are just learning to talk again. As they get older, and they notice that their surroundings are different, memories fade and may simply be remembered as dreams, if they're remembered at all."

"Yeah," Sheryye unexpectedly spoke up. "Plus getting the back of dear daddy's hand smacked across your face for lying doesn't exactly encourage a young child to speak out, does it?"

"Did you remember something about a past life?" Vanessa asked, more than a little curious.

"I dunno," Sheryye replied. "I remember telling my dad once that I was a motorcycle daredevil and my real name was 'Evil'. He was one of those righteous Baptists, and didn't tolerate any kid of his consorting with the devil and twisting her tongue up with lies, so I definitely never told him anything I thought was important, ever again."

"You remember being Evel Knievel?" Vanessa laughed. "Man, he died, like, a hundred years ago!"

"No, I don't remember being Evil, I just remember telling my dad about it," Sheryye explained. "But I've always liked motorcycles, and I've always wished I could've been born fifty years earlier, when they were still popular. I used to dream about leaping over cars and through flaming hoops and roaring up terrifying ramps into the air..."