Chapter 7

Tia sat up, concern written on her face. The motion attracted Murielle's attention and she turned her head, shading her eyes from the crystal sun with one hand. "What?" she asked.

"I dunno," Tia confessed. "I think something might've happened to Miranda. Tony's hunting her, right?"

Murielle closed her eyes for a moment, then grinned and said, "Yeah, Tony hasn't caught her yet. She's hiding in a tree, watching him. I love Tony – he's so gullible; never looks up."

"I had a really weird dream," Tia said, her voice sounding unusually tight with nervousness.

"What was it?" Murielle wanted to know. Tia was obviously upset about something. "Something bad?"

"At first I thought something had happened to Tara, but she's asleep inside the cabin." Tia said, closing her eyes as she tried to remember. "Anyway, I was running through the woods, I remember I'd been shot, but I was crippled somehow. And scared. I was trying to get back to the lodge and trying to call out to Tara, but I couldn't get her attention – I couldn't teleport, I couldn't use my fire ... it was almost like I was ... human, again."

Murielle's eyes widened as she listened. "Crap. I had that dream, too."

"Somebody's out there," Tia suddenly realized, "and they need our help!"

"But, where the fuck are they?" Murielle anxiously asked.

'Wow, that was some dream, ' Tara thought as she sat up. She had tried to stay in the dream, to determine where it was coming from. One of the advantages of being telepathic was that sometimes dreams got shared. This one was so unpleasant that she wanted to know who had sent it; it was obviously a cry for help, but a soft thump on the wall right next to her head had awakened her.

Standing up, she looked around, then stepped outside.

'He never looks up, ' Tony heard in his head. So, he looked up. Miranda was stretched out along a large, heavy branch, like a great long cat, just grinning down at him. Quickly, he swung his bow around while pulling back on the string.

Miranda raised up on one elbow and looked away, startled by something. Then she vanished. The arrow whipped through right where her stomach had been just an instant earlier. "Hey! Goddammit! No teleporting!" he shouted at the empty space she'd just vacated.

Tia, Tara, Miranda and Murielle all arrived at the same time. Tia bent down and turned the dead girl over. "OhmyGod! It's Kristi!" Murielle exclaimed.

"Couldn't be! She's dead!" Miranda added excitedly.

"Eaten by a T-Rex, I thought," Murielle added, upset and confused by what she was seeing.

"Two T-Rexes," her sister corrected her.

"Can she be revived?" Tara asked her twin.

"We should try. She's still warm," Tia replied.

"What're you going to do?" Miranda wanted to know.

Tara followed her sister as Tia carried the young girl's body inside the cabin. "If it's not too late, we're going to Phoenix her."

"You can do that?" both M-twins were anxious to know.

Tara didn't answer. When Tia lay the body down across the large wooden dining table, the twins positioned themselves, one on each side, and held their hands out over the body.

"She might want her clothes," Miranda decided, and teleported them off the slender girl just as they started to smolder.

"If she lives," Murielle added, sounding glum.

"Yeah," Tia agreed. "If her spirit's already left, even bringing her body back to life won't do any good."

"It might," Tara mentioned. "If somebody, uh ... someone is floating around out there sans body, this one'd be pretty convenient. Good looking, too!"

Tia said, "If we bring her back and she's not in there, maybe the Praetor can find her. After all, it's done that a few times for girls we bring back from Earth's past after their bodies have been killed."

"Huh. Really?" Murielle wanted to know. "Why would you do that? I mean – go through all the effort to convince a disembodied ghost to come with you all the way to friggin' Jupiter, just to stick her in one of those hybrid bodies at University?"

"Uh, you just answered your own question," Tara smirked. "To 'stick her in a hybrid body at University'."

"Yeah," Tia agreed. "To make another goddess and maybe even another Phoenix girl!"

"But it's easier to make a Phoenix from a human than it is to convince a Goddess to let herself be permanently killed just for the fun of it," Tara explained. "So when we can, we'll Phoenix the body with the girl still attached and bring the whole package back with us."

"Definitely easier," Tia agreed. "And since they'd already agreed to be murdered on stage, it's easier to convince them to let Tony or Mac kill them so's they can learn how to flame."

"Yep! Lisa sez we need all the Phoenix girls we can get!" Tara remarked.

The Kristi look-alike suddenly jerked, then gasped for air. "Oh, thank god!" Miranda muttered, grateful to the recently dead girl for saving her from more 'T' twin twin-speak.

"Yep! Looks like she's gonna live," Murielle grinned.

"Hey! Where the fuck did you go?" Tony demanded as the screen door slammed behind him. He quickly hung his bow and quiver of arrows on a wall peg, then turned around, expecting an explanation, breathing heavily from his brisk run back from the middle of the training area.

Then he stopped and stared at the beautifully naked oriental girl lying in the middle of their dining table. "Who she?"

'Hoshi?'

"No, I'm Sandi," Sandi grunted, sitting up as she corrected the man who'd called her the wrong name, then quickly folded her arms in front of her boobs as she suddenly realized I'm stark raving naked! She sat up and quickly crossed her legs as she realized she was naked down there! as well.

"Wha' the fuck did you do with my CLOTHES?" she demanded angrily. Anger worked better than fear, she knew, and she did her best to be angry, mostly because she was terrified! 'What am I doing here, surrounded by naked people – naked girls and a dressed man? What happened to me? Where am I?'

"Damn, tone it down, girl," Tia whimpered, holding her fingers to her temples on both sides of her head. "Nobody's gonna hurt you. We're all Phoenixes, here."

"Isn't that Phoeni?" Tara quipped, trying to lighten the mood of the newly revived girl sitting with her bare ass on the table everybody eats off of. "More than one Phoenix is a..."

"Sorry," Sandi yelped as it occurred to her that she had her bare butt on their dining table. She slid off, still trying to keep as much of her bare nakedness hidden as she could manage. She spotted her clothes and quickly began to cover herself, ignoring the fact that she had to bare her breasts in order to use her hands and arms. Bypassing her blouse, she slid her heavy, still muddy sweater over her head and began to struggle her wet, filthy jeans up her legs.

Halfway up her thighs, Sandi hesitated, then twisted around, trying to glimpse the back of her thigh where she'd been shot. Her mouth open in surprise, she looked up at each of the other occupants of the room, turning her head as she moved her attention from one to the other.

"Ha ... How..." she managed to stammer. Then she felt dizzy, the room swaying around as she began her drop to the floor.

Tony was quick to catch the girl as she collapsed. Letting her lean dizzily against his chest and right shoulder, he told her, "You have to remember to breathe for the first few minutes after you've been killed. Your body won't do everything automatically until it relearns some of its old habits."

"K-killed?" Sandi asked, gasping as she deliberately sucked in a deep breath and let it out. "I was killed? Yes ... I remember ... Hunters ... Outside the boundary..."

It took four deep breaths to get all that out, then she was breathing normally again. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, so she didn't have to worry about having to learn that all over again. 'How would somebody TEACH their heart how to start beating again, anyway?'