Chapter 19

Ronnie yelped (actually, she squeaked) as she suddenly found herself: 1) naked and 2) somewhere NOT in the lunch room! And this scary Lisa person was with her.

After a few seconds, she recognized her own sleeping quarters and glanced furtively around, hoping her lover/photographer Dave hadn’t slept in. She breathed a sigh of relief when he wasn’t there.

“Expecting someone?” Lisa asked, carefully watching her naked captive become aware of her new surroundings.

Ronnie’s eyes immediately jerked back to center on Lisa. “No. Hoping, maybe...”

The unspoken question was evident in Veronica’s eyes, so Lisa decided not to wait for her to ask. “You’re wondering what I want from you.”

“Uh, yes?” Ronnie agreed. “I ... did we just teleport?”

Lisa grinned and Ronnie noticed she looked a lot less frightening when she smiled. “I teleported. You just came along for the ride. But one of your ... students? A Phoenix girl noticed what I did, and she’s already figured it out. You are evidently a very good teacher.”

Ronnie took a deep breath, not knowing exactly how to respond. “I try,” she decided to reply. “But you know stuff that I didn’t even know was possible.”

“Well, you have a few tricks I didn’t know about, either,” Lisa admitted. “Your ‘niece’ Tara – she’s been spying on my blood-sister Tara, and I’ve only a few moments ago determined that they are the same person – two Taras, two Tias – traveling through the same time period, completely unaware of each other, except in their dreams. And though they seem to be similar in age, they are living different segments of their own time lines. Are there any other twins here?”

“No,” Ronnie told her, gaining more confidence as she continued to survive Lisa’s domineering, though polite, presence. “They showed up on my late husband’s doorstep – in Milan, Italy – Huh! It’s been eighteen years, now. They were twelve, and they were witches even then, but they couldn’t tell me how they acquired their magic fire, though Tara used it to save my life as well as her sister’s. They also didn’t remember how they got from Colorado to Italy, and international travel – even back then – was extremely perilous.”

“That’s because they didn’t,” Lisa corrected her. “I mean, they didn’t travel from Colorado. They traveled from ... my mother calls the place ‘New Eden’. I’ve never been there, so...” She shrugged, and Ronnie’s eyes were distracted by Lisa’s naked breasts as they jiggled. Lisa smiled to herself and folded her arms beneath her bare breasts, causing their tops to round out quite nicely, her nipples peeking out just above her forearms. “I have no idea what it’s like. But these girls – your ‘nieces’ – are from the future. I don’t know why they came back here, but when I looked into their minds, their childhood memories were the same as my Tia and Tara’s – right up to a few weeks before I found them roaming through the Rockies, frozen and nearly starved to death.”

She watched the aunt’s reactions as she spoke, determined to discover how much she actually knew about the twins that she might be hiding. “The gap in the memories of your twins extends from when they lived in Denver to when they knocked on their uncle’s door. In that two-month gap, they’ve lost over forty years of memories, except that Tara – your Tara – remembers being murdered by some hunter.”

“And you think those forty years were spent in this place you call ‘Eden’?”

“New Eden,” Lisa corrected her. “And since my Tara hasn’t arrived there yet, they have to have come from their own future. They were mind-wiped and transported into their own past. And I am curious as to why!”

“You don’t have any trouble believing that time travel is possible?” Ronnie asked.

Lisa laughed. “I’ve traveled millions of years back through time! And a few hundred years forward, as well. Have to be careful about how far forward you go, though, ‘cause Earth won’t be here very much longer and you could find yourself in the middle of a giant solar flare or something even worse.”

“What? Earth is going to be destroyed?”

“Sun’s going to go nova. It’ll suck to be here when that happens, huh?” Lisa snorted. “That’s what all these pretty lights over our heads every night means. The sun is dying. And expanding – for a while, anyway. Surprised that no one’s figured that out, yet. This is supposed to be some kind of scientific institute, isn’t it?”

Ronnie took a moment to catch up – her mind stuck on ‘Sun’s going to go nova’? What was her question? A scientific institute? “Oh, yes – Tia and Tara are honorary members of the faculty here.”

“Fuck me!” Lisa laughed. “Those space cadets?”

Ronnie’s mouth dropped open and she leapt to defend her family. “Those ‘space cadets’ have I.Q.’s in the 170s! They are both extremely bright and Tia even wrote and got published an article proving the existence of witch fire! She proved it isn’t magical, but scientific! She also theorized – and demonstrated – how it can be accessed!

“And,” she continued now that her rant was giving her courage, “Tara is a mathematical genius! Her thesis mathematically theorized the probability of an invisible hidden moon orbiting Jupiter!”

At this, Lisa’s smile became more friendly. “She’s just trying to figure out how to get back home – even if she claims not to remember it.”

“That hidden moon is your ‘Eden’?” Ronnie asked, astounded. “No wonder she’s so fascinated by the space program!”

“Space program? What kind of an institute is this?” Lisa asked, more curious than ever, now.

“Well, it’s really three – no, four – groups, and the twins are members of all of them,” Ronnie couldn’t help but brag. “There’s the Max-Planck Institute, which is centered around a radio telescope, the Bonn University and the Council of Knowledge, which is a group of scientists banded together to assist in the advancement and evolution of mankind. The fourth group is the Bonn Space Program.”

“A space program,” Lisa mused, “and a telescope. Interesting ... Even though they’ve been made to forget, they’re both trying to get back to New Eden.”

“So anyway,” Veronica was saying to the head councilman of the Council of Knowledge as he lay next to a sexually exhausted Tia in their shared quarters, “after that, she asked me some more questions about how we used our witch fire and I told her about Artistic Suicides and how we recruited girls and taught them how to repair their bodies after they performed their death rituals. She seemed impressed that there are so many of us. She has only a half dozen students of her own.”

Wolfgang looked down to see how Tia was reacting to all this new information, but the girl had been fucked completely senseless, her awareness limited to occasional orgasmic trembles as she recovered.

“And then she started in on my calling myself The Evil Vampire Queen and said, ‘You don’t even know what a vampire looks like.’ Then she stands up and grabs my arm and the friggin’ room disappears and I’m in fucking Outer Space!

“I mean like – we’re in the middle of the Aurora and there’s no friggin’ air so I shield and start generating an atmosphere around me and then I look around and she’s friggin’ got WINGS that stretch out like maybe five or six feet on each side of her!”

“She sounds really scary,” Wolfgang chuckled as he listened to Ronnie’s tale.

“She wanted to demonstrate just exactly how human she wasn’t!” the girl exclaimed, too excited to notice that her mentor didn’t seem surprised at what she saying. “She’s a completely different species – and she says that she and her mother were the only two on the entire planet who had wings.”

“What did she call herself?” Wolfgang wanted to know. “Did she have a name for what she was?”

“She said she’s a ‘Phoenix’,” Ronnie replied, “and that the witch fire the twins are teaching all the girls to use is actually Phoenix fire – Phoenix – like in, reborn from your own ashes!

“Then we got to talking about my shield and she was interested that I could make fire produce oxygen, but it isn’t really fire anyway – just a manifestation of energy – and I can make it do whatever I want and then she suggested that I put wings on my shield, ‘cause, despite the fact that we were really high up, we were falling – like, at around two hundred kph and picking up speed – and...

“I did!” Ronnie grinned, feeling smug and self-satisfied. “I made an airplane – well, a glider, really – and I got myself all the way down to the ground, all by myself!”

“And this ‘Phoenix’ girl,” Wolfgang asked, “she stayed with you?”

“All the way down,” Ronnie admitted. “She didn’t really seem to use her wings; when she wasn’t simply gliding alongside me, it was like she was levitating or something, but once we were on the ground, she let me touch them and it was just her skin – really tightly stretched across this amazing, fragile webwork of bone and cartilage, and then she folded her wings against her body – her arm bones and her ribs – her wing bones – are all the same by the way – and...

“I couldn’t even tell she wasn’t completely human!” Ronnie concluded. “She’s like a chameleon – blending in with what she calls the ‘indigenous indigents’ and she wiggled her fingers when she said it, so she at least has a sense of humor and I finally realized she probably wasn’t going to kill me – not like I’d stay dead anyway ... but it’s nice to realize that if I ever find myself several miles up and lacking an airship of some sort, I can make one of my own.”

Wolfgang chuckled and said, “You’re starting to ramble. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Ronnie stopped and stared at her mentor. She blinked, then blinked again, and blushed. “She fucks like a mink – and she really likes girls. She really liked ... me.”

“Is that it?”

Ronnie sighed. Finally she said, “Well, she’s a vampire. She ... bit me.

“You know, real vampires don’t have fangs – they just have really really sharp teeth!” she added.

“Did you bite her?”

“No,” Ronnie admitted, “but I showed her how I can make blood-sucking fangs out of witch fire. She laughed so hard she fell off the bed.”

Ronnie finally ran down and sat, simply staring at Wolfgang as he lay next to her well fucked niece. Wolfgang idly ran his fingers up and down Tia’s back, enjoying the smooth, gentle curve of her rump and the flaring of a hip from the girl’s narrow waist.

“She’s never going to get old, is she?” Ronnie finally asked, already knowing the answer. “She’s almost forty, and she had the waistline of a teenager.”

Wolfgang looked up, almost as though he was listening to Veronica’s thoughts, then shook his head. “No. She’ll probably live to be a thousand – maybe even longer. Her witch-fire keeps her young.”

“And infertile,” Ronnie added. “She’s never been pregnant – as far as I know.”

Wolfgang shrugged, as though Tia’s fertility was unimportant. “There are witches who are having children, so it’s probably a choice each one makes for herself. Tia probably doesn’t want a child. If she did, she’s certainly collected enough material to create one.”

Ronnie laughed at Wolfgang’s little joke. He and Tia had probably fucked, oh, likely a few thousand times since they met, and he had pumped enough sperm into her to grow an entire army of babies.

“Buck never managed to get me pregnant,” Ronnie confessed, “though I really didn’t want to bring a child into a world where men kill their women for the sheer fun of it. Besides, we already had Tia and Tara. And they demonstrated early on that they couldn’t be killed.”

“Not from lack of trying, if I recall some of the recordings I’ve seen,” Wolfgang commented.

“You’ve watched Tri-Ds of them being killed?” Ronnie asked, surprised that he might be interested in the sordid, brutal smut that provided the easy lifestyle for her and her nieces.

“Tia showed me a few,” Wolfgang admitted. “She wanted me to know who I was getting involved with.”

“She must really like you, then,” Ronnie told him. “She’s commented on the fact that you don’t share most men’s brutal nature regarding females. I remember she was the first one of us to start complaining about being murdered every other day or so back when Buck was running Artistic Suicides. Now, though, there are enough girls signing up every week to keep the company solvent for several more years.”

They sat silently for several more minutes – until Tia began to snore, which caused both of them to giggle. But then Ronnie’s face grew more serious.

“Lisa said that Earth won’t be here much longer,” she mentioned, simply dropping the sentence into the silence of the room. She watched Wolfgang’s face grow more serious as he gazed down at Tia’s shapely bare backside, his hand continuing to trail fingers from her shoulder to her hip as he thought.

“That’s not new information,” he finally said, seeming to talk to Tia’s bare rump. “The Council has known for a while, now.”

“What are they going to do?” Ronnie asked, forcing herself to remain as calm as Wolfgang seemed, though she wanted to shout and scream at the unfairness of it all – people all over the world trying to live their lives in this impossible, deadly environment, their efforts and hopes for a possible future wasted because of the finality of what was to come. “How much time do we have?”