“Probably,” Alicia said.
She felt like a little girl waiting for her parents to find out how bad she’d been.
“Shower time!” she exclaimed. “That’s the fastest way to get this shit off us!”
Alicia jumped off the couch and started running up the stairs. She slammed into the bathroom wall as Lisa teleported them both into the master bath.
She bounced off the wall and landed on her butt, then slid across and hit the back of her head on the sink.
“Ow! God damn!” Alicia exclaimed.
As she felt around her head, she realized she’d broken her nose when she hit the wall.
“You little bitch!” Alicia cried. “What the hell’d you do that for?”
“Sorry!” Lisa exclaimed. “I thought I was helping… But since you’re just sitting there, I’ll shower first!”
Lisa dove into the shower. Alicia climbed to her feet using the sink to pull herself up. She looked in the mirror.
‘Fuck! It’s not straight! My nose is crooked!’
She blinked in pain as she tried to straighten her nose. It was already healed in its new position.
‘Crap! I’ll have to break it again! What’s wrong with me? I’ve never healed this fast before! Even the teeth marks that little alien bitch left in my neck are gone.’
Taking her nose in her hand, she cried out in agony as she forced it back into position, breaking the cartilage again. She held it in place as it healed, hoping that it was centered, since she couldn’t see right at the moment with her eyes filled with tears like they were.
She could actually feel it healing. That’d never happened before, either. In less than a minute, her nose was healed and all the pain was gone. She stared in the mirror in amazement, then remembered why her nose had been broken in the first place.
Suddenly angry again, Alicia stormed toward the shower stall. She opened the door and opened her mouth to shout at Lisa. Lisa jumped, startled by the sudden door opening. She took one look at Alicia’s furious, bloody face and disappeared.
“Damn that girl!” Alicia said angrily, heaving a great sigh. “Well, since the shower’s empty…”
Alicia stepped in. The water was perfect. She stuck her head under and soaped up her sticky hair. Suddenly, she was standing in Béla’s bedroom, with soap running down into her eyes.
Snarling in rage, she stormed back into the bathroom. Lisa was back in the shower. Alicia opened the shower door and yanked Lisa out.
“Hey!” Lisa cried. “I wasn’t finished!”
“Neither was I!” Alicia screamed at her. “I have soap in my eyes, you little bitch!”
“Well lemme fix that!” Lisa hollered back.
Alicia tried to duck, but she slipped and fell. About two gallons of very cold water splashed down on top of her. As she sat in the middle of the bathroom floor, gasping at the sudden temperature difference of the water, she could hear, over the sound of the shower, which Lisa was in once again, that the toilet tank was refilling.
No one answered the door, so Frank used his voice code to get in. He was glad he only lived a few minutes away.
“Anybody home?” he asked.
He looked around. The kitchen was a royal mess. He could smell pancakes. It looked like someone had filled a salad shooter with pancake batter and just spattered it all over the kitchen.
There was a loud thump against the ceiling. In a distant part of the house, he could hear shouting. He grinned as he remembered the wars that Alicia and her younger sister, Katie, used to get into when they were kids. He remembered that Alicia, although six years older, usually lost. Katie had been the real scrapper in the family.
Sighing as he missed his younger daughter yet again, he followed the sounds of battle up the stairs and into Béla and Jake’s bedroom. The carpet was wet. The screeching and shouting was coming from the bathroom.
‘I feel like I’m home, again,’ Frank thought as he sighed, happily. ‘I didn’t realize how much I missed having the kids around…’
He opened the door. Lisa had Alicia in a headlock. Alicia tripped Lisa and they both fell. The shower was running. There was water all over the floor.
“Hey!” he shouted, unable to keep from laughing at the hilarious scene laid out before him.
Both girls jumped away from each other. Lisa took a quick look at him.
“Oh, fuck!” she exclaimed.
She vanished. Alicia slipped one more time and fell to the floor. She looked around for her antagonist. Not seeing her, and seeing Dad, instead, she shrieked in outraged frustration and pulled her own hair.
Alicia sat on the wet bathroom floor crying her eyes out. Frank waited patiently. He was enjoying this scene too much – not in an incestuous way, although Alicia was naked and finely built, just like her mother.
Alicia stopped crying as she heard her father laughing.
“What’s the matter?” she cried at him. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“I’m not laughing at you, sweetheart,” he said, finally bringing himself under control. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen a good cat fight…”
That was what he called the squabbles that she and Katie used to get into – catfights. He never defended or reprimanded either sister for starting the fight, and they’d both loved him for that, although each privately believed that he should have supported her against the other sister.
“Cat fight?” Alicia asked, looking up at him. “That means you’re not even going to ask who started it, are you?”
“Course not!” Frank exclaimed, still grinning. “Now get dressed. I’ll wait downstairs.”
He blew her a kiss and turned away, heading back toward the stairwell.
Alicia heaved a great sigh, audible all the way to the stairwell.
‘Little Miss Sophisticated,’ Frank thought happily to himself, hearing her. ‘She’s still just a little girl inside. My little girl!’
He started down the stairs, then changed his mind. He opened the door to Lisa’s room without knocking. Lisa was hovering in a lotus position two feet above the bed. She was naked. She was wet. There was a thin ring of fire surrounding her and water dripped down onto her bedsheets. Except for the water, she reminded him of the planet Saturn surrounded by its delicate rings.
“You might want to clean up the kitchen a bit before your parents come home,” he suggested, ignoring the exotic sight before him.
As he closed the door, something large and solid struck the other side and bounced off. He grinned again and went downstairs.
‘I really miss being a parent…’
Chapter 4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I don’t believe that I should be the justice in this case, since I’m the one pressing charges,” Elaine explained to the Bard Geoffrey. “This time-walking woman abandoned her family when they needed her the most. They all died because of her!”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Jeff said, more quietly than the Golden Goddess had been speaking. “She may not have had anything to do with it.”
“But she did!” the goddess insisted. “And she knows it! In her own mind, I saw the images she used to escape her past and come here. She did it on purpose! She wanted to get away!”
“That’s not a crime,” Jeff told her.
“It is when you take the only person who could have protected her family with you,” Elaine replied. “Her husband was in a position where he was protecting my sister and her Chosen People! This… witch… brought him with her from there to here! Without his protection, they were discovered and killed – every last one!
“She is responsible for the death of my sister, Béla, and my sister, Beth,” Elaine said icily. “She even remembers killing Beth. I want her tried, and I want her executed.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“We don’t execute people for what they do,” Jeff explained. “That was the Goddess of the Land’s edict. Would you go against your dead sister’s wishes to avenge something that happened two hundred years ago? What would she think?”
“I don’t care what she would think!” Elaine was crying openly now. “I only know what I feel! That woman has to die for what she did!”
She allowed Jeff to hold her while she cried into his shoulder.
In another part of the house, Tabatha and Jake Hedron, who was her husband and also was the son of Jake Pestova, who had been Béla’s husband, sat together on the bed.
“So you’re under house arrest, then?” Jake asked.
Tabatha nodded, her mind numb with the new knowledge of the terrible charges that were being leveled against her. That, on top of the grief of finding out her entire world was lost to her, made her almost catatonic.
“She wants to reinstate the death penalty just for me,” Tabatha said numbly. “For me!”
She broke down into tears again. Jake held her against him, not saying anything. Jake didn’t understand how they had gotten here, or why they had come here at all. From what little he knew of Tabatha’s history, she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. She’d saved his life, after all. He’d been shot in the head and dumped in the desert by that mutinous bastard Blacker and somehow, Tabatha had known where to look. She hadn’t even known him then, or even who she was looking for. But she had found him, rescued him, and personally nursed him back to health.
‘But why would she come here?’ he asked himself, over and over. ‘There’s got to be something here that can help us back there!’
Jake spent most of his time at the university, a few buildings away from his captive wife. There was an incredible amount of data available there, and it was all free for anyone who wanted to study it.
What Jake was interested in most, of course, was legal precedence. He had only four more days before his wife went on trial for causing the deaths of two immortal goddesses. One of the first items he found was a record of the only other execution that had taken place after the instatement of the present judicial system. Someone had attempted to kill a goddess. Not just ‘a’ goddess, but Béla, herself.
It was difficult to read, as this was a handwritten account by the Great Bard Geoffrey. But, enraged by the attempted assassination, the other goddesses and most of those present during the brief trial had demanded the woman’s death. She was executed mere hours after her attempt on the life of the Goddess of the Land.
And now, his beloved wife was being accused in the death of two goddesses, one of whom was Béla, again. The terrible feeling in his stomach as he read through various edicts was that his wife didn’t stand a very good chance of surviving the coming judgement.
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