Chapter 20

Wolfgang stopped, frozen in place, his mind racing. Neither twin seemed to remember the teardrop ship, even though it had previously fascinated them and fired their imagination for the last several months.

“You know,” he ventured, his voice wavering with uncertainty, “the American spaceship – the one that left Earth and was orbiting out toward Mars?”

“What are you talking about?” Tara laughed. “The only spaceships are the ones that we retrofitted to travel from Bonn to the new space station. The Americans no longer have the technology to go into space, even if they try to convert the few ICBMs they haven’t used on each other. The only other attempt to leave Earth is that giant Ark the Chinese are building – and that thing doesn’t have a prayer of ever getting off the ground. The Japanese are working on something, but they’re not sharing.”

“Gods, she made you forget!” Wolfgang gasped, amazed that his long-dead witchy queen still had that much power.

“She?” Tia asked. “You mean that painted woman in your dream?”

“Yes,” Wolfgang told her. “The one who was here yesterday!”

The twins gazed at each other, thoughts and images flashing between them for a few seconds. “Really! A dragon, huh?” Tara smirked. Then she stared at Wolfgang and told him, “We didn’t see any newcomers yesterday.” Changing subjects again, she asked, “Do you remember any powers you had back when you were a dragon? You think you can manifest something here in this time period?”

“I think we’d need to lend him some of our witch fire to work with,” Tia suggested. “But if he really has the mind of a dragon, he might remember how to control the magic.”

“It’s possible,” Tara agreed, “but we should probably let him practice in a more secured area – like the roof of the school – so he doesn’t draw attention to us.”

“Or blow anything up,” Tia laughed.

“I’m right here,” Wolfgang told both of them. “I would like to be included in your decisions if you don’t mind – especially regarding me.”

“Sorry,” came from both girls. Tia sat up and hugged her Wolf while Tara came around and sat on his other side. The twins linked their minds together, surprising Wolfgang, who found himself in the middle and linked with up with both of them.

‘Now that we’re a single unit, we can more easily agree on what to do, ‘ the TTW mind (Tia, Tara and Wolfgang) decided.

Several things happened at once: the twins discovered that they’d been mind-wiped regarding an astounding teardrop-shaped spaceship and the memories of some strange woman who’d visited them earlier. ‘She obviously had something to do with altering our memories. Look! There’s a psychic command to keep us from thinking about our duplicates on that spaceship. I think she’s trying to protect them from us or something.’

The Wolfgang part of their mind suggested that the woman might be trying to protect her own time line. ‘She said we are from our own future and we don’t want to mess that up. We might simply vanish!’

‘Who said that?’ Then Wolfgang’s memory of his conversation with Ronnie appeared and the twins studied it closely. ‘We should ask Ronnie to join us, ‘ one of the twins or perhaps Wolfgang suggested. It was getting difficult to sort out who was thinking what.

Then Wolfgang found himself exploring his own memories of his existence as a dragon. It was actually the twins directing the group mind’s attention, but he found that he was interested in learning more as well, now that Tia had removed some of the grief from that time period.

Tia awoke to someone shaking her shoulder. When she opened her eyes she was surprised to realize she’d fallen asleep sitting up and leaning against Wolfgang, who was also dozing. Then her stomach informed her she was starving.

“Hey, Zombie,” Ronnie grinned down at her. “What’re you guys doing? You’re completely blocked and it took a lot of shaking to bring you back from wherever you were. Find something interesting, I hope?”

Tia shook her head, then nodded. “Yeah, interesting. More than that. You still remember the witch girl from that space ship?”

“Lisa? Sure. Why wouldn’t I?” Ronnie asked, her eyebrows crinkling into her forehead.

“She went into our minds and made us forget,” Tia informed her aunt. “Wonder why she didn’t make you forget?”

“I dunno,” Ronnie shrugged. “She made you forget? Forget what?”

“She put a command in our minds – me and Tara’s – to ‘not remember’ the teardrop ship,” Tia said, scrunching her eyebrows as she tried to concentrate. “It was pretty deep ... I still have to concentrate to visualize Wolfgang telling me about it. He showed me images, but I can’t recall what the images were. Good thing Wolfie remembered your conversation with him last night.”

“Wolfie?” Wolfie – I mean, Wolfgang – asked.

“Sorry,” Tia replied, grinning at his annoyed expression. “I think of you as my ‘Wolf’, but now that we’ve recovered your past memories, I realize I chose the wrong species. I’ll have to get used to thinking of you as my ‘Dragon’.”

“Dragon?” Ronnie asked, brightening up. “That sounds interesting.” So the twins filled her in on Wolfgang’s new memories and the true identity of that strange visitor from yesterday.

“That was obviously some pretty sloppy work,” Ronnie declared. “Causing you two to forget about her and leaving my mind intact. What was she thinking? That you two wouldn’t find out what she did?”

“Maybe she wanted us to know what she was capable of,” Tara suggested. “I’m actually pretty pissed she would do that to us, but from what you told Wolfi ... Wolfgang ... our memories have been trifled with before. We are from our own future? What’s that all about? Why can’t we remember?”

“Obviously there’s another command in there somewhere,” Ronnie tapped a finger on Tara’s temple, “telling you not to think about that.”

“Well, I’m thinking about it now,” Tara grumbled, “and it’s giving me a headache.”

“That’s how it works,” Tia interrupted, suddenly realizing, “I got a horrible headache when Wolf ... gang ... asked me about spaceships a while ago. That must have been the ‘counter-think’ command trying to enforce itself. And Wolfgang had a terrible emotional backlash when he started to remember his life as a dragon! Afterwards, he told me that some spider species had given him some weird hypnotic command to ‘Forget’!”

“And why did he start to remember again?” Ronnie asked, still sorting through all the new info in her mind.

“Because he saw the ‘queen-bitch’ again!” Tia chortled. “That woman – Lisa!”

“But how did he recognize her?” Ronnie wanted to know. “That had to be ... at least a few hundred lifetimes ago. Certainly she doesn’t look the same now as she did then, does she?”

“No, but I really couldn’t see her features under all that painted-on makeup,” Tia replied. “She had the same hair color, but her forehead seemed lower ... flatter. She was a different sub-species, I think.”

“The woman we saw yesterday didn’t look the same,” Wolfgang told them, “but later, I began to remember her, so it must have been one soul recognizing another, no matter what forms we inhabit now, and that triggered the command that I’d ‘remember when I saw her again’.”

“Well, that would certainly explain the occasional ‘love at first sight’ phenomenon people sometimes experience, I suppose,” Ronnie murmured almost to herself as she remembered the first time she had laid her eyes on Buck. “That could explain the instant hatred some people feel toward each other, too. They hated each other before, so they hate each other now, even though there’s no obvious reason for it.”

‘Like that horrible boyfriend Buck rescued me from!’

“I remember him,” Tia grimaced, thinking back to the first time she got shot.

“I fried him,” Tara immediately added. “Must have known that creep before, ‘cause I didn’t even have to think twice about what I did to him...”

“You didn’t do it because he shot me?” Tia asked, pretending to be upset.

“Sorry ... I couldn’t even feel you with all the stuff Aunt Ronnie was flooding the room with. My first thought was to stop him!”

“That still upsets you, doesn’t it?” Ronnie asked, her voice soft with concern for her niece.

“He’s the first person I ever deliberately killed,” Tara admitted, her voice trembling from years of suppressed emotion. “The only person, in fact.”

Ronnie hugged her niece and softly told her, “He would have killed all of us, you know.” She could feel Tara’s head nod against her shoulder, her soft hair tickling her neck and shoulders.

“Don’t you think I’ve gone over that a million times?” Tara replied, her voice muffled against Ronnie’s heavy sweater.

“Too bad somebody can’t come along and tell you to ‘forget’ that,” Tia murmured, wanting her own turn to comfort her twin, then smiled as she picked up Tara’s willingness to be ‘comforted’ by her aunt.

Aunt Veronica picked up on it, too, and began to stroke her fingers down Tara’s back. After another moment, Tara sighed, almost purring as she began to respond. It wasn’t like she hadn’t had sex with her aunt before...

When Tia awoke this time, there were three people on the bed with her, and she still hadn’t been fed! ‘Damn! I’m going to starve to death if people don’t stop fucking me, ‘ she realized. She sat up to discover her face had been in Wolfgang’s crotch, so she actually hadn’t been fucked this time, though the taste of sperm in her mouth didn’t do anything to suppress her appetite. She was still hungry.

Disgruntled, she started to slide off the bed, only to discover her twin’s face was between her legs. ‘Well, at least I got off!’ she chuckled to herself, her body letting her know it had been satisfied even though it was grumbling for food. Real food – not witch fire! Or sperm!

Tara complained sleepily as Tia slid one knee over her face, and Tia stood, facing the bed and looking at all the others. Ronnie’s head was still between Tara’s legs, and Wolfgang had obviously been eating Ronnie. “Huh! Daisy chain!” she chuckled. “Ever’body got ate!”

“If everybody got ate, why am I so hungry!” Tara grumbled, sliding up toward the headboard to extract Ronnie’s face from her crotch.

“I’m calorie-free!” Tia laughed. “A decidedly no-fat snack!”