Chapter Nineteen - Call my name and save me from the dark

“Mom?”

Lissi looked up, directly into my face. She grinned, then said it again. “Mom.”

“Let’s keep that at ‘Jane’, at least in public,” I suggested. “People will stare if they hear that.” It was astonishing how well I understood her intent through the bond. Without that, her calling me mom without warning would have tripped me up.

“Hey, Lissi,” Livia said from her other side, where she had held on to her just like me. She sounded a bit reluctant, unsure.

“Hi, Mommy,” Lissi said, looking at her. “Long time no see, sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Livia said. “Your father was right. I would have been a bad influence.”

“That was my ‘mother’s’ doing,” Lissi said, making air quotes around “mother”. “That hag hated it when I came back happy from visitation.”

“Like that day,” I said. “You certainly looked happy in that picture.”

“Oh, my phone. Yes, that was nice.” She eyed Livia hungrily; then her eyes stopped, and she grabbed her hand. “Is that?” she asked. “You’re taken? Bloody arse of Thor, fuck it.”

“Language, young lady,” I chided her half mocking. “You don’t want my fiancée’s ears to start bleeding, do you?”

“You two?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, that’s cool. Would it be weird to bang both my moms?”

“Yes, it would. That’s why you call us by our names. Or use ‘dame’ if you must,” I said. I wasn’t yet sure if I, or Livia, had any interest in doing so, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Something told me this may be the connecting factor between us four.

Alessandra was out of earshot, talking to Bill, so I asked, “How’s your character sheet doing? Many changes from becoming an undead?”

“Huh? Undead? That’s how I’m not in that troll’s belly? Gimme a sec.”

Her eyes lost focus, flickering from side to side, then she spoke. “Race is now Vampire (special), factions are criminal and monster, I gained a level somehow, I have five racial skills for eating people, and a whole slew of debuff conditions, daylight, direct sun, garlic, crosses, stakes, mirrors, peaches, roosters. Where do those last two come from? It says food does nothing for me at all, but I can eat it at least. I have a new skill for a bite attack, one for fucking, and a couple of nice available ones, like flight or turning into animals. Oh, and abilities. I’m mostly immune to bleeding damage, don’t need to breathe at all, have some minor ones for strength, speed, etc. And, yeah, shit, no surprise, I’m sterile. Shit, I wanted kids!”

“Better sterile than dead. Makes adopting easier, Lissi,” Livia said. I held back a grimace—that wasn’t an opinion I could agree with full-heartedly.

“Um, moms? Jane and Liv, I mean. Could you call me Geri? Lissi is how that hag calls me…” Geri asked.

“Of course. My legal name is Yoana; I know how that is.”

“That’s not a bad name. And way less generic than Jane. What’s wrong with it for you?”

“My parents could never remember if they had named me Yoana, Johanna, Joana, or Yona.” Or that I existed at all.

“Ouch!”

“Wasn’t the worst.” I shrugged. “And I knew some girls who would have been envious of me for being ignored if they knew. There’s worse shit parents can do, even without breaking the law.” I added the last one, thinking back to the one girl in our class I knew had suffered from that. We snitched to the teacher as a group once we learnt about it, which had put an end to it quickly and got her in foster care, but at that point, the damage had been long done.

“I guess so. I also guess you killed that troll?”

“We did. But not before it ate a good chunk of your leg,” I pointed to the half-eaten leg still lying on the bundle of cloth. It may have weirded her out, but she had a right to know.

“Huh. I wonder how I taste,” she mused. No, I would not suggest her to try, not even in jest. Even the small chance she’d do it was too risky for me. I had no interest in seeing that. Yuck!

“Please don’t,” Livia said. “It has troll spit all over it. If you really want to know, your healing should be good enough that we can cut a fresh slice off and fry it up at home.” The fuck, Livia?

“Um, no thanks, I’m fine,” Geri said meekly. “But you could let me stand up anyway. I like the touching, but I think I can stand on my own now.”

Livia and I pulled back, both noticing only now that we had held on to Geri the whole time. It felt so natural, where it would have felt creepy with any other stranger. But Geri wasn’t a stranger. She was bonded to us.

Geri stood up and stretched, then fumbled with her severely damaged clothing. “Damn, I liked that shirt,” she said, then she walked over to the others. “Hi, I’m Geri. And who are you? I mean you two; Bill I know. Let me guess, you’re Jane’s twin sister, aren’t you?”

🙚⚜🙘

A round of introductions later, we were ready to get back home. Both Samantha and Geri indicated they’d like to either stay or at least spend the evening with us, but Alessandra wanted to get into her own bed. Bill phoned Greg so we didn’t have to march through town in our state, and we met him at the gate Bill had forced open earlier.

To say that he was surprised to see Geri with us would be an understatement. To his credit, he limited his questions to, “Are you alright, Geraldine?” before loading us into his car. Alessandra went with Bill to the second one; he’d drive her home directly.

“If you keep picking up strays, we’ll need to get a bus,” he said a couple of minutes into the drive.

“Dad!” Geri complained like a little girl.

I chuckled. “I think we’re done, Greg, but thanks for the concern.” I tried to come up with a good way to say it but couldn’t think of any. “We four are a group from now on.”

He looked at me in the rear-view mirror for way longer than I liked a driver to do so. “Fate?” he finally asked, putting so much meaning in that one word. Everything we had leaked and not said before echoed in it.

“Fate,” I confirmed. Yes, she has powers, too. Yes, I would protect her with all I had. Yes, we were more than friends.

He said nothing, but he gave me a thumbs up.

“What’s that all about?” Geri asked. “Are you using a secret code?”

“Parent code,” Livia said in a low voice. She understood me.

“Veeery funny…” Geri said, trying to sound like an annoyed little girl. It was cute but not at all convincing. Or maybe it was, and I was just too close to her age to fall for it? Maybe it worked on older people to whom she didn’t look too far off from the fourteen-year-old persona she was trying to project? At some age, you had to become blind to a tiny 4-year age difference, didn’t you?

🙚⚜🙘

We arrived back in the underground garage of our home in no time and made our way to the gym shower again. This time, someone had already put up a rack with bathrobes in advance. Had Greg set that up while he waited? He certainly was bright enough to realise we might need them after this little trip, too.

Geri seemed to have no shyness at all. She dropped her clothes the moment she spotted the shower room, giving me a good look at her body. Her hair was a light golden blonde, braided low at her neck. It was her natural colour, too, as her pubes confirmed. Her breasts were small, nearly absent, giving her a boyish look from the right angle. Thinking back to the clothes she had been wearing—beige cargo pants and a yellow band shirt—and imagining how they must have looked before she had been ripped apart, I suspected she had selected them to look more like a teenage boy for some reason.

She also had not worn a bra. I have to admit, that made me a bit envious. In my human form, I needed that support lest I wanted the freely bouncing weight to stretch my skin in a most uncomfortable way. My thoughts were interrupted when Samantha started to undress me. “What?” I snapped out of it and noticed I was the only one still wearing clothes.

“Sorry, I was deep in thought,” I said and took over the undressing part. As soiled as my clothes were, it’d be unfair to let Samantha do that, sexy as it was. To get my mind off of that, I asked, “Geri, what do you do? I mean, when you’re not trying to feed the trolls.”

“Enjoying the short time between school and whatever I’ll do next,” she said. “My ‘mother’ had everything laid out for me, uni, courses, even organised a dorm, ignoring all my protests. Turned out she completely forgot I could ignore all that when I turned 18 last month.” She giggled. “Her loss.”

“Uni? What subject?” I asked.

“Art History. At the Courtauld in London, nonetheless. And that for me; I can’t tell a Vanngoh from a cave painting!”

“Then, what are your interests,” Livia asked.

“Dunno. Having fun and earning lots of money?” Those were not interests. Every person on this planet—or is it “on this server” now?—wants that.

“Ever thought about escort work?” Livia inquired.

“Escort? Like fucking men for the big bucks because you know which fork to use? Haven’t thought about it, but I’ll put it on my shortlist—”

I wanted to facepalm so hard…

“—it’s certainly more realistic than catburglar. Would be a good way to feed, too. Do you have any idea how much I need to eat per day?”

I wanted to facepalm so hard…this time about forgetting we just made her a creature that lived off of sex. I felt a tiny bit guilty. Was it rape when you changed someone’s nature to make them crave sex? If I was honest, I would have to say yes. There was no real difference between that and drugging or hypnotising someone aside from it actually working. Could I live with it, using the knowledge we had done it to save her life without turning her into a killing machine?

A splash of water brought me out of my thoughts. “Come in before you fall asleep,” Samantha teased. “Only clean girls get to sleep in the bed.”

I put my dark thoughts aside for now and joined the other three. The shower didn’t feel that oversized anymore.

🙚⚜🙘

This round under the water was quite tame. I say “quite” because we were past the point where any of us would pretend not to enjoy touching each other. Geri had no inhibitions at all, Livia had never had any, I had stopped giving a damn about propriety, and Samantha seemed to have accepted that wanting to have a piece of Livia meant being part of a group.

We retired upstairs afterwards and ordered pizza. Gamma had left a note that she was over at Alessandra’s, which was just as well. We were all tired and starving from draining our mana, especially Livia, who had done it twice. As if to compensate, I had healed up from being beaten to a pulp, which took a lot of energy, too. Geri? She didn’t say if she was hungry, but she enjoyed being able to eat pizza by the fistful without worrying about her waistline. She said so, I’m not projecting.

Without any further discussion, we piled up in a heap in the bed afterwards and went to sleep.