~Chapter 16~

Carnal Love thought his mind must be playing tricks on him. Nestrelda again, taking him over and making him crazy. He'd never be rid of that bitch....He looked almost helplessly at Hawk, then saw his friend gawking too.

"There IS two of 'em!" Hawk said. "Well, whup me with a greenstick. I didn't know Murieta was twins."

Then I ain't going crazy, thought Love with a twinge of relief. Twins. Well, that explained it.

"He's a damn good swordsman," Hawk said with grudging admiration. "I'll say that much for the bastard."

"It's crazy," Love said. "Just plain goddamn son-of-a-bitchin' crazy. Where's the hell's that twin been all this time?"

"Beats the crap outa me. Kinda spooky, ain't it."

"So what do we do now?"

"You know what, Carnal," Hawk said after a silent moment, "I don't think they got Willy. I don't see him nowhere."

"They got him," Love insisted. "In that cave maybe. Tied up and gagged."

Hawk had a notion that kid would need gagging, all right. He half grinned, turning his head away so his friend couldn't see.

"If he's still alive, that is," Love said through clenched teeth.

"It don't look to me like there's anybody else around," Hawk said. "Just them and the women. Maybe we can go back and take 'em all by surprise. We won't need no hosses."

"I want 'em took alive," Love said. He felt slightly feverish, for some reason. "You tell them men of yours, you hear? I don't want no harm comin' to my boy. And this time I'm gonna get Murieta's ass good, and that double of his too. He's gonna think we was pettin' him yesterday."

The two men headed back the way they had come. They found some of the men shooting craps in the road, bored with the long wait, a couple of others napping against tree trunks.

"If you high-rollers can put away the bones for a few minutes," Hawk said sternly, "we're all goin' for a nice leetle stroll in the woods. Come on, Daggett, wake up, you don't look so purty with your tater trap gappin' open like that, your tonsils are liable to scare the birds away. Come on, y'all, let's git crackin'!"

Ahmed's sword flew up into the air as Alejandro finally disarmed him. Both men were covered in sweat by now.

"You are unbelievable," Ahmed told him, smiling with wonder and pride. "You must teach me your moves."

Alejandro actually blushed a little. "I can do that much, and do it gladly," he said. "But we must go to the hacienda soon. We should not stay here."

The women sat on the log watching them resume the sword fight, as Alejandro demonstrated the first position to his twin, then the second, and Ahmed caught on with amazing speed and grace.

"Aren't they sexy?" RoZ whispered to Elena.

"'Sexy'?" Elena looked at her new friend with raised eyebrows.

RoZita giggled, "I mean…ahem…they ARE VERY GOOD LOOKING and you want to…" She was about to say "jump them" but feared Elena would think her unladylike. She just giggled again.

"...and you may kiss one of them instantly?" Elena laughed also.

"Yeeeaaahhh! That's it!" They both laughed and squealed uproariously like two schoolgirls.

In the meantime, both men moved to the edge of the back of the wide and deep part of the stream. Ahmed stood dangerously near the water and Alejandro attacked him fast and faster. The Arab made a step backwards and noticed that the ground under his feet began to slip. With a quick move he grabbed Alejandro's arm and together they both fell in the stream! They laughed again and embraced each other. Then they climbed out to take off their boots and shirts, and dived in again to retrieve their swords.

"Do we want?" Elena asked RoZita.

"I want," RoZita said, thinking how delicious her Ahmed looked with wet hair. She smiled blissfully. How beautiful both men were, frolicking like otters in the water, with the waterfall pouring barrels upon barrels of sunlit diamonds into the cold ripples behind them. Ahmed was the better swimmer, she noted proudly. She wondered how he'd learned to swim in the desert.

The women took off their outer clothing and waded into the wide part of the stream, shrieking over how cold it was. RoZita felt a little self-conscious with the wet underwear clinging to her, leaving nothing to the imagination. She tried to stay totally submerged, thinking to herself that she was more the prim and proper Victorian girl than Elena. Elena looked like a mermaid with her long black hair floating out behind her and the rainbowed water droplets on her face. RoZ hoped she herself looked half as lovely, but had a feeling she just looked like a wet cocker spaniel.

They scrubbed at themselves with sand, since there was no soap to wash with. RoZita fretted about the lack of deodorant, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, and other things she was used to. And she wondered once more about her family. Were they missing her? Or did they even exist? What happened to the century she had been snatched away from? Were things going on there now? Or was this century the only reality? Could she possibly prevent the horrific events that had happened in the 20th century from taking place, and how? Was there some sort of purpose for her being here? What was to be her destiny now?

Suddenly there began a funny water fight between Alejandro and Elena. RoZ was ripped outside her thoughts and she joined in the "fight" with Elena against the men until the Zorros overwhelmed their "enemies" and tied them with their strong arms. Alejandro and Elena kissed each other instantly deep and passionately with lots of tongue playing. Elena buried her fingers in the wet curls of her man.

RoZita was suddenly taken over by Ahmed from behind. His arms twined around her waist and then she felt his hard body pressed against her back as he kissed the nape of her neck.

"I love you," he whispered.

Carnal Love was itching like a hound, and it was driving him crazy. All down the front, from lying on his stomach in poison ivy. His arms, chest, belly, privates, thighs, knees, all covered with a hellish rash. At this point he just about wanted to kill Lucas Hawk . . . who was right behind him now, with the others following, probably snickering over Love's discomfort. To make things worse, he could hear Nestrelda taunting him, "You gonna lose, papito. You never gonna see your boy again. Zorro is gonna kick your ass and you gonna go straight to hell...." He swore silently at her and scratched his lower belly violently.

"I can see something now," Hawk whispered as they crept up in sight of the waterfall. He lifted a pistol but Love reached out and pushed it down.

"I done told you ten million times, I want 'em took alive," he snarled, digging his fingernails into his left armpit in a way that drew a snigger out of one of the men. Love glared in his direction and the sound was instantly silenced. "No telling what they're liable to do to my boy in retaliation if anything happens to one of 'em…what do you see?"

"Well, I'll be a suck-egg hound," Hawk said, lowering his spyglass and rubbing his eyes a bit. "It IS a goddamn white camel. Jee jumpin' hoshaphat, wherethehell you reckon it come from?"

"I don't care if it come from the devil's asshole," Love growled. "You see anything else?"

He snatched Hawk's spyglass and peered through it. Yep, there was the damn camel all right, facing their way, as it nibbled some leaves. Love had half a notion to shoot the mangy beast. He moved the spyglass to see if anything human was about. Then he detected some motion behind the trees...by the waterfall.

"Somebody's there, by crackies," he said with a triumphant little smirk, then bent to scratch the insides of his thighs vigorously.

"I love you too," RoZita said as Ahmed's hands twined around her waist. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Alejandro and Elena farther out in the middle of the stream, splashing each other and laughing. Ahmed and RoZita shared a long, long kiss in the cold water, which did not feel very cold any more....

"Come with me," he said after a few minutes. "I want to show you something."

He looked very serious so she followed him out of the water, feeling self-conscious in her dripping, clinging underwear, even though he had seen all there was to see of her the night before.

Near the tent he found her kimono and helped her slip it on. Then he put on his own robe and led her into the cave where he had stored all the bags. He took one and lifted a bottle from it. A very plain, dark ceramic bottle with a tight stopper.

"Do you see this?" he said. "This is what brought me to you. It is the potion from the magician. There is almost half left. You understand?"

She put back a wet hair strand. "Why are you showing me?" she asked, with a twinge of apprehension.

"There is enough to send you back into your century," he said, coming over to sit by her. "The problem is, I do not know enough about magic to make it work exactly right. The old magician is such a powerful one, it is only to be expected that something should go wrong with his methods. I think perhaps it was the fact that my twin was here that pulled me into this century instead of yours. The question is, do you want to go back into your time? You would perhaps be twenty years older than you are now…not that it matters to me, but would it matter to you?"

"But you would be separated from your twin," she said softly. "Would that not be unbearable for you?"

"It would be very hard," he admitted, "but you are more important to me now. I took you away from your world without your consent, so it is only right that I should bring you back to it. I want you to be happy, and would you be so separated from your world, cut off from your family and friends, from everything you have ever known? Could you possibly be happy here with me, knowing?"

"That's such a hard decision," she said, a hard knot forming in her throat. He went to her and put his arms around her.

"I could go with you," he said. "Then, at least we could be together."

She was silent for a long moment, except for her sniffling. He stroked back her wet hair.

"I can't be apart from you," she said with her voice trembling, "and I also can't tear you away from the only real family you have now. I have my memories of my family to sustain me, but do you have happy memories? On the other hand, they must be wondering where I am, what happened to me. It must be horrible for them."

"The people here need Zorro," Ahmed said. "So I could not think of asking him to come with us. Yes, these are hard decisions, almost impossible. I will come with you then. It is the best thing. Perhaps your family can be my family too, they must be wonderful…and about Alejandro..." he drew a deep breath, trying to control his voice, then said, "I knew him for this short time. The memory will sustain me. We will never be out of each other's thoughts. And perhaps someday we will be reunited. Miracles have happened already, they can happen again, yes? We have that hope."

"We need not leave right away," she said. "We can stay a little while longer. Just for a day or two, at least." She wiped a tear away.

"I do not know how much longer the magic will last," he said. He dabbed at her face with the sleeve of his robe. "Surely it is not indefinite. So it would best to wait for not more than three days."

"Then we'll stay a little longer," she said. "I guess I really owe it to my family to go back to them. If there were some way of letting them know where I was, then staying here wouldn't be quite such a big deal. Well, of course it WOULD be, but I could stand it. But I can't stand thinking of them agonizing over my disappearance. I have to go back."

"That is the right decision for you, I think," he said. "And I shall go with you."

"My parents will adore you," she said smiling through the tears. Then she wondered what they would think about his religion. They were strict Baptists. What would they think about her taking up with a man of the Moslem faith? She guessed they'd have to worry about that when the time came...

They made love for a while in the cave. Later they dressed and ate some of the fruit from the food supply bag that hung near the underground stream that ran through the cave.

And outside, Carnal Love's men were skulking through the forest like panthers...

Although Alejandro's whole body ached after the fight with Ahmed, he felt powerfully aroused as he looked at his black-haired "mermaid" and played with her in the water. Her laughter and her hard nipples he saw through the thin wet material of her underwear made him totally crazy. He was sooo addicted to her!

He pulled her close to his own body to feel her wet breasts pressed against him. The both breathed heavily and Elena twined her arms around his neck.

"My dearest, you are sooo beautiful," he whispered. They looked deep in each other's eyes for a long moment, then Alejandro took her face in his hands and began tenderly to kiss the water drops away from it. Elena closed her eyes and enjoyed those soft touches of his lips and tongue. Then she did the same and touched his wet face with her warm mouth. He sighed deeply and their lips met in a kiss full of hot desire. She felt his hardness against her belly and pressed herself more closely against him as she felt his hands caressing her behind under the water and they moved slowly between her thighs to a certain part that only HE knew. She shuddered in anticipation for that magical feeling that would overwhelm her soon.

She rubbed his iron hardness through his pants with her fingers. Fast and faster. Hard and harder. Still kissing, they swallowed each other's moaning as they came together to a deep strong climax.

Afterward they helped each other dress, wondering where Ahmed and RoZita had gotten off to. Alejandro helped Elena unbraid and comb out her wet hair, then said, "We must leave here soon. We will go to the hacienda."

"Will we just keep running away from them?" she said.

"No. I will find him myself. This will be no easy thing for me, since he is a father also. But he will never leave us alone otherwise. Being evil, he will stop at nothing to get at me, even if it means harming you and our child, or my brother and his lady. And I would never let any harm come to any of you. I will take you to the hacienda where you can be safe, then I will find him myself and dispatch him as soon as possible."

Ahmed and RoZita came from the cave hand in hand. They did not look happy, Elena noted with some apprehension. In fact, they looked sad.

"Come to the cave with us," Ahmed said. "We have something to tell you. And we must be where we can talk safely."

Carnal Love wondered if you had to be born stupid to be enlisted in the Cavalry, or if you just got that way from being in it after a while. He doubted if any of these morons of Hawk's could find their butts with both hands and a map. You just about had to show them which way was right, which way was left, which way was up, damn near. When Hawk told them to surround the cave, they just looked at each other with blank stares and then at him like he was talking through his ears while dancin' the hornpipe buck nekkid. Love reckoned they'd left their brains in their saddlebags.

And he had a feeling he didn't have much more sense than they did, to lay in poison ivy when he knew damn well what it looked like and everything. The front of his shirt was damp from where his rash had leaked on it from being scratched. Ugh.

Hawk said, "Damn it, Carnal, this business of takin' 'em alive just ain't gonna work. What happens if they got guns too?"

"You trap 'em. How hard can that be? They lured and trapped Scourge's men. Don't know how, but they had to of done it. If only I hadn't of posted that idiot Cochino as lookout. I figgered the weed-head was too stupid to be any use elsewhere, and he'd shoot at anything that moved. But somehow they managed to get past him. Ain't you got any tricks up them sleeves of yours, Lieutenant?"

"You know," Hawk said thoughtfully, "they used to say of the first Zorro, all you have to do to bring him is to mistreat a peasant and there he'd be. Reckon that 'ud work with Zorro the Second?"

"So what do we do, find us a peasant and mistreat him, and then Ol' Foxy would come a runnin'?"

"Shouldn't be too hard to do, should it? It's a simple matter of catchin' some Mexican geezer with his frijoles tellin' on him, grabbin' a corncob with one hand and his britches with the other, or some fat little granny weavin' a blanket on her back porch, or a little barefoot muchachito makin' mud tortillas in the yard. Hey -- " he called out to his men, "you knuckleheads listen up. I got a little assignment for ya!"

"You…are not…leaving us?" Alejandro said in stricken tones.

"Not until we finish what we were sent to do," Ahmed said, as stricken as his twin and Elena, who stared at RoZita in dismay and sorrow. RoZ looked down at her hands. "We will help you destroy this enemy who is menacing you. I wish we could stay, myself. But I must take RoZita back to her time. It is not right to keep her with us when she has people there who have no idea what has happened to her."

"But that century has not happened," Elena protested, reaching out to touch RoZ's damp hair. "Her people do not exist. There is only...now. This is so strange...what is time? Are all events taking place even as we speak? Past, present and future?"

"It is a mystery to me also," Ahmed admitted. "But--" He halted as he heard something outside the cave. It was a horse's whinny. Alejandro sprang up. "Something is wrong. Tornado senses it. Perhaps they are out there?"

"Get the weapons," Ahmed went for the rifle he had taken from Cochino. Alejandro loaded his pistols, as did Elena.

"What should I do?" RoZita said. Her heart knocked as though it would fight its way out of her chest.

"Here," Elena handed her one of her pistols. "You know how to use it now."

RoZita too the weapon and made up her mind to shoot first and ask questions later, as they said on TV. She was a warrior princess, after all. She would defend everyone to the death...If only her hands would stop shaking so badly.

Alejandro climbed one of the ropes to the skylight and peered out.

"I can see some movement," he said. "Out in the forest. It appears to be some men." He slid down the rope in a spiraling motion. "I think perhaps they saw us go into the cave, and they will surround us. Perhaps come in through the skylight."

"We will be ready for them," Elena said, cradling the barrel of her pistol in her hand, which was shaking also. Ahmed cocked the rifle and raised it to his shoulder as if trying to remind himself of how to use it. Alejandro slid his sword into his belt.

And after a long moment, RoZita said, "I have an idea."