Mike & Karen Ch. 24

"Sorry, Kar," she said rather meekly as she came back into the room, shivering since she was still wet from her own shower several minutes earlier. "Nothing in the locker at the moment."

The older sister sighed and shook her head. "Fine, I'll just use you as a shammy. Get in here, you minx."

Grateful for the warmth of the water (not to mention her sister's glorious body), Alexa stepped in next to Karen under the shower, took hold of her sister by the waist and pressed into her. Karen stood still and waited while Alexa began squirming her breasts against her sister's, massaging the bodywash into them. She closed her eyes, delighting in the sensation.

"Alli?" she heard Karen say. "Alli."

"'m just making sure your boobs are properly washed, Kar," the younger girl sighed, her eyes still closed in reverie.

"My boobs were 'properly washed' three minutes ago; now you're just on vacation," Karen said flatly, her hands on her hips.

Holy shit, three minutes?!

She reluctantly began using her hands as well, trying to not fondle her sister as she firmly ran her palms around the supple, slippery skin. Having to stop massaging those glorious butt cheeks almost made her weep. She stood behind Karen and held her by the waist, bending her knees and slowly sliding up and down her body. Karen didn't make a sound.

"Don't forget the front," she said finally.

Alexa shivered and moved around to face her sister, once again holding her by the waist and moving up and down her body, slithering against her as firmly as she dared. Thank God she was already drenched in water, because her pussy was very wet.

"Okay, I think that's enough," Karen said finally, pulling her sister up and into a close hug, their lush bodies squashing together. She smiled gently at Alexa and kissed her. The younger girl almost whimpered as she returned the kiss. She loved her sister so much.

"Now," Karen said softly, her forehead pressed against her sister's. "Go find a towel or two while I finish up."

Alexa nodded and hurried off, heedless of any nudity she might inflict on anyone as she went by them. The blonde girl was gone, and Karen continued rinsing herself off. She was well aware that she would need a second shower upstairs, to get rid of the greasy film this bodywash would leave on her, but at least she didn't smell like a Soviet experimental weapons lab anymore.

There was a loud clanging in the pipes around her that shook the floor. At that moment, the lights shut off completely and the water turned ice-cold. Karen yelped in shock, slipping as she turned around and crashing down on her back.

Too stunned to move, the Mistress of Blackwell Manor stared up into the darkness, icy water inundating her.

What an excellent way to kick the day off... she thought darkly as her nipples froze.

***

Back upstairs, finally dry and warm again...

A small group was gathered around Mike and Karen as they examined the something on the table in the main library. Michael had brought the item up from one of the rooms in sub-basement one and was now discussing its transfer to the ROM with his wife. Of the onlookers, Alex seemed to be the only one who wasn't completely spellbound.

"Wow, that looks really old," Valentina said, staring at the jewellery that sat on the silk swathe.

Karen nodded. "It was found by one of my ancestors who was with Sir Leonard Woolley in the royal tombs of Ur, back in the early Twenties. It's been in the trust of my family ever since."

Alexa made a face. "Shouldn't it go back to the people?"

Mike smirked. "We've been over this, Alli. There are no Sumerians, no Babylonians, and no Akkadians. And even if we did give it back, there's no way in Hell that Baghdad could keep it safe or from being looted to begin with. Not right now. One day, when Iraq is safe again, we will happily give it to them. Until then, it's safe with us. We loan it to academic institutions and people learn about an ancient culture."

"How old is it?" Andrea asked, looking down at the gold and red necklace. On either side of it sat a matching earring. The gold parts were carved and had lovely images, while the red gems were translucent and beautifully shaped, spaced along its length. "And what's it made of?"

Alex grinned; he'd always liked this particular piece. He'd be sorry to see it go forever one day. "It's gold and carnelian; they found it in the tomb of Sargon, the first king of the Akkadian empire."

"I think I remember that name my Bible lessons at Sunday School," Valentina said. "Is that him?"

"Same name, but this dude is a lot earlier," Alex said. "The Sargon you're thinking of was an Assyrian king, around seven hundred B.C., gave the Israelites a lot of grief. The guy who wore this necklace was alive almost eighteen centuries before that. Sargon translates from 'Sarru-ken' and means 'The King Is Legitimate' in Akkadian."

"So this was worn by a king?" Andrea murmured as she looked at the ancient necklace.

Just then, Jeanie breezed into the room. "Whatcha all lookin' at? Oh, hey, cool. I made stuff that looked like that out of Play-Doh, plastic beads, and gold paint when I was in kindergarten. Who made it? Can I make one too?"

Alex squeezed his eyes shut, and Mike looked at the ceiling while Alexa shook her head. Karen gave Jeanie a deadpan stare and then pointed back at the door of the library. Without another word, the brunette hung her head, turned, and walked back out dejectedly.

"I expected nothing and I'm still disappointed," Karen muttered, turning her attention back to the priceless artifact on the table. "Listen up. A courier from the museum will be arriving at some point to take this case, so all of you be mindful of a visitor. It would be a brief visit, since they're just here for the jewelry, but keep an eye and ear out."

She closed the aniline leather attaché case and locked it before dismissing everyone to go about their day. Karen then walked out of the library, hand-in-hand with her husband.

***

An hour later, on the third floor...

Alex was walking down the hallway, having just finished his breakfast in the small dining room. It was a somewhat scattered morning, what with one thing and another. Normally his family ate together, but this was one of those rare days when schedules weren't quite syncing up. Dad was on his way to the university before too long, while his mom was letting a substitute teacher take over her classes for the day due to other concerns.

Alexa, his aunt and wife, was doing a good job of staying out of the way since this morning's incident, and Freja and Jeanie were nowhere to be seen. He doubted they'd gone far, though. This was a big estate, with plenty of places to hide.

He'd awakened alone in bed, stirred out of sleep by an explosion at the front of the property. He concluded quickly that only Freja could be responsible, and wherever that Roskilde lunatic was, Jeanie and his wife were bound to be also. At least he was in the clear.

He felt decidedly lazy today, and was thinking about casually researching new Linear A discoveries, and perhaps-

On the small but sturdy pedestal against the wall, the phone rang.

It was an old, antique style of phone, the candlestick variety. His mother had told him this particular unit was a Stromberg-Carlson and dated back to 1915. At over a century, it was the oldest one in the house, and there were several.

This unit amused Alex, since it had an old-timey ring like he heard in old cartoons or TV shows, and of course, there was no visual display, so you got a surprise every time you picked up.

Which Alex obligingly did now, on the third ring, picking up the unit and putting the hearing piece up to his ear.

"House of Lords, God speaking..." he announced cheerfully.

Whoever was on the other end, what they were saying gave him pause. He listened for some seconds before nodding and quietly saying "One second, please..."

Alex put the earpiece down, covered the microphone end with one hand, and then reached up to bip the button of the intercom unit on the wall above the phone. He used the button that allowed him to be heard through the whole house.

"Uh, mom?" he said rather hesitantly. "It's the bishop on the phone. He, uh... he wants to speak with you."

Mere seconds passed before he heard the clatter of heels echoing through the halls, moving very fast. It never ceased to astound him how his mother and Alexa could sprint in high heels when called upon. He couldn't even look at high heels without feeling like his ankles were going to break.

Karen rounded a corner and sped down the hall toward him. She was already in a professional business suit, but the chic look was undone by the brittle panic evident in her normally confident golden eyes. He held out the two units of the phone as his mother skidded by, her heels hissing on the Carrara marble floor while she grabbed the phone out of his hands.

"Hello? Your Excellency," she began, looking at the wall and trying to control her breathing, her eyes wide. The way Alex had spoken over the comm indicated that something had gone very wrong. "I... yes, that was Alex..."

Karen winced and held her face away from the earpiece. Alex could hear the bishop talking very loudly on the other end. Her eyes snapped open, and she looked directly at him. Alex stayed rooted to the spot, not budging. His mother was a T-Rex when she was angry, and maybe her vision was based on movement.

If he stayed perfectly still, hopefully she couldn't see him.

"Yes, your Excellency..." she said, putting the receiver back against her ear now that the bishop seemed to be done shouting. "Yes, he does come across as a bit of a heretic on occasion now and then, doesn't he? I know, your Excellency, quite blasphemous..."

Her golden eyes narrowed to evil slits as she looked at him. Alex willed himself to not piss on his kimono-robe.

"Yes, your Excellency, please excuse my son, he suffered a terrible blow to the head," Karen continued, but still holding her child in a death grip with her eyes. "When did that happen? Later this afternoon, I believe."

He felt himself sweating.

"By all means, you can speak with him about the folly of blasphemy upon your arrival, your Excellency," Karen said calmly, nodding as she listened. "No, it probably wouldn't do Alli any harm to receive the lecture on the subject either."

She listened again for several seconds.

"No, my husband is stuck teaching today on campus, your Excellency, a subject only he can navigate," she said, turning away from him and facing the pedestal the phone had been sitting on. The conversation with the bishop seemed to be winding down. His mother, however, was just winding up. "It will be just you, Alex, Alli, and myself... yes, without Michael we can use a smaller room, maybe the Bishop Hooper Study. Yes, I know you like that room. Yes. Do you want me to have our chauffeuse Glenda come and pick you up? No? Okay, we will just see you here then at four, sharp. Yes, the Lord be with you as well, your Excellency. Goodbye."

Karen slowly hung the earpiece on the phone's hook and put the unit down on the pedestal. Alex still didn't move. She turned toward him, her eyes closed. The hallway was absolutely silent.

When they finally opened, her golden-amber eyes were ablaze. She began walking toward her son, her voice initially quiet, but gaining volume and force with each step she took.

"Alexander Orion Dayraven DeBourne..." she said, forcing him to back up as she moved toward him, her body stiffening. "Do you have any idea what you have done?"

"I... I... I..." Alex stuttered as he kept stumbling backward, trying not to let her out of his sight.

A door between them opened and Valentina started to come out, but when she saw Alex backing up hastily, followed by Karen storming toward her son with murder in her eyes, the maid squeaked and shut herself back in the room, the sound of the lock clicking.

"Calling you a halfwit would be a disservice to people missing fifty percent of their brain!" Karen said angrily, now in his face and almost moving him backward with her own body. He might have had nearly forty-five kilos of body and muscle mass on his mother, but right now, that didn't matter. Alex was terrified. Forget pissing himself, he was just hoping he didn't faint.

He slammed up against the large window and sill at the end of the hallway, his mother still leaning into him, her blazing eyes giving him a headache. "Your father and I have been working for months on the bishop and the more reasonable elders, taking it slowly, planning everything, to make sure they would support you and Alli getting married in the church."

He swallowed.

"Now," she breathed, almost snorting like a bull again. "Now, we'll be lucky if we can get you two married in a Turkish prison. To each other. At this rate, you'll be fortunate to not end up with a very hairy husband named Serhan."

"I... I didn't know it was the bishop!" Alex said hastily, sweat streaming down his forehead. "I forgot that there was no Caller ID on the antique-"

"Alex, that doesn't even qualify as a lie, that was just noise leaking out of your face," Karen snapped, glowering at him. "It took you a mere five words to undo nearly seven months of careful effort your father and I have put into making what could have been a Hellish life for you and Alli as easy as possible."

The thought chilled him. "I'm... I'm sorry, mom."

Karen seemed to soften somewhat, and she leaned back to a more upright position, but he still remained bent backward. It might be a trap, after all.

"I believe you," she sighed, looking at her son as if studying him. "The porraceous tinge to your face gives it away."

She held up a finger, her eyes hardening. "But that doesn't mean you're off the hook for your imbecilic stunt, young man," she said, her voice taking on the serious tone again. "And with that in mind, I think it is our church elder who should decide how you are to be punished."

"No mom, please," Alex said, going from green to pale. "Gouge my eyes out, make me listen to country music, or rip my thorax open and devour my spore pods, but please don't let dad decide my punishment, it's always so horrible and weird! Banish me to Belgium!"

"Forget it, short pants," Karen said, having made up her mind. "You do the crime, you do the time." She bipped a button on her smartwatch and lifted it close to her mouth to speak.

"How might I serve my queen?" came the deep, powerful voice from the watch.

A sense of calm and warmth flooded through her as she heard her husband's voice, and she had to put real effort into not smiling dreamily after what she'd just been through. "Hello, my dearest. Would you be so kind as to join me at west end of the hallway? Alex will be here too, unless he plans to escape by jumping out the window and plummeting three storeys to his doom."

She ended the call and them gave her son an evil smile.

Dear God in Heaven, Alex thought, sweating bullets. What had he done?

***

Five minutes later...

Alex was still standing in place, pressed back against the window, not daring to move. Towering over him was his father, his huge arms folded behind his massive back as he gazed down at his son, clearly unimpressed with what he'd heard. His dad reminded him of Darkseid when he was not happy.

The Justice League: War version of Darkseid.

Karen, on the other hand, was almost hiding behind her husband's vast bulk and peeking around to smirk evilly at her son, her eyes glinting with a 'You have fucked up now' expression. She was letting the lord of the manor handle this one. He was much better at fitting punishments than she was. Hers were always so... visceral.

"So, you've decided that you don't want to be married to Alli and thought it'd be fun to undo all your mother's hard work by trolling the bishop, is that it?" Mike asked in his booming voice, making the whole fiasco sound so very absurd, which he had a unique way of doing. Even Karen couldn't stand it.

Alex screwed his face up, wanting to answer, to say 'You know that's not it, dad!', but there wasn't really a point. The question was posited simply to point out to Alex what a boneheaded thing he'd done. He knew the bishop was visiting, he knew the bishop hated using or calling to cellphones, and he especially knew that the bishop's sense of humour was rivalled in its whimsy only by the Black Plague.

Of course the bishop was going to call on the day of the interview, so naturally, Alex had chosen heresy as his preferred form of greeting on a phone with no Caller ID. Because why wouldn't he?

In the end, Alex just sighed and sagged his shoulders. "Sorry, dad. Really. Go on, lay it on me."

Mike looked over and down at his wife, and she seemed to see what he had in mind. She smiled evilly and nodded.

"This way, Cyrano," Mike announced, turning and walking down the hallway. He was followed by Alex, while Karen took up the rear, making sure that their son didn't try to make a break for it. Mike took them on a trek the length of the manor, to the east wing, and then proceeded to take the maintenance stairs down to one of the sub-basements.

This doesn't bode well... Alex thought, feeling a cold sweat on his neck.

The lowest sub-basement. There was pretty much no difference between it and the ones above, aside from the fact that this was almost exclusively storage space, and where heavy freight came in way back in the day. The tunnels that reached beyond the back of the property and used to have rails for shipping coal to the furnaces down here now allowed trucks to deliver cargo without disturbing inhabitants above. It was very well planned out just over a hundred years ago, with adaptations to technology methods in mind. The Blackwells had always been a forward-thinking family.

So if his dad had brought him down here, it couldn't be good.

Alex had only been down here around three times since they moved in, and he'd rarely been down here before that over the years when they came to visit his grandfather. There wasn't much call for a kid to be roaming these spaces in any event.

They stopped in front of an antique wooden door, and Mike took out the set of comically bulky iron keys they all carried and slotted one into the giant lock. With a twist, it clanked open and he pushed the batten and ledge-style door open and led his family inside. He flipped on a light switch and illuminated what lay within.

Alex was looking at lots of cardboard boxes, taped up tightly and lined along the walls.

"I'll put a big, sturdy desk for you there," Mike said, pointing at an expanse of wall currently blocked by boxes. "I'll buy you a new desktop, very heavy on graphics software."

Alex swallowed. He seemed to remember these endless boxes in storage at the house in Kleinburg, but he'd never seen what was inside. "Why? Wh-what am I doing?"

"This, my only child," Karen said, taking over and walking forward to gesture around her. "is many decades of pictures and old homemade movies."

Alex stared at her.

"Intimate pictures and movies, not meant for consumption by the general public," she added.

Oh, shit...

"I was planning on having all our old pictures and videos converted to modern storage methods, as well as being enhanced digitally for our viewing pleasure," Mike explained, his hands on his hips as he looked at the boxes around the room. "I wanted it ready for our anniversary, but it's understandably difficult to find any cyber-guru we could trust with such sensitive material."

He turned his head to look directly at his son. "But since you have demonstrated such a kamikaze and reckless spirit, I thought I might make use of it and put you to work."