It's Halloween night, six years after another Halloween went bad for three boys who didn't realize mischief carried a life sentence in skirts. Now Stark's in town, seeing if she needs to pick up the pieces and lay down some justice. But the next generation just might be a few steps ahead of her this time. Maybe ... just maybe ... she can take the night off.

Stark sat in the coffee house, nursing a grande decaf and thinking ugly thoughts about what some parents do to their kids. In the year since she started her crusade against those who would feminize innocent men and boys for their own amusement, she'd seen a lot of evil. Heck, she thought sourly, I even caused some of it, with some of the things I did in return. She didn’t want to think about the kind of monster her own deeds were turning her into, because that monster was the only thing that kept her own demons at bay. She needed her monster to keep from losing who she was -- to keep the programming from turning her into the submissive slut her dead tormentors wanted her to be, back when she was at their mercy.

Back before she killed them all.

The tabloid story Chesser and the research team dug up was pretty old, about three boys caught at the beginning of a mischief spree on Halloween night. Six years to the day, Stark thought, gazing around at the Halloween decorations on the walls of the coffee shop. As a punishment for the things they never actually got around to doing, they were forced to dress up as little girls and made to go trick-or-treating that night. According to follow-up investigations, the boys had been girls ever since -- their records changed, their former lives destroyed.

They'd be sixteen now, give or take, Jo mused, thinking of everything that must have been done to them since then. The fire inside her flared. According to the article, the boys didn't even do much damage in the first place. They were stopped practically before they started.

Stark stared down into her coffee. The parents just wanted to play some sick game with the lives of their children, and then decided to let it go on and on and on. Cruel and hateful and ... She shook her head angrily and forced her rage back. Once she stopped trembling, Jo took a sip of her coffee and thought some more. But if I go after the parents the way I want to, it's going to hurt the kids even more. They'll wind up in foster care, or worse. After what's been done to them already, is that any better?

Stark had used the Internet to contact the leader of the three boys mentioned in the article and arrange a meeting at a local java joint. She'd explained what she wanted in her e-mail, but the tone of Paula's reply seemed to suggest that the idea of Stark taking revenge for them was amusing somehow. She was still trying to puzzle out what that meant when the bell over the door rang. Stark half-turned in her seat, and froze.

"Paula?" The question just slipped out, but the girl smiled and nodded and cat walked across the room. Every male eye in the place was glued to her undulating hips, and her blonde hair tumbled down her back nearly to her waist in a flurry of large curls, swaying with every step. Her face was innocence personified, except for the dark gothic make-up that framed her blue eyes and the bright red lips that glistened in the muted overheads.

Paula slid into the booth across from her and crossed her legs at the knee. She was dressed head to foot in soft black leather. A tight leather corset put her well-rounded chest on display. She wore long opera gloves with the fingers cut out, showing her inch-long nails, polished a shining black. Her painted-on leggings hugged every curve so tightly, Stark knew she was wearing a thong underneath ... and nothing else. Her boots rose almost to her knees, with four-inch heels, and her backpack purse was big enough to be practical but small enough not to get in the way.

"Hello, Ms. Stark," she said, her voice a well-modulated contralto. "You look surprised."

"That's because I am." Stark raised her cup and looked over the rim. "And please, call me Jo. Actually, you're not quite what I expected. When the story of that Halloween years ago fell onto my desk, I thought you'd probably been put through the whole 'forced fem' thing pretty hard for a long, long time. In fact, I figured you'd show up tonight looking like something out of a fifties sitcom."

Paula laughed, a totally female sound that made the other patrons look over briefly before going back to their papers or laptops. She shook her head. "Those days are long gone, Jo. At first, when the 'rents thought they had to reinforce the whole girly thing every minute of every day, I got so sick of pink that I almost threw up every time I saw a bottle of Pepto Bismol! And the frillies, and the dolls, and the endless emotional bullshit." Paula sighed. "It made me angry, and sad ... but mostly it was annoying and frustrating as hell. The one thing I never wanted to be was a girl, and there I was in a box, being force fed femininity. But I was a lot younger then -- we all were -- and even though it took 'em a while, eventually the folks thought we were beaten and ... relaxed a little."

Stark laughed. "With you in that outfit, I'd say they relaxed a lot!"

"Oh, come on! It's Halloween! Although I must admit, Mom'd freak if she saw me in leathers. Oh, just a sec!" Paula waved, and one of the counter staff came over. She smiled up at him and lowered her eyelids slightly. "Hey, Bobby," she purred, touching him on the arm and watching him blush all over. "Bring me a triple espresso and another grande for my friend, k?" He nodded and nearly tripped over himself heading back to the bar. Paula shot Jo a look and smiled. "He's cute, but soooo shy. Still, if he ever asked, I'd go out with him in a heartbeat. Not that he will, though. I scare him to death!" She heaved a small sigh and watched him walk away. "Nice ass, though, don't ya think?"

Stark's eyes narrowed, and she gave Paula a long look. "They thought you were beaten?"

Paula stared right back at her, slightly indignant. "Hey! I may have been forced into clothes other girls my age wouldn't wear on a bet, but clothes don't make the man. OR the girl. I was ten years old then, and my options were limited. Joan and Allie, too. We had to go along, at least until we could figure out what our play was going to be."

"Your ... play?" A slow realization made Stark smile, and Paula could almost see a hard light flare behind her eyes.

"Oh, yeah," she said, smiling back. "It took a while to come up with something, but we had time. They sent us back to school like this -- had someone on the inside to change all our records, even our birth certificates. But they couldn't keep an eye on us all the time, even at school, so we got together and decided we'd let them think they won. It wasn't easy at first, but the punishment was so totally extreme, no one dared tease us at school. The guys were scared to death their 'rents would get the same idea if they started acting up, and the girls were royally pissed off at our folks for treating us this way. They welcomed us with open arms." Paula grinned.

Bobby took that moment to deliver the coffees, and Paula gave his arm a squeeze as a thank-you before turning back to Stark. She raised her cup in a toast.

"To friends, old and new!" Stark's lip twisted slightly, and she raised her own cup in response. After a shared sip, Paula continued.

"The girls helped us adapt, took us in and made us part of the gang. Helped us fit in, and helped us get over the worst of the early days." Paula looked down, and a small shiver ran through her shoulders. "It was pretty bad for a while there, for all of us. To have your whole life ripped apart because somebody else wants it that way?" Jo's eyes flashed, and Paula stopped, wondering if she had hit a nerve. "Not to mention that the people who are supposed to love you, watch out for you and keep you safe decide to remake you. That was harsh." She shook her head. "It took us all a long time to get past being betrayed, but eventually, we realized we needed to pick and choose who we trusted, and not count on genetics to do it for us. In the end, we just trusted each other. It was enough."

Her eyes turned inward, and Stark stayed quiet.

"We three became the best students in school, with straight A averages. When your only alternative is playing with dolls or practicing with make-up, you learn how to make your homework last, believe me. But that wasn't the only reason we studied. We knew from the minute they caught us that we'd been stupid, and they'd outsmarted us way too easily. So if we wanted to come out on top, we needed to get a whole lot smarter -- without the 'rents knowing about the things we REALLY wanted to get smart about."

"The first rule of strategy is 'know your enemy,' right? So we tried to learn everything we could about our folks. What they liked and disliked, where they worked. How they made their money. It was a long and incredibly boring exercise. Heck, it took us years to get what we needed. But we had to know, and we had to know without them knowing we knew. I kept all my notes in a little pink diary -- not the one I left under my mattress for the 'rents to find, all full of puppies and crushes and junk, but a second one hidden under the floorboards in the corner of my closet. At lunch, we shared what we had found, looking for common threads, and things we could take advantage of. But we still had so much left to learn when time ran out on us, the hard way."

"Two years after that awful Halloween, school closed for winter break. We went back to our houses and had dinner that night, but the food was drugged. We all woke up three weeks later, strapped down in hospital beds." Paula's mouth moved, like she was tasting something awful. "They'd 'fixed' us in our sleep. Flew us all down to a clinic in Mexico and paid extra to have everything done, quickly and quietly. That was our Christmas present that year. Vaginas and hormone implants." She shuddered again and took a sip of her espresso. "The year after that, we started getting the curves, the mood swings ..." Paula smiled ruefully. "When my voice finally changed, it got higher."

"When we went back home, everything went back to normal ... for the 'rents, anyway. For the three of us, it was another dark time. Before that, we all thought there was time, you know? If we could hang on long enough, play the game, we could get free in the end. But what they did in Mexico changed everything. Joan came close to committing suicide, but we kept her safe and kept the folks in the dark. After a while, we all faced the truth. For better or worse, we were what they made us. But it did make us work harder. Payback became much more important to all of us."

"By the following summer, we had a lot of sweet stuff. We had checking and savings account numbers, credit card statements, mortgage info and investment portfolios. We knew how much money the folks had, where they hid it, and how they got at it. All the while, we played the girl game. You know, short skirts and lingerie, make-up and make-overs, bikinis and ... and boyfriends." Jo gave her a sharp look, and Paula shrugged. "Like I said, by then we pretty much accepted what we were. Puberty hit hard, and there were enough hormones in those implants to give me these in record time." She waved at her chest. "I was a horny teenaged boy trapped in a hot teenaged girl body -- I was being chased by everything with a cock, and the girl in me wanted it more than the boy did." Just the same, her voice got very small. "And enjoyed it just as much."

Stark said nothing, and the teenager shrugged again and went on. "Anyway, we had all this information, but no way to do anything with it. We had the keys to their bank accounts, but no way to use them. None of us looked old enough to impersonate our moms, and everything we could do to hurt them would be discovered the next time a bank statement came in."

Paula took another sip and gave me a grin. "Then the business world discovered cyberspace. Online investing really started to take off. And online banking. Companies competing for mortgages on the Internet. Then everybody wanted to get in on the act."

Jo smiled. "On the Net, nobody knows you're a dog," she said.

"Or a minor," Paula replied, still grinning. "It was just what we needed."

"Allie begged and pleaded, and was on her best behavior for months," she continued. "Finally, she got that pink Barbie PC she'd been asking for, and she squealed and delivered hugs to her Mom and Dad on Christmas morn. Joan? She got an iMac for Hanukah ... perfect for graphic design and desktop publishing. And me? Well, I received the best gift ever -- a woman's business suit with a choice of blouses and shoes. I told Mom I might want to do some job interviews and wanted to look my best. The truth was, I was the tallest of the three of us, and the most ... developed. If we needed somebody to play the adult, I was the best we had."

"At first, we only took enough from everyone's savings accounts to rent an apartment, and Joan put together a copy of Mom's driver's license with only the birthday changed." Paula snickered, and ducked her head. "No WAY could I look as old as Mom, not even on my worst day. But it turned out that it really didn't matter. They xeroxed the fake, accepted the first and last month's rent, and we were on our way."

"We changed the address on every single account our folks had, and set up a secure, untraceable account in the Caymans. Then we began siphoning off assets. Allie enjoyed being a hacker as much as she enjoyed teasing football players. We sent false statements to all the 'rents every month, courtesy of Joan's Macintosh, and her magic fingers. Every account statement told them they were still stinking rich -- that everything was still in their accounts and all was right with the world. After a while, we convinced the folks that e-mail statements and checking the websites periodically beat keeping files of paper any day of the week. So now they get their false statements online, and check a phony Internet site. No more messy physical evidence."

Paula finished her coffee. "Eventually, all of their money would up in the Caymans. We even put a few extra mortgages on every house, just to be nasty. We've got a lot of it invested, and Allie's keeping an eye on it. Each of us is worth a few million -- but our folks are dead broke, and they don't even know it. It's a good thing they never tried to touch the principal, or we would have been so screwed. But we watched them long enough to see they were keeping their hands off, waiting for retirement to go wild."

"We've set up a dedicated computer in a pirate server farm offshore. It's programmed to keep sending digital statements on a regular basis -- properly formatted, of course. And by the time retirement rolls around, the 'rents will discover that their golden years have just become a lot less golden."

She went quiet for a while, her eyes down, moving the coffee cup around in circles on the scarred wood table. Then suddenly, without looking up, she spoke. "We’re leaving tonight. It's Halloween -- we thought it was the right time to go. Karmic balance or something, you know? And then there's the hook for the news people. 'Mysterious disappearance of three young girls.' It'll hit all the media, big feeding frenzy. Put the spotlight on the 'rents, and maybe somebody will dig up what we used to be, and make a stink." She paused, thinking. "Or maybe no one will ever remember Paul, John, and Al. I guess in the end, it doesn't matter. We're just gonna ... go. We'll fly off to somewhere sunny on our shiny new false passports, and live on the beach for the rest of our lives drinking rum drinks with umbrellas and seducing beach boys until we're too old to remember how."

Paula stood up. "So while I appreciate your offer, I'm afraid we have to respectfully decline. I'm sorry we didn’t just wait around to be rescued or revenged, but I guess I'm just a 'do it yourself' kind of girl at heart."

"So I see." Stark smiled and stood up as well. "You had the situation well in hand. Less work for me. I'm sorry I intruded."

"No, no," Paula replied quickly. "I'm glad you found us. It's good to know you're out there. I mean, it's good, what you do. You're needed, believe me. I'm sure there are a lot of girls out there in our position who aren't quite what you'd call ... self -starters. If you ever need a hand, doing what you do ... well, it can get pretty boring lying on a beach. And you've got to admit, we do have experience."

Jo laughed, and nodded. "You do, indeed."

They shook hands solemnly, and then Paula surprised Stark with a hug, which the older woman tentatively returned.

As they broke apart, Jo raised a finger. "One question?" The teenager turned and cocked her head. Stark chose her words carefully. "You seem very well ... adjusted to all of this. You're a beautiful young woman, and seem to enjoy being one. If you and Joan and Allie are all like this -- if you all like what you've become -- why choose revenge at all?"

There was a long silence. Paula stared out the window into the parking lot, and when she spoke, there was a touch of regret. "Before we put all this together, I started having second thoughts about stripping them bare. I mean, it had been years since it happened. The three of us were doing okay, for the most part. Maybe this wasn't the right way to go." She sighed. "So I went to Mom and Dad, to try and get some answers. I want to know why they did this to all of us. I just wanted to know why."

"Do you know what they said to me?" Stark shook her head. "They both smiled and said, 'Because we could.'" Paula snorted. "No regret. No apology. Just because they could. Now that's cold."

The teen shook her head. "Just because we got used to being this way, maybe even learned to like it ... well, that doesn't mean they had a right to do this to us in the first place. Back then, we were just ... boys, you know? Wanting to blow off some steam, raise a little Hell. Doing this to us was just ... cruel. And sick."

She looked off into the distance, thinking, and spoke slowly. "And in the end, I guess we could've gotten all kick-ass about it. You know, poisoned them, or crippled them, or done something physical, you know? Paul might have, maybe, if there was any of him left in me after six years like this. But I guess being forced to become female did teach us a lesson after all -- that maybe there is something to be said for being subtle, and smart. Maybe it is better to take a quiet but well-thought-out revenge instead of taking the more direct route."

Two more girls appeared at the front door and waved, all smiles. Stark recognized them from the survelliance photos. Joan was dressed as a pirate's wench and Allie as a sexy cat burglar. Paula waved back. "Besides, I heard someone say once that the best revenge is living well. And we'll all be living very well very soon." She smiled, with just a touch of sadness. "Well, not the folks, of course. But as for that ... it's just the price they get to pay for doing what they did, all those Halloweens ago."

Paula thought for a moment, and her sad smile became a feral grin. "Hey! I guess we got to play a Halloween trick after all. Even if it is six years too late. No treats for them -- and they'll be left holding the bag."

Paula blew Jo a kiss and glided across the room to her friends. After Stark watched them all disappear into the October night, she sat back down and picked up her coffee.

The best revenge is living well, she thought. Maybe ... maybe I've been going at this all wrong. Stark took a sip and let her mind roam.

Now there's something to think about.