Warlock Problems Ep. 06

Warlock Problem Episode 6: The Fall

By: J. H. Beach

Who's Who Updated

Coven Wright

Loki "Lock" Wright--Role: Narrator & Coven Warlock. Background: A male POV narrator adapting to his unique place in the witch world. Rather than wielding traditional spells, Lock acts as a mana siphon and "inverted battery" or "grounding source" for his coven. He tends to call his girls, girls rather than women. Witchery & Talents: Absorbs and drains accumulated mana from his witches so they don't overload, which he can then convert into absolute, single-word commands of raw will ("Stop," "Fall," "Cum").

Haley Feyrer Wright--Role: Shouer Prima (First Sister / Coven Leader). Background: Lock's original roommate at the Threfane School of Witchcraft and Arcana. Hailing from a small but friendly coven clan, she was unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role of Coven Wright through a political "arranged marriage" dynamic. Witchery & Talents: Mind-altering enchantments (Sleep, Hypnotic Suggestion, Hold Person).

Serena Sethr Wright--Role: Shouer Geféra ("Twin Soul" / Anima Mirror). Background: A former scion of the powerful Sethr clan originally tasked by her mother to bind Lock into her family's network. She shares an intense, empathic "spiritual mirror" link with Lock that makes their emotions entirely entangled. Witchery & Talents: Manipulation of luck, probability, and tugging the threads of fate.

Yvette Wright--Role: Senior Coven Member & Guardian. Background: A 48-year-old Gold Dragon disguised as a petite young woman who was magically bound to Lock when he was twelve. She grew up alongside him in secret as his neighbor's adopted daughter to protect him. Witchery & Talents: Master of fire magic; ability to shift between human, human-dragon hybrid, and juvenile gold dragon forms.

Briar Wright--Role: Eldest Coven "Witch" (~400 years old). Background: A venatrix (hunter) descended from the goddess Lurakate. Formerly bound to the villainous Witch King, Lock accidentally untied her original bond after an ambush, leading her to panic-bond herself into Coven Wright. Witchery & Talents: Item enchantment (especially firearms) and a devastating, direct force attack cantrip.

Bridget Goode Wright--Role: Defensive Specialist. Background: The quiet, guarded twin sister of Brittany and one of the first young witches Lock met on campus. Witchery & Talents: Wields powerful, near-impenetrable defensive aegis wards alongside nascent healing skills (vitamancy).

Brittany Goode Wright--Role: Offensive Specialist. Background: Bridget's highly expressive, emotionally vocal identical twin sister (distinguishable by a single facial freckle). She is fiercely attached to Lock and shares a volatile relationship with Serena. Witchery & Talents: Offensively oriented magic focused on inflicting direct physical and neural pain.

Emily Laveau Wright--Role: Legal Defense & Pragmatist. Background: A polished woman in her late twenties who serves as the coven's defense lawyer. Rescued from captivity, she joined Coven Wright for pragmatic reasons and is still adapting to the group's dynamic. Witchery & Talents: Advanced illusion magic.

Lara Zhiva--Role: Senior Ally & Healer. Background: A strikingly tall senior at Threfane who assisted Coven Wright in rescuing Yvette and curing Lock of a hex. Lara is the most recent addition to Coven Wright. Witchery & Talents: Advanced Vitamancy (Healing Magic).

Allies, Acquaintances & Threfane Students

Priscilla Vedmak--Role: Independent Ally & Duelist. Background: The first witch Lock met upon entering the magical world. Despite a powerful mutual attraction, she turned down Lock's invitation to join Coven Wright out of duty to her family and fear of drawing danger to his nascent coven. Witchery & Talents: Accomplished jinx fencer using physical transmutation to enhance her speed, balance, and strength in rapier combat.

Piper Volkhova--Role: Ally & Shifter. Background: An orange-haired, 19-year-old sophomore witch who helped rescue Yvette from her self-imposed isolation. Witchery & Talents: Shape-shifting (primarily into a 250 lb cinnamon-colored black bear).

Cassandra Sethr--Role: Seer & Information Source. Background: Serena's distant cousin, Piper's roommate, and a sophomore at Threfane. Tied to the ancient primordial goddess Lure, she reads the Tablets of Destiny. Witchery & Talents: Absolute prophecy (although, true to her mythological namesake, her warnings are rarely heeded by those around her).

Other Notable Figures

Nveena Kilili Ravenrook--Role: Enigmatic Elder / Wildcard. Background: A vastly ancient, immensely powerful witch rumored by some to be the very first witch in existence. Her true motives regarding Lock and Coven Wright remain unknown.

Julianna--Role: Legal Authority / Centrarch. Background: Formerly a court Lictor (bailiff), now serving as a prominent official and Centrarch in Threfane's chapter of the CRTC (Crossroads Reconnaissance Tactical Cohort) governance.

Astarte d'Erech--Role: Magistra (Professor) of Enchantment & Playful Seductress. Background: Succubus bound by the school to serve as the Professor of Enchantment. She resides in the Crossroads of Fate but is summoned to her classroom "on demand" regardless of her own desires. Her apparent interest in Coven Wright is... they're fun.

Amanda Vedmak Henderson--Role: Captive of Coven Wright. Background: Priscilla's half-sister/coven-sister from childhood. The venatori warlock, Case, seduced her into his coven trapping her in a life of servitude until Coven Wright captured her when Briar put a stolen mana manacle on her. Witchery & Talents: Like her sister Priscilla she's an accomplished jinx-fencer but uses a foil to deliver evocation strikes vs. Priscilla's Spanish rapier and self-transmutation enhancements.

Marica Ashwind--Role: Threfane's Decana (Dean / Principal). Background: Holder of executive authority at Threfane, traditionalist and not entirely in favor of Coven Wright, but wary of angering Nveena.

Cyprian--Role: The Witch King. Background: Cyprian is a warlock who built the first coven pyramid, providing a model for the later Matrona Coven Clans. Cyprian's true goals are unknown, but they are assumed to be the subjugation of all witches and venatori everywhere. Cyprian has so many venatori in his network that most witches consider venatori guilty until proven innocent.

Case Henderson--Role: Venatori "Plant/Spy". Background: Lock's neighbor and childhood best friend. Case's parents adopted Yvette when she was posing as a twelve-year-old girl in order to stay close to Lock, permitting the unsuspecting dragonnette to be monitored alongside Lock. After bonding with Lock, Briar revealed Case's "true colors."

Threfane

"Oh, you bad, bad boy."

I pant in exertion. I don't know how close Astarte is, but her voice carries on the chill wind sweeping over the basalt sea.

I stumble, nearly spilling my precious load. Yvette whimpers in pain. She's taken too many venatori bullets for us and Lara's vitamancy can't keep up with the enchantments coursing through my smallest girl's frame. We need safety and downtime to restore my girl. Both are luxuries we don't have.

There's a boom. Haley staggers. The aegis ward Bridget has dropped over all of us shatters. She starts spinning it up again as fast as she can, but she's clearly exhausted. I've only drained her seven times in the last two hours.

Karack-pow, pow, powpowpow. Briar's witchbolt goes off like a machine gun. No one I know has mastered it like she has. She's out of bullets, wads and powder for her pistols. There's this ricochet echo like the echo of a rifle report bounding off hills. A moment of silence and then...

A scream.

Brittany is going to be a sobbing mess of guilt tonight, but right now she's saving our asses. All of my girls are. Emily drops an illusion on Lara as she climbs the next stony wave where she'd otherwise be exposed.

"Lock," a quiet voice says from my elbow. "It's time, please."

I'm fucking exhausted, but I have mana. I'm draining my girls constantly. "Obey," I command and then say, "Come." The conflict in Amanda's face fades.

I no longer say come as a will-breaker command. If we ever manage to break Case's hold on her, I don't need her following me on my heels like a lost puppy. Obey already has her in a state where she'd lick the mud off my boots if I told her to. Even if we took the mana manacle off, I doubt her wards could deflect obey at this point. The resistance now is entirely in Case's coven bond and she's already up to thirty minutes where she'll do anything I say.

I hop Yvette in my arms before I drop her. I know this hurts her, but not as much as a tumble to the rock would. She clutches my shoulders, buries her face in my chest and whimpers again.

At least she's the only thing I'm carrying. I don't think I could carry her and my pack. I'm not sure I could even get off the ground if I tried. We've all abandoned our gear. Survival requires, well, surviving first.

Emily's illusion folds over me and I start up the steep incline of the basalt wave. When we reach the top, I sob in relief. One steep decline and then we'll be in the woods.

Another boom. More shattered wards. Another distant scream.

"Flame! Flame! Flame! Lock! DRAIN!" Brittany cries, shaking her fingers. She's been pushing her mana-charge past anything any witch would consider reasonable--apparently the backlash of that is the same nerve-flay she inflicts on others. I give her what she needs and I'm hit with such a flood of mana that I think I'm going to burst. I spin it off as fast as I can, probably dooming Amanda to a lifetime of service.

Not really any different than what she'd already been cursed with, but it's me, I don't like it even if it's the path to what she wants. There's no way we could've dragged her with us if she'd been fighting us every step of the way--she'd be back with Case.

I skid and slip down the final decline to crash to my knees on the cinder-strewn forest floor. I try not to collapse on Yvette as I fold over her petite body. My girls all stagger and fall to their own seats. Only Briar and Brittany stay on the rocky crest above guarding our retreat. There are so many ventrice after us it can't all be Case's coven. He must've been joined by those we rescued the Vedmak from.

Lara crawls to Yvette and me and spins up her healing again. Fuck, my girls are giving everything for each other.

A fireball roars through the sky to crash somewhere behind us with this meteor boom. Distant panicked screams echo on the chill wind. From where she's collapsed on the forest floor, Emily laughs, but she's so tired it sounds one chuckle from a sob.

"Illusion," she says to no one. "Big--huge. It didn't do anything... I hope some venatori shit their pants." Emily lets out another sob-like laugh. She rolls over on her knees and slowly pushes herself to her feet. "We need to go."

Emily might not be in as fit shape as the rest of us, but Valkyrie-in-a-Blazer has an iron will. Haley groans as she pushes herself to her feet. Briar and Brittany come skidding and leaping down the wave of rock.

"They're coming," Briar says, bending double and clutching her knees. "Too many, we can't stop them all."

"Wait." Serena does her stagger-spin thing. Even if we had the breath to question, none of us would. Serena has never steered us wrong. We speed-walk, stagger-jog the way her finger indicated.

"Took you long enough."

My eyes snap up. We haven't been in the woods long and I'm not saying Yvette's heavy, but my arms are so tired I'm not sure I'll be able to lift anything for a week.

Our packs, every one of them, are piled around the menhir anchor stone the Vedmak witches used to flee the Crossroads. Astarte is sitting atop the stone, her unguligrade legs crossed at the knees, her tail gently swaying behind her. She's got a baseball-sized rock in her hand. For a moment I think she's using it to file her nails like an emery board, but upon closer inspection I see she's carving scrolls and runes in it with her nails. After a moment, she leaps down off her menhir perch and sways towards us. I think my mouth might be hanging open.

It is, because my teeth click when she places her finger under my chin and closes it.

"Oh, my sweet, sweet boy, did you think I was done with you? Did you think I'd just let..." Astarte shoots me a mischievous wink while using her tail to pull me closer. I'd be chest-to-boobs with my succubus enchanting teacher if Yvette weren't in my arms right now. "... fun just wander away? I made something for your little girlfriend." She places the baseball rune stone in Yvette's lap. "It's about all I have left. I'm not quite like your other fun-time friends. I generate mana... other ways, and I used everything I've managed to store in that tower playing with your other friends. Now I need a recharge, so, unless..." Astarte wiggles her brows at me. "... you want to plug in the charger, I'm done for now."

"Is that..." Emily's staring at the stone in Yvette's lap. Yvette's clutching it weakly, slowly rolling it in one hand.

"No... how?" Emily says, eyes snapping up and staring at Astarte in confused... awe? "That's not possible."

"Awww..." Astarte purrs, unwinding her tail from around me and stepping to Emily. Catching Emily off guard, Astarte winds herself around Valkyrie-in-a-Blazer and gives her a full-on, make-out, French kiss. Utter confusion and shock blast over the Emily compass--although, that's not all. Emily's embarrassment flares and with it her arousal. Astarte saunters a step back and pats Emily's flushed cheek with one hand.

"That's the problem with Law Bitches, engineers and AI," she says. "No imagination."

"Set me down," Yvette murmurs to me. I can't pretend my aching arms aren't glad to hear those words, but I fear if I put her down, I'll never be able to lift her again.

"You sure?"

She nods, so I ease her to her feet but leave my left arm about her for support. Not looking up from the stone ball in her hand, she rolls it one more time like she's working a Rubik's Cube and then--

Celestial gold ribbons of witchlight spin out of the "ball," engulfing the coven, the packs, Astarte. The ground, the woods, the Crossroads of Fate unweave--the light fades only to be replaced by deep, cool, but not cold, darkness. The only light is a fiery summoning circle--oddly similar to Yvette's mandala--etched into a floor of stone. Haley spins up a mote of witchlight first. A shadowed cavern greets us, stone walls hemming us in on all sides. I get a sense of déjà vu, as if I'd been here before... but in a dream.

"Where... are we?" Brittany asks.

Yvette takes about five staggering steps and collapses face-first in a pile of quartz, agates, moonstone and other cheap-ass gemstones littered with a bit of lost-and-found jewelry here and there. "Home," Yvette groans, speaking as if to her bed of pebbles. Lara takes a seat on the hoard beside her and spins up another round of vitamancy. My cheerleader girl really did take a lot of enchanted lead for us.

"We're on Earth," Bridget says.

"I'd say in, but whatever," Brittany corrects, pointing at the ceiling. Her twin ignores her.

"But I've never seen wards so powerful. They prevent escape to the surface despite the pounding they've taken. The Crossroads were the only way in..." She glances at the engraved stone that has rolled out of Yvette's hand. "... or out."

Sudden understanding dawns. "This is where Yvette was..."

"Trapped," Haley finishes for me.

"So are we safe here?" I ask. We need a place to hide--long-term--and while I don't imagine wanting to be a dwarf, we need a long-term shelter. But if the wards are powerful and we're the only ones that can get in and out, this might be just such a place.

"Until the wards fall," Bridget says. "They're on some sorta limited timer."

"A year and a day," I say, not sure I know where that knowledge is coming from.

"Sure, but how much is left."

"The end of August," I say again, blinking at Yvette's form where she's curled up in her, um, hoard. "Right after Ren-Fair."

Bridget gazes at me, presumably wondering how I know that, but doesn't say anything. I wonder how I know.

While Bridget and I speak, the girls start poking about the limits of our prison. There's a good bit of space, but as expected, no way out. It's like we're in a stony bubble with silt, sand and tumbled rock for a floor.

With Emily's help, Serena begins picking through our packs and disgorging food. There's no wood for fuel and no one wishes to wake Yvette, so the girls heat a block of stone, feeding it cantrip after cantrip until they've got a crude stove.

I help Haley clear a silty, sandy space of the odd rock while the twins lay out bedrolls. Amanda sits, knees drawn up to her chest and rocks almost as if she were in pain. She asks me for another dose of obey, and that seems to ease things a small bit. I've never been compelled--not with witchery--and I can't really imagine what she's going through.

While Serena cooks jerky beef ramen, I fish all the remaining gold I can find out of Yvette's pack and place it within her easy reach. I dump the loose pearls, diamonds and other gems that she'd freed from her prior snacks into her hoard. There's a small fidget of motion, and when I glance at Yvette in concern, she has some girl's bracelet in her fingers awaiting its journey to her mouth while she sucks on someone else's lost jewels. Serena hands me a hefty length of beef jerky, and I go to take a seat in Yvette's hoard beside my oldest friend, offer her the jerky, and stroke her golden-blonde locks while she nibbles. I've known her since I was twelve, and now I realize I've never seen her ill before. What she's risked for us--all of us--has me rattled. At Lara's look, I drain her again so she can spin up more vitamancy for Yvette. Like all of us, Lara's exhausted, but as I watch, Yvette's color begins to return.

"A day, maybe two, if I can keep this up and we don't need to move."

I thank Lara with a kiss. Serena brings us a bowl of ramen which Lara and I share.

"We've got food for a week," Serena says, "if we're careful." She glances over at Astarte. "But I don't know what succubi eat."

"Oysters," Astarte calls, "fish tacos!" She makes no move, however, to acquire either.

Mostly in silence, we finish our meals. I feel Haley contemplating setting a watch over the Haley-compass, but as the girls collapse into their bedrolls, she gives up on the idea. Yvette's pile of pebbles isn't exactly comfortable, but I unzip my sleeping bag and drape it over both of us. Lara wiggles a hole in the nest on the other side of Yvette where she can spin off a little vitamancy every few hours without really moving.

I wake in near total darkness, someone shaking my shoulder. The face of the shadow hovering over me is pale, with midnight eyes that I know are blue but are black in this light.

"Please, please, please, help me."

I sleepily reach up and wipe a tear off Amanda's thumb--err, Amanda's cheek--with my thumb. "Is this really what you want? Should we free you?"

"Don't do that!" Amanda cries. Beside me, Yvette shifts uneasily in her sleep.

"I don't want to go back," Amanda finishes quieter.

"But how long can you keep this up? Does it hurt?"

"Forever," she hisses, "if I have to. You don't understand, the bond makes us crave our warlock, our coven. It makes it so we can't be disloyal. It doesn't make us love him." Amanda snarls love.

I swipe another tear from her cheek. "So long as it's what you want, Amanda."

She clutches my wrist in both her hands and nods into my palm.

"Then," I heave a heavy breath, "obey. Stay with us." She sighs, relaxing.

"I don't understand how that helps you."

Amanda settles back onto the pile of pebbles so she's not leaning right over me. "It's..." She hesitates. "... that because I can't help but obey you, I'm not betraying my coven. When your, um, command wears off, every moment I don't try to take you out or escape, I am. That's, um, painful when what I want is to escape Case, not you."

"Okay."

"Will I get to see Prissy again?"

Ever. I'm silent a long time. "I don't know." Another long pause. Razor pain makes confetti of my heart. "I hope so, though."

"Thank you," she says simply.

I wake to a slow, gradual increase in light. Yvette has rolled over in her pile of pebbles and is curled into my chest. Soft, quiet voices rise and fall in a gentle hum. I peek over the top of Yvette's hoard and most of the girls are chatting quietly while having a simple breakfast. Brittany and Astarte, however, are using threads of glowing witchlight to do Neanderthal cave paintings. There's a sun, moon, stars, mountains, a house, and stick figures doing, um, stick-boy stick-girl things. I think that's all Astarte until Brittany nudges her fellow artist and points proudly at a stick-boy with a stick-girl bent over his lap while he paddles stick-girl's red ass. Brittany starts to draw little pink hearts around the pair.

Sigh... I guess the mystery sunrise is now explained.

"We need to leave," Bridget is telling the group when I go to collect breakfast for Yvette. It's that instant packaged stuff that's easy to backpack, so not great, but I know Yvette likes strawberries and cream so I make her a bit of that.

"We only have supplies for a week, no cell service, no internet or real connection to the world."

"Venatori, matrona, anyone could be waiting for us," Serena says.

"The matrona don't know where we are, hopefully. The venatori might've lost our trail when we came here. Perhaps they'll think we used the anchor stone to Earth instead of the impossible rock Astarte made Yvette," Emily answers.

"Do we have a choice?" Haley asks. None of the girls respond. I give Yvette her food and return for a meal of my own.

"I'd still like to help Cassandra," Serena says. Her tone is as gloomy and depressed as the feeling she's mirroring with me on the Serena-compass.

"We can do nothing," Bridget says, "until we know where we are. We don't even know what gear we need. What if that anchor stone drops us in Siberia?"

Uncomfortable silence greets that idea.

"Do we even know if Yvette's stone will take us back to our exit point?"

"It does, cutie," Astarte says, swaying up behind Haley and running fingers through my first girl's hair. Haley shudders, her eyes fluttering and I'm forcibly reminded of that time she ground on my lap when Astarte pumped undiluted lust into our classroom. "The question is who's waiting for you on the other end?"

"Do you know?"

Astarte shrugs, worms into our huddle, and seats herself.

"Do you know how to find out?" I ask. It's always difficult to tell what our succubus teacher might know, but isn't saying.

"Go take a look."

Well, that's useful--not.

"Okay," Haley says, building on Astarte's comment, "we pop back into the Crossroads, hope we're not ambushed, use the anchor stone to go to Earth, hope we're not ambushed, find out if we can get cell reception, figure out where we are and if we have what we need?"

"We'll need clothes," Brittany says, joining us. She tugs at her ward-weave trench coat. "Not exactly nowit fashion," she adds, making a face.

"And a meat lover's pizza or ten."

All heads turn. My smallest girl is standing at my shoulder, her green eyes earnest.

Yvette tugs my zipped-open sleeping bag around her shoulders like a blanket. "What?" she whines. "I'm a growing girl."

The girls pack one backpack with what they're sure we're going to need--guess who gets to carry that--and Yvette pops us back into the Crossroads with her Rubik's Round... rock. When nothing happens, the girls break their defensive crouches and Serena opens the gate to home.

Celestial threads unweave the Crossroads and replace them with wet, green and drip. Fir, rhododendron and the not-quite-kosher scent of Pacific brine greet us. There's a heavy breeze and the distant sound of surf. Tattered white clouds speed through the fir-tree-crowded gap of blue directly overhead. Rhodies, madrone, and dogwood gorse make an impenetrable wall of foliage all around us. The ribbons thread us back together beside a menhir stone, but other than that, there are no other marks of civilization. It's wet in that way that says it just rained and it's coast cold--not inland cold. There's no sign of the Vedmak witches that came this way the other day.

Eight phones--every phone but mine--ping with notifications. The girls fish them out of various purses and pockets.

"Washington," Serena says.

"Seabrook," Bridget adds.

"109's that way," Brittany says, pointing. She pauses, a confused expression washing across her face, and then adjusts her facing. "That way."

Still looking a bit pale, Yvette sniffs the air. "Pizza!" She takes a step downslope, slips in the wet grass and slides five strides downhill, leaving long muddy tracks in the soil, but keeps marching as though nothing had happened.

"Pizza," another girl says and strides after Yvette. She's a few inches taller than Yvette, has dark-auburn hair littered with fiery red highlights and a swaying stride that makes me want to grab her butt. She's wearing a dark blue off-the-shoulder sweater, paint-on blue jeans, and sneakers.

Wait! What?

"Who are you?!" I blurt. Attractive she might be, but she's not one of "mine," and I've never seen her before in my life.

Freckles on a heart-shaped face framed by twisty, wavy locks that've escaped her ponytail. She's wearing big, round, raspberry-and-vanilla tortoiseshell glasses. Eyes blink up at me--a startling, impossible shade that matches the eerie, lit-from-within glow of Cherenkov blue.

I know those eyes. I know that blue.

"Astarte!"

She shrugs. "Nowit might've accepted the tail, but the hooves were going to be a problem."

The rest of my words finally make it out of my mouth. "You're wearing clothes!" Makes sense, and I don't mind--but it's out of character.

She looks at me, appearing confused. "No, I'm not." On my left, Brittany giggles.

"Oh--oh!" Astarte says, swaying up beside me and pressing herself against me. I feel like someone has mummy-wrapped my lungs in rubber bands and a tense ache coils below. All my girls--including Amanda--are grinning at me. Even Yvette has turned back to smile at my expense.

"Glamor. Glam--or." Astarte purrs at me. She picks at her exposed bra strap, and her fingers pass right through. She makes an expression that can only be described as do-me and flutters her lashes. "Want to play?"

What the hell am I supposed to say to that?! Does she arouse me? Yes! Does she look fuckable? Yes! Is it safe to fuck a succubus? I'm hazarding, no. Is it safe to tell a sex-bomb girl you don't want to fuck? Absofluckinglutely not. I'd be eviscerated--and there's a chance my other girls would help.

Besides, time, place, mud. If I'm going to die in bed, I want it to be a warm, cozy one. Fortunately, before I can find my voice, she gets bored, turns to follow Yvette and says, "Pizza."

There's no trail. We're on a coastal plateau. The brush is over our heads most of the time. In places it's so thick it's easier to "walk" on top of it. This leads to unexpected falls when the surprisingly dense and brittle rhodies or madrone branches snap under our weight. Canopy water run-off showers us and even with our ward-weave trench coats, we get more and more drenched. The sound of the surf grows closer, and from time to time we can hear a car speed by on a highway we can hear but not see through the brush.

"We should drop a pin so we can find this place again," Emily says. It's a good idea, and I do it, along with maybe three other girls, but I'm thinking the reason no one knows the location of this menhir rune stone is that it can't be found within all this brush. Even with a GPS coordinates it'd be tough.

We reach a creek in a deep muddy slot. It twists and turns, making it too annoying to follow directly downstream. We find a wide, slick, moss-covered log. Yvette and Astarte pop their wings, and while neither set looks big enough to permit them to fly, they do manage to glide across the ravine easily enough. The rest of us, except Brittany, shimmy across the log, our thighs straddling the fallen tree trunk. Brittany rolls her eyes at us.

"Like, really? No." She walks across the log.

Brittany's all confidence--she's rarely not. Her gait is easy, balanced, but a wide slab of bark, so soaked it looks more water than wood, sloughs off under her tread. Her left leg twists, just slightly. Brittany's brow-green eyes pop wide in alarm. Her arms windmill. It's too late, because her balance is gone.

Brittany goes over backwards. An ankle knocks the log on the way down, spinning her in a 180° loop so she's face down when she hits the water.

My pack is still sliding off my back as I race to help, when she bursts from the creek in a shower of water.

"Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Oh my god! Co--ld!" I skid on my heels down the steep, muddy, root-laced bank, only to catch a wave of what feels like glacial runoff when my troublemaker girl throws herself at me.

It's a group effort getting up out of the creek bed. I lift Brittany from below, Yvette and Haley haul on her arms from above and Brittany's boots slip and slide on the muddy bank. Lara hauls me up while Bridget spins up some sort of cantrip that pushes the water out of Brittany's clothes while she hugs herself, teeth chattering. When I'm standing on drier ground, Lara spins up the same cantrip and does for me what Bridget is doing for her twin--except Lara takes it further.

She steps up close and gives me a quick kiss. Serena lays her head between my shoulder blades and gives me a hug from behind. I knew there was a reason I love these girls. They might expect things, but they thank me for everything--even the things I'd do "for free"--perhaps especially those things I'd do "for free." It makes me want to keep doing them.

Another twenty minutes, and we've waded out of what could politely be described as a swamp onto a paved highway. An open expanse of spiky sand grass spreads before us before fading into beach and the vast expanse of the Pacific. Seabrook is maybe a mile that away.

A millennial or Gen Z zooms by without slowing or giving space. I often wonder who taught them to drive, but then remember my own driving instructor, who insisted I follow the law rather than crossing the center line to make room. I totally get not slowing down; who wants to do that?

I still wonder about the insanity of that.

I pull out my phone; we're going to need a place to stay. Vrbo is only a few clicks away. I find a seaside A-frame. It's not big, but it has an open loft that the coven won't hesitate to use as communal sleeping space. Its biggest draw? Vrbo advertises that one of the amenities is one of those infinite hot water heaters. We're going to need that with all the girls.

And, well, to be fair, me too.

"Bridget," I ask, "how should I pay for this?" I know we have the money--so much we could simply buy the house--but I'm hoping Bridget has a means that's not easily tracked. She does handle our finances, and I know she hasn't placed all our cash with Solomon & Sons or the Kobold Teller. I don't know if the matrona will be waiting for us to spend, but I don't want a nasty surprise if they are. She looks at my screen, fishes a long wallet out of an inner pocket of her trench coat, and slips out a Multnomah Credit Union card.

I blink. That wasn't entirely expected, but okay. I lift it from her fingers and type in the data. Emily told the coven once that the matrona are guilty of a number of nowit white-collar crimes. Hopefully tracking credit usage isn't one of them... or, perhaps, no one knows we use a nowit credit union. I hadn't.

"We'll use the credit union for this stay," she says. "We don't do a lot of business there, so hopefully it'll fly under the radar."

Ah, my quiet, reserved girl is thinking the same thing I am. At least she has more of a solution than I do. I finalize the purchase. Bridget drifts to the side, and Serena slides in, threading her fingers with mine.

"May I?" Serena murmurs softly, leaning her head against my shoulder for a second.

Bridget just offers a gentle, understanding smile before stepping back to give us room. I don't know how the girls work out the "timeshare" that is me, but somehow they do, and it's usually seamless. Serena gets more just-be-with-Lock time--she seems to need it. Bridget is more sit-quietly, study-or-read-books-together time. Haley wants to cuddle when she's nervous about leading the coven. Brittany wants to play and go on dates. Yvette wants to protect and be protected. Emily wants to talk stuff--smart stuff, intellectual stuff, like she wants to get to the bottom of every mystery in the world. I'm guessing she read Nancy Drew as a little girl.

That's not to say they all don't want everything sometimes, but there almost seems to be a natural flow of who-needs-what-when. I wonder if they share some sorta coven-compass that tells them that--like a, um, need tachometer.

Lara steps in close and bumps shoulder-to-shoulder on my other side. "Room for another?" she asks, nudging me.

"Always," I say, catching her fingers.

Hand-in-hand-in-hand we enter Seabrook. Astarte's looking around wildly at the houses and shops. "Why're all the buildings painted like Easter eggs?" she asks.

"It's pretty?" Emily says, clearly not sure of the answer.

I have to agree, it is pretty, and cute, as far as buildings go. There's a mix of styles from A-frames to mini colonials to bungalows, but everything is painted in pastel blues and whites and yellows and pinks. I think less Easter egg and more saltwater taffy.

A mischievous grin scrawls itself across Astarte's face and her eyes flash with mirth behind her glasses. "It's like a giant fertility ritual. I like."

"It's coast aesthetic, Astarte, not a pagan altar," Emily mutters, though she can't help suppressing a grin.

Brittany is in the lead marching down the sidewalk. However, when we're about to pass a small shop, her feet root to the sidewalk, she turns 90 degrees and starts for the door. "Oh! Hoodies!" she gasps.

"Good idea, we can't just wear this," Emily says, plucking at her ward-weave trench coat, "the nowit will stare." She's closer and actually beats Brittany to the door and swings it open for the rest of us.

Smashed between two other outlets in this mid-century colonial sidewalk strip mall, the store is not large. The girls and I crowd the showroom floor nearly as much as the various clothing racks.

Seabrook, Salt Life, and Pacific Sunset hoodies and sweatshirts of every description collect in the girls' arms at an alarming rate.

"Lock, hold this?" Haley asks, dumping a stack of three fleece tops onto my arm.

"And these!" Brittany adds, piling on six more.

My pack, the only one we have, grows heavy with shed ward-weave trench coats. The girls all get Seabrook tote bags and stuff them with even more clothes.

Emily ends up wearing a pink Seabrook off-the-shoulder sweatshirt silk-screened with a field of wildflowers. "Not tailored," she says to no one in particular. I think of her usual pencil skirts and blazers. They're like her armor and I'm beginning to understand that makes her feel more secure. "Still... comfortable."

Bridget pulls on a Pacific Sunset top with a girl reading a book on the beach, smoothing the fabric down with a contented sigh.

Brittany's is a girl in a bikini standing beside her surfboard. "Look, Lock! It's me!" she says, poking at her own boob. As far as I know Brittany has never surfed in her life--although I can see her trying. The bikini? Yeah, that's her.

Astarte's is just... Astarte. I don't know where she found it. I don't think the sales clerk knows where she found it, because Astarte's sweatshirt is silk-screened with Jaws coming up out of the water coupled with the words, "Bite Me." For a sweatshirt, it bears a surprising amount of skin.

"Where did you even get that?" I ask, staring at it. Is it an optical illusion created by the soft folds in the fabric or did Astarte glamor Jaws so that his jaws slowly chomp?

Astarte smirks and her eyes twinkle from behind her glasses. "The shirt chose me, Lock."

I shake my head. I hope she doesn't get cold. I know Yvette doesn't. Not normally. It's late winter on the coast, so most of the girls have selected fleece stretchy-pants to go with their sweatshirts and hoodies, but, like often, Yvette's in shorts and a crop-top hoodie.

"You're going to freeze your butt off," Emily tells Yvette, raising an eyebrow at her bare legs.

Yvette just shrugs, rolling her shoulders. "I don't get cold." She glances sharply at the shopkeeper who is settling accounts with Bridget. She blows a small smoke ring using dragon fire. "Usually. If I do, I'll just cuddle with our teddy bear." She smiles at me and, well, I won't say no, because cold feet turn into warm feet and lots of other fun things too.

We leave the shop looking entirely different. Before I was a weirdo boy hanging out with a lot of really good-looking weirdo girls. Now I'm another nowit college boy hanging out with a lot of really good-looking sorority girls.

Okay, not a lot has changed, but we're not catching as many stares as before. Just the men scoping out the girls and the women... trying to figure out, um, me. My pack is nearly as heavy now as it had been in the Crossroads of Fate. I think the shopkeeper is considering closing up and taking a day off. My girls put a sizable dent in her inventory. Lara and I couldn't actually find much that fit us. Now she's trailing the coven, her head bent over her phone.

I drop back beside her.

"Hey, what're you doing?"

Yeah, yeah, I talk weird sometimes.

Lara turns her phone towards me. Her Amazon. com cart is full of X-Long Tall. I worry about money trails, but I'm not going to tell her don't buy clothes. She's even got a few pairs of jeans in there that I'm pretty certain are for me.

Bridget, apparently having mapped our Vrbo, turns us a sharp left at the next street. The sound of the surf is louder here and the current of a chill Pacific wind eddies between the buildings. Our A-frame is beachside, but a wide expanse of pokey dunegrass consumes much of the sandy expanse between the house and the surf. Our lot is mostly sand with a bit of gravel and the A-frame doesn't seem to sit on a foundation as much as a wide frame of 12" x 6" skids. Haley knocks, presumably to check that we're not invading someone else's space and then enters the code at the door.

The main floor is two small bedrooms, a bath, mudroom, kitchen and wide family room dominated by plate-glass windows overlooking a small deck and the western horizon. Even inside, the roar of the surf and wind is omnipresent. Upstairs there's a massive loft-cum-bedroom and a second, larger bathroom. The girls are already lining up for showers. I know without asking, I'm expected to go last. How things have changed since the lord of the manor dirtied the bathwater first.

"Lock! You can shouer with me!" Brittany calls, sticking her head out of the smaller bathroom in the hall. The water's running, she's more than half undressed, and steam is already billowing out of the door.

"You go ahead without me, Brit. I like my unblistered, uncooked skin." Brittany pouts for just a moment and then ducks back into the bathroom. The shower door clicks closed, but the bathroom door doesn't.

I drop my pack in a corner and hang my jacket on the corner of the couch. I unpack several of the girls' trench coats, take them out on the back deck, and shake them out. I'm sure my ladies will appreciate them being aired after such a long, hard trek through the Crossroads. When I'm done, I flop on the couch and order up twelve pizzas from Frontager's Pizza Company--four for Yvette, eight for the other ten of us. All the girls can put away food when they're hungry, and we don't need anyone complaining of an empty stomach. Maybe I should order more. I glance up to where Amanda has tucked herself in a chair, waiting for her turn in the shower. I can see the strain on her face.

"Obey," I command, but nothing else. The tension leaves Amanda's midnight-blue eyes that are the exact same shade as Priscilla's, and I contemplate the meaning of the word, Ever. I know Priscilla and I haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but I'd really like that word to be wrong. A freshly showered Haley drops on the couch beside me. She's sans shoes, wearing stretchy pants and an oversized Seabrook T-shirt. She draws her feet up to sit lotus-style on the cushions.

"Now what?" she says. Despite the shower and fresh start, she sounds like Atlas has taken a break by transferring his load to her shoulders. "Serena wants to save her cousin. Yvette wants her gold. Our guest wants to see her sister. We all want to go home, and that's exactly the first place we shouldn't go, but how long can we stay here? How long can we stay anywhere before we're discovered? Days? Months? Years? Can we just settle down somewhere and just not be involved? What if we settle in somewhere, build new lives and then they come to get us? Even if the matrona ignored us, it'd be like a dark cloud sitting over our shoulders."

"I don't think ignoring our problems is just going to make them go away," I say, even though I wish that were true. Goddess, I wish that were true.

Haley combs her fingers through her wavy locks. "Neither do I. Especially after Astarte. Freeing her is not going to go unnoticed... or unpunished."

Yeah, I got that. We both descend into a contemplative silence, the roar of the ocean and the chatter of my girls threatening to lull me to sleep. Five months ago, I couldn't have imagined this. Now, just the thought of life without them--any one of them--causes distress.

"So let's just say," I say, "we go to campus, collect Priscilla, grab Cassandra and gather Yvette's gold. What then? Amanda's still bound to Case--which means he can find her, mana shackle or not. Cassandra is still vulnerable to possession. We've already got a compass pointing right at us and Cassandra would make two. We can't hide without ditching them or freeing them." From the other side of the room, from where she's curled up in the recliner, Amanda's gaze jerks to mine--alarm, fear, and possibly hurt scrawl across her face. I hurry to add, "Not that I can abandon them, no matter the risk."

"I couldn't either," Haley mutters, looking at her lap. She breathes a heavy sigh. "But I don't know what to do."

"Witches," Astarte says, sauntering into the room, "... poor, sad, woe-is-me witches, don't know how to hide." I don't know if her clothes are real now that we've raided a store or if they remain illusion, but she's not wearing shoes. Her toes are painted with this sparkly silver glitter. Like a dog inspecting its bed, she pads around the living room throw rug a moment, sinks to her denim-covered seat and leans back, pillowing the back of her head on her hands, staring up at the ceiling. "Just unravel their bonds."

"Yeah, been there, done that, don't know what Briar and I did," I grumble. This is really eating me. I did the impossible and don't know how I did it. No one--no one--but the Witch King is said to know how to unravel a witch's coven bond. If I knew what I did, I could help Amanda, assuming she'd go along with... you know. I'm not one hundred percent sure I want her in our coven, but I wouldn't say no to helping her even if that's what it required.

Astarte raises her hand from where it's resting on the carpet and does this kind of princess wave--except the vibe is more shrug. "Not many know how to do it--not anymore--it's knowledge that was intentionally suppressed. If witches could just get up and leave their covens, Cyprian and those matrona bitches would have to actually work for their power. I tell you, this is not what my cousin intended."

"Cousin?"

"Yeah, third cousin, four times removed--or something--on my mom's side. I told you about her once before. I'm telling you, they did something nasty to her in the... fifth century CE? It wasn't until the seventeenth century they really demonized her, but the fifth century--yeah, that's when things changed. I think. I'm still young, but it wasn't yesterday, you know."

Eight-thousand something is still young? Oh Goddess, the time involved hurts my brain.

"So do you know how to do it?"

Astarte rolls so she's facing Haley and me on the couch. "Do it? Do I know how to do it? Yes, I know how to do--it. P goes in V, and then the magic happens."

Of course. Astarte is all about p-in-v. "That's not what I meant."

From behind her glasses, she blinks at me, all innocent-like. "Then what did you mean, stud boy?"

"Do you know how to unravel Amanda's bond and or free Cassandra from her possession?"

"Sure. I mean, sorta. Any warlock can do it, but I can't. I don't have a P to put in V--and that's required--but I know the basics, you know."

Haley sighs. "Astarte, help us please."

"Magistra Astarte," Astarte says absently. She always insists Haley include her teacher honorific. I don't know why. She doesn't do that with anyone else. "Cassandra's easy. The coven bond will protect her from possession... or the kind of possessions she's having. Just fuck her into the coven and voilà--done deal. She's safe from possession. You get another please-fuck-me-now girl. Poetry rhymes for the rest of your life. Bonus, that orange-haired teddy bear will be pissed when she joins."

"Piper?!" I say, shocked. I won't pretend my thoughts haven't sometimes strayed in that direction.

"Yeah, her."

"Why would she be pissed? They're friends."

"Friends who have spent their entire lives telling each other the other is wrong. People should just accept that when Cassandra is quoting the Tablets of Destiny, she'll never be wrong."

I hear bare feet on the cabin's staircase, but they stop. I glance up to see Serena glaring at Astarte. I feel the chaotic emotions that not even she, Serena, can sort through.

"It'd help if she spoke English," Serena snaps. She finishes her descent and joins Haley and me on the couch. She's wearing the baggy, comfy clothes we purchased in town and her hair's still damp from the shower when she leans into my shoulder.

"The Tablets aren't in English. The translation is tricky."

Serena narrows her eyes and there's a lot of bite-me in our empathic bond.

"What about Amanda?" I ask, hoping to change the subject before my succubus teacher and my fate-twisting witch get into a catfight. Serena lifts her head and glares at me, clearly feeling my, um, hesitation and spamming our bond with watch-it-buster!

Feigning a faraway expression, Astarte taps her lips with a pair of fingers. "Case's bitch here," she holds up her fingers, leaving a small gap between thumb and forefinger, "is a tiny bit more difficult. She has to want out of her coven--"

"I do," Amanda interjects from the other side of the living room. If she took offense at being called a bitch by a succubus masquerading as the hot librarian next door, she doesn't let it show. "So... bad," she mumbles under her breath. She looks at me pleadingly and I use my will-breaker command on her once more. Once the demand takes hold, the desperate angst in her expression eases once more. She's thoroughly addicted to the compulsion now, and that bothers me... but we've not come up with a better way.

"--and then you have to put your P in her V and fumble around with her mandala coven knot and hope you tug on the right thread."

"Hope?"

"Yeah, hope. Or maybe not. Because then you can try again. But there's a lot of threads and a lot of tugging, especially with a network as deep as Cyprian's. It might take centuries... your other girls might get jealous. There's a way to locate the right thread, but I don't know how. Cyprian uses an artifact."

"An artifact?"

"Yup, a... what are they called? A worship table? No. An offering slab? No. A--wait--oh yeah--an altar. Cyprian uses an altar. Not just any altar, the Altar of Knots."

"The altar of what? Knots? That sounds like a place to tie witches down, not release them."

"What do you think Cyprian does with all those witches 'he releases?'" A faraway look passes over Astarte's face. "Not even a goddess could resist a leash binding her at the Altar of Knots. They practiced, you know--the Vedmak--on me. Not intentional, I'm sure, but they taught him how."

A goddess? Lurakate? I met her. She's bound? That's disturbing.

And irrelevant.

"Where's this altar at?"

"Malacor," Briar says, joining us from the downstairs shower.

"Ostra Vedma," Amanda says, sounding horrified. I know the feeling. We were right fucking there a day ago. Well, almost. Another two days of terrifying, back-breaking hiking through the Crossroads of Fate, and we would've been there. I'm not looking forward to that trek.

My brain stutters. That trek. I'd not even thought about it, and I'd just decided--with zero info--that I was doing it... for Amanda... for...

Ever.

Shit. What do the girls say? Hexit. Flame. Fuck! I have eight women that would do anything for me, and this one girl that rejected me, rejected us, still has me by the balls! It's not like she's a bitch. It's not like she's trying to control me. She doesn't even know we've rescued Amanda--sorta--but I've already decided I'd delve into the heart of darkness to save Priscilla's sister. It's not like I wouldn't do it for Amanda; I'm pretty sure I would. It's that I didn't even question it because I'm sure it's what Priscilla would want.

All but one of my girls have returned from the showers. The downstairs is still in use, so I head up. Hot water does a lot to ease the aches of the road, but little to ease the aches of the heart. When I return, the pizza has arrived and all my girls are devouring it in the living room. There's not enough seating--not even close--so most of them are on the floor. I gather a plate and go to join them, but Brittany and Serena, both on the couch, slide apart and pat the seat between them. Grateful I don't have to fold these long legs up on the floor, I take it.

Both girls lean into my shoulder. Brittany gives me a quick peck that's greasy with the pepperoni combination she likes. Tasting her makes my stomach rumble, and the moment she turns her focus back to her meal, I dig into mine. Lara scoots across the floor so she can pop her back against the couch between my knees. My heart feels so full it hurts. I don't know what to do with this knowledge that my girls chose me... keep choosing me. Serena snuggles closer to my side, and I know she's telling me she feels the love too.

Goddess, these girls. It's been what, six months now, and I can no longer imagine life without them. Half of them have been with me for only two months. How is it that they're so sure that they just up and decide to tie themselves to me for life?

I'm still reeling a little when Haley puts down her plate and addresses Bridget beside her.

"We need to get Cassandra a message, get her to come outside the wards."

"We could text her," Lara says.

"Mail." Emily.

"Chapar Khaneh."

"Huh?" I'm not the only one who says it. I think all of us are staring at Astarte expectantly.

Astarte rolls her eyes skyward. "The Royal Road. Persia. King Cyrus the Great. You youngsters tried it but couldn't really make it work. What did you call it? Um, The Pony Express? Same motto too. Herodotus wrote it, not you 'Americans'..." Astarte finger air-quotes when she says Americans. "...'Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.'"

"It doesn't matter how we message her," Bridget says. "The moment Cassandra steps outside the ward, the magistra will know." She pauses. "The matrona have to be watching for something like that, and Decana Ashwind is on their side."

"I... agree," Emily says. "The matrona had you in their sights before I became involved. The trial was just the first attack. Each time they fail to contain us simply tells them they need to use more force. It started all the way back with your clan..." Her gaze flicks between the twins. Bridget just nods, but Brittany blushes. The Brittany-compass still radiates with anger, hurt and guilt, even though she's the one that noticed in time to save us all. I rub the grease off my fingers on a napkin and then loop my right arm around her shoulder and tug her into my side. She shoots me a weak grin.

"... and your clan."

The same bitter feeling spamming the Brittany-compass floods the empathic link I have with Serena--perhaps worse, because Brittany saved us that time too. My two injured girls have made peace with each other... but not themselves. I scrub the fingers of my other hand on the napkin and put my arm around Serena too. There's a hole in my stomach. I'm fucking hungry. It can wait. My girls matter too much. Serena snuggles her head against my shoulder.

"We love you too, Lock," she whispers low enough that I'm the only one likely to hear. Of course I can't hide anything from her--our link is always on.

"I'm not leaving my hoard," Yvette growls. "Not again. They can't have it." She's staring at her plate--the leftover pizza crusts. My itty-bitty five-foot-petite girl probably ate three pizzas all by herself. She's not really talking to anyone, but she meant all of us to hear. I don't blame her; as a dragon, gold is her lifeline, but I don't know how we're going to get that much jewelry to the Crossroads where we could then take it to her lair. It's not all gold, but her finders-keepers lost-and-found pile is still the size of a giant bean bag--and gets used like one too--it can't be light. Diamonds are rocks, aren't they?

So are gold and silver and a lot of other things that make jewelry glitter. I imagine that much jewelry has to be heavy, and, um, guess who'll be expected to carry it? Whenever we get a break from running for our lives all the time, it might be wise to start hitting the gym. With this many girls looking to me to carry their loads, muscles might be a requirement.

"We need a plan."

"And provisions."

"An escape route."

"Time to bond Cassandra, so they can't just track us."

I jump into the conversation. "What if she doesn't want to?" I didn't mean to bark, but my voice is a little rumbly. That is a sticking point for me. No means no, and I will not force her. I'm a little concerned that even with consent, bonding her on the run is a little too much like what Case did to Amanda. He had his charming mask on, and she'd gotten into something she'd not expected... with no way out. Short of this altar thing--or sheer luck like Briar and I--coven is forever.

Serena laughs beside me. It's not a bitter sound, but there's something there that's, I don't know, self-deprecating. "Oh, she wants to." Our shared empathy tells me she feels that her situation and Cassandra's situation are too similar. Same clan. Same matrona. Same take-him-over demands.

Honestly, I can see why she thinks that, except... Serena wanted me--badly. I don't see that with Cassandra. She's nice. She hangs with us sometimes. She helps us. That intense pull I had--still have--with Serena and my other girls is missing.

I mean, she is I-want-to-fuck-her attractive--but what witch isn't?

"I will get us a van," Haley says. "One of those fifteen-seat Ford Transit thingies."

"We can't just drive up," Brittany says, "they'll have us surrounded before we set foot on the curb."

"We won't. We'll drive here," Lara says, holding up her phone open to Google Maps. "Then we can walk in the back, through the woods. We'll come out right next to Flavian. From there, it's a short sprint to our room--and Yvette's hoard. We'll grab Cassandra and run. If worst comes to worst, we can use the menhir gate to the Crossroads."

"Let's not," Emily grumps.

Despite being bonded, I haven't known Emily long, but I've not taken Emily for a whiner. I don't think she's whining now. She really doesn't like the Crossroads. Given my experiences there?

I can't blame her.

"We'll have to go back to help Amanda," Briar says to Emily, not ungentle. Briar reaches across Bridget in order to briefly squeeze Emily's hand. Briar might have more reason to fear the Crossroads in general--and Malakor specifically--than all the rest of us, but she's putting on a brave face. The Briar-compass confirms this, and I can feel nothing but pride for my platinum venatrix girl. My gaze bumps between Briar and Emily and then drifts to Amanda, who is sitting a bit separate but staring at the coven with an expression I can't read, but makes my heart ache.

"So, back door, snatch and grab--right? Then we run?" Haley asks. The girls all nod or voice their agreement.

"'Ridget could maybe weave a 'ittle hole in the wa'ds," Brittany mumbles, her cheek bulged out with pizza. She takes a loud, deliberate gulp before finishing, "... so we could slip through unnoticed."

We stare at her--even Bridget. It's not that Bridget isn't awesome with wards; it's that she's eighteen. No one expects a student to be able to defeat the school's wards.

"'at?!" Brittany exclaims, nearly spitting her food. "'o you know anyone 'etter at wa'ds? My 'itter is awesome!"

Ouch, my heart... because, ouch, my heart. All my girls are awesome. I never doubted that Brittany loved her twin. I didn't think it was possible, but having Brittany say that out loud makes me love Brittany even more.

We finish our meal. Brittany wants to go down to the beach. The rest of us are too exhausted. That doesn't stop her. I watch from the plate-glass windows as she skips down to the surf and dances in the sand. Goddess, what would it be like to be her? To feel, and be, and just live. I can feel her joy pinging in the Brittany-compass. There's a big part of me that wants to be Brittany when I grow up.

When she returns windblown, sandy and cold, she heads straight for a second shower. The rest of us try to turn the cabin's mattresses, cushions, and blankets into some approximation of our monster bed back on campus. It's good to be me, because I get a mattress--even if that's only because all the girls want to pile on top of me.

***

"Oh, Goddess..."

I'm having a dream. Or Serena is. Or we both are... because we kinda share them. We're back in that jail cell where Serena got bonded because Brittany and Briar seduced us.

This time, Briar's not there. That, more than anything, is how I know it's a dream. Brittany, however, has her hand in Serena's pants once again. However, this time I'm not just watching, but feeling.

We're already bonded and we feel everything the other is. I briefly wonder if Serena's death would kill me--and vice versa. That wet, slick, sloppy sound Brittany's fingers are making in Serena's crease has us both trembling. A tight, banding ache wraps around us both. There are sensations that don't translate, though. I can feel Brittany's fingers inside Serena and the pleasure is mind-numbing--but a little alien too. In the past, I'd been balls-deep in one of my other girls when Brittany'd done this with Serena and, thus, was distracted. But now my brain is trying to translate our mirrored pleasure and it seems a little confused.

"Astarte... stop," comes Serena's strained groan.

"Is that really what you want, little girl?" Brittany purrs over Serena's shoulder into her ear. Brittany's behind Serena, reaching out front and facing me such that I can't miss the tortured pleasure on Serena's face. Brittany's fingers ceased their motion the moment Serena said stop. "If that's what you want--really want--we can be done."

"No." The word is almost a sob, and I feel the war within Serena. She likes this--loves this--but she's embarrassed too. All those times she came because I was the one playing with one of our girls are playing through her mind.

"You deserve this, little mirror. You pay the price when your warlock plays; a little turnaround is fair game."

"Oh Goddess, oh Goddess, hexit, flame. Astarte, ple--" Serena's voice hitches. "--ase!"

Astarte?!

My eyes snap open. It's dark. Shadowed. The wind whistles. The Pacific surf roars in the distance. Across the room, Serena's staring straight at me, her eyes wide, her cheeks flushed, her lashes fluttering. There's a wet, sloppy sound as Astarte works the hand she has in Serena's panties.

"Hold on. Hold on, little mirror, then you and your man can have a really big one."

Serena moans, her head flopping backwards to pillow on Astarte's shoulder. She's standing, but a limp noodle. Astarte must be stronger than the little librarian she appears to be, because I think she's holding the taller girl up with the arm she has wrapped around Serena's belly. Serena's not wearing the jeans I'd seen in my dream, and Serena's thighs are flexing and trembling. I can see the sheen of her pleasure running down the inside of one leg in a thin sliver of moonlight.

"I can't--I can't," Serena chants.

"Just a little longer."

"Oh Goddess..."

The pleasure is unreal. I don't know if that's because it's a succubus doing this to us or if that's just how Serena's almost-gasms feel. If so, mine pale in comparison. I want to go to her and stop this pleasure-torment so bad it hurts. It'd mean waking three of my girls, though, so I wrap a fist around my dick instead.

The jolt that shoots through my spine has Serena's head snapping off of Astarte's shoulder. Silver-gray meets my gaze. Her eyes are delirious with pleasure.

"Come, little mirror. Come, repentant betrayer. Come with your warlock."

Serena's eyes squeeze shut. She grabs a wrist between her teeth. She bites. We both try not to scream. She comes so hard we both see stars. I barely register my own body as hers quakes. We come. And come. And come. And fuck, I can't breathe. She can't breathe. Black closes in.

***

I wake. I don't know how long I was out, but it was a while. The Pacific sky beyond our cabin's huge window has morphed from a deep purple-black reminiscent of Priscilla's stunning midnight eyes to a deep, but lighter, blue. The stars are fading. Serena is curled up beside me and, yes, we're both wet--from sweat and, yeah, that.

I stroke Serena's long, glorious, chestnut locks. She mumbles something and cuddles closer into my side as the morning light bleeds into the room.

Some of my girls are already up. The Pacific surf drowns the murmur of their voices, but the occasional clatter of a pan and the scents of pancake batter and bacon cut through. I try to gently disentangle myself from my girl, but sometimes me being awake is enough to wake her... even though she often doesn't want to move.

I don't want to move either, but a shower is in order. I've barely stepped under the warm spray when my grumbling girl joins me. We wash and join the others just in time for a breakfast of pancakes, eggs and extra-crispy, slightly burnt bacon. We must be early on Amazon's route because they arrive with everything Lara ordered, and not long after, a rental agency drops off a Ford Transit 350.

Briar registers her license with the rental agency, as she'll be the one driving. Astarte might be older, more experienced, but no one wants to discover if she knows how to drive. "Chained" though she'd been, at least Briar hadn't been locked in a cage for the past four hundred years. Emily "registers" as our backup driver. By the time we're piling into the non-descript, silver nowit transport, it's approaching noon. Goddess, honestly, I'm grateful for nowit transport right now. Riding in the back of a van sure beats hiking through the Crossroads. We've just left the quaint coastal town with all its pastel paints when Brittany says:

"I need to pee."

Fortunately, Brittany doesn't need to pee so badly that she says it again before we've reached the interstate, maybe an hour and a half later. Unfortunately, we've just passed a rest stop.

"I could use a coffee," Briar agrees from behind the wheel.

"I wouldn't mind something to drink," Emily says from the passenger seat.

"And eat," Bridget, Lara, and Serena all agree.

"Stop at a McDonald's," Haley suggests. Fortunately, Centralia is coming up, and there's one there. Despite being the one that needed to pee, Brittany ends up being third in line. Haley and I take orders for all the girls, and I busy myself by arranging food and drinks upon a table so I can pass them out to each of my ladies.

"What'd you get me?" Brittany asks. She'd been in the restroom by the time I'd gotten to taking down her order. That's okay; it's how I'd wanted it to work out anyway. I hand her a Happy Meal--burger, no cheese.

"Wha...?!'

"If you don't want it..." I hold out my hand. She clutches it to her chest. When I reach for it, she backs up a step, flips me off and then reaches past me to grab my 32 oz. Coke, leaving me with her 12-ounce. Brittany starts to march back towards the van, frowning. The Brittany-compass tells me it's fake, she's happy, but she's always happy so with Brittany, it can be hard to tell.

I chuckle. "Brit, it was a joke. What do you want? I'll get you something else." Brittany stops. Her lips twitch towards a smile. She slips back beside me, leans in, and gives me a peck on the cheek.

"It's fine. Maybe the toy is a spit-wad slingshot."

Even though we ate in the van, it's probably 45 minutes before all eleven of us are gathered and back on the road. We've not even reached Chehalis ten minutes down the interstate when a voice speaks up from the back row.

"I need to pee."

I twist in my seat, expecting it to be Brittany after she chugged three-quarters of my 32 oz. Coke. Instead, Astarte is sitting there, her thighs crossed and looking thoroughly displeased.

"What?" Astarte snaps, narrowing her eyes at me from behind her librarian glasses. "Give a lady a break. I'm eight thousand years old..." I'm stunned when her youthful cheeks turn all red delicious. "... err, well, about that."

We cross the Columbia around three. We manage to leave Portland just as the first hints of rush hour begin to gel. We turn towards the lower ridgeline between the southern slopes of Mount Hood and the northern slopes of Mount Jefferson, and things begin to feel increasingly like home.

We take the Beltline loop and park by the lake. I catch Briar staring at the steep slope climbing back up to the road from the shoreline. Yvette takes her hand and gives it a quick squeeze. Briar shakes herself, gives Yvette a tight smile, and goes to ready herself for this little adventure. Like me, Briar and Yvette must be remembering that night when I first discovered witchery, warlocks, and dragons--but I suspect each of us remembers it very differently. It's strange how the past can reach out and grab us sometimes.

Emily's out first, throwing open the trunk while the rest of us pile out of the van. Brittany eyeballs our CRTC ward-weave jackets as though they were covered in slime.

"I'm not wearing it," she says. "I might as well walk around with a neon sign saying Look at me. What doesn't belong? Shoot me first."

"We can't just leave it, Brit," Lara fires back. This discussion has been going on all day. "We'll need it if we have to flee to the Crossroads again."

"Then put it in Yvette's hole." My smallest girl, Yvette, narrows her eyes at Brittany.

"And just how are we going to do that?" Emily asks. "We can't get to Yvette's lair from here."

"But we can get to the Crossroads and from the Crossroads, the lair. There's an anchor stone just over there." Brittany points at the woods that are between us and the school. She changes her bearing a little bit. "Err, there." She rolls her eyes, presumably in frustration. "I mean, that way." She waves her hand vaguely in the direction of Threfane. "You know what I mean."

"That anchor stone is on campus, behind the wards."

"So, we pop in and then back out. It'll take five minutes tops, and we can drop off all our other stuff, too."

"We don't have five minutes," Emily says.

"If we don't have five minutes, we're screwed and shouldn't go."

"I..." Emily deflates. "... agree." Lara and Yvette don't look sure. Bridget sides with her twin, but the Bridget-compass suggests that might be more me-too and not total agreement. Astarte is definitely whatever. The Haley-compass tells me she feels caught in the middle.

"Yvette and I can pop into the Crossroads while you all loot our dormitory," Serena says. It's not often she catches me off guard, but I hadn't "felt" that suggestion coming.

"And I'll go fetch Cassandra... if she'll come," Lara says.

"I don't know that we should split up," I say. I'm not comfortable with my eight girls going thirteen different directions. I know they're the ones that generally protect me, but it feels wrong not to be with them when they go into danger. I don't like it. As though she can read my mind, Serena pats me on the bicep, goes up on her toes, gives me a swift kiss on the cheek, and then... utterly ignores my objection. All the girls do. Shouer Prima Haley Wright decides the Serena-Lara-Brittany plan has the best chance of success. What the fuck happened to coven is one?

Except I know the answer to that. Coven is the girls--I'm just the glue. We shoulder our packs, bags, and purses.

We all know the general direction of school, but Haley pulls it up on her phone's GPS while Lara paces along the front of the wood separating school and park, looking for a trail that might go the right way. It's too early in the year for the flowers to be in bloom, but Lara brushes the wide, wet leaves of a wild hydrangea out of the way and leads us into the wood.

The wood is wet, drippy. Douglas fir and bigleaf maple curtain the sky overhead. Hydrangea, salmonberry, and ferns drip stored rainfall in the undergrowth. The trail twists and turns around tree trunks, roots, and rotting logs. Half-fallen maples lean upon one another, dripping with moss and licorice fern. White fir and the occasional cedar spice as a counterpoint to the smell of clear rainwater everywhere. Three girls ahead of me, Astarte bumps a small maple, making the foliage shiver. Cold rainwater dumps down the back of my neck when I pass under.

"Ugh, wet," Brittany gripes, whipping her ponytail back and forth.

"Wait. Stop!" Emily calls from the third position in the line. The coven stumbles to a stop. She points. "The school wards start there." I glance about with the sight. With Emily pointing out the wards, I think I see them, but the witchery has been disguised, and the intricate ribbons fade into the foliage. Bridget, our ward expert, inspects them.

She shakes her head. "I can't. They're too intricate." That's not a surprise. Bridget is a freshman. The wards were woven by witches far more experienced and older. Several of us glance at Astarte.

"Don't look at me. I'm all about enchantment. Not wards."

Well, there goes that idea. We'll just have to hope no one is waiting for us or too concerned.

We move on. Our chatter, already sparse, nearly stills. Our pace picks up. This anxious energy lights up my nerves, the static charging higher with every stride we take. Haley corrects our course once or twice.

The trees break. Flavian comes into view. Serena breaks off and trots one out of every three steps as she speeds towards the menhir rune-stone gateway to the Crossroads of Fate. I rubberneck as the rest of us follow as best we can. I can hear the occasional sneaker on wood court squeak, students cheering, or coaches shouting from inside, but I see no other witches. By the time we reach her, Serena's already tracing rune-stone whorls with a finger. I feel a certain jittery panic, but can't tell if that's Serena's nerves or my own. If something happened to any of my girls, it'd tear out my heart, but with our empathic bond, losing Serena would feel like carving a limb off my soul.

"Don't worry, big boy," Yvette murmurs, taking my pack from me. My smallest girl has absurd strength--so long as she doesn't counterbalance. "I would never let something happen to your heart."

"You're all my heart," I mutter. I'm really not happy about this. Lara is already speeding away to find Cassandra and bring her back here. This is where Haley has determined we'll all rendezvous.

"Yup," Yvette says. "I will not let anything happen to your heart," she growls.

I appreciate that, I do, but she's only one dragon, and a young one at that. I don't want anything happening to her either. Goddess, this is hard. What gear Serena and Yvette haven't already caught up on their shoulders is all piled around the stone, and Serena is already spinning up the threads of fate.

"Stone to thread and thread to stone, when threshold breaks, the path we tread," Serena intones. Normally, spinning up the anchor stone's fate threads is rather casual for Serena, but today I hear tension in her voice. Our empathic bond is probably giving her my nerves.

It's weird. I've never seen this before--never stayed behind while someone I loved stepped into the Crossroads of Fate. Their bodies, their packs, all of our belongings we sent with them unravel like so much glowy, sunless ribbon. The color is not celestial sunshine or moonlit silver, but this dirty-white, cloud-gray--it's celestial sunshine ribbon except on a black-and-white TV. This void opens in my chest. My girls are going into danger without me. I'm torn like three ways. I and all my women are in danger, but the urge to jump into the vortex with them rises up so strong, legs tense to spring. My girls unravel, and then they're gone. The void in my chest draws me forward, and I stagger, catching myself against the menhir rock. There's desperate keening in my heart, but it's all illusion. The girl-compasses go a bit wild trying to point me at Yvette and Serena, but the bond remains connected.

"Come on, Lock," Haley says, gently taking my hand. Hoping to avoid eyes as long as we can, we round Flavian and bee-line for Moryanna. We encounter our first students as we pass Cauldron Square.

"This is stupid," I say.

"You wanted to fight back. We wanted to fight back," Haley quietly reminds me.

"We did. We freed Astarte."

"And now it's time to free Cassandra. And Amanda. There's no point in stopping. The matrona won't."

"Shit, I know," I rake a hand through my hair, "just... Goddess."

"Yeah, I know."

And she does. I know. I don't need the Haley-compass; I can see it in her eyes. Five months--five months ago she bound herself to me, the rogue warlock, and now this. There's this ache in my chest, and while it'd kill me, part of me wishes there was some way for me to let her--all of them--go. They'd be safer without me--without this.

"But have no autonomy. No choice," Haley whispers quietly. We've reached Cauldron Square, and while classes must be in session, we pass students here and there. We get a few second glances, the coven always does, but I don't see any alarm. Maybe the matrona haven't declared open season. The remaining girls and I trot up Moryanna's porch to the back wing. We head to the end of the hall, and our room.

"Wards?" Haley asks before trying the door. We're all looking, but I don't see any. Bridget shakes her head. Haley unlocks the door.

The downstairs is like we last left it. Homework open on the table. The curtains drawn. A couch pushed slightly out of the way by Julianna's flight across the room when Decana Ashwind did whatever it was she did. The room is a bit cold, no one's lit a fire, and even though it's only been a few days, it somehow feels abandoned--not lived in. Emily runs over to the homework table and tries to wedge both her laptop and Codex into a spare satchel. Bridget joins her a moment later, stacking grimoire textbooks as though she intends to keep at least one copy of each of our books.

"Does anyone know where Lara's rituals textbook is? Seniors study a lot of stuff freshmen don't," Bridget says. Haley retrieves it from under the coffee table. Brittany and I scramble upstairs. Brittany starts ripping through our closet like a tornado. Amanda tries to help Brittany, but between her nerves, the compulsion, and never having been here before, she's more pack mule than packer. Astarte doesn't even pretend to help. If a piece of clothing is even vaguely sexy, she holds it up to herself as if she wants to try it on. That's not good, because my girls are sexy. Their clothes reflect that.

Meanwhile, I try to figure out what we're going to do with Yvette's finders-keepers lost-and-found jewelry hoard. If it was just money, that'd be one thing, but gold is like Yvette's lifeblood. I dump some school books out of one of the girls' satchels and shovel jewelry into it.

Loaded, it's fucking heavy. When I hoist the satchel, the tangled mass shifts like a sack of lead shot, a dense, metallic clatter echoing inside the canvas. It's so absurdly heavy the leather strap looks on the verge of snapping--it has to be giving that basalt Fate Anchor a run for its money. I sling it over my shoulder; the strap bites straight into my flesh, pulling me sideways, and I can already tell my arm is going to go numb before I hit the end of the hall. I hand it off to our succubus with instructions to take it to Yvette.

The girls take two or three trips between our room and the anchor stone, passing clothing, hoard, schoolbooks and more off to Serena and Yvette. It's moving day, and by now someone has to have taken notice. I've refreshed Amanda's "obey," and it's just she and I loading up the last of our stuff when, downstairs, the door opens and closes.

It's not like that hasn't been happening, but that's not my girls--the coven-bond would've told me so. I grab Amanda's arm, and we both freeze.

"Tell me again, why are we here?"

I know that voice. It's a student. I know her. It's just, I can't place it; my brain is a little panicky right now, you know.

"I'd like to know that too."

Amanda gives a little squeak, but she doesn't move. At this point, the compulsion to obey me is likely so strong I could tell her to stand naked in the middle of the quad and she'd do it. Even if we do figure out how to free her from Case, I don't know how we're going to free her from me. But I know why she squeaked. I want to squeak too, because...

Ever.

Goddess, why does Priscilla have such a hold on me? Amanda's half-sister, Helen-destroyed-Troy, is still taking me apart, one piece at a time.

"The Tablets say," a third voice explains. It's Cassandra. It has to be Cassandra, which means--

"The Tablets," Piper, the original speaker, groans, sounding upset. "I love you, Cassandra. I do. I've known you forever. We're roomies. We're BFFs. But this year, the Tablets stuff--Cassandra, it's all the time, and it's too much. I'm... going."

"Don't leave." Cassandra is usually a little otherworld, singsong, or dreamy-sounding, but at this moment she sounds almost panicked. "You're needed."

"Who needs me?" Piper snaps.

"I need you."

Despite the echoing acoustics of our room, the whisper barely reaches me upstairs. That causes me to pause, an ache in my chest. Other than Piper, Cassandra does seem kinda alone. Even for a witch, she's a strange one--a lost girl, you know. Suddenly the thought of asking Cassandra to join our growing coven seems right on a whole new level. She needs family. I want to offer it to her.

"There's nobody here, Cassandra." That was Priscilla talking. I nod to the quivering Amanda that she should go. Black hair flying and crying Priscilla's name, Amanda races down the stairs. I follow more slowly.

"Amanda? Amanda?! How?!"

The half-sisters collide in a hug. Priscilla's midnight eyes snap to me when I reach the bottom of the stair. I read shock and... something else. It's little orange-haired Piper that speaks first, however.

"Lock, you were gone." There's a note of something I can't decipher in her voice.

"See," Cassandra says to Piper, as if somehow my presence proves something. Her tone doesn't say smug nearly as much as it says long-suffering-I-wish-people-would-believe-me. I go to respond, but alarm suddenly flares over the Lara-compass, and that's the only warning I receive.

The dormitory door bursts open as though struck by the battering ram Grond. Witches spill through--adult witches--and they're outfitted for war.