Cascade Fire

7. Market Day

See, there's this complex chain of dependencies. I loved Callie and she loved me, we both loved Jess and she loved both of us back, and neither of these wonderful women fully trusted Sati and so neither did I. This wasn't something I'd discussed with them, me being mostly incapable of discussion, but some indelible part of me knew. And so Sati trying to get this out-of-nowhere knowledge of telekinesis from me just wasn't something I was going to do without Callie's involvement, and probably Jess', no matter how deep in my psyche Sati was, or how much her body, her mind, her intent, taste, scent, her numinous presence owned me. This new self growing inside me had already developed to the point where I/it knew at least some of its limits and was intensely proud of Callie for resisting Sati's attempt to control me, and my new self felt like it could do no less. But Sati's best efforts, and remember, this is probably the most seductively powerful woman in the world if not the most irresistible woman who's ever been born, if that's indeed how she came into this world, plus Dani's extremely persuasive assistance when any part of me was in her mouth, erotic transmigration at any speed, these were not easy things to disregard.

They tried frickin' everything. But they couldn't keep me bound or caged or clipped or gagged or buttplugged or even blindfolded for long, they couldn't keep me from orgasming one way or another, and like Mari before them they couldn't keep me in trance if some part of me was uncomfortable with it, so all their efforts accomplished was a whole lot of bodily ecstasy for me and somewhat less for them. Eventually they got too tired to continue and I was pretty worn out myself, so these two beautiful women pregnant with my children slept with me late into the morning of the second day, me spooning Sati spooning Dani, my right arm draped over both, which might have been my favorite part of any time I'd ever spent with either of them.

"Please," Dani whispered to me after we woke, and that might've been the best reason either of them had given, but

"Callie, Jess," I said, my unfocused eyes in hers, and Dani's expression showed her longing.

It was a Tuesday. Tomorrow was the first Farmer's Market of the season, and we had work to do. Mushrooms to forage, honey to harvest, a little comb left in each jar, culinary and medicinal herbs, dried and fresh, tea from rose petals and apple blossoms and mint and sage and lemon balm, rose hip soup, vegetables and flowers and the preserved bounty of the previous autumn's harvest: apple butter and jams from all the fruits of our garden and the wild land around us, tinctures and oil pressed from various seeds or leaves or roots and infused with botanicals, some for massage or healing, all needed packing up and some needed labeling. Then, in the afternoon, there were one hundred chickens, and as we set up a kind of assembly line, yet another insane thing happened: that spell to restart a heart that we'd learned from my grimoire had its ward and its inverse and its corollary and they'd revealed themselves to me and if I'd been able to think about it I might've been very afraid indeed, because I no longer needed to hypnotize a chicken and then twist its neck.

I could just stop its heart.

At first I held the hypnotized chicken to do it, and then I could do it at arm's length, and finally I could stop the hearts of half a dozen unhypnotized chickens simultaneously even from a distance.

Callie started crying, and it wasn't from happiness this time ... she was genuinely fearful. Not of me for her sake or for any of ours, but of what else I might be able to do, or what someone else might be able to make me do. Or what she might soon be learning to do herself.

The chickens needed plucking and dressing and overnight cold storage, not quite frozen, and we shared three for dinner with morels and fresh spring peas and stock and thyme and scallions and parsley and fresh cream and fettuccine and a little sauvignon blanc and bacon, and it was absolutely fucking wonderful and for some unprocessed reason there was no orgy afterward, but this night I got to be with just Callie and Jess for the very first time and that was even better,

so much better

, and yes of course we fucked, and goddess what Jess could do to me with her hands while I had Callie for dessert and then I was deep inside Jess while Callie rode her face and then I took Callie from her wonderful behind while she had Jess for dessert, and then we slept the deep contented relieved sleep of lovers in a storm except for this thing and this other thing and maybe a few more things that we were going to have to find some way to talk about.

In the morning Stuart and Kelsey headed into Bend, Central Oregon's resort nexus, to set up the market stall with Ingrid while Sati had Jess teach Taylor how to please a man or a woman with her hands the way she'd teased and pleased me so much last night ... Taylor was becoming quite the force of nature with all of this technique on top of her natural voluptuous beauty and enthusiasm for giving and receiving pleasure, now directed more towards making any other man or woman happy to be an utterly compelled servant, because, goddess, she could give so much pleasure, and as Stuart and Kelsey were discovering to their enthralled multi-orgasmic dismay, she could also withhold it at her whim or complement it with bondage, discipline, punishment, humiliation and straight-up pain until they were as mindless as I. Taylor's look was changing, too, no longer the bubbly fresh-faced flamehaired natural beauty but now with plucked eyebrows and lip liner in thin sophisticated curves, heels indoors, her nails growing longer and manicured and lacquered glossy pale rosy pink, favoring sheer bodystockings that she absolutely rocked. If she wanted, I swear she could make a man come just from watching her, no magic required, and I would be surprised if she didn't already know it.

Sati disappeared into her suite with Lashe for most of the day, leaving Callie and me together alone, and we used that time to saddle up for another ride into the caldera, which this time we were determined to reach, and in the afternoon a thunderstorm was predicted so Callie brought two lightning rods, which is not something I'd ever heard of anyone doing.

As I followed Callie on a narrow forest trail, a thought skittered past about how odd it was that neither she nor Taylor had gotten pregnant. I sort-of perceived why Ingrid hadn't, but here in this place where there was so much fertility, four of seven women had gotten with child, three from me even though I'd had a fucking vasectomy. No answer came, of course.

Callie seemed preoccupied but talked a little as we rode, the horses mostly just walking easily except when she had us get up to a full gallop on two of the forest service road segments, which was a completely new kind of exhilaration for me.

"I feel bad for helping to keep you here, Bob," she said eventually, her words coming fast and maybe a little nervous, "I know you're married and you love your family, and I know you love me, and this is all very confusing because I've never loved someone the way I love you now, I didn't know it was even possible for me to love like this. I'm so happy we're together, so happy you helped open me to these feelings I thought I could never have, but I'm also afraid for the future."

I nodded. "I ... can't ... really ... remember," I said.

"I maybe shouldn't be telling you this, but when Sati went to Canada and found you, she went for the sole purpose of finding you. She knew from divination that someone like you would be there and she would have to seek you out, so she spread the word to her people, and a few days later there you were. I think she wanted to spend more time alone with you before bringing you here, but I know what happened in that park with Taylor and the others. And of course now I'm very happy that you came sooner."

I had no way to respond intelligibly other than smiling and nodding, but I would like to think my smile conveyed just a little of my love and gratitude for her.

We'd started later today than on our last ride, but those two gallops helped us get to the same meadow where we'd lunched and sparred and loved last time at about the same hour, and as the year moved on through the spring, there would be two extra hours of daylight later. And there we had lunch again, holding hands when we could, loving, remembering, under a huge sky with slowly gathering clouds, no sparring this time. Then we each took a lightning rod, carrying it horizontally over a shoulder, turned the horses loose, and hiked past several bubbling springs the rest of the way into the caldera.

Inside was a completely different landscape. There were two big lakes at the foot of a steep 1000' cliff on the opposite side, smallish deserted resorts and campgrounds on the shores, a fair amount of snow, especially on the north-facing slopes behind us, a breached central cone surrounded by broken lava flows, a much bigger flow near where we hiked in, beyond which was the ruined remains of what had once been a shoulder of the old peak, now merely the highest point of the caldera's rim. We made for the big flow, passing an outbuilding that some part of me noted, picked our way through weathered gray boulders and broken obsidian and snow patches, not much beyond lichen and tufts of thin hardy grass growing anywhere, then climbed to the top and sat down. She took my hand in both of hers and we closed our eyes and felt the world turn around us. It was about 4:00 PM and the clouds were getting darker. She pointed to the place she wanted me to inoculate the earth with my lightning rod in whatever space I found between rocks while she walked to another about 150m away to set up hers, then we came together between. She had an insulated mat that we spread on the closest thing we could find to a flat level space in a little bit of a hollow amidst boulder outcrops, and we lay down side by side, not touching except our fingertips. The wind rose, the pressure and the temperature dropped so fast it was startling, the clouds darkened, there was a flash of lightning followed three seconds later by a boom of thunder, and then the clouds opened up and we got fucking drenched. The lightning came closer and the thunder got louder and Callie moved her hand away from mine so no part of her was less than six inches from any part of me and the sole of one of my hiking boots was just beyond our insulated blanket and I started to feel a prickling sensation and then,

BOOM!

, one of our lightning rods got hit and the world lit up even through closed eyelids, Callie tensing but staying still. I could feel the ground wavering and charging around us, especially through that one foot just beyond the edge of our insulated blanket, and it was like when I'd been with Mari, exchanging energy, mostly channeling it to her but also getting some back, creating our own energy, but this time that energy was all around us and there for the taking and some part of my extrasense reached out.

Just a trickle at first, it would've been really easy to fry from getting too much, but it was like a revelation. And my extrasense just sort of unfolded, feeling and fumbling its way and then into Callie, into Jess and Dani who carried my children 15 miles away, into Sati who carried another child of mine and Hers, and right at that moment Sati was doing a tarot reading for herself. Which seems a strange thing for her to have been doing, if you knew who she is. And now I knew her true name but she had more than one and I knew who Ingrid was and I could just begin to know what had happened to my old self, and there was fire and another kind of energy deep down below us.

"Please don't seek the fire yet, darling, please," Callie said sadly, touching me lightly on my arm, her tears starting again, and for her sake I drew back.

And then there was another lightning strike, and another, and the energy my extrasense was tuned into rose and smoothed into a kind of continuum that was a wave I was riding and sharing with Callie and even with Jess, and with Taylor who was with Jess, all three of them fairly glowing with the energy they were receiving, and my extrasense knew more and more about what to do with it, and then the lightning and thunder were receding though the rain continued and Callie said

"Gods," awestruck, and reached to touch my arm and then my chest and my belly, and I was hard from her first gentle touch but her continuing made me that much harder, then she covered me with that hand and pressed her palm down into me and said "I want to know" and I nodded and kept what passed for awareness focused on everything around us and

Callie was unzipping my soaking wet pants and her riding breeches were crotchless, and she pulled my cock out and rolled to straddle me and unbuttoned her shirt and unsnapped her bra and took one of my hands and placed it over her heart between her lovely pointed breasts and lowered herself so I could take one of them into my mouth, and I teased that nipple with just the tip of my tongue, just a part of my awareness communicating with her, and then she lowered herself farther down until her lips were so close and she teased mine with just the tip of her tongue, her long dripping wet hair streaming over her strong slender shoulders and around both sides of my face, teasing my cheeks and ears and then her clit was playing my cock head like an instrument, like the lightest touch of a silky soft finger and I shivered and I felt that shiver echo in the energy around us and then her wet slit surrounded me as she pressed herself up and down until my cock was right there at her entrance and she said

"Deeper," and I exhaled as she slowly, slowly drew me inside warm wet heaven and I said

"Yes," and she moaned and whimpered and continued down onto me until I was all the way in and she flexed down harder onto my balls and my body was relaxing and her body was learning to relax with me and we felt the irresistible approach of release, and our lips moving together but no sound coming from mine she said

"Good," and flexed down harder, and then "Boy."

And I fucking lost it. 15 miles away with Taylor's lovely hand a precise maestraic instrument under Jess' tutelage playing a dildo next to her in the same way it would soon own any cock she wanted, Jess came hard out of the blue and Taylor felt it through her fingers and wondered how the fuck she could be feeling that good with nothing but a silicone cock in her hand but she did, and with Jess trembling in the throes, Taylor kissed her on the lips and then their tongues were at work and Taylor took one of Jess' hands and placed it on her breast as Jess whimpered at Taylor's snowballing feminine power incarnate and then my lovely tiny Jess and this nascent sex ba-bomb Taylor totally got it on except that Taylor kept her hand around that silicone cock the whole time, and when Jess took the tip of that cock into her mouth I felt it on my own even though I was pounding deep inside Callie from behind like an animal at the time, and Jess felt me moving in her mouth and when Taylor took her turn using everything she'd already learned from Dani and I felt that too and she felt a little of it back, it was just that much more pleasure on top of ecstasy and I catapulted to a whole 'nother plane, like being in that deep warm Aegean pool again, Callie suspended astonished beside me, both of us agog in something that I could once again only imagine as enlightenment, not just fleeting orgasmic pleasure but something like permanence even as our mortal bodies continued their enthusiastic orgiastic joining. And now I knew why Callie and Taylor hadn't gotten pregnant: because Sati didn't want it, because them not being pregnant was a different kind of female energy that she needed for what she was trying to do. And Callie was wise to distrust it.

Walking back down a little after 5:30, I saw that little outbuilding again and this time knew exactly where it was in relation to our hall and could see it as plain as anything else I'd ever seen even with eyes closed, ears and nose covered, and now I knew how to return here in a single step whenever I wanted.

Callie literally walked on air for part of the way back - she'd learned what I knew about telekinesis and levitation as well as about touching energy like the lightning had raised all around us, both of us absolutely awash in it, a sort of euphoria, and I'd also given her everything else I'd learned, including what I'd done to those poor chickens, though of course having their hearts stopped painlessly like that was a better alternative than even what I'd done before. And she was relieved to learn that stopping a chicken's heart was a lot easier than stopping a human's but couldn't yet know that it was only a matter of degree.

Next in chapter 8:

The Milky Way | Stars, goddesses, magic, and a kind of final exam.