Double Vision

"Heads up!" The striker's warning came just a split-second before the soccer ball smacked solidly into the side of Jo's head, hitting her square on the temple with punishing force. She didn't even have a chance to pretend she was fine-her muscles went slack and her vision narrowed to a pinprick as she collapsed to the grass. She could feel mud soaking into her jersey and smearing her blonde ponytail, but it felt impossibly distant.

Everything felt impossibly distant-she heard her teammates crowding around her, but it was like they were on the other end of a long tunnel. She heard them asking if she was alright, but her body seemed like it was miles away, totally unresponsive to her mental commands. She felt like even if she were able to open her eyes, she'd see the field through a telescopic lens from miles away.

I think I have a head injury,

she said to herself, but even the fear seemed remote and unimportant.

After a long, slow drifting moment, Jo heard Coach Erickson's voice cut through the babble of noise. "Everyone get back," she was saying, "give her some air." She felt Coach gently and carefully rolling her over onto her back, checking her neck to make sure it wasn't broken. "Jo," she said, "can you hear me?"

Jo strained to make her mouth move. "Muuh," she muttered, her tongue thick and unresponsive. "Guuh..."

"Take your time, Jo," Coach said, grasping her hand. "Don't push it. Just lie back and take it easy for a minute. You got hit on the head pretty hard."

"I'm fine," Jo tried to say. It came out more as, "Mafan." She started to open her eyes, but the second the sun spilled into her eyes a wave of sickening dizziness washed over her. She decided maybe she should lie back and take it easy for a minute, focus her energies on not tossing her cookies all over the practice field.

"It's okay," Coach said. "You're going to be fine. The ball just came off Molly's foot a little funny, and it smacked you pretty hard. You might have a concussion, but I don't think it's a bad one. You'll be back in time for the game at UMD, no problem." Jo felt her shift position to block the sunlight, and the intense headache and nausea eased slightly. "There, that better?"

Jo nodded extremely gingerly. She flickered her eyes open. Everything still felt bright, and her vision swam and wobbled in front of her, but it wasn't making her sick. "How many fingers am I holding up?" Coach asked. Jo tried to focus her eyes on Coach's fingers, but she kept seeing weird after-images. It was like there were two Coaches, one overlapping the other. One of them was holding up three fingers, but the other...

The other one was impossible. She had gray skin, the color of wet ash after a fire, but smooth. Impossibly smooth, smoother than skin, smoother than glass, smoother than satin. Skin that had never wrinkled into laughter. Skin that had never known age. Her face was swept back from an impossibly narrow, pointy nose and thin, pursed lips. She stared down at Jo with jet-black, glittering eyes and an unreadable expression. She had long, white hair and ears that stuck out widely and tapered into sharp points, and she held up three ash-gray, slender fingers with long, talon-like nails.

Jo closed her left eye. The apparition vanished, leaving Coach Erickson and her gentle, concerned face. She closed her right eye instead. Coach Erickson was blotted out and the creature was staring at her once more. She opened both eyes. They overlaid each other almost precisely, moving in perfect unison as they said, "Jo?"

"What are you?" she murmured, as much to herself as Coach Erickson. She reached up, brushing at the tip of those impossibly long ears, unable to believe the evidence of her own eyes. "What

are

you?" she whispered again, staring wide at the thing in front of her.

Her right eye saw Coach Erickson sigh in resignation. Her left eye saw the creature's eyes widen in surprise and alarm. its lips contort into a snarl of fear. "Concussion," they said in unison. Jo was surprised to notice that they even had different voices. "Definitely. Let's get her back to Doctor Eklund's office."

Jo felt hands under her shoulders picking her up and lifting her to her feet. The sun stung her eyes again and she clenched them tightly shut, but she thought she saw another couple of the creatures in among her teammates before the dizziness forced her to close her eyelids again. "There's more than one of them," she said loosely, but she knew she sounded like she was hallucinating. Maybe she was hallucinating. She didn't feel like she was hallucinating, but maybe that was part of the hallucination. But if she was really hallucinating things, would she even be considering the idea that she was hallucinating?

Jo's head slumped down and she let the others carry her unresisting body to the doctor's office. Just thinking about it was giving her a headache.

They set her down on a blessedly cool bed in blessedly dim lighting, and pulled over a curtain to give her some privacy. She heard Coach Erickson saying to her teammates, "Go on back to practice, girls. I'll make sure Doctor Eklund knows what happened."

In another voice, one that sounded like the rasp of paper rubbing against paper, Jo heard her say, "Leave and think nothing of her words. If anyone speaks to you of it, you will remember only that she rambled something unimportant."

Jo's teammates murmured their assent and left the office. Through the curtain, Jo saw Coach Erickson pacing back and forth. She cast two shadows on the curtains, one impossibly slender and tall. Jo wanted to slip out of the bed and make a break for it, but sitting up just made her so dizzy that she collapsed onto the pillow again.

After a moment, a second pair of shadows appeared behind the curtains. One of them had the silhouette of Doctor Eklund, familiar from a twisted ankle here and a sprained wrist there. The other one matched Coach Erickson's twin, gaunt and towering. "What is it, sister?" she asked in a papery whisper.

"The girl," Coach Erickson responded. "She sees us. Not our glamour, but our selves. She has a true Sight of us, and that means peril." That wasn't all she was saying-Jo could hear a whole other conversation laid over their words, mundane talk of head trauma and blurred vision. But underneath that was their secret voice, more like the shadow of a sound than like sound itself. Jo wondered if she'd ever be able to explain what that meant, or if it was just more concussion-babble in her head and she only thought it made sense.

Doctor Eklund said, "Fear not, sister. I shall take the measure of her Sight and the measure of the danger she poses. Go back now, and leave her to me. You have your own tasks to perform." With a curt nod, Coach Erickson's shadow moved away, leaving only one set of decidedly un-identical twins.

Jo tensed as Doctor Eklund popped her head through the curtains. "Howdy, kiddo," she said brightly. "How's my new patient?"

But Jo found herself responding not to those words, but to the scraping hiss beneath them that said something completely different. "Yes," she said. "I can see you as you truly are. You're not human, you're, you're a-what are you?"

"Call me Hanna, dearie," Doctor Eklund said in her human voice. The voice underneath hissed out, "We are the Dokkalfar, heirs to the ancient darkness. We have walked in your shadows since Odin first bequeathed Midgaard to his supplicants. You have seen us times untold, but our glamours have slipped into your mind and bent you to our will time and time again. There is not a moment of your life, not yours nor any man nor woman nor child in Midgaard, that was ever truly your own. What has changed, child? How have you come by the Second Sight?"

Jo winced. Her eyes watered with the effort of keeping both visions of Doctor Eklund-of Hanna in focus. "I don't know," she said plaintively. "I took a header and when I woke up, I could see you."

Hanna slipped all the way through the curtains and sat down on the bed next to Jo. "And is Sight the whole of it? Do you hear my true voice? The voice of power?"

Jo nodded. "I hear it," she said quietly, her voice thick with fear. "Coach Erickson told the girls to forget what they saw, and they acted like she was saying something completely different. They're going to, aren't they? Forget, I mean. They're just going to do whatever she says in that voice and not even know they're following her orders."

"Of course," Hanna said, both voices now speaking the same words in a tone of undisguised pride. "And you have done the same, many times. As have all the children of Midgaard. We gather you to us here in these halls of learning, and we instruct you truly and well. The world you go forth to make is our world, and your lives are spent in our secret service."

Jo shook her head for a moment, then froze until the room stopped spinning. "But I know now. I have the Second Sight, right? That means I can, can..." It suddenly occurred to Jo that it might not be a good idea to goad Hanna with her knowledge of their secret, not when she couldn't even stand upright unassisted and Hanna probably had scalpels or something in her office.

Hanna smiled. It was a scary smile even on her human face; on her other face, it was infinitely cruel and terrible to behold. "You can see us truly?" she said. "Hear our true commands? Aye, that seems to be the way of it, although I suspect it will not last. Even if it does, though, does it matter? You can see, you can hear...but can you resist?" She glared at Jo coldly, speaking only in her shadow voice. "Take off your garments, mortal woman."

Jo felt a sickening sense of deja vu as she felt her limbs move of their own volition, peeling off her sweaty, mud-stained jersey and dropping it to the floor. She was a junior in college, she thought to herself while undoing her bra. She'd been playing soccer since she was a freshman. How many times had she heard that voice without even realizing it? How many things had she done for Coach Erickson, for Hanna, without even the memory of it?

She lifted up her hips and pulled down her shorts and panties. "It seems you cannot," Hanna purred in delight, reaching out to caress Jo's naked body. Her long, sharp fingernails trailed over Jo's hips and down her thighs, leaving thin white marks on her skin. "Be pleased, child. Your obedience saves your life." Her hands brushed across the downy hairs covering Jo's pubic mound. "A mortal who can resist our power must be slain before they become a warrior, but a maiden whose body yields to our words may be gifted with the will of a concubine."

"Please," Jo whispered, squirming under Hanna's touch. "Please, I don't-"

Hanna fixed her with an icy stare. "That is why I bequeath you my gift." Her shadow voice rose to a shout. "You will enjoy your service to me, my skaekja, until such time as I release you from it!" Jo felt the words as much as heard them. They uncoiled themselves inside her mind like serpents, filling her thoughts with Hanna's will until nothing of her own remained but a shadow.

"Look on me again with your Sight, child," Hanna said, slipping off her clothes and leaning towards Jo. "How do you see me now?"

Jo's mouth hung open in a silent gasp of awe, and her legs opened to match. "You're...beautiful," she sighed, reaching up to touch Hanna's impossibly smooth skin. Her hand slid across it like she was caressing warm silk, gliding over the soft flesh with ineffable ease. Jo suddenly wanted to feel every inch of it.

"Of course I am," Hanna purred, her voice and her shadow voice whispering the same truth's into Jo's ears. "I'm the most beautiful woman you've ever seen." She punctuated her words with long, slow strokes of her fingernails across Jo's breasts and down her belly, stopping just short of her pussy.

"...ever seen," Jo responded helplessly. She knew that Hanna was commanding her, that every word was an irresistible directive that overrode her free will and bound her to obedience, but it didn't seem to matter. No, it was more than that-she loved every moment of it. She adored the subjugation of her mind and body with a reverent passion, and her arousal only grew as she realized that even that adoration was due to the force of Hanna's will.

"You want to make love to me," Hanna whispered, leaning close and pouring her shadowed words directly into Jo's ear. Jo shivered with delight at the warm breath tickling her skin, and she reached up and wrapped her arms around Hanna's body to pull her closer. She had never been attracted to a woman, but her pussy was feverish with desire at the thought of pressing herself into Hanna's ash-gray flesh and giving in to her aching need.

"I want to make love to you," she moaned back, unable to escape the words that burned into her mind, searing away all other thoughts and leaving only arousal. Her headache melted into insignificance, and the dizziness in her skull mingled with the pleasant giddiness of Hanna's control and left her head swimming with ecstasy. She shifted slightly, settling her pussy against Hanna's thigh and grinding forward to meet Hanna's dripping quim with her own flesh.

Hanna rubbed her body against Jo's, sliding her nipples back and forth against Jo's breasts and pressing rhythmically into Jo's cunt. "You want to obey me," she husked out, her pussy hot against Jo's leg as she rode Jo back and forth, again and again. "You are helpless to resist, helpless to speak without my permission, helpless even to move from this bed save when I direct you. You are my slave."

"I am your slave!" Jo yelped out, arousal driving her voice into a strangled scream of delight. Every one of Hanna's commands sank deep into Jo's mind, caressing the part of her that now loved nothing more than submitting to Hanna's will. The pleasure looped in on itself-she was being made to obey and she loved it and she was being made to love it and she loved that and she was being made to love that and it felt so fucking wrong and hot and wicked and good...

Jo's breath went out in a whoosh as she came harder than she'd ever imagined, greasing Hanna's thighs with her juices as she squirted her pleasure out all over the bedclothes. She shuddered as Hanna kept grinding into her, prolonging the orgasm until Hanna's own body quivered and shook with bliss. "Good girl," Hanna sighed, slumping onto Jo as she shivered with tiny aftershocks of pleasure. "My good girl, now."

"Your good girl," Jo whimpered, her eyes slipping shut. She felt so tired, now, like she could sleep forever.

"Tired already, my skaekja?" Hanna asked playfully, rolling off of Jo and tickling her breasts with long, slender fingers. "Definitely a sign that you need to heal. I think that as a doctor, I should keep you here for observation until your symptoms are gone. Especially that double vision of yours."

"Yes, Mistress," Jo whispered, smiling sleepily as Hanna began to stroke her body to another peak of arousal. Privately, she hoped that wouldn't happen for a long time.

THE END