Boy Sorceress

I was running down the streets of Springfield, scared shitless after learning that The Thirteen not only knew my name, but had also taken my parents hostage. They were going to kill me as soon as I turned on my phone, or contacted anyone I knew. The mysterious Mentor I had chatted with claimed my parents would be killed no matter what I did.

The reason I was running down the street at night like a chicken with its head cut off was that five of The Thirteen were coming after me, led by the fucking werewolf who was sniffing out my scent. That bastard knew both my real scent and my scent as Ashley. He had picked them up at the clearing two nights earlier.

I don't know how long I spent running blindly. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes before my panic subsided enough for me to resume thinking.

At first, I just denied most of the stuff Mentor had told me. I kept telling myself my parents were alright and that I was the victim of a cruel prank. Yes, that was stupid, but that was the first straw I clutched at in my despair. I stopped running and thought up of a way to test one of Mentor's assertions.

He told me I couldn't cast when seen by thirteen or more disbelieving witnesses. I looked around. There were only a few pedestrians across the street. The passing cars were sparse, too. It was the year of the hoverboard so I extended my hand towards a plank that was propped up against a nearby dumpster. I willed the plank to come to me and it did. I willed it to hover two feet above the pavement and stepped atop it.

One of the pedestrians across the street backhand-smacked his girlfriend's midriff and pointed at me, mouth agape. The girlfriend nearly doubled over as she gasped out a question about the guy's sanity. One witness and my hoverplank was working fine. I willed it to go across the street, in plain view of the now frantic man and his hostile girlfriend, as well as an oncoming car.

I was halfway across the street when the car honked and slowed down. The horn drew the girlfriend's attention to me and she gaped as she froze with her hand still poised to slap her boyfriend. I grinned. Three witnesses and my hoverplank was working just fine.

I hovered across the street and tore off down the sidewalk, leaving the stunned couple behind me. I turned a corner and found myself entering a small park. Unlike the sidewalks of Springfield, this small patch of green only had a few lamps straddling the gravel walk that split it in two. The walk was lined with benches and every third bench had several people sitting on it, or standing around. By the time I looked up and realized there were dozens of people there, I was already spotted by a few of them. They gaped in shock.

I got a bad feeling about this and altered my hoverplank's course to take me out of the light coming from the street and into the darkness of the park's bushes. My head started throbbing as I heard exclamations coming from the benches. I grit my teeth and willed the plank to go even faster.

I was suddenly stabbed in the head with a red hot poker and all my teeth exploded out of my mouth. I couldn't even scream as the agony overwhelmed me. The plank struck the ground and I soon followed, but I hardly felt it. I was too busy trying to stay conscious. I didn't quite manage that. I spent a while flitting in and out of consciousness. That wasn't all that bad for me since my skull was being torn apart and repeatedly rearranged into abstract art by a particularly sadistic giant.

A stab of light got me to focus through the pain. It was accompanied by repeated, loud calls of, "Miss! Miss, can you hear me?!"

I winced and tried to complain about the noise and the sharp light stabbing me in the eye, but my throat refused to generate speech. My valid complaints came out as a whimper instead.

"She's coming to," the loud voice said. The background noise coalesced in response and I realized it was a cacophony of voices that were now united in loudly inquiring after a woman's health. "Stand aside! We're taking her to the hospital."

Good fucking riddance! And take the goddamned racket with you! All I wanted was to sleep off this fucking headache and...and what else? A memory of something very urgent and very important tried to get my attention, but the pain was a wet blanket over my mind. It was growing lesser with each passing moment, and that gave me hope, but it was still too much to bear.

There was an incredibly loud count to three, right in my ear. I wanted to sock whoever was doing it right in the teeth.

The world started jerking around violently and I thought that I was on a boat, getting slammed by huge waves. Somehow, I remembered I was hundreds of miles from the sea. I didn't know my exact location, but I knew there was a river nearby.

My mind started kicking in when I felt myself dumped on a slab of something. The slab was shaking and rattling as it moved and I tried to blink my eyes open. Strange, shadowy figures whizzed past me overhead. There were intermittent flashes of color. A metal monster suddenly entered my field of vision and it engulfed me at the same instant. Bright lights on the top of its palate nearly blinded me.

I realized I was wheeled into an ambulance. One of the EMTs sat next to me as his colleague closed the doors. "Miss, can you hear me?"

The pain subsided enough by then that I was able to open my eyes, focus them on him and glare. Why the fuck was he calling me a miss?

"Miss, can you tell me your name?" he asked as he grabbed my hand.

The ambulance's siren blared at that moment and I flinched. The pain had almost faded. I groaned. The ambulance started moving and I nearly threw up all over the EMT. I breathed deep through my nose and fought back the nausea.

The EMT grabbed my hand again and stretched out my arm. Something pinched my index finger. I managed the strength to raise my head and look. There was a clothes peg fastened to my finger and a wire lead from it to a monitor. The EMT leaned over and fiddled with the dials and buttons.

"Do you know who the President is?" he asked me. He didn't waste time waiting for my reply as he started to attach EKG leads to my wrist.

"I'm fine," I managed to say. It was true. The headache was just that now, a headache. It was no longer the lovely sensation of repeatedly having my skull turned inside out with high explosives.

The EMT kept on trying to attach leads to me. "Can you tell me your name?"

I swallowed against the dryness in my throat and said, "Kevin."

The EMT stopped his work and I looked up at his face. He was looking towards the driver. "Goddamnit, rookie! I told you to check her for head trauma!"

"I did," a defensive, young voice from the driver's seat said. "She's got no visible-"

"She thinks her name is Kevin," the EMT said.

With the pain down to manageable levels, I recovered enough to remember my situation. "Whoa, whoa," I said, raising my hands in a peaceful gesture, "can't a girl crack a joke anymore? I'm Sheila. Sheila Herman. And I'm perfectly fine. You can stop with the..." I tried to get the wires off myself.

"Lie back, Sheila," the EMT ordered. He pushed me to lie back with a hand on my shoulder. He was way stronger than me. "We're taking you to the E.R. I just need to start your workup, ok?"

I had no time to play doctor. Not with my parents' lives at stake. I had no plan, no idea of a plan, but I couldn't call a time-out at this point. "Thank you for your concern," I said, politely, but firmly, "but I really

have

to be going now." I resumed ripping the wires off myself. "If you could just pull over-"

The EMT pressed me back down against the gurney with one hand and started fishing around for something with his other hand. "Pull over, rookie!"

I seconded the order with a, "Yes, please!" My tug of war with the EMT over the wires resumed, but he was winning, even with one hand pinning me to the gurney.

"What?" the driver asked.

"I said, pull over, rookie! She's altered! Come hold her down while I give her some Haldol!" The EMT fished out a black strap and I realized he wanted to restrain me.

Getting drugged was out of the question. "Hey," I said, drawing the EMTs attention to my face. "Sorry about this, but I'm in a hurry."

"Lie back, Miss, and-"

I grabbed his hand on my shoulder and tazed him. Lightly. He yelled out in agony and crumpled to the floor. What a wuss. I thought EMTs were supposed to be resilient.

His colleague exclaimed in dismay and pulled over. By the time he got out and ran around to open the back, I was upright and wire-free. He opened the door and gaped at me, uncertain of how to proceed. I stepped down from the ambulance. "Sorry about your pal, but I gotta go. Ok?"

He raised his hands in a gesture of peace. "Miss, you need to come with us to the hospital. You were unconscious when we found you."

The EMT groaned and stirred on the floor. I gave the driver a sheepish smile. "See to him, would you?" I turned and walked away. The driver called after me, even as he climbed inside to help his colleague, but he barely registered on my radar. I was consumed by thoughts of what I had just learned.

My little hoverplank test supported Mentor's claims about witnesses and I took it to also mean that my life was really in jeopardy. And that my parents were hostages.

I turned the corner and looked around. Springfield was still a mystery to me and this part of it I had never seen before. More importantly, I was dead sure I had not seen any of the surrounding buildings during my run from the coffee house, or my little park escapade.

I realized my scent trail was broken. The werewolf could track me to the park, but from there, my scent vanished inside an ambulance. How could he track an ambulance? By the exhaust fumes? I smiled, thinking I was free of the immediate threat, but then I realized that ambulances are kept track of. They have radios and such. The werewolf and his buddies could ask the people in the park about me, track down the ambulance, retrace its route and reacquire my scent here.

I knew dogs could follow someone's trail even if it was days old. The werewolf must have a similar, if not superior, sense of smell.

I growled in irritation, but soon saw the fix to my predicament. A taxi was rolling down the street towards me, lighted sign and everything. I flagged it down and had the cabby drive me to the bus stop. During the drive over, I cobbled together a plan. It was the best I could come up with at such short notice.

Once at the bus stop, I checked for security cameras and found they didn't cover the payphones in the back of the terminal. I called 911 from one of them. I willed James Earl Jones' voice to speak into the receiver and used it to tell the operator I needed to be connected to the FBI agents that were working the Riverside case. I told them I had information about the killers. The operator tried to get a name out of me, but I insisted this was an anonymous call and asked her if she knew what that meant.

I was connected to a woman who identified herself as special agent Hernandez. I told her that the corpses of the dead people had bruises on their arms that matched up if their arms were joined to form chairs and I dictated to her the descriptions of the five pairs of undead carriers. Once my credibility was established, I told her that there had been no mass suicide in Riverside and that the perpetrators of the massacre were thirteen armed lunatics who were holding the two residents of my parents' house hostage right now. I didn't mention my parents by name, nor reveal anything about me or our relationship.

I wanted Hernandez to storm the place with more than thirteen agents so The Thirteen's magic couldn't possibly work. It was, basically, the entirety of my plan and the one thing I let my parents' lives hinge on. I gave Hernandez the four names I knew and hung up. I would have told her more, but two cop cars pulled up outside in quick succession and I just knew I had to go. I walked right past the officers, who were looking for a man with a deep voice.

Once outside, I hailed a cab. I had the cabbie take me to the Springfield Mall. From there, I could find my way to Dakota's on foot. I didn't want to risk anyone asking the cab companies and tracking me to her place. It would be my hideout for the night.

The best way of dealing with the bad guys was to have the Feds aim more than thirteen guns at them and take them into custody. As appealing as the idea of storming in and rescuing my parents while stomping the bad guys into the ground was, I had no idea how to do that. I wasn't a trained professional. The Feds were. They could handle the situation far better than I possibly could. All they needed to do was show up in force and do their thing.

I wanted to go to Riverside and see my parents freed and hug my mother, but that would be the wrong move, too. I could see that, now that I managed to think it through. The Thirteen were split between sniffing after me, here in Springfield, and holding my parents. A few were probably on detached duty staking out my apartment. It would be pretty dumb to see my folks rescued only to get spotted and killed by one of The Thirteen five minutes later. I couldn't risk it. I needed to lay low, for tonight at least. After the Feds arrested some of The Thirteen, the rest would be stuck playing defense and I could roam more freely. Maybe play a little offense.

Plus, I was still kind of wobbly from all the bad news and getting dispelled. Add all the worry over my parents to the mix and you can bet I would be a danger to myself. The universe could fist my ass plenty well on its own. It didn't need me to bend over and grab my ankles from time to time.

I had barely started walking to Dakota's before I considered that The Thirteen could still find the cabby, ask him where he had dropped me off and track me to Dakota's by my scent. If I was following someone's scent and their smell suddenly vanished next to the road, I'd assume they got into a car. I'd check the cab companies and Uber. The Thirteen would surely do the same. They're evil, not stupid.

I hung my head and growled in frustration. Either I had a car of my own to drive around in, or I was at risk of being tracked. Buses would be an option, but I didn't have a clue if buses drove around Springfield. They connected Springfield to neighboring towns, but I hadn't seen any bus stops on the city streets. It was a moot question. Even if I did use buses, once the werewolf smelled me on them, The Thirteen would surely start staking them out.

I thought about breaking into the mall and getting a phone to call for an Uber, but even I could track someone's Uber ride. Flying seemed too expensive, weight-wise. Time was slipping away as I rejected one bad idea after another. Finally, I walked out of the mall's parking lot and stuck my thumb out.

There were cars driving past, despite the late hour, but no one was stopping. I swore out loud as panic began seeping back into my bones. If my scent trail wasn't broken in an untraceable way, then I'd wake up to being eaten by the werewolf. I just knew I would. The universe would arrange it, somehow.

My considerations were interrupted by a silver Hyundai pulling over right next to me. The window rolled down and I leaned in, flashing a big smile at my rescuer. My smile froze when I found myself face to face with the business end of a very fucking big, shiny revolver. Some distance behind the muzzle was the face of Kurt, asshat extraordinaire who had groped and attacked me the night before. His mouth was smiling. The rest of his face was twisted in anger. "Gotcha, bitch," he hissed.

I imagined his firing pin being held in place by a strong, magnetic field and willed it so. My smile widened. "Ah, sugar," I drawled in my best imitation of a Southern Belle, "you just gone and done the dumbest thing in your whole life."

He gestured with his gun. "Get in!" I nearly asked him about the car, but then I remembered I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, once he pointed that gun at me, everything was fair game. Even his mommy's car. I got in the passenger seat.

"The boys and I are gonna wipe that smile off-"

I casually reached up and tazed his hand. When I let go, he instantly grabbed the gun with his left hand and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, but my smile vanished all the same. "I stand corrected," I said. "

This

is the dumbest thing you ever did."

He pulled the trigger repeatedly, spinning the drum for a full circle, before I tazed him unconscious. I pushed him out into the street and took his seat. I worked the safety of the big-ass gun before putting it into a coat pocket. I drove off, made a circle, and recreated the route I had taken to Dakota's yesterday. I drove past her place and parked the car in the towing zone, right under the tiny sign.

I walked to the side of the warehouse-like building and found the door there. I buzzed Fitzgerald three times before I heard Dakota's voice say, "Yeah?"

"Uh, hi, Dakota. It's me, Sheila. Could I come up, please?"

After a few moments, Dakota said, "Sure," and buzzed me in. She met me in the hallway. The gel was out of her short, rusty hair. It made her look like she had just been fucked. My eyes fell down to her ample bosom, straining against her T-shirt.

I had expected to have to grovel to get a place to stay for the night, but she looked contrite as she welcomed me with open arms. "Oh, Sheila, I'm so sorry for being such a bitch earlier. Flora brings out the worst in me. Always did."

Being in her arms and feeling her giant tits through all my layers and her thin T-shirt, I finally relaxed. Her embrace was warmth and acceptance and the promise of pleasure. It made me remember what it felt like to not be in the grip of fear. All the tears I had kept at bay began to pour out of me. I openly wept in her arms.

She was surprised at my reaction. It didn't take her long to understand I wasn't crying because of the lesbian drama. For all her faults, she

was

intuitive. She didn't ask me what was wrong, or try to fix me and my situation. She just held me, rubbed my back and softly encouraged me to, "Let it all out."

I did. We wound up in her bed, partially undressed, with her arms around me. I wept and she comforted me until we fell asleep.

In the morning, the sun used all the windows to invade my sanctuary and I squinted angrily at it for waking me up. Dakota was entwined with me and I inadvertently woke her up as I stretched. "Sorry," I whispered.

"It's okay," she mumbled and yawned.

"Didn't mean to wake you up."

She snuggled closer to me and kissed my cheek. "Are you ok?"

"Yes. Sorry about the waterworks last night, I-"

She put a finger on my lips. "Shhh. Everyone needs to let it out now and then. I'm just happy I could help you through it."

"Thank you," I said and meant it. She had been my guardian angel last night.

She rose up on one elbow and planted a soft kiss on my lips. "You're welcome." We kissed again. This kiss was longer and more playful. Our hands started to roam over our bodies before it ended. I was desperate to learn if Hernandez's people had saved my parents last night but, the moment Dakota leaned over me and her tits fell atop mine, I forgot about it.

She undressed me slowly, running her magic fingers and nipping lips over my newly exposed skin. I lay back and enjoyed her ministrations, letting her stoke my arousal, until I couldn't take any more teasing. I was ready for the main thing. She resisted my attempts to draw her towards my pussy and kept touring the most sensitive spots on my skin.

I growled and rolled us over. Looming above her, I was struck with how beautiful she was. Her tits were spilled all over her chest and her hands were next to her shoulders, making her look like she was surrendering to me. I bent down and undressed her, kissing every inch of her skin I exposed. When we were both naked, I kept going. This time, I didn't focus on her tits. I explored the rest of her body, leading with my fingers and trailing wet kisses behind. She squirmed and moaned whenever I hit the right spots. I made a mental map of those.