Boy Sorceress

Disclaimer:

No children are harmed in this chapter. No children were harmed in the making of this chapter in real life, either. ;-)

****************

I was lying on my couch and thinking hard about how I was going to bring destruction to the One-Oh-Fours. Their magic was now strong enough to withstand the presence of a hundred and three disbelieving minds. They'd be rendered unconscious if a hundred and four saw them bend reality.

From personal experience I knew that a hundred and four people weren't necessary for the One-Oh-Fours to experience incapacitating feedback. They'd probably be incapacitated if they cast in the presence of seventy, or eighty people, but over a hundred witnesses was the goal I was shooting for. Just to be on the safe side.

While I was thinking about how to get that done, the TV was still on in the background. I only paid attention to it when they interrupted their program for some breaking news. I huffed and sat up to see what new massacre was being pinned on me.

The news reported the discovery of a dozen corpses on Merrick Guthrie's estate, along with Guthrie himself. He was reported to have died in the night, under suspicious circumstances. The news showed the front gate of the estate. Dozens of FBI vehicles were going inside while a SWAT team was keeping the journalists at bay. I shook my head and was about to yell at the TV to tell them where they could get a clean shot of the estate from, when it hit me.

The bad guys had fucked up.

They had killed their ally, their patron. With Guthrie gone, who could stop me from wrangling Alpha Security Solutions, a small army with lots and lots of guns and angry people, into fighting for me? No one.

I laughed incredulously.

Yes, the murders of the rest of the night shift were horrible and yes, even the death of a sociopath like Guthrie was a bad thing, but I couldn't keep from feeling a little elated by the news. The One-Oh-Fours had actually fucked up. This was a strategic blunder.

I steepled my fingers in front of my face as my mind raced. How to harness the wrath of hundreds of ex-soldiers and ex-cops that make up Alpha? I had only ever met two of them. From what they had told me, I knew that they were good and ready to kill the Riverside Ravager all on their own. The problem was getting them to kill the One-Oh-Fours, instead. And making sure that at least a hundred of them showed up to do it.

My stomach growled at that moment and I went to the kitchen to finally eat something. I was honestly scared to turn back into myself and see how much weight I had lost by powering the life-saving force fields last night. The news kept banging on about Guthrie and I turned the TV off. I put some music on while I cooked.

The Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" came on. I couldn't keep from laughing at the irony. I selected my Talking Heads playlist for my listening pleasure.

I finished my omelet and sat down to eat it. I mulled over my options and tried to come up with a scenario which would get the desired result. Telling Alpha about magic was obviously out of the question. They wouldn't believe me. If I showed it to them and made them believe in it, that would defeat the purpose of recruiting them. Claiming that the One-Oh-Fours were guilty would get me nowhere, either. I couldn't prove it. No one could, apparently, or the FBI would have done it by now.

I groaned as I was reminded that I needed to go dissect the mind of each and every law enforcement officer that's working on my case. That was going to be a lot of work. Risky work.

"Burning Down the House" came on next and my foot tapped in rhythm with the beat. My fork paused halfway to my mouth when I heard a particular lyric.

"Fighting fire with fire"

.

"Fuck me," I whispered as the idea came to me. I'd set the One-Oh-Fours up for something they didn't do. I'd wrong the Alpha guys myself and make it look like the One-Oh-Fours did it. Then I'd kick back, relax and watch as the ex-soldiers vented their rage.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. Its greatest strength was that it didn't have the risks associated with investigating professional investigators. I didn't need to go steal and analyze evidence from the previous crimes to see if I could use it to incriminate the One-Oh-Fours. I just needed to do something else, something new, and plant whatever evidence I wanted.

Plus, it was very appealing to give as good as I had gotten. Pin shit on me, I pin shit on you right back! Call it karma, call it an eye for an eye, I liked it either way.

I was still hungry after the omelet, so I made some waffles. While I was making them, I kept trying to come up with a specific plan.

I hatched, analyzed and dismissed one idea after the next as I ate the waffles. In the end, I was left with a plan that would surely bring death and destruction down on the heads of the One-Oh-Fours, but I wasn't comfortable with it. It consisted of me kidnapping family members of Alpha personnel and planting a trail that led to the bad guys.

And I'm seriously not a kidnapper.

I wished that there was another way, but I just couldn't see it. Killing an employee of Alpha, or a family member, was utterly out of the question, obviously. Try as I might, I just couldn't see how anything less than kidnapping could realistically result in a hundred or so armed mercenaries violently coming down on the heads of the bad guys.

"Fuck," I groaned. I'd probably need to kidnap more than one family member to get that kind of a response. And it had to be Alpha. If I did the same with cop family members, they'd show up with an insufficient number of SWAT officers and die. Best case scenario, they'd arrest the One-Oh-Fours. An arrest would be less than an inconvenience to them. They'd just kill the officers that were transporting them and walk away. If they even allowed themselves to get arrested in the first place.

I growled and stowed my deliberations for the moment. I went online and initiated a chat with Mentor.

Asker: O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? I stopped them from butchering hookers. I hadn't considered that they would turn on their host and his security force like that.

Mentor: O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand. Sadly, they are remorseless animals that would kill their own mothers to get their way. I warned you already that they would balk at nothing in their quest.

Asker: They made a mistake last night.

Mentor: By killing their sponsor? They don't see things that way. They seek power and everyone is a potential sacrifice in their eyes. To them, the only mistake would have been not making a sacrifice.

Asker: Now there's no one to stop me from turning the private security firm into my very own army and pointing it at them.

Mentor: Alpha has over five hundred employees, not counting the office workers. How do you intend to bring a whole fifth of them to bear?

Asker: Well, that's the part that I'm a little uneasy with. I think I could only succeed in that if I kidnapped some of their family members and then planted one of their cellphones wherever the One-Oh-Fours are. By the way, where are they now? I'm guessing that they hadn't stayed at the estate.

Mentor: No, they had left before midnight.

Asker: The sacrifices?

Mentor: About an hour after the convoy was due, they called the night shift guards into the mansion. I'm guessing they separated them in there and used their powers to subdue them. They performed the sacrifice ritual out on the estate itself. Then they argued for a while before packing up and leaving.

Asker: What did they argue about?

Mentor: The cars. Some wanted to take the Rolls Royce and the Bentley and the Aston Martin, while others argued about that being too flashy after they had just killed their owner. A couple of times during the argument, it even looked like things might come to blows. In the end, the anti-flashy ones prevailed and they got in two black SUVs. Susan then made the corpses of the sacrifices get into the white van. They drove off after that.

Wow. They had argued over whether they should take the flashy cars of the guy whose death was going to be investigated in the morning. I felt insulted that such morons had managed to murder my parents and stitch me up for it.

Asker: Where did they go?

Mentor: They drove to the intersection of Route 29 and the interstate. They had the corpses behead themselves there and watched over them until the first commuters came along and discovered them. I'm sorry, but I wasn't able to interfere.

Asker: Don't sweat it. Where are they now?

Mentor: They are holed up in a run-down motel behind the Gas'n'Gulp on Route 29. It's just outside of Bunker Hill.

Asker: What are their plans?

Mentor: As far as I can tell, they want to find themselves another setup like they had at Guthrie's and wait for the next full moon, but they've not decided on any specific place, yet. They're still debating. And by debating, I mean that they're still arguing.

I didn't hold any hope that they would actually fight amongst themselves and thin out their numbers all on their own. As long as I'm the one after them, the universe would always find a way to keep that from happening.

Asker: Can you stay on them?

Mentor: Yes. I'll keep spying and let you know where they're going as soon as they make up their minds.

Asker: Thank you.

Mentor: Good luck with the kidnappings!

He logged off before I could respond to that.

Was I actually going to kidnap anyone? As desperate as the situation was, I didn't think I could go through with something like that. I wished I could go after the book that was the source of the ritual and their powers, but Mentor had no clue where it might be. In all the time I had spent doing surveillance of the One-Oh-Fours, I hadn't seen

anything

that would lead me to it.

No, the situation was still either get the One-Oh-Fours killed before the next full moon, or watch them burn the entire world. A day of fright for some innocent people versus everyone's lives? The scales were kind of skewed to one side. Besides, it's not like I was actually going to hurt them. I still had enough tranquilizer to make it all just a bad dream for the victims.

Victims.

I lowered my head into my hands and sighed heavily. What was I becoming?

I buried my moral misgivings and focused on the practical misgivings. The moment I abducted one family member, the clock would start ticking on when all the Alphas went on alert and secured their families. I had no idea how many loved ones I could get before that happened. I felt pretty sure I couldn't get any

after

. Particularly not without violence.

I sighed and went online to start looking up who employees of Alpha were. I started with the Facebook memorial page for the ones that had been killed at Dakota's. Last night's dead were being memorialized there, too. I was floored with the sheer amount of promises and oaths of revenge that were written there. It seemed like every single Alpha employee posted a photo of one of the deceased and themselves, usually a happy picture, and wrote underneath it about how they were "going to get the bastard responsible".

As the "bastard responsible", I found myself gulping at the sight.

I drew a deep breath and my fingers lingered over the keyboard. I was tempted to type out the One-Oh-Fours' location. I decided against it. Alphas wouldn't deploy in force over a stray line of text on a Facebook page. Even if they did send a team of investigators, they'd just get slaughtered.

Sure, that might lead to the rest mobilizing and the One-Oh-Fours' demise, but I wasn't cool with the body count amongst the mercenaries. Besides, I was at home. I couldn't do anything suspicious online from my own house, or the One-Oh-Four's master hacker/computer empath would track me down.

No, the kidnapping plan was still on. As much as I hated it.

I got to work creating the list of all Alpha employees and their loved ones. I needed to find a way to snatch up six, or seven of them at once. If there were any more people present, then I'd risk being incapacitated if I tried to use my magic. That was not an acceptable risk.

The only place they were likely to be together soon were the upcoming funerals. Not only would there be too many people present for me to use magic, but I was also very uneasy with the idea of snatching someone from a graveyard. It seemed like just a step above grave robbing.

I made spreadsheets of everyone's social calendars for the next few weeks. Whilst the Alphas stuck together like glue, their family members didn't. They mostly kept to themselves, or met in twos and threes. The only times they gathered in larger numbers was when the company threw a family picnic, or some kind of party. Then they'd gather in the hundreds.

I huffed. If I wanted half a dozen Alpha personnel family members to be in the same place at the same time, I needed to get them there myself. I thought about it for a few minutes and then had an idea. I'd send them a message saying that they won a contest. I'd tell them where to go to collect the prize and that would be that. Signed, sealed, delivered.

I carefully selected nine teenaged sons and daughters of Alpha's lower management. I figured that lower management were the people that would both command the loyalty of the rest of the employees and harbor the desire for hands-on rescue and vengeance.

I drafted a "You're a winner" message. It only lacked the address where the kids would collect their prizes. It needed to be someplace private, of course, but it also needed to not arouse any kind of suspicion while a person was coming towards it. I racked my brain for an idea.

I made and ate a hardy lunch while I searched online for the ideal place. A banner ad finally provided me with it; Escaperoom. I'd tell the kids that they had won an Escaperoom experience with their friends and get them to show up at an abandoned warehouse. The existing Escaperooms were already put together in derelict-looking lots, it'd be the perfect cover. I modified the "You're a winner" message to specifically mention the Escaperoom experience as their prize.

With the bait chosen, I still needed to set the trap. I searched for a vacant lot where I could lure the kids. I had to go offline and call several real estate agencies before I found what I was looking for; an abandoned factory on the south side of the city. It was surrounded on three sides by busy streets, which inspired confidence in anyone walking into the main hall. Several warehouses and workshops belonging to other businesses were behind the factory, separated from it by a small alley. The alley would be my means of getting the kids out of there discreetly.

I also found an empty warehouse in Bunker Hill. I'd put some beds, food, water and a porta-potty inside and drive the kids there. They'd be safely tucked out of the way while I lured their parents to the One-Oh-Fours. I'd need something I could move the kids in. A big, fully enclosed vehicle, like a van, a truck, or an RV. I decided to rent a delivery van. It would blend in the easiest, arouse the least suspicion.

I would disguise myself as Susan Hamilton, the necromancer One-Oh-Four, while I was renting the van. I loaded up my surveillance photos of her and stood before my mirror. We were the same height, but she had long, black hair, while I had medium length blonde hair. Ok, I needed a wig. She had huge tits. I'd get a padded bra. She was Asian since the original ritual, but out faces were similar. We both had cute, diminutive features and huge, brown eyes. Her eyes were slanted. I could fix that. All I needed was higher cheekbones and slanted eyes and I was Hamilton's twin.

I could make those. For a moment, I was tempted to just change my own face with my magic, but I was held back by not knowing how much of my weight I had spent last night. I turned away from the mirror and stripped naked. I willed the blue flower in my mind to retract its petals, and my perspective shifted. I turned around and saw myself in the mirror. I was still quite chubby.

I smiled and stepped onto my scales. They read two hundred and thirty seven pounds. I barked out a glad laugh. I still had thirty seven pounds of excess fat at my magic-powering disposal. The force fields had only cost me twenty pounds. "Sweet."

Despite having the magical power to do it, I didn't try to make my face change into Susan's. Mentor had warned me about needing to create everything properly, down to the tiniest detail, and I certainly didn't want to turn my cheekbones into defective tissue. Instead of transforming my flesh, I'd just buy some silicone and use my power to mould and glue it over my eyelids and cheekbones. That would work just as well.

I found the website of a make-up store in the city. They sold flesh-like silicone for professional make-up artists and morticians. I wrote down its address.

With the how of it all out of the way, I completed the notification message and sent it to the kids, asking them to come to the factory at four p.m. That was after school, but before their parents came home.

I changed back into Ashley and went out the door, to lay my trap.

"Fuck," I groaned at the sight of my Interceptor. There were dozens of bullet holes in its sides and windows. Scores, even. It would take me a while to patch those up. I frowned. The armor-piercing bullets had gone through my windows and had been stopped by my force field, but what about all the holes in my doors?

I opened the driver's side door and heard them rattle inside of it. The deflection plates I had folded inside my doors, in lieu of soundproofing, had done their job admirably. I closed the door and turned towards my Civic. Fixing the Interceptor would have to wait for the time being.

"Shit." I realized my mistake. I had again acted without thinking it through first and covering all the angles. I should have waited until after I had fixed up the Interceptor. It was a valuable asset and it was in no fit condition to be used right now. Sure, it drove just fine, cause the armor in the grill and quarterpanels had kept the bullets out of the engine bay, but it had too many holes through which I could be shot. If I needed an armored car today, I was shit out of luck.

And I had made my own luck by already sending the "You're a winner" messages. I facepalmed and rubbed my temples between my thumb and middle finger. Sometimes I can be so stupid.

I just had to wing it today and hope for the best. With the universe out to get me like it was, the best case scenario seemed like it would spit on its knuckles before it slammed its fist up my ass. I swore at myself and my rashness as I left the garage and walked to the Civic parked on the street. I was on too tight a schedule to waste even five minutes on self-recriminations.

I drove to the make-up store and bought the silicone, along with a long, black wig. I went and bought a bra with E cups at Victoria's Secret. I also bought some banner supplies at the party store. I drove home and stuffed chicken breasts into the E cup bra I put on. I put the black wig on and pressed a piece of soft silicone to each cheek.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. I pictured Ashley's face and Susan's next to it. I focused on their differences. I willed the silicone that was pressed against my cheeks to mould to them on the inside and adopt the shape of Susan's face on the outside. I also used my power to spread some superglue under it, so it wouldn't come off if I frowned, or smiled. I knew enough chemistry to be able to undo the glue with my power whenever I wanted to remove the mask.

When I opened my eyes, Susan Hamilton was looking back at me from the mirror. I laughed. I totally looked like her, even my eyes were slanted by the silicone. The differences were minute at best. The only way someone could tell that I wasn't her was if they saw us both at the same time.