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All Characters are 18 years or older.
This story is a continuation of the Font of Fertility series. I would suggest reading from Chapter 1 if you have not already. This chapter includes casual sex, anal and some mild exhibitionism.
Mild warning, this chapter contains a scene with a non-sexual but mildly graphic depiction of a corpse with wounds.
Jeremiah begins his hunt for clues to the rebellious George Stoker, and starts laying plans for his magical and personal life.
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"Holy shit," I said, looking back at the doorway we'd just stepped through.
Lindsey and Annalise were both holding one of my hands as we teleportaled into the New Mexico winter air - that is to say, it was definitely warmer than it was back home. After Annalise and I had cleaned ourselves up a bit we'd touched base with the others. Lauren had stayed with Annalise's sister Maya at the B&B, while Stacey had taken the car back to our place to cover with the various parents.
I had opened up my telepathic spell with Annalise so that she could show me her memory of the front door of her house and then we'd used Google Maps so that I could get a top-down view of the area. In the satellite photo the house was clearly defined, along with a couple of vehicles parked out front on the dirt driveway and a greenhouse structure out back. The Stoker family had lived out in the middle of nowhere, which I had to assume was a choice made by their father so that he could do his magic in peace and without getting interrupted - a decision made much earlier than his turn to whatever the 'dark side' was in my new world.
Was there a 'dark side'? Magic obviously wasn't the Force, but even Harry Potter had that nebulous corrupted 'well if you do this you're evil' kind of thing going on. So far it didn't seem like it to me - people with magic were still just people, and capable of good, bad, and mistakes all in equal measure.
"Yeah, it's... not good," Annalise said. She let go of my hand and stepped back, looking up at what remained of her childhood home. The front half was still standing, though I had to wonder if it would collapse in on itself after the first big windstorm. The back half had been blasted apart and looked like a tornado had torn through, but was also singed at all the edges.
"It's amazing, is what it is," Lindsey said. She put a hand on Annalise's shoulder to try and comfort her. "I may not be an expert on magic, but I've taken enough chemistry and physics classes to know you must have produced an amazing amount of force and heat to do this. And even if that came from using Jerry's magic as a fuel source, you still controlled it enough that you and your sister are alive, and the damage is relatively contained."
Annalise just shook her head and sighed. "I... appreciate what you're trying to do, but it still feels like shit. And you haven't seen the back."
She led us around the side of the house. In the back, where the greenhouse was supposed to be, was a crater. Not a deep one like some impact site, but wide with a clear swirl pattern where wind and fire had twisted on itself in a vortex. The ground was scorched black except for a small bare bubble in the centre.
"This is where Maya was," Annalise said, gesturing to the bare spot. "The greenhouse started about here and went forty feet in that direction. This place used to be like an oasis, full of beautiful flowers and plants. My father- well, I don't know. What exactly are we looking for?"
"Clues," I said. "We don't know what he was doing, or planning for you and Maya. Did he have an office in the house?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "That was out here as well. It's all gone. I-"
"You didn't mean to," Lindsey said. "It's alright. If you can, can you run us through what you saw again? I don't mean to poke my finger in your trauma, but maybe we can figure out somewhere to start."
Annalise took a breath and nodded. She started at the beginning, explaining how her father had discovered her Fire magic almost as soon as she 'ascended' - a term I learned was supposedly common among the magic community for someone who went from a normie to a magically gifted person - and turned on her pretty quickly. She skipped over much of her life, just mentioning that as her brothers moved away things got worse, then she moved away to get some distance but that hadn't helped. Then she explained what happened the day she came back, and about where she thought she'd been held trapped, and the odd things she'd seen George Stoker doing. Where his desk and tables had been. Where he'd held Maya. The strange things he'd said, which didn't mean anything to us yet but certainly sounded ominous.
And where her mother was buried.
"I- don't mean to be a bitch here," Lindsey said. "But if she's buried around this spot, underground... and your father was doing some sort of experiment on her..."
"She might be our only lead," Annalise swallowed. "I know. It's- We need to dig her up again."
"I'll do it," I said, my stomach churning at the idea but knowing it was necessary.
"No, I need to help," Annalise said. "She's my Mom. I didn't always get along with her, and I told her enough times that she was a doormat for letting my father walk all over her like he did, but she was still my Mom."
"OK," I nodded.
We managed to find an old shovel in a tool shed on the far side of the house, along with a rusted-out lawnmower for a nonexistent lawn. I wondered if, before he turned, George Stoker had been planning to cultivate a lawn for his family out here in the desert. With his plant-based magic I had no doubt he could have done it, but there wasn't any evidence that he'd gone ahead.
With only one shovel, I let Anna do the digging and I got on my knees and helped clear the debris with my hands. I could have done it with magic, but even with her sexual offering to me not an hour earlier, I was still low on power in the pool in the back of my head. So while I got my hands dirty and Anna dug, Lindsey kept watch for us and asked Annalise seemingly random questions. I had a feeling she was just trying to keep the woman talking.
We found her Mom a couple of yards from where we started, the distortion of the surroundings throwing off Annalise's judgment of the correct distance on our first couple of tries. Mrs Stoker's body was that weird greyish colour that I'd only ever seen on TV shows, but I didn't immediately see any signs of rot or anything. Then again, I also really wasn't sure how fast that kind of stuff should set in.
It took us almost fifteen minutes to carefully dig her out, Annalise getting down on her hands and knees with me and only using the shovel sparingly. I carefully dragged her mother out of the ditch we'd dug, my hands under the corpse's arms.
She was naked, and I had a flash of my most morbid of perverted thoughts from sometime in the past - the question of would my horny mind find a naked dead body appealing getting answered with a solid No. There was a very clear difference between a naked alive body and a dead one.
Well, that's something, I thought to myself ruefully. I'm not the most fucked up person possible.
Whatever George had been doing, it had clearly been something to do with her side. There was a large wound there, the flesh carved enough to expose her broken ribs. I managed to suppress my urge to vomit by keeping a stone face and trying not to see the entire body all at once. Annalise carefully started to clean the dirt away from the wound but broke down crying and heaving.
"You take care of her," Lindsey said to me quietly. "I'll see what I can see."
I pulled Annalise away from the body, sitting on the ground and pulling her to cradle her head on my shoulder and try and hug as much of her as I could. She sobbed, clutching my shirt in her fists, and I softly rubbed her back and didn't say anything because what could I say?
Lindsey seemed the best of the three of us, also stone-faced but seemingly able to tackle the scene a little more clinically. She cleaned the wound in the side, peeling the skin back and wincing only a little as she looked inside.
"I think it might have been the same thing that Maya had," she said. "It's gone, whatever it was, but it's the same spot and her ribs are broken and out of position."
