Font Of Fertility Ch 36

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All Characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.

This story is a continuation of the Font of Fertility series. I suggest starting with Chapter 1 if you have not already. This chapter includes explosions, car chases, vigorous and fast MF, and sarcastic remarks.

Jeremiah tries to connect with a Magical Tinkerer and things go off the rails.

Returning Dramatis Personae

- Jeremiah 'Jerry' Grant - Seat of Fertility, aka. Powerful Sex Shaman

- Leandro de la Roca - Spanish Paladín of the Orden de la Espada de Piedra, protector of the Stone Sword, Sworn bodyguard to Jerry

- Stacey Wilde - Girlfriend/Concubine, athletic, old family friend of the Grants

- Lindsey Parker - Girlfriend/Concubine, gal-genius, former neighbour of the Baxleys

Referenced Characters

- Shelton - Ascended gun-nut from Utah, built his own moderately-successful rocket

- Lauren Baxley - Public girlfriend, Jerry's Prime in the magic world, closest friend and confidant

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"Alright, the closer we get, the more ridiculous this feels," I said.

Leandro snorted softly, then cleared his throat like he wasn't sure if he was allowed to laugh at something I said. "It is definitely not the most... understandable dead drop," he said.

We were walking down the street in Tuba City, Arizona. Cars were whizzing by on the busy four-lane, and there wasn't a sidewalk so we were sort of half on the gravel shoulder, half on the red-brown desert dirt. Despite my previous jumping down into New Mexico for Annalise and hunting her father, when I'd been a little preoccupied to really take in the scenery, a short walk from the door of the 7/11 that I'd used to teleportal us down this time gave me the chance to really take in how fucking

deserty

it was. The town was built on a slight slope, or at least this part was, and from the direction we were walking, we could see the edge of civilization and miles into the desolate wasteland that was the desert.

My first thought was '

Who the fuck decided to settle here?

' followed closely by '

And who the hell decided the first guy had a good point?

'

The KFC where we were supposed to ask for 'Billy' was two lots ahead of us, and I couldn't help but start thinking maybe I'd made a mistake listening to Shelton. I'd already burned some of my stored-up power hopping Leandro and I to the gun shows, and then I invested more into making sure the gun nut didn't die in a fiery explosion so he could live his dream of soaring through the sky on his homemade rocket. This whole part of the excursion to get Leandro the equipment he needed to do his job as my oath-sworn bodyguard would be a flop if Billy turned out to be as skilled as Shelton in his creations. The 'tinkerer' was my first decent lead to someone who was already doing magical enchantment work though, so it was hopefully going to be worth the time.

"Should one of us stay outside as backup?" Leandro asked me. "I don't know how you go about these sorts of things."

"I don't

have

a way of doing this stuff," I sighed. "Though you make a good point. Billy might get spooked if-"

BOOM.

The KFC exploded.

The fiery blast blew out the windows, shooting yellow-red fire out of every gaping hole, and then began pouring thick, black smoke clouds into the sky as cars screeched to a halt and horns honked up and down the street.

"Holy shit," I said, blinking and working my jaw to try and decompress the sudden pressure change in my ears.

Leandro was standing up, his instincts to drop to the ground for cover leaving him a little dusty but otherwise unhurt. "Do you think Shelton called and warned him?" he asked.

"I- can't see why that would bring on

that

," I said.

Then three black Escalades sped out from the back of the KFC parking lot, pulling onto the street and heading right towards us.

"You've got to be shitting me," I said.

The windows were tinted dark, and the driver of each vehicle was wearing black, with black sunglasses, laser-focused as they wove through the stopped traffic. The middle Escalade was rocking a little on its shocks and a muffled shouting was coming from inside before the engine revved as they picked up speed.

"There's no way," Leandro said as we turned and watched the three vehicles speeding away. "That those

don't

have anything to do with our man."

"Yep. That's not a coincidence," I sighed. Then I remembered I could do fucking magic and could have just stopped the fucking cars. "Fuck."

"Magic?" Leandro asked, possibly reading my mind.

"We need a ride," I grunted. The distance and the speed meant it would take a decent chunk of power to stop them, and I was

supposed

to be trying to build my reserves.

"On it," Leandro said, and he darted into the parking lot next to us. It was some sort of a storage rental place and there were a few cars in the parking lot, but he made a bee-line for what looked like an older Pickup/SUV hybrid thing - I had to get a look at the front to see it was a Bronco. The car was an old, beat-up piece of shit, and my Spaniard compatriot didn't exactly help things when he smashed the driver's side window so he could reach in and unlock it. He unlocked the passenger side and I got in as he started to efficiently start hotwiring it.

"You picked this over the newer ones?" I asked, gesturing to the other two cars in the parking lot.

The engine thrummed to life after a spark. "This one is too old to have alarms," he explained and threw the Bronco into drive and started to quickly peel out onto the street. Sirens were already starting as the local cops or firefighters responded to the burning chicken place - I had to guess that the fryer grease would be a

bitch

to handle.

I hurried to put on my seatbelt as Leandro cut across three lanes to get headed in the direction the dark Escalades had gone, a serenade of honking rising behind us as the sirens continued to get louder.

"Have you done this before?" I asked, watching his intense focus on the road as he seemed to be trying to watch ahead of us and all three of the mirrors at once.

"Only on the other end," he said. "It isn't so different, I think, running and chasing."

"Sure," I grunted, bracing as he whipped the truck around a minivan that hadn't yet reached the backing-up traffic. Tires screeched, and the lady slammed on her horn, adding to the chorus. "Just, uh, since we haven't really gotten into deeeetail-" Another gut-wrenching swerve to miss a car that had stopped to try and make a left-hand turn. "About what I can do - my magic can do a

lot

but I don't have unlimited fuel for it. And the more time I have to plan what I'm doing, the more efficiently I can use it. But the big thing is right now, compared to all the other Seats with their centuries of building reserves, I'm basically trying to start funding my first savings account."

Leandro grunted, and even he winced as the Bronco sideswiped some sort of luxury sedan that tried to cut us off for some ungodly reason. "So why did we do that whole thing with Shelton and the rocket?"

"I didn't know we'd be getting into a high-speed chase!"

He shook his head, sparing a glance at me as I had one foot braced on the front dash and my arms wide holding onto both the 'oh shit' handle above the door and the centre console. "We should probably talk about operational preparedness."

"Right now!?"

".... No," Leandro said. The Escalades had come back into view ahead of us, making a right turn onto a side street. "But are you able to do

anything

right now?"

"Get me closer," I said. "That'll help."

"Getting closer," he nodded, and I guess he wasn't already putting the gas pedal to the floor because somehow the truck started moving even faster.

There was a moment, making the right-hand turn, when I was sure the truck was going to flip from the inertia. I had to guess that whoever owned the beat-up old piece of shit had replaced the tires in the last six months because the

only

thing that could have kept us on the ground was good tread.

"Can you take out the back one?" Leandro asked me.

"Gimme a second," I said. We were maybe thirty yards back and gaining, and they

had

to have noticed us by now.

My options were technically limitless, but having almost no guidelines always led me to option overload so I immediately focused on what I'd seen in movies and TV. How would spies or special forces stop a moving vehicle?

My first thought was a magnetic bomb - I couldn't remember

what

movie I'd seen with that, because it seemed a

little much

, but it was what I jumped to first. The second was blowing out the tires. A flat wouldn't do it; they could keep driving on a flat, and continue making themselves a problem. And if they were kidnapping people and leaving behind exploding fast food places I doubted they cared much about their vehicle's long-term maintenance costs.

"What are the chances the vehicle flips if I blow up both tires on one side?" I asked quickly.

"Immediately?" Leandro asked. "Less than fifty per cent."

"Really?" I asked, kind of surprised.

"Life is not a Michael Bay film!"

"We just watched a Kentucky Fried Chicken blow up in a fireball!"

Someone stood up out of the sunroof in the Escalade. And then raised a rifle and aimed at us.

"Do something!" Leandro shouted.

"I'm doing something, I'm doing something!" I shouted back.

I blew both the tires on the left side of the SUV. It helped that I knew how a car tire generally worked, so the spell just doubled the air inside them at an exponential rate - it took less than half a second for both of them to pop like gunshots going off, and the Escalade bounced heavily. The person standing up in the sunroof bounced too, half falling out, and then got swung around wildly as the vehicle immediately veered hard left, crossing the other lane and narrowly missing a parked car before slamming into a fire hydrant. Red-brown dust kicked up all around the wreck as we zoomed by it.

"Holy shit, that worked," I said, craning my neck back to look. Then I looked forward again and saw that not all the bangs had been from the tires - two fresh bullet holes were letting in wind through the front windshield, right between Leandro and I. "Fuck!"

"It's fine," Leandro said. "It's fine. Probably fine."

"Just probably?"

"Well neither of us has been shot yet."

"... It's fine, we're fine." I agreed.

The two black SUVs ahead of us sped up and then started weaving, taking up the whole lane for a moment before they reached a four-way intersection and the front one pulled a hard right while the back one went left.

"Follow the right one," I said as my brain finally started fucking computing at a fast enough speed to react to shit. That explosion had rattled me. Thankfully I now had the presence of mind to quickly reach out and double-check where 'Billy' was.

Leandro made the hard turn, following my direction. "He was in the middle one, though?"

"They must have switched positions while driving. He's in that one ahead of us," I said.

The Escalade in front of us began weaving through a series of fast turns, trying to lose us, but Leandro stuck on them. "Who the hell are these people?" Leandro muttered.

"Not sure, but I think you can back off," I said. "I've got a fix on him now, so let's see if we can get them to lead us to wherever they plan on taking him."

"You don't want to just take them here?"

I shook my head. "At this point? We could do that, but I'd rather find out a little bit more about who is kidnapping the guy we

happened

to try and contact."

Leandro didn't want to make it look like we suddenly just gave up, so after a few more hard turns he made it look like he didn't react quite fast enough and missed a turn, letting the other car speed off. "You have them?" he asked.

"Yeah, I have them," I nodded, feeling the little 'blip' that was Billy moving further away.

"And if they bring him out to the desert and shoot him?"

"Uh..." I said. "Maybe... we should follow them."

Leandro got us back on track, and between GoogleMaps on my phone and my 'tag' on Billy, we followed the Escalade through Tuba City to a weird building on the northern outskirts. It was a sort of warehouse-looking structure made out of corrugated metal but had a big brick portion on one side that looked older than the rest. We pulled up down the street and around a corner so our car wouldn't get spotted and then got out, starting to walk down the street slowly like a couple of... well, in this part of town, on the edge of the desert, we weren't tourists so we had to be locals.

"There's the vehicles," Leandro muttered. The big building was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with loops of barbed wire - not exactly the

most

secure but it would likely stop casual vandals and people trying to get a better look around. People like us.

"No sign of Billy, but he's in there," I said.

"We don't know what Billy

does,

do we?"

"Shelton might not have known, but yeah, I didn't ask either," I said.

"So, technically, he could have 'blow up buildings' powers, and that place is going to blow up at any time," Leandro said.

"...Could you stop being right all the time?" I grunted.

We walked past the warehouse, stopping

almost

at the edge of the property but still on the other side of the road at another street corner.

"They have a patrolling guard," Leandro said.

"I saw," I sighed.

"I didn't bring any of the guns we just bought," he grimaced.

"You did say you wanted to clean them and test them before bringing them anywhere," I reminded him.

"Well, I'd prefer a handgun to no handgun right now," he grumbled.

"It's fine," I said, expanding my 'locator' spell to include the kidnappers. "There's only- fuck."

"What?"

"There's like thirty people in there other than Billy."

He looked at me. "That's too many for me to fistfight."

"And I don't feel like blasting thirty people with magic, kidnappers or not," I said. "But I have an idea. Just wait here."

He nodded, and I crossed the street and waved at the patrolling guard. "Hey," I hollered. "Hey, excuse me?"

The guard looked left and then right as if I could be talking to anyone else, and then shook their head and waved me off. They were wearing a ballcap, sunglasses and baggy clothes so I couldn't see all that much of them, but I could tell they had a bulletproof vest on over the bulky hoodie. No rifle, though I had a feeling if the cops drove by and saw a guard with a rifle questions would get asked, but I did see a holstered pistol.

"Hey, you!" I called over, waving some more. "Could I talk to you for a minute?"

My perseverance paid off and the guard shook their head again but started stamping over towards me. As they got closer I saw that they were shorter than I expected, and despite the bulky sweater and baggy cargo pants, I realised it was a woman.

"This place isn't open to the public," she said gruffly as she got closer. "Fuck off."

"I just need some help finding someone," I said, then tapped into my pool of power as she walked within ten feet of the fence and we could lower our voices. "I'm your favourite person, you love me, and you want me to know everything I need to know." My words paired with the spell in my head and I saw her rock back on her heel for a moment.

She immediately smiled and took off her sunglasses, revealing pretty brown eyes and carefully manicured black eyebrows. She was stoically pretty as she smiled. "Well, hey there, buddy," she said, a slight hesitation at not knowing me but feeling like she did.

"Jeremiah," I said, 'reminding' her and then immediately kicking myself for not using a fake name. "How are you? Long day?"

"You know it," she said, cocking a hip and resting her hand on it as she sighed. "Not that it should last much longer."

"Why is that?"

"We got our target, so we'll be pulling out soon."

"Billy, right?"

"William Abbot," she nodded. "Son of a bitch deserves what's coming."

"And you guys are sure you can handle him?" I asked.

"For sure," she said confidently. "He's not labelled dangerous up close. Unless you know something I don't?"

"I don't," I said honestly. "Just think it's good to be cautious."

"Fair. Some of these magic fucks can be real assholes," she said.

"Too true. So where are you taking him?"

"I'm not taking him anywhere. I just got called in for the operation, then I'll go back home until they call me up again," she said. "You know how it is."

"Sure," I said, not knowing how it was at all. "Hey, who's the boss of this operation?"

"Colonel Cournover," she said. "And he's running a tight ship. I really shouldn't be taking time out to chat, no matter how much I might like you, Jeremiah."

"Makes sense," I said. "How secure is William? Like, if someone with your credentials could get inside, could you walk him back out?"

"If folks weren't paying attention," she shrugged. "And after the extraction team got attacked on the way here, everyone is on high alert trying to track what happened through social media and traffic cams and stuff. It would be possible."

"You know, that sounds like your security should probably get tested," I said, tapping my magic, hopefully, one more time. "You should go do that. Try and see if you can get Billy and bring him out here to me, I have some questions I need to ask him."

She sighed, giving me a look with a raised eyebrow. "Really, Jeremiah? If it works I'll piss off the other team members, and if it doesn't they'll still be pissed with me but so will the Colonel."

I shrugged. "I mean, what if someone who really

shouldn't

get to Billy could do it just like that?"

"Alright," she said. "Wait here, I guess. I'll see if it's possible." She put her sunglasses back on and turned, stomping her way back towards the warehouse. I was pretty sure she was putting more hips into it than when she'd been walking before, and I noticed her glance over her shoulder back at me.

My phone rang as she headed towards one of the doors. "Yello," I answered.

"Did you just magic her or something?" Leandro asked.

"Yeah," I said. "She's going to try and walk Billy out to us."

"From under the nose of thirty paramilitary personnel?"

"Apparently we shook them up with the car chase," I said. "Go get the car ready if we need it."

We hung up, and I waited a few minutes, starting to wonder how long I should wait before moving to a Plan B, when the door opened back up and the guard came back out, tugging a person I assumed was Billy after them. He was hooded and handcuffed, stumbling behind her, and she encouraged him to move quickly. They were almost to me when some sort of alarm kicked off inside the warehouse.

"Better ask him your questions quickly," the guard said as she pulled him towards me and then yanked off his hood. "They'll be out here in a second and they won't be happy."

Billy was a sort of lanky guy, dark hair buzzed down, and sporting a black goatee and moustache. He was wearing a black polo with the KFC logo stitched into the left breast, worn slacks and black sneakers - he really did work at the chicken place. Billy blinked furiously as his vision was returned to him, whipping his head around. "Where am I?'

"Billy," I said, snapping my fingers until he focused on me. "Do you know who I am?"

"Wha-?" he mumbled, narrowing his eyes and looking closer. "Oh!"

"I assume you don't want to be in this situation?"

"Hell no," he said. "These fuckin' witch hunters blew up my job and kidnapped me!"

"I know," I said, then glanced at the guard. She was looking confused. "Sorry," I said. "You're kind of a babe, and I'm not looking to get you in trouble, but I need him." I released another spell as her frown started to deepen, and she sank to her knees and then curled up in the dirt, completely asleep.