Magical Mistress Alexandra

None of the alarm spells Alexandra had placed around her hotel suite had been triggered. Yet there was someone standing at the foot of her bed. A human-shaped someone who had not yet tried to hurt her. That could only mean one thing.

"Daylight," she said, conjuring a beam of it directly into Jim's face.

Jim groaned and held his palms out to shield his eyes.

"It's me, Lex!"

"I know," Alexandra assured him, without dropping the beam.

"I need your help."

"I assumed so."

"It's life and death."

"Always."

"Cosmic-scale life and death," he insisted in his natural Irish lilt, which had definitely contributed to his ability to compromise Alexandra's judgment in the past. It wasn't affecting her now, of course. The only reason she was allowing his continued presence was because she knew how capable he was of making cosmic-scale messes that really might require her attention.

She sighed. "Start talking."

Wincing, Jim lowered his hands from the light to unbuckle his belt.

"I said

talking

."

"Please," Jim said urgently, proceeding to his zipper. "It's easier to just show you."

"I've seen it before."

"No, Lex. I promise, you haven't."

Jim dropped his jeans and pulled his briefs down far enough to show her where his thoroughly average-looking dick should have been.

"What the actual fuck?" Alexandra jumped out of bed. With a gesture, she doused the daylight beam and brought up the room lighting, to make sure she was seeing what was in front of her correctly. "What did you

do

to yourself?"

"I'll explain after we stabilize it," said Jim.

"What do you mean, 'stabilize it'?" Alexandra's tone rose toward either shouting or laughter, she wasn't yet sure which.

Jim's testicles and the base of his shaft looked about how she remembered them. From there, his skin transitioned gradually into rough gray scales. A pair of spindly arms with tiny clawed hands reached out from either side of the dangling creature between his legs. Where the head of his penis would have been, there was indeed a head, ringed with a frill of spines and seven intelligent black eyes. In the center, a short reptilian snout full of needle-sharp teeth snapped furiously at the air.

A muzzle, which looked like it had been recently jury-rigged out of paperclips, prevented the jaws from actually grasping anything. Several angry, circular bite marks lined Jim's inner thighs, presumably from before he'd perfected the design.

"It feeds on blood," said Jim.

"Okay," said Alexandra, nonplussed.

"And the more blood it consumes, the stronger it gets."

"Ah, hence the muzzle." Alexandra nodded. "Seems like you're on top of this. Not sure why you need me."

"Its mouth isn't its only method of consumption," Jim explained. "If my blood starts flowing into it, more than just the bare minimum that's sustaining it now, it'll start growing. Within a few seconds it'll be strong enough to drain me by force, and then it'll move on to the rest of the warm-blooded creatures on the planet."

The dangling creature appeared to be trying to swing its face upward, to look at Alexandra with more of its eyes at once. It seemed frustrated with its lack of substance.

"You came to me to

avoid

getting turned on?" said Alexandra. "Thanks so much."

"I came to you because you're the only person I know who can keep me in check."

"I could never keep you in check," Alexandra muttered.

"

And

who could help me figure out a long-term magical solution," Jim added.

It was true. There was no one more qualified for that job.

Alexandra pinched the bridge of her nose, coming to terms with the total disruption of her immediate plans.

"Okay." She grabbed the ice bucket from her bedside table and shoved it into his hands. "Go fill it. Come back here, get in the tub, and turn on the cold water. If you feel like you're about to endanger warm-blooded life on Earth--"

"Maybe even beyond," said Jim.

"Pour the bucket in."

"Right," said Jim, carefully fitting his underwear and jeans back into place over the creature for the walk. "What are you going to do?"

"Get the rest of a night's sleep," said Alexandra. "I'll get you more thoroughly 'stabilized' in the morning. So keep your bath quiet."

She was half surprised when Jim carried the bucket to the door without complaint.

"Irresponsible fucking druids," said Alexandra, sliding back under the warmth of the covers.

"We can't all be demigoddesses, Lex," said Jim.

"Ice. Now."

He shut the door behind him.

#

Alexandra's decision to go back to bed, letting Jim's latest magic crisis wait at least a few hours for her convenience, had felt great while she was making it.

Such a simple, clear boundary, the kind she never had any trouble with when it involved anyone other than Jim.

Actually getting back to sleep was a lot more difficult.

Already, she was busy plotting out the next day, cancelling her lunch date and her evening shift in the dungeons, getting that

thing

between Jim's legs chained up securely, and trying about thirty different spells that just might help diagnose what the hell it was.

Her mind also kept wandering off to picture Jim waiting in her bathtub for her.

She wondered if he'd left on his shirt and sweater (a "jumper," he'd call it) to try to hold on to some warmth, or taken them off to keep them dry.

She could easily imagine him sitting there naked, his slender, usually unassuming muscles tense and shivering and obvious.

Nipples rock hard from the cold, but trying determinedly, for the first time in his life, to keep his dick soft.

Suffering.

Helpless.

Dependent on the chance that she might be able to save the world for him

again

, and also, incidentally, his genitals.

The thought made her feel reflexively guilty for making him wait. It also turned her on to an inconvenient degree.

Jim wasn't some client who had paid her for exactly this treatment. He was... a friend. She supposed she still had to call him that. A friend who needed her help. Even after all he'd put her through, good taste put limits on how insensitive she could be to his predicament.

For the first hour or so, she tried to soothe her mind and body with deep breathing and meditation.

Then she gave in and reached down to touch herself.

It was just like getting thirsty while watching a movie about people wandering in the desert, she reasoned. It was only natural that seeing Jim unable to safely touch himself would make her sympathetically horny.

Besides, the more worked up her body was over him, the more prone she was to bad decisions. It was better to get as much of it out of her system now as possible.

Three times. She gave herself three rounds of shamelessly picturing him sitting there in the ice until she came hard against her fingers, before she put him aside and tried to sleep again.

Three times was almost always enough to wear her out.

She did sleep, a little, judging by the fitful dreams full of the secondhand taste of coffee on Jim's tongue.

#

At seven in the morning, Alexandra gave in and opened the bathroom door.

Jim was indeed naked, and seeing him so made Alexandra uncomfortable in all of the same ways she had been in the night, as if she had gotten absolutely none of it out of her system after all.

The only part she'd imagined wrong was how tired he looked.

As she entered, he was nodding off against the shower wall and jerking himself awake with a hard pinch on his arm and a brief expression of terror.

The bucket was empty, and the ice had all presumably melted into the water in the tub.

If the cold wasn't enough to keep him awake, she realized, it probably wouldn't prevent erections if he started to dream, either.

"How are you doing?" she asked neutrally.

"Grand." Jim managed a weak smile for her and lifted one eyebrow toward his dark, currently damp hair. "Is that one of the nighties I gave you?"

"Yes," said Alexandra, putting one hand on the hip of the short, black, satin slip.

"Huh," said Jim.

Alexandra rolled her eyes. "What?"

Jim shrugged. "Somehow I never imagined they were the sort of thing you'd wear alone."

"You have annoyingly nice taste."

His eyes traced the lace hem wistfully.

"I certainly do."

The creature splashed restlessly under the waterline.

"Am I going to have to blindfold you for your own good?" Alexandra asked.

Jim shook his head and placed his hands on the side of the tub. "I'll go. I assume you need the room."

"You stay put," she told him with a stern gesture of her finger, before gathering up her toothbrush and paste. "I'll use the one downstairs. I'm going out to get you a proper cage for your new friend. Then we can have a talk that even

you

won't be able to turn into potentially world-ending foreplay."

"Can't you just put a spell on me to temporarily switch off my sex drive?" Jim asked. "There must be about fifty million impotence curses on the books. I'd even settle for one of those as a stopgap."

"The more magic you perform on one human being in a short period of time, the more unpredictable it becomes," Alexandra reminded him. "And I have no idea how much experimentation it's going to take to undo what you did. Do you?"

Jim shook his head reluctantly.

"Controlling circulation to a penis is something we can do through mundane means," said Alexandra. "So that's what we're going to do."

Jim looked up at her, mischievously skeptical. "Are you sure you're not making up excuses to torture me?"

"You never even learned about the instability of high-density magic around humans?"

"Of course I did, but how much difference could one little comfort spell really make?"

Alexandra cackled with exhaustion as she grabbed her long black coat to throw on over her nightgown. "I love how you think

you

can lecture

me

on the limits of magic, when you're the one who had to come crawling to me after your hobbyism turned your cock into an otherworldly abomination."

"

Hobbyism?

"

"I said what I said."

#

Alexandra didn't have far to go for her errand.

The Darkling Hotel knew its clientele, and in addition to its extensive dungeon facilities, it had multiple boutique sex shops on the ground floor.

"Mistress Alexandra," the prettiest clerk at her favorite shop greeted her warmly, brushing her red hair behind her triple-pierced ear. "You're early for a supply run. Did you forget something?"

Alexandra almost lied and said yes, but she wasn't about to misuse her company card because of

Jim

.

"I'm here for a personal project," she said. "Male chastity, unpierced, very narrow. Something tough, built to last. Must be genuine steel, that's very important."

"Lucky man, your personal project," said the clerk, opening a locked case behind the counter.

Alexandra snorted. "You tell him."

While the clerk wrapped her order, Alexandra eyed the racks of whips and collars. Routine things, suddenly both bitterly tempting and intimidating in a way they had not been to her for years.

She looked away and paid for the device from her personal account, making a mental note to collect the worth of it from Jim eventually, one way or another.

#

Alexandra stopped by the café on her way back to her suite. She could see Jim's mouth begin to water the moment she reopened the bathroom door, letting in the aroma of coffee and bagels.

His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.

"You're an angel," he said.

"Demigoddess," Alexandra corrected, backing into the bedroom and setting the food aside on an end table. "Lie down on the bed."

Jim toweled himself off and did so, with an extra-long look at the two coffee cups as he passed them.

With her other purchase in hand, Alexandra knelt on the mattress between Jim's legs. The creature twitched ominously, standing up slightly straighter.

"Think about soccer statistics, or something," she told him.

"I never liked football," said Jim.

"Fine."

She gave his testicles a swift, bare-handed swat.

Jim writhed and rolled sideways to muffle a groan against the covers. Alexandra shoved him back onto his back and grabbed the cringing creature. She bent part of one of the paperclips away from the rest of the muzzle, threaded it through the rigid, downward curving tube of the chastity cage, and then dragged the creature through behind it.

Jim gasped as the muzzle crunched inward slightly to fit.

The frill of spikes around the creature's neck flattened against its scales on the way through, and then flared out when it reached the opening at the end, leaving it little chance of being able to back its way out.

Alexandra didn't take any chances. She closed the device's latching mechanism, a bar that ran behind Jim's testicles to secure it in place, locked it, and dropped the key into the faintly glittering wooden box on her bedside table.

"That's the magic box that only opens for you, isn't it?" Jim checked with a nervous chuckle.

"Yes," said Alexandra.

"I thought you said no magic for this part."

"The spell is on the box, not on you."

"But don't you think it would be safer if I had access to--"

"No," Alexandra told him flatly.

"Only in case of emerge--"

"This

is

the emergency," she reminded him. "If it gets to be any more of an emergency, the backup plan is removing your dick completely, for the good of all life on Earth and beyond. Are we on the same page here?"

Jim shifted his hips uncomfortably.

"Yes," he said. "Though I have to tell you, Earth is lucky you got me locked up tight before this conversation."

The head of the creature was bulging through the gaps in the paperclip muzzle. It had swollen about as far as it physically could now, its scales spreading apart on its stretched skin.

"Oh, this does it for you, does it?" Alexandra teased Jim, staring him down and dropping into one of the sultrier tones she used for her clients. "Being told

no

? Hearing about how your cock no longer belongs to you? How you have no control over what happens to it? You know, you could have told me sooner. Not too long ago, I would have done this for you

without

cosmic life and death stakes."

The creature gnashed its teeth against the paperclip bars, as a few drops of pre-ejaculate dripped out of its forcibly downward-bent mouth.

Jim broke off from looking at her and draped his arm over his eyes, breathing slowly.

"It hurts," he said.

"You thought caging a creature as overexcitable as yours would be comfortable?"

"Please, Lex," he said seriously.

"See? This is exactly why you shouldn't have a key. The world would be doomed."

"I'm not asking you to take it off," he said. "It's just digging into me so hard. Isn't there anything you can do?"

Alexandra sighed. "Hold still."

Carefully, she nudged the muzzle, trying to adjust it back to its original shape, but it was too tangled a mess now. Finally, she disassembled it completely, letting the creature snap freely at the air.

The device held its head firmly enough in place that it could no longer reach Jim's thighs to bite him, but just for safety, Alexandra took a few of the least distressed paperclips and forced them between the creature's teeth like a bit, securing the ends behind its frill with a final paperclip as a collar. This one she wrapped around the outside of the device, to protect Jim from the pointy ends.

"Better?" she asked.

Though it was obviously far from the freedom his body craved, Jim nodded. "Yes. Thank you."

"You can get warm now," Alexandra told him, moving to sit beside him and placing the breakfast between them.

Jim put his shirt and sweater on and pulled her comforter over his legs. Alexandra noted how casually he had made himself at home in her bed again, but she decided to let it be for now.

He took one of the coffee cups from the carrier and sipped it gratefully.

Alexandra allowed him one swallow before telling him, "Start at the beginning."

"The beginning, you say?" He covered a grimace with a shrug. "Well, I was studying with a new master."

"You mean you were fucking a better magic user than you, to keep them off balance while you looted them for knowledge."

"Don't judge,

Mistress Alexandra

," Jim nudged her. "We all use our wiles for fun and profit in our own ways. Anyway, after dinner last night, the chap takes me into his basement and shows me a big jar full of the little bastards...."

#

Jim stared through the glass wall of the jar with a healthy amount of fear, which was completely overruled by his fascination.

"What are they?" he asked, watching the thumb-sized, lizard-like creatures crawl over each other, posturing with their frills and blinking their many eyes in rapid sequences.

"Fate burrowers," answered the mage, stroking his beard, a calculating look on his agelessly handsome face. "As useful as they are dangerous. Communing with one just once can bind your course to your most desirable possible destiny."

"You're telling me," Jim swallowed, "that if there's any reality where I become one of the great sorcerers of history, even one thread out of trillions..."

"These little geniuses have the power to find it," the mage confirmed with a flick of his cloak.

"How does it work?" Jim asked. "What does it cost?"

"First, you must understand what you're dealing with."

The mage opened the jar and, with a long pair of tongs, plucked one of the creatures from among the rest. He placed it in an even larger empty jar on the floor and then screwed on the lids of both.

The lid of the jar with the solitary fate burrower had a hole punched through it, a little smaller than a pencil eraser.

The mage handed Jim one of his smaller ceremonial daggers. "Feed it one drop, no more."

Jim pricked his finger with the tip of the dagger and held it over the hole in the jar, careful to pull it away as soon as the first drop fell.

The tiny creature launched itself to catch the drop in midair. When it did, it instantly doubled in size, barreling into the wall of the jar and knocking it on its side.

The mage set it upright again.

"The effect is exponential, and its strength scales proportionately," he said. "I assume your math is good enough to know what that means."

Jim nodded solemnly.

"Seeking their help comes with the risk that they will try to escape and run amok, and they rarely try the same way twice. Are you prepared to take responsibility for stopping this one at all costs, should that happen?"

"Yes," Jim said, almost without needing to think.

He was sure there was nothing the most powerful possible version of himself couldn't do.

"Then remove your clothes," said the mage.

Jim stripped down in a matter of seconds and stood naked over the jar.

"You're calling a new future, a new life, into existence for yourself," the mage explained, trailing his workshop-roughened fingers over Jim's body.

He started with his hair and worked his way down, removing the studs from his ears, grazing his chest and buttocks and paying extra attention to his genitals before moving on down his legs, checking every inch of skin for more jewelry, bandages, anything that might be considered clothing.

"The easiest way is to greet it as exposed as the day you were born, and feed it the raw material of new life."

The mage took Jim's hand and gently wrapped it around Jim's own cock, which responded eagerly to the promise of being used.