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."
