Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2)

by E. William Brown

  “If you keep that up I’ll lose hold of the preservation spell, and dinner will go cold,” she chided.

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I conceded. “It would be a crime to spoil your cooking. But afterwards…”

  I grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled her in for another rough kiss. She moaned into my mouth, and when I finally let her go her eyes were bright with excitement.

  “...I’m going to take you to bed, and remind you who you belong to,” I growled.

  Her breath caught. “Yes! I’m yours, Daniel. Don’t ever let me forget it.”

  Chapter 16

  The next day I went back to weapons development, intending to spend whatever time was left before the Unraveler’s attack coming up with nasty surprises to spring on her. I’d had to put in a test range on the island for some of my more explosive projects, but most of the work was safe enough to do in the roomy workshop Avilla had set up for me in the tower.

  To my surprise, the girls were actually good about leaving me alone to work. I suppose they had plenty of their own work to do during the days, so maybe I should have expected that. But they made up for it when I left the lab.

  Lunch tended to be a working meal in the keep, with most of my staff dropping by to ‘discuss a few things’ and incidentally cadge a meal off Avilla. Elin was always there as well, and I gathered that once Avilla had gotten over her fear of the girl’s ‘curse’ she’d immediately gone into mothering mode instead. Other people were gradually working up excuses to attend as well, and I could see that sometime soon I was going to have to move the affair to the formal dining room. But Avilla was obviously loving the opportunity to show off her skills, so I decided to give her the chance to manage that herself before stepping in.

  Breakfast and dinner, however, were family time. Beri was usually at breakfast, having been promoted to Cerise’s apprentice, and of course there were always a few servants around. But the maids Avilla had picked out as our personal household staff were universally cute, eager to please and relatively unfazed by any improper antics the girls might get up to.

  Which meant that Cerise and Avilla were free to be adorably lovey-dovey with each other, and all three of my girls tended to flirt shamelessly with me. Or sometimes more than flirt. Any residual concerns I might have had over propriety at mealtimes was dispelled the morning I came in to the private dining room to find Tina bonelessly sprawled across the table while Cerise held her down and energetically fingered her.

  “Someone’s energetic this morning,” I commented dryly.

  “I love those cute little noises she makes!” Cerise exclaimed. “Who’s a good kitty?”

  Tina purred. “M-me?”

  One of the maids scurried in to deposit a plate loaded with bacon and hash browns at the head of the table, and paused to scratch Tina behind the ears. The buxom catgirl’s purr turned growly, and she squirmed in Cerise’s grip.

  “Looks like milord gets a show this morning,” the maid said impishly. “Would you like tea, or something stronger?”

  “Much as these two are trying to drive me to drink, I’ll stick with the tea for now.”

  Yeah, living with three horny girls could pose some unique challenges. Fortunately my witches were as likely to pounce on each other as me, and while Tina was still mostly interested in men Cerise had managed to convince her that girls could be fun to play with too. Or maybe it was just that I’d wired Tina up to the point where a stiff breeze could get her too horny to care who was doing her. One night I actually stopped to ask her if she’d like me to turn things down a bit as we were undressing for bed.

  She shook her head. “No way! I love feeling so sexy all the time, Daniel. I never dreamed I could be so happy. Why would you want to take that away?”

  “I don’t, sweetie,” I assured her. “I just want to make sure it’s not so overwhelming that it keeps you from being able to do things besides sex. Enjoying yourself is good, but there are other things in life. That, and I don’t want anyone outside the family taking advantage of you.”

  She smiled, a big toothy grin that was more feral than I’d thought she was capable of. “I’m not a tame pet, Daniel. If I need to snap out of it I can always do this.”

  Suddenly she sprouted fur. Just a thin sprinkling of down at first, but it quickly grew into a luxurious tiger-striped coat that covered everything but her face and breasts. Cat ears poked out through her hair, and her face became noticeably catlike while her claws grew considerably.

  My jaw dropped. “What the fuck? I didn’t give you that.”

  She giggled. “Bast did it. She said she wasn’t going to have a helpless mortal for a mother. The blessing is supposed to grow along with her, until she’s reborn.”

  “I see. Well, she does good work. You make a very fetching anthropomorphic cat. Can you do a partial change?”

  She frowned in concentration. After a moment the fur receded, becoming a layer of soft down and then thinning until I could see bare skin on her belly and thighs. But the cat ears remained, and her claws were still real weapons instead of decorations.

  “Yes!” She announced triumphantly.

  I laughed at her enthusiasm. “Very nice. But you know I’m going to have to investigate this new power of yours. Yes, I think a very thorough examination is in order.”

  I ran my hand down her back, feeling the firm muscle beneath skin and fur, and scratched at the base of her tail. Her breath caught, and her eyes slitted.

  “Oh! Daniel, that… that feels… unh! I need you, Daniel!”

  She leaned over the bed and arched her back, presenting herself for mounting like a cat in heat.

  That was a good night.

  But I had serious work to do if I wanted to maintain this decadent lifestyle. So I restrained the urge to spend my days exploring all the kinky things that could be done with three very sexy girls and unlimited amounts of magic. Maybe we could all spend a few weeks inventing new perversions once we were safe, but for now I needed to concentrate on weapons.

  When I started I had hopes of repeating my success with the guns, and turning out some magical artillery pieces to further increase our firepower. But that proved a bit more difficult than I had hoped. Oh, scaling up my existing design to a small cannon wasn’t too hard, and I even built an enchantment factory for a weapon in about a 25mm caliber. That seemed like a reasonable size to put on armored vehicles, and I expected it would make short work of most giant monsters.

  But for real artillery you want explosive shells, and that turned out to be a hard problem. There were probably dozens of ways my magic could produce explosions, and I worked out several spells that gave decent results in the course of a couple of hours. Unfortunately, I then hit a bit of a wall.

  Enchanting a cannon shell to explode was a pretty serious piece of magic, and would take me half an hour to do myself if I wanted the result to be stable enough to store safely. Enchanting a cannon to create magical exploding shells was a challenging project that likely would have taken me a couple of days. Making an enchantment factory for magical cannons that could create their own shells…

  That wasn’t going to happen. Not with the kind of effort I could hope to devote to it in the next few weeks, anyway. It was just too many levels of indirection, with big high-energy spells that were all too likely to blow up if anything went wrong. I could make an ammo factory, maybe, but even then I’d have trouble making enough shells to matter. An artillery battery needs thousands of shells, not dozens.

  So I tabled that, and turned my attention to things I knew I could do quickly.

  My test rig for the new vehicle enchantments was basically a flying motorcycle, held a few feet off the ground by a levitation enchantment a lot like the one I’d used on my original hover barge. But it also had a propulsion enchantment, basically just a force push spell, and both that and the levitation height could be adjusted.

  That combination created something that performed a lot like an actual hovercraft from back
home, which was hellishly tricky to control. I could sort of manage it as long as I was careful and didn’t go too fast, but my men had never heard of Newton’s laws. If I gave them something like this they’d plow it into a tree at a hundred miles an hour before the day was out, so a more forgiving control system was definitely needed.

  I accomplished that by adding a third enchantment that created drag against the ground, resisting sideways movement and gradually slowing the vehicle to a stop if the thrust was turned off. That made it behave more like a ground vehicle, and once I added a brake pedal hooked up to the drag field the thing suddenly handled a lot more like an actual motorcycle. Add a speed governor to keep the thing down to thirty or so and I could probably count on my men not killing themselves with it.

  Of course, by the time I had that worked out Cerise had turned up to watch me drive the test vehicle around the island. She was practically vibrating with excitement, and considering how she’d reacted to the original hover barge I could only imagine what her inner speed demon would think of this.

  Well, what the hell. I turned off the speed governor, and pulled up next to her. It only took a moment to extend the seat to make room for a passenger.

  “Hop on,” I said.

  I didn’t have to tell her twice. She bounced up behind me, and pressed her firm breasts into my back. “How fast does this thing go?” She said breathlessly.

  “Faster than a diving gryphon,” I told her. “Hang on!”

  The little speedometer I’d rigged up wasn’t all that accurate, since I hadn’t had a watch or a ruler with me when I was brought to this world. But I easily got it up to eighty running laps around the island, so the fact that it was probably off by five or ten percent wasn’t terribly important. Then I took us down the boat ramp and out onto the river, where I could really open her up. The speedometer pegged at one forty halfway across the river, and that was still only about three-fourths thrust.

  Cerise was whooping and laughing the whole time, of course. After a few minutes I slowed down to explain the controls to her, and she leaned over my shoulder and nodded along intently. Then I set the governor to fifty, and cruised back up the boat ramp. At the top I climbed off, and she groaned with disappointment.

  “Aw, come on Daniel. Just a few more minutes?”

  “Nah, I’ve got work to do. But you have fun with the skimmer bike. It’s all yours now.”

  Her eyes went huge. “For me? Really?”

  “Really. I’m been meaning to make you something cool, and this will be useful too. Just start out slow, and take the time to get used to how it handles before you start trying to race the wind. If you lose control and hit someone you’ll probably kill them, and at top speed even you might not survive hitting something solid. I’ve set it not to go much faster than a galloping horse for now, but once you’ve mastered that I can take off the limiter for you.”

  She stood there gaping at me for a moment. Then she threw herself into my arms, wrapped her legs around my waist and kissed me until I was ready to do her right there next to the drill field.

  “You are so getting lucky tonight,” she growled in my ear. “Thank you, Daniel! You’re awesome, you know that?”

  “So are you, Cerise. Enjoy.”

  I hung around for a few minutes to make sure she had the basics down, but true to form she picked it up with preternatural speed. Soon she was back out on the river, practicing her cornering and bouncing over chunks of floating ice like she’d been riding that thing for years. I smiled, and headed back indoors to the vehicle park.

  Obviously I wasn’t going to be making skimmer bikes for anyone who didn’t have superhuman reflexes. But with the basic control functions worked out I was ready to tackle those armored vehicles I’d promised Captain Rain. So, what did they need to look like?

  I ended up with a design that was basically a big armored box, with an inch-thick hull of nickel-iron. The quartz windows around the driver’s position were even thicker, and backed by a grid of iron bars. A large compartment in back had room for eight men and their gear, with a ramp in the back to let them get in and out quickly. I mounted my prototype 25mm cannon in a small turret on top, with lighter armor and a force enchantment to make it rotate quickly.

  Making it self-powered didn’t sound like a bright idea, since military hardware inevitably gets damaged in use. So instead I made a portable power core, just a 100-pound slug of nickel-iron enchanted with my matter to mana and power transfer spells. One of those could run a few dozen heavy vehicles and assorted other gear easily, and while it didn’t have an unlimited range I estimated the power transfer links were good for at least thirty miles. That was plenty to support operations around the city, and if we needed to send an expedition further afield we could always load the power core into one of the vehicles.

  Add the same scheme of motive enchantments as the skimmer bike, put a pair of enchanted headlamps on the front, and I was done. The whole thing ended up a bit smaller than the APCs I was familiar with, thanks to the fact that I didn’t have to cram in an engine and fuel tanks and assorted other mechanical components. It was also whisper-quiet, which was going to take some getting used to.

  The men were pretty impressed when I drove it out to the training area to show off. Marcus had a hundred or so recruits in training now, and they all ground to a halt to stare at the iron behemoth as it crossed the field. I think half of them needed fresh pants after we test-fired the cannon.

  I was pretty sure I had a workable design, and the quick field trial I ran turned up only a few minor issues. A glitch with the power flow regulator, some minor ergonomic issues with the internal layout, and a few mechanical problems with things like door latches and the turret traverse. Nothing that took more than a few minutes to fix, thanks to the convenience of magical manufacturing.

  After that it handled well enough. I took Oskar, Marcus and a couple of the sergeants out on a test run. Around the island, down the boat ramp and across the river, where we stopped to try out the cannon a bit. It was louder than the guns, but the earsplitting crack of the shells breaking the sound barrier still wasn’t nearly as bad as the thunder of a gunpowder-based weapon. I’d also rigged it to fire continuously while the trigger was held down, and the cycle time on the enchantment was about half a second.

  Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack.

  Oskar took his finger off the trigger, and eyed the shattered remnants of the boulder he’d been aiming at. “Well, sir, I reckon that will put paid to any dragons we run into.”

  “It could tear down a wall in short order,” Marcus pointed out. “You’re going to make more of these siege engines?”

  I nodded. “Two more armored skimmers with cannons, for now. That’s enough to give us a decent reaction force, to deal with anything that comes up out of sight of our own walls. I’ve got another weapon in mind that’s more suited to dealing with masses of troops, assuming I can get it working.”

  “These are fearsome weapons, sir,” Marcus replied uncertainly. “Are you sure it’s wise to put such powers in the hands of ordinary men?”

  “This is Ragnarok, Marcus. My men are going to have as much firepower as I can give them.”

  Which was true, but it reminded me that I’d been neglecting another important area. While I certainly wanted my men as well equipped as I could manage, I also needed to come up with a major upgrade to my own gear. I’d come up badly short against Narfing, and I couldn’t afford to let that happen again. For that matter, I really ought to come up with some force multipliers for the girls too. Cerise was certain to end up in the thick of the action, and I’d feel a lot better about taking the field with her if Avilla and even Tina had better ways to defend themselves.

  So while the men were trying out their new equipment, I went back to the lab to take a swing at a more subtle problem. The last time I’d contemplated giving someone else a magic power source I’d been frustrated by the problem of regulating the energy flow, since a user who didn’t have metamagi
cal sorcery wouldn’t be able to just reach into the enchantment and adjust its behavior like I did. But since then I’d done quite a bit of work on making enchantments that did things automatically, or in response to the movement of mechanical controls.

  Cerise was bouncing with excitement when I called her in to my lab the next morning.

  “Hey boss, what’s up? Got another sweet present for me already?”

  “Actually, yes,” I told her. “I’ve been working on how to make a power source amulet that someone else can use safely, and I think I’ve got a working model here. You and Avilla have been getting a lot of practice with your techniques for sharing magic, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. I recharge off Avilla all the time, now that you’ve gotten in the habit of filling her up every few days. Are you saying this thing works the same way?”

  “Exactly. If you pull on it you should get a modest trickle of power, but otherwise it doesn’t do anything. I can make a stronger one, but I want you to try out the prototype for a few days and make sure there aren’t any problems first.”

  She accepted the amulet almost reverently, despite the fact that it was just a plain disk of nickel-iron. “This is like yours? It will never run out?”

  “Not for hundreds of years,” I agreed.

  She donned the amulet, and closed her eyes in concentration.

  “It works,” she breathed. “Fuck, that’s what you call a modest trickle? I could run all my best battle magic off that. I could call down concealment and loose my shadow at the same time, and still have plenty of power to fling curses and shed fear without even touching my own reserves. Daniel, this is huge!”

  “That’s the idea, Cerise. If I’m going to be fighting a demigoddess and her crew of legendary monsters I want you powered up enough to watch my back.”

  “You spoil me, Daniel,” she said with a huge grin. “Is Avilla getting one of these too?”