Wanderers 4: A Tough Act to Follow (The Wanderers)

by Richard Bamberg

  I glanced over my shoulder and then grinned. “Beast, you and Maia should drop the glamours. I think a pair of deer running through the middle of town are going to draw more attention than motorcycles.”

  I couldn’t see any difference in Beast’s appearance, but Maia and Tess appeared where the doe had been running.

  “That’s better. Now, about that cabin.”

  Cris let go of my belt with one hand and found her phone. “This would be easier if I wasn’t on the back of Beast.”

  I laughed. “Okay, who’s hungry?”

  “Me,” Cris and Tess said together.

  “Me too,” I said. “Okay, we’ll stop for something to eat and you can find us a cabin while we’re waiting on our food.”

  “Mexican!” Tess shouted.

  “Sounds good to me,” Cris added.

  “Okay, Mexican it is. Beast, think you can sniff out a Mexican restaurant for us?”

  “With one nostril closed,” Beast growled as he accelerated.

  Chapter 33

  Alexander

  “Try again,” Rowle ordered.

  I picked myself up from the snow, brushed at my pants, and concentrated on the levitation spell Rowle was having me practice. I could cast the spell, but I couldn’t seem to keep from becoming distracted as I began to float. Each time I got distracted, the spell lost energy and gravity reminded me that what goes up must come down.

  “Okay, Rowle, give me a second to catch my breath,” I complained.

  “You aren’t out of breath,” Rowle growled. “You’re procrastinating. You have to be able to maintain your concentration.”

  “Why don’t I just learn to burn a tat? It seems like it would be easier to maintain a spell that was in a tat,” I said.

  “Did Tess tell you that?” Rowle asked.

  “Not in so many words, but I gathered that Rafe never had any trouble maintaining a focus on any of his tats. I just figured–”

  “You figured wrong, Alexander. Concentration and focus are the twin keys to Wanderer magic. We may be able to burn tats and store energy unlike most magical beings, but unless we can hold a focus on those tats, they will darken and cease. Just like your levitation spell falters when your mind wanders off your concentration.”

  “If I just need to practice concentration, why can’t I do it with a spell that doesn’t keep dropping my ass in the snow?”

  “That’s exactly why you’re learning the technique with levitation. It’s called negative reinforcement, Alex. Each time you fall back to earth, your body, and mind learn that there are consequences to losing–”

  Rowle was interrupted by an ear-splitting roar from Grendel, his familiar. The red dragon was soaring above us, although to me it looked like a bald eagle behind its glamour.

  Rowle raised a hand to shield his eyes, looking for what had bothered Grendel. I felt a snap of power as Rowle activated his shield. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the energy shell forming around us.

  No sooner had his shield formed than a blast of incandescence smacked into the shield with a thundering reverberation. For a moment, the brightness blinded me, but my vision came back quickly.

  “What’s going on?” I said, forgetting all about practicing.

  “I thought that would be obvious. We are under attack.”

  “Who attacks you? I thought you were the top dog,” I said.

  Rowle half turned toward me and frowned. “There are always more powerful beings. Even if there weren’t, a dozen lessor ones could have the audacity to attack me.”

  “This happens often?” I asked.

  “Not in a score of years.”

  “Oh. So, ah, what are we going to do?”

  “I suppose I should teach them the folly of their ways. It’s never wise to let someone attack you and then flee to come back and do it again later. Invariably, they come back stronger.”

  Another bolt of incandescence struck Rowle’s shield. I was still squinting from the first blast so the second didn’t bother me as much.

  “There’s our intruder,” Rowle said as he pointed a finger toward the distant tree line. I looked to where he pointed.

  “Where? I don’t see anyone,” I said.

  “Let me point him out to you,” Rowle said.

  Rather than using a tat, he spoke a brief spell while weaving the fingers of his right hand in a complicated pattern. I felt the snap of energy as his spell completed and I noticed the trees were beginning to sway. A second later, I felt the ground vibrating as the trees began to fall toward a single spot. With enormous popping sounds like we were in a frying pan of popcorn, the tall pines fell, but were stopped by a shield.

  Rowle raised an arm and it glowed black. The felled trees began to morph, changing, becoming something strange that flowed and writhed against the landscape. I was still trying to make out what Rowle had done when there was a bright blue flash and the blackness disappeared.

  “Well,” Rowle said as he rubbed at a spot on his chest. “That was unexpected.”

  “What happened?”

  “They countered my night magic spell, but apparently had seen whatever they wanted to see and disappeared through a portal.”

  “They ran away?” I asked.

  Rowle shook his head. “No, it’s strange, but I didn’t get the feeling they were leaving in fear. They’d countered one of my deadliest spells and just left. Strange indeed.”

  “Are we going after them?”

  “A fair question, Apprentice, but not today. Let’s get back to your training.”

  I sighed and resigned myself.

  Chapter 34

  raphael

  Three hours later, after a lot of fajitas, we were cruising through the mountains southeast of Chattanooga. Cris had found us a mountain cabin on five acres outside Blue Ridge, Georgia. Apparently, the town was a hot tourist destination during the summer months, but in April we were between the holiday season and the vacation season so vacant cabins were easy to find.

  We drove through the middle of the small town, past a working locomotive that was a big draw for the summer crowd. There was still an hour before we could meet the real estate agent at the cabin. We stopped for ice cream at a little shop across the street from the train and walked down the streets, window-shopping while eating our cones.

  The girls and I chatted aimlessly, while I was as nervous as a teenage boy on his first date. Anticipation of the intense concentration and pain involved in burning as many tats as I had lost was weighing on me. At the same time, here I was, surrounded by two beautiful women who both enjoyed sharing my bed and tonight were ready to share it again, but together. It was a man’s fantasy and while I had shared my bed with two women at once a few times over the decades, it’d never been for anything more than the pleasure inherent in the act. This was going to be different.

  We stopped in the shade of a canopy and watched the limited number of tourists visiting on this warm April day. Back in Colorado, we’d be lucky not to have it snowing, but here it was in the upper seventies and the hot sun caused our ice cream to melt faster than we could lick it off the cones.

  Cris had ice cream sliding down the back of her fingers and I reached for her hand, intending to lick the cream off her fingers. Tess beat me to it. As Cris switched her cone to her other hand, Tess took the messy hand and raised it to her lips. While I watched, in growing arousal, Tess proceeded to insert each of Cris’s fingers fully into her mouth and suck the ice cream from them. By the time she’d done three fingers, Cris had a wanton smile on her face and my pants were a lot tighter behind the fly.

  Tess finished the last finger and then leaned forward to kiss Cris hungrily.

  Oh, hell, these women were going to kill me.

  Their kiss broke and Tess turned to me. “Looks like someone else needs their fingers cleaned.”

  “Allow me,” Cris said.

  Before I could respond, Tess lifted the ice cream cone from my hand as Cris took the same hand and gently inserted
each finger all the way into her mouth before sucking each digit clean.

  I groaned through the cleaning.

  Cris finished, licked her lips once, and gave me a wicked smile. “Yum, rocky road.”

  “My God, you two will be the death of me,” I said.

  “But what a way to go,” Cris answered.

  She gave me a quick peck on the lips and then closed her right hand on my left bicep. I turned to see Tess shoving the last of my ice cream cone into her mouth. She glanced at her fingers and then frowned. “How come I’m the only one who was neat?”

  I held out my right arm and she took it. As we started back toward where we’d parked our familiars, I said, “I’m sure we can fix that later.”

  Tess smiled coyly and rested her head on my shoulder as we walked. We passed a couple of boutiques and the ladies started window-shopping. I stood with them, agreeing on things that looked much too feminine for a Wanderer, even a female Wanderer, but on the rare occasions that Tess and I did a “date night” at a restaurant, she did like to dress like a real lady. She’d even roped me into a tie and a dinner jacket a few times. It all went back to having someplace where we could store things like spare clothes. If we hadn’t had Joe’s cabin, we’d never would have had room to carry all the clothes Tess had insisted we buy.

  “Do we have time for me to buy a few things?” Cris asked, snapping me out of my train of thought.

  “I thought we were just window shopping,” I said.

  “Yes, but if I can’t go home for a while, I need more than this one change of clothing.”

  “She’s right, Rafe. I wouldn’t mind picking up a few things myself,” Tess chimed in.

  “You know I’m not going to tell either one of you no. Go ahead, get whatever you need.”

  Cris gave me a quick peck on the lips, which obligated Tess to copy her act, and the two women hurried into the boutique. I glanced at the store’s sign, Humble Pie, yeah right. I had no business going into a place like that, but then again, the ladies might want to model something and it’d be my duty to judge each item of clothing with an unbiased opinion. Starting to whistle, I followed them inside.

  The shopping took more than an hour, but I had to admit that I definitely had some guilty pleasure in watching two women pick out things that they thought would please me. The few times Tess wanted to buy clothes, I had dutifully gone with her, but it had been more to protect her than to watch her try things on. Now I was thinking I’d been missing out. There was definitely male satisfaction in observing a woman trying on nice clothing.

  The ladies picked out a few things to keep and each paid for her own purchases. Luckily, everything fit into two normal sized shopping bags. I was going to have to come up with some way for us to carry more stuff. Perhaps something like a bag of holding. I thought I remembered seeing something like that in Walt’s grimoire. I’d research it when our current problems were settled. In the meantime, we made a brief stop across the street at Blue Ridge Adventure Wear and picked up a couple of large canvas bags with shoulder straps.

  We made one more stop, a quick one, at the local Publix and picked up a few groceries, enough to tide us over for the next day, or two, and three bottles of red wine. Then we followed the GPS in Cris’s phone through a dozen turns onto smaller back roads until at last we pulled onto a dirt drive that led up a slope toward a large log cabin.

  A black Cadillac Escalade stood in the drive behind the large structure. We stopped beside the SUV and dismounted our rides. The vehicle was empty so we followed the walk toward a screened in porch. We were half way there when a woman appeared. She smiled and waved excitedly. “Cris, I heard you drive up. It’s so nice to see you again. I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear from you when I got up this morning. Come on up and introduce me to your friends.”

  “Hi, Marge. This is Tess and Rafe; they’ll be sharing the cabin with me for the week. They’re old friends from out west,” Cris said as she led the way up the four steps to the porch.

  Marge held the door open until the three of us were inside.

  “Pleased to meet both of you. Any friend of Cris’s is a friend of mine. Has Cris told you that we went to college together? We even roomed for two years,” Marge said after she’d hugged Cris and shaken Tess and my hands.

  Marge was a thirtyish woman with nearly black hair, epicanthic folds over blue eyes, and I thought she was Cris’s height, until I noticed the four-inch heels she wore.

  “I’m glad you were able to find us something at the last minute,” Cris said.

  “Anything for a fellow Tri Delta girl,” Marge said. “Now let me show you around the cabin and I’ll get out of your way and leave–” Marge stopped suddenly and clasped Cris’s shoulders with both her hands. “Girl, what have you done?”

  “Ah, what do you mean, Marge?” Cris asked.

  “Girl, you look like you’ve dropped a decade off. You must tell me your secret.”

  “Oh, that. It’s just good diet and wholesome living,” Cris chortled.

  “Don’t give me that. You’ve done something amazing. I can’t believe you look younger than you did when we shared that room in the Tri-Delta sorority.”

  Cris laughed and blushed. “Stop it; you’ll embarrass me in front of my friends.”

  Marge studied her for another moment or two and then glanced at us. She dropped her hands from Cris’s shoulders and stepped back. “Yeah, well a lot of girls experimented in college. We never did anything to be embarrassed about.”

  I hid my smile behind my hand and stepped past the two old friends while I studied the porch and the exterior of the cabin. There was a large stone fireplace on the porch and a hefty stack of seasoned wood beside it. The cabin’s wall was mostly glass and a pair of French doors. I could see a great room and kitchen from where I stood. A pair of ceiling fans hung from rafters below the porch’s cathedral ceiling. Several Adirondack chairs and a couple of cushioned rattan sofas were arranged around the exterior fireplace.

  Marge moved to the French doors and opened the right hand one.

  “Please, let me show you around,” she said as she held the door.

  I motioned for the ladies to precede me and then followed, allowing Marge to bring up the rear. She left the door open to the porch and joined us in the great room. It was furnished rustically with lots of wood and leather. There was another stone fireplace to our right and it rose at least sixteen feet to the tongue and groove ceiling. To our left was a glass wall that faced the soon to be setting sun. The land dropped off to the west and the forest had been cleared for a good quarter mile, leaving a view of the distant mountains that were already green with new growth.

  The tour included the upstairs–three bedrooms and two baths–the basement–another bedroom with bunk beds, and a game room equipped with enough toys and video games to keep a dozen kids occupied–and then the master bedroom and bath. The master held a big four-poster bed with at least eight pillows, there were two dressers of rustic wood, another stone fireplace where a gas fire burned merrily, and at least a forty-five inch television hanging from the ceiling opposite the bed.

  Marge noticed both Tess and Cris dropping their bags onto the master bed and turned toward me with a widening smile. She winked at me and then led us into the bath. The master bath had the usual fixtures including a slipper tub and a shower large enough for four.

  The tour ended back in the great room and with Marge handing Cris a set of keys. “We’ll have to get together while you’re here. I’ll make dinner reservations for all of us at McGuire’s, it’s new, but I hear the food is to die for.”

  “That’d be nice, Marge,” Cris said. “Give us a couple of nights first.”

  “Sure thing. Well, I’ll let you three get settled in,” Marge said. She leaned in and kissed Cris on both cheeks. “You guys don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Cris laughed. “That’s a high bar to get under.”

  Marge laughed too and left, pulling the door shut behind
her.

  “I’ll set wards, if you two would like to relax,” I said.

  “Should I open some wine?” Cris asked.

  “Not until I’ve had a chance to get some work done,” I said.

  While Tess and Cris put away the groceries and their new clothes, I went back outside. Using my grimoire, I cast a spell that would protect the house from most forms of attacks, whether mundane or magical. As a side effect, it would act like a home alarm system. When I felt the snap of energy, I put away my grimoire and went back inside.

  Tess was lighting a fire in the great room’s fireplace. She’d found wood and kindling in a notch near the stone hearth and was using a butane lighter to get it going. “I’d forgotten how hard it was to do this the old fashion way.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, a fire spell definitely helps.”

  Cris came in from the hallway. “I can do that.”

  We both turned to look at her.

  “Oh?” Tess asked.

  “Sure, I am a witch after all.” She pulled a six-inch long twig from her jacket pocket and joined Tess at the hearth. She mumbled an incantation and a stream of fire leapt from her wand to the wood. She held the flame for a few seconds before cancelling it.

  The logs were burning nicely.

  “I may not be a Wanderer, but I’m not totally helpless,” Cris said.

  I moved to her, put my hands on her hips, and kissed her. “I never thought you were helpless.”

  When I released her, Cris stored the few groceries we’d purchased while Tess and I moved the coffee table from in front of the sofa. That left us a large clear area on the rug where I would have enough room to lay prone.

  “I’m ready to start. We might as well get comfortable,” I said, removing my boots and socks. I set them to the side of the sofa. Tess and Cris followed my lead, setting their boots beside mine.

  Taking out the bottle I’d refilled with salt, I cast it into the air and spoke the spell that would form it into a circle. Stepping into the center of the circle, I held out a hand for each of the ladies. They took my hands and joined me. Together we sat, crossed legged, our knees each touching the others.