by Dante King
“Come to me at sunrise tomorrow,” she said. “I think Madame Xel will ‘ave a job for you in the potion brewing process.”
“O-kay,” I said slowly. I waited to see if there was any more information forthcoming, but Odette Scaleblade was nothing if not cryptic when she wanted to be.
With that, the dragonkin made her way to the inn’s internal staircase and disappeared.
I was somewhat disappointed that Odette and I wouldn’t be getting to spend any down time together that evening, but Cecilia Chillgrave was still around.
However, this master plan of mine—involving a slap-up tavern meal, a cosy seat before the inn fire and at least three and a half bottles of Mademoiselle Crowther’s Christmas Claret—was not to be.
“I can’t hang about, darling,” Cecilia told me when I broached my cunning plan to her. “My parents are coming into Nevermoor this evening to see me, and I need to get home to powder my nose and make myself presentable before I meet them for dinner.”
“You look fucking fantastic as you are,” I said, with total honesty.
Some people might have liked their women dressed to the nines in jewels and silk, looking like they’d just stepped out of one of those nonsensical perfume advertisements. I, on the other hand, could think of few things sexier than a hot blonde elf caked in sweat, blood, and miscellaneous grime.
Cecilia got onto her tip-toes and planted a kiss on my stubbly cheek. She smelled interestingly exotic, what with being covered in a mixture of spices from the whirlwind that Ratfink had whipped up in the bazaar.
“That’s a very sweet thing to say, Justin,” she said, biting gently at my earlobe and causing me to quiver from stern to prow, “but I still have to go unfortunately, darling. I’ve found that, ultimately, it’s worth keeping the parents on side if at all possible.”
I grunted with grudging understanding. “Get those brownie points stocked up with them so that, when you do something that really gets up their noses, you have a buffer, you mean?”
“Astute and handsome,” Cecilia whispered into my ear, her breath tingling against my neck like a caress of menthol. “I knew there was a reason why I spent so much time around you.”
She reached down and gave the front of my pants a little, teasing rub. Then she lowered herself off her tip-toes and said, “To be continued.”
“That’s all I get?” I asked in a wounded voice.
“For now.” Cecilia rwinked, slipped through the taproom, and disappeared out into the deepening dusk.
I muttered a few choice words to myself, then turned to see Mortimer Chaosbane regarding me almost shyly from where he stood by the bar.
I took a deep breath and walked over to the lanky, pale guy.
“Well,” I said, slapping the long-limbed Chaosbane assassin-cum-bounty hunter on his bony shoulder, “looks like it’s just you and me, Mort.”
I glanced down at the vessel that Mortimer was clutching in one spidery white hand. Although the man had big hands, the cup looked to be roughly the size of a thimble.
“What the fuck is that, Mort?” I asked him bluntly.
Mort looked down at where I was looking. “It is a cup.”
“I see that,” I said. “It’s a bit small though isn’t it?”
“I do not make a habit of imbibing—”
“Of imbibing stimulants,” I said. “Yeah, I remember. See, the thing is though, we just survived a life-threatening fray, man. We need to celebrate. We need to sit around and swap a few stories, you know?”
Mortimer blinked a couple of times as he mentally digested his words.
“You wish to reminisce?” he asked me after a moment.
“Sure,” I said. “And drink.”
“You wish to remember the dead?” Mortimer asked, taking a minuscule sip of his drink; a sip so small that the liquid had probably evaporated before it even hit his stomach.
“Sure,” I said again, signaling the innkeeper—the rotund halfling, who was almost perfectly spherical, appeared to be comprised mostly of beard and eyebrows and walked around the inside of the bar on an especially raised walkway so that he was on a level with his patrons—that I was ready to start drinking my weight in mead.
“You wish to discuss the inherent beauty and art that lies in those infinitesimal moments where a person releases their grasp on mortality and slips into the void?” Mortimer pressed.
“Yeah… in a way… Sort of…” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to turn this night into a depressing journey through his past traumas.
Mortimer considered this.
“Then, I would deem it an honor to swap tales of death and imbibe liquor with you,” said the Chaos Mage with the white-blonde mutton chops.
I was awoken the next morning by a cock crowing in the inn yard.
My room was still dark, though I could just make out the dim gray smudges where the few bits of furniture were. It was, I thought, not quite sunrise. Obviously, the cock at the Cock and Bull Inn was a bit of an overachiever. For a moment or two I listened to the feathery overzealous fuck giving it his all, while I fantisized about how satisfying it would be to give him the Popcorn Chicken treatment and introduce him to the Colonel’s eleven secret herbs and spices.
I managed to peel my eyelids open a little further and stared up at the invisible ceiling, attempting to piece the previous evening together in my head. It was tough; like trying to do a jigsaw with boxing gloves on.
My last coherent memory had been recounting all my favorite Liam Neeson movies—Rob Roy, The Grey, and Taken, for the record—after trying to explain to Mortimer what a film actually was. I wasn’t sure how much of this talk had sunk into Mortimer’s brain though—I suspected he had been wearing his boots on his hands at that point so as to try and stop himself drinking just one more of the Cock and Bull Inn’s deliciously dangerous signature cocktails, poetically named; The Brain Puncher.
Thinking back on the previous night and feeling its aftereffects left me with only one option.
I uttered the empty benediction that countless millions had said before me, ever since that first unremembered genius ate the fruit that had been lying fermenting on the forest floor and got white girl wasted.
“I’m never drinking again.”
I raised my hands, clapped, and the candles all around the room sparked into life.
I groaned. You knew you were onto an Olympic level hangover when even the effort of clapping, coupled with the sound your palms made as they met, sent agony rippling through your dehydrated brain.
In cases such as this, I’d always been a man that embraces the whole mind over matter mentality.
“Fuck you, brain,” I said to myself. “I will not succumb to you.”
I hauled myself into a sitting position and examined myself. I was lying on top of the perfectly made bed sheets, dressed only in my underpants and boots.
“Still got the essentials then,” I said, casting about for my the cloak that Igor had given me when he became my very first Mage Games sponsor. I found it hanging from the chandelier above me.
I loved that cloak. After sluicing my body with cold water from the bowl at the end of my bed, which revived me no end, I swung the cloak around my shoulders and willed it into my usual black pants, white shirt, and black jacket with the red lining.
Once that was done, I walked out of my room and meandered down the hallway to where Odette’s room was at the end of the passageway.
I passed Mortimer’s room on my way and pressed my ear briefly to the wood. There was the sound of a muffled snort from inside, the creak of a bedframe, the soft swish of bare feet on floorboards, and then the door was wrenched open.
I stepped back, squinted, and focused down the length of a long, sharp knife held in a rock-steady grip about half an inch from my left eyeball.
“Morning, Mort,” I said. “How do ye fare?”
Mortimer lowered his hand and sheathed the blade—very riskily, if you ask me—down the back of his blood-red boxer shorts.<
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The man, without his capacious, knife-stuffed cloak on, was even thinner than I had imagined. That wasn’t to say that he looked weak though. Mortimer Chaosbane was all corded muscle, without an ounce of superfluous flesh on him. He was sporting a ten-pack that would have had HIIT-training gym junkies all over America grinding their teeth in envy.
“I believe I have experienced my first hangover,” Mort said, still in his placid, slightly disquieting voice. “My head feels as if a squadron of forest pixies burrowed into my ear and decided to use my brain as a trampoline, then exited out the top of my skull and stapled it closed behind them.”
I nodded sagely.
“And my tongue,” the bounty hunter said, “tastes very much like vomit or, perhaps, like I’ve been gargling urine.”
He made a nasty, sucking noise with his lips.
”It also appears to have grown fur,” he said.
I patted the man gingerly on the shoulder. “Welcome to your first hangover, man. Enjoy it. Try and do what no one has ever managed to do before you.”
“And what is that?” Mortimer asked politely.
“Learn from it,” I said.
I carried on down the corridor but turned back, struck by a sudden and very dopey thought. “Odette might want you to come along now, too,” I said.
Mort shook his head. “No, I think not. I have instructions from her; a job that must be undertaken before the day gets much older. I shall see you later, Justin.”
I raised my hand, and Mort closed the door quietly in my face. I thought I heard a soft groan come through the heavy wood.
I was smiling as I knocked on the door of Odette’s room. I had accomplished a lot of firsts in the short time that I had been part of the Avalonian Kingdom, and practically all of them would have been unimaginable until after I had done them. Being the catalyst for the most infamous and deadly mage assassin’s first hangover though, now that was definitely a role I’d never have guessed I’d be playing.
Odette opened the door and ushered me into her room. She looked as put together and suitably occult as she ever did, though her raven curls were piled onto her head this morning and secured with a nicely piratical baby blue scarf. She was, I also couldn’t help but notice, dressed only in a long chiffon robe that reminded me of a Japanese kimono.
“Morning,” I said.
“Good morning, Mr. Mauler,” she said, pulling me inside. “I take it, from the dusty look behind your eyes, that you ‘ad quite the evening celebrating with our friend, Mortimer?”
There was a roguish smile playing about her lips. I almost forgot my manners and was on the verge of reaching out to pull her to me.
“That’s right,” I said gruffly, remembering that I was in a state of forced celibacy until after we had awoken my old man’s spirit from where it slumbered in his black crystal staff. “We had such a good time. I imagine that you probably know more about it than we do. I woke up in my boots, which is always a strong indicator of a night that has escalated to the point of no return.”
“Yes, it is,” Odette said.
“My, my,” came Madame Xel’s voice from out of a shadowy corner.
I turned my head and saw that the succubus was lounging on a bed. When Madame Xel lounged on something, it was well and truly being lounged upon. The stunningly sexy woman, all long, smooth legs, tight muscles, and mischievous eyes, was dressed in a similar robe to Odette. Hers though, was open to her navel, a two-inch wide strip of silky skin drawing my eye southward to a landscape that I had seen enough times to picture with remarkable accuracy.
“My eyes are up here, you naughty boy,” Madame Xel purred.
“I know where your eyes are,” I replied with a grin, my gaze sliding slowly up her alluring form.
It was quite warm in the room, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that it was because the fire was going. There was a small cauldron hanging over the fire, bubbling away and giving off a smell like vanilla and sandalwood. Occasionally, sparks would bounce across the surface of whatever was simmering away inside, like stones being skimmed across a pond.
“What have you ladies been cooking up?” I glanced from one scantily dressed woman to the other.
Madame Xel stretched languorously. Her legs seemed to go on for days. Her skin shimmered in the soft light of the candles dotted about the large chamber. Her little silver horns winked in the firelight.
“Oh, that there is a little something that I started brewing up last night, sugar,” she said. “It’s a potion that I think will do you the power of good, yes indeedy-do.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember Odette mentioning it last night. The one that can cure any hangover?”
“That’s correct,” Odette replied. “Well, I asked Madame Xel to come over and whip this little concoction up for us before we went off to face Mallory—that is to say Priestess Entwistle. It doesn’t merely cure an ‘angover. It will also sharpen our senses, activate parts of our brains that usually lie dormant except during sleep, strengthen both muscles and willpower, and ‘arden our resolves.”
I raised my eyebrows. Even that sent a twinge of discomfort through my cranium.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” I said, “that sounds just like what the doctor ordered. But it sounds a little like overkill for a hangover.”
“Curing a hangover is just a helpful side-effect,” Madame Xel said. “We will need it to take on Priestess Entwistle.”
“Is this Priestess really this much of a badass that you felt like we needed to knock up an extra potent brew just to face her?” I asked.
“She is a ... formidable woman,” Madame Xel said. “She does not suffer fools. No indeed. She never has. She is a woman of firm convictions.”
It must be a succubi thing, I thought to myself, but how the hell can that woman make the words ‘formidable’ and ‘firm’ sound so goddamn dirty? I swear she could give a slug a boner.
“I guess it’s better to err on the side of caution,” I said, “especially when you’ve got a hangover like mine.”
I walked over to the cauldron and reached for the ladle.
“Hold those wild horses of yours, you minx,” Madame Xel said. “You’re so eager, aren’t you? So brazen. It’s part of what makes you such a pleasure to… teach.”
I laughed. “Just teach?”
Madame Xel winked. “The potion has taken Odette and I all night to whip up, and we’re exhausted.”
I turned to the bed that Madame Xel was sitting on, with its mussed up sheets and pillows all in disarray.
“I bet you’re exhausted,” I said to the succubus.
“Oh, you cynical boy, you,” Madame Xel scolded me gently. “You know that we have to strike that work-life balance, don’t you? It’s not healthy just to work, work, work your life away. But we didn’t do anything in this bed save for sleep.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
Madame Xel nodded. “You may or may not know this, but I am committed to you, Justin. And I wouldn’t do anything without your permission.”
That sounded so very old world. Nothing like the women of 21st century Earth. I couldn’t say I hated the thought.
“So, you need my permission, to. . .” I trailed off and gestured at the dragonkin and the succubus.
Odette laughed. “To finish the potion, yes.”
“There’s just one tiny, wincy, sticky little ingredient left to add, and we want it yes, we want it bad,” Madame Xel said, in the rhyming singsong that told me she was getting excited.
“And that ingredient would be…?” I asked. I had an idea that it involved something between these two women, something that would make me rather happy. And if that were the case, I was more than willing to give my permission.
“Well,” Odette said, taking a step toward me so that I was suddenly enveloped in her warm and musky scent, “the final additive to the concoction is usually the seed of a man.”
That sentence was left hanging in the air for me to examine at my leisure. It still o
nly took, even with only half my brain cylinders firing, about three and a half seconds.
“Hell of a time for me to have to be responsible and keep Justin Junior tucked away then, huh?” I said.
And I couldn’t say I would be that pleased with downing my own man juice. I’d prefer to deal with this hangover and take whatever Priestess Entwistle had to throw at me.
Madame Xel moaned longingly, and the sound sent a shiver running through the marrow of my bones.
“Very poor timing on your behalf, yes,” she said.
“‘owever,” Odette said, her eyes fixed on the bulge in my pants, which was growing at the mere thought of what Madame Xel was getting at, “Madame Xel tells me that the potion will also work when finished off with the sexual juices of a woman.”
I turned to Madame Xel. “If you need my permission to make this potion, then I’m more than willing to give it. I gotta say though, it might be a good idea for me to, you know, supervise.”
“By all means,” Madame Xel said. “Odette, that mischievous little dragoness, is, to put it bluntly, a squirter.”
Odette nodded her head, her eyes fixed on me.
“As much as I love the company of a woman, I’ve only ever been able to do it with a man present,” Odette said somberly.
“And, knowing how helpful of a man you are, Justin,” Xel said, “I thought you could, perhaps, offer some assistance.”
“But the whole abstinence thing…” I said.
“Yes,” Odette said, “I understand, of course, but I think just ‘aving you in the room while Madame Xel brings me to climax… I think that will be enough for me to reach the erotic ‘eights needed for me to ejaculate.”
Once more, my mind boggled at the conversation I was having. Just when I thought there could be nothing left in this Avalonian world for me to be surprised at, something like this happened.
“I see,” I said.
“I understand, Justin, if the frustration of not joining is going to be too much for you.” Madame Xel ran her very pink tongue over her very white teeth. “I know how much you like to get involved in these things.”