“Yes!” She groaned, arching her back to press herself against me. “I need you in me, Daniel.”
Her hands fumbled with my clothes, pulling of the cloak and tabard that were haphazardly draped over us both. I was just glad I didn’t have to do that myself, because after sitting across the table from Aphrodite for so long I was having trouble focusing on anything besides the need to bury myself somewhere warm and inviting. I squeezed Alanna’s firm ass, and mauled her breasts.
“Hey, guys. How did it… whoa! Someone’s horny today.”
Oh, shit. I’d forgotten all about Mara.
“Negotiations with… ah! With Aphrodite,” Alanna explained.
Then again, did I care? Alanna had finally gotten my shirt off, and tossed it aside. I turned us around, and carried her to the couch.
“Holy shit! You met Aphrodite? Is she as hot as they say? I guess so, ‘cause you both look ready to pop and you haven’t even done anything yet.”
“She’s a magnificent bitch, as always,” Alanna said. “But my wizard put her in her place. You should have seen it, Mara. She tried to wrap him around her finger like she does with all the men, but he just rode roughshod over all her scheming. Then he pulled out the rod, and told her to behave or he’d deal with her! I almost came.”
Mara laughed. “Sounds like an exciting conversation. How did she take it?”
“She left the cushion soaked with her excitement,” Alanna said smugly. “Oh! I just remembered. Come here, and help me with these stupid pants. You asked me to show you how to suck cock alongside another woman, and Daniel deserves a special reward.”
Mara licked her lips. “Sure, I’m up for that. Is this just for topping the grand bitch, or is there more?”
“He refused the lure of her body, saying he would rather have us instead.”
“Oh, shit! You picked us over Aphrodite? Are you nuts?” Mara knelt beside Alanna, and the two supernatural beauties hurriedly dragged my pants off.
“You do realize you’re demonstrating why it was the right decision, here?” I said.
“You’re damned right we are!” Mara shot back. “How do we do this, Alanna?”
“We’ll start with the show,” the elder dryad told her. “We each take a side, starting right behind the head here, and wrap your mouth around it as best you can. Stick your tongue out to fondle the underside, and look into my eyes. It will be like we’re kissing each other around his cock.”
“Got it!”
They put on a hell of a show, kissing and licking my tool from both sides while they stared into each other’s eyes and rubbed their breasts together. Then Alanna slyly started fingering Mara with the hand she wasn’t using to steady herself. The sultry redhead’s eyes glazed over with lust, and she started making needy little whimpering sounds in the back of her throat. I had to cheat a little to hold back from going off too early.
When she felt the magic Alanna pulled away to pout up at me. “Stop that! There’s no need to impress us with your manly control, my wizard. Let yourself go, and shower us with your approval. We both know it won’t be the end of this evening.”
Her nimble fingers didn’t stop their work, and Mara was clearly too distracted to notice something as irrelevant as speech. She paused for a moment when Mara broke off their joint performance, and then lunged to gobble down my dick.
“Oh, shit!” I groaned.
Mara’s blowjobs were hot and sloppy, and the way she hungrily tried to swallow me I knew she was already on the edge. Alanna leaned into her side, and growled encouraging orders into her ear.
“That’s it, slut. Show your man how much you want it. Make him give it to you. Suck the seed right out of his balls.”
Mara growled in horny desperation, and deep throated me. Alanna shot me a smug grin, and dived down to suck my balls into her mouth.
I didn’t last long after that. But Alana and I were way too horny to be satisfied with one round, and Mara was on fire. One thing led naturally to another, until an hour or two later we were all lying on the bed in a tangle of limbs.
I laid there for a while, letting the soreness and fatigue fade away. Sex with Mara was always exhausting, and it would have been great to just go to sleep early. But if I wanted to survive to enjoy this crazy life I’d stumbled into I had work to do. So instead I gently disentangled myself, and got up.
One of the twins had left a basin and washcloth, so I cleaned myself up and threw on a robe before padding into the workshop. There my most recent creation was working away, laboriously embedding high-energy enchantments into a heavy band of gold. I checked that first, verifying that the spells were setting cleanly and the factory enchantment was holding up to the load.
The first time I’d build something like this it had been a finicky machine that needed constant repairs to keep working, but I’d finally figured out how to do better than that. My mistake had been trying to go too fast, throwing together a quick and dirty factory spell and then expecting it to stamp out enchantments more powerful than it was like they were cheap plastic toys.
This new machine had taken longer to make, and it ran a whole lot slower. It took an hour just to conjure the receptacle for the enchantment, a thin band of gold a couple of inches across with a sheath of tungsten protecting its sides and outer face. Then it carefully inscribed the enchantments, repeated the difficult parts over and over for hours until they were as strong as my magic could make them. All in all, it took a good four hours to make each ring. A pretty big investment, for a magic item that didn’t even do anything useful on its own.
What made the whole exercise worthwhile was the device that was going to house them. I took the band that had been finished while I was out, and carefully slotted it into the cylindrical housing I’d made for it. The test rig was about the size of a large pistol, with room for eight bands in its stubby barrel. At the back of the barrel there was a flat base plate, with a disk of gold bearing a different set of enchantments mounted in the middle of it. But unlike my first attempt at a magical gun there was no physical trigger, just an intent control interface.
There was a whisper of sound behind me. I whirled, suddenly remembering that I wasn’t carrying Grinder. But it was only Mara, standing at the door in all her naked glory.
“What are you doing up?” She grumbled. “I tried to hug you, and you weren’t there.”
“I’ve still got work to do if I’m going to be ready,” I told her. “Go ahead and sleep if you want. I’ll be along in a few hours.”
“It’s not the same if you aren’t there. What is that thing, anyway? I was looking at it earlier, but I couldn’t figure out what it’s supposed to do.”
There’s something really adorable about a tough girl looking all grumpy because she wants to be held, and doesn’t want to admit it. I opened my arms, and she stared at me suspiciously for a moment before slinking across the room to me. But when I hugged her she laid her head against my chest, and made a happy little sound.
“Better?” I asked.
“I think you ensorcelled me,” she mumbled. “I’m a fierce monster bitch. I’m not supposed to be all touchy-feely.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a scary dark wizard, and I seem to have the same problem. You’re just too sexy.”
“Goof. Don’t think you’re going to distract me with mushy stuff. What does this thing do?”
“Hmm. Promise you won’t explain it to anyone? I still don’t know who all is going to end up trying to kill me by the time Ragnarok is over.”
“As long as you don’t think I’m going to be on the list,” she said. “If dad sent me after you I’d just tie you up and carry you back to my room. Maybe keep you chained to my bed, so I can have that big dick whenever I want.”
I chuckled. “How terrible. Better watch out, though. Turnabout is fair play, and I’ve got plenty of help. Tying you up might not work, but Avilla will get you addicted to magically good cooking.”
“I think I can live with that kind of danger,” she
said dryly. “Alright, Daniel. I’ll promise. As long as you’re not personally trying to kill my dad or his side of the family, I won’t tell anyone what I know about your magic. Good enough?”
“Sure. Alright, see the conjuration spells on the base plate?”
“Yeah, I got that far. It makes water, right? It looks like it’ll just keep making more for as long as you leave it turned on, so I guess it would be good for putting out fires. But how do you make a real weapon out of that?”
“That’s where the rings come in,” I told her. “This is a composite item, like most of the Atlantean enchantments I’ve been studying. The barrel carries commands to the rings from the intent control interface, and it’s reinforced to hold them in place and protect them from damage. Each ring has a spell on it that grabs anything passing through the middle and throws it down the barrel, while also concentrating it into a narrow jet instead of letting it spread out.”
Mara studied the ring I was holding up with a thoughtful frown.
“Okay, I think I can see that part. It still seems pretty wimpy, though, and what’s all that other stuff?”
“That’s one of the neat tricks I learned from studying Atlantean magic. Normally it takes at least a few seconds to cast a good attack spell, because it takes that long to spin together a useful effect and attach it to something you can throw. So something like a staff or wand is limited to a pretty low rate of fire, right?”
“Mostly,” she agreed. “There’s ways around that, like casting the spells in advance so you just have to tell them what to kill. But then you end up with a bunch of lighting balls or poison mist or something following you around, and sooner or later you’ll blow up something you didn’t mean to.”
“Exactly. Well, the Atlanteans had this interesting technique where you make a permanent enchantment that can grow when you feed it mana, and design it so that breaking the object it’s attached to just separates the enchantment into pieces without destroying it. So they could put some massively complicated imprisonment spell on a piece of crystal buried inside a rod, and when you want to catch someone it just expands the enchantment through the air to wrap around the target.”
“Whoa. That’s pretty slick. Making an enchantment grow that fast would take crazy huge amounts of power, but I guess that’s not a problem for you. Only, I don’t see how you’d keep it stable. There’s no way you can make it so the magic always gets broken along a spell boundary, and a spell that breaks in the middle is going to unravel in a few minutes.”
“It’s a pretty involved technique,” I told her. “You’re right, the only part that’s completely stable is the core of the enchantment, which is on an enchanted crystal inside the rod. The rest of it is like thousands of tiny little bubbles of magic that stick to each other, and they’ll gradually evaporate if you leave them alone. Only, if you’re doing this with battle magic, how long do you really need it to last? Most fights are over in a few minutes, and it’s easy to make things last that long. A lot of effects will stay stable for hours if you structure the spells right, and you can always re-cast them if you need to.”
“If you say so, Daniel. That’s getting out of my league when it comes to fiddly wizard magic. So, you’re using the water jet to carry attack spells? That makes more sense. Hey, is that some kind of acid spell?”
“Yep. Well, the important parts are the ward that protects the jet from other people’s magic, and the field of force magic that holds it together while it travels through the air. One ring will get the jet moving about as fast as an arrow, and this test rig holds eight of them. I’m pretty sure that’s going to give me a jet that will cut through stone, let alone people. But yeah, if I want to be thorough I can also turn the water into a magical acid.”
“Nasty. Well, that’s completely different from your usual magic, so I guess you’ve got a good disguise going. At this rate we’re going to be done and out of here soon.”
I frowned. “Maybe. We’re making progress, but this plan still has way too many holes in it. I really want more information about the defenses around your brother before we try anything. The Allfather has known for centuries that your father would have to get in there and free him somehow before he attacks Asgard, so there’s got to be some kind of trap. But I can’t think of a good way to find out more without setting it off.”
“Aphrodite would know,” Mara pointed out. “She’s a nosy bitch, and I think she was here when they build that giant dome over him.”
“Yeah, and what’s she going to do if I ask her about something like that? Best case, she makes me jump through hoops to get the information and then loses all respect for me when I do it. Worst case she tells Odin I was asking, just so she can enjoy watching me cope with the fallout. Either way I’m fucked, and not in a good way.”
“You really don’t trust her, do you? I still can’t believe you turned her down.”
“I’ll stick with women who aren’t completely insane,” I replied, giving her a friendly squeeze. She giggled, and groped me back. But then her expression turned unexpectedly serious.
“Daniel, what are we?” She asked.
Ah, shit. How did we drift into relationship talk?
“What do you want to be?” I replied.
“I don’t know. I mean, shit, you turned down Aphrodite but you want me? I don’t get it. I really don’t. What do I have that she doesn’t?”
“A heart,” I said.
She flinched. “What are you talking about?”
“When we first met you were on an undercover mission with your whole life riding on the outcome, but you still found time to befriend Elin and try to help her.”
Mara looked away. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved. She’s such a prickly, uptight bitch, it’s not like she was going to let me do anything for her anyway. It’s just, she got such a raw deal, but she kept soldiering on anyway. She deserved better, and I’m glad she finally got it. You’re taking good care of her, right?”
“The best,” I assured her. “But see, that’s what I meant. You can care about other people, when you think they’re worth it. You can have friends and lovers who aren’t just pawns on a chessboard, being manipulated as part of some twisted game. I don’t think Aphrodite can do that anymore. Maybe she was like that from the start, or maybe she’s just been hurt so much she can’t see past the pain anymore. But either way, anyone who gets close to her is just offering themselves up as a pawn for her latest scheme.”
“So you’re not going to try and fix her?”
I sighed. “That’s one of those typical male failings, you know? You see an attractive woman in a bad situation, and your instincts all say it’s time to saddle up your trusty steed and ride to the rescue like some kind of noble knight in a fairy tale. But in the real world there are people you can help, and people you can’t, and you have to know which are which.”
“Is that what I am, then? A little damsel you think you can help?”
“Hey, you’re the one who seduced me here, remember? I just didn’t say no when you decided to rip my pants off and jump on my dick.”
She swatted my chest playfully. “I never ripped your pants off, jerk! I was just making you eat me out, when you got so worked up you couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You have that effect on me,” I admitted. “What can I say, I have a thing for hot girls who can kick ass.”
“I guess that explains Cerise and Elin,” Mara said. “Even Avilla kind of has that fire in her eye, even if she can’t fight worth a damn. But what about Tina? That girl wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she’s dumb as a stump too.”
“A woman doesn’t have to be some kind of challenge to be interesting, Mara,” I said mildly. “Tina is a kind, sweet girl who just wants to be nice to everyone around her, and let them take care of her. You have no idea how relaxing that can be. When Cerise and I come home from yet another desperate battle for our lives Avilla and Tina are the ones who welcome us home, and remind us what we’re fighting for.”
/> “Huh. You know, sometimes I really wish I could have accepted your offer,” Mara said thoughtfully.
“It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” I said. “A coven bond isn’t just an expression of love. It’s also a binding, and there’s no way something like that could hold you.”
“I know. I guess I’m just stuck on the outside, looking in,” she said sourly.
“Do you really want in? You seem pretty independent to me, and you’re still young. Do you want to make a commitment that could last for hundreds of years, when you’ve barely started to live?”
“Maybe I don’t want to be all sensible and shit, Daniel. Maybe I’m tired of being alone. I know I’ll probably just fuck everything up, but when I see what you’ve got I’m too selfish not to want some for myself.”
“Then maybe you should visit sometime,” I said. “I suppose it would be less complicated if you wait until after Ragnarok, but you don’t have to. Just announce yourself to the guards instead of sneaking in, please. I’ve got a clan of dark elves running security for the island, and if they manage to spot you somehow things could get really messy.”
“They’d never suspect a thing,” Mara proclaimed. “But why would I do that? It’s not like anyone there wants to see me.”
“Now there’s where you’re wrong. Cerise still wants into your panties.”
She covered her face. “Ugh! I’m really not that into girls, you know? And don’t bring up earlier! That was about you, not Alanna. Even if she can melt my brain in ten seconds flat with those magic fingers of hers.”
“I know, I know. It’s fun, but it’s mostly something you do to wind up a guy. Or maybe if you had a really close friend who needed comforting or something, but even that would be more about friendship than romance. Right?”
“Um, yeah, I guess.”
“Well, I suppose you’ll have to decide how you feel about having someone with succubus powers seduce you into wanting her. I’ve never seen anyone completely reject Cerise before, so I’m not sure how she’d take it once she realizes you’re not just playing hard to get. But Tina is always happy to have a new friend, so all you have to do is be nice to her and she’ll be on your side. As for Elin, I think she has a lot of complicated feelings to work out, but when all is said and done I think she’d like to get to know you better.”
Thrall (Daniel Black Book 4) Page 25