by Harry Nix
Alex looked out the pile of ash on the table. “Write half the spell on one page and half on the other then.”
“You can't learn a spell like that. You need to listen to the full song and it has to be correct. A chunk of a spell or a word missing can easily kill you,” Juno said and then she gave Alex a kiss and clasped her hands around his neck.
“But I like the way you’re thinking. I award you a gold star,” she said, making one shimmer on her fingertip. It fell towards him and then burst into pieces before vanishing.
“Do that again,” Alex said, watching for the code.
Juno did but Alex barely saw her screen flicker before it vanished.
“Too fast for ya, huh?” the little witch said. He tickled her and Juno squealed before escaping his grasp, going to the kitchen to prepare lunch.
He sat back and stared at nothing for a while. There was still so much to learn. He felt he was standing on the side of the ocean with a thimble, able to only take a tiny drop of water at a time. He’d finally managed to copy across the compressed and compiled spell from the fire starting ring and he knew the original spell himself to light fire at the end of his fingers but he couldn't seemingly move from the compiled spell back to uncompressed code.
When he cast the spell there was no way to slow it. It simply appeared and collapsed in virtually an instant down to a pure almost mathematical form before creating a flame at the end of his fingertip. He done it countless times, trying to study it but had only ever gotten a flash of the compiled code. It looked nothing like the code on the ring either!
He supposed that was because the code on the ring was actually four spells running together, whereas when he lit fire at his fingertips it was a single spell with various functions within, some that created the heat in the spell and other that kept him safe.
The three of them ate lunch together and not long after Alex was sitting on the sofa in the lounge room with Nia next to him and Juno sitting across from them on a wicker chair. Both the girls seemed to have something on their minds.
“What is up with you two, anyway? “ Alex finally asked.
“We were wondering what you thought about having the two of us at the same time,” Juno said.
Alex smiled and looked over looked over at her. “Its been amazing. I like it.”
He wasn't quite else sure what he could say. The last two weeks still felt like some strange bubble separate from reality, as though he would wake up at any moment back in his bed in his terrible apartment. His life from before was like a quickly fading memory.
The pain of losing the game was fading away. Even though he knew he had to raise money to pay Howey and Puzo it felt like a distant obligation from someone else’s life. Sometimes he even forgot about the mages after him, becoming absorbed in his magic study. How could he not? It was magic! He could summon fire at his fingertips! It was an incredible thing.
“Alphas will often create a pack have many wives,” Juno said.
Alex looked to Nia who was watching him with a cool gaze.
“How many wives exactly?”
“For some Alphas it's quite a lot. Some stick with three, others go to five or seven. Some even to ten or more. How many wives do you think you want?” she said.
Alex swallowed at the idea of having anything more than two wives. The pair of them were running him ragged as he was dragged to bed as soon as dinner was finished. He was kept up all hours. Not that he was complaining but he certainly hadn't had a shower alone in the whole time he was here.
“The wolf side of me says it wants as many mates as it can get. The human side... it's not entirely sure what to do with more than one girlfriend,” he said.
“What, you never had two girlfriends at the same time?” Nia asked, raising an eyebrow.
Alex rubbed his face, the stubble making a scratchy noise. “Well, I did date one girl and another girl sorta at the same time... and one day the first girl calls me over to her house in the morning so I go... and then the second girl called me over to her house that night so I go...”
“You. Little. Slut,” Nia said and jabbed him in the ribs.
“Hey! It wasn’t like we were exclusive or anything!”
Nia kept jabbing him in the stomach and ribs.
“You little hussy. Two girls in the same day. Back me up here Juno.”
Juno dived on him and started tickling him under the arms.
“Probably just out there prancing around in your tight t-shirts, like a painted whore,” she said.
Alex was laughing, half trying to fight them off but there were hands everywhere.
“It wasn’t like that! It’s not like I set that scenario up. I was just an innocent cherub back then!”
“Oh, a cherub?” Juno said, jumping into his lap. “A little innocent cherub who just so happened to screw two girls in the same day? I don’t believe it. That was probably a slow day for a tart like you.”
Nia dived on him, the two girls pinning him to a sofa and gradually the tickling and laughing turned to kissing and clothes getting pulled off. Alex let Juno hold him down while Nia pulled his pants off.
“You need to be punished, don’t you little slut,” Juno whispered his ear as Nia enveloped him with her mouth.
She kissed him before he could answer and then slid her way further up his body, until she was kneeling over his face. Juno grabbed his hair and pushed his mouth on to her.
“Start licking,” she commanded.
Alex gladly complied. Juno still had her panties on but they were wet through. His tongue rasped against the fabric and she moaned. After a moment she pulled them to the side and lowered herself down again. She gripped his hair and slowly began moving her hips, rubbing herself back and forth.
As she moaned and gasped atop him, Nia swirled her tongue, her hot mouth like a furnace. With every swirl his legs jolted but he couldn’t move, not with Juno kneeling above his face.
It wasn’t long before Nia couldn’t hold herself back. He felt her climb up to his waist and then slip him into her. The moment of cool air in the transition made her feel like liquid heat.
Nia’s gasp seemed to spur Juno on and she began to ride his tongue, rocking back and forth, still clenching his hair in her fist. At the same time, Nia matched her rhythm and then overtook it, speeding up. She pressed her hands down on his chest for leverage and pushed back and forth, never slowing down.
There was something about being pinned, about being out of control, about being used by the two girls that drove Alex wild. Although they were on top of him, he was the Alpha. It was his tongue and his cock. He was licking and jolting back in return and each gasp and moan the girls made seemed to affect the other. Alex could feel Juno’s magic, surging like a wild tide. It connected through Nia, enveloping them.
It wasn’t long before Juno’s thighs started shaking and her gasps became more urgent. Nia sped up, somehow, and Alex was pulled along as both girls came. They held together in that perfect moment, Nia riding him as he emptied himself into her, Juno shaking above him, drenching him.
After the intense burst of pleasure, Juno half-collapsed, moving back down him and resting against his chest. Nia rested against her and somewhere under both girls Alex caught his breath, his head spinning, Nia still clenching around him.
“Oh goddess we need to punish you more often,” Juno sighed. Her eyes were half-lidded, the little witch almost on the brink of sleep.
Nia slipped off him and shakily stood up. Her face was red and droplets of sweat were running down her neck.
Alex could have slept after all that but then seeing Nia, disheveled and hair crazy, something animal in him responded.
In one smooth move he stood up, flinging Juno over one shoulder. Then he grabbed Nia and put her over the other.
“Hey!” Nia called out and tried to swat his naked backside.
“You better watch it because whatever you do is going to come back many times over,” Alex said.
Both girls giggled
and then swatted him, a cheek apiece.
“Oh, that’s how we’re going to play it?” Alex growled as he carried to two of them kicking and screaming off to the bedroom.
19
“Holy crap,” Alex said softly as a screen of uncompressed code opened above the ring.
He was home alone, a rare occasion as Juno and Nia had gone out shopping and also to check the neighborhood again. Although they hadn't seen a single mage in weeks and Alex was growing in power, he agreed him staying inside was still for the best. He knew ten spells but effectively the only useful one in a fight was Shield.
Casting a spell like a fireball was tremendously complicated and although he and Juno had been making strides in that direction, he still was unable to copy enough of the spell from her to cast it.
At the speed they were going it felt like it would take months and that was if it was the only thing they did.
As a result he’d focused on studying the rings they’d purchased from Bailey. Alex had cast Analyze on the protection ring. It would essentially stop three bullets or projectiles hitting the wearer. Juno had explained to him that it would even stop him from getting hit in the face with the frying pan and she would be more than happy to demonstrate if he wanted.
Alex had declined her gracious offer, wanting to have a chance to study the ring and the spell before using it. He still wasn't fast enough to catch and copy the spells cast by the ring or even Juno unless she allowed him to. They’d tested it out one night, Nia putting on the fire lighting ring and then summoning a flame to her fingertips. Although they'd practiced many times, Alex still only ever saw the faintest flicker of a screen appear above the ring as a spell within cast itself. According to Juno there were no way that she knew to slow down the casting process of a spell. The way she described it was as though you had filled your hands with heavy rocks to the point you couldn’t hold them any longer and they would overflow all at once. The casting the spell was filling it with magic, sending it down different pathways to perform different functions before finally combining at the end and overflowing.
Alex had finally managed to copy across the compiled version of the spell on the protection ring, a percent at a time. After spending plenty of hours copying and pasting over and over, seeing only a few characters come across each time, he could now study it at his leisure, without his mana running down.
He’d been doing that when he came upon the idea to cast Analyze on the ring to bring up the spell and then to cast a concentrated burst of Analyze on the compiled code itself.
Alex had been growing magically stronger over the past few weeks. All the practice with Juno was paying off. The Analyze spell which had taken a chunk of his mana the first time he’d cast it was down to taking ten to fifteen percent. He could now cast multiple versions of the Analyze spell. Although, as Juno had explained to him there was a limit to what it could do. Once you had all the information that's all there was.
Juno had given him strict instructions about magical experimentation – specifically not to do it or she’d have “his furry ass in a sling”. In deference to her threat he sat there for a good minute before deciding there was no triumph without risk.
“Okay, try not to die,” he said aloud before casting Analyze on the ring, bringing up the compiled code. Then, after carefully checking his mana he cast Analyze six times and began slowly combining them, forcing them to merge. The first pairings were relatively easy. He went from six to three in under ten minutes. But then pushing the final three together felt like trying to bench-press his maximum weight at the gym.
“C’mon,” he grunted, his hands out in front of him manipulating the spells on the screen.
The spells held fast, refusing to budge and his mana was dropping precipitously. Alex swore and pushed again before the spells finally collapsed on top of each other, producing Analyze 6x.
It hit the compiled code and raced through it, suddenly bringing up a full screen of uncompressed spell code.
Alex had spent weeks reading through the code of the spells he knew, looking for similarities. Although he knew ten spells, that was like saying you knew all the words in the dictionary because you’d read ten sentences.
This time the uncompressed code opened up before him, and it seemed very close to readable. He could see the function of the spell that strengthened the ring and another where it drew power from the wearer of the ring. Down near the end of the code he saw an actual number. It was three.
Alex sat there for a minute, looking at the number and the blinking cursor that had appeared beside it. When you were screwing around with computer programs and trying to modify them you might occasionally change a variable just to see what it did, so you could understand more closely the functions of the program.
That was fine most of the time. If it screwed up, at worst you could reverse it. Alex sat there looking at the blinking cursor wondering if the three represented three projectiles the ring could stop. Could he simply alter it and make it more powerful? Glancing down his mana, which was still draining thanks to the multiple Analyze spells running Alex quickly made a decision.
“The hell with it,” he said.
He thought to add a zero, to change the three into a thirty but just as he did the front door opened, Nia and Juno returning home. He’d been so focused on the code he hadn’t heard them and for a moment he lost focus. The three became a thirty and then three hundred.
The spell collapsed and compiled immediately. His mana went to zero and he roared as a screaming agony rose up inside him. When the Great Barrier pulled it felt like tiny fishhooks in every muscle, This was like every cell had a tiny madman stabbing at it with a needle.
Alex pulled on the magic around him, desperate to draw on it to feed the ring, but it still was a trickle compared to what Juno could pull.
For a moment in the pain he understood he was going to die.
Faintly he heard Juno scream.
His vision blurred as he stood and he coughed, seeing blood splatter across the table and hit the ring. The spell on it wasn't finished pulling energy from him – it needed enough power to deflect three hundred projectiles and he had been the one to change it and connect with it so that's what it was drawing on.
Things went black for a moment and then Alex found himself on his knees at the bottom of the stairs in his hybrid form, Juno and Nia hauling him towards the basement room with the batteries.
Alex looked down and saw he was covered in blood, wounds opening all over him as his skin itself ruptured. The agony was beyond anything he had ever known. There was a burning heat to it, as though he was about to burst into flames.
He saw the door and then black again before he opened his eyes, Juno and Nia shoving him against the four batteries. Alex felt some of his teeth snap off. His mouth was already full of blood. It seemed to be everywhere.
“Pull on them,” Juno yelled.
Alex could sense the batteries held weeks worth of magical power stored within them. He dimly realized Juno was pouring her own magic into him, but it wouldn’t be enough. He touched the first battery with a bloody hand. It was like putting his palm on a furnace. The moment he touched it and pulled the mana into himself, the ring upstairs swallowed it whole, leaving the battery cold.
Alex smelled burning flesh and felt fire in his palms. He reached for the second battery and did the same, the ring taking all the mana. The agony grew worse. This time it seemed the fire burnt up and down his nerves, leaving him weakened and gasping.
He pulled on the third battery and had the mana swallowed instantly too. Finally, however, this seem to sate the ring’s hunger and the pull stopped.
Juno and Nia collapsed and Alex fell to the ground, bashing his head against the final battery on the way down. He could barely move. He saw his arm, the flesh split open to the bone, the red and white inside wetly gleaming.
Juno still had his hand on her shoulder a little witch’s face a mask of pain as she pulled on whatever magic she could
and fed it into him. She still had a hand on Nia, who was gritting her teeth as Juno drew on her energy too.
“You stupid god damn wolf,” Juno's swore. Alex saw a slice of color appear in his mana levels. He was healing.
He managed to cast Know Thyself and saw a list of injuries can fill the page. Wounds on his arms and legs, burst veins, damaged lungs, perforated stomach and intestines, chipped hip, kidney function four percent, and his liver had split into pieces. There wasn't a part of him that wasn’t damaged. However, he was healing fast in his werewolf form. The wound in his arm closed up and each time a wound healed the magic moved elsewhere. Slowly his level of mana began to rise and eventually Juno took her hand off him and stopped drawing power from Nia.
Alex lay still, feeling his body heal. As he gradually came back together he wondered if it was too late to hit the road and head to Mexico before Nia and Juno could get their hands on him.
20
“He was damn lucky we came home when we did,” Juno fumed, stomping around the kitchen.
Although Alex was the Alpha and the wolf inside him was very much dominant, he sat with his head down as he took what his two mates decide to dish out upon him. They were a good half hour into it now, both of them taking turns like a tag team wrestling match, sometimes ganging up on him.
He given his best excuse: he been experimenting and hadn't intended to change the ring to three hundred charges. But what else could he say? The fact was the pair of them were right. It had been incredibly stupid and Alex was wondering if remaining locked up in the house for so long as such a good idea now. His desire to get out, to go somewhere, to see something other than these walls was growing stronger day by day and he wasn't entirely sure if he hadn't taken the risk just because he was getting bored.
“You could have died,” Nia said, pointing a finger at him.