Chapter 2: Intention

Good ol’ Yarosh had been a wakeup call, no doubt. Even though I had handled the crisis as well as could be hoped for, at least in my opinion, it didn’t change the fact that these people were serious, and were taking me seriously. There was no question in my mind that if I had been a standard magic practitioner like they were, I would be very dead right now. Luckily for me, it seemed that either these guys didn’t know what someone like me was capable of, or I was legitimately more capable than True Magi in the past. Either way, it was a small advantage, and one that could disappear at any time, so I needed to exploit it while I could.

On the night of the attempted assassination, I went to bed an absolute wreck, jumping at shadows, jittery and terrified of what the next attack would look like, where it would come from ... and when. However, a good night’s sleep did me a world of good, and when I woke up, I seemed to have moved past my funk, and straight into being pissed off. Maybe that’s what they mean about the resilience of youth? Who knows.

Some assholes in a magic fraternity are trying to kill me because I don’t pay union dues? Fuck that, and fuck them. Sideways. With a chainsaw. I can be an asshole too.

The plan was obvious to me, though looking back on it now, I think I was coming down from a cocky high after killing a skilled and trained assassin with no casualties, beyond some psychological damage in poor Laura. I felt strong, capable of protecting myself and my growing harem from anything these jokers could throw at me. But defense is a losing game. It just requires some bad luck, or a method I didn’t think to counter, and next thing I know there’s one less me in the world, and that would be tragic.

The obvious question: how do you protect yourself from a secret society who has no compunction about killing you? Well, it turns out Yarosh had given me the answer already, but it wasn’t where my head was. It just didn’t make sense to wait for them to make a move; they already had, and a response was not only appropriate, it felt necessary. I needed them to understand that I could reach out and touch them just as easily as they did it to me. If I did enough damage, made it clear that I was just as, if not more, dangerous than they were, we might be able to settle into some sort of cold war status.

Here’s why I think I was just being cocky: I legit contemplated coming up with some mechanism to wipe all the practitioners of the Orders out for good. When I first raised the idea to my full harem “war council” sitting across from each other on a pair of couches in the living room, all of them to a girl gave me a look that I’ll never likely forget, the sort of look that makes you question your life’s choices. I’d never seen it before pointed in my direction, and regardless of the fact that all these women were my slaves ... well, let’s just say it made an impression on me. Enough to modify my plans. Even Charlie gave me that look. What the hell?

So, Plan B it was. It started with Sarah asking about how Yarosh acted. When she heard about him making a beeline for me, she suggested he didn’t really know who I was or where I was, and likely had some form of tracker spell that he was using to find me, based upon some characteristic or action I took.

“Interesting,” I replied thoughtfully, leaning back into the cushions. Cassie, who was sitting to my right, snuggled up to me. “So it’s possible they hardly know anything about me. Yarosh was resentful of them, so it’s unlikely he shared any information or checked in regularly, so at this point I may still be a ghost in the machine.”

Sarah nodded slowly. “That will change soon, though. Scrying is a powerful and flexible art. The longer they know you’re out there, the more chance someone will be able to key off something you’ve done that nobody else can do. I found you by looking for a man that had cast a Perfect Spell, it won’t be long before someone else thinks to do the same.”

“There’s no way to protect yourself from ... Scryers? Is that what you’re called?”

“We’re called ‘Seers’, and yes, there are spells that will block scrying, but they block it based upon a fixed location. So if you had some private papers, or a secret vault, or a room you wanted to do shady deals in or lover’s rendezvous or whatever, you can make that happen pretty easily. The problem is, you can scry for that ward, too, and you’ll at least know where that place is. If you warded your home, a Seer would not be able to see inside, but he or she would know you were there, and could easily figure out much more about you.”

I nodded, thinking about the problem. That made sense to me. “So, to defeat a Seer, I’d need to make it so that anyone looking for me would instead find something else.”

“I ... don’t know of any spell like that. But if you can make one, you could make an awful lot of money. Every practitioner has secrets they wish to keep. Assuming the Orders were no longer trying to kill you...” she qualified. I snorted a laugh. That would happen, one day, I was confident ... but I wouldn’t bet on when.

Julie, sitting next to Sarah, was still red-faced and bubbling with fury. She took the news of the attempted assassination strangely personally. She had started cursing with some of the most sulfurous language I’d ever heard, steadily raising in volume and vitriol to the point I literally had to command her to be quiet. She looked at me and raised her hand.

I frowned, then realized she was asking for permission to speak again. I sometimes forgot that my slaves were bound to follow my commands as they interpreted them even when it conflicted with common sense. “You can speak, but control your tone. This meeting needs to be constructive.” She nodded, then drew a deep, calming breath. I stopped myself from rolling my eyes, this was just too melodramatic for my tastes.

“Sir, while I don’t think annihilating all the people in the Orders is a good plan for a lot of reasons, this assassin did give you a set of names that were directly responsible for trying to...” She took another deep breath. “ ... murder you. If we can verify through some means that he was telling the truth, I think they should be punished. Like, fatally punished.” Geez, she really wasn’t handling this well.

“What’s got you so worked up, Jules? You weren’t even the one he went after.” I was genuinely curious about this rather extreme reaction.

“I ... I don’t know, sir!” she cried, frustrated tears threatening to escape her eyes. “It’s just so evil! So uncivilized! And the fact that it’s you, the most important person in my life-- in all of our lives! I don’t understand how you all can be so calm about it!” She started to sniffle.

Aww. “Come here, girl,” I said, opening my arms. Mutely, she stood up and walked up to where I was sitting. “Have a seat on my lap.” She blushed, but quickly obeyed. I wrapped my arms around her and she shuddered through some sobs into my chest while she clung to me. Cassie leaned away to give her some necessary David time.

I always find it fascinating how my slaves react to me in their new reality. The script that embeds itself into their psyche uses the exact same words for all of them, but how they seem to interpret it and mentally conform seems to go down some profoundly different paths, not only in their behavior, but also in their emotional states. It looked like Julie saw an attack on me as some kind of attack on all that was good in the world. Somehow, in her head, the boy that had enslaved her literally for a ride home was the living symbol of righteousness, which ... yeah, I don’t see it.

But, I have come to terms with the fact that owning slaves actually does imply some responsibility to maintain them, and it’s work I can’t foist off onto someone else. A small price to pay in the grand scheme of things, but important just the same. The things we do for good pussy.

While stroking her back and trying to calm her down. I looked to the other girls. “I’m inclined to agree with her, actually. These assholes tried to do something permanent to me. Responding in kind at least for the ones Yarosh named seems like the right thing to do. What do you girls think?”

Janet grunted an unladylike sound. “If we can figure out how to do that, we should. Can we?”

Cassie nodded agreement. “Also, are you sure you can kill someone in cold blood, Brother? I mean ... it’s one thing to kill in self defense, in the heat of the moment, but ... planning out how to kill someone, and then doing it? That seems a lot harder.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it’ll be that much cold blood. Maybe I’m over the ‘kill everyone and let God sort ‘em out’ phase, but I’m still plenty hot here.”

Cassie giggled. “You’re super hot.” I rolled my eyes at the silliness, but it still put a smile on my face. Even Julie in my arms snorted a laugh. Her crying had stopped and now she was just cuddling with me.

“Ok, any other points to raise? We are going to try and track down these fellows that thought it would be a good idea to remove me from the gene pool, and then make them dead in such a way that they serve as an object lesson to the rest of the practitioners in the Orders.” Nobody said a word, but all my girls stared at me with resolution in their eyes. “All right. From now on, nobody moves alone. Cassie, Laura, you two head on down to the library and see what we can dig up on these chuckleheads. Charlie, Janet, you two are going to help Sarah. Sarah, I want you scrying as much information as you can safely gather about these men, their whereabouts, habits, whatever. Don’t get caught.”

“Nobody ‘gets caught’ scrying, David. That’s not how it works.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. She frowned, but then seemed to remember that I had done exactly that to her. “Present company excluded,” she grumbled, looking at the floor. I smirked at her.