Chapter 42

I woke up in the hospital the next morning. Jordan was in one of those pull-out chairs that unfold into a very uncomfortable bed. She looked relieved. I felt it too.

“Good mornin’, sleepy head,” she said with a soft smile.

I nodded. “How are you feeling?”

“Better than you look,” she said.

I smiled. “That bad, huh?”

“Well, you were unconscious when the feds arrived,” she said. “It took a bit of ... you-know-what to convince them to let you go to the hospital rather than arrest you.”

A smile grew on my lips and Jordan’s mirrored it. “Then it worked,” I said.

She nodded.

I glanced at the closed door. I saw the shoulder of someone in a cheap suit standing just outside. “I take it I have an armed guard?”

“The feds just want to make sure you don’t leave before they have a chance to talk to you,” she said.

I looked around the room and took stock of the décor. There were numerous cards, bouquets, and collections of balloons. “Was this room formally a florist shop?”

Jordan chuckled. It sounded like sweet music to my ears. “No, just a number of thank you gifts from a great many people for what you did, both those like us and some from families of the missing women.”

I nodded and looked at Jordan again. “And what about your family? Aren’t they happy to have you back?”

She sat up and stretched. “Well...” she said, holding the stretch, allowing me to note the fullness of her breasts and the way her nipples stood out against her top. “I think they are.”

Unfortunately, we were interrupted before we could say or do anything else. The cheap suite moved from the door and some familiar yet unwelcome guests arrived. It was Agents Radcliff and Bolson, followed by Detectives Williams and Barns. They asked Jordan to leave, which she did, without a word. Then they tried to ask me questions, but the only thing I would say was that I wouldn’t say anything else until my Lawyer arrived. We didn’t have to wait long. Linda had been at the hospital too. All my Fonti were, as well as several of my Stirpi.

The investigators wanted to know how I found the missing women when they hadn’t had any luck at all. I put it to them very simply: “In your endeavor to find the missing women, you’re also looking for any connections to who took them. That cuts into any possible chances of you finding the women. I didn’t worry about who took them, I just wanted to find the women. So, I checked anyplace that might have been able to house all of them until I found them.”

Barns looked at the rest and said, “Dumb luck.”

Williams shrugged. Bolson looked indifferent. Radcliff, however, didn’t believe it for a second. She continued asking me questions, most of which Linda wouldn’t let me answer. Finally, since they didn’t have any evidence to arrest me on, they left.

I had more visitors shortly after that. Namely my attending physician. He looked me over, couldn’t explain why I had fallen unconscious or how I had come out of it on my own since nothing the hospital did could wake me up, and finally succumbed to signing my release papers.

After I got home, Jordan and I exchanged stories. I told her what happened from the night she was kidnapped through when she woke up in the warehouse. She was more than impressed. She was ecstatic that I had finally accepted my heritage and embraced the use of Magic. After a quick celebratory lap around the bedroom, she told me what happened in the warehouse while I was unconscious.

Jordan woke up from my blast and could tell, almost instantly, that she had her power back. Several other women were also just waking up but a majority were piled on top of someone. Jordan calmed everyone down and helped to clear away the buzz from the power they had held. When she was able to convince them that everything would be okay, they finally let her see me. She then sent different women to find a phone to call for help, and to try to figure out where they were. They found the SUV I had been driving and contacted the police.

Jordan figured out that her bond to me, which had always been a Magus-Fonte bond, was now doubled. She also had a Padrone-Stirpe bond with me as well. She didn’t know how that was possible, but then she couldn’t think of anyone who had ever turned one of their own Fonti into a Magus either. A quick examination told her that all of the women were bound to either her, me, or one of the other three women I had turned into Magi. The ones bound to me were the most helpful when it came to my care, which she considered a natural side-effect of the bond.

When the authorities arrived, it wasn’t just the local police. Agents Radcliff and Bolson were with them. When they found me there, they tried to put me in handcuffs because they had always suspected that I was somehow involved in the kidnappings. Jordan argued with them and used a touch of Magic to convince them to let me at least go to the hospital first so that I might recover and explain how I came to be there.

All of the missing women were also taken to local hospitals, both to be checked over and so they could recover from whatever had been done to them while they were missing. From what Jordan had been able to find out, not a single one of them could remember much more than dreams. Further testing by the hospital couldn’t provide the police with any additional leads as to who took the women. No drugs were found in their systems, other than any prescriptions they needed, none of them seemed malnourished or for that matter hurt in any way. Jordan overheard one doctor say to the feds, “It’s almost like they had only been asleep for a few hours.”

With no evidence as to how the women were held or any form of abuse, they had nothing they could charge me with except impeding their investigation. And since all of the women were now found and healthy, even that seemed to be moot.

Unfortunately for some of the women, they’re absence would affect their lives. Many of them had been missing for months. Some of those had lost their apartments and belongings. Some had been students at UTA and would have to not only wait until the next semester to resume school, but they would have to take their last semester again. Some of the women had families looking for them, and though they were happy to be back home, they felt different. They were different.

The three women who had been blasted by me with energy all found Jordan that first night. She had to explain to all of them that they were now Magi. She told them how their lives would be different and that they had bonds with me. All three of them seemed to accept it, though only time would tell.

Jordan and I discussed the spell Valory had used, the one we called the Lockdown. Neither of us were sure why the bonds had forged, but we agreed that bonds like that must have existed even before Magi had reservoirs. It allowed groups to gather and share energy more efficiently for the spells they crafted way back when. Now, it served the same purposes, just in different ways.

Tanner returned that Saturday to continue my training. I talked to him about training Francine, Daphne, and Angela as well. After I shared my memories of the events that occurred between his appearances, he agreed to help train the three though he insisted that I continue to attend training too. He said I may have gained a lot of insight to Magic throughout the week since I saw him last, but I still had a lot to learn. I didn’t argue with him about it. I was simply glad that he would be there.

Linda was more than ecstatic to have her sister back. She was a little flustered that Francine was a Magus now. She didn’t ask me to try to turn her into one as well, as she understood that it was circumstantial. She did, however, show me just how appreciative she was the night I came home.

Francine was happy to be home too, though, like all of the other women, she felt like she had only been gone maybe a few hours rather than so many weeks. Her initial reaction to becoming a Magus was understood. She had been a bit like me, a non-believer who needed proof. It didn’t take long to prove it to her. Especially when I made her Magus Mark visible, a concave polygon centered on her belly button. When I explained the need to have regular sex and that several of the women from the warehouse already had bonds with her for that purpose, she gave me a funny look. “I don’t mind having sex with women but I can’t be like this and not have a guy or two in my bed.”

Daphne Flouren turned out to be quite enthusiastic about becoming a Magus. She even stumbled on her innate ability to summon people when she thought about one of her new Fonti, Tiffany Travers, and the buxom blond showed up, saying she just had the sudden urge to stop by. Apparently, she could summon anyone like that except a Magus blocking her. Daphne had the same ideas about her Fonti as Francine had though she talked to me about which of the women she would want to keep. She seemed to like the idea of sharing Fonti with me, not like a couple might swing, but actually having sex with me and one of her Fonti at the same time. In the end, she decided to keep Tiffany and Wendy, her two most buxom Fonti, only because they seemed to turn me on the most.

Angela Whitehall was quiet at first when she found out what it meant to be a Magus. She let me prattle on for a half an hour without saying anything or asking questions. When I stopped, because I couldn’t immediately think of anything else to say, she looked at me and asked, “Why did you choose me to be a Magus?” I couldn’t think of anything better than, “Because it was foretold.” I had seen myself hitting her with the energy and simply followed through with it. When I explained all of it, she simply nodded and then began asking more probing questions regarding herself, the women she shared bonds with, and the Magus community as a whole. To me she seemed kind of shut in, like she wasn’t reacting emotionally to anything we talked about. Then she told me that was the very reason her husband had filed for divorce. He didn’t believe she was emotional enough as a woman either. I tried to apologize, but she waved it off, saying, “Don’t worry about it. I’m not.”

Jordan was happy to have her power back. She was also happy to have more power than she had before. And like Francine and Daphne, she felt the desire to have men as her Fonti. Yet, she decided to keep two of the women, Kelly Dayton and Rachel Braswell. Jordan’s choices had nothing to do with me. She had talked to all of the women she had bonds with and chose those two based on their personal tastes (one was completely gay, another completely hetero) and relationship history (two were married). When she introduced me to Kelly and Rachel, it was in her bedroom with all of us naked. Jordan had never lost her enjoyment of sex as a Magus and she reveled in it now that she had her power back.