Chapter 8

Friday was a bust, as far as holidays go, but then again, New Year’s Eve had been a bust too! Those of us who were hanging around had decided to have our celebration Saturday night instead. There would be no countdown, but we came for a party and we were going to have one!

Saturday was a lazy day, with many folks traveling back home or down to the city. Maggie and I just lazed around for half the day and spent the other half meeting with people. Some had business proposals, and some were trying to find out more about the talents I had displayed.

The business proposals mostly went to Pat, though if he thought I should, I sat in and listened and offered my opinion if it was asked for. Some of the others came across as earnest, and I answered their questions as best I could.

One or two came across as slimy or grasping, and to those people I just pretended not to know how it was done, saying it just came naturally. One lady offered to sleep with me if I could teach her the shield trick, but frankly, I would rather have masturbated.

The party Saturday night was a low-key thing, with most of the Mages having given it up and written off the weekend. There were about thirty people at the manor for the party, and it was nice. We sat around and just got to know one another, danced a little, had some champagne and some laughs.

I did get to dance with Wendy, which was cool. Once you got used to her high-energy way of speaking, she turned out to be a lot of fun. She was super bright, and it was as if her mind worked faster that other folks’!

When the party ended and we retired to our rooms, I was surprised to see Wendy in our bed when I came out of the bathroom.

“Surprise!” Maggie crowed, giggling at my expression.

“Yeah, surprise!” Wendy added, looking a little unsure of herself. She was lying on her side, one leg cocked, and her head propped up on her hand. It had a very contrived feel, as if she had tried to assume a specific pose for a reason. But it was also effective!

Wendy was slim, with small breasts and just a tuft of light brown fuzz over her pussy. When she saw me giving her the once-over, I could see her relax a bit, and when I looked back to her face, she was giving me the once-over as well!

“What did you look like, you know, before?” Wendy asked, her eyes locked on my cock. It was standing up and saluting, and it was a second before I realized what she meant.

“The same there, smart-ass,” I said acerbically and got a giggle in response. “The rest of me is healthier ... a bit stronger and faster, thanks to the amp up spells I learned. You?”

“I had the perfect figure ... for a ten-year-old boy! It’s no wonder Brian didn’t get my hints before I pushed the issue. The spells really got me kick-started and amped up puberty for me. I have boobs now!”

“I can see that!” I replied with a laugh, moving on to the bed facing her. Maggie had been quiet so far, a scheming grin on her face. She moved into bed behind Wendy so that we had the poor girl book-ended.

“They look mighty tasty too.” I told the girl, leaning my head forward so I could kiss first one nipple, then the other.

“Oh god, I love to have my nipples played with! They are so sensitive now ... suck them for me, Hank.” She got more than she planned on when Maggie took one while I took the other!

The following morning, Wendy told us that she had never even really considered fooling around with a woman, but now that she had a chance to experiment, she might add a girl or two to her own harem back home!

When the two had worn me out, I retreated to the other bed and left them playing on their own. They were still going at it when I fell asleep, though sometime around ten the next day, I woke with both of them in my bed.

I had Wendy’s mental ‘code’ now, but she made sure to give Maggie her phone number as well. Wendy said she really wanted to meet my Mouseketeers, and we talked about visiting now and again, once we both were far enough along to learn the transportation spell.

I would be lying if I said that going home on Sunday and back to school on Monday, wasn’t a big letdown after the exciting weekend I had. The only good thing was being able to see Carrie, Alicia, Bernie, and Lynn again. I had missed them this weekend.

They seemed to be excited to see me, at least until lunch on Monday. Then, of all things, Maggie had them hanging on her every word as she told them about Wendy! She knew she had to be hush-hush about the Mage Council business, but we had never discussed keeping Wendy quiet.

At first, I was worried about their reactions, but Lynn and Bernie were all a-twitter about me having another conquest, this one long-distance. Alicia seemed surprised, but not upset. How I dodged a bullet with this, I’ll never understand, but I never understood girls in the first place. I just chalked it up to magic and let it be.

I should have worried.

It was Thursday when the trouble surfaced. It was Little Willy again, but this time with Big Willy at his side. When I saw them approaching, I unconsciously tightened up my shields and stood to face the pair.

Big Willy waved his hand at me, his expression and the gesture asking me “just be cool”.

“Alicia, you wanna come sit with me and your real friends?” Little Willy asked, ignoring everyone else at the table, but I saw his eyes shoot sideways to see how I reacted. The smug grin on his face told me he thought he was safe with his brother at his back. He had, mostly, avoided me since our confrontation at the dance.

Alicia looked at me and blushed, averting her eyes after a second. The rest of the girls were all staring at her or looking back and forth between Alicia and me.

When Alicia didn’t respond, I spoke softly to her, not wanting to cause a scene.

“If that is what you want, Alicia, it’s okay. You are a big girl and you can sit wherever you want to sit.”

“No one asked you, cracker.” Little Willy snarled, puffing out his chest. The meaty slap of Big Willy smacking him across the back of his shaved head echoed in the suddenly silent lunchroom.

“I told you to be cool, William Avery. You better behave now. I am not here to protect you, I am here to protect him from getting suspended when he kicks yo ass, boy.” Big Willy snarled at his brother.

Little Willy shot a betrayed look at his brother, then turned and glared at me, hatred in his eyes.

“Let’s go, ‘Licia. You know you don’t belong with a bunch of slumming, jungle-fever crackers nohow.”

To my great surprise, and based on the gasps, that of the rest of the girls, Alicia got to her feet and followed Little Willy away from the table. They headed towards a table filled with Little Willy’s friends, all of them laughing at jeering at ... us? Him? I wasn’t exactly sure at this point.

I spoke quietly to Maggie and Carrie with my mind, something I tried to never do at school in case it raised questions. ‘Please try to find out what that was all about.‘ I asked and got back their agreements.

The story, at least from what Lynn and Bernie could find out and tell the older girls, was simple. Twisted, hate-filled and racist too, but simple.

Little Willy hated me and spent a lot of time blaming me for all the ills of the world. If he failed a test or got a bad grade, it was somehow my fault. If he stubbed his toe? My fault. Rain? My fault too!

His father had heard him bitching about the best looking ‘sista’ in school, Alicia, hanging around piece of white trash, me. Willy’s Daddy knew Alicia’s Daddy, and the next thing you knew, Alicia was having trouble sitting down and was restricted from doing anything, talking to anyone, or going anywhere without close supervision.

And guess who the single exception to that policy was? That’s right, William Avery James, the little brother of William Jefferson James and the son of William Davis James. Why, according to the boy’s father, Little Willy was a Rhodes Scholar, a future Nobel Prize candidate and sure to be the next black man in the White House!

Alicia, when Lynn cornered her to get her side, just told Lynn to leave her alone. She had made her choice, and she would rather fuck Willy and be able to go out on dates, than sit home at night and pine over some white boy with a lot of sluts of his own.

Well, you can imagine how well that went down. Lynn ended up suspended for three days when a teacher saw her deck Alicia in the hallway.

I spent several hours thinking up increasingly painful ways to pay back Alicia’s father, Little Willy’s father, and Little Willy himself, but in the end, I had to let it be. I couldn’t force Alicia to change her mind, and it sounded like she had chosen the lesser of two evils, at least in her own mind.

That this whole thing made Little Willy and his sycophants even more obnoxious, was an almost expected side effect. I am a big enough man to admit that I took considerable pleasure in how Little Willy cringed and hid from me when he was alone, only standing up to me with his buddies backing his play.

Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, did you know that hexes are real things? Not super-powerful, generation-spanning curses that followed a bloodline, mind you, but little annoyances and unfortunate coincidences that could tease and bedevil the recipient.

And a hemorrhoid hex is a real thing too.

Business picked up a bit after the conclave, with larger pieces or more intricate requests coming in that I couldn’t fulfill by simply shoveling a bunch of power into a gem as the bus rolled past the closest ley line. Some of the requests were for powering spelled gems, and that took some finesse to keep from breaking the enchantments.

Others were for specialty spell work, where my power enhanced the spell-caster’s intent and design. These could take some time, upwards of an hour for one that was really intricate!

January faded into memory and February followed as always. Just before Valentine’s Day, the watchmaker came through with new baguettes for my watch. He had the old ones out, and the new ones in, toot sweet, and I had them powered up by dinnertime.

The larger ones took a full five Joules and the smaller, slightly more than two each. Thirty-two for the face, twenty more for the crystals was nothing to sneeze at. I was still out twenty from the stone that blew up at the conclave, but the new baguettes offset that loss almost perfectly.

This got me to thinking about Valentine’s Day and what might be expected of me. I asked for and got a ride to the mall after conveniently arranging for the rest of the girls to be busy elsewhere. Did you know that a spa day is a real thing? It’s not something only on reruns of Three’s Company!

With me raking in money hand over fist, I didn’t have to go cheap. I didn’t want to raise a bunch of eyebrows with overly extravagant gifts, but I wanted nice ... and quality.

As I shopped the various jewelry stores at the mall, I found something I thought was pretty cool. When I asked to see one, the lady behind the counter seemed surprised.

“Not much call for these anymore. When I was a girl, they were all the rage, but that was back at the end of the war. Make love not peace, you know? They sort of fell out of fashion, but I still think they are very sexy, if the girl has the legs for that sort of thing.”

They were gold chains with little charms in the shapes of letters. There were a few other charms, like a heart, a four-leaf clover, the suits of a deck of cards, and of course, the peace symbol. There were more, but most of them were either things I didn’t recognize or just abstract shapes that were pleasing to the eye.

On a whim, I purchased four anklets, each with a pair of letters for the initials of each girl. The letters I chose had a spot to set a small stone, so I had chips of each girl’s birth stone added, and agreed to pick them up the following Friday, the twelfth.

Even though I had been loosening the chains on Maggie and Carrie, getting them ready, slowly, for the time they would leave for college, there was no change in the way they treated me. I was certain it was working! Well, almost certain, anyway.

When I suggested a private Valentine’s Day party at our house, all four girls were excited about the idea. Later, I made sure to get Maggie and Carrie aside, and told them that they were free to accept dates if they would rather go out that night.

I am pretty sure that the look I got from the pair could have been translated to say, “Dumbass!”

“Hank, we need to talk. We know our feelings for you are changing a little, and we think it is you that is making that happen. We talked about it, hell, we talk about it all the time, and Carrie is certain that it is so we can go away to college. I thought it was just me, ‘cause we can’t have three-legged babies.” Maggie said with a grin.

“Seriously though, I will want kids someday, and as much as I love you to death, I know we can’t go there. So yeah, I will want to find some guy to love and marry someday, but not today, and not soon. So...

“You can wiggle your fingers, or your nose, or whatever it is you do when you get all magicky, but Carrie and I agreed that you are absolutely perfect for us for now. No issues, no headaches, no unexpected pregnancies, and no pining boys left behind when we go to school. Just fuck our brains out now and then to help us concentrate on school and let us adore you, okay?”

So, I did. The brains thing, both of them. Twice.

Jesus, Was I living the good life or what?

One thing I did want to do, and this was something else that Maggie and Carrie sort of insisted on, was to share the whole truth with Lynn and Bernie. I loved them both and they were head-over-heels with me, magically induced or not, and they deserved to know the truth.

Mom and Dad had their own Valentine plans, including a hotel, thanks to a suggestion from me and an agreement to fund their adventure. Lynn and Carrie’s parents had their own plans and had agreed that they could spend the night with Maggie, since none of the girls had dates.

Bernie, on the other hand, didn’t even ask. She told her mother she would be out and the answer was a shrug. She was spending more and more nights with us, and I had the feeling that no one cared except us.

The girls all came over Saturday morning and would be staying through Sunday night, leaving for school Monday morning from our house!

The big reveal went better than I had hoped, with Lynn seeming to think that it was too cool for words and Bernie jumping to her feet and pointing an accusatory finger at me, shouting, “I KNEW IT!”

Well, she hadn’t ‘known it’ exactly, but she had known something was up! She laid out a dozen times when one or another of us had slipped, or I had done something impossible. Or highly improbably, anyway.

“Magic is so out there though. If I hadn’t been crushing on you for years, I would probably think you had slipped us a Love Potion Number Nine or something!” she joked, perching herself in my lap and giving me a kiss. “I knew it was something though. I was so sure that you were, I don’t know, a spy or ... or, I don’t know what. Nothing really fit the clues but there was something, I could feel it!”

We spent most of the evening talking about magic and what it was, what it could do and, more importantly, what it couldn’t. At least as far as I was concerned. I told them about the spells I had learned and the ones I had invented or changed. When I told them about the differences between hedge Mages, Mages, Wizards and Warlocks, they all seemed to think it was fitting I was a Wizard.

I think they were just a touch prejudiced in my favor though, so there is that.

It was Bernie that kicked me in the pants and got me thinking of someone other than myself.

“So, could you, like, use some of those ‘get healthy’ spells on us?” she asked, unconsciously fingering a pimple on her chin. She was waging a seemingly never-ending battle with acne. Never very bad, to be sure, but she hated it with a passion and even one was too many.

I had to think that over for a bit, not sure what effect they would have without some kind of power to sustain the spells through the working period. Perhaps if I...

I did promise the girls that I would check in to it and, if it were possible, I would do everything I could for each of them.

Despite the loving kisses and the massive cuddle pile after I handed out their Valentine’s gifts, things did not devolve into a free-for-all. The ladies had done that most heinous of things, they had synced. Yep, they were all having their monthlies, so we all cuddled and just had time being close.

Okay, yes, I got a blowjob. Or three. And Bernie liked it when I ... whatever. The point is that we didn’t have a free for all like I had envisioned, but that was okay too.

March came in like a pussycat, despite its reputation. I was headed to Spain on the eleventh, leaving right after school, and Bernie was coming with me! She had all but given up the pretense of living at home, and Mom had let her take over the spare bedroom to store her things. That she slept in with me and Maggie most nights was something Mom ignored.

When the topic of the trip came up, Carrie and Lynn were both sad that they couldn’t slip away, and Maggie insisted that Bernie was the perfect companion for me this time. After extracting a promise of a European trip sometime in the future, of course!

We had both already been excused from class on the following Monday, the fourteenth, though we expected to be home again that evening. Sir David had assured us that the trip was completely casual but warned me that European casual was not quite what ‘American Teen From Georgia’ casual usually was!

This meant, of course, another shopping trip, and what the hell, I even went along and let them dress me up for the occasion too! We were headed to an Island, a pretty one judging by the few pictures I could find in the library, and we needed clothes for a warm climate like, well, like home! But nicer.

As soon as the last bell rang on the eleventh, Bernie and I were out of there like a shot! Holding hands and laughing. We ran from the school campus and into the woods behind the baseball field, headed for a spot where almost no one went these days, a dead-end gully.

It had, at one time, been a pothead hangout, but the cops started busting everyone they caught there, and it had been abandoned for safer places. Now it was a perfect spot, within seconds from the school, from which to be teleported along with our previously hidden luggage, without anyone seeing us disappear!

As we ran south, I extended an illusion of us heading east instead, and when I let Sir David know I was ready, we were there. Just that easy!

We appeared in the courtyard of a very Spanish looking villa, and there, waiting for us, was Sir David, his wife, Lady Elizabeth and a tall, thick-set man with an impressive beard and handlebar mustache.

“Hank, welcome to Palma de Mallorca! It is good to see you again, my boy. You know my lovely wife, of course, and this fine fellow here is Graf Helmut von und zu Zaftmund. You’ll remember I mentioned him when I visited you in Georgia.”

“Thank you for the lift, Sir David. Nice to see you again, Lady Elizabeth and very nice to meet you, Herr Graf. I hope I got that right? This very lovely lady with me is Bernice Langston.”

“Ah, my dear, you are very lovely indeed!” Sir David said with a wink. Graf Zaftmund just smiled a little and nodded his head.

“I am glad you are here! May I call you Bernice? You must call me Liz. Frankly, I understand, perhaps, a quarter of what these men talk about at these quarterly meetings, and I care even less. I come because it lets me get out of Scotland when the weather is beastly, and I get to shop in the most interesting places! Having you here will make it ever so much more fun.”

Before I even realized it, Lady Elizabeth had Bernie by the shoulder, and they were already off, wandering into the house and chatting like old friends. Well, no worries about her being bored while we are here! I did manage to briefly catch them long enough to get a kiss goodbye and to slip her my wallet! She would need some cash to keep up with Lady Elizabeth! I hoped the shops would take dollars...

“So, Sir David, I am looking forward to meeting the other Wizards. I am sure I have a lot to learn from you gentlemen!”

“Perhaps ve haf tings to learn from you, young man.” The Graf said, shaking his head, but he was smiling, so I just assumed it was a good thing.

“Anything I can do to help!”

Our conversation had barely started when we were interrupted by the arrivals of two more of our little group.

Shishou (Master) Chen Zhìwěi, pronounced Chin Chih-wei, was a water Wizard from the Island nation of Taiwan. He was a spare man, about five and a half feet tall, dressed in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit, and carrying a wood cane with a large emerald at the palm. He smiled brightly and bowed his head to Sir David and Graf Zaftmund, then smiled and nodded at me before holding out his hand.

“You are Hank Lambert? You have made my life much easier these last few months, and I find myself in your debt! We must make time to talk further, this weekend, as I would like to put myself even deeper into your debt before we are done!” He said with a smile. He spoke expansively, using his hands to emote and he seemed like quite a character.

The second arrival, right on the heels of the first, was Shishō (Master) Itsuki Ieyasu of Japan. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, and was wearing what I assumed to be a traditional costume of some sort. I was embarrassed to admit I knew very little about Japan or Japanese culture and didn’t know the significance.

He stepped forward and bowed slightly, from the waist, in the direction of the group already present, then smiled at the others. Shishou Chen had spoken with a bit of an accent, but he was not hard to understand after a moment. When Shishō Ieyasu spoke, I subconsciously expected the same.

“David, how are you? Helmut? Zhìwěi, you old communist, how goes the fight against the mainland? And you, you must be Hank Aaron, after the American baseball legend, no? I have been looking forward to meeting you. It is said that you have some tricks you can teach this old man.” His accent was non-existent. He could have been from Des Moines or Los Angeles, and I must have looked surprised.

He turned at looked at Sir David. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

He turned back to me and rolled his eyes. “He likes to think he is a jokester. Unbecoming behavior in one so old, neh?” he asked me, winking subtly to show he was kidding. “I grew up in Miami but traveled back to Japan regularly to visit family and so on. I went to school in Tokyo and made Japan my home after the Second World War,” He explained, waving it away as not important.

“No Juna yet? Is he coming, did anyone hear?” Shishō Ieyasu asked, looking from on to another of the men.

“I come.” A voice from behind me said solemnly, causing Graf Zaftmund to bark a laugh at Shishō Ieyasu’s surprised expression.

“Damn it! One day I will see you arrive, Juna, you sneaky bastard!” Shishō Ieyasu waved his finger in the new arrival’s direction.

Sangoma (Diviner) Djuna Ngbendu Agbepa Ndala was a very tall, very thin man whose skin was colored a rich, dark mahogany, and he had the most amazing amber colored eyes that seemed to catch the light. When he smiled, his blinding white teeth stood out in stark contrast to his skin, and throughout the weekend, it never failed to take me by surprise!

The man ignored Shishō Ieyasu’s remark and shook hands all around before turning to me.

“You are the boy from America, the one who will set the Mages of the world on their ears, yes?”

“I don’t know about that, sir. I seemed to have angered a few and surprised a few more though.” I said, shrugging and returning his smile.

“Ah, yes, I think you speak truly. Well, I think we should go indoors as I find myself particularly parched today. David, you did bring some of that horrid bathwater you try to pass off as scotch, didn’t you?”