Chapter 23

I followed the girls into the store and felt something wash over me. I looked back at the door. There wasn’t a curtain or any kind of air blasting to maintain the temperature of the store, so I had no idea what I had felt. The store was just on the cool side, which I preferred.

The girls disappeared down the far aisle, too excited about finding costumes to notice that I wasn’t right behind them. I smiled, curious about what the store had to offer, and considered where to start browsing.

“Hello, Seth,” said a female voice behind me.

I turned and had to look up. A very tall woman stood nearby. She had a long, thick mane of dark hair, heavy mascara behind a pair of short-framed glasses, and full lips painted rose red. She had a deep, even tan, which seemed odd since the record summer heat was only a memory. Her top was white with lace edges and it was stretched obscenely by her huge breasts, not to mention the soft yellow jacket she wore was too small to button closed around them. She wore a wide belt to cinch her waist and accentuate her hourglass figure. Her skirt was black and stopped less than halfway down her thighs. It left the bottom edge of the lace of her stockings visible. Finally, the black high heels she wore must have added four or five inches to her height, as if she needed it.

“You must be Joyce,” I said, looking back up to her face.

“No,” she said with a smile. She held out her hand to shake. “I’m Emma. I work here part time.”

I shook her hand and a wave of something passed through me. I frowned at her and pulled my hand away. The pulse stopped and I stared at this woman in front of me. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was HOT. She had the perfect build, and I had the strongest desire to do things with her I wouldn’t have imagined with my Fonti.

Emma’s smile was joined by a twinkle in her eyes. “Follow me. I want to show you something.” She took my hand and the pulse started again.

Something was wrong. How could I feel this way? What was causing it?

I followed Emma to the counter. There was a small mirror and I caught my reflection in it. In my eyes, I saw the same fire that burned in my girls’ eyes when my Magic turned them on.

My mind flew a million miles a second. If this was how they felt when my Magic hit them, then I couldn’t do that to them anymore; and if it took Magic to make someone feel this way, that meant Emma was using Magic on me.

My eyes left the mirror and I stopped walking. I pulled my hand from Emma’s and said, “No. I’m not doing this.” My voice was soft, as if I wasn’t sure about what I was saying.

She turned and looked at me with a small frown. “What did you say?”

I shook my head and refused to look at her. “I’m not having sex with you.”

She reached out to touch me and I pulled back. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked.

I nodded and bumped against the counter. I couldn’t concentrate to figure out which way to go to get away from her.

She followed me, staying within reach. “Seth, it’s okay,” she said with a calm tone. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to have some fun.” She looked me over with a lick of her lips. “Wouldn’t you like to?”

I shook my head. Consciously, I knew better than to trust her, but I wanted her. It was more than a physical reaction. I could foresee all of the things we would do. I was even willing to try things I wouldn’t normally consider. It would feel good. I would enjoy it. I simply knew it.

Call me fractured, but part of my mind worked out what was going on. Unfortunately, that part didn’t have much say when it came to any actions. My words came out disjointed. “What ... did you ... do ... to me?”

“What did I do?” she asked and I nodded. “Oh, my poor boy, I used Magic to make you want me. It’s quite a bit stronger than the normal cravings a bond creates, so fighting it is pretty much pointless.”

She closed the small distance between us, pressing her large breasts against my chest. She pulled my head down, my nose leading the way into her cleavage.

I tried to pull away, but it felt like all my strength had left me.

She hummed softly and squeezed her breasts around my face with her shoulders. Then she leaned closer and whispered into my ear. “Kiss my breasts, my poor boy. Make ‘em feel good.”

My lips moved of their own accord, opening and closing but not really kissing.

My mind continued to work on the problem. She used Magic to make me feel this way. Wasn’t that illegal? For that matter, how was she even using Magic? The Lockdown should have prevented that.

I regained a little control and raised my head. “Illegal...” I sputtered. “Lockdown.”

Her brow rose. “Illegal? No, the only manipulative Magic we’re allowed to use is seduction. Otherwise, most of us would be serial rapists.” She leaned closer with a small smile. “And the Lockdown doesn’t affect any of us in this store.”

That gave me enough strength to ask, “How?”

She shrugged. “Joyce has put a lot of work into protecting her store. There are the usual security spells, security from theft, influence so the economy wouldn’t force her to close, and even spells to protect the store from renovations the city wants to make. Some combination of those made it a sort of safe haven, or magicis sanctuarium.”

Watching her talk was fascinating. I had a huge urge to pull her face to mine and kiss her. It took all of my effort to fight it off.

Emma smiled down at me. “You are so cute,” she said and then ran her hand over me. “And it feels like you’ve got a monster packed in your pants.” She rubbed herself against me. “Be a good boy and I’ll suck it.”

The only thing better than kissing her lips would be seeing them wrapped around me. My body agreed and I thrust myself into her groping hand.

She smiled. “Oh, you like that idea, don’t you?” She leaned against me, pressing as much of her body to mine as possible, and kissed me.

I didn’t understand why I was fighting this. After all, I’d had sex with Dalton and nothing weird happened.

A voice in my head said, “That was consensual. She was testing to see if tapping your power would free hers from the lockdown. AND she gave back the power you gave her.”

Emma’s tongue filled my mouth, stilling that voice. She used it to pet my tongue, to coerce mine into her mouth, and she sucked on my tongue, giving me a preview of what she was going to do to other parts of my anatomy.

Her hands were busy too. I felt my belt loosen and my pants open. As tall as she was, she had long limbs and larger hands than any of my girls. She wrapped a hand around me and stroked. It felt good, absolutely wonderful. More than that, she moaned around my tongue.

She pulled back from our “kiss” and looked at me with wide eyes. “I knew you had a monster.” Then she dropped down in front of me, staying on her feet, and spread her knees out on either side. Her skirt rode up and I noticed, like Leanne and Erica, she was devoid of panties.

She had me out, pointed straight at her parted lips, when that part of my mind that had been working out what to do finally found the strength to do more than yell at me.

My butt slid along the counter and I pulled from Emma’s grip. My body screamed in protest but the strength my mind found was anger and that burned off most of the need Emma had generated in me.

I stuffed myself back in my pants and closed them up. I yelled at Emma, not sure what I was saying, virtually uncontrolled in my choice of words.

When I was dressed again, Emma stood up and pulled her skirt back down around her thighs. Nothing about her appearance changed. She really was that alluring and sexy.

She smiled at me. “Jordan said you didn’t talk like that. I’ll have to let her know I accomplished one thing at least.”

I frowned at her. “Talk? Jordan? What the hell is going on?”

“She told me how smart you are,” Emma said. “But I suppose anger can cloud intellectual processes.”

I growled. “Tell me what is going on.”

“Jordan came in a couple of days ago,” she said. “She was worried about you because you’re investigating the Lockdown.” She picked up the mirror from the counter and checked her makeup. It was perfect and she must have thought so too because she put the mirror down again. “She wanted me to teach you how to defend against Magical attacks.”

I frowned. “You didn’t attack me. You tried to seduce me.”

She smiled. “You think too much like a man. I’m not going to get you to drop your guard and then strangle you or stab you. Even with my height, I don’t match your upper body strength.” She looked at my chest. “And I would love to have that strength wrapped around me.”

I blinked at her latter comment. “Wait, you weren’t going to use Magic to attack me?”

“Why should I?” she asked. “There are plenty of mundane ways to attack. It’s the bit about dropping your guard you need to learn.” Her tone was the same as someone talking about the weather.

“Would you really have...?” and I held my throat.

“Oh, no,” she said. “But I would have given you a nice scar to remind you of what could happen.” She looked me over again. “I’d hate doing it too because you really are hot.”

I spotted a pen on the counter and grabbed it. “Something I’m not into: pain.” I said and jabbed the point into my thigh. It was enough to hurt but not break the skin.

She shook her head. “That’s not an issue,” she said. “I can turn pain into pleasure.” And she clomped her teeth together. “Think about it, Seth. What really brought you out of my spell?”

“Anger,” I said. “But you didn’t do anything that made me angry.”

She waved a manicured finger at me. “Huh-uh. Some part of your mind grew angry at what was happening. I couldn’t say why but it saved you. You have to figure out how to bring out your anger when facing this kind of attack.”

“So, it works like a shield as well as a spell breaker?” I asked

She nodded. “But only for spells designed to make you horny. Other spells require different shields or breaks.”

“Okay, anger breaks seduction,” I said. “So how am I supposed to know how to break other spells?”

“You misunderstand,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “For you anger breaks seduction. As for other spells, you’ll have to discover that for yourself.”

I shook my head. “Shouldn’t my trainer be teaching me this?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Jordan didn’t tell me much about you. She only mentioned that the Lockdown doesn’t affect you. The only reason to have a trainer is because your family abandoned you.”

I looked away. “I don’t know why but my father never told me about my heritage. I wasn’t aware of it until Jordan woke my power a couple of months ago.”

Emma looked me over. “That explains a lot,” she said and then turned. “C’mon. Let’s find your girls and see what they’ve found.”

I was a little leery of her, but I complied. We found Erica and Leanne way in the back of the store by the dressing rooms. Erica was dressed like a baseball player. Her uniform was tight in all the right places and lacked the long socks regular uniforms had, but otherwise it was actually very tame. Leanne, however, looked like an extra for the movie, Road Warrior. Erica had been watching all kinds of movies to understand different movie-making concepts she was learning about in her first screenwriting class. All three of us watched that movie together and I felt like I should have been looking around for beaten up cars and endless tracts of desert. When Leanne saw me, she smiled and picked up a very real looking assault rifle as if it was made of cotton balls.

Their attention on me was short lived though. Both of them looked up and their smiles vanished. I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not, but both of them looked Emma over as if they were both animatronic and on the same controls. Even their expressions of dismay looked the same.

They dragged their eyes from Emma to look at me and smiled again. “We found a few costumes for you to try on too,” Erica said. She glanced up at Emma and waved me toward the dressing room.

“What did you find?” I asked but Erica stepped away from me. Leanne did too. They walked over to Emma and stood next to her, looking as expressionless as when I forged bonds with them.

“Erica?” I asked. “Leanne?” Neither of them responded. I looked up at Emma. “What did you do?” I asked, my anger growing.

She waved her finger at me again. “Huh-uh. Anger won’t help you with this problem.”

“What did you do?” I asked again.

She smiled. “They are under my control. As long as you do what I want, nothing will happen to them. They won’t even know that anything happened.”

“Is this part of Jordan’s training suggestion?” I asked.

“No, it is not,” Emma said. “I lied to you earlier, Seth. Jordan didn’t set me up to test you. I overheard the conversation between her and Joyce.” She frowned while I glared at her. “No, I don’t work here, but I’ve known about the store because Joyce has offered it to a few Magi to work Magic while the Lockdown is in effect.” She thrust her chin out at the dressing rooms behind me. “Go through the dressing rom. There’ll be a hidden door on the back wall.”

I frowned. “Why? What do you want?”

“I need to be free of the Lockdown,” she said. “We’ll be more comfortable in there for this.”

I knew what she had in mind and shook my head. “It won’t work. Jordan tried tapping my power and lost hers. A Sheriff Magus tapped my power too but is still subject to the Lockdown. The only thing I can do to help you is to solve the problem, to bring it down.”

Emma shook her head. “No, there’s one thing you haven’t tried. You could give me all of your power.”

I sputtered at that. “What?!?”

“I know it sounds extreme but this is too important. I can’t wait for the Sheriff to figure out how to break the Lockdown.” She smiled, but she didn’t look happy. “As intelligent as you are, I can’t wait for you figure it out either.”

“There’s one problem with your logic,” I said and thought about the spell on Leanne and Erica. She had cast it quickly which meant it was thrown together just now. Something like that should be fairly easy to unravel. “What happens if you take all my power but you’re still subject to the Lockdown?”