SHADOW PLAY

Chapter One – Past Present

Heather could feel him staring at her legs as she transferred the numbers from her handwritten inventory to the official computer log. She crossed them, aware without even looking that his eyes were glued to the movement. That was something she didn’t get about Lance, the way he tried to hide his attraction, like it made him uncomfortable somehow. Sometimes he became transparent, and looked as though he was half a breath away from reaching out to give her ass a big squeeze; the next thing you knew he was going out of his way to avoid any obvious leering, even running from eye contact at times. Gay? No. A neurotic loner, or guilt-ridden perv? Too easygoing and affable. Secretly married? She’d asked one of the other bartenders soon after taking this gig, and was assured that he was both single and unattached.

Definitely conflicted, though, for whatever reasons. She glanced up, and he immediately lowered his eyes, as though deeply studying the glass he was polishing. Dodgy little Lance and his dodgy little dance, sneaky peeky eyes and a sausage in his pants…

She shook the strange rhyming out of her head, her long blonde hair bouncing. She was beautiful and she knew it — it wasn’t like she didn’t expect guys to check out her legs when she wore a tight, short skirt and stockings like this. She slowly re-crossed them, pointing her toes and letting the back of a heel slip off her foot, making something of a show for his viewing pleasure. A flush of excitement heated her thighs, and she moved her rear in the chair in response. Wow. Maybe she should be a shameless show-off more often, because it had her feeling hot.

Returning her attention to the inventory list, she wondered whether she would ask Lance out some day. He was cute enough, tall and lean with a great crop of wavy hair. Maybe his hot/cold routine could translate into a nice, slow in/out rhythm with the proper encouragement. Every guy she’d ever been to bed with had been so straight ahead, like mountain-climbers unaccustomed to the idea of a switchback trail. Perhaps a shy one like Lance would understand that an indirect path could sometimes lead to greater heights.

You can bet that his cock isn’t shy.

“What?” she asked.

“What?” he responded, looking up.

“Didn’t you say something?”

“No,” he answered. “What did you think I said?”

“I must be hearing things.”

He went back to his work, and she glanced around the bar. Just the two of them, two hours before the doors opened. It was a gorgeous day outside, a bit chilly but crisp and clear, with sunlight streaming in through the long windows. She thought she saw something dart to her left in her peripheral vision, but there was nothing there to move, other than the large ceiling fans slowly revolving up above. Seeing things and hearing things, what was that all about? And come to think of it, why were her nipples so hard?

She glanced down and sure enough, they couldn’t be more visible under this tight blouse. She had prominent nipples that expanded into twin exclamation points when they were excited, and they were definitely excited. Why? She looked over at Lance again, going about his business preparing for his shift. Did he always prepare this thoroughly, or had he shown up so early because he’d known that she would be here?

She watched him align glasses and mugs at the end of the bar, unable to look away for some reason. He was very precise and attentive to the tasks at hand. Able to start something and finish it. Thorough.

“I think I need him to eat me out,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked.

Fuck! Had she said that out loud? “I said, ‘How are we doing with the premium tequilas?’”

He looked up above the long mirror, to the shelves lined with the high end agave. “Eight bottles of the Tesoro Platinum, and three of the Casa Noble.”

His cock is premium, too. It’s huge.

She looked to the left and the right, only then certain that the voice had been inside her own brain. Inside. So very deep inside. God, what would it feel like to deeply stuff her pussy with a huge cock?

Make it happen tonight.

What? No, she wasn’t going to…

“What time does your shift end?” she almost shouted, not aware that the words were going to tumble out until they already had.

“I get off early tonight. Janine is taking over at ten. Why?”

She stood, without quite knowing why, and walked over to the long wooden bar, resting her rear on a swivel stool. The touch of the leather on the backs of her thighs sent a tremor to her pussy, and her heart began beating like crazy under her tits. She watched Lance’s hands as he polished the interior of a beer mug with a white cloth. Long fingers. Lightly tanned skin. Strong hands, but supple. And just look at them slipping and sliding in and out of that glass, stroking the sides, polishing every inch.

He can polish a pussy, too. Polish it good, inside and out.

“I’ll bet.”

“You’ll bet what?”

“That you could meet me at The Hammerhead Bar after your shift,” she responded, her words and the motion of his hands striking a match between her legs.

“Why?”

“Because…” Because what? Because an image kept flooding her mind, of Lance with a foot-long hot dog for equipment, finding zones in her depths that lit up and chimed like a pussy pinball machine.

“Heather? Are you asking me out?”

You’ll die if you don’t get his cock inside of you tonight.

“Oh! I… Yes. I’m asking you out, Lance. For a drink, elsewhere, away from work.”

He looked down, like he had to think it over. Think it over? With big aching nipples screaming at him from a scalding hot number like her, he was even thinking of saying no?

“Okay,” he smiled, his eyes peering into her own. “I’m kind of… surprised, though.”

Not as surprised as he’d be when he felt how wide she could open her mouth. The fire smoldering between her legs flared suddenly, and she had to swivel back and forth on the stool to keep herself together.

Go home and masturbate.

“Y…yes! I… I think I will.”

“Will what?”

“Ma… Manage to go home. But I’ll meet you at the Hammerhead later. Ten-thirtyish?”

“Sounds good. Unless you want me to…”

“Ten-thirty. And now I… I have to leave. I need to go home. Very important, extremely pressing. Really gotta go.”

“Okayyy,” he replied. “I’ll see you at ten-thirty then.”

She turned and gathered her things, feeling his eyes devouring her body the whole time. She could barely make it to the door without jamming a finger up her tunnel.

* * *

Lance blew out a gust of air as he went back to his preparations. What a fucking set of legs she had! He felt elated, but not elated enough to evaporate his nervousness about the situation. What would he do if they hit it off? He’d been smitten with Heather since the instant he met her, and would have asked her out weeks ago if not for his problem. He thought of her sculpted calves and the way her nipples sometimes made those incredible tents in her blouses, and felt an insistent stirring.

She’d been a Rockette over the holidays, one of hundreds or thousands of young aspiring actresses and dancers in the city who held down bartending or waitressing gigs to make ends meet. Heather described herself as a triple threat, an actress who could also sing and dance, and maybe she was actually a quadruple threat, because she was flat out gorgeous, too, the sort of woman who could give him a raging erection by just standing still and breathing.

Again he felt his cock stir, but the tingling set off his worries, which made him begin to soften. Why would it be any different with Heather, even if she did have a body like that? She could blow him like a fucking balloon and the outcome would produce no out-cum, not unless some miracle…

“I think I’d like a margarita!” a crisp female voice chirped, the closeness of the unexpected sound making him jump.

Christ, with his back turned to the door, he hadn’t even noticed that someone had prematurely entered the bar. “We aren’t open ye…whoa!”

A rapid glance in the mirror instantly confirmed four things: too young, too gorgeous, and two jumboliscious tits. He spun around, his eyes thoroughly sweeping two achy acres of creamy cleavage before rising to meet bright blue eyes and striking features that shimmered with youthful beauty. Fifteen or sixteen max, and so unbelievably stunning that his eyes started to water.

“Come on, Lance. You can make a drink for little ol’ me, can’t you?” She batted her eyes with her elbows on the bar, compressing her scrumptious young breasts just so.

Her sleeveless blouse was fire engine red, its plunging neckline showing more tit than most bras. He felt faint as his dick went from inert to “insert!” with almost frightening speed. “I…I’d need to see some… you know, I.D.,” he salivated, his response on autopilot.

“I’ve been having the greatest time in New York!” she beamed, as though he hadn’t said anything. Placing several postcards on the counter, she pointed to them, saying, “I went to the top of the Empire State Building this morning. Yesterday I did the Metropolitan Museum and the Statue of Liberty. The view from the crown is amazing!”

“But… They don’t let people go up to the top of the statue any more. Only the feet.”

“Pffft! I’m very persuasive, Lance.”

“But… Wait… How do you know my name?”

“This is the bar where all of the weird orgy stuff happened, isn’t it?” she asked in return, either ignoring his question or indirectly answering it. “I’m surprised that you still work here. They didn’t fire you after all that?”

It was common knowledge that a spontaneous, officially unexplained orgy had erupted in this bar more than a year ago. The owners of The Drowning Flamingo didn’t advertise the event, but they were happy enough when curiosity-seekers and the occasional tour group of the bizarre sought out the bar, adding to business. For better and worse, he’d been right in the thick of the turmoil back then, the uncanny sex in his case being carried out onto the street and into his car.

“Why are you asking?” he probed, aware that his fingers were trembling, all of his muscles tense. The girl’s looks were almost too much, they seemed to reach right in and microwave his hormones. He couldn’t help wondering whether a girl this hot could do it for him, could get his rockets to launch. He hadn’t felt this hard since…

“Laaaance… My margarita?”

“Listen… How old are you?” he asked, praying for an age that was legal for fucking, if not drinking.

“Not old enough.”

“So… What exactly do you want?”

“A margarita, are you deaf? You’ll mix one for me, won’t you?” She nodded her head up and down, and his head began to oddly mimic hers, moving on hinges as though their bodies were tied together with invisible wires. He tried to stop, and found he couldn’t.

“Oh fuck!” he gasped, adrenaline instantly flooding his system.

“The sex must have been pretty wild in here that night,” the girl mused, glancing back at the tables and the tile floor. “Did they make you clean up the mess?”

His head still involuntarily nodded yes, and she seemed to take that for his answer.

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like — clothing and underwear and slippery fluids all over the place. If I remember things right, everyone in the bar had to cum ten times before they could leave. I think I can still smell some of the pussy juice. Especially Cindy’s pussy juice.”

He felt the hairs on his neck stand straight up. Cindy had warned him that something like this could happen. It was her, right in front of him, and apparently she could do anything in the world that came to her mind, as long as the thought was sexual in some way.

“Cindy’s lovely slit has quite a distinctive scent, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked. “Almost like flowers, sweet wet pussy flowers, all fragrant and blowing in the breeze.”

He saw the vision as though he’d been transported there, into a broad field of pussies growing on thin stems, the light winds causing them to move and shimmer in the sunlight. The scent was overpowering.

“W…what do you want?” he asked, his nostrils full of pussy, the taste of fear like metal on his tongue. He had a cell phone in his back pocket and inched his left hand down to get it

“Hellloooo? A margarita?”

Like something from a bad dream, his hand refused to grasp the phone. He willed his fingers to move but they felt detached, remote. Then his hand began to move away from his pockets, reaching up towards the mirror for a bottle of the Casa Noble tequila.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, realizing that she was going to get a margarita whether he wanted to mix one or not.

“Be nice now, Lance, and watch your language. You don’t want to corrupt my innocent young ears, do you?”

He tried to keep his hands from salting the rim of a tall glass, but the essence of brain/eye/hand coordination was no longer his own. I can stop this, he thought, futilely trying to gain traction inside. Neatly and efficiently, but without one ounce of intention on his part, he salted the rim and poured Triple Sec and the tequila over ice, added lime juice and stirred. His hands shook as he added a wedge for garnish, placing the sweating glass before her on the counter.

She took a tentative sip, puckered from the tartness and licked her lips. “Could have used a bit more salt,” she commented, wrinkling her nose girlishly.

“You’re… MagicThunder,” Lance managed to choke out. “You used poems… on Cindy…”

“Poetry is so last year,” she admonished. “It’s still fun every now and then, but I have new interests to explore. Isn’t it interesting, though, how the conversation inevitably comes back to Cindy, and her perfect pussy blowing in the breeze?” Something in the young beauty’s eyes changed, their blueness firing at him like bullets. “Blowing. Just like this.” The littlest puckering of her adorable lips, and a thin puff of air.

“AAAAHH!” Lance grunted, the suddenness of the sensations in his pants tearing the sound out of his throat, causing him to stagger back, knocking bottles to the floor.

“Blllowwwiiinnnggg…” she drew the word out as a long breathy whisper.

He came as he fell, landing hard on the floor ready to cum again. It felt for all the world as though a dozen licking, sucking mouths had instantly grown around his cock, mercilessly vacuuming the months of pent-up cum out of his balls.

“Aahhh… ohhh… ohgod!” he cried, firing away.

“Long overdue, wouldn’t you say? When was the last time that Cindy helped you out with your little problem? And what’s the matter with you, anyway? You get a taste of a scalding hot fuckbeast like Cindy Hutton, and all you can do is try to cure your condition with drunken girls suffering from X-Files nostalgia? That’s so lame!”

Lame blame brain drain… How could she know that he had twice gotten blowjobs by recounting his Cindy/MagicThunder sex adventures to barroom hotties with a taste for supernatural sex stories? All to no avail, of course, the luckless girls unable to cure his curse no matter what tricks they played on his accursed cock. But somehow, without even touching him, this sizzling siren had his ass tightening, signaling another cumsplosion. Daggers of light flashed across his eyelids as he erupted again.

“And you even tried to keep your relationship going with your safe, wormy girlfriend!” MagicThunder scolded. “The same sorry job and the same sorry girlfriend, even when she couldn’t make you cum? What kind of a creature of habit are you, Lance?”

Somehow her voice worked with the phantom mouths, miraculously ripping a fourth load out of his reeling cock. He groaned, blinked, and wondered, almost from far away, whether she would make him cum for every time he’d taken the path of least resistance in his life.

He heard the tapping of heels coming forward. His eyes had trouble focusing, but he saw her standing above him, exquisitely toned bare legs rising, her thighs converging at a shaved and completely uncovered slit. The tiny red blouse and matching heels, nothing more, he realized. He tried to bring his focus to bear on her pussy, which seemed to vibrate wildly. Instinct told him that to enter her tunnel would be like sending his cock into an interstellar wormhole.

“And your poor wittle wiener might never come back!” she answered, probably reading his mind.

The girl who was MagicThunder grinned, and closed her eyes. He heard a roar, and had to squint as beams of blue-white light emanated from her cunt, flooding the whole room with so much light that he thought he could see inside of or through things. Her body, the wooden structure of the walls and counter, the ceiling and even the floors above… Brick and mortar evaporated, seemed to become more transparent than glass, the light in the room joining forces with the brilliance of the sun outside, everything going loud and whiter than white.

He cried out into the roar, felt and heard the light gathering, felt it coalescing around and within his pants, tearing at the fabric so that his jeans were blown apart in an instant. Blinking and shaking, eerily aware of cotton particles floating in the air, he made out the movements of the girl above, bending over at the waist, reaching down to touch his cum-slickened rod. His dick looked too big, like it was reaching up to meet her, like she had charmed his snake and could make it do whatever she wished. He felt a floating sensation, realized that his entire body was beginning to lift off the floor to meet her outstretched hand. Heat surged through his balls, causing cum to bubble out the tip of his dick like a pot boiling over. She tenderly stroked his cockhead with an index finger, and he both feared and prayed that she was going to add an otherworldly airborne handjob into the mix.

“Poor wittle Wance,” she cartooned, her young voice so at odds with her display of power. “Hims gots a wonderful wiener, but hims not know how to unweash its warp dwive without hewup.”

Almost theatrically, her outstretched finger circled around and around, gathering cum. She straightened and lined the rim of her gwass with his milky fluid, then took another sip, smacking her wet wips.

“That’s what your margarita was missing! You’re going to have to add that to every drink from now on!”

He didn’t know whether it was a joke or a command.

“Tell Cindy that the story is already being written, Lance, even if I’m not entirely sure where I’ll want to take it. What do you think? Should it be a comedy? A romance? A tragedy?”

Hot! he couldn’t help thinking. And pwease let me be part of it again!

”I’m also having trouble deciding whether Cindy should be the protagonist,” she continued. “It might be fun to focus more on others this time. What’s your opinion?”

He tried to say something, but his mind and his mouth were too far from each other. All that he managed was a fubbly bubbly sort of snort.

“Come again?” she asked, and he did, the electric shudder making him lose any feeling in his arms and legs.

Then, as though out of nowhere, a yellow, rectangular blur materialized and spun down towards him. He recognized the object as a manila envelope from the sound it made landing flat on his chest.

“The thing is, I’m in the mood for a little mystery,” she mused above. “Give that to Cindy for me, would you? It’s her first clue.”

He heard the crunch of glass, the clicking of her heels as she sauntered back to the other side of the counter. His traumatized eyes caught a final glimpse of searing blue eyes and a devilishly angelic smile, peering down at him with satisfaction over the counter.

“It was your pleasure meeting you, Lance. Not a bad introduction, hmmn?”

He bit his lower lip when he fell the few inches to the floor.

* * *

“We definitely have a live one,” Tony began. “It’s her.”

Cindy stared at the nearly drained wineglass in her hand, and he thought he could see the impulse run through her, to refill her glass and take a good long swig. But she might comment how he saw that because it’s what he would have done in her situation. He was still far too fond of the warm glow of scotch, so he wanted to find a similar weakness in others. Projection, she termed it, calling upon her psychology studies before dropping out of NYU. Psycho-babble, he would have responded before meeting her. But when this woman told you something about the insides of your brain…

He shook his head, as though the motion might untwist his convoluted thoughts, straightening them into the smooth and narrow patterns he preferred. It was challenging being around Cindy for any number of reasons, including this tendency to second-guess his instincts. She claimed that she couldn’t directly read a person’s thoughts, especially a man’s; nonetheless, he often suspected that she was rummaging around in the musty attic of his mind, peering into dark corners that he‘d rather not know about.

She put her glass down and slowly rose from the plush leather sofa, her eyes fixed on the balcony view over the rooftops of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was one of those glorious early spring afternoons, not a cloud in the sky, the orange light of the falling sun etching the city’s buildings into geometries of warm highlight and cool shadow.

Remaining seated with her cat purring away in his lap, he tried like hell to stare out the window as she did, but failed. Cindy, barefoot in a pair of khaki shorts with a plain white T-shirt tucked in, looked every bit as hardening as she did in the more revealing photos on her Website. He stared with admiration and a painful kind of wistfulness, knowing full well how great she looked naked, as did thousands of loyal subscribers to her site.

Strange, how knowing the details of the two-dimensional pixilated Cindy did nothing to blunt the impact of the real woman standing in front of him. He felt that awkward combination of emotions running through him, bubbling lust crashing into a correcting movement of imposed self-restraint, and he noticed that his hands had begun to dig more deeply into her appreciative cat’s pliant flesh. Would she call this a form of projection, too, or was stroking a pussy while admiring Cindy’s form just a tired metaphor, yet another example of his blunt psyche and limited imagination? And how much did she mind it when he couldn’t resist locking his gaze onto her body like this? Her every little gesture seemed to create a field of gravitation that his eyes could not resist, and that was without the additional turn-on of seeing her mind-jets switched on.

A single bead of sweat at his temple was plenty of warning that his imagination was getting the better of him. He stopped petting Mystic and took a big gulp of scotch, the liquid heat saturating his throat until even his ears burned. Batting averages: Jose Canseco, lifetime .266, best year 1988, .307. He felt his dick continuing to harden under the cat’s belly despite the numbing statistics, and drank more. Even he could pick apart his thoughts this time. His mind had chosen Canseco, not at random, but because the slugger’s ex-wife had posed for Playboy, and Jessica Canseco’s workout body was somewhat similar to Cindy’s fabulous form. Only minus Cindy’s angelic face and jaw-dropping tits, capped by the golden hoop nipple rings that drove him fucking crazy for some reason.

Stop it, he thought. Just stop it. Though it was completely understandable, Cindy deserved better than this morass of leering and wishing on his part. She was an incredibly attractive young woman, yes, but she was fourteen years his junior. Not quite young enough to be his daughter, but…

She appeared to be lost in her thoughts, perhaps peering into rabbit hole memories whose depths and nature would drive a lesser person insane. What is it like to be transformed? he wondered. He hadn’t known her before her intersection with MagicThunder, although he’d bet anything that she’d been impulsive and exuberant, a regular fun-loving college girl. He sometimes thought he caught glimpses of a less burdened Cindy, the girl who had once gotten off on mind-controlling sex fantasies, without any concern that they might come back to bite her.

It was a good sign that she felt okay over there by the big windows. Actually, it had been a good sign when she decided to keep her apartment, despite all that had transpired here. She had done that quite deliberately, refusing to hide or to attempt to wipe those experiences out of her life. A strong woman, definitely, although he doubted she’d be able to stand so close to the windows in a summer storm, with thunder rumbling overhead.

“How bad is it?” she asked over her shoulder. “Are there… lingering effects?”

“The three girls have been tagged,” he replied. “Verbal stuff. I didn’t see any permanent changes beyond that, but of course there might be other strings that I couldn’t detect. You know how MagicThunder’s influence can spread out from the epicenter of an event.”

Her shoulders stiffened and he wondered whether he should have said that. He’d seen restricted NYPD surveillance footage of one of Cindy’s “events”, and how many had been affected by her runaway sexual state. MagicThunder had turned her into the equivalent of a walking, lingerie-clad dirty bomb, her heat boiling the hormones of dozens or even hundreds of others right in Lafayette Square. Most of her victims had suffered no more than half a dozen hours in a crazed sex-obsessed state, or a night in the slammer on obscenity charges. A few, however, had received more specific and long-lasting interventions, and he knew how much that ate at her.

Despite having three cameras recording the event, Cindy hadn’t been easily recognizable, thanks to the surveillance cameras’ low resolution and the inclement weather during her rampage. She could have walked away, taking no responsibility for her MagicThunder-induced actions, but she hadn’t. She didn’t exactly go to the authorities and confess, but she refused to think of her victims as unfortunate collateral damage. She cared, and he would never be able to repay her enough for that.

“Tell me what you have, Anthony,” she sighed. Although she walked back to the wide sofa and reseated herself, Mystic remained in his lap, preferring his strange hands over Cindy’s familiar ones. Cats. They always seemed to know how to sniff out the non-cat lovers, and glom right onto them.

He gave her the outline of the case. Three freshman girls at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, all very attractive. A spontaneous sexual eruption in their dorm, unexplained and seemingly unquenchable lustfulness spreading into other rooms like some fast-acting contagious disease. Before it was over, eleven girls were involved. In separate interviews with campus police, all eleven showed signs of partial memory loss, and they could not explain their actions. But all agreed that the “trouble” had begun with three girls in particular. He'd been given access to their personal computers by the school administrators, and sure enough — one of the girls had been frequenting a new internet mind-control forum. As expected, a quick check of her personal messages showed that she'd exchanged messages with MagicThunder.

“Are these girls…” Cindy made the cupped-hands gesture out in front of her own considerable assets.

“Two of them, yes. One, especially, is pretty huge.”

“MagicThunder likes that,“ she shivered.

Don’t we all, he silently agreed, feeling odd about the thought.

“What are their names?” she asked.

“You mean their real names?”

“Oh crap. Is that the tag?”

He described to her how the dean of the Foundation Arts program had led him into a classroom where the three girls were being held and monitored for their own safety. They were Michelle Moore, Tawny Fine, and Sherri Linder, but all three would no longer respond to their given names.

“What’s happened to them?” the school administrator almost sobbed. The school had managed to keep the “sexual incident” out of the papers up to that point, but the dean was panicked. “How can I even let them call their parents like this? If the word gets out that students in our dorms are prone to deviant sexual behaviors and sudden personality changes…”

Tony regarded the young women, sitting in simple plastic chairs all lined up in a row. He almost felt like a high school principle when he asked, “What are your names?”

The brunette who should be Michelle raised her eyes. She was the one with the grandest rack, the one the other two kept glancing at as though she was the natural leader.

“Emma,” she replied, looking beautiful but dazed.

The same as his daughter’s name. Was MagicThunder sticking her tongue out at him? “Emma what?”

“Like, Emma Evergonnacum?”

Christ. He probed with the next girl.

“Anita Thikwun,” she stated, glancing at his crotch.

“Like, Ida Lichterclit?” the third volunteered without being asked.

Cindy shook her head as he recounted the episode, probably wondering how to put things right for the three girls. Maybe she could even strike out the annoying “like” part of their language while she worked on their troubled minds.

“MagicThunder loves wordplay like that,” she exhaled, looking up at him. “It’s almost reflexive for her, screwing with the way people talk. I think she’s also thumbing her nose at us. She’s letting us know that she’s finally turning her attention towards New York after all this time.”

“Although with the forum component, it sounds like it’s the same pattern we’ve found elsewhere. She’s still up north somewhere, reaching out and touching others through the internet.”

“Not necessarily,” she corrected him. “You have to remember that with MagicThunder, anything is possible. She could be grinding her hips against your leg right now, and you wouldn’t know it if she didn’t want you to.”

“Believe me, I’d know if a woman was grinding her hips into me.”

“You wouldn’t, Anthony. She’s… You really have to get it through your head how far she can take things. I could still be kneeling at her feet right now, dreaming this apartment and you sitting in that chair. I could have dreamt the entirety of the last eight months.”

He’d be perfectly happy to go over there and pinch her, pinch her everywhere. Instead, he only said, “I’m real enough.”

“Exactly what a phantom would claim,” she countered. Sipping her wine, she looked over to the windows again. “What’s next with the three girls? When can I see them?”

“Tomorrow morning. The police have agreed to keep a lid on the incident for now, and none of the girls have stories coherent enough to press charges against the school, or each other for that matter. But you can imagine how much the school administrators would love to avoid any publicity about the campus being a breeding ground for paranormal lesbianism. I told the dean you’d fix the three tagged girls as long as no one asks any questions. You’ll be… anonymous. Protected.”

“No one is protected, Anthony. And because of that, I think it’s time for you to disappear for a little while.”

“Fuck that. I’m not going to run, Cindy. I can’t.”

“Let’s not argue, please. But it’s just too dangerous for you. Helping me track MagicThunder’s victims after she’s struck is one thing, but now, if she’s turning her attention back this way… Exactly what are you planning to do should you confront her? Draw your gun and place her in handcuffs? I hate to put it this way, but you’re only… normal. She’d have you trying to hump the barrel of your pistol in an instant, and you’d think it was the most normal thing in the world to do. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Ouch. He could do his very best to persuade her to see things his way, but she was right — argument was useless. They were alike that way, determined and/or stubborn. Cindy was right, too, that this question, though never voiced, had always been there: What did either of them think they could do if they finally hunted MagicThunder down? Arrest her? Convince her to become a better person? Somehow withstand her powers?

Cindy’s memories of her one-on-one time with MagicThunder were fragmentary and jumbled, but she was clear on three points. One: MagicThunder was a human female, facts she had not known when she'd been attacked the previous summer. Two: She’d been made to control and fuck dozens or even hundreds of people somewhere up north, with MagicThunder either watching or participating. And three: MagicThunder was not all-powerful, but she might as well be. Sexual thoughts and sexual energies were like playdough for her mind — she could surf hormones and hijack desires in an instant, twisting them any way that could be imagined. Once MagicThunder had tapped into her victim’s sexual system, Cindy didn’t think there were many limitations to what she could do.

Cindy herself was living proof of MagicThunder’s reach. She had been inalterably changed, given mind-controlling powers of her own, which she mostly used for healing. She couldn’t remember the permanent transformation happening — she didn’t know if her powers appeared suddenly, or whether MagicThunder had groomed her. Or even taught her.

And the really vexing thing was that Cindy didn’t know why she had been “enhanced”. Did MagicThunder want to put temptations in front of her, to watch the power eat at her will? Was it an experiment, to see how long Cindy could resist becoming what she most loathed? Or was it all part of a game, Cindy being transformed into someone with a chance to fight back? He thought this the most likely explanation — the cat doesn’t really want the mouse to die too quickly — but in theory, the only worthy opponent for MagicThunder would be a completely sexless being, someone with no desires, no sexual weaknesses of any kind to subvert. And how many sexless human beings were there in the world? Zero?

Strange, though, how having no plan and no hope of victory was not the same as surrender. Cindy would never surrender, and neither would he, even if he’d have to contribute to the fight behind her back.

“No, Anthony. Not behind my back. Please.”

“Shit, you can read my mind!”

“Only sometimes. I don’t… intrude.”

He thought about pouring a fresh glass of scotch — maybe even downing the rest of the bottle — but refrained. “I’m not going to disappear, Cindy. If you can read me then you know that.”

She could make him take a vacation or become forgetful or whatever. She could probably scramble his brains like so many eggs, but that was a line she would never cross.

“I’ll come by tomorrow morning at nine,” he said, pushing the cat away and brushing the fur from his trousers. His feet were a bit unsteady when he stood, just enough to remind him of how flawed a warrior he was. “We’ll drive to Pratt, and you can take as much time with the girls as you need. It’s all arranged. I’ll be your guard dog.”

“You’re being stupid,” she smiled, signaling her retreat.

“That’s how you know I’m still me.”

“I guess that’s so.”

She stood and escorted him halfway to the door. They both stopped, seemingly for no reason. A silence followed that may or may not have been awkward.

“Want to grab a bite of dinner with me?” he ventured.

“I… can’t.”

He knew better than to press. ”Okay. Get some sleep tonight, then. You…”

The door opened and Emma walked in, her young pulchritudinous body loosely covered in a beige peasant dress. She was so beautiful, which made him want to smile and cry all at the same time. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then lowered his eyes, afraid to look, afraid to imagine the nature of the fires burning inside of his daughter’s body.

What a totally screwy situation. While he was getting his eight hours of lonely sleep tonight, how far would the two of them…

Don’t imagine it, he silently admonished himself. It’s so wrong, thinking of what transpired between Emma and Cindy that way.

He shivered, deliberately keeping his eyes on the parquet floor, keeping his mind as blank as possible. He was almost to the door when the phone rang.

It could be anything or anyone, but his instincts told him to wait. Ten seconds into the phone conversation, the look on Cindy’s face told him almost everything he needed to know.

“How bad is it?” he asked, already knowing that events were snowballing, overtaking them before they’d even gotten started.

“MagicThunder paid Lance a visit at the bar. In person. She’s more than back, Anthony. She’s here, in the city.”

“Holy hell.” Visions of eight million sex-crazed New Yorkers flashed across his mind in a wild, burning conflagration. MagicThunder could do anything, absolutely anything — it was only a question of what she wanted. “Is Lance…” he began to ask, not knowing how to finish the question. Sane? Himself? Masturbating like a monkey?

“We need to go get him,” Cindy answered. “He’s okay, sort of. But he’s going to need my help.”

Tony glanced over at his daughter, sitting now in the chair he’d just vacated. She looked half aware, as though she could listen and maybe even have some sense of what was going on. She might appear normal if both hands weren’t absently playing with her nipples through the cotton of her dress.

How long before every fucking person in the city would need Cindy’s help? Emma was still living for sex, even though she was a hundred times better than before. Would he and everyone else end up like that? How long before MagicThunder wiped his thoughts clean, replacing them with something more to her liking? Should he find a way to take a mental snapshot of his mind right now, something to revisit and look upon nostalgically when he was someone else entirely? So much of his life was disappointment and pain, but it was his pain, and his failings. Strange — as fucked-up as his life was, he’d still fight to retain his mind, his memories, rather than having the hard drive erased and some new, perhaps more pleasant program inserted.

“I’ll go get Lance and bring him here,” he said. “You have… other things to do right now. Give Emma… Give her what she needs, Cindy.”

* * *

Alana gasped, twice, before even putting her phone down. For Cindy to reach out through the handset like that and thought-caress her between her legs… And she was bringing Emma to be shared, which had only happened twice before. Something was up.

Alana expected her lover to bring unusual depths to their sex, and knowing what might happen only increased her passions. It had all been explained to her months ago, how her feelings towards Cindy had come into being so suddenly and forcefully that stormy summer night. She had been straight back then, a highly charged sexual being juggling three boyfriends, trying to find the correct balance between her need for autonomy, her need for company, and her need for sex. She’d known Cindy casually, mostly from running into her in the hallway or elevator, and had been distantly curious about her neighbor’s life. As gorgeous as she was, with the blonde hair and the large-breasted workout body — punctuated by nipple rings no less — Cindy seemed oddly undersexed, like a high wattage lightbulb receiving too little current.

Until the night they first made love. At that moment, Alana realized that she had always been undersexed as well, never going full-out, never falling completely, only to get up and fall again, harder, deeper, deeper than she ever would have imagined. The seduction had begun out in the hallway near the elevator, and she’d never stood a chance. A power greater than either of them had worked through Cindy’s gorgeous body, taking both of them into zones of female lust and fulfillment that changed their lives forever.

It nearly killed her when Cindy disappeared without a trace for several months, leaving her to stew in her heightened passions. She lost her attraction to men but had no female lover, and thought for a while that she might literally go insane. She continued to teach yoga, and credited the inner aspect of the practice with keeping her psyche together. That and replaying her brief time with Cindy over and over again in her mind, masturbating several times daily to the images, recalling every touch and thought-stroke, keeping the memories vivid, keeping her body alive while hoping, and lusting, and needing…

Cindy eventually returned, “curing” her of the supernatural lust she’d been inflicted with. With Cindy holding her head in her hands, she could actually feel the change happening in her mind, like pathways that had been padlocked suddenly bursting open, her ability to choose for herself restored. The odd thing was, her attraction to Cindy didn’t disappear. She had no interest in restoring her relationships with men, her heart fluttering and pussy gushing every time she was near Cindy. Free to feel what she wished, she was caught, caught wanting and hoping, practically living for the moment when they might become lovers again.

And thank the gods, Cindy did become her lover again. Her beautiful, powerful, mind and body-controlling lover, heating her loins with impossible gifts of liquid fire that drove her half-insane with desire, until she found her reward in tsunami-like orgasms that swept her into realms of thoughtless bliss. She would float, reeling, being tossed by unstoppable forces, until at some point she would come to, feeling like a woman dragging herself out of roiling seas, completely wet and spent, gasping for air on dry land once again.

Alana knew the intensity of her passions were artificially produced, but she came to the conclusion that she really didn’t care. She had flown into the sun with Cindy, her body melting, her mind open for any manipulation that raised the temperature even higher. She loved to fuck Cindy, fucking loved to fuck her, her pussy aching of its own free will even when they kept the sex “normal”.

“Ohhh,” she moaned, sensing how the inclusion of Emma signaled something quite different than a normal night. Physically, Emma was like a perfect peach with great melon breasts, and once she got going, she was insatiable. Whether silent or vocal, she begged for her body to be played, her voluptuousness exploited, her clitoris made to vibrate like the strings of some rare and resonant musical instrument. And because Emma’s lust had to be expertly “controlled”, Cindy almost never shared.

“Oh Goddd,” she breathed, just imagining her tongue gliding up and down the length of Emma’s eager slit. There was something about Emma, something that really got to her. Perhaps it was the vulnerability, the total openness to the fires within her body. Perhaps it was the fact that you could practically curl up and sleep in the deep valley between Emma’s tremendous breasts. Whatever the reasons, the inclusion of a second lover did far more than double Alana’s pleasure.

Her legs quivering in anticipation, it was all she could do to turn on the video cameras in her bedroom. Actually, it wasn’t even right to call the space a bedroom any more — it was their special love nest, a place designed to allow maximum bliss and the documentation of that bliss. Nearly half of the photos and videos on Cindy’s Website now came from this large room, and Alana had become something of a guest model, receiving her own fan mail. She checked the remote controls and adjusted the lights to their most romantic setting, then stood at the door to assess the effect. Even with no movement, no players on stage, the room already looked like a den of unearthly delights.

In the shower, she tweaked her hard nipples and fingered her clitoris mercilessly, secure in knowing that she could not exhaust her desires, no matter how well she brought herself off. What an incredible gift, having a lover who made her so hot, a lover who could command her body into as many orgasms as she could stand before falling unconscious. Then, if Cindy went just a little bit crazy, even the physical limitations of her body could be circumvented, her orgasms unnaturally following her into sleep, into dreams, the sandman himself making her cum all through the night, the sex crisp and detailed, seemingly lasting forever.

“Ohhhh!” she cried, the thoughts and the action of her fingers taking her into that place of no return. Her nipples were like throbbing bullets and she had to brace her hands against the shower walls to keep from falling when she came. Her muscles tightened, her heart and loins gushing, the scent of deliverance mixing with that of soap and body lotion. She slowly sank to her knees, the shower spray pounding at her head as her body naturally took on the posture of prayer.

Thank you for Cindy and Emma, she silently intoned, hearing her front door open and close.

An image flashed through her mind as she toweled herself off. Her blue mesh babydoll, the one she’d worn the night that Cindy explained everything to her. Was the vision her own, she wondered, or was it Cindy, implanting the thought, implanting instructions?

“Oh God!” she cried, feeling invisible fingers strum her cunt chords afresh. Definitely Cindy, and definitely on a mission tonight.

Alana slipped her heat into the sheer garment. She had no mind reading abilities of her own, but even so she could sense that Cindy needed her support in some special way. Something important was afoot, something that stirred emotion, stirred lust, yet was beyond it. Her lover needed to stretch her wings, she intuited. Cindy needed to let herself and her tensions go.

Which could mean… She gasped, just imagining it, a sign of just how willing and eager she was to be a vessel. Leaving the bathroom, the sound of her heels on the hardwood floors announced her approach to the warmly lit lovenest.

“Ungggh!” she heard before even entering the door. “Ah, Ah, ahhh, AHHH!”

She shut her eyes and sniffed the air, savoring the scent of Emma getting off. It was a weight on Cindy how Emma lived for sex, but Alana suspected that the joys nearly outweighed the guilt. The fact was that both women enjoyed the hell out of Emma’s “therapy”, and tonight, she would get to play the role of Emma’s therapist, too.

“Jesus Christ!” she grunted, feeling the psychic strumming of her pussy’s interior suddenly go flamenco. She nearly went over the edge, and might have if she hadn’t felt her body pulled into the room by an irresistible force. Cindy, completely naked but for a dark blue blindfold and blue heels, stood tall and straight in the center of the room. She had changed the lights from low and romantic to red-hot, the lighting etching her beautiful body into fiery orange highlights and deep red-violet shadows. Emma, on her knees at Cindy’s feet, clutched at one of Cindy’s strong calves, already looking half destroyed. Her red-brown hair was wild and almost glowed, her tremendous breasts spilling out of a half-unzipped black latex bodysuit.

The ache in Alana’s cunt deepened so fiercely that she had to shut her eyes to hold on. So sexy, so fucking sexy, both of them. How did she ever get this lucky? Deliriously happy, she felt a moment of imbalance or lightheadedness, almost as though she was floating.

“Oh!” she gasped, opening her eyes. She really was floating, floating with her feet a good foot off the floor! “Oh God, Cindy!” she cried. “I didn’t know… Why didn’t you ever…”

Sound was prevented from escaping her mouth, and a heatwave blew through her legs as she realized her destination. Suspended mere inches in front of Cindy’s body now, she was levitated up, and up more, until her dripping snatch was poised right in front of her lover’s waiting lips.

Oh God! she silently cried inside, feeling the liquid warmth of Cindy’s tongue grace her throbbing clitoris. Cindy’s fingers stroked the insides of her thighs as perhaps a dozen psychic hands caressed other regions of her body. The silk babydoll slipping away, she felt her legs being grasped and drawn wide apart at the ankles, opening her pussy to her lover’s ministrations. Fingertips ran down the back of her neck, along her spine to the dimples above her rear. A voice that wasn’t there whispered into her right ear, teasing her, promising excruciatingly exciting sensations to come.

It was too much, and Alana came, only her eruption was caught in mid-stream, the forces inside held in place just as her body was being held in place in the air. With her mouth agape, silence screaming out from her lungs, she felt Cindy’s tongue begin to flick at her clitoris, while phantom hands squeezed her ass, kneaded her breasts, stroked her neck and the underside of her jaw.

She heard a loud desperate moan below, and suddenly, with almost frightening speed, her body was flipped around, tilting forward so that she hovered face-down almost parallel to the floor. Emma rose to meet her, new soft lips meeting hers before an abundance of creamy breast-flesh came up like a wave, pressing into her cheeks. The smells of body oils and latex filled her nostrils, and again she would have screamed if she could, screamed hard and loud as another orgasm detonated and collided with the first, the two events mixing together within the chambers of her body.

She heard Cindy’s voice in her mind, heard it whispering erotic possibilities and filthy hot promises. The ideas sifted through her brain, only to slide horizontally to take up residence in her tunnel, lodging along her sensitive inner walls, as though her entire inner passage was lined with smut.

She gasped silently, her hips bucking in the air in response. She felt like she was boiling inside, bubbling like a cauldron with Cindy’s mind clamping down on the lid, causing the pressure to build. Sex with Cindy was always incredible, but… this…

Get ready to be properly fucked, she heard with greater volume in her mind, just before she felt it, felt the folds of her vagina parting like the Red Sea.

“AHHHGODDD!” she was allowed to scream as a massive thought-cock pushed its way in. “YESSS!” she bellowed, floating and cum/not-cumming in the best of all possible worlds. Her body began to rock as the phallus-that-was-not-there drew in and out, pumping her, filling her, charging in so deeply, stroking the orgasms that lay in wait.

She felt soft vibrations all around her face, a rapid undulation that gained momentum, became waves of greater force and pressure. Emma’s huge breasts, trembling against her cheeks, beginning to surge back and forth…

“Ah ahhh AHHHH!” Emma let loose, and only then did Alana understand that Emma, too, had been prevented from vocalizing her excitement. Emma, also on the receiving end of a psychic cock, began to scream in earnest. She grunted and growled, her voice tearing waves of sound into the room, her tits pressing hard into Alana’s face. And then they were screaming together, two beautiful banshees with hard thick thoughts plumbing their depths, their clits vibrating with unnatural fervor.

When the thought-cock burst through, popping the barrier that had kept Alana’s orgasms in check, she went sightless, soundless, nothing existing but the waves of heat blasting through the whole of her body. Her mind momentarily fused with Cindy’s, her lover tasting her orgasms, riding them and sucking on them, adding their energy to her own. And rather than lessening the power ripping through her body, Cindy’s loving spoonfuls increased the intensity, fueled it, stoking the coals and stirring them with her touch.

She came. She came again, everything fusing and melting, tits and pussies and screams of deliverance becoming one force in the room, shockwaves of pleasure nearly visible in the red and orange light. This was life. This was beauty. This was the power of women standing in the flames, everything else being blasted away. And loving it, loving every second of it.

* * *

Lance remained silent as Tony drove him to Cindy’s building. Too dazed to talk, or too self-conscious to hear himself speak?

MagicThunder had tagged Lance in two easily discernible ways. When he spoke, everything sounded normal for a little while, but then his voice would suddenly change into an involuntary, dead-on impersonation of Elmer Fudd. Just as well that the guy was keeping his mouth shut, because as awful as it must feel to Lance, it was hard not to laugh.

Physically, Lance had a few small cuts on his arms from all the broken bottles on the floor. His co-workers had him washed up by the time Tony arrived, but even so the smell of cum and booze permeated the entire bar. The backside of Lance’s jeans and shirt were soaked in alcohol, while the front… Christ, MagicThunder must have performed some real sorcery there, turning the guy’s balls into overworked sperm factories.

He glanced over at his passenger. Fresh clothes now after a quick stop at an Old Navy store, and had Lance placed the manila envelope over his groin area to hide the other change? Tony knew Lance; he’d interviewed him several times about his earlier experiences as MagicThunder/Cindy’s penis-puppet the previous August. Too much drink might have caused him to miss a few details here and there, but Tony was certain that Lance had not been hung like a horse back then. This was a new development, and perhaps a depressing one. Was there anything the bitch couldn’t do? No one had even suspected that MagicThunder possessed the ability to alter bodies just like she could alter minds.

They both had keys to Cindy’s building, but buzzed downstairs anyway. Best not to intrude, just in case.

No answer. They’re at Alana’s loft, he thought. Cindy and most likely Alana too, with his daughter, probably doing her in ways that most people wouldn’t think possible.

It bothered him that his dick started getting hard. Photosets and videos of Cindy and Alana together sometimes appeared on Cindy’s Website, and they were just smoking hot, the steamiest girl/girl pairing he’d seen anywhere. Alana was petite but a real dynamo, yoga-hottie fucking fantastically fit, with half-latina lusciousness added into the mix. It didn’t hurt that every special thing Cindy could make her feel could be clearly read on her face in the photos, the expressions of unimaginable sexual bliss obviously genuine. The site brought in a ton of money, the many loyal subscribers seeing for themselves that these photos and videos were uniquely torrid, even if they had no real clue as to why.

What kinds of expressions lit up Emma’s lovely features when they… An image of all three women flashed through his mind, and he felt that awkwardness again about his dick being so hard. Cindy wouldn’t release any images of Emma in heat, but he was almost certain that she had some. Should he feel some particular way about that? All of Cindy’s income came from the Website, and hell, almost all of his money came from the same source. He’d let nearly all of his other clients go to help her investigate the strange sexual events in the world that might be MagicThunder related. In his own strange way, he was almost an employee of Cindy’s Website.

Wiping the images of three intertwined gorgeous females from his mind, he used his key, and rode up the ten floors with Lance in more silence, knocking and listening before letting them into Cindy’s apartment.

“Can I fix you a drink?” he asked Lance.

“That would be great. Thanks.”

Tony poured two generous glasses of Cindy’s fine scotch, and brought a glass over to Lance.

“Oh no!” Lance cried out, frantically working at his zipper. The bulge in his pants looked like it had suddenly tripled in size, looked like it might rip apart the seams of his brand new jeans.

“It’s… her!” Lance cried out. “Take the drink away! Take it away!”

Tony hustled both drinks out of Cindy’s living space into the kitchen, emptying the contents of both glasses down the drain. It shouldn’t feel this bad to watch it disappear, but it did.

“The booze is gone!” he yelled out to Lance. He rushed back into the big room and saw the other man stuffing his cock back into his pants. Christ, the thing was huge.

“This is so humiwiating!” Lance fudded. “She said I’d have to line the wim of evewy gwass with my cum. I’ll never be able to dwink again!”

Tony looked down at his shoes, feeling awkward.

“And I’m a bawtenda!” Lance lamented. “I can’t suvive without mixing dwinks!”

“Calm down,” Tony advised, almost wishing that Cindy could undo Lance’s cum-curse by transferring it his way, making his every glass of scotch a sexual adventure. Secretly envious, he said, “We’ll see what Cindy can do to help.”

* * *

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. A year ago, Tony had expected to be challenged by the whims of a teenage girl — his daughter — not a sexually omnipotent stranger.

Truth be told, though, his life had begun to unravel long before the troubles with MagicThunder began. The drinking was probably the first sign of his descent, but he’d conveniently laid the blame at al Qaeda’s feet, like so many others. Although none of his immediate colleagues on the NYPD special investigations unit were among those killed on 9-11, he lost too many friends and acquaintances that day, and attended far too many funerals.

He tried to be a team player as his unit transformed itself into a counter-terrorism force. He snooped on Palestinian shop-owners, eavesdropped on Pakistani rug merchants, intercepted the e-mails and phone calls of countless unsuspecting immigrants, legal and illegal.

Interestingly, the constitutional ramifications of his work never really bothered him. It was the boredom that got to him, not the doubt. He was always sitting around, watching and listening and seemingly doing nothing as his belly began to go soft, the passage of wasted time clinging to his flesh like cobwebs. The back of his surveillance van began to smell of scotch, his breath like he’d spent half of his daylight hours passionately making out with Jim Beam. His surveillance partner tried to get him to attend AA meetings, and he went to a few, without ever giving up the scotch.

He wasn’t stupid, though. He knew he had a problem, and he did something about it. Without fanfare, almost without the feeling that it was actually happening, he turned in his badge, resigning before anyone had the chance to discipline or fire him.

Mary, his wife of eighteen years, didn’t complain when he gave up his stable job and pension to set up shop as a private investigator. She barely even seemed to notice, she was so deeply wrapped up in her church activities by then. Her conservative Catholic beliefs had always been an issue in their marriage, but stress sent her into the arms of Jesus and that “other” Mary, much as he gave himself over to booze. The gulf already existing between them widened into a vast sea, and neither of them showed the least bit of willingness to swim towards the middle, away from their numbing, familiar shores.

Emma, inevitably, became a tension point, especially when their daughter’s body changed so dramatically. She got most of her looks from Mary, but the breasts came from his side of the family. Mary disapproved of Emma’s remarkable pulchritude and might have even feared her breasts in a way, as though their daughter’s upper dimensions were a gift from Satan himself. Convinced that their lovely daughter would become spiritually tarnished by the high degree of sexual interest her body attracted, Mary promptly enrolled Emma in a strict Catholic school, where she was kept far away from boys and the temptations of sex, or even casual dating.

He disagreed with her decision, as he disagreed with so many others. In fact, they disagreed about so many things by then that he and Mary talked frequently about separating.

When Emma disappeared, right at the time of the unexplained sex riots, they instinctively knew their lives would never be the same. When their daughter turned out not to be among those arrested, remaining missing, he and Mary came together as a functioning unit for one brief, shining moment, their differences temporarily obliterated. They comforted and supported each other for two excruciating days, and celebrated as one when Emma was found, barefoot and minimally dressed, wandering the streets of lower Manhattan.

Physically, Emma was fine, although she was no longer a virgin. Mentally, however… Sex sex sex, nothing but sex. It was as though the contents of Emma’s mind had been wiped away and supplanted with every sexual desire known to mankind.

Mary flipped out, her worst fears realized to a degree she had never even imagined. She immediately arranged for an exorcism, which was just too creepy. You could listen to the news and know that the church was the last place to turn to for help about deviant sexual attractions. When the exorcism failed to make a dent, they went the psychiatrist route, but nothing could curb Emma’s constant and voracious desire for sex any which way with anybody. It was horrible. Every other word was dirty. She begged to suck the cock of every man she came into contact with, including his. She was constantly trying to eat out Mary, and managed to tear her psychiatrist’s dress and panties away before anyone could stop her.

Months went by with no improvement. They kept their daughter out of school, sedated in her bedroom most of the time, and he couldn’t have been at a lower point when Cindy called. The young female voice on the phone held out a slim ray of hope, although her secretiveness set off alarm bells. She wouldn’t give out any information — no last name, no return phone number, not even a rough outline of how she had heard of his daughter’s condition. She claimed to possess a special healing ability, and offered to help. He might have thought the call a prank if not for the clear urgency he could detect in the caller’s voice.

And really, what did he have to lose? Everyone has heard of so-called psychics helping the cops at one point or another, especially in missing persons cases. He’d managed to find his daughter’s body on his own, but her mind — at least the mind she used to have — was still wandering around somewhere, or deeply buried beneath a layer of filth.

And so they arranged a meeting in his office. Before the mysterious “helper” could even settle her perfect rear end into the wooden chair beside his desk, he demanded to know whether she had known Emma.

“No,” the beautiful stranger admitted. “I’ve never even talked to your daughter. But I… Look, just listen to what I have to say.”

Thirty seconds into Cindy’s narrative, his eyes began to undress her, because his concentration was not needed for listening. Her story was a pile of crazy-assed horseshit about mind-controlling poetry and magical summer storms, but man oh man did this young woman have the face and body to willingly die for. Something about her mind-numbing curves seemed familiar, and his mind kept trying to make a connection that would not come. He’d seen her before, seen her lighting up a screen somewhere. Her mouth was unusually expressive, her jaw a marvel of design. And every time she looked up into his eyes, he had the sense that she had stared out at him before, heating him up, making him hard as stone. Had she appeared in some movie? Maybe even some dirty movie?

It was the nipple rings and his dick’s response to them that provided the answer, aching just as it had when he’d gawked at her body on his computer screen. Cindy. Cindy, as in Cindy from HardBods!

It didn’t make that first meeting any easier, recognizing that he had drooled — and more — over her image dozens of times, especially since he and Mary never had sex anymore. This girl was by far the hottest model on the HardBods Website, but it had been several months since she’d appeared in any new photosets.

“Those sex riots last August,” the internet star whispered, her voice flat. “It was me. I caused them.”

“Riiiight,” he led her on, knowing that if she hadn’t been so fucking great to look at, he would have already kicked her out of his office.

“I did… those things, to all of those people,” Cindy continued, “although I couldn’t help it. I tried to resist, but it was like… I was still me, I was still there inside, but MagicThunder was in complete control. She used me as a vehicle, channeling her powers through my mind and this body to… to do things.”

He noted, even in that first meeting, how she referred to her mind as “my mind”, and her blazing hot body as “this body”. As though her body was a tool of some kind. As though it might no longer belong to her. As though it might up and do things that she didn’t want it to do, taking her consciousness along for a ride.

He kept listening to her story, sort of. He had never even contemplated the possibility of “mind-control” before, although it sure was easy to fall into a stiffening daydream along those lines, about “this body” of hers rising out of the chair, unbuttoning and pulling her jeans down those divine hips, her eyes wide with alarm as she realized that she was under his power, that he could make her do things just by wishing hard enough, and he was definitely hard enough. He could almost see her blouse come off, the scent of female excitement permeating his small office as she began to finger herself through her panties. Teal colored panties, those had been his favorites in one of her early photosets. Matching heels and pantyhose, and her hair had been pulled back, giving her this delightful innocence, like she just happened to be this great-looking, with a body like something out of a porn how-to video, exemplifying everything a man dreams of, everything he could ever…

His little fantasy ground to a halt when she started to speak about running across Emma in the rain, and reaching into the girl’s mind, igniting the hormones in her young body and making her strip out of her clothing. Cindy and some guy under her mental control took his daughter into a car, where they both…

He didn’t even let her get to her disgusting fantasy about having sex with his daughter. His blood boiling, he could barely make his vocal chords work when he told her to get the hell out of his office.

“I see,” she sighed. The way that she looked into his eyes next set his nerves on fire for some reason, and his flesh tingled when she said, “I see that we’ll never get anywhere unless I prove myself.”

He stormed out of his chair, ready to roughly escort her elsewhere. She shut her eyes, and for some reason his body disobeyed, and he found himself returning to his seat.

“This… isn’t easy on me,” Cindy whispered. “Please stop resisting. I just wanted to show you…”

It hurt now, remembering how enraged he became. Maybe it was the booze, or maybe he had begun to believe that this woman had actually played a part in ruining his little girl’s life. Though he couldn’t move his body, he began cursing, going into something like a tantrum.

Cindy sat there with her eyes closed, just taking the abuse. He heard her whisper “stop” several times, but he couldn’t stop, or he wouldn’t. Then, suddenly, sound no longer emanated from his lips, even though they kept moving. The sense of absence was so strong that it felt as though he no longer had any vocal chords.

“I don’t like doing this,” Cindy whispered between clenched teeth, opening her eyes. ”Just nod your head to let me know that you believe now, and we’ll go on as before.”

The funny thing was how hard the demonstration of her power made his dick. It was like his helplessness became its own aphrodisiac, or like his mind immediately weighed the carnal possibilities right from the start, instinctively realizing what it might be like to fuck a woman who could bring paranormal powers into the bedroom.

What a strange way for their odd partnership to begin. His cock was on fire as she told him every excruciating detail of the night that she and Lance “went MagicThunder” on his poor daughter. Now, Cindy wanted to use her powers to help the people she had harmed. She wanted to use her powers to help Emma. Which, he soon realized, meant that Cindy had to make love to Emma. She had to make love to his daughter a lot.

He and Mary separated soon afterwards, and the search for MagicThunder’s other victims began. So many people in so many places needing Cindy’s help, because MagicThunder continued to use the internet to fuck with her victims from afar. So many wounded people — in Japan, and China, and Brazil — anywhere the internet allowed MagicThunder’s mind to reach out and touch someone. They traveled together and Cindy did her healing thing where she could, and in a strange way he realized that Cindy might still be the most wounded victim of all, despite her powers. No one else, it appeared, had been used quite so intimately by MagicThunder. No one else had been turned into a channel, a direct vessel for MagicThunder’s handiworks. And Cindy was certain that no one else had been compelled to enter a limousine, to be transported against her will to meet MagicThunder face to face, all because of the results of some mind-control readers’ poll.

What must that have felt like for her, he wondered, seeing the votes about her future dribble in on a Website, knowing that her fate was being decided by detached, unbelieving hands? He read the MagicThunder story about Cindy’s travails that included the poll, and it shamed him to get so excited by the tale. The story was like an insider’s view of Cindy’s descent into a world of pure boiling lust, and while he hated to think of the pain and humiliation she and Emma had suffered, he couldn’t help feeling that it was all just… hot.

Cindy would understand this — in fact, she was convinced that she was largely to blame for everything that had happened, because of her attraction to just that kind of mind-control story. She had masturbated while reading them, oblivious to the possibility that they could ever come true. While she was strumming her privates in private, secretly wishing to be used by a controller, MagicThunder was already stalking her, already setting the forces in play that would make Cindy’s dreams come true.

And there was an additional element, the very real possibility that MagicThunder had gained her powers by reading mind-control stories to begin with, somehow absorbing the abilities described like some sort of fetish-sponge. Cindy was convinced that the method first used against her — mind-controlling poetry — had been self-inflicted, because she had written about just that power in one of her own stories. If true, then every sicko to ever contribute to the genre was partly responsible for the creation of a monster like MagicThunder.

Tony thought she was being too hard on herself, but then he couldn’t know how it felt to have a secret fantasy fulfilled, only to see it reach out and harm others. He had to make himself remember sometimes that Cindy had experienced sex in ways he would never even be able to imagine, as much as he sometimes wished to. Where the experience of enhanced sex — or sex of any kind — might feel to him like a lifesaving ride on a dolphin’s back after being adrift for months in the open ocean, for Cindy Hutton sex was… well, extremely complicated.

It was best for him to not even dream about it.

* * *

“I think I can help with the speech impediment,” Cindy softly assured Lance. “The other thing, your equipment… I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

Tony kept his mouth shut, even though an obvious joke wanted to tumble out. “Tell us about your run-in with MagicThunder,” he said instead. “If you feel like you’re ready.”

Lance squirmed, like recalling the events made him feel all itchy. He sat on the sofa with Cindy close beside him, the two of them holding hands without giving out the impression that they were lovers. Alana and Emma, freshly showered with their eyes a bit blank and their cheeks positively glowing, sat cross-legged next to each other on the floor, knees touching, looking like two lovebirds joined at the hip after helping each other survive a particularly fierce hurricane. Mystic, Cindy’s cat, had predictably gravitated to Tony’s lap, staring at the large delivery pizza that lay in its box on the coffee table, completely ignored. The manila envelope was right next to the pizza, beckoning.

Tony, alone but for the cat in his lap, felt very much like the odd man out. His life had been affected by MagicThunder just like the others, but he was painfully aware that he was the only one in the room who had not experienced some form of heightened sex as part of the deal.

Also, he felt nothing but tension inside, whereas all of the women looked strangely relaxed, given the gravity of the recent events. It’s because they’ve all had their pipes cleaned, he thought. Emma and Alana, especially, seemed to be silently beaming with contentment, and even Lance was destined to receive some sort of special treatment from Cindy that might include sex.

“MagicThunder was young, of course, and unnaturally gorgeous,” Lance began. “It was like… I don’t know how to describe it. Looking at her was almost painful, like everything about her had been specifically designed to make me go weak in the knees.”

“That might literally be true,” Cindy assessed. “We know now that physical changes aren’t beyond her scope. Or she could have just made you see things a certain way.”

“Do you think you could describe her appearance in enough detail to give to a police sketch artist?” Tony asked. “I know someone who might…”

“Not possible,” Lance shook his head. “I could describe her features, and certainly her body… But it was her… energy, or… Hell, I don’t know how to describe it. She’s just too… gorgeous! No one could draw that, and if they could and I looked at it, I’d probably…”

“Forget the sketch artist,” Cindy interrupted, glancing at Tony. “It’s pointless. Besides, let’s not add any fresh playthings for MagicThunder to fuck with, not when we know she’s close by.”

“She was almost totally naked,” Lance added, his shaky voice almost conveying the sight. “I forgot to mention that. Just a sexy red blouse and heels.”

“Wow,” Tony sighed, immediately regretting it.

“How could she walk around Manhattan like that?” Lance demanded. “It isn’t just me that would be affected. Everybody would get horny! Everybody!”

“That’s exactly what she wants,” Cindy explained. “If every witness feels some degree of lust, even unconsciously, then she’s already won. If she doesn’t want anybody in the city to realize that they’ve seen her, that’s exactly how she would dress. Maximum impact would let her be ‘seen’ only if she wanted that.”

“Invisibility?” Tony questioned.

“Not literally. But yes, for all intents and purposes.”

“Then how do you win?” Alana asked. “You’re saying that she could be sitting here with us right now and we would never know!”

“We can’t win!” Lance shouted. “You… she… She can do anything! I was fucking wevitating off the gwound!”

Tony noticed some sort of change in the room at that one, Alana and Cindy exchanging glances.

“And look at what she…” Lance went on, staring down at the oversized bulge in his crotch. “I’m wucky she didn’t…”

“Not luck,” Cindy interjected. “Don’t forget that she let me go last year, sort of. She could have done anything in the world she wanted, and yet she let me go. Yes, she could turn every one of us into drooling cumbots if that was what she really wanted, but she hasn’t. There’s no use in giving into our worst fears. We have to assume that she has less drastic plans for us.”

“Oh, she has plans alright. She said ‘the story is already being written’,” Lance reported. “And we’re in it.”

“It’s how she sees things,” Cindy told them. “MagicThunder is obsessed with mind-control fiction, and somehow gained these powers that allow her to play with real people as though they’re mere characters in a story she’s writing. I wonder sometimes whether she actually loses sight of the difference between real life and fantasy.”

“Maybe there is no difference when she can make her fantasies come to life,” Alana commented.

“She said that this story would be a mystery,” Lance added. “We’re suppose to solve something, I think.”

“Great,” Tony muttered. “MagicThunder as fucking Agatha Christie. And here we are, gathered together just like in one of those stories.”

Silence.

“What happens next?” Lance asked. “One of us mysteriously disappears, or…”

Silence.

“Fuck living like this!” Tony exploded, grabbing a slice of pizza. With his other hand he lifted the manila envelope and tossed it into Cindy’s lap. “Open the damn envelope, Cindy. We might as well see what we’re in for.”

SHADOW PLAY

by Ghosthostblue

Chapter Two - Savage Shadow

“I don’t get it,” Lance admitted for all of them. “A comic book?”

“More like pulp fiction,” Tony corrected. “Those characters were popular in the nineteen-thirties, or maybe even before. And from the format and wear, it looks old enough to be authentic. That issue might even be a collector’s item.”

The cover was split into two color illustrations, one of The Shadow, the other of Doc Savage. Cindy kept flipping through the contents, her expression glum.

“Not a collector’s item,” she declared. “Not even a real issue. Every word inside is pornographic. There aren’t even any complete sentences, except for here, where it tells us that the cover art is by Max M. Umspurm. She’s just screwing with us.”

“But it’s a clue,” Lance objected. “She specificwy mentioned that.”

“A tie-in to the Tarantino movie?” Alana asked.

“Maybe she’s tewwing us that she’s going to mc us to a pulp,” Lance countered.

“Or treat us savagely.”

“It would be deeper than that,” Cindy spoke softly, her eyes raised, looking inward for memories. “Doc Savage and The Shadow… What do we know about them?”

“I don’t remember squat about Doc Savage,” Tony said. “The Shadow was a crime-fighter who could make himself effectively invisible. He was a magician, I think, a master of illusion. There’s our tie-in right there.”

“But we aweady know that MagicThunder can do those things,” Lance objected. “Why give us a cwue that’s behind where we awe?”

“More importantly, a clue to what?” Cindy posed. “Clues are for finding treasure, or working out the identity of the murderer in a detective story. If MagicThunder is presenting us with a mystery to solve… Well, what exactly are we supposed to be figuring out?”

“Her wocation?” Lance asked.

“Maybe her identity,” Alana offered.

“Colonel Mustard up the ass in the library with a candlestick,” Tony joked.

Nobody laughed. They all fell silent, knowing they weren’t getting at it.

“Yourselves,” Emma whispered.

All heads turned.

“Emma?” Cindy asked, joining her on the floor. “Are you there?”

“Emma, sweetheart!” Tony exclaimed, tears welling in his eyes. “Emma! We’re here, baby!”

Cindy held the girl’s face in her hands and studied her eyes. “Emma? Is it… you?”

No answer, just a sweet smile and a soft nod of her head.

Tony and Cindy locked eyes, communicating months of questions and hopes. “I just don’t know, Anthony. It could have been her thought, or… I just don’t know.”

* * *

“Buy you a beer?” Lance asked as they neared his cross-street. It had begun to drizzle and the pavement glistened with the colored lights of the city.

“I drink scotch.”

“So? Have one with me. Heather won’t arrive at the bar for another hour or so. You can leave before she arrives or stay and meet her, your choice.”

Either this Heather chick was a total bombshell, or Lance was crazy. He’d been lying senseless and MagicThunder cum-shocked on a barroom floor some six hours before, and here he was, keeping a date despite all the weirdness.

“Oh hell, why not?” Tony finally answered, turning left. He circled the block and found parking right in front of the bar where Lance would meet his date. Choosing a booth near the front where Heather could find them, they ordered their drinks.

“Wait a minute,” Tony said, remembering. “When our waitress puts your glass in front of you…”

“I’m betting I’m cured. Cindy got rid of the Elmer Fudd thing, so I’m assuming the jizz-on-the-glass command is wiped away, too.

“What if you’re wrong?”

“The bathroom is right back there,” Lance motioned. “If I’m compelled to line the rim of my glass with cum, I guess I’ll have to duck in there in a hurry. I’m fucking having a beer tonight, either way.”

Turned out that Lance was right. Cindy had given him fifteen minutes in private before they all called it a night, and her magic must have been up to the task. Strictly verbal mumbo-jumbo? Tony had seen her talk some of MagicThunder’s victims out of their troubles, but sometimes she had to touch them, almost Spock mindmeld-like. And sometimes… He felt his dick stir, just picturing Cindy opening wide to give David’s new oversized hot rod its first lube job.

“I’m hoping I’m cured of that other problem, too,” Lance said. “I mean, Cindy has been… helpful…

Tony drank. Lance wasn’t referring to his new dimensions, which must feel weird as shit. He was talking about a longstanding MagicThunder intervention, that every drop of his cum belonged to Cindy. The poor guy hadn’t even been able to whack-off since the previous summer, his balls manufacturing nothing but pressure and disappointment even when some girl tried to beat the odds.

“I’m really grateful to Cindy, of course,” Lance went on. “The things she’s done for me…”

“Should perhaps remain private,” Tony advised, cutting him off.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m just pointing out that it’s been a mixed bag of pleasure and frustration. I must be maturing, because I want… you know, sex that’s about passion. Cindy is so incredibly sexy, but what I get is more like therapy, and I’m a little tired of being mercy-fucked. Maybe now, after what MagicThunder did to me in the bar today… You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to ask this girl Heather out, but there was no point in going for it when… you know…”

“Lance, I’m not your keeper, but after your run-in with MagicThunder today, shouldn’t you wait? Cindy might have been right about not inviting anyone too closely into our lives right now.”

“I know I’m pushing things, Tony. But fuck, it’s like having a race car with unfixable engine problems in the shop for eight months, and then you get this call that someone just gave you a new set of wheels, and it’s an even hotter car. And Heather is already in my life, even if not intimately. We work together, for Christsake. I’m having a beer with her, and getting to know her outside of the workplace, that’s all.”

A low rumble of thunder, just discernible over the sounds of the bar, rode piggy-back on Lance’s words.

“I sure hope that isn’t you-know-who,” Tony muttered. “It’s early in the season for a thunderstorm, isn’t it? And I don’t remember rain in the forecast.”

“Fifty percent chance,” Lance corrected, "and maybe even a little snow at some point. “Still, I hope Cindy’s already asleep. She tries to hide it, but storms still trouble her.”

Thunder and lightning had played a pivotal role in Cindy’s sex descent the previous summer. She believed that MagicThunder could actually master the weather within a certain radius, some connection between human beings’ bodies and the greater environment making such a thing possible. Or maybe one silly writer had typed up the idea somewhere, and MagicThunder had read it, making the physics irrelevant.

“I keep getting this creepy feeling,” Tony said. “Events are moving fast and we haven’t figured out one thing about the game MagicThunder is playing. She has all of that power and we don’t even know what direction we’re supposed to be facing to confront her.”

“I hate to keep repeating myself, but we don’t stand a chance, Tony, not unless she wants us to have one. After what I witnessed this afternoon… She could walk through that door and have our dicks drilling holes in the ceiling if that’s what turned her on.”

“What scares me is that we’re at the mercy of a teenager. She must have a real name, you know, and a life outside of this sex power stuff. If she was a bit older, I might try to figure out what makes her tick, but we can’t know whether she even understands how much trouble she’s causing.”

“So what would you do if you had all of that power? Just imagine it, the ability to get any woman you ever desired, making them feel whatever you wanted them to feel with nothing more than a thought. Wouldn’t it be… irresistible?

“Probably. But we have no need to contemplate things with that kind of weight, Lance.”

“Cindy does. She has to wrestle with this stuff every day.”

“Not really. She can’t do even a fraction of what MagicThunder can do. It’s hard for her, but it isn’t that hard.”

Lance studied his glass. “Sometimes I get this feeling that Cindy isn’t being entirely straight with us. Sometimes I think she can do more than either one of us would suspect.”

A loud peel of thunder, and the sound of the rain beginning to pour outside.

“Tell me something, Tony: Do you ever wonder how Cindy voted?”

“Which election?”

“Not an election. I meant in the reader’s poll that determined her fate. There were seventeen votes, if I remember right. One of them had to be hers.”

Tony had studied the poll, and even wondered how he would have voted. It was a cruel trick, the way MagicThunder presented Cindy’s plight as a fictional event, placing her immediate future in the hands of a bunch of unbelieving strangers. MagicThunder would have known that the horny readers who get off on mind-control fiction would wish to see a young woman further toyed with. Consequently, Cindy got voted right into the clutches of her tormentor.

He ended up reading all of MagicThunder’s mind-control stories, too, in an effort to get into the head of the sick fucker who had turned his daughter into a perpetual sex fiend. He learned that she was both intelligent and eloquent, this girl who called herself MagicThunder. He grudgingly had to respect her writing abilities, too. Despite how he thought he should feel, he couldn’t help getting an erection every time he read the sex scenes in her works.

“So how do you think she voted?” Lance intruded into his thoughts.

“I don’t have a clue. I’ve asked her, too. Cindy says that she can’t even remember how she voted.”

“And you believe her?”

“Why shouldn’t I? MagicThunder made her forget all sorts of details about the time they spent together. Why should this be any different?”

“I find it strange that MagicThunder gave Cindy her abilities.”

“Oh?”

“There were options like that in the poll, you know, various degrees of power versus autonomy for people to vote on. Cindy is a victim — we’re all victims, I can see that — but I wonder sometimes whether MagicThunder did Cindy a favor by entering her life.”

“A favor? You have to be joking.”

“I’m not. Cindy had fantasies about being controlled and being a controller. It’s why she liked to read those stories to begin with. MagicThunder gave her the real-life experience of having her mind invaded by another, but she also allowed Cindy to experience what it was like to have all of that power flowing through her. That second night last summer, when every person in the bar became a sexual playtoy for both Cindy and MagicThunder… She was a walking sex-goddess, Tony. It was just fucking unreal the way she could make people do almost anything. In that way, wasn’t Cindy again being given what she wanted?”

“Lance…”

“And then, when it was all over… Well, who’s to say that Cindy didn’t wish for the powers she has?”

“So you think Cindy voted to be given mind-controlling powers from the get-go, even if it came at the price of having MagicThunder continue to fuck with her?”

“In a word: Yes.”

“She uses her powers to help the people she fucked with, Lance. People like you. And people like Emma.”

Silence, this one definitely awkward. Tony downed the contents of his glass. Lance had never formally apologized for deflowering his daughter, and Tony was undecided on whether he should or not. Lance had been two steps removed from personal responsibility, controlled by Cindy, who was being controlled by MagicThunder. Lance’s true feelings about Emma’s current state were currently unfathomable, but he had enjoyed the ride back then, fucking Emma with magical fervor in the back seat of his car. Any man would have enjoyed that ride, and if they denied it, they were lying.

“I, um… I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be in your position with this,” Lance said.

“I can’t judge anybody, Lance. Not you, not Cindy. I’m not even sure that I can judge MagicThunder about what she did back then. Now however… She could probably fix Emma with one thought, or one touch. And because she hasn’t, or won’t, I probably hate her with all my being. Is that enough of an answer about where I am with things?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’ve made you uncomfortable,” Tony stated.

“Very,” Lance answered.

“I understand. But we’re all in this together, Lance. I never forget that.”

“Good. So bravely moving forward, here’s another question: What do you think about what Emma said back at Cindy’s loft?”

“I think it was her. It was Emma.”

“Not MagicThunder, inserting the word into her mouth?”

“No, and Cindy agrees. She and Emma have gotten… really close over the months, as you know. They’re pretty connected.

“Okay,” Lance went on. “But what about what she said? That what we’re trying to find clues about is ourselves? What do you think she meant?”

“Beats me. If it was MagicThunder speaking, then I have no idea what she was getting at. If it was Emma… Well, I could interpret it like this — that Emma realizes to some degree that she’s trying to find her way back to who she was before.”

“I think it’s another clue,” Lance disagreed.

“Telling us what?”

“I’m not sure. That we get in our own way, maybe. That it’s our fucked-up attitudes about sex that give MagicThunder all of the advantages. If we could just get a handle on our drives…”

“You’re starting to sound like Cindy, dissecting every thought and motivation.”

“Lots of people sound this way, and not only students of psychology. You don’t ever look inside of yourself and question things?”

“Not much, no. I’m painfully simple, I think. I get up in the morning and want somebody to fuck me, and I look forward to a drink way too much, probably because I know getting fucked isn’t likely to happen. I love my daughter and grieve for the end of my marriage. I wish for world peace but live with the certainty that people will try to kill each other all over the globe. A little bit of hope mixed in with a lot of cynicism. Simple. Ordinary.”

“I’m not sure I believe that. I remember Cindy saying one time that everyone alive is like an onion, with an infinite number of layers to peel before they can understand what lies inside at the core. She said that a real study of psychology was like turning the insides out.”

“Peeling onions makes me cry.”

“Yeah, me too. Although I think that might have been her point.”

* * *

“Your friend needs a week in the tropics,” Heather assessed, the moment she and Lance were alone. “He’s sweet, but stressed.”

“Tony has a lot on his mind, yes.”

“Is he a cop? He looks like a cop.”

“He was a cop. He’s a private investigator now.”

“A private dick, you mean?”

“Yeah,” Lance laughed. “And every now and then he lives up to the name. Most of the time he’s pretty cool, though.”

Heather poured her beer into a cold, sweating mug, poured too fast so that she gave it too much head. Stop that! she admonished herself, still surprised that she had made the private dick joke. She licked at the rim of her glass before it could flow over, her tongue suggestively traveling the entire circumference.

Dammit, what was it about Lance that had her behaving this way? Her pussy had nearly gone ballistic back at The Drowning Flamingo, sending her straight to her bed where she fingered herself like a crazy woman, going at herself feverishly and screaming so loudly that her two cats ended up cowering in the bedroom closet. All she could see in her mind was Lance with a gargantuan cock beckoning to her from between his legs, the vision ripping one incredible orgasm after another from her depths.

She should have been sated from all of the auto-play, but as their rendezvous approached, the aching in her tunnel returned, growing fierce, growing wet, and then wetter. She almost compulsively dressed to kill for their date, donning a form-fitting teal blue dress with a revealing slit up one side. Seamed stockings and a push-up bra completed her look, which was the look of a seductress. Which was odd, because the whole cab ride to the bar she had this sense that she and Lance were playing a game of cat and mouse, and for the first time since meeting him, she wondered whether she might be the mouse.

Lightning flashed outside, momentarily rimming Lance’s hair and shoulders in cool blue light. He definitely had a different look in his eyes tonight. More focused, more… hungry. She looked out the big windows at the continuing downpour, and could feel his eyes on her breasts, as though his staring could physically brush her flesh beneath her dress. Her big nipples hardened as they did only during sex, creating resounding shivers throughout her body.

I’ve got to fuck him, an insistent thought appeared, quickening her pulse. She raised her beer mug to her lips, allowing the inside of her arm to stroke her right nipple. Her breath caught and her legs became restless under the table.

“You seemed hesitant when I asked you out,” she said, her words tumbling out too quickly, her fingers active on her glass. Lance looked at them, and as though they had a mind of their own, her fingers pressed, and stroked, and suggestively slid along the mug’s handle. I have to stop this, she thought, but she didn’t. Her heart beat too fast beneath her tits and she crossed her legs down below, rubbing her thighs together.

“I was a bit shocked, yes,” Lance answered. “It was hard to imagine that a girl like you wouldn’t have some place to be on a Friday night.”

“A girl like me?”

His eyes swept her body, somehow including her shapely legs and the naughty slit up the side of her dress, all down there beneath the table. Down there, wiggling and jiggling, her thighs rubbing together, her pussy beginning to feel like it could catch fire from the friction.

“Well just look at you, Heather. It only made sense that a girl as beautiful as you would be out on the town on your night off.”

His “you’re such a hot babe” line wasn’t as smooth as it could be, but she felt herself blushing all the same. Blushing felt good, it sent heat into her cheeks. Hell, it sent heat everywhere. She uncrossed her legs and lowered her free hand, letting it slide down her hip, seeking the slit in her dress and access to her friction zone, her very problematic loosy goosy oh so juicy blast furnace of a pussy.

“Hah!” she breathed in backwards, a tremor cutting through her body the second her fingertips reached their destination.

“Hah?” he asked.

“I, um…” she began, her voice sounding thin. Her fingers began to circle, oh God she had to stop letting them circle, only she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, because it just felt too good, better than ever, better than sin. She felt a pressure in her depths and recognized it as an orgasm, forming deep inside her tunnel like it was cargo waiting to be delivered out into the light. Not possible! she thought. An orgasm didn’t come into existence only to wait in the wings, torturing her body with thrills and chills, as though stalking her body from within.

“Heather?”

She wanted to cry out. She wanted to jump across the table and plant her pussy on Lance’s mouth, and have him tongue her lurking orgasm out of its cave. She felt the muscles in her face fighting to remain calm, even though she no longer cared whether she showed her pussy passions or not. Her entire body felt like it was poised to blow, but only if the shy explosion inside was coaxed out, drawn forward to cheers and screams in her creamy reamy dreams…

“Heather? Are you okay?”

She shut her eyes and tried to focus. Focus focus, hokus pokus, maybe Lance's dick will stroke us... She tried to make the urges in her depths either detonate or go away, but they weren’t cooperating; in fact, they were rebelling, getting worse, her need growing, the pressure building, her situation becoming desperate.

“Heather? What’s the matter?”

“E…excuse me a minute, Lance? Little girl’s room?” Her tone of voice was squeaky and sounded like begging. She had to concentrate hard to get her fingers to stop playing with her pussy before standing. Her thighs quivered as she left the table, and she began to pray, because she really didn’t know whether she would make it without falling to her knees to start fingering her slit with both hands. She ignored the admiring stares all around, the many eyes sneaking up the naughty slit in her dress as far as eyes could go. She set her eyes on the door to the women’s room, staring hard at the doorknob, making it her goal, trying to walk quickly without creating any friction between her legs. So hot, so horny, oh God let me cum, gotta cum, gotta go, gonna scream, gonna blow…

“Oh no!” she cried, finding the door locked, some other patron inside. She closed her eyes again, closed them tight and tried to hold on. What was happening to her? How could she feel this way after already venting her passions in her bedroom? She’d been lying in her bed with masturbation in her head, needing something thick, Sir Lance-a-lot’s hard dick…

The door opened and she collided with the woman leaving, she was so desperate to get in. Inside, the bathroom was cozy, elegantly tiled with blonde wood flooring. Blonde like her, blonde like her trimmed pubic hairs, which must be nearly soaked.

She locked the door, then immediately leaned her forehead against the cool tile surface of a wall, her hand slipping up through the slit in her dress. She hissed as her middle finger found wet heat through her silk panties. She wiggled her finger and nearly jumped to the ceiling. She was sooo hot, and already sooo close…

This was crazy, playing with herself with Lance waiting out there. But she had little doubt that she could do it quickly, maybe even in record time. A jolting release of her lurking monster orgasm, then a few more minutes with Lance to set up another date. A lightning quick cab ride home and then playtime with Mr. Magic, her trusty ten-inch vibrator, primed with fresh alkaline batteries that could outlast even her worst itches.

Closing her lips tight to stifle her moans, she slipped her fingers over the waistband of her panties and dug in, her other hand cupping her left breast. She pinched her nipple, rolling the engorged flesh between her fingers, rolling it and squeezing and oh yes her finger dancing at her hot wet entrance, slipping in, sliding out, slipping in deeper, wiggling up, around, oh fuck yes deeper, now out, feathering, dabbing, sideswiping…

The bathroom light went out just as the lurking orgasm began to slide forward, the wave beginning to break inside. She was milliseconds from exploding…

Don’t move, she heard in her ear, hot breath tickling her neck, a hand at her throat. Every cell in her body seemed to scream to a halt. Her orgasm, right there at the moment of detonation, caught and held steady, an explosion bathed in an impossible stillness.

Heat, the voice whispered, fingers playing with her curly hair.

Oh God, yes! Blazing…

Wet.

Yes! Dripping, oozing…

Crrraving… A hand cupped her breast, and squeezed hard.

Please, please…

She felt her dress being lifted, her ass and the backs of her thighs squeezed, her hand that had been playing with her cunt roughly pulled aside. She was spun around, her ass and the back of her head against the wall. Without knowing why or how she was doing it, her feet inched out on the wood floor, her thighs opening. She dimly saw movement in the darkness, the even blacker shapes of hands grasping at her dress, lifting it higher.

She wanted to cry out, to scream, to anything, but there was only stillness outside, with hot wet napalm and pulsing desperate craving within. Her panties seemed to vaporize, as though they had been made of flash paper. Only there was no flash, just the darkness and oh God she was open, her pussy uncovered, craving a thick anything, needing it, dying for it. Oh God please, please, whoever you are, slide something deep inside!

She didn’t understand how it could be possible, but she felt breath on her clitoris, a tongue dabbing at both nipples simultaneously, hands traveling up her spread legs, tracing their shape. Lips kissed her left shoulder, and then the hot breath in her ear again, more excited now, a quickened panting whisper that heightened her hot chills.

Open up wide, need something thick and hard inside…

The sensation of her pussy being spread open should have had her screaming in a way that would bring the walls down, but her mouth and voice didn’t work, there was only her pussy, opening so wide, making room for the huge shape pushing its way in. Her entire body erupted with hot shivers, her inner walls parting as they had never parted before. The hardness entering her was massive, primal, reaching in and pulling her fire to it, bathing her heat in an even greater inferno. Oh God, how was she even still alive? She was blazing, consumed without combusting…

Only Lance can set you free, the voice slipped inside her ear, her brain freezing with heat.

Oh God yes, Lance and his hardness, pointing at her from under the table, his missile seeking her silo, seeking these wet walls…

You’ll die without his hardness.

She wanted to scream, to beg, to find Lance and literally cram her pussy around his hard cock.

Want him, taunt him, use him, abuse him, eat him, beat him!

“Yes, yes, anything! I’ll do anything!”

The thing inside slowly withdrew, leaving her cunt so hot and empty, excruciatingly empty, in desperate need. The door opened and her attacker slipped out of the darkness, into the bar. She couldn’t even move her eyes to see what he looked like.

* * *

“Everything’s okay?” Lance asked. “You were gone for awhile.”

Heather, panty-less, could feel her pussy undulating under her dress, her labia actually moving in an inward rhythm, as though already trying to suck him inside.

“You look… strange,” he said, his voice wary.

What a genius. Her thighs trembling, she slipped into the booth beside him, her left hand immediately going to his crotch, finding the shape of him and squeezing.

“Hey!” he cried out. “What are you… Oh fuck. Heather, you’re…”

An image flashed through her mind, of Lance lying naked beneath her spread legs, the biggest cock she had ever taken on rising up towards her dripping cunt like a filling thrilling flagpole. She felt the muscles of her inner thighs begin to quiver, as though his hard long gondola was already poised right at the entrance to her love canal. Like her pussy was calling his name down there. Like another word would have her ducking under the table to pull his dick out and suck it, suck it like she’d never sucked a dick before, suck it and keep him on the edge, her tongue attuned to him like a tuning fork, feeling every...

“Heather? Heather?”

She heard her name called over and over again, the sound like the rushing of her blood, or the rapid beating of her heart, or the swollen throbbing that raged through her pussy, demanding Lance’s meat, drawn to it, magnetized by it, her needy hole desperate for his greedy pole. Her thoughts felt all crowded together, like they’d been pushed aside into a back room in her brain, replaced by a pulsing beat that alternated between fuck rhythms and suck rhythms.

“Greedy, needy, size, prize, magnetic lies…”

“Heather? Oh shit! You… aren’t yourself! You’re in trouble!”

Her fingers began to pump the already huge hardness in his jeans. Lance tried to push her away. His eyes showed true alarm but his resistance was half-hearted, because his brain was starting to drain into his cock. She pressed her body in close, shoving her tongue into his mouth while she felt him hardening in her grasp. Her hand assessed his size, vibrating with applause when his shape filled her palm, far overfilled her palm. Hot saliva flooded her mouth as she realized just how big he was, big and fat and straining in his pants, giant meat, a tasty treat, time to suck and fuck and eat…

His hips slid on the bench chair like he was trying to present a moving target, but she focused, unbuttoning his jeans clasp, reaching in and grabbing hold, pulling him out.

“Hey!” their waitress’ voice erupted up and behind her. “You can’t do that here!”

She pretended not to hear, bending down and taking her first taste of Lancemeat with her tongue, coating the hot flesh of his pulsing pole with saliva, coating it for throating it…

“Hey! Stop that!”

The waitress’ hand clutched at her shoulder, pulling her off of her meal. Heather raised her head and turned, her tongue still out, her eyes blazing.

“Oh fuuuuck,” she heard Lance whisper.

She ignored Lance and his fear, regarding their waitress until she saw something shift in the other woman’s eyes. The waitress released her tray of drinks with a crash, her hands slowly moving up to squeeze her breasts, fallen beer spattering her legs.

“Head in a lap, my tits are on tap!” the waitress cried out to the others in the bar, her hands frantically unbuttoning the front of her blouse. “Oh God, what am I doing? Who am I screwing?” she cried.

Another waitress rushed to the stricken one, her mouth automatically seeking a bared nipple.

“Tits on tap!” somebody whooped. “Tits on tap!”

“Heather! Heather!” Lance shouted into her ear. “We have to get out of here! The whole place is going to explode!”

He pushed, grabbing her arm and forcing her out of the booth, pulling her through groping shouting patrons stripping out of their clothes. Their lust was sexy but she only wanted Lance, wanted his cock, needed it so badly that she would die without it. Hot Lance meat out on the street, let him guide her, cum inside her…

* * *

Cool rain blew sideways into his face the second they were out the door. Heather, towed behind, growled like a beast, shaking her blonde mane in the rain. She was almost exactly like Cindy had been last summer, her body and psyche consumed with MagicThunder-induced super-lust that happened to be aimed in his direction.

It was like a replay in some ways — the blonde great-looking babe he’d most like to fuck suddenly craving his dick, and willing to do anything to get it. And her lust was contagious, or even worse. What she had done to their waitress, just looking at the girl and turning her into a rhyming pussy-puppet…

It hadn’t made any sense to him the year before, although his dick had quite willingly responded to the promise of scorching sex. His mind had almost shut down, perhaps not even wanting to know how it was that someone as hot as Cindy Hutton could want him so badly, or coax so much excitement and cum out of him, blowing and fucking him like something out of the word’s most intense wet-dream.

And now Heather, whom he’d wanted to plug for weeks, only he couldn’t, because his dick had been cursed. At some point, MagicThunder had whipped Heather’s speech into rhyming patterns, her hormones into a lather, mind and body focused on one thing, and that thing was newly huge and feeling like it would rip his jeans in two if something didn’t happen soon.

Two women suddenly burst out of the bar, tearing at each other’s clothes, their limbs entwined as though they were trying to physically merge into one being. A quick glance in the windows was all it took to know that whatever had taken hold of Heather in there was spreading like wildfire.

“Heather!” he called out, grasping her shoulders while trying to propel her down the sidewalk. He would fuck her — there was no way his new stretch limo of a cock wouldn’t cruise into her tunnel— but he had to get her away from everyone to keep the conflagration from widening. She resisted, letting her legs go limp, trying to drag him down to fuck him right on the sidewalk in the storm.

“Wet on wet, a Heather weather fuck-event!” she moaned, working at his zipper again.

Someone shoved him in his back and he went down. His butt skidded on the slick sidewalk and he looked up, saw Heather standing alone a few feet away, unzipping the back of her dress, the wet fabric clinging tight to her fabulous figure. Who had shoved him? Several pedestrians had stopped in their tracks several car lengths away, unsure of how to react to Heather’s outdoor strip-tease and the noises coming out of the bar. No one had been close enough to have touched him.

Something slapped him in the face, even though there was nothing there. As his hand went up to massage his cheek, his cock was roughly pulled out of his pants, an unseen mouth swallowing it, hot saliva swirling all around.

“Holy fuck!” he shouted, the entirety of his massive rod rapidly pulled down an unseen throat. It was MagicThunder, right here, playing invisible games with his dick!

Lightning flashed and he cried out, catching a fleeting glimpse of a transparent presence crouching over his crotch. An even brighter flash of lightning burst overhead and he simultaneously felt current running through his dick, thrilling chilling vibrating current mixing with a darting tongue and sucking cheeks, and oh God, oh fuck, the way she was sucking him, his dick being blown by an invisible tornado of a mouth, barometric pressure filling his balls, making his ass tighten… He was going to fucking blow, the curse was definitely lifted and he was going to shoot big time…

The invisible mouth released its wet grip an instant before he came, his cock spurting up into the downpour like a milky fountain challenging the rain. He groaned, shuddered, his head jerking back and banging onto the concrete. Hot hands grasped his towering rod and he looked up, saw his dick swinging back and forth sideways, MagicThunder shoving it side to side as though it was a meatronome.

Flustered, frightened, drenched and somehow still incredibly horny, instinct took hold and he kicked hard, making contact. Quickly scrambling to his feet, he grasped Heather’s hand and pulled, pulled with all his might, pulled like their lives might depend on it.

“We have to get out of here!” he pleaded, forcing her along. “My apartment is just around the corner! Come on! Come on!”

She stumbled, but stumbled forward, her hands reaching down to grab hold of his bouncing cock along the way.

“Bigger than Mister Magic!” she cried up into the heavens.

Lightning flashed in response, an angry boom of thunder vibrating the air all around them. Heather tore at the front of her dress as they ran, somehow removing her bra. He saw it fall into a stream of running rainwater at the curb, its big upraised cups like two conjoined pyramids swept away in a flood. Finally reaching his vestibule door, he managed to get his keys out of his pocket and shakingly worked the lock.

“Give it to me!” Heather demanded, jumping up on his front and fastening her ankles behind his back. The door opened and they fell into the building, landing at the foot of the stairs leading up to his apartment. Heather instantly grasped the head of his vast rod, guiding it into the gaping maw of her need.

“Not yet!” he whispered, clamping a hand over her mouth and hoisting her up the stairs.

She tore at his wet clothing the second they were inside his apartment door, but he managed to secure the fire lock. Unless MagicThunder could walk through walls, they were alone, and relatively safe.

She pulled him down to the floor and he was instantly half-imbedded inside of Heather’s dripping pussy, chills running all over his body. He had seen how huge he was over at Cindy’s, had even measured himself to fix the reality of the miraculous transformation in his brain. His cock was nearly twice the size it had been before his afternoon encounter with MagicThunder, but Heather looked like she could easily handle him, her head thrashing, her eyes burning, her enthusiasm so great and reasoning so far gone that she was jamming him in, her cunt unbelievably tight and hot and slippery.

“Oh God, yes!” she cried. “Vast, blast, cum in fast, thrust and plunge and make it last!” she chanted, and he took her rhyming words as a permission slip, thrusting into her at full gallop, feeling himself diving into depths that he’d never before reached.

Heather gasped, moaned, fucking yowled like a banshee, wrapping her strong legs around his back, pulling him in as deep as he could go. Her first orgasm brought a strange quiet to the room, to her features, but the second one had her screaming, the third contorting her beautiful face in the strange look of anguish that actually signaled ecstasy. He felt her pussy walls going crazy inside, and he shot his load, groaning.

But nothing changed. She wanted more and he gave her more, his cock still hard, her need still fierce. He shifted their bodies as he pumped in and out, fucking her from behind, squeezing her beautiful tits tight, feeling her ass slapping against his abdomen.

He fucked the living hell out of Heather, fucked her again in the hallway to his bedroom, ate her hot red pussy at the foot of his bed.

“Stop, pop, swallow every drop, grunt and groan while riding him on top!” she somehow proclaimed, climbing on board and corkscrewing him from above, then dismounting just in time to drink every drop when he shuddered his release again.

“Thunder and rain, pleasure and p…” Heather recited, licking him clean before positioning her pussy to take him inside again.

He wondered how many times he could cum. He wondered how many times she would make him cum. He wondered what the hell MagicThunder had done to her to make her willing and able to do everything she was doing. And — perhaps perversely — he hoped that whatever MagicThunder had done, she was in no hurry to undo it.

* * *

It was while walking up the steps to his Astoria townhouse that Tony decided he shouldn’t have been driving. One drink with Lance had turned into two, and then he’d ordered a third when Heather arrived.

“Lucky Lance,” he sing-songed. Heather was an aspiring actress and drop-dead gorgeous. She looked somewhat like Cindy, in fact — long blonde hair, a tight body with legs to die for several times over, and the kind of mouth that might haunt him in his dreams tonight. Maybe Lance needed a girl like that after he’d been poking a gorgeous love doll like Cindy. How else could one move on from someone that beautiful?

He dropped his keys as his mind wandered where it shouldn’t be. He bent down to pick them up from the doormat and felt the rain find the opening between his hat and his jacket, tickling at the back of his neck. He had to concentrate far too hard to slip his house key into the lock.

“Fucking wasted,” he muttered, opening the door. “Ooof!” he grunted as a hand shoved him hard in the back, sending him sprawling into the entryway. He flipped over, surprisingly quick and alert, reaching into his jacket to draw his Glock.

Only there was no one to point his weapon at.

“Aw fuck!” he growled, knowing what that meant. “Show yourself, you bitch! I’ll…”

Some invisible something knocked the gun from his hand. He caught a glimpse of wet footprints intermixed with his own on the wood floor, just before the door slammed shut, throwing everything into darkness. The button, he thought, simultaneously trying to cover the thought to hide it from her. He’d had them installed in all of their apartments, an interconnected alert system, just in case there was no time to even pick up the phone.

An invisible hand slapped him hard in the face as he tried to rise, and he went down again. He felt something tearing at his pants, energy being pumped into his balls and cock, heating them and instantly giving him the hardest erection of his life.

Something that might have been an elbow slammed into the middle of his chest, and all of the air left his lungs. He writhed, needing oxygen at the same time that phantom lips surrounded his throbbing dick and blew.

“Aaaaahhhhh!” he shouted, suddenly able to breathe again, a steaming wet wind suffusing his whole body. It was like he could feel it happening in high definition, feel the mystery mouth and the mind behind it vibrating his sperm banks, causing anything and everything within him that was connected to sex to bellow and hiss.

“Fucking hell!” he shouted, too much energy flooding into his dick all at once. His ass-muscles clenched and it was like he couldn’t breathe again, but this time it was the pressure, so much pressure, months and months of wishes and desires come to life all at once.

Beg me, he heard in his mind.

“B…bitch…” he answered between clenched teeth.

Beg! he heard again, and the pressure went through the roof, like a whole lifetime’s worth of orgasms lined up in his dick, stacked end to end, all ready for takeoff. Demanding takeoff. Dying for takeoff.

“I… won’t… beg…” he managed to speak, right before his body began to spin on the floor. The wet mouth still surrounding his dick pressed in, a tongue sliding up and down as he went round and round, his cock like a pole at the center of a merry-go-round. JesusfuckingChrist! He was being given a spin-job, the pressure in his cock and balls centrifuging out to other parts of his body, some impossible spreading sending hot sex energy up into his mind. His thoughts turned milky, as though they were saturated with cum, swimming in a sea of real or psychic cum, like he was poised to have a braingasm, the world’s first braingasm, insisting, wiiishing, waaannnting…

“Ah God, please!” his lips were made to say by billions of screaming brain cells, and then it came, thrusting from the top of his head down and down, rushing for the exit, rioting and stomping to get out.

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…”

SHADOW PLAY

by Ghosthostblue

Chapter Three - Inside Out

“You’re safe,” she whispered into his ear. Her voice entered him like a soft, feminine caress and he smiled, but then the storm in his mind took hold and twisted, extracting the femininity, wanting to fuck it, fuck it over and over, fuck it for the rest of his life.

“Anthony? Come back, please. We need you.”

“Want to fuck you foreverrrr,” he whispered, still too far away.

She laid her fingers on his temples, felt his thoughts still swirling as though caught in a whirlpool. His mind was awash with liquid heat, forces pulling him down. She found a place in the center, a tiny zone of relative tranquility, and lowered a rope that he might climb. She read him taking in the scent of her hair, associating it with her looks, her body, her vagina. The smell of delicious pussy and the touch of her hands on his temples were so much alike, maybe even the same to him, and so identical to the energy that had blown his spinning dick into the stratosphere.

That was odd, how Anthony’s mind couldn’t separate the super-sex that had pulled him down from the feelings he had for her. She had never run into that before, even with Lance. Lance loved a good fuck to relieve the pressure in his aching dick, but he never really linked the cure to the disease, even though both had come through her.

It was going to make things more difficult if Anthony tied her presence now to what he had just been through. Unless she could use that link to her advantage. She leaned her head close to his, her hair draped upon the side of his head like a silky golden blanket. Deep inside, the essence of him was trying to choose. He could stay there and fuck the liquid feminine energy forever, revolving around and around, or climb the rope, out into that world where the pussy was so elusive, but smelled even better.

There, an opportunity. “Anthony… Please be with us,” Cindy tried again.

She could feel him slipping down. If he chose to remain, accepting the fantasies as real, it could take days or even weeks to bring him this close again.

She leaned closer, softly breathing tempting words into his ear. “It’s hot out here,“ she whispered. “I’m hot out here.”

Adjusting her body, she allowed her right breast to brush his chest, and pressed, just enough that his senses recognized the touch for what it was. A hand reached for her breast, and she met it, her nipple hard against his palm, his fingers curling, and closing, and lightly squeezing.

“Yes, Anthony. It’s here. Out here. It’s all out here, waiting for you.”

His fingers circled her nipple, tweaking it, hardening it further. “Ohhhhh,” she sighed as his touch spiraled out, traversing her entire breast, cupping it, assessing its weight, absorbing the tactile details of her blouse and bra. She could sense a new movement inside, the cupping of her breast like a moment of stillness inside. He squeezed, his hand trying to touch the whole of her breast all at once, failing because of its size. Still, the movement recognized wholeness, it wasn’t part of the spiraling. She began to sense his consciousness rising against the downward pull, trying to move from the inside, out.

Close, very close, but she could feel him continuing to struggle. She reached down between her legs, lightly stroking the length of her vagina with her index finger. Her finger lingered longer than it had to, thrilling chills almost making her cry out. She was extremely wet, wetter than she would have thought. It would be so easy to lift her skirt, and pull her panties aside, and feel Anthony’s hardness entering her…

Too much, too selfish. Biting her bottom lip to reinforce her determination, she bent even closer, brushing his cheek with hers, letting her lips meet the corner of his mouth. He puckered, and breathed. Linked as they were, she could sense everything he sensed, smell her hair and feel her flesh, and it was all so beautiful, and smelled so good…

He was closer to the surface now, his thoughts and senses reconnecting. She brought her finger up to his nostrils, allowing him to take in the scent of her heat. Parts of his mind that had been sputtering suddenly kicked into gear, the lights flickering on.

“Smells even better out here,” he said, right before his eyes blinked open.

“Hello, stranger,” Cindy greeted him. “Welcome home.”

Still tied to each other, his thoughts were there for her as though served on a platter. The green eyes that looked into his were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. So gorgeous, he’d always known that, but he’d focused so much on her body that he had neglected the eyes, the fine texture of her skin, the way her upper lip rose in the middle, the shaping so delicate, so precise. Her lips looked like they were designed for kissing, and blowing, and then kissing some more. She was… incomparable.

She smiled, and leaned her head back, giving him a little space. He became aware of his hand touching her breast, and a rush of adrenaline shot into his system. He disengaged his hand and she disengaged from his mind, saying, “We were really worried about you, Anthony.”

He lifted his eyes and took in his surroundings. She saw him piece it together, that he was back at her apartment, lying on the leather sofa.

“How?” he asked.

“I just knew somehow,” Cindy answered. “Alana and I got a cab to your house. We found you on the floor. You were… You were still spinning on the floor, Anthony. Like a top.”

“Tried… to hit the button,” he whispered.

“I know. You don’t have to tell me a thing about what happened, or what it was like. I’ve already seen most of it.”

Because she had rummaged through his memories while working to bring him back. He understood, smiling uncomfortably. She looked away, giving his silly moment of embarrassment an opportunity to rise and fall. She knew how uneasy it made him feel, the way she could tap in and read him. If he only knew how much she had seen over the months, he’d probably die of shame.

And so she didn’t tell. They needed each other too much to let pride come between them. They needed each other too much to even let love intervene.

* * *

“I wish it had been me,” Cindy said, emerging from a long silence.

“What do you mean?” he responded. He put on his signal, to pass the delivery van that was throwing so much back-spray onto the windshield. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, keeping their appointment to “fix” the three affected students at Pratt. The morning rain was steady, his wipers needing to go at full speed, but at least his head was clearing.

“She picked on you, Anthony. And unless she can just blink her eyes and teleport herself, she must have been specifically stalking you. I just wish she had started this whole confrontation with me, not you and Lance. If I knew I had her in the same room as me, I swear I’d…”

“You’d what? MagicThunder has definitely added invisibility and telekinesis to her bag of tricks, Cindy. If you’d come home with me, she might have launched you through my bay window for all we know. I don’t think you would have had much more of a chance than I did.”

Cindy fell silent again. Had she caught what he’d said, about her coming home with him? He’d imagined it several times, the two of them together after hours, maybe sharing dessert after he whipped up one of his masterful homemade pizzas. One drink for him, a couple of glasses of wine for Cindy, their eyes meeting and communicating things that had nothing to do with their professional connection.

Can’t go there, he thought. He was too old for her, and she was his daughter’s lover, for God’s sake. Not possible. Not right. Not going to happen.

“Fucking sucks,” he muttered, the rain coming down harder.

“Complain, complain,” she responded, probably thinking he was down about the weather. “You’re lucky to have a mind to complain with this morning, Anthony. Do you realize that?”

He did, and concentrated on the slick road. “Thanks for saving my mind’s ass,” he said. “And I think I would have thrown up if I awakened with my body spinning on the floor.”

She laughed. “I saw that you and Lance did a little male bonding last night,” she said, apparently changing the subject. “I’m glad.”

He wondered how much she had seen in his mind, and with what degree of detail. Did she know every word he’d uttered? Had she “seen” through his eyes, experiencing how he kept checking out Heather’s mouth and legs? Did she know that he envied Lance’s bizarre sexual history, because it had included an unknown amount of special Cindy-sex? Did she know how often he dreamed of reaching out to her, and how often he visited her Website, masturbating in front of his computer monitor like a kid, vividly imagining his cock squeezed between her magnificent tits?

“I’ve tried to call Lance several times,” she broke through his silent questions. “After what happened to you last night… I’m worried about him, Anthony.”

“Lance looked as happy as a clam when I left the bar last night. That Heather is a real treasure, from all indications. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit it off over time.”

“I still think we should look in on Lance as soon as we’re done here,” Cindy cautioned. “MagicThunder could hit any one of us anywhere at any time. I’m starting to wonder whether we should all stick together somehow.”

“Not practical,” he answered. “Like right now… We couldn’t show up at Pratt with an entourage. The situation is delicate enough as it is. I think we should do what we need to do. We aren’t safe even if we’re all together, anyway. We won’t be safe until we unravel what MagicThunder is up to.”

“Alana did a little sleuthing on the internet after you left last night,” she informed him. “You were right about The Shadow and his powers, but there was more. Although he ultimately fought to expose evil, he was something of a noirish anti-hero who liked to frighten and even mentally torture his prey.”

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

“Oddly enough, Doc Savage was almost the exact opposite, physically handsome and strong, well-educated and brilliant, like a brawny Sherlock Holmes as Renaissance man. Apparently some of the stories portrayed him as being almost Christ-like in his goodness.”

“Hmmm. Dark vs. light, good vs. evil...”

“Instinctive vs. intellectual, cruel vs. compassionate… Everything split in two, just like the cover illustration of her dirty book. She’s getting at something, Anthony.”

“I agree. We’re good and she’s evil.”

“That’s rather simplistic.”

“Well, it didn’t feel very Christ-like the way she slapped me around last night. With all of the power at her disposal, why take an old-fashioned slug at me?”

“I give up. Why?”

“Because belting someone is cathartic, that’s why. Maybe her invisible knuckles stung for a few minutes, but she enjoyed it, I’m sure.”

“Possibly. But I have a hard time picturing MagicThunder being so… crude.”

“Well it’s pretty obvious which of these pulp heroes she identifies with. She did most of her damage last summer in late night thunderstorms, didn’t she? She’s modeling herself on The Shadow, getting her kicks by slinking around, invisibly shadowing our movements. Face it, she could have us all walking around the streets trying to hump fire hydrants if she wanted, but she’s toying with us instead. This is all like a scary game of tag to her, or maybe hide and seek. She watches, hidden, and picks her spots to stir up trouble.”

“If that’s true, then she could be in the back seat right now,” Cindy responded. She looked up into the rear-view mirror, her eyes intense, and yelled at the emptiness in the back seat. “You’re a pitiful bitch, do you know that?”

“She isn’t in the car,” he said.

“Oh? And how do you know that?”

“I deduced it with my brilliant and Christ-like mind.”

“You’re a dick.”

“An observant dick. She left footprints last night, Cindy. She was invisible, but not ephemeral. She still had form, enough form to smack me a couple of times. It felt like hell, but perhaps it’s an opportunity for us. The rain got her wet just like anyone else. Maybe we can find her, sometimes, if she slips up. She’s detectable, Cindy. And she isn’t in the car.”

* * *

The dean of the school was nearly hidden behind three additional stiffs in dark suits when they were ushered into his office. Because they were never introduced and looked as though they’d been prematurely embalmed, Tony recognized the men as lawyers. Lawyers, just waiting for somebody to fuck up. He figured they’d try to pin the girls’ jumbled minds on him if anything went wrong, in an attempt to cover the school administrators’ asses.

Cindy, unruffled and efficient, insisted that the affected girls be gathered in a quiet dorm room, rather than a sterile classroom. She insisted on a relaxed atmosphere, with the girls bringing an assortment of clothes along, everything from formalwear to lingerie. After her wishes were granted, Tony took up his position outside the appropriate door while she worked inside, doing whatever kinds of crazy shit she did in situations like these.

He thought about some of his old colleagues on the police force, and wondered what they would say if they knew he’d become an investigator/bouncer employed by an internet hottie with a gift for healing others with paranormal sex. They’d never believe it, but if they did, would they envy him? This line of work was certainly unusual, but was it also exciting? Vicariously, yes. And last night, despite the bumps and bruises, the excitement had finally grabbed hold of his dick.

He heard low voices through the door, a gasping cry, several simultaneous moans. Somebody cried out sharply, not quite a scream but something very close, the tone of voice making his cock tingle.

“What exactly is she doing with those girls in there?” one of the lawyer types asked, suddenly standing too close.

“My partner? She has a magical eighteen inch strap-on,” Tony answered, working hard to keep his expression appropriately glum. “Those girls will answer to any name she gives them when she’s done.”

“That isn’t the least bit funny,” the lawyer stiffened. “I insist…”

”No, I insist,” Tony cut him off. “I insist that you get out of my face. You’re about two words from really pissing me off.”

The lawyer retreated, the four men standing uncomfortably down the hallway, probably wondering what the hell they’d invited onto their campus.

Fuck them. He tuned them out, and tuned out the sounds behind the door as best he could. He really didn’t mind standing and doing nothing, acting as Cindy’s bodyguard while she worked her wonders. Standing there relaxed him in a way, giving him a chance to think without really thinking. Time slipped by, and he gradually realized that his dick ached in a wonderful way that it hadn’t ached since before he was married, since he’d fucked his best friend’s sister for three consecutive days and nights in a cabin in the Catskills.

He remembered that girl, Claire. Cute as a button with cheerleader legs that set his sixteen year-old balls on fire. If her family hadn’t relocated to the west coast at the end of that summer, would they have remained an item? Might he have remained single, playing the field like most of his friends from way back, having all sorts of sex adventures rather than marrying so young?

He remembered how hard he fell for Mary when he met her. She was the proverbial devout Catholic virgin, incongruously equipped with a lascivious smile and a sinfully tight and toned body that sent jolts of energy into his young cock. Had it been Mary, the real Mary, that got to him like that, or some idea of femininity that she’d embodied, some idea that he couldn’t resist? Cindy called that the projection of a man’s “anima”, some piece of himself that gets invisibly superimposed onto a particular woman, making her appear perfect, irresistible. Like falling in love with her was a hidden way to fall in love with himself.

He didn’t know what he thought of Cindy’s overly-complicated psychological theories — he just knew that he fell for Mary to an almost frightening degree, wanting to be near her so badly that he’d accompanied her to church with her family at times, kneeling and praying with a very un-churchlike hard-on in his dress pants. Mary wouldn’t allow him past second base until they were married, so he married her young, and ended up a father at eighteen.

The things we do for sex, he thought. The things we do because a woman has an alluring smile, or eyes with a certain glint, or great legs or a round and shapely ass. Altered lives, changed goals, pheromones and hormones in control, not so different than…

“Anthony?” Cindy interrupted his memories, finally coming out of the girls’ dorm room. Her fine blonde hair was a mess and her cheeks were flushed. “I’m going to need your help this time.”

“Holy shit,” he breathed, when she described what she had in mind. So much time gone by without sex, and now…

“I guess when it rains, it pours,” she said, probably reading his thoughts.

“I just go in there and… do them?”

“If you’re up to it. I know how much you went through last night. We could wait, and come back tomorrow, but the girls are ready right now. Or maybe I could ask Lance, if it turns out he’s cured. But I’d rather it was you.”

“I just… do them? This is their cure?”

“I’ve done all I can. MagicThunder made it impossible for me to undo this last bit all by myself. Just remember that all three have to find the exit more or less together.”

“Find the exit?”

“Sorry. Cum together. And it can’t be me, Anthony. For obvious reasons.”

Because of the one girl’s imposed name, Anita Thikwun. They had to physically act out the puns together to fully crawl out from under MagicThunder’s spell.

“Things will have to be configured in a certain way,” Cindy added. “You know which girl is which, right? ‘Emma’ can go whichever way she chooses, but the pattern is more specific with the other two.”

“They’ll just… want me?”

“I’ve set their minds up to receive you, yes. They’re waiting, Anthony. Anxiously.”

He glanced past Cindy, trying to read how the dean and his little grouping of vultures were reacting to all of this.

“They haven’t heard a word. I’m… taking pains about that. And none of them will remember either one of us by tonight, I guarantee it. Now get in there! I’ll wait out here and be your guard dog this time. It’s all okay.”

He shrugged in wonder before turning, and opening the door.

* * *

The dorm room was larger and cozier than he would have expected, with clothing of all kinds strewn everywhere, as though they had spent the day exploring all sorts of role-playing scenarios. All three girls currently lounged in seductive positions on a double bed, their lovely bodies in various stages of undress.

They had all been obviously beautiful before, but had looked nothing like this when he’d interviewed them the previous day. All three had been wearing jeans and sneakers then, their expressions half-blank. Now, each girl was decked out in some form of seductive lingerie, to the point that it was like entering the back room of a dorm party with a Fredericks of Hollywood theme.

But the real difference was in them, in their eyes, and the way their tongues moved along the length of their lips. His presence was met with a level of focus that was almost carnivorous, as though Cindy had talked up his dick the way a good waitress recommends the homemade desserts. They wanted him, and they were going to have him.

“We’ve… been waiting,” the one really named Tawny whispered.

It was like going back to college, except that college had never been like this for him. He’d been prematurely adult, with a young family to take care of, never even having time to lust for sexual hijinks.

“Emma Evergonnacome?” the dark-haired beauty really named Michelle purred, squeezing her monumental breasts together with the insides of her arms. The blue bustier trying to hold her tits in place looked like it was headed for a system failure.

“You know, I’m beginning to think you are,” he answered, his dick springing to life.

“Anita Thikwun,” the girl named Tawny whispered. Her athletic body, tightly wrapped inside of a fire engine red teddy, was lean everywhere except for her tits, and her eyes never deviated from the area of his crotch. She uncurled her legs slowly, extending one out and arching her foot for effect. Long runner’s legs, shaped just the way he liked them, in sheer red stockings and matching heels. She looked like a late Valentine’s gift as she rose from the bed, her hands reaching out and deftly unfastening his belt. He gave in, felt all of his trepidations about the strange situation slipping away, any tensions leaving his body to take up residence in his straining dick.

He smelled female lust rising into the air, and he must not have been the only one. Sherri, now Ida Lichterclit, moaned loudly, then leaned over and began to pull Michelle’s thong panties down her legs. True to the pun, it didn’t look like Sherri was going to give him much attention in this deal. A shame, because to his eyes she was definitely the cream of the crop, with the cutest face and the hottest all-round body. Not quite as toned, not quite as heart-stopping to look at, but in so many ways she was the closest in looks to Cindy.

Funny, how his mind drew comparisons like that. If Sherri/Ida reminded him of Cindy, then Anita/Tawny was like a stand-in for Alana, all taut and super-svelte and flexible. And Michelle/Emma, with her grand tits, was much like… well, like Emma, his daughter. His lovely daughter with her sweet smile and her beautiful huge knockers.

Don’t think like that, he corrected inside, as Tawny pushed him down onto his back, extracting his hard cock and moving in deliberately with her lips. Michelle’s breasts, spilling out from the confines of her bustier, blocked out the light overhead until he could see nothing in his field of vision but two masses of fine pliant flesh, his face almost completely smothered in tit. He couldn’t really keep track of the others with all of this breast-flesh in his face, but what the hell? He did what anyone would do, taking his tongue on a magic rack ride, gliding and sliding it along every succulent inch, pausing at the nipples to suck, and dab, and holy fuck, the things beginning to happen to the head of his cock down there, Tawny’s hands holding him firm, her lips conforming to him, her tongue taking slow and languorous swipes…

Too much, too fast, he was getting too excited too quickly, the abundance of young cunt in the room getting to him. The conflagration needed to be managed somehow, orchestrated into a group effort so that the girls did their thing all at once.

He began to feel lightheaded, probably from the way Anita/Tawny was twisting her mouth around the shaft of his cock. He needed to back up, get the girls more focused on each other. He could ram himself into Tawny right near the end, trying to time her explosion to that of the others, and then, according to Cindy, everyone’s horny carriages would turn back into pumpkins.

He grasped Michelle’s shoulders, lifting her up to restore his field of vision. “Ahh!” he cried, instinctively blinking his eyes.

Not possible, all wrong…

Michelle had become Emma, his Emma. Her hair was reddish instead of dark, her features more refined, her lips like the perfect mix of his own and Mary’s… He blinked again, trying to shake the hallucination away.

Suck on my great big tits, Daddy, he heard in his mind, as Michelle/now Emma but not Emma shoved her grand mounds into his face, more aggressively this time.

“Mmmmf!” he tried to protest, turning his head. He caught sight of the girl working his cock, the girl who should be Tawny. She was Alana, down to the slightest detail. He didn’t even need to see Sherri/Ida to know that he would see her as Cindy.

She was in here somehow, MagicThunder, fucking with his mind, making him see things all wrong! He thought he heard a soft laugh, a chuckle of sorts, and he didn’t think the sound had come from any of the three girls he could see.

He tried to get up, but couldn’t. He tried to call out to Cindy, the real Cindy, out there beyond the door, but no sound came out. “Fuck you!” he managed to croak, just as his daughter shifted her body above him, planting her hot wet pussy in front of his face.

Eat me out, Daddy, his daughter’s voice swept through him.

No! he tried to shout, but instead his tongue snaked out, tasting Emma’s warm nectar… No, even though this was not really Emma, he would not taste this pussy. He wouldn’t, he… it wasn’t Emma, it was… it was… It tasted so right, her young body so fucking delicious, just as Alana’s mouth swirling saliva all around his cock was delicious, pulling on him with expert finesse with her cheeks...

Oh God, he’d always known that Alana would give incredible head. She’d been straight before Cindy bent her the other way and he’d been dying to fuck her for months. He’d wanted to bang his daughter since she was fourteen, and had fantasized about giving Cindy a good hard poke long before he even met her, her siren internet photos calling out to him through his computer monitor, getting him so hard…

“Fuck!” he managed to shout into the pussy poised in front of his lips. This was not Emma! This wasn’t Alana sucking his cock! And these weren’t his thoughts! It was all MagicThunder, invading his perceptions, twisting them, turning three young women he didn’t know into the three that were the most important to him now. And he was being made to wish for things, things he would never allow himself to wish for.

“Don’t be silly, Anthony,” he heard the Cindy stand-in say, her voice seductive, playful. “You’ve wished for this dozens of times. You know you have.”

As if on cue, Emma moved her pussy aside and he looked up the length of Cindy’s gorgeous-beyond-gorgeous body, standing over top of him, her feet planted beside his hips. It wasn’t really Cindy, it was not the real Cindy looking down with that teasing smile and narrowed eyes, the same eyes that bewitched him in her photos, with that “oh would you die and go to heaven if you ever got hold of this” smile that kept the credit cards charging, that seemed to take the wonders of her sex-goddess body and gift-wrap them for his throbbing cock, tying a bow around his balls, making them ache, making him want her so badly. She was too gorgeous, so fucking gorgeous that it wasn’t even fair.

“No, it isn’t fair at all, is it Anthony? So many times you’ve wanted me to reach out and relieve the pressure, to stroke your hardness, to grab the fever you feel and pull it right out through your cock. You want me to stand here and surround you with wet heat, bringing you inside of this body, deep inside where you know I can do things you’ve never even imagined, the kinds of things I’ve done for Lance, and Emma, and Alana…”

“Everyone… but me,” he whispered, or was made to whisper.

“You want me.”

“Yes!”

“You want Alana.”

“Yes.”

“You want Emma.”

“N…no.”

“Oh yes, you do. Don’t lie.”

“No! I…”

“You want to fuck us until we’re delirious, Anthony. All of us.”

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. Alana’s sucking intensified, and now Emma was crawling over him, through Cindy’s spread legs, and oh no, Alana released his dick, backing away, making room for Emma to squat over him, her pussy so inviting, and so open…

“N…nooo…” he moaned.

With her back to him, his daughter/not-daughter lowered herself down, slipping her slit over his cockhead like a snug, wet, glorious glove. He tried to move again, tried to even shut his eyes, and failed. And so he watched, watched Emma begin to rock on her haunches, her huge breasts visible even from the back, her ass so beautifully shaped, her tight sopping pussy coating him, beginning to slip up and down. I am not fucking my daughter! he tried to reassure himself, but his perceptions disagreed, his dick sliding in and out of a girl who looked just like Emma, panting in Emma’s voice, her fucking glorious pussy probably feeling exactly as his daughter’s pussy would feel, MagicThunder hitting him with every detail, making it like the real thing, making it almost true…

He tried to keep from enjoying it. He tried to will his dick into not loving the feel of her slipping and sliding, twisting her body for additional friction, fucking him like an expert, fucking him like some young whore…

“Cindy” laughed maliciously and hopped off the bed, moving out of his line of sight. Alana reappeared, standing, positioning her cunt in front of his daughter’s face. He couldn’t see Emma’s tongue reaching out, licking Alana’s slit while she reamed herself with his rod, but the fluttering of Alana’s eyes told him, showed her pleasure, the two beauties so connected, so hot…

“Fuck Emma until she’s delirious, Anthony,” Cindy commanded.

“No! I…”

“Fuck her!”

“No… Iyyyooohhhhh!” he cried out, Emma’s pussy suddenly slipping up and down his pole faster, the walls of her pussy squeezing. She began to moan loudly, expressing her own surge of passion.

“You will fuck us all!” Cindy commanded, and he came as she spoke, shooting deep into Emma, feeling her pussy spasm inside, her head thrown back, her mouth open to vent her own silent orgasm.

Oh God forgive me, he thought.

“She isn’t delirious yet, Anthony,” Cindy teased, and he felt his cock instantly recover, the pressure back as though his release had never happened.

“N…no…”

“Fuck her!”

His hips bucked, although he didn’t think he was making them move. His still-hard cock slammed into Emma, slammed hard so that she yelped, and then screamed, and then begged for him to go faster, to plunge in deeper…

She came again. And again. Her body was going wild above him, Alana holding onto Emma’s big tits now, squeezing them and feeling the flesh surge as Emma shook, and dipped, and he felt like he was just getting harder, and thicker, filling Emma to capacity as he fucking jackhammered her cunt, his dick plunging in and out like somebody had put a string of quarters into a magic dick machine.

Emma came. Emma came again, and he just kept pumping, helpless to stop, until her head lolled to the right, her upper body following, and she toppled to the side, lights out and nobody home.

“My turn!” Alana/Tawny cried, leaping onto his dick.

Unlike Emma, Alana faced him, squatting above and using her strong legs to mirror his bucking hips with her own up/down motions. He should be tired, he should be practically crippled with a softened or bruised dick, but he miraculously, automatically pumped away, watching her tight muscles ripple, watching her pussy meet everything he was dishing out, watching her hands descend to finger her clit, her expression shifting, her breasts flushing red.

“Oh Yesss!” she screamed, her legs unbending, her body defying gravity as her legs swung out to the side, hands grasping ankles yoga-like, her pelvis bobbing her pussy up and down his pole like she was some kind of lighter than air bouncy toy.

And then she began to spin, slowly, familiarly, MagicThunder conducting a new kind of spin-job.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” the girl who looked like Alana cried, her voice coming and going in volume as she revolved. He felt her pussy spasm, felt her explode over and over, and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t doing the same. The pressure in his dick was off the charts, his eyes bugging out. He had to cum, he had to fucking cum, oh fuck why wasn’t he cumming?

Alana spun right off of him, her rear bouncing twice on the bed before she fell to the floor, her limbs all akimbo.

“I knew you could fuck them senseless,” Cindy/not Cindy purred. “Which only leaves me, and I’m the one you want the most, aren’t I?”

He fought to ignore her, his cock on fire like a hot drill bit. He felt like he could explode spontaneously, shooting a load that would blast a hole in the ceiling.

Answer me! he heard deep inside his brain in Cindy’s voice. You’ve wanted to fuck Cindy for months!

His mouth opened to answer, but he resisted, his lips contorting, his tongue feeling thick…

She hopped onto the bed again, this girl who was not really Cindy, standing over top of him, putting a foot on his abdomen like a conqueror.

You’re making me annngryyy… she spoke into his mind, her eyes burning, her blonde hair beginning to move as though a hot wind was gusting through the room, originating from her growing fury and the intensity of her desire to fuck him good.

You’re a juvenile pathetic cunt! he thought as loudly as a thought could be thought, and almost without skipping a beat, the girl he saw as Cindy leaned down to smack the side of his face with the back of her hand.

It was really MagicThunder getting angry, he reminded himself, not this falsely-perceived teenager standing in for Cindy. He wondered whether there was some way to make MagicThunder slip up, to get her so pissed-off that she lost her focus, abandoning her pussy-puppet to give him a good slug herself. He couldn’t fight her if he couldn’t find her, and…

“Oh fuck!” he whispered, feeling his body beginning to lift horizontally off the mattress, his cock almost racing into “Cindy’s” grip. She shoved his hardness inside of herself as she threw her body onto his, hugging him tight, thrusting her tongue into his mouth.

And then they began to rotate in the air like rotisserie lovers, his cock going in and out of her with a weird kind of centrifugal thrust.

“Ahhhhh!” he cried as their velocity increased, his cheeks feeling like they were flying out from his gums, long blonde hair whipping at his face. The details of the room became a blur, the cum backed up in his cock feeling like it was being whipped, fucking frappe’d.

“Anthony!” he heard Cindy shout in alarm, and he felt something smacking him, a rough turbulence interrupting his flight. With a slosh of sound he was thrust away, his back and buttocks smacking flat against a wall. He thought he saw Cindy holding Cindy, comforting her, as he dropped to the floor.

* * *

Alana’s attention kept wandering as she studied the images from yesterday’s photo/fuck session. The jpegs were incredibly hot, maybe too hot. She couldn’t help feeling damp between her legs as she scrolled through the photos of herself, floating in the air, and Cindy standing there with the bearing of a nude orchestra conductor. She wasn’t worried that visitors to the Website would actually believe in the magical nature of the sex — though it was beyond her own modest skills, a masterful Photoshop practitioner could easily paste together images like this. No, the problem lay in finding images where Emma could be effectively cropped out of the action. As gorgeous as Emma was, and with a body to draw in even more subscribers with a taste for huge breasts, Cindy would never allow Emma’s image to appear on the Website, not when the still-stricken girl couldn’t give her consent in any meaningful way.

She giggled softly, just imagining Tony going all apeshit in his NYPD way, if he clicked onto the Website and saw his daughter there, a head planted between her legs. He knew that Cindy and Emma went at it regularly, but did he know that Cindy allowed Emma to be shared every blue moon?

She surveyed the images from the end of the shoot, focusing on a shot where all three of them were poised to explode. Clicking on the magnification tool, she zeroed in on Emma’s face, seen almost in profile. Just look at that open mouth, at those lips, so full, glistening in the colored lights. She scrolled down, like a traveler mapping every bit of Emma’s body. The terrain made her lick her lips, and her mouth wasn’t the only thing getting wet. Just look at the size of those mighty breasts, nipples extended. Just look at that tight abdomen, and those hipbones, and there, catching the colored lights, the downy reddish hairs above Emma’s constantly needy pussy.

She looked up past the computer monitor, to the loft bed across the room. She could only see one of Emma’s hands up there, dangling off the edge of the mattress. She was sleeping on her belly, her breasts compressed. Emma only thought about sex — did she dream about it, too? Her pussy was probably in contact with the sheets, making a spot on the bed, a zone of female fragrance. Getting the sheets damp. Making the sleeping area smell just right, but not for sleeping.

Go up there and lay on top of her, a thought surfaced. Her pussy ached from the thought, so much so that she had to squeeze her thighs together, hard. No, no, she couldn’t go up there and wake Emma. Cindy had done some special thing to put Emma to sleep. Emma was in her apartment as a form of protection, not as an object of temptation.

She looked back at the computer screen, but her mind wasn’t in the work. She could see herself quietly climbing up the ladder, straddling Emma’s prone body and lowering herself down, Emma’s firm round ass pushing into her middle, their bodies fitting together just right. She liked that about Emma, that she wasn’t too tall. With their pussies aligned, they could easily hug nipple to nipple, her own pert breasts almost disappearing into the greater mass of Emma’s incredible tits.

She’s dripping on the sheets. Go up there and lick her dry.

What a crazy thought! As though Emma’s velvety cunny would become anything but a wetlands area if she began to touch it, her tongue gently dabbing, her hands grasping the tops of Emma’s thighs, squeezing, her tongue licking and flicking, Emma’s fragrance wetting the skin around her mouth and the bottom of her nose. Turning her on. Making her lose any sense of restraint.

It isn’t fair that Cindy gets to fuck Emma anytime she wants.

True, but a necessary arrangement. Alana didn’t mind sharing Cindy with Emma, but she sometimes wished that she could dictate their lovemaking schedule more often. She had to defer to Emma’s greater needs at times, waiting patiently for her turn. Waiting, and aching, and dripping, and wanting.

And sometimes aching for Emma as much as Cindy. Or sometimes... even more.

Like she wanted to climb that ladder right now, and rub her hot body all over Emma’s back, waking her, switching her on. Emma was something like a freight train with an inexhaustible supply of fuel once she got heated up, to the point that Cindy surmised that the afflicted girl could and might have fucked herself to death if she hadn’t been found, her appetites psychically managed.

Maybe the real danger was that she would fuck someone else to death.

She hissed softly, imagining it, imagining switching Emma on, no psychic restraints, her awesome body on a mission, her lips and tongue and pussy indefatigable. Fucking for hours. Fucking for days. Living for a single purpose, to get off, and get Alana off, over and over and over, as much as she could take. Maybe even more than she could take. What a fucking way to go.

She stood, her heart beating loudly, and began pacing. She needed to stop thinking about getting it on with Emma. She needed to put those glorious tits out of her mind, and ignore how wet she was.

But she couldn’t ignore it, the tingling in her pussy was more like a strain, or a pull, like a rubber-band being stretched too taught. The strain had to be eased, or she might snap.

Masturbate, she definitely needed to masturbate. She could draw a bath, and light some candles, easing into the action, the bathroom door closed so that her moans wouldn’t awaken Emma.

Go up there and finger Emma’s slit instead.

No, she couldn’t…

Go!

No, that would be the worst thing she could do. Yes, she wanted to feel Emma’s tongue curling and slipping inside of her, but tampering with the fragile state Cindy had worked so hard to maintain could be disastrous.

She found herself at the foot of the ladder, staring at Emma’s limp hand. Something wasn’t right, she’d thought she was walking to the bathroom, not here under the bed. She turned her head in the direction of the bathroom, but the will to walk away simply wasn’t there.

She looked back up at Emma’s hand. Two fingers, that was what she loved the most. Two of Emma’s fingers stuffed inside and wiggling, the lining of her pussy stretched, a tongue feathering her clitoris, just the faintest little dabs, almost like there was nothing there to be making her feel so good, so excited.

She climbed three rungs, one for each finger and then the tongue she was dying for, just enough that she could see all of Emma’s body lying there uncovered. She was on her front, her breasts inspiringly squeezed out beyond the width of her torso, legs spread wide. And the hand that wasn’t dangling off the edge of the bed was pressed against her pussy. Keeping it warm? Protecting it?

A slow, almost imperceptible movement of Emma’s fingers gave the answer. Teasing herself in slow motion, perhaps dreaming. Maybe even dreaming of her.

She put one foot out to climb down, but didn’t. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sight of Emma’s hand between her legs. Resting an elbow on the mattress edge, Alana brought her free hand down between her own thighs, and slipped two fingers inside.

She sucked in air, barely able to believe how needy she felt, how insanely sensitive. She slowly scissored her fingers, trembling on the ladder, concentrating hard to hold on and remain silent. This was crazy, masturbating in such a precarious position, but she knew she couldn’t stop now that she had started. She began to gyrate slowly, brushing her nipples against the mahogany sideboard, feeling them become almost as hard as the wood as she kept her eyes fixed on the slow movements of Emma’s teasing hand.

So beautiful in sleep. Such silky thighs, glistening wet. And she was so wet, too, her body so awake by contrast, the speed of her teasing so fast, her mind so painfully aware of her longing.

“Ahhh!” she whispered, her fingers dancing so deliciously inside, striking a chord. “Oh no!” she cried more loudly, as Emma rolled over, staring right into her eyes. Awake. Aware.

“Mmmmmmnnn…” Emma moaned.

“I was just… checking on you,” Alana lied, her eyes locking onto Emma’s prodigious breasts, so full, so creamy. Broad wrinkle patterns from the sheets created criss-cross patterns into their roundness, like canals on Mars.

Or dripping hot love channels on Venus.

Oh God, yes… Alana ached to reach out, to smooth out the lines with her palms, rubbing and stroking every inch of those massive breasts back into shape.

A different look entered Emma’s eyes, her pupils flashing. Alana could see Emma’s lips growing fuller as lust seemed to infuse every pore. It was like watching a caterpillar become a sexual butterfly in a span of seconds, and their hands reached out in unison, their fingers meeting, and beckoning, and agreeing.

Only she couldn’t, she just couldn’t! “I… I can’t, Emma,” she whispered, but it was already too late and she knew it. Emma grasped her hand below the wrist and pulled, and Alana was up on the mattress above the beautiful girl, her breaths coming in gulps, her pussy ablaze, her lips seeking out Emma’s nipples as though drawn by gravity itself, pulled to the roundness of those divine breasts, attracted by their mass, her reservations irrelevant, her resistance squashed by the needs of her body and the feeling of rightness, absolute rightness in taking a swollen nipple between her lips, her tongue tracing its texture, feeling its warmth, her lips beginning to suck, her pussy sizzling hot.

“Oh God I love you,” Emma whispered, her hands on Alana’s cheeks, pulling her head up so their mouths could meet, their tongues circling, their bodies fitting together like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, breast to breast, navel to navel, hipbones pressing, wet on wet.

I can’t be doing this! Alana thought as Emma flipped her over, taking control, ending the kiss only to smother her face with a giant breast, a hand squeezing the flesh of her right thigh, sweeping up to brush against her heat, pausing to press, and stroke, and dabble.

How did this happen? she asked inside, but it didn’t matter how it had happened. There was only the now, only the moment, her body surrendering, her pussy opening to Emma’s fingers, pushing their way inside. She sucked on the breast above, reveled in its weight, her hands reaching down to squeeze Emma’s thighs.

The huge pressing breast moved down, Emma repositioning her body, turning to plant her head between Alana’s legs as fragrant heat was brought to her waiting lips.

Alana’s tongue reached up, seeking, desiring, darting inside, her open mouth crying out as two fingers slipped inside her own molten tunnel, so far away down there yet sending chills everywhere. The tip of Emma’s tongue began to stroke her clitoris, setting her ablaze, making her entire body gasp. Oh God, oh yes, eat and be eaten, give and be taken, die over and over again and be given life, and energy, and release…

“I love you!” Emma cried into her cunt, the words resonating so deeply, filling her body with sound and feeling.

“Oh God, I love you too!” Alana answered into slippery wetness, her words turned into liquid heat.

So wrong, but so right. So necessary. Primal. Real. Overwhelming. Love. Life.

* * *

He was bumping, bumpity bump bump bump. The whole world was shaking and moving, something vibrating against the top of his head.

His head ached, his shoulder hurt, and his dick felt drained like he’d fucked a whole squad of cheerleaders, and maybe some furry mascots, too. He slowly opened one eye, saw grey sky framed by a car window, dark tree limbs moving by fast.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“In your car,” Cindy answered. “We’re somewhere in Brooklyn, hopefully on the way to the Williamsburg Bridge. We have to get back to Manhattan to check on Lance, and Alana and Emma. There was something on the radio about an incident at the Hammerhead Bar last night, Anthony. I've tried to call Lance on both his phones but no one is answering. I’m really worried.”

He was lying in the back, his feet propped on the headrest of the passenger seat. “What the fuck happened?” he asked, raising his head and torso into something approximating a sitting position.

“MagicThunder got in the room with you is what happened,” Cindy answered, glancing back over her shoulder. “I don’t understand it! I was in front of the door the whole time!”

Tony winced as the car jolted through a pothole. They were in one of Brooklyn’s low-rise neighborhoods “How did we get out of the dorms?” he asked.

Cindy didn’t answer, turning on the wipers as the rain began to come down again. “The rain is beginning to fall as sleet,” she commented. “The temperature is dropping.”

“Cindy, tell me what kind of scene we left back there.”

“You should rest and clear your head.”

“You aren’t answering my question. What kind of scene did we leave? How are the three girls? How did we get out of there?”

“You know exactly what the scene was like!” she exploded. “Michelle and Tawny were crumpled like rag dolls on the bed and floor, and Sherri was practically velcroed to your body when I burst through the door. You were corkscrewing her in the air as though the two of you were conducting sex research in a wind tunnel!”

“MagicThunder… took control of me,” he muttered, rubbing at his temples. “She made me… do things.”

“She made you experience fucking Alana, and me. She made you experience fucking your daughter.”

He started to ask her how she knew that, but then stopped himself. Of course she knew. “Fuck, did she get away? Did you at least see her?”

“I think I felt her brush past me while I tried to get you and Sherri out of the air. I would have gone after her but the dean and his pack of legal heavies rushed into the room.”

“Oh fuck!”

“They were not happy with the state of things, as you can imagine.”

“So you… Oh no. What did you do?”

“Everything was completely messed up, Anthony! The girls aren’t cured, or at least I can’t imagine they are. I had everything going so well, and I know you could have managed things if MagicThunder hadn’t intervened. But as things are, the girls might even be worse off than when we arrived!”

“What did you do with the administrators? Are we in trouble?”

“We aren’t in trouble.”

“You mc’d them, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did!”

“How? What did you do, Cindy?”

“The four men will wake up peacefully with the three girls, unless somebody walks into the room. I made the men strip out of their clothes and cum all over themselves, then I put them to sleep. They won’t remember us, and neither will the girls. And the lawyers will be so freaked to have their semen in the room that they’ll bury the entire event. I don’t see how we can go back to try again, but no one can come after us, I swear.”

He rubbed his throbbing temples and then raised himself to put his mouth near her ear, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Look, we need to have a serious talk. You can do more than you’ve been letting on, can’t you?”

“Looks like heavy traffic leading to the bridge. But I finally see the entrance up ahead.”

“This is ridiculous,” he sighed, awkwardly crawling over the seats into the front of the car. He took up an unfamiliar position in the passenger seat, his back against the window. “Talk to me, Cindy. We both know what happened back there MagicThunder-wise, but you’re keeping me in the dark about the extent of your abilities. What are you planning to do, let one new fact drip out every week? How does that help us in our quest? Give me the fucking facts, so I can help!”

She glanced at him, her expression stubborn, returning her concentration to the traffic.

“I thought it was difficult for you to control men,” he said. “I thought it wiped you out. What else can you do that I don’t know? A lot? A little? How much in the fucking dark am I here?”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“I’m not yelling! Fuck, I am yelling. It’s because I’m still spinning and I’m pissed.”

“I can do a lot, Anthony.”

“Christ, I should have known. A little lot or a whole lot? Tell me.”

He saw her jaw tighten, but then it relaxed, and she took her focus off the road to look him in the eye. “I can do… just about anything,” she admitted.

“Anything? What does that mean?”

“She made me a lot like her, Anthony. I don’t… I mean I don’t use it. Much. Hardly at all. It scares me to think what I might be capable of, so I don’t… But when I’ve tried something, to see if I can… I usually can. The only really difficult thing is fixing the damage that MagicThunder has caused in others. It’s like there’s this barrier, or an extra layer in people’s minds that I have fight through to unlock.”

“JesusfuckingChrist! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I know it sounds lame, but I’m sorry, really. I thought you’d be afraid that I’d become someone like her, ready to go off, like I was some kind of ticking time-bomb. I worry about that. I worry about that a lot.”

“Losing control and becoming like MagicThunder?”

“No, not that, not unless she makes it happen like she did last summer. I worry that people would fear me. I’m not a bad person, Anthony. I wouldn’t… It was all a fantasy, I never thought it could become real! But it doesn’t even matter now. I haven’t told anyone until right now. No one knows. I didn’t even know at first.”

“Lance doesn’t know?”

“No, but he suspects, from what we’ve… I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Alana doesn’t know?”

“She knows some… but not really. MagicThunder does, of course. She made me this way, for whatever reasons.”

Unfuckingbelievable. To approach the almost unimaginable powers of MagicThunder, without confiding in him…

He felt his dick harden and it ached, it ached like a dick that had gotten more use in two days than it had in the last ten years. He realized that he couldn’t help it, though, he couldn’t help being turned on by the thought of what she could do.

Too many emotions rushed through him all at once, and he rolled down his window to let the wind and rain cool his face, blowing his previous conceptions out into the thick air. All of this time, keeping a secret like that bottled up. All of this time, Cindy had been doing the most difficult work, the work where she often failed, rather than getting off on her powers the way MagicThunder did. And all of this time, he’d been thinking that they didn’t stand a chance against MagicThunder, that they had no effective weapons to fight back with.

He rolled his window up, accepting the new reality. He was upset, pissed-off… But he’d been that way for months, dulling his brain with scotch because he’d felt so angry and frustrated. Now, for the first time in a very long time, he felt a glimmer of real hope.

“Could you take her on, Cindy? Head to head, so to speak — if we could get the two of you in a confined space…”

“It almost happened this afternoon, Anthony. If I hadn’t needed to deal with those stupid lawyers… I can’t become invisible, or walk through fucking walls — I don’t understand how she’s doing all of that, it doesn’t even make sense! But could I take her down? Yes, I think I could. I could put up one hell of a fight, and maybe even win. It’s what I’ve been wanting for months, the chance to put a stop to all of this. Maybe she thought she was creating another monster when she gave me these abilities, but what she really created is a worthy opponent. I think I could kick her juvenile ass.”

“I thought… All of this time, I’ve thought we were on a fucking suicide mission.”

“I know. You’re a brave man.”

“Pull over here, will you? Let me get some aspirin, unless you can reach into my head and cure my headache.”

She smiled, in that incredibly sexy way of hers, her eyes bright. In that one open glance, he could see that they were on new ground together.

“Go get your aspirin, Anthony. But hurry.”

“And I’ll drive, okay? Navigating through the city is something I can do with my eyes closed, and you’re…”

“Lost without you,” she laughed, pulling up to the curb.

“Cindy?” he said, as he got out.

“Yes?”

“After you’ve kicked MagicThunder’s ass? I owe her a couple of slaps to the face, and I’m going to want to take them.”

“No problem, Anthony. I’ll save a piece of her for you. I’ll save a piece of her for everybody.”

SHADOW PLAY

by Ghosthostblue

Chapter Four - The Enemy Within

“It’s like an epidemic!” Cindy exclaimed, pouring herself an unusually full glass of Chardonnay.

“No shit,” Tony answered. They’d heard Emma’s wailing and grunting the second the elevator door opened on the tenth floor, instantly aware that MagicThunder had paid a visit right here on their home turf.

“I can’t understand it! It’s like she’s cloned herself or something, to be in several places at once! She’s causing trouble everywhere!”

Not everywhere. Only with their little grouping, it seemed, as the police reports of last night's trouble at the Hammerhead indicated shorter-lasting effects than the sex riots last year. Lance and his date had their MagicThunder run-in almost immediately after he'd left the bar. That made two times now that Lance had been fucked with. Tony had been hit twice himself, his cock aching in his pants from overuse after a period of long near-hibernation. They were losing control of the situation, almost every situation, with sexual fires breaking out everywhere.

How had MagicThunder gotten from Manhattan to Queens so fast, fast enough to ambush him at his home? Each attack presented new unanswered questions, and perhaps the worst part of it was that they still had no useful theories about the goals of MagicThunder’s game.

Cindy sat across from him, looking wired. She had just finished a private hour with Alana and Emma both, doing God knew what to counter MagicThunder’s latest attack.

“How is Emma?” he asked, addressing his most personal concern. “Did you… Were you able to…”

The uncertainty on Cindy’s face was not reassuring. “I managed to sedate her, for the moment. Other than that, I really don’t know what to say, Anthony. Everything I tried to establish in her psyche over the past several months has been turned upside-down. It isn’t Alana’s fault, I know… She didn’t mean to… to...”

“To fuck everything up? To climb into bed with my daughter and undo all of your work with her tongue? Well thank God for small favors! Thank God she didn’t intend to turn Emma back into a salivating nymphomaniac!”

“Don’t be angry with her, Anthony. Alana really cares about Emma, perhaps even more than I'd realized. MagicThunder got to her the same way she did to you. Don’t judge her, unless you want to judge your own ‘willingness’ to commit virtual incest a few hours ago.”

That shut him up. His mouth tightened, but fuck — she was right. They were all being played, all losing control at different times and in different ways. And the question he kept asking himself was this: How could they hope to protect themselves from their own secret wishes? It seemed to him that MagicThunder was hitting them with something like mind-control judo, throwing them off balance with their own deepest desires. He’d just bet that Alana had been wanting to get it on with Emma, one on one, without Cindy around for a change. If so, her wish had been granted. Likewise, Lance wanted his pipes to work without Cindy having to be there to act as his plumber. Again, wish granted, and Lance even got a Rolls Royce of a dick in the bargain.

What were they fighting when the victim actually wanted the forbidden actions or effects to occur? For his own part, he’d wanted to experience supernatural sex in the worst way, and now he had. And he’d fantasized about fucking Alana and her tight workout yoga body, and drilling deep into Cindy, and in a way he’d been given incredibly thrilling facsimiles of both experiences.

But not Emma. He’d never wanted to fuck his daughter. Never.

Which bothered him, in so many ways. His gift as an investigator was in recognizing patterns out of apparent chaos, elucidating motives by piercing hidden designs. He could almost see a strange logic beginning to emerge, almost sniff out MagicThunder’s intentions. Except for several pieces, or actions, that simply didn’t fit into the puzzle.

“It’s so frustrating!” Cindy vented for him. “Face to face, I know I could take her on. But like this, attacking my friends right under my nose… She’s toying with us! I can just see her laughing, shaking her huge boobs at us and laughing!”

“I don’t care about being laughed at,” Tony responded. “I care about irreparable damage. We’ve all been tossed around, but we haven’t been harmed. Yet.”

“Except perhaps Emma.”

“Fuck. Have all of your efforts been undone, Cindy?”

“No, please don’t torture yourself about that. She isn’t the same she was at the end of last year, Anthony. But she’s… changed.”

“Changed? What the hell is ‘changed’?”

“Perhaps I should say that an important dynamic has changed. Emma… I’m not so sure where Emma is, emotionally.”

“What dynamic? Which emotions? Talk to me.”

Cindy looked into her glass. Looked hard, looked deep. “I really don’t know whether I should tell you this.”

“You should tell me. Fucking tell me, Cindy. It’s my daughter we’re talking about.”

“This wasn’t the first time that Alana and Emma… You know…”

He’d always suspected that, but had never really wanted to know.

“I don’t even care whether you approve or not,” Cindy went on. “It was… necessary, and supervised. And it might have been helping Emma. At least it didn’t hurt.”

“But now?”

“But now…An unforeseen development.”

“Which is?”

“Alana has fallen in love with Emma.”

“You mean MagicThunder made her fall in love with Emma.”

“No, I… I don’t think so. I can read things like that quite clearly. The feelings Alana has… They’re hers. They’re real. And they’re very, very deep. She can barely believe it herself, but Alana is in love.”

“But… I guess I thought…”

“That Alana had fallen in love with me?”

“Yeah.”

She stood, and walked over to the windows, looking out at the twilight glow and the city’s lights, twinkling on. “I guess I was right there with you,” Cindy finally spoke. “I’m… a little bit stunned.”

Tony could understand love taking unforeseen turns. His right hand moved, like it wanted to reach for a glass to take a good long shot by reflex. Only he felt no desire for scotch, which might be as strange as anything else going on around him.

“It’s probably because of all the sex,” Cindy said.

“Alana falling for Emma?”

“No, I mean you not needing a drink. Sorry to be so blunt, but you were cunt-starved, Anthony, and you were filling the void with booze, or perhaps dulling the pain. You aren’t particularly needy at the moment, because of… obvious things. So no compulsion to drink.”

“Well…” he began, feeling off-balance. She had tapped into him again, but he couldn’t even feel uncomfortable about it. In fact, he didn’t know what the hell he felt anymore.

“So there’s no need to worry about what I can see, is there Anthony? I’m totally confused, too. I want everyone to be happy, of course… But it’s hard to know where to be with this change between Alana and Emma. I’ve been working hard to get Emma to be balanced, not neutered — that’s been part of the difficulty all along, keeping her libido alive while trying to restore some kind of interests beyond a wish to get off. But how much sex is right in her case? And what about Alana? Does she understand what she’s getting herself into? Where Emma goes from here is a total unknown, and her feelings are so submerged, about me, about Alana…”

“Or about me?”

“That too. Emma’s emotional life is a real mystery, Anthony. I can’t read it at all. She seems to be more aware these days, but… I’m really not sure where to go next.”

“You’re saying that you don’t know whether this new situation is a help or a hindrance in bringing her back.”

“Exactly. I’m stumped, and not only about that. MagicThunder is pulling rabbits out of her hat that I hadn’t anticipated. She seems to be nowhere and everywhere, going behind my back instead of confronting me. She isn’t exactly causing harm…”

“Not causing harm? Don’t forget the way she slapped me around. And what she made me do to those three girls.”

“All of which is much less severe than what she made me do to Emma last year, or half the city, for that matter. Everything seems all catawampus — her ability to be everywhere, seemingly walking through walls… And the ‘attacks’ don’t feel right, either. It’s… it’s all wrong somehow!”

He sensed that Cindy was struggling with more than she was admitting to, and why not? He’d never really been clear about her feelings towards Alana and Emma, or Lance for that matter. He’d been tempted to ask several times, but it just seemed too personal, like ground he had never been invited to step upon. Were they mostly like patients who needed to have psychic sex doled out to them? Were they what some people called “fuck friends”? Or had Cindy developed deeper feelings for them, or at least some of them?

“I’d rather that you focused on MagicThunder’s psyche, Anthony. I can deal with mine.”

“Stop that!” he shouted, making her laugh.

“I’m beginning to worry about Lance again,” she changed the subject. “He should be here by now.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he replied. “I had the distinct impression that he and Heather… That it might have gone deeper than the sex.”

They had checked on Lance immediately upon returning to Manhattan, panicked that he didn’t answer either of his phones or his doorbell. Their noses almost blasted by the scent of sex the instant Cindy let them into his building, they practically broke Lance’s door down, expecting the worst. Only to find Lance and Heather sleeping together — and actually sleeping — linked together in a loving embrace, obviously exhausted and contented by who knew how much lovemaking.

“Lance is lucky,” Cindy said now. “Heather is stunning, and MagicThunder could have screwed with her much more than it appears she did. He’s… I think he might be able to be happy with her.”

Because she looks a lot like you, Tony almost said, figuring that she could probably read the thought anyway.

The buzzer sounded as if on cue, and she got up to speak into the intercom.

“Looks like fresh trouble,” Lance’s voice squawked from below. “There’s a FedEx envelope for you down here, from M.Thunder in Cumsaton, Maine.”

She and Tony locked eyes.

“Showtime,” he said.

“Or at least our next clue.”

* * *

“Well this is certainly unexpected,” Cindy said, her eyes re-reading the envelope's contents.

They were all gathered together again in Cindy’s apartment. Lance sat alone this time, while Emma and Alana had gathered together on the floor, a wool shawl spread across their laps for warmth. It was completely dark outside and snowing, a late blast of winter invading their early spring weather on wicked glass-rattling winds. Cindy, in jeans and a tight pullover sweater, paced back and forth near the windows, a small sheet of paper in her hands.

“A postcard with train ticket stubs, and then a proverb on evil?” Lance asked. “What does any of that have to do with anything?”

“I thought the proverb was beautiful,” Alana countered. “And completely relevant to the situation, although I don’t know what she’s trying to tell us.”

“Read both of them again,” Tony suggested. “The postcard and the proverb.”

Cindy stopped pacing, coming closer to the group, lowering herself to her knees near one of the lights.

“The postcard says: ’Had a great time in New York seeing the sights. Sorry there wasn’t time to stick around and play. Good luck with everything and wish you were here, M.T.’ And the Amtrak tickets show a single passenger, leaving Boston for New York three days ago and returning yesterday evening.”

“She’s loony,” Lance said. “We know damn well she’s still in the city. It’s a trick.”

“Here’s the proverb,” Cindy went on. “’We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not necessarily red-headed devils responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain.’”

“Sounds to me like she’s making excuses for her actions,” Lance said.

“I agree,” Tony responded. “But what about the train tickets? Does she really think we’ll believe that they mean anything? She fucked with me a few hours ago. And she had an… influence here in this building, at roughly the same time. She’s in the city, we know she is.”

“Something is familiar about that proverb,” Cindy mused, beginning to pace again.

“It’s longer than most proverbs,” Alana said. “And worded more densely. It's more like a part of some speech.”

“Could she be quoting from one of her stories?” Lance asked.

“I’ve read all of MagicThunder’s mind-control stories,” Tony answered. “She didn’t write it.”

“She’s going back to that theme of good and evil,” Cindy said. “She’s pushing that at us pretty hard.”

“And trying to convince us that she isn’t all evil, from the sounds of it,” Tony added.

“That’s a crock,” Lance objected.

“Maybe not,” Tony replied. “I’ve been having these crazy thoughts…” He told them about the patterns he was almost seeing, how MagicThunder might be driving actions in ways that brought some of their secret sexual desires into play. “Only my theory falls apart in places,” he added. “I never wanted to get slapped around, for instance, and I definitely never…” He stopped, lowering his eyes. Cindy knew what he was referring to. If the others couldn’t figure it out, he wasn’t going to spell it out for them.

“There might be some truth in that for me,” Lance admitted. “I’m not unhappy about what’s happened with Heather. Or my… thing. It was much more dramatic than I needed, but I can’t argue with the results. Heather loves it.”

“I've... gotten something I was wanting, too,” Alana whispered. “I mean, I never would have… But now that I have…” Alana took Emma’s hand, saying so much more without another word. Emma leaned her head on Alana’s shoulder and sighed.

Tony could feel himself beginning to choke up. She was still silent and not quite there, but he hadn’t seen Emma look this contented in months. She looked up at him, and smiled. Could he be on his way to having another of his desires fulfilled, that Emma be returned back to her pre-MagicThunder self, or at least something close?

He turned his head and studied Cindy, trying to read her. If anything, she was losing things, rather than gaining. Which, again, blew a hole in his theory.

“Not necessarily,” she spoke, perhaps not even aware that he hadn’t actually spoken the words. “It isn’t all that strange that MagicThunder would treat me differently, not after all that time I spent with her when…”

She fell mute as the lights went out, plunging the group into nearly total darkness.

“Power failure?” Lance asked, his voice thin and tense.

Something fell and shattered in the kitchen, breaking on the floor.

“It’s her!” Cindy shouted over the sounds of dishes falling to the floor. “She’s here!”

“Flashlight!” Tony bellowed. “Where do you keep a flashlight?”

“In the kitchen, on the side of the refrigerator!”

He bolted, fully expecting to get slapped around before he ever got near the kitchen. Suddenly, a crash of glass to his immediate left, and then a floor lamp switched on, bare bulb glaring.

He stopped in place, scanning the room, looking for any movement, any movement at all.

“Holy shit!” he cried.

“What the hell!” Lance barked a split second after.

They all saw it, Tony’s shadow, extending normally from his feet, cast by the light from the single illuminated bulb. Only by the time the darkened shape’s edges flattened out onto the nearby wall, it was moving in a way that he was not. In fact, his shadow had its head thrown back, and its dick pulled out. His shadow was fucking jerking off!

He had no time to react or reflect before all of the lights came back on, wiping the animated shape away. Standing there in the breathless silence, he looked down. His fly was not open, his dick was not in his hand.

“I…” he began, his thoughts misfiring with complete confusion.

“What the hell was that?” Lance asked.

“Oh my God!” Cindy cried. “The quote! I know where the quote comes from! It’s Jung!”

“Young what?” Lance responded.

“Not young, Carl Jung! The psychologist!”

“Don’t anybody move!” Tony ordered, his brain and mouth working again. “MagicThunder might still…”

“MagicThunder was never here!” Cindy shouted. “That’s what she’s been trying to tell us!”

“Never here?” Lance objected. “What do you mean she was never here? She turned me into a fucking floating fountain right where I work! And who just threw a temper tantrum? There’s broken glass everywhere!”

“Us, we did!”

“Us?”

“Just wait!” Cindy responded, dodging the shattered bits of her floor lamp’s glass shade, making her way to her bookshelves. A moment later she had a thick black paperback in her hand, scanning the pages for the text she’d recognized.

“’Confronting the Personal Shadow’?” Alana asked, reading the book’s title from afar.

“I could slap myself for not putting two and two together before!” Cindy exclaimed, her eyes almost wild with excitement. “The split between good and evil, a comic book about The Shadow… It isn’t MagicThunder we’re dealing with any more, it’s us! Our shadows! We’re chasing our own damned tails!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Lance asked.

“MagicThunder probably knows everything there is to know about me,” Cindy went on. “I can’t even remember what I told her over those months, but she surely knows about the concepts I studied in my psychology courses. Here’s the quote, right in the introduction,” she breathed. “I was right, it’s Jung. We aren’t fighting MagicThunder any more. She’s gone home after devising some way to activate our shadows, to give them form and power! She could be lying in a hammock downing margaritas for all we know, while we’re running around in circles!”

“I’m totally lost,” Lance admitted.

“I think I am, too,” Alana said. “We just saw Tony’s shadow going all freaky over there. Are you telling us that every time we pass a light source, our shadows are coming to life and screwing with us?”

“Not our literal shadows,” Tony said, starting to get it. ”What just happened with mine…”

“Was orchestrated somehow to help us to see,” Cindy interrupted. “We’re fighting parts of our own psyches, what Jung termed the shadow!”

“It’s what Emma meant when she said we were trying to find clues about ourselves,” Tony added, thinking out loud. “You’re saying that MagicThunder was here for a time, long enough to mess with Lance at the bar. But everything since then…”

“Who knows when the switch was made, but we’ve essentially been mc’ing ourselves!” Cindy exclaimed. “Hidden desires are breaking away and driving events, like psychic Mr. Hyde’s to our Dr. Jeckle’s! MagicThunder made me experience that at a certain point last year, simultaneously seeing how I wanted to do the ‘right’ thing while also witnessing how my worst impulses cheered every deviant action. MagicThunder took control of my body, inflaming my desires, but the sexual satisfaction was largely my own. I could see that part of me loved every minute that I did those outrageous thing to all of those people.”

“But our shadows…” Lance objected.

“The term isn’t literal,” Tony repeated, beginning to feel uncomfortable from the ramifications of Cindy’s new insight. He had never fantasized about fucking his daughter, never. No part of his psyche, seen or unseen, would have wanted to get its rocks off through doing it with his own flesh and blood.

“Here, here’s a good description of what Jung referred to as ‘the shadow’,” Cindy offered:

‘Jung speaks of the shadow as the “other” in us, the repressed self, the drives and behaviors that our conscious ego finds reprehensible. It most closely resembles what Freud thought of as the “repressed”. But in contrast to Freud’s view, Jung’s shadow has its own contents, such as autonomous thoughts, ideas and value judgments. Because it is contrary to our chosen conscious attitude, the shadow personality is denied expression in life and coalesces into a separate splinter personality in the unconscious, where it hides from exposure and discovery.’

“It’s completely devious,” Cindy went on, looking up from the pages of her book. “She never meant to confront me at all, because she didn’t need to. The enemy was within all along, sneaking around with us because it was us! She just gave life to parts of ourselves that we don’t recognize or accept, infusing them somehow with form and force and their own mind-controlling abilities!”

“Holy crap,” Lance breathed. “You mean… I mc’d Heather?”

“I think so, Lance,” Cindy replied.

"But that means I blew my own..."

“And I…” Alana whispered. “I admit that I’ve fantasized about what I did today. But I wouldn’t have, I…”

“But some part of you would have, and took control,” Lance responded, definitely catching on. “You mc’d yourself, as strange as that sounds. It gave you the pleasure while absolving you of the sin.”

“I can’t accept this,” Tony intruded.

Cindy looked at him, her lips tightening. “We all have to question our most hidden motivations, Anthony. Question them without passion, without embarrassment. Everyone has a shadow self, without exception. They say that even God has a shadow self, expressed in the idea of the devil. And the only way to…”

“No. I can admit that I can be a real prick, but I did not…” He glanced at Emma. Yes, she was hauntingly beautiful, and voluptuous and sexy. But he did not look at her that way and he did not feel that way. Never. Never!

“In therapy, the only way to ‘win’ against your shadow is to bring it into the light, Anthony. It only has power to cause mischief in your life when its wishes remain unacknowledged. The same must hold true even with these MagicThunder-affected aspects of ourselves. If we can see our dark sides, perhaps even incorporate them into the totality of our conscious awareness… What is it that they say? ‘Don’t curse the darkness, but instead shine a light’? We need to accept our darkness, as hard as that sounds. We need…”

“I need a drink,” he answered.

“You don’t,” Cindy soothed. “It’s okay, Anthony. You…”

“Back off!” he shouted. “It is not okay!”

“Tony, calm down,” Lance said, trying to play peacemaker.

“I’ve got to get out for some air,” Tony muttered, looking for his coat.

“Don’t leave like this, Anthony.”

“I said I need some air!” he growled. “And don’t you dare reach in and prevent me!”

His heart and temples pounded the whole elevator ride to the ground floor. Out on the streets of the East Village, the snow was coming down surprisingly heavy. Hunching against the wind, he braced himself and walked southward, no destination in mind. He needed to work off energy, and perhaps even scream out into the night somewhere.

Passing a streetlight, he saw his shadow begin to stretch out before him, a blue troubled shape effortlessly extending across a thin veneer of fresh white snow.

“Fuck you, too,” he muttered, striking out with a foot, wishing, in a way, that he really could kick himself.

* * *

“You okay?” a bundled stranger asked, passing slowly on a bicycle with fat tires.

“I’m good,” Tony replied, knowing it wasn’t true. He wasn’t hanging out on the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the night because he was going to end it all, but he certainly wasn’t good.

And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? He wasn’t naïve — he knew he had more undesirable traits than you could shake a stick at, who didn’t? No one was all good or all bad — every person on the planet was some admixture of both, with the dark side finding hidden means of expression even in people who lived saintly lives ninety-nine percent of the time. Mary had spoken often about the seven deadly sins, and every damned one of them had been his companion at some point or another in his life. But incest with his daughter?

It was hard to argue with Cindy’s theory, though. There had been no entity needing to walk through dorm room walls, not when the enemy was within, right there in the room the whole time. It was like carrying your worst enemy on your back, a personal devil lashing out right and left, usually without the conscious mind having any knowledge of its presence. It made sense, and the others had been quick enough to accept their own culpability. Why not him?

The incest part, obviously. But other things kept eating at him as well. Why would he want to slap himself around, the way it had happened last night? And why make himself beg to cum? And that vision of his shadow jerking off — if MagicThunder wasn’t around to make impossible things happen, then how had his literal shadow come to life for an instant to give them a clue?

He leaned on the railing, looking down into the dark waters of the East River, snowflakes tumbling down in tight corkscrew patterns. That was the problem, the patterns still didn’t line up. Something was off, very off. Then again, how trustworthy were his instincts? He had failed to recognize the enemy, which was as bad an error as an investigator could commit.

“I’m my own worst enemy,” he spoke into the chilled air. “Hell, I don’t even know who the enemy is any more.”

At least he hadn’t succumbed to his usual pathetic behavior. He hadn’t ducked into a bar, to drown his sorrows. Yet.

“Penny for your thoughts,” a familiar voice sounded behind him.

He turned, and saw Cindy standing there, bundled in a long white coat with a fur-lined hood. He felt his heart quicken, warm blood heating his insides. Somehow, despite the wonders of her body being almost completely masked, she had never looked lovelier, or her company more welcome.

“You can keep your change,” he answered. “Especially when I’m an open book to you anyway.”

She smiled, coming closer. “Open enough that I could feel your thoughts churning from several blocks away,” she said.

“I knew it,” he laughed. “You’re my global positioning device, aren’t you? With the keys to my brain.”

“I don’t listen to your thoughts, Tony, not the way you fear. I… feel them. They speak to me, but not as though I have a listening device hooked up to your mind. It’s more heart-oriented than that.”

“So what do you ‘feel’ from me right now? I really could use some help in sorting out my thoughts and feelings. Truth is, I’m pretty fucking confused.”

“Me too. I think I might have lost all three of my lovers tonight, all in one fell swoop.”

“What about Emma?” he asked. “You won’t need to… help her out?”

She laughed, a little sadly. “I can feel that you really wanted to ask whether I’d continue to eat her out,” she said. “And the answer might be no. I’m going to give her and Alana a chance, unless I see some reason not to. They’re together right now in Alana’s apartment, and I’ve realized that I have no business intruding. Alana will tell me if Emma starts to lose ground. But I’m hopeful.”

“I guess I should be happy about that,” he said. “Maybe I am, too. Perhaps Emma has turned some kind of corner.”

“I’m beginning to think that we all have,” she replied.

“Big changes,” he said. “What comes next? I haven’t even caught up to the fact that we weren’t really tracking MagicThunder down the past couple of days. It would feel strange to just pick up where we were before all of this happened.”

She came closer, leaning forward with her elbows on the railing. “Beats me, Anthony. I get this feeling that MagicThunder is changing, too. She played with us, sort of, but it was more like tossing a firecracker and then moving on. She might be getting bored with screwing with people, for all we know.”

“What about you? How are you feeling about things, other than being a bit shocked?”

“I feel… strange. Less burdened somehow. And cold. Why did you pick this place to sort out your thoughts? It’s fucking freezing up here.”

He was going to say something in reply, but she had already bent down to scoop up snow with her gloved hands, compacting it into a good-sized snowball. She laughed and threw it out into the dark air above the river, but he never looked up to see it fall. His eyes remained fixed on the patterns made by their shoes, footfalls pressed side by side into the whiteness of the snow.

“What is it?” she asked. “You’ve gone all excited inside. You’re having some sort of insight.”

“Holy crap,” he exhaled, hot steam escaping his lips. “It’s all coming together!”

“What? What is it?”

A thought clicked, and then another. The pattern slid into place, and it led… Well hell. The enemy had been within, alright, but not the way she had said.

“Tell me,” she urged.

“Certain things still didn’t add up, Cindy. I kept trying to make myself go for your explanation, but the pattern wasn’t right.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“What if I don’t?”

She stared at him, folding her arms in front of her chest. “It’s too cold to stand out here in the wind playing guessing games. Let’s go somewhere warm.”

“I’m fine right here,” he answered.

“What is this, Anthony? You’re being artificially stubborn all of a sudden, I can feel it. You’re trying to provoke me.”

“And you won’t be provoked, will you?”

“Not by some childishness, no. Come on. I’m really getting cold.”

“First, explain to me how my actual shadow came to life tonight.”

“I… I don’t know how that happened. You’ve figured it out?”

“Not really. It seems like something MagicThunder could do, but she wasn’t there.”

Cindy started to say something, but then stopped. “Go on,” she whispered.

“I’d also like to know why MagicThunder never attacked you this time around.”

“MagicThunder never attacked any of us. Except Lance, at his bar.”

“Because we were mc’ing ourselves the rest of the time.”

“Right.”

“Did you attack yourself?”

“No. But what is this? A contest?”

“Lance supposedly mc’d Heather without knowing it, which sounds plausible. But did you hear him? He would have had to blow his own dick if that's true! I supposedly mc’d myself, and slapped myself around, too. Hard. I keep wondering why I would do that. I also made myself beg to cum, even though every bit of me had been wanting to get off like that for months. It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“Rational behavior isn’t one of the shadow self’s attributes. It might even be a bit wild, or savage. Perhaps that’s the reason MagicThunder placed Doc Savage on that pulp fiction book, to represent that aspect.”

“Clever. But I don’t buy it. Was your shadow savage, Cindy? In fact, where has your shadow been during all of this? You were trying to put out fires right and left, but you never had some fragment of your personality sneak up and mc you, did you?”

“No, but…”

“You were immune somehow?”

“I… don’t know. Probably.”

“Why? Because of your powers?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“That’s bullshit, Cindy! It’s all bullshit, only you can’t see it!”

“I don’t like this game, Anthony. And I can feel you starting to be afraid of me. You’ve never been afraid of me before. Never.”

“I’m not frightened by your powers, Cindy. You’d never do anything to harm me, no matter how much magic you can wield.”

“At least we’re clear on that.”

“Bullshit! It’s been you fucking around all along, not us!”

“Whaaaat?! Have you lost your mind?”

“No, I don’t think so. You lost track of a portion of yours, that’s the whole point! Think about it, Cindy. We kept assuming that MagicThunder was responsible for everything, because she was the only one with the power to bend minds like that. But then it turns out that you have the power, too.”

“This is crazy. I should never have told you what I can do. You can’t handle it.”

“Look at those footprints in the snow, Cindy, right there — remember how I saw wet footprints on my floor when I was first attacked? I didn't even think about it before, because everything fit with the idea of MagicThunder hitting us again and again. But now I’ve been replaying the scene over and over in my mind. The footprints were small, like MagicThunder's, or yours. If it had been my shadow given substance, wouldn’t they have been larger, like mine? And at the dorms, we couldn’t understand how MagicThunder could slip by you or walk through a wall…”

“She didn’t need to when your shadow was right there in the room with you!”

“Or if you left your shadow in the room after you’d prepped the girls for me.”

“But I wouldn’t have done that! I…”

“Just like I never would have fucked my daughter? If I have to own my worst possibilities, why can’t you?”

“But…” She faltered, hugging herself tight against the frigid wind. “You’re accusing me of betraying my friends, my lovers! Why, Anthony? Why would I do such a thing?”

“I think we can agree that the Cindy I know would never do those things. But what about the Cindy we don’t see? How much hidden resentment has been building up, doling out sex to troubled souls like someone running a psychic soup kitchen? And how hard has it been bottling up your abilities, keeping a lid on them so you didn’t become something like MagicThunder? What does that Cindy want, the one who’s been itching to unleash some mind-control fireworks? What is she capable of? You said yourself that no one is immune, that we all have shadow selves, including you!”

“Stop this, Anthony. Just stop!”

“Or you’ll do what? Turn my brains into oatmeal? Levitate me and hurl me into the river? But you won’t, you’d never do that. But I bet your shadow would. I’ll just bet your shadow has been dying to do all kinds of devious magical things, and your shadow would have the power to do them. Not mine, not Alana’s, not Lance’s — yours! You have the power, not us!”

“Stop this. Please stop.”

“Stop telling you the truth? Stop opening your eyes? You’ll have to make my mouth go silent if you can’t take it.”

“I… I’m going home. Alone. And I don’t want you to follow me. I don’t want you to call or drop by. I need… space. Lots of space.”

“Just like that?” he asked. “You studied psychology in college in preparation for becoming a therapist, yet when someone starts poking your psyche with a stick, you turn and run?”

“Good night, Anthony.”

She turned, and walked away, the falling snow causing her to fade after only a few dozen steps.

“What should I expect next?” he shouted out into the wind. “A midnight blowjob from an invisible visitor, all teeth and no heat? A good smack in the jaw the moment I open my front door?”

He might have seen her make some kind of gesture with her right hand, but she was little more than a grey-white blur by then. A moment later he was alone again, the heavy structure of the bridge and the howling winds his only companions in an immense grey void.

* * *

He had time to think about whether he should have just kept his mouth shut. If he’d given himself the chance to weigh everything, would he have shoved her so hard, rather than easing into it, giving her a chance to absorb things more calmly? Their “partnership” had filled a void in his life, and she was his chief source of income to boot. It might have been a good idea to think about the repercussions before sounding off as he had, and driving Cindy away.

He was too blunt sometimes, clubbing people when he thought he was giving them a helpful poke in the ribs. And perhaps that was part of his shadow material, a roughness where he could be gentle, some level of aggression flying down there below his radar, causing misunderstandings. Fucking everything up.

Well. Unfortunate water under that bridge, and now he had time on his hands — time to work out at the gym, and time to make some calls, re-establishing old contacts for his P.I. practice, just in case. Within a week he had a good case, a potentially lucrative case, trailing one of Manhattan’s most aggressive investment bankers from borough to borough, gathering court-worthy evidence that the well-groomed sleazeball was cheating on his wife. It was the old gumshoe life again, planting listening devices, tickling the shutter button of a camera, sitting around in his car for hours at a time, listening to sports radio or the news to keep from thinking too much about a certain someone, and missing her too much.

He had time to go back to drinking, but he didn’t. The bottles in his cabinets didn’t call to him, not even when he surfed his way to Cindy’s Website, drooling over a fresh photoset with Cindy standing straight and proud, her svelte stacked body lit all red and orange as Alana hovered in the air, her cunt glistening even before Cindy’s tongue reached out to meet it. The photos were like jpeg napalm, the hottest he’d seen yet. He got even harder than he’d expected, and it felt strange, staring at this busty blonde internet bombshell, available to him now only in pixilated form. Unable to resist, he stroked himself with an urgent longing, excitement mingling with regret, his eyes welling with tears at the moment of ejaculation.

How fucked up was it, to chase her right out of his life by pointing out her darkness, when just being around her had helped him to find a better side of himself? She must have been healing him, too, whether she’d intended that or not. Without really trying, by just being herself and letting him in a little bit, she had grasped his hand, helping to pull him out of the deep dark hole he’d been sliding into.

He made a point of getting out, rather than hanging out at home where he knew he’d have a tendency to sulk. He went to the Bronx Zoo on one of his slow days, checking out a special exhibit on primates. On the weekend he caught a controversial exhibition he’d heard about at a science museum, all about the insides of the human body. Meeting up with an old NYPD buddy at a Nets game that same night, he found a partner for lamenting about failed marriages and the complexities of women. And when he was asked how Emma was doing, he said “better”, praying like hell that it wasn’t a lie.

As though summoning a spirit, Alana called him the next morning, to tell him that Emma was indeed showing improvement.

“She asked about you yesterday,” Alana said. “She’s beginning to reconnect, Tony. She’s still extremely… amorous — I hope it’s okay to say that.”

“It is.”

“Good. Anyway, she’s still kind of spaced out, but you’d be surprised at the strides she’s making. I’m teaching her yoga, and she really seems to love it. She’s becoming curious about life again, and I think she’s beginning to miss you. Cindy too.”

“Cindy misses me?”

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I misspoke. What I meant was that Emma misses Cindy. I… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. How is Cindy, if it’s okay to ask?”

“I don’t know. She’s been gone for… let me see, a little over a week now? You didn’t know, did you?”

“No. I… We haven’t spoken. Where did she go?”

“She didn’t say. Rented a car and left, with a note that we shouldn’t worry about her.”

“Do you?”

“Worry? A little. She’s strong… Hell, she can definitely handle herself, that will never be a problem. But Tony? I don’t know what you said to Cindy, and I’m not going to get in the middle of it. You sure shook her up, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so agitated, not even when she returned from her time up north.”

“I guess I have a way with words,” he responded, breathing out hard.

They spoke a little more after that. Lance and Heather were a long-term item, it seemed. Alana suggested that they all meet for coffee or lunch some day soon, and he said that he’d really like that. He rung off, feeling kind of wonderful that Emma’s recovery was coming along. Kind of hollowed out, too.

Hearing Alana’s voice like that brought back too many memories, and there was another thing, too. Though the situation was imperfect, Alana could move on past the psychic sex with Cindy, because she had love in her life. He could hear it animating her voice, whereas his had carried a tell-tale flatness.

He made a resolution right then. He was going to get back in the romance game, even if he was completely out of practice. He checked out several dating services online, and saw a few listings in his area that were at least slightly intriguing. He found that he was more comfortable with the personals in the Village Voice, though, and circled three of them with a red felt-tip pen before going to bed.

Sitting in his car on surveillance the next morning, he imagined the letters he might write to these strangers, wondering how he should describe himself. He was a few years shy of forty, still somewhat young, and in pretty good shape. He had a house, and an income, and he liked to go hiking up in the mountains even if he hardly ever did, and fuck this all sounded so clinical and trite, it made him want to puke. He was also an ex-drunk, with the “ex” part still somewhat in the air, and his teenage daughter was on a long upward climb out of nymphomaniacism, and he’d recently been employed by a soft porn goddess that he’d quite probably fallen in love with, despite knowing that he shouldn’t. And yet if he wrote even a tiny bit of the truth, hinting at the complexities of his existence, he’d probably sound like some kind of freak, and who would ever call?

He came up with the outline of something in his head, abstractly tweaking it throughout the day, getting comfortable with it bit by bit. Sitting at a little Thai restaurant for dinner, he wrote part of it out on a napkin, which highlighted a whole new problem. Type his responses up on the computer, or write them up by hand? A printed letter would be too clinical, but his handwriting was such a mess that a woman would have to be a mind-reader to decipher it. He laughed, sadly, at the irony as he drove home.

Switching the lights on in his house, he threw his wallet and keys on the bedside table and stripped for a long hot shower. His hesitations slid down the drain like the sweat and soap — he would write out his responses by hand, and fuck it if his sloppy script freaked these women out. He didn’t know them, and might never know them, what was there to lose?

He left wet footprint on the floor as he padded naked to the bedroom. Opening the top drawer of his dresser, he pulled out a fresh pair of briefs, and stepped into them.

“Don’t bother putting those on.”

He jumped, and spun, and there she was, sitting cross-legged on his bed, completely naked, his copy of the Voice resting on her lap.

“I see you’ve been contemplating the dating life,” Cindy said, raising the paper, blocking his view of her amazing tits while uncovering her pussy. “I like the sounds of this first one for myself: ’Divorced white female, thirty, with a body whose curves are guaranteed to please and more than enough spunk to keep you on our toes. Seeking a single or divorced educated and employed male, race and age less important than emotional maturity and an attitude that welcomes adventure, including adventure in the bedroom. Take a chance and write me, I’m worth it.’”

He stood with his underwear at his ankles, his heart pounding, his dick rising, feeling excited, and elated, and embarrassed, and suspicious, and…

“I can see how that one caught your eye,” Cindy said, throwing the paper down to the floor. “The other two you circled wouldn’t work out, they aren’t even worth bothering with.”

“What are you…”

“You’ve never had a woman on this bed, have you, Anthony? You bought it after you and your wife split.”

“That’s right,” he admitted, still stunned.

“It’s high time you discovered whether the springs squeak, isn’t it?”

He stared at her, his eyes skimming every perfect inch, afraid to even contemplate her words. The shaded light from the single bedside lamp raked across her every hollow and curve, turning the exquisite body he knew so well in two dimensions into a living breathing topographical map of female fuckability. He found himself breathing hard, because he was just plain hard. Her presence on his bed was like a fantasy come to life, somehow making his bedroom feel small.

“And your dick feel very, very big,” she grinned, looking right at it. “Do you really have an attitude that welcomes adventure in the bedroom?” As though her question released several joints all at once, she stretched her limbs out and turned on her side, reclining seductively. “It wouldn’t be very nice to tell a woman you do, and then disappoint her.”

Her eyes lowered, and she seemed to be contemplating her tits as a hand eased up her taut thighs, fingertips alternating with knuckles on the slow, steady journey. Her head tilted back when her hand found its warm wet destination, two fingers extending to glide straight inside. Her lips puckered just slightly, her eyes closing, and for several seconds it looked as though she had forgotten that he was even there.

“God, I feel all ornery,” she cooed, soft sounds of wetness entering his ears like thunder. “Sometimes, like right now, I can’t even believe how hot I can get. Like I could melt steel with my tongue. Like I could blow a dick made of fire, and it might not be hot enough to keep up with me.”

She rubbed her big firm breasts with her free hand, cupping and squeezing them, teasing the nipples, lightly pulling on her golden nipple rings. He felt frozen in place but for the movement of his eyes, devouring the sight of her hands playing upon the smooth carnal landscape that he’d fantasized about so many times. Yes he had seen her body on the Web, but never like this, the action of her fingers explicit, her shapely legs opening wide to bare her slit, the flesh of her incredible breasts flushing red with excitement. The look was hard-core, and it was a good look for Cindy, his rod responding, feeling harder than it had ever been, hard right to its core.

“You want this,” she nodded with her chin, indicating the entirety of her body. “You’ve wanted some of this for a very long time.”

His cock felt like it might shoot flames and launch right off his body. But something also felt wrong, terribly wrong.

“I can feel your struggle, Anthony. What are you afraid of? That I’m not really me? Or is it worse than that? Maybe you’re afraid that I am me, that you’re about to be swallowed up by the real deal.”

At the word “swallowed” he could feel them, invisible lips slipping over his pulsing cockhead, giving him just the littlest taste.

“You… could be MagicThunder… playing a trick,” he gasped.

“Thick, slick, tricky dick… You’re right, Anthony. I could also be Cindy, just having some good dirty fun. Or perhaps I’m Cindy’s dark side, the one you were so quick to point out. Perhaps I’m her shadow, come to life for real, finally given flesh and blood form. Would you like that, Anthony? Would you like another go-round with all that Cindy represses? I’d love to know which possibility frightens you the most. I’d also like to know which one of us you’re most dying to fuck.”

“You… can’t be Cindy,” he breathed, trying to turn and run, immediately aware that the invisible lips surrounding his cock were holding him in place.

“Why not? Because Cindy is always so cool and together? Because she would never show up in your bedroom and toy with you like this? Get real, Anthony. This very second you’re trying to run from the very thing you want to feel the most. If you can have so many contradictions alive within you, why can’t I?”

He cried out, a series of images zipping through his mind’s eye in fast motion. He saw Cindy’s face, laughing, smiling, looking at him with love, staring in anger. He saw her gazing up from between his legs, her cheeks expanding and collapsing as she sucked his cock, followed by her body riding him from above, her big breasts bouncing, and then his cock was ramming her from behind, his abdomen smacking against the twin curves of her tight ass. He saw her on his bed, just as she was, except that her body was encased in black shining leather, which turned into a red silk bustier, which turned into violet fishnet stockings and heels, with her uncovered tits expanding right before his eyes, her nipples racing towards his waiting lips with almost frightening speed. He felt her flesh pressing into his face, nearly smothering him, and then her gorgeous angelic face was close, filling his field of vision. Only now it wasn’t angelic – it turned sultry, then demure, now giddy, and her eyes rolled back as her mouth opened wide, screaming in orgasm. A whole stream of possible Cindy’s flashed in front of him, and nearly all of them, despite their changeable characteristics, made his dick want to explode.

“That’s right, Anthony. Take a good long look at me. Take a good look and see the parts of me that wouldn’t hesitate to reach out with my mind, and give you a biiiig, loooong, hotttt…”

It was instantaneous, the feeling of a tongue, a huge tongue, taking a long, excruciatingly slow ride up his legs, and then out along the bottom of his pulsing cock. The lips were still there holding him fast, only they began to pucker, and suck…

“Ohh, oooohhhhhhh…” he moaned.

“You gave me quite a kick in the ass out on that bridge, Anthony. You weren’t subtle or gentle, shoving the truth into my face like a schoolyard bully. It was all I could do to keep from lashing out — you were practically begging for it, for a good swift mindfuck. But you were right, about pretty much everything. It was eating at me, clamping down on the power that way. I made the mistake of trying to be too good, and my own forked tail might have whipped back around and dragged me down if you hadn’t helped, which you did at considerable risk. I want to thank you. Me, and my complex mind, and this body you’ve been wanting so badly. We’d all love to thank you, and we will.”

It was hearing her say “my mind” and “this body” that cinched it for him. It was Cindy, the real Cindy. Wickedly sexy and unrestrained in a way he’d never seen, but it was Cindy.

“Yes, it’s me, Anthony. But don’t get too comfortable with things just yet. I’ll thank you in a way you’ll never forget, but I also need to punish you for kicking my ass out there.”

Was it gratitude or punishment that accelerate the phantom licking and sucking of his cock? And what motivated her when he was practically tossed her way, where she caught his dick in her mouth much the way a dog catches a Frisbee? He was sucked off for real while floating face down over the bed, and when he came, Cindy allowed his cum to drip down between her tits, where it became a lubricant for the next phase of their lovemaking.

It was strangely like coming home when his tongue first met her wet pussy. Her moans and hisses felt familiar, despite never having heard them before. Her scent entered him in the same way, its flowery nature easing up his nostrils like a long lost love. He knew her, intimately, even though he’d never had the pleasure.

She was loud when she got close, her hips bucking and her strong thighs pressing in, giving his tongue and probing fingers encouragement. And when it all came together for her, she somehow brought him inside, let him feel it as she felt it, the waves charging through the both of them, a truly shared climax.

He fucked her, fucked her from behind, his cock unnaturally energetic, their thoughts linked, his heart given away, probably for good. When he couldn’t do any more or take any more, he collapsed on top of her, their pulses racing in tandem, warm sleep beckoning.

They joined again, back to front, limbs intertwined, and even his dreams seemed to come alive with the taut muscles of her body, the soft caresses from her blonde hair, the fullness of her breasts. She spoke to him, and stroked him to life again, bringing him back inside, slipping in and out of sleep, in and out of Cindy, in and out…

* * *

“I get this feeling that you were exceedingly gentle with me,” Tony said, his hand lightly squeezing one of her breasts. They were spooned together, silvery blue light from a nearly full moon spilling in through the curtains of his bedroom windows.

“You like it rough?”

“Sometimes,” he answered, the memories of spinning on his living room floor vivid in his mind. She fell silent, and he thought for a few minutes that she had fallen back to sleep.

“I drove up to Maine,” she finally whispered. “MagicThunder sent a photograph the day after I left you on the bridge. It was a rural landscape, and I knew the place. I knew exactly where it was.”

“You found her?”

“I rented a car and drove straight up. I could feel her, Anthony, like we were becoming more tightly linked with every mile that passed. I recognized the little town she lives in. I recognized her house, and another house a half mile away where I spent those autumn months with her.”

“I’m… almost afraid to ask.”

“I didn’t stop. There was no need any more. We were so linked by then that actually speaking would have been beside the point. I drove to the Maine coast after that, and spent a good bit of time staring at snow and the sea, thinking about things. MagicThunder and I are okay with each other, we understand each other. She’s growing up, and she’s wondering what the future holds for her, just like any teenager. Her giddiness over the extent and reach of her power has eased, and now she’s trying to find some kind of balance in her life, a way to fit in even when she acts ‘normal’. She’s still impulsive and over-sexed, but I don’t think we’ll need to keep circumnavigating the globe to put out her fires. She’ll still create some messes, but she’s more aware of the need to clean up behind herself.”

“And Emma? Can she clean that up?”

“I saw Emma right before coming here. She’s getting better, Anthony, and it isn’t MagicThunder helping her out. It’s Alana. They’re very right for each other.”

Hearing the news of his daughter’s progress, he felt something inside of his chest relax, perhaps for the first time in years. And because of that, he was able to ask his next question without hesitation, and without fear.

“What about you, Cindy? Or us?”

“Well that’s a very interesting topic,” she said, turning to face him. “There is a definite ‘us’, Anthony. I’m ready to go forward if you are.”

“You aren’t concerned about…”

“The age difference? No. I like the way I feel around you. I can be myself with you, even my bad self, and you don’t fear me. And I’ve seen the territory inside of you…”

“Uh-oh.”

“And I like it.”

“Whew.”

“You aren’t exactly a shining knight…”

“You aren’t exactly a virginal princess.”

She elbowed him in the shoulder, laughing, but then turned more serious. “I can’t promise that I won’t ever take on other lovers — in fact, I can guarantee that I’ll be with women again, I’m never giving that up.”

“Alright by me.”

“And I might be… bad sometimes. Controlling people, I mean. Not like MagicThunder, but some.”

“I think we’ve seen what would happen if you didn’t. Just let me share in the fun every now and then.”

“You really aren’t concerned?”

“I’m really not.”

“How about the fact that I can make you cum just by thinking about it? That doesn’t worry you?”

“Hardly.”

“Good, because I want to tell you something: You were completely on-target about my shadow side sneaking around and screwing with everybody. But I started to wonder about its motivations. That part of the psyche might be primitive, but it’s not without its own agenda. I kept wondering why I helped Lance seduce Heather, or why I would have thrown Alana and Emma into each other’s arms like that. I lost my lovers, practically gave them all away behind my own back. Why I would do something like that?”

“I give up.”

“I was making room for you, Anthony. It didn’t feel right to hook up with you when I was fucking another man, and I could never bring myself to do it with Emma sharing my bed. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t have these feelings for you, even though I did. So I guess I snuck around myself, to get what I wanted.”

“That explains the others, but what about me? What agenda did your shadow have when it slapped me around and more or less mind-raped me? And what did it gain by causing me to experience what I did with those three girls?”

“I’ve been wondering about that. In the dorm, I must have wanted to you to face your own shadow’s wishes; that and I probably just enjoyed screwing around with you. I really wanted to fuck you, so in essence I did, in several ways. And you piss me off sometimes, Anthony, which explains the roughness in your living room. It was cathartic, like you said before. And I’m sure my shadow loved it when you wouldn’t beg to get off. After wanting it for months, you were finally getting psychic sex from me, and there you were trying to keep it from happening. I’ll bet my worst instincts couldn’t stop laughing from the absurdity of it all.”

She raised her head and shoulders with an elbow, placing her breasts almost in his face before continuing. “Maybe we don’t know what it’s going to be like now...”

“Us?”

“Us.”

"We’ll take life as it comes,” he replied. “And we’ll take each other and cum, what could be easier?”

“No blind dates from the personals for you. You’ll be getting plenty of Cindy’s to fuck, believe me, and you’re going to need to save your energy for all of them.”

“Sure thing, boss,” he replied, running the back of his hand across the perfect pink nipple almost staring him in the face. He curled his fingers and lightly flicked at her nipple ring, and then grasped it, twisting just a little too much.

“Oooooo... Something tells me that our shadows are about to get acquainted,” Cindy breathed.

“Don’t be so sure,” he replied, pushing her away. “I wouldn’t fuck you again in a million years.”

Her eyes went wide with shock for about half a second, but then they narrowed, and gleamed. Her smile couldn’t have been more broad or open when she said, “You’re playing with fire, mister. You’re really asking for it.”

Yes, he was. What a mind-reader, that Cindy. No wonder he loved her so much.

I love you, too, he heard in his mind, just as her pussy began to glow red, illuminating the room.

THE End