The Horned Mage: Books 1-5

by Hayden Harper

  I groaned and let my head fall back. My antlers hit the tree trunk behind me but I didn’t care as a thousand diminutive kisses fell upon my shaft, circling the head. She beat her wings and a bit of purple powder encompassed my member for a moment before disappearing. And then every nerve ending in my cock was struck by lightning.

  Each and every sensation was magnified a thousand fold. Her little hands and mouth set my skin on fire and made my dick feel like it had swollen ten times larger. I wasn’t made of flesh and blood. My member was iron wrapped in a taut layer of flesh ready to burst. Each caress of her tiny body was a detonation that threatened to set off a chain reaction leading to a massive explosion.

  Bullet and Dicario were shouting at each other, loud enough to penetrate my fog of lust and be heard over the roaring fire. I couldn’t make out their words but they were angry. More than angry. They were terrified. I could taste their fear. Delicious and satisfying in a way that I’d never before experienced and it pushed me over the edge.

  The pixie continued to dance about my member, grinding her full body against it and spiraling around. I’d never been to a strip club but I had seen clips of poledancing before—there had always been something phallic about the pole, especially combined with the erotic nature of the woman’s dancing. Now I knew what it was like to be that pole. To feel hands and legs wrap around me, to have my dance-partner’s body bump and grind and give herself over to my power, my erection the sole center of her world.

  My cock throbbed in the pixie’s full-body grip and she shifted to straddle the mushroom head, grinding her diminutive pussy against my slit. Her beating wings sent vibrations coursing down through my length and into my core. I exploded with enough force to dislodge her and send her careening into the ground in a massive spray of semen. More blasts followed and I bit my lip to keep from bellowing my pleasure and triumph to the world.

  I don’t know that I blacked out but I came to my senses a moment later and found the pixie on the ground, her naked body completely devoid of any evidence of our sexual exchange. As I picked her up, the firelight through the trees revealed that her wings were now a deep shade of violet and her skin glittered like a stripper’s.

  She gave me a lazy grin. “Your seed is rich in magic, hunter.”

  I was going to have to ask why she kept calling me that, but first I needed to pull my pants back up. No sooner had I managed that—awkwardly with one hand, because the damn pixie was just about passed out on a magical pleasure high and couldn’t be bothered to hover or stand on my shoulder—than a second car pulled up. This one was not a truck. I couldn’t tell the make or model but definitely was a city car, not the kind you’d expect to see on the backroads of Woodhurst or on a ranch.

  The figure that stepped out was backed by the firelight so it was hard to make out details but it was definitely a woman. She strode to the arguing figures, radiating cold fury. It fell over the boys, but instead of backing down, they began to argue louder, pointing fingers at each other. Somehow I knew that this was a bad idea and recognized in this woman a fellow predator.

  Predator? Since when had I ever thought of myself as a predator?

  She said something and both Dicario and Bullet shut up. She said something else and they took a step back. And then they took off running.

  Bullet wasn’t fast enough.

  He made it only a few feet before the woman exploded and where she had once stood instead rose a black serpent easily as big around as the tunnels kids climb through on playgrounds. How long she was I couldn’t tell, in part because she was coiled up, and in part because she struck so fast my eyes could barely follow. Bullet fell to her jaws, screaming as she lifted him up in the air, high, high, higher than the lodge and began tossing him in her maw so that he slid down her throat head first.

  I stared at this, open jawed. It had happened so fast. One minute there’d been a woman and two men. The next, a giant snake was eating one of those men. And the second was running away. Straight for my hiding spot.

  And the snake was chasing after him.

  I turned and ran, branches slapping into my face. Whatever grace I’d felt before that had allowed me to travel the woods unhindered was completely undone and I caught on every loose branch and root in my path until an unseeing Dicario crashed into me from behind.

  We fell to the ground together in a tangle of limbs. Enough moonlight filtered down through the trees that he was able to make out my face and I was able to see the surprise and then the fury on his.

  “You!” he shouted and punched my across the jaw.

  I fell back the ground and reared back up, ready to throw down, but he was already up and crashing through the trees, making even more noise than I had been before. His wasn’t the only sound I heard though.

  I didn’t know that snakes made noise when they slithered but I guess at that size anything will make noise. Underbrush and detritus crumpled with a loud shushing sound as the snake approached. I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming and rolled beneath a nearby shrub, willing myself to stay as quiet as possible and clutching the pixie close to my chest, covering her with my hands in case she decided to start glowing again.

  The snake drew near in a whispered rush, bringing with it a dry smell like old paper and dust. My heart hammered in my chest, so loud that there was no way the snake couldn’t hear it. But then it passed by me, sweeping over the bush I was hiding beneath in pursuit of Dicario. I let out a sigh of relief and then choked on it as in the distance he started screaming.

  I stayed where I was, paralyzed with fear. The giant snake had eaten two people and it was still out here. I could hear it making its way back toward the lodge, coming closer to me. It would pass by again, this time without any prey to distract it.

  It came through the trees, this time at a far more languid pace. It almost appeared to be swimming through the forest, its golden eyes luminous in the dark. Up close I could see that the snake was not all black. In fact, it was probably mostly another color, but it was washed out in the starlight. It had dark markings over its not-quite-as-dark-dark body and two pale stripes running down its length on either side near the belly. I’d hadn’t spent a lot of time around snakes but I’d never seen anything quite like it before. Then again I’d never seen a snake that had to be around fifty feet long, either.

  I imagined that this was what surfers felt like when a great white swam past them at the beach. Only there was no getting out of the water with this thing. Hell, even assuming that I could climb a tree before it snatched me, all the thing had to do was raise itself up and pluck me from the branches. By the power of Greyskull I hoped it was full after eating both Dicario and Bullet.

  The snake slithered almost completely past me, its tail weaving through the foliage after its body.

  Something moved against my lip, trickling down over my chin. I tasted blood. Dicario’s punch had split my lip open.

  The snake stopped slithering. Far down its length it raised its head up into the air and flicked out a dark, forked tongue. I remembered reading somewhere that snakes scented their prey by tasting their air, which was why their tongues were always flicking in and out of their mouths. The head, guided by the flicking tongue, slowly turned to face me.

  A litany of swearwords ran through my head and my hands tightened on the pixie, who beat her wings in protest. I’d forgotten she was there and she glowered up at me, opening her mouth as if ready to give me an earful.

  I cut her off. “I’m calling in a boon,” I hissed. “Pixie’s are supposed to be good at glamory illusion shit right? Hide me.”

  “I just got my pixie dust back,” she protested.

  “Dammit I am going to hold you right here with me and if that snake eats me it’s eating you too,” I snarled. “You owe me a boon now hide us!”

  The pixie narrowed her eyes at me and then beat her wings furiously with a sound like bells caught in a windstorm. I was sure the snake would hear it and surge forwar
d but it never let up its languid pace. Purple pixie dust surrounded me in a familiar cloud and then vanished.

  But I didn’t.

  Shit!

  I clenched my teeth and tried to will my heart to quit pounding against my chest. All I could do was stay quiet and hope that the snake didn’t think to look under my bush or lost the scent of my blood.

  The snake drew to within a few feet and paused, tongue still flicking out to taste the air. It turned its head left and right, as if confused, and then began to shrink. A second later, Deirdre She stood in front of me, scowling at my bush with her hands on her hips. Her tongue, no longer forked, flicked out to taste the air again, the gesture made all the more disconcerting by her now human appearance.

  Pixie magic,” she murmured and shook her head. “Those idiots.”

  She turned and made her way back toward the burning lodge. In the distance I could hear a firetruck’s sirens blaring. Somehow I knew though that she would be gone long before they arrived.

  As soon as she was out of sight, I ran.

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t get back to my house until the sun was up. At some point the pixie had slipped into my backpack and fallen asleep and I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. I trudged my way up the stairs to the front porch and the door swung open to reveal Lexus wearing one of my old shirts and, from the quick look I got, nothing else.

  The bruise on her face had faded and her split lip was almost completely healed up. I noted this about the same time as I noted the panic on her face.

  “Where were you?” she demanded, throwing herself into me and wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “I woke up two hours ago and you were just gone.”

  I patted her on the back, then figured screw it, and wrapped my arms around her in a warm embrace. The anger that had been bubbling off of her simmered down but didn’t entirely dissipate.

  “Where have you been,” she demanded.

  “I had some errands to run, come inside, I’ll show you.”

  A few minutes later we were back in my room which definitely did not look like my room with the scorched bedsheets and broken mirror. Even the furniture hadn’t been replaced after I cast the spell to break my curse exactly where it had been so it all stood just a little bit off. The place had never really been home, but it had never felt less like it before.

  I sat down in the middle of the floor with the backpack and she joined me, sitting cross legged opposite it and eyeing the pack with undisguised curiosity.

  “You can’t talk about any of the stuff that’s in here, alright?”

  She nodded and somehow I knew that she wouldn’t. Given her history I really shouldn’t have trusted her to keep anything a secret. But I did.

  I upended the backpack and dumped the contents on the floor between us. Cash, jewelry, a few odds and ends, and a freaking revolver that I hadn’t noticed before, spilled out onto the floor. How the hell had a gun gotten in there without my noticing? That was more than a little disconcerting. Almost as much as the realization that my favorite TA was a giant fucking snake that ate people.

  Lexus eyes went wide as she took it all in, bobbing her head up and down to look from me to the pile over and over before her eyes fixated on a single object. With a trembling hand she reached down and picked up a familiar silver necklace. Tears brimmed in her newly green eyes.

  “You got this back,” she tore her eyes from the necklace to look me in the face. “For me?”

  I nodded.

  She brought a hand to her mouth and choked back a sob.

  “There might be some odd questions over the next few days, some talk about something happening outside of town,” I told her. “You don’t know anything about it, got it?”

  She nodded. “Got it.” She bit her lip. “But you’re going to tell me, right?”

  I hadn’t planned on it to be honest, but I found myself nodding my head. “Yeah, I am.”

  And I did. I told her everything, except the bit about the pixie using her body to jack me off. That was something that nobody needed to hear about. Ever.

  I may have also not disclosed the exact amount of boons the pixie owed me, making it sound like we’d done a simple one for one trade off.

  When I got to the part about the giant snake, Lexus swore and made some comments about how disgusting that was. Apparently she was not a fan of scaly critters. I debated telling her that I knew who the snake actually was but decided against it. I did tell her that I knew who it was and that if I thought she needed to know I’d share it. I don’t know why I held it back, I guess it seemed like she’d be safer not knowing. In hindsight this was probably a stupid decision.

  Finally when I was done she looked down at the money. “That’s a lot of cash. Do you know what you’re going to do with it all?”

  “No idea yet,” I said. It was a lot, but not enough to live off of or pay for more than a light semester or two’s tuition. Still, more than I had now. I’d have to give it a proper count later after I’d gotten some rest. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  She grinned at me. “I’m sure you will.”

  She got up and crawled into my laps. “Can you think of anything to do with me?”

  I smirked at her as she wrapped her arms around me and pressed her naked sex against the tent forming in my jeans. “I can think of a few things. What are you willing to do for me?”

  Her nipples poked out against her shirt and she gave a shuddering breath, eyes half closed. “Anything.”

  I leaned in close, pressing my lips against her ear and whispered, “Go back to school.”

  I pulled back, leaving her blinking in shock. “What?”

  “Go back to high school and graduate,” I said. “I’m going to be here for a while and you’ll be much better off with your degree than without.”

  She stood up, eyes blazing with fury. “I’m half naked on you and you want to judge my life and—”

  I cut her off. “Sit down.”

  She sat down on the edge of my bed, mouth closed, her face a mix of shock and indignation.

  “Did you forget that you are mine?” I asked her, rising to my feet. “Did you or did you not say that you would do anything for me?”

  Trembling, she nodded her head. “I-I did. But I thought you meant—I don’t know, like sex type stuff.”

  I felt my eyes flash and a grin spread across my face. I had no idea where this cocky attitude of mine was coming from, but I liked it.

  “Oh, there will be plenty of sex-type-stuff,” I assured her. “But I don’t settle. If you want to be mine and stay mine, neither will you. You will find ways to better yourself. The better you make yourself, the better you can serve me.”

  Serve me? Had I said that right?

  The words though just about made her swoon so I pressed on. “You’re going to become the best that you can be in all things, is that understood?”

  Swallowing, she nodded again.

  “Say it.”

  “I understand.”

  I grinned and surged forward to pin her to the bed. “Now, what was that about sex-type-things?”

  # # # #

  The next day I was back in Prof. Hardin’s class. I’d seriously debated whether or not to show up considering who all was going to be there. Honestly I don’t know which of them scared me more, professor who’d wanted to use me as a human guinea pig, the giant snake masquerading as his TA, or my best friend whose stepsister I was sleeping with.

  In the end though I decided that I couldn’t back down from a challenge. How that made sense to me this week when I sure as hell knew that it wouldn’t have last week I’ve no idea. But it did. So I was back in my usual seat with my notebook and pens out, ready to take notes when Deirdre and Prof. Hardin walked in.

  I tried not to stare at Deirdre as the professor droned on about some dead guy who thought that magic was life force or some shit. I tried not to wonder if he knew th
at she could turn into a giant snake. Or if anyone else in the room knew that she was a murderer who freaking ate people. I decided not. There’d be way more freaking out and this class would a hell of a lot more interesting.

  Deirdre seemed to notice my attention and gave me a curious look that quickly turned into a flirtatious smirk. Okay, that was scarier than anything else I’d experienced in the last few days. I returned my attention to Prof. Hardin, only to have it yanked away as the classroom door opened and a sheepish looking Jadeite walked in.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she faux-whispered, and made her way back to her usual seat beside me.

  My heart soared. She was back!

  “Hey,” I whispered as Prof. Hardin resumed his lecture.

  “Hey,” she whispered back, and then we both had to pay attention as best we could.

  Not that it did me any good because as the lecture came to a conclusion Prof. Hardin reminded us, “Turn in your papers on my desk on your way out.”

  Everything he’d said over the last hour fled my brain. Paper. Oh shit the paper! With everything that had been going on I’d completely forgotten about it. I froze, stock still in my seat as everyone else got up and made their way to the front of the classroom to turn in their work.

  Jadeite placed a hand on my arm. “Don’t worry.”

  I turned to blink at her. How could I not worry about this? This was a damn big paper and if my grades slipped and my scholarship vanished at the same time I might not be able to pick up school again in the fall.

  “I printed it out like you asked me to,” Jadeite said to me. “Sorry I was kind of late, you must have thought I’d forgotten.”

  She reached into her backpack and pulled out two small stacks of paper, each stapled at the corner. I spotted my name on the top of one of them.

  She’d written my paper for me.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and accepted it from her before moving to the front of the room to turn it in with everyone else. Prof. Hardin gave me a scowl, like he knew I was cheating, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to prove it. Jadeite wasn’t stupid enough to plagiarize something and was smart enough to write seven papers on any subject he gave us.