Magic Makes the Man

by Jason Hutchinson

  Chapter Seven

  As Steve felt his load pumping into the hot little receptionist’s eager body, his mind suddenly pictured someone else. A redhead. He couldn’t place her but the image was conjured the moment he had called Jill by her full name.

  Jillian.

  It meant something.

  He shifted positions, rolling the blonde beauty prone on her stomach with his cock still buried inside her. She was still climaxing and as his fingers left her mouth that sexy wail cranked up in volume, forcing her to immediately bury her face in the pillows.

  Her body felt so good inside he pushed through the super-sensitivity of his cock and continued driving in and out of her, his eyes wandering the soft, light skin of her back and the smattering of freckles there.

  Firefly.

  The word and the face came back to him in the same instant and he felt his weight crash into the woman beneath him, forcing a grunt even through the pillow as he sank deep into her ass.

  “Uh, we’ve got to talk about something.”

  The voice came from beside him in a soft tone. Steve looked up to see Cinder twisting her hair and nearly hopping on one foot in impatience.

  “Can we talk about it later?” He whispered, feeling his cock throb in Jill’s backside.

  Cinder hopped up on the bed and sat next to the two lovers, cross-legged. “Don’t worry, she won’t hear me or feel me.”

  “That’s not really the point, Cinder.” Steve said.

  “I’ve kinda done something bad.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Bring it all back.” Steve said, firmly. “And don’t give me any of that tricky shit. I want to remember this as well.”

  It was the strangest feeling. Cinder had beat around the bush a bit after he’d managed to wrap things up nicely with Jill, but the gist of it was that she had wiped his memory of some things, allegedly at the behest of his own wish. He just didn’t remember it. It did help explain some of the triggers he’d been feeling for the last few days; certain words and images would completely throw him for a loop.

  “Okay,” Cinder said, scrunching up her nose. “But I don’t think that you’re going to enjoy that.”

  “Just do it.”

  Steve suddenly felt like he was drugged. He staggered backwards, feeling around behind him for the hotel bed but missed it by a mile, sliding to the floor between the bed and the rumbling air conditioning unit. He lay there for a few minutes, just staring up at the ceiling and processing a bunch of information that hadn’t been there mere moments ago. What did I think this was going to feel like? That was the problem. He hadn’t really thought about it and it was way worse than anything he felt he could have imagined in the first place.

  A name would pop into his head, ‘Firefly’, and that would send him down an avalanche of memories that were at first simply movie posters. As he stared at one long enough, it became the trailer, and so on.

  That would have been bad enough if Cinder hadn’t actually re-written some of his memories with Firefly to memories of her and unfortunately, he’d asked for both sets of memories to co-exist. That was probably the bad idea she had alluded to.

  “Fuck.”

  “Sorry about that.” Cinder said, her face set into a cringe as she peered over the side of the bed at him, blonde hair falling into her angelic face. “But we’re supposed to find Firefly.”

  Sparks of memories flew again and the images and words came with emotions as they solidified in his mind. He cared for the Jinn and if…

  “What’s happened to her?” He grunted, pulling himself shakily back to his feet where he used the top of the mattress as a focal point to prevent returning to the ground. The blonde was scrunching her face up as if trying to avoid the question. His last memory of Firefly was that…

  “Gillian.” He said, giving the young Jinn a look that defied defiance. “Where’s Gillian?”

  “Probably with Firefly?”

  “How do we find them?”

  Steve listened intently as Cinder explained the ways she would go about searching for a lost Jinn, but none seemed to be very probable. As he listened his hands absently tried to straighten the blankets on the bed, which brought back the more recent memory of his tryst with a different Gillian. He felt his anger for the Jinn growing as she went on and on about theories that had been studied regarding finding a Jinn if they didn’t want to be found or if they were magically imprisoned or if…

  He interrupted her. “Can you find a mortal easier?”

  Cinder cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Well, of course. You guys advertise your position all the time with your thoughts and emotions. There was this scientist I knew in the fourteen-hundreds, no, was it the fifteen-hundreds?”

  “Find Gillian.”

  “We’re supposed to find Firefly, dummy. That’s what Crystal said.”

  “You just said that she was probably with Firefly.”

  The Jinn sat there staring at him for a moment with a blank look on her face. The eyes were blank too, literally, as if she was deep in thought and couldn’t be bothered with the distraction of vision.

  “So if she’s with Firefly…” Steve prompted, reciting each word slowly and emphasizing the important parts.

  Cinder’s eyes came back abruptly. “I’m not stupid, Steve.” She said in a huff.

  With a strength Steve hadn’t realized he had, he let it go. “Take me to her.”

  Chapter Nine

  Gillian stared at the door of the hotel room as she worked the bonds behind her back. Her wrists felt raw but weren’t likely to the point of bleeding yet. She didn’t think twenty-four hours had passed since she was knocked out and tied up in a room that was obviously in the same hotel as the one she had been staying in with Steve. It was close, though. Close to twenty-four hours and she had zero clue why the dark-haired guy with the comically evil moustache had broken into their room and snatched her.

  It was an easy hypothesis that it had something to do with the Jinn, Firefly. She’d gotten over the whole skeptical bit pretty quickly as the magical little pixie had transported them to some far-off castle for their first…

  Focus, Gillian thought.

  She’d managed to maneuver herself enough to get a clear look around the room, noting that the telephone was no longer in its prime spot on the table between the two beds. If there was anything she was happy about it was that she hadn’t had to actually watch as whoever-he-was noisily fucked some groveling blonde in the bed next to her. She just felt lucky that he hadn’t moved on to her yet. The way he looked at her gave every indication that she was definitely going to be on his creepy menu at some point.

  She felt the joint in her thumb pop out of place. The odd sensation was pretty innocuous. The pain the followed was certainly not. She grimaced, biting down on the cloth wedged in her mouth as she waited for it to subside.

  Once it went down to a level where she felt she could think clearly, Gillian started to experiment to see what benefit the old injury had given her.

  “Thanks, Betty Dawson.” She said in her head. “Appreciate it.”

  Betty Dawson had pushed her down the slide at her eighth birthday party and she had dislocated her thumb trying to prevent herself from falling. Ever since then, jarring it the wrong way would make it pop out and it seemed to take less and less each time it happened.

  She felt the rope slacken a little as she rotated her wrist, feeling her joint flare up with pain.

  “Just do it.” Gillian said, finally giving the door a break as she closed her eyes to prepare herself.

  Lightning flashed in her eyes as she pulled against the rope, sending stars into her field of view even through tightly shut lids. She could hear the groan of pain muffled by the gag. That one had to be let out.

  There was the pain, but there was also a new sensation; a relaxing of the shoulder muscle that had become tight from enduring that position so long. She brought it up to her eyes as she opened it.

  “Not bad.” Sh
e said, assessing the damage as she yanked the gag out of her mouth. It would be uncomfortable, but it would heal.

  The door of the hotel room became her focus again, eyes burning into it and trying to bring her ears along for the examination, examining every footstep that went by and only taking moments to glance at the knots at her feet she was working on. All in all, getting herself completely freed from the bonds took about ten heart-stopping minutes.

  Gillian’s first attempt to rise to her feet was met with abject failure as the pins and needles rushed up to overwhelm her. She massaged her ankles rapidly. She was going to have to at least drag herself out into the hallway because her captor would certainly be back soon. The mere fact that he had been keeping her here in such a semi-public place told her that he planned on moving her soon and that leaving her unoccupied was going to only be for small amounts of time.

  “Maybe he’s out trolling for another date.” Gillian said, looking at the rumpled bed opposite hers.

  She darted her eyes around the room as she tested her legs a second time. They felt more stable, but she was looking for anything that might identify him in the future. He certainly wasn’t dumb enough to register under his own name. Nothing stood out other than the ubiquitous tourist flyers and information sheets that came with the room.

  The handle of the door was almost in reach when she heard a rattle behind her. The jump and turn almost made her lose her balance again. Nothing. She froze for a moment before it happened again.

  It was coming from inside the top drawer of the dresser.

  Phone.

  He had left a cell phone. Gillian was amazed that he would do something so stupid.

  “Probably just a burner.” She said, pulling the drawer open.

  There were just two items in the drawer, a battered copy of the New Testament and a small, ornately-carved wooden box.

  No phone.

  Her eyes flashed to the door again and she knew she needed to go.

  Now.

  The rattle came again and this time right in her field of vision. The little box danced up and down for about three seconds before going back to rest.

  She grabbed it and turned, catching the door handle immediately in her other hand.

  Chapter Ten

  Steve would have braced himself if he had known he needed to. The lurch would have made him lose anything in his stomach, if he had bothered to eat. Cinder’s ability to transport mortals certainly wasn’t as refined as Firefly’s had been.

  It was probably the combination of worry and not knowing what he was going to find on the other end of the journey that made his reflexes a little bit slower than they usually would have been.

  There was no yelling and oddly very few sounds when they appeared in the hotel’s hallway. Steve recognized it immediately but completely failed to miss the running figure that plowed into him less than two seconds after arriving. He saw the angry face of the second figure just as he was falling backwards, instinctively grabbing the figure whose head had struck him in the solar plexus like a battering ram.

  The floor came up hard and he felt the dull thud of his head hitting the concrete below the thin, gaudy carpet, seeing his vision blur.

  He processed the images, as if they were in slow-motion. The pixie-like Jinn, Cinder’s face twisted in surprise as she reached up to catch something that had flown into the air when the figure had struck him. He watched her stare at it for a moment, then turn her eyes towards the other running figure he had seen as he fell.

  Then there was darkness.

  Chapter Eleven

  Desmond Loyale packed up his few belongings and left the room, turning not towards the elevator banks, but towards the back stairs that would wind him down and down until he reached the back parking lot where his car waited.

  He was pissed.

  The Jinn was gone and the girl was gone with her. He could feel Scarret sitting there in the back of his consciousness, judging him. He was trying hard to block some of his thoughts, because somehow he thought that the Incubus himself might hold some of the blame. Otherwise, there wasn’t much explanation for her not only taking the Jinn’s magical prison but even recognizing what it might be in the first place.

  The fast-paced events of the morning replayed in his mind as he pulled out of the parking lot, cracking the window to listen for any signs of sirens.

  He had gone down to the lobby for breakfast, leaving the girl bound tightly enough that she wouldn’t have even been able to get to the door to pound on it, much less free herself. As he stepped off the elevators when he returned, the shit hit the fan. The redhead at the center of his sexual frustration was just stepping out of the room and the two of them made eye-contact from about twenty yards apart. She immediately turned and took off on a wobbly run that he would have easily caught up with; if not for the supernatural intervention that took place.

  As he gained ground on her, Steve Ballard and a small blonde appeared in the redhead’s path and she barreled into him like a bull attempting to gore a toreador. The moment the two went down in a heap was when Desmond finally pulled up on his speed. It was also the moment he saw the enchanted box fly up into the air, only to be deftly snagged in the blonde’s tiny hand.

  He was just reaching into his jacket for his gun when the lot of them winked off the face of the Earth.

  “Fuck!” He said, pounding his fist against the top of the steering wheel as he gained enough distance from the hotel to be safe. Finding the Jinn again was going to be trouble since she would be on guard. The only saving grace to the whole thing, he hoped, was that instead of bringing one feisty Jinn to his bosses at The Chain, he now had a line on two.

  Chapter Twelve

  “She actually did a good job with this, at least.” Gillian said, standing at the balcony of the villa overlooking a body of water. Her best guess was the Mediterranean. “And it wasn’t like she was responsible for what happened, she just slowed the response a bit.”

  Steve sighed, feeling the warmth of her hand on his on the railing. “I’m not sure why you’re defending her.”

  Gillian turned to him and flashed bright green eyes that seemed far happier than a woman who had just gone through what she had should be. “Partly because what happened to me and Firefly wasn’t exactly her fault and partly because what she did wasn’t nearly at the level of what she did to you. I can understand you holding a grudge. It must be pretty confusing up there in that head of yours.”

  Oddly enough, Steve had been getting it under control. “It’s getting better. It’s weird, it’s like I can mentally tag the memories in order to separate the two timelines.”

  “Sounds like you had a lot of fun.” Gillian said, grinning at him and giving him a light poke in the ribs.

  Steve felt the guilt that had been on the back-burner after the rescue flood back in. “About that, I…”

  Gillian silenced him with a finger pressed to his lips that was quickly replaced by her own as she came up to her tiptoes next to him. He wrapped his arm around her waist.

  “I think we need to talk about that, anyway.” She said.

  Steve frowned. “Look, Cinder wiped my memory and the whole thing with Lily Austen, that was before…”

  “I think if you’re going to have this power, you should enjoy it.” Gillian interrupted.

  Steve stared at her for a moment. “I don’t follow you.”

  Gillian laughed. “You’ve got the ultimate power, a Genie granting you unlimited wishes. Yeah, you’ve got to put up with her stories, but you’re not using it.”

  “Absolute power…” Steve started, but was interrupted again.

  “…needs some checks and balances. I get it.”

  “What kind of checks and balances?”

  Gillian kissed him again. “I can cover that.”

  “So, when I’m trying to use Firefly’s powers to get in another girl’s pants, you stop me?”

  The redhead smirked and kissed him, turning to walk back into the villa
as she replied.

  “Why would I do that?”

  Steve turned and followed her in through the huge sliding glass doors that covered the majority of the south wall. “Wait, I’m a bit confused.”

  The redhead plunked herself down on the overstuffed white couch, her legs far from reaching the floor. “Is this the cliché point where I tell you I’m not like other girls?” She asked.