Chapter 3: A Gamble
The frozen alley held its breath. Jan’s own breath crystallized in the air, a visible sign of the panic freezing her from the inside out. The Winter Queen watched her, a sculpture of immortal amusement, waiting for the amusing struggle of a mortal fly.
Molly was gone. That was the irreducible fact. The Queen had taken her as one might pluck a curious flower, with no thought to its roots. Pleading would be a show. Bargaining? With what? Jan had no treasures, no ancient favors. All she had was the messy, human interconnectedness the Queen clearly found so trivial.
An idea, terrible and desperate, clicked into place. It was a bad idea. A vicious, cruel idea. It might not work. But it was the only lever she had.
“A solo act grows stale,” Jan said, her voice cutting through the crystalline silence. She forced a grin, the expression feeling like cracking ice on her face. “Even in a court as refined as yours. Molly’s good. A talented mimic of human frailty. But her best work… it’s a duet.”
The Queen’s head tilted a fraction further. The glacier-blue eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in sharper interest. “Explain.”
“She has a partner. Ginny. Her best friend. Her confidant.” Jan chose the words with the care of a bomb-maker. “Their chemistry is… it’s the real thing. The laughter they create together is deeper, richer. It’s not just artifice. It’s a connection. You isolated one note. I’m offering you the chord.”
The silence stretched. The cold gnawed through Jan’s jacket, her jeans, biting into her skin. Godfrey’s low growl was a constant, reassuring vibration against her leg.
“You propose I take another mortal,” the Queen said, her tone considering. “To improve my acquisition.”
“I’m proposing you complete the set,” Jan said, spreading her hands, praying the tremor in them looked like cold, not fear. “You appreciate beauty, right? Molly’s all bright, bubbly warmth. Ginny is… sharper. Wry. She’s the shadow that makes the light interesting. Together, they’re a perfect balance. Comedy and tragedy. They’ll keep each other sharp, keep the performance fresh for centuries. A single firefly blinks out fast. Two… they can keep each other’s light alive.”
It was a sales pitch wrapped in a sacrifice. Jan’s stomach churned with acid. She was selling Ginny into gilded, frozen slavery. To save Molly? Or to buy time? She wasn’t sure anymore.
The Winter Queen’s lips curved into a smile that showed the faintest hint of teeth, whiter than the snow. “A tragedy to sharpen the comedy. I see the appeal. This Ginny. She would come? Willingly?”
“She’ll come for Molly,” Jan said, the truth of it a heavy stone in her throat. “They’re inseparable. Where one goes, the other follows. It’s what makes them perfect.”
“Then summon her.” The Queen’s voice was a command that seemed to still the very air. “Let us observe this bond. If it amuses me, I shall accept your… completion gift.”
Jan’s fingers, numb and clumsy, pulled her phone from her pocket. The screen was almost too cold to react. She found Ginny’s number. The call connected, ringing in the utter silence of the enchanted alley.
It picked up. “Jan?” Ginny’s voice was tinny, strained with a panic of her own. “Jesus, where are you? Molly’s not answering her phone. She was supposed to be back from that weird catering gig hours ago. And the news… there are reports of some kind of… mass hysteria. People taking their clothes off. It’s insane.”
“Ginny, listen to me.” Jan’s voice was a tight wire. She kept her eyes locked on the Winter Queen’s impassive face. “Molly’s safe. But she’s… she’s with the client. The one who wanted private entertainment. It’s a long-term contract.”
“What? What does that mean? Where is she?”
“It’s a private estate. Very secluded. Very… traditional.” Each word was ash in Jan’s mouth. “They want you too, Ginny. They saw your picture. They know about your partnership. They want the duo.”
“Me? Jan, what the hell are you talking about? I’m a supporting player most of the time. Molly's the star-in-the-making.”
“It’s not about the status.” Jan squeezed her eyes shut for a second, then forced them open. She couldn’t show weakness now. “It’s about you and Molly. Together. They’re offering a… a residency. A long one. But it’s the only way to be with her. Do you understand?”
A long pause on the line. Jan could hear Ginny’s rapid breathing. “This is crazy. This sounds like a kidnapping. I’m calling the police.”
“The police can’t help with this, Ginny.” Jan put every ounce of certainty she didn’t feel into the words. “This is bigger than that. Molly needs you. She’s asking for you. But you have to choose. Now.”
Another silence. The Winter Queen watched, her expression one of detached fascination, like a child watching ants swarm.
“Is she okay?” Ginny asked, her voice small.
“She’s perfect,” Jan whispered, and it was probably true, in the most horrifying way. “She’s the star. But she’s lonely. She needs her best friend.”
Ginny let out a shuddering breath. “Okay. Okay. Tell me where to go.”
“I’ll text you an address. It’s an alley near the university library. Come alone. And Ginny… listen carefully. Do not, under any circumstances, eat anything anyone offers you. No matter how good it looks. Especially if it’s candy. Except… except when you see Molly. If Molly offers you something to share, you take it. You share it with her. That’s the only exception. Do you hear me?”
“Don’t eat candy… unless Molly gives it to me. Jan, you’re not making any sense.”
“Just promise me.”
“I… I promise.”
“Good. Come now.” Jan hung up. Her hands were shaking violently. She typed out the alley’s location and sent it.
“A touching display,” the Winter Queen murmured. “The loyal friend. So easily led.” She gestured with a hand, and the air several feet away shimmered. A vision appeared, wavering like a heat mirage on ice. It showed Ginny, in her cramped apartment, pulling on her coat, her face pale and determined, strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.
“To expedite matters,” the Queen said, her voice dripping with sweet malice. “And to ensure her… compliance.”
In the vision, as Ginny rushed out her door and down the apartment stairs, a man stumbled into her path in the lobby. He was naked, his cock hard and dripping, his eyes vacant. He held out a trembling hand. In his palm were two gold-wrapped candies. “Have one,” he slurred. “It’s so good. Makes you feel… amazing.”
Ginny recoiled, remembering Jan’s warning. “No. Get away from me.”
She shoved past him, out into the street. The Queen’s smile widened. The scene in the vision shifted, keeping pace with Ginny as she hurried toward the university district. The streets were a tableau of the candy’s influence. A woman was bent over a mailbox, moaning as a man took her from behind. A couple fucked doggy-style against the window of a closed coffee shop. Ginny ran, her face a mask of horror, avoiding eye contact, weaving through the naked, grinding bodies.
She was two blocks from the alley when a police cruiser, its lights silently spinning, blocked the sidewalk. An officer leaned against the hood. He wasn’t naked. He seemed lucid. He held out a bottle of water. “Miss? You look distressed. It’s chaos tonight. Here, have a drink.”
Ginny, breathless, paranoid, shook her head. “I’m okay.”
“Suit yourself.” The officer smiled. It was a normal smile. Then he reached into his pocket. “How about a mint? For your nerves.” He held out a small, gold-wrapped disk.
It wasn’t the ornate candy from the naked man. This was smaller. Subtler. The trap, refined.
Ginny stared at it. Jan’s words warred with her nerves, with the officer’s kind, authoritative face. Don’t eat anything anyone offers you. But this was a policeman. And it was just a mint.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. She took it.
In the alley, Jan gasped. “No!”
The Winter Queen laughed, a sound like icicles shattering. “Oh, but this is better.”
Ginny’s fingers closed around the gold-wrapped mint. The officer’s benign smile held. For a suspended second, Jan was certain she’d see Ginny’s slender fingers bring it to her lips, see her eyes glaze over with that blank, hungry lust. Ginny’s thumb rubbed the crinkling wrapper. Then her hand dropped to her coat pocket, depositing the mint with a decisive rustle. “For later,” she muttered, not to the officer, but to herself, a ward against the pervasive madness. She sidestepped the policeman, whose smile faltered into confusion, and broke into a run.
The vision in the air dissipated like smoke. The Winter Queen’s pleased amusement cooled into something thinner, more evaluative. “Resourceful,” she conceded, the word leaving her lips like a frost crystal.
Minutes later, the rapid crunch of feet on icy pavement echoed in the alley. Ginny burst into the narrow space, skidding to a halt on the frozen asphalt. Her chest heaved, pluming steam into the air. She took in Jan’s strained face, Godfrey’s protective stance, and then her eyes landed on the Winter Queen. All the color drained from Ginny’s face, her sardonic wit frozen solid by the sheer, unnatural presence before her. This was no eccentric client. This was something from a story, beautiful and terrible in a way that hurt to look at.
“Jan?” Ginny’s voice was a scrape of sound. “What is this?”
“Molly’s with her,” Jan said, each word a stark, heavy stone dropped between them. “This is the Winter Queen. She… collects interesting things. She has Molly.”
Ginny’s gaze flicked from the Queen’s impassive face back to Jan’s. She saw the raw, unvarnished fear in her friend’s freckled face, the silent pleading. Jan wouldn’t ask this. Not ever. Not unless the alternative was infinitely worse. Molly was in danger. Real, eternal danger. The logic of it was monstrous, but it was irrefutable.
“Okay,” Ginny breathed, the word barely audible. She straightened her slender shoulders, a soldier accepting a suicide mission. She looked directly at the Winter Queen. “Take me to her.”
The Queen extended a hand, not in kindness, but in acquisition. “Come.”
As Ginny walked forward, passing Jan, their shoulders brushed. In that fraction of a second, Jan’s hand moved, a magician’s sleight born of desperation. The strange, rune-etched candy from Norm the Wandering Nomad initiate—the one she’d been given before all this began—pressed into Ginny’s cold palm. Jan’s lips, hidden from the Queen’s view, formed silent, emphatic words: For when you see Molly.
Ginny’s fingers clenched around it. A minuscule nod, almost imperceptible. Then her hand was in the Winter Queen’s, their figures shimmering as if seen through warping ice. “A matching set,” the Queen said, her voice fading into the wind. Then they were gone. The alley was just an alley again, cold and empty but for Jan and her dog.
Jan sagged, a sob tearing at her throat. She’d done it. She’d fed her friend to a god. Godfrey nudged her hand, a warm, solid weight. “We have to move,” she whispered, swiping her sleeve across her eyes. Amy’s call about Jason and Yukio—the other candy victims—was her only tangible lead now. She needed information, a starting point to unravel this.
The city outside the alley was a silent film of depravity. A man knelt on the sidewalk, vigorously eating out a woman whose back was arched against a fire hydrant, her moans short and mechanical. Two businessmen, trousers around their ankles, were frantically fucking a third against the grille of a parked car, the metallic slaps of flesh mingling with their grunts. The candy’s influence was spreading, a silent, sexual epidemic. Jan avoided the clusters, her boots crunching on salt and ice, Godfrey a vigilant shadow at her side.
Amy’s dorm was on the university’s south campus, a bland brick tower. The lobby was a scene. A shirtless student was pinned over the check-in desk, a custodian pounding into him from behind with hard, rhythmic thrusts. The student’s face was pressed to the laminate, his eyes closed, a string of drool connecting his mouth to the surface. “Yeah, fuck, right there,” the custodian chanted, his gut jiggling with each slam.
Jan averted her eyes and took the stairs two at a time. The second-floor hallway smelled of weed and cheap pizza, undercut by the sharp, coppery scent of sex. A door was ajar; inside, a couple was on a narrow bed, the girl riding the guy, her small breasts bouncing, her whispers loud. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, oh god, your cock is so deep.”
Jan found the door marked 217. She knocked, hearing a frantic scramble inside.
The door opened a crack, revealing one of Amy’s wide, terrified blue eyes. “Jan! Thank god.” She yanked the door open and pulled Jan inside, then quickly locked it.
The dorm room was a catastrophe of books, art prints, and discarded clothes. And in the center of it, on the worn rainbow rug, were Jason and Yukio.
They were naked, slick with sweat. Yukio was on her hands and knees, her voluptuous body trembling. Jason knelt behind her, his hands gripping the intricate rose tattoo on her shoulder, his hips pumping in a steady, mindless rhythm. His cock, glistening wet, plunged into her again and again with a wet, slapping sound. Yukio’s face was turned to the side, her eyes unfocused, her mouth open in a continuous, low moan. “Feels… so… full,” she panted.
“They just… they won’t stop,” Amy wailed, wringing her hands. She was fully dressed, a stark contrast to the raw carnality on the floor. “They’ve been going for almost an hour. I tried to pull them apart, but they’re so strong. Sometimes they ask me to join in, but that's about the only time they even seem to notice me."
Jason’s thrusts became harder, faster. He leaned over Yukio’s back, his breath hot on her neck. “Gonna come in your tight pussy,” he grunted, his voice rough and unlike his usual gentle tone. “Gonna fill you up.”
“Do it,” Yukio begged, pushing her ass back against him. “Fill me, Jason, please.”
Jan stepped forward, her Green Moon senses reaching out. The magical signature was clear: the sticky, sweet psychic residue of the Candy Man’s work, tangled around their arousal like barbed wire. “It’s the candy,” Jan said to Amy. “It hijacks everything. They’re not in control.”
Jason’s tempo became frantic, his balls slapping against Yukio’s skin. A deep, ragged groan ripped from his throat as he shoved himself deep and held there, his body shuddering. Yukio cried out, her own climax triggered by his, her inner muscles milking him as he pulsed inside her.
They collapsed together onto the rug, still joined, breathing in ragged unison. The blank, contented haze settled over their faces. They’d finish, and soon, they’d just start again.
Jan knelt beside them, ignoring the heat and smell of sex. She placed a hand on Jason’s slick back. “Okay,” she whispered, gathering her focus. “Let’s see who gave you that candy.”
Her fingers tingled against Jason’s sweat-slick skin, the Green Moon power within her reaching past the physical into the psychic residue of the candy’s spell. It was a cloying, sugar-sweet compulsion wrapped around the base drive of their nervous systems. She saw a fleeting image: a smiling man in a bright vest offering gold-wrapped caramels outside the library, his voice echoing, “A little sweetness for the soul.”
But the vision of the giver dissolved as the raw, current need of their bodies surged back into focus. Jason, still semi-hard inside Yukio, began to stir. A low groan escaped him as his hips gave an involuntary, shallow thrust. Yukio gasped beneath him, her back arching, her own arousal re-igniting like a banked fire hit with oxygen.
“Fuck,” Jason muttered, his voice thick and confused, his conscious mind fighting the overwhelming directive to just keep going. His hands tightened on Yukio’s hips.
Jan recoiled, breaking contact. The old method—the direct, confrontational purge she’d used on the doctor—would be a brutal wrestling match here. Their libidos were too amplified, the candy’s roots too deep in their pleasure centers. A new, terrible understanding dawned on her. They were flooded with sexual energy; fighting it directly would shatter something in them. She had to redirect it. She had to use it.
“I might have to fuck the candy spell out of them,” Jan said aloud, the words hanging in the musky air. Amy stared, her mouth agape.
Jan didn’t hesitate. Time was a fluid, stretching thing in the heat of magic. She shrugged off her coat, then pulled her sweater over her head. Her boots were kicked aside, her jeans and underwear shoved down her legs. The cold air pebbled her skin, but the heat building in her core was a far more potent force. Her Green Moon magic flared, not as a weapon, but as an invitation, a conduit. It wasn’t about domination. It was about connection, about becoming part of the circuit so she could gently pull the fuse.
Naked, she knelt beside them on the rainbow rug. The scent of sex—salty, musky, alive—filled her nostrils. She placed a hand on Yukio’s trembling shoulder, the other on Jason’s heaving back. Her power flowed into them, a warm, golden current merging with the candy’s sticky-sweet static.
“Look at me,” Jan said, her voice not a command but a low, resonant vibration.
Yukio’s glassy eyes refocused, sliding from the middle distance to Jan’s face. Jason turned his head, his breathing ragged. They saw her, truly saw her—the freckles across her nose, the determination in her green eyes, the pale curve of her breast just within their sight. The Power of Exposure, intrinsic to her initiation, worked its subtle awe. Their compulsive hunger for each other wavered, making room for a new, dizzying focus.
Jan guided Jason, her hand on his hip. He slid, wet and spent, from Yukio’s clutching warmth. A thin strand of fluid connected them for a second before snapping. “Yukio, here,” Jan whispered, shifting the voluptuous young woman onto her back. Jan leaned over her, capturing her mouth in a deep, probing kiss. Yukio moaned into it, her hands coming up to tangle in Jan’s short red hair.
At the same time, Jan reached back, her fingers finding Jason’s renewed erection. She stroked him, her touch infused with that golden energy, and he shuddered, a full-body spasm. “Come here, Jason,” she breathed against Yukio’s lips. She guided him not back to Yukio, but to her own body. She was positioned over Yukio, her knees bracketing the girl’s hips. Jason’s cock, hard and eager again, pressed against Jan’s entrance.
He pushed in with a single, smooth thrust that made Jan gasp. Her own tightness enveloped him, the sensation magnified by the magic flowing through all three of them. She felt the candy’s spell like a greasy film inside their shared energy, and her own power began to emulsify it, to break it down with each movement.
“Fuck me,” Jan groaned, dropping her head to Yukio’s shoulder as Jason began to move. His pace was less frantic now, more purposeful, each drive pushing her body down against Yukio’s. Jan’s hand slid between her own body and Yukio’s, her fingers finding Yukio’s swollen clit. She rubbed tight, fast circles, mirroring the rhythm Jason set above her.
The room dissolved into a tangle of limbs and shared breath. Yukio’s cries grew sharper, more specific. “Yes, right there, Jan, don’t stop.” Jason’s thrusts grew deeper, his grip on Jan’s hips bruising and perfect. Jan was the anchor, the circuit breaker. She felt their pleasure cresting, not as a mindless peak, but as a wave she was gently steering to shore. The candy’s influence thinned, fraying at the edges under the onslaught of something more profound—a connected, conscious ecstasy.
Yukio came first. Her body bowed off the floor, a raw, shattering scream torn from her throat as Jan’s fingers and the pressure from above pushed her over. The climax ripped through her, and as it did, the last of the sugary haze behind her eyes evaporated. She blinked, panting, seeing the familiar water-stained ceiling tiles of her dorm.
A few strokes later, Jason followed. He buried himself to the hilt inside Jan, a guttural roar erupting from his chest as he pulsed. His release seemed to flush the final remnants of the spell from his system. He collapsed forward, bracing himself on his arms above the two women, his head hanging, sweat dripping from his nose.
Silence, broken only by the ragged symphony of their breathing. Jan carefully extracted herself, feeling the slick mess between her thighs. She sat back on her heels, utterly spent, her magic receding like a tide.
“What…” Yukio croaked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked from her own naked body to Jason’s, to Jan’s, her dark eyes wide with dawning horror and confusion. “What happened? We were at the library…”
Jason rolled onto his side, his face pale. “There was a man… with candy.” He touched his temple. “My head feels… clear. But I remember… everything.” He looked at Yukio, then at Jan, shame and gratitude warring in his expression.
With a choked sob, Amy scrambled across the floor and threw her arms around Jason, burying her face in his neck. “You’re okay,” she cried, her shoulders shaking. “You’re you again.”
Jan sighed, a long, exhausted sound that came from her bones. She reached for her clothes, the mundane texture of her sweater strangely foreign. “That was easier,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone. She pulled the sweater on, the wool scratchy against her sensitized skin. “But it’s not like I can fuck the entire city of Chicago at the rate things are going.”