Chapter 8: Fixing The Market
The silence after Katie’s defusal was brief, suffocated by the guttural sounds resuming from the surrounding stalls. The candy’s compulsion hadn’t broken for the crowd; it had merely lost its epicenter. Dozens of market-goers, mages, critters, and things in between were still naked, still desperate, their eyes glazed with a hungry sheen.
Jan stood on shaky legs, the afterglow a distant memory under a surge of tactical dread. “Okay, team huddle. We’ve got a contaminant spill with multiple live vectors. Standard Green Moon protocol is one-on-one purification. That’ll take hours we don’t have.”
Rainbor hefted his axe, eyeing a trio of satyrs who were now collaboratively attempting to mount a bewildered-looking troll. “I can discourage group coalescence. But I am not a delicate instrument for this work.”
“You’re crowd control,” Jan agreed, pulling her flannel shirt back on but leaving it hanging open. She needed access. “Viv? Feed status?”
Vivian took a steadying breath. Her shadows were placid, sated. “I’m at capacity. That was… a lot. But it’s clean. I can maybe buffer overflow, but I can’t actively drain another source like that without risking a backlash.”
“Right. So I’m the main ground wire.” Jan spat on the ground, the taste of ozone and Katie’s magic still on her tongue. “I’ll have to cycle the taint through me, purify it, and vent it. It’s gonna get messy. Rainbor, I need you to pick the most aggressive, most mobile ones and pin them down. Don’t let them come at me all at once.”
“A controlled demolition of desire,” Katie mumbled from the floor, now weakly trying to pull her dress over her head. “Use the horny against itself. That’s pretty metal.”
Before Jan could move, a chill cut through the market’s humid air, unrelated to any magic. A figure coalesced near a stall selling spectral candles, her form flickering like an old film projection. She wore a high-necked, lace-trimmed gown of charcoal grey, her face pale and pretty beneath a cascade of dark curls. A faint smile played on her translucent lips.
“Oh, I do adore a practical woman,” the ghost said, her voice carrying the crisp clip of a bygone era. “Such a vigorous approach to a public health crisis.”
Rainbor shifted his weight, uneasy. “Lady Eleanor. This is not a social call.”
“But it is a fascinating one!” Lady Eleanor Hawthorne glided forward, her feet not quite touching the grimy cobbles. She observed a nearby human mage, a woman frantically riding the thigh of a comatose goblin, with detached academic interest. “It quite takes me back. London, 1887. A similar confectionery disturbance in the alleys behind the Royal Opera House. The things one saw. A vicar, a street-sweeper, and a rather perplexed lion from a traveling menagerie. The lion was the most genteel of the three, as I recall.”
Jan blinked, processing. “You’ve seen this before?”
“The candy? Or the resultant… fervor?” Eleanor’s ghostly eyes twinkled. “Both, my dear. Though the formulation was different. That batch tasted of aniseed and produced a compulsion towards elaborate, formal waltzes that invariably degenerated. This seems more direct.” She watched as the mage ground herself to a shuddering finish on the goblin’s leg. “Efficient, if brutish.”
The ghost’s eerie calm was somehow more unsettling than the orgy. “Can you help?” Jan asked, blunt.
“I possess no tangible form to consume sweets, nor bodily fluids to exchange,” Eleanor said with a sigh of genuine regret. “But I can observe and report. And, if a willing participant is present, I can… ride along. Provide a measure of stabilization for the host’s consciousness during the purification. In my day, we called it ‘lending strength.’ It’s why I was popular at parties.” She gave a modest, coquettish shrug.
Jan’s mind raced. A stabilizer. Someone to keep a victim’s mind from shattering under the dual assault of candy-compulsion and Green Moon intrusion. She looked at Vivian. “Can you link us? If she possesses me, can you siphon the clean excess from her as well as me? Make it a triangle?”
Vivian bit her lip, thinking. “Maybe. If she’s anchored in you, her spiritual energy would have a… flavor. I could feed on the emotion of it, the experience. It might work.”
“Splendid!” Eleanor clapped her hands, the sound like cracking ice. “A spectral ménage à trois. I haven’t been involved in one of those since I haunted that Parisian bordello in the ‘20s. Do you need me to sign a waiver?”
“Just get in the queue,” Jan muttered, turning to the plaza. Her shirt slipped off her shoulders. She let it fall.
The Power of Exposure flared around her, a nimbus of commanding awe. It cut through the candy’s simpler, dumber hunger. Every glazed eye in the immediate vicinity snapped to her. The awe wouldn’t cure them, but it would make them pause, make them compliant.
“Rainbor,” Jan said, her voice echoing with authority. “The mage by the pillar. The one trying to screw the brickwork.”
Rainbor nodded. He moved with surprising speed for his size, grabbing a human man in tattered robes whose hips were frantically pistonning against a stone column. Rainbor wrenched him away, the man’s erection bobbing, snarling in frustration. With a swift, practiced move, Rainbor twisted the mage’s arm behind his back and forced him to his knees, facing Jan.
“Initiate the contact,” Rainbor grunted, holding the struggling man fast.
Jan approached. The mage’s eyes were wild, but underneath the compulsion, she saw terror. This wasn’t him. She placed a hand on his sweaty cheek. “I know it’s in there. I’m gonna pull it out. It’s gonna feel like I’m ripping your soul out through your dick. Then it’s gonna feel better.” She looked over her shoulder. “Eleanor. Now.”
The ghost didn’t need to be told twice. With a rush of frigid air, she streamed forward, a shimmering silver-blue vapor that poured into Jan’s open mouth, her ears, the spaces between her fingers. Jan shuddered violently, her back arching. Her eyes flashed, pupils expanding to swallow the green irises, replaced for a moment by Eleanor’s older, wiser grey. A double vision overlapped her sight—the grimy market and a gas-lit London street.
“Oh, my,” Jan-and-Eleanor’s voice said, a bizarre harmony of Jan’s Chicago rasp and Eleanor’s aristocratic lilt. “The vitality. I’d forgotten the sheer mess of having nerves.”
There was no more time for commentary. Jan-and-Eleanor dropped to her knees before the pinned mage. She didn’t bother with foreplay. She took his throbbing cock in one hand, aimed it, and slammed herself down onto its full length in one punishing stroke.
The mage cried out, his body seizing. The intrusion was violent, beyond pleasure.
Jan-and-Eleanor began to ride him, a hard, driving rhythm. Each downward slam was a probe, a suction. She could feel the corrupted magic inside him, a knotted, sugary cyst attached to his libido. With each thrust, she hooked her own power around it, pulling. The ghost within her provided a strange buffer, absorbing the psychic scream of the mage’s violated self, cushioning his mind so Jan could focus on the raw extraction.
The taint began to flow. It burned up through the man’s cock, into Jan’s cunt, a searing flood of distorted want. Jan-and-Eleanor gritted their shared teeth. Inside, Eleanor sorted through the chaotic feelings with a archivist’s precision—this strand is pure hunger, this one is shame, this one is loneliness sweetened to poison. Jan focused on the physical act, the slam of his pelvis against her clit, using the sharp sensation to anchor her in the now.
“Vivian, now!” Jan-and-Eleanor gasped.
Vivian was already there. She knelt behind them, her shadows flowing out to envelop Jan’s back. She didn’t touch the taint directly. Instead, she opened herself to the emotional resonance Eleanor was processing—the refined, historic feeling of the act, the ghost’s delighted, scholarly passion, the raw humanity of the mage’s relief. It was a complex vintage, and Vivian drank it in, her own form growing more substantial, her cheeks flushing with borrowed life.
The mage beneath them was changing. The wildness in his eyes broke, replaced by a flood of tears. His thrusts became ragged, then purposeful, then desperate in a new way—a need for release not from candy, but from a building, clean, biological imperative.
“I’m… I’m gonna…” he choked.
“So come,” Jan-and-Eleanor commanded, grinding down deep, twisting her hips.
He obeyed. His back arched off the ground, a strangled shout tearing from his throat as he emptied himself inside her in hot, pulsing jets. The final thread of the corruption snapped, purified in the crucible of their joined climax and evacuated with his seed.
Jan-and-Eleanor collapsed forward, catching herself on his chest. She felt him go soft inside her. The ghostly presence withdrew, streaming out in a cool breeze, reforming nearby. Jan was just Jan again, sweat-drenched and panting, feeling utterly used and hollowed out. The mage stared up at the cavern ceiling, weeping softly, free.
One down.
Jan pushed herself up. Her legs trembled. She looked at the dozens of other moving shadows, hearing moans from other tunnels. The scale of it was impossible.
“The method is sound,” Eleanor said, examining her translucent nails. “But your physical vessel, my dear, has limits. You cannot service an entire population.”
“We have to find the source,” Vivian said, her voice now rich, almost echoing. “The candy here had to come from somewhere in the market. A delivery point.”
Rainbor, who had been holding back two arguing imps, nodded grimly. “My stall was hit. The box was among my wholesale shipments. The shipping manifest was magical auto-script. Untraceable.”
“Then we look for the anomaly,” Jan said, forcing steel into her voice. She straightened up. “Something that doesn’t belong. Godfrey!”
The Bernese Mountain Dog, who had been sitting patiently by a pillar observing everything with canine disinterest, trotted over. Jan knelt, wincing at the ache between her legs. “Find the sugar, boy. The bad sugar. The rotten smell.”
Godfrey snuffed her hand, then her crotch, which carried the scent of the purified magic. He turned, his nose to the ground, and began prowling the perimeter of the plaza, ignoring the coupled bodies.
They followed in his wake, a ragged, unconventional triage unit. Jan walked naked, a beacon of awe that temporarily stilled the chaos where she passed, but the compulsion snapped back the moment she moved on. Rainbor was a stalwart enforcer, shoving overly amorous creatures aside with the flat of his axe. Vivian floated-like in her sated state, her shadows gently diverting some from their paths. Eleanor provided eerie, running commentary.
“The corporeal form’s exhaustion is fascinating,” the ghost mused as Jan staggered slightly. “The tremors in the quadriceps, the localized inflammation. In life, I’d have required a week of rest and several glasses of sherry after one such engagement.”
“Noted,” Jan hissed, her eyes on Godfrey.
The dog led them away from the main plaza, down a narrower tunnel where the stalls were shuttered and dark. The sounds of the orgy grew muffled. Here, the air smelled of damp rock and something else—a cloying, chemical sweetness underpinned by a bitter note, like burnt plastic.
Godfrey stopped at a rusted iron grate set low in the wall, a runoff drain for the market’s weird plumbing. He growled, a low rumble in his chest.
The grate was slightly ajar. Behind it, stuffed into the pipe, was not a box, but a translucent bag, the kind used for magical waste disposal. Inside were dozens of empty, gold-foiled wrappers, shimmering with residual enchantment. And nestled among them, like a tumor, was a small, heart-shaped candy, still uneaten. It pulsed with a faint, sickly pink light.
It wasn’t a delivery. It was a trigger. A single piece of candy, magically configured to infect a large area, its influence spreading through the market’s own latent magical currents. The empty wrappers were just fertilizer, scent-markers to amplify the effect.
“Bastard didn’t mail a bomb,” Jan whispered, sinking to her knees before the grate. “He planted a seed. It grew in the magic here.”
Eleanor floated closer, peering at the heart-shaped lozenge. “Oh, yes. Much more sophisticated than my London incident. This is… targeted agriculture. You don’t just want an orgy. You want a specific kind of chaos. A distraction.”
Rainbor’s face darkened. “A distraction from what?”
A cold, telepathic ding resonated in all their minds, followed by Bethany’s voice, strained and professional, piped through the Golden Wands’ network. “Jan? Are you receiving? We traced the signature. It’s not just random. The magical residue on the candy wrappers from the tower… it’s keyed. It’s drawing on latent emotional energy, but specifically from places of… romantic significance. First kisses, proposals, break-ups. It’s using Chicago’s own love stories as a power source.”
Jan looked from the pulsing candy heart to the distant sounds of mindless fucking. The Candy Man wasn’t spreading chaos for chaos’s sake. He was farming. And he’d planted his crop in the emotional topsoil of the city.
“What’s the most powerful love story in Chicago right now?” Vivian asked, her voice small.
Jan’s blood ran cold. She knew. They all knew.
The hospital. Where Casey Kapowski had just given birth. Where a child—a child already loved across time, a child whose future self was the cornerstone of a love story that defied logic—wasn't even a day old.
The candy in the market, in the tower, in Frank’s kitchen… they were just side-shows. Fertilizer.
The main event was happening right now, in a sterile room, where Stacy Steinberg should be guarding a door, and the most potent, vulnerable love in the city was focusing into a single, crying point of life.
“He’s not after the city,” Jan said, her voice raw. “He’s after the baby.”