Chapter 9: Maternity Ward Meltdown
The hospital room door hissed shut behind Mike, sealing him into a bubble of quiet exhaustion and antiseptic light. Casey slept in the raised bed, her face pale against the pillow, one hand resting on the clear bassinet where their son, Rick, made tiny snuffling sounds. The world outside this room—the candy, the chaos, Jan’s frantic mission—felt like a bad dream. Here, there was only the profound, terrifying peace of new life.
He didn’t even hear the footsteps. The door burst open with a slam against the wall.
Amy stood there, dripping wet from the decontamination shower, her blonde hair plastered to her skull and shoulders. She was naked, water beading on her skin, her eyes wide and unfocused, pupils dilated with a hunger that had nothing to do with food. Her chest heaved, small breasts quivering with each frantic breath.
“Jason, Yukio, no, I need—I need—” she babbled, words slurring.
Right behind her, Jason and Yukio stumbled in, their clothes soaked and torn. Jason had lost his shirt, deep scratches across his chest. Yukio’s jeans were ripped at the knee, her rose tattoo vivid against her flushed skin. They’d been trying to hold her, to restrain her, and it showed.
“Amy, stop!” Jason pleaded, his voice raw.
But Amy’s gaze had locked onto Mike. Something in the candy’s programming recognized him—not Mike the person, but Mike the partner, the father, a node of potent emotional energy in this room saturated with love. She let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl, and launched herself across the room.
Mike had a half-second to register the surreal horror of it—the sweet, willowy girl he’d shared campfire stories with, now a naked, ravenous missile—before she collided with him. The impact drove the air from his lungs and sent them both crashing onto the foot of Casey’s hospital bed.
“Oh god, please, please fuck me, Mike, I need it inside me, I need you to fucking ruin me,” Amy chanted, her voice a desperate, humid whisper in his ear. She ground her pelvis against his thigh, her soaking-wet cunt leaving a slick trail on his jeans. Her hands clawed at his belt.
“Amy, no!” Mike gasped, trying to push her off, but she was stronger than she looked, fueled by a magic that turned desire into brute force.
From the bed, Casey jolted awake. “What the fuck? Get off him!” Her voice was a low, dangerous snarl, weakened but ferocious. She tried to sit up, her IV line pulling taut.
Yukio and Jason grabbed Amy’s shoulders, trying to peel her off. “She got a piece in the shower area,” Yukio panted, her strength failing against the magical compulsion. “We tried to hold her but she just—she just wants—”
“I NEED HIS COCK!” Amy screamed, the polite, nerdy girl utterly erased. She succeeded in wrenching Mike’s belt open, her fingers fumbling with his button and zipper.
The door slammed open again. Jan stood there, framed in the fluorescent hallway light, naked except for her service dog vest strapped loosely over her front. Godfrey pressed against her leg, a solid, unmagical presence. She took in the scene in a millisecond: the struggling cluster on the bed, Casey’s furious, pale face, the bassinet holding the baby who was beginning to whimper.
“Shit. It’s in the ventilation. The love is drawing it,” Jan hissed. She had no time for the Power of Exposure, no time for awe. This was triage.
“Vivian, the bed frame! Ground it through the metal!” Jan barked, striding forward.
Vivian flowed in behind her, shadows dripping from her form like ink in water. She didn’t question. She placed her hands on the cold steel frame at the foot of the bed. Her shadows seeped into the joints, seeking conductivity.
Jan didn’t bother with subtleties. Amy had managed to yank Mike’s jeans and boxers down to his thighs, his flaccid shock of a cock exposed. Amy was trying to mount him, her wet slit smearing against him, seeking entry.
“Amy, honey, you’re gonna hate yourself,” Jan said, her voice suddenly calm, a sharp contrast to the chaos. She put a hand on Amy’s slick back. “But we gotta do this the fast way.”
Jan’s other hand found Mike’s cock. She gave it a few rough, efficient strokes. It was a clinical act, a mechanic priming a pump. Mike cried out in confused protest, but under the combined physical stimulus and the ambient haze of Jan’s own magic—a focused, directive pulse that bypassed consent in the face of medical necessity—his body betrayed him. He hardened in her hand.
“Jan, don’t you fucking—” Casey started, but her words were cut off as Amy, feeling Mike stiffen, let out a triumphant moan.
“YES! Give it to me!” Amy screamed.
Jan guided him. She helped Amy rise up on her knees, positioned the head of Mike’s cock at her dripping entrance, and then shoved Amy down onto him with brutal force.
Amy impaled herself with a scream that was pure, shattering ecstasy. She took him to the hilt in one stroke, her tight, virginal-seeming cunt stretching obscenely around his girth. She began to ride him immediately, a frantic, piston-like motion, her body slamming down onto his over and over. The wet, slapping sounds of their coupling filled the sterile room, mixing with Amy’s incoherent babble. “Fuck me, fuck me, yes, your cock is so big, fill me up, breed me you bastard!”
Mike was trapped, a vessel. He stared at the ceiling, his face a mask of anguish and unwelcome pleasure. Each brutal plunge of Amy’s body forced a grunt from him. He could feel the heat of her, the violent, magical need trying to suck the life and love out of him.
Jan placed her hands on Amy’s bouncing breasts, thumbs on her nipples, and pushed her own will into the connection. She wasn’t just watching; she was the circuit. She felt the taint immediately—a saccharine, cloying corruption that had woven itself into Amy’s simplest romantic fantasies, twisting her love for Jason and her admiration for Mike into this single-minded fuck-drill.
“Vivian, now! Pull it through me!” Jan gritted out.
Vivian’s eyes glowed. The hospital bed frame hummed, a low magnetic vibration. The shadows coiled around Jan’s ankles, then up her legs, a cool counterpoint to the heat of the sexual crash before her. Vivian fed, but not on the act itself. She fed on the extraction, on the painful purification Jan was conducting, siphoning the corrupted energy as Jan wrenched it free.
Jan’s vision doubled. She saw Amy’s inner landscape—a sun-drenched meadow from one of her fantasy novels, now overrun with thorny, candy-pink vines that squeezed the heart of it. Jan burned the vines. She used the raw, physical feedback of Amy’s cunt gripping and releasing Mike’s cock as a guide. Each bounce, each clenching spasm, was a vine to be severed.
Amy’s riding became jagged, less rhythmic. Her screams turned from pleasure to pain. “It hurts, it hurts, stop, it’s too much!” she wailed, but her body, still under the candy’s command, wouldn’t stop. She fucked him through the pain, tears streaming down her face.
“It’s almost out, Amy,” Jan murmured, her own voice strained. “Just let it go. Come for me. Push the poison out.”
The climax, when it hit, was convulsive and ugly. Amy’s body seized, her back arching violently as a torn scream ripped from her throat. Her cunt clamped down on Mike in a series of brutal, milking spasms. Mike couldn’t hold back; with a choked cry, he erupted inside her, his own release triggered by the overwhelming physical stimuli and the magical purge.
A visible wave of pinkish-grey energy, like dirty steam, erupted from their joined bodies. It snapped into Jan, who shuddered, her head thrown back. Then it traveled down her connection to Vivian, who gasped as the fouled energy was grounded out through the metal frame and into the hospital’s electrical earth. The overhead lights flickered.
Amy collapsed forward, off of Mike, onto the bed. She curled into a fetal position, sobbing, sticky with sweat and fluids. Mike lay panting, his softening cock slick with her and his own release, exposed and shamed. He quickly, clumsily, pulled his pants up.
Jan stumbled back, hitting the wall. She was grey with fatigue. “One more. Fuck. This place is a sponge for it.”
From the bassinet, Rick began to cry in earnest, a hungry, newborn wail.
In the stark silence that followed, broken only by sobs and the baby’s cries, the voices from the adjoining family room became suddenly, cruelly audible through the partly open door.
“—simply saying, Mona, that a more stable career path would provide a better environment for the child,” Irene’s prim Boston accent carried clearly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Irene, he’s six hours old! Let the kid enjoy not having a 401k for a minute!” Mona shot back.
They were arguing about college funds. They had completely forgotten the moment, less than an hour ago, when the same candy compulsion had seen them tearing at each other’s clothes, moaning, before Jan had broken the spell. The magic had erased its own trauma, leaving only petty, mundane resentment.
Casey let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. She looked from her sobbing friend, to her shell-shocked husband, to Jan leaning against the wall like a soldier after a bomb blast. Then she looked at the bassinet holding her son, whose very existence was a beacon for this kind of magical predation.
She reached a trembling hand for the call button, not for the nurse, but because she needed to hold onto something solid. “It’s not over, is it?” she asked Jan, her voice hollow.
Jan met her gaze, pushing off the wall. Godfrey nuzzled her hand. “They’re using the city’s own love stories as a battery, Case. And you two…” She nodded at Mike and Casey. “You’ve got one of the biggest ones going. He’s not after the candy eaters. They’re just the fuel. He’s after the source.”
She looked at the bassinet, at the vulnerable, squalling life they were all there to protect. “He’s after the happy ending.”
Jan’s words hung in the antiseptic air, a final, grim diagnosis. From the bassinet, Rick’s cries sharpened into a sustained wail, a siren call they now understood. The sobs from Amy, the shallow breathing of Mike, the oppressive silence from Jason and Yukio—it all formed a single, taut wire of dread.
Then Jan’s phone buzzed, a jarring electronic snarl in the quiet. She fumbled for it, her fingers leaving smudges on the screen.
Over in the Golden Wands Willis Tower field office, the air was a sterile mix of recycled air and ozone. Fatima leaned against a bank of monitors, her body a bowed line of exhaustion. She’d just cleansed the last of the field agents, a brutish man who’d been trying to fuck the ergonomic chair. The aftertaste of his corrupted, bureaucratic lust was like licking a battery.
“All clear here,” she muttered, her voice sandpaper-rough. “But the energy draw was… industrialized. Wrong.”
Beside her, Bethany watched the city grid on a massive screen, her pink hair a violent shock against the charcoal Wand suit. Little red dots pulsed and moved, a slow, converging river. “Traffic cams are picking up clusters. They’re not driving. They’re just… walking. Naked. In January.”
Liam, now dressed again in his own clothes, stared at the screen. His poet’s mind failed. “I cannae reconcile it. Those are people. Just… people.”
Hank’s large hand squeezed Fatima’s shoulder, a steadying pressure. Stacy stood rigid by the door, her athlete’s body coiled as if for a race. Their phones chimed in unison.
Hank pulled his out. “Group text from Jan.” He read it, his face hardening. “Baby Rick is okay for now. But the Candy Man wants him.”
The sentence landed like a physical blow. Stacy’s coiled stillness snapped. “That will happen over my dead body.” The words were flat, absolute, carved from stone.
Liam and Bethany exchanged a glance rich with bewildered curiosity. “Her dead body?” Liam whispered. “What’s she on about?”
Hank scrubbed a hand over his face. “You get used to the time travel shit, but it doesn’t get any less confusing when you do know.”
Bethany’s attention snapped back to her monitor. She zoomed in on the confluence of red dots. Her blood ran cold. “Forget confusing. Look.”
The streams of dots, hundreds of them, were adjusting their trajectories from seemingly random amblings to a unified purpose. All the pulsing crimson paths now led to a single complex on the map. “They’re all heading for the hospital. The magical candy’s the only thing keeping them from flash-freezing. This isn’t random attraction anymore. It’s a directed siege.”
Fatima pushed off from the console. Her knees buckled. Hank caught her elbow. “We need to go. Now. Jan, Mike, Casey… they’re in a room with one exit and a newborn. They’re sitting ducks.”
“You can barely stand, Fati,” Hank argued, his voice thick with worry.
“So I’ll lean on you. Or I’ll crawl.” Her dark eyes were fierce, all fatigue burned away by necessity. “That thing is using a city’s worth of stolen libido as a battering ram. To get to a baby. We are not debating this.”
Bethany was already moving. She threw open a weapons locker with a keycode beep. “Wand policy prohibits lethal force on civilians, even magically-compromised ones.” She began handing out sleek, grey devices that looked like TV remotes with prongs. “Stun nodes. Contact discharge, non-lethal. It’ll drop a charging rhino. Probably.”
Liam took one, hefting its unfamiliar weight. “And if they’re not all civilians?”
“Then we improvise,” Bethany said, her professional cool faltering for a second. She handed one to Stacy, who took it without a word, her gaze already miles away, fixed on a future only she had seen.
The plan formed in seconds, without discussion. Hank would drive his truck, with Fatima and Stacy riding shotgun. Bethany and Liam would follow in her agency sedan, monitoring the converging horde on the mobile feeds. The silence that fell as they moved toward the elevator was the silence of a breath held before a plunge.
Down in the parking garage, the January cold was a visceral slap after the office’s sterility. Hank’s truck exhaled plumes of white vapor as it started. Inside, Fatima sank into the passenger seat, her head lolling back. Stacy stared out the window, her knuckle white where it gripped the stun device.
“He’s just a baby,” Stacy said, not to anyone in the room. “He’s all softness and need. He doesn’t have a future if we don’t give it to him.” She wasn’t talking to Hank or Fatima. She was making a promise to a man who didn’t exist yet.
Behind them, headlights flared as Bethany’s sedan pulled out. The two vehicles moved into the sparse, frozen traffic, a tiny convoy heading into the eye of a gathering, lust-mad storm. On the dashboard screen, hooked to Bethany’s feed, the red dots swarmed, a bleeding wound on the map centered squarely on the hospital. The happy ending was under assault, and the cavalry, exhausted and outnumbered, was racing toward the sound of the screams.