Chapter 7: The Book of Mara
The air in Mike and Casey’s living room, already thick with the musk of recent sex, shifted again with Yukio’s arrival. Her boldness was a spark on dry tinder.
Amy stared at her best friend, a flush creeping up her neck. “Yukio, we weren’t… I mean, we were, but it was just us, and—”
“And now it’s us,” Yukio finished, her hand sliding up Amy’s inner thigh beneath the blanket, fingers brushing the damp, blonde curls. “You’re still all worked up, Willow. I can feel the heat.” Her dark eyes flicked to Jason, who was watching, frozen, his own blanket tented over his lap. “You gonna just watch, Jason? Or you gonna help me remind your girlfriend what her body’s for?”
Jason swallowed, his chivalrous programming warring with the raw, lingering energy in the room and the sight of Yukio’s naked, tattooed body. Casey broke the stalemate with a soft laugh.
“The kid’s got a point,” Casey said, pushing her own blanket aside. Her body was a canvas of faint sweat and love bites. She moved on her knees towards Jason, her hand reaching out to cup his cheek. “You’re thinking too much. We’re all here. We’re all real.” She leaned in and kissed him, a slow, deep exploration that was more invitation than demand.
Mike watched, his own arousal stirring again. He saw the hesitation in Jason’s shoulders melt under Casey’s practiced mouth. Yukio took advantage, shifting to kneel in front of Amy. She pushed the blanket away entirely, exposing Amy’s slender form.
“You’re so pretty,” Yukio murmured, not a compliment but a statement of fact. She bent her head and took one of Amy’s pale pink nipples into her mouth, sucking hard.
Amy gasped, her back arching off the rug. “Yuki—oh!” Her hands flew to Yukio’s hair, tangling in the dark strands.
Yukio’s mouth worked down Amy’s stomach, her tongue dipping into her navel, then lower. She didn’t tease. She pushed Amy’s thighs apart, buried her face between them, and licked a broad, wet stripe from her entrance to her clit.
Amy cried out, a high, shocked sound that broke into a moan. Jason pulled back from kissing Casey, his eyes wide, watching Yukio’s head bob between his girlfriend’s legs. Casey’s hand slid down his chest, over his stomach, and wrapped around his hardening cock.
“See?” Casey whispered, stroking him slowly. “She knows what she’s doing. Let her.”
Mike moved behind Casey, his body aligning with hers. He kissed her shoulder, his hands sliding around to cup her breasts, pinching her nipples. He was half-hard again, pressed against her ass. “You’re directing again, Picasso,” he mumbled into her skin.
“Someone has to,” she breathed, leaning back into him, her hand still working Jason.
The scene coalesced into a new, hungry rhythm. Yukio was relentless, eating Amy out with loud, sloppy strokes of her tongue, occasionally plunging it deep inside her. Amy thrashed, her hips pumping, her cries growing increasingly desperate. “Don’t stop, please, don’t stop, I’m gonna—”
Yukio pulled back, her chin glistening. “Not yet.” She turned her head, locking eyes with Jason. “Your turn. Fuck her. I want to watch.”
Jason didn’t need to be told twice. The last of his restraint vanished. He moved over Amy, his body covering hers. He was bigger, more solid than her willowy frame. He guided his cock to her soaked opening and pushed inside in one smooth, deep thrust.
Amy screamed, her legs wrapping around his waist. “Jason! Yes, fuck, yes!”
Yukio crawled around them, positioning herself behind Jason. She ran her hands over his ass, then leaned in and licked a stripe from his balls up the length of his shaft where it disappeared into Amy. Jason shuddered, a groan tearing from his throat.
Casey watched, her own breath coming fast. Mike’s fingers had found their way between her legs from behind, two sliding inside her easily, fucking her in time with Jason’s thrusts into Amy. “God, Mike,” she panted.
“I know,” he grunted, his own cock now fully hard and pressed against the cleft of her ass. He reached for the bottle of lube they kept in the basket under the coffee table. He poured a slick stream onto his fingers, then onto himself. He pressed the head of his cock against Casey’s tight back entrance.
Casey’s eyes flew open. She met his gaze in the dim light, and a wild, challenging smile touched her lips. She pushed back against him, taking the first inch with a sharp, controlled exhale.
Mike pushed forward, burying himself in the incredible, clenching heat. Casey threw her head back against his shoulder, a guttural moan escaping her. The dual sensation of Mike filling her ass and her hand on Jason’s bucking hip as he fucked Amy mere feet away was overwhelming.
Yukio watched it all, her hand between her own legs, fingers rubbing furious circles on her clit. “Harder,” she commanded Jason, her voice husky. “Make her scream. I want the baby to wake up. I want everyone to know.”
Jason obeyed, his pace becoming punishing, the sound of skin slapping against skin echoing in the room. Amy was sobbing with pleasure, her nails digging into his back. “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming!” she chanted, and her body clenched around him, milking his own orgasm from him. He shouted, a raw, unfiltered sound as he emptied himself inside her.
The sight and sound triggered the others. Mike, buried deep in Casey, felt her inner muscles spasm around him. He came with a choked-off groan, pulsing heat into her. Casey’s own climax rolled through her, a silent, shuddering wave that left her trembling.
Yukio came a second later, biting her own wrist to stifle her cry, her body convulsing as she knelt on the rug.
For a long moment, the only sounds were ragged breaths and the soft rustle of blankets. The monitor in the corner remained silent. Rick slept on.
Yukio was the first to move. She got up, found a box of tissues, and began cleaning herself with a practical efficiency. “Okay,” she said, tossing the box to Amy. “That was a decent warm-up. Now, someone tell me what the actual fuck is going on. And why did Nergal turn my best friend turn into a porcelain doll?”
Across the city, the silence in Mara’s apartment was of a different quality. It was a vacuum, a held breath.
Jan turned the heavy lawbook over in her hands. The title, Principles of Jurisprudential Transmutation, glinted mockingly in the sterile light from the skyline. Stacy stood guard by the door, her pistol drawn but held low, eyes scanning the empty space.
“Their clothes,” Stacy said, nodding to the small heap of fabric on the floor. “No struggle. Just… poof.”
“Not poof,” Jan murmured. “Edited. Condensed. Narrative efficiency.” She placed the book on the glass coffee table, next to the blank business card. She opened her pouch, her fingers bypassing the lucky dice and tarot cards, finding the smooth river stone. She pressed it against the book’s cover.
It didn’t spark green. It glowed a sickly, phosphorescent yellow before going dark.
“Warded. But by his magic, not ours.” Jan took a steadying breath. She closed her eyes, placing both palms flat on the open pages. They were blank, a creamy, expensive parchment. She began to whisper, not a standard Green Moon invocation, but something older, a thread of desire magic spun not for arousal, but for connection. For the essence of the people trapped within.
“Mara,” Jan breathed. “Counselor. You’re in there. I know you are. You’re arguing with the text, aren’t you? Finding loopholes. Come on. Show me a footnote.”
The pages under her hands grew warm. Then, inkwell-deep, words began to scrawl themselves with frantic urgency. It was Mara’s precise, angular handwriting.
Jan, he turned me into a book. Zack too. He’s the author. We’re the case study. Get us out.
Jan’s heart clenched. “Working on it. What’s the precedent? What’s the ruling?”
More words appeared, blurring as if written in haste. No precedent. Magical jurisprudence is a fucking joke. He said… he said we were perfect for a legal subplot. Wanted to see how far he could push us before we broke.
Jan focused her will, pushing more of her power into the pages, not to read, but to reveal. Green light, soft as moss, seeped from her fingers into the paper.
Above the book, the air shimmered. A spectral form coalesced, translucent and glowing with the same green hue. It was Mara, naked, her athletic body rendered in faint, luminous lines. She looked down at herself, then at Jan, her expression one of profound irritation.
“Why,” Mara’s voice echoed, thin and ghostly but brimming with her familiar ire, “am I always naked in your messes, O’Connor?”
Behind her, another form solidified: Zack, also spectral and bare. His hands were on Mara’s shoulders, his body pressed close against her back. His spectral cock, half-hard, nestled against the cleft of her ass. He looked less annoyed and more awestruck, even in captivity.
“Because the form reflects the foundational desire for truth and exposure in a legal context,” Jan said, her voice strained with the effort of maintaining the manifestation. “Or because he’s a pervert with a theme. How’s the binding?”
“Tight,” Mara hissed. She tried to step forward, but her feet were ethereal roots fading into the open pages. Zack’s arms tightened around her, his face buried in her neck. A shudder ran through her translucent form. “He… wrote urges into the text. Compulsions. To argue. To… consummate the partnership.”
As she spoke, Zack’s hands slid down from her shoulders, over her spectral breasts. He pinched her nipples, and Mara gasped, her head falling back against him. His cock hardened fully, pressing insistently against her.
“Zack,” she warned, but her voice was a moan.
“I can’t… I can’t help it, Mara,” he whispered, his ghostly voice thick. “It’s in the paragraphs. The clauses. It says we have to… to reinforce the union.”
His hands moved down her stomach, one sliding between her legs. Mara’s spectral legs parted slightly. Jan could see the detail: Zack’s fingers finding her folds, circling her clit. Mara bit her lip, a tremor of pleasure and fury wracking her form.
“He’s watching,” Mara gritted out, her eyes fierce on Jan’s. “The book is a lens. He’s getting off on this. On our frustration.”
“Then let’s give him a show with a plot twist,” Jan said, her mind racing. “Stacy, the card.”
Stacy, who had been watching the haunting, erotic display with clinical detachment, picked up the blank business card with a tissue. She held it up. “It’s cold. Inert now.”
“It’s a marker. A tag.” Jan kept her hands on the book, maintaining the connection. “Mara, Zack, listen. I can’t break his edit yet. It’s too woven into the narrative structure. But I can… annotate. I can add a rider.”
“Do it,” Mara panted. Zack was fucking her with his fingers now, two plunging in and out of her translucent pussy with a slow, relentless rhythm. Her body undulated against him.
Jan closed her eyes again. She pushed her will into the book, not against Nergal’s story, but alongside it. She wrote in the margins with her magic, a subtle, green script of desire—not for sex, but for patience. For resilience. For the slow, grinding power of legal discovery that waits for the opposition to make a mistake.
On the page, new words appeared in green ink beside Mara’s black: Section 7.1: The subjects shall retain full cognitive autonomy and capacity for strategic thought, irrespective of physical or circumstantial provocations.
Mara’s spectral form stiffened. The pleasure on her face didn’t vanish, but it was joined by a sharp, clarifying focus. She pushed back against Zack, taking control of the rhythm. “Okay,” she breathed. “Okay. That’s… better. It’s like a stay of execution.”
Zack groaned, his spectral hips thrusting against her ass. “Mara…”
“We work the problem,” Mara said, her voice regaining its commanding edge, even as she reached a hand back to guide his cock, positioning it at her entrance. “He’s using the edits to distract you, Jan. To keep you running. Molly and Ginny were a distraction. We’re a distraction. He’s working on something bigger. A… a class action.” She gasped as Zack pushed into her, filling her spectral form. They began to move together, a slow, grinding union that was part punishment, part partnership. “You need to find the… the original filing. The first thing he edited.”
Jan nodded, sweat beading on her forehead. The connection was draining. “We will. Hang in there, Counselor.”
“Just… find the fucking loophole,” Mara grunted, her body moving with Zack’s in the eerie, silent rhythm of their captivity. Her form began to fade, the green light receding back into the pages. The last thing to vanish was her fierce, determined gaze.
The book snapped shut.
Jan slumped back, wiping her brow. Stacy was already at her side, offering a hand.
“She’s right,” Stacy said. “We’re reactive. He’s leading us by the nose from one fucked-up scene to the next.”
Jan stood, her legs shaky. “We need to go back to the beginning. The first edit. Mike and Casey’s painting.” She looked at the book, now inert. “He’s not just playing with us. He’s building something. A story. And we’re all characters.”
As they turned to leave, Jan’s pendant, the small green moonstone, gave a single, faint pulse against her chest. A warning, or a call. She touched it, but no clear message came. Only a sense of deep, spreading wrongness, seeping through the city’s magical layers like a stain.
Somewhere, another page was being written.
Somewhere, another page was being written. The thought was still echoing in Jan’s skull when her phone buzzed violently in her pocket, shattering the grim silence of the elevator descent. The screen showed Charley Winkle’s name, which was unusual enough; the shattered-glass quality of his voice when she answered was a full-blown alarm.
“Jan. You need to come.Now. It’s Rebecca. He was here.” Charley’s words tumbled out, fractured by hyperventilation. “She’s… she’s a doll. A goddamn doll.”
“Address. We’re moving,” Jan said, her eyes locking with Stacy’s. Stacy was already hailing a cab from the curb with a sharp, commanding whistle.
The cab ride was a blur of streaking streetlights and a cold, creeping dread that had nothing to do with traffic. They found Charley in the doorway of his and Rebecca’s snug, book-filled apartment, looking like his own ghost. The man who had voluntarily sacrificed unimaginable power to become human was shaking, his kind face pale and waxy.
“I went for groceries,” he said, not moving from the threshold, his voice hollow. “She was making lesson plans. I was gone twenty minutes.” He led them to the living room, where a plush armchair was draped with one of Rebecca’s cardigans. On the seat cushion sat a doll.
It was about eighteen inches tall, with meticulously painted porcelain features and long, synthetic blonde hair styled in a perfect ponytail. It wore a miniature version of Rebecca’s favorite yellow sundress, complete with tiny buttons. Its hands were delicate, posed slightly outward. It was exquisitely, horrifically lifelike.
“Niles,” Charley spat the name. “Said he was a parent from last year’s class, dropping off a thank-you gift. She let him in. She’s too kind.”
Jan approached the chair, her movements slow and deliberate. She felt Stacy’s protective shift behind her, a guardian shadow. Jan didn’t use her river stone. She simply reached out and picked the doll up. It was cool and unnervingly weighty in her hands.
“Becca?” Jan whispered, holding it at eye level.
The doll’s painted blue eyes didn’t move, but a voice issued from it, small and tinny yet undeniably Rebecca’s, filtered through a layer of static. “Jan? Oh, thank goodness. I’m okay. I’m just… stuck. It’s very strange. I can see the room, but it’s all… big. And I can’t move my limbs. Is Charley alright? He sounded so scared.”
“He’s right here, Teach,” Jan said, her throat tight. She placed the doll carefully in Charley’s waiting, trembling hands. He cradled it against his chest, his tears soaking into the tiny yarn hair.
Stacy, her arms crossed, was scanning the room. Her gaze was forensic, missing nothing. “Question,” she said, her tone flat. “Why is Charley still standing here, fully human, and not a matching action figure? If Nergal was in the apartment, why leave a witness?”
Jan froze. Her mind, previously churning through a swamp of fear and reaction, suddenly snapped into a clear, cold line. The pieces she’d been stumbling over clicked into a brutal, obvious pattern.
“Because he can’t,” Jan breathed. She turned to stare at Stacy, her eyes wide with revelation. “At the penthouse, with Hank and Fatima. The spell hit Hank full force—turned him into a garden gnome. But Fatima got in the way. She’s Green Moon. The spell splashed on her, but it only shrank her. It couldn’t completely transform her.”
She began pacing, the words coming faster. “Charley’s an ex-Auditor. That might have spooked Niles, made him cautious. But look at the list. Really look. Mike and Casey, a painting. Casey’s an artist. Amy and Jason, figurines—fantasy collectibles. Hank, comic relief, a garden gnome. Molly and Ginny, actresses, stuck in a repetitive performance. Mara and Zack, legal minds, trapped in a law book. Rebecca, a kindergarten teacher, becomes a doll for her students.”
She stopped, facing them. “Every single one of them is non-magical. Every edit is a cruel joke about their lives, their passions, but it’s only possible because they can’t fight the spell on a fundamental level. He’s not just picking them because they’re connected to me. He’s picking them because they’re soft targets.”
“He’s a fucking coward,” Stacy stated, the words leaving a frost in the air.
“Maybe,” Jan said, dismissing the label as irrelevant. The pattern was the key. “But he’s a careful one. And he’s building a collection. A set.” A new, more urgent fear sparked. “Katie. Her girlfriend, Lena. Lena’s narrative magic might protect her, but Katie’s Kaboom magic is direct, offensive. He might see her as a threat, or try to get to her through Lena.” Jan was already pulling out her phone, thumb flying over the screen to shoot a warning text to Katie Manelli: Keep Lena close. Nergal targeting non-magicals. You’re a maybe. Be ready.
She looked at Charley, who was clutching the doll, his forehead pressed to its porcelain one. “Charley, you need to talk to Paulette. Today. She was an Auditor; she understands the framework of beings like Nergal, the rules they operate under. She’s in town with my mom. See if she knows what kind of entity gets its kicks from collecting people like trinkets.”
Jan turned back to Stacy, the plan solidifying. “We need Brigid. If anyone can deconstruct the magical math of these edits, it’s her and the Archimedes crew. And if she’s hit a wall…” She paused, considering the dangerous, obvious solution. “Then we need to go shopping. For answers.”
“The Dark Market,” Stacy said, understanding immediately.
“Where else?” Jan replied. “If there’s forbidden lore on unmaking narrative binds or identifying a story-eating entity, it’ll be there. For the right price.”
As if summoned by the mention of escalating conflict, Jan’s phone rang again. Bethany Xander’s name flashed, her custom ringtone a snippet of a 60s surf guitar riff.
Jan put it on speaker. “Beth, what’s up?”
“Jan. Word traveled up the ladder. Way up.” Bethany’s voice was tight, all professional Golden Wand agent, with none of her usual playful pink-haired flair. “The Merlin knows about Mike and Casey. About the painting.”
A chill swept through the room. The Merlin was Calista Gunderson. Casey’s aunt.
“She is… not amused,” Bethany continued. “She’s invoking precedent I didn’t even know we had. She’s rolling out every available field agent in the midwest. Surveillance, counter-narrative protocols, the works. She’s calling this a ‘hostile incursion by an unlicensed narrative entity.’ The whole apparatus is shifting to war footing.”
Jan and Stacy exchanged a long, silent look. The relief of having the vast, technologically-enhanced resources of the Golden Wands brought to bear warred instantly with a deep, instinctive dread. Calista was formidable, and she loved Casey fiercely. But the Golden Wands operated with the subtlety of a sledgehammer wrapped in bureaucracy.
“Is that good?” Stacy mouthed silently.
Jan brought the phone closer to her mouth. “Bethany. Be straight with me. Is this help, or is she about to blow up the whole damn board trying to save her queen?”
There was a heavy pause on the line, filled with the faint, rhythmic tapping of Bethany’s nails on a table. “Honestly, Red?” Bethany finally said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I don’t have a clue. I just know the suits are moving. And when the Merlin moves, things tend to explode.”