Chapter 10: The Midwestern Tourist's Testimony
The van smelled of incense overlaid with the sharp, chemical tang of fear sweat. Mike, his hands bound behind him with the cold, humming violet chains, was shoved onto a cracked vinyl seat. He didn't struggle. He took in the details: three acolytes, their crimson robes worn at the hem; the driver, a hulking silhouette; and the crone in the passenger seat who turned to look at him.
Her face was a map of deep lines, her hair a wispy grey cloud, but her eyes held a disturbing, hungry light, like embers in a banked fire. She said nothing during the drive, just watched him. Mike met her gaze, then looked out the window, tracking their route. They were heading into the industrial wasteland south of an unrecognizable city.
The interrogation chamber was in the basement of a defunct textile factory. The static from the holographic displays was a low, persistent itch in the teeth. The crone—Sister Morwen, one of the acolytes called her—gestured. Mike was forced into a metal chair bolted to the floor. The violet chains were looped through a ring on the chair back, holding him fast.
“The artifact,” Morwen said, her voice a dry rustle. “Where is its true vessel? The child with the leaf upon her palm seeks it. You will tell us where it travels.”
Mike sighed. “Look, I just do IT support. Occasionally I get kidnapped. My wife’s the artistic one. You sure you got the right guy?”
Morwen’s thin lips tightened. She produced a syringe filled with a luminous, viscous violet fluid. “This is Veritas Sanguis,” she hissed. “Truth in blood. It bypasses will. It consumes deception. You will speak only truth, and the truth will feed us.”
She plunged the needle into the vein in his neck. The effect was instantaneous.
A warm, fuzzy numbness spread from the injection site, followed by a compulsive loosening in his jaw. His vision glazed, the edges of the room softening. The truth serum didn’t hurt. It felt like a warm, guilty confessional.
Morwen leaned close, her breath smelling of old tea. “The artifact. Who has it?”
Mike smiled, a distant, dreamy expression on his face. His voice, when it came, was calm, conversational, and utterly, graphically misplaced.
“The first time I fucked Casey, I mean really fucked her, was at Stacy’s penthouse. Jan had enchanted the whole place. The air smelled like sex and champagne. Casey was wearing this black lace thing that barely covered her amazing tits. She pushed me back onto this ridiculously expensive rug and climbed on top of me. I was so hard it hurt. She slid down onto my cock, and she was so wet, so fucking tight, I thought I’d die right there.”
The acolytes shifted. One coughed.
Morwen’s eyes narrowed. “The artifact. Focus.”
Mike plowed on, his tone that of a man reminiscing about a favorite vacation. “She rode me like she was trying to win a prize. Up and down, grinding her clit against me with every stroke. I could feel her inner muscles squeezing me, milking me. She came with this gasp, her whole body shuddering, and that pushed me over the edge. I filled her up, shot my load so deep inside her it leaked out onto the rug. Stacy was pissed about the stain later.”
“Silence!” Morwen snapped, slapping the metal table. The holograms flickered.
But the serum demanded truth, and the question had opened a floodgate. Mike’s truth, in this moment of tension and fear, was his wife. It was the anchor of his normalcy.
“A few months after we started dating, she had a show at that little gallery on Grand. We snuck into the supply closet. Shelves of paper and turpentine. I had her bent over a crate, her skirt up around her waist. No panties. I remember the smell of oil paint and her arousal. I slid into her from behind, one hand clamped over her mouth to keep her quiet. She was so slick. I fucked her hard, pounding into that sweet, hot cunt, the shelves rattling with every thrust. She came silently, biting my hand, her pussy convulsing around my dick. I came inside her again. Always came inside her. Still do.”
The younger acolyte, a man with a pockmarked face, was staring fixedly at the floor, his ears bright red.
“You will speak of the leaf! The battery!” Morwen’s voice rose, fraying at the edges.
Mike’s head lolled slightly. He was in year two now. “She loves it when I go down on her. Loves when I spread her lips and lick her from her tight little asshole all the way up to her clit. She tastes like salt and musk. She grinds her pussy against my face, gets her juices all over my chin. Says I eat pussy better than anyone. She screams when she comes on my tongue. Loud. Whole apartment building used to hear. We had complaints.”
The crone stood up, her chair scraping violently. “This is a shielding tactic! A profane deflection! The serum will burn through it!”
But Mike was just hitting his stride. The serum wasn’t burning through anything; it was fueling a monologue of epic, pornographic proportion. He described the time they did it in the back of his old van during a rainstorm, the windows steamed, her legs hooked over his shoulders as he drove his cock into her over and over. He recounted the specific, filthy praise she whispered in his ear when he fucked her doggy-style. He detailed the way her ass felt when, on her birthday, she’d let him take her there, the tight, incredible pressure, her moans of pain melting into moans of pleasure as he came.
He was a raconteur of coitus, a bard of fucking.
“Our twentieth anniversary,” he sighed, a blissful look on his face. The acolytes were frozen in various postures of acute discomfort. “I tied her to our bed with her own silk scarves. Spread-eagle. I spent an hour just tasting her, licking and sucking until she was begging, sobbing, for my cock. When I finally gave it to her, she came in about thirty seconds. Then again.And again. I lost count. I fucked her until she was hoarse, until the headboard broke off the wall. The cops came because the neighbors across the street thought someone was being murdered. I answered the door in my robe, covered in her cum. They just left.”
Sister Morwen was trembling, not with power, but with incandescent rage. The violet chains around Mike pulsed, trying to drain his defiance, his calm, but they were slurping up a torrent of graphic marital devotion instead. It was like trying to use a straw to drain a septic tank.
“ENOUGH!” she shrieked, a burst of violet energy crackling from her fingertips and grounding out on the damp concrete floor. “The artifact feeds on terror! On anguish! Your pathetic, lecherous memories are nothing! They are weak!”
Mike blinked, the serum’s haze lifting slightly at her outburst. He looked at her, his expression shifting from nostalgic to mildly puzzled.
“Weak?” he said, his voice losing its dreamy quality, turning earnest, sincere. “Lady, have you ever had your prostate massaged while your wife rides your face? It’s fucking transcendental.”
One of the acolytes made a small, choked sound.
Morwen stared at him, her plans for a harvest of terror crumbling into dust against the sheer, immovable wall of his contented sexuality. The artifact’s call, a faint throb in the chamber, seemed to stutter for a second, confused by the emotional signal it was receiving from its intended battery. Instead of clean, sharp fear, it was getting a low-grade, simmering haze of explicit nostalgia and profound marital satisfaction.
It wasn’t the feast they’d planned. It was… junk food.
Outside, in the RV parked three blocks away in the skeletal shadow of a water tower, Stacy's sports car parked nearby, the collective psychic pressure suddenly eased. Jan, who had been pressing her fingers to her temples, let out a gasp.
“What? What is it?” Casey demanded, her face pale.
“The call… it just hiccuped,” Jan said, bewildered. “It’s still there, it’s still hungry, but it’s like… it just got fed a really weird-tasting chip.”
Rebecca, cross-referencing the psychic impression with a ley-line map on her tablet, looked up. “The emotional signature from Mike’s location… it’s not spiking with fear. It’s oddly stable. Fluctuating with… amusement? And something else. A very strong, repetitive… romantic frequency.”
Casey’s worried expression dissolved into a slow, proud smile. She knew that frequency. “He’s doing ‘Midwestern Tourist,’ isn’t he?”
“Sounds more like ‘Over-share at the Family Reunion,’” Hank muttered, checking the ammunition in a heavy pistol Fatima had produced from somewhere.
“Whatever it is,” Fatima said, peering out the window toward the factory, “it is buying us time. The Green Knight’s signal is also converging. They are coming for the artifact, and they think its battery is here, ripe for harvesting. We have maybe ten minutes before this place becomes the center of a three-way war.”
“Then we stop talking and start moving,” Stacy said, checking the slide on her 9mm with a crisp, professional click. “Casey, you’re with me and Jan. Front door distraction. Fati, Hank, you and the twins go up and around, find another way in. Becky, Calista, stay with the RV as our comms and getaway.”
“And Rick?” Casey asked, her eyes finding her son, who was looking determined and terrified.
“He’s with me,” Rebecca said firmly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll be the remote viewers. If the artifact’s call shifts, we’ll shout.”
No one argued. The plan was terrible. It was the only one they had.
Back in the interrogation chamber, Sister Morwen had composed herself. The rage was now a cold, calculating ice. She leaned down, her face inches from Mike’s.
“Your filth cannot protect you forever. The serum’s truth will turn. It will find your fear. It will find what you love most, and it will show you how to lose it.”
Mike just looked back at her, his eyes clear. The chains still glowed, but they seemed dimmer. “I just told you what I love most,” he said quietly. “In explicit detail. And you’re all invited to the next recital. Bring chips.”
The crone’s hand shot out, not with magic, but with a simple, brutal backhand across his face. His head snapped to the side. He worked his jaw, tasting blood.
“You will tell me where the child with the leaf is going,” she whispered.
Mike spit a red globule onto the concrete floor. He looked up, and the dreamy, truthful smile returned, edged now with something harder.
“Okay,” he said, his voice dropping, becoming intimate, conspiratorial. “You want truth? Here’s a truth. The best fuck we ever had was after our first kid was born. I was so tired I could barely see. She was sore, scared her body was ruined. We just held each other. And then she kissed me. And I went down on her, so gently, for like an hour, until she forgot about the stitches and the fear and just came, crying my name. That’s the truth. Your battery can feed on that. It’s fucking gourmet.”
Sister Morwen stared, utterly defeated. He had weaponized his truth, and it was armor she could not pierce. The door to the chamber burst open. An acolyte, breathless. “Sister! The Green Knight’s forces! They’re here! And… and there is a red-headed woman and a middle aged mother smashing the front gate with a crowbar!”
Mike leaned back in his chair as far as the chains would allow, a genuine grin spreading across his bruised face. He looked at the furious crone.
“Told you,” he said. “See? You should’ve brought chips.”
The silence that followed was thick and fragile, broken only by the distant, metallic shriek of the factory’s front gate giving way. Sister Morwen’s eyes darted toward the sound, her calculation shifting from extraction to containment. Then, the entire eastern wall of the interrogation chamber exploded inward.
Bricks and pulverized drywall erupted in a cloud of white dust. Headlights cut through the particulate gloom, blinding. The grille of a 1987 Chevy van, painted a faded blue, emerged from the wreckage like a charging bull, its engine roaring. It skidded to a halt, scattering debris across the concrete floor.
The driver’s door flew open. Mandy Williamson tumbled out, her long shaggy hair full of plaster dust. Felicity scrambled from the passenger side, clutching a leather satchel to her chest. Agent Kay emerged from the side door, a Wand-issue pulse pistol already in her hand, her dark eyes scanning the room with professional coldness that couldn't quite mask her fangirl excitement.
Mandy’s gaze locked onto the chair. “Dad? What are you doing here?”
Mike blinked in the van’s high beams. The truth serum, still coursing through him, interpreted the question as an invitation. His face lit up with that same dreamy, sincere smile.
“Story time!” he announced, his voice cheerful. “So, this one was last Thanksgiving. Your mom was making pie. She was wearing just this little apron, nothing else. I came up behind her at the counter, lifted the apron, and started eating her pussy right there. She was dripping. I got a can of whipped cream, sprayed it all over her cunt and my face—”
“OH MY GOD, DAD, NO!” Mandy shrieked, clapping her hands over her ears. “NOT THE WHIPPED CREAM STORY! I KNOW HOW IT ENDS! JAN WALKED IN!”
But Mike couldn’t stop. “—and Jan walked in looking for the gravy boat. She just leaned against the doorway, watched me lick the cream off your mom’s swollen clit, and said, ‘You’re missing a spot by her left labia, Mike.’ Then she took the can and sprayed a dollop right on your mom’s asshole for me.”
Felicity, her scholarly fascination overriding the danger, leaned closer, her blue eyes wide. “Really? What was the glycerol-to-nitrous oxide ratio in the propellant? Did it affect mucosal sensitivity?”
Agent Kay just stared, her pulse pistol dipping slightly. “He’s so… articulate,” she breathed, starstruck.
The moment shattered as emerald energy blasts tore through the doorway behind them. Green Knights in charcoal gray suits poured into the larger factory space beyond the demolished wall, engaging the stunned Setting Sun acolytes in a crackling exchange of magical gunfire.
“Go!” Kay yelled, snapping back to duty. She pivoted, her pistol whining as she laid down suppressive pulses of golden light towards the new threat, forcing Knights and acolytes alike to take cover behind rusting machinery.
Mandy and Felicity sprinted to Mike. Felicity fumbled with the glowing violet chains, hissing as the enervating magic bit into her fingers. “There’s a resonant lock! It’s feeding on his bio-signature!”
“Override it!” Mandy yelled, pulling a multi-tool from her pocket. She jammed a glowing probe into the lock mechanism at the base of the chair. It sparked, the violet light flickering. The chains fell slack.
Mike stood up, rubbing his wrists. “Thanks, sweetie. Now, about the whipped cream—“
“NO MORE STORIES!” Mandy yelled, dragging him towards the idling van. Felicity grabbed his other arm. They half-ran, half-stumbled through the dust. An energy blast cratered the wall beside them, showering them with chips of concrete.
They shoved Mike into the van’s back bench seat. Mandy dove behind the wheel. Felicity tumbled into the passenger seat, clutching the satchel. “Kay! Now!”
Agent Kay backed toward the van, firing two final shots. She slid the side door shut just as a green plasma bolt sizzled against the reinforced frame. “Clear! Go, go, go!”
Mandy slammed the gearshift into reverse, stomped on the gas, and the van lurched backward with a squeal of tortured tires. She cranked the wheel, aiming for a different, equally dilapidated section of wall.
“Honey,” Mike said, raising his voice over the roaring engine and the cacophony of battle. “Try not to do too much damage to the suspension. Your Uncle Hank and I just got the front end aligned last month.”
Mandy didn’t answer. She gritted her teeth and floored it. The van shot backward, crashing through a sheet of corrugated metal and splintered wood, bursting out into the cool night air and bouncing violently onto a weed-choked loading dock.
Inside the factory’s main entrance, Jan, Casey, and Stacy finally breached the inner door, Stacy’s crowbar still in hand. They froze, taking in the scene: Green Knights and Setting Sun cultists locked in a fierce, sparking firefight across the factory floor. And across the vast space, through a fresh, van-sized hole in the opposite wall, they saw the familiar blue taillights of Mike’s Chevy van fishtailing onto a service road and speeding away.
Casey’s breath caught. Her heart, which had been a cold knot of fear, bloomed with a sudden, fierce warmth. “That’s my van,” she whispered. Then, louder, with dawning hope, “Mandy just rescued him.”
Stacy scanned the immediate area, her bodyguard’s eyes missing nothing. “I don’t see him in the room. Or… what’s left of it.”
“Then we’re done here,” Jan said, already pulling backward. “Let the pricks in the suits and the robes fight over an empty room. We’re leaving.”
They retreated as quietly as they’d come, slipping back through the shattered gate into the shadowy yard. The sounds of battle were a contained storm behind them. They were almost to the alley where Stacy’s car was hidden when a new voice cut through the darkness, smooth and venomous.
“Leaving so soon? But the main attraction is just arriving.”
Evelyn Shaw stepped from behind a corroded dumpster. She was older, her face sharp and cruel, her hands clutching a weapon that looked like a cross between a blunderbuss and an archaeologist’s find—ancient, studded with uncut gems, and humming with malicious power. She aimed it at the three women.
“The artifact will be mine,” she sneered. “I will peel it from your daughter’s cold, dead hands. But you can watch first.”
From the shadows directly behind Evelyn, a large shape moved with a quietness that belied its size. Hank Powers brought the heavy steel butt of Fatima’s pistol down onto the back of Evelyn Shaw’s head with a solid, meaty thunk. Her eyes rolled back. The ancient weapon clattered to the asphalt. She crumpled in a heap of expensive, ruined linen.
“Nobody threatens my friends’ kids,” Hank grunted, shaking out his hand. “Jeez, her head’s hard.”
Fatima emerged from the same shadows, her gaze not on the unconscious collector, but on a figure perched atop the chain-link fence. The woman was pale, platinum-haired, and insubstantial, like a projection. She held a silent lute in one hand. In the other, she held a perfect, shimmering duplicate of the leaf-in-vial artifact.
“The Echo Thief,” Fatima said, her voice calm. She held up a hand to stop Stacy from raising her gun. “You are the least dangerous person here tonight. And you have a copy. Mandy and Mai need the original and the copy to settle this, don’t they? To complete the circuit, or negate it.”
The Thief’s image flickered. She tilted her head. “The original calls. The echo answers. Together, they can silence the hunger. Or magnify it. The choice is… perilous.”
“We’ll take the peril,” Fatima said. She took a step forward, ignoring the distant gunfire. “You want to see your work finished. Not stolen by these fools. So here is the deal. You come with us. You bring the echo. You help my family. In return, you get a front-row seat to the finale, and we don’t let the Golden Wands or the Root dissolve you into nostalgic residue.”
The Thief considered the offer. She looked at the unconscious Evelyn, at the factory, then at the determined faces before her. A faint, sad smile touched her lips. She floated down from the fence, her feet not quite touching the ground.
“A deal,” she whispered, her voice the sound of a fading memory. “I will ride with you. The echo is yours to direct. But the original… it is very close now. And it is starving.”