Chapter 12: The Green Moon's Gambit
The lake house didn’t just sit by the water; it was being consumed by it. The black mirror of the lake swallowed half the foundation, leaving the structure to lean like a drunkard, its porch beams jutting from the water like broken ribs. The air was cold, tasting of rotting reeds and wet stone, but beneath that was the buzz—a high-frequency hum that vibrated in the teeth, the ghost of powerful wards now gone corroded and wild.
Katie’s van, plastered with explosion stickers, was parked a quarter mile back, concealed in a thicket of skeletal birch trees. The approach had been on foot, silent.
“It’s a time-pocket anchor,” Bethany whispered, her vintage phone casting a pale glow on her face. She was in full Wand rig: charcoal suit, pink hair hidden under a tactical cap. The phone’s display showed tangled spirals of chronal energy pulsing from the house’s core. “He’s not just hiding here. He’s using it to dilate time inside. Could have an entire lab in there, months of work done in hours.”
“So we pop the bubble,” Katie whispered, her eyes gleaming in the dark. She clutched a small, dark cube in her hand, her thumb stroking its surface.
“We pop it loudly,” Jan corrected, a sharp grin on her face. She wore her enchanted strap-on over her jeans, a silent promise of the chaos she preferred. Godfrey sat patiently at her feet, unimpressed. “But first, we need the main event distracted. Morgane’s in there with him. She’s his attack dog. We take her off the leash.”
Stacy checked her pistol’s slide with a soft click-clack. “You mean you’re gonna make her horny. Can’t you just, I dunno, put her to sleep?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Jan winked. “Also, sleep spells are tricky. Lust is simple. It’s already there. I just open the floodgates.”
Vivian shifted nervously beside Dale. She was in her full succubus-vamp attire: leather jacket, tight black jeans. But her eyes were wide, anxious. “The emotional resonance in there… it’s hungry. Not like me. It’s cold. His experiments…”
Dale put a steadying hand on the small of her back. The scars on his neck, where Consortium tech had been burned out, were faint silver lines in the moonlight. “We stick to the plan. Perimeter clean-up. Leave the big swing to Red.”
Brigid, Will, and Sarah stood linked, hands clasped. Their triad bond was a visible hum, a shimmer of shared consciousness between them. Aisling stood slightly apart, her long black hair tied back, her green eyes scanning the house’s silhouette. She held a simple stone from Ballymore in her palm, feeling the pulse of the corrupted land.
“The foundational magic is sick,” Aisling murmured, her Dublin accent soft. “He’s grafted his machines onto the temporal flow. It’s a violation.”
“Then we perform surgery,” Brigid said, her voice firm. Pre-med focus hardening into magical resolve. “Will, Sarah, on my mark. We calculate the collapse vector.”
Jan took a deep breath, her compact in hand. The mirror didn’t show her face; it showed a web of fiery orange lines—hostile intent, defensive wards—and one pulsing, virulent knot of silver and grey energy: Morgane. “Okay. Showtime. Bethany, you’re on point for tech disruption. Katie, you get the cue. Everyone else, play your positions. Let’s go.”
They moved like shadows separating from the night.
Jan, Stacy, and Godfrey went straight for the front, such as it was—a sagging doorway half-submerged in water. Bethany, Vivian, Dale, and Katie peeled off to circle the perimeter. Brigid’s triad and Aisling moved to a vantage point where the sick magic felt thinnest, a small rise where dead grass crunched underfoot.
The interior was a nightmare of juxtaposition. The front room had moldering Victorian furniture, water lapping at claw-footed chair legs. But through an archway, the space warped into a sterile, bright laboratory of polished brass and glowing crystal. Tubes filled with bubbling colored liquids ran along the walls. In clear suspension tanks, figures floated—men and women in robes of various Orders, their bodies threaded with metallic filaments, their eyes open and unseeing.
In the center of the lab, Bedivere stood before a complex apparatus of interlocking rings, studying a holographic manifest. Morgane stood at his shoulder, her posture rigid, her silver hair a flawless sheet.
“The extraction from the Crimson Heart subject is promising,” Bedivere said, his voice clinical. “The empathy-link can be redirected. Imagine, Morgane, soldiers who can project pacification, not with weak-minded sentiment, but with surgical precision. No more messy resistance.”
“The Green Moon samples remain volatile,” Morgane replied, her contempt clear. “The pleasure impulses are too entwined with individual consciousness. The subject from the mountain lodge expired during replication.”
“A setback. Not a failure. We will—“
Jan stepped through the archway.
She didn’t sneak. She strode in, hands on her hips, the rubber cock bobbing with her steps. Godfrey trotted beside her, yawned, and lay down.
Bedivere and Morgane turned. For a second, there was only shock.
“Hiya,” Jan said, her smile wide and dangerous. “Remember me? You trashed my sister’s dorm. Rude.”
Morgane’s hand flew to a device at her belt. “O’Connor.” The word was a curse.
Jan’s magic wasn’t a spell she cast. It was a force she exuded. It hit Morgane like a physical wave, a tsunami of concentrated, unfiltered want. It bypassed the mind, targeted the lizard brain, the primal spine.
Morgane’s eyes blew wide. A sharp gasp tore from her throat. Her fanatical devotion, her icy contempt, her strategic brilliance—all of it vaporized in an instant, replaced by a need so vast it erased her identity. Her pupils dilated. A flush burned up her neck, across her cheeks.
Her hands, which had been moving for a weapon, flew to the buttons of her own severe jacket. She tore it open, then her shirt, buttons pinging on the laboratory floor. Her breasts heaved. But her gaze wasn’t on Jan. It locked onto Bedivere.
“You,” she rasped, her voice guttural, alien. “I need you. Now.”
She lunged for him.
Bedivere stumbled back, his clinical detachment shattering into confusion and horror. “Morgane! Control yourself!”
But control was a forgotten concept. Morgane clawed at his impeccable suit jacket, her nails ripping the fine wool. She got it open, then shredded his shirt, exposing his chest. She pressed her mouth to his skin, biting, licking, a starving woman at a feast.
“Get off!” Bedivere shouted, trying to shove her. But she was stronger, fueled by magically amplified lust and her own formidable physicality. She sank to her knees before him, her fingers fumbling desperately with his belt.
“I need to taste you,” she growled, the words slurred. “I need your cock in my mouth. I need to suck you dry.”
She got his belt open, his fly undone. His trousers fell. His cock, soft and shocked, was in her hands. She didn’t wait. She took the whole flaccid length into her hot, wet mouth, swallowing him to the root, her throat working convulsively.
Bedivere cried out—a strangled sound of protest that morphed into a shocked groan. Against his will, his body responded. Blood rushed, swelling him in her mouth. His hips gave a jerky, involuntary thrust.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his hands tangling in her silver hair, not to pull her off, but to hold on. His head fell back, his eyes screwed shut in a battle between utter outrage and surging biological imperative.
Morgane sucked him with frantic, obscene hunger. Her head bobbed wildly, saliva slicking her chin, her nose pressed into his graying pubic hair. She pulled off with a pop, gasping. “Harder,” she begged, her eyes glazed. “Fuck my face. Use me.”
She took him again, deep-throating him with practiced, desperate ease. Bedivere’s resistance broke. A low groan ripped from his chest. His hips began to piston, driving his cock into her throat in rough, relentless strokes. He fucked her mouth like it was a cunt, his grip on her hair tight enough to tear.
“Slut,” he grunted, his voice thick with a loathing that seemed to fuel his arousal. “Greedy fucking whore.”
Jan watched, her arms crossed, a cold satisfaction on her face. The distraction was absolute.
In the periphery, Bethany’s team moved. Vivian’s form shimmered, living shadows detaching from her body to slither along the walls, disabling glowing runes with a touch. Dale covered the hallway, his borrowed Wand tech-pistol neutralizing two bleary-eyed lab assistants with precise stun blasts. Katie placed her small cubes at key structural junctions—the junctions Bethany pointed out on her holographic schematic.
Outside, on the rise, Brigid, Will, and Sarah chanted in perfect sync. Not words, but mathematical formulae. Equations of temporal decay glowed in the air before them, burning with cool blue fire. Aisling pressed her stone to the earth, sending a pulse of pure, guardian-grade energy into the sick land, a catalyst for their spell.
The time-pocket shuddered. The golden hue of the lab lights began to bleed, leaching into a sickly, swirling green. A sound like groaning metal echoed through the house.
Bedivere, his orgasm building, seemed to sense it. He tried to pull Morgane’s head away, but she clamped down, sucking harder, milking him. “Stop—the integrity—” he gasped.
It was too late. With a wet, choked cry, he came, his body bowing as he emptied himself down Morgane’s throat. She drank greedily, swallowing every pulse, her own body shuddering with a sympathetic, mindless climax against the cold floor.
As he finished, spent and panting, the world tore.
Not with Katie’s explosion, but with the sound of shattering crystal. The temporal bubble collapsed. The laboratory’s extended space compacted with a violent whump of displaced air. Tubes shattered. Suspension tanks cracked, spilling their unconscious subjects onto the flooding floor.
Bedivere, stumbling back, pulling his trousers up, looked around in dawning, catastrophic understanding. His years of compressed research, his stolen magic samples, his entire hidden operation—exposed and collapsing in real time.
He turned his fury on Jan. “You… you chaotic bitch!”
He raised a hand, a complex brass device on his wrist whirring to life, targeting her.
A gunshot echoed, deafening in the enclosed space.
Bedivere spun, a bloom of red erupting on his shoulder. He dropped to one knee, clutching the wound.
Stacy stood in the archway, her 9mm held steady in a two-handed grip, smoke curling from the barrel. Her expression was pure “Coach”—calm, focused, utterly uncompromising.
“Nobody points weapons at my friend,” she said, her voice flat.
From outside, Katie’s voice rang out, gleeful. “Fire in the hole!”
The cubes detonated. But they didn’t blow the house apart. They blew the corruption out. Controlled, precise demolitions of magical grafting. The house trembled, and the sick hum in the air shattered, replaced by the clean, cold roar of the winter lake wind rushing in through new holes in the walls.
Bedivere’s lab was a wreck, sparking, flooding, ruined. Morgane lay on the floor, curled around herself, sobbing, the magic-induced lust receding to leave a hollow, shattered shell of a woman.
Jan walked over to Bedivere. She looked down at him, bleeding and beaten among the ruins of his ambition.
“The Merlin sends her regards,” Jan said quietly. Then she turned. “Everyone! Package secured! Time to go!”
Bethany was already herding the dazed, freed prisoners toward the exits. Vivian’s shadows supported those who couldn’t walk. Dale and Stacy covered the retreat. Brigid, Will, Sarah, and Aisling descended from the rise, their work done, the time-pocket permanently dissolved.
As they fled the crumbling house, the first true dawn light began to bleach the eastern sky. The lake was just a lake again, dark and cold. The laughter was gone.
In the van, stinking of lake water and ozone, speeding away from the disaster zone, there was silence for a long moment.
Then Katie giggled from the driver’s seat. “So. Did his thing work, at least? Before we blew it all up?”
Jan, leaning back against Stacy, let out a long, exhausted laugh. “Oh, it worked. He came so hard he forgot his own name. Mission accomplished.”
Bethany shook her head, a small, reluctant smile on her lips as she tapped a report into her vintage phone. “Pendragon to all points. Anchor destroyed. Subjects recovered. Bedivere contained. Merlin’s authority… now has an opening.”
She looked out the window at the rising sun. The distraction was over. The real war for the soul of the Golden Wands was about to begin. And they had just fired the first, chaotic, irrevocable shot.
The van’s tires screeched against the Lodge’s gravel drive, throwing up a spray of frozen stones. Doors slammed open before the vehicle fully stopped. Exhaustion hung on them like a second skin, mingled with the sharp scents of lake decay, ozone, and blood. They spilled out, supporting the dazed, blanket-wrapped survivors between them—a Verdant Pasture initiate missing an eye, a young Crimson Heart who flinched at human touch, a Wand with brass filaments still protruding from her wrists.
The grand doors of the Lodge swung inward before they reached them.
Calista Gunderson stood in the entrance, but she was not Calista. The Subtle Glamour was a living veil, a shimmer that made her features an impossible-to-remember sculpture of authority and muted light. The Merlin. Behind her, the Lodge’s main hall buzzed with a new, desperate energy.
“Get the wounded to the conservatory. Now.” The Merlin’s voice was layered, echoing slightly in the mind. She didn’t raise it, but it carved through the chaos. Percival and Becky moved with efficient grace, guiding the rescued toward where Annie and Aaron had already prepared cots and basins of water that glowed with gentle, green-tinged light.
Amir stood stiffly near a grandfather clock, his face a mask of guilt and relief. Gregor crouched on its top, a tiny dataslate in his hands, his large eyes darting. “The network is live! The message is propagating!”
The Merlin gave a single, sharp nod. She turned to Jan, Bethany, Stacy. Her shimmering gaze took in their wounds, their dirt, their defiance. “Report.”
“Lake house anchor is slag. Bedivere took a bullet to the shoulder but got teleported out by a loyalist before we could bag him. Morgane is… broken. Lab is destroyed.” Bethany’s words were clipped, professional. She held out her vintage phone. “Forensic data-stream secured.”
“The experiments were fucking vile,” Jan added, her usual humor absent, stripped away by what she’d seen in those tanks. “He was stitching magic together like cheap Frankensteins. It wasn’t working. It was just torture.”
The Merlin absorbed this. The air around her seemed to darken, then solidify. “Then we make sure it never works again.” She turned to the room, where anxious faces from a dozen different Orders watched. “I have re-established contact with Lady Gwenevere. The loyalist core is holding, fighting Bedivere’s faction and containing the supernatural influx his coup has unleashed. They are strained, but they are ours.”
A ripple went through the crowd. Fatima, standing with Hank, exchanged a long look with Aaron. He gave a slight, conceding nod.
“The message is clear,” the Merlin continued, her form flickering as she paced, each step measured. “The Order of the Golden Wands does not condone atrocity. We do not experiment on sentient beings. We protect humanity. All of it. Those who follow Bedivere have forsaken that oath. They are enemies of the Order, and by extension, enemies of all we collectively shield.”
She stopped before the recovered prisoners, her shimmer softening minutely as she looked at their traumatized faces. “You will have healing. You will have restitution. This is my word, as Merlin.”
It was a promise, cold and hard and infinitely more valuable than warmth. The Verdant Pasture initiate began to weep silently.
The Merlin then turned her impossible gaze to Fatima. “Agent Abaza. Your brother’s actions within Bedivere’s circle have been examined. His internal conflict, his attempts to mitigate harm, and his final loyalty to this coalition have been verified. The charges are void.” She paused, the weight of the title pressing down. “Can you separate the man from the monster he served?”
Fatima stared, her mouth slightly open. She looked at Amir, who stood petrified, his eyes begging. She swallowed. “It is… not easy.”
“It is not meant to be,” the Merlin said, not unkindly. She shifted her gaze to Amir. “And you, Agent Bors. Can you forgive yourself enough to earn your sister’s trust? Your usefulness to me hinges on it. A fractured tool is a dangerous one.”
Amir’s voice was a dry rustle. “I will spend my life trying.”
Aunt Noor, observing from a velvet armchair with a cup of tea, spoke softly. “A lifetime of trying is how peace is built. Grudges are simpler, but they build only graves.”
Hank shuffled his feet. “She’s not wrong.” Becky, standing beside Amir, slipped her hand into his and squeezed.
“Then work on it,” the Merlin decreed, and in that moment, she was every inch the supreme commander. The matter was closed. “Aaron. Fatima. You have held this coalition together in the interim. Your judgement has been sound. Do you recognize my authority to lead it through the coming conflict?”
Aaron, his ink-stained fingers laced together, nodded once. “Your actions are sensible. Your priorities are ordered. The Fair Bargain recognizes legitimate authority.”
Fatima let out a long breath. “The Green Moon concurs.”
With that, the tension in the Lodge’s great hall shifted, sliding from chaotic resistance into a grim, unified chain of command. Orders began to flow. Gregor chattered into a comms bead, relaying coordinates to Gnorbert’s team. Percival began inventorying their magical defenses. The Merlin moved to Bethany’s holographic table, her shimmering hands manipulating displays of the city, deploying assets like pieces on a chessboard.
Casey watched from the staircase, Rick asleep against her shoulder. She leaned into Mike. “I always thought Aunt Cal was impressive,” she murmured. “But this… it’s different. It fits.”
Mike put his arm around her, his gaze on the swirling, authoritative light that was his aunt-by-law. “Yeah. It does. It’s scary as hell, but it fits.”
He felt the adrenaline crash then, a sudden wash of fatigue and delayed shock. The gunshot in the lake house echoed in his bones. The image of those floating bodies. He needed to feel something real, something warm and alive and his. He looked at Casey, saw the same hollowed-out look in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, his voice low. “We need a minute.”
She understood. They slipped away, up the grand staircase, down a paneled hallway to a small sitting room someone had converted into a temporary nursery. A crib stood in the corner. They placed Rick gently inside, the baby sighing in his sleep.
The moment the door clicked shut, Casey was on him. It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision. Her mouth found his with a desperate hunger, her teeth scraping his lip. Her hands shoved his coat off his shoulders, yanked his sweater up.
“I need you to fuck me,” she breathed into his mouth, the words hot and urgent. “Right now. I need to not think.”
Mike didn’t answer with words. He spun her around, bending her over the room’s lone upholstered chair. He tugged her leggings and panties down to her knees in one rough pull. He didn’t pause to look, to admire. He unzipped his jeans, freed his cock, already painfully hard. He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and guided his thick head to her entrance.
She was wet, ready. He shoved inside with one deep, claiming stroke, burying himself to the hilt.
A ragged, grateful cry tore from Casey’s throat. She pushed back against him, taking all of him, her fingers clawing at the chair’s fabric. “Yes! God, Mike, like that. Fuck me just like that.”
He set a brutal, driving pace from the start. Each thrust was a punctuation mark against the horrors in his head. The slap of their flesh was loud in the quiet room. He gripped her hips, holding her steady, grinding deep with every plunge, hitting that spot inside her that made her see stars.
“This is us,” he grunted, sweat beading on his forehead. “This is real. You’re real. This cunt is mine.”
“Yours!” she screamed, her voice muffled by the chair. “Always yours! Fuck, don’t stop, make me feel it!”
He reached around, his hand sliding over her stomach, down through her coarse curls, finding her swollen clit. He pressed hard, circling it in time with his thrusts. Her internal muscles clamped around him, rippling, dragging him deeper.
“I’m gonna come,” she warned, her body bowing. “I’m gonna come on your fucking dick.”
“Do it.” His command was guttural. “Squeeze that come right out of me. Milk my fucking balls dry.”
The vulgarity tipped her over. She came with a shattered, continuous scream, her body convulsing around his driving cock, her juice coating his thrusting length. The intense, rhythmic clenching was too much. Mike drove in one last time, hilting himself, and roared as his own orgasm exploded. He pulsed inside her, hot and deep, painting her inner walls with his release, his thighs trembling with the force of it.
They collapsed together over the chair, gasping, spent, still joined. The ghosts of the lake house receded, burned away by shared, desperate heat.
Later, cleaned up and marginally more composed, they went to find Amir and Fatima, wanting to offer… something. Support, maybe. Or just to not be alone.
They found them in a small library, its door ajar. Inside, the scene was not one of somber reconciliation.
Jason, Amy, Yukio, Zara, and Youssef sat in a circle on an ornate rug, a pile of clothing beside them. They were mostly naked. Jan’s deck of “lucky cards” was spread between them.
“Two pair, bitches!” Youssef crowed, grinning as Zara, down to her bra and underwear, mock-glared and tossed a sock into the center.
“This is strip poker? Again?” Fatima’s voice was flat with disbelief. “At a time like this?”
Amir pinched the bridge of his nose. “Youssef, we are in a magical warzone. People are dying.”
Youssef shrugged, unrepentant. “The world’s always ending. Jan says you gotta find joy where you can. Also, I’m winning.”
From the deep shadows in the corner by a globe, a voice piped up. “Would you believe I needed to relieve some stress?”
They all jumped. Jan stepped into the light. She was wearing only a pair of lace panties, her pale skin covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Her enchanted strap-on lay discarded on a table nearby. Godfrey sat loyally at her feet, his head bowed, the very picture of canine embarrassment.
Fatima stared. Amir blinked.
Jan shrugged, a ghost of her mischievous smile returning. “The tension was… palpable. I conducted a brief internal review. Very cathartic.”
Before anyone could formulate a response, a piercing alarm klaxon blared through the Lodge, a sound of brass and screaming gears. It was the perimeter ward breach alarm.
The Merlin’s layered voice amplified, thrumming through the very walls. “All hands. Breach at the eastern treeline. Hostile signatures detected. Consortium tech signatures. They’ve found us.”
The game was over. The war was at the door.