Chapter 13: The Distraction Breaks
The alarm wasn’t a sound. It was a vibration in the marrow, a shriek of stressed reality. The golden light along the treeline rippled like cellophane under a blowtorch, then shattered into a million falling embers.
The Consortium’s first wave didn’t run. They marched. Ten figures in matte-black armor that drank the moonlight, their movements synchronized, faceless helms glowing with a single red sensor dot. The guns in their hands weren’t rifles; they were blocky, angular devices that hummed as they charged, draining the ambient magic from the air with a sound like sucking bones.
“Anti-thaumic pulses!” Bethany shouted, her vintage phone already projecting a shimmering energy diagram. “They’ll shred passive wards and disrupt active casting within fifty feet!”
“Then we don’t let them get fifty feet,” Stacy said, her voice calm. She braced her forearms on the stone balustrade, sighting down her pistol’s barrel. She exhaled, slow and controlled, and squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot was a violent, welcome crack of real-world physics. One of the advancing figures jerked, a spark blooming on its chest plate. It staggered, but didn’t fall. The armor held.
“Well, shit,” Stacy muttered, cycling the slide.
“Allow me,” Katie chirped. She leaned over the balcony, a lump of grey clay in her hand. She kissed it, whispered something, and tossed it over the edge. It hit the frost-bleached grass between two Consortium soldiers.
The explosion was a perfect, compact sphere of orange fire and concussive force. It didn’t shrapnel. It imploded, then erupted. The two soldiers were lifted off their feet and thrown backwards, their armor smoking, limbs at unnatural angles.
“Kinetic focus, baby!” Katie crowed.
But more were coming. A second wave, flanking. The air began to whine with the charge of their pulse-weapons.
“We cannot fight a siege here! The wards are failing!” Percival’s voice was strained, his usual polish gone. He fired a beam of golden energy from a wand-like device, forcing a soldier to take cover behind an ancient oak.
The Merlin’s voice, now emanating from everywhere and nowhere, boomed across the grounds. “The eastern treeline is a feint. Their primary force is teleporting into the west wing. They seek the recovered subjects. Protect them at all costs.”
Jan looked at Fatima. A whole conversation passed in a glance. The lab rats. The ones from the tanks. Bedivere’s failed experiments. The Consortium wants them.
“Go,” Jan said. “You and Aaron. Get them to the panic room. Annie, you’re cover.”
Fatima didn’t argue. She grabbed Aaron’s arm. “With me. Fair Bargain first—nullify any binding spells on them. We carry if we have to.”
Annie nodded, her face pale but set. She placed her kitten Sophie gently inside the purse hanging at her side. “Stay, sweetie.” She then thrust her hands into the soil of a large decorative planter. Vines, thick and thorny, erupted from the earth, weaving into a living, shifting wall before the main doors.
The Lodge was under attack from two sides. Chaos fragmented their unity.
“Brigid, Aisling—with me and Stacy. West wing,” Jan ordered. “Bethany, coordinate from here. Katie, keep their heads down. Vivian, Dale—flank anything that gets past the vines.”
Vivian’s eyes were pure black, shadows leaking from her like smoke. The Hunger, stirred by the violence and fear, prowled just beneath her skin. Dale saw it. He put a hand on her cheek. “Stay with me. We feed it clean. On our terms.”
She nodded, a jerky, desperate motion.
They split.
The interior of the Lodge was a war of aesthetics. Muzzle flashes from sleek Consortium tech-rifles lit up oil paintings of stags. Golden Wand energy beams scorched floral wallpaper. The air stank of ozone, cordite, and burnt wood.
Jan led with chaos. She didn’t cast intricate spells. She poured raw Green Moon energy into the hallway—a wave of disorienting, overwhelming want. A Consortium soldier rounding the corner stumbled, his rifle dipping. He didn’t see an enemy. He saw the hallucination of a lover, of a deep, aching need. He moaned, fumbling at his helmet’s seals.
Stacy shot him twice in the side of the neck, where the armor segmented. He went down gurgling.
“Effective,” Aisling noted dryly, her Ballymore stone glowing in her hand. She pressed it to the wall. The very floorboards in front of the next soldier warped, snapping up to entangle his feet. He fell, and Brigid was there, not with a weapon, but with a syringe of glowing liquid from her medical kit. She jammed it into his neck port. “Neural inhibitor,” she said to his twitching form. “You’ll have a headache. You’ll live.”
They were a good team. But the Consortium had numbers. And they had a target.
The door to the conservatory, where the rescued prisoners had been taken, was reinforced oak. It was also glowing red-hot around the edges, melting under the focused beam of a Consortium cutting tool.
“They’re already here!” Jan hissed.
Inside the conservatory, it was a tableau of quiet desperation. Fatima and Aaron were helping a stumbling Verdant Pasture initiate toward a hidden panel in the wall. Annie stood between them and the door, her hands raised, a barrier of intertwined rose stems and iron-hard oak sprouting from the potted plants around her, thickening with every second.
But the door was failing.
“We need a diversion. Something big,” Stacy said, slapping a fresh magazine into her pistol.
Jan’s eyes went to Vivian, who was pressed against the wall further down the corridor, Dale shielding her with his body. Vivian was shaking, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. The Hunger was winning. The fear, the death, the violent energy—it was a banquet, and she was starving.
“I have an idea,” Jan said. “Dale! Get her in here! Now!”
Dale didn’t hesitate. He half-carried Vivian into a side room—a small, wood-paneled smoking lounge. He kicked the door shut.
“Viv, look at me,” he said, his hands on her shoulders. Her eyes were pools of liquid shadow, her skin hot to the touch. “You can’t hold it back. Not with this much around us. So don’t. Feed. Feed from me. Take everything you need.”
“I could hurt you,” she whispered, the words blurring together. “I could… drain you…”
“You won’t.” He believed it. He started tearing at his own clothes, pulling his shirt over his head, revealing the map of silver scars across his torso. “You love me. That’s the circuit breaker. Now fuck me, Vivian. Feed. Be the monster you’re afraid of, and let me love all of it.”
It broke her. With a sob that was half relief, half roar, she pushed him backwards onto a sturdy leather couch. Her clothes didn’t seem to come off; they dissolved into swirling darkness. One moment she was in jeans and a jacket, the next she was naked, her pale skin glowing against the living shadow that wreathed her form. Her wings, insubstantial and elegant, fanned out behind her.
She fell on him. Her mouth found his in a kiss that was pure consumption. He could feel it—the subtle pull, the delicious siphon of his life force, his vigor, channeled into her. It wasn’t painful. It was the most intense pleasure he’d ever known, sharpened by the edge of danger.
She moved down his body, her tongue tracing the scars on his chest, his abdomen. She took his cock in her hand. It was already rock-hard. She didn’t tease. She guided him to her entrance, slick and hot and impossibly ready. Then she sank down onto him in one smooth, driving motion, sheathing him completely inside her.
Dale cried out, his back arching. She was so tight, so fiercely hot. It felt like being claimed by a storm.
“Yes,” she hissed, her voice layered with a demonic echo. “This. This is what I need.” She began to ride him, setting a brutal, hungry pace from the start. Her hips pistoned, taking him deep, then almost letting him go, then slamming down again. The wet, rhythmic slap of their union filled the small room.
Her shadows crept out, caressing him, holding him down, amplifying every sensation. He could feel the feed now, a radiant heat flowing from his core into hers. It left him lightheaded, ecstatic.
“Fuck me, Dale,” she commanded, leaning forward, her breasts in his face. “Fuck this hungry cunt. Give me every drop. Fill me up.”
He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into her pale flesh. He thrust upward to meet her punishing rhythm, driving even deeper. The angle changed, and he hit a spot inside her that made her scream, a raw, untethered sound. Her inner muscles clamped around him like a vise, milking him, pulling the orgasm from him.
“I’m gonna come,” he warned, his vision spotting.
“Do it,” she snarled. “Pour it into me. Let me drink it all.”
He exploded. His hips bucked uncontrollably as he poured himself into her, a seemingly endless torrent. As he came, he felt the feed intensify, a glorious, draining rush that left him weak and shuddering. She took it all, her head thrown back, a cascade of crimson hair mingling with the shadows. Her own climax ripped through her, a silent, convulsive thing that made her entire body tremble. She drank his pleasure, his energy, his love, and it stabilized her. The shadows receded, folding back into her skin. The black faded from her eyes, leaving them clear, green, and brimming with tears.
She collapsed onto his chest, panting. He was exhausted, pale, but whole. Unharmed.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He kissed her sweaty hair. “Anytime.”
Outside the door, the world had changed. Vivian’s feeding frenzy, the massive release of succubus energy, had acted like a magical flashbang. To the Consortium soldiers with their anti-thaumic sensors, it was a sudden, blinding surge of inexplicable power. Their helmet displays fritzed. Their cutting tool sputtered and died.
In that moment of confusion, Jan acted.
She kicked the smoking conservatory door. It fell inward.
Behind her, Stacy, Brigid, and Aisling moved. Stacy fired, not at center mass, but at joints, at sensors, at weapons. Aisling’s magic warped the floor, trapping boots. Brigid darted in with her medical syringes, targeting exposed skin.
And Jan focused on the leader, a soldier with a commander’s insignia. She didn’t blast him with lust. She reversed it. She poured a sudden, overwhelming wave of aversion into him. The thought of his mission, his weapon, his own armor, became repulsive. He gagged, dropping his rifle, clawing at his helmet.
It was over in sixty seconds of brutal, precise work. The Consortium strike team lay neutralized on the conservatory floor, unconscious or disabled.
Fatima stood by the open panic room door, Aaron beside her, the last prisoner safe inside. She looked at Jan, at the scene, and gave a single, sharp nod.
The immediate threat was over. But the battle at the treeline still raged. The klaxons continued to wail.
Bethany’s voice came through their comms, crisp. “East perimeter holding, but barely. Katie’s running low on happy fun stuff. They’re adapting. They’ve deployed dampening fields. Magic is becoming unstable.”
Jan leaned against the doorjamb, catching her breath. She looked at Dale and Vivian emerging from the side room, a new, settled power humming between them. She looked at her friends, covered in grime and adrenaline.
The Merlin’s final order echoed. Hold them here.
“They wanted the prisoners,” Jan said, pushing her red hair back. “They failed. So now they’ll just want to burn it all down.”
A massive concussion rocked the Lodge. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The east wing was burning.
“Yeah,” Stacy said, checking her ammo. “That sounds about right.”
Jan’s grin returned, wild and fearless. “Okay. New plan. We stop holding. We push.” She looked at Vivian, now radiant and focused. “You good for a little more… absorption?”
Vivian cracked her neck, a shadow of a smile on her lips. “I’m feeling peckish.”
“Then let’s go ruin their science project.” Jan turned and ran back toward the fire, her friends a loyal, battered tide behind her. The Lodge was burning, but the fight for it was just beginning.
The Lodge was burning, but the fight for it was just beginning. Jan led the charge back through the main hall, smoke stinging their eyes, the cacophony of Katie’s last explosions and the Consortium’s energy weapons a deafening wall of sound. They burst onto the main balcony, coughing, just in time to see a sun-bright flash of golden light condense and vanish with a soft thump of displaced air.
The Merlin was gone. So were Johnny, Gregor, and Percival.
“What the hell?” Jan gasped, sweat and soot streaking her face. “Where’d they go?”
Bethany stood at a console she’d cobbled from her vintage phone and a Lodge terminal, her fingers flying. “The Merlin had a realization,” she said, her voice tight. “She asked how the Consortium knew about the Lodge. How they knew we had Bedivere’s former prisoners.”
She looked up, her eyes grave behind her sunglasses. “The only answer is Bedivere told them. He sacrificed this location. Either the Consortium wipes us out, or we win but are too busy mopping up to follow him. He’s calculated the chaos. He’s headed to the Nexus.”
“The what-now?” Stacy asked, firing a shot over the balcony to force a advancing soldier behind a tree.
“The metaphysical anchor point for Order jurisdiction,” Brigid called out from where she was dragging a wounded Crimson Heart initiate to cover. “It’s where the fundamental agreements between the societies are inscribed. If he rewrites the rules there…”
“He makes his new bastardized magic the official kind,” Fatima finished, arriving with Aaron and Annie. She understood the implication instantly. “The only ones who could stop a move like that are the Merlin herself, or…”
“The Archimedes Society,” Brigid sighed, applying a glowing bandage to the initiate’s leg wound. “And good luck getting them to do anything timely. They’ll want to observe, write a peer-reviewed article on the rule-breaking, debate the ethics for a decade, then maybe act. I’ve seen how they work.”
Bethany nodded sharply. “So we hold the line here. Without the Merlin. Buy her time to stop him.”
A high-velocity round sparked off the stone balustrade an inch from Jan’s head, showering her with chips. Instinct took over. She didn’t think. She grabbed the hem of her smoke-stained tank top and yanked it up and over her head, tossing it aside.
The Power of Exposure wasn’t a blast. It was a revelation. The Consortium sniper nestled in the distant tree line, his finger on the trigger, his eye to the scope, found his view filled not with a target, but with an awe-inspiring vision of bare skin, fierce freckled shoulders, and small, perfect breasts tipped with pale pink. His breath caught. His finger went slack. All violent intent leaked away, replaced by a dizzying, reverent shock.
“We can’t keep this up,” Stacy said, ducking as return fire came from another angle. Her ammo was low.
“Agreed,” Bethany said, her knuckles white on her console. “We need something big. Something they can’t adapt to.”
The balcony door swung open. Cassie walked in, serene as a summer stroll. The newest Wandering Nomad looked utterly unperturbed by the battle. “Hey. Yukio just used the portal room in the east wing. Said she had an idea. I might have… mildly suggested it.”
Jan and Bethany exchanged a single, electric look. Their wide eyes held the same mad hope. They turned in unison to Vivian.
Vivian understood. She didn’t smile. She simply let go. The shadows that clung to her after feeding on Dale erupted, not as a nebulous cloud, but as structured, terrifying anatomy. Curving horns of solidified night pushed through her red hair. A carapace of chitinous armor, gleaming like a beetle’s shell, flowed over her shoulders and spine. Leathery, shadow-wing snapped out, scattering papers. Her hands elongated into cruel, graceful claws.
She was magnificent and monstrous. Dale stared, his breath catching. “God, you’re beautiful.”
Without a word, Vivian vaulted onto the balcony railing. She crouched, her powerful new legs coiling, and launched herself into the smoky air. Her wings caught an updraft from the fires, carrying her toward the thick of the Consortium formation.
“Wait up!” Rainbor bellowed from below. The orc candy-seller, his massive axe in hand, had been holding the main doors. He saw Vivian sail overhead, grinned a tusk-filled grin, and with a running start, leapt from the porch into the fray after her.
“We just need to hold for a few more minutes!” Jan shouted to everyone, pulling her shirt back on. “If Yukio went where we think she went… everyone, give them hell! Buy the time!”
The Lodge became a frantic, piecemeal defense. Hank, Jason, and Amy appeared at a broken window with hunting rifles from the Lodge’s trophy room, firing with more enthusiasm than accuracy, but the sporadic shots kept the Consortium agents' heads down. Eric stood by the tree line, his eyes closed, whispering; a swarm of enraged squirrels and a disoriented but very large raccoon began harassing the soldiers’ legs. Annie focused her power, and the ground around the Consortium’s right flank blossomed with thick, tripping vines that grasped at their ankles.
Rebecca Franklin, holding a cast-iron frying pan, politely said “I’m so sorry about this” before clonking a Consortium agent who’d breached the kitchen square on his helmet. He dropped like a sack of flour.
Mike and Casey, guarding the nursery corridor, found two agents climbing through a shattered window. They didn’t scream. They deployed “Midwestern Tourist.”
“Hey, excuse me,” Mike said with profound sincerity, “is this the guided tour? The brochure mentioned a scenic overlook, but all I see are guys with kinda cheap-looking armor.”
“The dampening fields are giving me a migraine,” Casey added, rubbing her temple. “Do you have a manager we could speak to about the ambient thaumic disruption? We lodged a complaint last time.”
The agents, trained for magical combat or silent extraction, froze under this baffling verbal assault. They looked at each other. One opened his mouth to give an order. Polluck the cat shot from under a side table like an orange-and-white missile and latched onto his face with a yowl. As the man screamed, Godfrey trotted up and chomped down decisively on his gun hand.
The agents fled back out the window.
A roar split the sky. It was a sound of shredding metal and crumbling mountains.
Vivian, now carrying a cheering Rainbor under one arm, soared back up to the balcony, landing lightly. “Everyone down!” she yelled, her voice still layered with demonic resonance.
They all ducked. The Consortium lines did not.
Flamewing descended from the cloud of smoke like a scaled thunderclap. The great red dragon’s wings blotted out the moon. Yukio Harata clung to the spines of her neck, whooping with sheer, adrenaline-fueled joy, her hair whipping behind her. Flamewing opened her jaws, and a torrent of liquid orange fire, hotter than any natural flame, engulfed the Consortium’s central position. Their dampening fields shimmered and failed, the tech overloading in showers of white sparks. The armored soldiers scattered, their disciplined advance shattered into a panicked retreat.
The dragon banked, coming around for another pass. The Consortium broke. They ran, vanishing into the trees, leaving their smoldering equipment behind.
Silence, broken only by the crackle of the Lodge’s fires and Flamewing’s great, hot breaths, settled over the grounds. The smell was of ozone, burnt plastic, and dragon.
An electric sedan, sleek and silent, pulled up the mangled driveway. The driver’s door opened. Mara Henderson stepped out, straightening the jacket of her impeccable dove-gray pantsuit. She looked as if she’d arrived for a hostile corporate takeover, not a battlefield. Zack scrambled out the other side, pale and clutching a large, rolled-up parchment.
Mara surveyed the scorched lawn, the damaged Lodge, the massive dragon now settling onto its haunches with a ground-shaking thud. She raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.
“I have the contract my client requested,” she announced, her clear lawyer’s voice cutting through the post-battle daze. “She was an older woman, very insistent on the clauses regarding temporal non-interference and jurisdictional sovereignty. She paid a retainer and said to deliver it here, immediately.”
Jan, finally fastening her shirt, walked to the balcony’s edge. She looked down at Mara, then at the retreating Consortium, then at the dragon currently being affectionately scratched behind a horn-spike by a beaming Yukio.
A tired, soot-streaked grin spread across her face. “Yeah,” Jan called down, her voice hoarse. “Come on in, Mara. Zack. Things are just getting interesting.”