Chapter 14: Tutorial Mode
The word hung in the car, a bomb waiting for a confirmation wire. Chloe’s gaze was unrelenting, forensic. “When does it happen, John?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came. The truth was a physical blockage in a throat that wasn't his. The rain traced rivulets down the windshield, distorting the neon beyond.
“It’s… complicated,” he managed, the high, feminine voice squeaking on the last syllable.
“Uncomplicate it.” Chloe shifted, her concern now edged with the frustration of the persistently baffled. “One minute you’re a six-foot-something guy in a stained hoodie, the next you’re… her. There’s a trigger. What is it?”
From the necklace, Amy sighed, a sound like tarnished silverware rattling. “Oh, for pity’s sake. The boy gets a stiffy. A tumescent event. A biological standing ovation. There, the mystery is solved, can we please focus on the fact that we’re blocking traffic?”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the timed thump-thump-thump of the left turn signal Chloe had forgotten to cancel. John wished, with a desperation that hollowed him out, that the seat would swallow him. He felt his—her—face grow hot. He couldn’t look at Chloe.
Chloe’s eyebrows climbed slowly toward her hairline. Her lips pursed. She blinked, once, twice. Then a snort escaped her, a brief, shocked puff of air. It wasn’t quite laughter. It was the sound of a worldview recalibrating under extreme duress.
“You’re kidding,” she said, her voice flat.
“I really, really wish she was,” John mumbled, staring fixedly at the air freshener tree swinging from the rearview mirror.
“And the necklace talks.”
“She’s less of a talker and more of a critic,” John said. “Amy, meet Chloe. Chloe, the millennia-old pain in my neck.”
“Charmed,” Amy drawled. “Now, driver, your vehicle is idling in a manner most conspicuous. The gentlemen you were so concerned about likely have associates. I suggest motion.”
The logic punctured the awkwardness. Chloe jerked, looked in the mirror, and eased the car back into the stream of traffic. She drove in silence for several blocks, navigating automatically, her mind visibly whirring.
“So,” she said finally, turning down a narrower street lined with shuttered industrial facades. “You see a pretty picture, or… think a happy thought… and you turn into a supermodel who beats up muggers.”
“It’s not voluntary!” John protested, the sound shrill. “It’s a curse! I was trying to get a decent wifi signal in the library and I touched this… this thing she was trapped in, and now my life is a poorly written anime!”
“The term is ‘geas,’” Amy corrected, her voice dripping with boredom. “And the wifi in that library is abysmal. I don’t blame you.”
Chloe shook her head, a slow smile finally breaking through. It was weary, incredulous, but genuine. “Okay. Okay. Magic is real. My buddy John is a magical girl. And his fairy godmother is a sarcastic jewel.” She glanced at the necklace. “What’s your deal, then? Genie? Djinn? Annoyed muse?”
“Think of me as a spectral operations manager,” Amy replied. “My current project is preventing this walking hormone reaction from getting himself killed or institutionalized before I can untangle this regrettable symbiosis. The project is… challenging.”
They left the brighter thoroughfares behind, plunging into the warehouse district. The streetlights grew fewer, their glow weak and jaundiced, casting long, skeletal shadows from fire escapes and sagging chain-link fences. The buildings were monoliths of corroded steel and graffiti-tagged concrete, windows either dark or boarded over. The rain had softened to a cold drizzle, and the air lost the scent of food trucks and exhaust, replaced by the tang of wet rust, old standing water, and something acrid—burnt plastic, maybe.
“Why here?” John asked, his own voice barely a whisper. The sheer, oppressive emptiness of the place made SexiWoman’s body feel even more glaringly out of place.
“It’s quiet. No witnesses. And if your fan club from earlier is looking, they’ll check your dorm, the diner, the usual spots. They won’t think to look here,” Chloe said, pulling the car into the shadowed alcove of a loading dock beneath a faded mural of some grinning cartoon character whose eyes had been spray-painted over. She killed the engine. The silence rushed in, thick and damp.
For a moment, they just sat there in the dark. John became hyper-aware of every sound: the slow tik-tik-tik of the engine cooling, Chloe’s steady breathing, the distant drip of water from a broken gutter. And his own heartbeat, a frantic flutter in a ribcage that felt too delicate to contain it.
“So what’s the plan?” Chloe asked, turning to face him. In the gloom, her features were soft, her expression serious. “You can’t go back to your dorm like that.”
“The transformation reverts when the, uh, stimulus passes,” John said, the clinical words feeling absurd. “Usually. Sometimes she just… takes over.”
“A necessary intervention when your piloting skills devolve into panicked flailing,” Amy intoned. “Speaking of which.”
The attack came with no warning.
They were just shapes detaching from the deeper shadows between two warehouses—three of them, moving with a coordination that spoke of intent. No shouts, no theatrical threats. Just swift, closing movement.
Chloe saw them first. “John—“
The passenger window exploded inward.
A gloved hand, thick and brutal, reached through the shattered glass, grabbing for the necklace on the seat. Reflex—John’s reflex, not Amy’s—made SexiWoman’s arm shoot up to block. The hand closed around her wrist instead, yanking with terrifying force.
Pain lanced through John’s shoulder. A scream tore from his throat, high and sharp.
“Mine!” a gruff voice grunted from outside.
Then, like a switched circuit, the control was ripped from him. The raw fear vanished, replaced by a glacial, focused calm. The body relaxed in the grip of the attacker.
“Bad move,” SexiWoman’s voice said, but it was all Amy now, a purr of liquid nitrogen.
The captured wrist twisted, not to pull away, but to coil like a serpent. Long, powerful legs came up, silk-clad feet bracing against the door frame. With a sound like tearing fabric, Amy used the man’s own pull as leverage, launching SexiWoman’s body out through the broken window in a twisted, impossible arc.
John was a spectator again, but this time the view was a visceral masterclass. He felt the sleek pivot in mid-air, the coiled strength in the thighs, the perfect balance. She—Amy—landed in a silent crouch on the wet asphalt, ten feet from the car, the ruined stiletto heels somehow finding perfect purchase.
The three men—they were large, dressed in dark, nondescript clothing, their faces obscured by ski masks—paused for a fraction of a second, surprised by the fluid escape.
That was all Amy needed.
She didn’t fight like John had, with wild, desperate swings. She moved like water finding cracks. The first man lunged; she sidestepped, her hand a blur that chopped precisely at the side of his neck. He went down as if his strings were cut, gurgling.
The second came in swinging a tire iron. Amy dropped low, the steel whistling over SexiWoman’s platinum hair. A razor-sharp heel snapped out, connecting with a knee. The sound was a sickening pop, like a chicken bone breaking. The man’s scream was cut short as an elbow drove up into his diaphragm, doubling him over before a swift kick sent him crumpling against the car’s fender.
The third, the one who had grabbed her, backed up a step, pulling a knife from his belt. The blade gleamed in the scant light.
“Watch closely, John,” Amy murmured through SexiWoman’s lips, a teacher giving a demonstration. “This is how a real woman handles herself.”
She didn’t retreat. She flowed forward. The knife thrust was fast, but Amy’s hand was faster, parrying the wrist, her fingers locking around it in a vice-like grip. There was a simultaneous twist and a forward step, her body closing the distance. John felt the impact as SexiWoman’s other forearm slammed into the man’s throat, crushing it against the hard bone. He gagged, eyes bulging. Amy guided him down, a dancer leading a partner to the floor. She ended up straddling his chest, one knee pinning his knife arm, the other resting lightly beside his head.
With almost casual grace, she reached down and plucked the knife from his limp fingers. Then she leaned close, her face inches from his mask. The ruined stiletto heel, its tip sharp and stained with grime, came to rest against the pulsing hollow of his throat.
The man froze, his panicked breaths puffing against the wet fabric of his mask.
Inside, John was screaming. This was too much. The violence was too efficient, too personal. But another part of him, a traitorous, deep-buried animal part, was electrified. The raw power, the absolute control, the terrifying grace of it—it hit him in a wave of adrenaline so potent it was indistinguishable from another, more basic thrill. A rush of heat, unwanted and shameful, coiled low in SexiWoman’s stomach.
Amy felt it. Of course she did. A slow, wicked smile spread across the perfect features.
“See?” she whispered, to John alone. “It’s not all bad.”
Suddenly, a new light washed over them—the blinding white beam of a high-powered flashlight from the end of the alley. A distant voice, amplified by a bullhorn, shattered the intimate violence.
“POLICE! FREEZE! PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!”
Amy’s head snapped up. The spotlight framed SexiWoman in devastating clarity: the torn dress, the predator’s pose, the knife in her hand, the heel at a man’s throat.
“Ah,” Amy said, the smile turning brittle. “Complications.”
In the car, Chloe slumped low in the driver’s seat, a hand over her mouth.
The spotlight held them, a tableau of impossible truth. The sirens began to wail, drawing closer.