“Mmm,” said Harlette. “You might say so. But you don’t kiss like Kate, either. Anyways, look in the mirror.”

I did, Harlette’s spell had done my makeup in an instant and perfectly. Well, it looked good to me–and I spent some time looking at myself. Eyeshadow, mascara, lipstick and some stuff I didn’t even know what it was called, all by magic. Now maybe I wouldn’t have to learn all that.

“I’m impressed,” I told her. And my nipples were still hard, but I didn’t say that. Had Harlette once told me she used to be a guy, or maybe was still really a guy–um, where it really mattered? At the moment, I couldn’t remember. Maybe it didn’t matter, my appetites seemed a bit omnivorous.

Of course, the question might be who sets the table and who gets to be lunch.

She cocked her head this way and that, looking at me, then smiled. “It came out beautiful, I think. I get better with it every time. I used a daytime scheme, not as dark or dramatic as you would want for night time.”

Uh-oh. I tried to imagine the kiss that would go with a night-time version of the spell and shivered. Darker and more dramatic, oh my.

The kitten pounced on the bottles and tubes as Harlette set them down, letting them roll across the dresser top. “Kill! Mine! Kill! Mine!” squeaked Muffins before getting control of herself. She immediately fell to washing and pretended nothing had happened.

Harlette hid her face behind some of the clothing hanging in the closet. I did something similar; I giggled and pointed at the cat.

After we recovered, Harlette asked, “Are you going to open the bookstore, pardon, book shop, today?”

“Do I usually open it on Sunday?”

“Well, duh!” she said. “Why have a book shop on the boardwalk if you’re not open on Sunday?”

Boardwalk? Visions of Coney Island danced in my head for a moment then I remembered that Los Angeles did have a boardwalk in a few places, even though some of them weren’t actually made of boards. “Venice?” I guessed. My brain seemed to be getting re-integrated, I had less trouble remembering the names of places now, at least.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “If you ask me, you keep the shop just to have an excuse to go down and flirt with the musclemen.”

“Probably,” I agreed. A kind of map in my head showed how to get to the book shop, less than a mile away, really. I could see the green-and-white awning and the craft-cut wooden sign in the window, “Buxom Books” with the outline of a busty woman lying on top of the letters, back arched, high heels in the air. Uh-oh. Another sign in the other window said, “Books for Grownups.”

“It’s an adult book store?” I asked.

Harlette waggled a hand, “Soft core, the city won’t let you handle the hard stuff in that location. Like you can’t sell your own videos there, the Wendy Splendid stuff?”

I blushed. “Oh, my!”

“But you’ve got an order desk with catalogs. I do the shipping on Tuesdays.” She grinned, “You still sell pretty good, what with mail order and internet, I must ship out fifty or sixty videos a week, plus the books. FotoZed handles mail orders, too, and all the wholesale.”

“Zed. That’s the guy that attacked me?”

Harlette frowned.

Muffins put in. “Well, he wants you back working for him. And he tried to send some muscle down to harass you. Last we heard, one of those guys is still selling photos of his zebra-striped ass down in Tijuana and the other is living under a bush in the People’s Park in Berkeley–when he isn’t in jail for public urination.”

Harlette gurgled.

“What? Did I do something to them?” I asked, a little alarmed.

“People ought not mess with witches and sorceresses,” said Harlette. “Kate gave them some erotic compulsions they’ll have to work off, unless some other mage undoes the geasá£.”

It sounded like she said something halfway between “guess” and “geisha” with a French-fried noise on the end but I knew how it was spelled–hah!–and what it meant: magically-enforced obligations. Their two fates sounded as if they were each refusing to follow the geas and suffering an alternate punishment from their own conscience.

“Wow,” I said. I didn’t know how I knew what I did know, but I knew that I knew it.

That little story made me feel relieved that I apparently wasn’t Kate. She didn’t sound like such a nice person all of a sudden–at least, not if you annoyed her. At the same time it bothered me that the details of what happened seemed both familiar and alien to me.

“Maybe Zed hired some magical help?” I suggested.

“Not many mages will work for money,” said Muffins. “At least, not the good ones. You wouldn’t. Power and knowledge are what magic-users seek, money, just money as money, is easy to get.”

“It is?” That startled me. Somehow, disrespect for money seemed to offend some part of my inner self, or some old part of what used to be me. Whichever. I didn’t want to chase my tail down that particular bunny burrow so I tried to change the subject.

“What about Mr. Styx? What did he have to do with all this, what happened to him and–well, is there anything we can do to help him get better?”

“Besides teriyaki sauce,” Harlette suggested. We all glanced toward the outer room where Mr. Styx supposedly had climbed back into my canopy bed–the site of his dessication.

Muffins looked thoughtful, crossing and recrossing her mismatched eyes again, so cute and silly-looking, but I tried reminding myself that a powerful intellect and an otherworldly spirit inhabited the tiny kitten body. I still giggled but I felt nervous doing it.

“Mr. Styx, Willie Compost-or-whatever, is a bit of a mystery. His talent, from what Kate said, was auto-redaction. Maybe that’s how he survived what happened to him.”

Auto-redaction? It took me a moment to work that out. “He’s a shapeshifter?”

“No, or he wasn’t–but that’s where his talent lay.”

“You mean he turned from jerk into jerky all by himself?” asked Harlette.

“No,” said Muffins. “He and Kate were locked in a tantric cell. When the ambush started, Kate tried to use all the power available so she could to protect them. When things went in the bottle, she tried to bail out and get us all to safety. Somewhere in there, Willie must have instinctively grabbed some power and tried to survive.”

No one said anything for a bit.

“Well, shake me out and beat me for a rug,” said Harlette finally. “Maybe he’s not a complete Jeffries Tube.”

“Maybe,” I paused to get another breath. Wearing a corset takes some getting used to. “Maybe he could tell us something important if we helped him restore himself?”

“Maybe,” agreed Muffins. She turned around twice and started licking herself somewhere that made me wonder what it would be like to be as flexible as a cat. I would have gotten completely distracted and forgotten all about poor Mr. Styx if not for Harlette.

“He looks like all the juice has been sucked out of him,” she said. “You’re the Juice Lady, Boss Lady. Maybe you can give him some juice?”

“How?” I paused for air again. “How would I do that?”

Muffins twisted and turned to get a better angle on her licking and fell off the countertop into my lap. I giggled then hiccoughed because the giggle going out collided with a breath coming in.

“Oh, now she’s going to do you,” said Harlette with an evil wink.

The giggles-mixed-with-hiccoughs began to get interesting. Little zings and zowies went through my anatomy and I didn’t know whether to squeal or moan. “Hickety hooper?” I said, helpless for the moment and enjoying it like a kid’s first tilt-a-whirl ride. “Hickety, hoop! Hickety koop!” Ooo, that was a real good one.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Muffins accused Harlette.

“What I did? You’re the one fell off the table into her possum-catcher!”

Mr. Styx appeared in the doorway, looking very interested in what was going on. Maybe he wanted to read the book later.

“Ry yry hrrrh yr hrrrr rry hy rrrr hr?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him that if just looking at him didn’t scare me out of the hiccoughs, jumping at me and saying boo probably wouldn’t work either.

“Hinklety Honk!” I said.

I tried to stand up to get more air. The sensations had become psychedelic, the world opening up like somebody’s oyster to show the slick little piece of meat inside. My nipples throbbed and my pussy purred. “Hickle, hinkle, hicklety hoo?” By which I meant something like, “My brain, my brain, my beautiful brain, it’s melting!”

“She needs a circuit breaker on that thing,” said Harlette.

“Hell’s Pretty Pink Pastel Possum Plaster! Do something! She doesn’t have any idea how to handle that kind of power! She’s sucking energy from anyone who’s ever seen any of her videos!”

I had the impression, real or imagined, that I had somehow synchronized the wanking of thousands of men, and a few women, watching my Splendid videos all over North America not to mention the rest of the world.

“Hinkle, hook, hookety-hickety-hinklety, hinkle,” by which I meant something like, “Holy shit! It’s a million disk seller! We’re going double platinum here!”

“It’s a megaorg power surge, millions of tiny organ solos!” said Harlette.

Lonely men in apartments and flats, cottages and motel rooms, hogans and igloos, yurts and fezes rubbed their dicks and thought of sticking their stiffie in my fuzzy blonde bijoona. Wait a minute, I think a fez is a kind of hat. And what the fuck is a bijoona?

“She’s cumming but her spell is keeping them from doing so! So they keep trying and giving her more power and her spell keeps getting stronger!”

“She’s like the frozen pot sticker Energizer Bunny in reverse!” said Harlette. “Good thing I didn’t put her in the really tight corset or the tall high heels, huh?”

Fuck, yeah. Not that I wasn’t enjoying the whole thing but I felt like just a little bit more of this and they’d have to wash my brains out of my panties–except, I wasn’t wearing panties, I remembered.

Time went non-linear and I saw the next few scenes in out-of-order snatches as I cummed in and out of reality.

Harlette helped me stand up then she kissed me again, half-rescue breathing, half-seduction.

Muffins ran around in a circle but she wasn’t the pussy who was in trouble.

Mr. Styx lurched through the door into the dressing room like a re-animated Ted Cassidy.

The men who imagined fucking me had ten thousand sets of eyes and ten thousand hands and a single cock two miles long.

Some time during all of the jump cuts and quick fades, Harlette’s tongue grew long enough to lick my skull clean from the inside and I stopped thinking at all.