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This text is (c) 2009,2010 by Melanie. All rights reserved.
 
 
Seventy-four

I woke from Stacy's stirrings and felt disoriented for a moment. I looked around and remembered ending up in a crack house in a bad part of Los Angeles, with Stacy drugged, unconscious, while trying to recover Alyssa.

I shifted to allow Stacy to roll onto her back and watched her slowly come to. She looked at me, then looked past me at the room surrounding us and asked “What happened?”

“It was a trap, remember?” I said, “they were waiting for us.”

Stacy nodded as memory came back to her. She looked at my arm and said “You were hurt, weren't you?”

I said, “yes, Tanya, the woman here, broke my arm with a baseball bat. But somehow it's not hurting so much any more.”

I sat up and examined my arm, which was still not quite right, but much better than yesterday. I took a wild guess and said, “I think my being a sorceress could mean I heal faster then normal people. I just don't know.

“So, do you remember what happened to you? I saw the man grab you before the bitch hit me and I passed out.”

“Yes, he grabbed me and the woman was going to hit you again when you just fell down. Then I tried to get free of the guy, but he was just too strong. The woman left and came back with a syringe and gave me an injection. I don't remember anything after that.”

I said, “Yes, she told me she used a drug they have to keep the children asleep and quiet. They are doing this to a child every two weeks. Seriously, I could just tear them both to pieces, but we need them to find the buyer, a woman, who got Alyssa. Without them, we don't have any chance of finding her.”

Stacy picked up on the worried tone of my voice and snuggled in for a moment. “We will find her, don't worry. So, what happened after I got drugged?”

I gave her a short overview of the things that transpired and what I had done, deciding to leave out any mention of socks. I ended, “So, now Tanya is in a magical cage and the guy is cuffed to the water pipes in the kitchen.”

Stacy gave a wan smile and said, “At least he could not have had a comfortable night.”

I nodded and said, “That is another thing. I'm not about to let them get away with this, but I don't know what to do to them, either. Seriously, killing is too good for them.”

Stacy agreed and we decided we would see what our captives were up to.

First, we checked the front room and Tanya. She was curled up in a little ball inside her cage, asleep. I took a pair of forceps from the table and jabbed her side with the pointed tip. She jerked awake with an “Ouch!”, then focused and started raining a stream of invective on us.

The gist of it was that she was going through withdrawal because her drugs were in her handbag, which had been sitting on the floor, just out of reach, all night long. The thought of that actually made me smile, she truly deserved that.

Since it didn't seem she would stop, i cast another of the nasty spells I had memorized on her. We could see her mouth moving, but no sound came out as she continued to curse us for a moment, then realized that her voice had been taken from her.

She looked at me, fear in her eyes as she realized that the evening had not been a bad dream, that I really was a sorceress and that she was completely in my power. I gave her an cruel smile and said to Stacy, “Now that this one is taken care of, let's see about the other one.”

When we entered the kitchen he started at us with hate filled eyes. His wrists were bloody from pulling on the cuffs, trying to get out of his bonds. His bloodshot eyes told the story of a sleepless night.

“Cut me loose, bitch!” he demanded.

I turned to Stacy and stage whispered, “He doesn't know who I am. Yet.”

Stacy nodded and the man said, “So who are you supposed to be, bitch? You're just some whore, I bet.”

I said, “WHO I am is the mother of the little girl you abducted yesterday. WHAT I am is a sorceress. As Tanya already had the pleasure to find out.

“You, on the other hand, are scum. You will suffer for messing with my daughter.”

He laughed, and said, “You're a crazy bitch! Sorceress, my ass!”

I reached for a spell and cast it on him.

His eyes narrowed as he tried to resist, but soon he was moving, constantly trying to scrape against the wall, pipes and anything else available. Stacy looked at him and asked, “What did you do?”

I answered, “I cast an itching spell on him. Its a common torture spell, it makes his entire body itch. Literally from his scalp to his soles.”

With that, I turned and left the bathroom, Stacy following behind. The man yelled, “Where are you going? You can't leave me like this! Come back, right now!”

I ignored him and we went to the living room again.

Tanya sat propped up against the wall and gave me a sullen look. At least she didn't even try to talk, I got a feeling she was beginning to accept who was the boss in here.

I sat down on the sofa and took the time to fill in Stacy on what the man and Tanya had told me, while Tanya looked on with hate in her eyes.

I motioned for Stacy to stay and went back to the bathroom. The man there was obviously in agony. His shirt was torn from scraping himself against the wall and he was bleeding from numerous scratched and abraded spots on his skin. On his wrists, blood was flowing freely where the cuffs had cut him with all that moving around.

There was no more hate in his eyes, only a dull, broken, pleading expression as he twisted in his cuffs and desperately rubbed himself against the wall and floor as I was watching.

I motioned with my hand and the itching stopped, he relaxed into the wall, his eyes opened wide, then rolled up into his head and he passed out.

I left and returned to Stacy on the living room sofa.

“How is he doing?” she asked me.

I replied, “I put him out of his misery.”

At that, Tanya's eyes became large, and I saw fear had begun to creep into her stare. Her mouth moved, but she immediately realized the futility of it and shut it again.

Seventy-five

With Stacy here to hold the fort, I skipped out and drove home to pick up a few books from my special collection. Moving the books was a calculated risk, but one I was willing to take.

I arrive back at Tanya's apartment just before noon, with a bag of so-called food from a popular fast food outlet for Stacy and myself. We made a bit of a show of eating it in front of Tanya, who got nothing.

Then I unpacked the books from my bag, two large, old tomes full of deliciously nasty spells. Tanya seemed to shrink back against the wall within her cage when she saw me open the first book and peruse it's pages.

Eventually, I had the collection of spells that I thought I needed for this. First, I cast a spell on Tanya, then I took back the spell that I had used to silence her and dispelled the cage.

Tanya blinked and moved as if to attack me. She got up, took a step and then gave me a surprised look as she had to sit down right there on the floor.

I gave her a hard stare and a cold smile and said, “You must really think I'm stupid. I wouldn't let you out if you were in any shape to attack me. You have the muscle strength of a 3 year old girl, but still have your heavy adult body. If you move very, very carefully, you might be strong enough to crawl over here. Maybe.

“So just sit down and listen. You are going to call the buyer. You don't have to say much, if anything. It just has to be you calling her.”

She gave me a questioning look and I said, “I'm going to get my daughter back. You'd better not even try to step in my way, because I will roll over you and crush you to a pulp.”

She looked really scared as she crawled across the floor to her handbag, and pulled out a cell phone and then tried to palm a small plastic bag of white powder. I noticed that and came up next to her with one swift step, effortlessly prying open her weak hands and taking the baggie. Then I proceeded to search the bag, coming up with 4 more identical bags of drugs.

“Please.....”, Tanya said, “I need it...”

“You need no such thing, and where you're going, there won't be any, so you better get used to being without,” I said.

She said, “Where I'm going? Where am I going?” and gave me a bewildered look.

“Hell,” I said.

She blanched. “You're going to kill me?” she asked.

I gave her a cruel, cold smile and said, “Worse.”

Tanya screamed, “Noooo!” and started sobbing.

I said, “You have messed with someone of real power, now it's time to pay the piper. You have only one way to get out of this with your skin intact. That way is to really work on getting my daughter Alyssa back to me unharmed. That is door B. Door A leads straight to hell. So, choose.”

“I'll help,” she sobbed.

“Then calm down and get on the phone.”

Tanya took a few minutes to compose herself, then picked up the cell phone again and dialed a number from speed dial. I turned to the book and cast the spell I had prepared on Tanya.

My consciousness left my body and headed in the direction of Tanya. The spell description had said that it may come to a partial melding of minds at this point, something I was not happy to experience with her. Fortunately, our minds repelled each other furiously, so there wasn't even a tenuous telepathic contact. The phone connected and a female voice said, “Hello.”

I found my consciousness yanked forward and into the telephone. Riding the waves of the cellular network was a singularly exhilarating experience, a bit like the flying I had once dreamed of, but much faster. I braced myself for an impact as I hurtled towards an antenna tower, but I somehow smoothly slipped into the smooth metal rod and zipped down the copper wires, relentlessly driven by the stream of electrons I was riding.

Before I knew it, I popped out of another antenna tower and hurtled downwards into the city. Passing through ghostly walls, I zoomed to my destination in a straight line, homing in on a woman sitting on a bench with a little child. Not Alyssa.

When I was about to dive into the phone she was holding, I diverted to connect to the woman instead. Remembering the way the other sorceress had tried to invade my mind, I used what I had gleaned from the spell book to enter her mind.

I found that I could read her like a book, her entire memory was spread out in front of me. I knew her name, her address, and I saw the entire operation she was a small part of.

Apparently, these abductions were only a side line for her, a bit of extra money that she was able to make off the connections she had from her normal work.

I was sickened by what I saw in her mind. I refocused to my own body and wrote the name, address and any other pertinent details on a piece of paper I had prepared for the purpose.

While I was back in my own body, I noticed a slow trickle of energy coming in through the connection to the woman. I went back to find her slumped on the bench, unconscious but still alive. I quickly cut the connection to avoid hurting her further.

I took the phone from Tanya and pressed the disconnect while turning to Stacy and said, “This is who she is. All her details. I hope I never have to touch a mind so vile again. I almost killed her. Drained her life energy. I didn't even mean to, it just happened.

“She's a sadist, a dominatrix and a specialist in behavior modification. Her 'job', if you want to call it that, is to break the resistance of people, children, they abduct, for the sex slave market.”

I shuddered and went on, “We have to move quickly. Alyssa is still drugged and asleep at her address. Let's go.”

I turned to Tanya and pushed deep into her mind, delivering a shock to her system that made her fall to the floor, out cold. I said, “She'll stay down for a few hours. Let's get my baby back.”

Suddenly I realized what I had said, but while it was a really strange notion, it felt so right. Stacy had also picked up on it and a smile flitted across her face, to be replaced by a look of worry again as she thought about what we were going to do now.

I grabbed the books, unwilling to let them out of my sight, went downstairs and tossed the books into the trunk, then we got into the car and I set the GPS.

Seventy-six

While I was driving, I suddenly realized that I had been using my broken arm normally. A quick examination showed it being healed almost completely. I shrugged and put it down as a perk of being a sorceress. Mind you, If I had a choice, I'd gladly be the old me again. Then again, would I?

Feelings that I hadn't felt before began to assert themselves as a little voice in the back of my head started nagging: “If you were your old self, would you have Alyssa? Would you have Stacy?” Angrily, I replied in thought, “Would I be in danger? Would I have to deal with this body?” But, deep inside, I knew my arguments didn't carry the force that these deeply emotional arguments possessed. My subconscious was betraying me, the old, male me, by preferring to be this woman. An image of Alyssa, playing and laughing, came before my inner eye unbidden, and I snarled a thought of “Ok, you win!” at my subconscious, but then i started to wonder who was winning out. And who should.

While I was musing to myself, we had reached the address I had gleaned from the woman's mind.

I parked half a block down the street and we walked up to the house, which was set back from the road on a semicircular drive. We approached the door, which was opened by a burly man with a scowl on his face before we reached it.

“Who are you?” He asked, in an unfriendly tone.

“Your worst nightmare.” I replied as I reached out for his life energy and used what I had discovered earlier with the woman, draining his energy. His eyes rolled up and he dropped to the floor like a rag doll. Stacy and I dragged him inside so we could close the door. Stacy quickly checked him an looked at me, wide eyed. “He's .... dead!” she said.

Her words barely penetrated my single-minded fixation on finding Alyssa, but I was shocked to the core when they did. I dropped down next to Stacy and checked him myself. I could not feel any sign of life. There was no breathing, no pulse. I tried to connect to his mind, desperate to push back some energy to give life back to him, but there was nothing there to connect to, only a lifeless void.

Stacy grabbed my shoulder and shook it, and I realized she was yelling at me to snap out of it. I got up wearily, and Stacy said, “Ronnie, let's get Alyssa. Don't let it be in vain.”

I pulled myself together as best as I could and we ventured into the house, where we found Alyssa in a bed, with the bars up and chicken wire over the top so she could not get out if she woke up. I took a hold of a pair of the wooden bars and pushed them apart and, with a loud crack, the bars broke and allowed me to reach inside and pull Alyssa out. I cradled her in my arms and pulled her close to me, standing there and hugging my daughter, savoring these feelings I had never previously allowed to take hold.

It was Stacy again who brought me back to reality. “Let's go!” she said.

I nodded and we headed downstairs, past the man I had killed and out of the house. We got into the car, Stacy slipped behind the wheel and we quickly headed home.

Seventy-Seven

When we arrived at the flat, I carried Alyssa upstairs with me. Stacy locked the car and followed me inside. I laid Alyssa down in her bed and sat down next to her. I cautiously felt for her presence, making sure not to create an energy connection to her, and determined that she was in a deep, drugged sleep, but otherwise well.

Stacy put her arms around me and I held on to her like a drowning woman to a life saver as the floodgates opened and I cried on her shoulder until my body was wracked by dry sobs, all my tears spent.

“I killed him.” I said. Over and over I repeated it. “He was alive, talking, and with no more than a thought I took his life. What am I? I'm a monster. A killer. I shouldn't be alive!”

Stacy hugged me tighter and said, “You're no cold blooded killer. You're not evil, Ronnie. I could not love an evil person. You did what you had to do. Mothers have killed people who threatened her children since the beginning of time. I would have done the same.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really.” she said.

Our attention was diverted to the bed when we saw Alyssa stir and stretch, then open her eyes?

“Mommy?” she asked?

I pulled her close and said, “I'm here, darling, and I'll never, never let go of you again!”

“There were bad people,” Alyssa said. “Real bad people. They hurt me.”

“Hurt you? Did they hit you?”

“They hit me and they put their hands .....” she stopped and pointed down.

“Stacy saw the rage build in my eyes and put a hand on my shoulder, helping me to control what was inside and not explode while holding Alyssa.

“Tanya,” I said. “It has to be her and that man of hers. She was drugged afterward.”

Alyssa gave me a blank look and Stacy looked at me reproachfully. “Later,” she mouthed.

We took Alyssa to the kitchen, where she nibbled at her food. She was still a bit giddy from the drugs and professed being tired after she had eaten. We took her back to her bed and laid her down. I bent over her to give her a good night kiss, but she was already out like a light. I kissed her anyway and murmured “Sleep well, darling.”

Then I straightened up and left the room. I moved with a purpose when I got dressed and got ready to leave. Stacy looked at me and made as if to stop me, then visibly sagged and approached me. She gave me a fierce hug and said, “Ronnie, watch out for yourself. Alyssa needs you, I need you. I love you. Be careful, ok?”

I nodded and headed for the door. I had a few loose ends to tie up. It wasn't going to be pretty.

End of part nineteen