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Author's note: Here's the first chapter of book five of I Wish. Here is where things start getting intense and we take off in a new direction. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

“Umm… excuse me, are you Shannon O’Reilly?” a voice asked tremulously from behind me.

“Yes, that’s me,” I replied as I turned around, model smile firmly in place, and saw a girl standing there. She was about thirteen or fourteen with long black hair and deep brown eyes, and she looked a bit nervous as she clutched a copy of Teen Queen in her hands. She wasn’t really dressed for a Toronto winter, and neither were the pair of adults that I assumed were her parents standing and watching us from not too far away so I figured that she was waiting for a connecting flight.

“Omigod! This is so cool! I can’t believe I’m meeting you! Umm… do you think that you could…” she gushed before seeming to get nervous again and trailing off.

“Sign your magazine?” I finished for her with a more genuine smile. “Sure, who should I make it out to?”

“Ellie,” the girl supplied uncertainly as she offered me the magazine and a pen. “I mean, my name is Eleanor, but nobody ever really calls me that.”

“My cousin is called Ellie too, she lives with us and she’s like a little sister to me,” I told her warmly as I signed the cover of the magazine, "To my good friend Ellie, Shannon O’Reilly.”

“Thank you sooo much! I gotta get going, Mom and Dad are waiting for me.” With that, she was running off excitedly to the pair of adults who had been watching us and I gave a little wave before turning back to Beth.

“That was sweet of you, Babe, she looked so nervous,” my intended said as she leaned forward to kiss me tenderly.

“It was no big deal, I’m getting used to signing those things all the time and talking with strangers. It couldn’t have been easy for her to approach me like that, as nervous as she was, so why make it harder for her? If taking a minute to sign a magazine and talk to her made her happy, then it was worth it. We should go catch up to the others though,” I said, grabbing onto my pair of travel cases as we hurried to catch up with my sister and the rest of our crew.

It had been almost three weeks since our battle with Khinara and her minions, it was now less than a week until Christmas, and I was looking forward to our trip. We had been so busy since that battle with everything that was going on in our lives and I was starting to feel burned out. It would be nice to get away for a bit, even if it was sort of a working holiday.

School had been one of our biggest time commitments, especially with volleyball. Our team was one of the best in the region and we had placed second overall at a tournament last Saturday. Schoolwork also took up a lot of time and so did dodging the ‘press’. At least we could come and go without people with cameras following our every move and trying to get pictures of me now that school was out for Christmas since they wouldn’t come near the house with the threat of legal action.

Sarah and I had also been very busy with work, so Beth and Annie were kept busy as well. Between shooting materials for phase two of the ad campaign for Divine Cosmetics, doing public appearances, and shooting our first few commercials, most of our weekends had been booked solid. We also had some other unrelated modeling work that our agent Peter and Jen’s parents had approved.

Then there was our other, more clandestine work. There hadn’t been much Demon activity since our battle with Khinara but what there was had been disorganized and it almost felt like there was a power vacuum here among the Demons in Toronto and they were all jockeying for position. Maybe I had hurt Khinara worse than I thought.

That didn’t mean that we weren’t working though since I was refining my skills and learning new Celestial spells with Sarah and Ziralin and I both had apprentices to train. Both Lisa and Michelle were coming along well, but they both had a stubborn streak that seemed to help with that. I didn’t think that Lisa had the power for Celestial magick but she was proving very good at multi-tasking and I had taught her how to purify magick energy and basic shielding and attack spells in case she had to tangle with any Demons.

As for Michelle, she had been working hard learning physical combat from Ziralin and that was what would serve her best since most of her Familiar abilities seemed to be passive with the accelerated healing, enhanced physical attributes, and her ability to teleport to Lisa when needed. Ziralin had been hoping to have that last ability herself, but it seemed that it was something unique to Michelle. Like Ellie was always saying, ‘Magick has a will of its own,’ and apparently a sense of the dramatic and an odd sense of humor as well.

Anyway, with everything that we had going on, it would be nice for all of us to take a break over Christmas while Talisha finalized buying the new house and getting us moved in before the new year. Jen’s parents had managed to rent us a big place for the next two weeks in Banff National park so that we and our assistants and friends could get in a little rest and relaxation. They thought that a little skiing and being in the great outdoors would help us to recharge our batteries before we had to return for school and more work on the ad campaign. Michelle had even suggested someone who flew a chartered plane to get us there and back.

While we did intend on enjoying the vacation, we also had work to do. While we were there we would also be traveling to Nhekar, the Plane where the knowledge that Torphael had given Ziralin indicated that the final Sentinel, Jalael the Serene, could be found. None of those among us who had gotten Celestial marks had much knowledge of Nhekar though, much less where to find Jalael’s remains.

At least while searching for the other Sentinels we had some coordinates to add to the gate spells so we ended up somewhere close to the Sentinels’ locations but this time we had nothing to go by. We could appear anywhere on that Plane without specific coordinates so it seemed that we were going to have to search a whole world randomly and hope to find what we were looking for. Worse yet, we didn’t even have any recent information to help us.

Apparently, Nhekar was one of the far outer Planes that the Celestials weren’t very familiar with because it’s so far out of the way and it takes a lot of power to cast a gate there. The information that Ziralin had inherited from Torphael was limited at best and thousands of years out of date by our terms but to make that even worse, one day on our Plane is months on Nhekar so the information was likely actually hundreds of thousands of years out of date so far as Nhekar was concerned. We had no idea what we would be walking into but at least we would have months to a couple of years to search before we had to be back on our own Plane in two weeks’ time. Maybe we’d finish up early and could get some skiing in.

As I thought about the trip ahead and we hurried to catch up with the others I looked around carefully. I had the feeling that I was being watched and it wasn’t the first time in the past few weeks. I couldn’t sense any demonic aura or a Demon Brand though so it was probably either my imagination or one of those photographers following me around again. I tried to put it out of my mind as Beth and I joined the others at the gate that would take us to the runway where our plane awaited.

The plane was bigger and a bit fancier than I was expecting for a prop plane and could seat up to fourteen passengers with a decent amount of legroom and space in the cabin. I wasn’t much of a plane girl but Michelle mentioned that it was a Cessna Caravan as we were securing our luggage. Soon we had taken off and it was a short time later as I was just settling in for a relaxing flight when I heard a familiar voice calling out clearly from near the cockpit. “Hello, everyone. We have reached our cruising altitude so you may all unfasten your seatbelts and feel free to roam around the cabin. My name is Rebecca and if you need anything to make your flight more comfortable, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

My eyes went wide with surprise as I unfastened my seatbelt and stood up to look at the source of the voice, not sure if I could believe my ears. As soon as I was standing and we both got a good look at one another, Rebecca and I said in stereo, “What is she doing here?!”

Michelle was quick to get to her feet and place herself between us. “Okay, girls, just calm the fuck down. Rebecca is here because her mom is our pilot and she sometimes helps out on the flights. Shannon is here because she and her sister are your mom’s clients. And I needed a way to get you two somewhere where you can bury whatever hatchet is between you.”

Rebecca glared at Michelle in fury and snapped, “I thought you were my friend!” Then she turned around in a huff and stomped back toward the pilot’s compartment.

“I am… I… fuck,” Michelle stammered as she sank into her seat with a sigh.

I let out a sigh of my own and took the seat across from Michelle and Lisa. “I know what you were trying to do here, Michelle, but this was a bad idea. If she and her mom are our ride back and spending their vacation in the same place she was going to want to hang out with you. How were you planning to explain the fact that we might not be around for most of our ‘vacation’?”

Michelle sank guiltily into her seat. “Well, she and her mom are staying at a different place and I figured that if I couldn’t get you two talking she’d do her best to avoid you anyway. I just wanted her to stop hating on you for no good reason, if you just got together and talked it out I think…”

Whatever she had been about to say was cut off by a loud bang as the plane seemed to lurch and Rebecca screamed. “I really hope that was turbulence,” I heard Elsaishe say, though I was pretty sure she believed it about as little as I did. We had all felt that sickening feeling of a Demon gate being opened and a very familiar aura and were scrambling toward the cockpit.

Rebecca was sitting on the floor gaping in horror and screaming at the scene inside the cockpit. Her mother was slumped forward lifelessly in the pilot’s seat, there was blood and entrails everywhere, and standing there in the center of it all was Khinara half covered in blood and a translucent black figure with glowing red eyes. Just great, it was a Wraith.

Wraiths aren’t like regular ghosts and spirits, and yes, ghosts do exist. Wraiths are the disembodied spirits of Demons whose hatred for something or someone is strong enough to keep their souls from going to wherever Demons go when they die. Because they are incorporeal beings and can’t interact with the physical world they don’t give off a strong demonic aura and, unless they choose to show themselves, even a sensitive Witch like me would never know they were there unless we were specifically looking for one.

Now that it was visible, I could see the bindings on the Wraith. Khinara must have had that thing following me for a while, waiting for an opportunity, but Wraiths are usually laser-focused on the object of their hatred and getting vengeance so they wouldn’t serve another unless it would lead to it getting that vengeance. That meant that this Wraith had a beef with one of us. Then I recognized that almost undetectable demonic aura and muttered, “Of course it would be Aarianna.” It made sense since she blamed me for her being turned into a girl and then a Succubus, and probably held a grudge against Ziralin and me both for killing her.

~I see that you recognize my new pet, Shannon,~ Khinara said with a creepy smile, seeming to take great pleasure in using my name. ~The things that she wants to do to you and the silver-haired Fae.~

She wasn’t going to get the chance since I had been gathering and purifying magick energy since I sensed the gate and Khinara. I hit the Wraith with a purification spell and peppered Khinara with holy missiles. Aarianna was out of the game now but Khinara’s shield spell was still standing as I sensed her casting another gate spell.

There was something seriously wrong here, and not just the fact that the cabin of the plane was too cramped for a full-out magick battle or for Mason, Jennifer, Annie, Ziralin, and Sarah to effectively use their Celestial forms without their wings making it really crowded. We couldn’t even use physical spells or bullets unless we wanted to risk bringing the plane down, if we weren’t going down already. Khinara was also in the cockpit and with me and Rebecca effectively blocking the door at the moment, so only I had a line of sight to attack her anyway.

Sure, Khinara’s shield spell seemed less powerful than the one that she used in our last encounter and her missing arms hadn’t regenerated yet, but she had the advantage here so why gate away? Was she maybe bringing in reinforcements to finish us off? She did say that she wasn’t going to play games this time.

I was pounding her with another trio of spells when everything seemed to lurch. It was as I started to draw in magick energy for another round of spells that I figured out what was wrong. The feel of the energy was sickening and tainted, it felt different than any that I had ever gathered before. Khinara hadn’t brought reinforcements to the plane, she’d brought the plane to Heil.

“Shit,” I heard Sarah curse behind me as she probably realized the same thing that I had. She might not be able to draw on magick energy in her human form anymore but she could still sense both it and demonic auras. There were Demons everywhere; on the ground below us, in the air around the plane, and the plane was shaking from blows as the Demons outside tried to stoke our fears.

It was working and the only positive thing about this situation was that Khinara seemed severely weakened after using that spell, well for the brief instant before the second portal appeared and she made good her escape. She didn’t need to stick around, she had all the Demons in Heil to finish us off now. We needed to get out of there, fast.

Lisa and I could draw on the magick energy here and only feel a bit nauseous, the abilities of our Familiars were mostly inherent magical abilities, and Ziralin and Ellie could use their Faery abilities but anyone who tried using Celestial abilities would be screwed when they had to start drawing in magick energy. Changing to their Celestial forms didn’t require using any, but their Celestial special abilities and even their ability to fly required drawing on magick energy once they used up what they had stored. Unless they took the time and concentration required to purify that energy first, this stuff would be like poison to them, as deadly as purified magick energy was to Demons.

Sarah took charge. “Everyone gather your things; we need to gate out of here! We are not ready to fight here yet!”

I was about to do as she said when I noticed that the ground seemed to be coming up fast. None of us knew how to fly a plane and Rebecca seemed to be in shock, not that I could blame her after what she just saw and with her mother’s entrails all over the cockpit. I knelt down in front of her and shook her, and when that didn’t work I slapped her. “Rebecca! We don’t have time for this right now! Can you keep this plane in the air for a few more minutes?!”

For a second all I got was an empty stare, but then she seemed to snap out of it and her brief glare quickly gave way to a slight nod. She was scared to death, but she knew more about this plane than any of us. As she raced to get to the co-pilot’s stick I ran to gather my purse and shoved it in my emergency backpack. The others already had their backpacks shouldered and Sarah was in her Celestial form casting the gate. The amount of power it was taking was straining her and she was only able to hold it open for a few seconds, enough time for Lisa and Michelle to make it through.

This was not unexpected. We had thought to do some scouting on Nhekar but had discovered that, for some reason, our gates didn’t want to stay open to that location for more than a few seconds. So we had prepared by drawing a gate for that Plane in permanent marker on an old bedsheet. We could use it as many times as we needed to just by feeding magick into the sigils. It would take less time to do that several times than to draw out and form an entirely new gate to a specific location on Earth for all of us.

That was why we had the emergency backpacks. Since we had no specific coordinates to work with on the gate, it was likely that we were going to be separated when we arrived a few at a time. Those packs contained everything that we might need to survive on our own for a while in a strange and potentially hostile Plane.

Sarah had only managed one more casting before she was too drained of magick energy to do another, sending Jennifer and Mason through. It looked like it was up to me now. I drew in as much magical energy as I could and formed the gate again twice more, sending through Sarah and Annie, followed by Ziralin and Ellie. I really didn’t want to be separated from my sister, Familiar, or my cousin, but I was a realist. I was needed to form the gates and Rebecca was needed to keep the plane in the air while I did that.

That left me and Rebecca to go last, a situation that I figured that neither of us was going to be too thrilled with once the shock wore off. “Rebecca! We’re bailing out!” I called out once I had gathered more magick energy and was ready to cast the gate.

“Parachutes are in the back!” our temporary pilot shouted as she ran into the main cabin, and I used that as my cue to shove almost all of the magick energy that I had into the gate. “What the?” Rebecca sputtered, staring at the glowing circle in the air. We didn’t have time for this so I shoved her through, hit the corner of the gate sheet with a quick fire spell so we couldn’t be followed, and dove in after her.

It was cold and dark on the other side. Two moons hung above us in the sky and I stood in a seemingly endless expanse of black sand dunes. I was going to need my Demon-hunting gear to stay comfortable in this weather and I would probably need to enchant Rebecca’s clothes for her. She was currently slumped down in the sand with a stunned and confused expression on her face and I figured that I should get to work before she came back to her senses and started either ignoring me or screaming at me.

Ziralin was very far away, I could feel the powerful pull of my connection with her and had to try to ignore that pull as I reached out with my magick sense, closed my eyes, and felt around me for magick energy to draw on. It was as I sensed nothing that I suddenly realized why a gate wouldn’t stay open to this Plane for very long and required so much power to cast. I fell to the sand beside Rebecca as I whispered in stunned disbelief, “There’s no magick.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 2 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

It was the screaming that snapped me out of my dazed state. It appeared that Rebecca had fallen asleep at some point and was having one hell of a nightmare, not that I could blame her after opening the cockpit to find something like Khinara and the Wraith of Aarianna standing by her mother’s dead body and her entrails all over the cockpit. I felt a sudden stab of guilt for making her go into that cockpit to keep us flying, who knew how that was going to affect her already delicate psyche.

I crawled over to where she was sprawled in the sand, shifting and whimpering in her sleep, and sat her up to put my arms around her. “Shh, everything is going to be okay,” I whispered as I held her tight. I wasn’t sure how though since we were stuck on a distant plane of existence, my friends were scattered to the four winds, I was alone with someone who hated my guts, and to top it off, I had no magick to draw on.

“No, this doesn’t change anything,” I told myself sternly. “We knew coming in that we’d probably be separated for a while once we got here and we still need to find one another and wherever Jalael the Serene is entombed. Okay, so there’s no ambient magick energy to draw on, and that definitely sucks, but the rules for magick are different on every Plane. Maybe here there’s a different way to gather and use magick energy, and I’m damn well going to find it.”

It was still dark, though the pair of moons were further along the night sky than before when Rebecca started to stir in my arms. It seemed that her nightmare had ended, or perhaps wasn’t as bad and she snuggled into my arms, and whispered, “M… Mom?”

I sighed and took a deep breath before saying as gently as I could, “I’m afraid not.”

Rebecca jerked away from me as if she’d been burned. “What the hell were you doing?!” she snapped.

“You were having a nightmare, I was trying to help,” I explained. I should have known she’d react like that.

“I don’t need your fucking help!” she screamed, turning away to look around us and once her eyes saw those twin moons she once again collapsed to the ground. “It… wasn’t a dream. Oh God, Mom…” She couldn’t seem to finish that sentence as I heard her sniffle and her shoulders started to shake as she cried.

I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder but stopped myself as I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to see that and then keep the plane in the air but I know…”

She swiveled around to give me a red-faced glare of pure rage and loathing as she shoved me away. “You don’t know anything! You’re pretty and popular and perfect! I’ve seen the billboards, you’re Miss Divine, with the perfect fucking life! How could you possibly know what it’s like to lose your mother, to be in a trapped in a body that feels wrong, or to be treated like shit and bullied every fucking day for being different!”

I pushed her right back. “I have had it with your jealousy! I’ve tried being nice, I wanted to help you, but you see someone pretty or athletic and you automatically think they’re out to get you! You don’t know one single thing about me! I know what it feels like to lose a parent, both of mine died in a car accident three years ago! Three months ago, before I turned sixteen, I was a scrawny boy, bullied by the jocks, and the only person who gave a shit about me was my sister!”

“Bullshit! There’s no way that someone who looks like you were a boy three months ago! Hormones don’t act that fast, Miss Fashion Model!” Rebecca snarled.

“Magick, moron!” I snapped back in anger at being called a liar. “Think about what happened on the plane and take a good look at where we are and tell me that you can’t believe in it! On my birthday my sister gave me a magick candle and I wished to be like her so it turned me into a younger version of her and I’ve been stuck this way since! I never wanted to be a girl, and sure, the wish has helped me adapt and feel more comfortable but it felt like I was in hell at first! Every time someone told me how much I looked like Sarah it was like a knife twisting in my soul! And the only reason that I’m a model now was so I could help my sister’s career!”

Rebecca feigned wiping tears away, though I could tell that there were real ones there as she taunted. “Oh boo-hoo! Look at me, I’m just so hard done by. I make so much money just sitting in front of a camera and looking pretty, it’s so much work and I’ve had everything handed to me and I don’t have to lift a finger to help people who are really hurting.”

“Fuck you! Are you ever not a bitch?!” I shouted, barely resisting the powerful urge to slap her. “Modeling is hard work and I’ve been working my ass off! Not only do I have a job to do and school but I spend nearly every minute that I’m not doing those or training my magick hunting down Demons, trying to keep people safe, and prevent an invasion! I want to be able to help everyone but I can’t!”

“If you’re so fucking sympathetic and have magic then why the fuck didn’t you help me or those like me at the meetings!” she screamed.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself enough to explain. “Magick can’t become common knowledge among humankind, it would lead to disaster. Even if I knew enough to do a transformation like what you want without possibly harming you in the process, or could create an artifact like the one that changed me, I couldn’t change all of your records or the memories of everyone that you ever met and you’d have no legal identity. We had enough trouble changing my records and stuff and my name was gender neutral leaning toward feminine when I was born. And how would you explain waking up a girl one morning, cooties? I wanted to help you, but what help I was trying to offer you threw in my face so how could I expect you to accept my help for anything even if you did believe in magick?”

“So, change me now then, whip up one of those candle artifact thingies and let’s do this. Mom’s fucking dead, probably because those things on the plane were after you, so I think you owe me.”

Her accusation hurt, probably because it was true. Rebecca’s mother would still be alive if Khinara hadn’t come after us. I should have been more careful; I should have realized that I was being watched or at the very least thought to take measures to keep anyone else on the plane safe. We had thought that we’d be safe in the air, that a portal would be difficult to target on a moving airplane but it seemed that Aarianna’s Wraith wasn’t only watching me but had also signaled to Khinara the best time to attack and acted as an anchor for her portal.

“Do you see anything nearby that I could use to make a candle?” I asked pointedly, gesturing broadly at the expanse of black sand around us. “Even if there was and I didn’t have to worry what to do about your sudden gender reversal with your family when we get back to Earth… I can’t.”

“I won’t tell anybody about your precious magic,” she said in a singsong tone before an expression of pain and uncertainty washed over her, quickly replaced by her usual disdain for me. “And I don’t have any family now, Mom was it. She and my asshole father got divorced because of my transition and I’m dead to him and his family. I got nothing to lose and everything to gain, so hit me.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “I used up all of the magick energy that I had stored to get us here and make sure we weren’t followed. I haven’t been able to gather any since we got here. There’s none here to draw on and I need it to cast spells, like to find the others or get us home.”

“You mean that we’re stuck here?!” Rebecca yelled as she shot to her feet and glowered down at me. “Why the hell would you bring us to somewhere that has no magic if you need it to get us home?!”

“I’ll find some! The rules are just different here! We didn’t have much choice, unless you would have preferred staying in actual Hell and being tormented and killed by Demons!” I snapped back, getting to my feet to glare right back at her. “We didn’t know what this Plane was like, but we were prepared to come here! We had a gate prepared since we knew it couldn’t stay open long and we’d have to use it several times and it took less time to charge that one five times than it would have taken to draw an entirely new gate with specific coordinates on Earth!”

“You’ll find some?! I feel better already! It sounds so much better than, ‘I fucked up and we’re stranded!’ Where the hell do you expect to find some?! You just said that there’s none here!”

I was getting sick and tired of Rebecca’s attitude. “I said that the rules are different here! Magick doesn’t work the same way everywhere, there are differences! It’s been slightly different on every Plane that I’ve been to and I’m sure that it’s different here too. We just need to find out how! There is magick out there somewhere, I know it!”

“You know it?! That’s just so fucking reassuring! And how do you plan on finding it if ‘the rules are different’?” she shot back.

“Well we’re not going to find it by standing here yelling at one another,” I groused as I tried to calm myself down again. Rebecca was so damn infuriating. I had never met someone so negative in my life. I was trying hard to remain positive for both our sakes but she wasn’t making it easy. “We need to get moving if we plan on finding a source of magick, my friends, or what we came here to look for in the first place. If I’m right, we’re in some sort of desert and we’ll need to get under cover once it starts getting too hot to travel.”

“Assuming that there even is a sun here,” I heard my reluctant companion grumble before she snapped, “Fine, whatever,” and started walking away.

“We’re going this way,” I told her pointing in the near opposite direction.

“What?! Why the hell do you get to decide where we’re going? You’re as lost as I am! Who died and made you leader? Oh wait, my mom did!” she shouted in anger, though I could see that she was trying to act tough and hold back tears. It seemed like that was her answer to everything and I was pretty sure that it was only her anger and dislike of me that was keeping her from curling up in a ball and crying right then.

I tried to keep control of myself as I replied, “Yeah, I have no idea where we are, but I do know that Beth is in that direction. I can feel her.”

“Oh, you can feel her. Isn’t that so fucking sweet? The power of love is going to lead us to your jock girlfriend,” Rebecca retorted with a roll of her eyes and a snarky tone.

“She’s my fiancée,” I corrected as calmly as I could. “But she’s also my Familiar, which means that we can sense one another, no matter where we are. It’s a Witch thing.”

“More like a bitch thing,” I barely heard her grumble under her breath.

“Wow, and I thought that we left Hell to get here, maybe I was wrong. I’d rather go back there and face the Demons,” I muttered as I turned away and started walking.

We had been walking for a while with Rebecca keeping a good distance behind me. As much as she apparently loathed me, she still had the sense to realize that I was her only chance at surviving on an alien world and getting home. So she kept close enough not to lose me but far away enough to make conversation impossible. Still, she was close enough for me to hear her crying in the silence of the desert night as we walked.

As much as her attitude and blind hatred toward me infuriated me, I wished that she would let me in to help comfort her. We were the only company that each other had for now and it would get pretty lonely if we continued to ignore one another. She had just lost her mother, her only family, in a very traumatic way and the last thing she needed right now was to be alone.

I felt responsible for her, but then from what everyone who knows me says, I feel responsible for everyone. In this case though, I really was responsible for her. It was my fault that her mother died and that she was going through this right now. She had nobody else, she was only fourteen, she wasn’t used to magick or travelling to different worlds, and right now it was just me and her so I was going to have to take responsibility for that.

Dawn was starting to paint the sky in bright warm colors so I was able to deduce that we were heading northeast. By the light of twilight, I was also able to get a better look at the black sands around us. It stretched off in all directions as far as I could see and I saw something that made me halt my progress. There were tracks of some sort in the dark sand crossing my path, something small and something much, much larger. If Ziralin were with me she probably could have told me how old the tracks were, and anything else I wanted to know, but I didn’t share her skillset.

Rebecca and I needed to stick closer together or we’d be easy pickings for any predators out there. I was also going to need a few things. I waited for my caustic companion to catch up and said, “Rebecca, we need to stick together, maybe we should stop for a bit to rest and eat something, I need some things from my pack anyway.”

“Not hungry,” she said morosely, not even glancing in my direction as she walked past and continued walking in the direction that I had set us out on. Her eyes were red and puffy and it seemed that she didn’t even have the mental energy to scream at me or say something snarky. She did stop to sit in the sand though once she had put enough distance between us to make conversation impossible.

I sighed and turned around, watching her for a couple of minutes. I was about to go to catch up to try to talk to her when I heard a familiar voice say, “The two of you are going to have to learn to get along and work together if we are going to get through this.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 3 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

I turned to gape wide-eyed at the hooded and masked figured who stood watching me. “Xuriel!” I gasped in one-part confusion and two-parts relief. Maybe she could help us out of this jam. “What are you doing here? I thought that you didn’t want to reveal yourself to the Demons yet.”

“The situation has changed,” the Celestial responded carefully. “I did not anticipate the possibility of you having no magick to work with while searching for Jalael’s power. If you are to live through this, then I must reveal myself now and ensure that you have the abilities to survive this world without magick.”

“What do you mean?” I asked uncertainly. “Didn’t you come to help us?”

“Yes, I did, but I cannot use magick any more than you can at the moment, Shannon. As I said, I am here to reveal myself.” Xuriel pulled back her hood and removed her mask and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there. I was expecting the face of a Celestial with one of those unusual eye colors and matching head feathers, but that was not what I saw. I nearly fainted, and did fall to my knees as I recognized her face. I should have since I saw it every day, in the mirror.

“You’re… me? What… I…” I couldn’t seem to form the questions that assaulted my mind on my lips.

“It would be more accurate to say that you are me, at least in part,” my doppelganger replied calmly. “You have been since you made that wish. Please, allow me to tell you a story before I show you what you need to know and consign myself to oblivion.”

I was a child when the Demons first attacked Haven and our war with them began. My father was a farmer and my mother an artist of some renown. They were poorly suited to fight Demons, but they held them off long enough for my brother to get us to safety. By the time I reached maturity and was prepared to enter the Navaris Field to receive my mark and gain the power which slept within me, we had already had many warriors to fight the war but we were still losing. I was one of seven who would change the course of that war.

Even without my ability to passively gather and purify nearly limitless amounts of magick energy from the world around me I was an accomplished user of holy magick. With it, I was the most powerful of the Seven Sentinels. Despite our power and determination, the war dragged on and the Demons began to invade other Planes as well, so I came up with a plan.

The key to taking down the Demons was to deal them a blow that would leave them in chaos, fighting among one another rather than with us. We needed to kill the Demon King. I told the others of my plan and both Anjurael and Torphael agreed with my assessment. Jalael, Lunael, and Lunariel felt that we should focus on a stronger defense. Ysuriel was the deciding vote and she felt that it was reckless and foolhardy to try to attack the Demon King in Heil where he would have a distinct advantage, even if we all attacked him at once.

When the others decided to move on to defending our territories more vigorously, I went after him myself. I was a proud and somewhat arrogant man, so certain that I was right, and I was confident that I had the power to destroy him, even if I had to do it by myself. In a fair fight I probably would have been right, but Demons do not fight fair.

I had him weakened, I had him on his knees, and as I began to cast a spell that would finish him off I was felled by an attack from behind. A Succubus names Izhara cursed me, placing a Demon Brand over my Mark to take away my empowered form and its abilities and leave me trapped in the mortal form of a primitive creature that she discovered on another Plane. That was when something entirely unexpected happened, my Mark and the Demon Brand merged.

I was left a mere human, barely more than a child and unable to change forms, with the uncontrollable power of both Celestial and Demon barely contained in a mortal body. My arrogance and short-sightedness did not only cost me. Instead of defeating the Demon King and ending the war, the war raged on for two more years with the battle ground spreading to other Planes and displacing the Faery from their home.

I fled Heil, and they let me so that I could live in torment and remember my failure, and the Demon King named Izhara and six other Demons his generals and gave them the task of destroying the Sentinels so that he could not be attacked like that again. I was not prepared to give up and die though. I was determined to fight and defeat the Demons, and I discovered that I still had ways of doing so.

While I could no longer seem to change to my empowered form, I had not lost my ability to gather magick energy and manipulate it as Izhara had likely intended. I had new abilities as well, or perhaps it was that the merging of my Mark and the Brand had changed the abilities that I had already. While I found that I had to work harder to purify magick energy I also seemed to have the ability to taint it as a Demon would for their magick. I could cast curses as they did too, and I found that I could take on the physical attributes of a Demon as well.

This was the true curse which Izhara had bestowed upon me. To be a mere mortal girl in form, unable to ever take my empowered form again, but to still have power at my fingertips, her powers, the power of a Succubus. I had their strength, their speed, and I could change my body entirely to one of her kind or take on individual attributes such as wings or eyes to use their abilities, not as an empowered form but as an inherent ability akin to Succubus shapeshifting.

For a time, I had lost myself in shame to the freakish creature that I had become; half-Celestial half-Demon but truly neither, instead something neutral in a primitive adolescent and female mortal form. It was when I was lost in my own misery that I discovered that even that dark cloud had a silver lining. While I had to work harder at purifying magick energy to use in Celestial spells, I was no longer limited by casting those ritualistic spells. My mere thoughts and desires could reshape the world around me if I was not careful to control my magick.

And so I used my new abilities to help bring the first war to a conclusion. I used their own abilities and tactics and attacked from the shadows. I gave off no aura, neither demonic nor that of a Celestial in their empowered form and I while I could attain the strengths of a Demon I did not share their weaknesses. They couldn’t see me coming, I had a greater power than ever before, and I slew Izhara with my own hands, but this did not relieve me of my curse.

Unable as I was to return to my former body, I kept out of the public eye unless necessary among other Celestials, and even then I kept my true appearance hidden beneath a mask and hooded robe and remained cloaked in shadow and mystery. I kept my distance, even from the other Sentinels, and while I convinced them that I had been cursed and had my gender changed I kept the extent of that curse and my new abilities to myself. This, my penchant for working alone, and my ability to take the Demons by surprise where others could not, earned me the name Xuriel the Shadow.

My people managed to win the war, but it was not a clear victory, and both sides retreated to lick their wounds and rebuild their forces. Ysuriel knew that it was not truly over and that the Demons would come back some day so she came up with the plan to leave their power behind for others to use when the need arose. That was something that I could not do. I could not curse another as I had been so I fled to the Plane of Earth, where I attempted to make a life among the people whose form I now wore. I took the name Brighid and found a village that accepted me, until I lost control of my magick.

My magick had become more and more difficult to control each day, light and darkness battling inside me as my power grew ever stronger, already far too much for an adolescent mortal to contain without eventually killing me. It was as I fled the wrath of those who had taken me in that I met the Faery, who tried to help me to control my great power. They felt a kinship to me and they made me feel like I belonged for the first time since I was cursed.

It was the blood oath and Faery blood flowing through my veins that stabilized me. It created a balance of the light and darkness and allowed me to master my powers and separate the Celestial and Demonic aspects. The immortality granted me by their blood and magick allowed me to contain my power, even if I could only use a fraction of it and my empowered form was still lost to me. In time though, I found that I wanted a family and so I returned to the humans for a time to conceive a child.

When my first daughter had her sixteenth birthday she took on a similar appearance to me and seemingly inherited my ability to gather and manipulate magick energy and to use it to effect the world around her. She did not receive my curse or the abilities that came with it, merely the last vestiges of what was once the unique power of my Celestial Mark. It was then that I came up with my plan and sealed my overwhelming power, my knowledge, my memories, and my cursed mark, hiding them and a shred of my consciousness away, just as Ysuriel and the others had before me. Rather than hiding them away in a set place like others had done though, I hid them within myself and the bloodline that would follow.

I planned to wait for a magical prodigy who could contain and control my full power and then I would bestow that power upon her and awaken the other members of the Seven to guide that prodigy and take her to Heil to finish the task that I came so close to completing so long ago. Since then I have watched myself and my descendants grow and live their lives, a spirit of sorts watching the living and waiting to fulfill my purpose. I watched descendants live and die, none of them the prodigy that I required and then even my original self died as well, in a fire after completing your mother’s training.

I began to lose hope of ever finding the prodigy to inherit my power. Your sister was close, certainly gifted and very clever and, other than you, she was the last of the lineage. I very nearly chose her but then something amazing happened, you made your birthday wish on that candle. So I took the opportunity that that wish presented to remake you into the prodigy that I sought, a girl of my bloodline infused with great potential for magick and a natural ability to use it. Then to ensure that you remained that way I exercised enough control over your body and magick to light the candle.

“It’s your fault that I’m stuck like this?!” I practically snarled as I clenched my fists at my side once her story was finished.

“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Though I did everything that I could to help you to adjust and feel better about the situation. Is your life not better now than it was before?”

“That’s not the point!” I snapped, even though I knew she was right. I loved my life now, I loved my job, my friends, my fiancée, and especially the relationship that I had with my sister. Sure, our current situation sucked and there had been a lot of bumps along the way, but I was happy and everything was better.

“I have been watching you, Shannon, I have been watching your life through your own eyes since you made your wish. You have adapted quickly and done something that I was never able to truly do in my life, you have become genuinely comfortable and happy with being female, it is who you are,” Xuriel told me gently. “I did not grant you that, nor did the wish that I guided. We could help you adjust and adapt and give you the necessary tools, but that happiness, comfort, and sense of self cannot be granted from a wish or anything that I could impart, it is part of who you are inside. The wish making you more like Sarah could have had some part in contributing to you getting to this point sooner, but it was only uncovering what was in you all along.”

“So, what? You’re just in my head and now you’re going to give me your mark and disappear?” I asked, trying to ignore the implication that I probably had repressed gender issues before being changed. I didn’t want to think about that and I had so many other things to occupy my mind right then. So much made sense now, like how Xuriel was able to watch me all of the time, why she only ever spoke or showed herself to me, and why the others couldn’t sense her appearances.

“You have had my Mark all along, Shannon. I have merely kept it under a seal so powerful and subtle that not even an accomplished Celestial magick user such as Ysuriel could detect it, and out of sight until you were ready to fight the Demon King. I have been slowly giving you my memories and knowledge as you sleep so you would not be overwhelmed when the time came. Most of it is behind a barrier in the deepest recesses of your mind but I have released some of it as you had need of it,” she conceded.

“The dreams I’ve been having!” I sputtered in realization.

My head nodded atop her shoulders. “Yes, and you very nearly stumbled upon the truth the night when I attempted to warn you about Demon Brands, test you, and prepare you for the realities and temptations of bearing my Mark.”

“But you destroyed the records at my old school, made up new ones for homeschooling online, changed the old transcripts at St. Catherine’s for the new ones, and you altered the memories of my agent, Jen’s parents, and Mother Josephine to believe that it was all real,” I argued in disbelief.

“Technically, you did those things,” Xuriel countered, “the night before your volleyball tryouts, and your first date with Bethany that led up to the battle with Varas and Aarianna. As you and your sister slept I fed my memories and knowledge into your dreams, kept you asleep, and took control of your body to do what was required. I used my experience and your practical knowledge, combined with a bit of creative magick use, and I briefly unsealed the mark to give me the power to do so without detection.”

I felt kind of violated after that revelation, as much as when she had admitted to being behind my transformation, and she knew that, being in my head and all. She looked away, and said with a sigh, “I did only what was required to ensure your safety and that magick remain a secret, and you were still adjusting to your new form and magick. I could not reveal myself to you then, you were not ready. I am uncertain that you are ready now, but you will need the full scope of your abilities to survive here.”

“If I’m understanding you, I’ll be more powerful and able to gather more magick when the seal is removed but that won’t help me at all if there’s no magick energy to draw on. I would only have the abilities of your curse to work with and… those are Demon abilities.” I really didn’t feel comfortable with that.

“No, Shannon,” Xuriel said with a shake of her head. “They are your abilities. You are a Witch descended from a Celestial of great power, but in essence you are and always will be human. You do not have a Demon’s dark soul nor their aura, just as you do not have the aura and soul of a Celestial. I lived with this curse for many years and in doing that and in watching my lineage for all of this time I have learned one very important thing, no power is truly good or evil in and of itself. This power will not define you. What will define you is how you use it and why, and I know you well enough to be certain that you will always try to do the right thing for the right reasons.”

“So, what do we need to do then? Am I gonna pass out after this like Sarah and the others?” I asked after taking a deep breath and a moment to think.

“No, your mind already contains enough of my memories and knowledge that I can safely remove the barrier keeping it from your conscious mind and give you the rest along with it, though it will take some time to process all of the information. It should all come to you as you require it though. Once both that and your Mark are unsealed I will bother you no longer,” she told me with a sad smile.

“You’re going to leave us alone here?” I asked, feeling a surge of panic.

“It is long past time that I rest, Shannon. You have my knowledge and memories and the power to help you survive. Before I go though, I would ask that you share your curse with Rebecca.”

“You want me to curse her?! How?! Why?! Wouldn’t that make her no better than my slave?!” I sputtered, in shock and disbelief.

“Curses are granted by feeding on a person’s negative emotions, drinking in those emotions will connect you to her and allow you to imbue a mark upon her. You should have much to work with, she is in a dark place right now. Yes, some Demons make those that they curse no better than slaves with their Brand, especially weaker ones, it gives them a sense of control. As I said though, you do not have their dark soul or aura and no power is good or evil on its own, it is intent that matters,” she told me seriously.

Then she gave me a weak smile as she turned her gaze toward where Rebecca was sitting carefully looking away from me and said, “My curse was to be bound in the body of a human female, unable to ever take my empowered form again, my only ability to change that to take on the powers and appearance of a Succubus. Had the Brand not merged with my Mark and altered my ability to gather and use magick energy, then it may have very well been the torture that she had intended for me rather than just a severe discomfort. There are some though, I think, who may not see such a thing as a curse.”

As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. It would give Rebecca what she desperately wanted and increase our chances of being able to survive on this Plane. Not only was it the sensible thing to do, it was the right thing to do. We would deal with figuring out a new identity for her if and when the time came. “I’ll do it, but I’m not calling it a curse,” I muttered as I looked toward Rebecca.

“Call it what it is,” Xuriel said with a smile, “call it a blessing. I will release the seal and the barrier over your unconscious mind now, but I will leave the protections upon your mind in place, you may yet need them, Shannon. I know that you will do me proud and fulfill your destiny.” With that I fell to my knees, a searing pain in my lower back and my mind assaulted with new memories and knowledge as I felt Xuriel’s presence fade from my mind with one final, “Good bye.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 4 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

I knelt in the black sand for a moment trying to catch my breath as the pain faded from my head and lower back. Once my head had cleared, it didn’t take much thinking to realize what the pain in my lower back had been, it was my cursed mark. My face flushed at the thought that I now had a supernatural tramp stamp, even if only those sensitive to magick could see it. I even knew what it looked like; a silvery blue heart bound in black chains with black bat-like wings stretching out to my sides.

I staggered to my feet and tried to put it out of my mind as I turned back toward Rebecca, whose head swiftly snapped around from where she had been staring to look in the opposite direction again. I could see her more clearly now that twilight was fading and the sun was visible on the horizon. Something about the sun didn’t seem right but I couldn’t figure out what it was at the moment and just filed the thought away for later as I approached my reluctant traveling companion.

“You done talking to yourself?” Rebecca jabbed. I could practically hear the sneer in her voice.

How was I going to explain this? Because yeah, saying, “I was talking to the spirit of my ancient ancestor who was a Celestial cursed by a Demon and has been haunting our family for thousands of years to give me her power,” was going to sound just so mentally stable. I settled with telling her, “I wasn’t talking to myself but I’ll explain what that was about later. The… ahh… being that I was talking to offered a solution to a couple of our problems.” I could have said that she awakened my true power but talking with Rebecca was like navigating a verbal minefield and I didn’t want to sound like some sort of cliché manga protagonist or something.

“Which problems?” she asked with a sniff. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was just being dismissive or she was still crying and trying to hide the fact. It was probably both since she followed up with, “We have plenty of problems, but unless this imaginary ‘being’ of yours can change the fact that I’m stuck alone on an alien world with you, I’m not really interested.”

“This isn’t exactly my dream vacation either,” I snapped back.

“Well, unless your little hallucination gave you a tutorial on how ‘magic works differently’ here then I don’t see how you’re going to be useful for anything, little miss model. We wouldn’t want you to break a nail or something. Oh wait, you can lead us to your jock girlfriend. Won’t that be great, then I can be stuck here alone with two people that I hate,” she spat at me angrily.

I stomped irately toward her, quickly closing the distance between us until I was standing over her glaring. “Whatever your problem with me and my friends is, you need to get the fuck over it! I’ve never done anything to you except try to be nice and offer to be a friend, and right now I’m the only person who can help you! Now, do you want to be a fucking girl or not?!”

She was staring up at me in confusion and terror and it took me a moment to realize why. I was looming over her in full Succubus mode; horns, claws, wings, long spaded tail, and the whole shebang. “Okay, yeah, I’m going to have to learn to control this when I get upset or magical accidents will be the least of my problems,” I thought to myself bitterly. I quickly looked away and sighed before attempting to speak calmly. “Look, I’m sorry. I literally just got this ability like five minutes ago, and I have a jumble of another person’s memories in my head only giving me a vague idea of how to control it.”

“You’re so beautiful,” she said, sighing as she gazed up at me adoringly.

“Annnnd cue the super pheromones and mental whammy, because of course Rebecca would be into girls and I would have those too. Geeze, I hope that I don’t need to live on male tantric energy,” I grumbled to myself. New old memories came to the fore of my mind and I was relieved to find out that since I wasn’t a real Succubus, just a convincing copy with the same abilities, I could survive on normal food. I could of course absorb the tantric energy of men and convert it to magick energy but I didn’t need it to live like a real Succubus would.

Well, that would give me a way to get some magick on this world, if it came to that. Not that I had any intention of doing so. The idea totally squicked me out for one thing. For another, I couldn’t even be sure that there were men on this planet aside from Mason, and having sex with my best friend’s boyfriend would be all kinds of wrong, no matter what the reason. Yeah, I was not going there, I would find out how magick worked on this world and use it that way, hopefully before we found the others.

I cleared my head and looked back at Rebecca, who was still gazing dreamily at me. Wow, she was so much more cooperative like this but it kinda creeped me out. I wasn’t really sure if this was an improvement over her being perpetually pissed at me or not. Best to get this over with though, since I suspected that I needed to be in my full Succubus form to place a curse. With that in mind, I asked Rebecca, “Do you truly wish to have a female body?”

“More than anything,” she replied nodding eagerly, not taking her eyes off of me. Then she suddenly looked uncertain as she timidly asked, “Do you like girls?”

Wow, she was seriously under the influence if she didn’t remember that I had a girlfriend, she was hating on both of us enough. I put those slightly bitter thoughts aside though and pushed onward. “Rebecca, I can give you a… blessing. It will give you the body that you wish to have but I will need to place a mark on your body somewhere, like a tattoo. Where would you like it?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca replied uncertainly before adding almost flirtatiously, “where would you like to see it on me?”

Nope, this wasn’t getting awkward at all. I needed to get this over with, for both our sakes. “This may hurt a little bit, Rebecca,” I told her as I closed my eyes and felt for the negativity inside her as I would look for magick energy to gather. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out the trick to it, with a bit of help from Xuriel’s memories, but soon I was able to sense what I was looking for.

Beneath the surface of Rebecca’s mind that was so focused on her blind lust and desire for me at the moment, there was so much pain, anger, loneliness, and raw grief that it threatened to overwhelm me. I began to draw it into myself, equal parts of each, hoping to lighten her emotional burden and gathering that energy in the palm of my hand. As I did so I could feel a stronger connection form between us and once I felt that I could hold no more of that emotional darkness in my hand I gently placed that hand upon her shoulder, focusing on the mark that I had in mind and imparting the same curse that I had upon her.

For a time Rebecca’s screams rang out across the desert sands as the ‘blessing’ altered her body. The change was agonizingly slow and with each scream I felt a new stab of guilt until at last she had screamed herself hoarse and fell to the ground in a heap, breathing raggedly and whimpering as she lost consciousness. The transformation had put a lot of strain on her body and she was going to need rest, food, and water if she was going to recover.

With Rebecca in that state, I didn’t think that we were going to get anymore traveling done that day so I would need to set up camp and get her out of the open before the sun got too high. I went to retrieve my backpack from where it had fallen from my back when I had gone all Succubus and my wings had emerged. Thankfully, only the straps were damaged and I thought that I could fix them enough to make the pack usable again.

Too bad the same couldn’t be said for my hoodie and bra. The back of both of them had ripped apart under the strain of my wings popping out, but at least I was still covered in the front. The only thing that had saved my jeans was that they were low-rise jeans and my tail had emerged above the waistline of them.

I briefly considered trying to shift back to my normal form but it wasn’t like anyone was here to see me except Rebecca and she already seemed to believe that I was some sort of Demon, judging from the way she had acted toward me since we had first met. My new additional appendages felt strange though, having a tail and wings is a bit weird. A look behind me showed that both were a striking red-gold color, while my inch-long claws were a startling black. My compact, fished from my purse inside the backpack, showed that other than those features and the most adorable little golden devil horns emerging from just above my hairline, I still looked like myself in this form at least.

I returned the compact to my purse and the purse to my backpack as I started to check the other contents. That was when I heard something, and it wasn’t coming from Rebecca. I quickly turned to get a look at the source and immediately cursed. “Shit!”

In the light of dawn, there was a huge creature approaching. It was dark and scaly with an almost feline shape to it, except that the tail was more like a lizard’s than a cat’s. It was easily twelve feet long, not counting the tail, and had powerful-looking jaws filled with oversized razor-sharp teeth and a pair of nearly two-foot-long tusks. Its nostrils were little more than slits on the end of its muzzle and its ears were either very small or non-existent. It moved low to the ground, and probably would have blended in with the black sand if it hadn’t been for the stark white of those tusks, the curved horn jutting from its forehead, and the small plates of bone, cartilage, or something similar that covered most of its upper face and head and protected its eyes.

That thing was a predator, there was no doubt in my mind, and it was heading right for Rebecca. I immediately reached for my magick, only to be disappointed as I barely had enough stored to light a candle and there was nothing here to draw on. All that I had right now was my new abilities and I had no idea how to fight something like that.

I charged the creature, counting on the speed and strength that I knew Succubae possessed and tried to hit it as hard as I could. I closed the gap in an instant, my fist connecting with one of the plates on the side of its head with enough force to crack it, and sent the thing rolling away from the force of the impact with a startled high-pitched yelp. Okay, strength and speed confirmed.

The creature, I think I’m going to call it a tuskreaper, was back on its feet quickly, regarding me cautiously and beginning to circle as it looked for an opening or weakness. I kept myself between it and Rebecca as I tried to figure out what else I might have to work with. “Okay, so what abilities do Succubae have? I doubt that I’m going to be able to charm it and even with my new strength and speed in this form I’m not sure that I want to go toe-to-toe with that thing. There’s regeneration but I’d rather avoid having to use that particular ability. I’m probably agile and can fly but even if I can figure out how to do that, the minute that I leave the ground it’ll go after Rebecca.”

“I can’t feel any negativity coming off that thing, it’s just a big bundle of instincts and hunger, so curses are probably out too. I need to find a weak spot,” I concluded. I carefully looked over the tuskreaper and how it moved. I had surprised it when I first hit it, but how? “The way that it’s watching me I’m pretty sure that its vision is fairly sharp, but maybe those plates around the eyes limit its peripheral vision while protecting its eyes. Maybe it can’t hear well, or at all, and it relies mostly on sight and smell, or some other sense that I’m not aware of.”

“Screw it, the eyes have it,” I decided. I rushed toward the tuskreaper, startling it a bit since it was supposed to be the predator in this situation. It probably wasn’t familiar with anything like me though so it gave me a bit of an advantage. At the moment I was ready to take any advantage that I could get.

I leaped into the air as I closed the distance getting some good air and feeling my wings extend to catch the air. That was a really strange feeling but I didn’t have much time to think about it right then as my glide put me on top of the creature’s back. I had wanted to go for the eyes but hadn’t expected to get so much air so now I had to make due. So I did the only thing that made sense, I held on tight and started using my claws.

To a creature as big as a tuskreaper my claws were probably an annoyance at best. I certainly couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage, especially with the way it was bucking trying to get me off of it. This was why I liked magick, I could fight things from a safe distance and I didn’t need to worry about being eaten, impaled, or getting thrown off a creature’s back like a novice bull rider.

On a positive note, the longer that I was staying on its back the more pissed the tuskreaper was getting. Pissed is a negative emotion and I could use that. The angrier it got the more negativity that I had to work with, so I dug my claws in deep and held on for dear life. We were both starting to tire when I felt the connection click into place.

“Thank Goddess,” I muttered as I slammed the dark energy home. “Just die already!”

Perhaps I should have been more specific but I wasn’t really thinking much about being able to get off before I threw up or it threw me. So I totally wasn’t expecting to be sent flying when the tuskreaper exploded. I must have flown a good forty feet, not using my new wings, before crashing into the ground and bouncing through the sand another twenty feet.

The wing on my right side hurt and I was fairly sure that it was broken somewhere but I could already feel it starting to heal, so that was pretty cool. What wasn’t cool was that I was covered from head to toe in tuskreaper guts and sand. The smell and taste made me lose my lunch. “This sucks,” I grumbled as I finally got shakily to my feet and walked back to check on Rebecca, who of course was still fresh as a daisy.

I took a moment to scowl at the tuskreaper’s fully intact head roughly ten feet away and then removed the pair of collapsible tent poles from my backpack. After driving each of them deep into the sand, roughly three feet apart, I then pulled out the only other contents of the pack besides my purse. The three-by-five-foot piece of simple grey canvas material had attached nylon laces that would allow me to secure it tightly between the two poles.

It wasn’t a lean-to or anything like that, nope it was sort of a portable doorway. Sarah had used some sort of Celestial spacial magick to imbue a small pocket dimension into these pieces of canvas and we each had one in case we were separated. The space wasn’t much bigger than mine and Ellie’s bedroom and looked fairly drab on the inside but it was shelter from the elements and there was plenty of food, water, and other supplies to last a person several months. There were also a few weapons, my Hunting outfit, several changes of clothes, and a large foam camping mattress with bedding.

My first goal was a bottle of water and after a nice long sip to get the taste of guts and vomit out of my mouth I went back outside and stripped off all of my clothes, using them and the remainder of the water to clean the gore and sand off of me as best I could. Damn, I was glad that I’d been wearing a hoodie, even if it had been backless, it had prevented the gore and sand from getting in my hair and it and the jeans had protected most of my body as well.

What gore and sand there was on my body did feel really gross but at least I was able to clean it off without too much trouble. Though I did have to wash my face very well. That thing’s innards tasted worse than they smelled and I may have lost my lunch earlier but it had been worth it to get that taste out of my mouth and I didn’t want to risk tasting it again. Sadly, my clothes, except for maybe my panties, were all a lost cause. Even if my hoodie hadn’t been shredded in the back, all that blood was never going to come out.

Since my wing still felt like it was healing and I needed the strength boost to carry Rebecca into the shelter, I decided to stay in my new Succubus form for the moment. I would have to be making physical contact with Rebecca anyway to take her inside and I didn’t think that she would be too keen on that if she were conscious. Sarah had made it so that only we or something that we were touching could enter the pocket rooms that she had created, to anything else the doorway would act like regular, if very sturdy, canvas so that people or wild animals couldn’t wander in and surprise us in the middle of the night.

As I carried Rebecca to the doorway and then inside I gave her a good once over. Shit, those clothes were going to have to come off. She had grown both up and out quite a bit and her clothes were tight enough in some places that they were starting to cut off her circulation. It was basically the same thing that had happened to me when I first changed and Sarah had had to destroy my clothes. I should have checked earlier, but I was busy with the tuskreaper.

She had been wearing jeans and a hoodie like I was, that was all I had ever seen her wear really. The jeans were several sizes too small with her new curves, but the hoodie had a zipper and was oversized so it would still be wearable if a bit tight in the chest. I carefully removed that and her still usable shoes and socks first after placing her on the foam mattress. Then, using my claws, I quickly cut off her jeans and the way too tight t-shirt and bra that she had been wearing under the hoodie, being careful not to cut her skin in the process. Her underwear had ripped at the seams from her expanding hips so I tried to ignore them as I rubbed some circulation back into her legs.

She had turned out fairly well, very sexy with a typical succubus body even in her human form, not that I could throw stones about that since I was in the same boat. My clothes hadn’t felt uncomfortable at all since I changed except for the wings having to burst through the back of them. She looked closer to fifteen than fourteen and had long wavy auburn hair, a very pretty face that only remotely resembled her old one, and a flawless peaches and cream complexion. She was nearly as tall, curvy, and endowed as I was now too, so I was hoping that she might be able to wear some of my spare clothes.

It was as I was considering that possibility and massaging her legs that Rebecca woke up and jerked away from me. “What the fuck are you doing?!” And then she noticed my wings and horns and backed away further in fear, so scared that she didn’t seem to notice when her own Succubus features emerged. Well, damn, maybe I should have taken the time to get dressed.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 5 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Rebecca’s dark blue, nearly violet eyes were wide in fear as she backed away from me. Her spaded tail and large bat-like wings were the same color as her eyes and the little horns poking out from her auburn hair were as black as her claws. She didn’t seem to notice her Succubus features or her newly feminine body but somehow she seemed to have enough presence of mind to realize that she wasn’t wearing clothes and she instinctively scrambled to cover herself as best she could with her arms and hands. “Who a-are you?! What are you? Why are you naked?! Why am I naked?!” The questions burst out of her mouth in a frantic torrent.

I raised my hands to show that I wasn’t going to hurt her. I thought that my wing felt fully healed and briefly considered changing back to a human if I could even figure out how, but if I did that and Rebecca freaked out while in Succubus mode then I could get really hurt. Instead, I opted for talking very calmly and slowly. “Rebecca, it’s me, Shannon. You need to calm down and let me explain the situation. First, I want you to look down at yourself.”

It took a moment for my actions and words to penetrate her mind. Her breathing and heart rate didn’t slow, I could still hear them from where I knelt several feet away, but she did look down. I tried not to think about how cool enhanced senses were as I focused on the task at hand, which was making sure I was ready in case Rebecca completely freaked out.

She just stared downward in stunned silence for what seemed like ages before her hands tentatively touched her breasts. She gasped and then her hand shot downward and I quickly turned away to give her what privacy I could at the moment. To make her a bit more comfortable I went to go look through the spare clothes that I had packed and searched for something that we could both wear.

As I did so I tried to calmly explain the situation. “Okay, Rebecca, technically I’m not naked, I’m wearing panties still. I’m not dressed because I just got through fighting a monster to protect you while you were out cold and all of my clothes were half-destroyed and covered with blood and guts. You’re naked because, when I brought you into the porta-bunker for safety, I realized that your clothes were meant for someone smaller and were cutting off your circulation in your new body. That’s why I was massaging your legs, to get the blood circulating again.”

That was when I heard her start to sniffle and I turned to see her staring at me with tears running down her cheeks. “You… How did you… I thought you said there was no magick here.” Her tone was tinged with uncertainty and a bit of suspicion.

“There isn’t, I didn’t lie to you or anything, Rebecca,” I told her carefully. “When you thought I was talking to myself… well, it’s a very long story but Xuriel, the person I was talking to, was the one responsible for me being a girl now and she kinda unlocked some abilities that were hidden from me until now. One of those abilities allowed me to turn you into a girl and give you similar abilities to help us survive here. That’s why you’ve got wings and stuff too, but we should be able to turn back to our human forms and you’ll still be female. Are you okay? I thought that you wanted this.”

“I do; this is my dream come true! I’m just… why?” she stammered, looking at the floor of the bunker.

“Because I’m not the bitch that you seem to think I am, none of my friends are either. It hurt me so goddamn much that I couldn’t help you or the others in the support group, but I’ve seen what happens when the wrong people learn about the existence of real magick. It can’t become common knowledge. We need to survive here though, and we both need every edge that we can get for that until I can find out how magick works here and we can join the others.”

I had tried not to let any of my bitterness show but I was a little more direct with her than I had wanted to be as I focused on finding something backless and lightweight in the small collection of tops that I had stored in my bunker. “What are you doing?” Rebecca asked hesitantly from behind me.

“I’m looking for clothes for us to wear,” I answered with a sigh. “I’m a model and I’m used to spending time with the Faery so I’m comfortable seeing other people naked or in various stages of undress, and being seen that way myself. I’m pretty sure that you’re not though. I need to find something backless or something that we can alter to allow for our wings though.”

“I… look… I guess that Michelle was right about you. I was going on and on about what a bitch you were and how you couldn’t be trusted to see past your own ego but I guess that I was the one who was really acting like that. It’s just, I’ve gotten so used to…”

I sighed and cut her off as I threw her a pair of panties, some sandals, and a backless white sundress with blue floral patterns from the warm weather clothes box. “You don’t need to explain, Rebecca. I’ve been there. You get so used to being treated like shit by all of the popular kids that you think they’re all alike. You can’t defend yourself from the beatings or the humiliations so you try to avoid them altogether; you withdraw, try to think of yourself as independent rather than alone, and wrap yourself in a cloak of apathy while wishing for some way to pay them back for what they’ve done to grind you down.”

Rebecca gaped at me, barely managing to catch the clothing. “You… you really do know.”

“Yeah, but I also know that those assholes aren’t worth it,” I told her candidly while extracting an emerald halter top and cutoff denim shorts for myself. “Revenge doesn’t help anyone and they want attention, so don’t give them what they want. I’m confident now and I’ll stand up to anyone who messes with me but what’s the use in hating and wanting to make others suffer? It just turns you into the same type of person as those you hate. I’ll point out their stupidity and hope they learn a lesson but anything after that is up to them. I’m too busy living my own life to hold grudges for people being stupid.

My fellow pseudo-Succubus winced, her eyes downcast and her large wings drooping in a way that was sort of cute. “I… thank you… y’know, for doing whatever it was that you did to change me. I’m sorry, I was a bitch to you and there’s no real good excuse for that, Michelle and my Mom both tried to tell me but…Mom...”

As Rebecca broke down and cried I took a pair of comforters from atop the camping mattress and wrapped one around each of us as best I could with our wings in the way. Then I held her as she let out all of the raw fresh grief from the loss of the only family that she had. “We’re going to get out of this place, Rebecca. We’ll find a way and then we’re going to kill the Demon King and all of his generals, including the one who killed your mother. I know that I said that revenge doesn’t help anyone but she has a lot to answer for and your mom deserves to be avenged.”

For the next several hours I let her cry it all out, she needed to get it out of her system. As she did I told her about everything that had happened since my birthday, including the things that I had found out from Xuriel’s perspective. There was a lot for both of us to process as I let the words fill the silence of the bunker. I told her about the Celestials, the Demons, the war between them, the Faery, and then I finally told her Xuriel’s story and how it applied to us.

Rebecca’s tears had run dry some time ago. And then she finally spoke she was staring at her hands, or more specifically her claws. “What are we? I mean, I’m grateful for this curse, or blessing, or whatever you want to call it but are we even human anymore?”

“We’re not Demons,” I told her sternly. “Xuriel was clear about that and I agree since I don’t feel a demonic aura from you. We just have the ability to become convincing replicas of Succubae and copy their abilities. It’s not the power you have, it’s how you choose to use it and that applies to all creatures, not just humans. Maybe good and evil aren’t inherent, I’ve met at least one Celestial who was a total dick. He purposely screwed my fiancée over for something he thought was for the greater good. Maybe some Demons just want to live in peace too. But as for me and you, this doesn’t change who we are inside, we’re under a curse but we’re both still human, or well, a Witch in my case.”

I could almost see the weight being lifted from her shoulders. “Do you think that I can use magick too? I want to help take that Demon bitch down.”

I shook my head. “No, the Witch thing seems to be genetic for our family and separate from the curse, passed down from Xuriel’s mutated Celestial ability. I mean, you could probably learn to use magick, but to have the juice to use it you’d have to gather tantric energy from men like a real Succubus does, through sex.”

Rebecca looked about as thrilled as I was with that option, which was not at all. “Uh… yeah…that’s not gonna happen any time soon, even if I did like the idea.”

“We do have other abilities to use though, and we’re going to need to learn fast so let’s eat something, get dressed, and then get to work,” I told her as I got up to grab us each a water bottle, energy bar, and some dried fruit.

It was sometime later that we started practicing what was probably our most important ability, returning to our human forms. We needed to be able to do that to get dressed since wings make putting on tops super awkward, even backless ones. We managed to get the trick to it though, if we just relaxed enough and concentrated on our marks then we could feel a sort of mental switch that we could flip.

My mark was of course a stupid tramp stamp but Rebecca seemed happy with the pale blue and black butterfly mark that I had placed on her right shoulder. She seemed even happier with the reflection in the mirror I loaned her, even going so far as to hug me in her excitement. That got awkward fast though since we were both trying to figure out where we stood with one another and set any boundaries that we might need.

Soon we were both properly dressed once again, though since we needed to get used to our new abilities we opted for the clothes that I had found earlier. We had to go braless though since I didn’t have any what would allow for our wings. At least the sundress that Rebecca was wearing had a bit of built-in support. I managed to get around that issue somewhat with the navy blue one-piece backless bathing suit that I had put in with the summer clothes. Wearing it instead of panties under my clothes wasn’t super comfortable but at least kept me from jiggling around too much.

As soon as we were both dressed I gave Rebecca a rundown on the abilities that we would have in our Succubae forms. Most of those abilities were inherent ones that we wouldn’t need to think of to use, like the increased physical attributes, claws, and regeneration. The pheromones and mental whammy were another inherent thing and seemingly interconnected, and it kind of sucked that we couldn’t control those because I figured that it might make things awkward when we found the others. Things like casting curses, shapeshifting, and flying were going to take practice though, not that either of us was too keen on using the curse ability.

I was lucky to have Xuriel’s memories to work from, even if they were still a bit jumbled. I was able to ‘remember’ how she used those abilities and I would be able to use those memories to figure things out and help teach Rebecca. One thing that those memories told me was that Xuriel had learned how to do only partial shifts from her human form taking on only the wings, eyes, or claws. That would be useful but we had a long way to go before we would be ready for that.

As cool as shapeshifting might be, I decided to start us off by getting us accustomed to controlling our new appendages. Succubus tails are long, flexible, and dexterous enough to be used as an extra limb but they’re also strong and the spaded tips are razor sharp and able to be used as a weapon if needed. We needed to get used to our wings too since they could be used to shield us from attacks or to fly, and flying would let us travel faster since, unlike Celestials, Succubae relied on the powerful muscles in their wings rather than magick energy to keep them aloft. Celestials could glide well but to get any real lift they needed to use magick energy to reinforce and empower their wings.

With that in mind, we had to go outside. I wasn’t planning on having us trying to travel any further today but we needed space to get used to what our new bodies could do. As soon as we stepped outside I could feel the nearly oppressive heat and the bright light had a reddish orange tint that hurt my eyes at first. “Oh my God! The smell! And there’s like blood and guts everywhere,” Rebecca complained, looking like she was about to lose her recently devoured lunch. It seemed that she managed to hold it in though, not that I was looking at her by that point.

Now that I was able to see without squinting it wasn’t the gore of the tuskreaper’s remains that had my attention. Although the sun seemed high in the sky the portions of the vast expanse above us that weren’t covered in clouds were a lavender color rather than the blue that I was accustomed to. It wasn’t even that alien sky that had my attention though, it was the sun. It seemed larger in the sky than I was used to and shone crimson with over a dozen strange black threads like faint shadows seemingly wrapped around it like a net.

Rebecca caught the direction of my gaze and I could hear her mutter in wonder and confusion, “What… the… fuck?”

She took the words right out of my mouth as I ran some quick calculations in my mind. “That’s impossible.”

“Duh, this whole situation is impossible,” Rebecca grumbled.

“No, I mean sure magick and other planes of existence may seem that way at first but they’re part of the way the universe works, but this… I don’t know what’s going on here.”

“What do you mean?” my companion asked. “We’re on an alien world so shouldn’t we expect it to be different?”

“Different Planes are essentially different universes or alternate realities,” I tried to explain. “When we travel between them we have to be specific or we could end up anywhere; inside a star, out in deep space with no breathable air, inside a solid object, or on the other side of the universe. That’s why we need to use specific sigils when forming a gate. If we know specific coordinates that are safe to appear at we use those, if not then we use a bunch of safety sigils that will take us somewhere random but on ground level in an open space, which was what we used to end up here. The most important sigils though are the one for the specific Plane we’re aiming for and the one for our general area of space, or rather Earth.”

“Wait so this is some sort of alternate Earth?”

“Yeah, but I just ran some calculations and with time passing roughly sixty times faster on this Plane that would mean that the sun here would be nearly three hundred billion years old and while magick may work differently on different Planes, usually physics and the other basic laws of the universe are the same,” I told her as patiently as I could manage.

Rebecca sighed and rolled her eyes at me as she mumbled, “We’re not all nerds here you know.”

I groaned and tried to figure out how to best explain my thinking before speaking again. “Almost all of the Planes that we’ve visited are similar in that Earth has the same type of sun. A sun of that mass wouldn’t still be around though, it would have gone on to a red giant, and after this long, it would have become a white dwarf or maybe a black dwarf. In either case, Earth wouldn’t still be habitable. If the sun somehow started as a red dwarf in this reality, instead of a G-type main-sequence star, it could still be around but Earth would be tidally locked, which means a nightside and a dayside like the moon.”

I could see the realization hit her as she looked at me and then up at the strange red sun. “Okay, so what the fuck is up with that then?”

“I have no clue, it shouldn’t be possible if the laws of physics are the same here, and last I checked we still had gravity and stuff. It looks weird too, do you see those faint shadowy lines?” When she nodded I looked up to try to make sense of them again myself. “I’m grateful that this planet can still sustain life, if not we’d be in deep shit, but something weird is going on here. We need to find the others, Jalael’s remains, and a way off this rock soon. I have a bad feeling about this place.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 6 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Rebecca and I spent several hours attempting to get used to our new forms and controlling the additional body parts that came with them. We also tried to get a good start on learning to shapeshift and fly. Our first attempts at the latter were less than spectacular unless of course, you have a taste for slapstick comedy.

Several times over the course of our impromptu training session, I caught Rebecca looking down at herself, or just touching her body in disbelief and then smiling as if she were still not sure that this was really happening. I guess that I couldn’t blame her since she had been wanting this for a long time and had paid her dues for it through the beatings, shaming, and everything else that she had gone through for daring to admit to the world who she was inside.

It made me realize how lucky I had been with Xuriel manipulating the wish the way that she did. I just got what Rebecca had been fighting so hard for served up to me on a silver platter without having to pay those dues, or even consciously realizing that I had a problem. Looking back now I could see it. I had always idolized my sister, I wanted to be just like her, and I hated my body. It felt wrong to me but I could never tell why because I didn’t know what it was like to feel right.

I had thought that puberty was going to solve that problem but it never really happened, I was a late bloomer and that had led to the bullying. Looking back, I had never really put up more than the token protests to being called a girl, but that made sense now. It wasn’t that part that bothered me and drove me to nights of crying alone in my bed while Sarah was gone for modeling gigs. What made me miserable was the bullying itself; being shoved in lockers, having my books shoved out of my hands, and being beaten up, pushed around, and humiliated at every opportunity.

After I had changed on my birthday I hadn’t really made more than the token protests either, maybe because it felt like I should hate it. Really though, I was just scared about how everything was changing so fast and how I was having to learn to be this new person. When Sarah had said that the wish had probably made me more comfortable with my body I had latched onto it, just let myself roll with things, and convinced myself that the happiness that I felt from being closer to Sarah and making friends was helping me to be happier about my situation.

I shook my head to clear it and attempted another lift-off by working my wings. I couldn’t afford to get caught up thinking about this right now, it wasn’t nearly as important as some of the other problems that we were facing at the moment. We had enough problems to worry about already, things that could affect us in the here and now.

First, we needed to find out how magick worked here. Sure, Rebecca and I could protect ourselves better than normal humans now but we might need magick to track down some of the others and we were certainly going to need it to get home. I was so used to there being ambient magick energy to draw on but I just couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t any here. Even if the rules were different on how magick could be used on various Planes, ambient magick energy had become a staple that we were used to from one Plane to the next even if the individual flavors of it had differed.

Then there was the strangeness of this place compared to other Planes, like the two moons and that strange sun. Okay, having two moons wasn’t all that shocking, Tír na nÓg has two moons but one is significantly smaller than the other and barely visible due to its small size, and the fact that it’s on the opposite side of the planet as the other and can only be seen during the day. Here though, the moons were nearly the same size and not that far apart at least from our perspective on the planet. While that, and the pink and violet shades of the two moons might be a little strange to get used to, I could at least think of scientific reasons for both their color and existence.

The sun was giving off light mostly in the infrared spectrum rather than the white light of our own sun. With that in mind and the possibility of different surface conditions reflecting that red light in different ways, the colors were explainable. As for the second moon’s existence, this was an alternate reality, and mass, elements, and various gasses were possibly distributed differently during the birth of our solar system.

Hell, the planets’ orbits might even be different here and we could be on Venus, Mars, or some planet that doesn’t even exist in our universe but happens to be in the same general location that the Celestials searched when first exploring various Planes nearly ten thousand years ago. We were using their spells and sigils when we used Gate magick and up until now, I hadn’t really cared about the details, other than that the planets we appeared on supported life. Call me crazy, but that’s kind of a dealbreaker for me when exploring other worlds via magick portals.

That red sun was a concern though. I just couldn’t think of any plausible reason for it that made sense if the laws of the universe were the same as in every other reality we had been to thus far. Those shadowy lines weirded me out too, what was up with that? I was half worried that the sun would explode or something before we could get off this Plane.

Ugh, I really needed to stop thinking about things I couldn’t do anything about and start focusing on what I could. With that in mind, I tried digging through Xuriel’s memories to see if I could ‘remember’ how to fly. We needed to learn so we could make better time searching for the others and avoid any other tuskreapers or other dangerous desert creatures.

Eventually, I was able to access Xuriel’s memories on how to fly and use my wings and tail in general. From there, I was able to give Rebecca pointers so that she could learn as well. It took a couple of hours but finally, we both had the hang of it sometime in the mid-afternoon, judging by the position of the sun. With that achievement completed, I decided that we should return to the porta-bunker and get some sleep.

Since it was too damn hot outside during the day with the heat of that oppressive sun being absorbed by the black sands of the desert, I thought that it would be best if we traveled by night and slept during the day. I managed to get to sleep fairly easily, I fact, I drifted off almost as soon as I had returned to my human form and put my head on my pillow. That wasn’t too terribly surprising though since I had had a pretty eventful day, what with everything that had happened since we had arrived in Nhekar.

I awoke to the sound of crying. Rebecca was trying to be quiet about it and I barely heard the sniffles and heart-rending sobs as she attempted to muffle the sounds with her pillow. Her shoulders shook as the sobs ripped through her and I wasn’t sure if it was the faint sounds or the slight jostling of the camping mattress that had woken me.

Rebecca had more than enough reasons to cry. Her mother had been brutally murdered by a Demon practically right in front of her, she was in a strange world and it looked like getting home wasn’t going to be easy, and frankly, this world was a bit terrifying. I really should have tried to make sure she didn’t see the remains of the tuskreaper.

She had been trying to keep up appearances with her tough, snarky, and distant exterior all day but it hadn’t been difficult to see the cracks forming in her emotional armor. I couldn’t blame her for trying to hide her feelings to protect herself and attempting to keep me at a distance with her little verbal barbs, it was what she knew after all. It might not be emotionally healthy but it was what she was familiar with and, in our current situation, grabbing on to what was familiar and holding on for dear life was completely understandable.

I propped myself up into a sitting position and asked as gently as I could, “Bad dream?” Rebecca just buried herself further into the pillow as her sniffling and crying seemed to intensify, her staggered breathing reaching my ears as muffled hiccoughs. A sigh slipped out from between my lips as I considered how to handle this.

“Rebecca, you’re allowed to show your emotions, that’s one of the best things about being a girl. It’s not frowned upon, it’s expected,” I offered after a moment. “We may not be friends yet, we may never be, but right now we’re all that each other has. We need to be able to work together, count on one another, and know that we have each other’s backs. That includes being there for one another when we need it.”

My companion remained silent except for the sound of her emotional upheaval so I decided to just keep talking since she was a relatively captive audience and hadn’t actually objected yet. “I know that I’m not your favorite person and that we both have to build up some trust but I’m here, and I’m willing to listen or be a shoulder to cry on if you need it. It’s okay to be upset, it has been a really overwhelming day for me and I’m sorta used to this kind of stuff. It’s got to be like a hundred times worse for you. I… I know what it’s like to have your whole life turn upside down. It happened to me the day my parents died, on my birthday, and again today.”

Rebecca lifted her head ever so slightly from the pillow and while she still wasn’t facing me she said, “I thought *sniffle* that you said you were used to this stuff.” Her voice was tremulous and a little hoarse from crying so hard but I had gotten her to talk at least.

“Well, I have been getting a lot of experience over the past few months but this is a harder situation than normal. I’m separated from everyone I care about and worried sick about them, I can’t use magick to get us out of this situation, this whole place is just scary and weird so far, and Xuriel’s dramatic reveal… well, it’s been a lot to take in and I’ve been barely keeping myself from totally freaking out about things,” I admitted. “I can’t magick this kind of stuff away.”

“You seem fine to me… I mean, you’re not crying into your pillow,” Rebecca said uncertainly with another sniffle as she got into a sitting position. She didn’t relinquish her hold on the pillow though, keeping it held tightly against her newly feminine chest.

I gave her a long thoughtful look and then let out another sigh as I confessed, “I’m keeping it together because we both need me to but I’ve been worrying about shit pretty much since we got here. As long as I keep it together then we have a chance of finding the others and a way out of this mess. If I break down, then I can’t help either of us and we’re both screwed. It’s funny, I’ve fought Sorcerers, Demons, monsters, and shit without thinking twice about it but I don’t think I’m as brave as you are.”

“W…what do you mean?” she asked before burying her face back into the pillow with a sniffle.

“You’ve fought tooth and nail to be seen and treated as the girl that you felt that you were inside. Sure, you may be a snarky bitch half the time and withdrawn the rest, but from what I’ve seen at the meetings you’ve never given up. Being that way is understandable with the way you’ve been treated. You’ve had assholes terrorize, humiliate, and beat you but you’ve never given in or stopped pushing forward with your transition. You fought the everyday monsters and never backed down. Me, I couldn’t even admit to myself who I was inside until the voice in my head pointed it out today,” I said with a despondent shake of my head.

Rebecca lifted her head from the pillow as she listened to me, her eyes seeming to widen further with each word. Then her expression turned incredulous just before she rolled her eyes. “That’s bullshit, and you’re a fucking idiot.”

I frantically went over my words, looking for what I might have said that could have offended her. “I’m… it’s not… that’s what I really think of you,” I said, bumbling over the words.

“I was talking about what you said about yourself, Stupid,” she snapped. “I’ve seen that cover of Teen Queen; you brazenly announced your sexuality on the cover of a major magazine even though it could have hurt your career. You’ve been confident about who you are since the day we met at that first meeting. I was angry and jealous of you because I saw a genetic girl who was confident, comfortable in her own skin, and happy with who she was, and it fucking hurt because I knew that could never be me.”

“I thought that it was the wish that was making me that way but Xuriel said that it was who I was, that neither she nor the magick of the wish could make me comfortable with being a girl, only make it easier. Xuriel lived a long time and she never felt truly comfortable with it. I’ve been thinking a lot about it today and the signs were there, I just never saw them, or maybe I just never had the courage to face it like you before I got changed,” I pointed out sadly.

“So what if you didn’t realize that part about yourself until now? It’s in the past and doesn’t change fuck all about who you are now. All that fucking matters is that you’re happy with who you are now. And except for this little pity party that you’re throwing right now, I think that you’re the most sickeningly sweet and happy person that I’ve ever met,” Rebecca grumped. “Seriously, you and your girlfriend are fucking cavity-inducing.”

She could have slapped me with a fish I was so stunned. It wasn’t her aggressive and acerbic way of speaking; I was starting to get used to that. No, it was the fact that she was actually right. Why was I letting myself freak out about something that was in the past, I couldn’t change, and wasn’t really a problem anyway? I had more than enough to freak out about right now without adding things like that.

“You’re right,’ I admitted with a blush after a moment of letting that roll around in my thoughts. “Well, about that stuff not really mattering. Sorry, I was trying to make you feel better and things kinda got turned around. Is there anything that you need to talk about?”

“I… just had a nightmare, about Mom,” she reluctantly admitted, clenching her pillow tightly. “We’re gonna kill that thing that killed her right?”

“Yeah, you’re not the only one who wants to take her down. Lisa probably wants to kill her as much as you do and she’s been trying to kill me or make me suffer for a while now. You… were right. Khinara came after me and your mom paid the price, just like Lisa did,” I told her morosely, my breath catching in my throat and my heart tightening as I looked away.

Rebecca wiped away the last of her tears, her fists clenched and her voice steely with determination and tightly controlled rage as she insisted, “You didn’t kill her, that Demon did. I saw it. I saw her do it and I was too frozen with fear to do anything about it. I… that was what I was dreaming about. Just promise me that we’re going to get out of here and kill her. I don’t give a shit what happens after that, I just want to make that hideous bitch watch while I disembowel her and rip her heart out with my own hands, just like she did to my mom. You made my dream come true and gave me the power to avenge my mom, so… uhh… thanks for that.”

“I promise, I’ll find the others and a way out of this place, and then we’ll take down Khinara and the other generals,” I vowed, carefully placing a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Just, don’t do anything reckless. I think that your mom probably wanted you to be able to live as the girl you are inside and you’ve got that now, don’t throw it away for revenge. We’ll take her down together and when we’re done, I’ll see that you get the life that she’d want for you.”

Rebecca shrugged my hand off, turned away, and wiped her sleeve across her cheek before standing up. “Yeah, well, thanks for the offer or whatever. We’ve got shit to do before we walk off into the sunset or some shit like that, so we should probably get to that now that it’s dark outside.”

I nodded and let her think that she had gotten the last word as I got up and began to put a meal together with some of the few perishable supplies that I had and the camp stove. We would need our energy if we were going to be flying. Once I had the stew going I started gathering things that we might need to have with us outside of the bunker for our journey to find the others.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 7 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

“Rebecca, do you know how to use a gun?” I asked as I tried to decide what we might need for our travels and looked over the holdout weapons that Annie had insisted each of us keep inside our porta-bunkers. They were for emergencies where we couldn’t use magick and I was pretty sure that the current situation qualified. It would be nice to have some sort of ranged option for self-defense since most of our abilities at the moment required us to get up close and personal in a fight.

“Only from what I’ve seen on T.V. I never wanted to hurt people that bad,” I heard her mumble behind me as she approached. From the corner of my eye, I could see Rebecca’s eyes widen as she took in the Remington pump-action shotgun and the Desert Eagle Mark XIX. “Holy shit, where the fuck did you get those? Are you some kind of secret gun nut?”

I shook my head and sighed. “Nope, but my sister’s Personal Assistant slash bodyguard is an ex-cop and a huge gun enthusiast. She thought that if we were all going to an unfamiliar Plane that we should have holdout weapons just in case something went pear-shaped. She made sure that we all knew proper gun safety and maintenance and had us all practice a bit with the weapons she picked for us during some of our trips to Tír na nÓg to sneak in some extra hours of training for Lisa and Michelle.”

“Tír na nÓg?” she asked, raising an eyebrow as she turned her gaze from the guns to look at me.

“It’s the Plane where the Faery live, though there aren’t many of them left. My cousin and her Mom are both Faery and so are Beth and her Mom, but they started out as human as you did. Beth became one when I accidentally made her my Familiar and her Mom had her dormant Faery blood awakened on purpose about a month ago. Sarah and I have some Faery blood too, though we don’t look like it. Anyway, time passes just over four times faster there than on our own world so a six-hour trip there let us get like a full day of training and a little downtime,” I explained.

Rebecca gave me an exasperated look. “Your life sounds fucking crazy; Faery relatives, fighting Demons, learning magick, visiting other worlds, and a modeling career on top of school and the other stuff, how the fuck do you manage to stay sane?”

“Well, I’ve kinda gotten used to things since my birthday, when all of this started. Family and friends help though, and being able to use magick and help keep people safe is cool. I don’t have magick right now though and the only way that we can protect ourselves is up close and personal. I’d really rather not have to fight another tuskreaper or something similar that way again though, so we might need these guns,” I admitted.

“I dunno,” she said uncertainly. “I’ve never used one before and I don’t want to risk doing something stupid and hurting one of us.”

“I’ll give you a quick lesson on gun safety and let you get some practice in before we pack up camp and get moving,” I promised before getting back to figuring out what we might need to have on hand for our trip.

There wasn’t really much that we needed to keep on us except for the weapons and with my backpack needing to be repaired, I couldn’t have carried much anyway. As long as I kept the extendable tent poles near the entrance of the bunker for easy reach, I figured that I could probably get away with just keeping the canvas cloth for the entrance of the bunker and a few other small items on me. If we needed food or drinks or anything else one of us could just hold the entrance up while the other went through to get them.

I was a bit worried about the cold though since the night before had been pretty chilly and we were going to be flying. So, after a dinner of some nice hot stew and some crackers and a can of Diet Coke each, I worked on trying to figure out what we could wear. My White Witch outfit would keep me comfortable in just about any weather but my wings would pose a problem with that. I would have to cut slits for them into the back of the dress and the cloak and corset could both be particularly problematic. I also might need the disguise later so I felt it better not to try to mess with it.

I started by keeping my navy bathing suit on. It was one of Giselle’s designs and the whole reason I was wearing it was that it was backless and tight enough up top would keep my chest from jiggling too much. It tied in place behind my neck and hugged my chest like a second skin until it connected to the bottom half with a two-inch gold metallic ring over my belly. The nice part though was that the bottom half had a snap so it could be disconnected from the ring which made it a lot easier to go to the bathroom. I guess that technically made it a two-piece bathing suit, but I didn’t care what it was called since it suited my purposes at the moment.

I put on some warm black fleece leggings, a pair of warm socks and my sneakers, and another one of Giselle’s designs that actually went with the leggings. It was a warm black fleece zip-up hoodie with hot pink accents and kitty ears on the top of the hood, It hugged my body almost all the way down to my thighs and had an adjustable mask inside the hood to cover the mouth and nose when it got cold that had a design of a kitty nose, whiskers, and mouth on it. The sleeves ended with built-in fingerless gloves and had these flip-up ‘paw’ covers that could be pulled over the gloves to make them into mittens. It even had a fuzzy tail attached to the back, just above my butt.

That outfit was so warm and cozy and I felt instantly horrible about cutting a pair of slits in the back where I guessed my wings would emerge before putting it on. I was totally going to buy another one when I got home. I also almost accidentally removed the kitty tail when I went into Succubus mode and my own tail punched a small hole in the back of both the leggings and hoodie. I guess I was right about where to put the wing slits though since there was no pain or ripping when those emerged.

Now that I was changed and knew that I wasn’t going to have to replace any clothes. I quickly added the holster belt for the Desert Eagle, placed the gun in the holster, and a bunch of those huge bullets in the ammo pouch before putting on one last thing. It was a simple-looking quartz pendant on black twine which I secured around my neck and slipped beneath all of my layers so that it was resting against my skin. I sighed in relief as I felt it’s magick, but I hoped that we wouldn’t need it.

For Rebecca, I found a pair of thick pale blue leggings to go with the dress, socks, and sneakers she was already wearing as well as a pair of gloves and a scarf in case she got cold up there. We added her hoodie after making sure to cut some slits in the back. She would also have the bandolier of shotgun shells and the shotgun after I gave her a basic firearms lesson.

“If you get cold up there, let me know and I’ll see if I can find some stuff for extra layers,” I told her once we were both dressed. Figuring that she might be uncomfortable being seen naked, or seeing me that way, I had allowed her to change in the privacy of the bunker while I did so outside.

She took one look at me and started laughing her ass off. I sighed and rolled my eyes as she giggled away and when she finally managed to speak it was interspersed with laughter. “Pfft! Omigod, Nerd-girl, you look like the fucking cat in the hat, all you need is that fucking striped hat!

“I thought I was Jockette,” I grumbled. I should have just worn the White Witch outfit.

“Nope, with all that fucking science stuff earlier and wearing that ridiculous outfit you are definitely a nerd, or maybe a geek.” Rebecca paused for a moment in thought before nodding. “Yup, definitely a geek, Geek-girl.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know this is really warm and comfortable! It’s cute too, I modeled this for Giselle Collette’s winter line,” I snapped.

“You actually let someone take pictures of you wearing that?!”

“You’re just jealous,” I muttered as I turned away and headed back outside. Oh well, at least it put a smile on her face.

“Nope. I’ll give you credit for guts though. That’s not an outfit I would wear, I would not wear it anywhere. I would not wear it in this lair. I would not, could not ever dare,” she managed to get out behind me between giggles.

Once we left the bunker and Rebecca had stopped laughing, I carefully untied the entrance cloth from the tent poles and placed them just inside the entrance before carefully folding up the cloth and putting it inside one of my hoodie’s inside zippered pockets. Then I taught Rebecca everything that Annie had drilled into our heads about gun safety and usage. Only when she had all of that down did I let her take a few practice shots to get used to firing a shotgun, the kick, and proper breathing when firing.

We used the tuskreaper’s head as a target and she managed to do okay with the five shots I let her fire. It took her a few shots to get used to the kick but once we were finished I was fairly sure that she wouldn’t shoot either of us by accident. I would have let her practice her aim more but I didn’t want us to risk using too much ammo that we might need later. Aiming wasn’t as big a deal for her as with the gun I would be using since she was using buckshot and she really just needed to keep the weapon pointed in the right general area.

After Rebecca managed to settle the bandolier and shotgun strap in place so that neither would interfere with her wings in flight, we took off in the direction where I sensed Ziralin. We needed to get some traveling done before the sun rose and I wanted to get away from there in case anything like a tuskreaper decided to investigate the sound of Rebecca’s target practice. Shotguns tend to make a lot of noise.

With the light of the two moons to guide us and our wings to carry us, we quickly ate up the miles, the black dunes passing beneath us in a blur. We stopped once during the night to give our wings a bit of a rest and to make a quick meal, but as soon as we felt ready we were on our way once again. We managed to get some good altitude and caught a wind current that was going in our general direction and rode that for a while to not strain our wings too much.

As we flew, we tried to keep our eyes open for anything unusual, dangerous, or possibly useful on the ground below. Personally, I thought that anything other than barren desert would have been wonderful. It was almost dawn when we saw something just ahead, there was some sort of light down there.

Rebecca was the first to see it and maneuvered closer to get my attention. ‘Hey! Shannon!”

Once I turned my head toward her she pointed downward in the direction and when I saw what she pointed at I could feel my eyes widening. “Let’s check it out!”

As we circled our way downward my heart was beating a mile a minute, especially when we got close enough to figure out that it was a campfire. There were also a pair of smaller lights that I thought might be lanterns. Could it be Sarah and Annie, or some of the others? I counted what looked like maybe four figures but it was hard to tell since I was using night vision at the moment and looking too hard at the lights as we got closer was killing my eyes. I pointed to a spot a good distance away from the apparent campsite and went in for a landing with Rebecca following behind.

We really needed to work on those landings. Okay, sure, we didn’t crash and we managed to stay on our feet but I wouldn’t exactly call us stumbling along the ground graceful, or any other remotely complimentary adjective. “That looked like some sort of a campsite,” Rebecca said, echoing my thoughts.

“Yeah, I thought I saw four shadows that could be living things, maybe even people, but they weren’t moving and that light made it difficult to see. I didn’t want to risk coming down too close in case they’re not friendly. We’ll sneak a bit closer and find a spot where we can watch long enough for our vision to adjust,” I replied.

Rebecca nodded in agreement as she muttered softly, “Night vision is awesome, but it takes way too long to adjust to normal or bright lighting again.”

We made our way carefully toward the light in the distance, our senses keyed to any sign of danger. I was nervous as hell and so was Rebecca so we kept conversation to a minimum. Finally, we crept to the top of a large dune overlooking the campsite and laid on our bellies to get a closer look. Once our eyes adjusted to the light enough to see details rather than blurry shadows Rebecca hissed, “That is not anyone that either of us knows. You’re the great magical extra-planar explorer, Geek-girl. So, what the fuck are those things?”

I shook my head in confusion. On all the other Planes I had been to or Demons I had fought I had never seen anything quite like what I was looking at right then. “I think they must be the locals.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 8 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

I was extremely grateful for the long-range vision of Succubae once my eyes had adjusted to the light and I could get a better look at our quarry. Two of the people around the fire were wearing some sort of dull grey-colored robes with short hems and large hoods that appeared to be more for utility than for comfort or fashion with all their pockets and pouches. The other four, including the one keeping watch, were wearing some sort of chest armor of overlapping metal plates, though they too sported large hoods. The ones in the armor also had some sort of long and curved metal implements that I thought might be bladed weapons within reach.

None of the six were moving much, it appeared that the moving shadows I had seen had come from some sort of beasts of burden, like a cross between a camel, rhinoceros, and mountain goat. The large beasts were harnessed to roughly-made wooden carts loaded up with various crates, barrels, and sacks. These people were probably some sort of trader caravan with early dark ages technology, even the lanterns that I had noticed were only some sort of rough oil lamps, though their light did let me see the people around the fire in more detail now that I wasn’t half-blinded.

They looked to have been descended from some type of snakes from the long serpentine lower bodies that I saw in place of legs beneath the hems of their robes and armor. Their upper torsos were vaguely humanoid with long muscular arms and hands with opposable thumbs and three somewhat long and spindly fingers. Set above their wide chests and shoulders were slightly large reptilian heads with slits for nostrils and powerful-looking jaws. I would have expected slit pupil eyes like a snake’s but theirs were more like an amphibian’s, large and bulbous atop their heads.

After a few moments of carefully watching them, I gently tapped Rebecca on the shoulder and motioned that we should back away to a safer distance. Once I figured that we were far enough that we wouldn’t be heard, I said, “Let’s go find a quiet place to set up the portal cloth so we can get some rest before it gets too hot.”

‘What?! We’re not going to go at least try to talk to them?! They might be able to help us! What kind of extra-planar explorer are you?!” she hissed back at me.

“The cautious kind,” I replied with a sigh. “They might think we’re a threat and attack us and I seriously doubt that they can help us. I didn’t see anything that indicated they can use magick and their technology is, at best, equal to the middle ages on Earth. Even with the Rosetta stone that I’m wearing to help, it would take several days of listening to conversations for me to learn even the basics of whatever language they use so one of us could talk to them. And who knows how meeting us with our guns, and talking to them about magick and stuff, could affect their culture. We need to follow the prime directive, Rebecca.”

“Star Trek?! Really?! You are such a geek! Just because they don’t use magick doesn’t mean they don’t know about it! They could have legends that could lead us to whatever you came here looking for, or someone who does know about magick!” Rebecca snapped.

“Okay, I’ll admit that you have a point, but we know nothing about this world, its people, or their values. We can’t just walk right up to them like we belong here, they could think that we’re Demons or food,” I countered as calmly as I could. “Maybe we can find a village or town where we can try to get more information but we’ll need time to work on our shapeshifting and for one or both of us to hear enough of the language while wearing my Rosetta stone to be able to blend in and to talk to them.”

“How do you know that they even have towns?” my argumentative companion asked with a frown. “You just said that we know nothing about them.”

“Well, those carts looked like they were carrying goods and, given the way they were dressed, those guys looked like caravan traders and guards, so they might not even be heading in the same direction as us anyway. But trade caravans usually mean places to trade at, and given their tech level and the fact that they’re traveling in a group, I’m willing to bet that they are fairly social, at least with one another,” I explained. “We also learned that this whole planet probably isn’t completely covered in desert.”

Rebecca rolled her eyes and groaned before asking in a tone heavily laden with sarcasm, “And how do we know that, Professor?”

I ignored the sarcasm and name-calling once again as I looked toward the horizon. Snark, sarcasm, and attitude were a defense mechanism for Rebecca and probably the only means that she had had of fighting back against her tormentors. It was how she faced the world when scared, uncomfortable, or backed into a corner. Right now she was way out of her element, scared, stressed, grieving, and probably feeling alone since she only had me at the moment and we weren’t exactly best friends.

Sure, she had admitted to herself and me why she distrusted and disliked me but I couldn’t expect her to just get over those feelings instantly, it would take time for both of us. I knew that she was trying; she had been grateful for what I had done for her, she didn’t blame me for her mother’s death even when she probably had every right to, and she had even tried to be supportive in her own way. I just needed to be patient and help guide her when I could.

I took a deep breath and then answered her question. “Those camnocergoats looked like herbivores; I think that the locals were using their dried droppings as fuel for the fire, and those carts were made from wood. That means that there are trees and other forms of vegetation growing somewhere. Now let’s get going, the sun is starting to rise and I’d rather not be standing out here in the open when it’s light out.”

We had found a decent spot among a group of large stones to place our portal for the day and after a good solid sleep, we had a meal and spent the rest of the daylight hours practicing with our pseudo-Succubus skills, or rather those that we could consciously control and didn’t need a target for. Then, after another quick meal at dusk, we once again took to the skies and headed northeast toward Ziralin.

The two moons were high overhead and we were going to stop for a break and a small meal when I noticed the black sands below starting to give way to grasslands. I could see what looked like woodlands in the distance and my heart skipped a beat in my excitement. I turned to see Rebecca looking at me and actually smiling, she had noticed it too. So, instead of landing for our meal, we pressed onward, catching a nice tailwind until the forest and a small river were beneath us.

After circling to decrease our altitude, and to ensure that there were no locals to see us, we landed near the riverbank. I secured the portal cloth against the trunk of a large deciduous tree with pink birch-like bark that was out of the direct view of any traffic that might make its way along the river. The night sounds of the forest were a little alien, but also comforting, there was life here and I had so many scents assailing my nose and sounds teasing my ears from the various animals that I had to switch back to my familiar and comfortable human form to keep from being overloaded by the input.

“Do you think that’s safe? And I thought you’d want to just eat something and keep pressing on until dawn,” Rebecca asked with an uncertain look in my direction.

“I’d like to feel like myself for a bit and I’d really like a bath while we have water available,” then I sighed as I thought of the possibility of some unknown predators attacking us in the water. If something attacked we might need some of our Succubus abilities, like regeneration. “You’re probably right, we don’t know what’s out there. I’ll change back after I undress but I’m having a damn bath. We haven’t had a chance at more than a sponge bath since getting here and I feel super gross. I figure that now that we’re out of the desert we can probably travel by day and see what we can find that’s edible. My supplies were meant for one person, not two, and we don’t know how long we’ll be stuck here.”

“A bath does sound good,” Rebecca admitted wistfully.

“Maybe we should do it one at a time while the other stands watch,” I said thoughtfully. “I’ll grab my bath stuff and a towel and you can go first if you want.”

Rebecca seemed a bit self-conscious as she considered it. “I… umm… thanks. That would be great.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to watch you or anything,” I promised her. “I’ll use the camp stove to make us some soup while I keep watch. It seems a bit colder here than it was in the desert at night and we don’t want to catch a cold or something.”

I got my basket with shampoo, conditioner, body wash, a loofah, body lotion, and added one of the only two clean towels that we had, and handed them off to her so she could get started. After retrieving the camp stove, some of our water, a pot, a kettle, and some ingredients I temporarily returned to my Succubus form to be alert for danger while I prepared a quick meal. I listened to the unfamiliar night noises of the alien forest and Rebecca splashing about as she got herself clean as made our meal.

I chopped up a couple of carrots and potatoes and added them to the pot of water with a packet of chicken noodle soup mix, a can of flaked chicken, and some spices. It wasn’t anything special, but I had to work with mostly non-perishables and it would warm us up and fill our bellies when paired with some soda crackers. Once I had that on the heat to boil I poured a can of condensed milk and some water in the kettle with a pair of mint leaves to heat up as well, but at a lower heat since there wasn’t as much liquid and no solids to cook.

By the time that I had the soup and the kettle going Rebecca was finished her bath and it was my turn. “That water is f-f-freezing,” she complained as she quickly dried off and practically leaped back into her clothes.

“It’ll be nice to get clean though,” I replied as I snatched up a roll of biodegradable bathroom tissue and dashed to the nearest bushes to relieve myself before getting clean. With that task completed I grabbed my towel and the basket she had put aside and assured her, “I won’t be long; the soup probably won’t even be done before me.”

Rebecca was right, that water was freezing. Still, it was really nice to feel clean once I was done and back in my clothes. I had bathed in my Succubus form just in case of predators in the water but I didn’t have any problems. Well, not from predators. Washing my tail and wings was a really weird feeling and I had almost forgotten about my horns until I washed and conditioned my hair. Still, soon I was out of the water and drying off as fast as Rebecca had before switching back to my more comfortable and normal human form and getting dressed again in my warm clothes.

One thing that I hadn’t thought of was how we were going to dry our hair without magic or a blow-dryer. I just did as Rebecca had and did the best that I could with a towel and then wrapped it turban-style until we could deal with it in the bunker after eating. It was so cold that I didn’t even bother with my skin lotion, instead vowing to do it before bed when I dealt with my hair.

The soup was starting to simmer, but it would be a little while still before the carrots and potatoes in it were properly cooked so I went to the food stores in the bunker and snatched up a pair of stainless steel travel mugs, a wooden spoon, and a couple of large Ziploc bags. “W-w-what? Are you making c-c-coffee?” Rebecca inquired, still shivering from the cold air after the freezing water.

“N-nope, m-much better than that.,” I told her with a grin as I tried not to give in to the cold as well. I put the mugs and the sealed bag of mini marshmallows on a large stone that I had used for dicing the veggies earlier and took the other baggie and the spoon to dole out some of the powder mixture into the bubbling and steaming milk. It was my own hot chocolate mix; baking cocoa mixed with a blend of white and brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

I resealed the bag and carefully stirred the hot beverage, and then lowered the flame beneath the kettle to let it simmer on its own for a couple of minutes. I had time to quickly put everything but the marshmallows, mugs, and the actual cooking stuff away in the bunker before returning to pour us both a mug and add some of the marshmallows. Rebecca took a cautious sip before her eyes went wide. “Omigod! That’s amazing!”

“It would be better with real milk instead of the condensed stuff, but yeah. Between this and being clean, I almost feel human again. Well, actually being human for a change probably helps too,” I admitted with a tired giggle “I was experimenting and made some last week and my sister loved it, so she had me make a big batch of the mix and store some of it, the mint leaves, and other stuff for our bunkers.”

“Yeah, it’s really good. Mom used to make hot cocoa like this when I had a bad day but she never had this earthy, minty, sweet taste to it. It kinda tastes like home though. It’s almost like we’re just camping instead of trapped on some other world.” Rebecca said with a sigh before casting an uncertain look my way. “You’re… uhh… I’m… sorry. I know that I’ve been freaking out a lot since we got here and I’m probably not easy to deal with but thanks for… being you. I was wrong about you and I don’t know how I’d get through this without you… Shannon.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if I heard her right. No Jockette, no Geek-girl, she actually used my name and didn’t choke on it. Maybe I was making progress with her. I found myself smiling as we sat there drinking our sweet, minty, chocolatey bit of heaven in silence until the soup was ready and we ate.

Rebecca was full of surprises. After we finished our soup she offered to help me clean the dishes in the river and put everything away in the bunker. We were going to do our laundry as well while we had the water available but we decided to wait on that until the afternoon when we planned to wake up and eat around midday. The plan was that we could hang the clothes to dry in the sun and do some foraging and maybe hunting in the hopes of finding stuff that woudn’t be toxic to us to augment the food supplies.

It was almost dawn by the time we managed to mostly dry our hair and get ready for bed. Rebecca still wasn’t used to her hair being quite that long but she tried not to complain and I offered to brush it out and braid it for her so it wouldn’t get tangled while she slept. Once I was done with her hair, I was about to get to work on mine when she offered to return the favor. She had done it for her mom a few times when they had girl nights and she wouldn’t admit it, but I heard her start sniffling behind me about halfway through and I was pretty sure that she had started crying.

I tried to let her think I didn’t notice. Her grief over her mother was still raw and I kind of felt bad that doing that for me and the hot chocolate had brought up such strong memories of her. She had managed to collect herself by the time she was done and we settled onto the foam mattress and under the comforters for a bit of sleep. I was just starting to drift off when I heard her sniffling into her pillow though.

“Rough few days, huh?” I said tentatively to the back of her head. “I’m sorry if I did anything to make things worse.”

“Y…you didn’t. I just miss Mom so fucking much, and… you were right. What will I do when… if we get home? The only friend I have is Michelle and I probably got her pissed at me. I have nobody else there who gives a fuck about me even if they did recognize me, no place to go, no identity, no family… I…”

I wrapped my arm around her in an awkward hug, afraid that she would pull away, surprised when she didn’t. “Michelle cares about you, she wouldn’t give up on you because you said something to hurt her. No offense but it was kind of your thing. You can be prickly and untrusting and she knew that going in. My family and I won’t let you down either. No matter what happens, in whatever world, we’ll all get through it together. I only had my sister for a long time, but family isn’t just about whose blood you have in your veins. It’s about who’s willing to shed blood, sweat, and tears for you, it’s about who’s there to help you pick up the pieces when your world shatters. You can choose family and they can choose you. You’ve got me, Becca, and I’ve got your back.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 9 of book five of I Wish. I was hoping to post it yesterday but I wasn't able to finish it in time and wanted to give it a good edit today. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

We awoke and made our breakfast, or more likely brunch, around what I guessed was noon based on the position of that strange sun overhead. After eating some simple oatmeal with a bit of brown sugar and some dried fruit we stripped off our clothes and started to wash our laundry in the river as best we could since it was a pleasantly warm day. We did that in our Succubus forms so that we could be ready if any of the local predators or any other dangers decided to show up while we were occupied. I felt that our heightened senses in those forms would allow us to detect anything coming toward us before it became a danger.

While our clothes were hanging and drying we explored the forest around us to get the lay of the land and see what we could find that was edible. We found some nuts and berries that seemed ripe and didn’t taste bitter or cause a reaction when held against our lips or tongues. There were small animals around the woods too but they were mostly avoiding us, I think that they realized that we’re predators.

Not that either of us wanted to go around killing cute little woodland creatures, but we are omnivores and we needed to eat so we would have to start taking opportunities to get whatever we could that was edible. For now, it was far more convenient for us to fish while we had the river available though. Our very flexible and dexterous tails with their razor-sharp spaded tips certainly proved handy for spearfishing, and it gave us a chance to get used to using them as a weapon of sorts in case we needed to do so in a fight later.

I was extremely grateful for the lessons on foraging and hunting that the Faery of our troupe had insisted on giving us when we told them about this trip into the great unknown. It was as I finished cleaning the fish and placed them over the fire on skewers to cook that Rebecca asked, “Where’d you learn to do that? I never pegged you for the outdoorsy type. It’s kinda part of the reason that I was so jealous of you, you come across as so femme and I wanted to be like that.”

“Yeah, I grew up a total city girl,” I agreed with a laugh. “We were spending a lot of time with the Faery of our troupe though while getting in shooting practice and teaching Lisa to use her magick. They taught us to survive off the land; how to tell if something is poisonous, and how to fish and hunt and then prepare whatever we caught. They were worried about us coming here and possibly being stuck here for a while. I guess they were right.”

“Your troupe sounds nice,” she said with a sigh.

I nodded and let out a sigh of my own. I missed them, and I missed Ziralin, Ellie, Sarah, and the others too. “They’re amazing people once you get over the culture shock and their casualness about sex and nudity. I’m proud that they accepted us and made us a part of the troupe. They didn’t really trust me at first, they don’t trust most humans. You know, they could be your troupe too, Rebecca. Then, even if we can’t figure out something for you in our world, you would still have a place in Tír na nÓg.”

“You said that they don’t trust Humans though and you’ve mentioned before that Demons nearly wiped them out of existence. How could they possibly trust me? Especially with this whole Succubus thing? I know that we’re not real Demons but…” my traveling companion trailed off, looking at the ground.

“I can talk to them,” I quietly assured her while I kept an eye on our cooking meal. “We don’t have a Demonic Aura and they’ll be able to sense that. I changed you, so you’re my responsibility now, Rebecca. That kind of makes you part of the troupe already, it would just need to be made official. Lisa is my apprentice so it’s almost the same thing, and they brought both her and Michelle into the troupe before we left. They’re a very supportive and caring family group once they get to know and trust a person. There aren’t many of them left though, less than a hundred, and only a few of them are male, even after they awoke Beth’s brother’s dormant Faery-ness.”

When she spoke again it was tentative and she didn’t take her eyes off the ground. “I… they sound nice. It’s just… I don’t want to be stranded on another unfamiliar world. Maybe later once I knew them, but I want to go home, to our Earth and the familiar things that I miss, even if I don’t have anybody there.”

“Rebecca, look at me,” I told her gently. When she didn’t comply I cupped her chin in my hand and tilted her head up so that we were looking eye-to-eye. “I am not going to strand you or abandon you, on this world or any other. I promise that I’ll do everything that I can for you, I can remember what Xuriel did to change my records so I may be able to come up with an identity for you. If not we’ll figure something else out. I meant what I said last night, you’re family now and I take care of my family.”

“Wh… why don’t you hate me? The way I’ve treated you… I’ve given you every reason…” She trailed off again, her eyes teary and confused as she looked into my own.

I kept my eyes on hers, my expression and tone as serious as I could make them. “I’ll admit, you’ve made me angry and you’ve hurt my feelings a bunch of times. You probably will in the future too but what good would hating you do? We need one another and you don’t have anyone else. That’s my fault and I turned you into what you are now so I feel responsible for you. Family doesn’t always get along, Becca, but if someone values that bond the way that they should then they will always be there for you when the chips are down. Just like I will.”

For nine days we flew as far and fast as we could toward where I was sensing the pull of Ziralin from our bond. The strength of the pull was lessening by the day, even during those brief periods when Rebecca and I stopped to forage, hunt, eat, and rest so I figured that Elsaishe and Ziralin were trying to get to us as well. It was likely draining her, but I had the feeling that my fiancée was using her Celestial form and carrying Ellie.

Being one of the Faery, Ziralin could produce magick energy as part of her metabolism and use that to allow her to put that energy into using her Celestial abilities. She couldn’t store a lot though and it took time to build up in her system. So, since there was no ambient magick energy for her to draw on while in her Celestial form she was probably having to resort to quick bursts of flight whenever she had enough magick energy built up in her system to make it worth it.

Rebecca and I currently had a dilemma though, one that we were having a problem with solving. There was a colossal mountain range between us and Ziralin. The mountains were high and covered in snow and the range stretched as far as we could see in either direction. Going around would take forever but we wouldn’t be able to fly through without clothes a lot warmer than we currently had available.

My White Witch outfit would keep me comfortable in that kind of weather but it was completely impractical if I was going to use my wings. Rebecca had nothing at all that she could use. If only I had a little bit of magick energy. Even just enough to cast a warmth enchantment on our clothes would be a boon.

For the moment we were hiding in a village at the foot of the mountains as we considered our options and tried to gather information. Like what we had seen thus far from the inhabitants of this Plane, the village was, at best, stuck in the middle ages technology-wise. The streets were dirt, it smelled like raw sewage most of the time, and the buildings were either stone or wood and thatch.

We had been there for a week now after coming under the cover of night. We had the portable bunker set up on top of the tallest building in the village; a two-story-tall stone tower in the center of the village square that had no windows or doors. It was basically a tall pillar, roughly 12 feet in diameter. I suspected that it was just a big sundial of some sort since it was in the center of the open square and conversations I had heard from below us seemed to support that theory.

Regardless, since nobody was looking up we were well out of sight for our stay, eating food from my supplies, and taking turns with one of us sleeping while the other kept watch and wore the Rosetta Stone pendant to learn the locals’ language, in case we needed to try and join a caravan through those mountains. What little useful information that we had learned so far only made it that much more crucial that we get across those mountains. The locals spoke of a great city on the other side where people who they called the Makers lived.

These Makers occasionally raided smaller towns and villages like this one for slave labor to work in some sort of mines and supposedly they were capable of using the ‘earth power’ and that sounded an awful lot like magick to me. But then, to these villagers, our guns would probably be thought to be magick too. Still, I felt that this city might be worth checking out since we were heading in that general direction anyway.

In preparation for that possibility, now that we had learned enough of the language to converse if we needed to, we were practicing with our shapeshifting and trying to make ourselves look like one of the locals while the villagers below were turning in for the night. Their species seemed to be more active during the day and slept during the cooler hours of the night. “This isn’t working, Shannon,” Rebecca half-growled in frustration at another failed attempt.

She wasn’t the only one who was frustrated. We had both been trying for the past two days to make ourselves look like one of the locals so that we could blend in and get some actual information rather than listening to random conversations drifting upward from below. We had been able to change our appearances to look like other humans, Faery, and even some of the different types of Demons that I had encountered but we just couldn’t make ourselves look like the locals.

Finally, I sighed and shook my head. “Don’t waste any more energy. We’re not going to be able to get it to work, Becca, and I think I know why.”

She raised an auburn eyebrow and her near-violet eyes regarded me for a moment before she simply nodded. Since that first day in the forest she had become more comfortable deferring to my experience and letting me take the lead in things. So it was no surprise that she asked, “Why not?”

“Our curse makes us only able to take on female forms,” I replied simply.

Rebecca’s brow furrowed in confusion as she asked, “Are you telling me that their whole species is male?”

“No,” I clarified after a long sigh. “If they were male then I would be able to sense even small amounts of male tantric energy from them. Xuriel could sense it from men of all species when in full succubus form. It’s how Succubae track their prey; all men display small amounts all of the time but the more a man has built up the better the meal he’ll provide. I don’t think their species has two genders or physical sexes, They’re probably asexual, so they don’t have a template that’s compatible for us. And Succubae shapeshift by using a generic template of species that they have seen before and then just altering it within the bounds of the species to suit their needs. I can only turn into a Faery or the others species that we’ve been experimenting with because I’m familiar with them and you can because you’ve seen me do it.”

“Well, fuck. There goes blending in so we can join a caravan.”

“Yeah, and I was really hoping that…” I trailed off as I felt something familiar tickling the edges of my senses. Someone was using magick west of the village. More than one someone by the feel of the rapid-fire pulses of magick energy that I was feeling. I quickly snatched up the portal sheet and stuffed it into one of my zippered pockets as I explained, “There’s magick out there, Becca!”

I didn’t have to say anything more than that. Rebecca knew as well as I did that this could be our ticket to finding the others and getting home. The second that I had pointed out the direction she launched herself into the air and I followed as soon as the portable bunker was safely tucked away and the pocket zipped.

We soon found the cause of the magick I had been sensing. Four locals were running, or rather slithering, through the forest as fast as they could in the direction of the village that we had been holed up in, chasing something that blended into the night’s shadows. They weren’t dressed like the villagers in rough robes, but rather in shiny armor that reeked of magick and they were firing red beams at whatever they were chasing. I had a feeling that these were some of those Makers, or at least their goons.

As we circled downward to get a closer look Rebecca groaned. “I thought you said these people didn’t have modern tech, so why the hell do they have phasers?”

“They’re some sort of artefacts,” I replied, feeling sick to my stomach. “Items imbued with spells and powered by magick energy stored somewhere. The magick smells and tastes nasty. I think the light beams are for show but the spell is meant to stun and cause a lot of pain to the target. It’s a weapon to hurt and intimidate, and let the victim know exactly who is in charge.”

“So, bad guys?” Rebecca asked, her tone turning deadly serious.

“Yeah, bad guys,” I agreed. We already knew that these Makers took slaves and that and their choice of weapons didn’t exactly make them come across as the sensitive and caring type.

We were close enough now to make out what they were saying and a shrill voice called out. “Just shoot it, you hatuks! Do not let it escape as the other creature did! Sah Lortae wants this one as a pet!”

“We are trying! Lortae’s Light does not affect it!” one of the others snapped back.

Oh, that was interesting. And since I only knew of two beings that direct attack spells like that wouldn’t affect and knew for sure that one of them was across the mountains, that only left me with one other possibility. “Beks! They’re chasing Michelle! I’ll take care of these guys!”

“On it!” Rebecca replied before turning in pursuit of what I really hoped was our mutual friend.

While she was doing that I reached out for the enchantments on the weapons and armor of the bad guys and whatever was powering them, drawing all of that magick energy into myself. The feel and taste of it were awful but I’d absorbed much worse during our brief stint in Heil. There was a decent amount but not near as much as I would need to cast a portal spell to get to Ziralin, Sarah, or one of the others. Transport spells, in general, tend to use a lot of juice.

Still, it felt good to have a little in reserve, and now that their armor was little more than decorative and they didn’t have those nasty weapons, I could try to scare them off. I did the superhero landing, dropping down in front of the group. It’s a good thing I have that super regeneration thing going on because that’s really hard on the knees. They stared at me in shock and horror for a moment before trying to use their now useless weapons. “I’m afraid that I ate all of the earth power in those,” I told them with a grin and licking my lips. “You’re next.”

They looked uncertainly to their leader, but he wasn’t willing to back off, instead, he pulled a bladed weapon that had been hanging at his side, spurring the others to do the same. I knew that with my strength, speed, and other demonic attributes that I could probably take all of them, but I didn’t want to kill anyone unless I had to and I really wanted to catch up with who they were pursuing, especially if it was Michelle. So I decided not to waste time and, using as little magick energy as I could possibly put into the spell as I directed my will and said, “Sleep.”

A moment later they were all out for the count and I was running through the forest in the direction that Rebecca had flown off in, back toward the village. That was when I heard a familiar voice shout, “Demon!” It was quickly followed by a gunshot. As I crashed through the tree line and into the open I saw Rebecca falling from the sky, her right wing shredded by buckshot. She hit the ground hard but it looked like she was still moving.

Michelle and Lisa were standing well away from her and I could hear the latter say as I ran toward them, “Damn, that was a good shot, if I had silver or some of Shannon’s special shot I probably could have killed her but at least I clipped her wings. No time to switch loads but a shot to the head should do the trick.” Then she pointed the shotgun back at Rebecca and announced, “I’m Lisa, this is Michelle, and this is my boom stick. Any last words, Demon?”

I allowed my body to change back to my comfortable human form so they would recognize me and I wouldn’t accidentally whammy one or both of them as I shouted, “Lisa, stop!”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 10 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Michelle and Rebecca were standing far enough away from Rebecca that she couldn’t whammy them with Succubus super pheromones, a wise move, especially if they had been dealing with a real Succubus. They were both wearing swimsuits of all things, rather than the outfits that Sarah had enchanted for them for Demon hunting and Lisa was ready to pull the trigger when I called out. At the sound of my voice though both of their heads turned toward me so fast that I thought they might get whiplash.

Although their swimsuits looked dirty and a little worse-for-wear, the girls looked the same as when we had been separated, though Michelle was in her cute and fuzzy cat-girl form. Lisa’s hair was even still the same electric blue that she had magically changed it to before we left Toronto for our ill-fated plane trip. It was so good to see those familiar and friendly faces that I could feel tears coming to my eyes but I knew that I needed to calm them both down and get their attention off of Rebecca and on me.

For a few long seconds, they just stared at me in a mix of disbelief and uncertainty. Lisa still had her shotgun trained on Rebecca though as she asked in a mix of happiness and confusion, “Shannon? Is that really you?”

“It’s me,” I told them with my best model smile as I walked slowly toward them. “You can put down the gun, Lisa. That’s not a Demon. Think about it, use your senses. Does she have a demonic aura like Khinara or any of the other Demons that we’ve encountered since your magick awoke?”

Lisa looked uncertainly from me to Rebecca, her face scrunching up in focus even as she said, “But it…”

“She’s right, there’s no aura. We should hear her out, Lissy,” Michelle interrupted, gently pushing down the barrel of Lisa’s gun so it was pointed at the ground.

I was almost to the pair by that point, trying to keep my walk casual and non-threatening. “Look, I know that she looks like a Succubus but she isn’t really. A lot has happened since we got separated and I’ll be happy to explain to you both once Rebecca has regenerated and can change back to her human form,” I told them calmly. Then I called out, “Hey, Beks! Are you okay over there?!”

Michelle’s eyes went wide and she gasped out, “That’s Becca? But that’s not…”

Thankfully Rebecca was moving and I could almost hear her groan before she snapped back at me, “Of course, I’m not fucking okay! Michelle’s fucking girlfriend fucking shot me! I must have fallen forty fucking feet! God fucking dammit!”

At the sound of Rebecca’s profanity-laden angry response, Michelle’s cute little kitty nose scrunched up as she let out a groan and shook her head. “Okay, yeah, that’s totally Becca. I’d recognize those F-bombs anywhere.”

“Stop whining! You’re still alive and you’ll be all healed up in no time!” I shot back to my fellow pseudo Succubus, trying to keep my tone light and teasing despite the extra volume.

Lisa couldn’t decide who to focus on, her stunned and confused expression kept switching from me to Michelle and Rebecca. Finally, she shouldered her gun and sighed. “Well, damn. I’m not sure what to find more disturbing about this situation; that that seems to be Rebecca, that I shot her, or that the two of you seem to be getting along.”

“As I said, a lot has happened since we got here,” I told them carefully. “I’ll tell you both the whole story once we’re safely away from here. Those goons that were chasing you should be out for a while but I’d rather put some distance between us.”

It took Rebecca over fifteen minutes to heal from her fall and the damage to her wing so she could revert to human form. I supposed that we could try shifting when injured but I wasn’t sure what kind of effect that might have on us so we had both decided to play it safe and heal completely after injuries before becoming human again. She also kept her distance during that time so she wouldn’t accidentally hit Lisa or Michelle with the pheromones or mental whammy and turn them into lust zombies.

From what I had learned from Xuriel’s memories, she had never learned how to turn those particular features off while in Succubus mode. The best that she could do was to focus on a single person to just affect them instead of an entire group, much as the three Succubae that Ziralin, Ellie, and I had encountered at the Alpha Kappa Phi sorority house had with the three of us. She had suspected that real Succubae could turn the ability off and that having it always on while using her Succubus abilities was a part of the curse, a little extra twist of the knife, courtesy of Izhara.

That wouldn’t have surprised me at all since Demons love that kind of shit, at least the ones that I’d encountered. Also, Aarianna had never used the ability during our battle, even though it would have given her an edge. It was probably because she was so pissed off. After all, she had certainly been feeding, and leaving a trail of mutilated male corpses in her wake while doing it. She had likely used the pheromones and mental whammy to help her with that.

Whenever Xuriel had to meet with the other Sentinels she had done so in human mode, keeping her features well hidden, though she had been tempted to whammy Torphael occasionally. Frankly, I couldn’t blame Xuriel for that since from her own memories of him and what he’d done to Ziralin when he granted her his power, it was pretty obvious that the guy was an arrogant ass. Still, not being able to turn these abilities completely off could make things awkward if we had to use these forms around the others often, or during a fight. The only one in our group who wasn’t attracted to women was Jennifer.

Once Rebecca was done healing she returned to human form. As we walked, Michelle and Lisa just stared at the gorgeous auburn-haired girl who looked practically nothing like her old self. I knew that they had a ton of questions but I managed to convince them to wait until we were somewhere a good distance away, where we could safely set up the entrance for one of the portable bunkers.

Soon we were settled into my bunker and eating a light meal of granola bars and some fruit and berries that Rebecca and I had picked a couple of nights ago while leaving our hiding place in the village to get a little exercise. Then I said, “Okay, this is a long story so I’m gonna have to start at the beginning…”

The words had barely started to leave my mouth when Lisa blurted out, “Okay, how the hell did Rebecca turn into a Succubus? I thought you said she was going to turn back to her human form but she’s still Gorgeous McHottie.” She turned to see Michelle giving her a hard look and her face flushed. “What?! C’mon, Kitten, we’ve both got eyes. She’s as hot as Shannon is now!”

“Lissy, if that really is Rebecca, then there’s only one way she could have become like that since coming here. Shannon used magick to do it,” Michelle said with a frown.

“Nope. Shannon hasn’t had any magick since we got here. I was cursed by a demonic witch,” Rebecca taunted me playfully while sticking out her tongue. She had come a long way in the past couple of weeks and we were to the point where we could do some friendly teasing with one another now. The fact that she was telling the complete truth while purposely making sure to make it sound like a joke at my expense, which it was, only made the other girls cast dubious glances my way though.

“I thought we were calling it a blessing, Beks” I complained. I really didn’t like thinking of her change as a curse.

“Okay, just sayin’, but the two of you getting along is kinda freaking me out. And this is coming from the person who was trying to make it happen in the fucking first place,” Michelle griped. “Why’d you change her, Shannon? I thought that you were against using magick like that. You weren’t even sure if you could do it and you said that it could cause more problems for her than it would fix.”

I let out a long sigh and gave Rebecca a dirty look for stirring shit up before I spoke. “Becca was telling the truth. Until we ran into those goons chasing you I haven’t had any magick energy to work with since we arrived on this Plane. I used up everything I had stored getting us here and there’s no ambient magick energy here. I have no idea how those people had magick artefacts but I drained every last drop of magick energy that I could from them, not that it was much.”

“Yeah, I haven’t sensed any either since we got here, not until those guys jumped us last week,” Lisa agreed. “And I had to use most of mine in a fight the moment that we got here. So if you didn’t magick her then how...”

“I am responsible for Becca’s new body but I didn’t use the type of magick that we’ve used before to do it. I did it because we had no magick to defend ourselves, we both needed to survive, and because it could give Becca the body that she wanted.” I turned to Rebecca with a sigh and said, “Show them, Beks.”

Rebecca nodded and rolled up her right sleeve to reveal the blue and black butterfly mark on her shoulder. The other girls let out a collective gasp as their eyes went wide. “Is that a… it looks like a Demon Brand. I can feel it with my magick sense, but there’s no demonic energy at all,” Lisa said in a hushed and almost frightened tone. Given her personal experiences with Demons and their Brands, I couldn’t really blame her.

“That’s because I’m the one who branded her,” I told them solemnly. “I shared my own curse with her. Xuriel thought that it would be a kindness.”

“Wait! You’ve been cursed?! And Xuriel is here?! Shit, why isn’t she helping us?!” Michelle blurted in a panic.

“Okay, see, this is why I wanted to start at the beginning,” I practically groaned as I rubbed at the headache that was forming. “Please, I’ll tell you everything. Just let me start from when we got here so you can follow everything, and don’t interrupt.”

It took a while but I managed to tell the whole story without interruption. Michelle seemed glad that I had used my new abilities to help Rebecca while Lisa was fascinated with the idea of us being able to mimic Succubae, not that she wanted the ability for herself. She never wanted a curse of any kind embedded into her flesh again, even if it was me giving it. She was mostly just relieved at Xuriel’s assurance that the curse didn’t make us Demons, that we were just convincing copies. Of course, that also got them both wanting to see my merged Celestial Mark/Demon Brand.

“She’s not gonna show you guys,” Rebecca warned. “She’s all self-conscious about it.”

I appreciated Rebecca trying to get them off the topic but that only seemed to encourage Michelle further. “What? Is it, like really bad? It can’t be that bad. I mean, only people with magick can see it, right? And we know that they don’t show up on camera so it won’t affect your career. It’s not somewhere really personal, is it? We won’t laugh or anything, Shannon, I promise.”

“Fine,” I grumbled, my face bright red as I turned around, lowered my leggings, and raised my shirt just enough to expose the area of my lower back just above my butt.

“Okay, yeah, totally not where I would get ink if I had the choice,” Lisa offered sympathetically. “It actually looks pretty cool though. It makes you look like a bit of a badass.”

I readjusted my clothes and sat back down, my face still as red as my hair. “It’s your turn for storytime now,” I told them.

With that, Lisa and Michelle began trading off telling us what had happened with them since they had arrived. They had problems right out of the gate. They had appeared on a remote stretch of beach along the ocean, practically right on top of the nest of some sort of giant sea serpent/armadillo type thing. Lisa had used up all of her magick just fending the irate mother off as they ran for their lives.

Until just over a week ago they had been wandering along the shoreline avoiding other nests and searching for some signs of the rest of us, or at the very least intelligent life. The Makers’ goon patrol had found them while they were swimming near the shore, trying to get somewhat clean until they could get a proper bath or shower. They hadn’t expected to be very long and had left everything in Lisa’s porta-bunker except for their towels and the swimsuits and Rosetta Stone pendants that they were wearing.

The goons had used those stun blaster things on them and when Lisa had fallen down screaming Michelle had gone straight into her cat-girl mode to try to protect her. There were too many of them though and Michelle was knocked out by more conventional means in the fight that followed. When she woke up they were in a cage and being treated like wild animals. The damn goons even treated the slaves better than them, none of the goons would get very close to their cage and they were only fed scraps once a day.

For the next eight days, they listened and learned. The picture was pretty bleak; the goons were returning to Kavarik, which I assumed was the city over the mountains, raiding villages and collecting slaves as they went for their boss, Sah Lortae. He was one of the Makers, the rare people of this world who could use the ‘earth power’, and just like in the middle ages on Earth, those select few who had power did whatever they wanted to the majority who didn’t.

The slaves would be used to mine okka, something that they heard the slaves talk about a lot. Lisa suspected that it was some sort of crystal on this Plane that formed from ambient magick energy drifting upward from the planet’s core. Apparently, the Makers were the only ones in this world who could draw on that magick energy and manipulate it to create magical items.

Earlier that night, one of the goons had come close enough to their cage for Lisa to act. They had been talking to their boss over some sort of enchanted mirror that let them hear and see one another. Sah Lortae had wanted to see the two ‘rare and unusual animals’ and when the goon came close enough to give their boss a good view of the girls Lisa had sucked the magick energy from his weapon, armor, and the communication artefact.

While the goon had run off in a panic to report what had happened to their compatriots Lisa had used the stolen magick energy to summon her porta-bunker entrance from where it had been left at the beach. She stepped inside, Michelle held it on the outside of the bars so it was facing outward, and then Lisa just walked right out. After that Michelle just had to teleport to her.

Since Michelle was immune to their weapons and would be fine as long as she could keep her distance she had Lisa step back inside the bunker while she ran for her life, clutching the cloth that it was imbued into. And while she was doing that Lisa got some weapons of their own in case they needed to stop and make a stand. Michelle planned to do that once she emerged out of the woods but when Lisa emerged from the cloth portal she saw Rebecca flying toward them and reacted.

“And that’s when you fucking shot me,” Rebecca grumbled.

It wasn’t long after that when we decided to sleep for the night. I wanted to get up early and enchant some clothes to keep me and Rebecca warm when we crossed through those mountains. Not only was Ziralin on the other side but Lisa and I would be able to refuel there if we could find enough of those okka things or assholes to de-magick. This could be our ticket to finding the others and getting out of here.

I was a bit worried about Michelle and Lisa though. They were both exhausted and hadn’t had near enough to eat or drink for over a week and they were a bit shaken from their ordeal. Instead of going to sleep in their own bunkers, they brought their bedding into mine. It was a bit crowded but we made it work.

After what they had gone through for the last week though, I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to be alone and it was good to have them with us. They both had trouble falling asleep though, and I had woken up a couple of times when one of them cried out in their sleep. Both times, my eyes met Rebecca’s. She was worried too; I could see it as she watched over Michelle.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 11 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was worried about Lisa and Michelle and angry at the way that they had been treated. The Makers, and those who worked for them, were the worst kind of people and I felt the need to do something about them. Not just because they would be heading to the mountain pass too and I didn’t want them coming after us, but because it was the right thing to do.

I quickly got dressed and was about to slip toward the bunker exit when Rebecca asked in a whispered hiss, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to make sure those assholes who were chasing Michelle and Lisa can’t follow us,” I whispered back.

“Not alone you aren’t,” she replied as quietly as she could with a frown and a shake of her head.

I shook my head right back at her. “I need you to stay here in case they wake up, Beks. I know that you want some payback for what they did to Michelle, but she and Lisa shouldn’t be alone after what they’ve been through and I’m counting on you to look after them. I won’t be long and it’s still dark, so it’s the best time for me to go, their species seems to be fairly lethargic when the sun isn’t up.”

She seemed reluctant but after a look at the two moving around in their sleep in the throes of nightmares she muttered. “Fine. Just promise me that you’ll make sure that those fuckers get what they deserve, Shannon.”

“I’ll make sure that they’re properly punished,” I promised with a nod before leaving the bunker. The two moons were still out and judging from their positions I still had a few hours before dawn. I changed into my Succubus form and took to the sky, heading in the direction that we had encountered Sah Lortae’s goons earlier.

They weren’t where I had left them so I assumed that they were either searching for us or had given up for the night after waking up. I kept flying in the general westerly direction that they had come from, keeping my eyes out below me but I didn’t see any slithering figures below, at least not until their camp was in sight. Even in the camp there was not much movement, only four guards awake and patrolling.

I circled above for a few minutes to get the lay of the land. I could feel some magick energy down there and since my goal was to be quick I used most of my gathered magick energy to cast a sleep spell over the entire camp before touching down in the center of the camp. Following the pull of magick, I found anyone with magick armor or weapons and sucked them dry, but not before studying one of the weapons a bit closer.

The weapons housed a small purple crystal inside them and the enchantment on the weapon itself seemed to draw on the magick energy stored within the crystal when used. I figured that the rest of their artefacts must work similarly. I also found a small satchel of those crystals, I assumed that they were replacements since all but a few of them had been drained. I drained those that hadn’t been already and left the satchel where I had found it before focusing on my main goal.

The wagons were large and shoddy-looking with bars and some form of thick locks on their doors. There were six of them in total and I figured that the only empty one was the one that my friends had occupied earlier. The other ones held Nhekarites that were packed in like sardines and many of them didn’t look very healthy.

I could have looked for the keys but instead, I released the intended slaves from my sleep spell, using as little magick energy as I could to wake them. Some stirred faster than others and looked around in confusion and that was when I used my Succubus strength to tear off the poorly-made iron-barred door of the first wagon cage and toss it casually aside. Once I had their undivided attention I told them, “I have stripped your captors of their earth power and they will sleep until well past dawn. Take their remaining weapons and do with them what you will. I don’t care what you do to punish them, it’s not my place to tell you what to do, you’re free now.”

Without another word, I tore the doors off of the other cages and then took to the sky once again as the freed slaves watched me warily. They were leaving their cages as I circled to gain altitude and it looked like they outnumbered Sah Lortae’s snoozing goons by at least four to one. I had a feeling that they would be showing their captors the error of their ways very soon. With my work done, I headed back to join my friends.

Despite my late-night activities, I was the first of us to wake up. So, while the others slept, I placed some enchantments on clothes for me and Rebecca. All three of them were enchantments that Sarah had used on our Hunting outfits. The first of the enchantments was the one to keep us comfortable in any weather so we wouldn’t freeze while going through the mountains, or bake if we encountered another desert. Another enchantment was to make the clothes more resistant to damage and offer slightly more protection. The third and final one was to make them relatively self-cleaning by expelling dirt, grime, sweat, and such.

For me, I chose what Rebecca teasingly referred to as my ‘Cat without hat’ outfit. It was my warm and cozy outfit from Giselle’s winter line with the warm black fleece leggings and matching zip-up hoodie with hot pink accents, kitty ears on the top of the hood, and a fuzzy tail just above my butt. It hugged my whole body and had an adjustable kitty mask inside the hood and built-in fingerless gloves with flip-up ‘paw’ covers that could be pulled over the gloves to make them into mittens if it got too cold. All that I really needed to add the enchantment to other than those two pieces was my sneakers and a pair of socks, and I was set

For Rebecca, I chose some of my leggings, her sneakers and socks, the pair of gloves and the scarf that I had given her, and her hoodie that we had cut slits into the back of. Our wings and tails wouldn’t be protected but I couldn’t really remember them getting cold during the cold nights flying through the desert. It would have to be enough since I used up nearly all of the magick energy that I had appropriated the night before.

The last of that magick energy was used to add Rebecca to the ‘recognized users’ for my portable bunker. Having to remain in physical contact with her every time that she needed to go inside was getting slightly annoying for both of us and there might be emergencies where we wouldn’t have that luxury. I had just finished my work when the others began to wake up.

After I made my way to a nearby stream for some water to boil, we put together a quick breakfast of oatmeal with dried fruits and berries. Lisa and Michelle were both looking better after a night’s sleep in relative safety but I was still worried by how skittish they both seemed. Still, if they wanted to talk about what was bothering them then they would and they probably just needed time to feel safe, process things, and put them in perspective.

As we ate we discussed our plans. “I’d like to get past those mountains as soon as possible,” I told the others. “Ziralin is on the other side, and probably Ellie too. And if that city and those ‘Makers’ are there too, it’s a chance for us to recharge our magical batteries as well. I was thinking of Becca and I taking shifts flying and carrying the portal entrance while the other takes a break in here with the two of you but I can’t be sure how long the air in here would last with the portal folded up.”

“You’re probably not strong enough to carry one of us, huh?” Michelle asked as she considered the problem.

I shook my head. “No, that’s not the problem, we’re pretty strong in our Succubus forms. We could manage it with enough breaks. The problem is that it would be awkward… for all of us.”

“As in, we can’t control the whole pheromones and mental roofie thing,” Rebecca pointed out with an audible groan. “The best we can do is aim it at one person each. And since you’re both attracted to girls… instant lust zombies.”

“Which would make things awkward for you afterward and for us, both afterward and pretty much the whole time that we’re carrying you. You’re my friends, and Lisa is my apprentice so I’d rather not do that, especially with how Lisa used to feel about me,” I said, looking away.

“And, Michelle, you’re my best friend, I don’t want to make things weird between us,” Rebecca admitted. “Well, at least not any weirder than our lives already are at the moment. And I’m pretty fucking sure that zombifying you or your girlfriend would do that.”

Lisa looked toward her Familiar/girlfriend for a moment and they shared a long look before Lisa looked sternly toward me. “Shannon, listen. Yeah, I used to have those feelings for you but I know who your heart and soul belong to, and mine as well. You’re my friend and my mentor, and I think that I’ve gotten to know you pretty well so I know and trust you well enough to realize that you would never abuse such a situation. You would never let yourself even consider it.”

“Yeah, and if I can’t trust my best friend to behave and make sure I don’t do something stupid while under the influence, who can I trust, Becca? It’s not all that much different than if we were drunk or stoned,” Michelle pointed out. “Sure we could do something stupid while fawning all over you but friends see each other do stupid shit all of the time. Good friends don’t take advantage of you, they support you, even when things aren’t ideal. You showed me that, Shannon.”

I cast an uncertain glance toward Rebecca and was about to speak up when Lisa frowned at me. “No, Shannon. I realize that you’re worried about our mental states right now, and I appreciate that you both care that much about us, but you don’t need to treat us with kid gloves. Sure, we’re not at our best right now but I think that’s understandable after what’s happened since we got here.”

“If you’re really that concerned about this whole lust thing, then you can put that magical genius brain of yours to thinking up some sort of anti-Succubus charm while we’re traveling,” Michelle added.

“Kitten is right,” Lisa said with a nod and a smile to Michelle as she held her girlfriend close. “The two of you won’t be able to fight at full strength around any of us if you’re constantly worried about using the lust thing on one of us. Put your mind to a solution instead of just focusing on the problem itself. If anyone can come up with something, it’s you. Until we cross the mountains, the two of us will place our trust in you both. I don’t know about any of you, but I am sooo ready to find the others, get what we came for, and get the hell out of this place.”

They were right, rather than focusing on the problems that our abilities could cause between us and the others, I needed to look for ways to counteract those abilities. An anti-succubus charm would have been nice to have a few months back. Maybe I could look at the protections that Xuriel had placed on my mind and combine them with some sort of altered anti-toxin spell targeting Succubus pheromones? I would definitely need something with a dual-layer of protection to address both the mental and physical aspects.

“Great, now you two have put her into nerd–mode. You do realize that this means we’ll eventually have to listen to some long and insanely technical explanation of how the whole thing works when she does come up with something, right? I swear, she lives for this sort of shit,” Rebecca said with a roll of her eyes. Her tone was teasing and she was smiling though. “If you’re willing to trust us though, I’m all for getting out of here as soon as fucking possible. The sooner we do, the sooner that I can rip out the heart of that hideous bitch who killed my mom.”

Rebecca’s expression turned cold as ice as she spoke those last words, the raw pain and anger still seething in her tone and her eyes. Lisa nodded in grim agreement. “I’ll hold her down while you do it. I have my own score to settle with her.”

Michelle sighed, looking from her best friend to her girlfriend in concern. “Do I really have to be the voice of reason here? Usually, I’m the one with the horrible and impulsive ideas. I would happily help you both kill her if I thought we had a chance but Khinara is one of the strongest Demons there is. You and Shannon barely survived when she transported you to that jungle, Lissy,” she pointed out sadly. Of course, she left out that part of the reason that we did survive was that she had appeared and distracted Khinara at the critical moment.

I looked up at the trio and shook my head. “Actually, I don’t think Khinara’s strength is going to be a problem for long. She was significantly weaker on the plane and she’s only going to continue getting weaker. Casting those portals drained her, it’s probably why she was content to let other Demons finish us off. I mean sure, she made one big enough for a small plane to pass through but other than the portals and a shield she didn’t use any other magick. When we tangled with her before those kinds of spells would have been nothing to her.”

All three of my companions looked at me in sudden wide-eyed interest and Lisa asked, “What do you mean, Shannon?”

“She had trouble just forming that portal and, thanks to Xuriel’s memories, I have a pretty good idea why,” I began to explain. “Besides Becca, I was the only one to get a good look at her. The tip of her tongue and the two arms that I blew off during our last fight haven’t regenerated, and they won’t. If they had been injuries from more mundane attacks, she would have been fully regenerated in a week at the most. I was wearing platinum on my hand when I ripped off her tongue though and it was holy magick that took her arms. She can eat normal food to stay alive but it won’t do much for her. She needs to feed on emotions or she’ll just keep getting weaker and she can’t do that without sucking on brain juice using the needle-like organ that used to be on the tip of her tongue.”

“See! Nerd-mode!” Rebecca exclaimed, pointing at me animatedly. Then she turned a malicious grin toward Michelle and Lisa. “We are going to rip that bitch to shreds.”

It was a short time later that we decided to get underway and got properly dressed for our flight. While I appreciated the trust that Michelle and Lisa were placing in me and Rebecca, the look of pure bliss and devotion that Lisa was giving me as I carried her and we flew through the mountain pass made me feel sick to my stomach. I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.

With that in mind, I pushed us hard. We only landed for breaks when it was absolutely necessary for us to rest or when I started getting hungry around lunch and dinnertime. Rebecca didn’t complain and, from the look on her face, she looked no happier about the situation than I was.

We had just finished dinner and Rebecca and I both felt energetic enough to get underway again so we stepped outside to fold up the portal and change into our Succubus forms so we could get moving again. “Okay, let’s get this train wreck back underway, I want to…” Words abandoned me as I realized that something was suddenly very wrong. A feeling of emptiness hit me like a kick to the chest and I fell to my knees in the snow, suddenly unable to breathe.

“Shannon? What’s wrong? Goddammit, answer me, Shannon!” I barely heard Rebecca’s words. Even the sensation of her shaking me was muted as my heart tightened in fear and loss.

The impact and heat of Lisa’s hand slapping my cheek brought my attention somewhat back to the others. I was only vaguely aware of the tears streaming down my cheeks and the choked whisper from my suddenly too-tight throat. “I can’t feel her.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 12 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Each second that passed without me able to feel Ziralin’s presence in my mind I grew more panicked. This had never happened before, we had been a constant presence at the back of one another’s minds since I had accidentally turned her into my Familiar. It was a constant tugging at my mind that lessened as she grew closer. Since we had gotten stranded on this Plane that tugging had been my lifeline, it meant that the girl I loved was still alive out there somewhere.

Another slap brought me out of those dismal thoughts and I realized that Rebecca was shaking me. “Shannon, stop freaking out and think,” she told me firmly but gently. “You’re the smart one here. Just because you can’t feel her doesn’t mean that she’s dead. Could she just be sleeping in her bunker? They’re separate dimensions right?”

I shook my head and couldn’t speak at first because of the tightness in my throat. I sniffled, wiped freezing tears from my cheeks, and tried again. “Not unless she’s inside with the portal folded up and put away but she wouldn’t be able to get out that way unless she had someone she trusted to open it again. She might trust Ellie with that but she wouldn’t let her face things outside alone unless something really bad happened, Ziralin is much better suited for survival in a place like this. As long as the portal is open we’re not completely cut off from this Plane and can still get a faint sense of one another. She just vanished.”

“This whole world is just weird in general so there could be all kinds of explanations, right?” Lisa encouraged.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. They were right, it could be anything preventing me from sensing her, and if Ziralin was feeling that too then she still wouldn’t stop until she found me. I needed to pull myself together and consider the problem. Finally, I nodded. “You’re right, it’s not like Nhekar has been playing by a rulebook that I’m even remotely familiar with so far, so it could be anything. The last sense I got of her was that she was just beyond these mountains, in that direction,” I said hoarsely, pointing in the direction where I had last felt Ziralin’s presence.

“Good, so we just need to find the general area that you last sensed her in and I can try to pick up her scent or any magic that she or Ellie might have used to track them down. It’s something that Ziralin was pushing while training me and I know her scent pretty damn well. We need to move fast though, so less talking and more flying,” Michelle insisted.

Rebecca and I pushed on through the evening with a new sense of urgency, flying without breaks. The twin moons were well on their way toward the horizon and my arms and wings were aching from flying and carrying Lisa for so long but we were rewarded for our tenacity when we could see the final mountains of the pass parting to reveal what appeared to be farmlands of some sort, vast fields dotted with the occasional homes.

We cleared the mountains and that was when we saw the city beneath us, built along the lower slope of the mountain to our left as if to watch over the farmlands below. Or to look down upon them. It was a city of mostly dull stone and very large compared to what we had seen so far in this world. Some form of magical illumination lit the streets in the center and I could feel magick energy everywhere there. That city was where Ziralin had been when she vanished, I was certain of it.

We found a quiet place to land and once we had returned to human form and Lisa and Michelle had shaken off the effects of our Succubus mojo, Michelle switched to her cat-girl form to try to pick up a trail. We moved as quietly as we could and fortunately, most of the city seemed to be in bed. We only had to avoid a few figures with basic weapons and armor that I thought might be city guards. That was easily done since Michelle’s sharp senses were better than even those of a Succubus, and she picked them up before they got too close and gave us ample time to hide.

It was easy to see the disparity between the Makers and those who were not. The area we had landed in had been run down, the buildings had little more than cloth curtains in bare windows and doorframes to keep out the night’s chill. The roads were roughly hewn from the mountainside, vermin skittered away at our approach and into the shadows, and there was the constant reek of refuse, urine, and shit that made me want to gag.

And then we got to the wall. It was smooth, pristine white, easily thirty feet high, and ran for as far as I could see in each direction and there were regularly spaced large violet okka crystals along the top that could be seen even from ground level. The Makers weren’t subtle, that was for sure, this was a physical and magical barrier to keep out the ‘undesirables’ and keep them from getting any ideas. It was near the gates built into this massive wall that Michelle picked up Ziralin’s and Ellie’s scents. The scents were faint and among many others but there. There were also signs that there had been a fight and afterward the trail led right through those gates.

The massive gates were made of what looked like gold with intricate carvings, dotted with over two dozen fist-sized okka crystals, and were barred for the night with guards standing to either side. Well, they had been standing. Now they were slumbering thanks to a quick sleep spell.

“Well, how do you want to get inside? Should we just fly over?” Rebecca asked as we all considered the wall and gates.

There was a lot of magick energy running through both those gates and the wall. I turned to Lisa and grinned. “You know; I don’t know what my new limits for storing magick energy are. I think that I should find out. Would you like to join me for a recharge, apprentice-mine?”

Lisa grinned right back. “Oh, I don’t mind if I do, oh wise and powerful Master.”

I let Lisa get her fill first and then I sucked every drop of magick energy out of those gates and then started on the wall. I hadn’t taken quite everything in the wall but it was now effectively useless as a magical barrier. I only took that much because I wanted to use that magick energy while it was available and had needed to top myself up a couple of times while I took care of some important precautions before we moved on.

First, I had to cast the anti-Succubus spell that I had come up with on Lisa and explain it so she could use it. It was a combination of the mental protections that Xuriel had cast on me and a spell designed to ward against and filter out harmful gasses and toxins but also targeted toward Succubus pheromones, which I had Rebecca pump out. Much to my surprise, the spell seemed to work and my apprentice prepared to cast it herself.

It took everything that Lisa had to be able to cast it on Michelle. It also required a lot of focus on her part and it wasn’t quite as powerful as I could make it, but we had little choice since only Lisa could cast spells directly on her Familiar. She needed to recharge again afterward but there was plenty more magick energy for her in that wall and I had my second chore to see to while she did that.

Rebecca and I changed into our Succubus forms to rip every one of those fist-sized okka crystals from the door so that I could stuff them with as much magick energy as I could before topping myself up again from the wall. Those crystals could store a lot of magick energy for their size and I wanted to have some batteries available in case we ever ran dry again. Once they were filled and stored in the bunker, Rebecca and I worked together to rip those doors off their hinges as dawn began to break.

“Is this a good idea?” Rebecca asked, placing a hand on my shoulder and looking me in the eyes once we had finished our task. “The sun is rising and we’re going to risk being seen and having to fight our way to your cousin and fiancée. What about the prime directive and all that?”

“Fuck the prime directive, Beks,” I told her seriously. “They already know about people like us. They captured Lisa and Michelle and held them in a goddamn cage for over a week and it looks like they kidnapped Ziralin and Ellie now. I’m done with subtle. If these people have harmed one hair on either of their heads, then I will bring their precious city down around them. Besides, I think that it’s high time that people on both sides of this wall see how the other half lives. Vive la révolution.”

Rebecca nodded and smiled. “Good. I’m always up for sticking it to the rich and popular. I just wanted to make sure that you’re thinking straight and know what we’re probably in for. I’m a bitch, but you’re not that type of person and you’re kinda growing on me, sort of like fungus. I don’t want you to do anything you might regret later, Shannon.”

“Thanks, Beks, you’re growing on me too. Honestly, I’m okay. I’ve seen enough to know that these people hoard and abuse their power for their own sakes. We won’t kill anyone if we can avoid it, only in self-defense if there is no other way. We’re just making their lives a bit uncomfortable and giving those poor people on the outside a chance to fight back if they want to.”

Where the slums that we had landed in had been destitute and decrepit, the Makers’ area of the city was opulent and ostentatious. The streets were paved with smooth white cobblestones and the buildings were large and elaborate in their designs. Luxuries and magical conveniences, from street lights to self-propelled carriages, were everywhere that we looked. There were also a lot of Nhekarites with fancy magical armor and weapons, though those varied in appearance and abilities. Most likely by whatever Maker that they served.

The only thing they had in common was that they tried to get in our way. So we took them down and then refueled any magick energy that we had spent with their little toys. I would have thought that our actions would have raised some sort of general alarm but that didn’t seem to be the case. From what we overheard, they were all so sure of their power over those outside the wall and of the wall itself as a defense, that such a thing didn’t exist.

They didn’t work particularly well together either. In fact, some groups ended up fighting one another in hopes of being the ones to capture us for whatever ‘Sah’ that they happened to be working for. Sah seemed to be a title given to the Makers, and three of them attempted to catch us ‘interesting creatures’ themselves after their subordinates had failed. They weren’t Sahs any longer though because I sealed their ability to use magick once we had incapacitated them.

Michelle’s sharp senses led us to a large building guarded by yet more magically equipped goons. As soon as they saw us they began to talk excitedly about, “More new specimens for Sah Mharis.” Instead of reaching for the more obvious magical weapons that they wore they tossed some red spheres at us while we were still approaching.

“Move!” I called out as I used my wings to get a bit of air. Lisa and Michelle tried to get behind cover as the spheres shattered on the ground, releasing some sort of thick red gas. Rebecca wasn’t quite quick enough to get into the air with me though and passed out. I quickly cast a spell to summon a wind strong enough to blow it back in our attackers’ faces. They only had a few seconds to realize what was happening and panic about it before the gas hit them and they collapsed.

I landed by Michelle and Lisa while we waited for the red mist to clear. “You girls okay,” I asked. Lisa looked okay but Michelle was looking toward Rebecca’s prone form in concern.

Lisa nodded and while Michelle was still looking at Rebecca she mumbled, “Holy crap, whatever that shit is it's fucking strong. I got a little whiff of it but other than a moment of drowsiness, I’m fine.”

“You also have a much more powerful sense of smell than me and weren’t able to get clear as quick as Shannon,” Lisa pointed out, looking over her Familiar in concern. “It’s probably some kind of potent sedative. You would have probably been in dreamland too if you hadn’t had the protection from gasses and airborne contaminants portion of the anti-Succubus spell that I cast on you. Just sit still for a minute, Kitten.”

“Yeah, really potent. Rebecca was out, like instantly, but Succubae have a pretty powerful sense of smell and she didn’t have your magical protection. Still, it affected those jerks almost as quickly,” I said with a glance toward our most recent attackers. “At least now we know how they managed to capture Ziralin and Ellie. I’m going to cast a purification spell on Becca, wake her up, and then drain their weapons to top up my magical fuel tank.”

By the time Rebecca was awake and the goons’ magical equipment was drained Lisa was convinced that Michelle was fine. “Beks, would you mind knocking?” I asked, gesturing to the overly ostentatiously carved wooden door to the building.”

“It would be my pleasure,” the other pseudo-Succubus replied with a grin before punching it hard enough to send splinters of wood flying everywhere and leaving a gaping hole in the door. Then she just grabbed what was left and tore it from the doorframe to toss it casually aside. “Oh look, they left it open. I say we should accept their gracious invitation.”

Michelle quietly chortled beside me as both Lisa and I had trouble keeping smiles off our faces. “You could have just opened it, Becca. Was the gratuitous violence really necessary?” Lisa commented dryly.

Rebecca shrugs and shifted her wings. “They gassed me, tried to capture us for Goddess knows what, they’re probably holding your friends captive, they take slaves, and they’re kinda abusive assholes in general. At times like these, gratuitous violence is always necessary. Not to mention oh-so-satisfying.”

We stepped into the room beyond the front entrance but, besides the Nhekar version of the trappings of wealth, there wasn’t really much to see. The place was huge though. there were ramps leading up to a second floor and hallways branching off in several directions. “Can you sense her yet, Shannon?” Michelle asked in concern.

I shook my head. I couldn’t sense anything yet and as much as I was trying to remain calm and not worry the others, it was starting to really worry me. “Nothing yet. It looks like we’ll have to treat this like a Sorcerer hunt.”

“A Sorcerer hunt?” Rebecca asked in confusion.

“It was one of the first lessons not directly related to magick that Shannon taught me,” Lisa explained. “It kind of works for Demons too. The general rule of thumb is to never look for the victims or possible victims. Unless you know them personally, you won’t get anywhere. Always look for the asshole with the magick. Usually, the victims won’t be far away.”

“Yeah, we just had to narrow down the area first this time to get a better idea of which particular asshole we were looking for,” I added as I reached out with my magick sense. “I sense four potential assholes. One is off by itself and doesn’t feel as powerful as the others. Feels like somewhere up those stairs. The other three are together and somewhere down that hallway. I’m betting that that is where we’ll find Ziralin and Ellie.” I tried to ignore the, “or what’s left of them,” that my fear-addled brain was attempting to add to that and led the way down the hallway in question.

There were several doors down the hallway but none of them were of interest to me. That is until I found one that opened to a spiral ramp going downward. Michelle groaned as she saw where I had stopped us. “Why is it always the basement? Talk about cliché. Can’t people on any Plane of existence do their shady business deals and experiments in a nice sunroom or garden?” I couldn’t respond, my heart was beating too quickly and I was having trouble breathing as I led the way down.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 13 of book five of I Wish. It took a little longer to finish and edit than I was hoping for, but it's still Wednesday somewhere, right? Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

The ramp spiraled downward, lit by the occasional stone in the wall that had been enchanted to provide illumination. We seemed to be near the bottom when I started hearing voices and motioned for the others to stop. “…are indeed fascinating creatures, Mharis. I am waiting for my supplicants to deliver specimens from a similar species that they found by the ocean. They said that one of them changed its form right before their eyes. Have these creatures displayed any similar abilities? Wherever did you find them?”

“Would you believe that they were right here in the city? We would likely not have discovered them at all if they had not been so determined to prevent my supplicants from gathering test subjects from the urchins outside of the wall,” a second voice that I figured must be Sah Mharis responded. “I have not seen them display such abilities but my supplicants told me that they looked like one of us at first. They reverted to these forms not long after my sedative rendered them unconscious. Perhaps we can run some tests once they have awoken? They walk on their hind legs, they spoke, and they wore clothing and carried devices that I have never seen before.”

A dismissive snort heralded the emergence of a third voice. “You are attributing intelligence to lower lifeforms, Mharis. They are mammals. They cannot even reproduce without a second of their species. I can see why Lortae is here, they are our foremost expert on animals, but why did you call me here before the sun was even up? My area of expertise is earth power theory, not beasts.”

“They carried items with them that I could not identify that were overflowing with earth power, Gerta. But that is not the most fascinating thing about them. They radiate earth power themselves. There was not much at first but it has been steadily increasing since they were brought to me, almost as if their bodies produce it naturally. I cannot use okka crystals to draw the earth power from either them or the items that they carried. That is why I summoned you.”

“You are certain about this?” the one called Gerta asked in sudden interest. “The Council says that the okka mine is running dry and no new veins have been found yet. If the rumors about the power vanishing from the crystal mountain are true as well, these creatures could make us the three most powerful Makers in Kavarik. I will need to study them to discover whether we can safely extract the earth power from them somehow. Two will not be enough for our needs though, can you breed more of them, Lortae?”

“They are both birthers, Gerta, note the lactation glands and the genital configuration. That could be better for our purposes though since two birthers will allow us to increase their numbers twice as quickly. Fortunately, I do not require a breeder to impregnate them. I know that it’s in here somewhere… ah here! You see, this artefact is one of my own creations, I have used it before to impregnate infertile birthers among my various specimens. While they are still asleep we can just touch one with the wand to extract a sample of their life code while securing the pad over the womb of the other. It will infuse one of their eggs with the life code gathered from the other specimen.”

“Will it work with two birthers?” Mharis asked.

“Yes, yes,” Lortae answered impatiently. “I have used it with pairs of birthers before, though it only resulted in other birthers being conceived. That would be better for our purposes anyway. Lower your barrier so I can do this while they are still asleep.”

For a second, I was too frozen by what I was hearing to move but then I felt Ziralin’s presence return to my mind. “Oh, hell no. There is no way I’m letting those assholes do that,” I snarled as my wings and tail twitched in anger. That artefact could very well be the solution to the Faery population issue but I was not about to let them knock up my cousin or my fiancée without their consent, like some sort of barnyard animals.

My intent was focused and the spell waited upon my lips even as I turned that corner to see one of the three of the snake-people in the large and dreary dungeon approaching a very naked Ziralin and Ellie. “Don’t move!” I shouted as I released the spell.

With the three of them frozen in place, I quickly set about sealing their ability to use magick. As much as I wanted very much to wake Ziralin and Ellie up and to show my fiancée in particular just how much I had missed her, I knew that it would be best to make sure that their captors weren’t a danger to any of us first. Once that was done, I relieved the one that had been moving toward the pair of Fae of the weird-looking artefact in his hands.

The artefact was literally just a wooden wand tipped with one of those okka crystals connected to a six-inch square silver ‘pad’ by an eight-foot length of braided silver wire. The pad had two long leather straps (which I assumed were to secure it on the specimen on the receiving end) connected to the rear side, to either side of where the braided wire was attached in the center. Magick was definitely weird in this world but I thought that I had an idea of how it worked now.

These people were almost like me. They could just focus on what they wanted to have happen and make it work through willpower, but instead of affecting the world directly, they put that intent and will into artefacts using okka crystals. Then the artefact drew the magick energy necessary for the enchantments to work from the crystals placed inside or attached to the artefact. The Makers didn’t seem to gather and hold magick energy internally like me, Sarah, and Lisa, they just sort of shifted it from the crystals to the objects they were using as artefact.

We didn’t have to play by those rules and these assholes could see it. If they could sense the magick energy that Ziralin and Ellie were producing, then they could probably see how much I was currently holding. The fear in their eyes told me that my suspicions were correct. “What are you? What have you done to us?” one of them asked. I think it was Mharis.

I could have made the spell shut them up as well as freeze them in place but I figured that we might need some questions answered. After a glance at my still slumbering fiancée and cousin, I leveled a glacier cold glare at them. “I’m Shannon. I cast a spell to keep you from going anywhere but don’t worry, it should wear off some time tomorrow. I also took away your ability to use the earth power. You don’t deserve it. Such power could be used to make the world a better place for everyone but you have only been using it for your own self-interest and have caused suffering for those under your power.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not alone. She’s done the same to anyone who was stupid enough to get in our way,” Rebecca added. “We’ve also torn the gates off of that wall that you’re all so proud of and drained it of its power as well. So those people who you’ve been mistreating on the outside should be visiting all of you real soon.”

I turned to my apprentice and her Familiar and finger-flicked the one who had been holding the artifact in the forehead. “Guess what, girls. This is Lortae, wasn’t this the one whose goons held you in a cage for over a week and treated you like animals?”

“Yes. Yes, it was,” Michelle said, her feline face twisting in a mix of negative emotions as she snarled.

Lisa snorted disdainfully. “It’s a shame that they’re all frozen and can’t defend themselves. I’ve been aching to teach this jerk a lesson since I woke up behind bars.”

“Just playing bitch’s advocate here but we could give them a taste of their own medicine,” Rebecca suggested with a grin. “There’s enough fear and hate in these jokers right now to curse them five times over. I don’t really like to think about cursing people but these jerks do deserve some sort of punishment. I’m thinking catgirls since they were so interested in Michelle and they think mammals are inferior.”

Lisa shook her head and sighed as she switched to English so the Makers couldn’t follow our conversation. “They’re just bullies, Becca. They’re not worth the effort and I don’t want to sink to their level.”

Oh, I wasn’t going to do it, I just wanted to see the looks on their faces. Totally worth it by the way,” Becca replied, still grinning like a madwoman. "Besides, I think they’ll get their just desserts when the people outside the wall are inside the walls and start looking for anyone in those fancy robes that they’re all wearing.”

“That’s enough,” I said with a groan. “I want to be done with the place and find the others. I’m to cast the anti-succubus spell on Ziralin and Ellie and then try to wake them up. We should probably return to our human forms first though, Beks.” The other pseudo-Succubus nodded and we both shifted away our Demonic features to become human again, or at least to look like we were.

“Do you need us to do anything while you’re going that, Shannon?” Michelle asked, still looking a bit on edge. “I need something to focus on so I don’t decide to use that jerk as a scratching post.”

“Could the three of you gather anything magical down here? I want these guys to watch me and Lisa drain it all. Except for this thing, the Faery could find it very useful,” I said after thinking for a moment and handing Michelle the weird fertility artefact. “Oh, and question Lortae about how it works exactly and see if you can find Ziralin and Ellie’s clothes and other stuff. Maybe if these jerks are helpful, we won’t leave them in full view of the public until they’re mobile again.”

“Sure,” the catgirl Familiar agreed as she took the device. As I made my way over toward the two Fae I could hear her switch back to the Nhekarian language. “Okay, Assholes, I’m only going to say this once. The two of us would really like to hurt you in indescribable ways. You’d be surprised just how much damage and pain a mortal body can take without dying. As for the Demon here, she wants to do even worse things to you. If you’re really good and answer all of our questions, we might be convinced to not do either of those things.”

“If you don’t want to cooperate that’s cool too. We’ll get to demonstrate on one of you what the others are in for, and I’m sure the others will be super helpful after that. Fun fact: in our language the first five letters of the word ‘demonstrate’ spell ‘Demon’, so guess which option we’d be choosing,” Rebecca’s voice added enthusiastically. She was enjoying this way too much.

I tried to tune out the background noise as I knelt between Ziralin and Ellie and cast the anti-Succubus spell on both of them in turn. I would have rather asked them first but I knew that we might have to fight in a hurry if anyone else came down here and I would rather we didn’t have any issues if I had to change forms suddenly before they were safe from my Succubus charms. Once they were both safe from my supernatural sex appeal I cast a purification spell on them and spoke as reassuringly as I could, “Ellie? Ziralin, my love? Wake up.”

Elsaishe was the first to wake up, her eyes fluttering open only to then stare at me in confusion. “Cuz? Is that really you? I’m not dreaming am I?”

“Nope, it’s really me, Cuz. I figured that you two needed me so we came as fast as we could. Rebecca, Lisa, and Michelle are with me too,” I assured her, squeezing her hand gently.

She was still looking pretty damn confused. “How did you…? There’s no magick here, at least we couldn’t detect any until we found Jalael, and then this city.”

“Rebecca and I had to rely on other skills until we ran into Michelle and Lisa, I’ll explain later. Wait, you foun…mmmmph.” My words were cut off as Ziralin wasted no time in wrapping me up in her arms and laying a kiss on me to show me how very much she had missed me. Her lips claimed mine and the contact was like a shot of adrenaline to my soul. I felt alive again while feeling her lips pressing against mine, her arm around me, and her free hand gently caressing my cheek. This was how things should be. This was where I belonged, in her arms.

I didn’t realize just how much I had missed her, how much I needed her by my side until then. I had to focus on surviving but now I just wanted to focus on her. I eagerly returned her kiss and it was taking every bit of self-control that I had to keep my wings and other Succubus features from popping out in my love and lust for her as I passionately pulled her closer and returned her display of love with my own.

We finally broke our amorous contact, both of us breathing heavily and gasping for air as we stared into one another’s eyes. “Babe, are you okay?”

Of course, I was okay, I had my soulmate back. It wasn’t until she had asked that I realized that tears were streaming down my face. “I… I couldn’t feel you. I was afraid that I’d lost you. Don’t scare me like that again.”

“I was worried sick about you this whole time, Babe,” she replied, wrapping me up in her arms again. “There was no magick and you were so far away. The pull was so strong that I couldn’t sense your emotions or anything. How did you…? Holy shit… just how much magick energy do you have stored right now? That’s a lot more than you can usually contain.” Her eyes went wide as she pulled away to give me a worried look.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” I said, not really eager to tell it. So I changed the subject. “You two first; Beks, Michelle, and Lisa are dealing with the jerks who were imprisoning you and going to experiment on you, and trying to find your clothes and stuff. So, you found Jalael?”

“We didn’t just find Jalael,” Ellie said with a grin as a pair of white wings appeared from her back. “Everything was kind of boring for us when we first got here, the lack of magick and that sun were pretty weird but we were able to blend in with a caravan of locals with glamours until we learned the language. It turns out they were taking supplies to a fort near this huge mountain of purple crystal with a magic barrier keeping the locals out. The people that the locals call the Makers have been trying to get past that barrier for a long time.”

“Yeah,” Ziralin said with a laugh, “They took us exactly where we needed to go within like, four days of getting here. The Makers are assholes, by the way, they hurt some people for no good reason, and Ellie and I tried to protect them. I chased them off while Ellie used one of our first aid kits to patch up the injured.”

“It turns out that Jalael was expecting whoever got Torphael’s powers and memories to bring some candidates here when the time came that their powers were needed but he was waiting a looong time,” Ellie added. “Like, way before the disaster that made magick here go all wonky and wiped out the previous species of intelligent life on this plane.”

“After Ellie got her wings we started making our way toward you, flying as fast and for as long as we could. We found this city and since there was so much magick around I thought it might be a good place for you to refuel if you needed to so we decided to wait. We wanted to try to get inside the walled area to check it out but the goons of one of those Makers were trying to snatch kids off the streets and we got in a fight. Next thing I know; you’re waking us up,” Ziralin finished with a shrug.

“That fight would have turned out differently if we hadn’t drained our magick reserves by flying here and then casting glamours to blend in,” Ellie grouched. “I could have used my new Celestial powers, though I’m not sure how good they’ll be fighting anything besides Demons, they’re actually mostly for support. It turned out that Jalael was looking for someone who was compassionate and had a desire to help and protect others. I guess that I fit the bill, but I wish you’d been with us, Cuz. I think that you would have been a better candidate.”

I shook my head. “No, Ellie, he made the right choice. I wouldn’t have been able to receive his power and memories anyway. I already have Xuriel’s, I have since my birthday, they were just sealed until we got here and I needed skills other than magick to survive. It’s a really long story and I’d rather wait until we’re somewhere safe before I tell it.”

“You’re hiding something, Shannon,” Ziralin said, taking my hand in hers and squeezing it. “What are you worried about?”

“Come on, Cuz, you can tell us. I showed you my wings, I wanna see yours too,” Ellie pleaded.

“It’s… complicated. As I said, it’s a long story and some parts might bother you both,” I said with a sigh. “Like the wings, the tail, and the horns to name a few, given the history that the three of us have with Succubae. I just have to keep them from seeing anything that might freak them out or make them ask questions until I can break it to them gently first,” I thought nervously.

Of course, that was when Rebecca came over and deposited the pile of their stuff on the floor beside me and the two Fae. “Hey, Jockettes, ‘sup? Michelle said that should be all of your stuff. For some reason those jerks are being very cooperative,” she said with a grin. “She and Lisa are gathering up the magical stuff now so we should be able to get the hell outta here as soon as they’re done and you two are… dressed.” That was about when she realized that they were both naked and turned quickly around, her cheeks bright crimson.

“Great timing, Beks,” I thought bitterly. Maybe they wouldn’t notice that she looked like a completely different person. Of course not, how could I even entertain that thought?

It was made quickly obvious that they did indeed not recognize her. Though the way that she had greeted them had probably been intended to let them know it was her, just in case I had actually been smart enough to explain things. That only seemed to leave them more confused and Ellie was gaping at the auburn-haired beauty with such interest that I had to double-check that Becca’s more demonic features weren’t on display. “Whoa, who is that?” my cousin asked in a stunned whisper.

Ziralin turned to give me an uncertain and suspicious look, those feelings were echoed in her mind as well, mixed in with a lot of worries, worry for me. Of course, she knew that I wasn’t telling her everything, and the way that she was sniffing the air had me worried too. “This could be very bad if she’s smelling what I hope she isn’t smelling.”

The love of my life calmly raised a single silver eyebrow and said, “Who is that and why do you both smell like Succubus pheromones? It’s very faint, but after that incident at the sorority house, I’d recognize that scent anywhere. You’re not really acting like yourself either, you’re really nervous, Shannon. I think you have some ‘splainin’ to do.” Then she turned toward Becca and her gaze immediately turned into a baleful glower. “As for you, if you’ve been fucking with Shannon’s head, then there will be nowhere on any plane of existence where you will be safe from my wrath.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 14 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Rebecca bristled at the threat and looked like she was going to snark something right back at my fiancée but I gave her a warning look and she held her tongue. She had every right to defend her honor but if this devolved into a shouting match then things would only get worse. I tried to quell the suspicious looks in Ellie’s and Ziralin’s eyes by taking one of each of their hands in mine.

“Ellie, Ziralin…I’m not asking either of you to trust her yet,” I said, giving them both an imploring look. “I’m asking you to trust me and just wait until we’re through a portal and meeting up with some of the others. I promise to explain everything then but this is a long story and I’d rather not go through it more times than I have to. Haven’t I earned that type of trust? I’m not being coerced and if she really meant you harm and was controlling me, she could have just killed you while you were still unconscious.”

Ziralin looked into my eyes, sighed, and then after a moment, she nodded. “You have. I… just… I’ve been worried sick about you this whole time and now there are those pheromones and you’re acting like you’re scared of us.”

I leaned over to kiss her, putting all the love that I had for her into both the action and my thoughts before pulling away. “It’s not either of you, I promise. There’s an issue with the Mark that I got from Xuriel and I’m just worried that it will make you see me differently. Can you please get dressed? I’d like to leave soon so we can get this talk over with.”

With that, I turned around and headed toward where Michelle and Lisa were waiting with our three frozen captives. To my surprise, Rebecca placed a hand tenderly on my shoulder as we made our way over and whispered, “You need to chill about this Shannon. I know that I’m probably not the best to give this kind of advice, but my mom used to tell me, ‘If people truly care about you for who you are inside, the outside won’t matter.’ I think I can see what she meant now because of you.”

“Thanks, Beks, you’re right,” I whispered back gratefully. Right then, that was exactly what I needed to hear. The upcoming explanation was still going to be awkward as hell, but I needed to have a little more trust in the people that I loved. As long as I could show them that I was still the same person inside, their feelings for me wouldn’t change, we were all better than that.

Michelle and Lisa had gathered up all of the magical artefacts and, after slipping the one that I wanted for the Faery into my portable bunker, Lisa and I drained the rest of them of magick energy in front of the former Markers, including the cage that had held Ellie and Ziralin. Lisa hadn’t used much magick since she last topped up so most of them were drained by me. It wasn’t quite enough to fill me to my new limit, but considering how much magick energy I already had stored, I was hoping that it would be enough to find the others and leave this plane of existence.

“So, what do we do with these assholes?” Michelle asked once we were done and a fully clothed Ziralin and Ellie had joined us.

I shrugged and decided to leave it up to the others. “Well, I’m inclined to just leave them here now that their ability to use magick has been sealed, but I’m not really the victim in this. You, Lisa, Ziralin, and Ellie were the ones who were caged with the intent to breed you, experiment on you, and/or keep you as pets. If there’s something else you’d like to see done as an appropriate punishment, then I’ll help. But no magical punishments.”

“I think that sealing their ability to use magick was appropriate, Shannon. I say that we just leave them outside this big house where people can easily find them before your spell wears off. Let their own people decide their punishment. They’ve suffered far more than we have,” Lisa suggested.

“I… You’re right Lissy,” Michelle agreed, letting out a small sigh. “As much as I would love to punish them personally, this isn’t our world so it’s not our place to say how they’re dealt with.”

“Yeah, I can get behind that, they’ve hurt those people outside the walls a lot worse than they did us. The bastards take slaves and use orphans as test subjects. We should just stick them somewhere they can be easily found,” Ziralin said with a shrug. “Not like we suffered much, we were asleep the whole time.”

“Well, we did wake up naked, not that that really bothers either of us,” Ellie pointed out. “But I guess that I agree with the others, we should just take the trash outside and then get out of here so Shannon can tell us what’s going on, who the hottie is, and what happened to Rebecca.”

Rebecca didn’t have an opinion one way or the other it seemed. She did blush a bit at Ellie calling her a hottie, but sighed and muttered, “I am Rebecca.”

My cousin and fiancée both gave me a long hard look at that. “Long story, and it’s all tangled up in the stuff with Xuriel and how we survived to get here. If you want to hear it, let’s drop these jerks outside and get out of here,” I told them.

Ellie, Ziralin, and Michelle hauled the Nhekarites upstairs physically to preserve the magick energy that Lisa had stored, with Michelle leading the way. It made sense since Lisa’s Familiar and the two Fae were the strongest of us. Well, Rebecca and I were probably stronger than all of them but to use that strength we would have needed to reveal our Succubus forms.

While we waited for them to return, I cast a locator spell to track down my sister and Jennifer. I figured that they would either still be with the partner that they entered this Plane with or at least somewhere nearby. Sarah’s signal was really far away, I thought they might actually be on the other side of the planet. Jennifer seemed somewhat closer, but still far away. At least being able to track them confirmed that the two of them were still alive.

It didn’t really matter which group we traveled to first, they were both probably in the same general situation with no magick energy to draw on so they could use their Celestial forms. I figured that if we got delayed with the first group though that Sarah and Annie were more suited to survive in the long term. Mason might be psychic, but his gift wasn’t always completely reliable and while he and Jen were both still teenagers, my sister and Annie were adults and genuine badasses.

As soon as the other three returned, I cast a portal to Jennifer’s location. I had never had a chance to use the spell myself but Sarah had used it several times since the first time that she used it to get us to Ziralin’s bedroom when she had accidentally let her mom see her without a glamour and outed herself to her family. I had plenty of secondhand experience with it too since my ‘Xuriel’ memories indicated that she had used this spell often.

I stepped through to hold the portal open while the others followed and the moment that I was on the other side Jen’s familiar voice squealed, “Shannon! I missed you so much!” I was tackle-hugged before I could even get a look at my new surroundings but at least everyone else got the same treatment when they came through. Except for Rebecca, of course.

“See, I told you they were coming,” Mason teased his girlfriend once we were all through and I had closed the portal. “It’s good to see you guys again. I guess that we just need to find Sarah and Annie now.”

“Yep, and I can cast another portal right now so we can do that,” I confirmed, eager to see my sister again as well.

“No! Wait! Not Yet! You have got to see something first,” my best friend insisted excitedly as she half-dragged me along behind her. We were in a small chamber of some sort and the walls, ceiling, and floor were all made of some kind of metal that I couldn’t identify. The only things of interest were the pale blue lights embedded in the ceiling, the entrance to one of their portable bunkers along one wall, and what looked like two metal doorways on opposite sides of the room.

“Jen, stop!” Ziralin called out. “Shannon promised me and Ellie an explanation when we got here and I want to hear it.”

“But this is huge, and it might help us find Jalael!” Jen quickly protested.

My fiancée quickly countered, “There’s no need to find Jalael, Ellie and I already did and she’s got her wings.”

“What?! Congrats, Ellie! Omigod, we have all six Sentinels now. If Xuriel’s ready to help us, we can take down the Demon King and his Generals! You still have to see this though!” My best friend was as excited as I had ever seen her while Mason just watched her with a patient smile, probably waiting for his girlfriend to get it all out of her system.

“Actually, we have all seven Sentinels,” I corrected with a sigh.

Ziralin gave me another long appraising look and I sighed again as she said, “Jen, no. I can appreciate that you’re excited about this, I’ve known you longer than anyone here, but whatever this groundbreaking discovery is, it can wait. I’ve been worried sick about Shannon since I arrived on this rock and frankly, everything I’ve seen and heard since she found us hasn’t made me any less worried now. Explanations now, Shannon. Please.”

Well, this was awkward. Lisa, Michelle, and Rebecca were all looking away, either feeling guilty for not letting Ziralin and Ellie in on the secret yet, or unsure of what to say to make this any less tense. Ellie and Ziralin were looking at me and Rebecca with a mixture of concern, uncertainty, and possibly even suspicion. Jennifer looked downright confused, and Mason didn’t look much better off as he looked like he was trying to solve some sort of complex mental puzzle.

“I did promise,” I agreed as I walked over to Mason. “I need to cast a spell on Mason first though. Then we can have ‘show and tell’ safely.”

Mason’s eyes widened and I could tell that he had figured out the puzzle with his intuition, or at least part of it. “Um… yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” he quickly agreed.

I quickly cast the anti-succubus spell on our resident psychic and then I stood where he, Jennifer, Ziralin, and Ellie could all see me and I could see them, so I could monitor their body language and facial expressions. Then I swallowed the lump in my throat and began to speak. “When we arrived on Nhekar, I noticed pretty quickly that there was no ambient magick energy to draw on. I had used everything that I had to open the portal one last time for me and Rebecca and then to make sure we couldn’t be followed. Things weren’t looking that great for us.”

“Ya think?” Rebecca snarked.

I tried not to get too upset with her for responding, this situation was tense and snark was her defense mechanism. “Anyway, we were in the middle of a huge desert with some pretty damn terrifying predators, I had no magick, and when Rebecca wasn’t withdrawn and depressed from losing her mother, we were constantly fighting. Our chances of survival were pretty slim. That’s when Xuriel appeared.”

“What, so she gave you her Mark?” Jen asked in confusion.

“No, I’ve had it all along, ever since my birthday wish,” I explained with a shake of my head. Then I began to relate Xuriel’s story, making sure not to leave anything important out. Finally, I sighed and said, “So you see, she wasn’t bound to a place, she was bound to our bloodline and she used my birthday wish to make me into the magical prodigy that she had waited thousands of years for.”

“Holy shit, I can’t believe that Xuriel was the first Cailleach Dearg,” Elsaishe said in a hushed tone. Then her brow furrowed in anger. “And she was inside you all that time, she could have unsealed the mark at any time and helped us when we needed it.”

“She didn’t want to reveal that I had her Mark so she sealed it and slowly fed me memories or skills in my dreams or as I needed them and kept anything I didn’t need behind a mental barrier until I was ready to fight the Demon King. She did help us though. She was the one who put the protections on my mind, clued me in about the Demon Brands, and snapped me out of that Succubitch’s control at the sorority house. She had to act subtly. When we got here though, she had no way to help me and Rebeca survive except to come clean with me and unseal my Mark,” I explained.

Everyone seemed to be quietly taking it in so I took a deep breath and continued. “The problem is that her Mark was changed, it merged with the Demon Brand. So I didn’t get a Celestial form, I got her curse and my ability to gather and manipulate magick energy became way more powerful. I had to use the abilities that came with the curse to survive and to share my curse with Rebecca. This is why I didn’t want to show you or Ellie, my love, I was afraid of how you might react.”

With that, I took one more deep breath and then shifted into my Succubus form. “Before he was cursed, Xuriel was prideful. He was proud of being a man, overconfident in his power as a Celestial, and he hated Demons with a passion. Izhara wanted him to suffer so she cursed him into the body of a young human girl, a mortal with the only option for power or a change in form to be those of a Succubus. It was only some weird twist of fate that the Mark and the Brand merged and she retained a mutated and more powerful version of her original Celestial ability.”

Before anyone else could say anything Rebecca had changed form as well, placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder, and stated clearly, “And before any of you start thinking of giving Shannon shit for cursing me, I don’t see this as a curse. I asked for this. She gave me what I always wanted and a way to survive in this world and it wasn’t an easy choice for her to make. She did this for me, and I’m grateful.”

“They may look it, but they’re not real Demons. They don’t have a Demonic aura because they’re still the same people on the inside. They’re still human, just cursed. They can just look like Succubae and use similar abilities,” Lisa pointed out as the others squinted their eyes as if looking for an aura.

“That’s how Xuriel managed to get the drop on Demons and turn her curse into a good thing, she had no aura, Demon or Celestial. She used that to strike from the shadows and take Demons by surprise, it’s how she got her title,” I added. “She was like this for most of her time as a Sentinel but she hid from even her friends. I don’t want to do that.”

“Shannon has all of Xuriel’s knowledge and abilities when she sealed her powers, it’s really not all that different than a Celestial mark. She’s had the Mark all along too so she’s still the same person that we’ve known all this time,” Lisa insisted.

I could have sworn that I saw Ziralin and Ellie both breathe a sigh of relief as I tried a smile. “Ummm… yeah, we’re still us, just with some new abilities, and I have some new memories, just like you when you got your Marks.”

“This is going to take some getting used to, Cuz. I can understand why you were worried about telling us but I know it’s still you in here. You’re unique, and I’d know you anywhere. I can sense the Faery blood, the power of the Cailleach Dearg, and the flavor of your magick. You’re still the same person who brought me into your family and held me when I cried myself to sleep,” Ellie said as she nearly crushed me in a hug. Once she had let me go she pointed at Rebecca, “Just sayin’, she doesn’t look anything like Rebecca though, she’s really hot now.”

“And one hundred percent female too,” Rebecca shot back with a grin. “Shannon thinks that the curse is meant to keep our human bodies looking like our Succubus forms, sorta as a reminder.”

Ziralin crossed the distance between us in a heartbeat, wrapped her arms around me, and kissed me passionately until we both needed to come up for air. I was still feeling giddy from the kiss when we could breathe again and she spoke. “You should have trusted us, Babe, but I can understand why you were so tense now. I should have trusted you more too but I was worried that you were under her spell once I smelled those pheromones. This changes nothing, you’re still the girl that I want to spend eternity with. Out of curiosity though, why am I not wrapped around your little finger right now?”

“With her and Becca both being the way they are now, Shannon came up with an anti-Succubus spell to protect us all from the effects of the pheromones and the mental whammy. That’s what she cast on Mason, so one of them doesn’t turn him into a drooling idiot under their complete control. It makes things awkward afterward, trust me,” Michelle explained. Then she turned to look at the two Fae. “She cast the same spell on you two while you were still asleep to protect you because she didn’t want one of them to accidentally whammy you after your experience at the sorority house.”

Jennifer awkwardly raised her hand as if we were in class and then blushed as she realized what she was doing and just spoke. “It would be nice to know what you’re both capable of other than Shannon’s magick. It would improve our teamwork and Mason and I have never fought a Succubus. So what abilities do Succubae have exactly, other than turning men’s minds to mush?”

“We can fly and regenerate really fast from injuries. I lost half of my wing when Lisa shot me but it grew back within ten minutes,” Rebecca said, teasing the Witch with the electric blue hair.

“I said I was sorry! We didn’t know it was you and we were already being chased by people wanting to put us back in a cage,” Lisa grumped.

“Other than that we’re really strong, fast, and fairly agile, but only in our Succubus forms. Our tails and claws can be used as weapons when fighting close up and we can use negative feelings to place curses on other living beings, though we’re not really comfortable using that, and the more specific a curse the better,” I explained, shuddering as I recalled my explosive curse on the Tuskreaper. “We can also shapeshift to change our appearances but we're limited to female forms. We’ve been working on partial shifts from our human forms too, like staying human but only gaining the eyes, tail, wings, or something from our Succubus forms.”

“Is there anything that we should watch out for? Your promise ring is platinum, is it going to kill you if you try to put it on? And don’t Succubae have a very specific diet?” Ziralin asked in concern as she held me.

“If we had to drain men to live, this planet would have killed us already,” Rebecca pointed out with a laugh.

“We don’t really have any of the negatives of being a Succubus unless you count not being able to control the pheromones and mental allure, but I think that was part of the curse. The best that we can do is sort of direct it at a single target. We don’t need to feed on male tantric energy to live and silver, platinum, and holy magick won’t cause us any problems either,” I told my beautiful Fae Familiar and fiancée before kissing her tenderly and wrapping my tail around her thigh, causing her eyes to widen as my tongue probed her lips and gained entry to dance eagerly with her own until we were once again forced to come up for air.

“I… uhh… see,” she gasped out. “So, all of the…benefits without much of a downside. I gotta say though, the horns are adorable, and your ears are pointed in this form too. I’ll need to be careful of those fangs though, I nearly cut my tongue while we were kissing just now.”

“TMI! Geez, get a room, you two,” Rebecca teased.

“Beks, I’ll have you know that the Faery have no problems being intimate with others in public. Succubae shouldn’t either, even fake ones,” I teased back, causing the other pseudo-Succubus to turn red.

“Is it weird that I think the strangest thing about this whole situation is those two getting along?” Ellie asked, eyes darting between me and Rebecca.

“No,” Ziralin, Michelle, and Lisa all replied in unison.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 15 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

With the situation now decidedly less tense, everyone seemed to relax, at least until Ziralin’s stomach growled loudly. We couldn’t be sure when the last time that Ellie and Ziralin had eaten was and it had definitely been a while for me, Rebecca, Lisa, and Michelle. That meal had been followed by me and Rebecca flying through the mountains as fast as we could while carrying Michelle and Lisa. We hadn’t stopped for breaks and then after that, we had made our way through the city as Michelle tracked Ellie and Ziralin by scent, and there had been a lot of fights and spells cast on the way.

As a result, it seemed that we were all very hungry. So we grabbed some supplies out of what turned out to be Jennifer’s portable bunker and we took the time to make a meal and eat it together. It wasn’t anything special, just some veggies and pasta with some sort of meat that Mason had determined was safe and had dried and salted to keep longer, all made up into a thick and filling stew. He had also made a bunch of jerky from the meat, which wasn’t half bad. Along with some sodas and some crackers, it was a pretty good meal, especially the company after being away from my friends for so long. As we ate, Jen and Mason told us what had happened to them since arriving on Nhekar.

They had arrived in what seemed to be a desert, much like Rebecca and I had. It wasn’t made of black sand like the one we were in but desolate red dirt and stone canyons for as far as the eye could see. Jen said it kind of reminded her of pictures that she had seen of Arizona or Mars. They also realized early on that there was no magick energy for them to draw on in their Celestial forms. They had been hoping to just fly over the desert while they searched for the rest of us but seeing that they were effectively grounded and couldn’t use their Celestial abilities, they were forced to just pick a direction and walk.

Mason was sure of their direction from the start, he had a very strong sense that there was something important in the direction that they were traveling and that we would find them there. So they followed his instincts and his psychic gift helped them to avoid danger, for the most part. There wasn’t much alive, at least that they saw, and what there was avoided them at first as they followed the trail that Mason had chosen. Their luck ran out six days ago.

“So, we were making our way through this really narrow canyon,” Jennifer explained as we all listened intently, “when BAM! This pack of freaking velociraptors come running out of a cave straight at us.”

Rebecca looked at me as if to say, “And this is your best friend?” before turning to Jen and interrupting her. “You can’t be serious. I mean sure, I know there are some nasty predators out there, I saw the corpse of the Tuskreaper that Shannon killed. Okay maybe not the whole thing, but its guts were all over the place and its head was whole. That thing was scary enough without being attached to a body. We saw some big bear-like things in the forest too, but velociraptors?”

“I’m totally serious here!” Jen vowed, crossing her heart.

“She is,” Mason interjected. “They probably weren’t exactly like the velociraptors from our world millions of years ago but they looked pretty damn close, not to mention scary as hell coming at you in a pack. We had to say to hell with it and change to our Celestial forms, planning to use what little magick energy that we did have stored to fly up to the top of the canyon and get away from them.”

“But the leading one grabbed on to Mason’s leg when we did that. It was a good thing that his Celestial form comes with that shield and head-to-toe armor or that thing would have taken part of his leg off. You should see the bruises, they’re still fading,” Jennifer said as she snuggled closer to her boyfriend and softly caressed his right leg.

“That damn thing held on, all the way to the top of the canyon wall, and I had to beat it to death with my shield before I could get it to let go. And I figured that turnabout was fair play, so now we’re eating it,” Mason said with a grin.

“You mean… this is…?” Ellie asked as she looked dubiously at her stew.

“Yup, waste not, want not,” Mason said, still grinning from ear to ear.

“It’s actually not that bad,” Rebecca said with a shrug as she continued eating her jerky.

I took a bite of the jerky and Rebecca was right, it wasn’t all that bad. I had certainly eaten worse things. It was while I was pondering that Jen continued the story. “Anyway, after Mason pried that thing off his leg, we saw this place way off in the distance. As soon as we saw it, Mason knew that this was the place that we needed to go to. It turns out that it’s a huge monument to the people who lived here before a disaster wiped them all out. I think that they knew that they were going extinct, so they built this place to let people who came to this planet know who they were.”

Once we were finished eating I was anxious to find Sarah and Annie but Jen insisted that we take a look at her discovery first. “C’mon, guys, this is epic!” she enthused as she half dragged me and Ziralin to one of the doors. Apparently, this was some sort of antechamber and the door that we were heading to was where the main event was. The door on the other side of the room led outside.

I had to admit that I was curious as she dragged us along and the others followed behind, so I figured that we would humor her and look at whatever statue with alien writing was inside the room that we were heading toward. Even if we couldn’t read it, we might learn something interesting and it wouldn’t hurt to pay our respects since we were here anyway. Only what we found wasn’t just some statue with alien writing.

The room was smaller than I expected, much smaller than the antechamber, maybe ten by ten feet square. The only thing in the room was a black pedestal that was roughly a foot square and four feet in height. The top surface seemed to emit a glow similar to the strange pale blue lights in the ceiling, only the glow was gold instead of blue. There were also these two odd tentacle-looking things emerging from the sides of the pedestal that looked to be made of the same black metal.

“One of you put your hands on the top,” Jen encouraged. “Only one person can use it at a time but there is so much information in there and the rest of us can at least watch. I’ve been using it off and on since we got here three days ago to try to learn as much about them as I can.”

Since I seemed to be the closest and nobody else was volunteering, I gently placed my hands on the glowing gold surface. I almost yanked them right off again once those two tentacle things started to move and lit up. In an instant they were moving up and down my body, the ‘heads’ hovering mere millimeters away and making humming sounds as the lights bathed my skin.

Finally, the two tentacles reached up to touch either side of my head and I heard that slight humming increase for a moment before a translucent image of what I assumed was one of the planet’s former residents appeared before my eyes. She was naked and very obviously female, and their species didn’t look too much different from humans.

If she was anything to go by, they were bipedal with light purple skin and had opposable thumbs and three long fingers on each hand. Her limbs were long and slender and her face a little flat with an almost feline nose and small round ears on the sides of her head that were higher than on a human’s head, almost on top. She had large dark eyes that had no whites, or even irises from the look of it, and her dark purple hair seemed to cover not only the top of her head but also around her neck like a lion’s mane.

Once the humming ceased I heard and saw the image say, -= Scan complete. Mental interface achieved. Welcome traveler, and thank you for visiting the Sanori Memorial. This planet was once home to the Sanori people and this archive contains all that is known of our culture, history, biology, and technology. This unit will respond to your thoughts and engage with you in your own language so that you may learn about our people. =-

“Damn. If this one device is any indication, these people were a lot more advanced than on my Earth. I wonder how they got wiped out,” I thought as I stared at the hologram.

-= Our sun was reaching the end of its natural life, at least in a state that the people on our planet could survive, =- the image responded to my errant thought. -= Desperate to save our home and our people from this disaster, we designed a technology to preserve it in its red giant stage. It required the use of a type of energy that we had only recently discovered and barely understood. In using it we saved our sun and doomed ourselves. =-

“What kind of technology could possibly prevent the death of a star?” I wondered aloud in awe.

The image before me changed to show a view of a red star encircled by a massive structure, almost like an orb-shaped web. -= The Nisadri Web was designed to use the Sun’s own energy to power a system that would create helium and hydrogen and inject them directly into the Sun’s core. It was the single greatest technological achievement in our history. =-

“That’s no moon,” I heard Rebecca say in awe behind me. Jeez, all the teasing she had given me about being a geek and she lets out a Star Wars reference? I was so going to rib her about that later.

“Holy crap!” I sputtered as I stared at the image and processed what the hologram had said. “That thing is kinda like a reverse Dyson Sphere! How the hell could they just ‘produce’ helium and hydrogen though? Let alone inject it into the Sun’s core?”

-= Devices interfacing with large korab crystals were included in the Nisadri Web to produce the necessary elements and transport them into the core. It was determined that the korab crystals would absorb ambient universal essence emitted by the Sun, allowing these devices to work indefinitely without being replaced, =- the now disembodied voice replied.

“Korab crystals? She’s probably talking about those okka crystals,” I told the others thoughtfully.

The image changed again to a familiar-looking purple crystal. -= Korab crystals were discovered by Ogan Korab. They are a rare type of crystal that we discovered absorbs and stores a type of energy that we had never known of previously. This energy was named universal essence. It was named this because once we learned to identify it, we were able to detect it everywhere; in the earth, the air, and even being emitted by the Sun itself. As we searched for ways to utilize this power we discovered that rare individuals could, when in direct contact with a korab crystal, utilize that power and create devices that could do things previously undreamed of by our people. =-

Since the voice had just confirmed my suspicion, I had a very bad feeling about where this was going. They used a power that they couldn’t possibly fully understand yet and I had a sinking suspicion that it bit them in the collective ass. This was exactly why Sarah had taught me that we couldn’t let the general population learn about magick. “Let me guess, there was a problem with either the korab crystals or the universal essence when the Nisadri Web went active.”

-= Correct, =- the hologram agreed as it returned to the appearance of the lavender-skinned woman. -= As the Nisadri web was activated there was an unexpected chain reaction after a solar flare erupted, causing a solar storm of unprecedented strength. The devastating storm rendered much of our technology useless, killed off nearly all life, and likely permanently damaged the flow of universal essence on our planet. Those few of the Sanori to survive lived long enough to build this monument before succumbing to radiation sickness. =-

I took a step back my guts twisted in knots. As soon as my hands left the top of the pedestal the tentacles lowered back to the sides and the small room fell into a deathly silence. We were all barely able to breathe, let alone figure out what to say. This place wasn’t just an archive and a monument, it was a cautionary tale too. “You know, if Sarah were here, she would be saying that this is exactly why the existence of magick can’t become common knowledge,” Ziralin pointed out, breaking the silence as she wrapped me up in her arms.

“Yeah, this is why my mom says that magick is a responsibility and privilege, not a right,” Ellie agreed.

“Fuck, Shannon, even after you changed me I thought that you were being a bit extreme about how magick becoming common knowledge would be a bad thing. I thought, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? I guess you were right,” Rebecca said, shaking her head with a stunned look on her face.

“This, right here. This is the worst that could happen,” Lisa muttered grimly as she held Michelle close.

Michelle leaned into her girlfriend’s embrace turning her head away from the pedestal. “As interesting as learning about the Sanori might be, I really want to get the fuck out of here now. This isn’t a memorial, it’s a fucking tomb. I feel like I’m standing in the middle of the biggest mass grave in history.”

“Me too,” Jennifer agreed in a hushed tone, “this isn’t so epic anymore.”

“Let’s go pack up our stuff, Jen,” Mason said, pulling her along toward the door. “The sooner that we can get out of here, the better. We learned exactly what we needed to.”

The others quickly followed and Ziralin and I were the last to leave the room. “It’s sad really, they used a power that they didn’t comprehend to prevent their sun from being destroyed and save their people. In doing it, they saved the sun but caused their own destruction. Now there’s nobody left to learn their lesson or remember them,” I said with a sad shake of my head.

“There’s us, Babe,” my Familiar/Fiancée said so softly that it barely reached my ears, even as close as she was holding me. “I don’t think that I’ll ever forget the Sanori or what we learned here today as long as I live. I don’t think that any of us will.”

I nodded as we walked, silently agreeing with her since I couldn’t think of anything else that could be said about the topic. Instead, I took a deep breath as we walked into the antechamber where Jen and Mason were hurriedly packing things back in Jen’s portable bunker. Then I said, “Let’s go find Annie and my sister so we can get the hell off of this cursed rock.”

There was no disagreement as everyone helped Jen and Mason finish putting things away as quickly as possible. I think that we all just wanted to leave Nhekar before something else terrible could happen. Jen had barely finished putting her portal cloth in her backpack with its collapsible poles before I focused on my sister and cast the portal that would reunite us all.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 16 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Wherever the portal had brought us, it was dark and the air smelled of salt water. “Sarah?” I called out uncertainly as Elsaishe cast some ghost lights to provide illumination. We were on a beach somewhere with what looked like a jungle in front of us.

Lisa and Michelle were instantly alert as my apprentice muttered, “I don’t like this, this place reminds me way too much of when Michelle and I arrived on this world. Keep an eye out for sea monsters, everyone.”

“Wasn’t your portal supposed to take us right to Sarah and Annie?” Jen asked as we all looked around carefully.

“Yeah, but in cases where there’s not enough open space around, usually around four feet square, the portal will appear in the nearest open space that’s on solid ground. It wouldn’t do us any good if it opened with no space for us to make our way out of the portal,” I explained. “That jungle looks pretty dense so they’re probably in there somewhere.”

We made our way cautiously into the jungle, keeping our eyes peeled for any signs of predators and using Ellie’s ghost lights to guide us. The night sounds around us seemed to fade as the thundering sound of crashing water began to drown them out. It didn’t drown out the scream though.

That was Sarah’s voice, I was sure of it. Without a word, I ran toward the sound as well as the dense vegetation would allow with the others right behind me. As I ran, I debated whether or not to switch to my Succubus form. She could be in danger but it would also be really awkward if she happened to see me that way before I could explain everything. No, I had plenty of magick energy stored up, I could just throw a quick spell out if the situation was dangerous, and I had everyone else to back me up.

Mason shouted some sort of warning but I didn’t hear him until it was too late. I burst out from the tree line and into the pool of water at the base of the waterfall where my sister and Annie were locked in a very intimate and very naked embrace. My splashing had caught their attention though and I quickly turned away, my face as red as my hair.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t what they were doing that embarrassed me. I knew that they were lovers and I had gotten used to seeing plenty of that kind of thing while spending time around the Faery. I just felt kind of stupid for worrying about my very capable sister and her bodyguard/girlfriend and rushing in without thinking. Especially since we had a psychic, a cat girl, and two Faery who would have been able to sense any danger, even with me and Rebecca currently limited to our normal human senses.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in my embarrassment since both Jen and Rebecca had gotten a good look as well and both of them looked as embarrassed as I felt, but probably because they weren’t used to seeing that kind of thing unfolding in front of them. I kind of felt terrible for interrupting too. This was not the reunion that I had been expecting.

“Well… this is… umm… awkward. Sorry, we’ll… uhh… come back later,” Rebecca said as she quickly turned around to go and join the others back amongst the trees. I felt bad for my fellow pseudo-Succubus since she had gone out of her way to make this reunion less awkward by shifting into a form that resembled her former self as closely as she could manage until we could explain things. And then this happened.

I could hear splashing behind me as Jen and I went to join them as well and my BFF muttered, “I feel like Sarah should have sensed us coming, with Shannon having a full tank of magick again.”

“She was a little preoccupied, in case you didn’t notice,” Ziralin pointed out playfully.

“Oh, I noticed, and now I can’t un-notice,” Jen shot back, her gaze carefully on the others as we returned to the trees that we had emerged from.

It was several minutes later when Annie called out, “You can all stop hiding and join us in Sarah’s bunker now!”

Once we were all settled down with some local fruit and bottles of water inside Sarah’s porta-bunker that had been hanging from a tree on the shore my sister said somewhat sheepishly, "Sorry guys, but you can't believe how bored we've been. We didn’t think we’d be seeing any of you for months since there doesn’t seem to be any ambient magick energy on this plane. This is a desert island, with no other land in sight and with no magick energy to draw on, we were stranded here. There was nothing else to do so we decided to just enjoy ourselves until one of you could find us."

“We explored the whole island during our first few days here; nothing but jungle, this nice little grotto, and sandy beaches,” Annie said with a shrug.

Michelle leaned against Lisa and pouted. “So… let me get this straight, this whole time that we've been going through hell, you two have been having a vacation on a tropical island? That is so not fair!”

“It’s not like we could do anything to help, even if we had managed to build a raft we would have had no idea what direction to go in and it could have taken months to reach land that way. And with us on the ocean, casting a portal to us probably wouldn’t have worked since you need solid ground to anchor it,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Is this world really that bad?”

“I don’t even know where to start, Sis. The sooner we get out of here the better,” I told her candidly.

Sarah wrapped me up in a hug and damn it felt good to see my sister again, to have her hug me again. It seemed that she felt the same way as she said, “I missed you, Shannon. We missed all of you. Whatever you’ve all been through, I’m proud of you for managing to get through it and find us.”

“Yeah, we may have been trying to enjoy ourselves while we were stuck here but we needed the relaxation just to counter the stress of being worried about you kids,” Annie quickly added. “Once we figured out that there was no ambient magick energy here and that we were stuck on this island, we were worried sick about the rest of you. It’s good to see you all in one piece.”

“Speaking of, where did you and Lisa get all that magick energy that you’re hoarding? I tried everything that I could think of to find some but came up empty. And did any of you find Jalael, or do we need to set off in search of his spirit now?” my sister pressed.

“Actually, Ziralin and I found Jalael,” Ellie offered, summoning her Celestial form and showing off her wings.

Both Annie and Sarah grinned at that as Annie said with a look of relief, “Great! So as soon as you get us up to date on what we missed since coming here, we’ll figure out a plan for what comes next and get out of here. Unless you all want to enjoy the beach for a few days? This is supposed to be a vacation, and we haven’t even been gone a full day yet by Earth time.”

“Actually, I think we’d all like to get to any other Plane right now,” Lisa said with a shake of her head. “I’d take Heil over Nhekar right now. And before we go home we have to figure out how we’re going to explain our airplane vanishing, our pilot being gone, and Rebecca’s… umm… situation.”

At Sarah’s questioning look I sighed and shrugged. “A lot happened, Sis. The biggest thing is that Xuriel showed up… well, she was always with me really, ever since my birthday…”

After I explained everything that had happened to us, having Xuriel’s mark, the curse that came with it, and who and what Xuriel was to us, Sarah was quietly thoughtful. She and Annie took it surprisingly well when Rebecca and I showed them our Succubus forms. “Those skills helped you both to survive, and I’m grateful for that, Shannon. You’re my sister and nothing will ever change that. These are just new abilities, no different than when I got Ysuriel’s mark, and you know as well as I do that abilities aren’t good or evil, it’s all in how you choose to use them.”

After another big hug, the others went on to tell the pair what had happened with them, and then we told them all of the fate of the Sanori, and why there was no ambient magick energy around. Once we were done, I frowned and said, “The Sanori played with forces that they couldn’t understand and sure, they were able to extend the life of their sun by injecting more fuel into its core but it cost them their entire species.”

I took a deep breath and added, “That’s why we need to get out of here. The Nisadri Web has been adding all of that mass without removing any for who knows how long now. With all that extra mass, especially the heavier elements building up, I’m pretty sure that that sun is a ticking time bomb. It’s already well past its natural life and it’s going to keep getting bigger until it pops and then, goodbye Nhekar. It could be a thousand years from now or it could be a few minutes, I don’t want to wait around to find out.”

Suddenly, everyone was in a bit of a hurry to get off this screwed-up plane of existence and somewhere relatively safe. I had to agree with Lisa, I would take Heil over this place at the moment. So, as Sarah and Annie packed up their stuff for travel we all discussed what our next step was going to be.

Since we had been gone for less than a day by Earth time, Sarah thought that we could probably manage to figure out where search parties might be looking for our vanished plane, or rather its survivors, once we got back. She was also pretty sure that we were over one of the Great Lakes when we were attacked.

With that in mind, we could arrange to be found near the search area and say that the plane went down after engine troubles. Finding the remains of a small plane not equipped for water landings in one of those massive bodies of water in the middle of winter would have been damn near impossible. Our problem would be explaining the lack of our pilot and her daughter, not to mention how we got safely to the ground.

There was also the problem of how we got ourselves an extra Rebecca that looked nothing like the one we’d left with. She and her mom were well known by the airport staff. She could stay shapeshifted but that got uncomfortable after a while and we were going to need to come up with a new female identity for her later anyway, if possible. Her father still technically had partial custody of her and she was afraid of being sent to live with him and being forced to be a boy if she pretended to be her old self.

“It’s probably best to just say that both Rebecca and her mother went down with the plane,” Annie said with a sigh. “We can always arrange to ‘meet’ this Rebecca officially later and hide her in Tír na nÓg with the Faery or keep her at home until we figure out what to do about her identity.”

“I might be able to figure out the identity thing, I have Xuriel’s memories. All she did was mess with my school records though, she didn’t create anything big like a birth certificate or anything,” I offered uncertainly.

“I think that it would be easier to get her admitted to the hospital as a Jane Doe with no memory,” Annie countered. “If we do that and her prints don’t come up in a search and she doesn’t match the identity of any missing kids, she’d be able to establish a new identity, so long as someone is willing to take custody of her. Sarah, Talisha, or I could be the one who ‘discovers’ her and offer that. You’d have to be convincing though, Rebecca. Have you ever been fingerprinted?”

“I was told that I might have to be to get my name legally changed but Mom and I were having trouble doing that because my sperm-donor was being a dick and not giving his consent. So, legally, I still had to use my dead name. So, I haven’t been printed but I’m not sure if I could make it convincing,” Rebecca reluctantly admitted as she looked into the jungle.

Sarah frowned in thought before suggesting, “I could always use a spell to temporarily block access to your memories, but that could be a problem if your Succubus abilities surface while you’re in that state.”

“Ugh, yeah, I don’t even want to think about all of the ways that could go horribly wrong,” Michelle muttered as she rolled her eyes.

“We’ve got time to figure out Rebecca’s situation later if she’s not going back to her old identity,” Sarah said. “I’m more worried about how we’re going to tell people that we escaped the crash when Rebecca and her mother didn’t.”

Rebecca let out a despondent sigh. “I guess that we could have both been killed instantly when the plane hit the water if we were in the cockpit. Or you could have lost track of us when you parachuted to safety. But if you wanted to sell the story, the life raft and ‘chutes are all still in the plane.”

I placed a hand on Rebecca’s shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze, “You okay, Beks?” I had the feeling all of the talk about her mother’s death was hitting her hard.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine, Shannon,” she replied, giving me an unconvincing smile. “I say we just go back to hell, kick whoever’s ass that we need to kick, kill that bitch Khinara, and then we can grab the ‘chutes or the raft from the plane.”

“And what if the fire that I set to cover our escape damaged them? I don’t even know where your mom’s plane is well enough to make a portal there,” I pointed out. “I want to go finish things too, Beks, but we need to be prepared. Rushing in will just get us killed.”

“I agree,” Mason said with a nod. Those of us who are Celestials will need to fill up on magick energy somewhere because we should keep those crystals that Shannon charged in reserve. Trying to purify the magick energy in Heil in the middle of a fight will leave us vulnerable.”

Sarah looked pensive as she listened to what everyone had to say and then she sighed. “As much as I might hate it, we may have to mess with people’s minds a bit. Nothing too extreme, just altering perception a bit to make the rescuers believe that there is a damaged life raft with us when they find us.”

“If they’re guys, Beks and I might be able to convince them without having to do any serious mind magick,” I suggested. “I’ll need to cast the anti-Succubus spell on you and Annie though.”

Sarah nodded. Neither of us liked the idea but it seemed the only way to deal with the problem. With that decided my sister said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Shannon will cast a portal to Tír na nÓg and then once she casts her protection spell on me and Annie, the two of us will go home and talk to Talisha to find out the status of any search for us. If she doesn’t know then we’ll just keep hidden from mortal sight and find out more directly. Once we know the search area we’ll look for a place for the rescuers to find us and I’ll cast a portal back to the Faery village so the rest of you can join us.”

“What about dealing with the Demons?” Rebecca pressed.

“Well, after how well the last flight went I think people would understand if none of us want to go on a plane again for a while,” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “I would rather not risk it until Khinara is dealt with anyway. Of course, we’ll still want to get away and de-stress though, even more than before, so I’ll ask my parents if we can just use the family cabin again. We can drive out there and be secluded for the rest of our vacation.”

“And while we’re there, we can make some preparations and then go to Heil to finish things once and for all,” Lisa added grimly.

“You really think that we can make it through the backroads of northern Ontario to get to the cabin in the middle of winter with our tiny cars?” my fiancée/Familiar asked dubiously.

“We don’t need to,” Annie pointed out. “We all just make sure we all meet at our new house and park the cars in the garage. Shannon and Sarah know the cabin well enough to cast a portal there, and that way we can be sure that no paparazzi follow us there.”

With our plan fully fleshed out and Annie and Sarah packed and ready to go, I cast a portal that would take us to our Faery troupe in Tír na nÓg. So long Nhekar, and good riddance. I wish that I could say that it was fun while it lasted, but it really wasn’t.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 17 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Despite how eager we all were to leave Nhekar, I was a little bit nervous about seeing our troupe again. Don’t get me wrong, I had missed them a lot and I was looking forward to seeing them again but there were a few things that had me a bit nervous. First, I was really hoping that the fertility artefact would still work as advertised on a different Plane from Nhekar so those Faery who wanted children could have them. I didn’t see why it wouldn’t since it was an artefact but I didn’t want to get their hopes up only for it to not work.

Secondly, I was a bit worried about how the troupe would react to Rebecca and our pseudo Succubus situation. I knew that they all trusted and cared for me and that I had earned that, but all of the Faery in our troupe had some form of trauma involving Demons and I didn’t want to make any of them uncomfortable or inadvertently trigger someone. I was also worried that while they knew me well enough that they might accept this part of me, they might just reject Rebecca outright.

It was mid-morning in Tír na nÓg when we stepped through the gate into the small village square. Most everyone in the troupe was going about their daily business and they were used to our comings and goings by now, so we made our way to the Chieftain’s hut to find Yanisse. I could feel her familiar magick as we approached her hut, so I wasn’t surprised to find the strawberry blonde Faery fashioning something out of metal.

Since we didn’t want to distract her we decided to wait until she was finished before stepping inside her hut. Rebecca had been looking around in rapt fascination as we made our way through the village. She pointed at one of the huts and asked, “There are no walls, is that normal here?”

The hut in question was normal, for the Faery at least. A metal frame had been grown from the earth with magick and thick vines with large leaves grew up along the supports to completely cover the roof and keep the rain out. Ziralin answered Rebecca with a smile, obviously glad to be back in Tír na nÓg, or away from Nhekar. “Yup, we’re in a tropical area and shelters are only to keep one dry when it rains. The Faery don’t really care about privacy and modesty anyway though. Nudity and sex aren’t something that should be ashamed of or hidden from those that care about you. There is only one hut in the village that has walls but Jaenara is a special case.”

“Yeah, Shannon told me about that,” Rebecca replied with a blush, “I just wasn’t expecting to see it. Why is this Jaenara person a special case?”

“She’s a spirit healer,” Sarah explained. “She’s strongly empathic and sometimes the feelings that she picks up from looking at other people can be overwhelming so her mind needs a break sometimes. She’s also sort of like a psychic counselor, she uses her abilities to help people who have suffered trauma to distance themselves from it and put it in perspective. Because of that, those who need her help sometimes don’t feel comfortable discussing their trauma where others might see, even other Faery.”

“She’s good at what she does too,” I added. “Annie, Ziralin, Ellie, and I have all seen her and she helped us a lot. I think you should probably talk to her, Beks. She doesn’t speak English well but we can try to find a way to make it work if you were to trust me to translate.”

“I don’t know… I…” Rebecca stumbled hesitantly over her words.

“Beks, I’m saying this as a friend,” I said, placing a hand gently on her shoulder. “You had issues from the bullying and stuff even before we all got on your mom’s plane. Since then you’ve witnessed your mother being violently murdered by a Demon, not to mention all of the other crap that we went through in Nhekar. And you weren’t used to this kind of stuff like the rest of us. Please, just think about it, Beks.”

“I’ll… think about it,” she reluctantly conceded as she looked away.

Things were quiet then for a few minutes until Yanisse finished the silver and gold bracelet that she was working on. It was gorgeous, Yanisse was truly a master of her craft. She looked up from her finished work and turned her golden eyes and her smile toward us. “Thank you for not interrupting, it is good to see you all again. We weren’t expecting to see you all again so soon.”

“We had to leave for Nhekar earlier than we thought and things didn’t take as long there as we thought either,” Sarah offered.

“Thank the Goddess for that,” Michelle muttered, “it was still too long though.”

“You found Jalael’s spirit then?”

“Ziralin and I found Jalael like four days after we got there,” Ellie said, changing to her Celestial form to display her new wings. “I haven’t had much chance to use my abilities much yet but I guess that I use some sort of holy magick to heal people. I’m hoping that since it’s holy magick it will hurt Demons too.”

Yanisse’s smile brightened and her eyebrows rose in interest. “Congratulations, Elsaishe. Having a healer available for the troupe would be wonderful.”

“So, yeah, we probably would have been back a bit sooner but there were some problems and magick energy wasn’t readily available so we were stuck there for almost a month,” Annie explained.

“Says the one who was vacationing with Sarah on a tropical island the entire time,” Lisa grumbled. “You didn’t have to deal with sea monsters, people kidnapping you, and all the other stuff we went through before getting to you.”

“That’s why all of you get to take a break now while Annie and I go home and try to figure out if people are searching for us yet, and where, so we can arrange to be found,” Sarah offered apologetically. “I’ve filled up on magick energy so we should be good to go. You girls and Mason can relax a bit and introduce Rebecca around.”

“But, Sarah, I need to… umm…” I started to mumble while sending her an imploring look.

Sarah reached out to hug me and whispered in my ear, “Introduce Rebecca to Yanisse? Yes, you do, and you have other things to show her too. I love you, Sis, and I will always support you but I have never babied you. You don’t need me to hold your hand, you haven’t for a while now, and you proved that on Nhekar. So woman up and just tell them. They’re our troupe and they aren’t going to hate you for something beyond your control.”

Yanisse’s gaze was focused on Rebecca as Sarah released me. “Rebecca is it?”

With the attention on Rebecca now, Sarah dragged Annie off so that she could cast a gate to Earth and they could get to work. That left me to make a somewhat awkward introduction. “Rebecca, this is our troupe’s Chieftain, Yanisse. Yanisse, this is Rebecca. She lost her only family, and it’s kinda our fault. She was traveling with me in Nhekar and… well, there’s something about her… both of us that you should know.”

The strawberry blonde Faery looked at me and Rebecca in interest, as if trying to figure out what secrets we held. “It is nice to meet you, Rebecca, welcome to our humble village. Shannon, please calm down and tell me whatever it is that you need to.”

It took a while, and I was nervous as hell the entire time, but I told Yanisse everything. I started by telling her about Xuriel, her story, how the Sentinel was actually the first Cailleach Dearg, and how she had given me her Mark and hidden it away on my birthday. That was a bit of a shock for her but not as much as when I went on to tell her about the curse in more detail and now I had shared it with Rebecca so we could both survive.

When I was finally done, Rebecca and I nervously switched to our Succubus forms, though only briefly. We also made sure to get to keep our distance from Yanisse when we did it so she wouldn’t turn into a lust zombie since most Fae are pansexual or bisexual to some degree. “So, you… uhh... see. We’re not really Succubae, we can just kinda copy their forms and abilities,” I finished while wringing my hands nervously once we had changed back into our human forms.

Yanisse’s shocked expression faded as a thoughtful one took its place. “Shannon, calm yourself. You have no demonic aura and, as I understand it, you had this mark even before you, Elsaishe, and Ziralin saved our people. You are the same kind and caring person, just with a new ability. It will take us a while to get used to this but you are still one of us, even more so than before now that we know that you are truly a descendant of the Cailleach Dearg and that she has entrusted you with her powers. Our people knew Brighid for a long time and she was no Demon either, she was a scared young woman when our people found her and she became family, just as you have.”

“But I used a curse on Rebecca,” I pointed out.

“To make her dream come true, give her a body that she is comfortable with, and help her to survive in a hostile world. You showed mercy and compassion by doing something that you weren’t comfortable with for her sake, even though the two of you didn’t get along,” the Chieftain countered before turning to Rebecca. “You truly have nobody to turn to, child?”

I let out a sigh of relief as Ziralin took my hand in hers and squeezed it. Rebecca seemed to shrink a bit as Yanisse’s gaze fell upon her. She gritted her teeth, a pained expression on her face as she replied, “Only my ‘father’ but he’s an abusive dick who wants to force me to be a boy. I… can’t go back to that.”

“She has me,” I quickly interjected. “Her mom died because Khinara was after me and that makes her my responsibility.”

“She is not an orphaned animal, Shannon, she is a child, despite her mature appearance, and you are not much older than she is. You are too hard on yourself. I will not send her back to an abusive parent but I cannot be sure if she will be a good fit for our troupe until we have gotten to know her better, just as we did the others who you, Ziralin, and Elsaishe have brought into the troupe,” Yanisse said with a sigh.

“Technically, she’s already a part of the troupe,” Ellie pointed out.

“How so, Elsaishe?” Yanisse asked, tilting her head like a curious kitten.

“Well, Shannon turned her into a Succubus and helped her to learn to control her abilities. Even if they aren’t real Succubae, that makes her Rebecca’s Succubus-mama. And if she’s Shannon’s Succubus-baby, then she should be a member of the troupe by default,” my cousin pointed out with a playful grin.

Rebecca was gaping at Ellie and then looked at me briefly before suddenly finding her feet much less awkward to stare at. Her face was bright red but I could completely understand since I was flabbergasted by Ellie’s logic too. I knew that as much as she was trying to help, my cousin had pointed that out to make us both squirm as well. What was worse was that the others all seemed to find it as funny as Ellie did.

Well, Yanisse didn’t find it funny, or maybe she did since she was trying to cover a smile after seeing the looks on our faces. She did relent though. “Alright, Rebecca is technically a member of the troupe but we will only induct her officially once we have gotten to know her better. As her ‘mother’ she will be your responsibility, Shannon, just as your apprentice has been.”

As grateful as I was to my cousin for easing things somewhat, I also resolved to get her back for this later. Maybe I would get Rebecca to help me, she looked perfectly willing. If Ellie complained, then we would just rub it in her pretty elven face by saying that it was a mother-daughter bonding activity.

By the time we finished talking with Yanisse, it was already time for the midday meal. As we were all eating, Yanisse brought attention to our return and our tentative new member of the troupe. She told everyone that we had gotten the last Sentinel and that once we were ready we would be leaving for Heil to take the fight to the Demons. She also had me address everyone to tell them everything that I had told her earlier and to introduce Rebecca.

I was a bit nervous about coming out as a pseudo Succubus to the whole troupe at once but Ziralin stood up with me for support and held my hand the entire time. The Faery of the troupe were uncertain at first, especially once Rebecca and I changed forms and accidentally zombified the Faery sitting close to us. They mostly settled down and seemed to somewhat accept the situation once Yanisse pointed out that neither of us had a demonic aura, we were fighting against the Demons, and that I was not only a descendant of the Cailleach Dearg but that Brighid had entrusted me with her powers.

Once things had settled down, I decided to bring up something that I had forgotten to mention to Yanisse earlier. “Rebecca and I will try not to use our abilities in the village for now, at least until I can give you some immunity to them. We can’t really control the charm aspect of our Succubus forms but I’ve created a spell that will help people resist it. It may be a while before Sarah, Lisa, and I can cast it on everyone in the troupe though.”

“The spell works really well,” Michelle added. “None of us have had any problems being around them when they’re doing the Succubus thing since she cast it on us.”

There was some obvious relief at Michelle’s assurance that the spell worked. The lust thing wouldn’t bother any of the Faery much but I doubted that anyone was comfortable with the thought of mind control, even if they could be sure that we wouldn’t abuse the ability. I couldn’t really blame them for that since I had been on the receiving end of a Succubus whammy and would feel the same in their place.

Jennifer managed to guide everyone’s thoughts away from that kind of thing though as she exclaimed, “Oh! Tell them about the thing you got from the magical mad scientist!” I silently thanked my BFF for providing a distraction in that awkward moment and reminding me of another thing that I had forgotten in my nervousness.

“We came across a magical device that some jerk was going to use on Elsaishe and Ziralin,” I explained to stave off the widespread confusion at Jen’s exclamation. “He wanted to breed them like farm animals and I guess this device is supposed to allow the user to… uhh… impregnate a female by taking genetic information from someone else. It doesn’t matter if the person donating the DNA is male or female. We haven’t tested it ourselves, of course, and we can’t be absolutely sure that it will work but if it does this could allow those of you who want children to have them.”

A hush fell over the Faery gathered as they all gaped at me. Finally, Yanisse spoke for everyone. “You are certain about this, Shannon?”

I felt bad that we were getting their hopes up for something that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure was going to work so I shook my head. “As I said, I can’t be absolutely certain. It might not even work here, though there is plenty of ambient mana to keep the okka crystal fully charged. We’ll have to get some volunteers to test it though, I guess.”

“The asshole that we got it from said that they had successfully used it on a variety of creatures, they even managed it with two females when there were no males available. Those ones only had female children though,” Lisa contributed. “It’s a hell of a lot better chance to have kids than you had before though.”

“I have a very strong feeling that it will work,” Mason offered. From the look on his face, he wasn’t just trying to offer them false hope and I breathed a sigh of relief. When Mason had strong feelings about something he was usually right. This could very well save the Faery from extinction.

We had no problem finding volunteers, there were so many in fact that Yanisse had to organize a lottery since she had decided to limit the test phase to three for now. If it ended up working, then the whole village would have a chance at a child if they wanted one. Since Rebecca was the most unbiased person there, not knowing any of the Faery very well and not having any magick to affect the results, she was the one who drew the lots.

To everyone’s surprise and delight, Yanisse was one of the three lucky winners. Despite her happiness at the turn of events, the Chieftain had tried to refuse and give someone else the chance but her fellow Faery insisted that she deserved a chance at a child as much as everyone else. I immediately retrieved the magical device from my portable bunker and once Lisa and Michelle had explained how it worked, they used the device on the three volunteers and their chosen partners.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 18 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

It was late the next afternoon by the time that Sarah and Annie returned to Tír na nÓg. It had taken them a while to find out how the search for us was going after reassuring Talisha that we were all fine. When they had gotten there, a little less than half a day had passed since we were shwooped away and the search for us hadn’t really gotten underway yet. The sun had set by the time it was being organized and due to that and a severe snowstorm, the search wouldn’t be starting until the morning arrived there.

They did know where the search would be picking up in the morning though and had already found a good spot for us to appear. The plan was to spend another day in the village relaxing and then just after dinner we would cast a gate to the right area. Annie and Sarah felt that would get us there a few hours before dawn so we could get things set up and look like we had been surviving out there somehow for a day or so.

We settled in and other than relaxing, we tried to get Rebecca used to life in a Faery village. The troupe seemed to take to her well, though that could have been due largely in part to her being so entertaining to them. Not that she was trying to be. Poor Beks was having trouble adjusting to the openness of the Faery and the troupe found it hilarious that a Succubus (even if she wasn’t a real one) would get nervous, turn bright red, and run off whenever she saw someone naked or having sex.

I think that she was even more awkward about it than I was at first and even I was finding it entertaining. She would get used to it in time, as the rest of us did. She wasn’t happy with the thought of staying in the village while the rest of us went back to our world to get rescued though. It was closing in on dinner time when Rebecca and I flew to a cozy little grotto near the canyon that the village was in so I could talk to her about it privately.

It had felt good to stretch my wings after keeping them mostly under wraps by staying in human form since we had arrived at the village. I sat down on a rock near the pool of water, gave my companion a serious look, and asked, “What’s wrong, Beks?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Shannon,” she snarked. “Could it be that you’re leaving me here in a strange world with a bunch of exhibitionists?”

“We agreed that it was better for you to wait and establish a new identity when things are more stable,” I insisted. “You know that nothing good would happen if you went back with us and tried to pretend to be your old self, Beks.”

“I… know that,” she agreed with a sigh. From the dark look in her eyes, she was probably imagining being sent to live with her father, or something equally terrible. “I just…”

“The Faery are good people and you’ll only adjust to the culture shock by being exposed to it,” I told her plainly while trying to ignore her little snort of amusement when I said ‘exposed’. Maybe she had been spending too much time with Ellie.

Rebecca and Elsaishe had spent most of the day together while my cousin tried to introduce her to the finer aspects of Faery life and culture, and I was afraid that her odd sense of humor might be rubbing off. Ellie had claimed that it was so I could spend some much-needed quality time with Ziralin after our long separation but I could tell that she was attracted to Rebecca’s new form. Ellie wasn’t exactly subtle. Impulsive was a much better word to describe my Faery cousin.

“What if you don’t come back?” Rebecca’s question was barely audible and delivered with an uncharacteristic show of vulnerability.

“Beks, I already promised that I won’t abandon you, here or on any other plane of existence. This is temporary, just until we can be found and then disappear from the public eye for a while. We’ve gone over that enough. Or are you afraid that we’ll leave for Heil without you and deny you your chance at revenge for your mom?” I pressed.

From the way that she turned away from me, I figured that I had hit the nail on the head. It was a moment before she replied through tears and sniffles. “I need this, Shannon. Don’t… take this away from me. I still see… the inside of that cockpit… every time I sleep. I have to… be the one who kills her. For Mom.”

I stood up and walked over, wrapping her up in my arms while she cried out her pain and loss. “Beks, I promise that we’ll come here to get you before going to Heil. You know that I don’t like revenge but I promised you that we’d avenge your mom together, and I keep my promises. You deserve a chance to go as much as any of us. I’m worried though. This isn’t just a jaunt to another plane, this will be war and we could lose people. I think that you’re the one that I’m least worried about.”

Rebecca returned the hug, sniffling into my shoulder for a moment before replying. “I guess you haven’t broken a promise to me yet,” she admitted. “Maybe you’re just less afraid of losing me because we haven’t really known each other that long, and I was kinda a mega-bitch to you at first. I mean, I’m not even sure what this thing between us is now that we’re not focused on surviving; are we friends, frenemies, or something else? I don’t want to lose it though, so don’t go dying on me when we get to Heil. I can’t… lose someone else that I… care about.”

For a moment I was too shocked to speak. Even while we had traveled together it was rare to hear Rebecca talking about her feelings. I just hugged her tighter and said, “Yeah, let’s both try not to die. You’ve kind of become like an annoying kid sister over the past couple of months and I don’t want to lose you either. That’s not why I’m least worried about you though.”

She pulled away to look up at me with confused tear-filled eyes, “Why then? They all have those Celestial forms and cool magical abilities. I just have my Succubus abilities, and I can’t even use magick unless I were to…” A disgusted look settled on her face as she trailed off, unwilling to finish that sentence.

“Your Succubus form should make you able to survive there better than anyone with a Celestial Mark, Beks. You can blend in when needed and you have the physical strengths of a Demoness. If Sarah and the others run out of those okka stones that I charged, they’ll have to draw on the local magick energy to keep using their abilities and that stuff is toxic to Celestials. It could kill them, either through taking the time to purify it in the middle of a pitched battle or by using it without purifying it,” I explained.

I must have let my concern show on my face because Rebecca looked worried now too. “I guess we’ll need to come up with a plan then,” she muttered.

“Yeah, I’ve got some ideas but we’ll discuss it as a group once we come back here to get you and prepare,” I told her as I unfurled my wings. “Now let’s go and get some dinner, I want to eat before I go back to Earth. Who knows how long we’ll have to sit in the cold before the search parties find us.”

It wasn’t until well into the afternoon that a search and rescue helicopter got to us. It had been still snowing heavily when we had appeared on the small island near Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron and it continued through the morning, making searching for us difficult. That water was damn cold too, though not cold enough to freeze yet so the rescuers would be looking for us by search planes, rescue helicopters, and boats.

We had prepared as much as we could by wearing the warmest clothes from our bunkers but it was still freezing. Since we needed to look like we’d been waiting in the cold for rescue for a while, we couldn’t use magick to make ourselves any warmer either. We also gathered what wood we could find and built a fire to gather around while we waited and discussed our next steps.

I didn’t have it quite as bad as the others since I was in my Succubus form with my demonic features all shifted out of sight to make me appear like my human self, and I didn’t seem to get cold quite as badly that way. Still, there were enough fallen trees and branches on the island to keep the fire going throughout the morning and afternoon and the fire and the warm clothes kept us all from completely freezing. To sate our hunger and thirst, we had some granola bars and bottles of water from our backpacks.

It was the smoke from the fire that got the attention of one of the search planes when the sky began to clear. As soon as the helicopter came into sight, I created an illusion of a life raft on the shore that I had practiced and perfected the day before with Rebecca since she knew what the raft on her mother’s plane should look like. At least it wasn’t something that needed to move, and that made the illusion easier to keep up.

The island wasn’t large and there wasn’t any level ground where the helicopter could land so we were brought up one at a time in a harness after extinguishing the fire. Thankfully, they were more concerned with getting us all aboard the helicopter and getting us warm with blankets and thermoses filled with hot soup than they were with retrieving the illusory life raft. I didn’t even have to whammy anyone, which came as a great relief since the person who came down with the harness was female and not effected by my Succubus mojo.

I made sure that I was the last to come up so I could keep the illusion in place until she followed me up. Apparently, the raft and anything else left behind could be retrieved later, their priority was getting us somewhere warm where doctors could look us over to make sure we were alright. It wasn’t until I was wrapped in a blanket and enjoying some chicken soup that I allowed myself to shift back to human form. My Succubus form had made things a little awkward with the guy who had helped me out of the harness at first.

With nine of us being rescued, it was feeling a little cramped in the helicopter so I snuggled up against Ziralin, who was now back in her Beth glamour, as best I could to share warmth and comfort. As we flew to the coast guard base in Parry Sound where the search was being coordinated, Sarah and Annie told them our story of woe. How the plane had shuddered and then started to go down, and how we had had to use a life raft after the plane hit the water and started to sink. We had tried to check on the pilot and her daughter but we weren’t able to get into the cockpit.

Sarah did have to use a bit of mind magick, just enough to make our rescuers, including the paramedics who looked us over, think that we had all suffered some bruises and a bit of whiplash from the rough landing and were badly shaken up from the experience. They didn’t seem to want to traumatize us further and once we had been deemed to have no serious injuries we were allowed to go to see our families, who had all rushed there from Toronto to wait for news on the rescue efforts.

I was a bit worried about Lisa’s mom being a doctor and not in on our secret, but Lisa had managed to convince her that she was okay except for some bruises. Still, she and the other sets of parents had all been hovering since we’d gotten the okay to be released, especially Michelle’s and Jen’s parents. Mason’s mom was being pretty clingy too. Talisha made it clear that she had been worried but she wasn’t hovering that much since she knew what had really happened.

The worst of the experience was the media circus outside the Parry Sound Medical Center when we were finally allowed to leave. We had all been given strict orders to take it easy for a few days and go to the hospital if we felt any unusual pains or discomfort. By that time, we were all tired, uncomfortable with all of the attention, and Sarah wasn’t too happy about having had to use mind magick on the paramedics and the particularly insistent pair of doctors at the clinic.

So we weren’t thrilled to see reporters and cameras everywhere when we stepped outside. The camera flashes were blinding me and I could hardly hear anything but the questions being rapidly fired at us. Sarah and I both knew that we weren’t going to run that gauntlet unscathed so we decided to give a statement so the others could slip through while their attention was on us.

Still, they were crowding Sarah and me, and I wanted them back off a bit. I had to focus to keep my Succubus form from activating while I thought about what to say. My control over the shift while in highly emotional states was still a work in progress and after the long day, most of it out in the cold, I was tired, hungry, and just didn’t have the energy to deal with the media hounds.

“We’re all a little shaken up and a bit bruised, but we’re fine. We just need a bit of quiet time to reflect on what happened, and… I don’t think I’m going to be flying again for a while,” I said simply while giving an obviously forced smile. It played well on television that night though, people thought that I was trying to put on a brave face after my traumatic experience.

“Search efforts are still underway for our pilot, Lauren Kline, and her daughter, Rebecca,” Sarah added sadly as she put an arm around my shoulders. “We ask that you keep them and their family in your thoughts and prayers. After what happened we’ll be going home to spend a quiet Christmas as a family and count our blessings.”

Annie had hovered, watching the crowd around us in bodyguard mode as we gave our brief statements. Now that we had finished, she led the way through the crowd to where Talisha’s minivan was parked on the side of the road. She and Elsaishe were already inside and the engine was running. As soon as the three of us were buckled in, Talisha put the van in gear and took off.

“Are you okay, Sis?” Sara asked as Talisha pointed us toward the highway.

“Yeah, just tired and hungry, and Rebecca and I are still trying to master not changing forms when we’re really upset,” I replied as I looked out the window. “We haven’t had as much time to practice controlling that kind of stuff since we got enough magick energy to track the rest of you down. Xuriel’s memories help a bit but practical experience is better.”

“You’ll get it, Sis. Look how well you took to magick,” she assured me while reaching out to take my hand in hers. “We haven’t had much time to really talk since you guys found us but we’re proud of all of you. You put aside your differences with Rebecca to help her and the two of you survived together and mastered those abilities well enough to help the others and find us. When I realized that there was no magick energy there, I was a little worried that you two might end up killing one another, if something else didn’t kill you first.”

“It was close at first,” I admitted. “She turned around once I ‘blessed’ her and she started to realize that I wasn’t the bitch she thought I was. I thought she was going to be a terror when her first period hit a week or so after I changed her but she was actually happy about it. I think she was even starting to get a bit of a crush on me before Ellie derailed it with the Succubus-mama comment.”

Ellie giggled in the front seat. “All part of the plan, Cuz.”

I tried not to think about what she might be up to and thankfully, Annie interjected. “Speaking of plans, we’ll need one soon. We can’t afford to wait long before going to Heil. Khinara knows who Shannon and Lisa are and if she’s figured out that we managed to escape her little ambush she’ll come after them first.”

We discussed it as we drove but other than the wards that were already in place on both ours and Lisa’s house, and keeping our senses peeled for trouble, there wasn’t much we could do. Talisha had finalized the purchase of our new house yesterday but the trouble would be getting movers before New Year’s with Christmas only three days away. The new place was much more secure against more mundane intruders like nosy reporters though since it had a high fence and a security gate. As for supernatural problems, I would be helping Sarah with the wards to make sure that those wouldn’t trouble us either.

By the time we stopped in Barrie for something to eat, we had decided to rent a moving van the next day and keep up appearances by moving things ourselves without any noticeable magick. I would have liked to do it the easy way, but with reporters still watching our old place we couldn’t afford to. They might get suspicious if the place went from fully furnished to empty overnight without any obvious signs. After the move, we would play it by ear but leave for Heil on the 26th at the latest.

I retrieved my phone from my purse and turned it on to text the others and let them know the plan. For the moment, I tried to ignore the massive amount of texts and missed calls from our agent, friends at school, and numbers that I didn’t recognize. People would understand me not being in any condition to talk after a seemingly near-death experience. Once I had let the others know what we had decided I tried to just relax and ended up drifting off to sleep until we arrived home sometime after midnight.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 19 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

The next morning we were up early and Annie and Talisha left the house after breakfast so our Fae cousin could drop Annie off to rent a moving truck. Almost everything was already packed since we had expected Talisha to handle the move while we were on vacation, so there wasn’t much packing left to do other than in the kitchen and bathrooms. Thankfully, that was mostly sorted out by the time Annie got back with the moving truck. We only really needed to worry about loading the boxes and furniture in the truck and then driving to the new place.

It was a good thing that my car was still at Beth’s place for now, or we would have had to make a trip back for one of the vehicles. As it was, with Annie driving the truck, I was going to have to drive her car to the new house. With Talisha, Sarah, Annie, and me all having our own vehicles we were going to need the four-car garage at the new place.

I had gotten my driver’s license just before our trip but I was still letting Beth use my Beetle and having her drive me around as my assistant until she could get a new vehicle of her own. She could afford it with the job, and her parents had promised to help with it, but she wanted to get a motorcycle instead of a car. We thought that it would be best for her to wait until spring to get a motorbike and I enjoyed having her to myself in the car when she drove me around.

Unfortunately, Beth and the others couldn’t come to help us. I had texted with my friends over breakfast but after our disastrous plane trip everyone’s parents were feeling a little bit clingy, even Beth’s folks, and they knew about the whole magick and Demon hunting business. With that going on, we all decided that it would be best to let them get it out of their systems and act like normal teens until Christmas, It would make them more likely to approve a relatively harmless car trip to Jennifer’s family’s cottage.

It took us until mid-afternoon to get everything loaded and double-check to ensure that we hadn’t missed anything. Doing everything the mundane way without magick was tiring, boring, and gave me far too much time to think. Ellie was as bored as me, and it seemed that she was just as worried about Rebecca. She didn’t bring it up until we were in Annie’s car and headed to the new place.

Once we were buckled in, I decided to see what was bothering her. “So… why did you want to come with me, Cuz? I’m like, the least experienced driver and I’m not exactly used to Annie’s car either.” I didn’t mention that I was also the one that Khinara was most likely to attack if she was looking into our escape from Heil.

“Aren’t you worried about Rebecca? You two were pretty chummy when you found us…” she started uncertainly.

“Of course, I’m worried about her. There’s nothing going on between the two of us though, we’ve just developed a weird kind of friendship. You know that Ziralin is my soulmate. Beks is like you, a sometimes annoying little sister,” I poked back, uncomfortable with the thought that she might think that there was something more between me and my fellow faux-Succubus.

Ellie’s face turned bright red. “I didn’t mean it like that, Cuz. I just… I know that the troupe is our family and that we know and trust them but from her perspective, we left her over four days ago with a bunch of strangers in another world with no timeline on when we’d be coming back for her. She hasn’t been in the best mental state and she’s lost so much already. You and Michelle are the two people that she trusts and cares about the most now. Don’t you think that she’d rather spend the holidays with the two of you than with a troupe of Faery that she barely knows?”

I sighed and focused my attention on the road. “I get what you’re saying, Cuz, and I agree with you. We need to establish a whole new identity for her though and what Xuriel did for me didn’t even come close to that. I’m not sure where to start for something that big. It would be better to just make it look like she’s an amnesic runaway like Annie suggested but Beks doesn’t think she can act that well and with her powers, temporarily cutting off access to her memories would be risky. We tend to change when we get agitated and not having any memory of who she is would probably be stressful enough to trigger it even under good circumstances.”

“She doesn’t need to act. You’re a shapeshifter, Miss I belong in front of the cameras,” Ellie said with an exasperated tone. I was pretty sure that she was rolling her eyes too but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the snowy road to check. “You could copy her base human form and then just do the acting for her.”

“I’ve only done a few commercials,” I countered with a long sigh. “That barely counts as acting experience. There are so many things that could go wrong with that plan, Ellie. I have no idea if things like my fingerprints change when I shift and that’s not even taking into account what weirdness that any medical or blood tests might pick up while I’m using my Succubus abilities.”

“But…”

“No, Ellie, no half-baked plans. We need to do it right,” I insisted as I cut off whatever protests she had been about to make. “We will bring her here from Tír na nÓg once we get to the new place so she can spend the next few days with us until we’re ready to go to Heil though. That should be fine so long as she doesn’t leave the house in a form that can be identified later when we do figure out the identity stuff.”

“I… fine,” my Fae cousin conceded.

For the rest of the drive, we were both quiet as I focused on the road, the moving truck in front of us, and trying to sort through Xuriel’s memories for some idea of how to create a new identity for Rebecca. I did discover something that might help but I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea. It would have to be Rebecca’s decision, and it was too risky to do right away.

Our new home was a five-bedroom and two-and-a-half bath home on a large fenced property with a hot tub on the back deck. Since Annie and Sarah were sharing a room, that left enough bedrooms left that Ellie, Talisha, and I could all have our own, and still leave the last for Rebecca to use. The unfinished basement was huge and Annie and Sarah planned to build a training room down there for Annie to give our martial arts lessons and a magick library and workroom where I could practice my magick and give Lisa lessons as well. It was also conveniently located close to our school and just down the street from Beth’s place.

Fortunately, Sarah, Annie, and Talisha agreed with Elsaishe and me about Rebecca needing to be around people that she cared about and trusted for Christmas, especially with everything that she had lost. The poor girl had nothing but the clothes on her back now, and most of those clothes were technically mine. So, while the others began unloading the truck, Ellie and I made a brief trip to Tír na nÓg to bring Rebecca home for the holidays.

This place is huge… and empty,” Rebecca commented as we stepped through the gate back into the foyer of the new house.

“Yeah, well, almost everything is outside in the truck,” I replied with a shrug. “We kind of had to move up moving day to make it harder for Khinara to find me if she comes looking for us here on Earth. I’ll need to start on the wards soon too and that’ll take a while with a house this big. The good thing is that we have enough bedrooms that you don’t have to bunk with me or Ellie. You may need to use the camp mattress from my bunker until we can get a bed and stuff in there for you though.”

Sarah came through carrying a box bound for the kitchen but stopped once she saw that we were back. “We can handle things here. You two should take Rebecca to get some clothes and other necessities if she’ll be staying here for a while. Just be careful that she’s disguised so nobody sees her with you before we officially ‘accidentally discover’ her,” my sister suggested.

“I… don’t have any money,” Rebecca said with a despondent shake of her head. “I’ll probably get a lot of attention if I use my shapeshifting too, and leave a trail of lust-zombies behind me. I don’t want guys leering at me.”

I put an arm around my prickly friend and pulled her into a side hug. “Don’t worry about it, Beks. The least I can do is make sure that you have a few new outfits for Christmas. I’m the reason that you need them after all. And there are other ways of disguising you than shapeshifting, you know.”

It took over an hour to find the boxes that I wanted and place them in my bedroom to look through. I didn’t have any furniture set up yet but once I had Rebecca dressed in a slightly oversized blue sweater dress and some black leggings, I worked on her makeup to make her look a little bit older and a bit different while Ellie put her hair in a French braid. I wasn’t as into makeup as Jennifer but you learn things when you’re the face of a company that produces it. Being friendly with the makeup artists at my photo and commercial shoots had helped me learn a lot too.

Ellie and I were easier to take care of; my cousin just cast glamours on the both of us so we (or more specifically I) wouldn’t be recognized. After borrowing my sister’s car and checking to make sure that nobody was watching the house or the security gate, we were on our way to the mall. We wouldn’t have much time for shopping, especially since we were all hungry and wanted to stop by the food court first, but we would likely have enough time to pick out a few outfits and get some important things like a nightshirt and a toothbrush for Rebecca before the store closed.

I was worried about Rebecca as we shopped though, and I was sure that Ellie was too. She seemed more withdrawn than usual and I had noticed over the weeks we had spent together that Rebecca being sullen and withdrawn rather than surly and sarcastic was a sign that she was thinking about her mom. I had hoped that being back in familiar territory back on Earth might help but then, was this familiar territory for her?

Before Michelle started hanging out with her, Becca didn’t have any friends. She was bullied by most of the kids she knew and like Michelle, she had learned to avoid the places where kids her age gathered, for her own safety. I was willing to bet that on those few occasions that she did frequent the mall, she had been with her mom for safety. And her mom wasn’t here now, and never would be again.

So, as we bought her some clothes, and anything else that we thought she might need, she was largely quiet and didn’t offer much input. She swayed between distracted and depressed and I felt bad for convincing her that this was a good idea, because it obviously was not. We made quick work of finishing our shopping and as we drove home I apologized.

“I’m sorry, Beks. We were hoping that this would help but I think it did the opposite. Were you thinking about…” I trailed off, uncertain if I wanted to open that can of worms if I was wrong.

“My mom?” Rebecca asked, looking down at her hands as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Yeah, I… some days it felt like she was the only one in the world on my side. She… kept me going, helped me focus on the life and body that I wanted to have someday rather than… She kept me sane and stopped me from just giving up and… I’m still alive because of her, and now… she’s not. Christmas is about family but… my only family is gone.”

I clenched the steering wheel tightly as I disagreed. “No, Beks. You’ve got us and we’re going to take care of you and help you avenge your mom. I promised that I wouldn’t abandon you and I won’t. We can’t replace your mom, nobody can, but we can be there for you like she was and try to give you the kind of life she’d want for you.”

“You know,” Ellie said quietly from the back seat. “My dad was killed by a Demon too, and it was my fault. I got careless and because of it we lost him and Mom and I had to run, leaving everything important to us behind to make sure that the Demon didn’t find us and kill us too. I didn’t have any friends because I never really felt like I belonged anywhere. Then Mom and I met Shannon, Ziralin, and Sarah and suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore. It was hard to get used to at first, having someone besides my mom who cared enough to make a place in their life for me, to treat me as if I mattered… to hold me while I cried myself to sleep. Shannon did that for me, and she’s been trying to do it for you too. I’d like to help too, I’d like to get to know you and be there for you if you’ll let me.”

“You’re both sappy as fuck, you know that?” Becca wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and sniffled before adding, “Umm… thanks, Shannon… for everything you’ve done and wanting to be there, even when I push you away. I think Mom would have liked you… and your family.”

“Our family, Beks,” I told her.

“Yeah, you’ll be staying with us for now, and it’ll be permanent as soon as Shannon can figure out a way to get you a new identity,” Ellie promised.

“Actually, I have an idea how to do that now, but it will have to wait until after we take care of things in Heil. I don’t want to risk leaving Becca helpless if Khinara or one of the other generals tries to make a move on us,” I told them candidly as I stopped for a red light.

“But earlier you said…”

“That I needed time to figure something out,’ I interrupted my cousin’s protest. “I have an idea but I’ll need to sort through some more of Xuriel’s memories to make sure it’s going to work. I won’t risk it until after we’ve dealt with our Demon issues though.”

Becca wiped at her tears again, her expression hardening. “Well, I’m ready to take care of that whenever you are.”

I nodded as the light changed to green and I put the car back in gear. “We’ll have the next two days to prepare so as soon as we get home I’ll cast those wards on the house. Then we can finish unpacking and start planning.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 20 of book five of I Wish. It's been a while, but hey, extra-long chapter. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.

 

Jen, Beth, and the others spent most of the time over the next couple of days with their families while Rebecca got settled in with us. It was for the best since we were going into what was essentially Hell itself to fight the most powerful Demons in existence. I think that we all realized that some of us might not come back from this.

I was tempted to try to order my apprentice and her Familiar to stay behind, but I couldn’t for two reasons. First, like Rebecca, Lisa was just too determined to go and get revenge against Khinara. The second reason was that she was a Witch like me, and while she might not be near as powerful, she didn’t need to purify the magick energy there before using it, like those with Celestial powers would. And where Lisa went, Michelle would follow.

It was Christmas Eve, and last night I had put the strongest wards that I could imagine on the new house as soon as Rebecca, Ellie, and I had returned from our shopping trip. Sarah had cheated and used magick while in her Celestial form to unload the truck and put most of our stuff away while we were gone, after making sure that nobody was watching the house through the gates or something. She and Annie had also decided this morning that before returning the moving truck, they would use it to go get some bedroom furniture and stuff for what would be Rebecca’s room.

Now it was after lunch and Annie was on her way to return the truck while the rest of us were unpacking our bedrooms and trying to get organized. I took one out of Sarah’s book and cheated by using magick. I finished quickly that way and once I was done, I started helping Rebecca with her room. She didn’t have much stuff so it was basically just putting together her bed, vanity, and other bedroom furniture.

It was as we were working on her bed that my cell phone rang. It was Beth! I motioned to Rebecca that I was going to take the call and stepped out into the hall as she rolled her eyes and smirked at me. I had barely hit the icon to accept the call when Ziralin’s melodic voice said, “Hey, Babe, what are you up to?”

“I’m just helping Becca put her bed together,” I replied, smiling at the sound of her voice.

“Do you think you’ll have time to go out for a bit?” she asked hopefully. “Dad’s family is visiting tomorrow so I probably won’t see you until we leave for the cabin, but it’s Christmas Eve and I want to spend some quality time with my girlfriend. It feels like it’s been months since we did anything, just the two of us, and I’ve missed you.”

“It has been months, or close enough while we were in Nhekar,” I replied as my heart fluttered at the thought of us being alone together. “We didn’t really get much of a chance to be alone together during our brief stay with our troupe or while waiting to be ‘rescued’ either. I’ve missed you too. Can you come to pick me up?”

“Sure, I’ll be there soon, you live a lot closer than you used to. See you in a bit, Babe.” With that, she cheerfully disconnected the call and I turned to look back into Rebecca’s room to find her smirking at me.

“I… Beth wants to…” I started to explain.

Rebecca rolled her eyes as she cut me off. “Geez, just go get ready for your date, you big sap. You were whining about being apart and missing her the whole time we were in that shitty excuse for a fantasy world.”

“You’re going to be okay on your own?” I asked in concern. I felt kind of guilty about bailing in her and not thinking about her when I agreed to go out.

“This isn’t that hard to put together, Shannon, and it’s not like I’m alone here. Your sister, her girlfriend, and your cousins are all here too. Just go already,” she insisted.

“Okay, I’ll see you later then, Beks.” I gave her a hug, which she of course tried to squirm out of, and then I ran toward my room to get ready before Beth showed up.

I snuggled up next to Beth, enjoying both the heat of her body and the hot cocoa in my hands. We had come to Nathan Phillips Square to do some shopping, take in the big Christmas tree, and just relax for the first time in months. We just finished ice skating for over an hour and now we were sitting down for a well-earned rest and something hot to drink.

“This is nice,” I murmured contentedly into her shoulder as I snuggled closer. We were getting the occasional dirty looks for our public same-sex PDAs but I didn’t care. It was their problem, not ours, and if they didn’t like seeing us showing our love for one another then maybe they should stop staring.

There were other more friendly looks as well and at least nobody recognized us. Beth had placed glamours over both of us before leaving the house so we would be free to enjoy our date without being hounded by the press or people with cameras while in public. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t recognizable as a celebrity, some people seemed more inclined to give us hateful looks or hurl insults and slurs at us for our public shows of affection.

It was Christmas Eve; surely, these people had more important things to worry about than two girls kissing one another. I tried to put it out of my mind and just enjoy my time with my girlfriend. I guess that it was bothering her though too since she replied, “Yeah, I missed you so much while we were in Nhekar; it’s nice to have you to myself again. I could do without the audience though.”

Same here,” I admitted before finishing my hot cocoa as silence fell over us. The silence had stretched several minutes before I finally broke it again. “The shopping and skating were fun, my love, but maybe we should do something else. I’m getting cold anyway.”

“Sure, it’s almost dinner time anyway, Babe. Let’s go get something to eat.” With that decided, Beth stood up and extended a hand to help me to my feet. We both knew that it wasn’t necessary, but it was one of those casual considerate gestures that were just part of who Beth was, and that was something that I had missed.

We disposed of our cardboard cups in a recycling bin that already had several others inside and made our way toward my car to drive to a place that Beth had been wanting to try since before we left for Nhekar. It was an old-fashioned pizza parlor that she had heard good things about and thought might make an interesting place to have a date.

It looked to be quiet too, at least tonight. There were hardly any cars outside, so I dropped the glamour that my fiancée had placed on me and she changed to her Beth glamour so we could both be ourselves again, or at least as close as could be allowed while around non-magical people. Then we stepped out of the car and walked into the pizza parlor while holding hands.

The place had a family atmosphere and it was almost like stepping back in time. It was all wood flooring and brick walls with Italian-themed décor and photos on the walls, cozy booths along the outside, and some larger tables in the center for parties or big families. There was a window into the kitchen where you could watch the cooks tossing pizza dough and near the bathrooms was an old pinball machine and a couple of old arcade games like Pacman.

We headed toward a corner booth that would offer some privacy and since it was Christmas Eve and the place wasn’t very busy, a waitress was there almost immediately to drop off menus and take our drink orders. The waitress, a pretty woman in her late teens or early twenties, was wearing a nametag that identified her as Maria. She looked to be of Italian descent and despite having to work on Christmas Eve, her smile seemed genuine.

We both ordered a Coke and then looked over the menu. There wasn’t too much variety there, but then Beth said that this place was mostly known for its pizza and wings. They may not have much variety, but what they did serve, was supposed to be delicious. Half of the menu consisted of various types of pizzas, some that I had never heard of before. It also showed a wide variety of chicken wing flavors that could come with fries, onion rings, or their signature potato wedges and ranch dressing or other dipping sauces.

Maria returned fairly quickly with a tray bearing our drinks and I was a bit surprised when she deposited an empty chilled glass in front of each of us and a small pitcher filled with Coke and a little ice between us. There wasn’t enough ice to water the drink down, just enough to keep it cold. Once the pitcher and glasses were placed on the table, our server smiled at us and asked, “So, what can I get for you girls tonight?”

We had already decided on sharing and trying to get a good taste of what the place had to offer. “We’ve never been here before, so we’d like to try a few things,” Beth replied as she returned the smile. “Could we get a small deep-dish Classic, and an order of a dozen hot wings with potato wedges?”

“Good choice,” Maria offered with a grin. “Some of the fancier pies are nice once in a while, but nothing beats a classic pepperoni. How hot do you want your wings? We have mild, spicy, and five-alarm. I can always have them put the sauce on the side if you’re not sure if you can handle the heat. And did you want any dipping sauce?”

“Could we get the five-alarm sauce on the side for me and some ranch dressing for her?” I inquired. I knew that Beth didn’t like things too spicy but I wanted to feel the heat.

“Not a problem. I’m a spice girl myself, but not everyone can handle it, it’s nice of you to consider your girlfriend like that. You make a cute couple by the way. Is there anything else I can get you?”

I guess that she recognized me after all, but I appreciated her not making a big deal about it. Beth and I looked at one another for a moment before both shaking our heads, “I think that’ll be enough. Thanks, Maria,” Beth said after a moment.

“It’s my pleasure, it’s been quiet tonight and I needed something to do,” Maria replied with a laugh. “Dad says it keeps me out of trouble. It should be about fifteen minutes, but if you need anything else while you’re waiting, just holler.”

With that, Maria gave a little finger wave and headed back in the direction of the kitchen. Once she was out of hearing range I said, “We are giving her such a big tip. She seems so nice and it’s gotta be rough working on Christmas Eve when you should be with family.”

“Actually, I think this place is family-owned and operated,” Beth offered. “That’s part of the charm; there aren’t many places like that anymore.”

“Well if the food tastes as good as it smells, then I can see why they’re becoming so popular. It’s a nice place, I wouldn’t mind us all coming here together if…” I trailed off, not really sure how to finish that sentence, or if I wanted to.

Beth reached across the table to take my hand in hers. “Shannon, what’s wrong? You’ve been quiet for most of the night and I can feel in the back of my mind that you’re worried about something.”

I looked away and poured some Coke from the pitcher into my glass with my free hand as I mumbled, “I’m trying to enjoy our time together. I’ve missed you and if… what if this is our last date?”

“Shannon, I love you more than anything, we’re going to be together for a long time if I have any say about it.”

My voice was barely loud enough to carry across the table to her as I choked out my next words and tried to hold back my tears. “We’re going to Heil, Beth, and if these other Demon Generals are anywhere near as powerful as Khinara was when we first met, some of us might not be coming back. We barely came back from Nhekar. I thought you died when I couldn’t feel you anymore, and I couldn’t bear it. I… don’t think that I can handle losing you again. I don’t want to lose any of you.”

Beth squeezed my hand hard enough to be uncomfortable, and when I looked up at her, she shook her head. “Stop that, Shannon. We can’t afford to be second-guessing or doubting ourselves, we need to work together, use our heads, and be confident…”

“I’m being a realist,” I interrupted as I wiped at my eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie. “These are powerful Demons and everyone who uses Celestial forms to fight is going to be at a serious disadvantage there. But you can’t afford not to because that’s the only power that will let you have any chance against them. The rest of us won’t have that disadvantage, but Rebecca, Lisa, and Michelle aren’t powerful enough to stand toe to toe with something like that.”

“Yeah, we have a disadvantage there, and the Demons will know that,” she admitted quietly while still gripping my hand in hers. “It will make them overconfident though, and we’ll have those okka crystals that you filled with purified magick energy too. That gives us an ace in the hole that they won’t know about. And didn’t Sarah mention that she was making some sort of emergency escape artifacts for all of us in case things go bad? None of us wants to die, and if things get too hot we’ll run away to fight another day.”

“I know that, I just…”

“You have to believe in and trust us, Shannon. Just like we do you. We’re family and friends, that’s what we’re supposed to do when things are rough,” she insisted.

“I do trust you, and I know that you can handle yourselves in most situations, but this isn’t most situations. Unexpected things could happen. I almost lost Sarah once, and I thought I lost you. Promise me, my love, promise me that if something happens that you can’t handle, that you’ll use your escape artifact, even if you have to leave me behind,” I pleaded silently as I looked into her eyes.

“No.” The reply was simple and left no room for misunderstanding. “I’m your Familiar, Shannon, your partner, and someday I’m going to be your wife. No Demon is going to stand between me and that, I don’t care how strong he is. My place is at your side, it always has been and it always will be. We’re going to face and beat all of this shit together, side by side, because that’s what partners do.”

“I…” the words lodged in my throat and I found myself having to wipe at my eyes and take a sip of my drink to steady myself. She was being foolish, but loyal, and it was one of the most romantic things that she had ever said to me. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from my soulmate, and while it worried me it made me happy in a way as well. Still, I had to try one more time. “Xuriel believed that it’s my destiny to face the Demon King alone.”

Beth still wasn’t having it. “To Hell with that, Shannon. We make our own destinies, and mine is at your side, where I belong.”

I knew that I could have gone to Heil alone and nobody could have stopped me, but I also knew deep down that as much as I wanted to leave them at home where they would be safe, I needed Ziralin, Sarah, and the others with me. Xuriel had failed because she had tried to go alone, without people that she trusted to fight alongside her and I couldn’t repeat her mistake. This was their decision to make too, and I couldn’t take that away from them.

“I guess I’ll have to keep you safe then,” I said with a sigh.

“We’ll keep each other safe, isn’t that part of the whole Witch/Familiar package?” Beth replied with a weak smile and a squeeze of my hand.

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.

We were quiet for several minutes after that, just holding hands across the table and occasionally sipping at our drinks until Maria arrived with our food. The pizza was very good; not too greasy, wonderfully cheesy with a thick soft crust, and they weren’t stingy with the pepperoni. The sauce had a slightly tangy and spicy taste that I really liked too. The potato wedges and wings were both lightly breaded and crisp on the outside but tender and cooked to perfection inside, and the breading was just spicy enough to add a hint of flavor without taking away from the chicken or potatoes they were coating.

I dipped both my wings and wedges in the five-alarm sauce but after I gave Beth a brief taste with a kiss, she stuck to her ranch dressing. It was too spicy for her. It was almost too spicy for me, and I loved it. I really wanted to come back here with the others when we got back from Heil to celebrate. Beth was right, I had to believe we were going to beat the Demon King and his Generals, all of us together, and that nothing was going to stand in our way.

All too soon, it was time to go home and I left Maria a fifty-dollar tip when we left for the great service and as a bit of a Christmas gift. Then Beth drove me home, where we fogged the windows for a while with our enthusiastic kissing before finally parting. When I finally stepped back into the house after a final kiss and parting declarations of our love, everyone else had seemingly gone to bed early after a long day. Everyone except Sarah, who called me into the kitchen.

“Hey, Sis, how was the date? You look a little less tense,” she casually commented as she poured a mug of mint tea and motioned for me to join her.

“It was good. Is it really that surprising that I’ve been tense after what we’re going through, and what we’re preparing for?” I pointed out defensively.

“No, it’s not,” Sarah agreed, “but you don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. I know that you want to, Shannon, but not even you can protect everyone all of the time. You’ve been watching everyone in the house like you’re memorizing our faces the past few days, and then there’s Rebecca.”

“What about Beks? Is she okay?” I asked in concern.

“That, right there,” my sister replied with a sigh. “You’re hovering around Rebecca whenever you’re at home. I know that you feel responsible for her situation and want to take care of her, but part of being a big sister is knowing when to give them some space and let them make their own mistakes.”

I stayed quiet for a couple of minutes, staring at my tea. “What if those mistakes can get them hurt, or killed?”

“Then you make sure you’re ready if they need you and trust in them to ask for help if they get in too deep. See how it plays out and trust them to take care of it themselves, and if they can’t then you can jump in and protect them. Like I did the night that we fought Vargas.”

“Sarah, you damn near died trying to sacrifice yourself,” I pointed out.

“And I would do it again if I had to, but living to see the woman you’re growing into would be much better. I’m proud of you when I think of how far you’ve come and what you’ve handled, but I’ve been mostly watching you handle these things on your own, and you’ve done admirably,” Sarah told me gently.

I sipped at my tea and stared at the table. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

She nodded and placed her hand on mine. “When you need me, I’m there for you, but I give you the space you need too. How would you feel if I was always hovering and trying to intervene at the slightest hint of danger? I know that you want to keep everyone safe, but you have to accept that sometimes, that means giving them the tools to do it for themselves and taking a step back until you truly are needed. You’ve given Rebecca those tools, and the rest of us have our own toolboxes. Count on us to use them the best way that we can. If we need you, then we know you’ll be ready to jump in and protect us. Constantly focusing on protecting us when we may not need it is a distraction, and that will only place you in danger. None of us wants that any more than you want it for us.”

I let out a long sigh. She was right, just like Beth had been right about facing things together and protecting each other. “I guess I have a lot to learn about being a big sister… I’ll try to trust you all more too. Just… don’t die on me again.”

“I’ll do my best, Sis,” she promised before leaning over to muss my hair. You’re still pretty new at the big sister role, but I think you’re doing a pretty good job with both Elsaishe and Rebecca.”

“Only because I have the best teacher,” I replied as I forgot my tea for the moment and stood up to go wrap Sarah in a hug.

We stayed there in one another’s embrace for a few minutes before Sarah gave me a quick kiss on the forehead. “I should get some sleep, Shannon. Sweet dreams and don’t stay up too late.”

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 21 of book five of I Wish. It's been a while, but I'm back on schedule. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.
 

We spent Christmas at home as a family. Jennifer’s parents had invited us to join them for Christmas dinner as we had for Thanksgiving, but Sarah told them maybe next year. She said that she didn’t want to intrude since it wouldn’t just be her and me this time now that Annie and our cousins were living with us, and that we wanted to spend the holiday getting settled into the new house.

The reason that she didn’t mention was, of course, Rebecca. We didn’t want to leave her in the big new house alone for the holiday and we didn’t want to risk having anyone see her with us until we could ‘find’ her after getting back from Heil and officially bring her into our home. The whole reason that we had brought her here from Tír na nÓg was so that she wouldn’t have to spend the holidays alone or with people that she barely knew.

We spent most of the morning just spending time together and hanging out, and Elsaishe had a strange request for me and Rebecca that took up part of the morning as well. My Fae cousin wanted us to change to our Succubus forms so she could make molds of our tails. Not the whole tails, just the spaded tips and a little bit of the tail beyond them. We went along with it and just chilled and talked as the molds set before reverting back to our normal forms.

That evening, Sarah and I made a nice Christmas dinner for all of us, and to my surprise; Rebecca offered to help as well. I guess that it was something that she used to help her mother with, which made her fairly emotional during the whole process, but she didn’t once consider leaving the kitchen to do something else. She was actually pretty good in the kitchen and it was nice to see her trying to be part of the family like that. Sarah was right; I worried too much about her.

We didn’t exchange gifts yet since the plan was for everybody to do that at the cabin before we left for Heil. Instead, we just spent time together after dinner, playing board games and talking about the hypothetical future where we all survived Heil and Rebecca would be living with us. It didn’t escape my attention how interested Elsaishe seemed to be in my fellow pseudo-Succubus; how she would get tongue-tied sometimes, or look away while blushing after saying something a bit too eagerly.

I hoped that they both survived and could explore their feelings for one another because as they got to know one another over the past few days, I could see Rebecca becoming smitten as well. Not that she was sure what to do about it. She had never really had anyone interested in her that way, but with her new body and being back on our version of Earth, she was probably going to have to get used to it.

The brief oasis of quiet and happiness passed as we slept and the next day everyone was tense and nervous as the others arrived at the house after lunch and we prepared to teleport to the cabin. Talisha looked like she hadn’t slept at all the night before when we were all gathered in the living room and ready to go. “I should come with all of you. I can use Ziralin’s old bow,” she said nervously as she looked over our grim faces.

Sarah shook her head and gave our Faery cousin a look of sympathy. “Tali, we talked about this. Someone needs to stay here in case something happens, and you’re the logical candidate. You can’t leave your store for a week while we deal with this, and if we don’t come back, then we’ll need you to warn the Faery in Tír na nÓg that we weren’t able to stop the Demons. Besides, if Annie and I don’t come back then Shannon, Ellie, and Rebecca are going to need you. I trust you to take care of all of them, just like you would Ellie.”

Talisha sighed, and there were tears in her eyes, but she nodded. “Come back. All of you,” she said simply, her voice hitching.

After some emotional goodbyes and promises to do our best to do that, Sarah cast the spell that would transport all of us, and our belongings to the cabin. The cabin was cold when we appeared in the living room and Jennifer immediately set about starting a fire to warm it up a bit, as we all got comfortable and gathered our gifts to exchange. She used her elemental control in her Celestial form to save time, but none of us were going to complain about that.

As the cabin warmed up, we all sat down to exchange gifts. It was mostly little personal trinkets, some clothes (especially in Rebecca’s case), and the occasional joke gift that lightened the mood. The most notable gifts that I had gotten were a blank Book of Shadows from Sarah since I had never gotten around to getting one for myself yet, a silver pendant that Ziralin made with two entwined hearts, and Jennifer got me a big white stereotypical witch’s hat with a pale blue ribbon around the base as a joke gift.

Elsaishe had made everyone but me and Rebecca a silver ring with a small spike that could be used to scratch or puncture any Demons that got too close for comfort. That was when Becca and I found out what my cousin had needed molds of our tails for. For a moment, Becca and I both stared at what looked like spearheads in confusion. They were made of silver, hollow, and had a lethally sharp edge to them from her ability to manipulate metal.

Seeing our confusion, Ellie offered, “You said that your tails are really flexible and can be used for weapons, so I… uhh… thought that we could weaponize them further against Demons since you’re not hurt by silver and they are. See the springy bits inside? You can just slip your tail inside when you need it and then the springs will lock it in place. They should just come right off when you return to human forms and your tails shrink and retract.”

Annie grinned at the young Fae across the table. “That’s nasty, I like it.”

“Yeah, that’s brilliant, and it’ll give Shannon and Rebecca an edge in a fight,” Lisa added with a sage nod.

We all groaned at the pun, but Rebecca and I did change forms briefly to test our new weapons. They worked exactly as Ellie had hoped and when we shifted back to human forms they just fell right off. Once I picked mine up off the floor and placed it back on the table, I wrapped Ellie up in a hug. “Thanks, Cuz, these should be a big help. Hopefully, nobody decides to try to cut off our tails, but they would regenerate and they’re flexible enough that we might be able to use the blades to deflect attacks as well.”

I sat back down beside Ziralin and snuggled close as Sarah cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention. “I guess that we should discuss our plan of action then. I’m going to suggest that we wait to leave until tomorrow morning. Tonight we can all get a good night’s sleep and have an early breakfast so we can be at our best when we leave. Sadly, I think most of the information that we have on Heil, the Demon King, and his Generals is thousands of years out of date, except for what little we know about Khinara.”

“Khinara has probably been getting weaker every day since I removed her tongue,” I pointed out. “Xuriel said that since I was wearing platinum on my hand when I yanked it off, it won’t grow back. Neither will the arms I blew off with holy magick. She can’t feed without her tongue to suck on people’s brain juice. She was strained when she used magick to take our plane to Heil. She’s likely gone from the strongest of the Generals to one of the weakest, if some other Demon hasn’t already killed her and taken that position by now.”

“I have a feeling that she’s still alive and waiting for us,” Mason interjected with a frown.

“The element of surprise could mean a lot against these generals, the quicker that we can take each of them down, the better,” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “I don’t like us not having any information to go on though.”

“Shannon and I could do some scouting as Succubae,” Becca suggested.

It was pretty obvious that nobody around the table liked that idea. It was Michelle who turned it down though. “Khinara might still be able to sense Shannon, which would take away the element of surprise when we do hit them. And we are not sending you on your own; I don’t want my best friend going alone into the depths of Hell.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Annie announced after a few minutes of silence. As soon as we arrive, we’ll all hide in one of our bunkers and Rebecca and Shannon can quickly get the lay of the land and bring back a weak Demon to interrogate. The problem is that most Demons probably won’t buckle under torture, they’d keep quiet just to spite us.”

“Uh… who needs torture?” Becca asked, looking genuinely confused. “We just need to make sure that it’s a male Demon. With Shannon and me asking the questions in our Succubus forms we’d have him wrapped around our little fingers.”

We all stared at our newest addition for a moment in shocked realization. “That… could probably work,” Ziralin said pensively beside me. “It gives me the willies thinking about it, but it could work.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” I said with a groan and shuddering at the thought of debasing myself like that. “It sounds like a plan.”

With that decided, we made dinner and then started preparing our gear for the next morning. We all had our portable bunkers stocked with food and supplies, just in case, and the sheets that served as their entrances tucked safely inside one of the pockets of our Demon hunting clothes. Sarah had made one for Rebecca as well, in case she got separated from us for some reason.

The Celestials among us were each given a share of the okka crystals that I had filled with magick energy in Nhekar. They would need them if they were going to be fighting in Heil for long. Other than that, everyone had a gun that we were comfortable with as a holdout weapon, a pouch filled with my special anti-Demon ammunition, and what Sarah called our bug-out bracelets.

The bracelets were simple silver affairs made by Talisha, with a small shard of okka crystal embedded, and engraved with the Celestial spell runes for a spell that would take us back to the coordinates for our new home in Toronto if the wearer spoke the trigger word. Basically, it was a concentrated single-person planar translocation spell and Sarah had infused each bracelet with not only the spell itself, but enough magick energy to fuel it by having Talisha embed the okka crystal shards. The best part was that they would be reusable since the okka shards would start passively absorbing magick energy again until full once drained by the spell.

The others would be wearing their Demon hunting outfits that had been enchanted with protection spells and to keep them comfortable in any weather, of course, but Rebecca and I couldn’t. Becca didn’t have anything like that since she was new to the group, and I couldn’t use mine if I wanted to be able to use my Succubus form since the corset dress wouldn’t be able to accommodate my wings, and my cloak would have gotten in the way. With that in mind, we had to improvise and I placed the same spells on our clothes as were on my former Demon hunting outfit.

I kept to my White Witch theme, though my new look was, by necessity, fairly revealing. White yoga pants that barely covered my butt, and would allow my tail to come free without damaging anything, were paired with a form-fitting white sleeveless halter top that would do the same for my wings. I wore similarly suitable undergarments underneath and added the boots and face shield from my original White Witch outfit.

Instead of the gloves that I would normally wear on our world to keep from leaving any fingerprints; I wore the platinum handflowers that Yanisse had made for me for a bit of extra punch against Demons. I also had a belt with some pouches on it containing magick bullets, my new tail blade, my bunker entrance, and the holstered Desert Eagle Mark XIX that I had used in Nhekar for my holdout weapon. I topped the whole thing off with my new large-brimmed white witch’s hat, which could be tied securely under my chin with attached ribbons.

For Rebecca, we used yoga pants like mine, but in a solid grey, and a grey hoodie with slits cut in the back for her wings, over top similar undergarments as mine. We had a spare face shield that I used magick to turn grey for her to match her other clothes, as well as a pair of sneakers and fingerless gloves that wouldn’t get damaged when her claws emerged. She also had the shotgun that she had used in Nhekar and a belt similar to mine with pouches for her tail blade, bunker entrance, and ammunition for the shotgun.

With preparations made for the next morning, we all tried to go to sleep early, knowing that we should rest while we could with what lay ahead of us. I was worried that Sarah, Lisa, and I would have to break out the sleep spells, but most of us seemed to fall asleep without too much trouble. Most of us were awake on our own before dawn, and after a quick and hearty breakfast of oatmeal, we were ready to leave.

Well, most of us were ready. Rebecca looked like she hadn’t slept very well after all and had a serious case of bedhead as she finished her breakfast. “You know, Beks,” I casually taunted, “Succubus powers or no, you might want to brush your hair if you want to seduce a Demon today.”

She responded by quickly patting down her hair into something less, ‘just woke up’ and sticking out her tongue at me before adding for good measure, “Go to Hell, Succu-bitch.” Yeah, she was tired and snarky, but the barest smirk on her face told me that it was just our usual taunt-jousting.

“That’s the plan,” I retorted with far more cheer than I actually felt. The truth was that I was nervous as hell, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t alone in that. A few moments later, Sarah called us all outside to let us know that the gate spell was ready and we were on our way.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 22 of book five of I Wish. A day late, but I had a bit of a rough week. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.
 

I could only think that it was little wonder that the Demons were looking to gain access to new worlds through conquest as Rebecca and I flew in search of a Demon to interrogate. Much of the terrain that we had seen thus far had been inhospitable at best. It was a literal hellscape, barren cracked earth where most living things had been either burned away by lava or suffocated by ash-laden air that was torture to breathe. I hoped that their entire world wasn’t like this.

We might have ended up in the middle of nowhere since we hadn’t specified any specific coordinates. It was a risk that Sarah and I had privately decided was for the best though. We hadn’t dared tried to transport back to our downed plane for several reasons after all.

The first of those was that doing so would have probably led us straight into a trap. I had little doubt that Khinara would have people scouring that area for any sign of where we had disappeared to, or of a possible return. She had used up a lot of magick energy to bring us here to destroy us, so I imagined that she wasn’t too happy when we slipped through her fingers.

The second reason was the sheer multitude of Demons that had been waiting for our arrival there the first time. I doubted very much that it was a coincidence, or that Khinara had happened to assemble an army’s worth of Demons to that spot just to kill me. It was far more likely that she had brought us to an area where Demons already congregated.

The most important reason for not taking us to the ruined remains of her mother’s plane was, of course, Rebecca. Seeing what remained of it and knowing that her mother’s mutilated remains were probably still inside would have been dangerous to her mental state. Sure, she probably needed closure, but I was hoping that she could get that by facing her literal Demons. There was no need to traumatize her all over again, and I didn’t want to see her have to go through that.

Sarah and I were familiar enough with Khinara that we probably could have used a spell to take us right to her and possibly catch her by surprise, but the flip side of that would have been that we would have no idea where she would be or who would be with her. It could end up even worse than going to wherever the plane had crashed. So, for now, it was safer for all of us if Rebecca and I could just find a solitary male Demon or a small group of them to talk to.

We seemed to have appeared on a large volcanic island, which wasn’t all that surprising given the ash clouds that we were flying under, the volcano, and the lava. I could see a large expanse of ocean ahead of us now though, and in the distance, there was a chain of small islands that looked slightly more hospitable than this one. Since Rebecca was gesturing wildly in that direction, she probably saw it too, so I nodded and we veered off in the direction of the one that seemed closest.

It took much longer than I would have liked to get clear of the ash cloud that covered the island and a good distance around it. The regeneration that we possessed in our Succubus forms kept us from being too bothered by the ash that was thick in the air, but it was still a welcome relief to be free of it. The others who were currently kept hidden in my folded-up bunker wouldn’t have been so lucky and we would need to stop soon to get some relatively fresh air in there for them. Sarah could do that with magick, but I didn’t want her wasting magick energy for that when she might need it in the battles to come.

The first couple of islands were still in the shadow of the ash cloud and pretty much barren, so we kept flying. The third island was small, but there were some signs of life there at least, with some patches of vegetation and some desiccated trees that looked more dead than alive. I thought it might be a good spot for the others to come out and get some air though, while Rebecca and I went on to check the other islands for inhabitants.

I removed the bunker entrance from its large pouch, unfolded it, and then pinned it to one of the trees so the others could leave the bunker. As they all stepped out to get some air and stretch their legs, Ziralin wrapped me in a hug and kissed me. Once she had released me from her amorous embrace, she looked around and shrugged. “It's not that bad.”

Michelle gave my fiancée an incredulous look. “I’d hate to see your idea of bad then.”

Ziralin raised her hands in defense. “Well, I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely."

Lisa turned to shake her head at the silver-haired Fae, but I could see the crack of a smile. “Really? You’re quoting the Princess Bride?”

She just grinned and shrugged as she countered, “It’s a good movie. And honestly, I was expecting way worse when we appeared so close to a volcano.”

“Well, just be glad you didn’t have to fly through that shit,” Rebecca grouched as she tried to dust herself off. “We’re all covered in ash. Shannon really shouldn’t have worn white.”

“But she’s been ‘White Witch’ ever since this whole dealing with the supernatural thing started, it’s kinda her thing. She can’t just change to some Succubus theme now, how would we introduce her?” Jennifer pointed out, though I was pretty sure she was mostly teasing. “Plus she’s rocking that hat I got her.”

I focused on using a little of my, quite frankly massive, store of magick energy to pull all of the ash, dirt, and grime from my hair, skin, and clothes and then followed up by doing the same for Rebecca. “Is that better, Beks?”

“Much better, thanks, Shannon,” she replied with a relieved smile.

“Okay, we should be good to continue on our way then. I would rather we find someone to interrogate as soon as possible so we can get on with this. Would you all rather wait here while we scout out those other islands, or go back in the bunker?”

“We should probably stay here for now,” Sarah replied thoughtfully. “If you don’t find anyone or any other signs of life then we may just have to try casting a portal to another location anyway. If you do find any Demons, then you can bring one back here for a private conversation.”

It wasn’t until the second to last island in the chain that we found something promising. It looked almost like an eighteenth-century village; roughly made stone homes with dirt walkways. On the outer edges, large oxen-like animals with thick wool grazed in pastures, and it looked like there were a couple of farms as well. There was also a large square that looked like a market of some sort by the shoreline.

As we got closer, I could see Imps, Gorgons, Djinns, centaur-like Demons, and some that looked almost human except for their horns and bright red skin. They were all just going about their daily business; working, buying things from the market, or having what looked like casual conversations. There were even Merrow set up to sell fish and other seafood on the waterside of the market.

This was not what I had been expecting. Given the wars against the Celestials, the conquest of Tír na nÓg, and their current attempts to infiltrate our world, I had expected to see something more along the lines of a military camp, if and when we found any sort of organized groups. That or Demons jockeying for position over one another, as we had seen in Toronto since Khinara had vanished.

Still, as idyllic as the village looked from our current vantage point far above, I felt it best to be cautious. We started to wing our way downward and as we descended, I tried to spot any lone male Demons to talk to. We weren’t cautious enough, it was the middle of the afternoon and we were spotted long before we could touch down on the ground. Demons of all types were looking up at us and pointing as their conversations became more animated.

With a sigh and a bad feeling in my gut, I motioned to Rebecca for us to land. The crowd followed our motion and since there was no avoiding them, I just landed in the square with Rebecca joining me a moment later. I was greeted by the tip of a spear at my throat, held by a very muscular red-skinned woman with black hair, crimson eyes, and a pair of black horns atop her head. Maybe these people weren’t as friendly and peaceful as they had looked.

“Best you go back to where you came from, Succubus. We’re not interested in fighting in your thrice-damned war. If you even look at any of our men to try to tempt them otherwise, I’ll separate your head from your body and send you back to your precious Demon King in pieces. We’ll see if you can regenerate from that.” She was speaking Demon so poor Rebecca, who had found herself in a similar position, had no idea what was going on.

Xuriel and the other Sentinels had managed to get a working knowledge of the language during the first war by using Rosetta Stones while interrogating Demon captives, so I could understand her, but dredging up Xuriel’s knowledge of the language to speak it myself took a moment. A moment where I was very careful not to move. I tried my best to keep my expression neutral as I said, “We’re not Succubae, we’re just under a curse to resemble them and can copy their abilities. If you don’t believe me, have someone look at my lower back or my companion’s right shoulder.”

“Don’t move,” the Demoness warned before turning to a female Imp and adding, “Etlik, check her back.”

The Demons surrounding us were all female; they really didn’t trust Succubae, not that I could blame them. I carried hard feelings toward the real thing as well. I felt a fingertip carefully prod my back and then the Imp behind me said, “Huh, that’s a Brand curse, she’ll be stuck with that forever. Someone really doesn’t like this girl, Kisha. There’s something strange about it though. It’s fused with another mark of some kind.”

“Yeah, that would be a Celestial mark,” I said with a grimace. That spear was still uncomfortably close to my throat and I was worried that if I moved so much as the tip of my tail that she would use it.

There were several gasps at that confession, including one from the woman holding the spear. “Who would do such a thing? Demon King Baal forbid using Brands on Celestials, lest another Shadow appears. Are you truly a Celestial? Have you come to try to kill Baal?” The spear lowered slightly as she stared at me with a conflicted look on her face.

“Shadow? Do you mean Xuriel?” Kisha’s eyes widened as I spoke the name. Given her reactions to our arrival and to what I had said so far, I decided to take a risk. If it didn’t work out, I could probably subdue the people surrounding us with a spell, now that the spearhead wasn’t uncomfortably close to my throat. “No, I’m not a Celestial, but my ancestor, Xuriel, was. I’m the one that she chose to inherit her mark, her memories, and her power. I haven’t come to try to kill Baal though, I will kill him.”

It turned out that the village of Mynsk was one of many communities that had banded together to try and eke out a decent life far away from the Rings, where most of the Demons serving under Demon King Baal lived. Kisha had once been a member of his armies until she realized that the war that Baal was intent on waging was not for lands where the denizens of Heil might find a better life than on their own mostly barren world. It was for the sole purpose of conquest.

They had practically conquered Tír na nÓg and displaced the Faery, but despite the lush lands there, no colonists were being sent. In fact, it would have been dangerous for most Demons to live their long term with the purity of the magick energy there. The same was true for Haven but he still sent offensives there. He wanted to beat the Celestials, as he had the Faery, to prove his superiority.

The target that would have made the most sense for them to take was Earth, but he had not bothered claiming it in the last war when the population was small and uneducated. He was making a move now, but our population was huge and we have created powerful weapons, and he was still focused on Haven as well. Kisha believed that he feared the power of the Sentinels and Xuriel in particular; it was why he had appointed seven generals. It was why he had his underlings try to claim their marks.

Many Demons didn’t care about the war, they were just too terrified of Baal to go against him. Some, like the people of Mynsk placed themselves far out of his influence, but they still had to repel the occasional ‘recruiters’ for his army. They had made a decent life for themselves in Mynsk and were mostly happy, but the recruiters had been coming more and more often lately as Baal tried to build up his army for a major offensive.

We needed to stop him, to take him and his generals down for good, and Kisha and the people of Mynsk were willing to help. They couldn’t fight at our side, of them all, only Kisha had any real fighting experience. She knew all too well that she was no match for any of the generals though. Instead, once we had taken her to meet the others, she offered us what knowledge she had of each of the generals and of the Rings, the largest city in their world, and the seat of Baal’s power.

Now, two days later, the ten of us stood atop a cliff overlooking the massive city below. The Rings. Nine concentric circular walls and each had a gate. The first gate would be easy enough, the first ring only contained farms and those who tended them to feed the armies of Heil. Each gate after that had a guardhouse though where the generals lived and the rings were filled with the Demons under their command and those who served them. Within the center ring, was Baal’s palace.

I turned to the others and asked my sister, “So, what do we do?”

Sarah sighed as she cast an uncertain glance at the city below us. “There’s got to be at least a hundred thousand Demons in that city, we can’t possibly fend off that many and try to take down the most powerful of them all at the same time.”

Annie nodded in agreement. “I’m always up for a good fight, but just attacking head-on might be suicide. Mason, what do you think?”

We all turned to our resident psychic. He hadn’t steered us wrong yet and his gut feelings were usually right on the money. He seemed reluctant to share his feelings though. Finally, he frowned and looked each of us over. “I know that the plan was to all fight as a team, but Sarah is right, most of us will die if we do it that way, and we won’t win. We need to attack each of the generals and Baal directly, all at the same time so they can’t reinforce one another.”

“But that’s crazy! You want us all to take on one of the eight most powerful Demons in Heil by ourselves? Can we even do that? They have the advantage here,” Ziralin pointed out with an uncertain look in my direction.

“Shannon can teleport each of us right to those gatehouses, and they are all there right now, or soon will be. I’m certain of it. If we hit them hard and fast we can take them by surprise and we’re no slouches power-wise either,” Mason insisted with a shake of his head. “My gut says this is our best chance. Shannon is the only one who can take on Baal, and each of us has advantages that will help us against one of the generals. Rebecca, Lisa, and Michelle, you’ll take the first gatehouse. Jen will take the second, I’ll take the third, Annie the fourth, Ellie the fifth, Ziralin the sixth, and Sarah will take the final gatehouse.”

We debated it for a while and nobody was happy, but Mason had a point. If we wanted to win, we couldn’t let them reinforce one another or Baal. We had to take them all down at the same time. So, in the end, I focused on the gatehouses of the city below with my enhanced Succubus vision and on each of my friends and family members with my mind. Then, as I was teleporting them to their locations, I prayed to the Goddess that I wasn’t sending them to their deaths.

I couldn’t teleport Michelle, since she was Lisa’s Familiar, but that wasn’t a problem as she used her own teleport ability to join her Witch’s side. Still, that many teleport spells at the same time while eyeballing the locations from such a distance took a bit of effort and was a little tiring, but I was already starting to gather more magick energy as I readied a final teleport spell to take me to my own destination. It was time for the final battle to begin.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 23 of book five of I Wish. Switching things up with a different PoV. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.
 

I appeared on a small rooftop, some sort of pagoda or something that I figured was probably the gatehouse that Shannon had been aiming for. I might still taunt or mess with her occasionally, but one thing that I had learned while traveling through that godforsaken hellhole that we had been trapped in after Mom’s plane went down, was that she’s very good at this magick stuff. She’s way more imaginative and focused than I will ever be, for sure, and I guess that’s important with that kind of shit.

I would never admit it, of course, but it was because of her that we survived and got out of there alive. She’s smart, she never gives up, and she genuinely cares about what happens to other people… what happens to me, and probably far more than I deserve. She and Beth aren’t what I originally thought them to be, as hard as it is to accept sometimes, their sickening sweetness is genuine.

It might be having an effect on me too. I think that I might have been actually crushing on Shannon there for a while until Elsaishe made it awkward. Now, Shannon is like the big sister that I always wanted but never had. She’s a bit overprotective, but she cares and she and Sarah are both wise in the way of girl-fu. It’s hard to believe that she was like me once. Hell, sometimes it’s hard to believe that I was like me once.

I think Mom would have liked them, she probably would have liked this whole crazy group once she got past the ‘magic is real’ thing. I’m still trying to get used to that myself, but I guess it helps hanging out with witches, psychics, angels, faery, and Succubae. Being one of those Succubae helps too, even if I’m not a real one. I have the abilities and I’m hot as hell now, which is great, but now I was going to need to use those abilities.

“Focus Beks. Shannon isn’t going to be here to cover your ass this time,” I told myself sternly. I was in the middle of Hell itself and I was going to be attacking one of the most powerful Demons in existence with an ex-jock Witch and a Catgirl. Wow, my life is seriously fucked up these days, but even I have to admit that it’s exciting sometimes. It’ll be even more exciting if I can find the bitch who murdered my mom and rip her fucking heart out.

I could do it, I would do it. My… friends would help me, and Lisa had a score to settle with the bitch too. Speaking of Lisa, she had appeared nearby and a moment later Michelle was by her side. My best friend was smitten with the woman who had become her Witch, and even I had to admit that they made a good couple. For a former jock, Lisa had some qualities that I admired, like her refusal to take shit from absolutely anyone, even Demons.

Oh yeah, we were going to get some payback today. The thought of it made me smile as I shifted to my full-on Succubus form and used my sharp senses to get a read on the area. I didn’t put on the new toy that Elsaishe had made me yet, it was safely in its pouch, waiting for just the right moment. Even I knew that fighting a Demon wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, and I decided that I should keep the pretty Faery’s gift in reserve as my ace in the hole.

It was a thoughtful gift, and I could feel a warmth building up in my cheeks, and other places, as it brought my thoughts to Elsaishe. For some reason that didn’t make a lick of fucking sense, she liked me. I had tried pushing her away at first, but she was like Shannon and just wouldn’t give up on me, and as we were getting to know one another, I found myself starting to like her too.

“Keep your head in the game, Beks,” I reminded myself as I listened carefully and scented the air. There was something moving far below us in the Gatehouse, but looking around I could see that the large courtyard around the gatehouse was clear of any Demons. Whoever this Demon General was, they obviously valued their privacy. Well, at least it would make our job easier.

I looked at Michelle, pointed down, and held up one finger. The catgirl nodded, but there was a dark expression on her face and even from fifteen feet away, I could tell that she was on edge. Her body language was stiff and rigid, her ears were back flat against her head, and her tail was bristling. She gave Lisa a meaningful look and the Witch tensed up, clenching and unclenching her fists.

Screw this. We were supposed to hit hard and fast so none of these fuckers could come to each other’s aid. Lisa was a Witch so she needed to have some space to throw spells, or bullets if all else failed. Out of all of us, I was the best built for a physical one-on-one fight to keep the Demon’s attention off her while she did her thing. Michelle was fast enough and had those claws and regeneration, but I was stronger and faster, and my regen was better too.

Shannon would probably tell me to try to figure out what I was dealing with before throwing myself into a fight, but this was the best choice. I needed to do this. Besides, I already knew what was down there. Michelle had recognized the scent and her and Lisa’s reactions had told me everything that I needed to know.

“This is for you, Mom,” I told myself as I flew off the roof and glided toward the sounds and scent I had detected. The gatehouse wasn’t really a gatehouse after all, just an open courtyard built between the outer ring and the next with a large gate to restrict traffic on each side. The pagoda at the center was real fancy and all, but I didn’t give a shit as I burst through the nearest wall on the top floor toward the breathing I heard on the other side.

I wasn’t able to get my hands on her before some magical energy blast threw me back through the hole I had just made and sent me crashing to the ground and skidding across the courtyard. I got to my feet and could already feel the damaged bones in my left wing resetting and my various bruises and scrapes healing. Good thing I was durable, and at least I got her attention.

The hideous freak who had killed my mother jumped out of the pagoda and walked toward me, giving me a dismissive look as she spoke in that guttural Demon language that I couldn’t understand a word of. She probably thought I was some other Demon trying to take her place in the hierarchy and was telling me that I’d never be good enough. I didn’t need a common language to understand that bitch. She might be ugly as fuck and have scary Demon powers, but I’d seen tons of people with that same superior sneer and that body language that says, “I’m better than you and always will be.” Fuck, Demons are so high school.

I dusted myself off and just gave her my best “I’m gonna fuck you up” smile. And that was when Lisa hit her in the back with a barrage of what Shannon called holy missiles, Michelle emptied a clip of Shannon’s special bullets, and whatever magick shield Khinara had protecting her flared with the impacts. She quickly chanted something in Demon and raised another shield as Lisa followed up with a spear of light, and Michelle leaped her way down the balconies of the building and rushed the Demon.

“Pour it on!” my best friend said as we both attacked with a mix of punches and slashes to keep her occupied while Lisa readied another round of spells. “She’s protected herself against physical attacks too this time, but her shield is a lot weaker!”

I guess Shannon was right, Khinara was weak and getting even weaker every day that she couldn’t feed. We could take her; Mason said that we had an advantage. I might not believe one hundred percent in his psychic powers or his sense of the future, but I was ready to make my own future. I was going to fucking kill the bitch who took my mom from me.

“You two,” Khinara spat, glaring at the black-furred catgirl and the Witch bombarding her from the roof of the pagoda in turn. “You escaped after all and somehow managed to turn a Succubus against me. Did you offer her my place? She’s too weak to keep it.”

“I’m not a Succubus, bitch!” I snapped, causing her eyes to widen momentarily.

She glared at me as if she was trying to burn a hole through me with willpower alone, that or she was constipated. Whatever it was, it only resulted in a headache, for her. “You… those protections on your minds…”

“Shannon says hi,” Michelle said with a savage smile as her claws raked across Khinara’s energy shield.

“No, Michelle, get it right,” I countered. “She said ‘die’.” I swung out my shotgun to hit the Demoness full in the face with a load of magical buckshot, causing her shield to flare again. She landed a savage kick in return though, sending me flying and my shotgun skittering across the flagstones.

“Fuck, I think she broke some ribs there,” I muttered as I clutched my side and got to my feet. Lisa managed to get a shot in with a holy spell while her shield was down, disintegrating one of the three arms on her left side. Two more like that and one on the right and she’d have to start biting to fight back. This might take a while.

Taking that hit might have been worth it though; something had caught my attention as she kicked me away. When something hit her shield, it would flare with the impact, only when the shield faded there was a very faint popping sound that accompanied the flare and it took her several seconds to recast the shield. In fact, she was getting weaker the longer that this fight went on, and it took longer to re-cast the shield that time than it had after Lisa and Michelle had ambushed her.

Ignoring my ribs since they were already beginning to heal, I threw myself back into the fight. Khinara let loose the same spell that had sent me flying and hurled it at the only one that she considered a threat, Lisa. The blast blew the top of the pagoda off and Lisa lost her footing trying to avoid it. Shit, that pagoda was probably at least fifty feet high and she was too far away to catch on to any of the balconies.

Michelle vanished and I dove in to get the Demoness’s attention back on me as the catgirl reappeared in midair to catch her girlfriend in what would have been a fatal fall for her. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them hit the ground, Michelle cushioning the landing of her Witch, but landing with a painful-sounding crack as she tried to stick the landing. Oh fuck, her leg wasn’t at a good angle, even with her regeneration that was going to take time to heal.

Lisa got right to her feet, standing protectively in front of Michelle as she recharged and threw another battery of spells at Khinara and I beat on the Demoness with every ounce of strength that I possessed. The shield popped again and I managed to rake my claws against her back, causing a hiss of pain that sounded vaguely like a can of soda that had been punctured. Khinara turned toward me snarling, “I don’t know who, or what, you are, but this is where you die. I will gut you and feast on your entrails.”

She re-cast her shield spell and then she was suddenly on top of me, raining down a flurry of blows. The pain of bones breaking and starting to heal was only a dim discomfort in the back of my mind. For some reason, all that I could think of was the day my mother had died, walking into the cockpit and seeing her standing over my mother’s desecrated body, guts strewn all over the cockpit. A fury built up in me as she grabbed me by the throat and lifted me into the air to sneer at me.

Behind her, I could see Lisa prepping another round of spells. On the ground beside her, Michelle had her gun reloaded and was aiming carefully as her face scrunched up in pain. I needed to hold on, I wasn’t going to let them die too, and I couldn’t afford to die either. I had a promise to keep. I slipped my tail carefully into the pouch that held my tail blade and felt it click into place securely on the spaded tip.

Khinara held me high in front of her, mercilessly pounding on my ribs and stomach, and I wheezed as I spit a bloody gob in her face. I ignored the pain, ignored the arrogant sneer on her face, and waited for my moment. Lisa unleashed another rain of holy missiles and Michelle emptied her clip into the Demon’s back, and as I heard the faint popping sound, I lashed out with my tail, burying the silver blade at its tip into her chest. “That… was… for Mom… bitch.”

For a moment, Khinara’s eyes were wide with surprise and realization before she turned to ash and I fell to the stone-covered ground. I didn’t stay down. I’ve taken enough beatings to last a lifetime, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you never give them the satisfaction of staying down. Even in death, I wasn’t going to let that hideous bitch have that power over me. We’d won, at least for the moment, and I needed to check on Michelle and Lisa.

Staggering to my feet, I walked toward them, my head held high. “Thanks… for the opening. How’s the leg, Michelle?”

“Hurts like a bitch,” Lisa’s Familiar admitted with a grimace. “Even with my regeneration and some hefty healing spells, this is probably gonna take a few days to heal once we set it. Elsaishe could heal it a lot quicker, but she’s got her own fight to handle. Fuck. I guess we’re done here.”

“We did our job,” Lisa replied with shrug. “That’s one less Demon that can go after Shannon or the others. Nice job, Becca. I’m glad you were able to avenge your mom.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you two,” I admitted while looking anywhere at them. “Um… thanks. You two should use your bug-out bracelets to head home, so you can work on healing Michelle’s leg.”

“What about you? You just took a beating too,” Michelle protested.

“Yeah, but my regeneration works a lot faster than yours, and I can still fly and not get too much attention. I… need to go. I know that I avenged my mom, but there are people that I want to protect too. I’ll meet you at home.”

I waited until they had both vanished before retrieving my shotgun and taking to the air. I still hurt like hell, but I could regenerate on the way. As I got some altitude, I could see and hear the battles going on below me. The entire second ring was in chaos and looking into the distance, it looked like the same might hold true for the third ring as well.

It looked like Kisha had done her part and contacted her friends in the resistance after all. Hopefully, the chaos would help turn things in our favor. I didn’t give a fuck what happened to the Demons in this shithole, but I needed to hurry. I had someone to protect.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 24 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.
 

** Jennifer **

I crouched down where I appeared and took a moment to look around and get the lay of the land. It looked like I had appeared on top of a wall, roughly thirty feet high and overlooking a large cobblestone courtyard, and a tower that stood at the center of it. The tower was on a tiny island that was surrounded by an actual moat and had large bonfires burning at each corner.

The building itself appeared to be made mostly of stone and vaguely resembled a pagoda that I saw on my trip to Japan with Mom and Dad a couple of years ago. Back then, I had thought that visiting another country was cool. After the things I had seen and done recently though, it was hard to believe that I was the same person as back then.

My life certainly had changed since meeting Shannon and sure, a lot of this was crazy and scary, but it was also so damn exciting. I fought Demons and went to other worlds; it was like a gamer’s dream come true. Mom and Dad would totally freak out if they knew that we were doing this stuff, but we were the only ones who could. We had earned the power to do it.

Yeah, it’s a comic book saying, but with great power comes great responsibility. We have a duty to protect the people in our world who can’t protect themselves from the Demons, whether through powerlessness or ignorance. I take my responsibilities very seriously.

Sometimes I felt like I was in over my head though and this was one of those times. I mean, Shannon was a powerhouse, even before she had Xuriel’s mark unsealed, and Sarah was too, and Sarah had experience and some real wisdom going for her too. Annie was a total badass even without her Celestial powers, Mason had his psychic power, and both Ellie and Ziralin were freaking Fae before getting their wings. It was kind of hard to see Ziralin as my friend Beth sometimes, even with the glamour, because she had grown so far beyond the person she once was.

Even Lisa, Michelle, and Rebecca had something going for them. Lisa was a Witch and probably one of the bravest people I knew. Michelle was like a catgirl version of Ziralin before she got her mark; strong, fast, she healed fast, and magic just slid right off her. Rebecca had the whole pseudo-succubus thing going for her now, and I was sure that she could probably take on a Demon on her own if she tried.

Then there was me; plain, ordinary, and practically fading into the background. The rich girl riding on her best friend’s coattails. There was no doubt in my mind that I was probably the weakest of all of us who had earned or inherited a Celestial’s mark, and usually, I was okay with that. I contributed how I could and got to do things most humans could never even dream of, but sometimes, I just wanted to stand out on my own just once.

I guess this was my chance to do that, to prove myself by taking on one of the Demon King’s generals. By myself. “Fuck, I am so screwed,” I thought to myself as I looked around and tried to form some sort of plan. We were supposed to hit them hard and fast and not let them help one another, and here I was wasting time.

At least with those fires and the moat, I would have all four elements available to me, but this wasn’t my usual kind of fight. I liked to know something about the Demons I was facing before the fight, to take time to observe them and get a feel for who they were and how they reacted, and then come up with a plan to take them down. The one thing that I had going for me was that I’m smart, and I liked to use that. This cowboy stuff wasn’t me.

As quietly as I could, I unslung the rifle from my shoulder and got into the sniper position that Annie had taught me. Then I brought the rifle to my shoulder and looked down the scope to scout out the tower and the demonic aura that I could feel coming from within. Whatever it was, it was strong, terrifyingly so if I could sense it while not in my Celestial form.

I didn’t dare transform yet either. If I did, I would be wasting magic energy, and as soon as I did, that Demon would probably detect my aura. Maybe with one well-placed magic bullet, I could avoid a fight. At the very least, I could try to get a read on my opponent.

He, or maybe she, was sitting in a meditative stance on the bottom floor of the tower. They looked sort of like a black-furred werewolf, but their clothes and body type made it hard to determine their gender, if they had a gender, as I knew it at all. Not that their gender, or possible lack thereof, mattered. They were a Demon general, and not to be taken lightly.

I had them in my sights and carefully controlled my breathing as I lined up my shot when the Demon turned and looked right at me. They knew I was here. I reacted instantly, jumping from the top of the wall and changing to my Celestial form as a rock spike erupted from the spot where I had been laying a moment earlier and my rifle clattered to the ground.

My opponent stepped calmly from the tower, their voice carrying to me on the wind. “Hmmm… A Celestial, and using a human weapon. Did you truly think that you could kill Falora, Mistress of the Elements, with such an attack? I felt you the moment that you appeared in my domain, all that you see here is mine to command. I am intimately familiar with every grain of sand, every drop of water…”

“What is it with Demons talking themselves up like some monologuing comic book villain?” I wondered bitterly as I tried to take in my opponent. If she could command the elements like me then this could be a tough fight. It might come down to who was more creative which would be bad because she probably had a lot more experience than I did. I needed to buy time and think of a plan, so I interrupted her to ask, “Should I know you? I can’t say that I’m familiar with the name.”

Maybe that wasn’t the best idea because her reply was an angry roar as she gathered fire from the closest of the bonfires and launched it at me. “Okay, Jen, mental note. If you’re going to interrupt the Demon’s monologue, do it with an attack,” I mentally grumbled as I intercepted the fire with a shield of water from the moat.

The meeting of the two caused a sizzling sound, but it was the water that held. Most of it was evaporated, and honestly, I think it was the element of surprise that really saved me there as she stared at me wide-eyed. I couldn’t afford to let up though, so I directed my mind to the air around me as I reached into my ammunition pouch for a handful of Shannon’s magicked bullets and launched them at Falora with a hurricane-force wind.

The bullets struck a hastily formed stone barrier and detonated their divine magic. Her barrier exploded, sending rock flying everywhere as I winged backward to avoid the shrapnel. What was left of the barrier collapsed, showing Falora unharmed and I mentally cursed at the glare she gave me. “Shit, that was my best chance to finish this quickly. She’s going to be taking me seriously now and I can’t keep this up for long.”

Not for the first time, I wished that I had another power from my Celestial mark. Sarah had told me that the mark, and the powers they granted the bearer, were something uniquely suited to them. The others all had some sort of divine energy as part of their Celestial abilities. I, on the other hand, had control of the four basic elements and while that is awesome, it makes killing Demons a pain in the ass sometimes.

It takes finesse, concentration, and a lot of mental and magick energy to manipulate the elements and make them do exactly what I want them to do. That shield and the wind had taken a lot of juice, and since it looked like I was going to have to stay in the air to give myself time to counter her attacks, devoting energy to that was going to drain my reserves too. I was already draining the first okka crystal in my pouch dry to keep from poisoning myself on Heil’s tainted magick energy.

Falora had similar powers to my own, so I needed to figure out a weakness to exploit, fast. This was going to be a battle of attrition otherwise and once I ran out of okka crystals; I would lose. I also needed to keep my mind on the battle, because if she slipped up, she could regenerate and keep the fight going, but I couldn’t afford to slip up even once.

I barely avoided a barrage of stone shingles from the roof of the pagoda by erecting a stone barrier from the ground, but Falora countered the retaliatory spikes that I launched from it with a wall of her own. I followed up with a powerful burst of wind from her right, but she just shifted her barrier to block that too. Then she got serious.

The water in the moat gathered at Falora’s command, turning into a massive waterspout. It was huge and she sent it right at me, so fast that there was no time to move out of its path. Draining the second of the crystals, I raised a stone barrier at record speed, formed a second barrier of hardened air between me and the first, and braced myself with a counterwind.

The water twister punched right through my first barrier and the second slowed it, but I was still sent flying into the wall encircling the courtyard. The counterwind I had summoned had barely served to slow me and take the brunt of the damage as I slammed into the wall in a symphony of pain that forced the air out of my lungs as I fell to the ground below. I could barely move and hissed from the white-hot pain that engulfed the left side of my body as I tried to get up and get back in the air.

This was bad; I used so much magick energy trying to counter that waterspout that I had to drain the third of the okka crystals. I had one crystal left and my left wing and probably a few ribs were broken. I was fairly sure that I had dislocated my left shoulder too. Dammit, I was going to lose like this.

Falora had said it herself, this was her domain, and she knew it intimately. She could sense every attack that I threw at her. I had only gotten lucky at first because I surprised her by having the same power and then with those bullets. I needed something she couldn’t sense and counter before it got to her. Something like the bullets.

I had a few more in my pouch, but my gun was a dozen feet away and there was no way I could reach it before she could finish me off. I doubted that I would fool her again with using the wind to launch the bullets either. All I had besides the bullets were my bracelet, my portable bunker, that stupid joke gift that my boyfriend got me for Christmas, and the okka… I had to fight not to smile as a plan came to me.

I couldn’t get up, I was going to need all of the energy that I could summon to pull this off, and moving hurt too much right now anyway. I turned my head to look at my rifle, my left arm in agony as I reached toward it. Meanwhile, my right hand was removing my gift from its holster slowly and carefully as Falora stalked toward me with a lupine grin that said that she had won, and she knew it.

She stood several steps away, looking down on me with that grin, and started to monologue as she saw where my gaze and outstretched left arm were directed. “Foolish girl, did you really think yourself a match for the Mistress of Elements? While in my own domain? You are beaten, even if you could reach that pathetic human weapon…”

This time I interrupted the Demon’s monologue with an attack. I pulled the trigger and waited until the flare hit her in the chest before replying, “I wasn’t reaching for that weapon, I was reaching for this one. Hurts, doesn’t it, you bitch? Magnesium burns hot. Oh, and water is not going to put that out.”

I couldn’t believe that worked. When Mason had given the flare gun to me as a sort of joke Christmas gift, he said I might need it. He had said it jokingly as he quoted, “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” Still, even I thought that it might be useful in case there was no fire for me to manipulate nearby in a fight. I can manipulate the elements, not create them, after all. I was never going to doubt his hunches again.

Falora was screaming as she frantically tried to put out the fire that was rapidly consuming her clothes and fur, but I wasn’t done yet. I dropped the flare gun and reached in my pouch for the last of the okka crystals, the one still brimming with divine magick energy. I focused my concentration on it and let it fall from my hand to roll toward the still screaming and burning Demon.

One thing about crystals is that they’re a mineral and I can control those. They can also be grown, so I used my power to make this one grow. At my urging, and with a lot of energy, that little violet crystal sphere grew into a massive spike that impaled Falora through the chest and there was enough holy magick permeating the crystal, even at its larger size, that Falora’s still-screaming body turned to dust. I laughed, which was pure agony, and muttered, “Who’s the Mistress of the Elements now, Bitch?”

It took forever, and a lot of pain to get to my feet. I was running low on magick energy after that stunt, and I was in bad shape, but I limped over to retrieve my rifle. The flare gun was already holstered, and I just needed to get rid of the okka crystal formation that I had made before I could go home and rest. I sucked all the magick energy that remained from it and then used my powers to turn the whole formation into dust. I didn’t want to risk any enemy Demons finding it and putting it to use, and I could always grow more later if we needed it.

With that done, I touched my bug-out bracelet and painfully hissed, “911” to go home. As much as I wanted to find Mason, Shannon, and the others, I knew that I was in no shape to do so. I was in agony, my vision was getting blurry, and could barely stand right now. Besides, I believed in them. They would find a way to win, even if it seemed impossible. Because that’s what we do.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 25 of book five of I Wish. I was hoping to post it yesterday, but a thunderstorm and exhaustion conspired to prevent it. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.
 

Have you ever met a person who, by their mere existence, turns your life completely on its head in the most unexpected ways? For me, that person was Shannon O’Reilly. Shannon is that rare kind of person who draws other people to them and changes their lives as a result. Unlike most people like that, she usually changes the lives of those who become close to her in weird and supernatural ways, but more often than not, those changes are for the better too.

The day that we met at that café and I asked her out, I had been following one of my hunches but I never really expected that one action to change my life the way that it had. Before that day I had been focused on my dream of becoming a movie star, and the rest of my life suffered as a result. I was so focused on getting modeling jobs, auditions, reading lines, and especially acting lessons that I hardly spent any time with my old friends anymore. Despite my hunches, I missed seeing something important. My mom and some of my friends got sick and probably could have died because of the Demons that were feeding on their life energy.

I was so focused on what I wanted from life that I ignored the feeling that what I had was in danger until it was almost too late. When I finally did give in to that feeling I had been surprised to see an actual Demon. However, I was even more surprised to see that same, sweet, redheaded girl that my hunch had pushed me to meet earlier in the day use magick to destroy the creature. She probably saved my ass too.

Shannon, Sarah, and Ziralin saved my mother’s life, and the lives of a few friends who had been ‘sick’ as well. They also invited me to join them, to use my gift to help other people the same way that they did. Shannon pulled me into her gravity and now my life was weirder, but so much better than before.

Sure, I still wanted to be a movie star someday, but I was also doing something amazing. I was helping people, protecting them, even if they didn’t realize it most of the time. My hunches were becoming more reliable and happening more often too since I had joined Sarah’s and Shannon’s team of Demon hunters. The biggest thing that meeting Shannon had brought into my life would also be the most innocuous to other people though. It was because of her that I met Jennifer.

That first night, when Jen had given me a ride home from Shannon’s house, the two of us just clicked. She was smart, fun to be with, and a lot prettier than she would ever give herself credit for. We had been going steady for two months now, longer if you counted our time in Nhekar together, and I had fallen for her hard. Now, I couldn’t image my life without her in it.

I hoped that she would be okay. I know that splitting up and taking on all of the Generals at once had been my idea, but I was certain that it was the only way that we would all live through this. That is if I had chosen the right targets for us. This was literal Hell though, and I was well aware that worse things than death could happen to us here if we failed.

We couldn’t allow ourselves to fail here, we all knew that going in. I had to believe in my hunches, and believe in the others. “Don’t doubt yourself now, Mason, and have faith in your friends. We can do this,” I mentally scolded myself. Still, that didn’t stop me from worrying about my friends, and especially Jen, as I appeared in a large cobblestone courtyard with a sixty-foot tall tower in the center.

I couldn’t sense any Demons in the tower, or the courtyard at all. Beyond the walls I could hear fighting though, it sounded intense. Kisha must have managed to convince the resistance force of Demons against the war to rise up after all. It sounded like chaos out there, I only hoped that the distraction would work to our advantage.

I had a feeling that the Demon general that held this gatehouse was out there, trying to stop the apparent insurrection, and that gave me two options. The first was subtlety. I could try to get a good vantage point, hope that my psychic ability could help me pick them out of a crowd, and try to take them down with my shotgun. The second option was to get their attention and make them come to me, hopefully without reinforcements and before the news started to travel about the other Generals and the Demon King being attacked.

Forget it, subtlety was out. That was more Jen’s kind of thing than mine and even if I could pick out the General in a crowd of fighting Demons, long-range accuracy was also something that Jen would be better at, it was why I used a shotgun instead of a rifle. My Celestial ability was also far more suited to defense, and protecting others, than to attacking.

The armor and shield that manifested on me when I changed to my Celestial form contained powerful holy defensive enchantments, so I figured that the moment that I changed form I would light up like a flare to any Demons nearby, even without my Celestial aura. If anything would bring my opponent to me, it would probably be a Celestial in their gatehouse. It was time to wake up the neighbors.

I concentrated on the shield-shaped mark on my chest and changed forms, feeling my wings emerge behind me and the familiar weight of my armor and shield settle upon me. Now I could sense the seething mass of demonic auras in the ring beyond this courtyard and, almost immediately, the most powerful aura I had ever felt separated from the fray and moved straight to my position. Whatever it was, it was fast. I only barely reacted in time to my hunch to raise a defensive dome before the courtyard around me erupted in flames.

My armor and shield only protected me from physical attacks. As far as I knew, the armor was damn near impenetrable, except for a few weak spots, and any Demons who so much as touched it or the shield would be burned by the protective magicks. For magical attacks, and things like this fire, I needed to use my actual Celestial ability and not its physical representation though.

I quickly drained one of the okka crystals in my pouch as the flames faded and I allowed the silvery dome of protection to vanish. I had been hoping not to have to use it so soon since it was a power hog of an ability and I only had four crystals to work with. Well, three crystals now.

My opponent regarded me from atop the courtyard wall with wide reptilian eyes once the smoke cleared since half the courtyard was blackened and cracked from the heat of the flames, except for a ten-foot-in-diameter circle around me. The Demon was covered in black and blood-red scales, was roughly eight feet tall as it stood on its hind legs, and had a long sinewy body and tail with black spikes emerging from its spine, and a wedge-shaped head. It had short forelegs with talon-like hands tipped with nasty-looking claws that were easily six inches long.

It was a Salamander, I recognized its kind from Lunael’s memories, smaller distant relatives of Dragons. How the hell did this one get so fast though? It hissed, flicking its lizard-like tongue at me from between rows of teeth designed to rend flesh. Then its mouth erupted in flames again and I barely reacted in time to the glow in its mouth to raise another shield.

“Damn. Two crystals down and two to go,” I thought bitterly as the flames started to clear and I fired a round from my shotgun, one that the Salamander deftly avoided in a blur of motion. I needed to bring this thing in close to fight in a way I was better suited for and hope that my psychic instincts could help to counteract its raw speed.

I had an idea as I quickly fired off a round toward where my instincts were telling me that he would appear next. There was a hiss of pain as it again deftly avoided the shot, but it sounded as if I had grazed him with some of Shannon’s special buckshot at least. As he moved again I tried to get into the role I had in mind and casually called out, “You know, I came here to fight a General in honorable combat, not some lizard with bad breath. Feel free to keep trying though, I don’t need to draw on the toxic magick energy here to keep this up. I can keep canceling out your little flames all day long.”

I was ready this time as another gout of flames erupted around my hastily erected dome. “Shit. Three crystals down, I really hope he doesn’t decide to call my bluff.”

When the flames cleared and I turned to their source, the Salamander was watching me warily. “You do not draw upon the essssence,” it hissed. I tried not to breathe an audible sigh of relief. From what I knew, Salamanders were mostly physical combatants and couldn’t sense magick very well. It could probably sense if someone was drawing on the ‘essence’ around it but I had been hoping that it wouldn’t sense me drawing on the magick stored in the okka crystals since they were so close to my body and the powerful enchantments in my armor and shield.

“Nope, I do not,” I cheerfully agreed. “So I can do this all day unless a General decides to face me in honorable combat. No tricks, no weapons, skill against skill alone. What do you say? You stop wasting both our time trying to barbeque me, and I’ll put away my boomstick, and we’ll try to kill each other like civilized people.”

“Sssselessstials and your honor,” the Salamander hissed in distaste. “Very well, I will give you credit for courage, at leassst, to challenge Ssssihaal the Unsssseen.”

“What can I say? I like a challenge,” I replied as if I actually had any idea who he was. I am Mason, the… uhh… thespian.” I needed to keep playing along so I could get him in close and hope that the crazy plan that I had just come up with would work. So, I carefully shouldered my shotgun. If I tried to aim it at him, he would probably have moved before I could even pull the trigger.

As soon as I had shouldered the weapon, Sihaal made his move. I didn’t even see it, one minute he was standing there watching me, and an instant later I was reacting so a very powerful hunch and moving my head to the right as quickly as I could with my enhanced Celestial speed and reflexes. The bastard had gone straight for the eye slits in my helm with those long claws of his and I had barely managed to move aside in time.

The fight carried on like that for a while as Sihaal moved too fast for me to see and tried to land killing blows while my hunches were barely keeping me alive and in one piece. Then I got a hunch that wasn’t related to my current fight, one that tugged at my heart as well as my mind. Jen was hurt, and probably in trouble, but if I took my mind off this fight for even an instant, I would be dead within that same moment. I had to trust in my girlfriend, she could win as long as she used her head.

Still, I wanted to go to her side so I needed to finish this up quickly. He was coming for me again, on my right side, where I didn’t have the shield to intercept him. I swiftly pivoted and at the last second, I summoned a protective dome as I slammed my shield into where I thought he was going to be. I was rewarded with an impact on my shield and a hiss of pain from my opponent as the divine energies in my silver shield made contact with his scales.

When he tried to retreat and put some distance between us, he was in for an unpleasant surprise and another hiss of pain, more intense this time, rang out to my left, followed by a curse in the demonic language. I turned, slamming my shield into him again while he was still stunned and pinning him between it and my barrier. “Did you just realize now that you’re trapped in here with me?” I asked, not caring if I got an answer. “My protective domes don’t just keep things from getting in, they keep things from getting out too, and the barrier is made of pure holy magick.”

“You sssaid no trickssss!!!” he screamed as he was burned from both sides.

“I was acting, Asshole.” I gave a push with all the strength that I had as I drained the last okka crystal to keep the dome up a little bit longer. Sihaal’s screams and the smell of burning flesh permeated the courtyard for another couple of minutes before they suddenly stopped, and I felt no more resistance to my pushing as he turned to ash.

I let my dome fade as my exhaustion from the fight set in. What about Jen? Was she okay? She had to be, if she had died, I would have felt it, I would know. No, I had a strong feeling that she was hurt, but that she had won and had used her bugout bracelet. Should I stay and help the others?

It didn’t take me long to decide against it. I would have to fly to get to any of them in time, and I had just used every bit of magick energy that I had to kill Sihaal. It would take me too long to purify enough to safely make the trip to even the next gatehouse.

No, the others could handle their fights. I had faith in them. I needed to go home and check on the girl that I loved. I dismissed my Celestial form and reached for my bugout bracelet and as I spoke the emergency number that would take me home, I thought that I saw a lone Succubus flying overhead, toward the center of the city. There was no aura, and she was moving with a purpose, so it seemed that Lisa, Michelle, and Rebecca had won the battle at the first gate as well. “Good luck, Becca,” I thought as the courtyard disappeared from my sight and I returned home.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 26 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

I looked cautiously around the cobblestone courtyard from the spot atop one of the walls where I had appeared. The courtyard below was filled with statues of various Demons; there were at least a hundred of them, probably a lot more. Some looked to be kneeling, begging for forgiveness, or perhaps their lives. Others were recoiling, expressions of horror etched into their faces. It was creepy and they made me nervous, a feeling of tightness in my gut that I couldn’t explain.

I couldn’t sense anything else, but that wasn’t surprising since I was still in my regular human form and I could only sense demonic auras in my Celestial form. I didn’t want to use that form quite yet though. For one thing, if the Demon General whom I was to face was close by, they would likely sense my aura in that form as well as I could sense theirs. I didn’t want to give away my presence until I had some idea of what I was dealing with.

I could hear fighting in the distance, so it seemed that Kisha was able to get the resistance to stage their rebellion as planned. I just wished that she had been able to give us more information to work with. She only had reliable information on three of the Generals, and one of those was Khinara, whom we were already far too familiar with. The other two were a Succubus named Larezza who was nearly as powerful with magick as Khinara and a Gharl named Kreiber.

Those three were the strongest of the Generals and had held their positions for decades or longer. The other four General positions were held by considerably weaker Demons and were constantly being challenged, and often replaced, by up-and-coming Demons. It was like a revolving door from what Kisha had told us, and I couldn’t be sure what any of us might be facing with those four since Kisha had left the Rings some time ago and possessed very little up-to-date information.

I didn’t want to go into this unprepared, but I also knew that I needed to hit hard and fast, and I needed to do it soon. The others were counting on me. Sarah was counting on me, and I wanted to finish this as soon as possible and get to her side, where I belonged.

Sarah was more than just some woman that I was being paid to protect, and so was Shannon and the rest of this crazy group of ours. Those kids were all like family and Sarah… well, I was in love with her, and I think that I had been since not long after we met. She was beautiful, smart, and had the kind of confidence that only those who have been through hell and survived could possess.

From that first time that I had seen her naked in the woods, I had been smitten, though, for Shannon and Beth’s sakes, I had tried to stay professional. It wasn’t just her body, though that had made my heart race. She had sacrificed herself for her sister, and for Beth and me as well, facing almost certain death with a courage that I had never seen outside of the movies.

I wanted to know her better after that, even as traumatized as I was by what had nearly happened. Then she offered me a job as her bodyguard and personal assistant. It wasn’t just a job offer though, she stepped up for a person she barely knew and helped give me the courage to stand up to my captain for everything that he and those two fat assholes had put me through, to hand in my badge and give them hell.

When she surprised me and everyone else with that first kiss, I went from smitten to half in love on the spot. Since then, things have been crazy, but my life has been so much better too, and all because Sarah was a part of it. I would do anything for her. Right now, that meant going into the unknown and crushing whatever Demon that I had to so I could get back to her side.

I hopped down from the wall, landing in a crouch as I surveyed the courtyard again from ground level and approached the tower at the center. Something about this place had me wound tighter than a spring and I suddenly stopped as I caught the barest motion from the corner of my eye. I was not alone in the courtyard.

There it was again, more movement, barely noticeable. I could have sworn that one of the statues had turned its head toward me slightly. I had a bad feeling about this. I carefully controlled my breathing and in the silence, I heard stone scraping on stone behind me.

“Screw it, no sense hiding now, whoever is in charge of this gatehouse already knows that I’m here,” I thought bitterly as I focused on my mark and changed to my Celestial form. I took to the air with powerful beats of my wings and barely avoided the lunge of some large lizard-man Demon, or rather the statue of one. A burst of concentrated holy magick energy from my bracers reduced the statue to rubble, but the other statues were moving as well, coming at me now with no effort to hide their movement.

The statues gave off very faint demonic auras, either from whatever was controlling them or as some remnant of the Demons that they once were. There was a much larger aura coming from the tower though. I didn’t have time to think about it though as the statue of some massive goliath threw one of its fellows at me. I barely avoided it by dropping to the ground, where I immediately had to duck a swing from another statue and countered with a kick to try to give myself some breathing room.

Fuck did that hurt, and the statue was barely chipped, even with my Celestial-enhanced strength. I released the pairs of claws from each bracer and slashed at the demonic figures closing in on me, but even the holy magick-infused silver weapons didn’t do much more than leave gouges in the stone. I cursed as I realized that I had no choice but to fire more bursts from the barrels between the claws.

Stone figures exploded, battering me with shrapnel as I peppered those closest to me, trying to give myself some space. Wincing from the damage that I was inadvertently causing myself, I drained the magick energy from one of the okka crystals I carried to recharge and put some distance between the horde of stone Demons and myself. They were slow and their movements were jerky but I couldn’t risk trying to fight them up close, especially the larger ones.

As soon as I had some space, I took to the air again, and once again, the Goliath threw one of its companions at me. I jinked to the side and, as the statue sailed past me to crash into the courtyard wall, I unloaded on the giant with a barrage of purified magick bolts from my bracers. Right now, he was the biggest threat, both figuratively and literally. Its face and body were no longer identifiable but it was still standing and reaching down to throw another statue at me.

I let him have it again, and by the time he collapsed into a massive pile of rubble, I had to drain another crystal. Dammit, I did not want to be on the back foot like this. At least my biggest problem so far was taken care of, so quickly I moved toward the source of the large demonic aura. Large, but nowhere near as large as the aura that Khinara had possessed.

She was human-shaped, at least above her waist, but below that, she was like a snake and she was covered from head to tail in iridescent green scales. Her face was a hideous caricature of a woman under those scales, with small tusks protruding from her upper jaw, snake-like eyes, and some sort of tentacles in place of hair. Anjurael’s memories flashed through my mind and suddenly, I knew what I was facing.

It was a Gorgal, a type of Demon that the ancient Greek myths of Medusa and other gorgons had probably been based on. For a brief instant, I was afraid that I was going to have to fight her blind, but I hadn’t been turned to stone yet. Anjurael’s memories told me that the Greeks were wrong about being turned to stone by just looking upon them; they actually turned their prey to stone through a curse unique to their species and once they had, they could control them like puppets on strings of demonic magick.

I was probably safe from the curse since it was placed when they used those tentacles to drain a creature’s life energy. Feeding on the life energy of a Celestial would be like trying to eat holy magick; it would hurt her and then kill her long before she could finish feeding on me. I would have to get in close and fight her, hoping that I could take her down hard and fast. Even without their puppets, Gorgals are dangerous; they are strong, and fast, and those thick scales make them very durable.

Considering the problem, I fired a burst of holy magick projectiles as I approached but she managed to dodge and I found my path blocked as a quartet of huge gargoyles dropped from the tower to intercept me. I reduced them to rubble before they could get close enough to attack, but I was again showered with shrapnel and had to drain my third okka crystal. I only had one left; I was going to have to finish this fast if I was going to conserve enough energy to join Sarah after this.

With my claw blades extended, I turned back toward the Gorgal’s demonic aura. Shit. She was quick, and she had slithered right into a large group of statues. I pulled my Glock and started firing Shannon’s special rounds into the crowd. Unlike the usual rounds, which were only set to release their purified magick energy if they hit a Demon, the ones that we had brought to Heil had been enchanted to release that energy no matter what they hit. The energy release wouldn’t hurt any of us, but the hordes of Demons that we had come expecting to fight were a different story.

There was a scream amid the group of statues, one that abruptly cut off as first the Gorgal, and then the statues, turned to ash. For a moment, I thought that I was done, that I had beaten the General who held this gatehouse. I retracted the claws back into my bracers and was about to go find Sarah. That moment was all too brief before I felt the sickening sensation of a Demon’s portal spell being activated behind me and something stepped through.

Whoever, or whatever, it was they were much stronger than the Demon that I had just faced. If I had to guess, they were nearly as strong as Khinara was when we last encountered her, and even weakened by hunger she was no slouch in the power department. A masculine laugh rang out behind me and I turned to see an Incubus standing at the entrance to the tower, looking at me in keen interest.

“A Celestial? No, a Human, playing at being one, but here, in Heil of all places? And strong enough to defeat my little puppet, Tria?” He smiled as he approached me, sauntering as if he had nothing to fear. “I am Dallin, one of the Demon King’s seven Generals, and I would very much like to get to know you better.”

Fuck. I thought that Gorgal bitch was the puppeteer, but she was as much a puppet as those statues of hers. I ejected the clip from my weapon and slapped another home as I glowered at the approaching Incubus. “Not gonna happen, Asshole. I’m not attracted to guys, so your whammy isn’t going to work on me.” I saw no sense in mentioning that my mind was also shielded by Shannon’s anti-Succubus spell regardless.

His face briefly showed disappointment before I emptied the newly loaded clip at him. I like to imagine that it turned to shock, and maybe disbelief, as he was hit with over a dozen explosions of holy magick. Shit. He had a shielding spell, like that bastard Varas did when he fought Sarah to a standstill on the night we met.

He tossed a smoking amulet to the ground and I considered how best to go about this. If he was a mage like Varas and Khinara, he could probably shield himself again and I had just used all my ammo to take that damn amulet out of play. I had more ammo in my pouches, of course, but I would need to reload both clips and I honestly didn’t think that he was going to give me the chance to do that. I needed a plan here, I needed it fast, and I only had one okka crystal left.

I needed to get in close, but I needed to make sure that he didn’t have any protections first, and maybe I could lull him into thinking that I was a long-distance combatant. I experimentally fired a burst from my bracers and they harmlessly impacted against another shield spell, because of course, he could use magick, he did come here through a portal after all. He sneered at me, seemingly confident in his defenses, and decided to go on the offense.

A barrage of hellfire blasted toward me and I had to take wing to avoid it, firing a few more bursts in an attempt to whittle down his shield, only to have to dodge a ball of purple flame that exploded when it hit the ground where I had briefly touched down. Back into the air to avoid a second and third of those purple balls of exploding flame and I hit him with yet another burst from my bracers.

Three more bursts and a half dozen dodges later, I was draining the last of my okka crystals when he sneered at me once again and snorted in distaste as he said, “Such a weak and predictable little holy mage thinks that she can best me? A General of Heil? Your arrogance will be your death.”

“Wait, he thinks I’m some kind of spell caster?” I guess that the bursts of holy magick that my bracers fired could be considered spells since they were magick-based, and the bullets I had fired had definitely been enchanted, just not by me. Could it be that he thought that I was some sort of one-trick pony? It was as I was considering this and dodging another of those annoying purple fireballs and getting showered with shrapnel that I noticed something important. He was getting hit with shrapnel too.

No way. He couldn’t seriously be making the same mistake that Khinara did during our big fight with her, could he? The shield in the ruined amulet had blocked the enspelled bullets, but that was an emergency protection embedded into the amulet and he could never know what he might need protection against. Right now though, he thought that I was a spell-caster, so he was only protecting himself against magick.

I dodged another hastily woven spell, this time a black beam of some sort crackling with energy that I was sure that I didn’t want to touch me. Then I jinked to the side, got in close, and took his legs out from under him with a leg sweep before he even realized what was happening. Dallin’s eyes were still wide with surprise when I pounced on top of him, ejected my claws, and thrust them into his chest.

I waited just a moment, crouching above his ashes to be certain that no other puppet masters were going to appear, and then I went to retrieve the discarded clip for my Glock. It took longer to find it than I would have liked, and then more time to reload both clips but I wanted to be ready in case Sarah or the others needed backup and I had precious little magick energy left to work with. I would probably have enough to fly to Sarah though, and I could still be effective between my claws and my Glock.

I hoped the others were managing their battles as well. I mean, yeah, I was bruised all over from being showered with shrapnel, but I was alive and ready for round two. Hopefully, they wouldn’t need my backup at all. I could only pray that was the case as I took flight and made my way toward the innermost circles of the Rings. Ahead of me, I could see a single Succubus-like figure doing the same, and she was moving fast.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 27 of book five of I Wish. A little later than I was hoping, but the chapter turned out longer than I thought it would. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

I didn’t think that I would ever get used to the sensation of being teleported. There’s this sudden lurching in that instant when you leave one place and reappear in another. It’s disorienting, and when you add in the feeling that your insides are briefly outside, and vice versa, it isn’t a pleasant sensation. I had only gone through it a few times, but every single time I felt like hurling immediately afterward. This time was no exception.

I was vaguely aware that I had appeared atop the wall of a large courtyard, as large as a football field, with a black tower standing in the center. I quickly dropped to the ground and retreated through wildly growing brush into a nearby dark corner to empty my stomach. I hoped that the others were having better luck than I was. I was worried about all of them, especially Rebecca and Shannon.

I was sure that Shannon could probably handle most Demons, my cousin was just that powerful and talented and I often found myself in awe of her. She was planning to fight the strongest Demon in Heil though, one that had ruled with an iron fist for millennia. How could anyone, even Shannon with her powers unsealed, hope to defeat something like that?

That was just the kind of person my cousin was though, doing whatever she felt that she had to do so she could keep other people safe and happy. That first night that we met, she had barely known me, but she let me sleep with her in her bed and held me through my tears and nightmares. She and her friends helped me to find my courage, and stop hating myself for my father’s death, and they even reunited my mother and me with our people. Every day, I counted myself lucky that Shannon and Sarah had taken us in, and I was proud to be a part of their family.

I was worried about Rebecca because, unlike the rest of us, she had no experience at all fighting Demons and was being thrown right into a fight with one of their Generals. Sure, she had the Succubus powers and could probably fight a regular demon on her own if she had to, but against something like this? I wasn’t sure that whatever she and Shannon had gone through on Nhekar could prepare her for this, and she was so focused on revenge for her mother’s death.

At least Michelle and Lisa both had experience fighting a Demon and one of the Generals at that. Neither of them was very powerful, but they were smart and resilient, and Shannon and Ziralin had been training them both. I could only hope that they would all keep one another safe and that my gift would give Rebecca an edge in their fight. “Please, Becca, come back alive,” I thought as I finished emptying my stomach and got to my feet.

Sure, Rebecca could be abrasive at first, and she was even pricklier than Michelle, but she had changed since traveling with Shannon in that alien world, and not just the whole Succubus thing. She seemed more comfortable in her own skin, she was making an effort to try to be nicer, and oh Goddess, I was so attracted to her, even with the anti-Succubus spell on me. I wanted to find the courage to make a move on her, but that wouldn’t happen if I lost her here.

I attempted to calm the fluttering in my chest and took in my surroundings. I was hidden inside the thick brush that grew along the walls and well into the courtyard itself, thinning out only a mere ten feet away from the tower in the center. “Maybe those butterflies in my chest weren’t from thinking about Rebecca,” I realized with a frown. Something was very wrong here.

The plants here, and this prickly brush, were familiar; I recognized much of it from the area around our troupe’s village. They were among the hardier plants, able to grow in even harsher climates. How did plant life native to Tír na nÓg end up here, of all places?

I found an answer, sort of. The desiccated corpse of a Faery lay amidst the brush, his eyes and mouth wide in a scream of abject horror. The life had been sucked out of him, and two others that I found in various stages of decomposition as I made my way toward the central tower, and each had been armed with roughly made weapons. I knew the signs well enough to know what I was dealing with here; I should since my father had looked much the same when he had died. It was a Hradok.

Terror surged in my chest with each body I discovered, my hands trembled, and my knees threatened to buckle. They couldn’t even flee properly because their wings had been ripped off. By the time I found the fourth body, images flashed through my mind of my father trying to fight off one of the blue-skinned Demons to protect my mother and me. It just had to be the Demon that I feared the most, the ones that hunted my people to near extinction, just as whoever held this tower seemed to be making a sport of hunting Faery before gorging itself on their life force. I wanted to throw up again. I wanted to run away.

No. Shannon wouldn’t do that, and I wouldn’t either. I came here to kill a Demon General and this didn’t change anything. If anything, it made it even more important. I needed to face my fear, and not just for my own sake. That first body had been killed recently, within the last day or so. This Hradok may be keeping others of my kind captive, and I would not rest until they were freed. Nobody else was going to die like that on my watch.

If I got close, that Hradok was going to smell my life force if it hadn’t already. I couldn’t hide it from one of their kind. I was willing to bet that it wasn’t around at the moment if it hadn’t already sensed me. If it had, it would have roared to stoke my fear.

I needed to think. I had three okka crystals, but I would rather not waste them if I didn’t have to. If there really were other Faery being held somewhere, then they might need my healing powers.

What would Shannon do? She would probably overwhelm it with sheer power, but I didn’t have that option. I only had my Celestial healing powers, my Faery abilities, my gun, and enough silver to improvise some weapons if I needed to. I wasn’t nearly as talented with weapons as Ziralin was though.

“Think, Ellie, think. Mason said that we each had something that was needed to defeat our opponents, so what do I have that nobody else does? I’m impulsive and reckless, and I guess I know Hradoks pretty well. I was obsessed with learning how to protect myself from one after Dad died, not that I found anything. They’re strong, fast, and the only time they’ll get close to their victims is when they’re about to suck them…” That was when I came up with a brilliant plan.

Five minutes later, I heard an all too familiar spine-chilling howl as I made my way to the tower at the center of the overgrown courtyard. I was hoping to ambush the Hradok with some well-placed gunfire when it arrived, but unfortunately, it had stepped outside the tower when I was halfway there and immediately caught my scent. The howl was immediately followed by a male voice calling out, “Don’t you smell delicious, little Faery? So much essence. How did you find your way into the very depths of Heil? You are not one of those from the pantry, I don’t recognize that scent.”

“I came to kill you,” I called back brazenly. He would expect me to flee, to give him some sport, but he was going to be disappointed.

I could see him now, a large man in what looked like leather armor. He would have looked like a large and muscular human if it wasn’t for the azure skin, the lack of any hair, and the huge crown of bony horns atop his head. The bastard was laughing. “The prey would kill the hunter? Your kin have tried before you, and failed, little Faery.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not them,” I said as I pulled my gun free of its holster and fired a couple of shots. “I came prepared. These are Demon-slayer rounds.”

The hunter heard my shots and ran wide to keep its distance. Damn, Hradoks had senses as good as a Faery’s but they’re much faster. He managed to avoid the shots and the small explosions of holy magick energy that followed. I kept firing, trying to shoot where I thought he was going to be in the hopes of getting a lucky shot and finishing this off quickly. I wasn’t really comfortable with what I might have to do if this fight dragged on for a while, better to finish it fast.

Unfortunately, none of my shots landed and as I was ejecting the magazine to reload, he came in close and knocked me flying with a tackle. My gun went sailing from my hand and I couldn’t reach my sword as he pinned me to the ground, making a show of taking in my scent. I shuddered in fear for an instant, once again a scared girl watching her father’s life drained before her eyes.

No. I gritted my teeth and enacted my plan. If he thought I was going to lay down and just let him eat me or try to get some more sport out of me by stoking my fears, he was in for a surprise. Probably more than one.

Yup, he was definitely surprised when I manipulated the silver sword and jewelry that I was wearing, forming multiple blades and stabbing at his arms, causing him to scream in agony. The moment that he reared back to try and push himself away on mutilated arms and put some distance between us again, I wrapped my arms and legs around him and refused to let go. Then his eyes went wide as I called upon my Celestial form and my wings burst forth from my back in all of their glory. “A Cel…”

I didn’t give him a chance to even finish the word. I just kept attacking with silver, hacking at his legs and arms until I had to drain one of the okka crystals. I didn’t attack anywhere vital, I still needed him to answer a question, but he wouldn’t need those arms and legs for that, and letting him keep them would only be dangerous for me. I shifted the silver once again, forming a blade at his throat and his flesh sizzled at the touch. “Where are you keeping my kin? Speak. If I even think that you’re going to try to bite me, I’ll finish you off and find them on my own.”

He spoke, and once he had told me what I wanted to know, I finished him off. Only once the ash was settled did I allow myself to collapse. I had been lucky, he was one of the newer and weaker Generals, and I had silver available when his other prey had to work with rocks or sharpened sticks, which wouldn’t do shit against a Demon. I was still sitting there, though I had managed to get control of my breathing and stop trembling when I heard a familiar voice say in a relieved voice. “You’re safe, thank goodness.”

I looked up into Becca’s eyes and forced a smile. “Yeah, I… I’m good. I’m glad to see you are too. This guy was used to chasing Faery that weren’t able to defend themselves.”

“Your gift helped,” the faux-succubus said with a bittersweet smile, as she pulled me to my feet. “Thanks. I was able to kill the bitch that killed my mom. Michelle got hurt though so she and Lisa headed home, she might need your healing magick. We need to go help Shannon though.”

I shook my head and told her. “Shannon will be fine, if anyone can handle that fight it’s my cousin. We would only get in the way. I need your help here, there are Faery being held in that tower, that pile of ash there was keeping them here as future meals. I can sense Demons inside, but their auras are weak so we should be able to handle them. We’ll probably have to get Shannon or Sarah to help us get them home once the fighting is over.”

“I guess you’re right,” Becca replied, letting out a long sigh as I went to retrieve my gun and then led her toward the tower. “Shannon would want us to help those people anyway; being a fucking goody-two-shoes is her thing.”

Becca cracked a smile at that and I wondered if maybe she was still crushing on Shannon. Was there any hope for me at all? I stopped us before the tower doors and leaned up to impulsively plant a kiss on her. I would never know unless I tried. “For… ummm… luck,” I offered lamely, my face bright red.

She hadn’t broken away, her lips might have even lingered a bit. I smiled at the thought as she blushed and stammered something unintelligible. Maybe I had a chance after all. I felt like I could do anything after today.

As we searched for the Faery in the tower, I learned that Becca could be downright vicious in a fight. She took out most of the dozen or so Demons that we encountered, and damn was it hot. The eight Faery that we found alive were in rough shape; half starved, weak, and suffering from various injuries from when Demons roughed them up. Fortunately, their wings hadn’t been torn off like the bodies I had found in the courtyard, I guess he did that to hobble them for his hunts so they wouldn’t try to fly off.

It was heartbreaking to find so few alive and in such a condition. I used up the last two okka crystals I had healing them all, but I figured that I would still have enough magick energy to get me to Ziralin or Sarah, and I could always recharge by resting. Still, they were alive and would soon be safe with our troupe if I had any say in the matter, and sharing food from our packs seemed to improve their moods somewhat.

Becca made them a bit nervous, but that was to be expected after what Demons had put them through. I managed to convince them that she wasn’t really a Demon, just under a curse, with the help of the mark on her shoulder and the fact that she had no demonic aura. Hopefully, Jaenara would be able to help with their trauma once we got them back to the troupe.

For now, we had done all that we could for them and the adult Faery would be able to fly and help carry the two young Fae. I had just finished telling the Faery where, and to whom, we were going when Becca gave me a strange, almost concerned look and said, “Lose the wings.” Apparently, she figured out how abrasive that must have sounded because she stammered, “I… um… mean that you’re tired, and you might… uhh… need to save your energy. I could carry you, I don’t need to worry about that magick shit and I… umm…”

I tried not to giggle and showed mercy by changing out of my Celestial form. Rebecca picked me up in a princess carry and it was my turn to blush as I felt the eyes of the other Faery upon us. I was still bright red and nuzzling against her as she leaped into the air with the Faery following as we made our way toward the others. I just hoped that they were all okay.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 28 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

The moment that the lurching sensation from the teleportation began to recede, something big and hard slammed into me and sent me flying. What the fuck? I didn’t even have a few seconds to get my bearings before I was sent rolling across the ground like a person-shaped bowling ball to crash into a wall.

It was only my speed, reflexes, and big pointy ears that allowed me to somewhat roll with the blow and avoid the follow up attack, as whatever had hit me smashed into the wall and sent debris flying everywhere. Stone shrapnel pounded me as I got to my feet and tried to take stock of my injuries while putting some much-needed space between myself and whatever had hit me. This wasn’t good, the fight had barely started, and I was already on the back foot, and I didn’t even know if I was facing the actual General of this gatehouse yet.

From the aches starting to form all over my body, I figured that I was likely bruised all over, but I probably got off lucky since only a few ribs were causing me serious pain. They didn’t feel broken at least, probably just cracked. It wasn’t as serious as I feared while getting to my feet, but it still made moving and even breathing painful.

Flying was going to be rough, but I focused on the twin swords mark below my navel and changed to my angelic form before quickly taking to the air. I was right; the movement of my winds seemed to jar my ribs with every beat, but I needed to put a bit of distance between myself and whatever had attacked me. Not only would it, hopefully, give me an aerial advantage and more space to react to attacks, but I needed to at least get a look at whatever I was dealing with.

Whatever it was, it recovered as quickly as I had from its crash into the stone wall and I could see it moving before the dust even settled. It was a tall and lanky male humanoid, almost eight feet tall, with sickly-looking swamp-green skin. His head was disturbingly large compared to his lanky body, especially the area of the brain, and was protected by a set of four massive black horns that curled up over it. Even with his imposing height, he looked ridiculously top-heavy and his little beady eyes looked tiny in his bestial boar-like face. He even had the tusks.

He wasn’t wearing any sort of armor, but then, he wouldn’t really need it. Instead, he wore a simple black toga and sandals and several steel bands around his upper arms and lower legs. His hideous green skin was half-covered in some sort of tribal tattoos.

Unfortunately, Torphael’s memories were able to give me a pretty good idea of what I was dealing with. It was a Gharl. Out of all seven Generals, why the hell did I have to get Krieber? On the upside, he was one of the few Demon Generals that we had been able to get any information on, but he was also probably the worst of the seven for me to face.

Gharls can’t use magick and their bodies are surprisingly frail if you can hit them without protection, but they make up for it with their psychic abilities. From what Kisha was able to tell us, Krieber was the most powerful and versatile Gharl that Heil had ever spawned. He was able to use his psychic abilities to sense the area around him without using his physical senses, boost his strength and speed, and maintain a constant psychic barrier around himself that would make my swords and holy arrows effectively useless.

I didn’t have time to dwell on it as a barrage of debris from the damaged wall of the large courtyard flew toward me, forcing me to allow myself to drop a good ten feet to avoid it. “Dammit, I need to go on the offensive here. I can’t let him keep controlling the flow of battle,” I thought to myself bitterly.

Barely dodging a large stone that hurtled through the air toward me, I linked my swords together at the pommels to form my holy bow and rained arrows of light and purified magick energy upon my opponent, hoping that I could wear him out by having to defend himself from so many deadly projectiles at once. His damned shield held as I had to drain one of my trio of okka crystals.

The bastard laughed off my attack, even as I bombarded him with even more arrows, and the holy magick they contained dissipated before they could reach him. That shield was so fucking unfair and annoying. I couldn’t even sense any fluctuations or weak spots in the shield and between all of those arrows I was firing and trying to stay in the air to keep some distance between us, I was going to need to drain another okka crystal soon.

Maybe I should try to make him wear himself out, if I couldn’t overpower his shield. He wasn’t drawing on magick energy to fuel his abilities, so they probably used up physical energy. If I made him continuously keep his shield up, moved around a lot so he had to keep that psychic sense of his on me, and goaded him into senseless attacks fueled by his psychic powers, then maybe I could tire him out enough to get a decent hit in. It was a better plan than trying to overpower him, which clearly wasn’t working.

I forced a laugh and somehow managed not to hiss at the pain it caused in my ribs. “Seriously, Krieber?! Is this all you got?! I came here expecting to fight a General, a warrior, not some asshole who bumbles around and hurls things like a toddler throwing a tantrum!”

As he roared in fury, I touched down on the ground, firing a single arrow from his left side before powerful beats of my wings took me back in the air as he rushed at me, narrowly avoiding me. Damn, he was fast, almost as fast as I was. I shot another arrow at his back as he managed to stop his forward momentum, just short of the tower at the center of the open courtyard. I dashed around like that for a while, managing to avoid his rage-fueled attacks and taking shots of opportunity.

I drained another okka crystal along the way, leaving me with only one remaining, but this was working. He was tiring, his attacks were slower and he was taking longer to pinpoint my location during my counterattacks. I probably should have realized that he was up to something when he stopped to glare at me maliciously.

A barrage of stone debris from one of his many collisions with the courtyard walls during our battle hammered me from behind, knocking me to the ground and causing searing pain in my ribs. The bastard targeted my injuries from before with a telekinetic attack. I was still trying to get to my feet when he collided with me and knocked me back down to the ground and before I knew what was happening, I was pinned beneath his massive foot.

I was nearly blinded by the pain in my ribs when a new source of pain assaulted me, like someone was digging into my brain with an icepick. ~ Pathetic Celestial scum. You thought that you could overcome me, a General of Heil? I have crushed the life from those who have attempted to usurp my position for centuries, just as I shall with you. I will break your bones, one by one, until you beg me for the release of death. I may even grant that wish. ~

The pain rushing through me increased tenfold as one of the major bones in my right wing seemingly snapped of its own accord and I screamed. I had barely stopped screaming when he snapped the same bone in my other wing. All that I could feel was the agony of broken bones and the pulling sensation of my bond with Shannon. “Focus dammit!” I scolded myself through the pain. “Shannon might need you and if you die here she would be devastated, it would probably cause a big enough distraction for her to lose her battle too. This is too important. Shannon is too important for you to let something like a little pain stop you from killing this lanky piece of shit!”

Shannon. It hadn’t quite been love at first sight when we met during her first day at St. Catherine’s, but I was definitely attracted to her and I had this strange feeling that just knowing her would change my life for the better. She was also the most beautiful girl that I had ever met and while she seemed friendly and confident, there was also this vulnerability to her because she was dealing with a new life and issues that I didn’t know about and probably couldn’t have even comprehended at the time. Later that afternoon I learned in the worst way that magick was real.

All through that ordeal, I just wanted to protect Shannon, the girl that I was quickly falling for and so very attracted to. In the chaos that followed, I became her Familiar. Our minds and hearts were suddenly connected, and it was impossible not to fall head over heels for her after she had saved us both and with the feelings that I sensed from her.

By the time we had our first real date, I was well and truly smitten. That was the same night that Sarah, Annie, and the two of us were all dragged into this war with the Demons. Coming here, taking on the most powerful Demons in Heil on their own turf seemed like fate now, just like my bond with Shannon. Even through our battles with Demons and Sorcerers, the loss of my humanity, and the things that Shannon had revealed in Nhekar, our bond, and our love had endured, and become stronger still. I had come to love her more than anything or anyone.

What wasn’t there to love? Sure, she was beautiful and had that mix of confidence and vulnerability that I loved, but she was also possibly the most powerful person on Earth, but she never let that power corrupt her. Sure, she kicked Demon ass when needed, but Shannon was gentle, kind to a fault, and would even help her worst enemy if they needed it. She always wanted to be a better person, and she made me want to be a better person too.

These thoughts of Shannon tightened my focus, during the brief instant that they flew through my mind and drowned out my screams. She was my Witch, my love, and my north star and I would do anything for her. I would even find a way to kill this bastard.

I made myself focus on Shannon, and the pull of our bond, brutally shoving the pain in my wings and ribs to the back of my mind. I was pinned, and my bow was out of reach, so how could I take Krieber down or, at the very least, give myself some breathing room? Another pull besides my link to Shannon teased at my mind, not as strong, but perhaps useful in my current situation.

Precious metal, the sense and manipulation of it was something that Talisha had drilled into me relentlessly since I had become her apprentice. Faery can all sense and manipulate them; even the earliest games of young Fae involve that sense and ability. It is as inherent to Faery as our ability to use glamours.

Krieber was wearing metal, and I could use that. If I couldn’t overwhelm or wear down his defenses, maybe I could get inside of them. The steel bands that he wore on his arms and legs were useless though; iron is the one metal that Faery can’t manipulate, and that steel had a very high iron content. What was the metal that I was sensing then?

Pushing through the pain and doing my best to ignore Krieber’s laughter and taunts about which bone he should break next assaulting my mind, I focused on the pull of metal and followed it. A gaudy chain hung from his neck, bearing the massive claw of some beast as a centerpiece, likely a trophy of some sort. I probably hadn’t noticed it before because of his massive head, but now as he leaned over me it swung within my sight, taunting me.

I forced myself to speak, my throat raw from screaming, and I had to grit my teeth against the pain in my wings and ribs as he pressed his foot down harder on the latter. “H…hey, ass…hole, how do you breathe… with that thing on?”

His momentary confusion was enough to allow me to focus on my task and push away the pain that I couldn’t allow to distract me. The chain was brass, with trace amounts of gold, and for a moment, I narrowed my focus on it alone. Everything else was unimportant. Under my guidance, the links of the chain liquefied, turning into a vaguely gold-hued blob, which rose to encircle Krieber’s neck as the claw that had been attached hit the ground beside my head.

I allowed the metal to solidify once more, a choker with no release or latch around the Gharl’s neck, and then I tightened it, the metal becoming gradually thicker as it tightened further and cut off his air. Krieber’s eyes were wide as he clutched at the metal, struggling to breathe and too desperate to remove it to find more of my bones to break. The weight of his foot on me lessened and I dismissed my angelic form, the pain from my wings vanishing along with both them and my bow as I gave a shove with all of my strength that caused my injured ribs to shoot fiery pain through me in protest.

That top-heavy asshole fell to the ground like the tipped-over bobble-headed motherfucker that he was as he vainly tried to remove my little gift and I rolled out of the way. As Krieber struggled on the ground and his face began to lose its color due to lack of air, I considered just watching him asphyxiate. No. We were better than that; Shannon would want us to be better than that. Instead, I drew the 44 Magnum from its holster on my belt and put a demon-slayer round into his head.

A moment later, there was only a pile of ash, the steel bands, his clothes, and the choker lying on the ground to mark Krieber’s passing. I was in agony and bruised all over, but I could deal with that. The fight was over and I won. I briefly changed back to my angelic form, but the pain that assaulted me from my wings when they reappeared showed that they were still broken. I would have to get Ellie to heal them later, along with the rest of me.

“I guess I’ll be going by foot then,” I muttered as I changed back to normal and basked in the lack of agony coming from my wings. I opened my portable bunker just long enough to use the bandages in the first aid kit to bind my ribs, swallow some aspirin for the pain, and wash the pills down with a bottle of water. I wasn’t willing to waste time on anything else, not when Shannon might need me.

I was her Familiar, her girlfriend, her bodyguard, and a whole lot more. My place was at Shannon’s side, keeping the love of my life safe. I would get there to protect her even if I had to fight my way through every inch of this city that stood between us. Any Demons stupid enough to get in my way would just be more ash on the ground because nothing was going to stop me from getting to the girl I love.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 29 of book five of I Wish. I was hoping to have it finished before midnight, but the chapter turned out longer than I thought it would. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

Even before Shannon could teleport me to my destination, I summoned my Celestial form. If I didn’t want to be detected by the general of this gatehouse I could have still sensed any nearby demonic auras without changing. I still had my magick sense even if I couldn’t use magick in my human form anymore, but I wanted them to sense my Celestial aura. It probably wasn’t the wisest move that I made in my life, but if my opponent came to me then I would have to waste less time searching for them.

I didn’t feel like waiting so I was announcing myself. As far as I was concerned, the sooner I could finish this fight and go help my sister, the better. When Mom and Dad died, I promised that I would look out for Shannon, protect him, and give him a good life. He may be a she now and may have gone through a lot of changes, but I still intended to keep my promise. She was my little sister, and I needed to keep her safe.

That made a lot more sense before her birthday and her changes. She had changed so much in the past few months that it was hard to recognize her sometimes, and not just physically. She was still the same kind, gentle, and caring person at her core, but now she was coming out of her shell to be more confident, less afraid to show her softer side, and she was quite likely the most powerful magick user that I had ever seen.

Her power dwarfed my own, and Mom always said that I was a prodigy. Shannon though was learning so quickly that I wasn’t able to keep up, but I assumed that Xuriel had something to do with that. Shannon had the power and the knowledge, and I had tried my best to teach her to use it wisely and responsibly, but no matter how powerful she was, I still worried about her. She was my kid sister, my apprentice, and the closest person in the world to me, so how could I not?

I was worried about the others too, of course, but Shannon was on my mind the most. I love my girlfriend, but she’s a certified badass and I was pretty sure that she and the others could take care of themselves and come through their battles alive. I had faith in their ability to persevere. I had faith in Shannon too, but she would be fighting the Demon King, a Demon that made even his Generals look weak by comparison, and she would be doing it alone.

So, here I was, brazenly announcing myself so I could get this battle over with and go fight by my sister’s side in case she needed me. I needed to win this, no matter what I had to do, and hopefully, this time I wouldn’t have to sacrifice myself to do it. There would be no third chances at life, and I had too much to live for to die trying or take my opponent down with me in some pyrrhic victory like I had tried with that damn Incubus. I had my sister, a badass girlfriend that I was head over heels for, and the rest of this family that we had built around ourselves. I would win because they were counting on me to come through this alive as much as I was counting on them to do the same.

I didn’t have to wait for long before my opponent sauntered out of the tower at the center of the courtyard. A tall and buxom blonde Succubus walked toward me with a smile that displayed her confidence. Her aura was strong, not as powerful as Khinara’s had been when we first fought her, but still far above the power exuded by lesser Demons. That confidence, the power, and the looks meant that this could be only one Demon, it was Larezza the Lustful.

On the positive side, she was one of the few Generals that Kisha had been able to give us any information about. That information complicated things though. She was a magick user, like me, and Kisha said she had a reputation for two particular things.

The first was that she was even more sexually voracious than others of her kind. The other was that she enjoyed fighting and defeating Celestial magick users… and then screwing them to death. Just great, this could end up being a firefight and her spells would be hard to predict if she was anything like Khinara, while my magick energy was limited to what I could pull from the four okka crystals I had with me. It would be better if I could end this quickly, now that she’d shown herself.

I was already forming a series of spells in my mind to do so as the Succubus sashayed toward me with that confident smile. “Well, well, well, a Celestial came all this way to visit me?” she purred. Then her eyes narrowed. “No, not truly a Celestial, just a human with a shard of their power, how interesting. I do hope that you’ll make this fight entertaining.”

Even as I focused my intent and let loose my first barrage of spells, I snapped back, “I came here to kill you, not entertain you, Larezza. I have other things to do, so let’s get this over with.”

The Succubus deftly sidestepped the stone spikes that erupted from the ground where she had been standing a moment before and a quickly raised shielding spell blocked the follow-up Holy Lance that I fired at her. Another damn silent caster. That was going to make things difficult.

Some sort of tar shot up from the gaps between the courtyard flagstones but my own shielding spell kept it at bay and I quickly worked my wings to get some distance between me and the ground. I quickly cast another spell to freeze the tendrils of tar and launch it back at her as a barrage of icicles. Larezza’s eyebrows raised slightly as she reassessed me. “You do not cast using those silly rituals and incantations that the Celestials are so fond of. Perhaps you will be entertaining after all.”

“As you pointed out, I’m not a true Celestial, I was born human,” I replied as a blaze of flames materialized in front of her to melt the ice, sparing her shield as she sent balls of the now-flaming tar toward me. Usually, I wouldn’t waste time talking during a fight like this, but it would hopefully keep her attention on me instead of my spells.

I dodged the flaming projectiles as she rose ten feet into the air to match my altitude and a barrage of flagstones flew at me from behind my right shoulder, shattering against my shield spell. Dammit, I needed to channel more magick energy into the spell to reinforce it and was already being forced to use the first of my okka crystals.

“True, and you are very good at hiding your spells,” she admitted with a smile as she dodged a barrage of iron spikes from the guardhouse gates to her right. Somehow, she managed to do it so that she was away from the flash of light that I had intended to blind her with, instead of toward it like I had planned.

I silently cursed and prepared another round of spells as I asked, “Why are you smiling then?” That smile bothered me; she had something up her sleeve.

“I have fought many Celestial spell weavers since our war with them resumed, and you fight nothing like them. Though you are deliciously devious and hide your spells well, I am familiar enough with Celestial auras and the feel of their magick to sense when you are casting a spell, and where it will appear. You cannot keep going for long before you will need to risk drawing on the essence of Heil. This is a battle that you cannot win, but fight on pretty little spell weaver, I look forward to celebrating my victory with you.”

A chill slithered up my spine. Was she just messing with me? No, I didn’t think so, She seemed to know exactly when I was firing my spells and where to avoid them, and I had the distinct feeling that she could at least guess at a spell’s power and nature as well. She was only casting counterspells to keep this fight interesting and feel out my responses. She had also summoned a shielding spell to block the one spell I had cast that could have probably killed her rather than just harry her.

Okay, if she liked devious, I’d give her devious. I just needed to get her in the right spot first. So much for dealing with this quickly, but the others were counting on me to take this bitch down, including my sister. I couldn’t afford to fail. I had to have faith that Shannon could hold her own until I could finish this fight and go help her.

By the time I managed to herd Larezza into position with every minor spell that I could think to throw at her to conserve my magick energy, I had burned through two more okka crystals and would need to use the last one to pull off my plan. She had been deftly avoiding or directly countering everything that I threw at her with frustrating accuracy, and I had even tried physical attacks until I found out painfully that her shield protected against those as well, unlike when we first fought Khinara. I was getting tired and ready to end this. I quickly drained the final okka crystal and prepared my spells.

I had tried to get Shannon as proficient as I was with multi-tasking and casting multiple spells at once, but not even I had attempted five spells at once before. This was going to take some precision as well since I would need to make three of those spells as powerful as I could while conserving enough magick energy to deliver the coup de grâce, in case this didn’t manage to kill her. I dedicated all of my focus and intent to the spells and let them fly.

Three of the spells were the biggest and most destructive beams of holy magick that I could summon, one to her right, another to her left, and a third between and just above the other two. I’d noticed that she preferred to dodge using her maneuverability in the air, if possible, and I hadn’t seen her use anything akin to a teleportation spell yet to try to avoid attacks. These beams were each potent enough to be a real threat to her shield and they would only allow her one direction to physically dodge, down. The other spells were a self-teleportation spell and a simple light flare, cast right in front of me in hopes that it would obscure the teleportation spell from her detection ability.

I had just enough time to see the Succubus’s eyes go wide as she dropped to the ground at the base of the tower to avoid my holy attacks before I reappeared one hundred and fifty feet above my previous position. All three beams hit the side of the massive tower an instant later, causing it to collapse on top of Larezza. “Damn,” I cursed. I hoped that dropping a building on her might finish the job, but her aura was still there so I started to work on my next spell.

I didn’t have time to finish it before a furious and bloodied Succubus exploded out from the rubble and launched toward me like a very angry homing missile, her fists covered in a dark energy that I did not like the looks of at all. I quickly abandoned my spell to pour my remaining magick energy into my shielding spell seconds before she hit me. I managed to take the hit, and the second blow that sent me crashing back to the ground, but surviving hitting the ground took the last bit of energy that my shield had and the pain shooting through my left wing told me that I hadn’t come through the crash completely unscathed.

Reflexively I started to draw in more magick energy, but quickly stopped myself when it felt like swallowing napalm might feel. Shit. I was out of magick, couldn’t fly and now I had an angry and battered Succubus who was quickly healing hovering over me. Maybe if I could get a surprise shot off with my gun…

It was my best bet, and I dismissed my Celestial form so I wouldn’t be distracted by the pain in my wing. I reached for my gun as Larezza landed and looked down at me. My gun was gone; did I somehow lose it when I crashed to the ground? I couldn’t see it anywhere nearby either, just the Succubus standing over me.

Shit. I was beaten. “No,” I told myself firmly. I promised Shannon that I wouldn’t die on her again. As long as I still had breath in my body, I would do everything I could to beat this bitch that was looking down on me. I needed a plan, I still had my silver ring, maybe if… Larezza was reaching out for me and once again, I tried to draw on the magick energy around me out of reflex to protect myself.

“Human, you have lost, but you managed to wound me. Before I kill you, I will bring you to pleasures such as you have never known in life as…”

“Heh… Hahahahahaha!” My sudden laughter interrupted her, and I had to wipe tears from my eyes. It fucking worked. The texture and taste of the magick energy made me feel like throwing up, but it worked. “Magic’s will,” I managed to get out between fits of laughter.

“Are you… laughing at me? Larezza asked in confusion before catching my words and looking at me as if I was crazy. “What are you on about? Without your Celestial ability to use magick, you are a mere mortal. I have beaten you and I will take my prize, this act of yours will change nothing.”

“You know,” I stated conversationally to buy time as I drew in the foul magick energy, “my cousins keep telling my sister and me that magick has a will of its own. I actually agree with them, it has a will, and maybe even an agenda, putting people in the right place at the right time, that’s how I got my Celestial abilities.”

The Succubus knelt down on top of me, pinning me to the ground as she reached for my top while muttering, “I fail to see how that is funny, but if reminiscing makes your last moments…”

I tried not to smile as I felt the warmth of her flesh. Her shield had been depleted when the tower collapsed on top of her, and she was so confident that I was a helpless human now that she hadn’t even bothered recasting it. I made an effort to push her off and fight against her superior strength as I finished drawing in enough magick energy to fuel one last, desperate spell before she could figure out what was going on. A little more time.

I interrupted again as I focused part of my mind on my spell. “Did you know that I was a Witch before I got those Celestial abilities? I lost my magick while protecting my sister from one of your male counterparts. Now, here I am, at your mercy with no way to fight back, no way to use my Celestial abilities, and desperate to kill you to protect my world and others. Well, I’ve also learned that magick has a flair for the dramatic, it loves that shit. So, when do you think would be a really good time for me to get my magick back?”

I didn’t give her time to think about it. My hand was now on her chest and feebly pushing against her in token resistance against her unwanted attention. She never saw the Holy Lance coming before it burned through her chest and she was reduced to ash. She might have been able to read Celestial auras, but at the moment I didn’t have one.

Revulsion threatening to make me throw up, I hurriedly got to my feet, brushed the ashes off my clothes, and fixed my blouse, trying not to think about how close she had come to… “No, you have things to do, Sarah,” I told myself firmly, fists clenched at my sides.

I won and stopped her before she could do anything, and now she was ash. I might need to see Jaenara about this later but right now; I couldn’t afford to let my thoughts drift to could-have-beens. For now, I was safe and alive, that was what mattered. Now I just needed to find my sister and make sure that she stayed that way too.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 30 of book five of I Wish. I finally got over my block on this one. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

As soon as the others vanished from my teleportation spells and Michelle had used her own ability to join Lisa and Rebecca, I started gathering more of the foul magick energy around me to replace what I had just spent. I wanted to be prepared, and to be able to use my full power straight out of the gate. Only once I had completely topped up my stored magick energy, did I cast a teleportation spell that I had been preparing for myself.

The teleport spells had been guesswork at best, I had to eyeball them, but being in my Succubus form with its superior long-range vision helped with that. I was fairly certain that I had gotten the others at least close to their target locations but Baal, the Demon King himself, was likely going to be much harder to find. We were told that while the others tended to be at their respective gatehouses unless they had a specific assignment, Baal had a vast palace that took up the entire center of the rings beyond the innermost gatehouse.

He could be anywhere in that palace or on the estate at any given time, and he was likely to have slaves, guards, and/or attendants with him according to the limited information we had gotten from Kisha. There would be a lot of area to cover and plenty of people (possibly innocent slaves) who could spot me and report me, or just generally be in the way when I tried to make my move. That was a problem since I wanted to do this as stealthily as possible and hopefully take Baal out quickly.

As much as I loved stories and video games there the main hero is on a quest and storms the castle to proudly exclaim that they’re going to take the big bad down, resulting in an epic battle, this was real life. There were lives at risk here, and a war the likes of which humankind had never before seen if I didn’t end this here and now. It wasn’t just humans either, but also the nearly eradicated Faery, species who lived on other Planes, and even Demonkind.

Even back in Xuriel’s time, Baal was a tyrant and a warmonger who thirsted for conquest, and speaking with Kisha and others from her village showed me that he hadn’t changed with time. It had also shown me the abuses that he heaped upon his own kind in the name of his senseless war. The war wasn’t for land, wealth, or even about belief, it was because he was greedy and ambitious.

He ruled Heil with an iron fist, but it wasn’t enough, he wanted more. He wanted to conquer all other Planes, all for the sake of his ego. He was the very definition of a villain, so I guess that made me and my friends the heroes because we refused to let him win.

Being a hero is all well and good, but it was far better to be practical here. So, if I could assassinate him quick and dirty, I was pretty sure I’d still sleep just fine at night. With that in mind, I had two advantages in my favor to infiltrate this estate and find and kill Baal.

The first was that I didn’t have a Celestial aura, or its demonic counterpart, to give me away. This would allow me to slip through the palace and its grounds unseen if I was careful, and the worst-case scenario would be that if anyone did see me, they would likely just think I was just a normal Succubus with a very weak aura and abilities. The second advantage was that I could sense them. This would allow me to avoid people for the most part, and to track down Baal without having to search the whole palace.

I materialized high above Baal’s vast palace and immediately stretched out my wings to glide downward while I felt out the auras in the area below me. Even from a good two hundred feet above the highest rooftop of the palace, I could sense Baal’s suffocating aura. It was familiar, thanks to the memories that I had inherited from Xuriel, and easily the most powerful demonic aura that I had ever felt.

With most Demons, their auras felt nauseating, unsettling, and overbearing, kind of like social anxiety in a way. It’s like it’s trying to make you turn away, and you struggle to act while in terror of what might happen to you unless you know what’s causing it. This aura though, was on an entirely different level from anything I had ever felt before. It was so suffocating, malevolent, and overwhelming that I was sure that even those not sensitive to magic or auras could probably feel it.

Baal’s aura seemed to radiate through the entire palace and its grounds, and as I alighted on a sloped rooftop, I realized that he was going to be very difficult to track down by aura alone. I had thought that it would be as easy as following his aura to where the pull was the strongest, but his suffocating presence so permeated the grounds of this complex that it was like it was coming from everywhere, all at once. It looked like ‘follow his demonic aura’ wasn’t going to be a feasible plan here.

I frowned as I felt another faint sensation of pain from my empathic link with Ziralin. My Familiar was having a tough time with her battle it seemed, something had hit her hard almost as soon as she appeared in the location I sent her to, and it felt like she was having a rough time of it. I was fairly sure that she hadn’t been seriously injured yet, but this didn’t bode well for her, and if the others were having similar troubles…

No. I needed to have faith in them, and I couldn’t afford to second guess this plan now. Mason thought that this was the best way for us all to come out of this alive and to defeat the Generals and Baal, and I trusted his psychic intuition. Hitting them all at once was a solid plan and it would limit any interference when I found and fought Baal.

“Focus, Shannon,” I mentally chided myself. “Stop second-guessing yourself and focus on how you’re going to find Baal. If following the strength of his aura isn’t going to work, then how else do I find him in a complex this large?”

I could always follow some of those abundant servants down there and hope their tasks brought them to him, but that was a shot in the dark at best, and there was no guarantee that he had any kind of regular contact with the compound’s various slaves and servants. Finding a lone male servant and seducing him could work, but I would risk showing myself to others and there was no guarantee that he would be able to take me to Baal either. Then the thought came to me. “Why go searching for Baal, when I can bring him to me?”

I would have expected that my teleport would have gotten his attention when I first arrived, but it wasn’t a particularly powerful or flashy spell compared to a portal spell and I could sense some of the Demons in the compound using minor spells for other things, so it could have just been ignored because of the other magic going on. The version that I had used wasn’t a Celestial spell either, but my own improvised version. A Celestial spell, brimming with holy magic would definitely have gotten his attention. I couldn’t help but smile as a plan came to me.

It took longer than I would have liked to set up my plan. First, I had to find a place for my ambush and a good spot to conceal myself, where I would have a good enough view of the area to react quickly when the time came to attack. For the ambush spot, I chose some sort of large courtyard that had a massive stone statue of Baal, the Demon King himself.

The statue looked just like him, or at least the memories of him that I had received from Xuriel, though grander in size. While the statue was made of black stone, I remembered his skin being a bright crimson and his hair black, but they had captured his likeness well. He had an almost human face with long hair, large horns jutting from his forehead and sweeping back over his head, and bone spikes along the underside of his jaw.

His build looked as powerful as it was in Xuriel’s memories. Again, it was almost human save for the tail, much like my own, and the great size of the statue, which was clearly exaggerated. This statue stood almost thirty feet tall, while the memories I had from Xuriel would have placed him between seven and eight feet.

As for my hiding spot, I chose a spot atop one of the courtyard walls, where I concealed myself in the shadows as I worked on my first spell. It was while I was doing that, I felt a series of sharp, agonizing pains and panic from Ziralin that brought me to my knees and had me worrying about my love. Moments later they stopped. She was still alive, and from the emotions I was feeling from her, she had probably won her battle. She was moving toward me now as well, though slowly.

I had a feeling that this courtyard was close to the nearest gatehouse because I was sensing magic faintly from what was probably Sarah’s battle at the edge of my magick sense. When I managed to catch my breath after the unexpected assault of Ziralin’s agony, the sense of magick that I was feeling faded and became less chaotic. They were finished their battles, and I was running out of time to finish mine before they arrived. I needed to hurry and get back to work.

I willed into existence a scythe blade of holy magick, enough that it would surely get Baal’s attention, and I used that holy scythe blade to sever the giant statue’s head from its shoulders. The stone head crashed to the ground, where it immediately shattered into hundreds of jagged shards of black stone. Those looked sharp, was that obsidian?

I couldn’t waste the time thinking about it so instead, I concentrated on drawing in more magick energy, purifying it, and working on my next four spells. I needed to hurry. Not only did I figure that Baal would be arriving very soon, probably with company, but I was on a timer now before Sarah and Ziralin arrived as well.

Thankfully, Baal was as prompt as I’d hoped he’d be after my use of so much holy magick in the heart of his domain. A demonic portal opened in the courtyard below and out stepped the Demon King himself, just as he was in Xuriel’s memories, flanked by a dozen other Demons that felt strong on their own but paled before the strength of their leader. They were barely stepping out of the portal before I began my assault.

Sarah sat amongst the rubble of the now-destroyed gatehouse, carefully absorbing and purifying the foul magick energy that Heil provided. She wanted to be ready for a fight and to hurry to help her sister. She wasn’t about to let Shannon fight the Demon King alone and have history repeat itself. Fighting alone was the reason that Xuriel lost, though from what Shannon said, her mortal body kept her from using her full power as well.

It didn’t matter; she was going to be there to watch her sister’s back. Once she topped up her magick reserves she would return to her Celestial form to heal her wing so she could get there faster. She was almost ready when she sensed a Celestial aura, and it was getting closer. Moments later, she heard wingbeats as well and Annie landed, holding Ziralin in her arms.

They had both been through a tough fight from the looks of it. Annie was sporting bruises all over that sexy body of hers and Ziralin wasn’t looking any better. The Fae wasn’t using her Celestial form and visibly winced when Annie gently placed her on the ground. She had her old bow and swords out too and, while both swords and arrowheads were coated in silver, they would not be as efficient at slaying Demons as the weapons that could summon in her Celestial form.

The former cop explained, “I found her running along rooftops, trying to avoid the fighting between the resistance and those loyal to Baal. She’s in rough shape, but she says she can fight.”

“Of course, I can fight,” Ziralin snapped. “I may not be able to use my wings right now, but my place is at Shannon’s side. A few cracked ribs aren’t going to stop me. She just started fighting, I can feel it.”

“Hey, calm down kiddo,” Annie soothed. “I know you want to get to Shannon and help her, we all do, but we should take an inventory first. I’m just about out of juice here, and if you two are in your normal forms, I guess you’re not much better.”

“Actually, I’m much better off than I probably look,” Sarah told the pair with a faint smile. “I was just gathering magick energy to heal a broken wing, but I can fight like this if I need to. I’ve got my magick back.”

“No way!” Ziralin sputtered as she looked at her with wide eyes. “I thought you were burnt out.”

“I was, but I got my magick back when I was on the ropes and had to change back to my normal form. I’m almost fully charged now and ready to back my sister up, and anyone who gets in my way will regret it.”

“You’re not going to help her without us,” a familiar voice stated as Rebecca landed with Elsaishe cradled in her arms. They had company too, six adult faery and two Fae, one who looked to be around four years old and another who was probably a preteen.

From what Ellie said, the Fae were being held captive by one of the Generals, a Hradok, as a food source until she defeated him and found them with Rebecca’s help. Rebecca then quickly explained that she, Michelle, and Lisa had managed to kill Khinara, but that Michelle had been badly injured, so she and Lisa went home using their bug-out bracelets. She saw signs from the air that Jennifer and Mason had won their battles as well but had probably gone home as well since she saw no sign of them on her way to help Elsaishe.

It seemed like it would just be the five of them going to help Shannon then. The Faeries had been through a lot and they weren’t fighters, so Sarah encouraged them to hide in her portable bunker where it would be safe after casting a spell to create fresh air in there over the next few hours while they took care of the fighting. Sarah was a little concerned about her sister’s fiancée trying to fight in the shape she was in though.

That was a matter easily handled though between Ziralin and Elsaishe. It turned out that Ziralin still had a fully charged Okka crystal, which was enough for Ellie to heal her fellow Fae, Annie, and Sarah while in their Celestial forms. Except for Sarah, they would all be fighting while low on magick energy, but they were in a lot better shape than before. Sarah had managed to top off her magick reserves while Ellie was doing the healing, and at least they all had weapons and could use their wings to get there faster.

Ziralin led the way, following her bond with Shannon, and the others followed her with all the speed they could muster. None of them wanted to waste another moment after being healed since every moment was another minute that Shannon was fighting the Demon King on her own. It wasn’t long before they could all hear the sounds of a battle in the distance.

 

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Author's note: Here's chapter 31 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support, and to the Big Closet staff.

Baal looked just as I remembered him from Xuriel’s memories, though older and even more commanding. During the previous war between the Demons and Celestials, he had been young, brash, newly ascended to the position of Demon King, and wanting to prove himself. Demons may age slowly but they do age, and he looked older and harder somehow, though he was still probably in his prime and I wasn’t willing to wait another few thousand years to end him and the threat that he posed.

It felt like he had grown in power since his last battle with Xuriel, not a comforting thought when one also took into account the thousands of years he had to do so and gain experience between that last war and now. Just the fact that he had grown further during that time when he was already the strongest Demon that Heil had ever produced was enough to be concerning. His aura was overwhelming enough that it seemed to smother the auras of the dozen guards with him, making it hard for me to get an accurate sense of their power. They probably weren’t strong enough to be generals though, so I had fought stronger than them before, when I wasn’t unsealed and at full power.

I waited until they were all through the portal and it was closing behind them before I made my move, first releasing the scythe of holy magick from where it hovered where it had removed the head of Baal’s statue. The Demons, and even Baal himself, had been watching it warily, and their eyes widened in surprise as it shot toward the group. It was followed by a barrage of obsidian shards that had once been the statue’s head, even as one of the Demons raised a horn to his lips and blew, probably calling for reinforcements.

The other three spells I was casting settled into place even as the first two were launched toward my opponents. The first was the most powerful protection spell that I could muster, I might need it if I was going toe to toe with Baal. The others were a barrage of stone spikes launching from behind the group at the base of the rapidly closing portal and the second was a spell that would turn the ground at their feet to a morass of tar that would drag the unwary down to suffocate as they struggled against it.

Baal already had some sort of protection spell in place. He tanked the scythe and what obsidian projectiles flew his way and leaped away from my trap even as it started to form, before the tar could do its work. Now he stood at the base of the headless statue, unharmed by my attacks.

Most of his demonic companions were not so fortunate. While a pair of Succubae took to the air at his command, the others were now struggling against the tar and three had been impaled and killed by stone spikes. Another two were shredded by obsidian projectiles, including the one with the horn. The booming sound of the horn was cut short as a shard of obsidian found his throat and he gurgled his last bloody breath.

Baal was scanning his surroundings and shouting orders to the pair of Succubae as I continued to draw in more magick energy and purify it. I had plenty still in the tank, but I didn’t want to get overconfident and face the possibility of having to rush to gather and purify more when I truly needed it. I expended a bit of that magick energy, focusing my will and intent, and the newly formed tar pit burst into white flames of holy magick, causing those caught inside to scream as they were consumed.

I didn’t have time to pat myself on the back. I was still on a timer here before either my friends or Baal’s reinforcements showed up and I wanted this battle over before then if at all possible. Baal was still looking around for their attacker and I could feel him readying spells and two of the Succubae were searching from the air, heading toward the walls of the courtyard, one of them almost directly toward my hiding spot.

I hit the one headed for the opposite wall, forming an assault of stone spikes from that wall and launching them at her. She dodged the first wave, the second shattered on her shielding spell, but the third hit her with full force and she crashed to the courtyard floor with her chest and both of her wings impaled. As I hoped, both Baal and the other Succubus took this to mean that the one I just killed was approaching my hiding spot and focused their attention there.

Baal loosed a terrifying blast of magick that eviscerated the opposite wall of the courtyard even as the Succubus approaching my hiding spot turned and raced toward the rubble Baal’s attack had left behind. The moment her back was turned, I cast two more spells. The first was my own blast of magick, this one holy in nature which I sent toward Baal, burning with raw power and antithesis to the essence of Heil.

The second spell was a simple teleportation spell which had me dropping onto the Succubus’s back with force. She barely had time to shriek in surprise at the impact and added weight before I thrust the silver blade on the tip of my tail into her back. As the ash that was all that was left of her was taken by the wind, I spread my wings and got in position to hover as I turned my attention back to the Demon King.

When the dust cleared, Baal stood in the middle of the now devastated courtyard looking unharmed. I knew better though. That attack may not have hurt him physically, but it had completely drained his shielding spell, and I could sense him drawing on more tainted magick energy to create a new one even as his gaze settled upon me.

“Xuriel, I should have known,” the Demon King spat in the demonic tongue. “I would have thought you long dead by now.”

I was already firing off two more spells even as I replied in the same language, “I’m not Xuriel, but she left me all her memories, and her power, to finish what she started. And don’t bother hoping that your generals might show up to give you a hand, the other Sentinels have already taken care of them.”

The second blast of holy magick impacted his new barrier spell, but not before obsidian shards from the destroyed statue rained upon him. He managed to avoid the worst of it, but he now had a host of cuts and his tail had been severed near the base, leaving me with an advantage until his regeneration could grow it back. That holy blast had taken a huge chunk out of the new shielding spell too and I had a feeling that one more big spell would take it down completely.

Xuriel had learned in her first battle with Baal, and she had passed those lessons on to me. He might be powerful, but he relied on pure power and favored large, destructive spells and powerful shields when not in close-quarters combat. While that may give him an edge against most Demons, those big spells also took a while to build up the power for, and an agile and sneaky opponent who could avoid his attacks, keep out of range for a slugfest, and whittle down his shields could beat him. Xuriel had him on the ropes when they first fought and would have won if she had not been cursed by Izhara at the critical moment.

In a one-on-one battle between the two of us, it would probably end up as a battle of attrition, one that I had confidence I would eventually win. Now I just had to worry about interference. I could feel other demonic auras getting closer by the minute and Ziralin and three other Celestial auras were fast approaching as well. I was on the clock here.

If I had to split my attention between multiple opponents, Baal would have more opportunity to cast his shields and wide area attack spells, which was why I took care of the hangers-on and didn’t show myself until I had Baal alone. I was also keeping to the air and out of physical combat range because I knew that he would have an edge there if I got too close. Baal was as powerful physically as he was magically, maybe more so, and while I did have my regeneration and the physical strength and attributes of a Succubus, I knew I wouldn’t be able to match him in the type of physical fight he preferred. I needed to play to my strengths.

I slammed a holy lance into Baal’s shield, depleting it and forcing him to use the magick energy he was building up to cast another instead of a big attack. Spell after spell, I kept him on the back foot, forcing him to focus on shielding himself rather than attacking until the clock ran out. I could sense the portal forming even before it opened, and that meant a magic user. Still, I poured on my attack, hitting Baal with every powerful spell I could muster, counting on my shielding spell to protect me from another spellcaster.

I barely glanced at the Demons emerging from the portal as I hammered Baal with another barrage of spells. There were a couple more Succubae, an Incubus, and a large group of heavily armored Demons with nasty-looking weapons. One of them looked like a Minotaur and it must have been twelve feet tall. A trio of vicious spells hit my barrier, but I was much more powerful than them and could probably take at least another dozen attacks like that before I needed to shield myself again.

Baal was casting another shield spell already, but it didn’t feel as powerful as the ones he was casting before. I had him on the ropes, I just needed to hold out long enough to finish this. I was already casting another barrage of spells when one of the Succubae that was pelting me with spells dropped out of the sky, turning to ash as she fell from the silver-tipped arrow in her back. “Leave my Witch alone, Demon filth!” Ziralin’s voice shouted, making my heart flutter in both relief and anxiety.

I wanted to keep the others out of this fight. “Shannon, finish off Baal! We’ll handle the rest of them!” my sister’s voice called out as a barrage of spells pelted the remaining Succubus and several gunshots rang out, Demon slayer rounds slamming into the shield of the Incubus.

Sarah didn’t need to tell me twice. This was my fight, and it was about time that I finished it. My holy blast slammed into Baal’s shielding spell, followed quickly by a holy lance, and a couple of volleys of holy missiles that finished his shield.

It seemed that Baal was through with letting me fight this battle my way though. Instead of refreshing his shield this time, when he cast his spell, I felt a dark magical force shatter my battered shield spell and crush me in its grip as it pulled me down to the ground and toward Baal. I worked my arms free and hammered the construct with spells of my own to destroy it, even as I fired another volley of holy missiles toward the now unprotected Baal.

He managed to avoid most of the projectiles as I worked through the agony of my wings being crushed against me to free myself, only taking a glancing blow from a missile that cost him an arm. He had me above him and within a few meters of the remaining arm now as the construct finally shattered from my attacks, but my wings were both damaged and would probably take at least a few minutes to heal. It was make it or break it time, and I had an idea to finish it.

“Is that all you’ve got, Baal?” I asked as I fell the remaining couple of meters toward him, focused on another quick spell, and angled myself to avoid his remaining reaching hand to grab at his face. He screamed in pain as soon as the platinum handflowers I was wearing met his eyes and caused both them and the flesh around them to sizzle and burn. Then, while he was blinded and distracted from the pain, I thrust the silver-bladed tip of my tail into his chest, sheathed in pure holy magick for good measure.

I fell to the ground as Baal turned to ash. I didn’t have the time to pat myself on the back though, because there was still a battle going on. Annie and Ellie were side by side, the ex-cop ready to protect my Faery cousin as they both fired their guns at another group of approaching Demons, the ones I had sensed getting closer earlier. Ziralin was firing arrows into the unprotected spots of the armored Demons, landing one in the eye of that minotaur, and Rebecca had gotten up close and personal with another armored Demon, slipping her armed tail through a gap in the armor to finish him.

Most surprising of all though was that my sister was in her human form and still hammering the Incubus with spells until his shield vanished and her last holy lance turned him to ash. She had her magick back. I was so happy for her that I almost didn’t notice that she, the others, and even the Demons suddenly stopped fighting to stare at me, standing over the Demon King’s ashes.

I was tired, but determined not to let it show as I cracked my knuckles, smiled viciously at the remaining Demons, and said, “Okay, who’s next?”

I wasn’t prepared for what happened next, I don’t think any of us were. Though maybe we should have been, given that I had just defeated the strongest Demon that Heil ever produced in combat and looked very much like a Succubus right now. The Demons, who were staring at me in terror as I began to prepare more spells, all fell to their knees. Then their voices rang out through the ruined courtyard. “All hail the Demon Queen!”