Power of the Lost Read online

  He nodded, looking up into her faux eyes. The shape of her face was now as precise as cut glass, lit through with a radiant crimson glow, but he knew she could not actually see him. Yet she gazed at him, patiently awaiting his answer. He ordered his thoughts in his mind and never once considered rejecting her despite his misgivings. The gift she had just given him was absolutely priceless, as much in that it was evidence she really did understand him as anything else.

  He concentrated on speaking the words in plain English as he said, "I, Terrence Wyatt Mack, do swear to you, Prada, to cherish and honor you as my own, use you as I see fit, keep you from neglect, and henceforth to acknowledge you as my wife."

  The words came with difficulty to his tongue, and he recognized the feeling as one he'd come to associate with attempting to cast spells. He'd tried many cantrips over the last week, most unsuccessful, using the language in the books he had taken from Volai, with Prada coaching him on the pronunciation. Now though, he knew that his words were correct, and though they came with some difficulty both because of their apparent magical nature and because Prada was still doing absolutely indescribable things to his erect flesh, he spoke them in complete confidence.

  As the words left his lips, a hard sapphire aura arose around him. With every syllable, the light grew ever more brilliant until the two auras — one red, the other blue — became one indistinguishable royal purple radiance.

  With the word 'wife,' the combined aura vanished completely, leaving him blinking in an effort to clear his eyes.

  The sound of Prada's voice was practically a purr as she drawled. "Husband ... always surprising me with gifts. I did not ask for honor. I do not need it, but I ... I gratefully accept. Thank you."

  Terry squeezed his eyes shut and barely managed to mumble, "You're about to make me cum ... you have to know that, right?"

  "Yesssss ..."

  He jerked as though he'd been shocked. She was forming the word all around his shaft, and he had the crazy image of a woman with champagne sex juice. It flowed all around him, dripped from his length, covered his thighs, all the while fizzing the word as Prada's feminine shape flowed away. She covered him — as she had once promised him she would — and it felt as though he were being deeply massaged by a thousand silken hands. All the while that sensual word forced a raw gasp from his throat as he arched, cumming violently.

  "Oooooh." Again she sustained the sound until he whimpered and gasped, "Oh god, no more!"

  "Ah aah," she said in a playful, chiding tone as her substance glided up the side of his throat to caress the shell of his ear. "I have a lot of catching up to do. This is my wedding night, Husband. You wouldn't deny me my pleasures on my wedding night, would you?"

  "Do you even ... feel pleasure?" he asked, abruptly uncertain as he realized he had already cum, and he'd done literally nothing for her.

  "Oh yes," she said, the words fizzing against his skin. "In a very real way, I am you, and you are me. I am no mere resident in your flesh, but a literal part of you. When I am connected to you, I see what you see. I taste what you taste. I feel what you feel ..."

  Her hold on his flesh tightened and began to swirl, making him feel as though his shaft were at the turbulent center of a whirlpool. Taking a break was clearly not going to be an option, and despite his post-coital hypersensitivity, his lusts surged. He groaned, his head falling back as her giggle throbbed across his body as her own shimmied, magnifying his groan as sensation and spreading it over him. Just enough of an impression of shape appeared in her protean body to show him her sly smirk, her shoulders and the hint of cleavage as she lay atop him. He got a sense of arms shifting over his shoulders as she wrapped herself around his neck and pillowed his head. She lifted him and kissed his lips with a curious delicacy before whispering against them.

  "I can't get off by myself. I have to have a partner to experience orgasm. I cum when you cum, and you've been holding out on me. Almost every time you're with your other girls, you made me leave you. So frustrating. There will be no more of that, Husband. I want a share in all of your bliss."

  The whirling sensation eased, and he felt the first liquid heat of pressing his cock deep into a wet, willing woman for the first time. He gaped, his breath hitching in his throat as that sensation simply repeated itself, as though inside her body was another silken slit, and then another, and another ... and she flowed on him without moving, one long, ongoing initial thrust that never ended.

  "Yes ... that feels nice ... let's keep that up until you cum in me again," she murmured, the words popping against the flesh just behind his ear.

  Being with Cecaelia had been about as helpless as he'd ever felt with another woman, until tonight. Prada put the elder sea goddess to shame. With her, it seemed as though he were a mere tool for heightening her own pleasures. His own feelings were purely secondary, because as she flowed across him she heightened his sensations in a way that ran counter to every instinct he had. He wanted to thrust, but she held him down. He wanted to caress her and guide her movement, but what he felt and how she moved were completely disconnected. He had the sensation of an ass under his palm that molded to his fingers, but no matter that he gripped or squeezed, the steady sensation of plowing ever deeper into her continued. Prada felt like an infinity pool of sex.

  In the end it was too much to withstand.

  He came for the second time in as many minutes as illusory brilliance burst across his vision from the raw intensity. Prada lost all semblance of a human shape and folded herself around him, engulfing him from toes to neck as she squeezed and kneaded and shuddered against him. It was a sensation of violent, yet somehow controlled release as her voice sounded inside his head.

  'That feels so good ... like my mind is about to break ... ooooh, take me there, Husband. Can we go, together? Let's lose ourselves — you and I. Give me Terry, and I'll give you Prada. Together we can become someone new, a child of bliss. Tonight we can be ... one.'

  Terry moaned. He felt like he was holding a live wire, but the feeling flooding through him wasn't electricity, it was ecstasy. There was simply no withstanding that tide of euphoric energy. His eyes rolled back in his head as the raw sensations bathed his mind, dissolving it into a soup of perfect pleasure as Prada's substance rose to claim the last of him, all the while cooing softly in his ear.

  7

  Doppelgänger

  Terry felt warm, but not unpleasantly so. He was snuggled in close to his man, and ...

  Wait, what?

  Opening his eyes, he found himself resting on the shoulder of ... himself. He blinked as he stared as his own sleeping face. Lowering his eyes, he looked at his hand, only to find that he didn't have one.

  His wrist was delicate and slender, and it ended abruptly on the masculine chest against which he rested. No, that wasn't quite right. It didn't end. His arm was grafted to that chest.

  Panic rapidly rising, he glanced down and saw that he had a woman's body, or at least, those parts of him that were separate from his true body were female.

  Eyes wide, he glared wildly around, reflexively trying to jerk himself away.

  All the jostling woke him up.

  Eyes crinkling in irritation, he glanced down at the woman laying with him in his blankets. She had blonde hair, pale green eyes, and full, red lips ... and she was him, staring back at him.

  "What the ever-lovin' fuck is going on?!" he asked, speaking with both mouths. One voice was his, but the other was higher-pitched and decidedly feminine.

  Prada answered inside his thoughts. 'Calm down, Husband. I am simply not quite done forming my body yet. It will happen much more quickly in the future, but this first time I have to take it slow. Internal organs are surprisingly complex.'

  Terry nodded, again the movement happening in both bodies. His eyes were locked with ... his eyes. He was staring at himself, except there were two of him, and one of him was now a chick. The feeling of 'self' existed equally in both places, but now that both of him were awak
e, it seemed as though he were one mind with two distinct sets of senses.

  He felt a headache coming on, and Prada's voice sounded again inside his mind, this time with a sense of unmistakable urgency.

  'Husband, close your eyes. Both pairs. If you don't relax, you're going to tear us both apart. That would be extraordinarily painful, and I am NOT that kind of girl.'

  Her voice inside his head became soothing, and hypnotic, 'Close your eyes. Close your eyes, and rest.'

  Terry closed his eyes and fought to relax. His female body lowered herself against his masculine chest and both of them shivered as he tried not to let this most recent insanity be what finally got him to snap for good.

  I faced down a goddamn dragon. I have seen an elder god and lived. I can do ... whatever the fuck this is.

  'That's the spirit, Husband. But for now, the easiest way to 'do' this, would be if you went back to sleep.'

  Consciously suppressing the urge to speak the words aloud, he thought, Well, Wife, if you can make that happen, now's the fuckin' time.

  'I'd usually be a bit leery of messing too much with your endocrine system, but in this case I think I'll make an exc—'

  Terry woke up. Whatever Prada had done had knocked him out so quickly that he still felt disoriented. Before he was even fully conscious he was patting himself down.

  Oookay. No missing pieces, aaand nothing extra. Whew.

  Opening his eyes, he found that his bedroll had been opened and he lay half in, half out of it. Still mostly under the wagon, he noticed that the sun was up and already all the way past the horizon.

  Most of his companions were gathered not far away, talking to a woman that Terry recognized, both from his immediate and distant past.

  Of all the girls in my head, why did she pick Charlotte 'Charlie' Blackwood from Top Gun? Why not Mikaela Banes from Transformers or Nancy Callahan from Sin City?

  He paused, then glanced down at himself.

  I'm also curious why she left me naked, with no cover.

  Another glance toward the motley group by the embers of last night's fire, and he turned toward his pack, shooing a few spiders out of his way as he reached in for a set of clothes, grumbling, "Who am I kidding? When do I ever know what's going on around here ..."

  A few minutes later he was crouched against a wagon wheel lacing up his boots when a broad shadow fell across him. He glanced up and saw Laina frowning down at him.

  "Uh, morning?" he said, her dour expression putting him a bit off his game. She was wearing a loose tunic and supporting her chest with folded arms, her sarashi wound loosely around one fist. She otherwise wore her red loincloth and thick leather belt.

  "It's time," she said, and jerked her head. "Come on. We'll do this in the wagon. And while we do, we can talk."

  Terry blinked, then nodded and finished lacing up. He followed her into the wagon — which creaked under their combined weight — and she doffed her shirt as he opened a camp stool and pulled out the pair of buckets set aside for the job.

  Laina — as a producing minotress — needed to be milked twice a day. It was a job that Terry had come to enjoy, but at the moment Laina was avoiding eye contact, and he felt it best to simply tend to the task as efficiently as possible rather than play around. She settled comfortably onto her hands and knees, and he got to work.

  After the first few moments, she sighed in relief and hung her head, eyes closed.

  Once he switched to her other breast, she asked in a neutral tone, "So, Prada is your wife now?"

  He paused, but only for a moment. He'd been expecting the question.

  "Yeah, she is. Only real thing that's changed is what she calls me ... at least, I think so. It's still new."

  "I thought you didn't trust her." Laina glanced back at him, dipping her head to do so. One of her longhorns thumped the wagon bed, and she scowled and looked away again.

  As he kneaded her flesh, relieving her of her morning tension, he thought about that for a moment before he said, "I didn't. But she changed. She gave me something I didn't think it was possible for her to give. It changed the way I thought about her."

  "What did she give you?" she asked.

  "A few things. Knowledge, comfort ... help. She did it with no strings attached. She wasn't my familiar at the time. We dissolved that contract and then she ... well, she stayed."

  "Mm."

  Laina didn't say anything else until they were done, and she leaned back on her haunches and handed him a damp towel which he used to clean her, lifting each breast with unwonted gentleness and wiping away the residual traces of milk as he looked her in the eye and asked, "Are you okay with this?"

  "I might have been, if you'd asked me before you did it," she said, not looking away. "What does it matter now, Boss? We talked about this. No more surprises. You think this doesn't count?"

  "Ah." He sat back and nodded, then looked down. She was right. She was rarely anything else. He should have waited, should have asked. It had just never occurred to him in the moment. He'd fucked up again, and now he was at a complete loss.

  "Was she good?" Laina asked.

  He blinked, looking up at her in surprise. She smiled and reached out, pulling him off the stool and into a bosomy embrace. The feel of her massive, pillowy breasts against him did predictable things to his state of mind, but she kissed him and shoved him back again as she said, "At least you had the good grace to be embarrassed about it, you slut."

  He gaped at her, but she only quirked a brow and gave him, 'the look.'

  A moment later he was laughing helplessly and muttering in between chuckles, "Okay, yeah. Guilty as charged. Please forgive me?"

  "Forgiven. I knew you were going to wind up with more women, Boss. Just, next time, a bit of warning would be nice. I can't say I didn't see it coming though, and I approve of her. She's clearly protective of you. Is she worth it?" Laina asked.

  He nodded. "Yeah, she's worth it. She's different ... not at all like a normal girl, but I need her. I won't say I couldn't have refused, but it didn't occur to me in the moment."

  "So is that what template females look like?" she asked, nodding in the direction of the now hidden group by the fire.

  "One of them looked like that, thirty some odd years ago, yeah," he said. "There's just as much variety in us as there is in your people. Some girls are pretty, some not."

  "And her?" Laina asked. "She's one of the pretty ones?"

  "Oh yeah," Terry said, grinning as he watched Laina's smile fade slightly. He gave her just a moment, then added, "But if I had to choose between her and you, I'd pick you."

  "I'm not even your race," she said, scowling at him. "You don't have to lie to me, Boss."

  Now it was his time to give her 'the look.' "Laina, you have the body of a goddess, and the heart of a saint. I love you. Prada and I may be married by a vow, but you didn't need a vow. You just stuck by me, even when you didn't have to."

  "I'll take a vow, if you're handing them out," Laina said, looking him in the eye. "Euryale's got one, now Prada does as well. What about Shy and me?"

  He nodded, thinking about that, then reached out and grabbed her sarashi off the barrel where it had been set aside. He handed it to her, because despite her teaching him he still hadn't mastered the trick of putting it on her so she felt comfortable, then said, "When you're dressed, meet me outside."

  He set a hand on the tailgate of the wagon and vaulted down to the ground. He took a moment to gather up his backpack, slinging it across one shoulder as he stepped over to the group by the fire.

  Prada was dressed in one of the loose poet shirts his girls had gotten him, along with the black set of dungarees. Aside from the fact that the shirt he was wearing had no sleeves and his pants were undyed, they essentially wore the same clothes. He noticed she was barefoot, but suspected — given she wasn't really a human woman pulled straight out of the 1980s — that she wasn't bothered not having shoes.

  "So," he said as the conversation died down and al
l eyes turned to him. "Prada, you want to explain to me exactly what the hell? You've never been able to hold a human shape for more than a few minutes at a time when we sparred, and let's face it, red's been pretty much your only color. What gives?"

  "Surely you've guessed," Prada asked, sashaying forward to drape her arms across his shoulders and gaze with an expression of mischievous adoration up into his eyes. "Why not impress the class with how smart you are, Husband?"

  "My bond did ... this?" he asked, settling hands on her slim waist.

  "Mmm." She leaned up on her toes and kissed him before slipping from his grasp. "Your bond has a variety of effects, and now that I'm one of them I can say with certainty that it can cause changes not only to what a person can do, but what a person is.

  "I, for instance, was a sanguine devil last night."

  She spun, and the movement was supernaturally graceful. With each rotation, her arms rose up until she ended in the attitude of a pirouette. She straightened and smirked at him as she said, "This morning, I am what folk on Celestine, and your world as well, call a doppelgänger."

  Terry glanced from her to Yuri as he said, "Tell me about doppelgängers."

  Yuri shrugged and said, "They are rare, extra-planar creatures. One does not know a doppelgänger is such a thing unless the creature chooses to reveal it. They are shape changers. It is said they can steal memories from those they kill and flawlessly assume their identities."

  Glancing back to Prada, Terry said, "Anything to add?"

  "Doppelgängers are a higher order creature on the plane I originally hail from. In fact I can take someone's memory, kill them, and assume their place if I choose. In practice I need not kill them to steal their memories, but if I leave my subject alive the memories fade after a week or so unless I renew them. Your friend is very well-informed. Most doppels that exist in this world are escaped familiars, like myself."

  She gave him a brilliant smile as she said, "We are ageless, and our protean nature makes us very hard to kill with mortal weapons. I am much less vulnerable to fire now than I used to be, though I can still be burned. Should I choose to, I can also resume my original form as a blood devil. In all honesty, that is how I am most comfortable, and how I'll be spending most of my time."