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Arena Road 2 Chapter 4

When I woke up on the day we were going through the portal again, my two warriors were already up and trying on the outfits they would wear in the arena with the new additions.

“Whoa…” I muttered through a groggy yawn.

Indy was strutting around in her usual blood-orange romper, plus the greaves and corset that were made of black leather with gold swirls, along with the matching bracer and vambrace that were new to her and reinforced with carbon fiber. Her outfit was completed by the decorative golden scale-mail that covered her shoulders, and the gauzy black cape fluttered behind her as she swayed across the room.

Ellie wore her usual white, dress-like romper, but she had replaced the ribbon around her waist with her new polished, deep-periwinkle corset with its gold edges. The matching pre-battle shoulder armor was fastened onto her dainty shoulders. Combined with the corset, the upside-down flowers sitting on her shoulders accented her delicate beauty in an eye-catching way, and they betrayed a slight hint of the fact that she was a ruthless, badass warrior who could slay just about anyone in her path.

I could only imagine the looks Indy and Ellie would get in Bayalon when people’s eyes were caught by their flashy new attire. Their metal weapons, sturdy leather armor, and badass fighting in the arena had already gotten them plenty of attention on our first trip. Now they had all that, plus this new war-like but decorative finery to walk around in before the battle took place. From what I had seen, even the most famous of the legendary city’s warriors didn’t possess anything similar, and I knew it was sure to draw even more attention to my stunning, deadly warriors.

That would bring more people to the arena, more repute to my women, and maybe even more repute to me as a backer.

If all went well, it would also draw more money into the bulging pouch of winnings I would be receiving from the gray-skinned bookies after the fight was over.

After all the preparation we’d done over the last few days, my nerves about the fight had mellowed, and I could tell it was the same for my women as they shed their new finery so they could spar for a bit before leaving. They seemed keyed up and determined, but not too anxious.

I got out of bed and stretched as I watched them raining light and playful blows on each other in my attic bedroom, and the sight made me smile more than ever.

“Do not be so forgiving, Ellie,” Indy grunted as she jutted her palm into the dainty fighter’s ribs. “You are too fond of me, pretend I am your opponent.”

“I am,” Ellie almost growled, and she whipped around in a high kick that Indy easily dodged. “Stop being so tall and spry, and I will beat you properly.”

“See?” Indy huffed and dove at Ellie’s hips. “Too many compliments! Too much fondness! Beat me–”

A swift elbow to the neck from Ellie cut off my princess’ words, and she staggered away with a satisfied smile on her face.

“Much better.” Indy nodded. “Now, harder next time.”

After that, I spent some time making us breakfast and taking a few jabs at one of the human-shaped training dummies with my new tactical gloves. Then I made sure everything was packed and ready before we started off in my car and headed to the company lot to trade it for my war chariot.

When I rumbled out of the gate behind Spitfire’s wheel and waited for my two women to ascend gracefully into my cab, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

“I always adore seeing you in your war chariot, John,” Indy purred as she sent me a cat-like smile. “You exude the same brawny fierceness, and I like this.”

Ellie nodded in agreement, and she patted Spitfire’s dash in the same way I always did. “A sturdy chariot for a deserving man.”

My heart nearly cracked open at this, but I tried to keep my shit together as I steered us toward the highway.

I discussed every aspect of the leadup to their fight with them as we headed toward Portland to pick up our duckload of dead ducks. We hit on every little detail, like when and where the women would change from their decorative armor into their battle gear, plus the caffeine pills they would take about forty minutes before they were set to go out into the arena.

I was more glad than ever that my old clunker was a cabover when it came time to maneuver from the narrow city street to the cramped area where I’d be picking up my load. Spitfire’s tight turn radius and good visibility did a lot to reduce the hassle of setting myself up at a good angle and backing smoothly up to the loading dock in the cramped confines of the alleyway outside the taxidermy store.

I chuckled slightly at the awed reaction this accomplishment got from the two warrior women in my cab. It honestly hadn’t been the easiest skill to learn back when I first picked it up, and I had worked hard enough to master it that a little praise went a long way. Most people didn’t appreciate the skill, especially not the people I was picking up from. I had learned from Doug, my favorite and more seasoned trucker at the company, that those people would always take a driver’s ability to back up a big rig for granted… until something went wrong, and they thought they might have to pay for any sort of damages to the loading area. Thankfully, that hadn’t been an issue for me as a truck driver so far, and as long as I stayed careful, it probably never would be.

Soon I was waiting patiently with my two women for the feathery cargo to be loaded. As Nick had promised, the taxidermied ducks appeared to all be packed into sealed crates, and these were quickly tucked into Spitfire’s trailer with wooden planks bracing them snugly against each other.

Nick himself was nowhere to be seen, but that was what we had agreed on back when we hammered out the details of our plan. Other than the fact that he already wasn’t personally involved in this part of the process for the taxidermy store, it also seemed smartest for him to refrain from being too chummy with me here and now.

Not that there would be anyone I knew of who had seen us together in the shop enough to make the connection, other than Vero. But it still seemed best to err on the side of caution.

Once the trailer was loaded and I was sure everything was well in place, I drove us out of Portland and up onto SR 14 to head east.

“On the road,” Indy chanted, and her glossy black hair streamed back in the wind as she leaned down to carefully roll up the window that I had taught her the workings of.

“You are very good at that,” Ellie praised, and the princess smiled smugly as she admired the closed window.

“Yes, I have mastered this contraption,” she agreed.

The sun was just past the center of the sky as we drove along the river. Washington had been graced by a soft blue sky today that was strewn with gauzy clouds at the edges. It cast the river’s surface into a calm azure shade, and it felt almost like we were driving into a late summer afternoon as we headed into eastern Washington.

Eventually the big tree-clad slopes and rocky cliffs dwindled into lower and lower hills covered with dry yellow grass, and then they flattened out almost completely.

“Party Fowl,” I muttered to myself again as the sign of the lonely shop finally came into sight on our right. I shook my head at the pun for a second time with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

“What does it mean, John?” Indy asked with a frown.

“It’s a joke,” I explained while I drove us across the crumbling parking lot that was almost empty except for a few derelict cars. “Uh, a really corny joke. ‘Party Foul’ means doing something stupid at a party, basically. And ‘fowl’ is also what some types of birds are called. Including the ones that are in the trailer of my truck right now.”

“Foolish,” Indy whispered in a disparaging voice.

“Yeah, explaining it really kills the last scraps of humor,” I sighed mostly to myself.

When I glanced over at Ellie, though, she seemed to be fighting off a smile that threatened to appear on her pouty pink lips. I made a mental note to think up some extra-cheesy puns to shower her with at the next opportunity, because that smile was adorable as hell.

Once we had dropped off the ducks, I directed us back toward the highway and drove back west through the scrubby desert. The shadows gathered in every small hollow in the land as the sun moved lower in the sky into the cover of the gauzy clouds. By the time we took the usual exit to turn around and access the portal exit on the other side of the highway, dusk was falling in earnest.

I slowed slightly as we rolled down the ramp of the portal exit.

Then I glanced at my two warriors. “Ready to rumble?”

“Rumble?” Ellie echoed in a nervous voice. “I suppose the fog is very… rumbly.”

“We are ready, John,” Indy said with a toss of her hair, but I thought I saw her long fingers reach over to twine through Ellie’s in the faint glow of dusk.

“Let’s do this thing,” I exhaled, and I guided the truck steadily ahead into the gently swirling fog that was starting to appear on the road in front of us. Then I raised my voice slightly. “And by ‘this thing,’ I mean this, uhh, super fun journey through the enchanted fog. It’s so luminous and… swirly. Gorgeous, really.”

Either I was imagining things, or the fog’s swirling was becoming more gentle as we continued to roll forward into it.

Then, to my surprise, Ellie picked back up where I had left off. “The fog is dazzling and radiant. It is…”

“Majestic,” Indy added solemnly. “Fierce and mighty as a wild gorsican, but beautiful, glowing with the l-light of many sss-sunlit gems—”

I could’ve sworn I saw the increasingly colorful swirls of fog ruffle themselves slightly in a way that reminded me of a bird preening, or my princess tossing her hair proudly. Then the cab around us started to vibrate with slowly increasing force.

Suddenly, the truck rocketed forward into the mist.

“Shit!” I whooped. “I mean… yeehaw!”

“Shit,” Indy agreed in a sputtering whisper.

“Yeeee…” Ellie squeaked. “H–”

A snort of laughter exploded out of me, but then it turned into a choke as the truck picked up more speed, and Ellie’s statement died down.

Tendrils of flowy, glowing fog streamed past Spitfire’s windshield. I felt the same slightly unsettling loss of gravity as usual, but to me it seemed like there was less turbulence in our journey as we zoomed along. Maybe it was just the effect of me getting used to these journeys, but it almost seemed like a fun ride.

Then we slowed and drifted down with a gentleness that I hadn’t yet experienced in the foggy portal, even on our last trip home when the fog had seemed to react to my lighthearted flattery.

This time, there was only the lightest imaginable bump when we touched down on the Moonstone Road.

“Wow,” Indy whispered as we rolled out of the fog.

“You two okay?” I asked, just to be sure. “This trip was pretty fu– ugh!”

I groaned as the familiar jello-like feeling ran through my body, and the two women both shivered.

Then I exhaled slowly and urged Spitfire back into motion before I spoke again. “The question stands.”

“We are fine.” Indy tossed her hair. I saw shades of silver and pale yellow flickering through her red-gold eyes, but it looked like it was starting to dissipate already now that we’d landed.

When I reached out to trace my fingers over her hand, the rest of the silvery-yellow fragments fled at my touch.

It wasn’t as blatant in Ellie’s case, but I could see the calmness creep back into the dainty warrior’s eyes too when I was in close proximity, and it made me glad.

“The flight was smooth this time,” the doll-faced warrior observed. “Fast, but smooth. But the wobbly feeling was still…”

Indy shuddered. “Not nice.”

“Definitely not nice,” I agreed. Then I took in the gleaming white road and darkening desert ahead of us, and I gave Spitfire’s steering wheel a grateful pat. “At least we’re here in one piece, though.”

“Here to make the crater arena shake with the cheers of the crowd,” my princess declared with renewed fire flashing in her eyes.

Ellie nodded vigorously in agreement, and I smirked as I thought of how well our preparations would pay off in the arena.

No matter who my women faced.

I made sure we were regularly referencing the map Indy had been making as we headed back to Bayalon, partly to keep us on track and partly because I figured it couldn’t hurt to check the times against each other and make sure it was as accurate as possible. I didn’t see us getting lost out here at this point, but then again, it never hurt to be careful in this scorching desert land where gorsicans were the sole life form outside the oasis cities.

When Bayalon’s fiery balls of light swam into appearance on the horizon, I slowed the truck to a momentary stop so my women could don the new decorative armor they would wear before they entered the arena.

The gold scale-mail that covered Indy’s shoulders glinted brightly even in the dim yellow overhead light of my cab, and combined with her gauzy black cape, it gave an impression that was both regal and fierce. The polished pink twin flowers that sat on Ellie’s shoulders and the gold-edged, deep periwinkle corset that enclosed her waist made my pearly-skinned warrior look like some divine warrior sculpture that had just escaped from an art museum.

I gave them both a look of deep, silent appreciation before I coaxed Spitfire into motion again.

My warrior women were equal parts stunning and badass.

The fireballs that lit the walls of Bayalon got brighter and closer as we drove along. The sandstone walls towered over our heads as we approached, and soon we were close enough for the writhing motion of the red-orange light to become visible.

When we pulled up beneath the patterned shadows that danced across the ground around the city, I didn’t hesitate to split the night air open with a deep, baying honk of Spitfire’s horn.

After a few seconds, the small, high-set door in the stone wall opened halfway, and I saw the shadow of a head dart out for the briefest of moments. Then the door swung shut.

A few seconds later, the hollow, metallic sound of a chain-winch could be heard, and the big brass gate started rising up into the wall above. I glanced at my two women to make sure they were following my lead as I made sure all my gear was in place, and I prepared to exit the truck.

By the time our feet thudded to the dusty desert ground, the last of the gate was retracting smoothly into the wall overhead, and we strolled right in through the entrance of the legendary city for the second time.

We were approached by the same broad-shouldered, skinny-legged guard I remembered from our first trip, and his fierce hawk-like face was full of excitement and recognition. His yellow eyes lingered on the new additions to my warriors’ clothes with a look of appreciation that bordered on awe.

“I knew you three would be back,” he swore. “My brother bet me twelve creds that we’d never see you again. Sucks to be him.”

I snorted, but I allowed a small smirk to creep over my face. “Well, here we are.”

“Hell yeah,” he chortled. “Can’t wait to put some tokens in my pocket betting on your fight tonight. Cheers.”

“Cheers.” My smirk deepened as the roars of the distant crowd almost drowned out my reply. It sounded like it was already a lively night.

My warriors’ weapons clinked in my duffel bag as I led the two stunners between the black domed buildings of the Old Town that rose out of the volcanic stone ground like bubbles. I kept a sharp eye out as we passed by the shadowy buildings and their yards full of ominous, toxic-looking plants. Some of the glowing foliage shifted threateningly as we walked past, and I saw a row of plants that looked like giant Venus fly traps lining the edge of the road. The plants silently yawned their mouth-like traps open wide when we passed, like they were hoping one of us would trip and fall inside, but otherwise they made no movement toward us.

I cast a wary glance up at the spiky, javelin-like branches of the creepy head-tree I remembered from our first venture here, but the branches just glowed in pulsating silence while the strange mist that cloaked them swirled around.

Still, I quickened my pace slightly, and my two warriors hovered a little closer to me while we walked. I gave their wrists a reassuring squeeze as we continued on with no sign of the creepy, head-harvesting old lady we had seen before.

The cheers and roars of the crowd rang out intermittently, and they got even more audible when we left the town with its bubble-like buildings behind. I allowed our pace to slow, and we walked through the moss-strewn landscape with the volcano island in our sight ahead. The slopes were dark, but a steady white light spilled out of its open top.

I took the same simple route from back when we followed the now-dead Barsava and her traitorous, sallow-skinned friend who had pushed her to her death in one of the invisible pools on the offshoots of the main path. There was no one in sight here this time, and the offshoot where I remembered the poor racoonish woman disappearing looked flat and empty in the ruddy light of the fireball lanterns.

It seemed like the incident was on my two warriors’ minds, too.

“I wonder if the evil, greasy-haired backstabber is still alive,” Ellie said in a small voice, and she drifted even closer to my side.

“Maybe the lake-beast decided to devour him,” Indy suggested hopefully.

“He’d deserve it,” I muttered. “Oily, double-crossing, human-sacrificing bastard.”

Well, I guessed Barsava technically hadn’t been human, but still, she had seemed to trust the greasy-haired man.

“Anyway…” I said briskly. I was planning to change the subject as I decided it was best to pull my warriors’ minds away from the gloomy memory, but a sound from behind us made me freeze in place. I pulled the two women over toward the edge of the path and glanced back. “Are you two getting the feeling that we’re being… followed?”

Suddenly, Indy stiffened in my grasp. I glanced over and followed to exactly where her smoldering gaze was fixed on the area of the path behind where we’d been walking.

Then I reached into my jacket to rest a hand on the grip of my pistol, just in case there were any fuckers around here who were unwise enough to choose me and my women as targets to sacrifice to their evil Cyndrigon creatures.

Something roughly the size of a Great Dane was shuffling down the path in our direction. From the strange, awkward way it moved, I could see that it definitely wasn’t a dog, or at least not one like any I’d seen before.

When it got closer, I realized the creature was something that looked like a shrunken dragon with a spindly body and huge, leathery wings that jutted out from the backs of its arms. The beast seemed like it wasn’t accustomed to walking on the ground, and the movement clearly didn’t come easily to it. The backs of its folded wings poked awkwardly up in the air as it used its arms to help it shuffle down the path.

“Spectrid,” Ellie whispered from my side.

I heard a soft ringing noise that seemed to accompany the dragon, and I couldn’t figure out what it was coming from until I saw the fiery light twinkle off something on its long, sinuous neck.

Then I realized it was a bell. The dragon-like creature, or Spectrid, or whatever it was called, was wearing a bell around its neck like a damn housecat.

The three of us watched in silence as it scuttled past us without looking in our direction. Afterward, it took a left to skirt around the lake.

The soft tinkling of the bell faded from hearing, and I turned to the dainty warrior next to me.

“Spectrid?” I repeated.

“We had them in Gavahna, too,” Ellie explained. “You talked to one, back when–”

“When we were leaving the Diamond Gap?” I guessed. “Interesting. Do you know, uh, why it was wearing a bell? Are they kept as pets, or something?”

“No…” The doll-faced fighter looked hesitant. “As you saw, they can talk very well, just like people. Their memories are flawless, too. So… they are spies, usually.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Spies that wear stuff like top hats, and tinkly bells around their necks?”

“If a Spectrid is owned by a person, that person is required to have them wear something that makes it obvious.” Ellie pursed her round pink lips thoughtfully as she stared after the Spectrid with her wide blue eyes. “I think it’s so people will realize there’s a chance they’re being observed when they see an owned Spectrid nearby… but also because it’s against the laws to capture a Spectrid that’s owned by another person, since their secrets might be discovered. Or… those were the laws in Gavahna, anyway.”

“Interesting,” I muttered. From the obviousness of its approach, I was doubtful that the little dragon-like creature had been spying on us.

But even if it had been, it wasn’t like the Spectrid could’ve learned anything that would work against us. In the desert cities, it seemed like spying would be something reserved for an enemy who wouldn’t be leaving at the end of the night. If someone here meant us harm, they basically only had until sunrise to see it through.

Still, I was doubly on the alert as we headed to the lake shore so we could cross over to the volcano arena.

But we arrived there without incident, and soon I saw the faroff silhouette of the ferry against the light of the fiery lanterns on the volcano-island’s shore.

Soon the fire lantern on the ferry’s prow swung toward us, and it didn’t take long for the little craft to make its way to the shore we stood on. From the cheers and roars that thundered out of the volcano crater again, it seemed like most people from the city were in there, but a small trickle of people showed up to take the ferry alongside us.

One of them was a stooped-over old man with frazzled, flaming-red hair. He was pushing some squeaky wooden contraption along in front of him that looked like it was part wheelbarrow, part medieval-style hotdog cart. Clouds of steam and conflicting pungent smells wafted out of the cracks in several sealed compartments in it, and there was even a little glass case on one side that rose up to display some sort of wares that the red-haired guy was selling. A post of scarred black metal jutted upward out of the one corner of the cart, and it had a small version of one of the fireball lanterns hanging from it to illuminate the vendor’s wares.

I did a double-take when I saw that the things displayed in the glass case weren’t food at all. They were vambraces and greaves just like the ones my women wore in the arena.

Well, they were supposed to be just like them, I thought. But as I looked at them more closely I saw that they were an incredibly poor copy. They were painted to be the same shades of the fawn leather of Ellie’s armor and the black of Indy’s with its gold swirls, but they were misshapen and poorly-shaped, and they definitely didn’t seem like they were made out of leather. I thought they might be crafted from some sort of tree bark.

I nudged my two warriors subtly and tilted my head toward the cart, and I saw both of their eyes widen when they realized what the wares were.

Indy opened her mouth with her eyes flaring, but I squeezed gently on her wrist. “Shhhh.”

The princess looked at me like she was going to ask why, but then her eyes flicked back to the red-haired man. I could tell it was because she had seen the ominous red glow that spilled out from his throat onto the hand he used to shield his mouth when he yawned.

Indy’s full lips closed, and she nodded slowly at me before she folded her hands in front of her and stood completely still.

When I glanced over at Ellie, I saw the red-hot glow from the man’s mouth reflected in her big blue eyes as she stared at him in silence.

The crew on the ferry seemed a little reluctant to let the hunchbacked old vendor onto the craft, but once all the other passengers had gotten aboard, they allowed him to push his creaky wooden cart up the ramp and squeeze into the remaining space on deck.

He gave another cavernous yawn as the craft pushed away from shore, and when a small belch burst from his lips, a wave of heat washed over the whole boat, and the glow from his mouth brightened. The nearest passengers all shuffled nervously away, and the red-haired vendor covered his mouth apologetically.

Other than the two-hundred-degree bastard who I had punched after my warriors’ first fight here, this was the most blatant sign I had seen of a possibly harmful form of magic from these fiery volcano beings. For the most part, the magic had seemed a part of their appearances and temperaments, and definitely something that shaped their identities and politics, but there hadn’t been many signs of magic that could be deliberately used against others. This stooped-over old vendor seemed mild-natured enough, but the magma-like glow that emanated from his mouth was just another reminder for me to be on the alert with these beings.

I shot another glance over at the wares visible from his wooden cart and reflected on the fact that the “armor” in the glass case there was unmistakably meant to be a replica of my warriors’ leather armor. Some of the other passengers on the ferry even did a double take to look at the replicas more closely, too, but from their lack of interest afterward, it seemed just as obvious to them that the wares were poor copies.

In any case, it was clear that the two gorgeous warriors who stuck close to my sides were a far more exciting sight to the people around us, and to my surprise, I even thought I was getting some looks, too.

My women were undeniably eye-catching and impressive as hell. The light of the fireball lanterns winked off Indy’s scale-mail shoulder armor and the gold leaf trim on Ellie’s polished corset. The princess’ gauzy cape streamed behind her as the ferry picked up speed. The closest backer, who was a short, stocky man with plaited copper hair, raked his eyes over my two women from head to toe with a hungry expression.

My warriors definitely seemed aware of the guy’s aggressive stare, and they moved slightly behind me in a way that gave me a little bit of a rush. It was the same feeling that tended to sweep over me unexpectedly whenever I saw signs of how much the two fierce and flawless warriors trusted me to protect them outside the arena.

I gave the copper-haired backer a deadpan, stone-eyed stare until he finally turned away with a slight flush on his face under the light of the fireball lanterns.

He turned his attention back to his own warriors, who were three slim, bow-legged women with pale green skin and moss-like hair. Their copper-haired backer was clutching three wooden javelin-like weapons that I assumed must have belonged to his women. The javelins looked like they definitely could’ve come from the creepy head-tree back in the Old Town. Other than the obvious lack of impaled heads on the weapons, the only differences were the lack of any ominous, pulsating glow or swirling mist. The weapons looked like they were layered with dark bloodstains, though.

Indy scanned her eyes over the weapons with a look of disturbed respect in her red-gold eyes, and I knew she was remembering the javelin-branched tree, too, with the human heads that had adorned it like fruit.

Ellie was focused intently on the open top of the volcano crater we were approaching. When the red-orange light spilling out of it flashed back to white, it made her pearly skin and blue eyes luminous. The faint bloodthirsty expression that flitted across her doll-like features made me smile. I could tell my dainty warrior was dying to get in the arena again and show her stuff.

I was feeling pretty damn stoked myself, and I drummed my fingers against Indy’s wrist that was still in my grip as I shifted my weight from one foot to another. The princess was vibrating slightly in my grasp now, and a small shiver like an electric current ran through her at the movement of my fingers.

Then the ferry bumped against the stony shore of the volcano, and the wooden ramp splashed down to provide a path off the craft. I was the first to exit with my two warriors, and the crew gave me a respectful nod as I passed.

As soon as we were off the boat, I pulled my two warriors to the side and allowed the other passengers to pass and head up the steps to the Caldera stadium. Indy and Ellie followed me unquestioningly, and they hovered next to me while I released my grip on their wrists to unzip my duffel bag and rifle through it.

I shifted the womens’ weapons to the side to access one of the thermoses I had stashed in the duffel bag. It was slightly cold to the touch, and the ice cubes inside it clinked around as I pulled the thermos out.

“The frigid, icy water of Earth,” Ellie whispered reverently.

I chuckled. “Yup. I figured it’s about time for you two to take your caffeine pills, like we discussed, and make sure you’re hydrated.”

“Yes, John,” the two women said together in a way that I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of.

I popped two caffeine pills out of the plastic packaging and handed one to each of my shieldmaidens. Then they passed the thermos between them, and they both let out a blissful sigh as the chilled water passed their lips to wash down the caffeine pills.

I let them drink their fill after, then took a small sip for myself before I slipped the thermos and remaining caffeine pills back into my duffel bag. I pulled out the two warriors’ weapons to sling them over my shoulder before I zipped the bag shut. Then I led the way up the black volcanic stone stairs toward the source of the fresh onslaught of roars and cheers that was filling the night.

At the top of the staircase, I paused for a second to take in the sight below.

The crater arena was just as cavernous as I remembered. Every inch of the stone benches carved into its slopes were packed full of people, and they were all perched on the edge of their seats as their screams died down. Another hush fell over them as they watched the fight that was taking place, and for a brief time, the only sound in the arena was that clash and scrape of weapons that echoed around the crater.

There were four fighters down in the flat, black stone arena. Two of them appeared to be the type of slender, nymph-like beings I had glimpsed on our first journey to Bayalon. One had a mane of emerald-green ringlet curls that were tamed into a low ponytail, while the other had fine tawny hair that was cropped into a short pixie cut. Both of their skin was a light-taupe color, and the same fawn-like white spots were patterned across their cheekbones and temples. Each one of them had a short sword that I thought was made out of deer antlers.

The third warrior in the arena was a prowling, sharp-limbed woman with a pale gray complexion. Her skin didn’t look stony in texture, like the skin of the bookies. It was perfectly smooth, and it had a faint but noticeable layer of dark smoke that hovered close to its surface.

This gray-skinned woman was unmistakably some sort of volcanic being, although at this point there was no way to tell whether the smoggy smoke that clung to her was a sign of some sort of magic that could be used in combat. As far as I had seen, that sort of thing seemed like it was against the rules here, and most of the city’s inhabitants didn’t seem to have that type of magic in the first place.

The smog-veiled woman also had wings. They looked more dragonish than fairy-like, and she kept them folded tightly against her back as she and the two nymphs fanned out to approach the fourth warrior in the arena. From the way the three of them were moving together, it definitely seemed like a team battle.

But this meant the fight was three against one.

That didn’t make sense.

How the hell was that fair?

The fourth warrior had wings, too, but they weren’t at all like the smoggy fighter’s leathery, dragonish pair. Instead, these wings reminded me more of a phoenix. They were covered with white feathers at the base where they met her shoulder blades, but the feathers’ color darkened toward the edges of the wings.

She had long hair that was black on one side and platinum-blonde on the other. It was bound back in a single Viking-style braid that ran down the center of her head and trailed down her back to rest between her wings. She pursed her lips to blow a stray strand of hair out of her eyes as she faced her three opponents, and then set her tapered jaw in a grim, focused expression.

Other than her eye-catching appearance, I couldn’t stop focusing on the fact that the black-and-white-haired warrior really had no one on her team whatsoever.

I looked everywhere for another warrior, but this was it.

It was genuinely three against one.

“Bold,” Indy whispered, and I glanced over to see that her red-gold eyes were fixed intently on the outnumbered warrior.

The smoggy woman was approaching her from the front, while the two nymphs were set to angle in toward her right and left shoulder. When her opponents rushed her, the outnumbered woman showed no sign of backing away, and her pale silver eyes looked entirely unruffled as she surveyed the three warriors who were about to confront her.

I was watching closely, but she moved so fast that I still almost missed it.

First, she darted forward like she was going to meet the smoggy woman head-on, but at the last second she jerked to the side just enough to brush past her. Then she brought her spear into a hard backward thrust, the sort of movement she might use to elbow someone standing behind her.

The motion sent the butt of her spear hurtling directly between the smoggy woman’s leathery wings.

A strangled screech burst from the gray-skinned woman’s lips when the wood rammed into her upper spine. The sound was somehow both high-pitched and guttural, and her eerie voice was thick with pain.

She was sent into a headlong flight away from the spear-wielding warrior’s back. Her bat-like wings unfurled in a way that seemed like an instinctive attempt to slow herself, but it mostly just succeeded in entangling her with the tawny-haired nymph who had been approaching from the other side.

Even as the two allies tumbled to the ground together behind her, the black-and-white-haired fighter flowed forward again and pulled her spear into a sharp forward thrust at the red-haired nymph she was now approaching.

The spearpoint jabbed hard into the delicate taupe skin of the nymph’s shoulder, and a small rivulet of blood immediately appeared there. It trickled down to join another wound near the crook of her elbow, and the nymph let out a squeak of pain that was soon eclipsed by the crowd’s roar of approval.

The tail of the spear-wielder’s black-and-white braid spun behind her as she tucked her wings and threw herself into a graceful spin in the other direction, back toward her remaining two opponents who had just scrambled to their feet after giving each other an irritated shove.

I knew enough by now to realize that baring her back to her multiple opponents even for a second was risky as hell, especially with wings thrown into the mix, but the spear-wielding warrior seemed fast enough to mitigate the risk, even with the slight drag created by her wings.

I only took my eyes off the fight long enough to keep from tripping while I navigated the stone benches. I led my women over to the area I remembered from our first visit, near the bottom of the sloped stadium just above where the bookies clustered near the backers’ lounge.

Another backer yanked his jet-haired warrior to the side to clear a spot for us in the second row, and I felt my jaw tighten slightly as I took the seat with my own two women.

The other backers seemed to consider themselves above the way the rest of the crowd was leaping to their feet and bursting into a fresh chorus of cheers at every blow, but a glance around showed me that they were deeply respectful of the spear-wielding fighter, if in a reluctant and wary sort of way.

I didn’t understand the reluctance quite yet, but I shared every ounce of respect as I watched her complete her spin and skip toward the tawny-haired nymph.

The nymph hacked at the spear shaft with her deer-horn blade like she was hoping to lop the head off the weapon, but the spear proved sturdy enough to weather the blow as the black-and-white-haired warrior allowed it to scrape harmlessly against the wooden shaft.

Without breaking stride, she darted another half-step closer and snaked the spearhead out to hook it deftly around the deer-horn blade’s ornate crossguard. Then she spun the spear in a small, swift loop that sent the nymph’s blade flying from her grip.

The deer-horn weapon was still spinning through the air when the black-and-white-haired fighter drove her speartip into the nymph’s upper kneecap in a place that almost perfectly mirrored the dried-up wound on her other leg.

The black-and-white-haired warrior moved on and left the collapsing nymph without wasting a second. Now she and the smoggy-skinned fighter moved to face each other again.

I saw the spear-wielder’s bright silver eyes flicker around to take stock of the two nymphs. One was still collapsed on the ground off to the side, while the other was hanging back warily behind the gray-skinned warrior.

The smoggy woman shouted something as she advanced. I couldn’t understand the words, but their tone had the jeering ring of mockery in it.

Whatever the statement was, it made the small, sharp taper of the spear-wielding fighter’s jaw tauten, and her silver eyes bored into the smoggy woman’s dull, flint-gray gaze.

Then a pale golden glow started to flare out from the black-and-white-haired warrior’s skin. It wasn’t evenly spread. Instead it was purely concentrated into a tracery of thin lines that looked almost like glowing scars. It reminded me of something I had only ever seen in documentaries, where there were cracks in the surface of volcanic stone that reveal the golden glow of magma lurking just below the surface.

The sight was just as startling to me as the smog that swirled on the skin of the bat-winged woman, but this was somehow both stunning and slightly ominous.

Any signs the two nymphs had shown of wanting to reenter the fray suddenly vanished, but the gray-skinned fighter had a savage, mocking smile on her face as she bounded forward to meet her glowing, black-and-white-haired opponent. A husky, crazed laugh burst from her gray lips as she swung her axe, and cords of wiry muscles bulged from her otherwise-gaunt arms.

The more fights I had seen in the desert cities, the more I had noticed that axes seemed to be more common than swords. I thought the reason might’ve had something to do with how impossible it seemed to give a precise shape to the lumpy black metal, much less get it to hold the type of edge and balance that I now knew made a sword truly effective.

My warriors’ fighting master had also mentioned some of the advantages of axes during their training, when we had discussed their opponents’ weapons. I knew now that axes could make up for the lack of sharpness because of the extra blunt force they possessed.

The smoggy-skinned woman in the arena now seemed to be well aware of this advantage, and she was putting it to good use, or at least trying to.

Just from seeing it in motion, I already thought the axe might’ve been capable of hacking through the slender wooden spear-shaft in a way that the deer-horn blades weren’t, and the black-and-white-haired fighter seemed to have come to a similar conclusion. She made some quick, sharp feints with her spear to keep her opponent at a distance, but otherwise she ducked and danced deftly away from the storm of axe-blows. As she did, she kept all her opponents in her line of sight in a way I appreciated more now that I was learning things from my own warriors’ lessons.

The gray-skinned fighter shouted another jeering comment, lunged forward, and hacked savagely down toward the spear-shaft with her axe. Her mocking laugh rang through the crater with renewed glee as she finally succeeded in lopping off one end of her opponent’s spear.

But she had fully committed herself to the blow in a way that provided a tiny opening before she could raise her axe again. Her eerie laugh turned into a hair-raising shriek as her silver-eyed opponent took advantage of this gap in a way that no one quite seemed to expect: She arced the now-bladeless spear down in an overhead, axe-like blow that brought the flat of it crashing down on the gray-skinned woman’s exposed knuckles.

The smoggy woman’s husky shriek dropped down into a pained snarl as her bony hand spasmed visibly. The axe slipped from her grip and clanged to the ground. The mocking smile on her face curdled into an ugly mixture of rage and fear in the split second before the jagged, broken end of the spear-shaft rammed into her vulnerable shoulder in a quick and savage thrust.

The black-and-white-haired warrior’s gold-patterned skin flared to the sort of blinding white glare I associated with lightning as she put her whole body into delivering the blow. The splintered wood bit deeply into the fleshy region of her opponent’s skin in a place that was close enough to the smoggy woman’s jugular that the whole crowd cringed reflexively toward each other.

Then the silver-eyed warrior jerked the spear free. The flaring, criss-crossed lines in her skin ebbed back into their previous shade of luminous gold, and the crowd realized that a rule-breaking mortal wound hadn’t been made.

But from the way everyone shot back to their feet and erupted into a new level of screaming, the blood that was now gushing from the gray-skinned woman’s shoulder must have been the fifth and final wound required to win the fight.

There was a loud, gong-like boom from the bronze arches above the arena, and the gargoyles crashed to the ground on their metallic feet.

“Artemn the Abandoned is our victor,” the lead gargoyle boomed.

The backers around me were silent, but in the rows above us, I could hear some of the crowd talking amongst each other. They sounded slightly breathless from screaming, but their voices were still full of energy and admiration.

“They need to give her a better byname,” one of them complained in a deep croak. “Like… ‘Artemn the Undying,’ or something.”

“‘The Undying Tempest,’” a squeaky voice suggested.

“That’s too long,” someone else grumbled. “‘Golden Tempest’ would be better.”

“Wait,” a wheezy, older-sounding voice interrupted. “Why’s she called ‘the Abandoned,’ again?”

“Because she’s so good that no one wants to fight her,” the squeaky voice responded irritably. “Try to keep up, grandfather.”

“Didn’t you see how those nymphs were playing hide and seek out in the arena?” another person added with a snicker. “Great balls of fire, I can’t wait to see who faces her in next week’s fights.”

“They will find a way to keep her out of the arena,” the deep, croaky voice replied in a knowing tone. “Or the backers will all manage to bow out–”

“Remember the year when they decided to draw straws?” the squeaky voice giggled. “Poor Scakri.”

“Screamie, you mean?” another voice cackled. “I’ve never heard anyone holler like that.”

The wheezy voice scoffed in reproach. “You would, too, if someone hit you right in the dumplings with a…”

The people dissolved into a babble of impassioned arguments.

I turned to my two fighters and spoke in a low voice. “That was pretty damn impressive.”

Both of my warriors nodded vigorously, but before they could say anything in response, one of the stony-skinned bookies I recognized from our first visit was waving energetically at me as he approached.

“Would you and your warriors like to come to the lounge now?” he asked, and he had to seize the head of a frizzy-haired man in the front row to avoid crashing into him completely. The bookie ignored the man’s furious string of curses as he addressed me over the top of his frizzy hair. “You’re next after the fight that’s about to start, and trust me, that won’t take very long.”

“Sure thing,” I said. I stood and grasped my two women by the wrists to lead them out of the stands and follow the bookie into the closeby lounge. I leaned closer to the bookie as we walked inside and lowered my voice slightly. “So, uh… You probably have some knowledge of who exactly my warriors will be facing, right? I mean, I sort of got the impression that Zenia and Mavra were going to be joined by a third fighter.”

I only allowed a small hint of displeasure to creep into my normally easygoing tone, but the bookie picked up on it immediately.

“Ah…” The rocky gray skin of his face creased into a nervous smile, and his eyes darted around the lounge. The bald backer was nowhere to be seen yet, and the backers for the fight that was starting now were already striding out of the lounge to take their place in front of it, right on the side of the arena. The bookie seemed to draw courage from the emptiness around us, and he took a step closer to me to speak in a hushed voice. “Master Freyos has done some, ahh… rule-bending, you might say…”

I folded my arms and fixed the bookie with an unblinking stare that made it clear it was in his best interest to tell things to me straight.

He cleared his throat and glanced around again before he obliged. “Well, this week of fighting is the one that allows outnumbered fights, but there are certain rules in place that prevent them from being too uneven. But Master Freyos requested for skill to be taken into account, and, well… Your warriors are excellent fighters, it couldn’t be denied. And Master Freyos can be most, ah… persuasive.”

“Interesting.” I was thinking fast about how to handle the situation. A glance at my women told me they had heard this loud and clear, and they both gave me eager nods when our eyes met, so I turned back to the bookie and spoke with less frostiness in my voice. “So, that means it’ll be three against two, just to be clear? And that’s because my women…?”

“Have been established as high-level fighters,” the bookie finished. He still seemed slightly nervous about what my ultimate reaction would be, but he didn’t flinch away from the no-bullshit stare I sent him. “Master Freyos’ reputation has taken a bit of a dip because of that, but he believes it will be outweighed by the glory and wealth that would come to him if his warriors win the fight. It will be to six-blood, so it’s double the risk and double the reward, you see.”

“Right,” I snorted. “So, has he not considered the fact that they might lose, or…?”

I was a little surprised, but not much.

The bookie shrugged. “Master Freyos… does not truly entertain the idea that his warriors may lose, I think.”

“But you do?” I asked with a slight smirk.

“We take all possible outcomes into account.” The bookie’s voice was solemn, but he tossed in a barely noticeable wink. “That is why we’re willing to open a line of credit for you if necessary, as we have with Master Freyos. You are both, ah… highly respected.”

I allowed myself to feel smug for a brief moment about the fact that I was already as respected as Freyos, but then I took the time to mull this over before I nodded evenly.

Most of the tension cleared up from the bookie’s expression when he determined that I wasn’t going to wring his neck or something for the last-minute discovery.

I dismissed him with a wave and stepped into a close huddle with my women. “Are you sure about this, my shieldmai–”

“Yes, John,” they immediately chorused, and both warriors took another step to bring themselves even closer to me, like they needed to communicate the strength of their agreement with a touch.

I gave them both a long look.

“Alright,” I finally said as I pushed away a slight flutter of nerves.

As soon as I had fully committed to going through with the increased risk for my warriors, I felt calm and focused.

I ran a hand through my hair as I exhaled. “I guess we were sort of prepared for something unexpected.”

“And our reputations will soar even higher when we best the three fighters of the cruel bald wizard,” Ellie said with a feverish look in her big blue eyes.

“The heavens will shake with the cheers of the crowd,” Indy agreed with a nod. “The very stars will rattle with their awe.”

I thought of what the bald-headed backer’s face would look like when my women triumphed despite his best efforts to make it impossible for them, and I smirked slightly at the image. “I’m counting on it.”

Arena Road 2 Chapter 3

The two warrior women looked at me in confusion, so I decided to clarify things. “Like, not just at the gate, but when we’re moving around throughout the city, before your fight.”

“How, John?” Ellie asked with a small furrow in her pearly brow.

“Well, I was thinking we could get you two a little more, uh… finery.” I paused to take in the two women’s facial expressions before I quickly continued. “Something badass, but easy to take off or change out of before the fight starts.”

Indy frowned doubtfully, but the dainty warrior on my other side started to look thoughtful.

“We would stand out from the other warriors,” Ellie mused. “Most do not have such finery to wear.”

“Exactly,” I said with a grin.

I directed us toward the store I had looked up on my phone, Luminos Apparel. According to Yelp, there was a huge range of medieval clothing, and it seemed like it was frequented by cosplayers and costume designers alike.

“More human dolls,” Indy said skeptically as the store’s window display came into view.

I didn’t blame her. The mannequins in the window display were wearing some fussy medieval gowns with about a hundred too many ruffles. The best use they would have served for my warrior princess probably would’ve been to smother her enemies with those skirts.

But here on Earth, we were in the digital age, and the Yelp reviews for this shop made me decide it was worth walking in and taking a look around. I had seen pictures of the type of shit I was sure my two women would love, so I was gentle but unyielding as I propelled the two women into the store in front of me. As soon as we were inside, I spotted the type of clothes I had seen on Yelp toward the back of the store.

And so did Indy.

“Come, Ellie,” she commanded, and I snorted as the princess took off toward the back while pulling the dainty warrior along behind her.

I sidled up next to them when they came to a halt in the back area of the store, and both women turned in circles to look at the treasure trove of clothes there.

There were a ton of Daenerys Targaryen-style dresses with jeweled bodices and draped or flowy skirts, but they ranged from queenly to queenly and scandalous. There were also various pieces of “armor” that had a similar shape to the leather armor I had bought for my two women, but with a purpose that was clearly decorative. Some of them even looked like they belonged at some sort of red carpet event, but they still held a war-like element, and I knew the combination would immediately draw everyone’s eye in Bayalon.

There were corsets, shirts, and shoulder armor made out of shiny metallic scale-mail in all different colors like black, gold, and copper. Some outfits even had queenly capes or cloaks made of silk or sheer gauzy fabric. A lot of the clothes were medieval in style, but some had more modern twists. Others look like they belonged in ancient Egypt, and some were vaguely Greek Goddess-like.

The two women drifted toward different areas of clothing like there was a gravitational pull to them, and I stuck next to the more vulnerable Ellie for the moment, since she was both tinier and newer to Earth. I still kept a careful eye on my princess, partly to make sure she was safe, but also to ensure she didn’t backhand any innocent customers who got too close to her.

There was no fairy godmother-like women to guide our journey here, but my two warriors were both getting braver and bolder in my world already, and it didn’t take them long to get the hang of the whole “snatch up anything that looks pretty” thing that I not-so-subtly encouraged.

Then I lounged around near the changing room while my two women trooped inside together. I heard them whispering and giggling for what seemed like forever, but I let them have their fun. Then I watched the two bombshells parade out in different outfits like they owned the place.

Soon Indy strutted out in a skin-hugging black gown with a long, V-shaped neckline that revealed a generous amount of her plush golden cleavage. It even went down far enough to display a portion of her toned abs. There were glittering black beads on the dress that accented the lush curves of her form, and she wore a skimpy bralette made of gleaming gold scale-mail underneath that made the dress only slightly less revealing. She wore gleaming golden scale-mail on her shoulders, too, and a gauzy black cape flowed down to the backs of her ankles.

As I looked Indy up and down, I still almost couldn’t believe this woman was mine.

“You look like a fucking warrior goddess,” I told her with total honesty. “I’m slightly concerned that someone in Bayalon will jump us at the sight of you in this, though. And… maybe it’s not the most practical thing for striding around in the desert world.”

I could see that Indy agreed with this idea, but she also looked slightly mournful as she ran her hands over the fabric of the dress and toyed with the golden scale-mail bralette. Her bottom lip poked out in a way that immediately got to me.

As I studied her outfit more closely, I could see that the scale-mail and the cape definitely seemed like they were separate pieces from the dress, and I gave them a thoughtful look.

“I think you should get the whole outfit,” I said decisively. “But maybe just wear the shoulder scale-mail and cape with your romper thing when we go into the city. You’ll still look every fucking inch a warrior queen, but it’ll probably be a lot easier than wearing the dress and then changing before battle.”

Indy’s face brightened, and her eyes flared like a desert sunrise. “I may take the dress home, then, John? And wear it here on Earth?”

“Hell yeah,” I chuckled at her reaction as she bounded back to the changing room.

Then I realized Ellie had been in the changing area for a while now, and I was just debating whether it would be weird to call out and see if she was alright when one of the doors creaked open, and the dainty warrior shyly flitted out to stand in front of me.

“Ellie…” My mouth suddenly felt dry as I drank in the blue-haired fighter with my eyes. “Damn.”

The dress she wore was somehow both ethereal and faintly scandalous. It was a shade of pale, airy periwinkle, and the upper part of it bared the tops of her small, high breasts. The bodice sheathed her dainty form so closely that they were almost spilling out of the top, but she looked at ease in the dress.

And she looked fucking beautiful.

The dress’ long skirt flared out a little toward the ground. Its delicate appearance was both emphasized and balanced out by the corset that encircled Ellie’s waist and abdomen. I had no idea what the corset was made out of, but it looked almost like polished blue porcelain, and it had swirling designs made of gold leaf on its edges. It seemed as decorative as a painting that belonged on the wall of a museum, but the shape of it had a war-like aspect that immediately drew the eye.

She wore shoulder armor, too. Each one was made of the same polished material as the corset, but they were a rich shade of pink. Instead of just being shaped like the protective leather shoulder pads that she would wear into the arena, these were intricately molded to look like two big pink flowers that sat upside-down to cup her petite shoulders under their petals.

Then Indy marched out wearing her normal Princess-Jasmine pants again and clutching her new clothes in her arms.

“Waspie,” she commented with an approving look at Ellie’s corset. She reached out to touch the material, and her fingernail made a clinking sound against the polished surface when she tapped it. “This armored finery is very nice. I think Ellie needs these clothes, John.”

Ellie smiled shyly, and I rubbed my jaw as I contemplated the anatomical details of this outfit.

“The corset and shoulder flower… things… can go on over your normal fighting outfit, right?” I asked as I stood up and tapped the material myself.

“Yes, John.” Ellie twirled around in front of the mirror and watched the dress’ skirts swirl around her ankles, and I thought about the fact that neither of these women had ever owned a fancy dress in their lives.

So I ended up giving it the same verdict as Indy’s new outfit.

When we were carrying the clothes up to the idle-looking guy at the front desk, I suddenly realized there was more than just the two dresses and decorative armor in the collection of garments my ladies had chosen.

I came to a halt.

“What is all this?” I asked, and I plucked up a skimpy, sheer lace garment and stared at it. “Is this lingerie?”

I was more curious than anything else, even without seeing the price tag, but Ellie’s face immediately blushed a vivid, pearly pink at my words, and she averted her big blue eyes. She studied the blank white face of the nearest mannequin like she was staring at a fascinating painting, and I turned my gaze toward Indy to see if she knew what was going on.

To my surprise, my princess did the same exact thing. I glimpsed about a dozen scattered colors dancing through her eyes before she hurriedly shoved my sunglasses back onto her face, and a blush of bright pink spread across her golden-hued skin.

I glanced down at the lingerie again, then at the two women, and I thought of the whispering and giggling I’d heard when they were in the changing rooms together.

Finally, I shrugged to myself and placed the heap of clothes on the counter, lingerie included.

Altogether, the price for the new clothes was well over a thousand dollars, and I winced reflexively at this information before I suddenly realized I could afford it now.

And these stunning, badass women deserved to be treated to something like this for the first time.

They were both still blushing slightly when we left the clothes store, and I shook my head again at the mysterious ways of women.

As we walked back toward my car, I fished the pamphlet that the martial arts trainer had given me earlier out of my pocket and scanned over it to find the Portland location of the supply store. Since we were already here, I figured we might as well go to one of the bigger locations. They were more likely to be supplied with home training equipment for my warriors to practice with.

I let out a low whistle as I led the way into a labyrinth of wooden post dummies inside the store, along with a crowd of various human-shaped ones. There were other kinds, too, from simple sandbags to more elaborate contraptions constructed from tires and PVC pipes.

Indy walked up to a wooden-post dummy and reached up to tap one of the rods that stuck out from it. “We practiced with these during our training for a short time.”

“They were formidable,” Ellie added, and she gave the sea of posts a slightly mistrustful look. “The wooden arms move.”

Eventually, I managed to track down a worker in the middle of the wooden labyrinth, and I ended up deciding to get several different kinds of dummies: One of the wooden-post kinds, and two that were human shaped.

One of the two human-shaped dummies was the grappling kind, and the other was like the upper body of a person mounted on a stand. With the latter option, a weapon could be placed in the dummy’s hands.

I grabbed some wrist wraps and a few other accessories for my women’s home training, too. Thankfully, the guy behind the register allowed me to pull my car up to the curb right outside the store, and I managed to shove the wooden-post dummy, which was boxed up in several pieces, into my trunk. The grappling dummy could be curled up enough to squeeze in on top of it.

The person-on-a-stick dummy ended up wedged in the back seat with its head in Indy’s lap, but my princess didn’t seem to mind. She just settled in with her fingers tapping an idle rhythm against the dummy’s blank, featureless face, and she looked like she was already daydreaming about putting it to good use.

Now that the idea had occurred to me for the warriors’ bracers, I realized it might be a good idea for me to get some reinforced gloves of my own. The kind I wanted weren’t available in the store, though, and I stopped to grab a pair on our way home. They were half-finger gloves that left some extra room in my first few fingers, so I’d still be able to handle my gun. I figured the gloves would come in handy if I needed to fight my way through a crowd like I had last time we’d left Bayalon.

Especially if that required punching one of those fiery volcano beings in the face again. This way I wouldn’t scald my knuckles on one of those motherfuckers.

The sky was getting dark when we finally headed back to my little cottage. It took several trips to bring the dummies inside, and I stared at them as I set the last  box containing the wooden wing-chun dummy in my living room.

“This is gonna take up half the room when it’s all set up,” I muttered as I stared at the three training dummies.

I decided to save setup until later, since Indy and Ellie had just had their training session earlier today.

The two women immediately darted upstairs with their bags of new finery, and I was about to head upstairs too when the ominous Imperial March song suddenly filled my living room.

“Shit!” I fumbled to snatch up the phone and silence it. Then I took a deep breath before I answered. “Hello?”

“John.” As usual, Marsh’s gravelly voice spoke my name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. But a familiar self-satisfied tone crept into his voice as he went on. “I’ve got a shipment that’s perfect for you.”

“Oh, really?” I asked warily, but a small thrill ran through my chest at the statement. “Where to?”

“Walla Walla,” he said with a growing note of grim delight in his tone. “From Portland. It’s to a shop called Party Fowl Taxidermy Studio.”

“Taxidermy,” I repeated slowly. “Uhh, you mean, like…”

“Stuffed dead animals,” he finished in a crisp voice. “Birds, to be specific. Mostly ducks, I’m told.”

“I see.” I strived to infuse my voice with the perfect mixture of acceptance and gloom. Then I asked the question that I already knew the answer to. “When’s it for?”

“Friday,” he said triumphantly. “Hope you didn’t have any big plans.”

“I can do Friday,” I said, and I had to dig deep to use my calmest and most neutral voice so I didn’t betray the excitement that was making itself felt in my speeding pulse.

Because I did have big plans, as a matter of fact.

And those plans were contingent on this shipment being assigned to me.

“I’ll text you the info, bird boy,” my boss cackled hoarsely.

Then the line went dead.

I couldn’t help letting out a small, exhilarated laugh.

Marsh thought he had just screwed me over, but he hadn’t.

It was the other way around.

I officially had my schedule set to drive through the portal again Friday night.

Marsh could call me “bird boy” all he wanted. I didn’t give a fuck. Now I was that much closer to stealing that bastard’s business out from under him.

“This bird boy is about to fly the coop,” I muttered under my breath as I dropped down onto my couch and let out a satisfied sigh.

With all the excitement, I had expected the next few days to drag by. Instead, time seemed to fly in a way that surprised me. I focused most of my effort on making sure my two warriors were ready for the fight.

Coordinating their training almost felt like the easy part compared to being strict about not letting them go overboard with the dummies at home.

There was one time when I emerged from my five-minute shower to find the two women converging on the grappling dummy with perfect coordination. They even acted out a move where Indy used different techniques for dislodging the dummy from on top of Ellie when she was lying on the ground with it on top of her, and vice-versa.

But when the situation devolved into the two warriors pummeling and throwing the dummy in earnest, I eventually decided to intervene.

No matter how fun it was to watch.

I allowed Indy to practice using the metal version of her chain whip against the other two dummies, though. I had solved the issue of the cramped space by squeezing each dummy into two respective corners of the room, and then dragging one out to the center whenever the women wanted to practice on it.

The dummies were perfect for fine-tuning new chain whip moves she’d learned in training. Unlike the foam version of the whip she’d been using in her training session, using the metal version against the fighting master in earnest could’ve had unwanted consequences. But with the dummy, she didn’t have to hold back, and I watched with approval as she went to town flowing through some of the moves she’d learned.

When the chain whip’s weighted metal spike scraped against the ceiling again, the princess froze in place and shot me a nervous look.

I still assured her these little scrapes weren’t a huge deal, although it did lead me to imagining a home where my warriors would have plenty of space to do some training. A space that had even more equipment, and where they would have a better surface to spar on than the carpet of my little old living room.

It was an amazing thing to envision, and the fact that this idea was actually in the realm of possibility for me was about as thrilling as watching my two warriors strive to prove to me that they were more battle-ready than ever.

When I got a text message from Abbey the leatherworker that I could come pick up my womens’ new bracers, I decided we’d go grab them right away so Indy and Ellie could have them at their next training session as planned. Making the two-hour drive again seemed like nothing in light of the fact that my warriors would be equipped with this type of armor for their upcoming fight. From the sheer amount of exclamation points Abbey used in her messages, I knew they must have turned out even better than anticipated.

As promised, Indy’s single bracer and new vambrace were both reinforced with carbon fiber, including the knuckle area of the bracer. They were both the same color as the leather armor she already owned with the same gold swirls, but when my princess put them on and did a casual punch against her own open palm with the bracer, her mouth fell open at the concentrated strength of the carbon fiber knuckles.

Ellie’s two fawn-colored bracers had the carbon fiber knuckles, too, and I was happy my petite little warrior had this extra protection in case she lost one or both of her weapons for any reason when she was in the arena. She had been slowly working on strengthening her strikes, including the hand-to-hand kind, but the reinforced knuckles would lend more impact to those strikes, and it would protect her delicate hands in the case that she did need to fight that way.

I stayed to watch the womens’ next training session so I could go over the footage of their last one with them and their trainer. Even though I wasn’t going to be the one out there in the arena, it seemed like a good idea for me to watch over the critique of their moves and the trainer’s suggestions for improvement. That way when I was at the sideline of the arena watching them, I could even call out specific things I remembered if it was necessary.

No matter what happened in that crater stadium, or any of my warriors’ fights for that matter, I was determined to never be like the backers I’d seen who roared threats at their fighters from the sideline.

Part of my reasoning for this was the simple fact that I cared for and respected my two warriors.

Well, that seemed simple to me, at least. But I knew that to the asshole backers I’d met in the oasis cities so far, this was something they straight-up just didn’t understand, and probably never would.

Still, even if I did have the same lack of caring toward my women, I had seen first-hand that trying to terrify a warrior into winning was supremely unhelpful when things got real in the arena. When the bald backer with the wizard staff had tried that with his own fighters, it had given them a burst of desperate energy, but the desperate part had ended up contributing to their downfall in the fight as they hurried to best my women as quickly as possible.

As I watched the video footage of Ellie strengthening her counter-attacks and Indy increasing the intricacy and precision of her chain-whip moves, I felt a growing sense of pride in the spirit they showed in applying themselves to their training. They seemed fully determined to never stop improving, and I was just as determined to keep finding ways to help them do that.

And then kick more ass in more desert cities.

And come back with more warrior women in my possession.

Arena Road 2 Chapter 2

I parked on the curb near the pawn shop. As I stepped out of the car and strolled down the sidewalk with Indy and Ellie at my sides, I felt like the pearly gray sky was bright and promising instead of dull and gloomy. Even the dead ostrich in the window display of the creepy taxidermy shop looked less eerie than usual as we passed.

The bell on the door of the Screaming Goose pawn shop tinkled lightly when we walked in. I immediately spotted Nick hunched over the jewelry counter beside Vero. Unlike Nick’s shaggy, untamed mop of dark hair, the appraiser’s slicked back, helmet-like bronze hair stayed perfectly in place without even a strand escaping to fall down over his face as he bent over whatever he was doing on the counter.

It seemed like the sound of the bell took several moments to penetrate Nick’s consciousness, but once it did, he abruptly straightened up to see who had come in.

When he spotted me, his sharp green eyes brightened, and he sprang out from his place behind the jewelry counter.

“Hey, Johnny B—” He paused with a look of mock-terror at my unamused expression, and then amended himself. “Uhh… Bossman. Johnny Bossman.”

“That’s me,” I said dryly. Then I gestured at the two women who hung back slightly behind me. “Nick, you’ve met Indy… and this is Ellie. Ellie, meet Nick.”

The dainty warrior shrank slightly further behind me, but she gave a shy little wave at Nick, who looked as shocked as if Damian Lillard had just burst in the front door on horseback to ride around his pawn shop.

My friend’s eyes glazed over slightly, and his stare followed the two women until they disappeared into the same aisle where I’d found them playing the Twister-Jumanji game last time we’d been here.

Then he looked back at me with an expression of dumbfounded respect. “Nice.”

“Thanks.” I smirked and returned his clap on the shoulder before I glanced back at where Vero was hard at work behind the jewelry counter. “Uhh, dude... Just out of curiosity… are those dentures?”

“Hmm?” Nick swiveled his head around to look at Vero like he had forgotten his employee was even there. “Oh, yeah. This hundred-year-old lady paid us like thirty grand to bedazzle her dentures, and now she wants her sister’s done, too. Talk of the town, apparently. Or the retirement home, at least.”

As I watched, I finally realized that was exactly what Vero was doing.  He seemed entirely focused as he used a pair of tweezers to carefully squeeze another tiny jewel into place on one of the fake teeth.

“Only you,” I muttered, and I felt a mixture of disbelief and respect at what I was pretty sure was only a tiny tip of the iceberg with my friend’s shenanigans.

“Yeah, you know me.” Nick shrugged, and a familiar cheeky grin overtook his face. Then he strolled over to lean against the other side of the jewelry counter and rolled up the sleeves of his rumpled dress shirt. “Speaking of oddly specific business ventures, I have an idea for getting you your shipment. Well… several ideas, actually.”

“Alright.” I followed him over and stood with my arms crossed. “Hit me with the one that’s least batshit first, Wile E. Coyote.”

Nick let out a deep, dramatic sigh of disappointment. “If you say so. Okay, well… First of all, you don’t have to load your own shit, correct?”

“Into my trailer, you mean?” I snorted. “No. I’m not even allowed to lay a finger on it, actually. Company policy.”

“Good.” My friend rubbed his hands together, and he had a faintly wolfish expression on his face, like I had just set a juicy steak down in front of him. “And you said your boss hates you, yes?”

I grimaced. “Yep. Making my life as difficult as possible is his favorite hobby.”

“Mm,” my friend muttered sympathetically. “Sounds like a total fucktrumpet. Luckily, I just so happen to own the creepy taxidermy shop next door. Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of?’” I asked with slight suspicion.

“I run it through a holding company in New Mexico.” Nick waved one hand in a vague and careless gesture. “And that company is registered through my lawyer’s firm. So it’s more, uh… anonymous for me, as a business owner.”

“Right.” I laughed and shook my head. “Of course.”

“Gotta keep my reputation squeaky clean,” my friend said with an innocent smile. “And this holding company of mine owns more taxidermy shops in Eastern Washington, so…”

I ignored the puppeteering motions he was doing with his hands as I stared at him with curiosity. “Why the hell is Eastern Washington so interested in taxidermy?”

“Waterfowl.” He shrugged, as if that explained everything. “Anyway, I’ll make sure your boss is told that the load will smell like complete ass, so—”

“Will it smell like complete ass?” I asked pointedly as I thought of the taxidermy shop’s stench.

“It’ll smell like dead birds,” Nick said with a small smirk. “But assuming the load is assigned to you, I’ll make sure the packaging is done right. You won’t smell a thing in that old truck of yours.”

I rubbed my jaw as I mulled this over. “And what’s the worst case scenario here? I mean, is there any chance of Marsh finding out it’s me orchestrating this through your business?”

“None,” my friend said without hesitation. “The only people who know that are in this room. As far as anyone else is concerned, the request will come from Deadhead Boutique.”

He gestured at the door behind the jewelry counter that led to the creepy taxidermy shop as he spoke the last words.

I laughed again. “Charming.”

“If all goes well, you’ll be delivering your load to Party Fowl Taxidermy Studio,” Nick added. Then he continued in a drawn-out voice. “You’ll have a…”

“Don’t say it,” I groaned as I realized he was going to hit me with a cheesy pun.

“Duckload of ducks,” he finished in a loud voice.

I rolled my eyes dramatically before I punched my friend affectionately on the shoulder. “Thanks, dude. Seriously.”

“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said in a voice that sounded equal parts sincere and rueful. “You should’ve heard all the other plans I had cooked up, oh man…”

“Soon, Dr. Evil,” I laughed. “But first…”

I reached into my jacket to slowly pull out my pouch of jewels as I strolled over to the velvet mat on the jewelry counter.

Then I stopped and turned to look at my friend again. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m having you orchestrate all of this?”

“Nope,” he replied promptly. When I raised my eyebrows, he just shrugged. “You haven’t asked me to do anything highly illegal or risky, so unless you’re in a sharing mood, then… none of my business, Johnny boy. It’s about time some good shit came your way. Especially since a chunk of that good shit is coming my way, too.”

“Touching,” I snorted in response to the last statement, but I could still recognize the note of sincerity in the rest of my friend’s words. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Nick smiled but then slipped into his back-to-business tone. “Now, let’s take a look at those jewels. Vero…?”

After a moment, the bronze-haired appraiser popped up like a jack-in-the-box from where he’d knelt down to arrange the finished dentures in the glass display case, where I assumed they were placed to attract the attention of any aging customers until the lady who had requested them stopped by to pick them up.

His eyes lit up at the sight of the gems I was carefully pouring out onto the velvet mat.

“Excellent,” he murmured, and he approached the jewels with such reverence that I was tempted to ask him if he wanted some time alone with them.

I tucked the pouch into my pocket after I had finished emptying it and then glanced at my phone to see the time.

When I saw that it was four o’clock, I sighed. “Oh, damn.”

“Places to go?” Nick waggled his eyebrows and glanced at the aisle that my two warrior women had disappeared into. I narrowed my eyes at him, and my friend plastered an expression of utmost innocence on his face. “Just asking.”

“Sure,” I muttered, and I gave him a mock-threatening scowl. “Just remember who’s putting this money in your pocket, bucko.”

Nick’s sharp green eyes lingered on the jewels that Vero was poking and prodding around under the microscope now. I could tell that this sentiment was warring with his impulse to launch into a string of vulgar jokes.

Finally he nodded. “Whatever you say, Mr. Bossman.”

A small laugh escaped me as I waved goodbye to my friend and then strode over to see what Indy and Ellie were up to.

To my amazement, the first thing I saw when I turned the corner of the aisle was my princess crouched precariously on one of the higher shelves. She was clinging onto its edge with one hand to keep her balance while she stretched her other hand upward to place a top hat at the peak of a towering array of other hats.

There were all different kinds of hats in this tower: A few wide-brimmed straw hats, several French berets, a bowler hat, some visors, four fedoras, and more. I even caught sight of something I thought was an orange hard hat, the kind that normally was worn by a construction worker.

The foundation of the hat-tower was a huge brown cowboy hat, and it was sitting on top of Ellie’s blue-haired head. It was so big that the cap part was almost covering her wide blue eyes, and she was holding her dainty arms out slightly in a way that made her look like a little mannequin as she concentrated on keeping the hats balanced.

The urge to laugh was overwhelming, but I stayed completely still to avoid attracting the two women’s attention while Indy completed her masterpiece.

My princess carefully eased the top hat into place on top of a safari hat that had been the tower’s crowning glory previously. Then she slowly removed her grip from it. When the top hat was clearly going to stay without toppling, Indy’s long fingers reached out to grope around for more hats from the shelves around her.

Then she realized there were none. The top hat must have been the last of them.

“All done, Ellie,” she announced as she clapped her hands together in triumph.

The dainty warrior started to look up at her reflexively but then froze in place as the tower of hats swayed dangerously on her head.

“How many hats?” she asked in an excited tone.

Indy leaned out precariously from the shelf again and craned her neck to see all the hats from top to bottom. I saw her full lips moving silently as she counted.

“Twenty-one hats,” she declared.

I chose this moment to slowly approach, but my movement still caught the princess’ eye, and she wobbled on the shelf as she almost lost her grip. “John!”

“Princess,” I greeted her, and I managed to keep a completely straight face as I looked the tower of hats up and down. Then I glanced at Ellie. “Were you, uh… planning on wearing these into battle?”

“No, John,” the dainty fighter responded in a slightly nervous voice. “We were just—”

But the rest of her sentence was cut off as the tower of hats started to lean further and further, until finally it was clear there was no rescuing it. Hats started showering to the ground one by one in a series of small, muffled thuds.

It took about half a second for Nick to appear at the end of the aisle. His approach was quick enough for him to catch sight of the last several hats tumbling to the ground, and he skidded to a stop to stare at the scene.

Then his green eyes traveled over to me with an expression that told me he was both completely baffled and working hard to fight off a laugh.

I shrugged with a mixture of apology and amusement, and my friend slowly raised his hands before he backed away around the corner with exaggerated slowness, like he was leaving a dangerous crime scene.

My poker face finally broke when I saw the sad little way Ellie was looking around at the field of fallen hats around her. I joined in as Indy patted her consolingly on the shoulder and then started scooping up hats off the ground with impressive speed.

I helped replace the hats on the shelf, and then I chuckled at the look on Nick’s face when I strode out from the aisle. I didn’t stop to chat this time. Instead, I just gave him another jaunty wave before I left with the two beautiful women at my side.

Other than the fact that it had been hilarious as hell to me, I loved the fact that my two women felt comfortable stacking twenty-one random hats on Ellie’s head in a public place. Even though it seemed like a simple and playful act to me, I realized the two women had probably never been able to play dress-up in their lives, considering the single, well-worn garment that had been their only outfits when I first met them.

I felt amazing all over again when I thought about the fact that I had now outfitted them with new clothes, weapons, and training.

It felt even more amazing to know that this was just the beginning of what I would be able to provide for these two neglected women.

When we were outside it, I glanced up at the store’s vine-covered sign that I hadn’t really paid much attention to before. The words “Hide ‘n’ Seek” were just barely visible peeking out through the leafy plants, and I snorted with laughter as I realized it was a play on words.

“Amazing,” I said under my breath as I held the door open for my two women.

At first the store seemed empty except for the crowd of leather-clad mannequins, but soon I saw a head full of electric-pink curls bobbing around through the white plastic heads, and the familiar worker who I now knew as Abbey appeared.

Her eyes widened as she saw the three of us. “Hey, strangers!”

“Strangers?” Indy asked in a shocked and displeased voice. She tossed her hair haughtily, and I knew her red-gold eyes were flaring underneath my sunglasses.

I stifled a laugh. “It’s just a saying, princ… uhh, Indy. It means we’re the opposite of strangers.”

Indy’s full lips relaxed slightly into a mollified expression, but then I saw her mouth the words “foolish” as she muttered under her breath about Abbey’s choice of words.

The pink-haired leatherworker seemed keen to gloss things over with my proud princess, and she started chattering away as she led us immediately through the sea of mannequins.

“So,” she said over her shoulder as we headed toward the back of the store. “You’re interested in some more reinforced leather armor?”

“Yep,” I confirmed. “I actually wanted to see if we could invest in some custom stuff. I mean, if you do that sort of thing. I’d obviously be willing to pay more for—”

“Of course!” Abbey’s voice was full of excitement. She started walking in slow circles around the two women while she looked over every inch of them in a closer way than before, like she was assessing every little part of their anatomy.

Ellie looked faintly unnerved, and I was pretty sure Indy was, too, but she stood straight and proud as the smaller warrior gravitated closer to her side without realizing it. I recognized the protective stance my princess took on, and it was so adorable that it made me miss Abbey’s next words.

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I turned back to the pink-haired leatherworker. “What did you say?”

Abbey waved a hand. “Oh, I was just saying that I’m going to go get a measuring tape. Then we can talk while I…”

Her voice faded away as she bustled through a curtained doorway at the back of the store. It didn’t take long for her to emerge with a measuring tape slung over her shoulder and her arms full of assorted pieces of leather armor.

“Okay,” she said briskly as she dropped the leather unceremoniously in a pile on the floor. “These are just to see if you like any of the general styles more than the ones you already have, as soon as we hammer out some basics. Then we can go into more detail. May I…?”

She cautiously extended her hand that was holding the measuring tape toward the princess. Indy’s head swiveled over toward me, then back to Abbey, and she nodded slowly. I saw her long fingers reach out to subtly pat Ellie’s delicate shoulder.

The two women obediently held different limbs out at intervals while the pink-haired leatherworker carefully assessed every part of their bodies with the tape and jotted numbers down on a notepad after each measurement.

Then Abbey showed us different pieces of leather armor and talked us through every aspect of them in a way that made me once again appreciative of her total lack of smooth, swindling attempts.

“Making something like this custom will allow for even more mobility,” she explained as she held up a piece of leather shoulder armor that was similar to the ones I had bought for Ellie on our last trip here. “Even with the carbon fiber sewed in. The thonging that I weave through the leather segments will follow the shape of the shoulder perfectly when it’s measured.”

I listened carefully as she explained more about the shoulder armor and then followed up with greaves and vambraces.

“So…” I took a moment to think about how to carefully phrase the question I wanted to ask. “With those vambrace things, the ones that cover their forearms… Do you have the kind that, er, protect the hand, too? Or maybe just the knuckles?”

“Like gauntlets?” Abbey’s face brightened. “I’ll be right back.”

She rushed into the back room again and came out with an armful of different styles of leather gauntlets.

I looked them over closely and tapped on the pair that would cover the womens’ forearms and knuckles best while still leaving their fingers free.

One of Indy’s long fingers reached out and joined mine in tapping the leather.

“Strong like Ellie’s boots,” she murmured in approval. “And… many pieces.”

Abbey nodded. “These ones are more like bracers than gauntlets. They’re good for keeping mobility while adding some protection for the knuckles.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. I drummed my fingers against my thigh for a few moments while I thought. “So… In our, uh, larping thing… Indy here fights with a sword in one hand and a chain whip in the other. So if we’re trying to be realistic, she’d need extra flexibility in her whip hand, right?”

“Yep.” The leatherworker’s pink curls bounced as she nodded again. “It would make sense to have a bracer like these– the one with knuckle protection– on her sword hand, and just a vambrace, like she already has, on the other, if that’s what you were thinking. They could both be reinforced with carbon fiber, of course, like you asked.”

I grinned. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. And could there also be carbon fiber reinforcements in the knuckle area specifically?”

“In the knuckles…” Abbey pondered this for a moment. “I haven’t done that before, but it’s definitely possible. My dad rides motorcycles, and he actually has a pair of gloves that have hardened knuckles. I can’t remember if they’re carbon fiber, or like… kevlar. But there are tactical gloves with both, I think. If I take some inspiration from those, I’m sure I can incorporate carbon fiber knuckles into the bracer.”

“That would be perfect.” I had to fight off a smirk as I contemplated Indy backhanding Zenia again, this time with reinforced bracers.

Even though the princess was still wearing my sunglasses, a glance at her face told me she was thinking the exact same thing.

We went over some more details, like getting two bracers for Ellie, and some other adjustments to the new, reinforced armor Abbey would be making for the women.

I had a huge level of appreciation for how thorough and thoughtful the leatherworker was, but when I mentioned this, she just waved a hand airily.

“It’s literally my favorite thing to do,” she assured me. “I love theorizing about this stuff, and coming up with functional versions of something that could’ve existed once. And if it’s something that has never existed at all, well, that’s even cooler. Medieval-modern fusion.”

I chuckled at the phrase. “Sounds like something that would be in the Yelp description of a Portland restaurant.”

Abbey slapped her knee as she laughed at this, then winced.

“Quit cracking jokes like that,” she said in a mock-stern voice as she wagged a finger at me. “I’m going to have to start wearing poleyns around the store.”

I could only assume poleyns were some sort of medieval knee armor, and I had to smile at the leatherworker’s antics as we worked out the final details and decided on the styles of the women’s new leather armor.

“Do you think you could do a rush order?” I asked after we had agreed on the specifics. “If only for the bracers? I mean, I know it’s a lot of stuff to do in a short time, so I’ll understand if you can’t…”

Abbey toyed with one of the piercings in her lip and got a calculating look on her face, and then she ducked into the back room again to check how much of each type of leather and carbon fiber she had.

“I’m almost certain I can have three pairs of bracers done within a few days,” she said decisively. “I can’t say I’m 100% sure because I haven’t done carbon fiber knuckles before, but I think I can do it by then. I’ll work on those first, and then do the other stuff as quickly as possible without compromising quality. I still want to equip you guys with my top work.”

“I appreciate that,” I said genuinely. “I’ll pay extra—”

“Don’t worry about that for now,” the leatherworker assured me with another wave of her hand, although her pierced face was glowing with pride and excitement about her work. “Payment after. Do I have your phone number already?”

“Nope,” I said, and I accepted the pen she was holding to scrawl down my number at the bottom of her notepad. “This is my cell number, so you can call or text.”

“Wonderful!” she cheered. “I’ll text you updates, and then give you a call when I’m done. I can’t wait to get started on these.”

I felt just as excited when I left the leatherworks store, and the feeling was reflected on the faces of the two warrior women at my sides as we headed back toward the car.

The fact that they would have the functional equivalent of brass knuckles incorporated into their leather armor was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me until I was in the shop, and I was glad Abbey was so thrilled to go along with it as I contemplated how much better this would be than traditional brass knuckles.

I felt confident that the option I had agreed on with the leatherworker wouldn’t have the same possibility of hurting my women’s hands as brass knuckles, and it also removed the possibility of the knuckle armor slipping from their grip. I wasn’t sure if Mavra and Zenia would’ve been quick enough to snatch up a pair of brass knuckles off the ground and use them if that were to happen, but it seemed better not to find out.

Not to mention the fact that this would just be that much more unexpected to my womens’ opponents.

I knew the blood count would be higher in the fight they would be walking into a few days from now, so taking these steps alleviated some more of the tension. I’d been nervous after considering the possibility of my warriors facing one or more different and unexpected opponents when we returned to Bayalon. Now, between the new armor, the additions I had requested for their upcoming training session, and the few other preparations that were forming in my mind, I felt fully confident that Indy and Ellie would be safe and victorious in their battle.

The prospect of hitting up even more oasis cities in the future was dizzying to me in the best way imaginable. My two women were getting more skilled in the mortal arts by the day, and I had even more ideas for ways to up their training and conditioning after we returned from Bayalon again.

But for the moment, I had plenty of excitement in the immediate future to hold my attention. Indy and Ellie’s feverish eagerness, along with the additional commas I’d soon be seeing in my bank account, made it easy to be focused on the task at hand.

Which brought me to the next action to check off on my list.

“We made a pretty big entrance to the legendary city on our first visit,” I reflected.

“Your war chariot was thunderous,” Indy agreed with a hint of smugness. “And our new weapons helped awe the guard into acceptance.”

“Hell yeah.” I grinned. “But I was thinking for the second time, maybe we could make an even bigger entrance…”

Arena Road 2 Chapter 1

The rap of wood-on-wood was audible from the lobby when I walked in through the double doors of the martial arts training center. I followed the sound down the hall and stopped outside the open door of the training area to watch.

Indy and Ellie were sparring with their trainer, along with another guy I didn’t recognize. My two warriors were using the replicas of their own weapons that I had asked the trainer to have made so they could practice new techniques faster and with more intensity before they moved on to the more careful execution with their real weapons.

And they needed as much practice as possible. It had already been four days since my warriors won their first battle side by side in the Bayalon arena. They’d practically decimated their opponents, Mavra and Zenia, and their superior weaponry and armor had more than excited the fiery crowds in the legendary city.

Now, we were set to return to Bayalon and go double the stakes against the very same warriors, and I was determined to see my women leaving their mark and gaining as much glory as they deserved there.

While I gained a hell of a lot of jewels.

Ellie was using two wooden tonfas with foam blades to parry the attacks of a stout, muscular guy wielding two foam practice axes. This sort of sustained defense was something I hadn’t seen the dainty blue-haired fighter do before, and I was impressed as I watched her parry several axe blows in a row. She used the long, straight end of her tonfas to redirect the axe blows, rather than the other side that had a foam tomahawk-like shape, and I assumed this was because the tiny warrior would be sent flying if an axe-blade were to interlock with the tomahawk-like one. By using the straight end instead, it seemed like she could sweep aside the axe’s strikes with less chance of them becoming interlocked.

The axe-wielding guy was raining blows on her high and low. I nodded with approval as she swept one strike to the side, dodged a second, and used the gap to hack at the guy’s unguarded shin when she rolled to the side. I heard the pained breath hiss in through his teeth, and I smirked slightly at the strength the petite warrior possessed.

Maybe her innocent appearance was what had made the guy decide he didn’t need any shin guards.

Then my attention was grabbed by a familiar, wildcat-like growl of frustration that was accompanied by the scraping sound of wood against wood. I turned just in time to see Indy’s practice sword go flying from her hand thanks to a deft wrist movement by the trainer who was her opponent at the moment. From what I could see, my princess had pulled a move I’d seen her use against Zenia in Bayalon, where she hooked her shorter blade around the edge of the shield in an attempt to snatch it from the man’s hand. I wasn’t sure exactly what he did to turn the tables, but somehow he’d used the shield to send Indy’s weapon sailing off to the side instead.

The double-bladed wooden sword skidded and tumbled across the floor, and the trainer tried to use the moment to get a jab in at the princess with his own wooden sword.

But his aura of calm, focused intensity flickered slightly as Indy jerked to the side with shocking speed. In the process, she swept the foam training version of her chain whip around at the trainer’s ankle. The feathered flag at the end of it whipped through the air as the chain entangled itself with his legs, and the light-footed man was suddenly sent into a short stumble.

He recovered himself just before Indy jerked hard on the chain whip, and I held my breath to see what would happen next.

But then the practice chain snapped off right below the handle.

My princess huffed in disbelief and scowled down at the wooden handle in her grip, then at the rest of the chain that slithered to the floor, but then she mirrored her trainer as he straightened up and slipped out of his fighting stance.

Somehow, the change in his demeanor was so distinct that it was as if he had altered his entire appearance in front of me. Suddenly, he wasn’t a fierce opponent, but a patient and proud instructor with an easy grin instead.

Although Indy also eased out of her fighting stance, I still saw a hint of the prowling grace that rarely left her posture.

“Nice footwork,” the trainer was saying. “Let’s focus on your grip this time and give it another go before—”

He cut off mid-sentence as Indy’s eyes caught sight of me over his shoulder, and her gaze lit up like a firework show. The bright red-gold of her irises was suddenly brindled with amber radiance, and flecks of rose-gold danced through them like dust motes in a sunlit forest.

I cleared my throat slightly to draw the trainer’s attention away from this jaw-dropping sight, partly so he wouldn’t get too suspicious and partly to keep him from falling in love with my princess.

He whirled around with a slightly punch-drunk look, but his expression cleared up when he saw me.

“Oh,” he chuckled, and he folded his hands behind his back as Indy carelessly lobbed away the wooden whip handle to bound over to me. “Right. Next time, then.”

I smiled as Indy flung herself into my arms, and then a blue-haired blur joined her as Ellie pelted over to us with a tiny, bird-like screech that I never would’ve expected from her a week or so ago.

“How’d it go?” I asked, and I mostly directed my question at the trainer for now, since I knew I’d already be getting a play-by-play of the session’s coolest moments from the women on our way home. “Did you tape the session?”

I immediately felt two heads nod against my chest in response.

“Yeah, boss.”’The trainer nodded. “Yeah, that was a great suggestion. I actually have had a few other advanced students who requested that in the past, so I just set up the same camcorder on a tripod for this session. It’s only a few years old, so the HD is still really good. I’ll make sure to break down the footage before their next session so I can go over it with them.”

“Awesome,” I said with approval.

I was nowhere near being an expert when it came to this fighting stuff, and I couldn’t help but be a little proud that I’d had the idea of starting to record my warriors’ training sessions so they could critique it with the help of their fighting master.

And the way my women still seemed floored to have a backer who put so much thought into their training made me feel even more awesome.

“We practiced some zui quan today, too,” the trainer added. “It’s–”

“The fighting style of drunkards,” Indy said proudly.

I raised my eyebrows, and the trainer chuckled again.

“Some people call it ‘drunken style, boss,’” he explained. “But it’s actually, uh… a lot more serious than that.”

“And more complex,” Ellie added with enthusiasm. “We will stun our enemies and dazzle the crowds.”

“I don’t doubt you will.” I smiled down at the dainty warrior, but I was feeling slightly preoccupied now as a thought returned to me, and I glanced back at the trainer. “Their next session is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, right?”

“Right,” he confirmed. “I’ll make sure we don’t hit it too hard. I know you have, er… that event coming up.”

By the way he said this, I thought he still assumed it was all part of some movie gig, and maybe that my two women were just devoted method actresses.

“Perfect,” I said with a nod. “I think we might pick up a few extra weapons before then. Nothing too crazy, but it’d be cool to have them try out a few hand-to-hand moves with those in mind…”

“Of course.” The trainer nodded respectfully.

“One more thing,” I added. “This might be kind of a weird question, but do you have any, uh… training dummies, or something along those lines?”

“He means human dolls,” Indy whispered loudly to Ellie. “Very large human dolls. They are bigger than you, Ellie.”

I exercised my poker face to the maximum extent as I did my best to ignore this comment and the strange look it drew from the trainer before he responded to me.

“I don’t have any for sale,” he said with an apologetic look. “But there are several different kinds that might be useful for some home training practice, if that’s what you’re looking for. Some version of each kind is generally available at your standard martial arts supply store or on Amazon.”

I nodded and then led the women out into the lobby after the trainer. He ducked behind the front desk and grabbed a pamphlet from its surface.

“This shows all the main categories of training dummies,” he said as he handed it over. He pointed at a picture of a dummy that looked like a tall wooden post with wooden rods sticking out horizontally in various places on it. “The wing chun is awesome for hand-to-hand stuff, and we messed around with one earlier for a few minutes. But if you get one of those, have them be careful about using it to block, because it can be a little tough on the palms. It can be a bit hard on the forearms at first, too, even with vambraces. After their event is over, they can put some more extended time into that sort of dummy. It’s no replacement for training, but it’s a great supplement that we can go into later.”

“Cool.” I glanced at the assortment of dummies on the pamphlet. “What about the other kinds?”

The trainer’s finger traveled down to a picture of a free-standing dummy that was human-shaped next. “Even though they have each other to spar with, a grappling dummy can be really useful. They can use it to practice some of those close-range grappling moves without holding back and worrying about injuring each other. Just make sure it’s not too heavy.”

I nodded as I absorbed all this and accepted the pamphlet from him. Then I collected the women’s new practice weapons to bring home with us, along with the practice axes and practice sword that were meant to resemble Zenia and Mavra’s weapons. I returned the trainer’s parting wave as I headed toward the double doors.

My two warriors were brimming with enthusiasm as we walked out to the car.

“I cannot wait to pummel Mavra with the masterful moves I have learned,” Indy said in a dreamy voice. Somehow, she managed to sound both deeply meditative and gleefully vengeful. “I am becoming more skillful with the shiny metal whip, too. I will show the fierce cat-woman that we are not to be trifled with.”

“I approve,” I said solemnly.

But I was still feeling slightly distracted as I pondered the fact that my two women had already shown that they weren’t to be trifled with.

Ellie looked at me with a thoughtful expression in her big blue eyes as she got in the passenger seat that Indy offered her.

“John?” the dainty warrior asked shyly. “What is it?”

“Mmm?” I glanced over at her as I started the car, and just like with Indy, it took a conscious effort to focus on her words instead of her delicate, tempting beauty. I took a moment to gather my thoughts before I replied. “Well… There’s something that occurred to me recently about your upcoming fight, and I’m trying to decide how to handle it.”

“Is something wrong?” Ellie asked anxiously.

“Not exactly,” I said slowly as I drove us out of the parking lot. “It’s just… Zenia and Mavra were good fighters, but they didn’t even manage to lay a finger on you during your battle. And yet, that bald-headed bastard who backs them still had the guts to challenge us again. It makes me think there might be something more to this.”

“More?” Indy asked. She was in the back seat, but I could hear the frown of confusion in her voice. “Like what, John? More weapons?”

“No.” I shook my head as I steered us toward home. “More warriors, maybe.”

“More warriors?” the two women echoed in unison.

I nodded. “It would explain why he gave us seven days. Maybe he was planning to duel someone and take their warrior. Or warriors, even.”

My own two warriors absorbed this in sudden silence, and I felt like their minds were now racing as much as my own.

I calmed my thoughts and shuffled them into order while I drove. By the time we got back to my little cottage in Long Beach, Washington, I knew what I wanted to do next.

“Okay,” I said decisively while I held the door open for the two bombshells to enter. “I want to get in touch with that woman from the leatherworks store and ask her about some new armor for you two, and then work on getting you both some more weapons for hand-to-hand stuff. Like the brass knuckles I was telling you about, maybe.”

“Yes, John,” Indy agreed as she skipped through the door. “Zenia will taste the wrath of my blows for weeks after our battle.”

“Right.” I smirked as I remembered the savage backhand my princess had dealt to her red-haired opponent in Bayalon. “Just, uh… don’t get carried away, please.”

“I will keep a level head, John,” Indy said obediently.

“I will do the same,” Ellie chimed in. “We will be full of controlled fury.”

“’Atta girl.” I grinned as I pulled out my phone.

Then I strolled over to the couch to sit down while Indy marched Ellie into the bathroom. I stretched out my legs while I searched for the number to the leatherworks store.

The phone rang several times before the familiar, bubbly voice of the pink-haired leatherworker picked up. “Hide ‘N Seek, this is Abbey.”

“Hey there,” I said. “This is John. I’ve come in a few times—”

Suddenly there was a huge crash from her end of the line, followed by a muttered curse.

“Sorry, John,” her brisk, sunshiney voice picked right back up like nothing of consequence had just happened. “Think I just broke my toe. I’m moving some… stuff… into the back room.”

She paused with a grunt of effort at whatever she was doing, but then I heard her do a little gasp.

“John,” she repeated. Now there was a note of excited recognition in her voice. “You mean, the John with the two lovely shieldmaidens?”

“That’s me,” I chuckled, but I was slightly confused because of how many Johns must have traversed her store over time. “How could you tell?”

“Your voice.” She sounded slightly absent-minded now. “It’s, umm… nice. But anyway… What can I do for you, John?”

“Well…” I drummed my fingers against the arm of the couch. “The carbon fiber reinforcement on those boots you outfitted my, uh, shieldmaiden with… That was some good stuff.”

“Thanks!” Abbey sounded like she was bursting with pride. “Are you looking to get some more of it? That’s all I’ve been up to lately. I think I’ve really perfected— ouch!”

“Uhh… You alright, Abbey?” I asked with a slight sense of alarm.

“Oh, yes.” Her voice became brisk and cheerful again. “Stabbed myself with my new overstitcher for the leather. That’s what I get for multi-tasking, though. I’m making more reinforced armor, and I’ve been honing the technique. I’d be happy to show some of them to you and your shieldmaidens, if…?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I confirmed. “I was hoping to maybe get some custom stuff. Will you be in the store any time soon?”

“I’m here now!” Abbey said brightly. “I’ve been doing all my stitching and stuff in the back of the shop lately. We’re technically open till seven, but I’ve been staying here until nine or ten since I started sprucing up the back room. You’re welcome to head on down whenever.”

Suddenly the bathroom door swung open in front of me, and my eyes widened at the state of the two women prancing out into my living room.

Words seemed beyond me all of a sudden.

“Hot damn,” I murmured. Then I realized I was still on the phone, and I felt my face turn beet red. “I mean, uh… Nice. Thanks, Abbey. We’ll be there.”

I hung up the phone and ran my eyes over the two women from head to toe.

A faint cloud of steam poured out of the bathroom after the two towel-wrapped women. The heat of their bath had brought out a pearly pink glow on Ellie’s porcelain face, and Indy’s golden skin was glowy and gleaming. Their wet hair tumbled down their backs, and the burning of Indy’s red-gold eyes were perfectly complemented by Ellie’s angelic, sapphire-blue gaze.

The sight of their perfectly-shaped forms pressing through the towels was almost enough to make me forget my sense of purpose, but I regathered myself after a long moment.

“Time to get dressed, my shieldmaidens,” I said with slight reluctance. “I have to send a quick message, and then I want us to head down to Portland soon.”

“The strange city!” Indy clapped her hands together, and the towel slid down and exposed the spellbinding sight of her naked breasts. Her long fingers traced temptingly over her dark nipples before she hitched the fabric back up. “Is that where we will get our new weapons, John?”

“Uhh,” I mumbled as I gave my head a quick, hard shake. “Yep. And I’m going to have you both fitted for some custom armor, the kind that’s reinforced like Ellie’s boots.”

“They spared my ankles from a cruel fate,” Ellie murmured. Then resolve crept into her heart-shaped face, and she lifted her chin. “I won’t let the scaly-legged woman get close to such a strike in our next fight. Our new training will aid us well. But… I am grateful for the protection of this armor, John.”

“Very grateful,” Indy amended. “And very honored. No warriors have ever been so lucky.”

“It’s not luck,” I said truthfully. I felt slightly flustered, like I always did with these comments, but I also thought I might be starting to get used to them. “You deserve it. Both of you.”

The two women had radiant expressions, but then Indy’s got a commanding expression as she removed one hand from holding up her towel to grip Ellie’s dainty arm.

“Come, Ellie,” the princess instructed. “Let us dress.”

I chuckled at the firm, big sister-like attitude that Indy took on with the doll-faced fighter.

Then I looked down at my phone to type out a text message to my Portland-based friend.

You working today, St. Nick?

As usual, his reply came in a string of separate texts:

Yep.

Well, I’m in the shop, anyway.

You thinking about coming down to P-town, Johnny boy?

I shook my head with a mixture of amusement and disgust as I replied.

Don’t call it P-town.

Sorry, he replied. Clown Town, I mean.

I snorted. Nevermind. P-town it is. But yeah, I have some more jewels to drop off, so I was thinking I’d swing by.

His reply came in a new burst of messages:

Sure thing, Johnny boy.

By the way, I have the perfect idea for that thing you asked me about.

I’ll tell you when you get down here.

Deal, I responded. See you in a few hours, Nickiboo.

There were a ton of ideas flitting through my mind, and I took some time to get them in order while my women got ready for our trip to Portland. We only had a few days until we were set to go back to the legendary city, and I wanted to make sure I had all my boxes checked before my warriors faced off with Zenia, Mavra, or whatever other fighters that bald-headed wizard motherfucker decided to throw our way.

The trip to Portland would already cross a few major things off the list, like getting the women fitted for reinforced armor, grabbing some new weapons for their close-range fighting, and stopping by Nick’s pawn shop.

This last errand was important for reasons other than dropping off my jewels.

All my past trips to the desert world had been opportunistic. I had taken the portal exit when my schedule and route made it possible. But for this upcoming visit, I had a timetable. A specific date when I needed to be back so my women could battle the bald backer’s fighters for double the winnings of what we had walked out with last time.

So I had recently engaged my wily friend in cooking up a scheme to make sure I had a shipment that would get me back on SR 14 at the perfect time.

Nick didn’t have direct connections in the world of truck drivers, but he did have some mysterious business connections at his disposal. I had to find a way to get Marsh to send me out for a shipment at exactly the right time, but getting Marsh to do anything convenient was an uphill battle. It was the opposite of what the jackass always did when he had the chance. I had some general ideas of how to go about swinging things in my favor, though, and I knew that if anyone could be trusted to help me work out the exact scheme, it was Nick.

Granted, having to juggle my boss’ bullshit was wearing on my nerves with this one, but a huge part of me couldn’t seem to give a shit. I was becoming filthy stinking rich thanks to my trips down SR 14, and that made up for a hell of a lot.

The gem and pearl haul from my first few trips to the oasis cities had now brought about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars into my bank account, even with some of the pearls still not sold yet. That was over double the amount of money I made in a whole year as a truck driver.

On top of that, there was the future income from the jewels I had in my possession now, the ones I was about to drop off today. These were my winnings from the trip to Bayalon with my women several days ago.

And a few days from now, I’d be returning home with double the loot.

I’d be that much closer to hopefully swiping my boss’ business right out of his greedy, spiteful hands.

But I needed to make sure my warriors were safe, and that they would come out of their upcoming battle as the victors. Not only so I could secure the bag, but because I had already come to care about the two women more than I could even explain.

I felt another surge of pleasure at the fact that the two gorgeous warriors belonged to me as they hurried down the stairs. Indy was ready to prowl the streets of the strange city in her Princess-Jasmine pants, gold belt, and the skimpy top that hugged her ample breasts. Ellie wasn’t far behind in her cropped jeans and teal velvet bralette, and the dainty fighter’s platform boots clomped eagerly down the stairs behind the swift, softer tap of Indy’s beaded sandals.

I got to my feet and watched with affection as the princess snatched up Ellie’s clingy white sweater and threw it over the blue-haired warrior’s delicate shoulders. The sweater’s buttons hung open, and I was suddenly acutely conscious of the outline of Ellie’s nipples pressing through the velvet fabric that emphasized her small, high breasts.

The sight of the two women made the idea of outfitting them with more clothes flit back into my mind. They looked gorgeous as hell no matter what they were wearing, but I couldn’t deny that the fairy godmother-like lady had done them justice in finding clothes that suited them perfectly. The increasing confidence of Indy’s panther-like sway in her Princess-Jasmine pants, and the way Ellie’s hand strayed up to stroke the previously undreamed-of softness of her velvet top, were the type of little pleasures I lived for already, even though this was new to me.

I took damn good care of my women, and their gratitude seemed to roll off them in waves every time their eyes met mine.

As we got started on our drive south to Portland, I glanced at the two warriors in my car and let myself revel again in the way they were getting more comfortable with me, and with each other, too. The dynamic between the three of us was something I had never even imagined myself feeling until recently, and I loved it.

I was one lucky son of a bitch, and things would only keep getting better.

I couldn’t wait to put my plan into motion and make our next trip to Bayalon happen.

Before I’d found the mysterious portal, the prospect of jumping through hoops was challenging in a way that left me feeling a little deadened, although my love of being on the road had definitely made up for it.

But things were different now.

Navigating these twists and turns of being a backer was challenging in a new way that excited me. Because I was no longer just scrambling to keep in good standing with my boss.

Now, I had a plan for putting that buzz-killing bastard in my rearview mirror forever.

I was taking measurable steps toward getting Spitfire out of his clutches, and maybe even doing the same with his trucking business.

The possibilities for what I could do in the future were practically unlimited. At this point I didn’t just feel like I had stepped into one of the fantasy books I had always loved listening to. Now, it felt like I was the one holding the pen.

Better still, that would go hand-in-hand with providing the best for the two incredible warrior women who now belonged to me.

And the ones who might belong to me in the very near future.

Audiobook Release | The OP MC 9

The OP MC 9 audiobook is in your BF library ABLs.  For everyone else, pick it up on my website or on Audiobook Guild

Overview

With the fast travel amulets now in my possession, I am the God of Time and Space.

I can travel to the far reaches of the world and then blip back to Bastianville, and my wives, with just a thought.

The world is my oyster.

And for my next quest, I think it’s time for the God of Time to have his own dragonscale armor.

Narration by: Christopher Boucher, Jessica Threet
Length: 10 Hours, 04 Minutes

Dungeon In My Closet NSFW cover

That's a juicy ass. Damn.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6BF6P5D

Dungeon In My Closet is out!

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Dungeon in My Closet Chapter 4

Amber and I left the pawn shop when the transaction was complete, and the moment the heavy glass door slid shut behind me, I let out a huge laugh that I felt like I’d held in for hours.

“So…” Amber turned to me with a confused giggle. “Ten thousand is a good amount in your world, I take it?”

“And that was just for the three nuggets!” I laughed maniacally. “Your world is gonna make us rich, Amber. We can get an apartment, and we can go shopping, and I can… I can…”

I sighed happily, and I looped an arm around her shoulder as we walked toward the bodega on fifth Aron had mentioned.

“I can give you a life,” I continued. “A good one, not one where you’re trapped inside of a bow and arrow constantly. If you’d like it.”

“Of course I would!” Amber sighed and leaned into me.

We met up with my two friends outside the bodega, where Aron had scored nothing but a carton of cigarettes and a can of Coke, and the two of them studied me with odd expressions as I approached with Amber.

“What’s got you smiling so much?” Honey asked with a chuckle.

“Ahh, just the sweet smell of money in the evening, ya know?” I smirked. “You guys still hungry?”

“I was thinking we could wander ‘til we found somewhere that smells good.” Honey shrugged. “I mean, I’m from the Midwest so I’d be happy with a hotdog stand.”

“Aron?” I prompted.

The guitarist still wore a long sleeved Megadeth shirt as well as a heavily studded leather jacket, despite the warmth in the air, and he just shrugged nonchalantly.

“I’m a garbage can, I’ll eat anything,” he said happily. “Although, hotdogs do kinda sound fun for our first meal in New York.”

I suddenly came to the realization that my new friends weren’t born and bred Brooklynites like me, and a grin formed on my face as Amber looped her other arm through mine while we loitered outside the campus gates.

“Nope, I’m taking us to my favorite pizza place,” I told them excitedly. “Domenico’s is the only place to go, and it’s only a few blocks from here.”

Both Aron and Honey made enthusiastic noises of agreement as I led the way, and then Amber pulled slightly at my arm.

“Pizza?” she whispered curiously as we walked slightly ahead of the other two.

I almost froze in my tracks and had to force myself to act normal.

She’d never had fucking pizza.

“You’ll love it,” I quickly assured her with a wide smile. “I promise.”

“If you say so, master,” Amber said and happily leaned into me as we walked.

Aron and Honey had fallen in line with us at that point, and Honey nudged my shoulder with her own until I glanced down at her.

She just mouthed the word ‘master?’ at me with a pointedly raised eyebrow, and my face heated up as I lightly shoved her back and fought the grin on my face.

It somehow felt completely normal for me to have Amber on my arm. A couple hours ago, even the thought of hooking up with a girl let alone being one’s master, was so completely out of my first day checklist.

Granted, the frat party might’ve changed that thought process, but it didn’t feel odd at all to walk hand in hand with a woman I’d somehow rescued from another dimension, in which she took the form of a hunter’s bow.

I decided not to question it too much and just enjoy it for what it was.

I felt inexplicably connected to the auburn-haired woman, and the sensation was apparently completely mutual, so I allowed myself the constant grin on my face as the four of us walked through downtown Brooklyn to get to my favorite pizza place.

Domenico’s was the only place I bothered getting pizza from, unless I made the ungodly trip into Manhattan, and then I’d just settle for dollar slices. But the restaurant I led my new friends to was the best in the city-- a hill on which I’d die on-- and it had been owned by the same small stocky Sicilian guy for however many years it’d been since my mom and I first found the place.

The moment the little bell above the door jingled, I heard Amber’s sharp intake of breath.

“Is this like a tavern?” she asked me in a hushed voice as her eyes took in the pizza shop.

“Restaurant,” I corrected her with a rueful smile. “We pay to eat here.”

“You mean, James pays,” Honey said with a grin of her own. “Right?”

“If I can’t treat beautiful women to some food, then I’m doing something wrong,” I replied to my friend with a smirk and then cleared my throat. “Uhh, Aron can buy his own, though.”

“Hey!” My long-haired buddy pouted jokingly. “Don’t I deserve to be treated, too?”

The server behind the polished wooden counter greeted me with a familiar smile as the four of us entered the place.

“Hey, we haven’t seen you in forever!” he said in a booming voice.

“It’s barely been a week,” I chuckled.

“That’s forever!” The server just shrugged and laughed loudly. “Four of you?”

He seated us at the same booth I always sat in and diligently handed the four of us menus, despite the fact he probably knew exactly what I’d order.

“Woah…” Amber murmured as she glanced at the leather bound menu. “The devil?”

“Diavola pizza.” I grinned. “Spicy.”

“No, thank you.” Amber wrinkled her nose again.

“Speak for yourself,” Honey said across the table as she winked at me. “I like it hot. Like your James.”

Amber looked confused for a second, and I kind of felt the same way. Honey told me she was gay, but she was obviously flirting with me, so I just returned her grin.

Honey went ahead and ordered a diavola pizza, Aron ordered a sausage calzone like a madman, and I requested a margherita with extra cheese for Amber and I to share.

Amber’s pale eyes grew wide when she saw how huge the pizzas were, and she quickly looked over to me to study my exact movements.

I picked up a long slice of cheese pizza by the crust, used my middle finger to fold it in on itself, and guided the slice into my hungry mouth like a true New Yorker. As I chewed, I watched Amber, and I couldn’t stop the smile that grew bigger and bigger the longer I watched her.

She gingerly picked up a slice with both hands, one on the crust, the other right on the point with her pinky finger sticking out, and she bit into it on the edge of the long side. I couldn’t help but huff out a laugh, but then her eyes became even wider as she chewed.

“This is so good!” she mumbled with her cheeks puffed out. “I can’t believe I’ve never had this before!”

Aron choked on his bite and looked round at Amber in sheer horror.

“What do you mean, you’ve never had this before?” he asked.

“I’ve just… never had pizza.” Amber blushed, and she shot me a look as if to make sure she’d pronounced it right. “But it’s really good. It beats hard bread, that’s for sure.”

“Hard bread?” Honey grimaced but then chuckled. “I don’t even wanna know.”

“Pizza is better,” Amber said decidedly, and she shot a dazzling smile at me. “James was right.”

“I told you,” I chuckled. “Best pizza place in the city.”

“It’s pretty fucking great, actually,” Honey admitted as she chewed her mouthful, but then she swallowed and placed both elbows on the table so she could lean across to Amber. “But girl, why are you eating pizza like that?”

Aron and I laughed into our food, and the four of us spent the next hour or two just eating and hanging out together.

It was weird to think how earlier in the day I’d had Amber’s soft voice in my ear teaching me how to handle her in her bow form. I’d shifted between worlds into a reality that resembled a video game, and then I’d just suddenly reappeared in my home city, in my college room, with a beautiful girl on my arm, and two new friends that felt like I’d known them for years.

Staying in Brooklyn had definitely been the right decision.

We finished our meal and then headed back toward campus. We’d accidentally spent a good couple of hours hanging out at Domenico’s because night had almost fallen completely by the time we left the pizzeria. There was only the faintest hint of sunlight on the horizon, a bright crescent moon hung large and low in the sky, and the residual warmth from the evening sun was carried on the breeze as our little group made a beeline for the Kappa Sigma house.

It was glaringly obvious that it was the first party of the semester because despite it only being about eight o’clock in the evening, the frat party was in full swing already.

The Kappa Sigma house was a hulking four floor brownstone, with the front facing windows covered proudly in various different flags and sigils of the college fraternity. The loud music thumped like a heartbeat from within, the stoop was already littered with party stragglers, and I could see that some were slugging malt liquor from brown paper bags while others stood beneath clouds of pearly smoke with white tipped cigarettes between their fingers.

“I meant to ask you earlier…” Amber murmured under her breath, and her grip on my hand tightened. “Are these… Are these all buildings that people live in?”

“Yeah, this is just a frat house,” I chuckled lightly. “Nothing special.”

“But it’s huge…” she murmured as her eyes traveled skyward. “And there’s just so many… All bunched in together.”

“This is only the city,” I assured her. “It gets a lot more rural. This is just a very… Busy place.”

“I’ll say…” Amber breathed as she brought her wide eyes down to meet mine. “Don’t leave me.”

“I would never.” I squeezed her hand back and then shot her a quick, reassuring smile.

“Ready up, squad!” Honey hollered above the noise. “Let’s go and find something to drink.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice!” I grinned eagerly, and with Amber’s hand still gripped tightly in mine, I led the way into the booming frat house.

Inside was somehow even more chaotic than outside. There was nothing to light the place other than several bunches of haphazard string lights thrust up into the stairwell, and the living room appeared to have some sort of strobe light pumping in time to the music that hammered from a set of DJ decks standing in front of the mantel.

The place smelled of cheap perfume and wine coolers, as well as questionable clouds of smoke and the twang of sweat. It was also packed to the rafters, and we somehow managed to push past a bunch of girls that had glittery eyeshadow splashed on their cheeks like drunken tears as well as a stoner slumped against the wall with an expression that looked like he’d seen another dimension.

Finally, our little group finally made it into the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” I pulled Amber close to me so I could mutter in her ear above the thumping music.

She looked up at me with a sparkle of excitement in her pale blue eyes, and a breathless giggle escaped her shapely pink lips as she quickly nodded.

“I’m okay!” she told me as she instinctively leaned against me. “I think! It’s just so… Loud.”

“Yeah, frat parties tend to be like that.” I laughed.

“This is normal?” Amber asked and gestured helplessly at the chaos of the kitchen, where liquor bottles and red cups and ice buckets littered the island in the center.

“Pretty much,” I admitted. “College is for partying first, studying second.”

“That seems… Counterproductive.” Amber giggled. “But alcohol I know well. I used to be able to drink most of the big loutish woodsmen under the table, in the tavern back home.”

“I have no doubt that you did.” I grinned before we were interrupted by Aron’s incredulous snort.

“Woodsmen?” my long-haired friend scoffed. “Tavern? Where are you from, Amber?”

“Somewhere with a lot more green,” Amber said with a light laugh of her own, and she shot me a look to wait for a reassuring nod. “But I like it here. It’s different.”

“So you’re a small-towner like me, then?” Aron nodded understandingly as he shuffled over to the island in search of a drink. “I get it.”

“You’re doing great,” I whispered in Amber’s ear.

“It’s kinda crazy, but…” she glanced around at me with her blue eyes glinting. “Still nothing on fighting a troll in a river with you.”

“A troll?” Honey turned around with a disbelieving smile on her face.

“Ahh, video game,” I quickly explained as a bubble of panic ran up my spine. “We run raids together.”

“Right.” Amber nodded confidently, despite not having a damn clue what I was talking about and she frowned at me in panic which only made a laugh escape my mouth.

“You fucking nerds.” Honey laughed loudly and then pulled a bottle of whiskey out from behind her back with a smirk. “You’re lucky you’re both cute. Let’s drink.”

“I’m guessing ice is a long distant memory?” Aron sighed as he took the bottle. “I guess I can drink it neat, like a neanderthal.”

“Amber?” Honey grinned across at my girl. “Whiskey?”

“I, ahh…” I faltered a little as Amber wrapped her slim fingers around the neck of the bottle.

She turned to me with a sly smirk, and for the first time since she’d fallen through that portal with me, she looked confident instead of bewildered at her environment. Then she poured herself a drink and set the bottle back down on the kitchen counter, where it immediately got scooped up by a passing frat boy.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she took one slow step toward me, and then right as she got within touching distance, she took a long sip of whiskey, licked a stray drop from her bottom lip, and stood on the tips of her toes to mutter into my ear.

“We may be from different worlds, James from Brooklyn…” she murmured, and she was so close I could feel her soft breath against the side of my neck. “But whiskey is universal. I’ve seen people drink it before, and I’ve always wanted to… taste it.”

“That is unfairly hot,” I muttered in reply as I watched her take a step back.

“Yeah, I can’t watch this all night.” Honey threw her hands up and slugged her drink. “You guys are sickeningly adorable.”

“If I find you fucking in the bathroom when I need to pee, I’m breaking down the door,” Aron said nonchalantly, and then shot me a wink over his shoulder as he left in the opposite direction.

“Okay so, you have magic in your world, I have pizza here, and we both have whiskey… I wonder what else we have that’s universal?” I leaned against the kitchen counter as Amber ran her fingertip over the rim of her whiskey glass and looked up at me with sparkling eyes.

“Well, the more we get to know each other, the more we’ll find out.” Amber smiled at me as she took another sip of whiskey. “Your world is… Very strange. No one carries their weapons for some reason, and your carriages and carts are made from metal and smell worse than a horse after a week-long trek.”

“Granted, your dimension has a slightly different version of natural beauty than New York does.” I chuckled ruefully. “But that’s not to say it can’t be beautiful in its own way. Like when the sun sets down the avenues. Or the Rockefeller tree when it’s lit up during the holidays.”

“What’s a Rockefeller tree?” Amber giggled in confusion. “I’ve not heard of those types of trees.”

“It’s not the name of the tree, it’s the name of the place where it stands,” I tried to explain, but my words were starting to get jumbled in my head the more I fought to explain my entire world to her. “I’ll show you one day. The holidays here are incredible.”

“Holidays?” Amber asked and cocked her head curiously. “Like the solstice?”

“I guess that’s kinda what it’s based off.” I nodded. “God, I don’t know how to explain everything, there’s just so much.”

“I’ll learn,” Amber said as she lifted her chin confidently. “As long as I’m with you.”

My two friends had left me alone in the kitchen with Amber, and although the room was still packed with various different pockets of people, it felt like it was just the two of us. That insatiable pull I had toward her was made stronger by the low lighting, pounding music, and warmth of whiskey as it traveled down my throat and past my chest, and she seemed to feel the same because her eyes sparkled still, and she silently insisted on being at least within touching distance of me.

“This is normal here?” Amber asked me with a slight chuckle as we watched a meathead frat boy with sandy blond hair and sunken eyes shotgun a beer to raucous cheers from the crowd.

“Pretty much.” I grinned in reply. “Although, frat boys are a completely different breed.”

“Frat boys?” Amber asked and cocked her head curiously.

“These guys.” I motioned to the group of them gathered around the keg, and out of the four or five that were there, only one had an actual shirt on. “The complete opposite of me.”

“I prefer you,” Amber immediately retorted, and despite it sounding like flirtation, I could see in her pale eyes she was serious.

“Well, I’m glad.” I smirked as I leaned against the kitchen counter again. “There are not many girls I rescue from different worlds that can handle a frat party so well.”

“You clearly haven’t experienced a night at the tavern when the bard’s in town.” Amber shrugged nonchalantly. “Now, that’s full of different breeds.”

“I don’t doubt it.” I laughed as I finished my drink. “You’ll have to show me some time, but I bet you can probably drink me under the table.”

“Maybe I could have,” Amber muttered as she poured me another measure of whiskey. “Before I spent a little over a decade trapped in another form.”

“A decade?” I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice, but she could definitely still hear it because her expression saddened, and she couldn’t quite make eye contact with me.

I watched as Amber fiddled with a thread on her leather dress and stared into her drink, and then she eventually just shrugged her shoulders.

“You’d think that time would have less meaning, when you’re not in human form.” She sighed heavily and shook her head, so her auburn hair fell in front of her face. “But I felt every single day pass, from sun up to sun down, stuck in the same damn spot under that tree. I don’t know the exact time, but a decade is about where I managed to count to.”

“Do you have any idea how you ended up like that?” I asked her in a gentle voice.

“I don’t, no,” Amber murmured and then shook her hair out so she could look up at me with big round eyes. “I don’t have any memory of how I came to live with this curse. I have vague memories of my old master, but more just… Fleeting images. Like I can’t quite remember fully, just the odd thing crops up… Like whiskey.”

She trailed off with a smile, but it was still tinged with a little sadness.

“That must’ve been awful.” I sighed and instinctively placed a hand on her shoulder as a way of comfort. “To be so alone.”

Amber glanced at my hand where my fingers touched her soft skin, and a smile began to tug at the corners of her mouth.

“It was.” She nodded and then brought her pale gray-blue eyes up to meet mine. “But you were worth the wait, master.”

I felt a sudden heat in my chest as our eyes locked, and I realized just how badly I wanted to kiss her, because the moment our eyes met every single nerve ending in my body was suddenly on fucking fire.

Her lips were shaped almost like a heart, plump and the same shade of pink as the inside of a seashell, and as we silently continued to stare at each other, with the chaos of a college party raging around us, I wanted nothing more than to press my mouth up against hers and taste the whiskey on her tongue.

Amber could definitely sense my desire for her, because the slight smile turned into a full blown smirk, and I was about to make a heavily flirtatious reply when I was suddenly interrupted by a loud and drunken voice.

“Now, how the fuck have I never seen you around before, gorgeous?” A shirtless guy with a backwards baseball cap suddenly had an arm around Amber, and his hooded eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from the admittedly enticing sight of her cleavage.

She just grimaced as he leaned down to speak to her, and a sudden red rage ignited in my chest at the sight of his mouth so close to her neck.

“Back off, buddy,” I warned him.

The frat boy blinked slowly and eventually turned to face me with a smarmy grin on his drunken face, still with his arm clasped tightly around Amber’s waist.

“Or what, first year?” he snickered as he took a long drink of beer from the red plastic cup in his free hand.

“I said back off,” I repeated again in as calm a voice as I could muster.

I suddenly realized most occupants of the frat house kitchen had eyes on us as the shirtless guy stared me down, and I didn’t particularly feel like getting into a fight at my first party of the semester, but the sight of his sweaty arm around Amber’s waist had my entire bloodstream flooded with fury.

I was psyching myself up to get into a brawl with the guy, but suddenly Amber whipped around in one fluid motion and pushed the guy away from her so hard that he almost stumbled into the kitchen counter with a grunt.

“I’m not interested,” she said flatly as the frat boy whirled around, and then she raised her voice so everyone in the kitchen could hear her. “I’m with James. I’m his, and no one else’s!”

“Mine, huh?” I grinned down at the gorgeous redhead as I put my arm around her.

“Yes,” she cooed softly. “Yours, master.”

I wanted to put as much distance between us and the frat guy before his dangerous pout turned into unbridled anger, and so I grabbed the whiskey bottle from the island as I guided Amber out into the backyard. He was too dumb to realize right away what’d happened, and by the time he had, we were already in a whole other part of the house.

“Yes, yours,” Amber clarified the moment we stepped through the doors and out onto the garden patio, and she turned to face me with my arm still wrapped tightly around her slim waist. “If that’s okay with you?”

“Definitely,” I agreed with a fervent nod. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m just… drawn to you.”

“We are bound,” Amber said in a soft voice and through a wide smile. “Like I said before.”

“Bound…” I let a chuckle of slight disbelief escape my lips. “I guess we are, huh?”

“Yes,” Amber said, and I could see her ample chest stretch out and back in as her breathing started to become just slightly more ragged the longer our eyes were locked. “We are…”

I became hyper aware of the fact my arm was still around her slender waist, and I flexed my fingers against her hip and let them brush against the soft leather of her tight dress. Then I watched as the tight skin of her throat moved slightly as she swallowed. Her blue eyes were huge and round, and they glistened with desire in the dim light provided by the raucous party behind us. Her pale pink lips parted, as if she were about to speak, and I felt myself leaning in toward her so I could finally taste her lips.

Then, suddenly, the spell between us was broken when we were rudely interrupted by Aron crashing drunkenly through the sliding garden doors.

“What the hell did you two do to Brad?” our metalhead friend demanded as he shook his long curly hair out of his face. “Dude’s on a warpath.”

“I’m guessing Brad is the dudebro in the backwards cap flashing his abs?” I asked with a heavy sigh, and I reluctantly let my arm fall from its place around Amber’s rounded hips.

“Yeah!” Aron nodded quickly. “What the hell happened?”

“He tried to hit on Amber, and I told him to back off,” I explained with a shrug.

“And then I told him that I belong to James, and not him,” Amber said as she looked at me proudly.

I stifled a laugh at Aron’s momentarily dumbfounded expression.

“To be fair,” Aron hiccuped as he hung off the door frame and shot the two of us a toothy grin. “Anyone with a pair of eyes can see that.”

“You wanna get outta here?” I looked down at Amber and tried to keep my expression neutral, but even just the potential of leaving the frat party and heading back to my dorm with Amber, knowing full well that Dalton Hall would be all but empty, was too enticing for words.

“Yes, I do,” Amber replied after a moment, and she stifled a giggle behind her fingers.

Even in the slight darkness, I could see a flush creep up Amber’s lightly freckled skin, and I watched as it traveled up her slender neck and then stained her cheeks an adorable shade of pink.

“No wonder Brad’s pissed,” Aron snickered. “You two are just too much.”

“Even more reason for us to get the hell out of here,” I shot back with a smirk of my own, and my fingers tightened around Amber’s where she held my hand. “You guys gonna be okay?”

“I mean, by some miracle I found a girl in a Slipknot t-shirt who absolutely destroyed me at beer pong, and the last time I saw Honey she was making out with a girl dressed as a nurse in the living room, so…” Aron just shrugged and then shot me a drunken wink. “Think we’re good.”

I left my two new friends to the chaos of the frat party and hightailed it out of there with Amber hot on my heels. It was never really gonna be my scene anyway, and I was glad Aron and Honey were having a good time, but I had a mysterious, drop dead gorgeous redhead on my arm who’d proclaimed herself to be mine for the entire college to hear.

That, and that alone, had been enough to get adrenaline shooting through my veins, but I also had a couple drinks of whiskey floating around my bloodstream, and the fiery alcohol did absolutely nothing to stop the growing desire I felt for her.

It seemed like it took us an age to get back to Dalton Hall, though it had probably only been ten minutes at the most, and I suddenly became hyper aware of how good her hand felt in mine as I finally unlocked my bedroom door.

“Are you going to send me back?” Amber suddenly asked as I shut the door behind us.

“Back through the portal?” I confirmed with a frown. “Of course not.”

“Then I can stay with you, master?” she asked, and her eyes lost their sudden sadness until they glinted with flirtation again. “Is your bed big enough?”

“Plenty big enough.” I grinned, and then I nodded to the double bed in the corner of the room, covered in admittedly too many pillows and a squishy gray comforter.

“Oooh, it looks so soft,” Amber cooed as she walked toward the bed. “Much softer than the ground and tree I was stuck under for all those years.”

“Well, I won’t make you go back there, if you don’t want to,” I promised as she bounced down onto my bed.

Her breasts and thighs jiggled ever so slightly as she sat on top of the comforter on my bed, and I had to make a conscious effort not to immediately cross the room and push her further into the mattress.

She leaned back casually so she rested on her elbows, and then she looked up at me with slightly closed eyes, and I just watched her for a moment, almost in disbelief at the fact that this gorgeous otherworldly woman was on my bed.

“I just can’t believe I’m human again.” Amber suddenly smiled widely, and she leaned all the way back on my bed so she could kick her legs as she laughed. “It feels so good.”

“There’s other things that feel better.” I smirked as I folded my arms and leaned against the doorframe, and Amber’s laugh suddenly died.

Then she swallowed thickly and immediately sat back up.

“Will you show me?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I laughed.

“Show me,” Amber repeated earnestly. “Show me the other things that feel good as a human.”

“I… You’ve never…?” I shook my head and then ran a hand through my hair. “You’ve never, y’know… Been with someone?”

“I’ve never gotten the chance to… To lay with a man,” Amber explained in a soft voice, and I noticed her eyes had become even more hooded with a strong desire she couldn’t quite mask any more.

Her pale blue eyes strayed from my face and began to hungrily look me up and down, and I felt my breath hitch in my throat as she subconsciously bit at her plump bottom lip with perfectly white teeth.

“Oh, this is gonna be so much more fun than a frat party…” I muttered under my breath, and I finally pushed myself away from the doorframe and headed straight for where the redhead was sprawled against my bedsheets.

Dungeon in My Closet Chapter 3

“Woah!”

I scrambled against the scratchy gray fabric of my dorm room carpet, and the woman on the floor beside me grimaced at my reaction, though not out of fear. The expression on her face seemed more exasperated than anything else, but she still wore a slight smile on her beautiful face.

“Hi, master.” Her voice was soft, and I just stared at her in disbelief as she tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear.

“Your voice…” I muttered in shock when I suddenly realized.

“Yeah…” The woman just nodded slightly and shifted her weight until she sat across from me with her legs crossed.

“You’re the… The voice in my head, from the bow and arrows, and… Oh shit! There was a fucking troll, even, what the hell is happening right now…?” I rubbed at my temples and suddenly felt exhausted as a long shuddering groan escaped my lips, and the residual panic threatened to take over again.

“In through the nose,” the woman said in the same calm voice I’d first heard in my mind. “Out through the mouth.”

I dutifully followed her instruction again and immediately found it helped. I focused on my breathing, and then I locked eyes with the gorgeous woman that had tumbled through the portal with me and back into my world.

Her hair was long, with ends that skimmed the small of her back, and natural waves and curls tumbled about her heart shaped face. It was a beautiful shade of burnt auburn, like every color of the fall, and I suddenly realized it was almost the exact color of the wood that the bow had been made from. Every strand caught the light spilling in through the still open window of my room, like thick weaves of spun gold, and I suddenly understood Rumpelstiltskin’s obsession.

The woman also had pale blue eyes, so light they almost didn’t hold any color at all, and they were big and round as she continued to study me.

Her skin was covered in light freckles, and she had high cheekbones and plump, rosy pink lips that looked unfairly inviting in the way they were turned up in an absentminded smile.

“You okay?” she asked after a moment.

“I think so,” I muttered as I ran my fingers through my hair. “You… I thought I was going crazy, hearing voices in my head…”

“You’re not crazy, master,” the redhead chuckled. “Although, I can see why you’d think that.”

“Why do you keep calling me master?” I suddenly asked.

“Because that’s what you are.” She grinned knowingly. “I haven’t been wielded in so long, I’d almost forgotten how much fun it can be.”

“What’s your name?” I wondered.

“You can call me Amber.” The redhead’s smile widened at my question.

“So, when you’re not… Y’know…” I helplessly gestured to her with both hands. “When you’re not a wooden bow, you’re… This?”

“A woman?” she suggested in the same casually flirtatious tone I’d heard her use before. “That’s right. Although, it’s been even longer since I’ve been one of those, I guess.”

She quickly scrambled to her feet and stretched her limbs out. I slumped on the floor as I watched her inspect her outstretched fingertips with the exact same level of excitement as Ariel the mermaid had when she first felt her legs, and I just stared incredulously up at her.

She was dressed in a raw leather dress that clung to her frame like a second skin. Her ample breasts bulged against the material, and it was cut so short I could appreciate her long, lean legs and pert ass. She had leather boots on her feet that laced all the way up to her knees, and a simple gold chain around her slender neck, and when she caught me looking, she immediately did a twirl.

“What do you think?” Amber asked with a giggle. “Pretty good for a wooden bow, huh?”

“I’d say so…” I muttered and then shook my head in disbelief. “But hang on, how is any of this even possible? There’s a-- a portal in the back of my closet, and you’re from a different world, one with trolls apparently, and you can shapeshift into a weapon?”

“Unfortunately, master, most of those questions I can’t answer,” she admitted with a slight hint of frustration, and the way she scrunched her nose up was adorable. “Like I said, I haven’t been wielded for gods only know how long. The portal, I have absolutely no idea.”

“So, you’ve had other masters?” I asked. “How come you were just left under that tree by the river, what happened to your last one?”

“Of that, I’m not entirely sure,” she sighed heavily. “My memory fades, when it’s been so long. Time ends up molding together a little, and I’m not even sure actually how long it’s been since I’ve even… Spoken to anyone, let alone been wielded…”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “That can’t be much fun. But you say wielded… That still means stuck in the form of a bow, right? So how come you’re human right now?”

“I have no idea. The magic I’m cursed with… I don’t feel it here.” Amber scrunched up her face as she tried to explain something that really neither one of us truly understood.

“Magic?” I raised an eyebrow. “We don’t have magic here.”

“Well, then, that explains it,” Amber suddenly said, and her face lit up with excitement. “Though I have no idea where you’ve brought me. Your world is… very white.”

“That’s just college accommodation for you,” I snickered with a hint of hysteria, because what the fuck was happening right now? “You wait ‘til I show you the concrete jungle out there.”

“I don’t know if that sounds appealing or not.” Amber matched my grin and put her hands on her shapely hips. “Anything with you sounds like an adventure, master. I know what a jungle is, but what in all the god’s names is concrete?

“Uhh…” I huffed out another laugh and then shrugged. “It’s kinda hard to describe. It’s a liquid rock that hardens. It’s what most buildings and roads and infrastructure is built with.”

“And college?” Amber asked eagerly, as if she were starved and every new bit of information about my world was like a bite of food. “What’s a college?”

“This.” I gestured helplessly with my hand and grinned. “It’s where we study. So we can get decent jobs.”

“Study?” Amber eyed me almost suspiciously. “Like at a guild?”

“I mean… Kinda, I guess,” I replied with a huff of laughter. “Everyone studies as kids, and then we choose to study more.”

“That sounds… Boring,” Amber said, and then she gasped and slapped her hand across her mouth as her eyes widened. “Not that you sound boring, master. I didn’t mean to offend.”

“None taken,” I chuckled as I watched her whisper through her fingers. “I mean, you’re sorta right in all fairness. But the city… You’ll fall in love with it. Everybody does.”

“Fall in love?” Amber asked, and the way her big round eyes blinked earnestly up at me made my stomach twist into a knot.

“Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that.” I couldn’t help the playful flirtation in my voice, and the way I’d interacted with Amber in my head filtered through into real life almost seamlessly. “But New York is one of the best cities in the world.”

“New York?” Amber’s nose scrunched up again as she spoke the unfamiliar words. “That’s the name of your settlement?”

“I mean, kinda.” I shrugged. “Although, if we’re getting technical, we’re in Brooklyn. Plus settlement is a bit of an understatement. You’ll see.”

There was a sudden knock at the door, and both Amber and I froze.

“Dude?” I heard my metalhead neighbor’s voice on the other side of the door. “Me and Honey are gonna grab some food before we go to this party, if you’re game?”

I hadn’t even thought about how long I’d been in whatever alternate reality the portal in my closet led me to, but time apparently didn’t pass in the same way it did in the real world. It had felt like I’d been in Amber’s reality for almost an entire day, especially after that troll battle, but in my world my new buddy was still asking me to head to a frat party with him as if it’d only been an hour or two since I’d agreed to go.

Part of me wanted to talk to Amber more and figure out what the hell was going on with this portal in my closet, but another part of me had never been on a date with a woman as stunningly beautiful as her.

“Uhhh, just give me a minute!” I called out to my friend, and I cringed at the tone of my voice.

Aron must’ve sensed it too, because he barreled in through my bedroom door regardless with a wide grin on his face, but then he stopped in his tracks when he spotted Amber.

She just waved at him and then nudged me with her elbow.

“Who’s that?” Amber whispered up at me.

“My friend, Aron,” I quickly explained with a tight smile. “Aron, this is Amber.”

“Hi, Amber.” The curly haired metalhead greeted her with a genial smile before he fixed me with a raised eyebrow and a frown. “How the hell did you get a girl back here so fast?”

“Uhhh…” Shit, now I needed to really think on my feet. Although, I appreciated Aron’s assumption that I had the ability to score a college girl so quickly.

“Hey, Honey!” Aron suddenly called out over his shoulder. “Come check this out!”

I held in a groan as my other friend poked her head round the door frame.

“No way,” the petite blonde girl snickered. “James the nerd has scored a girl before me?”

“Ha, ha, pipe down both of you.” I chuckled and shook my head. “Amber is… Uhh, Amber is my girlfriend, she got accepted here, too. She’s why I decided to come here in the first place.”

I faltered with the lie until it started to taste true, and I just nodded with silent encouragement as Amber looked up at me curiously.

She seemed to get the message, though, and she looped her arm through mine with a wide grin and nodded silently along.

“Nice to meet you, Amber.” Honey winked at the redhead who immediately blushed. “Are you coming with us to the party?”

“I’d be honored.” Amber’s freckled cheeks blushed a beautiful shade of pink, but then she frowned. “But I don’t have a gown.”

“Oh, I think you’re dressed just fine,” Honey assured her, and she smirked as she glanced at her knee high boots and tan colored tight fitting leather dress. “It’s very avant garde typical New York attire, you’ll fit in just fine.”

“Trust me,” I said softly to the redhead. “You look amazing.”

“Of course I trust you, master.” Amber’s pale eyes glittered as she returned my grin.

“My name is James,” I reminded her in a low voice with a smirk pulling at my lips. “People might raise eyebrows at you calling me ‘master.’”

“Really?” Amber giggled. “Why? I belong to you.”

“Maybe I’ll explain one day.” I chuckled, and then I gestured for her to follow me toward the door. “C’mon, we’d better go.”

My two friends had already sauntered out of my room, so I quickly grabbed the pouch I’d stolen from the river troll and shook three of the thick gold nuggets out into the palm of my hand.

I knew there was a pawn shop pretty close nearby, and I wondered how much the going rate for gold was as I pocketed the nuggets with an excited grin on my face. Then I hid the pouch under my mattress. I double checked the lock on my dorm an extra time to make sure no one cold get in, and then we all walked out of the building.

It was late in the afternoon as we walked across the quad, but the sun was still warm in the sky. Spring in New York was always great, but the day was particularly warm, with a couple of wispy white clouds in an otherwise totally blue sky and a soft breeze that carried the sounds of students still moving into their dormitories across the campus.

The air around the college was full of different types of music being blasted from different dorm room windows, as well as shouts and laughter from old and new friends.

“You guys know where you wanna eat?” I asked our group as we headed past the wrought iron gates of the campus and out onto the constantly bustling streets of downtown Brooklyn.

Amber’s pale eyes became as wide as saucers as she took in her new surroundings, and I realized my concrete jungle quote was probably incredibly accurate for her.

I hadn’t explored a great deal of her world, but just judging from the rudimentary wood cabin I’d emerged from, as well as the fact ancient looking trolls roamed the lands freely, I figured the concept of skyscrapers and cars and everything else that seemed totally normal to me would be close to freaking her out.

I instinctively grabbed Amber’s hand, and her eyes immediately found mine as I touched her. She shot me a small smile, and I could tell that her tension relaxed the moment I squeezed her fingers.

“Hey, I need to buy some smokes, and there’s a really hot girl that works in the bodega on fifth,” Aron suddenly piped up as he lit his last cigarette and exhaled a light plume of smoke.

“Hot girl?” Honey grinned. “Say less, I’ll come with.”

“We’ll meet you guys there,” I told my two friends as I kept my fingers entwined with Amber’s. “I just gotta change something up at the pawn shop a few blocks up.”

“Pawn shop?” Honey raised her eyebrow at me. “What fine goods are you trading in exactly?”

I had to stop the smirk from pulling at the corners of my mouth at the thought of the three thick gold nuggets that were currently burning a hole in my pocket.

“Nothing interesting,” I lied, but my smile definitely started to give me away. “My mom had found some old jewelry before I left and gave it to me as a pocket money fund.”

“So pizza’s on you, then?” Aron chuckled as he took another long drag on his smoke. “Sounds good to me.”

“We’ll catch up with you,” I promised the two of them. “Besides, I desperately wanna see Aron’s flirting skills.”

“Trust me, buddy,” Aron snorted suddenly. “No one wants to see that.”

Amber and I left my two friends and started to walk in the opposite direction away from campus.

“What is a… pawn shop?” Amber asked as soon as we were out of earshot.

“It’s a place where you can sell things for money,” I explained as we walked through the streets of Brooklyn hand in hand. “I only grabbed a few of the gold nuggets before we left, but I wanted to see how much money I could get for them. I didn’t wanna risk getting mugged for the whole lot, but I don’t know how much gold is worth right now, and I figured it’s definitely worth checking out.”

“You already have the gold, and yet it isn’t worth anything until it’s traded for different money?” Amber said as her nose wrinkled in confusion. “Why does your world have so many rules around things?”

“I’ve asked myself that more times than I can remember,” I admitted with a laugh, and I looped an arm around her shoulders as the sudden excitement started to sink in. “I hope we get a good deal.”

I’d never had more than a couple hundred dollars in my account, and I definitely wasn’t privy to how gold and jewelry trades worked, but I figured, if the troll’s little pouch of gold nuggets was legit, then I could make myself a decent amount.

Which meant I could dive back into Amber’s world and make myself stinking rich.

The shop front was dusty and pretty nondescript, but the thing that really caught my eye was the blinking neon sign that proclaimed ‘WE BUY GOLD!’ and I grinned widely as Amber stared at the shining light.

“It’s so bright!” she whispered in awe. “And you say you don’t have magic in your world.”

“I guess this is our version of it.” I nodded with another laugh. “Technology is our magic. Huh. I never thought of it that way.”

“The lights are brighter than any flame I’ve ever seen, and the metal carriages that power themselves are so loud, and it’s so busy…” Amber sighed. “There’s definitely magic here, just not a kind I’ve ever been familiar with.”

“Wait ‘til you see the numbers in my bank account change,” I laughed as I guided Amber through the door of the pawn shop.

It smelled like stale sweat with a metallic twang that could’ve been old blood or old jewelry, it was hard to tell. The cases haphazardly littered across the shop floor were sort of musty, and the glass looked like it hadn’t been completely clear in a good couple years.

As I approached the counter, a withered old man who couldn’t have been any younger than seventy-five fixed me with a steady stare. His skin looked like a lizard’s, and it was artificially tanned to within an inch of its life, which made the off white of his shirt even more glaringly obvious.

He had a thin silver chain around his neck as well as a massive signet ring on his left hand, and he studied me through thick framed spectacles whose glass was at least a half inch thick.

“Hi.” I smiled at him with anticipation suddenly racing around my veins.

“What can I do you for, son?” the old man asked in a flat voice.

Without a word, I pulled the three gold nuggets out of my jeans pocket and gently placed them on the glass counter between us. Amber’s eyes flitted between the scene like she was watching a game of tennis, and I just cleared my throat and smiled again.

“I’d like to sell these,” I told him with a fake air of confidence.

I had no idea how much I’d get for the satisfyingly thick otherworldly nuggets, but I wanted to seem like I had some sort of clue as to how this all worked.

The old man with the chain just raised an eyebrow in silence and scooped the nuggets off the weathered glass countertop to inspect them.

After a moment, he hummed in interest.

“I’ve not seen nuggets like this in a long time,” the teller said with his voice still void of emotion. “Let me test ‘em real quick.”

The old man bent down beneath the counter and pulled out a black slab of stone as well as a little glass bottle with a squeeze stopper in the lid, and I felt myself subconsciously shifting my weight from foot to foot as the teller worked at a damn snail’s pace.

I watched eagerly as he rubbed one of the gold nuggets vigorously against the black stone, until a slight golden mark remained on the slab. The teller hummed to himself and gently set the gold piece back down with the others, and I had to stop the groan from escaping my mouth.

“Does that mean it’s satisfactory?” I asked quickly and nodded to the golden mark left on the black stone.

“Not quite yet,” the old man muttered. “Next, we apply the nitric acid.”

“What does that do?” Amber asked curiously, and I noticed she’d been watching the old man work with as much excitement as me.

“If there’s a strong reaction, it’s not gonna be worth much,” the teller murmured as he used the squeeze top to sucker up some acid into the stem. “If there’s no reaction at all, this suggests purity.”

“Okay, do the test,” I replied, and I bit my lip.

That sounded far too much like a demand, and the old guy just slowly raised his eyes to stare at me above the thick black frame of his eye glasses.

Without a word, he turned his attention back to the black stone slab, and then he let a few drops of acid fall onto the golden mark that was still there.

It felt as though the three of us held our breath as we watched the liquid splatter against the stone, and after a few seconds of absolutely nothing, a wide grin split my face.

“No reaction.” I huffed out a laugh. “So it’s pure?”

The old man just raised an eyebrow, nodded, and then pulled a completely old school set of scales and weights out from under the counter.

He placed all three of my gold nuggets on one side, the counter weight on the other, and huffed again.

“Three ounces,” he said with a nod, and he looked up at me as he adjusted his spectacles. “I’ll give you eight thousand for the lot.”

“E-Eight?” I stuttered as my breath hitched in my throat.

Eight thousand dollars? I’d never seen more than eight hundred in my account, and this guy was just gonna casually offer me eight grand?

I cleared my throat and folded my arms across my chest, and Amber continued to watch the exchange between the two of us with intense curiosity.

“Is that the, ahh, the best you can do?” I asked him in a nonchalant tone.

I had no fucking idea whether you bartered at pawn shops, and I had no idea whether I was dreaming or not at this entire exchange, but the old man fixed me with another steady look before he sniffed hugely.

“Fine, I’ll do ten considering its purity.” The pawn shop teller shrugged. “Cash or bank transfer?”

“Bank transfer would be fine,” I said in a strained voice as I fought to keep my words casual.

But inside I was fucking break dancing.

I’d fallen into some mad otherworld, where I’d fought and killed a troll with the help of a beautiful woman trapped inside of a mystical bow and arrow, and now I was back in Brooklyn with ten thousand dollars about to be wire transferred to my bank account.

I had to physically stop myself from punching my fists into the air as if I were in a John Hughes movie.

Life was awesome.

Backyard Dungeon 6 cover poll

Dungeon in My Closet Chapter 2

I’d walked a fair ways from the wooden cabin with the dungeon and the closet portal, and I pulled myself out of my frozen trance to shift further down the slope I’d found myself on. I grabbed at a tree branch to steady my hasty shuffling, and my sneakers skidded on the dewy leaves beneath my feet, until finally I broke free from the tree line and found myself on the bank of a small river.

The stream rolled and bubbled happily along in its current, with crystal clear waters and thin disc shaped gray stones beneath the steady ripples, and it was probably clear enough to drink.

Or, it would’ve been, if it hadn’t been for the gigantic creature that had waded ankle deep out into the water.

It let out another thunderous bellow, as if to confirm my fears, and I even found myself nodding in reply to its deafening shout, as if to say to myself yes, it was in fact the hideous creature that had made those sounds I’d heard before.

It was an ugly thing, with mottled greenish gray skin that gleamed unattractively in the sunlight and made it look like it had been submerged in water for years. The creature stood at least seven feet tall, and though it was humanoid, it was definitely nothing I would ever find in the human world. His brow was massive and furrowed like a caveman, and his nose was huge, round, and squashed flat against his ugly face. The thing had tiny little black eyes, almost hidden beneath folds of greasy gray skin, but they honed in on me almost instantly.

Fuck.

We sized each other up for a split second, and the gigantic troll-thing glared at me with sheer hatred in his beady black eyes. I’d frozen again the moment I’d laid eyes on the creature, with my hand gripped for dear life around a jagged tree branch, until my left foot suddenly slid against the slick leaves that littered the riverbank.

The moment I moved, the spell was broken, and the troll screamed yet again. Its teeth were like mini tombstones, as gray as his skin and as hard and brittle-looking as stone, and his tongue was a disgusting wet snake dripping with thick tendrils of saliva.

“Easy…” I murmured, and I held my hands up as the creature’s deafening roar reverberated through the forest behind me.

At the sound of my voice, the troll growled deep in the cavern of his chest, and he huffed out through his nose as his little black eyes stared at me.

I kept my hand up and open, in the universal sign for ‘I come in peace,’ and I even attempted to plaster a nonchalant smile on my face as I nodded encouragingly.

Just like training a skittish dog. Or a horse. Emit the emotions you want to receive.

Except, despite his caveman skull and his lack of words, my troll-like adversary was far too intelligent to be swayed by such rudimentary tactics, and he let out another furious bellow as he started to crash through the water and head straight toward me.

“Oh, shit!” I yelped and immediately turned on my heel.

I bolted out of the troll’s path, and I dipped and weaved through the tree line as best as I could without slipping again on the leaves that littered the forest floor. I could hear his thunderous footsteps behind me, and I was pretty sure that if I’d had the opportunity to test the theory and placed a cup of water next to the creature, I’d have gotten a pretty impressive ‘Jurassic Park’ style water shake.

My mind at this point was just throwing stupid pop culture references to the forefront of my thoughts, anything to ignore the fact I’d been pulled through a fucking portal in my dorm closet and into some crazy fairytale world filled with supernatural creatures hellbent on having me for lunch.

I skidded along the tree line, and every single one of my limbs scrambled to pull me further away from the gargantuan creature tearing through the water after me, until there was a sudden bend in the river. The direction of the stream turned sharply, and my own momentum had me slipping against the bank and into the water itself.

“Shit!” I gasped as the water hit my skin.

The water was icy cold and took my breath away as I splashed into the stream up to my knees, but I didn’t have time to grumble at the temperature. I took the opportunity to put more than just air between me and the troll, and I quickly waded through the stream toward the other side. Then I clambered up the riverbank with my chest heaving and my heart pounding against my ribcage, just as the troll rounded the same corner.

He screeched across at me in fury as he too skidded to a halt, and I knew the water wasn’t going to stop him for that long. It would just take maybe a little while longer to process in what I assumed was his pea sized brain.

“Shit,” I gasped again as I shivered in my now soaking clothes.

I looked around for something, anything, that might help me get away from this thing, and I noticed a gnarled old tree on my side of the riverbank that had almost completely upturned roots.

The thick tendrils had sprouted out from the ground and formed a miniature sort of cave, but it wasn’t the tree itself that caught my eye.

It was what was nestled beneath the canopy of roots.

There was an ornate hunter’s bow along with a leather quiver stock full of arrows.

Now, I’d never in my life taken an archery lesson, nor did I know anything about how impervious to arrows this creature was, but I figured grabbing the pointy flying things could only help my cause. I scrambled almost on my hands and knees across the riverbank toward the tree, and then I grabbed at the bow and quiver as the troll roared furiously behind me again.

Finally!

I jumped when I heard the voice in my head, and I whipped my eyes back and forth through the forest tree line as I looked for its owner.

All this time, and I get found by someone who’s never used a bow and arrow before, the voice sighed. Typical.

“Who…?” I shook my head as my heart continued to race in my chest, and the troll continued to smash his fists into the water behind me. “What is this?”

The bow, master, the female voice giggled in my mind. Just point and shoot, I’ll do my best with the rest.

Master? The fuck?

“I’m talking to a bow now?” I murmured breathlessly as I hooked the leather strap of the quiver over my chest. “Really?”

It was a beautiful weapon, made from a light wood that was almost auburn in color and polished to a high sheen. It was inlaid with intricate goldwork that looked like lace against the soft wood, and the grip was wrapped in soft and supple leather that immediately molded to the shape of my hand.

“Woah…” I murmured as I held the bow in my hand and marveled at its even weight distribution.

I still hadn’t ever had any sort of archery training, but the bow felt somehow correct in my hand, as if it had been made for me, and I instinctively reached behind my head for one of the arrows.

I slipped one of them out from the leather quiver and inspected the weapon. The shaft was made from the same auburn colored wood as the bow itself, and the arrowhead was made from some sort of golden orange crystal that glimmered and shone as if it were trapped sunlight. The fletching on the end of the arrow was made from a bouquet of beautiful brown and gold bird feathers, and I slowly brought the arrow up to the bow itself.

I had no idea what I was doing, but my muscles seemed to, like they were privy to some memory I wasn’t.

A quick learner, the woman’s voice said, and I could hear the smile in her words. I’m impressed, master.

“Are you gonna help me take this thing out?” I muttered as I tentatively flexed my hand against the bow’s leather grip and steadied my footing in the wet mud.

Let’s see how well we work together, shall we? the voice in my head crooned softly. Notch your arrow and see how it feels. We don’t have long before that troll figures out he can still get to us.

Said troll was still throwing a tantrum on the other side of the stream, but it seemed to have taken a few steps forward since I last looked.

“Okay.” I nodded as I slipped an arrow out of the quiver, brought it forward, and nocked it against the bowstring. “Yeah, sure, I can do this. Never even held a bow ‘til today, but I can do this.”

Yes, you can, the voice of the bow assured me gently. I won’t let you fail, master.

An hour ago, I’d have scoffed at myself and sent my own ass packing to the psych ward.

But on my first day off college so far, I’d accidentally fallen through a magical portal, ended up in a mystical forest, and come face to face with an actual fucking troll. So, a bow that could telepathically communicate with me, impart its infinite wisdom upon me too, and called me master was actually pretty far down on my list of unlikelihoods.

Even so, what the fuck was going on?

I was interrupted from my scattered thoughts when the ugly gray troll roared again.

“Okay,” I repeated in a steely voice as I lifted the bow up with one hand and kept the arrow steady against the string with the other. “Tell me what to do.”

Breathe, the bow whispered in my thoughts. In through your nose, out through your mouth.

The voice was earnest, but excited, and whoever it belonged to sounded hot.

“I know how to breathe,” I murmured in reply as my lips brushed against the hand that held the end of the arrow.

I stared past my fingers and glared across the river at the slimy gray troll, who continued to roar steadily in frustration.

Do as I say, the voice commanded again. In through your nose, out through your mouth.

“Okay…” I said, and then finally did as I was told.

I drew in a long breath through both nostrils, held it for a moment, and exhaled slowly so my breath fanned out across my hand. I immediately felt the pressure lessen in my fingers, and my grip against the leather of the bow somehow seemed even tighter, but more comfortable at the same time.

Like we were somehow connected now.

That seemed almost as unlikely as falling through a portal to a dungeon world in the back of my closet, and yet here I was, ankle deep in river water with a mystical bow in my hand.

Envision your shot. The female voice sounded almost sultry as it talked me through the process. Your command of the arrow doesn’t just stop when it leaves your fingers. You have to tell it where to go.

“Uh-huh…” My own voice became husky as I honed my gaze on the troll’s ugly gray face, and I lined it up against where my fingers held onto the bow. “I understand.”

I knew you would, master, the voice said happily. Now, take another breath, bring your elbow up, and then release. All in one fluid motion.

“Tell the arrow where to go,” I muttered with my lips pressed against the side of my hand. “Right.”

I took a long breath, brought my elbow up, and then let the arrow fly.

It sailed through the air with an almost electrical fizz, as fast as a bullet from a gun, and made almost immediate contact with my target.

Except my aim was ever so slightly off.

The arrowhead sunk into the fleshy folds of the troll’s neck, on the left side just below the mound of skin that could barely be called an ear.

“Shit,” I hissed. “I missed.”

Only by a margin, the voice replied. You did great. Except…

“Except now I’ve really pissed him off,” I groaned as I dropped my arms with the bow still firmly in one hand.

The troll suddenly began to beat at his chest, and his balled up fists made sickeningly wet smacking sounds as he punched his massive pectoral muscles. Then I watched in horror as he ripped my arrow out of his neck in a hot spray of blood. He threw the broken arrow, which looked almost comically like a toothpick between his fat fingers, into the rippling waters below and then bellowed at me as he took one thunderous step forward.

He’s realized he can cross the river to get to you, the voice in my mind said helpfully. You need cover, master.

“There is no cover!” I shouted and spread my arms. “We’re on a freakin’ riverside!”

When was the last time you climbed a tree? the voice asked.

I glanced over my shoulder at the trees that lined the river. They were satisfyingly huge, with massive twisted limbs and boughs thicker than my entire body, and I let out a whistle as I inspected the one with the upturned roots.

“Well, I guess I’m climbing one now,” I muttered as I slung the bow’s string across my shoulders, hooked it onto my back, and hauled myself up onto the root canopy.

You’ll need a good height difference, if you want an advantage, the voice said cheerfully.

“Talkin’ about height differences…” I grunted under my breath as I wedged my left foot into a helpful knot and used my upper body strength to clamber up to the first row of branches. “I’m six foot two…”

But that troll is easily over seven, the voice countered. I’m just being realistic.

“Realistic.” I huffed out a laugh as I continued to clamber up the tree branches. “Nothing about this scenario is realistic.”

You can still do it, master, the voice replied, and I fought back an involuntary smile.

“Just you watch,” I muttered as I straddled a particularly wide branch and shifted my weight back. “I’m gonna impress the shit out of you.”

I wholeheartedly hope that you do, she giggled in my ear.

God, now I was flirting with the voice in my head. In my defense, though, she did sound super sexy.

The troll finally thundered his way through the stream as I clambered through the tree branches, and as I settled my weight back, he skidded to a halt at the foot of my tree with his black beady eyes glinting in fury. He roared again and clawed at the tree trunk, as if he was trying to physically pull the tree down with his bare hands, and I grimaced as his long yellowed fingernails ripped out long ribbons of bark.

“I can hit him point blank from here,” I said as I reached behind my head and pulled another arrow out of the leather quiver on my back.

Don’t aim for the head. Their skulls are too thick to pierce with these normal arrowheads. You had the right idea to begin with.

“Go for the jugular?” I grinned.

In a manner of speaking, my bow replied in my mind. You need it to go all the way through, because then he’ll yank it back out.

“And that’s what’ll kill him.” I smirked as I nocked my next arrow. “You’re really smart, you know.”

I’ve just been in more open combat than you, it seems, the bow purred in a silky smooth tone.

I started to wonder what she meant by that. She’d called me ‘master,’ so did that mean she’d had previous owners? Had she been some sort of warrior?

I made a mental note to ask at a later time, just out of sheer curiosity, because for the millionth time that afternoon… What the hell kinda weird video game world had I somehow found myself in?

“Alright, alright.” I grinned as I brought the bow up to my face and cocked my elbow up. “Okay. Aim for the throat.”

Wait ‘til he roars, she suddenly said. He tilts his head back when he does.

“Your intelligence is my favorite thing about you,” I muttered against my hand as I aimed.

If only you knew, the voice said, and it was an odd mixture of sadness and flirtation.

I didn’t have time to decipher her meaning, though, because the troll that clawed angrily at the tree beneath us had just taken a huge breath into his gigantic chest.

The bow’s voice was absolutely right, and as the disgusting creature let out a long, chest-rattling roar that made saliva fly from his tombstone looking teeth, I took a deep breath of my own.

In through the nose, out through the mouth, and focus on where I wanted the arrow to go.

The projectile erupted from the bow string with a deadly hiss, and the arrowhead sank right into the blubbery flesh of the troll’s neck like a hot knife through butter.

I even heard it pop out the other side with a grossly squishy sound, and I whooped from my spot in the tree’s branches.

“Direct hit!” I cackled with satisfaction. “What d’you think of that?”

You did amazingly, master. The voice cooed in reply.

There was that ‘master’ again. It was like I’d rubbed a bottle for a genie, except I’d gotten a really hot sounding bow and arrow.

I watched with morbid satisfaction as the troll gurgled against the sudden intrusion in his neck, and when he finally opened his mouth in a silent shout, the tombstone teeth inside his head had been dyed a deep red. His blood foamed with saliva and dribbled past his gray lips, and his little black eyes suddenly became wide with panic.

The troll instinctively reached a hand up, grabbed the spindly shaft of the arrow, and yanked it forward.

The poor brute succeeded in what he’d planned, but he also sealed his own fate, because the jagged edges of the amber colored arrowhead tore his throat apart on its exit in a grotesque spray. He swayed for a moment, gurgled again, and then collapsed against the tree trunk in a pathetic slump as his heart eventually pumped the blood out of him and stopped.

“Holy shit,” I gasped as I looked down at the weapon in my hands.

Good job, master, my bow commended me.

“We make a good team, huh?” I grinned widely as I started to shimmy my way back down the tree trunk. “I should probably collect those arrows before they get washed away in the river.”

Not necessary, master, the voice of the bow giggled. I can replenish your quiver with fresh arrows.

“Oh.” I grinned. “Well, thank you. Saves me having to yank them out of that thing, and I don’t know if my stomach could take that.”

The arrows you fired at the troll are probably broken anyway, the voice said with another chuckle.

“You think this big lug had anything of worth on him?” I wondered as I stared at the collapsed body of the troll at the foot of tree.

I still wasn’t sure what the fuck was going on, but in almost every fantasy video game I played or book I read, the victor of the battle was able to loot their defeated opponents.

Certainly doesn’t hurt to check. The bow’s bright voice conjured up the image of a smile. You deserve some sort of reward for that endeavor.

“I’m glad I lived up to your expectations,” I chuckled as I hopped down onto the riverbank beside the troll’s corpse.

Quite fucking thankfully, the creature had worn some sort of disgusting loin cloth to cover his modesty, and attached to the waistband of the grimy material was a small drawstring pouch that looked like something he’d stolen and kept for himself as a trinket.

I pulled the drawstrings with baited breath, and then I whistled as several large clumps of solid gold tumbled out into the palm of my hand.

“Nice.” I grinned. “Hey, I can pawn this off, too.”

You can do what with it? the voice in my mind asked curiously as I pocketed the gold as my prize.

“I can take it to a pawn shop and change it up for cash,” I snickered. “And here I thought I’d have to find a job at college.”

What’s a pawn shop? the voice asked again. And what’s a college?

I faltered where I stood for a moment, with a dead troll at my feet, a voice in my head, and a handful of gold nuggets.

What the hell had just happened to me?

How the hell was any of this real? I now knew it couldn’t be a dream, because I was actually shivering in my wet clothes, and the palms of my hands stung with tiny cuts from hauling myself up the tree.

So all this had to be real. It had to be.

Then a thought drew me up short.

If that portal suddenly just appeared in my closet, could it disappear just as suddenly?

I took off at a dead sprint and splashed my way through the river, and I ignored the sudden cold of the water and the way that my heartbeat stammered haphazardly in my chest.

Hey, what’s wrong? the voice attached to the bow demanded, but I just continued to run full pelt back toward the dungeon that housed the portal without bothering to answer her.

I could feel my chest tighten, and the panic started to bubble and spread beneath my skin the closer I got to the little wooden cabin in the forest clearing.

I was hellbent on getting back to reality, and if another troll crossed my path right now, god fucking help it.

Are you okay, master? I heard the voice in my head ask me, and I closed my eyes against it as I stumbled through the cabin door.

Down, head downstairs. Toward the cellar.

I clattered down the tight spiral staircase and back into the cool confines of the stone room beneath the ground, and I let out a strangled breath that might’ve been either a laugh or a sob when I finally saw the old closet in the corner, with its door still slightly ajar.

I yanked the door open and pushed my way through the shimmering golden portal until suddenly, I was gasping for breath with my nose pressed against the light gray carpet of my college dorm bedroom.

I’d made it back again.

I let the panic come to a head the moment I knew that I was safe, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my nose harder against the carpet, desperate to feel the reality of it.

“Hey, I asked if you’re okay?” the bow huffed, and I could hear the worry in her strained voice.

“I’m okay…” I gasped into the floor. “I just… Hey, what--”

I ripped my head up from the ground and stared.

I no longer had the bow and quiver of arrows on my back, and the soft female voice was no longer in my head. I hadn’t brought the weapon back to my college dorm room at all.

Somehow, the bow and arrows had transformed into a beautiful woman the moment I’d collapsed through the portal in my closet.

Dungeon in My Closet Chapter 1

“Are you sure you have to actually move out?” my mom pouted.

I glanced up to where she was leaning against my bedroom door frame with her arms folded across her chest and her dark eyes shimmering with residual tears, and I smiled.

“I’ll still bring you my laundry, if you like,” I chuckled as I tried to force the lid of my suitcase down over my haphazardly packed clothes. “It’ll be like I never left.”

“Hmm, on second thought…” my mom giggled softly and then wiped at her cheek as a stray tear dribbled down past her eyelashes. “It’s just gonna feel so empty without you here, James.”

I’d lived in Brooklyn with my mom my entire life, and so when the time had come to finally choose a college, it had come as no surprise to anyone in my life that I’d elected to stay in the best suburb in New York city. But that didn’t mean I wanted to stay under my mom’s roof while I studied, as much as she wanted me to.

“You’ve got Roscoe,” I reminded her, and as if on cue, the straggly tom cat leapt onto my desk with a lazy meow.

My mom scooped the grumpy cat up into her arms, much to Roscoe’s disdain, and she sighed heavily as she scratched him behind the ears. Then she looked up at me again with the same glassy eyes.

“You’ll call me at least every weekend?” she asked with a sniff. “And you’ll come home to see me?”

“Yes, I promise.” I grinned as I finally managed to zip my suitcase up, and I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek before I scooted my luggage past her and toward the front door of our apartment. “You had to get rid of me some time.”

“I never said I wanted that,” my mom reminded me as I began to lug my packed up life down the rickety old stairs of our building.

“I’m twenty now,” I said with a grunt as I heaved my first suitcase round the corner and onto the next flight of stairs. “Nearly twenty one, actually, and I can’t be a functioning adult if my mom is my roommate.”

I’d taken a year or two off after highschool to take an internship at a record company in the city, but they’d wanted graduates for their permanent music production positions. Thankfully, my mom had saved up a whole bunch of money after my dad died when I was little, and so here I was, hauling ass to college at the ripe old age of twenty.

At least I’d be able to buy people booze soon, so it shouldn’t be too hard to make friends on campus.

“Girls love mama’s boys, though,” my mom argued. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you and help you get all settled?”

I let my suitcase wheels clatter to a resounding stop and looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Okay, fine, fine…” she laughed and dropped Roscoe the cat so he could scamper back up to our apartment. “I get it, you’re blossoming.”

“Mom…” I groaned. “Blossoming? It’s not my quinceanera.”

She continued to tell me all the how’s and why’s and great benefits of me studying from home as I moved my packed up bedroom down the stairs and out onto the stoop of our building, and when I’d finally dragged the last box down, she pulled me into a spine-crushing hug.

“I’m proud of you, baby,” she mumbled somewhere beside my shoulder. “So is your father.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said softly and gave her a squeeze in reply. “Thanks, Mom.”

She insisted on waiting with me as I hailed a cab, and then she hastily shoved a small wad of twenty dollar bills into my shirt pocket as a yellow car slid to a stop against the curb beside us.

“For emergencies,” she said, and she shook her head as I tried to protest. “Nu-uh, you take it. And call me when you’re all settled in and stuff, okay?”

“Thanks, Mom.” I smiled widely and kissed her one last time on the cheek, and then I hopped into the waiting cab and shut the door with a sigh.

I turned in my seat and watched as she waved me off down the block, but soon, the cab turned a corner, and my mom, on the stoop of the building I’d grown up in, eventually disappeared.

“Congrats on your first day.” The taxi man grinned knowingly in the rearview mirror as I settled back into my seat. “NYU?”

“Nah, I’m headed to Brooklyn School Of Music,” I said with a proud smile on my face. “At the Clinton Hill campus, corner of Hall and Willoughby.”

“Keepin’ it local.” The cab driver nodded in approval. “I like it. Alright, Brooklyn School Of Music, you got it.”

The cabbie was a quintessential New Yorker. He had leathery skin and a wide smile that showed his crooked, cigarette stained teeth, and he studied me with crinkly old eyes. He wore a pressed white shirt that had seen better days and a chunky gold chain around his neck, and he even pulled a pair of aviator style sunglasses from his visor when the sun broke through the clouds.

I just grinned to myself as I nodded along to the song blaring on the radio.

I could’ve gone anywhere to study music production, but why would I, when I lived in the coolest place on Earth?

The late morning was bright and cheery, with a warm sun hanging high in the air and a light breeze that only had the faint whisperings of an approaching fall. The Clinton Hill campus was a surprisingly green oasis in the middle of Brooklyn’s concrete jungle, and I counted four separate brick buildings shrouded by the welcome shade of the tall trees that surrounded the college.

The cab driver pulled up and even helped me with my luggage and boxes that had packed his car up, so I tipped him heavily for his help. He thanked me and wished me good luck with a toothy grin, and then I watched the yellow car as it disappeared into traffic.

There were lines and lines of parked cars full of families wishing their loved ones goodbye, or helping them unload all their stuff, and I spotted a helpful looking pair of guys dressed in school colors standing guard against a row of metal carts for new students to load up their luggage.

I grabbed one from the shorter of the two guys with a grateful smile, and then I hauled my suitcases and boxes onto the metal grating Tetris style, but I was careful to keep my prized PC tower and sound recording equipment on top. Then I wheeled my stuff further onto campus, which was a sprawling mess of first day of semester chaos, and as I was busy people watching, an eager guy with wide eyes and a mess of red hair bounced in front of my path.

“Hi there!” he said in a bright voice with an even brighter smile, and I had to yank the handle to stop my cart from knocking him flat on his ass. “Welcome to the Brooklyn School of Music!”

“Hi,” I chuckled breathlessly. “Sorry, I nearly took you out then.”

“I’ve gone through worse.” He shrugged his skinny shoulders and held up a clipboard with a grin. “First year?”

“Yeah, I’m in Dalton Hall apparently,” I replied with a nod.

“Okay, so you’re gonna wanna go all the way across the quad, past the fountain, and then take a hard left at the end. There’ll be someone there to greet you and tell you which room you’re in, okay?” The redhead guy even put his hands on his hips as if he were a real life Peter Pan, and I laughed

“Yep, that’s perfect,” I said as I quickly wove my cart around him and headed in the direction he told me. “Thank you.”

I continued my way across campus, and there was a surprising amount of already established students hanging around and watching the newbies arriving.

A bunch of what passed as frat boys at a music school were sitting on camping chairs in a large semicircle, and they’d made a drinking game out of people watching. As far as I could tell, their rules stated that they had to drink every time somebody tripped up or every time a parent or family member cried, and they had to all shotgun a beer any time someone’s luggage cart toppled over.

A potentially dick move, but harmless enough all things considered.

I ignored the lot of them, and thankfully my luggage cart didn’t betray me and leave me to their mercy as I headed toward Dalton Hall.

As promised, another student helper wielding a clipboard was standing sentinel at the door to the dorms, ready to guide new students to their rooms, though he was far less enthusiastic than his counterpart I’d met earlier.

“Name?” the clipboard guy asked me with an exhausted sigh and a tired smile.

“James.” I grinned. “James Miller.”

“Room four twelve,” Clipboard said in a flat voice as he ticked my name off from his list. “All the way down the hall and just before the corner. You got a laundry room round that corner, and then the common area is here at the front of the dorm.”

I wheeled my cart with my luggage into Dalton Hall and followed Clipboard’s instructions. The corridor bustled with people doing the exact same as me, and I smiled and nodded at my new dormmates as I passed them. Eventually, I found myself outside a door with the numbers ‘412’ stamped in black paint, and I pulled my cart to a stop.

“Hey, neighbor.” A voice sounded out from behind the door beside mine, and a petite girl with a blonde pixie cut and a silver lip ring leaned against the open doorway with a wide grin on her face.

“Hey.” I nodded politely and matched her smirk. “Nice to meet you.”

“And you.” The girl smiled even wider and cocked her head toward me nonchalantly. “Name’s Honey.”

“I’m James,” I said as I tried to keep my eyes on hers instead of the breasts currently attempting to pop out of the tank top layered beneath her open flannel shirt.

“Nice to meet you, Jamesssss.” Honey just continued to smirk as I dragged my cart into my room, and I had to bite my lip against the natural flirting that was doing its damnedest to come out.

I didn’t have a girlfriend, but I also didn’t want to completely ruin whatever chance I had at making friends, and Honey seemed cool, so I turned my focus on unpacking my shit instead.

My room was small but cozy, and thankfully I got it all to myself. A large double window on the north side took up almost the entire wall and drenched the room in a wash of natural light, and I heaved the window open to let some summer air in as I set to work.

A small double bed was wedged into the corner beneath the window, and on the other side of the room was a simple desk with a black leather chair. There wasn’t a door for a closet, but there was a wooden wardrobe that looked so old it was almost out of place sitting in the far corner.

“Good thing a dude is in this room and not a girl,” I laughed as I looked at the Narnia-inspired wardrobe-closet-cabinet-thingy. I didn’t exactly have an impressive array of clothing, so I figured I could still keep all my shit in there. I could get to organizing my clothes later, though. Now I just wanted to get my computer and sound equipment set up. I shrugged my shoulders out of my checkered shirt, tied it around my waist, and readied myself for the mental and physical duress I was about to willingly put myself through.

Cable management.

Luckily, I’d remembered to buy a whole bunch of zip ties before I’d moved, so by the time I had my PC tower, LED strip lights, sound equipment, and microphone set up, I had gathered the mess of black cables together in neat bunches at the back of my desk. I was still breaking a sweat, though, and as I fastened the last zip tie, I collapsed onto my back right there in the middle of the floor.

“The grunts and moans coming from this room,” I heard Honey’s snicker from somewhere by my still open door, and I just let out a laugh as I stared up at the ceiling.

“I’d apologize, but…” I heaved myself up so I could prop myself up on my elbows and then fixed her with a smirk. “I’m not sorry.”

“I’ll get you back the moment I get a girl back here.” She grinned, and then she fully cackle laughed when she saw my expression as my brain worked to catch up to her words.

“Oh!” I laughed in surprise. “You’re…”

“A raging lesbian?” Honey grinned. “Yeah, dude, I’m dressed the fucking same as you, did that not give it away?”

“Hey.” I shook my head with a chuckle and sat up with my arms resting against my knees. “I don’t assume based on appearance.”

“Good to know.” Honey nodded in approval. “I was gonna a-- woah.”

She was cut off mid-sentence when the screech of an electric guitar, hooked up to an amp with the volume cranked to eleven, suddenly wailed through the dorms. I immediately recognized the Led Zeppelin riff and hauled myself to my feet to investigate the source of the shredding, with Honey at my shoulder.

The previously closed door of the room opposite mine was suddenly wide open, and I watched as the guitarist worked his instrument with a scrunched face and a classic power stance.

He had a mess of curly black hair much like Slash’s, except he wore his in a half up half down ponytail, and he wore thick black framed eyeglasses, a cut off faded black t-shirt that showed off muscular arms, and ridiculously tight skinny jeans with a thick metal chain dangling from his belt loops.

Then he looked up, as if he could sense the eyes on him, and froze in place as he stared at me and held the note.

“Black Dog?” I grinned. “A classic.”

“Thank fucking god someone has taste here,” the guitarist sighed and then riffed excitedly before he unplugged his cherry red guitar and hauled it off his shoulders.

“Was that a test?” Honey asked with a wry smile.

“Kinda,” the curly-haired guitarist chuckled as he put his guitar in its stand beside his desk. “I just wanted to see if I had any decent roomies.”

“Did we pass?” I smirked.

“Fuck yes,” he laughed as he switched his Marshall amp off. “I’m Aron, and I pinky promise I’ll do my best to not be too annoying.”

“If you keep playing the likes of Zeppelin, I can’t be mad.” I laughed and crossed the gap between our rooms so I could quickly shake Aron’s hand. “I’m James, this is Honey.”

“Pleasure.” He winked at the both of us. “What’re you guys studying?”

“Production,” I explained with a proud smile, and I motioned to my open door. “Hence my tasty little set up.”

“No kidding,” Aron breathed as he eagerly hopped across and peered into my room. “Do you play anything?”

“Nah, I’m no musician,” I chuckled. “I wish, though.”

“Maybe I can chuck in some free lessons, if you produce some of my band’s shit.” Aron waggled his eyebrows and adjusted his spectacles as he turned to Honey. “I’m just kidding. But hey, what are you studying?”

“I’m a musician, too,” the tiny blonde explained. “Not as cool as you, though. I play the violin.”

“That’s pretty fucking cool,” I countered.

“Classical.” Aron nodded approvingly. “I dig it.”

“You’d be surprised how many metal bands use classical music, to be fair.” Honey grinned up at Aron.

“Like Metallica’s S&M performance?” I offered.

“I’m so fucking glad I have cool neighbors.” Aron held his hand up to his heart and groaned theatrically. “Are you guys going to the party at the Sigma Alpha house? I’m not normally one to mingle with frat boys, but it’s the first party of the semester, and I’m pretty sure, like, everyone’s going.”

“Oh, I’m completely in!” Honey clapped her hands together with a giggle. “I made my dad buy a bunch of beers for exactly this reason.”

“I’m definitely down.” I nodded in agreement. “I’m gonna finish unpacking and stuff, and then I’m all yours.”

“Okay, I’ll let out the bat signal in a couple hours.” Aron grinned.

I hadn’t banked on a full blown college party on my very first day, but I was definitely excited at the prospect, especially going with Honey and Aron. It was a good feeling, knowing I’d already made two pretty cool friends.

I made a mental note to tell my mom, just so she didn’t worry about me crying into my pillows with homesickness on my first night away from her.

Since I’d successfully set my computer and sound production equipment up already, I decided to finally unpack all my clothes before I jumped into the shower to get ready for my first proper college party.

I only had the one suitcase of clothing, although that was the one that was fit to bursting despite it being mainly jeans, checkered overshirts, and band merchandise. I hauled it across the room with a grunt, and it spun on its wheels and eventually came to a stop beside the battered old closet.

The thing looked like it was a hundred years old, despite the rest of the furniture in my dorm room looking like something out of an Ikea catalog, and I wondered why on Earth they’d decided to keep it. The hinges were pretty battered and rusted, and the brass handles, which might’ve gleamed once upon a time, were a tarnished brown color.

I pulled the two doors open, and I was already a half-turn around when I spotted something in my peripheral vision.

The back of the old closet should’ve been the same wood the rest of it was made from, but it simply wasn’t. I blinked once, then twice, and then rubbed at my eyes before I peered at it again, and I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was seeing.

The back of my college dorm closet looked as though it were made from molten gold. It swirled and ebbed of its own accord and had a weird glittery sheen to it as it moved, and I became suddenly hyper aware of the fact I was staring at something that absolutely did not belong in my world.

“What the fuck…” I muttered under my breath as I stared at the wall of my closet, and without giving it another thought and letting my curiosity take over, I extended my hand.

It was the equivalent of a sign that said “DO NOT PRESS THIS BIG RED BUTTON!” Of course I was gonna touch it.

The moment the tips of my outstretched fingers came into contact with the swirling gold, I felt a yank somewhere near my navel as my entire body was sucked toward the back of the ancient wardrobe.

Instead of headbutting the wall of my dorm room, though, I instead started to fall forwards. My arms began to flail, and a panicked yell fought its way up my throat, but the sound was dampened by whatever the fuck I had fallen through.

It only took a second, but it was like the world slowed down, and I felt the weird shimmering portal envelope my entire body and suck me through to a place that was definitely no longer my university dorm room.

When everything stopped spinning around me, I froze for a moment and tried to catch my breath.

What the hell had even just happened?

It was pretty dark, the air was suddenly cold and damp, and my knees already ached from where I’d slammed into a hard stone floor.

I let out a long shuddering breath and brought my head up so I could inspect my surroundings. I had fallen into some sort of underground dungeon, which was only obvious to me because of the amount of video games I’d played in my time.

The walls and floor were made from a dark gray stone, and old metal brackets were nailed into the walls where wooden torches, or maybe shackles, should go, except they were totally empty which was probably why it was so dark. Aside from a smattering of old dried straw on the stone floor, the place was utterly empty. There were a couple of ante rooms on either side of where I stood, but aside from that, nothing.

I crawled to my feet, brushed my knees down, and looked behind me to see an exact replica of my dorm room closet. I tentatively pushed one of the doors open and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the same shimmery golden portal at the back.

Then my eyes widened when I stared down at my left hand. The skin somehow had what looked like a tattoo inked into it, but it was mostly numbers and letters instead of a pattern.The tattoo looked like something out of a video game, with a skill tree that alluded to my dexterity, luck, and also strength, with long inky tendrils that curved across the back of my hand and was yet to be filled in.

“What the hell?” I said as I flexed my hand and looked at the design. It was for sure a character skill tree, but I was missing any actual named skills.

Then I stretched my arm out to push my fingers back into the weird molten metal of the portal and breathed another sigh of relief when my hand slid through to the other side.

I needed to check if it worked both ways, or whether I was permanently stuck in this strange dungeon, and I didn’t particularly take well to the latter option.

I took a shuddering breath and pushed myself back through, and I felt a sharp tug somewhere in my lower abdomen. Then I stumbled out of the shimmering gateway and back into my college dorm room, where everything was exactly as I’d left it.

Except the very stark tree-like tattoo that’d marked my left hand on the other side had suddenly disappeared, and I pulled and pressed at the skin on the back of my hand in confusion. Whatever it was, whatever had marked me, it didn’t transfer to my world apparently.

“What the hell…” I murmured breathlessly as I stared at the portal in my closet in sheer disbelief.

I could walk away from the otherworld portal in the back of my closet and try to tell people about what had just happened to me, though I’d probably get carted off to a psych ward for my troubles, and I had no intention of starting, and ending, my college career like that.

Or, I could go and explore.

Maybe this was just a dream, like I’d fallen and hit my head or something. That was definitely the most logical explanation, but… something told me this was more than that.

I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and pushed back through the golden portal.

The air on the other side was cold enough that goosebumps had appeared along my arms, and my knees ached with very real pain from where I’d stumbled through the gateway the first time.

So, what if this was all real? It sounded totally crazy, but I had to find out for myself.

I made my decision and gently pulled the closet door closed behind me, but I made sure I kept it open a tiny crack, mostly out of fear that it would magically weld itself shut and I’d be stuck in wherever this dungeon was for the rest of time.

And my mom would never forgive me for going missing, hell, she’d come and track me down herself.

After a quick study of my immediate surroundings, I realized there was a whole bunch of nothing in the damp and dreary cavern, at least nothing that would help me in my exploration. I found one archway that seemed to lead into a tunnel, but it was caved in several feet down. I wondered where it went. Was there a whole underground network of caves and tunnels down here?

And if so, where did they lead?

I pressed forward, away from the closet portal, and further into this weird unknown world.

After walking for a minute, I could feel a slight breeze in the dungeon, so I headed in the direction from which it came, because I figured that would at least show me how to get out.

The air started to become cooler, and I finally found a tight spiral staircase carved right into the stone on the other side of this large underground room. I hurried my way up the steps until the air opened up around me, and I found myself in a relatively empty wooden cabin. The entrance to the cellar itself was concealed by an old wooden trapdoor similar to farmhouse style tornado hatches. The huge metal hinges were rusted red, and the wood itself was covered in patches of dank green moss, but I was still glad I had something to cover the entrance to my portal.

I quickly looked around and inspected my dusty surroundings. There was a fireplace on one side of the main cabin room, but it had no fire or even old ashes in the hearth, so I figured the place was most likely abandoned.

Definitely, considering the thick layer of dust that covered the place.

I saw a few wooden structures that resembled coat racks, but they also were empty of anything interesting. There was also an old wooden table and one or two rickety looking chairs, but other than that, the little cabin possessed zero signs of life.

I figured someone must’ve lived in this cabin at some point, and the portal between worlds was right there in the dungeon beneath, but the disarray and dust proved it had laid dormant for at least a couple years.

I slowly headed toward the door on the other side of the cabin and I eagerly pushed my way out to see where the hell I actually was.

The little wooden hut and stone dungeon was nestled within the middle of a gorgeous forest clearing. Incredibly tall trees clawed their way up to a clear blue sky, and their branches were full of deep red and gold leaves. The forest floor already had a light carpet of orange and gold, and I realized wherever I was, fall had definitely come early. The air was crisp and light, noticeably different to any kind of New York air I’d ever breathed, and I could hear the distant chatter of birds circling and playing together somewhere high up above me as I trudged my way through the clearing.

“What the hell is going on?” I rubbed my temples in confusion, but to my genuine surprise, I didn’t feel any fear. I’d never particularly been a wimp, but falling through an otherworldly portal in the back of a closet into a different world Narnia-style would’ve definitely warranted some sort of panic.

Then again, I still wasn’t convinced that this wasn’t a dream, so maybe there really wasn’t anything to be scared of.

My initial shock had given way to a mildly confusing calm, and I wandered through the idyllic forest with a slight smile pulling at the corners of my mouth. The trees were lush, the sky was clear, and the air had a refreshing chill to it. It almost felt like home.

Until I heard an almighty fucking roar.

My heart jumped in my throat, which made my breath hitch, and I froze. The birds above me squawked in protest at the intrusive sound and scattered from the trees, and I could suddenly hear my blood pumping in my ears.

Then another roar sounded through the forest, and I realized, with an impending sense of sheer dread, that it didn’t sound like it belonged to any sort of animal I’d ever heard of.

Shit.

Audiobook Release | Monster Girl Islands 14

Monster Girl Islands 14 audiobook is in your BF library ABLs.  For everyone else, pick it up on my website or on Audiobook Guild

Overview

Ben has successfully convinced the Council of Dragons to welcome him as one of their own and aid him in the war against the orcs.
But their home on the dragonkin island is no longer safe.
So, Ben and his empire must make the perilous journey to a secret island on the back of an enormous gigadragon named Seshuna.
But the question remains: Will Seshuna let them stay?

Narration by: Alyssa Poon, Robert L. Bradvica
Length: 7 Hours, 7 Minutes

Mage Assassin 5 NSFW covers

This artist isn't quite comfortable with cream pies yet, but we'll get there.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5VXT6X1

Mage Assassin 5 is out!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5VXT6X1

Survive the Monsters and Breed 5 cover sketches

Kane's Fate 5 cover poll

Res as a drow cover 4 poll. I really like all of these.

Audiobook releases for July 2022!

Got some good ones coming out. If you join the $40 tier after one has already come out, my assistant will add it to your Bookfunnel library the next business day.

Monster Girl Islands 14

The OP MC 09

Made in Hell 05

Werepanther 06

Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2. NSFW covers!

Asian + Pie = awesome

Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 is out!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B586QZ3F

This was a fun one to write.

Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 Chapter 4

“Sami doesn’t want to risk getting flagged in the system,” Kylah said as she read the texts off her phone. “So she’s not going to try and check out any books with the stolen card.”

“She’s going to be doing all that research all on her own?” I asked with a frown, because that was a lot of reading, and even for someone who loved books as much as Asami Tanaka did, it was a daunting task.

The sheer breadth of information she would need to sift through would be immense. She didn’t have a password for Jake Haystead’s login, meaning she wouldn’t be able to use the internet and skim-read e-books by searching for useful terms. Admittedly, the Sanctuary hadn’t seemed too big on technology-- insofar as digitizing its resources went-- but even with access to an academic library, there would still be a lot of wrong stuff for Asami to sift through.

Kylah gave a soft little laugh that reminded me of a tinkling bell, and she twisted a lock of hair around her finger as she put her phone back in her pocket.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a knowing smile. “She’ll be fine. And if she isn’t, Kegan can just steal another student ID, and one of us can go help.”

“Not it,” Carmen said immediately, and I shot her a look, but she just shrugged. “What? I don’t like research. Don’t like reading. I’m more of a hands-on, practical learner.”

As a matter of fact, I knew exactly how ‘hands on’ my sister liked to be with her learning, because she’d disassembled the engine to our foster father’s prized 1930s Cadillac when we’d been fourteen. Allegedly, this had been so she could compare the differences between its engine and that of a modern Cadillac, but I still didn’t know where she’d gotten a modern Cadillac engine from and for many reasons, I didn’t want to.

Theo had not been pleased about the engine. He’d been slightly less not-pleased when Carmen reassembled it flawlessly. The day my sister turned fifteen, he’d helped her get a part-time mechanic job at a nearby garage, and she’d gone full-time upon graduating high-school, while I’d joined the military.

Even if we’d had the money for college-- which we hadn’t-- neither I nor Carmen were the academic type. I didn’t much like research either, but I still felt a bit guilty about Asami doing that much work all by herself.

“She really will be alright, Leo,” Kylah insisted with a smile. “There’s nothing Sami likes more than to be surrounded by piles and piles of old books.”

Kegan walked over to sit at the end of the bed, right next to where Carmen was sitting, cross-legged. The blond man peered over my sister’s shoulders for a few moments, and then he looked over at Kylah with a grin.

“Well,” he said to Carmen in a low enough voice that Kylah didn’t seem to hear it, but I did. “I reckon I can think of one-- maybe two-- things she’d prefer to be surrounded by. Don’t you?”

I had no idea what Kegan was referring to, but evidently my sister did, because she let out a snicker, and when I shot her another look, she just smiled at me as pleasantly and innocently as possible. As if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

That crap wouldn’t work on me. I knew her almost better than she knew herself. I’d seen her try to charm friends and teachers and guardians for years with that exact same look. When she’d broken Theo and Maria’s ten p.m. curfew on her first date with Lisa, when she’d forgotten to do her homework and lied about spilling a drink over it, when she’d been trying to get her friend Jack to ask out his crush by needling him constantly about how much the girl obviously liked him.

“Care to share with the class, Monkey?” I asked as I raised an eyebrow.

“Nah, I’m good,” Carmen replied breezily. “Now, while you and Kegan were putting up with the Order of the Sticks-Up-Their-Asses, Kylah and I made some progress of our own.”

“You did?” I asked and grinned at Kylah. “What did you find?”

“Well, the precinct was a bust, because their records room requires an ID to even enter, which we don’t have,” my sister explained to Kegan and me.

“So, instead, Carmen and I just went to a local supernatural bar,” the blonde woman said with a shrug. “Chatted to people, asked for information.”

“You’d be surprised how forgiving people are with details when you genuinely want to help with a problem that’s been terrorizing their community,” my sister said in a bland tone. “They were all too happy to cough up information when we complained about how ineffectual the Order was being.”

“Ask a question, you get nothing, state an opinion, you’ll have answers galore,” I agreed with a nod.

“Exactly,” Kylah said with a smile.

I ducked down and kissed her again since I was impressed.

“So, Kylah and I made notes on everything the locals told us, and we managed to get a rough timeline of events,” my sister said.

“That sounds an awful lot like research,” I remarked with a grin that only got wider when Carmen glared at me.

“We’ve managed to narrow down the first attacks by this creature to about a year ago,” Kylah said, and they both led Kegan and I through to the room they shared with Asami. On the wall, they’d tacked up a huge expanse of newspaper clippings and what Carmen had been able to learn through a rudimentary internet search, which had unexpectedly included some police case files that were illegally leaked to the public about six months ago.

“One of the humans who got ‘mauled by a mountain lion,’” Kylah said with extremely dramatic air-quotes, “was the son of the dean of the nearby university, so his father was able to kick up enough of a fuss and circumvent enough bureaucracy, got ahold of the file, and published it online with a number for anonymous tips.”

“Which were of course flooded with total garbage, because the only people who actually know what is going on are not going to touch human authorities with a ten-foot barge pole,” Carmen added unnecessarily. “All of the ‘information’ was from people just trying to fuck with him.”

“Bit fucked up,” I remarked with a frown. “His son died.”

“His son was embroiled in three separate sexual assault lawsuits,” Carmen deadpanned. “Daddy decided to settle in all three cases. Somehow, those allegations didn’t even make the papers until after the murder file was leaked.”

“His dad was able to pay for a cover-up until he antagonized the cops,” I said with a nod. “But we have the case file, then?”

“I don’t know how useful it is, since the autopsy is ruled as an animal attack,” Kylah said with a frown. “I do wonder what the excuse would be if we were in a state that didn’t have cougars.”

“Bears, freak case of migration, anything that doesn’t make the coroner look like a crazy guy,” Carmen said as she waved her hand back and forth carelessly. “But the timeline is actually pretty useful. People talk about sighting weird aura or feeling an unusual magical signature on a pretty regular basis, about every six weeks.”

“However, this doesn’t line up with any species’ timeline we know of,” Kylah told Kegan and me. “Vampires need to feed at least once every two months, but it’s more common for them to act weekly. Werewolves can only change form on the full moon.”

“And the last attack was about five-and-a-half weeks ago,” my sister added. “So the next attack will probably be within the next few days.”

“It’s good we’ll have more overt signs to track,” I said carefully. “But I’m not too enthused about the idea of being on a hard deadline.”

“Agreed.” Kegan nodded. “We don’t want anybody else getting hurt, and we don’t have enough information yet to guarantee we’ll be able to save them in time.”

“And you’re absolutely sure it’s just one species?” I asked with a pointed look at Kylah.

“Frankly, I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s just one creature,” the blonde woman answered, and her brow furrowed with displeasure. “I’m not the researcher, so I can’t make as educated a guess as Sami. Hopefully, she turns something up at the library.”

“She will,” I said with confidence.

“There’s just the question of whether she does before the next attack,” Carmen said, and she looked over at the papers with a frown. “Do we want to try and catch this thing ourselves? If someone could get seriously hurt, or even killed, we should be moving to attack, shouldn’t we?”

“I don’t know if we have the resources to mount an effective attack on this thing,” Kegan told her and cocked his head to look at where she was looking, at one of the pages from the police file that had been leaked online. “We only have one official case file.”

“We can try again once you pickpocket some cop,” my sister said with a grin and elbowed him encouragingly.

“Better yet, one of the people who actually work in the records room,” I added, and I folded my arms as I, too, grinned at Kegan. “But I don’t think we should try to attack or capture this thing. We don’t have enough information, and we definitely don’t have enough people or weapons. We’re too in the dark, and if we get caught off guard, we’re fucked.”

I was used to risking my life by now, but when it came to the lives of my sister, my friends, my team, I was a lot more careful. If we charged in, guns blazing, and someone got hurt, I knew I would never forgive myself.

“You said the aura looked weird,” Kylah said with a nod. “I think this is a job that should be approached with caution, even if we’re on a tight deadline.”

By the way her mouth twisted, I could tell Carmen was uneasy at the idea of someone getting hurt because of us wanting to be careful, so I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.

“We’re not leaving this alone,” I promised her firmly. “We’re just being careful. We won’t just stand back and let people get hurt, but if we only go in with half the information, we’re the ones who will get hurt.”

“And no one else will be left to try and stop this thing,” Kegan added.

I nodded to him in agreement, and Carmen managed a small, rueful smile.

“Alright, I see your guys’ point,” she eventually said with a sigh, and she patted my hand. “We’re playing it smart.”

“And you’re one of the smartest people I know,” I said to her, and she grinned.

“Only when it comes to an internal combustion engine,” she snorted, but I could tell she was pleased.

“So, if we’re not going to make an offensive move on this thing tonight, what d’you want to do?” Kegan then asked me. “Shall I steal another student ID so we can give Asami some backup?”

“Let’s see what she comes up with tonight, first,” I said. “You’re still technically on R-and-R, dude, you shouldn’t even have been out hunting the revenants.”

“I feel fine,” the blond man said as he frowned at me in a slightly petulant way. “There’s not any damage left, physically anyway.”

“No, but we don’t want to put strain on you, or Sami,” Kylah said.

We all knew that while the Japanese woman knew some basic healing magic, it was only basic, and a severe injury would be too complex and too exhausting for her to try to heal. None of us wanted to put any more stress on Asami than necessary, which was just another item on the long list of Reasons To Not Be Stupid.

“It’s psychosomatic,” Kegan said in a stern tone as he looked at his sister. “I got hurt on a field mission, it’s going to flare up more when I’m stressed about field missions. I have it under control.”

“I’m serious, Kegan,” I said as I matched his tone. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt, and we don’t have the capacity to fix serious injuries if someone does.”

“Then I need to practice,” the blond man said like it was obvious. “I need experience in the field. I’ve been training for years, I have the skills, just like Kylah. All we need is the opportunity to put what we learn into practice.”

“Our foster mother used to always tell us that the first year after you pass your test is when you actually learn how to drive,” Carmen said. “So, if you guys leaving the Order is passing the test, this year is you actually learning to drive.”

“At least we know how to operate the car,” Kylah said with amusement, and with a grin, Carmen flipped the blonde woman off.

“My point is, I don’t want anyone on our team taking on more than they can handle,” Kylah said. “That goes for Sami with her healing magic, and you, Kegan, because you’re still recovering.”

“Okay, so we take tonight off,” my sister then suggested with a shrug. “Strictly non-combat activities, and we wait to see what Asami turns up at the library.”

“You know, I wouldn’t mind a break,” Kylah admitted in a sheepish voice, and she twisted a blonde curl around her finger again as she bit her lip. “It’s been kind of non-stop ever since… well. Ever since Kegan and I met the two of you.”

“It really has,” I said, because the realization only dawned on me as Kylah said it. But man, I was actually exhausted. I’d barely had a chance to sit down and think in the past three weeks, and no chances at all in the past two.

“Tonight off it is, then,” Kegan said, but I could tell he was a little frustrated the decision had been partly based on the fact he was still recovering from an injury. “As long as you lot don’t force me to take it any easier than you all do.”

“Fully egalitarian, you have my word.” I smirked, and the blond man smiled dryly at me.

“In that case, I’m going to a bar,” Carmen announced, and she stood up from the bed and grabbed Kegan’s hand. “And you’re coming with me.”

“I am?” he asked, though he didn’t look remotely bothered by the idea.

“Absolutely,” Carmen replied with a decisive nod. “You haven’t been able to drink for weeks because you got shanked. You have some catching up to do, and I’m gonna help you do it.”

“Well, that’s that, then!” Kylah said, and she let out another tinkling laugh. “You two have fun!”

“We’ll hit up that supernatural bar,” Carmen told her. “See if we can get any more information from the locals. If not, I’ll drink blondie here under the table.”

Kegan very pointedly looked Carmen up and down and gave a small scoff. He was about an inch taller than me, albeit slenderer, and my sister was a half-foot shorter than me. She wasn’t short by any stretch of the imagination, but she was still a lot smaller than Kegan.

I, however, knew better, and when Kegan scoffed, I grinned.

“First mistake,” I warned him with a laugh.

“He’s right,” Carmen agreed in a faux-serious tone. “There are two things no one can beat me at: car repairs, and drinking.”

“In that case, we’ll know to pick the pair of you up from the hospital after Kegan has his stomach pumped,” Kylah giggled. “You guys have fun.”

“Back atcha.” Carmen grinned, and when she shot me a very unsubtle wink, I glared at her.

It was true, though, that in the past two weeks, Kylah and I had no time alone together. It hadn’t made sense for her, Kegan, and Asami to blow all their money living in a hotel when Carmen and I had a perfectly decent apartment, so the five of us squeezed into the two-bedroom, with Asami sharing Carmen’s room and the Campbells sleeping in my room, since I’d refused to let a guy recovering from a stab wound sleep on a couch.

As a result, when Carmen and Kegan pulled the motel room door shut behind them, and left me and Kylah alone together for the first time in two weeks, I wasted no time in leaning forward and kissing her deeply.

She smiled against my mouth and curled her hands into the lapels of my jacket to pull me closer.

“Getting right to it, are we?” she teased softly.

“Are you complaining?” I asked as I pulled away from her lips to mouth kisses down her neck. I was looking for that little spot that would make her give a soft whimper and tremble in my arms, and I grinned into her skin when I found it..

“Absolutely not,” she answered in a breathy voice, and her arms slid up over my shoulders, around my neck, to hold me close. “I just-- I thought you would want to go talk to locals, too?”

I hummed against her neck like I was pretending to actually consider this, and my hands slid slowly up and down her back as I kept kissing along her throat.

“Nah,” I said after a few seconds. “I trust Kegan. And Monkey. They’ll handle it just fine. And he said he needed the chance to practice, right?”

“He did,” Kylah murmured as she tipped her head back a little to give me better access, and one of her hands reached up to tangle in the hair at the base of my skull and pushed my mouth closer to her neck.

I rolled my hips into hers to let her feel just how much I’d missed her like this, just how much I wanted her like this, and she gave a small, gasping moan as she tried and only half-succeeded to choke it back.

And fuck, had I missed her.

Top priority for our group now was a place where we could live without being crammed on top of one another. Carmen and I had a bit of money from our parents, but not enough to buy an apartment in LA. But maybe, now that we’d teamed up with three magically-gifted badasses, that could change, and Kylah and I could have a room to ourselves more frequently than once every two weeks.

“Do that again,” Kylah muttered, and her other hand gripped desperately at my shoulder as she pressed herself against me. “God, Leo, I…”

“What?” I asked in a vaguely teasing tone as I kissed my way back to her mouth and crashed her lips against mine. “What do you want?”

“You,” she breathed back as she held my face in her hands, and my lips brushed against hers as she spoke. “Want you.”

“You have me,” I swore to her as I walked her back toward the bed, and my hands were palming at her hips and ass and pulling her close against my crotch.

I wanted her so bad it was almost physically painful.

Kylah let herself fall backward onto the bed, and she pulled me along with her with one hand in my hair and the other around my shoulders while scratching lightly at my back. I knelt over her and pressed frantic kisses to her neck and collar before I grew frustrated by her neckline and reached for her hips to rip her shirt off over her head.

Her hands went to my shoulders and tugged meaningfully at the jacket I was still wearing, and I scrambled to shrug it off my shoulders before I let Kylah pull at the hem of my t-shirt and remove that, too.

Our kiss broke only for a moment as I pulled the shirt over my head and threw it carelessly aside, but I leaned back down to devour her mouth with my own as if I hadn’t seen her in years. I put a hand behind her knee to hike her leg up around my hips and pressed against her again, and even through my jeans and hers I knew she could feel how hard I was for her, because she let out a low moan.

“Off,” she panted. “Jeans off, now.”

“Fuck yes,” I groaned and kissed her again. Her hands scrabbled to unbuckle my belt and undo my fly, and even that slight relief of pressure was enough to make me moan a little into her mouth.

It was graceless and awkward as I kicked off my jeans while trying not to break our kiss, but I did manage it, and Kylah shuffled further up the bed as I undid the button of her fly and tugged her pants down by the belt loops. I kissed my way down her stomach as I went, and by the time her jeans were falling off her ankles and to the floor, I was mouthing kisses over her abdomen, and her hand was scratching the base of my skull in a silent plea.

I nuzzled her stomach with a grin before I crawled my way back up to her and let my hand slide under the cotton of her panties to brush lightly over her clit.

“Fuck, you’re so wet,” I murmured as I kissed her.

“Want you so bad,” Kylah whined and wrapped her legs tight around my hips. “Please, Leo, don’t-- don’t make me wait, fuck.”

When she was begging me like that, who was I to refuse?

I slid one finger inside her and grinned as she shuddered and moaned, and her head rolled back against the pillows. I slowly pumped in and out a few times before adding a second, until she began to claw at my shoulders.

“Please,” she panted into my ear, and before I could answer or tease or do as she asked, she shoved me hard in the shoulders so I flipped onto my back. The next thing I knew, Kylah was straddling me and grinding her hips down against mine so hard I couldn’t stop the low moan that ripped itself from my throat.

The blonde woman then leaned down to kiss me, hard and desperate, and when she pulled away she whispered, “Take off your boxers.”

I was only too happy to comply, and I shuffled them off as she reached behind her back to remove her bra. I sat up to kiss her sternum and each of my hands squeezed at her breasts, which distracted her from taking off her panties as she arched her back and clung to me. She seemed to remember her original goal after a while and pushed me down onto my back so she could shimmy them off, and I took one of her nipples into my mouth and rolled the other between my fingers.

“Shit,” she groaned and pressed herself closer to me. “Shit…”

I grinned as I pulled away from her chest and tipped my head up to kiss her mouth again, but my smile turned into a shaking gasp when Kylah reached down between us to grab hold of me and stroke me a few times.

“Oh, fuck…” I breathed against her mouth.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I answered quickly. “Yeah, fuck yeah. Please.”

With that, she sank down onto me, and we each let out a moan. Kylah’s hands dug into my shoulders and mine into her hips. It took every fiber of my self-control not to thrust up into her, but I let her take the pace as she adjusted, and soon she was moving on top of me. Her breath punched from her chest with every stroke, and her burning emerald eyes were staring into mine while her mouth dropped open in a perfect little ‘o.’

“Oh, god,” she groaned as she rolled her hips into mine and forced me deep. “Right there, fuck, fuck, right there.”

After two weeks of barely more than a couple of kisses, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold out for very long. Kylah was too hot, too tight, too perfect, so I wrapped one hand around her back and pulled her down over me, and my other went between us to rub at her clit.

“Shit!” Kylah let out a high-pitched squeal, and her fingers dug hard into my shoulders. “Fuck, Leo!”

“You close?” I asked her and bit her lower lip gently.

She hissed into my mouth and pushed herself ever closer to me, with hips still rolling into mine.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Yeah, I-- god.”

“Come on,” I encouraged, and I sped up my hand a little, just enough to make her start to shudder in my grasp. “Wanna-- wanna see you. Wanna feel you cum for me.”

“Yes,” she agreed desperately, and I felt her begin to spasm around me, so I had to grit my teeth to hold on just a little longer. “Yes, yes, yes-- oh!”

Kylah pushed her hips into mine as she came with a cry, and a moment later I followed her over the edge and came so hard my vision went white. We undulated against each other as I filled her up, and I felt the blonde’s teeth dig into my shoulder as she spasmed on top of me.

By the time I returned to earth, Kylah had too, and she stared at me, panting hard, with her hands braced on my chest. I managed a slow, lazy smile and leaned up to give her a slow, lazy kiss.

“Fuck…” she breathed against my mouth as she kissed me back. “That was… intense… Feels like you poured a gallon of sperm into me.”

“Maybe we should always leave it two weeks, then,” I teased, and she swatted me.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned. She eased off me carefully and shifted so she was lying on the bed beside me, and I turned onto my side to pull her into my arms and nuzzle the crook of her shoulder.

“We need a shower,” I told her. “Care to join me?”

“That sounds nice.” She smiled and kissed me. “But let’s use the one in your room. Ours is a bit weird.”

I grabbed my towel and followed Kylah into my and Kegan’s room. After the intensity of the sex, I was content to hold her in my arms under the hot water and pepper soft kisses over her cheeks and shoulders, and we both found we were so tired from the non-stop action of the past fortnight that we couldn’t even be bothered to get dressed or even return to the girls’ room, so we crawled naked into my bed with still-damp hair.

“We definitely need to get a place with more than two bedrooms,” Kylah said as she absently ran her hand up and down my sternum.

“Carmen said the same, don’t worry,” I yawned. “I think we could all use a little more privacy than what our current situation gets us.”

“I haven’t shared a room with my brother since before we came to the Sanctuary,” Kylah told me, and I tipped my head to look down at her.

“You remember?” I asked her, and my eyebrows raised. “Your life before you came to the Sanctuary?”

“A little.” She shrugged. “Not a huge amount. But I remember our father didn’t have a very large house, so Kegan and I shared a room.”

“Do you… like those memories?” I asked her carefully.

“I don’t have any particularly good or bad ones,” she said. “Just neutral stuff. Sharing a room with Kegan. Playing at the beach one summer. I don’t know. Kegan remembers more than I do.”

“I get the sense he doesn’t like your father much,” I admitted.

“He doesn’t,” Kylah said with a nod. “I’m a little more neutral, but I think that’s mainly because I don’t really remember him. You can’t hate someone you don’t know.”

“He’s not worth it,” I said. “Your hate, or Kegan’s. You guys have your own family without him.”

Kylah tipped her head up to smile at me, and she leaned forward to peck my lips.

“You’re right,” she said and nuzzled my shoulder. “We do.”

The peace of this moment was shattered a second later when Carmen burst into the room, opened her mouth to announce something, noticed Kylah and I were naked in bed, and interrupted herself before she’d even started speaking to let out a horrified yell.

“Leo!” she shouted and clapped her hands over my eyes. “God! What the fuck, dude?”

“What do you mean what the fuck?” I demanded. “It’s my room, Monkey!”

“It’s also my room,” Kegan said from the doorway, and while he grimaced at the sight of his twin sister in bed with a guy, he didn’t totally freak out like my twin sister had.

“I thought you guys were at a bar,” Kylah said as she pulled the blankets up to her chin. “What happened?”

“I’m not talking to either of you when I know you’re both naked under there,” Carmen said, still with her hand over her eyes. “Put on some clothes, then we’ll explain.”

“You know, we’re naked under clothes, too,” I told her, and with her free hand she flipped me off.

“Just get dressed, Pip!” she said, and she stopped flipping me off to grasp around behind her for Kegan. She shoved him toward the door that adjoined our group’s two rooms and then began groping for the doorknob to shut it behind her. “We have information about the creature attacks!”

“You do?” I asked, and all thoughts of embarrassing my sister vanished. “What?”

Carmen finally located the doorknob and began to pull the door shut, but before it closed entirely, Kegan called out from the girls’ bedroom.

“There’s going to be one tonight.”

Kill Monsters Get Rich 2 Chapter 3

Kegan was evidently a man of many talents, because I hadn’t noticed anything remotely suspicious when he’d bumped into the young man, whose name was apparently Jake Haystead. I hadn’t seen Kegan’s hands go anywhere near the oblivious kid’s wallet or pockets or anything.

And it seemed Jake Haystead hadn’t noticed either, because despite the fact my sister was staring after him with absolutely no subtlety, he didn’t turn around, or pat at his pockets, or do anything other than keep walking.

“This should get you into the library, no problem,” Kegan said as he passed Jake Haystead’s student ID to Asami.

I knew students would often lend and borrow their friends’ ID cards if their own was lost or forgotten at home, so I knew no one would be suspicious if they saw Asami didn’t match up to the photo-- assuming anyone even noticed. I couldn’t imagine that was the most pressing thing on the minds of the library staff.

“I’ll be able to get into the older collections, too, with this,” Asami said as she took the ID card. “Proper research and historical accounts, stuff we can actually use.”

“I wonder if they’ll have any books by supernaturals in there,” Kylah mused. “There are quite a few who are known in human academic circles, too.”

“It would be handy if there were,” Carmen said. “We’d be able to rely on that properly, rather than Twilight or whatever.”

“You know, I have a vampire friend who actually really likes those books,” Asami said with an amused smile as she slipped the ID card into her back pocket. “They’re total nonsense, of course, but she thinks they’re funny.”

“A lot of supernaturals find human takes on magic very interesting,” Kylah explained to Carmen and I. “Sometimes it’s actually quite accurate, maybe because someone involved in the writing actually is a supernatural. But a lot of the time it’s just... wrong. And it’s funny!”

“I get that,” I said with a grin. I liked the idea of a vampire explaining the inaccuracies of vampire pulp romance. “But it’s not super useful for figuring out whatever the hell is killing random hikers in the woods.”

“That it isn’t,” Kegan agreed, and he pointed at me. “So, Sami, you’ve got this?”

“Absolutely,” the Japanese woman said with a firm nod.

If I was being honest, the research part of this monster hunting business didn’t appeal to me. I loved learning about the magical world and the people within it, but actually researching, looking through old books for the tiny nugget of information we needed, that was not my idea of fun.

Unfortunately, though, it was the only way we were going to stop these murders, because it was uncomfortably obvious the Order of the Eye wasn’t going to do shit to help.

I remembered what Amaryllis, a Seelie faerie who’d tried to have Kylah, Carmen, Asami, and I killed, had said a few weeks ago. She’d talked about the veil that separated the human world from the magical world and how the separation was unnatural. She’d been convinced humanity was naturally subservient to magic, and that faeries-- and other magical species, but mainly faeries-- should rule over humans. Before the veil, humans had known about magic, and they’d feared and respected it, and it was a time she clearly missed.

But since I’d never much liked being told what to do, I reckoned I preferred the world as it was now.

The veil wasn’t very popular with other supernaturals either, though. Many believed the separation of magic and humanity was wrong, and that they were meant to intertwine. On the far other end of the spectrum to Amaryllis were people like Jamison Hawthorn, a half-fae we saved who apparently believed seers and human-magical hybrids such as half-fae were the natural order, the inevitable conclusion we were all slowly creeping toward.

But the Order had been established explicitly to protect the veil and what it stood for. Humanity possessed weapons of mass destruction and advanced technology and billions of people. Magic had arcane forces and power over the natural elements. I knew if the veil ever fell, the most likely outcome would be conflict, and a war between humanity and magic would devastate the planet and probably render both sides practically extinct.

So, insofar as ‘preventing the apocalypse’ went, I supposed I appreciated the veil and the Order. The Order were also the people paying us to hunt these monsters, and while they only did that because they didn’t want to deal with those problems themselves, they were paying a lot.

That reminded me, actually. We still needed to go to the Sanctuary and get paid for the revenant problem we’d just cleared up.

Kegan had evidently said the same thought, because he turned to me.

“Do you want me to mirror you to the Sanctuary? So you can give Renée the photos?”

“That would be great, thanks,” I said to him, and I was relieved I had a decent excuse to get out of research. Plus, I knew we would be in very safe hands with Asami. Carmen and Kylah could trawl the internet for other useful sources, or try to get access to more detailed police files instead of just what was available to the public.

Ideally, we needed a police officer who was also a supernatural, but I had a sneaking suspicion we would be out of luck. Otherwise, the disappearances and murders would have been brought to the Order’s attention a lot sooner.

“Okay, so Kegan and Leo will head to the Sanctuary to speak to Renée, Asami will masquerade as a student to research in the university library, and Kylah and I can do a little on-the-ground detective work,” Carmen said in a conclusive tone.

“You read my mind,” I joked, and she grinned at me.

Being my twin, she obviously knew me better than anyone else in the world, but it was still funny to pretend like twin-telepathy was a thing. A lot of kids at our high school had asked us if we were psychic, and we’d quickly learned not to lean into the joke after all the stuff about the silver lines only we could see.

“It would help to speak to more local magicals,” Kylah agreed. “Or human law enforcement. We could pose as reporters.”

“I was more thinking FBI,” Carmen said with a mischievous grin. “Could you make us invisible and sneak us into the precinct’s record room?”

“I could make myself invisible while you distract the officers for good measure,” the blonde woman suggested, and Carmen pointed at her.

“I like it! Alright, so we’ve all got our assignments. Meet back at the motel in a couple hours?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Is there anything Kegan and I should pick up from the Sanctuary, though? Books, clothes, et cetera?”

“Since we’re no longer Eyes, we no longer have access to their resources,” Asami sighed gloomily.

I could understand her frustration. I wasn’t even obsessed with books, but even I had been taken aback by the Sanctuary’s library. The sheer size of it, the impossible number of books, and the grand architecture had made it feel like something out of a fairytale.

But Asami was a researcher, and it was clear to anyone who talked to her for even a few minutes that she adored books. And now she couldn’t access any of them.

This was another thing I disliked about the Order, and another thing that made it so obvious that helping people wasn’t really what they were about. If they really wanted magical threats to be taken care of, they would lend their resources to anyone and everyone.

Instead, they played gatekeeper, which meant people who were less fortunate than Carmen and I, people who didn’t have three Eyes on their teams, including a researcher, got killed.

I didn’t know how yet, but I vowed to get Asami all the books she could ever possibly desire.

Once we’d all finished, Asami headed to the library to get started on research, Kylah and Carmen made for the police precinct, and Kegan and I returned to the motel.

I was familiar with mirror magic by now, but it still fascinated me. It was a particularly complex type of magic, but it was Kegan’s ‘affinity.’ I still didn’t know exactly how his being a half-faerie affected his magic, other than it meant healing magic didn’t work on him the same way it did on regular humans, but I wondered if his faerie blood had impacted his affinity.

Carefully, he used one of Kylah’s silver daggers to cut a shallow slice along the back of his arm, and he then dabbed a symbol on the mirror in our shared motel room. I was still taken aback by the way a mirror looked when it became a doorway, like liquid mercury that rippled and shifted but didn’t fall out of the frame.

I was used to mirror traveling by this point, but it still wasn’t a sensation I particularly enjoyed. It was similar to being trapped in a sort of bubble, because I could feel the liquid mirror around me, but I didn’t get wet, and it didn’t stick to me.

After several seconds of discomfort, I emerged into the entrance hall of the Sanctuary, located in Denver, Colorado, about thirteen-hundred miles east of where I’d been standing only moments before.

Kegan stepped out of the mirror just behind me, and I saw him tense as he took in the hall. His shoulders bunched up ever so slightly, and his jaw twitched as he clenched it just a little tighter than normal.

I could understand that. This place had been his home, the only one he’d ever really known, and two weeks ago he and Kylah had just… left. Walked out and left it all behind.

I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling because Carmen and I hadn’t really had a home since we were eight years old. Our foster parents Theo and Maria were kind, but they’d never quite felt like our family.

Then again, the Sanctuary had never been much of a home for Kylah and Kegan, either. I’d seen first-hand how some of the other Eyes treated them, mistrusted them for being half-faerie.

I wondered what that felt like for the Campbells to never truly have a place where they belonged. Carmen and I had the memories of our parents to compare Theo and Maria to. Kylah and Kegan had only known the judgment of the Order.

“You can wait in the motel, if you want,” I said to Kegan. “I’ve just gotta show Renée the photos. I can do that by myself.”

Kegan paused a long time before he answered, and I knew he was carefully weighing his options.

“No,” he said at last. “I’ll come with you. This was my home for years. I refuse to let it haunt me.”

I supposed that made sense. Haunted things were so much bigger and creepier in your head than in real life. If Kegan allowed the Sanctuary to become this Forbidden Place in his mind, it would only worsen how he felt, and it might even cloud his judgment going forward.

I clapped my hand on his shoulder, half comforting and half impressed, and then the two of us headed down the winding hallways toward Renée’s office.

The Sanctuary, on account of not actually being on the physical plane, was ever-changing. It was anchored at the front entrance to a dilapidated church, which also happened to be what the Sanctuary looked like to mortals, or non-seers.

All of this meant the corridors shifted, and rooms would become closer or further to walk to. I’d never actually seen any of them change in front of my eyes, but I knew they did.

Renée’s office seemed eager to see us, or perhaps the Sanctuary didn’t want Kegan and I within its walls any longer than strictly necessary, because we arrived quickly. Kegan knocked on the enormous doors, and they swung open to reveal Renée sitting at her desk, which was covered in paperwork, and she looked surprised when she noticed who’d just walked in.

“Kegan,” she said in a slightly stunned tone. “And Leo Rivera. What are you two doing here?”

“Collecting payment,” I answered, and I pulled the flyer for the revenant job out of my back pocket, plus my phone. Carmen had sent me the photos since her phone camera was better than mine, and the true horrors of poisoned magic were artfully rendered in close-ups of dismembered limbs and rotting innards.

Renée’s face didn’t even flicker as she looked at the photos, but given that she’d been doing this for a lot longer than two weeks, I had to imagine she’d seen far worse.

“Who was the initial spirit who poisoned the land?” she asked after several long seconds. She didn’t look up from my phone, just flicked over to the next photograph.

“Jonathan Rowe,” Kegan answered. “Hanged himself after his wife and child were killed by a disease outbreak.”

“Hanged himself? So he was tied to a tree, then?”

“He was,” I said, and inwardly I had to fight not to stare at her, because she’d figured out Jonathan Rowe’s anchor in about two-seconds, and she hadn’t even seen the place where he’d died.

But again, she’d been doing this for a lot longer than I or the Campbells.

“He must have been truly heartbroken that his death was enough to poison the land there,” Renée said after a moment as she handed my phone back to me. “Even without being administered last rites, many spirits still pass peacefully to the beyond.”

“Well, now he has,” I said. “So you see the proof, the revenants.”

“And you reburied them?” Renée asked, and she raised one eyebrow. “Or at least didn’t leave them strewn across the forest floor?”

“Of course,” I said, and Renée smiled encouragingly. She projected a very motherly demeanor, albeit a mother who was quite firm and strict, and I could sense there was real pride as she looked at Kegan and me.

Pride, and maybe relief.

Despite my issues with the Order, and my dislike for the way it handled things, I did genuinely like Renée. I could tell she honestly cared for Kegan and Kylah, and I also got the sense that she didn’t agree with everything the Order did, either. She’d been in favor of Carmen and I becoming real Eyes, of us being allowed to train properly and use the Sanctuary’s extensive resources.

She was also one of the very few members of the magical community I’d met who didn’t have a problem with the Campbell’s being half-fae.

And she’d known my father when they’d been kids. Not well, but she had known him.

Part of me wanted to ask Renée a barrage of questions every time I saw her, to try and get every scrap of information I could, because my own memories of my father were blurred with time and my having been so young. But another part of me wanted to preserve the idea of the perfect, caring man who had taught Carmen and I how to ride a bike, who had pretended to be a monster coming to eat us, who had cooked the best chili I’d ever tasted.

The idea that I could learn something that might lower my opinion of him kind of scared me, because those memories were all I had, and the last thing I wanted to do was somehow taint them.

Or, worse, taint Carmen’s memories of him.

“You work fast, the little team you’ve put together,” Renée said as she sat back down in the large chair behind her desk and gestured for Kegan and I to sit.

I was contemplating whether to say we couldn’t stay, because I’d seen how uncomfortable Kegan had been to be back in the Sanctuary, but the blond man sat down before I could say anything.

I sat, too, and Renée looked at us both over steepled fingers, and I thought she seemed a little less motherly and a little more authoritative now.

“I’m impressed by the work you five have done,” she said. “Thanks to your efforts, the missing half-fae in Los Angeles have been reunited with their loved ones, and we are keeping tabs on any known vampire associates of Sullivan Scratch.”

Not for the first time, I remembered that day in Scratch’s safehouse-slash-base-of-operations-slash-dungeon. He’d imprisoned as many half-faeries as he could get his hands on and had drunk their blood so he could withstand sunlight. When we’d found him out and hunted him down, he’d tried to bargain for his life with information on whatever was going on in Phoenix, Arizona.

We’d learned the Phoenix group was more than one type of magical species, and they were a group hellbent on taking down the veil, on reintroducing magic to humanity.

Many people in the magical world liked that idea, but only the most radical would agree with what Phoenix was trying to do, because there was no finesse to it, no delicacy. It would uproot everything humans thought they knew about the world, it would throw everyone and everything into chaos, and that wasn’t even getting into the fact the Phoenix group intended to subjugate, enslave, and possibly exterminate humanity.

Needless to say, I wanted to stop them. And I would stop them, as soon as we figured out exactly what their plans were.

“However,” Renée then said, and her voice pulled me out of my thoughts. “I want to remind you both not to get too brazen. You have had early successes, and saved lives, but you have still chosen an immensely dangerous path, and I don’t want those victories to go to your head. You are still very capable of being hurt and killed, even you and Kylah, Kegan, even with all your training.”

“Believe me, I know,” Kegan answered, and he put his hand to his side, where he’d been stabbed a few weeks ago. “We’re not being brash. This was a job we came across while doing something else in Oregon.”

“We decided to help, since we knew we had the means,” I added, and I tried to keep my voice pleasant, tried not to sound too judgmental and pointed, but I only half-succeeded.

“And that is admirable, but it’s still dangerous,” Renée told us. “You don’t have the resources of Eyes anymore. You don’t have the luxury of back-up, and I am not in a position to change that.”

I got the sense Renée’s hands were more tied than she was technically allowed to admit. She was the head of this Sanctuary chapter and a member of the Council, but she was beholden to the votes of her peers, such as Councilman Samuel White, whom I knew had a personal dislike of ‘half-breeds’ such as half-fae like the Campbells.

“We are being as careful as our choices allow,” Kegan assured Renée. “But Kylah, Asami, and I… we can do much more good and help many more people outside of the Order.”

“I know why you chose to leave,” Renée said, and her voice softened a little to sound more parental again. “And I’m heartened to see you all have such strong moral convictions. But you can’t blame me for worrying when you are putting yourselves at a marked disadvantage.”

Kegan frowned a little, and his lips pursed. Whereas Kylah twisted a lock of her wavy blonde hair around her finger when she was nervous, Kegan tended to curl his hands into fists like he was physically restraining himself from fidgeting or giving a tell.

Which was, in itself, a tell.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” he asked after a long moment, and though he technically phrased it as a question, his voice was grim with confirmation. “Phoenix.”

I could see in the way Renée’s brow furrowed ever so slightly that Kegan had hit the mark dead on, and I wondered if Renée steepled her hands like that so she, too, would not fidget and indicate what she truly felt.

“Since you are no longer a member of the Order, I am not at liberty to discuss the confidential details of active cases,” she finally answered in a very measured, rehearsed sort of voice.

When Kylah, Carmen, Asami, and I had infiltrated Sullivan Scratch’s operation, it had been via the fae Amaryllis. She was a noblewoman in the Seelie Court, and supposedly the Seelie were the benevolent faeries, but having seen Amaryllis for myself, I knew the Seelie weren’t so much ‘benevolent’ as ‘less unlikely to hunt humans for sport and eat them.’

But as best as I could tell, no one knew of Amaryllis’ involvement with Scratch. She’d deliberately kept a decent distance from it because, as a full-blooded faerie, she could not lie. And because of her status, no one would dare accuse her without hard proof.

Arguably, the fact she’d tried to kill the four of us-- primarily Kylah-- was fairly good proof, but we’d agreed not to bring that forward to the Order. Amaryllis was powerful and dangerous, and Asami and Kylah had pointed out to Carmen and I that the Fae Courts would not take such an accusation lightly, even if Amaryllis was guilty. Which she was.

It was all about appearances and manners and permissions. Even saying Amaryllis had been working with Scratch could spark a diplomatic incident, and the fact Kylah and the other targets of Scratch’s operations were half-fae meant few supernaturals would jump to their aid. Many viewed ‘half-worlders’ such as half-faeries and seers as less-than, as people who would not decide which world to belong to, and therefore people who belonged to neither.

As a Mexican-American who’d spent the latter half of his childhood in a white foster home, I could relate.

So, we’d kept quiet about Amaryllis. The Order possessed resources we didn’t and surely already knew Amaryllis was somehow involved, and they were either waiting for an opportunity to act on that information or-- and this was probably the more likely option, given the Order’s general policy of ‘not my problem’-- had decided not to act on that information at all.

In the meantime, I was eager to take down everyone who was involved with Phoenix, everyone who wanted to see innocent people hurt for the sake of a little power.

“So, it is getting worse,” I said to Renée. “You guys haven’t made any progress.”

I liked Renée, despite her position, but I didn’t trust the Order with any of Scratch’s files we’d found. The records all detailed what little he knew of Phoenix’s operations, what disasters they’d been involved with, some people he thought were members of the group, and all kinds of weird and creepy experiments on magic.

I hadn’t read any of the files, but Asami was slowly working her way through them. She’d mentioned to us things like vampires artificially inseminating half-faeries in an attempt to get ‘natural daywalkers’-- vampires who were permanently unaffected by sunlight, because they had faerie blood.

Kylah actually needed to leave the room to throw up at that part.

There was no way I was trusting the Order with that kind of information when people like Samuel White were on their Council. They cared about keeping humans and magic separate, keeping the veil up. By and large, they didn’t care if the magical world tore itself to pieces in the process. I wanted to help people, and I would, but with two half-faeries on my team, I had to think about their safety, too.

“Is the Order’s intense focus on the Phoenix problem why some of the other things up north have been neglected?” I asked with absolutely no attempt at subtlety. Renée knew exactly where I stood and if I pretended otherwise, it would be as much an insult to her as to myself.

Still, she fixed me with a warning look in her eyes before she answered.

“The Order is not as large as you seem to think, Leo,” she said. “There are not many members who are qualified to deal with such dangerous things, so we have to prioritize. Phoenix has a large body count and is attracting a lot of unwanted attention from human law enforcement.”

“There’s something up in Eugene, Oregon with a large body count, but you guys just slapped up a flyer for twenty-grand and basically told the locals to shut up,” I said in a voice that was a little more petulant and sour than I would have liked. But I wasn’t going to pretend like I wasn’t frustrated by this set up, even if I did like Renée as a person.

Even those who meant well could be caught up in bad systems and perpetuate issues. It became a moral failing when you realized you were enabling those problems and didn’t act to change it, and Renée knew the Order had problems.

“And I’m sure the two of you, along with Carmen, Kylah, and Asami, will handle it as effectively as you handled poor Jonathan Rowe,” Renée said in a slightly chilly voice.

“So, you admit the Order has to rely on bounty hunters and freelancers risking their lives with a fraction of the support?” I asked, and I met Renée’s eyes unflinchingly.

“Just because a system is not perfect does not mean it should not exist,” she answered unintimidated. “The Order of the Eye is one of the very few barriers that keeps order in the magical world. You know full well what would happen if magic was reintroduced on a large scale. Many people-- myself included-- would love to one day see a world where magic is once again allowed to coexist with humanity. But right now, it is safer for everyone if they are kept separate. And something like Phoenix is definitely not how we would want humans to rediscover magic. It is something that needs to be handled delicately, and preferably without a body count in the hundreds.”

“But Phoenix isn’t the only issue!” I insisted. “There are so many other problems, and you don’t even try to fix them.”

“I will not apologize for not having the resources to give every incident the same attention,” Renée said flatly. “As much as I would like to. Ralph Chander, I believe you know him, don’t you, Leo? He was in the same seat you are now only a few days ago, asking me to help him try and locate his missing niece. He is a nice man, and his husband, Conleth, is a friend of mine, but I could not help Ralph because there is nothing about the disappearance that would justify the Order’s involvement.”

“That’s precisely why Kylah, Asami, and I left,” Kegan said, and he made no attempt to try and hide the bitterness in his voice. “We were tired of how removed the Order is. The Eyes don’t care about Chander’s niece, and they didn’t care about the half-fae going missing, and they don’t care about whatever’s happening in Eugene right now. It markets itself as protection, as a place people can come if they need help, but it’s not. It’s just there to prop up a system you yourself admit is flawed.”

“Flawed is better than nothing,” Renée argued. “Without the Order, there would be nothing to stop any supernatural individual with ill intent from carrying out a string of murders that could garner worldwide attention. The secrecy of the magical world could not survive a Jack the Ripper of the twenty-first century.”

Renée then rose from her seat and placed her hands very firmly on the top of her desk, and I knew she was going to dismiss Kegan and I before she’d even opened her mouth.

“You have my gratitude for handling the issue in Oregon. I will see you are properly paid by the end of the week. In the meantime, I wish you all well, and again remind you to move with caution.”

Kegan and I both stood up, and I saw the blond man square his shoulders to mee the woman he regarded as a surrogate mother with the same cool indifference she projected onto him.

It was a difficult thing to love someone when you were so convinced they were wrong and you were right. I was impressed Kylah, Kegan, and Renée were so insistent on doing it.

“Thank you, Councilwoman Beckett,” Kegan said in an even voice, and he turned on his heel and walked out.

I followed right behind him, and we walked back to the mirror in the entrance hall in total silence. Again, the corridors seemed to be shorter than before, and now I was pretty sure it was because they wanted us gone ASAP.

Fine by me. I was getting more and more sick of this place by the minute.

It was a relief to step back into the motel room and see Carmen and Asami sitting on Kegan’s bed and giggling like college girls in a shared dorm, and when Kegan and I emerged from the mirror, they both turned to us with Cheshire-cat-like smiles.

“How’d it-- oh.” Kylah’s question died on her lips, just like her smile did, when she saw the forlorn expression on her twin brother’s face.

I crossed the room and kissed her forehead hello before I shook my head.

“We… had an ideological disagreement with Renée,” I told them. “But we’re getting paid for the revenant job, at least.”

“She seems to like the work we’re doing, even if she fundamentally disagrees with it,” Kegan said, and again he didn’t bother to mask the bitterness in his tone.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Carmen raise her hand as if she meant to reach for Kegan, to squeeze his shoulder and comfort him, but she let her hand drop after a moment and said nothing.

“It’s okay,” Kylah said encouragingly to her brother and me. “Renée… she loves us. I know she does. But when you’ve dedicated so much of your life to something… it can be hard to admit it has problems. It’s human nature.”

“Sunk-cost fallacy,” my sister added. “But I think I know something that might cheer you both up.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, and even that simple statement from Carmen was enough to make a wry smile tug at the corners of my mouth. “And what’s that?”

“We just got a text from Sami,” Kylah answered. “She’s in the library, and she’s found a whole lot of very promising books. We’re finally making real progress on this job.”

Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 Chapter 2

In the aftermath of the attack, I felt slightly out of sync with the world. Every cell in my body was humming with adrenaline, and I almost didn’t hear Carmen speak because of the ringing in my ears.

“You okay, Pip?” she asked me, and I had to focus on how her lips moved to actually hear the question.

I blinked slowly as my adrenaline-filled brain took a moment to process what she’d said.

“Yeah,” I said finally, and then I shook myself and repeated more firmly. “Yeah, I’m good. I didn’t realize they’d… react like that.”

“At least Jonathan Rowe can properly rest now,” my sister sighed and wiped at her brow. “And stop puppeting those poor people’s bodies. I’m just glad their souls weren’t tied to them. Can you imagine being trapped inside your own rotting corpse?”

“I’d rather not,” I said flatly as I walked over and punched her shoulder. “No scratches then?”

“Nope!” she answered and popped the ‘p.’ She then turned to Kegan. “And how are you feeling, big guy?”

Kegan shrugged in an unconcerned manner, but then he winced and put a hand to his side.

“I guess I still have a little stiffness there,” he said as he took his hand away.

That was more than fair enough, it had only been three weeks since he’d been stabbed, and since he was half-faerie, healing magic didn’t quite work the same way on him as it did on normal humans.

“Not that I could tell when we were fighting.” I smiled at him encouragingly. I supposed Carmen and I had only been able to keep pace with Kegan during the fight because he was still not at one-hundred percent, meanwhile my sister and I were still learning the ropes of fighting magical dangers.

But we were learning those ropes fast, and by the time Kegan was back to full health, I was confident we would still be able to match him, no problem.

Carmen pulled her phone out of her pocket and snapped a few photographs of the burning tree and the limp, unmoving bodies strewn across the forest floor. Showing Renée a picture of the job flyer and photos that proved we completed said job was a lot easier than mailing the actual flyer and a dismembered revenant head via USPS.

And also far less likely to get us arrested.

“That’s another thousand in the bank,” my sister said cheerfully as she waved her phone at us triumphantly. “Pretty tidy for two days’ work.”

“Well, it’s two-hundred, technically,” I reminded her.

We’d all agreed it was only fair to split all our job earnings five ways, but still, two hundred bucks wasn’t bad for an hour’s worth of work. It would certainly pay our motel bill while we worked on our main job, the reason we’d come all the way to Oregon in the first place.

I was hoping Kylah and Asami would have made progress while Kegan, Carmen and I had been dealing with the revenants, but mostly I just wanted to sit down, have some food, and maybe take a nap and a shower while I was at it since the smell of smoke from the burning tree didn’t quite cover the stench of partially-rotted bodies.

“We should rebury the bodies,” Kegan said once Carmen had successfully sent off the pictures.

“Yeah, we don’t want rangers to find them and think there’s been a mass murder,” I agreed.

Not to mention, our DNA was probably all over the scene.

“I was more thinking along the lines of it being more dignified for the dead,” Kegan deadpanned. “But that, too.”

Fortunately, there was a pair of shovels in the wooden cabin, as well as an iron pot that had probably been set over cooking fires, back before Jonathan Rowe’s family died. I grabbed one, and Carmen took the other before Kegan could get it. He frowned and clearly didn’t appreciate how Carmen was fussing over him in a similar way to how Kylah had been fussing over him these past two weeks, but he said nothing.

“I expect you and Kylah wouldn’t show up in a police database?” my sister asked Kegan as she and I dug. “Cause, like, Leo and I are in the system since we were fostered. But you and Kylah don’t interact much in the human world.”

I already knew he and Kylah owned social security and birth certificates, because their father was human, however that seemed to be the extent of contact they had in the human world.

“We don’t,” Kegan admitted. “But I’d prefer if they didn’t get my DNA on file from this.”

“Seconded,” I said with a grunt as I continued to dig.

As a general rule, I tried to avoid law enforcement.

After a while, Carmen and I had dug a decently sized hole, and the three of us began to drag the bodies-- and their various pieces-- into it with as much dignity and respect as possible.

Which, if I was honest, didn’t seem like very much. At the end of the day, it was still a mass grave.

Once they were all in, and Carmen and I packed down the earth, Kegan said some vague blessing that could generously be considered last rites, and we headed back to the motel.

Despite the fact we’d been gone for several hours, it didn’t seem like Kylah and Asami had moved from their positions on the floor. They were surrounded by a sea of newspaper clippings, police reports, and everything else we’d been able to get our hands on over the past couple of days.

“I take it you were successful?” Kylah asked as she looked up at the three of us.

I grinned, walked over to her, and then ducked down to kiss her forehead.

“Very successful,” I told her. “Poor Jonathan won’t be bugging any more tourists from now on.”

Carmen pulled out her phone to show Asami and Kylah the photographs with the enthusiasm of someone who had just been on a fabulous holiday, rather than someone who’d spent their day dismembering corpses.

“That’s another grand for Team Rivera!” she told Kylah and Asami cheerfully.

“Since when are we Team Rivera?” Kegan asked with a frown.

“Because there are two Riveras on this team.” Carmen smirked as she shoved her phone back into her jeans. “We’re forty-percent Rivera.”

“We’re also forty-percent Campbell,” Kegan pointed out and crossed his arms over his chest. “Why not Team Campbell?”

“Ugh, typical,” my sister said with an expression of pretend disappointment. “And it was Leo and my idea to go freelance, anyway. So we’re Team Rivera.”

“It doesn’t matter what we’re called,” I interjected with a meaningful look at Carmen. I’d realized in the past two weeks that teasing Kegan had rapidly become her new favorite hobby, but I wasn’t sure the blond enjoyed it as much as she did. “We got a job done, we’ve saved lives, and we made some money doing it.”

“Of course you say it doesn’t matter, it’s your name,” Kegan muttered with a petulant frown, but Kylah cleared her throat pointedly, and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m sure we can come up with a non-name-based team name,” Asami said with a small, amused smile. “In the meantime, this job needs doing.”

“Agreed,” Kylah said firmly. “We haven’t been able to find any kind of pattern to the killings. Sometimes the bodies aren’t found at all, sometimes they’re found whole but mauled, sometimes organs are missing-- but which organs are taken seems totally random.”

“Could it be like Phoenix?” I suggested. “Multiple people working together?”

“It could…” the blonde woman admitted, but her tone was skeptical. “But this doesn’t seem like a group effort. Not enough bodies are going missing to support several supernaturals.”

“Maybe it’s one individual, but they’re super picky,” Carmen suggested. “Anything about the blood types of the people who went missing? Or the organs who were taken?”

“There’s a lot of variation,” Asami sighed. “No common factors-- not that we could see, anyway.”

Unlike the revenants, there was no pattern to these killings. No time of year, or type of person, or even method of death. But Carmen had sensed something was off when she’d seen the story in a newspaper back in LA, and I trusted my sister’s gut as fully as I trusted my own.

“I don’t suppose the Order have changed their mind and decided to weigh in on this?” I asked as I sat down heavily in one of the chairs by the window. I was more exhausted from the fight than I realized, now that the adrenaline rush had worn off.

“Not unless you consider putting up a flyer for twenty-thousand dollars,” Kylah answered wryly.

I couldn’t help that my interest piqued. “Twenty-thousand?”

“I guess they must really care about all these helpless civilians they’re refusing to actually help,” Carmen scoffed.

The Order liked to present itself as the last and greatest defense between oblivious humanity and dangerous magic, but I was realizing more and more that this was more than a little selective. Its primary function was to keep humanity ignorant about magic, to uphold the integrity of the veil. Protecting supernaturals and protecting humanity was only a side-effect, and only sometimes. As long as these murders were being written up as ‘animal attacks’ by the human authorities, the Order wasn’t going to do shit to help stop them.

I picked up a nearby newspaper with one of the killings on the front page. This had been one of the more high-profile examples because a body was actually found. Carmen had done her radar thing over as many missing persons reports as we could find, and sometimes the only evidence recovered by the police had been bloody scraps of clothing. This particular case talked about how the body was mauled by a very large creature, such as a bear or a mountain lion.

“Could a werewolf do this?” I asked and showed the paper to Asami and Kylah.

“Maybe, if they were very large,” Kylah said. “But werewolves can only turn on the full moon. That killing happened a week and a half after the full moon.”

Another thing Hollywood apparently got wrong: werewolves couldn’t change shape whenever they liked.

I’d only properly met one werewolf since I’d learned about the magical world, and that had been Ralph Chander, a gym owner who was friendly and built like a brick shithouse. While he was certainly large enough to do something like this to a person, he hadn’t given me the slightest impression he actually would.

“Sometimes, in cases where a werewolf is turned by being bitten-- instead of being born-- the transformation can damage their minds,” Asami said, and she scribbled something down onto her notepad. She was, I realized, left-handed. “The intensity of the damage could be explained by a rogue werewolf, but only on the nights of the full moon. We’ve found a lot of theories that can explain part of the killings, but nothing explains everything.”

“I guess we’ve just got to keep digging, then,” Kylah said as Kegan crouched between her and Asami. “Just as well we have the Order’s best former-researcher on our team.”

“We absolutely do,” I added with a warm smile, and I noticed that while a slight pink blush had dusted Asami’s cheeks at Kylah’s words, she went almost bright red at mine.

“I was hoping the internet would be more useful in piecing everything together,” the Japanese woman then said with a sigh, and she rubbed at her temples. “But just sifting through the fake sources to actually useful stuff takes up so much time. At the Sanctuary, I already knew everything had been vetted for accuracy.”

“Maybe we need to get you a library,” I said. “Something where the academic quality will automatically be higher.”

Carmen perked up. “We’re close to the University of Oregon.”

“We are,” Kegan agreed. “Their student library must have a history and mythology section.”

“True,” Asami admitted and chewed on her lip. “But I’m not a student. I wouldn’t be able to get in.”

“We can figure out how to get you to a proper research source later,” I said as I got to my feet. “You two don’t look like you’ve moved in hours, and I think I’ve earned a little break after fighting off revenants all morning.”

“Agreed,” Kegan said firmly as he, too, stood up. “Give me five to wash the smoke and zombie guts off me first, though, yeah?”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind a shower, either,” I said. I’d already noticed the smell, but now that the blond man mentioned zombie guts, I felt especially unclean.

“You can use the one in our room,” Kylah said at once.

The five of us had gotten two motel rooms and, for sake of ease, we split our group by gender. Kylah and Asami shared a bed in one room, like they did in my and Carmen’s apartment back in Los Angeles, with Carmen taking the other bed in that room. Meanwhile, Kegan and I shared the adjoining room, which was the one we were all standing in now.

“Awesome, thanks,” I said with a smile, and I headed through to the girls’ room.

Kylah followed me, and once the door closed behind us and we were alone, I shot her a wry grin.

“Care to join me?” I asked.

“Maybe another time,” she replied with a smirk. “Fun as that sounds, you do smell like rotting corpses.”

“Fair.” I winced, but that smell didn’t stop her from stepping forward and kissing me on the lips.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said softly.

“Course I am,” I said, and I brushed my nose against hers. “I was with Monkey and Kegan. We were fine.”

“I know, I know,” she said, but she bit at her bottom lip, and her hands slid up my arms to rest on my shoulders. “I just… you and Carmen are still very new to this. You have combat training, true, but…”

“But it’s for fighting against human opponents,” I finished for her, and I remembered coming to that same conclusion while fighting off the revenants earlier. “I know. I’m working on it, though. And with examples like you and Kegan to learn from, I reckon I’ll be just fine.”

“I know you will,” she agreed with a smile, and she kissed me again before she pulled away. “But you can’t blame me for worrying. I worry about Kegan, too. And Sami.”

“Well, Asami’s a little different,” I pointed out. “She wasn’t a combat Eye, not like you and Kegan.”

“And yet we’ve dragged her into this,” Kylah sighed, and she twisted a lock of blonde hair around her finger, a nervous tick I’d long-since learned to recognize on her, so I reached up, pulled her hand away from her head, and tugged it instead to my lips to kiss her fingers.

“One thing I learned in the army was not to worry over possibilities,” I told her. “You can plan for things to go wrong. You can have contingencies. But if you worry too much about things fucking up, they’re more likely to get fucked up because you were distracted. Asami’s researching for now, she’s nowhere near any combat. And you’ve seen her in a fight before. She can hold her own when it comes to that.”

“I know,” the blonde woman said. “But I still worry. She… she’s like family to me. Like Kegan. And you. And Carmen.”

“And you’re all family to me, too, which is why I can promise you I’ll do everything to keep you all safe. Just like you’ll do the same for me.” I cocked an encouraging smile. “With everyone looking out for one another, I’m sure we’ll be safe.”

Kylah finally seemed to be a little assuaged by this, and she gave me a tentative smile. Then I kissed her fingers one last time before I let go of her hand and headed into the motel bathroom. The water pressure wasn’t great, but it was still a relief to feel the hot spray against my skin and know all the death and panic was being rinsed away. By the time I emerged a few minutes later, toweling my hair dry, I practically felt like a new man.

I walked back into my and Kegan’s room to see the other four all ready to go. Kylah had thrown on her leather jacket, probably because it meant she could carry two of her silver knives, which strapped to her inner forearms, and they would be hidden by her jacket sleeves. Kegan was in the process of shoving another knife into his boot, which would be hidden by his jeans, and Asami, unarmed, was scrolling on her laptop and frowning at what were probably more garbage ‘sources’ on how to hunt monsters.

Carmen had also gone for a shower, I noticed, since her dark hair was damp and messily braided over her shoulder. As I threw my towel onto the rack in my bathroom, I peered into the cubicle and hoped she hadn’t blocked the shower drain. She’d been such a shit for that before I’d left for my tour.

Luckily, it seemed she hadn’t, and the five of us headed into the center of the little town in search of food.

Now that we were out of the thick forest, I could properly appreciate the nice weather. The sky was azure blue and cloudless as we walked, and it was cool without feeling cold. Having lived my entire life in California, I preferred warmer weather, but Carmen had always hated feeling hot and sweaty, so much so she’d taken it upon herself to fix the air conditioning unit in her previous mechanic garage on several occasions, since the owner had been too cheap to fork out for one that wouldn’t break every three months.

But while the weather was nice, Eugene, Oregon was much smaller than LA and over eighty-percent white, which meant our little group got more than a couple second looks as we walked down the street. Or maybe that was just because Kegan and Kylah had this strange, almost inhuman beauty to them.

Faeries, I now knew, were almost grotesque-looking. They were elongated and pointy, human ideals of beauty taken to extremes so they became kind of horrifying. But half-faeries just looked elegant and more than a little entrancing, and I still caught myself staring at Kylah, just awed by how graceful she was.

Either way, it meant people looked at us as we took seats at an outdoor table. I caught one guy-- probably a student at the nearby university if the backpack and laptop were any indication-- staring very unabashedly at us, and I realized after a few seconds that he wasn’t staring at Kylah, but at Carmen, and I glared at him until he returned to minding his own business.

A polite waitress with a smile that said ‘I’m not paid enough’ took our order, and then we got down to business.

“I managed to speak to a couple local magicals while you guys were dealing with the Jonathan Rowe thing,” Kylah told us once she was confident no one was eavesdropping. “Apparently, there have been several local attempts to try and figure out what’s killing those hikers and how to stop it, but none of the people who go into the forest are heard from again.”

“For all the Order like to advertise hefty monetary rewards, freelancing really is dangerous,” Asami said meaningfully. “A lot of people do die when they take up those jobs.”

I remembered the bar in Colorado, with all the flyers corked to the bulletin board. There had been a lot there, and at first I’d wondered why anyone would pass up the opportunity to do what the Order did, only for money and on your own terms.

But having spent the past several days looking over this case, I now understood perfectly.

“Probably whatever’s killing those hikers is doing the same stuff to whichever magicals are trying to stop it,” I said grimly, but Kylah frowned in a thoughtful way and began twisting her hair around her finger.

“I’m not so sure, actually,” she said. “All of the bodies that have been recovered, either partially or wholly, have been human.”

“She’s right,” Asami said with a nod. “Kylah and I have been looking over the records of who’s disappeared, and all the people whose bodies have not been recovered, all the people who are being treated as missing rather than dead, they’re supernaturals.”

“Seers, mainly,” Kylah added. “But not entirely. A few werewolves, vampires, harpies, and so on.”

“Do you think whatever’s killing those people is… using the magicals?” Carmen asked with a disgusted expression.

“What would they be using them for, though?” Kegan asked. “These humans are being found mangled and eaten. It’s not like they were used in some kind of experiment.”

“Maybe it’s a group,” I reiterated. “And the magicals aren’t going missing, they’re being recruited.”

Asami looked very unconvinced, and she pursed her lips slightly.

“Whatever’s going on in Phoenix apparently has magicals of multiple species working together,” she said after a moment of thought. “But that’s… well, it’s unprecedented. There’s never been a large-scale example of something like that before. Even in the LA community, it’s mostly coexistence rather than actual cooperation. Interspecies marriages are still pretty uncommon. I don’t think we can treat a multi-species collaboration as a standard. It’s an exception.”

“Is the magical world just super racist or something?” Carmen asked bluntly.

“Not… exactly…” Kylah said with a grimace. “There’s very little outright hostility, aside from general mistrust of humans. It’s just… people generally gravitate to people who are similar. Similar politics, similar life experiences. So while a werewolf might have friends and acquaintances who are seers or vampires or so on, they’re most likely to have close friends and partners who are also werewolves.”

“But that’s not always the case, is it?” I said. “Ralph, the werewolf from the gym, is married to a phoenix. Uh… Conleth, right?”

“Right.” The blonde woman nodded. “Similar to interracial marriages in the human world.”

“My first boyfriend was from a mixed family,” Carmen remarked with a fond expression on her face, and she propped up her head on one fist as she reminisced for a moment. “His dad was Cuban, and his mom was Jamaican. He had the nicest accent.”

“And your second boyfriend was a white kid from high-school who’s dad was a banker,” I reminded her with a grin, just to keep her humble.

Carmen flushed with embarrassment and shot a glance at Kegan, who was looking at her with raised eyebrows.

“We’re getting off topic,” my sister said hastily. “Sami, you still think this is one individual, and if it’s multiple, it wouldn’t be a mixed group?”

“I’m almost certain,” Asami replied with a nod. “One creature seems to be the most likely, though I can’t figure out what. Sometimes it attacks like a werewolf, other times like a harpy, or a vampire, or something else entirely.”

“Maybe it’s a human,” Kegan suggested. “Someone varying their attack patterns to disguise their true goals.”

“Which would be… what?” Carmen asked pointedly. “To kidnap supernaturals? Why kill humans and kidnap supernaturals?”

“There have been cases of experimentation on various magical species in the past,” Kylah said, and her pale skin looked faintly greenish. “It was theorized for a while that it would be possible for vampires to be ‘born’ by turning a pregnant woman.”

“Oh, god,” I muttered with a grimace. “What happened?”

“Most commonly, the fetus would be turned into a vampire, which is technically the desired result,” Asami said slowly. “But the result would be a creature that aged much, much more slowly than a normal human. If they survived the transformation at all, they usually… ate their way out of their mother.”

“Fuck.” Carmen winced. “What kind of sick fuck wanted to make a vampire baby anyway?”

“I think people just wanted to see if they could.” Asami shrugged. “Experimentation for the sake of sheer curiosity. Science for science’s sake.”

“That’s what Victor Frankenstein did, and he ended up freezing to death in the Arctic after almost his entire family got murdered,” my sister said flatly.

“You know that book was fiction, right?” I teased, but then I paused and turned to Asami. “Frankenstein was a work of fiction, right?”

“Oh, entirely,” the Japanese woman assured me. “By all accounts, Mary Shelley was a perfectly normal human being. Not even a seer.”

“What about Bram Stoker?” Carmen then asked, and her eyes had gone wide with fascination. “He wrote about vampires. Was he a vampire? Did he have the second sight and know some vampires?”

“No, but Doctor Van Helsing was based off a real person,” Kegan answered. “Funnily enough, though, the Van Helsing line is actually one of the oldest vampire families in Europe.”

My sister’s mouth twitched in a smile, and I could tell she was doing her best not to burst out into obnoxiously loud laughter.

“That’s hilarious,” she finally said in a deadpan tone.

“Wait,” I then said. “I thought vampires couldn’t have kids. You just told us that nightmare shit about babies eating their way out of their mothers’ wombs.”

“Vampire propagation focusses less on sex and biological parentage than on siring,” Asami explained. “If you were turned into a vampire, the vampire who turned you would see themselves as your parent, and you as their child. It’s no small thing to turn a human into a vampire, you know. It’s seen as quite a sacred milestone. Many vampires never sire any children, because training a fledgling is a big responsibility.”

“In Europe, it’s fairly common for a vampire to take a protégé under their wing,” Kylah told me. “Usually, a human with no biological family, or none they want to acknowledge. They’ll have a few years of preparation, they’ll wait until they reach their physiological prime, and then they’ll be turned. That’s how the Van Helsings do it, anyway.”

“Werewolves are known for having large family units, but vampires are also very protective of their heirs and sires,” Kegan added.

“Well, it’s nice there’s a strong sense of community, at least,” Carmen snorted. “But that doesn’t bring us any closer to figuring out what is attacking those people and why.”

The waitress chose this moment to reappear with our food and drinks, and conversation halted as we politely waited for her to get out of earshot so she wouldn’t think we were crazy, or murderers, or crazy murderers.

“I’m still not sure if it’s just one thing, though,” I said. “I told you before, whatever aura I’ve seen in the woods is… weird. It’s… spotty. Inconsistent. Like it can’t decide what species its from. Or if there even is an aura at all.”

“I know,” Asami said with a sigh, and she gloomily dripped a French fry in some ketchup. “But I don’t know of any magic that can hide or change auras, so it’s not some kind of shapeshifter. I’m still sure it’s a powerful illusion spell tricking you into thinking you’re seeing an aura.”

That was a possibility. I was still new to this world and still figuring out the extent of my abilities. I was only just starting to learn how to differentiate between different species’ auras, because the differences were very subtle, and maybe what I thought was an unusual aura was actually totally normal for a species I hadn’t yet encountered, or-- as Asami suggested-- a convincing illusion.

“But I still have no idea what could even create an aura or an illusion like that,” Asami lamented. “I need access to more rigorous sources. Stuff that isn’t clogged up by wikis from fantasy series.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me real vampires don’t sparkle in the sunlight?” Carmen asked with a shit-eating grin.

I groaned and rolled my eyes, but Kegan snickered. Honestly, I was surprised he knew what my sister was referencing.

“I still think we should try and get you into the university library,” I said to Asami. “The Sanctuary library was full of old historical stuff, wasn’t it?”

“It would certainly be more useful than the public library,” Kylah said, and her tone was half sheepish and half amused.

We’d tried that a few days ago, but the only books involving magic, vampires, werewolves and fairies had been in the Fantasy section. What we needed were historical accounts from the time before the veil was put up, when magic had just existed as part of the world.

“Then we need to get you into the university library,” Kegan said, and then he stood up. “I’m going to get a glass of water.”

The table we’d sat at was actually right on the edge of the sidewalk, and there was no divider between the end of the restaurant’s seating area and the bit of the sidewalk left for pedestrians to walk on. As a result, when Kegan turned away from the table, clearly meaning to walk inside and get a drink of water, he collided right into a young man-- the student guy who’d been staring at Carmen earlier-- who’d been walking past our table at that moment.

“Shit!” Kegan gasped as he and the young man bounced off one another. “Sorry about that, I didn’t see you there!”

The young man, though he seemed a little dazed, was unhurt, and he shot Kegan an easy grin.

“Oh, it’s no big, man. I should’ve been looking where I was going.” He waved his cellphone at us to show that he’d been in the middle of composing a text.

Kegan clapped him heartily on the shoulder both to steady the guy and in an apology. “Same goes for me. Sorry again. You have a good day.”

“You, too!” the young man said cheerfully, and he gave us all a wave before he continued down the street.

Kegan then sat back down at the table. We all stared at him for a moment in total silence, but he said nothing.

“Uh, I thought you said you were going to get a drink of water,” my sister finally said to him.

“I did,” the blond man admitted, and he took a nonchalant sip of his soda. “I lied.”

He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic object the same size and shape as a credit card, only it wasn’t a credit card. It had a picture of the guy Kegan just bumped into, along with his name and a barcode.

It was a student ID card.

Kill Monsters, Get Rich 2 Chapter 1

I ducked down just in time to avoid having my head clawed off, and the creature’s bony, rotted fingers instead raked five thin lines across the wooden planks of the cabin wall.

I didn’t want to think about what would’ve happened to my face and eyesight if I’d been too slow.

“You okay?” Carmen yelled to me as she grappled against her own adversary. Despite the fact it was missing one of its forearms, it was still putting up a pretty intense fight, and its teeth gnashed furiously as it tried to get a bite out of her shoulder.

“Fine!” I shouted back as I raised my foot and kicked the thing in the chest hard enough that it staggered back a few paces, far enough that it bumped into the back wall of the tiny cabin.

This place really was a box, a one-room wooden shed in the middle of a forest. There was a front door, a back door, and two windows, though only one of the windows still had glass in it, and the panes were warped and yellowish with age.

The silver knife I held in my hand was one I’d borrowed from Kylah, a badass half-faerie and my girlfriend, and the blade glittered in the light that shone through the holes in the cabin’s roof. This would have caught the creature’s attention if it had enough brain function left to notice anything other than ‘food,’ but it didn’t, so I slashed wide.

It would have been a clumsy move if I’d actually been trying to injure the creature, but I wasn’t. I was instead trying to corral it to the back door of the cabin so I would have some space to move.

“Leo, behind you!” Kegan suddenly yelled, and I whipped around just in time to see another creature lunging for me from behind. I stabbed the silver dagger into its stomach, deep enough to rupture something vital, and I realized my mistake a second later, when the thing didn’t so much as flinch.

They were called revenants, reanimated human corpses. They hadn’t been resurrected, because they had no mind or soul, nothing that would constitute real humanity. They were neither thinking, feeling creatures nor simple puppets, because no one was puppeting them. A necromancer, I’d learned, bound a soul to a body, and the soul became the strings by which the necromancer could control the body. But a revenant was, by definition, soulless.

I’d been a little uneasy and a lot shocked to learn necromancy was a real thing. It encompassed any kind of magic that interfered with the dead. Not the bodies, but the souls. So calling upon ghosts and spirits was necromancy, but creating a revenant was not.

All of this meant my learned attack patterns were useless here. I’d spent years in the army learning how to wound people in a variety of ways with a variety of weapons. I could take out an enemy both lethally and non-lethally, with my hands or a knife or a gun, but none of that was of any use here. A revenant didn’t feel pain, and the magic binding it together meant it would keep moving even if I split its limbs off from its body. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw as the disembodied forearm of Carmen’s revenant dragged itself across the floor, and I knew it was still bent on killing us all.

So my instinct to stab the second revenant in the stomach was useless, if not dangerous.

I yanked the knife back and out of the creature’s torso, and then I made a wide slash. Kylah’s daggers were so sharp, the blade cut cleanly through the leathery, blackened skin of the revenant’s neck, and its head literally rolled off its shoulders and onto the floor, where it snarled and gnashed its teeth at me furiously, but ultimately harmlessly.

I literally kicked it out of the way, punted it like a football, out of the back door and into what could generously be called the cabin’s ‘back garden.’

“Thanks, K!” I called out to Kegan, since he’d been the one to warn me of the revenant sneaking up on me from behind. As Kylah’s twin brother, he was also a badass half-faerie, and despite having been stabbed only three weeks previously, he was holding his own pretty well.

Unlike me, the blond man’s fight training had focused on non-traditional adversaries, ones that might not be able to be subdued by aiming for pressure points but instead needed to be literally dismembered. It was obvious in the way he moved and attacked the revenants he’d been trained to fight supernatural enemies, whereas my training focused on human ones.

Also three weeks previously, my own twin, Carmen, and I had asked to join the organization known as the Order of the Eye. Kegan and Kylah were raised in the Order, since half-fae were broadly disliked by other supernaturals, and they were thus some of the best-trained Eyes to have ever lived. But they’d left two weeks ago once it had become clear that, for all the Order liked to think of itself as a benevolent protector, there was something rotten at its center that neither of the fae siblings wanted anything to do with.

Now, barely a fortnight later, the four of us, plus our resident researcher and translator, Asami, found ourselves slap-bang in the middle of rural Oregon while hunting basically-zombies in the woods.

Kylah and Asami weren’t actually present with us at the moment, because this revenant problem wasn’t actually our main job. We’d sort of stumbled across it while investigating a completely separate job and figured we might as well help out while we were here. So, while Carmen, Kegan, and I attempted to clear this forest of reanimated corpses, Kylah and Asami were researching our primary job back at the motel.

I was willing to admit, though, I wouldn’t have minded Kylah being here at the moment. There were more revenants here than we’d anticipated, and since they needed to be split into pieces rather than dealt ‘fatal wounds’ that would incapacitate a living creature, it was a lot of work.

“Why are there so damn many?” Carmen demanded as she shoved back her revenant and ducked low to slash at its knee. Her knife, another dagger borrowed from Kylah, dug deep into the muscles and tendons, and the creature staggered sideways as its ability to walk was suddenly severely impaired. As it tried to approach Carmen again, it limped and shuffled so much that it looked like a Hollywood zombie.

Sadly, real-life zombies were a lot faster than what The Walking Dead would have people believe.

“There must have been a lot of people buried in this area,” Kegan said as he slashed at one revenant’s arm, and the arm literally dropped off its shoulder. “Whatever curse seeped into the land and poisoned it, it poisoned the bodies, too.”

I didn’t know a great deal about curses or poisonous magic yet, since my training had focused more on learning how to fight the various dangers of the supernatural world. Asami was the expert in magical theory, more so than Kegan and Kylah, because their own magical knowledge focused heavily on faerie magic, which Asami, Carmen, and myself couldn’t do.

“Yeah, but why would anyone bury people here if the land is cursed?” Carmen huffed as she went for her revenant’s other leg. It staggered again and this time fell to its knees as it was reduced to crawling. “There must be rumors or bad vibes or something.”

“Not everyone is a walking vibe-check, Monkey,” I pointed out as I returned my attention to my first revenant and continued trying to lead it out of the cabin’s back door and into a more open space.

Every supernatural creature had a magical affinity, some kind of magic that they were naturally a bit better at. Since we were humans with the second sight, Carmen and I were technically supernatural creatures, and her affinity was something we hadn’t quite figured out yet. As best we could tell, she possessed some sort of premonition ability and was able to sense danger, or a plea for help, or just general concepts about something. It had been her idea to even come out to this cabin to deal with the revenants, because she’d sensed something deeply wrong with the magic here, something cursed and twisted.

Evidently, cursed and twisted enough to raise the dead.

My own affinity was a broader mystery. I was somehow able to amplify other supernaturals’ auras, like some kind of battery that made their own magic a little bit stronger. Asami had explained to me how there were some scholars who believed someone’s personality was informed by their magical affinity, or maybe their affinity had an impact on their personality. If that was true, I guess it meant I was there to support my friends and have their backs, thereby making them stronger, and the group as a whole more likely to succeed.

That was one of the few things I’d actually really liked about the army-- the sense of camaraderie. The knowledge that no matter what, you had guys who would look out for you, and you would look out for them. I’d hated the endless orders, the rigid submission to all authority figures, but I’d liked that.

A sense of family.

I’d only realized a few weeks ago how I’d been craving a sense of family for a long, long time. I’d been trying to fill some void in my life or my heart or whatever without even realizing how the void really got there. When we’d been eight, Carmen and I had lost our parents in a house fire and been put into the foster system. I’d been trying to fill the hole left by my family ever since, but it had been deeper than that, because our parents also possessed the second sight, and they hadn’t gotten around to telling us about the supernatural world that lived just under the surface of the regular world.

So, for over half of my life, I’d desperately tried to find something to replace that, without even knowing what I was trying to replace. But once Carmen and I met Kylah and Kegan, once we’d been introduced to the Order and the supernatural world, it had all just clicked into place.

Now I found myself trying to kill something that was already dead in a shack in the middle of an Oregon national forest.

I’d almost managed to coerce the revenant out of the cabin’s back door when it decided to pounce on me. I hadn’t been anticipating such a direct line of attack, but since the bastard couldn’t feel pain and didn’t even have a self-preservation instinct, it made sense he would go for the risky moves.

Somehow, despite being mostly kind of rotted away, the revenant was pretty heavy, and I was caught off guard enough that I toppled backward and landed harshly on the floor. Then I drove Kylah’s dagger upward so the revenant couldn’t lower its head enough to bite me.

Contrary to what TV would have you believe, being bitten by a revenant would not turn you into a revenant. But it would definitely give you a really nasty infection that could poison or kill you, so I was eager to avoid getting bitten.

I managed to angle the dagger and pushed it forward so it pierced the revenant in the middle of its throat. But since it couldn’t feel pain, this just meant the shrieking sounds it kept making became weird, breathy wheezes that honestly sounded creepier.

“I hate these things!” I shouted to Kegan and Carmen. “They won’t fucking die!”

“They’re already dead, Pip!” Carmen shouted back, and then she let out a yelp as her revenant grabbed her by the shoulders and made to sink its teeth into the side of her neck like it was a vampire.

I barely had time to feel panic when a knife whizzed out from the side and embedded itself in the revenant’s skull with so much force its entire body was pulled sideways with the momentum, and it was pinned to the cabin wall by its head.

“Less talking, more dismembering,” Kegan told her as he kicked the revenant he’d just stabbed in the throat so its body was torn free from its head. The body slumped to the ground and began scrabbling blindly for a new target, so he stomped on that, too,until it was barely shuffling.

Meanwhile, I’d managed to wiggle my own dagger around enough to have made a sizable hole in the throat of the revenant trying to pin me down. I maneuvered my feet up under its torso as I reached up to grab its head with both of my hands, and then I kicked my legs outwards, which shoved the body back hard enough that I ripped its head right off its shoulders.

I threw the head to the side, where it just snapped at me uselessly like the other one had, but this was a temporary solution since the separated body parts were still very much a danger. We hadn’t hiked all the way out here to just tear these things to pieces and leave them shuffling around.

Since revenants were caused by cursed magic, the only way to actually get rid of them was to fix or destroy the cursed magic. Which meant figuring out the origin of the curse, which meant a whole lot of research.

When we’d arrived in Oregon for our main job two days ago, we’d come up to investigate a slew of killings and disappearances that had been plaguing the nearby forests. Since the mortal authorities attributed the deaths to animal attacks, the Order hadn’t bothered getting involved and outsourced the job to supernatural bounty hunters to get the local magical population to shut the hell up.

However, in our-- or, mainly Asami’s-- research, we’d found a separate set of killings had been occurring in another part of the forest. Every year, for the week around the Spring Equinox, which was around late March, there would be a rash of unexplained disappearances or even deaths in this small region. Unlike the case that brought us to Oregon, no bodies had ever been found in the Equinox disappearances, or at least, no intact bodies. And when Carmen saw old newspaper accounts of these deaths, her bad vibes radar had pinged like crazy, and we’d known this was something we needed to take care of, since it was obvious the Order wasn’t going to bother, and if mortals tried, they would certainly get themselves killed.

As the Boy Scouts liked to say: Be Prepared.

Asami eventually discovered a man by the name of Jonathan Rowe had built and lived in this cabin in the late eighteenth century. His wife, Olivia, and daughter, Prudence, were both killed by some sickness epidemic that had swept the local area and, heartbroken by the loss of his family, Jonathan buried them beneath a wizened old tree behind his cabin and then hanged himself from it. Since he’d been so far away from the rest of the village, and since the illness meant people weren’t really able to pay house calls, his body went undiscovered for several weeks.

Apparently, this kind of disregard for proper funeral rites, combined with an unjust death-- such as a suicide or a particularly violent murder-- was prime real estate for curses and curse magic. Which in turn were the most common ways to cause revenants.

The very land had become poisoned by Jonathan’s death and the fact he hadn’t received his proper rites, so now, every year, around the time of his death, any bodies buried around the tree became temporarily reanimated.

They couldn’t stray too far from the tree, the source of the curse, without the magic that held them together just breaking down, like a weak phone signal. This meant the danger was fairly self-contained. But if an unlucky set of hikers or campers came across this cabin at the wrong time of year, they became revenant chow, and the following year, they would join the horde, since their bodies would have been left on the cursed land, and they would not have received their own last rites.

I’d asked Asami about the significance of religious rites, and if this pointed to some kind of ‘One True God’ or not, but she’d explained how it was less about the truth or accuracy of the religion and more about the person who’d died. A violent death, or a suicide, or a death that was not properly marked according to the person’s cultural practices would lead to a restless spirit. And restless spirits could very easily poison land or create curses.

Kylah’s dagger had clattered to the floor when I’d beheaded the revenant, so now I snapped it up and turned my attention to the revenant’s shuffling body. Then I tried to emulate what I’d seen Kegan doing. I wasn’t trying to cause pain or subdue an enemy, I needed to literally take this thing to pieces if I wanted to win.

Or, scratch that, if I wanted to survive.

Having been at this ‘bounty hunting’ thing for a couple weeks now, I reckoned I better understood why the Council that ran the Order of the Eye had been so reluctant and ultimately refused to let Carmen and I join. I’d been confused because I had a decent amount of combat training from the military, and Carmen was plenty strong, since she worked as a mechanic, but now I understood.

It wasn’t so much that we were untrained, it was the fact we’d been trained wrong. Our instincts were totally off, because my opponents had always been other humans. I would need to unlearn a whole lot of stuff in order to be an effective Eye, and that was an investment in time they hadn’t been willing to make.

No, they were instead perfectly happy to pay Carmen and me to take care of exactly the same problems, just as ‘independent contractors’ rather than ‘employees.’ That way, if any of us got fucking killed, the Order couldn’t be blamed.

It was a total insurance scam, but it paid well, and it meant I didn’t have to take orders from anyone. Plus, with Kylah, Kegan, and Asami on our team, all of whom possessed extensive experience in both the supernatural world and the Order itself, Carmen and I had a pretty decent advantage.

I gripped Kylah’s dagger as I carefully edged toward the revenant’s shuffling body. It scratched at the walls of the cabin as it searched for a living target to dismember, but now that its head had been removed, it was a considerably lesser threat, so I lunged forward with enough force to knock it backward, like it did to me earlier, and I stabbed down hard into the joint of its shoulder.

It twitched horribly, not out of pain but because the knife was jerking around nerves and muscles, and I bit back the urge to gag a little at how it moved. But I didn’t let up, and I wiggled the blade back and forth until its right arm was fully severed. Now with no torso to anchor it, the arm flopped uselessly to the ground, with its fingers flexing around nothing, like an upturned turtle. I then turned my attention to the other shoulder and did the same.

By the time I was done, what was left of the revenant no longer had the means to even stand up. It was a pretty gruesome sight to behold, the combined handiwork of my twin sister, Kegan, and I, but since the bodies were all so old and dry, little more than skin stretched over bones, there was no blood.

In some ways, they really did look like cheap Hollywood zombies, the sort that couldn’t be too human, otherwise the movie would get too high an age rating.

“Wow, remind me to never get on your bad side,” Kegan remarked as he dug his own borrowed dagger into a revenant’s spine and twisted so its entire lower half suddenly stopped moving. It tried to crawl forward and drag itself on its hands, but he copied what I’d just done and severed its arms.

The cabin had already been small and cramped, but now there were several pieces of dismembered revenant on the floor, so we really needed to watch where we stepped. I kicked stray arms and heads out of the way, toward the back door, as I tried to get out there myself. That was where the tree was, where Jonathan hanged himself, and where most of the bodies originated.

Out here, it was a considerably less ‘goofy, cheap movie’ scene. Many of the revenants here were from recent years, not too deep under the ground. Some of them looked disturbingly still human, with modern clothes in bright colors and chunks of hair still matted to skulls. One of them even still had fairly intact eyes, and they bored into me with an animalistic intensity that looked so deeply wrong on a human’s face.

I felt a wash of pity even as my skin crawled. These people hadn’t done anything to deserve this. They’d just been at the wrong place at the wrong time. And it was the Order, whether by being overworked or not caring enough or a combination of both, that allowed these people to die.

I didn’t let myself think about it any longer as I got to work aiming for joints like hips and shoulders and knees and necks. Kegan and Carmen came out shortly behind me, and we congregated in a tight formation with our backs to one another as we worked as much to protect each other as ourselves. Carmen and I had a better sense of how to deal with the revenants now and were able to keep pace with Kegan, though I suspected this was as much to do with the fact he was still recovering from his stab wound as it was about my sister and I improving.

“It’s good we’re dealing with these things,” Carmen said eventually. “But this isn’t sustainable. They’re still alive. How do we get rid of them for good?”

“We have to find the source of the curse,” Kegan answered as he dragged his dagger across a revenant’s torso and severed it clean in two. The legs staggered for a few steps before they just tipped over, and the upper half of its body tried to drag its way toward us until I stomped on its head to crush its skull. It made a considerably wetter, squelchier sound than the revenants inside the cabin, and I tried not to think about what I would be cleaning off my boots later.

“If we destroy the source, the magic holding these things together will dissipate,” Kegan went on. “They’ll just crumble into bones and dust. They’ll be normal bodies again.”

“Do we need to give all of them their last rites?” I asked the blond man.

“Asami said that was an important part of this,” my sister added as she stabbed a revenant in the shoulder. Its head kept coming toward her, though, so with her knife occupied, she punched it in the face, and its nose slid off. “Ewwww!”

“I could give a small blessing to mark their deaths, but I don’t think we’d be able to give everybody a full rite,” Kegan said and ignored Carmen’s cry of disgust. “It wouldn’t work, anyway. Rites are more about being acknowledged than getting the details correct, but revenants don’t actually have souls. Their spirits are gone. It’s Jonathan Rowe’s spirit that’s doing this.”

“So, we find his body,” I said. “Burn it, or give him his rites, and they go away, right?”

“Normally, burning a body would be enough to sever the spirit’s connection with the mortal plane,” Kegan agreed. “The body is the anchor, and last rites are a way to sever that anchor without destroying the body. But Jonathan’s body has long-since rotted away entirely. So last rites won’t work anymore.”

“So, how do we get rid of his spirit?” Carmen asked. She surreptitiously tried to wipe her hand on my jacket sleeve, but I shot her a glare and dared her to just try wiping zombie snot on my clothes. She flushed with embarrassment and looked away. “It’s obviously still here, or these bastards wouldn’t be trying to eat us!”

“Something else must be his anchor,” Kegan said. “Maybe the house, or maybe a piece of jewelry, like a wedding wing. If we destroy that, we can sever the connection, and his spirit will be forced into the next life, where it can have proper peace.”

I stabbed an encroaching revenant in the throat and tried not to vomit as thick, black blood oozed out of the wound. Then I jerked the knife harshly to the side, which severed the head from the body and sent the revenant staggering sideways. As it did, I looked up, out across the tiny ‘back garden’ that wasn’t marked by any fence or wall, and at the ancient, gnarled tree with sparse leaves and brittle-looking branches.

“That tree’s dead,” I said. “Or dying. Look at it. It’s barely got any leaves.”

“That’s the tree Jonathan must have hanged himself from, then,” Kegan said.

“Yeah, I can sense death on it,” my sister added. “Its aura is so fucked. Bad vibes are off the charts, boys.”

I squinted a little harder at the tree when Carmen mentioned aura, and sure enough, the wispy, glowing lines that denoted the presence of magic were, in a word, fucked. They tangled around the base of the trunk, but something about how they moved just looked wrong. Sickly.

“That’s his anchor,” I said aloud. “The tree. That’s Jonathan’s anchor. He hanged himself from it, and after his body was gone, the spirit stayed tied to the tree.”

Actually, now that I’d said it aloud, it seemed kind of obvious, and I was a little embarrassed none of us had realized it earlier.

But, then again, we were all on a learning curve. Carmen and I had only known about this world for weeks, and Kegan’s first field mission was the night we’d met him and Kylah, which ended with him getting stabbed. So we all still had stuff to learn.

“Burn it, then!” Carmen cried out as she flailed a hand at the tree. “It looks dry enough to go up in smoke as it is.”

“She’s right,” Kegan grunted and dodged another swipe from a revenant. “We’ll cover you. Do you have matches? A lighter?”

“No, but I did enough wilderness training to know how to start a fire without ‘em,” I replied.

Truthfully, it had been a long time since I’d had to do something like that, but surely it was just like riding a bike, right?

I lurched forward when there was a gap in the onslaught of revenants. Most of them were more interested in Kegan and Carmen, but some came after me, and I beat them back with wide slashes of the dagger and well-aimed stabs when that wasn’t enough. More goopy, black blood sprayed everywhere, and I flinched when I felt something wet splatter across my cheek.

I’d never been squeamish with blood, but this was considerably more gross than an ordinary stab wound.

Luckily, I made it to the tree un-bitten, and I began searching around in the earth by the roots for a small stone and some kindling.

Flint-and-steel was an old bushcraft technique for starting fires that dated right back to the Iron Age. It was primitive, but it did work.

Since the old tree was already all dried out, I snapped a few twigs off a low-hanging branch and laid them against the base of the trunk, and then I began striking the dagger against the stone to produce sparks. I saw the tip of the blade became a little scratched with each blow, and, and I made silent apologies to Kylah in my head for damaging her beautiful knives.

I was confident she’d understand, though.

After a few attempts, I managed to get a spark going, and a tiny blaze started at the base of the tree. Since it was only small for now, I would have to be careful, and my objective went from making sure I didn’t get bitten to making sure none of the revenants accidentally extinguished the flame by landing on it or something. These revenants, the newer ones who weren’t entirely rotted yet, were far too damp from being under the earth to make good kindling.

I continued slashing and stabbing, with errant pieces of bodies flying this way and that, until I felt the oppressive, dry heat of a real fire behind my back, and I turned to see the ancient tree going up in smoke.

Was I imagining it, or could I hear a wailing? A second later, I realized I actually could hear wailing as the revenants all began to shriek and scream. They stopped trying to attack us as they trembled and threw their bony arms up into the air. Then, one by one, they fell to the ground, and they were twitching like they were the ones burning, even though there were no flames.

Carmen had been right, the old tree was dry as tinder and went up quickly. I was torn between watching the golden flames lick up the bark, slowly turn it to black, and make it crumble, and the morbidly fascinating sight of the revenants writhing and screaming until finally, all at once, they went still and silent.

Audiobook Release | Arena 7

Arena 7 audiobook is in your BF library ABLs.  For everyone else, pick it up on my website or on Audiobook Guild

Overview

Seven.

It’s a bigly number. The biggest this series has ever seen, and that’s to be expected, because I only endorse the best and most biggest possible.

And that’s what Arena is. It’s a fantastic story about the best American President of all time picking Marc Havoc to represent the world in the very important Crucible of Carnage space battle arena thing.

But this book is a bit different. For one, it’s back in the good old USA. Second, Marc has to save my daughter from all these illegal aliens. Literal illegal alien terrorists from outer space. Bad guys, I assure you. Very bad garbage aliens. The worst. Thirdly, It’s even more tremendous than the previous six books because there are more guns, more space-babes, and more Nakatomi Plaza. I’m even in it, since I make the best decisions and only hire winners, and the biggest winner of them all is Marc Havoc.

Narration by: Joshua Story
Length: 8 Hours, 11 Minutes

Court of the Shifter 4 NSFW covers

I love the pie shot