Font of Fertility Ch. 17

"Let's change that," I whispered.

I wasn't a massive RPG gamer, but I knew some things, and one of the things I knew was that a great way to take a boss fight from hard to easy was to pre-cast buffs. Thinking back to my list of ideas, I started slow. The first spell was a variation on what I had done at Lindsey's apartment, changing my vision so that I would see anything that had been touched by magic, and the glow would be brighter if it was magic that was still active with potential - that last bit about potential was a last-second addition as I thought about magical traps that could activate some hidden power. The next was a set of layered shields that would stop physical force from coming at me, acting like magical kevlar about a foot from my body. I put a time limit on both spells of an hour, which helped with the costs, but I was already noticing a dent in my reserves even in the Amplifier and knew that pushing the shields would drain more once I left.

Next, I had planned to make myself invisible, but as soon as I formed the idea I saw that it would be a cascading amount of magical costs - every time I moved it would take more magic. I was sure there must be a way to make it work, I just needed to figure out more about human perception and maybe even just the biology of the human eye and the science of light to make it work. So I had to scrap the invisibility.

There were other things I could have done. I could have made myself super strong, or super resilient. Instead, I had decided I needed to be adaptable. I needed to have as much magic on hand to deal with things as they came up. The layered shields would stop anything from just immediately killing me - probably - and the main idea here was to use surprise to my advantage. This wasn't an assault, it was a stealth mission.

So the last thing I did was something I had specifically researched. I thought about my own adrenal gland and willed it to begin ramping up, releasing adrenaline into my system, while also giving my heart a little boost in capability to handle the increase in my system. It wasn't a massive jump or anything, but I let the adrenaline build until I could feel my pulse quicken and my fingers tingle at the desire for my body to want to move anddo something even if it didn't know what.

I stopped the ramp-up and kept myself at that level, breathing deeply.

"Alright, motherfucker," I said. "Where are you?"

The next spell went looking for George Stoker. I 'limited' the search to the United States, assuming he hadn't gone too far, and in my mind's eye I pictured a map, and that map zoomed in, and down, and down, like I was scrolling closer on GoogleMaps until I was looking at a forest somewhere in northern New Mexico. I'd always thought of the state as being a desert, but apparently it had a big ass forest, too.

I zoomed in further and there was a cabin, a sprawling thing that almost looked like a one-story log warehouse. He'd probably grown it or something. With a twitch of my mind that view shifted and pivoted until I found a front door. A soft red ball of light, Stoker, was somewhere deep in the building, away from the door.

That was my in.

I opened my eyes and kept that door in my mind but dispelled the tracking spell. It had eaten up a decent chunk of magic, maybe the amount of a long fuck with one of my girlfriends, even inside the amplifier. The adrenal thing had taken almost nothing but was a slow, tiny trickle to keep it going when I stepped out. The shields held, but if anything hit me it would take bites out of my pool of power to keep them up. The vision lit up the entire Sanctum with a glow, though only the Amplifier glowed brightly with active magical potential.

At the Teleportal door I took a long moment. A hard breath. I flexed my fingers. And I stepped out of the Sanctum and into the dark warehouse.

Even though it was almost pitch black the soft glow from my magical vision lit up the entire space since George Stoker had obviously built it with magic. No immediate hard glows were around, though when I turned and glanced back at the door I saw that it did have some sort of a potential about it. I couldn't tell what it was, but stepping through the doorframe meant I didn't actually open the door and trigger whatever the trap was. Or maybe it was just an alarm...

Who the hell was I kidding? This asshole kidnapped and experimented on his own daughters, let alone what he did to his wife. Of course it was a trap.

The front room of the warehouse was wide and shallow and looked like it was some sort of a work and living space. There was packaging scattered around, like he'd received multiple deliveries way up here in the rocky forest, though in the dark I couldn't see any of the labels. There looked like there was some sort of bed over on one side made out of what I could only guess were mosses and grasses, and at the other far end was some sort of a kitchen space. The room was cut off from the rest of the warehouse by a long wall with an entry into a hallway right down the centre.

With a thought I cast another spell, dampening any sounds that my shoes would make through friction or touching anything for the next twenty minutes, and then I started creeping forward in a crouch. I took it slow, trying to watch everything around me all at once. The floor was little more than hard-packed dirt and I noticed tiny dots of glowing bits scattered lightly that I quickly realized were either little plant shoots or seeds - I avoided them carefully, once again not sure what I would be stepping on.

I made it to the hallway without incident and entered. The walls were the same heavy, barked wood as the front room but weren't perfectly straight like I would expect from a man-made building. They were lumpy and wavy like a tree trunk, and I realized this wasn't a log cabin so much as one single tree organism that had grown up whole cloth from the ground under George Stoker's direction. How long had it taken him to do this? How long had he been working on it?

Pushing deeper, I knew I was putting myself in the lion's mouth - this entire place was a plant and both source and material for George's magic. But it didn't matter because this had to happen.

There were arched doorways every so often on either side of the hallway. As I went deeper the first few looked like they had once been prepared as bedrooms, though a swipe of my finger on the floor found a thick layer of dust. Three more rooms, around the midpoint of the warehouse, were entirely empty. As I'd moved down the hallway a soft, pale green light had become apparent at the far end coming out of an archway, and now that I got closer to it I realized there was some sort of a luminescent moss growing out of the back room, clinging to the ceiling. It wasn't bright by any means, but the little amount of glow it did put out was enough to start to see details. The tree bark of the walls was a pale white and black, like birch, and even had some areas where it was peeling away from the wood beneath.

I reached the end of the hallway and slowly eased my head around the corner, peeking low to the ground, and was surprised to see a strange conglomeration of the living wood furniture and stainless steel lab equipment. Most of the steel was slowly being overtaken by plants, it looked like, with ivy and flowers and grasses crawling up the legs and across the boom arms like muscles around bone. The whole area was lit by denser patches of the luminescent moss on the ceiling, still not bright enough to be a true light source, but now I wondered if George could brighten it at will.

He was supposed to be here, but despite clear signs of him working here and plenty of strange patches of live magic among the lab equipment, I couldn't see him.

Fuuuuuck, I sighed internally.

I rounded the corner fully, creeping up among the lab equipment. The entire space looked like it belonged in a sci-fi apocalypse, some forgotten lab that had been exposed to the elements for decades, but with all the packaging out front I had to assume these tools and other strange equipment of steel and glass were freshly acquired and delivered.

It looked like George probably had any number of half worked on projects on the go, but what immediately grabbed my attention was the human-shaped plant thing laying on one of the wooden tables. It was dressed in a lab coat but was clearly bundles of plants formed into the approximation of a person, tied together with grass fibres. It was glowing with potential magic, but only in its chest, so I wasn't immediately concerned it would jump up at me or something. Creeping forward, I was eventually standing over the thing and looked down at the glowing chest.

Inside, cradled among the plants, was a piece of flesh right where the heart should be.

"Motherfucker," I whispered.

It was some sort of a voodoo doll thing. He'd put a piece of himself inside it, and that's what my location spell had tracked onto.

But George Stoker could manipulate plants, not flesh. And it looked like there was an entire organ - maybe even his actual heart - buried in there. To figure out what it was I would need to pull the thing apart and I wasn't ready to start poking at it yet.

But if itwas his heart, or something else equally important to bodily function, how was he still alive? He could try and manipulate a plant as a prosthetic, I guessed, but he couldn't make his body accept it. Maybe with enough knowledge he could replicate a mechanical one, but with plants?

I looked around some more and noticed a notebook lying over on another table that looked like some sort of messy, makeshift desk. I had to avoid several of the floor seeds to get there, but I made it and opened the notebook with one hand. Inside were clearly scribbled notes, both scientific and personal, but between the scratchy writing, jargon and what I could only assume was some sort of code or another language, I couldn't understand what it said.

Before I cast another spell I flipped through and found he also drew diagrams. The plant-person thing was in there with lots of little scribbled notes pointing to different areas. There was a picture of what looked like a tree-branch replacement for a leg bone and how muscles would need to be formed around it. There was a half-skull drawing with some sort of a mushroom diagram running through it that looked ominous as fuck. Something that I thought vaguely looked like the strange root thing I'd pulled out of Maya was in there too.

And then I found the womb. I'd seen enough diagrams of fallopian tubes and wombs in health and early biology classes over the years to recognize the drawing immediately. But this wasn't just a diagram, this was some sort of plan. There were a series of drawings with more of the scribbled notes, and in each one it looked like George was imagining or placing something inside of the womb.

Or growing.

Down at the bottom of the page, in very clear and frustrated writing complete with two savage slashes of underline, were the words NEED MORE SUBJECTS.

Lindsey had discovered George Stoker had harvested his wife's reproductive organs. He'd been holding his daughters captive.

I flipped the page and there were mathematic calculations and my eyes immediately dropped to the big circled number at the bottom of the almost unreadable formula.

7.

What did that mean?

I felt it, somewhere between the hairs on my neck and the goosebumps on my skin, more than I heard anything. It was instinct. Pure survival. My enhanced adrenaline levels had kept me on the edge of fight or flight, and now they saved me.

The notes, the tools and the table all scattered as the massive spike of a thorn erupted from the ground, piercing through the tabletop and jetting for my heart. I was already leaping away, jumping blindly backwards, but the thorn still stabbed into the range of my shield spell and I felt the drain on my magic like the sound of ripping fabric.

I stumbled back, going with my momentum and letting myself clatter and flip over one of the tables and scrambling to keep moving as all of the plants started to vibrate and come alive around me.

"Come to steal and thieve, I see, Jeremiah Grant!" George Stoker roared from somewhere nearby. All of the plants were glowing with that active power now as he tapped into them, making it hard to track him using it. "Like you've stolen my subjects? My flesh and blood?"

"Wow, you're a cock," I grunted as I rolled to the side to avoid the whipping slash of several strands of ivy. My shield blocked two more that tried to swing around my neck.

"You've entered my house now, boy," Stoker spat. "I know every movement you make."

Spears of branches erupted from the nearby wall and I jumped away, my shield getting battered by acorns shot like bullets out of holes in the opposite wall.

"You will not escape!"

"There you are," I grunted as I followed his voice. Then I punched my fist into the heart of the plant-person simulacrum even as it was starting to twist itself like a person waking up, wrapping my fingers around that fleshy nugget and ripping it out.

I still didn't know what it was, but I knew what it was connected to, and I focused my mind on that connection as I squeezed the flesh and looked at where Stoker was shouting from.

His next sentence cut off in his throat as his body was gripped by a magical hand, squeezing the air from his lungs and stopping him from moving. Using that hand I pulled him forward into the light of the luminescent moss. And then I slammed a shield around him. Not a protective one, like the one around me that felt like it was hanging in shreds as I'd cut the feed of magic that was trying to reinforce it. No, this one was metaphysical. Maybe even spiritual.

I slammed a concrete wall of mental force between him and magic.

The impact was staggering to both of us. Everything plant around us suddenly went still, frozen in place, causing much of the awkwardly-positioned branches and fronds and whatever else to collapse in a crash. I stumbled to the side as I felt a massive rush of power out of my mind and body, the sheer force of the spell feeling like it had been sucked out of me to leave a hollow vacuum where once I'd been full of power. I still had some, I wasn't empty, but that one spell had used up everything I'd gotten from having sex with each of my newest partners over the past couple of days.

It felt like I'd been kicked in the chest and the head at the same time.

It must have felt worse for George because he screamed a raw, bloodcurdling sound as his eyes went wide and he used every last ounce of air that hadn't already been pressed out of his body.

He collapsed as I released the magic hand, though I still held his lump of gristly flesh in my fist, and I got my feet under me properly and walked over to him.

"George Stoker," I said. "You fucking fucky fuck. We need to have a talk."

He looked up at me with horror in his eyes, gasping for breath. I wasn't holding him anymore, so I slapped him across the face and that seemed to kickstart his lungs as he gasped. George looked haggard, even more than what he'd looked like in my time-vision thing a few days ago. His eyes were sunken and he looked like he hadn't been sleeping or even eating. His beard was scraggly and a mess and his clothes were filthy like he hadn't changed since Annalise had fought him down to various scorch marks.

"You- you can't-"

"I can't what?" I asked.

"You can'tdo this. This is-"

I raised an eyebrow. "I'm a motherfucking Seat of motherfucking Fertility, motherfucker," I said. To be fair, it sounded better in my head. "I can do whatever I want."

"I- I'm- He'll-"

"He?" I asked. "He, who?"

"He, me," said a voice from the darkness.

The blast was the same purely magical force as the hand I had used on George, and it came at me like a bus.

Well, not like a bus. In my magical vision it was literally a magical city bus.

I pounded magic into my shield with one thought and punched my fist forward, imagining a blade of anti-magic forming from it and slicing that bus to separate around me. It worked, but the force of it still shoved me back across the lab area along with all of the equipment and tables until I hit the back wall.

The magical bus hit the wall a moment after I did with a crash, cracking and then ripping through the living walls and sending me tumbling outside. I scrambled to my feet, but the light of day around me cast the inside of the building into even deeper shadows.

I could see the magic being cast inside even if I didn't know what it was. It looked vaguely like a bubble, so I assumed it was a shield.

My initial instinct was to try the Time Stop thing, but I still hadn't actually figured that out, or the more vague problem that it was way too expensive for me to cast now. Especially not at range and without being able to see what I was doing it to.

So instead I shoved my mental grasp down into my pool of power and touched that little, hot burning nugget at the bottom. That little piece of love and hate, of hurt and care, that sent waves of cinnamon through my senses as I thought about it.

I spit fire. Literally.

I mean seriously, if the guy was going to throw a metaphysical bus at me, I could breathe dragon fire, right?

The fire blasted into the hole in the side of the warehouse, scorching and chewing away and then disintegrating the living tree. I swept it wide, eviscerating the building, and burning it to ash. Burning everything.

When I stopped, I coughed a little trail of smoke. The building was gone. The ground was scorched.

"Hadouken, you dick," I coughed, and then spat the taste of soot out of my mouth.

I was running low. Dangerously low. I staggered back to the edge of where the building had been and saw that right in the middle of the lab area was an unscorched bubble of ground. Inside it, in the dirt, were weird-looking runes quickly scratched in a geometric pattern and a little scorch mark right at the centre.

"Fuck," I said. And then I looked around and there was nothing to see. Just the burn marks and trees along a rocky, craggy set of hills. And not a door in sight. "Fuck!" I yelled, and the hills echoed it back at me.

I took out my phone and took a picture of the magical circle of runes, and then fished in my wallet for Victorious' key. A little bead of magic and his engine was thrumming through the sky as he came to a landing on the black scorched earth where the warehouse had been standing, ironically blasting 'Highway to Hell' through his speakers.

"Jeremiah Grant, where are we?" he asked when he skidded to a stop next to me.

"Buttfuck nowhere," I said, stepping through the driver's side door he opened for me. "I found George Stoker and had him."

"It seems you still have him," Victorious said.

"Huh?" I looked down and realized I was still holding that fleshy piece of him in my other hand. "Eugh, gross."

"Trophies are an important part of the victory, Jeremiah Grant. Better to take his skull, but a heart does send a strong message."

"That's the thing, Vic," I said. "I didn't kill him. He got away."

"What!?" Victorious roared, his engine revving heavily. "Then shall we give chase? Such a puny upstart should not be allowed to escape your mighty wrath!"

I coughed and then chuckled grimly, starting to feel the aches and scratches from my tumble out of the building. "Oh, he didn't," I said. "Not alone. He had help."

"What other mage would dare aid a Judgement Breaker? To sully what meagre honour they might have and debase themselves with a criminal outlaw?"

"That's just the thing, Vic," I said. "I'm pretty sure I just met another Seat."

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