A-Cup Angst Ch. 16

"So, you have something that you enchanted a long time ago that allows you to stop darts in mid-air," Caitlin asked.

"No," he said. He was distracted by looking at the slowly moving tactical formation he was following. "I have a small store of stuff I've enchanted a long time ago. Before I got captured, I had nightmares I didn't properly interpret as warnings of what was coming. In those nightmares I saved myself by enchanting a spell sigil, so I did that when I woke up. When the vampire modified my brain with her magic, the sigil's magic piggy-backed on her efforts and transformed my brain into that of a Jedi."

"Seriously?" Mara asked.

"Yes, seriously," he said.

"What can you do?" Mara asked.

"I can sense the minds of people who are nearby. I can detect emotions and even read surface thoughts. I see the very near future if it results in terrible things for me and I have telekinesis. I can lift half a ton with my mind alone and hold it aloft."

"Wow," Caitlin said.

"So, you know that Laura and Alessandra weren't back in the trattoria," Mara asked.

"Correct," he said.

"Well, who are these guys?" Mara asked. "What can you read from their minds?"

"Nothing," he said. "Their minds are warded against being read. I came across such a spell once before. Section used to use it to keep their agents' minds protected from broadcasting secrets."

"So, these guys are Section," Mara asked.

"Probably," he said. "Maybe not. Other law enforcement agencies use similar spells, too. I intend to follow these guys and find out who they are." He fished his phone out of his pocket and dialed Laura's number. It went straight to voicemail. He got the same result with Alessandra's phone. No one was answering the phone in the trattoria. "Damn it! They must have taken them!"

He kept following the men and then dialed the contact number of the Jordanian embassy. He got in touch with Yousef, who had no idea what was going on, but promised to call in the authorities and contact Ahmed. Jamie thanked him and hung up. Whatever aid Yousef might get him, it would be too late if he let these guys out of his sight.

He slowed down and let the men gain some distance. "Ok, girls, unless I'm very wrong, they're going to take the next left and turn onto the main avenue. Their cars are probably waiting for them there. We'll have a brief window for you to get out of the car and go your own way. I intend to follow these guys and snatch one up for questioning."

"We're coming with you," Caitlin said.

"I'd rather you didn't," he said. "This will be dangerous."

"Then you'll need my help," Caitlin said. "I am a witch, you know."

"Mara, do you want out?" he asked.

"No," Mara said. "Absolutely not. I'm here to help."

"Well, fine then," he darkly said. He stepped on the throttle and caught up with the men. "If you're expecting me to talk you out of this, I don't got the time for the usual nonsense. Don't come crying to me later about how I didn't warn you!"

He took out his phone and called his mother. She answered him quickly and Jamie had the most unpleasant conversation of his life as he desperately tried to convince her to collect her daughter and get out of town. Caitlin and Mara tried to ignore his tearful pleas as he kept following the men at a crawling pace. Finally, it ended and Jamie wiped the tears from his face with his sleeve. He cleared his hoarse throat.

"Are you ok?" Mara asked him gently.

Jamie shook his head no and blinked his eyes clear. There was still a job to do. He had to focus and follow the men. They came to the walls that encompassed the small town and the satellite phone was used again. Jamie parked right next to them as they formed up on a clearing not far from the town gate. They ignored his car, as always.

"How much magic can you sense," he asked Caitlin.

"Is it ok for me to use my senses on them," she asked. "Won't they sense me in turn?"

"Not while you're in the car," he said. "I don't know if they'll be able to tell you're watching them, but they won't be able to find you. That, I'm sure of!"

She closed her eyes and focused for a few seconds. "Oh, there's a lot of magic around," she said. "They've got a spell drawn around this whole field to make everyone ignore it and they're all carrying many protective charms. I think four, or five, of them are casters."

Jamie looked at the way their formation changed. "And they've definitely felt you looking," he said. There was no way for him to snatch one of them and stick them inside the car without the rest of them intervening. He gripped his steering wheel tightly and seethed in rage.

A helicopter was soon heard and it landed right next to his car, making the air buffet it with loud gusts. The men boarded the helicopter under full cover and it rose back up into the air to fly away. Jamie reached out with the Force and tried to manipulate some of the mechanisms of the helicopter, to get it to make an emergency landing. He could feel his work being undone on the fly, using magic, as the chopper swayed and dipped, but ultimately flew out of his range.

Jamie cursed up a storm as he watched them fly off. He made another call to Yousef and told him the helicopter's tail number. Yousef promised to do what he could to have it intercepted. "Come on," he said and put the car back in gear. "We need to examine the trattoria for clues!"

He drove them back there and carefully got out of the car to see if there would be any more shots taken at him. There were none, so he led the girls into the building. The place had been ransacked. Laura and Alessandra's things were strewn all over the place and many pieces of furniture were damaged, or upturned by the search.

There was no sign of either woman, nor any kind of clue where they might have gone to. Jamie didn't even know if they had been taken for certain. He obtained some of either girl's hairs and Caitlin tried to do a blood scry for them.

"They're warded against it," she sadly said after the scrying failed.

Jamie bit back a juicy curse. They both wore bracelets he had permanently enchanted ages ago to ward the wearer against being traced by magic. He had hoped that their kidnappers might have taken those off and left them traceable. He guessed they could have done that and then placed their own, temporary wards on them. He had no way of knowing for sure. He huffed and went online to check on the server he had rented in Florence. He nearly wept with frustration when he saw that his electronic trace of the Worth girls had gone cold.

The last place his algorhythm managed to follow them to was the American consulate in Munich. Their trail abruptly ended there, in the wee hours of the morning. "Fuck," he grumbled. He forced himself to concentrate and programmed the server to redirect his mother and sister's electronic trails, so people trying to trace them would go hunting ghosts, instead.

He was just about done when Mara quietly said, "Uh, Jamie, I'm really, really hungry."

He looked up at her and said, "Well, why didn't you say so, before?"

Mara looked nervous and Caitlin said, "Maybe because you look like you might flip out at any second?"

"Well, if I look like that, it's only because I really am ready to go berserk at any moment," he deliberately said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm going to go off on you. You're my friends and I'm not that far gone. Not yet, anyway. Go downstairs, to the kitchen, and help yourselves to anything you like!"

"There's nothing in the kitchen," Caitlin said. "Remember? They threw everything to the floor and it's all melted and spoiled by now."

Jamie sighed. "Just wait a few more minutes for me to finish this and then we're going someplace to eat!"

The girls wandered off and raided the Rossis' closets for winter attire. When they came back to Jamie, he could hear their stomachs growling. His own was starting to join them. He finished setting up the electronic redirects, found Laura's address book, and took them to a ristorante, where the two of them ordered a mountain of food. He sat in silence and watched the real time feed of his server tracking his mother and sister and redirecting their trace at the same time. It was working splendidly, but he didn't want to risk taking his eye off it for even a second.

Last night's revelations had been so shocking that he had forgotten to check on his trace of the Worths earlier that morning and he had completely missed it when they dropped off his radar. He beat himself up over it, especially since he had sworn to himself that he would check it every time he went to sleep and woke up. If he had checked it that morning, he would have seen it had gone wrong and he would have warned Laura and Alessandra. Maybe even moved them to safety. The thought that their disappearances could have been prevented made him want to stab himself in the eye.

The girls ate ravenously when the food came and he joined them, though with no real appetite. He desperately tried to sort the morning's events in his head. A group of armed thugs had tried to capture him, after they had captured Laura and Alessandra, but they hadn't gone after his mother and sister. The last part made little to no sense. If he was the target and they had the manpower to do it, why wouldn't they also have gone after his mother and sister?

During the meal, Caitlin and Mara tried to get him to talk about the very emotional and uncomfortable call they had witnessed him making from the car, but he cut them off by saying, "I had said farewell forever to my mother and sister the other day. Late last night, I had called them to tell them I was back and I visited them this morning, for a very, very emotional reunion. And just now, I had to call them to say they had to run for their lives. You'll understand if I'm not really in the mood to talk about it."

During dessert, a terrible thought came to him. He glared at Caitlin and said, "Caitlin, how much did you tell Rose and Sandra about me? You know, when you brought them over here?"

"Nothing," Caitlin said. She swallowed nervously under his glare and he sensed her guilt.

"Really," he said. "Nothing at all? So why did they choose to come with you in the first place?"

Caitlin hesitated for a moment and then said, "Well, we've been in touch ever since you saved me. You know that."

He sensed the truth of the matter in her mind and said, "You told them enough about me to be able to figure out who Laura and Alessandra were and where they could be found. Didn't you?"

Caitlin blushed furiously in shame and stammered, "No, I didn't! I'd never!"

Jamie sighed and put his head in his hands. He didn't doubt that Rose and Sandra would want to have some revenge against him, but he couldn't really believe them to have the resources to pull this off. And they definitely wouldn't have had the time to plan it. They might have figured out about the Rossis, somehow, and then passed that intel on to someone else, who was pulling the strings. Someone big and powerful. Someone who now had the Rossis and his unborn children.

He used some of Nova's algorithms to hack into the long-term parking at the airport. He looked up some license plates of the cars parked there. After some more hacking, he determined several villas and houses in Florence and its environs that would be unoccupied for weeks to come.

"We're relocating someplace safe," he said and led the girls to the car. He drove them to one of the villas on the outskirts of Florence and used the Force to gain entry and disable the alarm system. "Make yourselves at home!"

The girls used the bathrooms and raided the closets of the family that lived there for more clothing in their sizes. Ahmed called Jamie to tell him all the Italian authorities were on the case. He also expressed his sympathies and outrage at the kidnapping. He swore to do all that he could to find the Rossis. Jamie thanked him profusely and the man hung up after fifteen minutes of promising to do all that he could, to actually start doing it.

Jamie didn't know if it was the Force telling him so, or just his own instincts and experience, but he didn't hold much hope in Ahmed saving the day. He opened Laura's address book and called every number in it, asking people if anyone had any clue as to where they were. A small part of him still held hope that they might have gone off somewhere on their own. He longed to learn that this had all been a misunderstanding. Three hours and ninety-six phone calls later, he was thoroughly disabused of the notion. He sank into an overstuffed lounge chair and buried his face in his hands. He breathed slow, deep breaths to keep from crying.

Mara and Caitlin had, in the meanwhile, made dinner and used the villa's phone to catch up on their own phone correspondences. Jamie had programmed his server to redirect the calls at random and watch out for any tracers. Mara brought him a tray loaded with food and set it in his lap. He mumbled some thanks and then picked at it.

Mara stood behind him and rubbed his shoulder. "Jamie," she softly said, "you can't beat yourself up about this."

"Oh, do shut up, Mara," he quietly said. "I neither need, nor want any platitudes."

"So, what," Caitlin asked. "You're gonna just sit around and stew in your own misery? Isn't this kidnapping connected to the prophecy Laura's dead father gave her? The one about the world ending?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, it is. It must be!" He locked eyes with Caitlin. She gulped nervously.

"Well, the prophecy said Alessandra would live," Mara offered in a small voice.

"It didn't explicitly say she was among the first to die," Jamie said, not taking his eyes off Caitlin's. "That doesn't mean she lives. I need to know, Caitlin. I need to know."

She shook her head no. "No, no way. I'm not gonna do that!"

"I need you to summon the late Mister Rossi and have him possess you, body, soul and magic, so he can cast his spells and see the future."

"I'm not gonna do that!"

"You owe me," Jamie said.

"No," she said, shaking her head.

"I saved you from possession. If I hadn't done that, you'd still be living the nightmare, even now! You said so yourself. You owe me twice! And you're the one that brought those two snakes Rose and Sandra into this and I'm sure they're involved somehow!"

"No," Caitlin insisted. "If I let him have me all the way, then I won't be able to evict him. If he wanted to, he could stay inside me, wear me like a meat puppet until the day I die! I'm not going to do that!"

"He won't," Jamie insisted. "He is an honorable man. A hero to all the magical communities of Europe."

"He is a long-dead spirit of a powerful magician whose agenda could be anything at all," Caitlin all but screamed. "You don't know what limbo does to a person's spirit!"

"Caitlin," he admonished. He set the food tray aside and got up to stand in front of her. "If you don't do this... then the world ends. No more you, no more me, no more Mara, no more anything." Her face was scrunched up and tears were starting to leak from the corners of her eyes. She lowered her face to the floor and shook her head. "Do you doubt that? Do you doubt the word of the late seer?" After a long moment, she shook her head again.

He grasped her hands and gave them a squeeze. "So, you do accept that the world is about to end and all the people in it?" She nodded her head once. "Then what will you do about it? Will you hide inside your skin until the last day, or will you fight? Will you fight for yourself? For me? For every innocent person on this planet and their loved ones?"

She sobbed and he softened his voice. "Come on! Where is that gorgeous girl that memorized the names and cities of every caster that had received a copy of the vampire transformation ritual? Huh?" He crouched lower and looked up into her watery eyes. She straightened up and sniffed. "Where is the girl that survived being possessed by two angry, vengeful ghosts?" He smiled at her. "Ah! There she is! Brave and beautiful!" He brought one of her hands up to his mouth and kissed it.

"You're going to do this," he said, "aren't you? You're going to summon Rossi and let him have all of you, so he can tell us exactly what's going on."

She swallowed, sniffed and blinked away her tears. "Yes," she said, making Jamie's smile widen, "but only under one condition!"

"Name it," he said without hesitation.

"You have to have sex with me and Mara, first," Caitlin said.

Jamie looked from her to Mara and back again. "Are you serious?"

"That's what I want," Caitlin said. "If you want me to give myself to your dead future father-in-law, then you have to have a threesome with the two of us and you have to make it great. No threesome, no summoning."

"You'd be willing to risk the fate of the world for the chance to have sex with me?"

Caitlin nodded. "You and Mara," she said.

"Ok, but, um," he said, "we haven't asked Mara about-"

"I want to," Mara quickly said.

Jamie looked at her. She seemed quite eager, with her lips quirked into a toothy grin. He reached out with his senses and felt their previous arrangement to this effect. He could also sense that Mara was very nervous. She had never been with a girl before. As far as he could tell, she had never even dreamed of it.

"I don't think we should pressure Mara into doing anything she isn't comfortable with."

"Pressure-shmessure," Caitlin said. "My girl is with me on this, one hundred percent. Ain't that right, Mara?"

"Yes."

Jamie could plainly see that Mara wasn't one hundred percent into it. He shot Caitlin a look. "Come on, Caitlin. Let's you and I-"

"No! Threesome, Jamie. I want a threesome. No threesome, no possession."

"Then, let's find someone else, cause Mara isn't-"

"There's no one else," Caitlin declared. Mara and she stepped towards one another. They lifted their arms and slowly embraced. Jamie could sense Caitlin's single-minded desire and Mara's hesitance at the same time. He found the combination of their emotional states oddly erotic.

Their faces began to venture towards one another and his misgivings about loyalty to the mothers of his children slowly faded away as he felt their anticipations mount. Mara was tense and swallowed nervously as she closed her eyes. Caitlin parted her lips and they closed the last inch of distance between them. Their first touch was hesitant, with Mara nearly flinching away, but they soon relaxed into it. He could sense Mara enjoying the feel of another woman's lips.

The busty brunette gasped and moaned when Caitlin slipped her tongue past her lips. They French kissed for a few long, languid minutes, before they suddenly remembered they had hands, too. Caitlin reached up and caressed the sides of Mara's neck. Mara's hands roamed over Caitlin's back, reflecting her uncertainty of how to proceed.

They made out slowly, with Caitlin taking the lead and easing Mara into things. Jamie sat and watched as their sweaters and shirts came off. Caitlin's small hands went to Mara's big breasts. Mara gasped at the contact and threw her head back. Caitlin looked over at Jamie and winked before she lowered her face to Mara's deep cleavage.

Mara gasped and squealed when Caitlin began to kiss between her breasts. She offered no resistance as the fair-haired girl kissed first one fleshy globe and then the other. Jamie could sense her hesitation, which Caitlin had successfully beaten down with her tender ministrations, spike when small, deft hands reached the clasp of her bra.

Caitlin sensed her reaction, too, so she settled for caressing the skin between Mara's shoulder blades. She nuzzled her tits and provoked a few giggles from her. When she felt Mara relax again, she swiftly undid her bra and pulled the straps aside. Mara gasped and her arms flexed, on reflex, to catch the garment.