Augur Ch. 05

The following days proved instructive in multiple ways.

For one thing, I thought of Wizards as being the top of the magical food chain, on the mortal realm at least. Having spoken with Cindy on the matter, I learned the wisdom my family had passed on to me was likely heavily flavored by the fact that my family's native magical talents are modest at best, and our exposure to the other realms of reality was therefore minimal. Wizards probably were among the more powerful magical beings wandering America, but from Cindy's descriptions of Demon Princes, I realized that they might just be the big fish in a little pond.

For another, I learned that Cindy was not a great teacher. Not that she wasn't entirely willing to instruct me - in this, she was as obedient as in anything else. She was enthusiastic, even. She just wasn't great at breaking down material in a way that made it easy for me to absorb. Part of that was down to our relationships with magic differing heavily. Wielding the power of Sin was literally Cindy's nature, and while I had my singular gift, any magic beyond that was something I needed to learn to perform. Part of it was also down to the fact that as willing and eager as Cindy was to obey, she was still a Sin Demon. The first time she and I sat down to study the book in earnest, she had dressed herself in a tiny tartan skirt and translucent blouse, without either bra or panties, resulting in a study session that lasted about fifteen minutes before I was balls deep in her pussy.

We also made a few fascinating discoveries, some of them with disturbing implications. As I struggled my way through performing a ritual which would, in theory, allow me to hear lies for a short time, I cursed aloud the exacting and fiddly nature of what I was doing.

"Fuck, there has to be an easier way to manage this. Even if part of my problem is lack of practice and a lack of grounding in true magic, you can't expect me to believe that Wizards go around spending thirty minutes setting up a ritual space every time they want to cast a minor spell."

Cindy was surprisingly patient for a demon, provided she was following my orders, so there was no frustration or exasperation in her voice as she answered me. "I expect that magic has advanced in the centuries since this book was written. Perhaps the wizard who penned this tome in the 900s knew of no other way, but given how much your non magical society has advanced, it is possible your magical society is similarly more sophisticated."

I glanced up from the notes I was taking on my progress to ask, curious, "How do you know the book was written in the 900 AD? Is that on the cover somewhere, or...?"

To my surprise, Cindy didn't answer right away. Instead, she frowned and stared off into space for a few moments, only to announce cautiously, "I do not know how I know that." I let her take a few moments to process and think, finishing writing down the sentence I had started, before setting down my pencil and looking at her. "Is it possible you learned it when you were summoned previously? I mean, the ritual which allowed Mycah - and me - to summon you is right there in the book. Could someone have used the same ritual and summoned you before?"

Cindy continued frowning, an expression I hadn't really ever seen on her face before. Her time on the mortal plane was generally blissful, so seeing her upset was honestly a little shocking. Eventually she nodded slowly and explained, "It is possible, but I have no memories of it having happened. If I have been summoned to the mortal realm before, whoever did so must have found a way to remove my memories of it. I do not naturally forget. That is a thing of mortals. If I cannot recall a thing which I have previously experienced, it means powerful magic was involved."

I spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going back and forth with Cindy, developing a few simple experiments to see if I had the power to cause her to forget anything, but we weren't able to find any sets of commands or uses of her own power which would produce the effect. Modifying memory simply wasn't in her power suite, as it didn't relate to Sin in any meaningful way, and none of the spells she had yet studied in the book would do the trick. Eventually, she announced that she would examine the remainder of the book to determine if it contained such a ritual, but we otherwise set the matter aside as something to look into if we ever got more resources to help.

Another fascinating discovery was that the bond Cindy mentioned which granted her a tiny measure of the free will I possessed also granted me the ability to draw upon her as a power source. Much as she could leverage and expend the Sin she absorbed to fuel herself and her power, I could draw forth her Sin to power the spells and rituals in the book.

The sensation of doing so was dangerously seductive. I just needed to relax my controls a little, to let myself give in to some measure of Sin, to draw on her, and suddenly performing the rituals became vastly easier. Tiny mistakes in hand gestures or pronunciations which would otherwise have caused the spell to fail completely suddenly were smoothed over by demonic power. A ritual which allowed me to see in the dark went from grainy 80s night vision goggles to not being able to tell the difference between the lights in my apartment being on or off.

I resolved not to draw on that power too often, for two specific reasons. The first was that any Sin which I drew from Cindy needed to be repaid. The first day I discovered that I could draw on her power was also the first day she needed to warn me that I was at risk of breaking our bond. Considering we had spent nearly an hour in bed together that morning, I needed to have her explain that the Sin she was giving through the bond was the same Sin she absorbed to maintain it. I could draw on that power freely, but if I spent it too heavily, I was at risk of not being able to repay her in time.

The second reason was that giving in to the sensation of Sin affected my mood and my actions in ways I wasn't comfortable with. Much as Cindy was a creature of absolutes, only able to act according to her nature, the more I leveraged her power to fuel magic, the harder it was for me to exert my will over my own choices. I didn't want to fuel some magic spell with Sin, only to turn around and assault the next pretty girl I encountered because I couldn't control my Lust, or to road rage and ram some asshole driver when I was overtaken by Wrath.

Dipping into her power briefly seemed safe enough, but I ordered her to help me keep an eye on it and to warn me if I was drawing enough power that it was likely to impact my behavior.

After about two weeks of regular study - and wild sex - with a Sin Demon, I managed to master a ritual sufficiently well that I was able to turn it into an actual useful part of my daily life. This made me inordinately proud, which in turn caused Cindy to press her body fully against me as she soaked in the Pride I was emitting.

I had asked her if, when she took in Sin from the mortal realm, Cindy was actually taking anything away from the people giving it off. She explained that it was much more akin to absorbing sunlight while outside. The sun was giving off the light anyway, and whether it impacted the ground or a flower, the sun wasn't affected. Mortals indulging in - and radiating - Sin were giving off that energy regardless of who was nearby. It wasn't a good idea for a mortal to give Sin to anyone 24/7, but that was more about what it would do to you as a person to be indulging that much. That was billionaire behavior, and I resolved to keep a tighter leash on myself than those parasites.

The ritual I had mastered was a comparatively simple one, and when Cindy first explained what it did, I was frankly underwhelmed. Described in the tome as a cleansing and purification of an object or room, it sounded like an overly complicated way to clean. Burning sage and chanting for ten minutes while making a series of exacting motions with my hand and a tiny crystal at the end of a stick was about as much physical effort as it would take me to actually clean out my car the old fashioned way. However, when the ritual took effect, not only did the inside of my car look as sparkling and new as it did the day it rolled off the factory line, but my check engine light turned off. For the first time in about nine months.

Something about the ritual apparently fixed or maintained whatever was out of whack enough to trip the car's sensors. I noticed on my first test drive afterward that the timing belt had even stopped squeaking on right turns. I took my Honda into the shop the day after, just to get it checked out, only to be informed that not only did it not even need to have the air filters changed, but it was the best maintained car the mechanic had personally ever worked on. The car was 12 years old with over a hundred thousand miles on it, and he asked who else had been working on it to keep it in as good condition as it was. I had to laugh that off and make up an excuse about my dad being a hobbyist mechanic in order to get the man to stop pestering me.

From that day on, I never needed a tune-up again.

That might not sound like much, depending on your financial situation, but suddenly never having to worry about an 800 dollar repair bill looming over my head was astonishing. I pulled over as soon as I could spot a dark side street on the way back to my apartment and bent Cindy over the hood of the car. I celebrated this success by enjoying her welcoming pussy in the tiny employee parking lot behind a tax office that was closed for the night, since it was well past dark by the time we left the mechanic.

The Sin Demon held no personal modesty at all, so she was more than happy to push her heavily zippered skirt up over her hips and bend over for me as soon as I expressed interest. I had personally never really been hot on the idea of public sex, but seeing Cindy pull her panties to the side and urge me to use her while I felt the cool night air around us had my cock harder than it had been in... well, hard to gauge, Cindy had been introducing me to a lot of new things lately, but it certainly felt as though it might have awakened something in me.

I let my gift be our only warning system, trusting that it would tell me about any danger before it happened, and just let myself enjoy a pretty girl with a willing pussy. Cindy pressed her hips back against me, splayed her arms out over the hood of my Accord, and let me rut into her. I didn't bother taking off my pants, I just unzipped them and fished my cock out of my boxers, then slotted it up against her cunt and slammed it home. My hands gripped her slender hips, and I fucked her hard and fast, invigorated by the new surroundings and the excitement - and risk - of being discovered.

The location I had chosen wasn't exactly picked after careful deliberation, but we were in a tiny parking lot down a side alley, protected from view by the strip mall that was between us and the main road. I didn't spend a great deal of time or thought on the people zipping by a hundred feet away, but knowing that I was plunging in and out of Cindy's greedy pussy with nothing but open air between us and the nearby road was enough that I didn't last long. Probably ten minutes after I had parked the car and opened my door to race outside, I was moaning and pumping demon pussy full of human cum. Soon after that, Cindy was squatting down in the parking lot with her face buried in my pubes, enthusiastically licking my cock clean of our combined juices while she leaked my cum onto the pavement from her dripping pussy.

I did feel a little guilty about that, hoping that no one from the tax office stepped in that particular puddle first thing in the morning, but as we got back into my car and drove towards my apartment, I consoled myself with the fact that it started to rain.

That particular ritual might have been the first I was able to reliably perform, but with Cindy's instruction, I started to learn as many of the spells contained in the book as I was able. Several of them weren't especially applicable to my personal situation, since I had little need to guarantee a good harvest, nor bless a boar hunt, but I did add them to my hypothetical offerings to clients.

I hadn't started expanding my services just yet, since I wasn't entirely sure I wanted rumors of an upstart making their way to the wizards of the American midwest. I lived on the outskirts of St. Louis, and while I didn't know of any full wizards in the city, Chicago wasn't too far off, and I had heard rumors of a powerful and capricious one living there.

In the end, while I decided to remain cautious, I also knew that I couldn't let fear keep me from taking advantage of my newfound situation. If nothing else, I was spending more money now that Cindy was in my life, and I needed to find a way to recoup those costs before my meager checking account balance hit zero.

I started letting a few of my previous customers know that there were a couple other services I could offer. I made sure to limit my new offerings to things in line with my original offerings, in order to give myself some plausible deniability and limit the potential damage of my actions. My reasoning behind this was twofold. My talent doesn't produce any grand and obvious magical effects, nothing that can be captured on camera or picked up by someone completely outside of the magical world. In fact, nothing about my gifts goes beyond what telephone psychics have been claiming to offer for decades. As such, nothing about it made me stand out from the crowd of shysters and frauds who have been bilking the populace for generations. As long as what I offered met those same criteria, it wouldn't make me stand out anymore than what I was already selling.

Further, even if someone did figure out that I was actually offering magic, the additional services I was offering - lie detection, finding missing objects, and the like - were all things which could hypothetically be explained as permutations of my original gift.

I could, after all, theoretically find an object misplaced in a field with my native talent. It would take quite a bit of effort, and the presence of other humans would throw a huge monkey wrench in the process, but by carefully focusing on the odds of my success if I were to search one area at a time, I could gradually hone in on the most probable place to find something, until success became inevitable. I had actually used that trick in the past when I was in danger of falling so far behind on rent that Sara wouldn't be able to cut me any slack. Twice I had found what were probably discarded engagement rings off of hiking trails near the Missouri river, and once a brand new Rolex watch, still in its box, protected by wrapping paper.

I had felt a little bad about the last one, but what was obviously intended to be a gift had no name tag on it, and an hour of searching nearby didn't turn up anyone who knew anything about it. The rings only got me a couple hundred dollars at a pawn shop, but when I eventually sold the watch, I made rent for the next six months.

I didn't get too many people taking me up on my expanded services immediately, but the woman who had such a hard time taking 'no' for an answer earlier made an appointment with me immediately. Well, she made an appointment as soon as I explained that my earlier reticence was because I needed to make sure she was dedicated to the truth. Sometimes even real magic needs a little showmanship to go with it, particularly when dealing with a public who has certain expectations about how practitioners of the arcane arts should behave. I'm just glad a certain fictional wizarding franchise didn't damage public perception of magical capabilities too much. I still had to explain to the occasional customer that I didn't use a wand to perform my Auguries.

Shit. I actually did use a wand in some of my rituals. I really hoped I didn't have to look at the smug faces of some previous customers if I had to bring that into play.

New appointments did begin to slowly pile up, and with Cindy's aid, I started to actually grow my bank account in a measurable way for the first time in years. I even managed to cut back on the delivery and driving gigs, since I could make enough money for rent and food just by selling my magical services. That was a first for my life. I had been selling Auguries since junior high for pocket money and supplemental income, but hadn't ever been able to make an actual living off of it until now.

The day after I checked my bank balance and realized that it was actually growing, I celebrated by dragging Cindy into my bedroom, and we only left when my phone informed me the delivery I had ordered arrived. I hastily threw on some sweat pants and a t-shirt and ran down to the lobby to pick up our food, passing Sara on the way back to my apartment.

Curiously, the look she gave me was speculative rather than... anything else. I had only spoken with her a handful of times since the whole Mycah incident, and she had been frostily professional each time. We didn't exchange words as I brought the brown paper bag back to my apartment, but her expression lingered in my mind.

I felt a pang of shame when, half an hour later, while lying on my back with Cindy riding my cock languidly in a reverse cowgirl position, I realized I was still picturing Sara's face, wondering what it would feel like if she were the one with her pussy wrapped around my dick. Then the Sin Demon's cunt fluttered around me as though in response to my idle fantasies, and both the shame and Sara's face faded from my mind.