Johan Birch

Jaci Stone hadn't inspired whole neighborhoods to help her out, she just stopped and left flowers in her wake when she left. While we were having fun with this neighborhood rally, I needed a little Johan-to-gaia time.

Petra then suggested that we give Rog a nitrogenator to use for his business. He was obviously a lover of green, and he could do one thing that I couldn't do: Plant every day.

There was merit in her idea. Jaci had done her work in Los Angeles at random; a park here, a lawn there, there was no pattern to her work, which made it hard to calculate the benefit as a whole.

I hadn't really thought of the negative energy vacuum that Jaci had created, simply because I didn't seem to have a third eye. If I could get data, exact data, on when and where nitrogenators had been used in and around Houston, science could be applied to whatever benefits the project exhibited. I told Petra to set it up.

Erin would have to be briefed and we had to set up a means for the data to get to her. By nineteen hours everything was arranged and ready for input on a tablet computer. I had been giving Rog lessons on how to use the nitrogenator all day, and he didn't show any surprise when I turned it over to him.

***

After breakfast, Petra slid a photograph across the table. For a moment, I was confused; printed photographs were mostly used for destinations to fold, and I couldn't fold. Then I really studied it. It was a picture of an interstate highway marker, a kilometer marker and a little sign:

Adopt-a-Highway

Birch America

Next 10 kilometers.

It was a destination picture. A destination that I could drive to. To plant. Yes!

Petra laid a long, sloppy kiss on me before Aysun whisked her away. I would have to fly home alone tonight, but I would fly happy.

I didn't know how Petra had gotten a hold of Jaci's original trailer. It must have been for sale somewhere, just like the rest of Jaci's belongings. That made me sad, why was everybody getting rid of Jaci's things?

I thought about that more as I drove to my designated section of highway. There was actually nothing to work with out on that stretch of interstate, making me glad that Petra had included some rotten hay and water to make my fertilizer.

My supply of flowers ran out quick, but grass seed had been included in my supplies, so it got used. Altogether I spent four hours on that plot, but I felt better than I had in months when I packed up my things for the drive back to the city.

I input the data from the planting on the plane ride back to Las Vegas. I didn't know how much good it would do for Erin, but she'd get it. On a whim, I told my pilot to just refuel in Vegas, I wanted to go home tonight.

Jaci's home was now mine, Petra had assured me over breakfast. She and Ayson appeared at the end of the driveway when the car stalled out. The car had died because my driver, Eric, didn't have an invitation. Everything was fine once I extended the invitation to everyone there, but I couldn't figure out why the warding would keep out my wife and daughter.

The house felt different empty. Petra asked me where I had planned on sleeping. I shrugged and answered that I thought she would have taken care of that already.

My response was a raised eyebrow. Petra said that for some reason the house didn't like anyone. Since Starr and Pete had taken off to Laurel, not even the realtor was brave enough to visit. The reason there had not been a 'For Sale' sign out front was that it wouldn't go into the ground. I wondered about that, telling them about gaia's visit while I had been touring the property.

Petra told me that Gabrielle had even tried her hand at buying the house, thinking that the last offer had been one million dollars. I snickered when Petra admitted that Gabrielle wouldn't pay five. I didn't know why Gabrielle would have even tried throwing her wig in that ring, she hated the house.

Aysun immediately fell in love with the guardian dragon, saying that she had never seen a familiar in purple and yellow before. I took them into the cellar and down into the cavern. I had told Petra a few times about the god's tear under Jaci's house, and now I finally got to show it to her. It took a while to peel their eyes away from a huge gold ball just sitting there like nobody's business.

Grace was waiting for us when we exited the garage. She had sensed Aysun entering the cavern, and wanted to see who the other presence was. She was really surprised that three of us had come out.

"Why are you buying up all of Jaci's things?" She demanded in her interrogation tone.

"Watch your tone, young lady!" Petra wagged her finger. "Polite conversations need not have compulsion spells woven into them. If we choose not to tell you, then you don't need to know."

"I do need to know!"

"Such a petulant child," Petra said. She was looking at Grace, but really over her shoulder. "This is a property and gold matter, isn't it, Shane?"

"It certainly is," the man who had appeared behind Grace replied. I wasn't really sure where he had come from, but he had given Grace a start. "As daughter of the previous owner, she does possess a certain leeway crossing the warding, but trying to use witchcraft against the new owners wasn't a wise choice."

"We'll thank you to leave now, Grace Vanauna," Petra said. "Your invitation is revoked."

"I almost wish Gabrielle would have won the bidding war," Grace muttered. A second later, she was gone.

"Sir Johan, I will return to my duties," Shane nodded and vanished as well.

"Petra, what the hell was that?" I demanded. "Grace's last name is Stone!'

"Grace gave Jaci's name back, dad," Aysun explained. "She no longer wanted to be known as 'Grace Stone.'"

"I'm just wondering when I'm going to wake up," I sighed.

"Don't you dare!" Petra grabbed my hands. "Would you give us back?"

"Mom, dad, we should do this inside," Aysun warned.

I let Petra lead me inside. Aysun vanished and came back with two chairs from my condo. She got a thoughtful look on her face, vanishing with the chairs and coming back with the sofa. Petra sat down first, and I lay down with my head in her lap.

"Why does everybody want to forget about Jaci?" I asked with a sob.

"I keep catching thoughts off of her lovers and friends. The general thought is that Jaci betrayed all of them by going after Miranda. I don't know the specifics, but there was a great deal of turmoil that took time to get right."

"And you couldn't help because you were busy trying to get Johan situated in his body," I nodded.

"You. Janine started the ball rolling by selling Boulder, Limited, to you."

"Us," I corrected.

"You. Then, it was everybody else. Nobody wanted to keep anything remotely connected to Jaci."

"Why didn't you tell me any of this?" I looked up at her.

"Because it would have put you in the state you are now. You can't change anything, Johan, you know that you are just as powerless with the knowledge as you were without."

She was right, of course. "Thank you for being my shield."

"That is what wives do for their husbands," Petra smiled down at me. "I know that I hurt you, me treating Grace like that."

"She's a busybody," I agreed. "At some point we're going to have to break the secret."

"Eventually," Petra nodded. "While our daughter is zipping back and forth between here and downtown, would you like anything to eat?"

"I am starving," I admitted.

Petra gave me one more piece of information regarding Grace. She had resigned as the head of The Stonebrook Coven. While the other daughters and sons had regarded Jaci as a heroine, Grace had felt hurt and betrayed. Jaci had been really close to Grace, that's probably why the hurt was so bad. For them both.

Correy, Mathis, and Calleigh had resigned for the obvious reason. They didn't want to give away the fact that Jaci's soul was still hanging around. Some errant thought, here or there, could betray me, and they didn't want that.

Dinner arrived on a coffee table that Aysun had brought with her. We enjoyed Chinese, the memory of Jaci and Samantha's visit to the Chinese mainland lightening my mood. Petra made sure not to let Samantha's current location drag me back down.

Morning came much too soon, Petra riding into the city with me rather than catching a fold with Aysun. The Los Angeles offices of Birch America, while not as high up as those belonging to Brookstone Pointe, still afforded me a magnificent view. There was the added bonus of being the building owner, my office was much bigger. The executive suites were added as we did the remodel.

Nora escorted Doctor Erin Granger into my office at eleven hours plus thirty. We discussed the construction of yet another dome in the desert. This would be the 'city-sized' dome that we hoped we could duplicate on Mars. The newer generation of solar cells would be placed as a part of the overhead structure, hopefully providing us with enough power for the colony.

Then Erin hit me with the bad news. As much as we would have liked to, we couldn't make our experiment invisible. A small passenger plane, the kind I liked to call 'puddle jumpers' had flown over the property.

We couldn't control the airspace higher than a thousand meters or so, the rest belonged to the government. This plane, strangely enough, had been populated by ten of the twenty-five members of the European Space Agency, including the Director-General.

They were on their way from Houston to Edwards Air Force Base when one of them had spotted our huge domes. Of course they were all scientists, so none of them were stupid, and on the second pass they had divined what our domes were for. Nobody built domes in the middle of the fucking desert without a purpose.

The Director-General had sent an envoy to make contact with us, staking out the entrance to the access road until someone came out to meet them. Erin had gotten the feeling that they hadn't contacted NASA about our little project, and I thanked the goddess for that.

I told her that we were going to contact the ESA eventually, because we needed their pads to launch our missions to Mars. As Birch Industries was a major conglomerate in Germany, and we had a major friend in France, we could skip over a leaky, backstabbing bureaucracy to start our mission in relative privacy.

Erin related that they wanted to make contact with the person, people, or company responsible for the projects, and I told her to pass my name along. I would wow them soon enough.

Before Petra could object about spies, I reminded her that we were allowed by The Laws of Man to filter out any interlopers. She agreed, and vowed to teach Nora how to tell who was who before I explained my full dream to our guests.

The scientists agreed to the screenings, not really surprised by the spy in their midst. Once I had their complete attention, I turned the briefing over to Erin.

She wowed the group, to say the least. Before the gathering was over, we had their tacit approval to piece together a probe for launch to Mars. Within the year. Erin snickered and told them that we already had a multi-piece probe that could be mated to rockets and launched within a month. She waited for my nod before agreeing that we would share complete telemetry from the probe.

That is when the second spy revealed himself. He wondered loudly why we weren't teaming with NASA, as they were the principal space agency on the planet. Before I waved the security guard to toss his ass out, I told him that I wanted to keep my toys to myself, not have every piece of my work studied in the media before the first rocket flew.

***

Erin had surprised me with her probe. It was actually under the purview of her Mars projects, and I was giving her free reign with that. The parts for the probe had actually been made and tested separately; they just had to be assembled, and that assembly would have to be done in space.

It was actually pretty amazing how the project could drag in some places and then take huge leaps. The plan for launching the probe was two years into the future, but Erin admitted she had gotten caught up in the moment. She promised that everything would work, she wouldn't just waste one hundred million dollars of company money.

Petra gave me a pat on the back for my leadership ability and then tweaked my ear for joking about keeping my toys to myself. That was an idiom that Johan Birch could not use, ever again.

Erin got her probe launched three weeks later, and promised to update me when it reached Mars in nine months. Birch America was going to have a baby that would give other people cows because it was the first private interplanetary probe to ever be launched.

Once the public found out what company had been behind all the launches, Birch Industries was bombarded by questions about what we planned to do on Mars. The only thing we let out to the public was that they had to wait and see.

The following weekend Petra and I flew from Vegas to Houston, landing after sunset. We paused in our drive from the airfield to the house a few times along the way, just to look up at the night sky. Something of ours was out there, in space, barreling toward another planet at thousands of kilometers per hour.

On a whim I called Erin, explaining where Petra and I were, asking her if she could give us a general direction to look. She had a good laugh and told us that we were on the wrong hemisphere of the planet to see the probe at the time. She promised that she would get some observatory names and good viewing times together for us.

Erin added that if we were excited now, just wait until we started sending people to Mars. Those domes that we were building weren't just for decorations. I didn't have to tell her to keep me posted.

We arrived at the Houston house just before dawn. Aysun was there, almost done cooking breakfast for the three of us. I asked her when she was going to bring a nice boyfriend over for me to intimidate, and she shook her head. She told us that she was just waiting for the right one. There were so many nice boys, but she hadn't met the right man yet.

Petra and I found some nice flower colors for the stretch of highway we had adopted. Each bed we planted was nine meters square, and we were starting on our fifth bed.

The second time I had gone out to plant, a Trooper had stopped by and chatted me up. He hadn't seen but a few adopt-a-highway folks out actually taking care of their stretches of road. He also admitted that he thought I was crazy being outside in the heat. But since I seemed to be sane, he'd go on his merry way.

The third time I went out, Petra had come with me. She quite literally stopped traffic with her beautiful self, making me a little jealous at times. The same Trooper who had talked to me stopped and complained that he hadn't been able to give out any speeding tickets on this particular stretch of highway that day.

Petra apologized to him in her silkiest tone of voice and told him that she would be more careful next week. The Trooper, after turning three shades of red, asked if we could make it two weeks and ambled back to his patrol car.

On the way back to the house, Petra teased me and told me not to get my hackles up. Once we got there, she promised me, putting my right hand over her heart, that it beat only for me.

I scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom. I tossed her on the bed and pulled her shoes off as I slipped off my own. She sat up on her elbows as I stripped off my clothing and went into the bathroom to take a shower.

As I exited the bathroom, Petra slipped her naked body past mine. She was sweaty and sticky and smelled absolutely divine. My hand got slapped when I tried to touch her, her telling me to fix us something to eat.

I pulled on a pair of shorts and went into the kitchen. Of course there was a full refrigerator, one of the girls had gone grocery shopping for us.

Grilled chicken would be the meal if the grill fired up, which it did. I prepped the chicken and threw it on the grill, coming back inside to fix salads for us only to find Petra starting on the dicing.

Petra finished the salad preparation just before the chicken was ready, so she brought the dinnerware outside and set us up at the patio table. The sun was low enough that it wasn't beating down on us and it was pleasant enough.

"Penny for your thoughts," Petra said after we finished our dinner. "You aren't still thinking about that Trooper, are you? I can use a glamour..."

I shook my head. "Laws of man, you know?"

"Spoilsport," Petra accused.

"It's just that the ogling bothers me," I sighed. "People can gawk at you as much as they like on TV, but this was too close."

"Johan, maybe me going out is a bad idea if it bothers you that much."

"No, I want you with me," I smiled. "I'm sure you catch your share of dirty thoughts about me in the offices."

Petra giggled. "Not as many as you might think. Nora is pretty good at taming your admirers."

Petra got a snort for that remark. "Tell me how you sensed her again?"

"Nora was just a secretary that happened to catch a good look at us fucking in your executive suite. I sensed her thoughts and asked her if she wanted to be your companion."

"You've told me that story a dozen times, and I do believe you are holding something back. Fess up, Missus Birch."

"Nora was masturbating in your private bathroom. I sensed her frustration first, and went to check things out. Johan, she was trying so hard and I felt her frustration, so I finished her off."

"Yeah?"

"Johan, I promised myself that I wouldn't get sexually involved with another woman," Petra looked down at her hands in her lap.

"Petra, I don't understand. We have foursomes and more all the time, and you don't sit there and watch."

"It's different, one-on-one like Nora and I were. I actually wanted to take it further, but I managed to stay myself."

"You've never told me about this, Petra. Are you depriving yourself for me? Should I stop having sex with other women?"

She gave me a weak smile. "Let's just keep doing things the way we do, that's the best for both of us."

I put my hand on the table, waving it so she would put her hand in mine. "Thank you for being such a wonderful wife. Just let me know if you're uncomfortable with the arrangement, okay?"

"Okay," Petra smiled. "Let's go to bed now, husband."

When we got into the bedroom, Petra shed her dress, letting it fall to the floor. She walked to the middle of the room, waiting for me to join her.

I doffed my shorts and joined her. She held out her hands and I took them, closing my hands around hers. "My love," I said.

"My love," Petra echoed. She wriggled her fingers, and I opened my hands. She reached down and grabbed my cock, first squeezing the head with one hand and then squeezing the shaft with the other.

Our first few sexual forays were all physical, and they were awesome to say the least. Once Petra got past the worry of using magic during sex, she poured it on. While the magic didn't work on me directly, she used it to change the way that I felt her.

One time on my birthday, Petra cast a class-two glamour on herself, turning into a man for the day. I did enjoy the present, but she told me that she would never do it again. When I asked her why, she simply told me that she didn't want any man to have that kind of power over me. She didn't rule out her using toys on me, and that was just as good.

At the moment she was alternating her squeezing of my cock. In a moment her hands would alternate between near-freezing cold and near-boiling heat. It was a wonderful feeling, but it wouldn't last because this was just a prelude to her mounting me. She let go of my cock after making sure I was nearly stretched out to my limit, and started to climb me.