Thaumatology 101 (15 page)

A few of the tables at the end of the stage had been pulled back to make space for a trolley with equipment on it. Ceri’s gaze flicked briefly over it; there was a computer and something which looked like it was probably a digital thaumometer, but not a design she recognised. Standing beside it was Carter, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, talking to a petite, attractive girl who looked to be not much older than Ceri. She had cropped, strawberry-blonde hair and was dressed in a short, silk wrap pulled tight across a chest which looked a little large on her slight frame. As they approached, the blonde nodded toward them and Carter turned around, smiling.

‘Ceri, Lily, glad you could come,’ he said. ‘You know Alec, of course, Ceri, and this delightful young lady is Jasmine Bell.’ Ceri stepped forward and took the offered hand to shake. ‘Jasmine is one of the dancers here at the Collar Club,’ Carter added.

Now it made sense. Ceri had some vague memory of Lily mentioning the latest of Carter’s clubs, and seeing a report on it in
The Wednesday Witch.
The Collar Club, as was obvious, was a strip club, but it catered to weres and other people who liked watching girls with a built in fur coat dancing around a pole. The red in Jasmine’s hair should have clued Ceri in; if Jasmine was a dancer at the club, then she was a werefox. Ceri glanced around at Alec, who was now leaning on the edge of the stage. A wolf and a fox, both main bases covered.

‘So, you’re going to get them to change,’ she said to Carter, ‘and… what? Record the results for analysis, make sure the pattern’s the same.’

Carter smiled, showing a lot of very white teeth, and pointed at the trolley. ‘MagiTech-Killburn, Model Five-thousand, ten-channel, digital thaumometer, connected through via a high-speed data connection to the computer, which has the Killburn analysis software on it. I borrowed it from the university this morning.’

Ceri let out a little squeal of glee and began examining the various boxes on the trolley. As she examined the detector heads she heard Jasmine say, ‘Is she always like this?’

‘Generally,’ Lily replied, ‘but things are slowly changing. She recently got promoted from geeky academic norm to ultra-sexy goddess of magic and she’s taking time to adjust.’ Ceri blushed and tried enormously hard to concentrate on the equipment.

‘She doesn’t exactly
look
like an ultra-sexy goddess of magic,’ Jasmine said and Ceri started to breathe a sigh of relief; at least someone had perspective. ‘Not that she’s not hot,’ Jasmine added. Ceri hid under the trolley. ‘I mean,’ Jasmine said in a rather contemplative tone, ‘I would.’

Carter came to her rescue. ‘I was hoping, Ceri, that you would set up the sensor heads appropriately. We can trust Alec and Jasmine not to toss the furniture around when they change, so we can arrange the equipment as you see fit. I must admit, I’m not sure
how
we’re going to arrange it…’

Emerging from behind the trolley, Ceri looked up at Jasmine and the stage with its gleaming pole. ‘How many microphone stands have you got?’ she said. ‘And we’ll need duct tape, of course. Lots of duct tape.’

It took them around forty minutes, two microphone stands, and a fair amount of duct tape, to get the detectors set up the way Ceri wanted. They were left with nine detectors mounted on the stands and the dancing pole, forming three rings at roughly chest, waist, and knee height to Jasmine. They would be a little low on Alec, but not enough to worry about. The tenth detector was taped to a table as far from the stage as the cable would reach.

‘I don’t get how that one’s going to detect anything?’ Lily said, looking at the lonely grey box sitting all by itself.

‘It’s not supposed to,’ Ceri said, ‘which is why you’re going to stand nowhere near it.’ Lily pouted at her. ‘It’s called a “control,” Lil,’ Ceri explained. ‘It’s supposed to measure the background level during the experiment so that we can filter out external effects.’ She sometimes forgot that Lily had not done well in school, getting kicked out entirely at fifteen in what was referred to as “the Incident in the Gym.” Best scientific practice was not one of her life skills.

‘You’ll probably want me standing well away from the stage then?’ Lily said.

Ceri nodded. ‘But you won’t be alone, I’ll be standing beside you.’ Lily looked at her quizzically. ‘My power is new, I’m not sure how I’ll react,’ she explained. ‘It’s safer if Carter operates the machines.’

‘Which, I might add,’ Carter said, ‘is not exactly a skilled job. I just have to press a button to start recording and press it again to stop.’ He grinned. ‘Just my skill level, right up there with the trained monkeys.’

Ceri giggled. ‘Who’s first?’ she said.

‘Uh, that’s me,’ Alec said. ‘Carter? Could you…’ He trailed off, leaving Ceri confused until Carter picked up a small, wooden box from the trolley and carried it over to Ceri and Lily.

‘You two will need to wear these,’ the club owner said, opening the box. Lily immediately took out a silver amulet and slipped it over her head. Ceri took out a second one and looked at it. The amulet looked old, the silver black in the bottom of the marks carved into it. The design was that of a wolf’s head, but there was something caged within the silver. ‘Wolfsbane amulet,’ Carter explained. ‘Most werewolves don’t like to admit it, but they
do
become more animal in wolf form, and sometimes they have trouble with impulse control.’ He snapped the box closed as Ceri hung the amulet around her neck.

‘What about Jasmine?’ Ceri asked as the fox-girl started over, away from the detectors.

‘Oh, he won’t be bothered about me, hun,’ Jasmine said. ‘He’s got to be sexually attracted to someone for it to be an issue. Alec don’t do brush.’

Ceri glanced across at the big man as he climbed up onto the stage. ‘I should be fine then,’ she said, ‘he’s not interested…’

‘When we were talking about it earlier,’ Jasmine interrupted, ‘Carter said that Lily would have to wear one whether she liked it or not, and Alec said you would have to too.’ The werefox looked at her. ‘If I couldn’t smell the nervousness, I’d think you were fishing for compliments.’

‘She’s not,’ Lily said. ‘If there’s one thing she’s never done it’s ask for compliments.’

‘Are we ready, ladies?’ Carter said.

Ceri looked around and settled her mind to allow her Sight to manifest. Just as she began to see the overlay of energies and reality, she opened her mouth and said, ‘Yes.’ Then she bit her lips to suppress a gasp as Alec slipped his dressing gown off his shoulders and dumped it over the side of the stage. He was not some sort of Greek Adonis, but his body was firm and well-muscled, his skin tanned and taught. Thick hair covered his chest in a mat, thinning to a strip which ran down the centre of his stomach before fanning out again around a thick and quite long member hung between thick, muscled thighs. None of that was what had made her gasp, however. It was the scars, long ones, short ones, thin scratches and deep gouges. They covered his chest and, she saw when he turned, his back.

Alec glanced over at the three girls watching from one of the booths and spotted Ceri looking at him wide-eyed. She could tell he got slightly the wrong impression since the thick shaft between his legs chose that moment to grow slightly larger. Ceri felt her cheeks heating up.

‘Recording,’ Carter said. ‘In your own time, Alec.’

Ceri saw the beginning of it this time, a flare of light at the base of his spine, the Root of the Chakral Median. Every vertebrate ever discovered had two Medians, the Chakral which ran up the spine, and the Tantric which ran from the pituitary gland to the sex organs. As she watched, the flare of light became a torrent of energy building upward until it reached the Crown at the very top of his skull. With the primary power bar formed there was a fraction of a second’s break and then the same, magnet-like field flickered into existence around Alec’s body.

‘Well I’ll be thrice damned and eaten by demons,’ Carter said, his eyes on the computer screen. Ceri could not see what he was seeing from her angle, but she guessed the detectors were working. Her gaze flicked back to Alec and she saw that the field was contracting much more rapidly than it had on the Dog Boy in the Jade Dragon. It made sense; Alec was changing on purpose where the other had been giving in to instinct or emotion. The collapse went ever faster until the swirling colours fell in upon themselves. Alec’s body seemed to shine and, for a brief second, Ceri could see both the man and the wolf-man standing there. There was a pulse of energy which seemed to sweep out over the room, and then the dual image was gone and there was a huge, black-furred creature standing in Alec’s place. He looked around the room and ran a huge tongue over jaws which came supplied with an impressive array of vicious-looking teeth.

Carter, who had seen this happen a number of times, was entirely un-phased. He hit the button to stop the recording and said, ‘Thank you, Alec. Ceri, do you want to take a look at this?’

Standing quickly, Ceri hurried over to look at the monitor with its ten traces. All except the control detector’s showed a sudden surge of level, then a drop off which increased in rate. The instant of change was marked by a sudden pulse which had hit the control a fraction of a second after the others with barely any drop off in power. Ceri nodded and turned around.

Somehow, Alec had managed to slip off the stage and get around behind her without her noticing, to look over her shoulder at the screen. He backed away from the amulet she was wearing, looking slightly pained, but she could not help but notice the erection he was sporting. She quickly looked up into his big eyes and tried to appear as if she had not noticed. He looked down at her, licked his lips, and made a soft growling noise in his throat. Ceri swallowed; the only thing stopping him using that tongue on her was the amulet she was wearing.

Alec seemed to know it too. He gave what sounded a little like a whimper and backed away, sinking into one of the booths on the opposite side of the room from where Lily and Jasmine were sitting. ‘Can’t he just turn back?’ Ceri asked Carter.

It was Jasmine who replied as she walked over to take her place on the stage. ‘Takes a lot of energy to shift, hun,’ she said. ‘It’s less to turn back, but you can’t just snap between the two in an instant. And it’s worse for wolves.’ She dropped her robe into Ceri’s arms, gave a little smile, and bounced up onto the stage, slipping into the middle of the triangle of detectors. The werefox had a perfectly tanned body with the musculature of a dancer. Where Alec had just stood on the stage, Jasmine
posed.
‘Ready when you are,’ she said and Ceri hurried back to her booth to sit down beside Lily.

The half-succubus leaned closer and whispered, ‘Alec’s certainly got a hard-on for you.’ Ceri’s cheeks absolutely flamed. ‘Not that I blame him…’

Ceri did her best to ignore her friend and concentrate on Jasmine. ‘Recording,’ Carter said, glancing up and smiling at the she-fox, ‘unfortunately not on video.’

‘Maybe later, gorgeous,’ Jasmine said, and Ceri saw the same flare of light in her that had begun the transformation process in Alec.

There seemed to be two main differences between the species. The first thing Ceri noticed was that the pulse which had blasted out from Alec as he shifted was missing from Jasmine’s change. The second, of course, was that she was left looking at a sexy fox-girl instead of a huge wolf-man. Alec’s changed form had no tail, but Jasmine’s had a large, luxurious brush. Her features were more humanoid as well. It had been theorised that werewolves had evolved long before werefoxes, and that the latter had developed in a manner which made them more suitable to live alongside humans. Certainly, there was a significant werefox-fetish culture, but the humans who got off on female werewolves were a lot fewer.

‘No final pulse,’ Carter said, musing over the screen even as a very sexy, lithe she-fox began to cuddle up to him with fairly obvious intentions. His statement backed up what Ceri had seen. ‘That’s most interesting and, ah! Jasmine, could you just give me a minute before you start doing that?’ Jasmine pouted, but removed her hand from the growing bulge in Carter’s jeans.

‘Do you think that’s the catalyst for the cascade effect?’ Ceri asked, checking the screen. ‘I take it that doesn’t happen with foxes?’

‘No,’ Carter said, ‘it doesn’t.’ He looked at the traces, placing Alec’s set on top of Jasmine’s to compare, and nodded. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that we can make this work. We’ll trial it here. Every time someone gets over-excited in this place, we have to close for three days while the damage is repaired. If we can get to them before they change…’ He grinned at Ceri. ‘You, young lady, have just saved me a lot of money. I
knew
you were a good investment.’ Jasmine was pulling at his shirt; he looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Could I ask a huge favour? If you could pack things up here? This one’s been horny all morning and if I don’t let her have her way soon I’ll be healing the scratches for weeks.’

‘We’ll manage,’ Lily said, giggling as Jasmine started to pull Carter toward one of the doors behind the stage. Lily grinned at Ceri. ‘He loves it really. He personally interviews every girl who works here.’

Ceri shut down the machines and climbed onto the stage to start stripping down the detectors. ‘Get the one on the table, would you Lil?’ she said. She worked fairly quickly, but by the time she had finished she turned to see Lily standing at the end of the stage looking up at her with a twinkle in her eye. ‘What?’ she said, grinning bemusedly.

‘Ever thought about… y’know… dancing?’ the half-demon said, nodding at the pole.

‘Huh? No, I couldn’t…’

‘Got the body for it,’ Alec said. He was pulling on his fluffy dressing gown and was back to his normal shape, but there was still a slightly embarrassing tenting of the front of the robe. ‘But I don’t think the temperament.’ He grinned. ‘Oh, you can take off those pendants now. I may still have the desire to do the same things I did ten minutes ago, but I’ve got the self-control to avoid actually doing them.’

‘Shame,’ Lily said. ‘I’m sure Ceri’d have taken her amulet off if you’d growled nicely.’