Since We Met

Kara was feeling annoyed.  Her co-workers had said they’d meet her at the magic show, but she hadn’t found any of them.  Their tickets were all a scrambled mess because they’d egged her into coming at the last minute, so if she didn’t find them before the show...

The lobby’s over-the-top creepy pre-Hallowe’en decor wasn’t doing her nerves any good, either.  So when a voice spoke up behind her, asking “Are you alone?” she nearly jumped out of her skin.

“What?”  Kara turned to the source of the voice.  It was a pretty twentysomething woman, perhaps five years her junior.  “Sorry about that.  I’m trying to find my friends, but they seem to have bailed on me.”

“Maybe they came to the seven o’clock show?”

Kara sighed, and slapped her forehead.  “That’s probably it.  Bother.  Sorry about snapping at you.  I’m Kara.”

“Lane.  Pleased to meet you.”

They chatted for a while.  Lane seemed quite pleasant and interested in her history.  Kara had been terribly lonely since travelling so far for a job, and welcomed someone to talk to.  Lane seemed to know the right things to say to set Kara at ease, and she found herself smiling more during their brief chat than she had in the past week.

“I have to get going,” Lane said.  “But I do have a spare front-row ticket that might help make up for the mix-up.”  She held out the ticket to Kara, who accepted it with a smile.

“Thanks.  This is way better than watching from the nosebleed section.”

Lane gave her a winning smile.  “And who knows, maybe you can come up on stage and volunteer.”

Kara smiled back, just as broadly.  “Whatever it takes to see you again.”

She wasn’t terribly surprised when she got called up on stage later, and Everd the Evil was able to magically guess her hometown, and other things that had come up in conversation with Lane.  It was impressive that he could remember enough do the same thing for what seemed like half the front row.

After demonstrating his mental prowess, Everd sent about half his volunteers back to their seats.  Kara noticed that all the remaining volunteers were youngish, good-looking women.  Then he brought out a cheesy-looking hypnotist’s watch with a swirling dial on its face, and went through the whole ‘you’re a chicken’, ‘bark like a dog’ routine.  

Kara almost lost her drone-like composure when one of the girl was asked to strip to her underwear, and actually did it.  Soon another was dry-humping Everd’s leg.  

Then Everd came to Kara, and asked with a comical leer if she was wearing pretty underthings.  Kara simply nodded.  He told her to strip like the other girl had, and Kara grinned and played along.  It seemed like a great excuse to show them off without shame.  Not that she had a lot of that to start with, or a lack of experience with being seen in minimal clothing.

Another of the prettiest girls got the ‘strip’ treatment, and seemed as happy as Kara to comply.  She even put on a show while doing so, to catcalls from the audience.

Everd brought his three ‘beauties’ in their sexy bras and panties forward to applause, and ‘restored’ the rest of the volunteers, sending them back to their seats.  Kara idly wondered if the other two girls with her were as alone as she was in this big city.

Everd launched into a spiel about how the modern world necessitated lots of travel, making a joke about not even being sure what city he was in.  Technology marches on, he said, and now it was possible to Fax people, instead of just documents.  Kara watched with admiration at how well he could play the crowd.

Two of Everd’s assistants came on stage, pushing a pair of boxes.  They were clad in little more than the hypnotized volunteers, though their outfits were sequined and much more sparkly under the stage lights.  Kara felt a twinge of jealousy at that.  Soon, the boxes were in place, with a plexiglass tube connecting them.  It was about an inch deep, but what Kara could see and the audience couldn’t was that it was about a foot from front to back.

Kara watched the trick intently, excited at the chance to see an illusion up close and personal.  She hoped to spot how the trick was being done.  Instead, what she saw was that the first volunteer simply seemed to disappear after Everd touched her with his wand.  She tried not to frown at that, schooling her expression into the relaxed pose Everd had ordered.

She continued to watch, and shortly a pink sheet of something started working its way through the plexiglass panel, accompanied by blinking lights chasing from the one box to the other.  When she saw the other girl’s face go by, she started to wonder what was going on.

Everd brought his volunteer out of the other box, and showed what Kara had already seen.  She had indeed been faxed from one to the other, and was now as flat as a sheet.  Everd waved her in the wind, and picked up her hand to wave it at the audience. Then he tossed the flattened woman to an assistant, and she was whisked off-stage.

The props were efficiently scooted off the stage by a pair of assistants.  While waiting for the next to be brought on, Everd amused the audience by pulling handkerchiefs out of improbable places on a third assistant.  

Kara’s eyes widened briefly as she recognized the assistant.  Lane looked different when she was wearing so little.  The glittery outfit had distracted her.  It was difficult to stop smiling and school her expression to that of the mindless drone she had supposedly become.

She was just in time, too, as Lane came over to pick the next assistant.  She sighed softly as she saw Kara, and shook her head.  She led the other girl to the large ovoid pod that had been brought on stage.

“Well, as we’ve seen, Faxing is far too slow.  What we need is teleportation!  Now if my lovely volunteer would step inside... oh, and be careful not to bring any insects with you.  We all know how that works out, don’t we?”

There was scattered laughter from the audience.

Soon the pod was blinking away madly, accompanied by a similar light-show on its twin on the opposite end of the stage.  The noise of the machine built to a crescendo, until with a ZREEEEN-POP the display suddenly stopped, and smoke billowed out of the pods.

“Oh dear,” sighed Everd overdramatically.  “Still a few bugs in the system.”  As he opened the pod where Kara’s companion had entered, she saw his wand flick out.  The pod opened fully, and once the smoke cleared something not quite human was revealed.

The girl’s skin was a dark, iridescent blue-green, glittering under the stage lights.  Her face was mostly unchanged, save for her eyes, which had become glittering faceted emeralds.  As she brought her arms up to explore her new face, Kara and the audience gasped.  She had four arms now, two on each side, and they were segmented like an insect’s.  Her hands had been replaced with pairs of chitinous talons.

Everd led the bug-girl over by Kara, and told her to wait.  Kara thus got to see her up close, and could see what the audience could not.  This was no hastily-applied costume, it seemed that the girl had really changed.  At first, Kara was simply shocked at the incontrovertible evidence that whatever Everd was doing, it was real.  Then she examined the girl more closely.  Kara was surprised to realize just how beautiful she now was with her bizarre changes.  She hid a frown as she realized she was feeling jealous of that shiny, shimmery skin.

The next contraption to enter the stage looked like a pair of standing cabinets connected to a shining central pole.  Kara was far from surprised when she was asked to enter one side, but privately fretted.  What was going to happen to her when the wand came out once more?  One of the assistants, a dusky-skinned girl that Everd called Mina was put in the other cabinet, facing the other side of the stage.

Kara felt an electric thrill as Everd surreptitiously tapped her with his wand while making sure she was secure in the box.  Something had changed, but it took her a few moments to realize just what.  She glanced at the part of her body she could see, and it all seemed normal.  But when she tried wiggling her toes, she couldn’t feel them.  Or her legs.

Before she got far trying to figure it out, the boxes began to spin, the top halves going one way, and the bottom halves the other.  Once she was moving quickly Kara no longer needed to hide her dismay.  She’d been cut in half.  Really, truly in half!  How could that even work?  She was missing essential parts, and her lower half wouldn’t be getting any oxygen...

The audience whirled past her view repeatedly, leaving her dizzy by the time they stopped.  Kara was now facing straight at the audience, and the lights seemed to bob and whirl before her.  Despite her shock and dizziness, she managed a placid expression as Everd approached her once more.

Everd opened the boxes, and drew Kara forward.  She still couldn’t feel her legs, but somehow she was walking forward and even balancing well while the whole world span.

“I present to you, Kara-Mina!” called Everd, to wild applause.  Kara stole a peek at her legs, and saw the dusky skin of Mina.  She tried to keep her expression neutral, but it was difficult.  Where were her legs?  Where was the rest of Mina?

Everd led her off to the side of the stage beside the pretty bug-girl.  “Just lean in the direction you want to go,” he advised in a stage whisper.  “Mina knows how to handle the rest.”

Kara took her first steps slowly, wondering at Mina’s ability to balance with just her feet.  Soon enough she was confident that her legs wouldn’t betray her, even if she couldn’t feel them.

The next apparatus brought onto the stage looked very much like an old-fashioned torture rack, except it was all chrome and matte black paint rather than crude wood.  One of the assistants was placed upon it, as Everd pattered on about how some people weren’t happy with their short stature, and he had a way to fix it.  Kara squeaked when it went wrong, and the wheels spun too far.  The assistant’s arms and legs stretched like rubber, and she moaned in what didn’t really seem much like pain.

Kara and the bug-girl were tasked with carrying the assistant off-stage, and Kara could see that her rubbery arms and were entirely boneless, and obviously much longer than any normal human’s limbs.  When they set her down offstage, her limbs draped like spaghetti.  Kara’s ER experience kicked in and she murmured comforting words.  The taffy-like assistant just stared at her in shock and shook her head.  “Don’t let him know!” she hissed.

Kara tried to watch the next trick with an impassive face.  It was very hard not to break character.  As the spike drove through the assistant, she was perfectly able to see into the side of the cabinet.  There was no wiggling out of the way.  The spike drove straight through her, with a grinding sound of metal on bone that Kara recognized all too well from some of her worst ER shifts.

She distracted herself with the details.  For example, the blood seemed fake, and not even a very good fake.  For a hole that size, there was very little, just enough to sell it to the audience.  It didn’t gush or spatter the way normal blood did, and it didn’t smell quite right, either.  

The realization hit her then.  Everd must have changed this assistant, and the previous as well.  He’d done something subtle to them with the wand that made them easy to stretch, or able to survive with a great big spike pushed through their middle.  It explained why the girl’s expression of pain seemed entirely faked, too.

When the pole was removed the assistant had a large hole through their middle.  Everd waved a lighter through it.  It got a bit close to her skin in front, and for the first time the assistant winced in what seemed like real pain.  That triggered a sympathetic wince from Kara.

Lane was just walking past Kara at the time, carrying a large woven basket.  She stared at Kara, who winked back at the girl.  Lane’s face went white, and she rushed up to Everd.  Hissed words were exchanged and Everd’s glower spoke volumes.

Then Lane was getting into the basket she’d carried out, a look of true fear on her face.  Even from Kara’s vantage, she couldn’t see inside the basket.  The rapiers looked awfully sharp, and no matter how lithe Lane was, there was no way she could avoid all of them.  The last three rapiers emerged from the other side of the basket bloody, and this time the blood on the blades smelled right.

Lane didn’t come out of the basket, even after the swords were removed.  She only smiled and waved weakly to show she was ‘OK’.  Everd got the bug-girl and the last intact assistant to bring out a wheeled platform and scoot her off stage.  Kara couldn’t help but turn her head to watch as she went.  Lane was still cowering inside the basket, and the girl’s whimpers of pain nearly broke Kara’s heart.

“I seem to have only one whole assistant left,” Everd was saying as the two brought out yet another prop.  This one looked like the back half of a round-topped cage, and the bars were lined with some kind of mad-sciencey emitters.  They came to life at Everd’s gesture, glowing a sickly green.  “This will never do.  Say goodbye, Candi!”

The blonde in the cage waved cheerfully at the crowd.  “Goodbye, Candi!”  The lights glowed brighter, and started strobing in patterns.  They grew so bright that it was nearly impossible to look at them directly.  From the side, Kara could see Everd reach out with the wand, and Candi just... vanished.  Kara stared at the place where Candi had been.  Was she invisible?  Or had Everd really just erased her from existence?

When the lightshow stopped, Kara could see something had changed in the base of the disintegrator.  There was a small pink lump of something rubbery on the floor of it, in a recessed part that couldn’t be seen from the audience.  Kara sighed softly with relief when she realized Candi had simply been changed into something small.  Eyeing it more closely, she started to blush.

Everd gestured dramatically.  “Behold, the Disintegrator!  I’m sure you can think of a person or two you’d like to volunteer for it.  Step right up...”

The audience laughed nervously, but nobody stirred.  The curtain closed.  Everd went in front of it for a brief bow to muted applause, and disappeared behind it once more.  The crowd murmured excitedly to itself until the lights came up, and then they slowly dispersed.  A few looked back from the doors, as if wondering what happened to the volunteers.  The volunteers had no friends to miss them, so soon the theatre was quiet once more.

Backstage was another story.  Kara had rushed to Lane’s side as soon as the curtains closed, ignoring her weak protestations that she was fine.

“No you’re not fine, you’re bleeding all over the place.”  

“Just leave it.  I can manage an hour like this.”

“What on earth are you talking about?  You need bandages...  screw that, you need to go to the ER.”

While Kara was stanching Lane’s wounds, Everd strode up.  “We seem to have a problem here.”

“Yes,” growled Kara.  “One of your assistants was bleeding out.  She’ll live, but she needs immediate care.  I’m not sure how the other is even alive after you put that telephone pole through her.”

Kara looked around for the freckled woman who’d been impaled, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Everd waved it off.  “Trust me.  If Mina can manage without the top half of her body, the others will be fine, too.”

“What the hell are you talking abo...”  Kara looked where Everd was pointing.  Her legs.  Her legs that reacted to how she leaned this way and that, but weren’t her own.  The dusky legs that were very obviously Mina’s.

“Where’s the rest of her?”

Everd gave Kara a sharp tug upward while bracing a foot against Mina’s legs.  With a sound like Velcro tearing, Kara lifted away from the half-girl.  “Shouldn’t your question be, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’” he asked with a chuckle.

Kara stared down at herself.  She carefully felt the underside of her abbreviated body, worried at what she might find there.  All she felt was something fuzzy and rough.  She looked at Mina.  “Wait.  Were we really velcroed together?”

Everd laughed.  “Remarkable.  You’re half gone, and your first question is about the velcro.”  He set her down on a folding chair.  “Now.  What are we going to do with you.”

“How about you restore me, and let me take Lane to the hospital.”

“No!” protested Lane.  “Don’t do it.  Please.”

Kara stared at her.  “You want me to be stuck like this?”

Everd chuckled.  “Why Lane, whatever are you trying to do?  You know what will happen.”

“You bastard.”  Lane struggled to her feet.  “Leave her alone.”

“Why?  Why would you ask such a thing?”  Everd looked genuinely hurt.  “She just wants to be back to normal.  All it takes is a tap of the wand...”

“Please,” said Kara.

Lane swore, and charged at Everd.  There was a flare of light, and a smell of ozone.  Lane crumpled to the floor, twitching.

“What did you do?”

“I?” asked Everd.  “I did nothing.  I simply have certain... protections against those who would do violence to me.  Come, let us resolve this civilly.”  He touched Kara with the wand and once more she felt the electric tingle of it.  This time, it was accompanied by the return of her legs.  But not her panties.  Everd handed her the rest of her clothes, that she’d discarded what seemed like a very long time ago indeed.

Kara hastily dressed.  “What a crazy night.  I wish I could forget the whole thing.”

Everd’s chuckle sent a shiver up Kara’s spine.  “I wish you would.  But we both know how unlikely that is, don’t we?”

Kara crouched by the still-unconscious Lane, and checked her bandages.  “Will you take care of Lane?  I stopped the bleeding, but there might be internal injuries.”

Everd guided her toward the door with a sincere-seeming smile.  “Don’t worry.  Lane will be fine, shortly.”  He even was so nice as to call her a cab, and send her on her way home.

Kara sighed, stretched, and tumbled into bed.  It had been a very strange evening, and she hoped she could just forget the whole thing.  She found she just couldn’t forget Lane’s face, and tried to remember it as it was when she’d first met her.  Why was that face so appealing to her?  She wasn’t normally attracted to women.

As Kara was tossing and turning with visions of Lane in her head, she felt the static of the wand course through her again.  She cried out in surprise and tried to sit up, but her legs weren’t responding.

Kara pushed herself upright, turned the lights on, and threw off the covers.  She stared at where her legs had been.  “Now what am I going to do?”

“That is a good question, isn’t it?” replied a familiar male voice from her front door.

“Everd!  What happened to me?  Wait, how did you get in here?  I locked the door.”

Everd just laughed as he strolled into her bedroom.  “Consider what you saw tonight.”

“Magic.”  Kara snorted.  “I should have figured.  What do you want?”

“Ah, my dear.  The question is... what do you want?”

“I want my legs back!”

Everd shrugged.  “You do understand how this works, though.  Something for something.  You’d make a good assistant.”

“After what you did to your assistants?  What happened, anyway?  Why did I change back?”

“The wand I used last night,” Everd flourished the plain-looking thing, “its effects change back at midnight.”

“So if I’d just done like the others, and mindlessly waited...”

“You’d be fine now, and have forgotten all about what you saw that you shouldn’t have.”

Kara shook her head. “You were doing magic.  Real magic!  How could I forget that.  How is it that nobody knows?”

“Oh, a few people know.  Here and there.  Magic like this is very hard to come by, so those of us who have it like it to stay... private.”

“But you’re up there doing a stage show!” Kara protested.  “How on earth is that private?”

“Everyone thinks it’s smoke and mirrors.  Everyone off the stage, anyway.”

“Magic can’t stay secret forever.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Everd sighed.  He tapped Kara with the wand.

Kara wanted to yell at him, she wanted to strike at him... but all she could do was flail about with limbs that were too short and too weak.  Soon her gills were burning with the need for oxygen, but they couldn’t get enough from the air.  She thrashed her entire length, flipping her scaly body off the bed and toward her bathroom.  Just before she flipped herself into the bath, Everd caught her.

“No, I don’t think so.  You won’t last long like this.”  He touched her with the wand again, and she was half-human once more.

Kara sucked big lungfuls of air in relief, then glared at Everd.  “I still don’t have my legs back, you slimy git.”  She kicked at him with her scaly mermaid tail, but the limb didn’t move like her legs had and she missed.  Even through her anger, she could see how pretty the shimmering purple scales were, and got distracted by the patterns the lights made in them.  Belatedly, she remembered how Lane had fared while attacking Everd, and didn’t take a second swing at him.

“The only way you’re getting them from me is to agree to join my show.  Otherwise... think of what happens at midnight.”

Kara glared at Everd some more, then sighed, and lowered her gaze.  “I guess you win, then.”

Everd’s laugh made Kara’s blood run cold.  “Excellent.  Keep your spirits up.  You’ll be my star before long.”

Everd touched her once more with the wand, and finally she had legs again.  She packed up her meager belongings, and followed him hopelessly out of the apartment.

On the drive back to the theatre Kara started to smile, unnerving Everd.  She was going to see Lane again!

The first thing she did was rush to Lane’s side.  The bloody holes from the rapiers were all gone, as if they’d never been.  Lane tried to apologize for getting Kara caught up in Everd’s show, but Kara silenced her apology with a kiss.

The next morning, Lane introduced Kara to the rest of the assistants.  She remembered the bubbly Candi from the end of the show, and could hardly forget Mina.  She grinned as Lane re-introduced them.  “How could I forget the sexiest legs I’ll ever have?”

Mina laughed.  “If you ask Everd nicely, I’m sure he’ll give you an upgrade.  None of us are exactly... stock.”  She looked over at Lane, who shook her head briefly.  Mina shrugged.

“Something I should know?” asked Kara.

“I...  No.  What is, is.”  Lane caught her hand once more, and gave it a squeeze.  Kara smiled back at her.

Terri was the freckled assistant that Kara had helped out of the limb-stretching rack.  She giggled a bit as Kara checked out her restored limbs.  “You had no idea what was happening, did you?”

Kara shook her head.  “Just that the wand could do strange things.  Once I realized the blood was fake on the impalement, I realized that you must have been given rubber limbs.”

The redhead who’d been impaled snorted.  “I keep telling him that nobody buys the ketchup.  Hi, I’m Abby.”

Kara shook her head.  “Really?  Ketchup?  With what that wand can do, it could be the real thing.”

“He doesn’t like cleaning up real blood,” Mina said with a shrug.  “Too messy.  I’m inclined to agree with him, it stains clothes something awful.”

“But couldn’t he just use the wand a couple of times to fix the clothes?  After midnight, they’d be fine.”

Another woman that Kara hadn’t met spoke up.  “Where’d you get a silly idea like that?  All the wand’s changes revert in time.  They all get stacked up and you have to work your way backward.  Candi has it worst, I think - she gets turned into a mannequin for the matinee, and reassembled on stage.  Then she does the evening show too.  So she’s got a bunch of mannequin changes stacked up on her, I don’t even know how many.”

Kara looked over the new arrival.  She was shorter than the other assistants, thin and limber.  And also unlike the other assistants, her breasts were quite small. “I don’t think I saw you last night.  Were you in the act?”

“I’m Zera.  And I love getting into the Origami box, especially the bit where I get squished down to just a head and feet.  Everd mostly indulges those of us with favourite tricks.  He did Origami in the early show, so I was watching the late show from offstage last night.  I didn’t spot that you weren’t under, either.  Not a lot of people are that casual about stripping on stage.”

“Nursing school got expensive, so I did a bit of exotic dancing on the side to make ends meet.”  Kara blushed, and looked over at Lane.  “Now you know my dark secret.”

Everyone in the room looked at Lane, who just shrugged.  “We all have secrets.”

* * *

Kara got used to the life of an assistant quickly.  In the rush before Hallowe’en there were two shows a day, and now that Everd had seven assistants he could dispose of more in the early show.  His tricks there were tamer than the late show.  There was none of the blood or impalement that Everd had done with such gusto.  Still, assistants did get used up.  Origami would leave one assistant as little more than a head with feet attached.  The mannequinizing cabinet—using the same prop as the Disintegrator—was always popular.  The crowd loved it when the unlucky assistant was ‘brought back’ by carrying her over to the other side of the stage piece by piece.

The down-side of being the mannequin was that that the assistant had to spend the next day inanimate.  Kara found that she enjoyed the quiet, so she took Candi’s place as the mannequin some nights.

Kara also discovered why the others stayed.  Much like her, they had at least one very unpleasant change stacked up.  If they didn’t get their midnight wand-touch, they’d step one day closer to their doom.  Lane didn’t know what the others had in store, and they refused to tell.  Late one night, she did tell Kara about her own fate if she ever tried to leave.  She’d spent a few minutes in a form that had no face.  No eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth.  Kara was shocked.  “How could you breathe?”

“I couldn’t of course.  No nose or mouth, right?  Everd changed me again before I passed out.  Some of us think that even if you died while transformed, you’d change back at midnight and be fine... but nobody’s willing to be the first to try it.”

Kara turned that over in her head for a while.  “You wouldn’t have to die, you know.”

Lana stared at her in surprise, then whispered very softly.  “What do you mean?”

Kara whispered back, “I’m a trained nurse.  I know how to do a tracheotomy, so I could get you breathing again.  It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would only be for the day, right?”

Lane nodded, eyes shining.  “We should run for it.”

“Does that work?”

Lane sighed, and shook her head.  “He always finds us.  I’m sorry I roped you into this,” she apologized once again.

As always, Kara silenced her with a kiss that went on for some time.  When they broke for air, Kara said, “Don’t be sorry.  I’m having a blast.”

“That’s because he hasn’t made you the sword-basket girl yet.  Usually he uses the wand to make it painless.  He was really ticked with me the night we met, when I pointed out you weren’t under.”

Kara winced, and kissed Lane again.  “My hero.  You didn’t need to defend me, though.  I can manage.”

“I’ve noticed.  You own that transformation booth, especially the way you ham it up after the change.”

“I like being shiny!”  Kara smiled at the memories, rubbing her fingers lightly over the normal skin of her arm.  “It’s best when he pretends I had cat fur on me, though.  I like having a built in fur coat even more.”

Once Hallowe’en had passed, the pace of the shows slowed, and there was time for mannequinized assistants to lose their stacked up changes.  Candi spent every other day as a mannequin for a month straight, but never complained.  She never complained about anything, that Kara saw.

Lane shrugged when Kara asked about Candi.  “I don’t know her story well, she joined before I did.  All Mina and Abby will say is that the hypno-watch worked way too well on her, and she couldn’t remember who she’d been before.  I wonder if maybe she really was a giggly stripper named Candi, and Everd’s just confused.”

Kara laughed.  “Still.  He does like to use that watch on her a lot.  Should I be asking what he does with her in private?  Or with her usual ‘Disintegrate’ form?”

Lane shook her head.  “She enjoys it, and it keeps him happy... and away from the rest of us.”

Most of the time Everd seemed nice enough.  As long as everyone stayed where they were supposed to, and did as he asked, he was happy, and didn’t abuse the wand.  Mina ran off in November, and was brought back in a small bag.  She spent the next week as a mouse in a cage, until one night just after midnight she charged at Everd screaming obscenities, and something about him knowing she was afraid of mice.  As had happened with Lane, she was struck down by an electrical discharge.

Everd was superbly cheerful for a week after that.  He even let Kara take a turn in the Disintegrator, and as requested, turned her into a sex toy for Lane.  They only had half an hour like that, but both of them quite enjoyed it.  Lane returned the favour the next night.

Then Everd started picking on the redhead, Abby, assigning her all her least favourite tricks over and over again.  He even went so far as to do to her what he’d done to Lane, putting her in the sword basket without first changing her so the swords would pass through her without doing any real damage.

Abby ended up attacking Everd much as her friend Mina had, and was struck down in the same way.  Afterward, the sword-basket duties were shared evenly once more.

Kara talked to Lane about it a few nights later as they were lying in bed.  “Why does he keep goading us into attacking him?”

Lane leaned up on one elbow to look at Kara.  “Every year he does it.  I suspect I’ll be spared until it’s almost your turn.  I’m not sure why, but... I’ve heard him saying he has to ‘beat’ us.  It’s not like it’s a fair fight, with that damned lightning coat of his.”

“Huh.  Should I just walk up to him and deck him, then?”

“No.”  Lane pulled Kara tight against her.  “No.  I think... something about it lets him keep us like this.  He gets increasingly cruel as the anniversary of the last attack approaches, but none of us have had the strength to fight through what he can do to us.”

“I can,” Kara said, with conviction.

“Oh, love...  I hope you can.  But I shudder to think what he’ll do to you.”

As the year passed, each of the other assistants had their turn as Everd’s focus.  Terri was next, and held out for nearly a week.  But after four straight nights of the sword basket, without being transformed to make it painless, she couldn’t help herself.  Zera started whining when she didn’t get to be compressed in Origami on a regular basis, and it only took the slightest of taunts to send her into a rage.  Candi didn’t last a day, nor did she seem to notice what had happened a day later.

Before Kara knew it, the calendar was turning back to October again.  Everd started her torment extra-early, as he knew that Kara and Lane had become lovers.  Lane broke quickly at the sight of Kara bleeding, but Kara just bottled her anger, stoking the flames inside her.  If sheer will could have burned Everd to ash on the spot, he wouldn’t have lasted a second.

Kara never attacked him.  No matter the taunts, no matter what new tortures he devised for her or for Lane.  Lane cried piteously in her arms after spending three straight days bleeding from a single sword-basket.  Everd would transform her minutes before midnight, and it would start over again.  Kara got the same treatment a few days later, and they bled in each other’s arms, too tired and sore to make love.

Then one night, Kara felt as if her rage, her need had crystallized inside her.  When Everd approached her with the wand at minutes to midnight, she smiled.  And when he tried to use the wand on her... Everd was the one who flickered and changed.

Kara laughed and laughed at her twin.  Everd still had the wand in hand, and swung it at her in a rage.  The result was terrifying.  Instead of a person, where Everd had been was a writhing, mewling ball of... Kara wasn’t quite sure what it was.  It looked like a fleshy bag of broken bones - worse than anything she’d seen in the ER even after horrific traffic accidents.

The wand tumbled to the floor, and Kara scooped it up.  Her first instinct was to stop the painful bleating of the thing in front of her, and she tapped it once.  It turned into stone.  Kara was just relieved that she hadn’t been knocked on her ass by lightning.

Lane limped up to her.  “You know you’ve just made it worse.  It’s three minutes to midnight, he’d have survived a few minutes.  But a whole day?”

Kara bared her teeth.  “Good.”  She tapped the inert form that once was Everd many more times.  The stone shrunk smaller and smaller under her onslaught, until it was little more than a pebble.  “That should hold him for a while.”

“May I?” asked Lane, holding her hand out for the wand.

“Of course.”

Lane added another few months as a variety of small items: a little toy horn, a rubber ball, a live mouse.  But a rock somehow seemed the right state, so she returned to that, making them into rude shapes.  The others, save for Candi, also helped.  By the time they were done, Everd wouldn’t turn back for most of a year.

Midnight had come and gone.  Kara and Lane were whole again, and hugged each other tight.  “Free at last,” they murmured together.  “Free at last.”

“Except we’re not really free,” said Mina, as she handed the wand back to Kara.  Everyone was looking at her expectantly.  “We’ve all got some terrible things stacked up.  Sword basket, impales, that sort of thing.”

Kara brandished the wand.  “We have this, now.  I’ll nurse you through the worst days, and if you’ve got too many in a row, you can have days or weeks between the bad ones to recover.”

The show stopped, and they pilfered Everd’s travelling fund.  While doing so they also found that Everd had a fourth magic item none had known about before - a crystal ball that actually worked.  It couldn’t show the future, but it could show anywhere and anything in the recent past.  It started getting fuzzy for anything more than a week ago.

“So that’s how he always found us,” breathed Mina once they realized what it could do.  “The bastard.  I wonder how he got it.”

Kara shrugged.  “Doesn’t matter.  It’s not his anymore.  You were with him from the start, right?  Maybe you two should have it.”  Zera claimed the watch, but everyone knew the wand was Kara’s by right of conquest.

They holed up in a little cabin paid for by Everd’s funds, and slowly worked through their painful transformations.  Kara kept wanding Lane and herself so they could care for the others, and after a few weeks they were the only two left in the cabin.  Lane and Kara took turns going through their bad days, and Kara was the first to finish.  They’d made sure to find a place with access to a pond, and Kara spent two carefree days swimming in it.  The first was as a mermaid, the second as a fish.  Lane helped her out of the pond at midnight, and amused her by turning a patch of wall into a giant Velcro sheet, and sticking her to it here and there.

When Kara returned to normal, she was surprised to find that her medallion of Saint Christopher had become a plain unadorned mirror.  Holding it up she could feel its power, and realized that it was what had saved her from Everd by reflecting the wand’s magic back at him.

Then it was Lane’s turn.  Kara had stockpiled the equipment she needed for an emergency tracheotomy, as both Mina and Abby had needed them.  With practiced efficiency she opened Lane’s throat so she could breathe, and stayed by her side to keep her comfortable all through that long day.  Then Lane was back to normal, and they hugged and kissed until Kara passed out from sheer exhaustion.

The next day, as midnight came ever closer, Lane started to get nervous.  She paced back and forth in the cabin, wrestling with something other than Kara.

Just before midnight, she hugged Kara extra tight, kissed her, and whispered, “Please don’t hate me.”

Lane stepped back, and at the stroke of midnight, changed for the last time.  A handsome young man appeared, with an apologetic smile.  “I never figured out how to tell you, after that first night...”

“Lane?  Is that really you?” asked Kara in wonder.  “No wonder I felt attracted to you from the moment we met.”

Lane ducked his head.  “I was so worried that you were...”

Kara grinned.  “No.  I’m not even sure I’m bi, now.  I love you, no matter what you look like.  Is your name really Lane?”

He nodded.  “Lane Przowski.  Just call me Lane P, everyone else did.”

Kara stepped closer to him, orbiting him curiously.  He was only a touch taller than he’d been as a girl, and his face still had familiar curves.  “How did you end up an assistant?”

Lane laughed, and it sounded just like it had when he was a girl.  “A bachelor party gone terribly, terribly wrong.  But I can’t complain, if it brought us together.”

Kara snuggled up against him, and kissed his cheek.  “It did.  But you’re going to have to shave regularly.  I got spoiled by stubble-less cheeks.”

Lane laughed again, and hugged her tight.  “I promise.  If I have to, I’ll use the wand.”

Kara’s eyes sparkled.  “You’re still willing to use it?  I was hoping...”

“Mmm?”

“Well, I really liked being an assistant, except for the evil bits.  I bet we could put on a pretty spectacular show, without the blood...  And with me turned into a tiger at the end.”

Lane grinned at the image.  “You’re fierce enough to pull it off, that’s for sure.  If you’re not too traumatized by the last year, then yes.  I wonder if we could get a few of the others to sign on...  Do you want me to be the magician, and you the assistant?  We could trade off alternate weeks.”

Kara handed him the wand, then took off the mirror pendant and set it aside.  “I want to be your assistant.  I want you to change me into anything and everything you can think of.”  She went to her knees and shuddered as she finished speaking.

“What?”

Kara smiled up at him.  “I know why Everd got us to attack him every year.  I can feel the magic more clearly now, and... I just gave myself to you.  You own me, for the next year.  His contrived duels had the same effect.”

“I... own you?  Oh sweetie, I could never own you.”

“Why not?  You already own my heart.”

Lane kissed Kara softly.  “I love you too.  What are we going to do?”

“We are going to put together a fantastic magic show.  But first... remember the Disintegrator?   I want to be your toy again.”

Lane grinned and tapped her with the wand.  “As you wish.”