
They say black magic is addictive, like cigarettes or heroin. There
might be some truth to it, but Vanessa had never seen a necromancer
going through withdrawal if it had been too long since he had last
raised the dead. It wasn't black magic that was addictive, it was
power that was addictive. The rush that binding a demon to your will
gives the sort of personality that dives into the black is saccharin
sweet. Every black magician worth her chicken's blood is a power hungry
thrill seeker. It's just not worth it for anyone else.

It was probably why Vanessa was dancing naked under the new moon holding
an cold iron knife in one hand and a bag of spores in the other. She had
been dancing hard for 20 minutes already, and sweat was soaking her hair
and covering her skin. Droplets of her salty sweat flew off her thick nipples
with every step, landing on the packed earth beneath her feet with a hiss.
It was time to begin the ritual in earnest, so she started to release the
spores from her left hand chanting in her seven fold voice. Wherever the
spores fell on the ground her sweat had touched mushrooms sprang up, as
tall as her waist. When she had danced all the way around in a circle,
she turned into the center and sprinkled the last of the spores behind her.

She stood in the center of her circle of toadstools for a moment, then
spoke a single word in her seven fold voice, "Come."

Quentin Var had not been demonkind for two centuries, so he was not expecting
to be summoned. Nevertheless, the Seelie lord remembered the feeling from
the time he had spent as a Baron of Hell. He had just enough time to savor
thought of rending his unfortunate summoner limb for limb before his summoner's
magic ripped him from Faerie and brought him to earth. He was no longer
a Baron of Hell, and no longer bound by the rules of that place.

Lord Var entered the earthly plain in a burst of hell-fire and brimstone,
old habits dying rather hard. Before he had time to orient himself
something slammed into his chest and forced him to the ground. His head
bounced on the turf and he realized that a naked girl was sitting
on his chest. Considering the way she looked it was normally something
he wouldn't have minded, but the fact that she was holding a cold iron
knife buried in his neck was something he definitely took issue with. He tried
to bind her in a thousand year nightmare to make it clear just how much he
minded, but he hardly had enough magic to maintain his glamour. She cast some
sort of paralysis hex, and then all he could do was watch as she cut out his
still beating heart. The last thing he ever saw was her first bite of his
flesh traveling down her throat.

After she finished consuming the heart of the fey at her feet, Vanessa
sent a tongue of hell-fire to wash over his corpse. She jumped over the
circle of mushrooms and went over to the place where she had stashed
her clothes. She poured water from a bottle over her nude form to wash
the blood from her skin, then took a swig to wash the taste from her mouth.
When sifting through her father's memories she had come across a spell
which would let her steal the beauty from those she was related to, but it
required fey magic. She could have bargained with a fey lord for a dual cast,
but fey were worse than demons when it came to weaseling out of contracts, and
the ability to cast a proper fey glamour was the last thing she needed to make
her unnoticability spell ironclad.

To test her new power she spelled herself to look like her sister Megan.
Examining herself in a mirror spell she could see that the likeness was
perfect. There was Megan, serpentine tattoos winding around her throat
and arms. She dismissed the spell and made her way over to where her clothes
were piled on top of her backpack.

As she got dressed Vanessa was not thinking of the immortal she had just
slain like a sacrificial chicken. She was imagining what it would be like
to drink in her sister's power.
