both in front of the fireplace. They were . . . Well, nuzzling is both polite and generally accurate, even if it doesn’t quite convey the blush factor the two were inspiring, I mean, they’d have been asked to leave any halfway reputable club for that kind of thing.
I lifted my hand to my eyes for a moment, concentrated, and opened up my Third Eye, my wizard’s Sight. That was always a dicey move. The Sight showed you what truly was, all the patterns of magic and life that existed in the universe, as they truly were—but you got them in permanent ink. You didn’t ever get to forget what you saw, no matter how bad it was. Still, if something was chewing up my friends, I needed to know about it. They were worth the risk.
I opened my eyes and immediately saw the thick bands of power that I’d laid into the very walls of my apartment when I’d built up its magical defenses. Further layers of power surrounded my lab in a second shell of insulating magic, beneath my feet. From his perch atop one of my bookshelves, Mister, the cat, appeared exactly as he always did, evidently beyond the reach of such petty concerns as the mere forces that created the universe, though my dog, Mouse, was surrounded by a calm, steady aurora of silver and blue light.
More to the point, Kirby and Andi were both engulfed in a number of different shimmering energies—the flame-colored tinges of lust and passion foremost among them, for obvious reason, but those weren’t the only energies at play. Greenish energy that struck me as something primal and wild, that essence of the instinct of the wolf they’d been taught by the genuine article, maybe, remained strong all around them, as did an undercurrent of pink-purple fear. Whatever was happening to them, it was scaring the hell out of both of them, even if they weren’t able to do anything about it, at the moment.
The golden lightning of a practitioner at work also flickered through their auras—which shouldn’t have been happening. Oh, the Alphas all had a lot more talent than Darth Wannabe and his playmates. That went without saying. But they had become extremely focused upon a single use of their magic—shapeshifting into a wolf, which is a lot more complicated and difficult and useful than it looks or sounds. But that kind of activity should only have been working if they were actually in the process of changing shape—and they weren’t.
I stepped closer, peering intently, and saw something I rather wouldn’t have.
Creatures clung to both of them—tiny, tiny things, dozens of them. To my Sight, they looked something like tiny crabs, hard-shelled little things with oversized pincers that ripped and tore into their spiritual flesh—tearing out tiny pieces that each contained a single glowing mote of both green and gold energy.
“Ah!” I said. “Aha! You’ve got psychophagic mites!”
Andi and Kirby both jumped in shock. I guess they hadn’t noticed me coming closer, being fully occupied with . . . Oh, wow. They’d sort of segued into NC-17 activities.
“Wh-what?” Andi managed to say.
“Psychophagic ...” I shook my head, dismissing my Sight with an effort of will. “Psychic parasites. They’ve latched onto you from the Nevernever. They’re exerting an influence on you both, pushing you to indulge your, um, more basic and primitive behavior patterns, and feeding on the energy of them.”
Andi dragged lust-glazed eyes from Kirby to me. “Primitive . . . ?”
“Yeah,” I said. I nodded to them. “Hence the two of you, um. And I imagine they make you want to change form.”
Andi’s eyelids fluttered. “Yes. Yes, that sounds lovely.” She shook her head slightly and came to her feet, her eyes suddenly glimmering with tears. “Is it . . . Can you make them go away?”
I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “I can’t figure out how they would have gotten there in the first place. I mean, these things are only attracted to very specific kinds of energy. And you’d only be vulnerable to them when you were actually drawing upon the matter of the Nevernever—when you were shifted. And”—I blinked and then rubbed at my forehead—“Andi. Please don’t tell me that you and Kirby have been getting down while you were fuzzy.”
The bombshell blushed, from the roots of her hair to the tips of her . . . toes.
“God, that’s just . . . so wrong.” I shook my head. “But to answer your question,