Bespelled

Chapter 2

Shrugging into the sleeves of my jacket, I couldn't help staring at the enticing flush to her rosy cheeks. The swirl of her thoughts was as confused as her expression suggested.

I knew she lusted after my perfect body. Ironically, it was only perfect because of her. The gift of life long membership to gyms and the intense exposure to martial arts training of every kind, had that effect.

Prone to fits of rage and an unruly temper, I spent most of my childhood in fist cuffs.

It was even how we met.

Being soulless made me the butt of many jokes and the target for bullies. Being underfed and undernourished back then didn't help matters. But then I was living out on the streets. Turned out by my own parents once I was weened off my mother's milk and no longer shared the protection of her soul, it became apparent what I was... the curse that I was. Still it took my parents several more years before they turned me out onto the streets when I was merely six.

I had been on my own for three years before I bumped into Ebony.

Ebony with her chubby rosy cheeks, her adoring parents and her unaccountable confidence. I had been lurking in the darken alley watching her exit the most expensive looking car I had ever seen, and follow her parents into a toy store across the road.

I shouldn't have even been there. I had known better than to tempt myself with what would never be. But the vast display of imaginative toys at Mr Picklescott's store was as always irresistible.

Unfortunately, the butcher Jones and his hefty boys lived nearby and kept a look out for me.

I had succumbed into white flash of pure rage amidst the pummeling I was receiving from their hefty fists when the Ebony swooped in to save me.

Like a avenging angel, she had sensed the disturbance and left the toy store without her parents being any the wiser. Then with powers I hadn't even known existed, she had me lifted, still swivelling, kicking and throwing useless punches, out of the melee to hover above up in the air.

With their target having disappeared from beneath their fists, the Jones boys had turned swiftly on the little girl standing calm and serene within their midst. But they failed to land a single blow on her. While she didn't retaliate other than to raise a bored brow up at their temerity, she still managed to send the four boys scampering off in fear.

It was on that day, that I acknowledged Ebony Blackthorn would be a force to reckon with. It was on that day too that she took me in off the streets, bundled me into that luxurious car with her ever indulgening parents and took me off to live with them.

"You do realise he's a souless?" Mr Raven Blackthorn had murmured softly to Ebony in the quiet confines of the car but Ebony had only raised that peremptory brow up, this time at her own father, and said condenscendingly," Of course I  know dad."

With a roll of her eyes she had turned to smirk mischievously at me. It was also on that day that I realised I could read minds. For Ebony's was the first mind I had read and whose I wanted to read again and again. She was pure, power and strength combined with an intelligences that defied explanation. I had unknowingly become enslaved to the brilliance of her mind. A fact I have kept well hidden from her inquisitive mind.

Taken under her wing, I was given a suit of rooms for my own use in the Blackthorn mansion. I was given the very best in education and every means to enhance my puny grasp of power. Without a soul I couldn't tap into the wealth of potions and spells that would render me true power so I used that expensive schooling to perfect my grasp on the mundane as best I could.

But despite my best efforts and Ebony's, the bullies wouldn't relent so what I couldn't handle with power, I used Ebony's supply of gym access and my well trained limbs to physically compensate. I fought with fists and with the vast array of expertise in martial arts at my dispense to do that deed.

So given all that I owed Ebony Blackthorn, the use of my body for her pleasure was the very least I could offer.