Okay, I admit it: I fucked the wrong guy. Do you hear me up there? I’m sorry I fucked your Hero, okay? Can I have my life back now?

I mean, it was my job to fuck Wrong Guys, wagging my amazing tail at them across years or decades of their lives until I turned them into Right Guys. I was designed to be a Grade-A Free-Range All-Natural Organic Fuck Bunny, and I had centuries of practice at turning boys into men and wrapping them around my little finger.

But when I came home from a tough job expecting praise and instead found replacements, I lost my shit and ran away to a hidden place I thought nobody else knew about.

Finding a good-looking naked guy playing Sleeping Beauty in my secret refuge felt like a birthday party, Christmas morning, and Easter Sunday all rolled up together. I knew a Hero when I saw one, and this one didn’t even need much breaking in. If I was going on the run to avoid finding out what happens when the Powers ditch you for a younger model, a Hero was exactly what I needed. So, yeah, I fucked him.

Unless you’re Anne Rice, you probably think Sleeping Beauties should be woken with a kiss. Not a chance. Stasis spells are a bitch, and this one was freshly cast by or at least for a major Power. I needed to wrap him around a lot more than my finger before I could wrap him around my finger.

Where do you hide a world? In a room full of doors full of rooms full of… you get the idea. I was being sent back, but at least this time I’d been given a pair of pants. And a whole lot more. I resisted the urge to look in the backpack again; bigger on the inside gave me a headache.

“So there are people there now?”

The old man/god/whatever-he-was chuckled. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons, Demon Lords?”

“That last one’s a bit comic-book for my tastes, but it could happen; you spent a few years looking for one, after all, thanks to her interference. Unfinished worlds are shaped by desire and expectation, which is why I’d left you in stasis. Mortal desire can change even finished worlds, though few ever try, and as the only one there, waking, sleeping, expecting, you shaped this one quite a bit.”

“Are we, then? Mortal, I mean, the three of us.”

“They weren’t, until you named them. They didn’t age because they weren’t finished yet, and you didn’t age because your world wasn’t; you were all missing pieces. It was your mutual desire for completion that reshaped the door to let them in and lock her out.”

“So you’re saying that deep down, I just wanted a loli and a catgirl?”

His eyes twinkled, and I mean that literally. “Is that really what you got?”

He finished making changes to the door, and it opened to reveal a familiar rock, with two even more familiar shapes curled up together on top of it, stirring softly.

“Go home, son, they’re waiting for you. You won’t need to wake them with a kiss, but I recommend it.”

There were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask, for Angel and Ariel as well as for me, but I knew he wouldn’t give me the answers, at least not today. A new one popped into my head as I stepped through the door, though.

“Hey, how did I end up on that rock in the first place?”

“You were run over by a truck.”

The cranky old martial-arts instructor who’d lived upstairs, who’d taught me more than I’d understood, strode in through the half-open door, swinging his cane like the prop I’d never known it was. “It’s not her name until you say it to her face; it will change her, and I can’t allow that, not yet. We need her just the way she is for a little while longer, warts and all.”

I’d expected that line to draw an angry remark from her, but a quick glance showed she was more stunned than I was. Apparently the game was four-dimensional Twister.

He misinterpreted my look. “Not physical warts, boy, character flaws. Ones that we’ve carefully nurtured for centuries.”

I didn’t know what he was, but I thought about all the pain and loneliness Angel and Ariel had gone through before I met them. He’d nurtured them, too.

My hands curled into fists. “And what were you nurturing me to be?”

“A hero, like your father before you.”

“My dad was a bank teller.”

“​…who gave up his dreams to love a woman he knew would die young, and raised their child to be a protector, once he found something worth protecting. We do have something like valkyries, son, and they’re never wrong about heroes. I liked him, so I picked up where he left off.”

“Time for you to get back to it, I think. Don’t worry about this one; I’ve got one last job for her before Graduation, and I guarantee it will keep her out of your hair.”

She fell back onto her glorious ass and her hands flew up to cover her face. “Yu bwoke by nodse!”

“You haven’t changed. I have. If you can’t send me home, take me to the entrance. Maybe I can get in without you.”

She dropped her hands and grinned wickedly. Not a mark on her. “I’ll just pull you out again, and next time I won’t give you the chance to say no. I’ll fuck their stupid names right out of your head, and when I’m done, you’ll do as you’re told. Forever.”

Names. Names had power over them. Power to change them, make them grow. And we’d named her, together, Angel and I.

“You’ll pull us all out, Vir-”

“Yamero!”

I stopped dead, reflexively obeying the command. After all, he’d drilled me mercilessly, back in the life I’d thought was so simple.

“Sensei?!?”

She shrugged, her dress artfully falling open. She was recovering her composure, slipping back into character. “We’re connected, intimately, and you signed that contract at least a dozen times, in something better than blood. I can find you anywhere, and when I couldn’t go to you, I pulled you back to me.”

Her lips curled in a faint sneer as she continued. “Your little princesses never gave it up, did they? That’s why you left them behind. You’re my hero, and I’m going to make you forget them right now.”

She stood up; her clothes stayed in the chair. She was a wet dream walking, making promises that I knew she’d deliver on, again and again, as long as I served her needs. I thought of Angel, Ariel, and our hard life in that empty world, holding them up against the soft sweetness that was swaying toward me, and then I hit that. Hard.

In the face. With my fist. Bitch.

She counted it off on her fingers. “Slay the dragon, save the kingdom, bed the princess: Heroing 101. I always start at the end, to make sure they’re motivated and don’t ask too many questions.”

It had certainly worked on me. If she had come back in five months, or maybe even five years, I’d have slain any dragon she pointed me at, with a salt shaker and a butter knife if necessary. She’d been extremely motivating.

“Problem was, you weren’t one of mine. You were protected, maybe by the Power that made that world, maybe by something else that had just stashed you there. It took me three days to fuck you back to consciousness and forge a connection to your lifeline.”

“I’m sorry I missed that.”

The mental image of that magnificent body riding me for three days straight was causing a painful reminder that it had been thirteen years for me, and it had been her the last time, too. She noticed, and a raised eyebrow was enough to make the offer: Hero Wanted, Apply Within.

I forced some blood back up to my brain and focused on what I really wanted. “If you couldn’t get in, how did you get me out?”

She held up a hand to ward off my angry outburst. “I can’t go there any more, and I don’t know why.”

She slumped into the nearest chair like a person, not a professional temptress. Without the Manic Pixie Fuck Bunny pose, she wasn’t the redhead I remembered. Not necessarily someone I’d like, and definitely not someone I’d trust, but I thought I was seeing something real.

“I found it a long time ago. I don’t know what Power created it, but it felt abandoned, unused. It was my refuge when I needed one, my ‘fortress of solitude’. I kept it a secret from the others, and was careful never to leave behind any trace that I’d been there, that it mattered to me. We weren’t… nice to each other.”

“Angel said you broke their toys.”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’m horrible to everybody, especially the new ones. We’re the meanest pack of Mean Girls in the universe, and we never grow up or grow old, but sometimes we get replaced.”

“When I got back from my last job, there were three new girls. I’d never seen that many at once before. All of them older than your sweet Angel, sexier than your weird little hybrid Ariel. Sexier than me, which meant my days were numbered. I ran away to my safe place, and found something I never thought I’d need: a hero.”

Her panic receded a bit. “That’s… surprisingly accurate. We’re not those Muses, of course, and not all about poetry and music and such. Although I make an awesome groupie.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you do. Maybe I should have said Catalyst, or in your case, Succubus. Whatever you call yourselves, your job is to make men change. Inspire, tempt, seduce, distract, mother, annoy, whatever it takes. You pick a target, or someone does, and then you show up in his life again and again, pushing him in a certain direction. And when you’re not around, he forgets you. Mostly.”

“Holy shit, you really have been with Angel for three years.”

I found clothes laid out on a table, and started getting dressed. “Every hour of every day, and you’re taking me back to her, now.”

“I can’t.”