I chose not to argue with him, so I told him. I told him everything. And when I was done, I felt better for it. There were no tears left to cry so talking about Eliza now was easy, even if thinking about not seeing her every day, cleaning and organizing at the bookstore wouldn’t be. But she hadn’t worked there in a while, and that—maybe—would help.
“You and I both know she’s better off,” Frank said, “And she knows it too.”
I nodded. “I know. Leaving was the right choice for her.”
“Remember Yule last year? When we had that scare?”
“I try not to.”
“Never forget it,” Frank’s voice was stern. It made me look up from the beer bottle. “Never forget the wrongs that are done to you and yours.”
“To us and ours,” I said, clinking bottles with him. “Speaking of which, where is everyone?”
“The Mistress of Darkness is in her room, no doubt reading a book. Your boy-toy is in your room, waiting—shirtless, I believe—and Damien…” Frank trailed off.
“Damien? He came home right?”
Frank nodded. “He’s in his room too.”
I didn’t like the tone of his voice. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t think so. He came home late and went straight up, didn’t even touch his pizza.”
“Did something happen to him?”
“I didn’t wanna read his aura, but it was spilling out of him like a light in the dark. I couldn’t help but see it… only maybe you should go talk to him; find out for yourself.”
“Why won’t you just tell me?”
“Because,” he said. “It isn’t my place.”
My eyes went toward the staircase. Damien had been acting a little strangely over the last couple of days, but I guessed I hadn’t given much thought to it. He was, after all, working a new job and juggling school at the same time. I may have decided not to go back to Raven’s Hall, but Damien wasn’t the academic fuck up I had turned out to be.
I took a sip of my beer in silence and after a moment got up, grabbed another beer from the fridge, and headed upstairs. The house was quiet save for the creaking caused by the wind and the thumping of heavy raindrops against the window at the end of the hall. Aaron would know I was home—he would smell me now as I crossed in front of our room if he hadn’t already heard me—but he could wait a little while.
Damien answered the door moments after I tapped on it. He was awake, and as far as I could tell he had been on his laptop, typing something out. His eyes looked strained and his lips were puffy and red. Has he been crying? I thought.
“Hey,” I said, handing him the beer. “Got a sec?”
“Uh, sure,” he said, taking the beer—albeit hesitantly.
I walked into the room that had once belonged to my sister and sat down at his computer desk, swirled the chair around, and narrowed my eyes. “Alright,” I said, “I’m just going to go ahead and ask; are you okay?”
“O… kay? Yeah, I’m fine, why?”
“Damien.”
“Amber?”
“Something’s wrong and I want you to tell me what it is so that I can help you.”
“A—”
“Please?”
Damien’s lips pressed into a line. I watched his Adam’s apple bounce up and down for a few moments before, finally, he shuffled toward the bed and sat down. He placed the beer on the night-table and ran his hands through his hair, which he now kept cut at about shoulder length.
“Start at the beginning,” I said.
The hesitation in his eyes was still present, but after a swig of beer, he said, “It’s about Natalie.”
My heart rose into my throat. I swallowed now, too, and took a long drink. “Go on,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I could tell he was tip-toeing around the issue, and that was sweet enough considering our history and the way our relationship had ended. But I didn’t want him to tip-toe. We were siblings in Magick. I wanted him to be comfortable with telling me anything.
“Yes,” I said, “Tell me.”
A moment, and finally, “We broke up.”
Holy hell, I thought. I wasn’t expecting that. The beer bottle found my lips again for another drink, but I sipped too little and gotten only bitter froth. “Ugh, gross.” The words fell out of my mouth. Damien cocked an eyebrow, confused. “Sorry, no, I meant the beer was gross. Those words shouldn’t… that wasn’t at all what I wanted to, or should have said, just then.”
“It’s alright.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, when I recovered. “What happened?”
“Are you sure you’re okay to talk about this with me?”
“Damien, I’ve gotten over it, believe me. All I want to do now is help you.”
I surprised even myself then. The Amber from a few years ago, the same Amber who sent a succubus after the man who had cheated on her, was well and truly gone. Poof. Just like Harry Houdini. Only I hadn’t realized it until that moment with Damien. I would have smiled at myself if a smile wouldn’t have been totally inappropriate.
Damien nodded, sighed, and took another swig of his drink. “When I met you,” he said, “I wasn’t kidding when I said things weren’t going great with her. It may have looked on the outside like we were happy, but the truth of it was that she was happier than me.”
I thought back to that day when I casted a spell of clairvoyance and… spied on him. He looked happy enough back then, watching as Natalie removed her shirt for him through his laptop screen. But then, she was really pretty—and naked boobs fix everything.
“I thought you were happy,” I said.
“There was a time where I was,” he said, “But… have you… ever felt trapped in a relationship?”
I had, so I nodded. I could have left Kyle, could have gathered the strength to just dump his ass when I first caught wind of his potential to cheat on me. He looked like the kind of guy that would cheat, too. All too often I had seen people on the news doing fucked up things and heard people say things like ‘I had no idea he was capable of that.’ But with some people all you had to do was get a good look at them to know they were bad news.
The bedroom lit up for a second as lightning flashed in. An instant later, thunder rolled so loudly the house seemed to tremble beneath it. When the thunder died off, Damien continued speaking.
“I had my reservations about our relationship before it even started. I swept them aside because she was pretty and smart and she was into me. But as time went on I started to wonder how much of that attraction was due to the binding.”
“Didn’t you feel the same way about her?”
“Her energy was crazy intense,” he said after taking a swig. “It wasn’t like that at the beginning, but maybe the Binding did something to her.”
Damien had told me about the Binding ritual he had performed to save Natalie’s life once. It sounded unreal when he spoke about it, I could tell the details were sketchy even to him, but the emotions… those he could recall with perfect clarity. He really did love her then, because if he hadn’t loved her the ritual wouldn’t have worked. But to hear him tell it the Binding did something to him too, took more from him than he thought.
Maybe he didn’t know just how high the price was at the time, though knowing Damien he would have probably still paid it anyway.
“Look,” I said, “I know you’re probably going through a tough patch right now, but I just want you to know that I’m here for you, okay? People fall out of love all the time, so don’t beat yourself up about it; you’re gonna be fine.” Then I realized something. “Only… what happens to her now that you’ve broken up?”
Damien had told me, many moons ago, that he couldn’t break it off with Natalie for fear of what it might do to her. If he gave her a piece of himself to save her life, then maybe taking it away would have hurt her, maybe even killed her.
“It had to be her that did it,” he said, “The break up, I mean.”
“And wa
s it?”
He nodded.
“Did she know you were unhappy?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly advertise it. But I’m living here now, in Raven’s Glen, and studying. She didn’t want to move from San Francisco because of her job. It wasn’t working.”
“But like,” I ran my hands through my hair to push it out of my face, “She didn’t come with you when you first moved to Raven’s Glen. You enrolled in a college and everything. She must have known you were planning a permanent move.”
“It wasn’t permanent,” he said, “I moved here to find out what happened to my sister. Enrolling in the college was only an excuse I could use to throw authorities off if they started asking questions. I used Magick to get in.”
“You must have liked it if you stayed.”
“I liked some things.”
Our eyes locked, and we sat motionless, staring at each other for a long time. I didn’t know what was going through his head, but in my head Frank was screaming get the fuck out, witch. So I stood up, grabbed my beer, and headed for the door. When I got there I opened it, stopped at the arch, turned around, and said, “Get some sleep, Colt.”
I left before he could reply, closing the door as I went and hurrying into my bedroom where Aaron was waiting—or sleeping. With any luck he would be awake, though. We hadn’t spent any time together today.
Chapter Four
If Aaron was awake, he didn’t go to great lengths to let me know about it.
I stalked in quiet as a mouse and saw him lying on his back, bathed in the grey glow coming off the TV bolted to the wall. With his torso exposed and the thin blanket barely covering the lower half of his body he looked like he was posing to be the centerfold of a magazine. Now give me sleepy hunk, I could hear the photographer say.
Careful not to make a sound or wake him up, I slipped out of my shoes, wiggled out of my jeans, and snuck around his side of the bed. He had such a peaceful look about him it seemed almost a shame to wake him up, but he had something I wanted.
So I knelt by his side, ran my fingertips lightly up his thigh, traced the line of his bulge, and continued up and over the ridges of his abdomen until my fingers found his lips. Then I went back down again, again sailing over the tight muscles of his chest and abs, lightly travelling along the length of his stiffening manhood, and down his thigh. By the time my hand came back up and reached his bulge again, he was hard.
I gently peeled the blanket down just far enough to free him, and then I took him in my mouth. He was hard and warm and soft and I couldn’t help but moan as my lips and tongue and hand worked in unison to rouse him gradually from sleep. When he reached into my hair with his hand and cupped the back of my neck I knew he was awake, and I accepted the gesture as my cue to work faster.
My body ached for him to be inside me, but the night was still young and Aaron’s stamina was like no other guy I had ever been with. I had no doubt he would be good to go again in a couple of minutes. So I kept going until his body tensed and he filled my mouth, and I moaned with him, and enjoyed the experience with him.
Big, strong werewolf he might have been; but right here, right now, I had more power than he did, and that felt so good.
When I was satisfied that he was done, I crawled into the bed with him, drew myself across his body, and nuzzled into the side of his neck. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he echoed. His body was shaking lightly.
“Did I wake you?”
“Yeah…”
“I’m not sorry.”
“I bet you aren’t.”
“What can I say? You left me blue-balled in the kitchen earlier. I wanted to take what I was promised.”
“You realize I’m the one who just—”
“Oh, yeah, totally, but now that you’re awake you’re gonna take care of me. That’s how this works.”
Aaron laughed and his entire body shook. “You’re unbelievable,” he said.
I kissed him on the neck. “Aren’t I?”
A silence fell over us like a blanket, but it was a comfortable silence—one you could wrap yourself in. “How did everything go tonight?” he asked.
“I’m fine, if that’s what you mean. Frank was there to cheer me up after I spoke to Eliza. I’m going to miss her though.”
Aaron nodded. “I know. It’ll be okay, though. And what about Damien?”
He was awake for that. “He… Frank told me he wasn’t doing too well so I went to see him. Natalie broke up with him.”
“That sucks for him.”
“Yeah, it does. I thought I’d go and talk to him.”
“And?”
“I think he’s gonna be okay.”
“Do you think I should go and talk to him? You know, as the only other straight guy in the house.”
“Would you? He’d like that, I think.”
“It’s the least I can do. If it weren’t for him I may have never had you.”
“Don’t be silly. You had me. Have me.”
“I do have you.”
I couldn’t say that, at the time, I wasn’t a little resistant to the idea of having Aaron and Damien living under the same roof considering I had been romantically involved with both men before. But while they didn’t have a lot in common, it didn’t take them long to become friends—or at least I liked to think they had, anyway. Neither of them had attacked the other over me, or in general, so there was that. What few things they did have in common—like Football, surprisingly; Damien was a big 69’ers Fan—though, they spoke about passionately and at length. Plus, Aaron’s status as a werewolf meant he soon started to see everyone who lived in the house as his pack; and while I may have been the group’s leader, he was the pack’s Alpha.
And, you know, sometimes in bed I would let him have his title.
Aaron was strong and tough and fast, warm to the touch, his sweat—hot and slick against my body—drove me mad, and the way he would nibble at the skin where my jaw met my neck made my legs buck and shake. Intimate times with Aaron were in many ways like tugs-of-war: when I had him, I had him. He was mine to do with as I pleased. But when his primal side turned on… I don’t know. It was like his sweat had some kind of pheromone that turned me to putty beneath his powerful hands. When he had me pinned against the bed and he was inside me, filling me, I was his.
It was the sweetest surrender.
Much later, I couldn’t say when—an hour, maybe three—I let myself slip into sleep with Aaron’s arms around my waist and his body tucked in behind mine. But the howling wind and the battering rain hadn’t abated, and the night kept calling me back to the waking world every so often.
Sometimes I would nod off for ten minutes before being yanked awake by a grumble of thunder, another time a whole hour had passed since the last time I checked, and once—when the wind seemed to have died—it was that damned owl that woke me up with its incessant hooting.
I shut the noise out as best I could, but it was no use. The owl won. In the end I decided to get out of bed and go to the window to try and find the thing, even though my chances were slim since I had only ever seen it once. I wasn’t going to hurt it obviously; I was only going to scare it off with a little Magick.
What good was telekinesis if you couldn’t use it to touch things from far away, right?
But when I opened the window the world came spilling in. It was as if I had opened the window to the back of a live jet engine; the air was hot, powerful enough to send me flying across the room, and loud. It was like a lion’s roar! I struggled to get to my feet but every time I stood the wind would knock me back against the wall and pin me there.
Aaron, I thought. I could see him on the bed but he was fast asleep and immobile. How could he not hear the wind’s thundering voice? Why wasn’t he awake? I screamed, but the air wouldn’t leave my lungs. In fact, every time I opened my mouth it was like the gust was trying to force my voice back into my throat.
The storm was choking me, and all I could think a
bout was how helpless I was.
Then I heard another noise; a kind of buzzing sound. I fought hard to open my eyes against the wind, turning my head just enough so that the blast wasn’t hitting me squarely in the face, and then I saw where the buzzing was coming from. Outside, hovering inches away from the window, was a hornet; a man-sized, ugly, hairy hornet.
My heart jumped into my throat and started to beat so hard I could feel it on the sides of my head. Aaron! I wanted to say, get it quick, its right there! In my mind Aaron would have easily been able to grab hold of a swatter to smack the hornet away, despite its huge size; such was the nonsensical nature of dreams. Because, of course, that’s what it was. I was having a dream. Just a dream. Don’t be stupid, Amber, it’s only a dream. The wind, the roar, the inability to move and speak; I’ve been here before plenty of times, and I can totally wake myself up if I want to.
I shook my head violently as I had done many times before when held tightly in the grips of a nightmare, rocking and shaking and thinking no, no now! But it didn’t work. The roar was still there, the buzzing still present—even if I wasn’t looking right at it.
“Amberrr,” said a voice like a fork scraping on a plate, “I’m waiting.”
It was the hornet. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, approaching, reaching for me with its insect-like talons. And then I woke up, cold, clammy, sweaty, with an iron shriek locked in the back of my throat. I went to shake Aaron, to wake him up and make sure I wasn’t dreaming again, but the bed was empty and before I had a chance to question where he had gone I was running to the bathroom.
There, holding onto the toilet bowl as if for dear life, I retched until my throat went raw.
Chapter Five
Hornets are assholes. I had never liked flying insects, but of all of them, hornets were the worst. They’re the worst because they serve no purpose other than to predate on other insects, often larger ones than themselves, and because sometimes you can’t tell them apart from their wasp cousins. And yet, spiritually speaking, wasps and hornets in dreams tended to mean good things.