Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  I felt another jolt of heat just standing there, watching Seamus as he took off his coat, and was trembling with the effort it took to keep from jumping him where he stood. I’d always found him attractive, but this was ridiculous, and I’d just spent the past hour shagging the life out of Sol.

  Once his coat and boots were off, Seamus was standing in front of me. He smelled amazing, like pine trees, rocks, wind, and snow. I caught myself leaning forward to lick his neck, but stopped. He was already leaning down to wrap his arms around me, though.

  “What did I miss?” he asked, slowly enveloping my waist with his arms. His breathing and speed suggested each move was calculated. I wondered if he was fighting the same thing Sol and I were.

  “Gwen?” I asked.

  But Gwen wasn’t there.

  “Sol?” I tried.

  Sol sighed.

  “As a were with a theoretical mating bond in place, I should want to tear his throat out for touching you like that,” she said, as Seamus’ hand starting running up and down my back beneath my hoodie. “But instead, I find myself wanting to watch him take you. And, I have never wanted to watch a man have sex before.”

  Just the idea of it had me pressing myself against Seamus. Poor Seamus; he’d missed all of this. He’d gone for a run, or whatever he’d done, to try to escape this very feeling, and now he was back and everything was just as bad as before, or maybe worse. What the hell must he think of what was going on?

  “Is this a mating bond?” Seamus asked, still only caressing my back. I marveled at his restraint. I wanted him to caress so much more than that.

  I nodded, trying not to press myself any harder against him.

  “Weird,” he said. “I always figured it would be between two people of the same animal spirit.”

  Sol laughed.

  “Yeah, and I thought they were never between three people.”

  “But you’re the bridge, aren’t you?” Seamus asked, his eyes locked on me.

  “If you mean am I bisexual?… I think the answer is a resounding yes,” I sighed. It was nice to say that out loud finally, and, certainly, if I’d wanted proof here it was. I was just as attracted to Seamus as I had been to Sol. Was still attracted to both of them… was starting to fantasize about being with both of them at the same time…. Of course, sexual attraction was only one part of the whole equation, but for now it was the part that was jumping up and down waving semaphores at me, so I was going to go ahead and let it have its way for a moment.

  Sol laughed and came over to stand beside me. She took my arm and Seamus released me on that side, still rubbing his left hand up and down the right side of my back, while Sol grabbed my left arm and pulled me towards the bedroom.

  “You’re right,” he said, looking at her. “I should feel defensive as hell about you touching her like that if this is a mating bond, but…”

  His eyes flashed, and I wanted to sprint all three of us to the bedroom.

  “You’re just picturing me sitting on her face while you ride her, aren’t you?” Sol said.

  Seamus nodded.

  I moaned.

  “Can we please make that happen? Like right now.”

  I didn’t wait for a reply, I just pulled them both into the bedroom.

  HOURS LATER, WHEN none of us could move anymore and we finally decided that we should break for food before we wound up with permanent damage, we emerged, dressed at least partially, into the living room.

  I was grateful that no one was out there.

  “I’m glad Trevor and Rhelia aren’t here at the moment,” I said, making my way to the small fridge that was on the far wall of the kitchen. “Do we have ingredients for sandwiches?”

  Sol patted me on the back, then hip checked me out of the way so that she had primary access to the fridge.

  “Yes. Now, step aside so I can put them together quickly. I am fucking starving.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me three,” agreed Seamus.

  I looked at him and smiled.

  The three of us had certainly bonded in the past few hours. It was night outside the windows of the cabin and I wondered exactly how many hours we’d spent fucking each other’s brains out. The edge had been taken off by that first round, no doubt. As soon as we’d all finished together (and when does that happen to a threesome?) the driving compulsion to have my way with Sol and Seamus had all but ceased, but the fun of pleasuring each other so completely had simply made me want more and more each time. Especially when you threw in the novelty of having sex with another woman and a man at the same time. I’d fantasized about threesomes before, but since I’d never met a woman I had been attracted to before Sol, I’d never pursued it. Now… Now I couldn’t stop pursuing it. Damn. I needed to think about something else, or I was going to drag them both back into the bedroom before we ate. We needed to eat.

  “So, do you think the mating bond is… satisfied?” I asked.

  Sol looked up from where she was generously applying mayonnaise and mustard to six slices of bread.

  “I should fucking hope so,” she said.

  Seamus cackled.

  “Seriously,” he agreed.

  I smiled.

  “I mean it, though,” I continued. “Is it going to do that to us again? Because while I’m a huge fan of the results, I do not appreciate the means.”

  Sol and Seamus both nodded.

  Then Gwen popped back into existence.

  “Oh goody,” I said, sighing. “Are you here to answer questions or just raise more of them?”

  Gwen frowned.

  “Don’t you enjoy my visits?” she asked. “My last one was… instructive, wouldn’t you say?”

  I just glared at her.

  She sighed, as though I never appreciated her. She might be right.

  “The mating bond is likely satisfied, to answer your question.”

  “Eavesdrop much?” I asked.

  She just shrugged.

  Sol shoved a sandwich into my hand, then turned on Gwen.

  “Mind telling us what the hell a mating bond is doing on the three of us, anyway? It makes no sense. I’m a lesbian. I don’t care how hot it is to watch those two get it on, I am not having sex with a man. WHY AM I PART OF A MATING BOND?”

  Gwen shook her head.

  “I didn’t put it on you, if that helps, and I’m not privy to all the details about why it had to be you three, I only know that it does. The whole concept is stupid, if you ask me.”

  That had all three of us nodding.

  “Are we all going to turn batshit nuts whenever either of the others bats their lashes at another person?” I asked. I really couldn’t stand jealousy as a concept, and that idea bothered me more than anything.

  Gwen snorted. “Not unless you normally would. To my knowledge, the mating bond doesn’t make you insane with jealousy unless that’s your natural tendency anyway. It just makes you crazily attracted to the person, or people, in the bond.”

  “What does that mean for Sol and Seamus?” I asked.

  “I think Sol just stated pretty clearly what she will and won’t do when it comes to Seamus.”

  “And what if Seamus becomes overwhelmingly attracted to her?”

  “He can take care of it with fantasies and his hand?” Gwen said, sounding baffled. “It’s not like any of this gives any of you more rights to each other than you would normally grant. Look, I know the traditions around mating bonds go back millennia and are… well, stupidly patriarchal, but the magic behind it is simple enough. It wants to create a bond between certain people that is unbreakable, and that encourages those people to procreate.”

  All three of us started to object.

  “The magic was around before condoms or birth control were a thing, ok?” Gwen raised her hands to forestall our objections as she spoke. “You have every opportunity to prevent pregnancy that anyone else does. The magic just makes you want to screw a bunch, and ok, yeah, it makes you want to stick with people for life, or
so I’m told. If you didn’t have access to birth control, that would greatly increase your chances of reproducing. Since you do… enjoy shagging a lot. Or don’t. It’s up to you.”

  I took a deep breath. It was reassuring to hear that we weren’t going to be… forced into anything.

  “The storytellers always make it sound like the magic of the bond makes people do crazy things to keep each other from ‘straying,’” Sol said, still seeming unconvinced.

  Gwen smirked.

  “The patriarchy is a long-standing, opportunistic, piece-of-shit mythology that has corrupted so much of history, it boggles the mind.”

  “So… those people were just being jealous assholes?” Sol asked, sounding relieved.

  Gwen nodded.

  We all three let out a breath I hadn’t realized we’d been holding.

  I finally took a bite of my sandwich. It tasted heavenly.

  Then the door to the cabin exploded in a ball of flames.

  “TREV! WHAT THE fuck?” I shouted, as Trev fell into the living room fighting with… an unfortunately familiar looking vampire.

  Without waiting for any kind of reply or explanation, I jumped into the fight, wondering why Trev was bothering to fight Edik in human form, and what had blown down the door if Trev wasn’t a fiery phoenix at the moment.

  The answer rapidly became clear as more spells slammed into the cabin, some making their way through the door and singeing past Trev and I, as we grappled with Edik on the floor.

  “Hijo de puta!” Sol shouted. “The fucker led them right to us!”

  It was the last thing she said before shifting into her panther form and charging at the first MOME agent to stick his head in past the door.

  I didn’t have time to pay attention to what Sol was doing, I was too busy trying to keep Edik from hurting my brother.

  Why aren’t you in phoenix form? I asked him, while I struggled to pin Edik down.

  They have a null out there. He touched me just as I was about to immolate this asshole.

  I didn’t know what a null was in the real world, but in most of the fantasy books I read it was someone who absorbed magic. That made sense with what Trev had just described, and I didn’t have time to ask for clarification anyway, because Edik was actually fighting me for once, and the asshat was surprisingly fast. It seemed that whatever creepy romantic notion had kept him from attacking me before had expired. Thank Gwen. I needed him to be distracted by me, because Trev was clearly in no shape to fight for much longer, and I wondered if getting hit by a null was the only thing that had happened to him.

  How many MOME agents are out there? I asked, while blocking an insanely fast series of punches of from Edik. Not for the first time, I was sincerely glad that Edik didn’t seem to have ever trained in a martial art. Even with the way he telegraphed every single one of his punches, kicks, and attempted bites, his moves were almost too fast to track.

  Twenty or so, Trev replied. Rhelia’s keeping most of them busy.

  Well fuck. That was a lot of MOME to fight off when one of our most effective fighters couldn’t pull on any of his magic. And of course, we were too spread out for me to grab all of us.

  Well, if I couldn’t get all of us to safety right away, at least I could start taking out the trash.

  The next time Edik threw a punch at me, I didn’t block it, I just grabbed his fist.

  I shifted us all the way back to the school pool in Flagstaff, but I didn’t even give him a chance to get his bearings, I just jumped back from him, laughed at the ridiculous expression on his face as he hit the water, and then shifted myself right back to the inside of Sol’s cabin.

  Luckily, Sol and Seamus had been successful in keeping more MOME agents from gaining access to the house. Trev looked like he was still catching his breath when I grabbed his wrist, before launching myself at Sol and Seamus. They were fighting the nearest MOME agents coming through the doorway.

  As soon as I grabbed hold of them, I shifted us to the top of the rise outside of Sol’s cabin, hoping that it would be behind enemy lines.

  Rhelia! I shouted mentally, hoping to gain the dragon’s attention without bringing any more MOME agents to us. Apparently, Sol had been mid-bite to the wrist of a MOME agent when I’d shifted us, because he had come along for the ride, so Sol continued to fight him atop the rocky outcropping that stood 200 meters above her small mountain sanctuary. I joined her, hoping against hope that Rhelia would make her way to us before any of the other MOME agents did. Sol was limping and Seamus was shaking like a leaf, and I remembered that none of us had gotten much sleep or food in the past few days. The best we’d managed was to shag for a few hours and eat a bite of sandwich. We were all running on empty, and Trev looked like he’d run a marathon or something just in order to get here.

  Sol must have decided that we were running out of time too, because she lunged for the mage’s throat and the man didn’t even have time to scream, though he did manage to light Sol’s fur on fire as they both went down in a heap together. Not waiting to see if the man was dead, I reached forward and grabbed his arm, shifting him back to the cabin, which was now more of a smoldering hovel than anything else, as the myriad spells that MOME had launched combined with what must have been dragon breath and brought the house most of the way to the ground. I dropped the offending MOME agent in the flaming confines of the living room before shifting myself back to Sol, Seamus, and Trev. Seamus, now in wolf form, leapt to my side and pressed his head against my leg as soon as I appeared.

  A roar like a typhoon shook the earth around us, and then we were all knocked to our asses as Rhelia backwinged herself to a spot a few meters above us on the slope. I was almost completely out of energy, but I could hear MOME agents calling to one another from below us. We didn’t have time to climb the 200 meters to Rhelia, not in the state we were in. Not with Trev unable to shift.

  “To me!” I shouted, feeling a bit like Aragorn, or Gandalf.

  Luckily, cheesy one-liners aside, everyone got up and put a hand, snout, or paw against me.

  I shifted us to Rhelia’s back, and hoped to hell she wouldn’t be offended.

  If she was upset with me, she gave no indication, instead launching herself skyward while we all still scrambled to find something to hold onto that would keep us from falling to the earth.

  Relief coursed through me as she took us higher and higher, and I realized I wouldn’t have to shift us all again.

  Then I passed out.

  I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS fighting off an attack from some evil, furred beast that was trying to smother me.

  Or… Sol’s tail.

  I sat up gasping, swatting the offending appendage away from my mouth. Sol and Seamus were curled protectively around me, both asleep. Sol’s tail was just doing its own thing. My hands pressed into the sand underneath me, and my eyes finally took in my surroundings. Aquamarine water and white sand took up my field of vision, the water extending all the way to the horizon, until the sky bled into the sea.

  “Where are we?” I muttered.

  “Ssssomewhere near Fiji,” Rhelia’s voice called, from behind me. I turned to see her sitting on the beach a little ways behind me, with Trev beside her. They were holding hands.

  “Fiji? Holy crap, how long was I out?” I asked.

  “Only about a day,” Trev replied. Something in his voice made me look him in the eyes, and I realized that he looked wrecked.

  “When was the last time you got any sleep?”

  He smiled. “I slept most of the way here.”

  “Then why do you look like shit?”

  “Vic, I—”

  “Can someone tell me why we’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?” Sol had apparently been woken by our conversation and resumed her human form. She was clothed in a sarong wrapped over a skimpy looking swim suit, and I had to wonder if my Gwen-given powers were pranksters, or if my subconscious had some sway in how everyone wound up clothed. Then I shook myself out of my pondering, bec
ause everyone else was still talking.

  “MOME are behind us at every turn,” Trev grumbled. “Rhelia thought the safest way to lose them was to fly over the ocean for a long assed time.”

  That made some amount of sense…

  “And?” I asked, sensing that we weren’t getting the full answer.

  “And Rhelia talked to a seer before we left.”

  As if that was an explanation.

  “Just wondering what your next lotto numbers should be?” I asked, giving Rhelia a hard stare.

  “The sssseer came to me, actually,” Rhelia said. “She gave me a very cryptic messssage about finding answerssss in the ocean.”

  “Well, that’s pretty vague.”

  “Indeed,” Rhelia agreed. “When I ssssaid assss much to her, she showed me an image of an island, thissss island, I think.”

  “Did she show you a map? How did you know where to go?”

  “No. Thissss island issss on no map.”

  “Well, then how did you—”

  “Vic.” Trev cut me off. “You didn’t finish your initiation ceremony, so there’s a lot we can’t tell you yet, especially with two people who aren’t dragonkin present. Can you just trust us for a minute?”

  “So you know what’s going on here?” I asked, suddenly a bit peeved at all the dragon secrecy shit.

  “Not exactly, but I have a better idea of why we might be left in the dark about a few things, and yes, it’s annoying, but it’s mostly with good reason. Besides, if the vague prophecy was in any way accurate, we’re about to get a few answers.”

  I thought about that for a moment, and then something else occurred to me.

  “Where the fuck is Albert?” I asked.

  “The old mage?” Trev asked.

  “Yeah, I haven’t seen him since we hit the streets in Unterberg. Have you?”

  Seamus must have woken up not long after Sol, because he shifted to human form and said, “He was with us when we moved the MOME refugees to the dragon realm, but he chose not to come back with us. He said he wanted an audience with the circle of elders.”

  “Hmm… I hope he’s as trustworthy as he seems,” I muttered.