by Sarah Piper
Sixteen
ASHER
“Ace of Cups. Drink.”
Tossing the Tarot card on the discard pile, I pushed a glass of whiskey toward Gray, amber liquid sloshing up over the sides.
Clear-eyed and resolute, she held my gaze and downed it, never blinking.
“That’s not how Tarot works.” Haley rolled her eyes. “You can’t just say drink every time you draw one of the cups cards, Ash.”
“And you can’t ask me to give you guys a reading and then tell me how to interpret the cards.” I picked up another one from the pile on the table between us. “The Fool. Oh, this one’s got your name all over it, Barnes. Drink up.”
“No way,” Haley said. “I’m tapping out. Two is my max, and I’ve already had three.”
“I’ll take one for the team,” Gray said, downing the glass I’d set up for her sister.
I shook my head, flashing her a grin. “You’re a lot harder to drink under the table as a bloodsucker.”
“Bloodsucker fae,” she corrected.
“That too.” I’d been sticking to beer, but now I poured a round of whiskey for myself and picked up the glass, lifting it in salute before downing it. When I finished, I caught her gaze again, seeing right through the jokes to the soft parts inside her—the parts that still felt like the lost, confused kid who’d first washed up in Blackmoon Bay all those years ago. Couldn’t blame her, though. Seemed like every time she finally solved another piece of her mysterious origins, she uncovered another betrayal. Another painful tale she wished she could close the book on for good.
But shit didn’t work that way. We didn’t get to flip through the fairytales of our lives, picking out only the best ones, the happy ones to keep. They were all part of us, the good as well as the terrible.
I just wished she’d gotten a few more good ones lately.
“Pick another card,” Addie said. “It’s my turn.”
“You got it.” I did as she asked, revealing the next card in the deck—Three of Cups. This one had three women sitting side-by-side on the rocks before a lotus pond, the full moon shining down upon them. They each held a chalice, and their eyes were closed, heads bent as if they were casting a spell.
“It’s you three for sure,” I said.
“Does this mean we all have to drink? I think it does.” Without waiting for an answer, Addie reached for the bottle and poured three shots, then downed hers like a champ. “Cheers, fae bitches.”
“I should’ve quit while I was ahead,” I said. “I’m no match for three drunk-ass sister-witches, especially if you keep ganging up on me.”
“The big bad incubus is afraid of three little girls?” Haley teased. “That’s rich.”
“We should totally start a band,” Addie said randomly. “Drunk-Ass Sister Witches. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“I’d definitely pay to see that show,” I said.
“Your turn, Ash,” Gray said, flashing a smile I know she didn’t totally feel, despite my best efforts to cheer her up. To cheer them all up. “Pick a card for yourself.”
I picked up the deck, giving it a good shuffle before turning over my card.
“Seven of Swords?” I picked up the card for a closer look. There was a dude on the front, with black angel wings, kneeling in the snow to pick up two swords, one of which he’d grabbed by the blade—total fucking amateur. Five ravens circled him, each one holding its own sword. The storm clouds behind him felt pretty damn ominous to me. “This guy looks shady as hell. What’s his deal?”
“Oh, you know,” Gray said. “Deception, trickery, the usual.” She folded her arms across her chest, eyeing me up and down as a sexy-ass grin stretched across her mouth. “Maybe the cards are warning me to watch my step around you, incubus.”
I reached for my beer again, tipping it back to take a swig. “You needed the cards to tell you that?”
Still grinning, she slid out of her chair and joined me on the other side of the table, straddling me, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we weren’t alone. “I’m not so great with learning lessons. Maybe you should teach me the hard way.”
I wrapped an arm around her back, ensuring she wouldn’t wriggle away. “Why the fuck are you so sexy?”
“And on that note… Barf.” Haley stood up, making a show of yawning and looking at her phone. “Wow, would you look at the time?”
Addie laughed. “Subtle, girl. Real subtle.”
“Stay for the show if you want,” Haley said, “but the two of them have enough chemistry to set the whole lodge on fire, and trust me, you don’t want to be at ground zero when it happens.”
“Alright, alright.” Addie stood up and grabbed her glass, along with the unfinished bottle of whiskey. “You two kids have fun. Try not to incinerate anything.”
“No promises,” Gray said.
And then two of the three drunk-ass sister witches were gone, leaving me alone with a woman insisting on being taught the hard way.
Emphasis on hard.
Gray leaned forward, licking a path across my lips.
Three, two, one, and… yep. Hard as fuck.
“You taste like beer,” she said, her voice low and sultry.
I kissed her again. “You taste like trouble.”
“Mmm. We make a good combo, don’t we?” She looped her arms around my neck and sighed, her breath warm on my lips. “A vampire-fae-witch with the worst gene pool in history, and an incubus with… well, let’s just call it your garden variety mysterious origins.”
I laughed. “My origins aren’t all that mysterious, Cupcake. You take one incubus, find him a succubus mate, throw ‘em together, shake well, and garnish with a cherry.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
I shrugged and ran my hand up her spine, cupping the back of her neck and pulling her mouth to mine. Kissing was better than talking. Always had been.
But eventually she broke our kiss, pulling back and staring into my eyes in a way that completely undid me. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know me—all the things I’d never told her, the things I’d been trying not to tell myself.
“Last I heard they were somewhere in Italy,” I said. “I haven’t had any contact with them for at least a hundred years, give or take.”
Her mouth fell open, and she stared at me for a good full minute before finally finding her voice. “Ash, your parents are still alive?”
“No idea, but I haven’t heard otherwise, so that’s my assumption.”
“You don’t talk to them at all?”
I reached for my beer again, tossed back another slug. Normally the booze kept the memories at bay, but every once in a while they snuck back in.
Like whenever I had to watch Gray live through some fucking trauma her own family had caused. That shit always stirred up old ghosts.
Hundreds of years wandering this forsaken rock, and I’d never understand why so many of the world’s worst people in existence insisted on procreating. Most of the population—human and supernatural alike—had no business bringing kids into this world.
“Alright, Cupcake,” I finally said. “You want the whole sob story? You got it.”
I sighed and closed my eyes, breaking off her intense gaze. Saying the words was one thing. Seeing her eyes change from sexy and flirty and curious to sad and pitying was another—one I wanted no part of.
“My parents never bothered to tell me what I was. I grew up thinking I was a regular kid with serious fucking problems.”
“How did you finally figure it—oh. Oh, fuck, Asher.” She leaned forward, resting her forehead on my shoulder, and in that moment I knew she’d answered her own question. “The girl,” she said softly. “The one from your drawings.”
“The one and only.” The same girl I’d drawn night after night for decades, though the drawings had stopped not too long after things heated up between me and Gray. Somehow, whenever I tried to draw her after that, I’d end up drawing Gray instead, which was just fine
by me.
“I saw her,” she said. Confessed. “The night I… When I had your soul. I saw the whole thing.”
“I figured as much.” The night she’d taken my soul to save me from the devil’s trap in Norah’s attic, our souls connected. She relived my worst memory as though it were her own, and I was pretty sure it’d haunted her ever since. “If I could erase that from your memory, I would.”
“I’d erase it from yours, too.”
“My parents thought they’d have more time, but they waited too damn long. If they’d just been honest with me from the start, I could’ve learned to control it. And I damn sure wouldn’t have gotten involved with a human girl. Fuck, Gray. Carina was innocent, and I just…”
I held Gray close and clenched my jaw, willing the wave of memories to recede, but of course they wouldn’t. Carina… It was the first time in centuries I’d said her name out loud, and in doing so, I’d called forth her ghost.
Every single memory I’d ever shared with her came crashing back, from the first day we met at her father’s farm stand, to the last in that wheat field.
“You loved her,” Gray said softly.
At this, I pulled back and opened my eyes to meet her gaze. There was no jealousy there. Only empathy.
There was a time when that look in her eyes would’ve sent me into a rage. When no one got behind my walls without a fight.
But who the fuck was I kidding? This woman had crashed through those barriers the very first night she sat across from me at her own kitchen table, slinging the cards that revealed my nature to her.
I looked into her eyes, losing myself in their twilight blue depths. “Yeah. I loved her, Gray. I loved her, and then I killed her.”
My throat tightened, barely keeping the tears at bay. The guilt.
“I never even got the chance to tell her I was sorry. To go to her funeral. To tell her father what had happened, man to man. My parents whisked me away in the middle of the night, forbidding me to talk about her. To this day, I’m sure her father thought she’d run away.” The tears gathered, then spilled. Hastily, I scrubbed a hand across my eyes. “That was the worst of it. The man hadn’t even known his daughter had died.”
Gray took my face in her hands. “It’s not your fault, Asher. You didn’t even know what you were.”
“Neither did she. So why am I the one still walking around? Still breathing and eating and drinking and fighting and fucking… Falling in love. I just…” I closed my eyes, reining it in. “She doesn’t get a do-over, Gray.”
“No, and that’s not fair. Really. But Ash, even if she’d never met you, right now? Tonight? She would’ve already been dead for centuries.”
“If you’ve got a point, Cupcake, I’d appreciate you getting to it.”
In a voice so soft it nearly broke me, she said, “Why are you still carrying her on your shoulders?”
I felt another tear slide down my cheek, hot and bitter, and willed myself to end this. To change conversations, get us back onto neutral territory. Back to fake Tarot readings and teasing and kissing.
But Gray wouldn’t let me. And in so many ways, I didn’t want her to.
I loved her. With my whole fucking heart. With my soul, however tarnished and tattered it was.
So this part of me, this deep dark well of regret and pain… I had to let her see it. The worst of me. The best of me. All of it.
“I can’t put her down,” I whispered. “Carrying her, remembering that moment, watching the life leave her eyes… That’s my punishment. My penance.”
“That’s just torture. You’re torturing yourself.”
“What else can I do?”
“Forgive yourself, for starters.”
I grabbed her hands, pulled them against my chest, pleading with my eyes for her to understand. Why was this so fucking hard?
“Ash, you have to—”
“I can’t, Gray. I just can’t.”
Gray shook her head, her own eyes reflecting my pain. My anguish. “I love you. That means you don’t get to carry this burden by yourself anymore. You say Carina doesn’t get a do-over, and you’re right. But you do. Every day you wake up alive, it’s a do-over. You decide every minute, every second. You choose. So if you can tell me that you’re honestly not ready to put her down, or that you’re not quite sure how to forgive yourself, I will accept that, and I’ll do my best to help you through it any way I can.” She reached for my face again, her eyes blazing with new fire. “But you don’t get to say ‘can’t.’ Not anymore. Not about this.”
“Good advice, Doc. So how’s that grandma of yours? You ready to forgive her yet?”
It was a low blow, a desperate move to get off the topic of Carina, and I regretted it the instant the words fell out of my big, dumb mouth.
Gray didn’t take the bait, though. Instead, she just shrugged. “A traitor, a dark witch, and goddamn liar. The devil’s playmate. I’m still on the fence about whether she’s evil incarnate or not, but I’ll keep you posted.”
“Gray, you can’t—”
“What did I just say about that word?” She leaned forward, stealing a kiss I was all too eager to give her anyway. Beneath the heat of her thighs, my cock stiffened again, ready to pick up right where we’d left off.
When she pulled back again, she said, “You know what? Let’s not talk about our fucked-up families for the rest of the night. Deal?”
Gray and I had both cut a little too damn deep—I knew she sensed it, too—and it seemed we’d both had enough soul-baring for one night. It would’ve been so easy to give in to her touch, to laugh at her joke, to let her soothe the ache that tore through my heart, just as I would do for her.
But I was done taking the easy way out. There was something I needed her to know, and it went beyond the love I felt for her, beyond the guilt and shame I’d felt about Carina, beyond the rage I still felt toward my parents.
One thing all of that had taught me was that standing around with your dick in your hand when you should’ve been telling someone how you truly felt was a one-way ticket to endless regret.
Immortal or not, none of us ever knew how long we truly had.
“Gray, listen to me.” I slid my hands into her hair, fisting it, holding her steady. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful, so fucking incredible, and the fact that she loved me—that she’d continued to stand by me night after night—that blew my fucking mind. “The people who gave birth to me? They aren’t my family. Darius, Ronan, Emilio, Spooky? They’re my family.” I pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth, whispering close. “You are my family, Gray. The one I choose, every day I wake up alive.”
The admission felt big, important, more vulnerable than anything I’d ever admitted to another being. Family—the kind I was talking about? It was so much more than being in love. Yeah, that was part of it for me and Gray. But it was friendship. It was respect. It was calling each other out on our bullshit, and holding each other close when everything got to be too much. It was being vulnerable and scared because you knew and trusted your heart was in good hands.
It was everything I never had growing up, and never dared to dream I’d have now. Not until the first time she’d told me she loved me.
A tear rolled down her cheek, and she smiled, her eyes twinkling. “You’re my family, too, Asher. Always.”
She kissed me then, deep and passionate and wild, and I wrapped her legs around my hips and rose from the kitchen chair, carrying her into the common room. The few witches who’d been hanging out in there vacated the moment they saw us coming, closing the French doors behind them, and now we had it to ourselves. I laid her on one of the couches and kissed my way down her throat, loosening the buttons on her shirt as I went, the fire roaring beside us.
I’d just unveiled her sexy-as-sin black lace bra when I sensed an unwelcome intruder standing over us.
“I thought I smelled fire,” Darius said. “Apparently I was correct.”
I tore my mouth away from Gray’s silk
y-smooth skin and glared up at him. “So you’re, what? Swooping in to dump some cold water on my nuts?”
Gray laughed. “You and your visuals.”
“You’ve got two options here, bloodsucker,” I said, repositioning myself between Gray’s thighs. “One—turn around, go back to your coffin, and we’ll all pretend this never happened.”
He folded his arms across his chest, gracing us with his smug grin. “What’s choice two?”
I cut my glance back to Gray, her eyes glittering like twin sapphires. The smile on her lips felt like a dare.
“Yeah, incubus,” she teased, arching up against me until I was about ready to come right there. “What’s option two?”
“Ladies choice,” I said, giving it right back to her. I rolled my hips, grinding my thoroughly-hardened cock against her clit, wishing I’d thought to take her jeans off before the shirt. “You wanna play with fire, Cupcake? Be my guest.”
“Oh, I do, and I will. Darius?” she called out, never taking her eyes off mine, her smile never slipping. “Get naked. Now.”
The command in her voice made me weak in the best fucking way.
The vampire was naked in a heartbeat. By the time I flicked my gaze up to meet his, he was already hard as fuck, a slow grin sliding across his face.
“Alright, little vampire,” he said, kneeling down beside us. “I’m here and at your service. Does this mean I’m well and truly forgiven for last night’s oversight in the woods?”
“Hmm.” She looked at him with a wicked gleam in her eye that told me we were both about to be in some serious trouble. “I’ll let you know later. Now shut up and kiss me before I change my mind.”
Seventeen
GRAY
The fire crackled before us, bathing my incubus and vampire in a flickering orange glow. They were naked, stretched out on their backs on the bearskin rug before the hearth, the French doors shut tight against intruders—including poor Sunshine and Sparkle, who’d been taking turns pressing their muzzles up against the glass as if they’d been utterly abandoned.
