Charlotte
Let it be known: Professor Jablonsky told me to break the rules.
So maybe he wasn’t actually mad when he found us breaking into Master Blair’s house last year after all. It seemed like they were cool with me being the heroine of the story.
You know, in the sense that heroines are usually fun little scamps who ignore rules and do dangerous things all the time without managing to be dead yet. So far, that was me.
I really should stop.
But, not yet.
It was a very cold night with a light dusting of snow, and we had a moonlight class with Professor McGuinness. We were standing out under a brilliant sky full of stars, no light pollution in sight, breathing in cold puffs wearing heavy wool coats and school crest scarves. The clothing shop didn’t offer any nice, lightweight down, only this thick stiff wool. Even the smallest coat in the shop looked big on me. We looked like we were ready to die for the glory of the Tsar.
“You have all given me the names of the people you intend to summon,” Professor McGuinness said. “Please do not summon anyone else. If the person doesn’t come, do not try again. You’ll get another chance later with one of the spirits who was successfully summoned tonight. You must do this alone, but all of the professors and staff are posted around the campus for safety. Please, find an unlit fire and begin.”
Alec looked at me. “Good luck, Charlotte.”
“You too.” I blew him a kiss.
Bonfires had been set up in advance around the grounds, in the more tucked away places. The air already smelled of woodsmoke. I started hurrying down the path to the farthest end of campus.
I told Professor McGuinness I was summoning some old witch, but I had every intention of summoning Lily Maxwell. A Sinistral, but also…Alec’s mom. I just wanted to try to get Alec some closure.
Once we were away from the group, Firian appeared next to me. He was dressed the same as everyone else, so he blended in. He also looked very BBC hot in his coat and scarf.
“Oh hey,” I said. “Did I call you?”
“You seem nervous,” he said. “I figured I’d just watch over you tonight.”
I smiled. “Good. Maybe you can help me talk to her. I don’t know how I can cover all the things Alec would want to say to her.”
“But you know how it feels.” Firian’s hand brushed mine. “You’re the perfect person.”
“I didn’t handle my mom that well, but…thanks.”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “I’m proud of you, Charlotte. Whenever I see you, I think, that is my witch.”
I grabbed him by the scarf and kissed him. The kiss deepened quickly. His breath and his body were so warm in the cold. “Shh,” I said. “I get so turned on when you call me your witch, but I have demons to summon.”
I found a relatively isolated bonfire spot out by the visitor housing. The fence that surrounded the school was just behind me. It looked like a decorative fence, mostly, but I also knew that beyond the fence was the forest with thick woods unprotected by the wards. On a night like this, the school seemed like an outpost in the middle of some strange land, and I could hardly believe we were in North Carolina.
I lit the fire with my magic. By now, this was easy stuff. I shot a neat little fireball into the kindling and it immediately caught and glowed. I watched as the twigs and brush spread to the larger sticks.
“You can do this,” Firian said.
“Oh, I know.”
But Firian knew I was nervous. The last time I tried to summon a dark mom spirit, it went badly.
I lifted my wand. The wand was sort of like a radio antenna. I could feel the magic all around me, and as I shifted my focus, I picked up different signals, some stronger than others. The full moon had a serene power that could also turn dark, but it was a strong force for speaking to the dead.
Earlier in the week, Professor McGuinness had us gather some materials to cast in the fire to help our summons. I opened the small bag and poured them into the flames.
“Lily Maxwell,” I whispered. “My name is Charlotte Byrne. I call upon you to speak to me. The moon is full. I wish to reach into the veil that separates us.”
The flames immediately began to leap and send out waves of sparks. I took a step back. The fire looked like a churning volcano. I grabbed Firian’s arm as the form of a woman seemed to come crawling out of the flames, rising up in front of us.
It happened faster than I expected. She looked at me, and she was gorgeous. I don’t know why I expected otherwise. She was Alec’s mom, after all. I guess I envisioned someone older and more of a chain-smoking tough. She had thick, wild hair and reddish eyes that reminded me of a cat, full lips, and crazy curves, and she barely looked forty. She had a scarf tied around her thick black hair like a headband, reddish eyes that glowed against her dark bronze skin, hoop earrings and a black leather jacket.
“You’re Alec’s mom…,” I said.
“Alec.” Her hands clutched together. “He is my only son. And you are…?” Her eyes narrowed with scrutiny. “I sense he is not mating with you.”
So, if I didn’t know how to talk to my dad about this, I definitely didn’t have a guide for Talking to My Celibate Incubus Boyfriend’s Dead Mom. “Not yet, no. He is…saving himself, I guess?”
Flames leapt from her skin. “My son is saving himself!? For what!?”
“Whoa! It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “You should be proud of him. He’s trying to study.”
“For how long?”
“Until college is over!”
“Did you ask him to do this, girl?”
“Oh, no. Definitely not,” I said.
“He needs to fuck,” she said. “I am not proud of him at all. He should get it everywhere he can find it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” I didn’t expect her to start arguing with me about not having sex with her son within the first five minutes. “You’re not proud of him for being a talented warlock at a great university? For being disciplined? For liking one girl?”
“You can’t satisfy him all by yourself.”
I glanced at Firian like, what do I say!?
“Charlotte’s pretty horny,” he said.
Not quite what I wanted, but okay.
I tried to get this back on track. “I summoned you because I wondered if you had any words of closure for Alec,” I said. “I don’t know your situation, but I do know you weren’t around to guide him as he was growing up, and I also know how that feels.”
“Guide him?” She rubbed her forehead. “Succubi and incubi don’t guide their children. We aren’t meant to be parents. That’s my opinion, anyway. A succubus has a baby, the human father raises him, and in the end, he comes back to his roots.”
“Alec is both,” I said. “He’s a human and an incubus. He’s not just one or the other.”
“He is denying what he is.” She added, “Every succubus has at least one baby. To keep the race going. But otherwise we just don’t make for good little wives. So don’t ask me for ‘closure’.”
“So your words for Alec are ‘you were born because I had to have one kid’?”
She flamed up and waved a smoky spirit hand at me. “I gave him up. I couldn’t have been his mother, and I wouldn’t have been, and it’s best I didn’t, especially since I died young like a fucking moron. But you’re pissing me off with this.”
A lump rose in my throat and it was possible I was taking the mom abandonment situation personally. “So that’s it? Nothing you want to say to him? Not even like, an ‘I love you’?”
“Did his dad take good care of him?”
“I—I think so.”
“Well, maybe he should stop looking for love in places he ain’t getting it.”
“Go away! I banish you!” I shouted, waving my arms.
“If you love Alec, tell him this. Leave school. Let him knock you up if you care about him that much, so he can get it out of his system—”
“I fucking banish
you!” I screamed at her.
Wow. Alec’s mom was the worst.
I didn’t expect that at all. I thought I was doing him a favor and now I was battling with his mom, who was actually fighting my attempts to banish her. As I shouted at her, trying to put my will into it, she started chanting and my bonfire burst into a pillar of flames that engulfed her entire body. “Promise me you will leave my son alone and not try to entangle him into a human life,” she said in this scary voice that seemed to echo.
“No way! You don’t know anything about him!”
She lifted her arms and started chanting something at me.
“Try a defense spell,” Firian hissed. “She’s not leaving. You have more practice with those.”
“Right.” Firian took my hand, lending me focus. I could feel the path opening to tap into my magic as I waved my wand. “I surround myself with light and you cannot touch me!”
A circle of light blazed up around me, just as Harris swooped in, chanting his own spell. He pointed his wand at the succubus and with a hiss, she was forced back down, the flames dying. In French, he invoked the name of some Hapsburg and the succubus now vanished decisively. The bonfire went completely dead, like it had been doused with a hose.
“What was that?” I yelled at him. “I didn’t ask for your fancy ancestor powers.”
“I saved your ass. Again. What were you—”
I cut him off. “Oh no, you did not save my ass. I was casting a defensive spell and it was working. I would have figured out something, or one of the professors would have come over. Were you watching me?”
“Well, where were the professors?” he asked. “Probably busy dealing with other mistakes. Necromancy is always a mess. People always break the rules and summon their family. I already finished my contact so I took it upon myself to watch you because I just knew you would do something.” He leaned closer. “Thank you for not disappointing me.”
When he said that, he sounded more impressed than critical.
“Um…”
Firian put a hand around me and drew me a step away from Harris. “Charlotte, don’t listen to him. You were handling that well. No one expected her to attack you.”
“Who was that?” Harris asked. “Why did you summon a sinistral? You should know by now how dangerous it is to summon dark spirits and how hard they are to control.”
I glared at him. “It was Alec’s mom.”
“Alec’s mom?”
“He saw her in the back of the memoriam book and I offered to summon her. I didn’t think she would be crazy like my mom. To be fair, she was crazy in a different way. I think she was just angry that Alec is living a human warlock life instead of an incubus life and she blamed me. It seems that succubi have a really different view of what a parent should do.” I looked at the bonfire, feeling suddenly like I was a failure even if it wasn’t my fault.
I should have known better than to agree to do it. I should have known it doesn’t always work out like you expect. Now I had to subject Alec to the same pain I felt when I summoned my mom and found out she wanted me to join her in the darkness instead of coming back to me and Dad.
“I’ve saved you twice now,” Harris said.
I whirled on him and shot him with a blast of magic that was much stronger than the other day. He slammed against the brick wall and immediately retaliated with a spell that froze me in place.
“Stop—saving—me,” I ground out. The spell actually made it hard to move my mouth. “I didn’t—ask.”
“But you need it,” he said. “Not for summoning Alec’s mom—though it was stupid. Not even for summoning a demon. I know I goaded you into that one.” The quickest wry smile flashed across his irresistible, smug lips. “But because of Firian. And Wyrd wands. And the council. The council doesn’t like Chosen Ones, Charlotte. They don’t like anyone who might change the world. You need me to keep an eye on you because my name…is your cover…and I want to cover you.”
What was he saying?
The last bit was almost a whisper from his full, gorgeous mouth.
He wanted to kiss me.
He was so close.
I want him to…
God, Firian was right there. What was I thinking? I tried to twist away from him. “What happened to Daisy?”
His face immediately shut down and he drew back with a quick wave of his hand that released me from the spell. “With her grandmother.” Then he said, in a reserved voice that was hard to read, “She’s safe.”
With a faint shrug of his broad shoulders, he started walking away, dead leaves crunching under his feet.
“I don’t understand him,” I said, when he was just out of earshot, or maybe not even quite out of earshot.
But that wasn’t actually true. Harris knew how severe the consequences could be for breaking the rules even as his friends were breaking them around him. He had watched Alec and Montague getting closer to me for over a year, and maybe he was jealous of them.
Is the reason he’ll never admit to liking me because if he pisses off his parents and the council, he wouldn’t be able to protect us?
That’s giving him too much credit!
“What do we tell Alec?” I said, turning my eyes back to the ash of the dead bonfire.
“It wasn’t your fault Alec’s mom is trash.”
“Don’t say that. Maybe she just—”
He shook his head. “No. She was terrible. It’s okay to admit it. Though we won’t say that to him directly. We’ll just tell him in a calm way that…he does his father proud.”
I laughed, if a little sadly. I was glad Firian was so honest. I could never like Harris back, anyway. He was too secretive.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Firian
A certain class of witches and warlocks were careful with their hair. The ones who had enemies. So I knew Ignatius Blair was definitely aware of some serious ongoing danger in his life when I got into his office and found a perfectly clean comb in his desk without a single stray hair. And when I searched the rug under his desk, it had been vacuumed into oblivion.
I even tried to brush a hand on his jacket and saying, “You have something on your shoulder” but he dodged me and brushed his shoulder himself.
Yep. Blair seemed relaxed. But deep down, I knew he had to be on edge. He was way too aware of me.
In the end, it was dumb luck that brought me to this point. The school held a weekend bake sale to raise money to repair the tower on the main hall, and when I heard someone say that Master Blair made the loaf of banana bread, I took a chance. I bought it, ate the entire loaf very carefully, and was rewarded with a prize: one single brown hair.
“And Firian is rewarded with the rarest of item drops,” I said.
“Ew!” Charlotte looked over the edge of her book to watch me hold it up triumphantly. “You ate that entire loaf already? And there was a hair in it?”
“Yes. I surmised that Master Blair does not bake often and didn’t think to tie back his nearly shoulder-length locks while baking. I am a genius.”
She finally put down the novel, a rare moment of relaxation for her these days, with the air of annoyance universal to all interrupted readers. “You wanted his hair?”
“I’ve been trying to get his hair for months.”
“I’m glad that’s all it is. I have to say I was a bit insulted when you bought his banana bread instead of those cookies I slaved over last night.”
“Alec and Montague fought over the cookies as it is.”
“Yeah, but I wanted you to fight with them,” she said, raising her brows and then laughing. “Okay, so what nefarious thing are you doing with that hair?”
“I’m going to find his familiar.”
“Ohh…”
“So don’t call unless you need me. But maybe before I go…I’ll put a ring or two on your fingers.”
I opened up a jewelry box, took out a ring, and placed the hair in its spot for safekeeping. Then I slid into bed beside her. “Alec is d
own at the gym. So we probably have fifteen minutes alone.”
“Firian.” She dug her fingers into my hair and pulled me into a kiss.
The ring idea was genius. Whenever I saw a new gold or silver ring on her fingers I immediately wanted to pull her into some private place and put my own mark on her. I lifted her hand now and tugged on her fingers. “Two silver and one gold since last night…must have been a hot date.”
“It was…”
I pushed her down on the bed and tore off her panties under her skirt. “I like weekends.” She wore pants during class.
“Me too.”
“But I bet you didn’t get any of this.” I slid my nose down her body and slipped my tongue between her legs. The canine in me was more than happy to start here, and the girl in her seemed pretty happy with it too.
“Oh god…no,” she moaned.
For now, this was my domain, because although I hadn’t asked, I had a feeling Montague’s tendency to want to bite her was a bad match for going down on her, and obviously Alec was out. Only I could please my girl like this, and no one was going to do it better than me anyway, I’d bet on that.
“Firian…ohhh…” I worked my tongue over her clit, pushing her knees open, and she writhed in a very satisfying way, grabbing the pillows.
I paused. “I’m sorry. You were trying to read.”
She smacked me with one of the pillows. “You’re not getting out of this now.”
“Oh, I know.” I slipped my tongue inside her, curling and thrusting it, just the way she liked it. I love the taste of her, sweet and musky and dangerous as sin. I loved how her breath came quicker and raspier until I knew she was too consumed by sensation to speak anymore, and that was when I knew it was time to give her more, to give her all of myself. Our limbs tangled together, her eyes meeting mine with a little wondering smile on her face. I don’t even know if she knew that she made that smile for me.
Her sheath was tight but slick, and as soon as I was inside her it was more perfect than I could have imagined. Every time.
She matched my rhythm right away. We didn’t fumble much with each other, because we were a pair. Witch and familiar. We were meant to work together.
A Witch Among Warlocks: The Complete Series Box Set Page 47
