Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  I’ll go with that if it’s got a chance of swaying her. “Exactly! And I want to suck your blood,” I lean in, trying to bury my face in her porcelain neck. But she pushes me off. She doesn’t pull me towards her and she doesn’t turn her mouth to mine like she has so many times in my daydreams. I stifle a groan. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. The whiff of cherry blossom and honey floats off her skin.

  “No way,” she smiles, softening the rejection. “What have you got against churches?”

  “Nothing,” I lie. “I just would prefer to see you outdoors where the sun plays in your hair and on your skin.”

  “Seriously? Is that what they teach you in Italian school?” she laughs. “It’s a bit much. Now, come on.” And she starts to walk away from me.

  I have been waiting for this moement to see her for the last two years and after two minutes she is walking away!

  What the fuck?

  And I love that about her; the persistence. She’s so sure and so clear. Even the way she figured out who I am and how to get a hold of me and she emailed me out of the blue. There’s no way she’s not gonna let me go to the damn church. I press my lips together, letting them go with a popping sound as I move after her.

  “Okay,” I say, but there’s no smile in my tone. We have been forbidden from going to the church. Our entire clan, for generations upon generations upon generations, back for as long as any of us have ever known, we have never been permitted inside. Sure, some of them might’ve snuck into a church now and again, on the off chance we wanted to see what one looked like. But for us, the Domani, the church is the home of the enemy. Church is where the Hunters live.

  It doesn’t mean there are Hunters in Orvieto, though. It’s just so consistently ingrained in my system to not go into any churches that my stomach roils at the thought.

  “You look a little green around the edges,” she says.

  I feel worse than that. Saliva sticks in my throat as I try to respond, but can’t.

  She unrelenting keeps walking forward.

  It’s such a dichotomy. She weakens me, even though I am stronger around her. I feel like I am one with her, as if she is part of who I am and why I was born. everything about her makes me want to throw away my life and my honor and my people and my fiancée and everything and just be with her. I suppose going into the church is a small sacrifice to make. She’s holding my hand and pulling me along and I simply do not have the strength to say no. For her, I want to be strong, but she makes me weak.

  The cathedral in Orvieto is medieval and glorious. As much as I hate to go in them, I have often stood outside and enjoyed the spectacle of a sunset on it’s golden façade. The shadows of the saints’ statues create dark shapes along the soaring peaks.

  She walks straight up the stairs and into the church only glancing back at me as I hesitate, before she barrels up the short stack of stairs. I jam my hands into my jeans’ pockets and bow my head as I stare at my feet, which are about to tread onto the steps of the church.

  I hesitate.

  She laughs and turns, disappearing into the church. I stand outside, feeling as if my world has been taken from me. This woman I can never have, this life I can never hold, she’s gone.

  I stare idly around the square. There’s no way I can stay here. I can’t sit out here in the village square while she is inside alone She is but a threshold away from me, but I feel like there’s walls separating us. And in the time I’ve known her, in the two years since we met, I’ve always thought about her. Every day.

  And now she’s here.

  She’s in my country and I am too concerned about the church to go and stand next to her? To breathe the same air?

  No. I am not a slave to my clan.

  I’m going to do it.

  I don’t think a second longer. Instead I step onto the marble steps leading up to the entrance and into the darkness.

  The smell of incense clings to my nostrils and makes my nose twitch. It’s a heady, deep scent infiltrating my lungs and making me stop for several seconds in choking silence. The chalky smell of stone underlies the heavy incense.

  The interior is magnificent. Soaring columns of alternating dark and light stripes lead the way towards the alter where the glint of sun catches on gold icons.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. And as they do, Constance grabs my hand.

  “Come here.” She pulls me toward her with a throaty whisper. All I want to do is grab her, throw her on the ground, and press myself into her. Not on her. Not against her. Into her.

  But it’s not possible. Not here.

  She leads me around the corner and I stare at how her ass looks in those jeans.

  “Quit looking at my butt,” she giggles. “You’re in a cathedral! Can you believe this place? It’s stunning.”

  But when I look around all I see are bare stone walls. They rise rather majestically but somehow still seem a cage to me. A hollow vast space. Maybe it’s different when all the parish is in attendance. Maybe their voices raised in hymn change the ambience of the space.

  “Look at this carving,” she motions towards the statue in the alcove.

  St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. She’s standing staring at him, her back to me. I approach her slowly, almost as if I’m stalking her. But she doesn’t run.

  I gently place my hands on her shoulders and stand behind her. Let her think I’m looking at the statue. But I lower my head just above her hair and breathe in deeply.

  “Why did you come for me?” I ask.

  I don’t even realize I’m saying the words out loud, but she reaches up and grabs my hand. She doesn’t take her eyes off the statue of St. Francis in front of us. All the animals hang on him the same way I am hanging on her.

  She is like a saint to me. Pure and open

  “It’s simply that I couldn’t not come to you,” she says. “It’s not what you say or what you do. It is just what is.”

  “Oh, then it must be the way I smell,” I chuckle against her hair quietly in the silence of the church.

  “No,” she chuckles. “It’s because you are inside of me, inside my heart, and I feel you.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say. “You’re crazy.”

  But I don’t lift my hands from her shoulders and I don’t move my mouth from her hair. I don’t want to tell her, this is exactly the way I feel, too. Like sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I don’t even have to look at the clock or wonder what she’s doing. I know where she is. I can feel the fire telling me if she’s happy or sad. And I feel myself, separate from her, so I wake up and in sadness, but then I notice this other part inside of me, and it’s happy and I can tell it’s her, not me. And it sounds just as crazy in my head as it is coming out of her mouth. I inhale her deeply.

  “There is a fabric in the universe,” she says, “And I believe that all the threads are connected. So, if you were one part of the fabric and I am in another, we are still connected, regardless of how long we have known each other or how often we get to see each other. We are connected and even if I’m not there I can reach out to this thread and feel you.”

  Oh.

  She says it so simply and eloquently and yet she speaks my heart. And there is never a way in a million years I can tell her I feel exactly the same. Because if I admit it, if I tell her that, then there should be nothing keeping us apart. How could I not be with her? How could I not break everything in my life to draw our thread closer?

  “I do not believe in coincidence,” I say.

  “Neither do I,” she says. Then she turns to look at me, her face glowing in the dim candlelight that flows off the candles of the shrine of St. Francis. And I think of the Domani chapel back home in Soriano. And how I want to show it to her. How I thought of her so much as I sat in that chapel, but this is not the right place, this is not the chapel. These are the soaring walls of a forbidden zone.

  But the chapel is forbidden to her, also. It will never be allowed. It shoul
d never be allowed. Especially by me. I am the enforcer, the Alpha.

  “I think we met for a reason,” she says.

  “This is not exactly what I mean,” I say. “I do not believe all this New Age ‘everything happens for a reason’ nonsense. All I was trying to say, is there is a pattern to the universe, like this fabric you talk of. So, nothing is random and somehow whatever pattern there is in the universe has you and I in a single form.”

  “The shape of a heart,” she laughs, clutching her hands to her chest in the familiar shape of a valentine heart.

  “You’re such a dork,” I shake my head grinning.

  I grip her wrists and pull apart her valentine heart, pressing her hands down and against her sides as I pull her towards me. I press my lips against hers. Our first kiss. But I can’t just stop. I probe her mouth with my tongue.

  She gasps and pulls back.

  “We are in the church,” she laughs. “And you have a fiancée. You shouldn’t kiss me.”

  My whole body tightens at the mention of Violetta. “I do,” I say the words out loud because I want her to hear them again and make sure we’re clear. But it doesn’t stop the way I want her. It doesn’t stop the way I feel. If I could just take her and have her, press myself into her, I know some part of me will finally be fulfilled and she will ease the burdens and confusion and strains that I exist within. They will all lift away if we could share our bodies with each other.

  But I would be a complete ass if I ever did this with her.

  God, I would like to try.

  It’s impossible to stop myself. I push her back against the wall and lean in to crush her moist mouth to mine. She stops me with a firm hand on my chest and pushes me away.

  “No,” and her voice is very strong and very specific. “Stop.”

  “I can’t,” I say, a growl escaping from my throat. Every muscle in my body stretches against each other as if I’m about to snap apart.

  She looks up at me her eyes blinking bright and clear. “Then leave your fiancée.”

  I snap back from her. “What?”

  “If you want to be with me, leave your fiancée,” she repeats.

  “You are so- so firm, strict…” Words fail me, so I simply clasp my hands together in front of me.

  “If you care for me, if you want anything with me, then you cannot have a fiancée,” she says. Her lips tremble. This isn’t easy for her to say. But she doesn’t touch me and I don’t reach for her. “I cannot be with you in any way while you are engaged to somebody else. I only wanted to see you because we haven’t seen each other in two years. And those five minutes before was nothing.”

  “For me it was everything,” I whisper.

  A small smile pulls at the corners of her mouth, and I’m so happy to see that smile and I want it to grow. I want to make it bigger and I want to- I want to be everything she needs me to be.

  “Constanza,” I murmur. My hands go to the back of my neck and I stretch my chin up. All I see are the claustrophobic walls of the gray stone church rising above me about to crash down. She will cut me off. It’s like a prophecy in my head before she even says it.

  “I can never see you again.” Her words echo against the cold stone.

  I reach towards her, but she’s looking up at me with tears in her eyes, glistening like shallow pools about to drip from her lashes.

  “Stay. Stay with me.” I say, but when I reach towards her, she puts her hands up and ’ shakes her blonde head. “Please.”

  “You must be single.” Her voice is awful and quiet. She doesn’t look at me. She stares down her hands and clasps them together.

  I’d rather rip off my right arm than tell her I can never leave Violetta. But it is the truth. I stand there helplessly, my arms at my sides, my shoulders hunched under the weight of the truth inside me.

  She steps forward placing her hand so it rests over my heart. “I love you,” she says softly. “I don’t know why and I don’t know how I do, but I know that will never change.”

  Her hand burns through my shirt and into my bones making my heart beat faster and harder. It races to pump blood throughout my entire body, blood soaked in her energy, her love and her truth, and I am stronger and more powerful and more capable than ever before in my entire life.

  But I don’t dare touch her. If I touch her I will never let go.

  She takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “You know exactly how to get a hold of me,” she says firmly “But please do not contact me until you are single. I can’t take it.”

  The tears that have been threatening to spill over her cheeks fall in sad tendrils down her face. She swipes them away. I close my eyes, because the last thing in the world I ever want to see is her crying. Especially over me. I’m the last person she should ever shed tears for.

  She takes her hand away from my heart and a part of me goes with her, held in the palm of her hand. I inhale sharply, closing my eyes.

  When I open them, she’s gone. I want to run after her but it makes no sense. This way I feel about her. The way I crave her, it makes no sense. And there is no future in it. I must let her go. Forever.

  I stumble three steps forward and sit down on a bench facing the saint. Will she come back? Maybe she’ll say it’s okay for us to simply make love and then I can get her out of my system.

  I should never have come here to see her.

  My fingers grip the edges of the bench. My stomach turns as if I’m on a turbulent ship. My head hangs down, pulled forward to the ground but I need to desperately hold it up and stay steady. I must. My entire clan relies on me. An entire people need me. And here I am, sitting in a church of all places, desperately wanting to choose a young American human to keep with me like a pet.

  It was so wrong of me to even come here.

  I stand up to leave, a deep sigh ripping from my chest. The stark grief as if she has died in my arms drags at every cell in my body.

  It’s best I go to the camp and check on the ones there.

  But there is something under the smell of the stone and incense. There is a tangy, musk in the air.

  A shifter.

  But not one of us. The smell is darker and deeper, mangy and massive. If I place it… that’s the smell of a Berzerken.

  And if I can smell him, then he can smell me too.

  I slip off the bench and head towards a side door of the church, pushing it open and letting light stream in on me.

  “What the hell were you doing in there?” Lucia’s voice is grim as she yanks at my arm.

  I blink in the bright light. “Go!” I push her away from the church and into the long shadows of the afternoon.

  “Not until you explain to me what you were doing with that blond girl and in a church!” she exclaims.

  “There is a Berzerken in there!” My grip is firm against her elbow. I will drag her if I have to.

  Her skin pales and eyes go wide. “Berzerken?” The horror is deep in her voice as she turns and runs low with me. We round the corner, but I don’t lose my grip on her elbow as we make our way down a small alley lined with cafes.

  We have to shift.

  We have to get out of here. But shifting here is not going to happen.

  “Slow down,” Lucia hisses as people start to stare at us.

  I pace my steps to hers, though every particle of my body wants to shift and escape. Leave the church, leave the Berzerken, leave Constance…. Leave myself.

  “Marcello?” The American accent rings loudly in the small street. Lucia and I both whip around to see Constance sitting in a sidewalk café with her parents. My life is a cliff that has just crumbled into the stormy ocean below.

  Lucia is behind me, hidden, but I know Constance has glimpsed her. By her crestfallen face I am sure she believes it’s my fiancée.

  “Constance.” The word is a whisper trailing out of my mouth. But Lucia is pulling at my hand, taking me away from the place my heart feels most at home. My eyes close briefly, as I turn. I can’t
watch Constance’s expression as I leave her.

  Forever.

  Lucia drags me around the corner to a place where no one is watching. She doesn’t waste time with words, she reaches for the energy, the golden light in each of us and her body shrinks. Hair sprouts along her limbs as her face elongates. In seconds, she is in her fox form nipping at my ankles.

  I sigh as I let go, allowing the animal in me to rise and take over escaping into the beast who lives within me.

  Together we race for the city gate that will give us access to the Tuscan countryside.

  The End

  Continue the Domani Curse Series in book one, Forever Fated.

  Coming Soon

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  About the Author

  Since I was eight I have been writing stories that capture the adventures in my head and the characters strong enough and flawed enough to have them. When I look at an empty field I see a formidable citadel. When I meet a vulnerable old man, I greet an emeritus warrior. When I walk through city streets I feel dimensions hiding around every turn. It has been my lifelong passion to explore these worlds that reveal the pain of loneliness, the joy or self-actualization, and the hope of magic.

  I grew up in a place called Potter Valley where the Milky Way is held aloft by a circle of mountains and the central business district consists of a bait store and a saloon. At 19 I moved alone to London and spent the next ten years exploring the world, even becoming an Australian citizen, before I returned to California and found a new home in Los Angeles. My world revolves around my two wee children, storytelling, and my love of travel.

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  Tainted Whispers

  AN AMBER CITY BOOK

  T.F. Walsh

  Tainted Whispers © Copyright 2017 T.F. Walsh