“Too late, incubus,” Firian said. “She’s mine.”
“We’ll see what my tentacles have to say about that.” Alec flung out a hand, tossing a long colorful cloth inside that snaked around one of my feet and tugged me toward him. Firian snapped his fingers and a gold chain appeared at my other foot, binding me to the bed post, so now my legs were spread between them.
“That’s all you could do for tentacles?” Firian hissed. “It looks like one of those woven belts from Guatemala. You told me incubi could do some illusion work.”
“I’m having trouble concentrating because Charlotte looks so fucking hot in the elf outfit. Whatever. I have a natural tentacle,” he said, swishing his tail.
“Oh god,” I panted. “Yeah you do. I mean—no, please, I’m afraid!”
“I smell your fear…and your desire,” Alec said.
“You’re forbidden from entering my cottage,” Firian said, folding his arms again.
“Try and stop me.” Alec bared his teeth and leapt toward Firian.
“Easy. You’re a mere brute and I have dealt with many demons in my centuries of existence, ha ha ha!” He spread his kimono sleeves and summoned some little blue flames, sending them toward Alec.
Alec dodged them and slipped around me, curling his tail around my leg. “You will feed my magic, little elf…” His eyes flashed like red flames at me, and he seemed so big and impressive I was almost intimidated. He was wearing kind of a loincloth himself, which was probably just an illusion, and he tore it off to press the head of his huge cock into my belly.
“Ooh…” I leaned away. “Yokai-sama, please, protect me from this demon!”
“Hmm…” He smoothed his chin with two fingers, that still had slightly fox-like claws, and his tail twitched. He snapped his fingers and Alec froze in place. Or pretended to. His tail was still wrapped around me.
“What can I expect in exchange?” Firian purred, stepping up to me and leaning down until we were almost nose to nose. “What could an elf give me that I would want?”
“A kiss?”
“A child,” he countered. “I want…the two of us…to have a child.” For a minute, his lips twitched in a real smile. “But I’ll take the kiss too.”
Our lips met, softly.
“If that is what you demand to save me from the demon…”
At that moment, Montague kicked down the door. Which honestly made me almost trip while my feet were tied up, because I truly didn’t expect anyone to kick the door off its damn hinges, and the way he looked at the slab of wood hitting the rug, I’m not sure he did either.
“Oh shit,” he whispered. “I’m strong.”
“I left the door open a crack!” Firian said. “What kind of a kick was that?”
I giggled a little and Firian grabbed my chin. “Shut up, elf, this is serious! This is a vampire. What manner of creature are you to attract such troublesome beings to my doorstep? What trouble. I was just going to eat this bowl of ramen in peace.” He conjured up a bowl of steaming noodles.
“Don’t let me stop you,” Montague said. “You can eat that ramen while I take a good taste of this elf…” He walked over to me and licked my neck. “I didn’t know I was into elves in skimpy armor, but you’re pretty cute…”
At this point I was having a very hard time not laughing my ass off, as Harris stepped in the door with a crossbow pointed at Montague, who was slipping a hand down my loincloth and froze mid-touch.
“Ah, good. Maybe I don’t have to do anything after all,” Firian said, eating the noodles. “Looks like the vampire hunter I hired got here faster than I expected.”
“Hands off the elf,” Harris said. “But you know what I demand in payment, fox.”
“A turn? Fine by me. As long as I get to have her first.”
There was a scratching sound outside the window. “What is that?” I tried to pull Montague’s hand out of its rather delicious but embarrassing location.
A black fluttering shape rose up into the window. I realized it was a cloak on a hanger with an excellent colored pencil rendering of Piers’ face blown up and stuck to the top.
“Yare yare,” Firian sighed, with the perfect long-suffering tone of an anime boy pretending not to care. He really must have watched a lot of Youtube or something when I was going to stupid high school. “Someone from the magical council is here to rescue the elf. How annoying.”
“I say we have a truce,” Montague said. “This elf girl looks pretty tough to me. I think we could all battle off the wizard and share her instead.”
“Oh, fine.” Firian waved his hand. “I release you, incubus.” Alec started moving again. Harris shot the Piers face out of the window while Firian shot off a few more blue lights, but no one seemed very interested in staging a battle compared to figuring out how to share their ‘elf girl’.
“Ooh, be gentle, I’m so scared,” I said, covering my mouth with both hands.
“How long do we have to keep this up?” Harris asked, tossing the crossbow on the bed. “You’re about to laugh.” He pressed a finger to my chest.
“Keep what up?” Alec said. “I’m not really pretending…” He slid a hand around my waist, Montague and Alec now flanking me on both sides and letting their hands roam freely over me.
Firian shrugged. “I’m getting into it,” he said. “Anyway, this yokai needs to make sure the lost elf is properly ravished before she’s released.”
“Did you guys practice this?” I asked.
“Well, I thought we should have a proper script,” Montague said. “But everyone else preferred improv night.”
“Monty, no one cares about the script,” Alec said.
“You drew a really good Piers face, though.” I said.
“Yeah, just so Harris could shoot it.”
“I’ve been working on my aim,” Harris said. “My cousin will be back someday, I’m sure, and he’s probably heard that I gave up my magic, but…some of the best vampire hunters weren’t warlocks. They just got their hands on magical weapons and made good use of them.”
“Are you sure you really want to give me your magic?” Firian arched a brow. “Now that you’ve had a few weeks to think about it? It is yours. And you can hold that gift over Charlotte’s head, but you’re not holding it over mine. Once you give it to me…”
“You’ll use it to defend her to death,” Harris said. “No, Firian. I want you to have it. My magic was part of my family legacy, and in some way, I’d rather figure out how to be tough in some way they can never take credit for. When I see them again, I want them to know I earned my power.”
While they were talking Alec started licking my ear and then quietly snaked a tail up across my cleft and then, deeper. “They can talk,” he whispered. “I’m going to take what I need…”
“Ooohh…” I moaned incriminatingly as Alec’s tail and his very tasty magic started to work on me like a drug and all I could think about was how I wanted more of him.
Naturally, this stirred everyone to get a little competitive.
“Hey.” Firian snapped his chopsticks at Alec’s tail. “I said I was going first.”
“What if we all went first?” Montague asked, still stroking me between the legs in an almost idle way that made me writhe, giving everyone a show of heaving elf boob armor.
“You’re in for it now, Chosen One,” Harris said, blue eyes merciless.
“She likes the idea, judging by how wet she just got.” Montague took his hand away and licked his fingers. “You’re lucky. I don’t need to fuck you yet, I just want to taste blood.”
“Not when Charlotte’s pregnant,” Alec said. “You can taste mine, Monty. As long as you’re not the only one sucking on me.” He gave me a dangerous look.
“I think you’ll…have to untie me,” I said.
Firian broke the bonds and then he drew me over toward the bed.
This really could have turned into a pretty hardcore situation and I’m not gonna lie, we fucked those sheets up.
But what I felt was the complete love and trust and shared laughter between four best friends and me. We met in our first year of college and we had all become different people since then, but it had brought us closer.
Where did I end and where did they begin?
My body was theirs. My heart was theirs. The hands and mouths that caressed me all blurred and I succumbed to them gladly. I shut my eyes as I lost myself to their rhythms; I gave them everything I could. When they weren’t inside me I reached them, stroking them until my arms ached, licking and sucking until they were calling my name.
Because they were mine too. They might argue, but when it came down to it, these boys knew how to share. Man, did they ever.
I was passed from one to the next, meeting the raw lust in Alec’s reddish eyes and the devotion in Firian’s gold ones, the shell of ice that surrounded Harris’ heart and mind and reflected in his cold eyes, and the warm brown charm undercut with hunger in Montague.
Each gave me love in their own way, and it was always exactly what I needed. They each claimed me in turn, filling me, rough and tender.
My boys. I could have lost them, but they were here with me still. We had changed, and we would continue to change, in ways that hurt and ways that were good, but we would always be here for each other.
My family.
41
Epilogue
Ten Years Later
Charlotte
“Char! What are you doing on a ladder? Let me help you with that,” Alec called, as the doors busted open and he walked in with the Christmas tree.
“Oh, please. I know my limits.” I tapped another nail into the wall. “I’m barely past the first trimester and I think I know how to stand on a ladder.”
“Mommy, we got the biggest tree!” Cassandra announced. “We had to go to three different tree lots.”
“We went all the way to Asheville,” Viktor said. “We went to a Christmas market.”
“What? Why? No wonder you got back so late.”
“Shh.” Montague covered his mouth.
“Surprises? For me?” I smiled as I came down the ladder, where Alec was already spotting me. When I got to the third step he picked me up and put me down.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You don’t like this?” His arms were still around my waist.
“Well…I didn’t say that.”
Alec looked at Anna, sleeping in her stroller with her rabbit familiar snuggled in her arms.
“She’s been sleeping all day,” I warned him. “I hope y’all saved some energy. I’m tired, but we’d better decorate the tree. The faeries always get here whenever they feel like it and it might be the crack of dawn.”
Viktor came up to me and slowly unfolded his hands to show me a small animal skull. “Look what Uncle Monty bought me.”
“Oh wow, what is it?”
“The lady said it’s a rat snake just like Dorothy.”
“How…does Dorothy feel about that?”
“She loves it. Where’s Daddy? I want to show him too.”
“Probably in the library. Go tell him the tree is here, okay?”
Cassandra was twirling around the ballroom floor with a spangled shawl.
“Christmas came early,” Alec said. “They were bouncing off the car doors.”
“One early present each seems fair,” I said. “They don’t get to see the human world very often, anyway.” My children were part of the magical world, through and through. They ran around in the forest with their familiars and seemed half like faeries themselves. I could hardly believe Cassandra, my firstborn, was almost ten. She strongly resembled Firian, with his reddish hair and golden eyes, although her familiar was a falcon. Tristan kept his human form a lot, just like Firian.
When I was heading into middle school I was going through a Pokemon obsession, hunched over my Gameboy Color. (Yeah, that was totally out of date, but it was one of Dad’s ways of saving money.) Cassandra had grown up riding in the woods on the back of a wolf (hey, some kids got horseback riding lessons, my kids rode their great-grandfathers, and yeah it does sound weird when I say it aloud), learning how to make potions from flowers, and sewing her own protection spells into cloaks. She seemed very childish in some ways and much wiser than her years in others.
Viktor came two years later. He was Harris’ son, quiet and drawn to anything to do with skulls and bones and death, so I expected he might be another necromancer in the family, and he also enjoyed hunting. The circle of life didn’t faze that kid at all. It would have been a little creepy except he had so much respect for it. Even though he was Harris’ son, he was very close to Montague. He’d already told me he was going to be a vampire when he grew up, but kids had some weird ideas.
Or maybe he really would become a vampire. I don’t know. You had to get used to some strange possibilities when you lived the magical life. Fares wyrd as she must, I told myself with a deep breath, whenever my own kids freaked me out.
A year and a half after Viktor, Anna came along. Alec and I had been putting off a kid. Alec was nervous about having a kid who inherited the incubus sex drive, and no wonder, because Anna was a knockout baby. I mean, no one would ever say a baby was hot, because ew, but whenever I took her to the human world, they do say things like “She’s going to be a heartbreaker some day, isn’t she?”
Yikes.
But I couldn’t be too upset because she was such a cute baby. She was breaking my heart already. She was born with a head of dark curls and eyes that were almost purple, and she slept through the night from day one, which is pretty charming on its own.
But oh damn, you better believe the first thing I did when she was born was research spells to tamp down a succubus’ sex drive for at least the next eighteen years…
After Anna was born, all the parents and grandparents started asking me if I was done, so I kept going, just to be contrary. (Actually, I just kinda liked the idea of having a big family.) Anyway, I felt I had a certain responsibility to populate our Wyrd town. Just like the other realms, once you were accepted into Wyrd, all your children were automatically Wyrd witches and warlocks. Merlin was full of love connections between our community of Wyrd wizards, and there was already talk of reclaiming territory in Ireland, which was why the faeries were sending envoys to our Solstice/Christmas ball.
Firian came in from the cold, and Harris and Viktor a moment later, while Montague and Alec were making sure the tree was straight. It was a nine foot monster, and taller in the study old tree stand, filling the grand Victorian ceiling of the ballroom. I already had generations of ornaments set out on a table nearby, and two ladders so we could cover the top.
“Tomorrow’s going to be crazy,” I said, a little tired at the thought. “The faeries are so different from us. We all get along, and I’m glad, but…you know?”
“They’ve gotten better since they married those human girls,” Alec said.
“Oh, I imagine even Daisy by herself was quite the cultural bomb dropped in the faery kingdom,” Harris said.
“I am excited to see her of course,” I said. “We’ve got some shows to binge.” I knew she was going to love ‘Trailer Trash to Trailer Splash’, where a fabulous southern decorating team buys old Airstream trailers and decorates them in vintage style to flip, plus there was that new show Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir were hosting. I only watched an episode and saved the rest for a Daisy visit.
Most of the ornaments had been here in the storage attic at Merlin College when we took over, but one of the boxes of ornaments was from my own childhood. Every year, I teared up when I saw the ones from Grandma and Grandpa, from the nativity scene to the angel they thought looked like me, and Pikachu in a Santa hat. I could still hear my Grandpa saying proudly, “That’s the Pokey-man, right there, isn’t it? I saw that and I thought of you.”
Then there was the ornaments I made out of pasta in elementary school, and the one given to me by my very sweet 5th grade teacher who was also ou
r neighbor over on Skyview Road of an owl reading a book. Just memories, you know?
Memories of the time when it was just me and Dad in ‘the real world’.
Now I was watching my own kids and their own version of reality, watching Montague send ornaments flying up to the high branches with a spell. Why did I even bother with ladders? It was much easier just to climb a few steps than try to use a spell. Showoff.
“When do I get a wand?” Cassandra asked.
“That’s too strong for you now,” Tristan said. He was in his human form, a polite but opinionated boy whom we treated like another son when he let us get away with it. “You get a wand in ten years.”
“Ella Starr has a wand and she’s only twelve! I saw it in my magazine.”
“Some kind of celebrity witch does not count,” Harris said. “When we were kids, that wasn’t even allowed, but they’re training them younger nowadays.”
“Why don’t I get to train younger?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” Alec said. “And we’d rather protect you than teach you to fight other witches.”
“Uggh. You’re always protecting, protecting, protecting.”
I suppressed a small laugh. Firian came up to me and crossed his arms on a step of the ladder. He wiped a tear off my cheek.
I shook my head. “Shit. I’m not crying. I just can’t believe it’s been ten years already. I’m still afraid the shock killed Grandma.” She lived just long enough to see Cassandra born. She was so in love with my adorable firstborn, but we basically had to use magic to brainwash her into understanding the situation, which I felt awful about.
He smiled. “I think trans fats killed Grandma. You gotta let a good southern woman die happy. She did. She missed your Grandpa, right? She was probably hanging on because she was worried about your dad, and when she saw that he wasn’t alone, she could go.”
“That’s probably true. I know they’re still close, one way or another.”
“Do you miss the simpler times?” he asked.
I looked at him. “Well…no. When I think about it now, I can’t believe you weren’t with me.”
Battle of the Hexes Page 26
