by Abby Knox
Alice lifted her head up to meet his eyes. “Oh my god, why?”
Drew turned and led her over to the bed. He sat down and motioned for her to sit in his lap. His plain pajama pants, bare chest and pillow-mussed hair were too, too sexy. She knew it was wrong, but she obeyed.
He answered, stroking her back. “You might love chocolate. But could you imagine going through life not tasting anything but chocolate?”
“Have you met me? The only thing I love more than a shade-grown, fair-trade, organic Nicaraguan bean is chocolate.”
He leaned in and placed his nose between her breasts and inhaled. Oh god, she should really not be allowing that right now. He continued, “But imagine eating only chocolate but not appreciating anything else, no other taste or scent, or touch. So we adapted.”
“That’s crazy to think about,” she said. Drew was placing little kisses up and down her neck as he slipped his hands under her top. Oh goddess, that feels good.
“No more crazy than humans adapting to walking upright,” he said. He boldly released his fangs and traced them across her collarbone. This was getting out of hand.
Dammit, she let a little sigh of pleasure escape before she could stop herself. Breaking up could wait. Maybe she could stall him with more genuine questions. “I suppose. But wait, how were they killing themselves if they are immortal? Wooden stake through the heart?”
“Not unless the wooden stake is magically cursed. Since we can’t be killed by natural causes or terrestrial violence, it has to come from somewhere else.” Now he worked his way downward, across her chest, tentatively biting without breaking skin.
She displayed her neck for him. She had no hope of going back once she was this close to him. Fuck it. “You know,” she said, starting to feel breathless, “You’re debunking a lot of mythology that’s been in place for, like, a millennia in about 20 seconds. Even for a witch, I believe a lot of wrong things, I guess. Oh goddess…”
Drew’s hand was all the way up inside her top, cupping her breast, rubbing one nipple with his thumb.
“What was it you wanted to tell me?” he asked, stroking the hair at the nape of her neck with the other hand.
She lifted her face to meet his gaze, and she felt the pit of regret in her stomach.
And she just couldn’t bring herself to rip off the bandage, metaphorically. She felt so at home in his arms. They simply fit. How could this be wrong? How could she end it when she didn’t even know if what Morgan was saying was correct?
But deep down she knew it was all true.
“We have to stop, as much as I don’t want to,” she said weakly.
“What is it, beauty?”
Alice forced herself to focus and placed a hand over his hand that was at her breast, signaling for him to slow down. He growled in frustration, but he complied.
“After you left I went to see Morgan,” Alice said. “She sees visions, she interprets dreams. And she did not give me a warm and fuzzy interpretation of the visions I had while we were together last night.”
“What did she say?” Drew looked more curious than concerned.
“I’m sorry, Drew. But as much as I like you, and as much as I felt the connection between us, I don’t think we can be together.”
“What’s gotten into your head?” he asked, smoothing her top down. She appreciated him acting like a gentleman despite the beast she knew was rising in his chest. She slid off his lap.
“Drew, if we stay together, it could kill you.”
Chapter 11
Drew
Silly girl, he thought. As if death mattered to him, after all he’d been through.
“Death doesn’t scare me. I’ve been killed dozens of times. Doesn’t seem to stick.”
Alice looked down and hugged her chest. “Remember what you just said about magic being able to kill you? And you do remember how I’m a bona fide magical witch?”
“My dear, I don’t have a choice. You are mine. I’m yours. We bonded last night and there’s nothing you or I can do to turn back.” He folded his arms across his massive chest.
She was pleading now. “Drew, what did you see when you closed your eyes when you were with me last night?”
“I saw us together, in space, I guess. Like, the infinite.”
“So did I. But it’s not a good thing,” she said. He felt bad, she was genuinely scared.
Drew sighed and rubbed his eyes. He could see he wasn’t going to get much-needed sleep tonight. “Fine. Have your guy bring up some coffee so I can stay awake and we can hash this out.”
“So you see,” Alice was saying as they sat at the table drinking espresso that Jordan had delivered himself, "the more human you feel, the more your immortality will disappear. If we keep having sex, if we stay together, the more I unlock the curse that I evidently cast on you all those centuries ago. The Alice that I was in a former life created the vampire race, unintentionally spreading this bloodsucking curse among the mortals. No offense. That’s why you’re drawn to me. It’s destiny trying to bring your story to an end, full circle.”
“There’s a lot of fuzzy math going on here. I believe you when you say we did know each other in a past life. But if I’ve learned anything it’s that when two people are destined to be together, you hold on for dear life and don’t fuck it up. Life is a balance of fate and making your own story. It’s both rolling the dice but taking a calculated risk. I have enough experience to know that being with you is a risk I want to take. I have to take.”
Alice gripped her coffee; he could see her knuckles turning white. She was stressing out about this. As far as Drew was concerned, this was nothing to worry about. Life and death were interconnected, love and hate were equal partners. It all might end tomorrow so you may as well enjoy life now.
He reached across the table and wove his fingers through her hair, her eyes pleading with him to understand. But he understood completely.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Being with you is more real and delicious and powerful than anything I’ve ever experienced before, and I’m not going to let that go. I’m keeping you to myself.”
Drew leaned closer across the table so she could see it in his eyes. Dead serious. Emphasis on “dead.”
Alice did not look convinced. “This is all going to come to a tragic end for one of us. Either you disappear, or you lose the memory of us when you become fully human, and I have to carry it with me for the rest of my days. Maybe you won’t suffer, but I will.”
Drew stood up from the table. He had heard enough. He held out his hand.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To my bed. I want you in it.”
“Drew…”
“Enough of this prophetic mumbo jumbo. You witches are far into your meticulous research and it’s making you way too cautious. There have been predictions and miscast fortunes all throughout history. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is you’re my witch. I know you believe it, too. I hear your blood pumping for it.”
She stood up, but she did not take his hand. She moved toward the door. He flashed across the room and blocked her exit. “Run away all you want. I can smell your blood rushing to your sex. Your scent changes when I turn you on. I thought you Sisters didn’t have any sexual hang-ups. You’re all about letting nature take it’s course, unless I’m mistaken.”
“We believe in balance. There’s a time for impulsiveness and a time to be mindful.”
He grabbed her wrist and pressed her palm into his dick, which was still standing upright, waiting. “But you’re different. Hell, your soul loves vampires so much you hired one as your assistant.”
She looked confused.
“Oh, you didn’t know? Seriously, woman. Open your eyes. Jordan’s a vampire, too. And you just can’t stay away from me. Give yourself permission. Stop worrying.”
Alice snatched her hand away. “This is the beast talking. I have to go,” she said, reaching for the doorknob. “Let’s just end this now b
efore we get too far with our emotions and we get hurt. We had a date. A really good, strange date. For charity. I fulfilled my obligation and then some. Now let’s just part ways and stay safe.”
He put up his hands in surrender and stepped out of her way. “Fine. See you tonight,” he said.
“What?”
“You remember. Your little fantasy?”
“No, Drew. Don’t come see me tonight,” she said. “I mean it. I know what I said before, but I’m changing the code.”
He waited until she was out of the building and across the street before angrily kicking a hole in the door. Then he crawled back into bed, covered himself up with the comforter, closed his eyes, and tried to get back to sleep. He supposed another thing she didn’t know about vampires was that no befuddlement charm in the world could confuse a bloodhound.
There was no escaping this. Not for her. Nor for him.
Chapter 12
Alice
After leaving the shop early to let Jordan close up, Alice headed home. She was sure Drew was wrong about the kid being a vampire. Why would he not have tried anything sinister by now? She was tired and sad and needed to wallow.
She had just broken up with Drew and even though they had literally one date semi-against her will, and one bout of intense fucking, she felt like she’d just ended things with a longtime true love.
Staring into her freezer, Alice was about to grab a spoon and eat an entire pint of Cherry Garcia right in front of the open door when she looked outside. It was what she called the “Blue Hour.” Even in the freezing cold, she could not resist.
It was her favorite time of day, but being so busy with the shop, she rarely got the chance to see it.
She cast a small warming spell over her winter coat and headed outside. Trudging through the snow in her boots, she was beckoned to Colony Hill. Here was the place where her Colonial-time ancestors had been executed by being burnt at the stake. Sure, it was depressing, but it had the best view anywhere in the county. It was dark, but she could just make out the lines of the twisting country roads, the nearest neighbor’s fence lines. She could hear a dog barking. She looked up in the sky, and she saw the shape of Orion, which would be bright and easily spotted in less than an hour.
Alice turned her face to the moon. She took a deep breath, drinking in the cold night air and letting the moonlight glow on her face, filling her energies. Next, she disrobed completely. Yes, it was freezing, but she needed this. To reconnect with the moon was essential to the life of any witch worth her weight in sage. But like normal people, witches were busy. And all the sex, fighting and frustration had sapped her.
After she had her fill of the moon’s energy, the woods beckoned. Alice felt warmed, exhilarated and refreshed. Who needs to wallow and eat ice cream when you have the woods at your beck and call? Who even needs clothes at the Blue Hour? The sky was her blanket as she literally floated over the snow. Her only clothing was the sheath attached to her thigh that held her wand. The bare tree branches of her beloved maple stand reached skyward like old crones’ hands, as if summing the starlight and moonlight that lit her snowy path. She felt she was about a tenth of a mile deep into the woods when she heard footfalls nearby. It sounded to her like it could be her friend. She turned and indeed, a familiar stag ambled out of a thick stand of young evergreens, having filled his belly with any hardy shoots that might still be found this late in winter.
The stag bowed his head and approached Alice for a pet. She laughed and scratched behind his ears, amused at the mighty, skittish beast behaving like a puppy in her presence. This was the best thing about being a witch, in Alice’s mind. All creatures sensed a witch’s connection to the earth and the elements as if they were one of them. A witch has the gift of true understanding; she is not just human, but also a mushroom, a rabbit, a tree, a cloud, all particles of the same infinite universe. Each was tiny, but together they were all one majestic ball of unstoppable love.
She was suddenly having a thought. It wasn’t yet formed but there was something giving her a kernel of hope in this train of thought.
But before this idea was fully formed, the stag was startled by something and suddenly took off for the deeper woods. It might have been a bear, or something as silly as a little nosy wren. Alice watched the stag go until she could not see it but only hear its hooves on the forest floor. It was getting dark, it was probably time to go fetch her clothes and go home.
Just as she thought she might be hearing another deer approach, something very powerful had her around the waist and was pulling her through the air, away from the maple stand so fast it was a blur. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She saw branches whizzing by her head, and she realized she was being carried by a creature as fast as a speeding car, deeper and deeper into the woods. She pulled and pushed and struggled against this creature that had captured her. She hit it with her fists, but the creature was stronger.
She reached down for her wand, but the creature caught her and bound her hands. By the time she had gathered her thoughts, she found herself backed up against a mighty oak tree miles deeper in the woods, with a beast pressed against her, breathing hard into her face, growling like an animal. Without warning, the creature had his teeth at her neck. The fangs were at her neck and just beginning to pierce her skin.
She cried out, “Drew, stop!”
“Tell me you don’t want this.” Drew’s voice was rough and ragged. Alice could feel the sharp teeth at her neck, but not quite ready to drain her dry. Drew was carrying out her sex fantasy, even after she had told him she had changed her mind.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t want you to die,” she said.
He gripped her shoulders and pressed her harder against the tree. He withdrew his teeth and instead inhaled her scent.
“What do you care if I die when I’m already dead? You can feel me in your blood, I know you can. You liked feeding me. Admit it.”
Tears streamed down her face. “Is that what you want? You want me to take away your immortality so you can just leave, and leave me stranded. Alone in this world without you?”
He gripped her hair. He traced his fangs up and along the line of her jaw. “You wanted me to come to you like this. To shock you and grab you by surprise.”
“I changed my mind.”
“But your mind forgot to tell your sex. It is open and wet for me already. It’s a fact. I can smell you readying for me from miles away. I wouldn’t have come, I would have obeyed your wishes if your body didn’t command me.”
And then he was pressing himself against her, their pelvises locked in a tortuous ache. He felt her body tighten and yet her hips rock into him.
“Just give in to it,” he urged.”
Alice
Alice wanted to reach up and push him away, to put distance between them so she could clearly express and clarify and reason and give her dissertation on witchcraft to him. A fiery sermon in the style of that old Colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards—only, you know, more occult-friendly and less fire-and-brimstone. A PowerPoint presentation here in the evening woods. But with Drew’s lips and fangs teasing her naked flesh, turning her nipples to hard beads in their desire to be tasted, and her judgment was becoming increasingly clouded. Damn him.
All she could manage to say was a simple clarification. “Our first calling is not to do harm to other creatures or to the earth. That supersedes everything else.”
She reached down to her thigh holster, but to her shock she found her wand was gone.
“What…?”
He stopped teasing her neck and reached into the waistband of his pants and held up a gleaming wand of silver. “Looking for this?”
“You don’t know what you’re doing with that. Give it back.” She tried to keep her calm. But her desire was quickly turning to rage watching a low creature of the night, a bloodsucker, a taker of life, with his hands on her holy relic. “You have no idea what you’re holding right now. “
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��Oh, but I do,” he said. “You say you don’t want to do any harm, then why do you all carry these weapons with you?”
“Give it back, vampire.”
He laughed. “What hypocrisy. You alter the world around you all the time with these things! You can kill people with a flick of the wrist, faster than I can by sucking your blood. Who are you to talk to me about live and let live?”
She was not going to be baited into an argument with a soulless creature who was proving himself to be just that. “I thought you were different,” she said. “Just give it back and go away. You are holding eons of magic in your hand, more power and responsibility than you know what to do with. You might be 700 years old, but that thing has about two thousand years on you. If you use it against me, it will obliterate you in the blink of an eye. Don’t fuck with me, and don’t fuck with magic.”
Drew got into her face again and reached the wand downward and did something only a base vampire would think to do. He smiled and splayed open her wet labia and found her clit. The wand was ice cold and his breath on her face and neck was equally cold. As she was overheated with lust and rage simultaneously, the sensation was a magnificent torture. Was she really going to let him do this?
“How did you even get up here? I changed the gate code. Oh god…” The stimulation with her own wand at the hands of her lover-slash-enemy was sending dangerous, dark sparks through her body, from her toes to her core, up her spine. She closed her eyes and tried to summon the will to fight back.
“Baby,” he said, “Once you invite a vampire in, there’s no lock or charm that can keep me out. “
Then, unexpectedly, even to herself, she laughed. “Does it make you feel strong, knowing you can pass through any of my barriers? Does it boost your ego, holding my ancient relic between my legs, using it to coerce me to fuck you? Is this the beast or is this the noble human man supposedly being restored by my super-amazing magical cunt?”
