Her teeth were firmly set together, keeping in her cry of pain as her head spun.
And spun… and spun…
“Ash…” she said, fathoming something was wrong. Something didn’t feel right at all; the world itself was beginning to warp around her like melting glass.
Ashcroft didn’t seem fazed at all. His eyes were completely dilated; his expression somewhere between shocked, terrified, and extremely distant. He was buried deep within her, yet it seemed like he was even more drugged than she was. “Ash…” she moaned again, and Ashcroft came back.
She held onto his shoulders; for some reason strange thoughts were beginning to slide across even her vision as if she was falling asleep. His hardness pounded into her, harder and harder…
“Ashcroft… Ash…” she was moaning. She wondered if she was going to pass out. His fullness in her was divine in a way, but she felt like she was steering herself off of an edge, out of control.
Ashcroft’s jaw was clenched hard, and he grunted as he exerted himself into her entrance, seeming to squint from the tightness, the constriction of his movements.
“I don’t know how to get across how important you are…” she could hear Ashcroft say, his voice swimming around as if in a dream. The dream continued; the next was her own voice, only with a different accent, the one she used in her earlier dream involving writing the lines.
“I don’t want to be your stupid apprentice! I don’t care about anything you do. I don’t want to learn what you have to teach me!”
Another voice swirled, and as it did, she couldn’t tell if she was awake or asleep. This one sounded like Moriarty’s, of all people.
“I could name a dozen wizards who would love getting their hands on all this knowledge. You have no idea how fortunate you are! Ashcroft is one of the most powerful wizards in existence because of this knowledge. He rarely comes across a creature that doesn’t fear him!”
“Charlotte!” whispered a voice in her ear.
“Charlotte!” screamed a voice in her memory.
And then she was falling… falling through rain, through the cold, over the roar of the waves… until she was wrapped in coldness…
Her body clenched, whipping her back into the present where she screamed with pleasure and pain all at once as her legs twined around Ashcroft’s back and pulled him closer to her. She was convulsing madly, her thoughts again scattering like rain on a windowpane.
“Charlotte…” Ashcroft groaned, and she felt his warm essence pour deep into her, filling her.
Her mind was again folding back into dreaminess. “Chaaarlooootte…” She saw herself in her mind’s eye, looking out of a window and seeing a dark figure amongst the trees. A figure that held a rolled piece of parchment in his hands, had blond hair and silver eyes.
She’d seen those silver eyes before.
“Lachlan!” she screamed, trying to scramble back. “Lachlan!”
She somewhat could conceive that Ashcroft was now trying to hold her flailing arms down, but she was in a nightmare, a nightmare she had to escape…
But then the memories began to pass as if on a freight train; frightening, noisy, overwhelming… and she couldn’t make them lift. She had fallen off of the edge…
* * *
Ashcroft couldn’t for the life of him remember a time where he had been so terrified. “Charlotte!” he gasped, and then he immediately corrected himself. “Maili. Maili!”
The girl’s eyes were just staring at the ceiling, looking glassy and nearly lifeless. She had been flailing violently not a few seconds ago, but now she was completely catatonic.
He didn’t know what had come over him! The last he remembered, he was pressing himself deep into her, and then he lost even further control of himself. She was so tight, so hot, and then his brain was completely swept up, his body was surging like power he had never felt before. He felt like he had just downloaded every piece of information he had ever come across. It seemed like he was learning everything anew, just far, far more quickly than he had the first time, with the same feeling of power and knowledge and strength that he got from reading. He had never felt anything like it before. He couldn’t stop; the more he thrust into her, the more intense the feeling had become until knowledge and memories exploded through his brain like a grenade as Maili’s orgasm rocked her body and her cunny squeezed hungrily down on his cock, pulling his seed from him.
He was feeling like his brain had been run over by a herd of wild horses when Maili suddenly screamed his long-dead brother’s name and started to flail like she had lost her mind.
Now this—now nothing.
He squeezed her face between his large hands, looking down at her. “Maili, sweetheart. Come back. Come back to me…”
Nothing. Her eyes were as still and as empty as his own grave. He pressed his hands to her temples and tried to concentrate, using a spell he had known to connect with people whose minds had shut down, or been in shock.
But there was still nothing! He couldn’t reach her; she had a weak pulse and yet no response.
“Damn it, Maili! Don’t do this to me!” he yelled, feeling like he had fallen into his own personal hell. He grabbed his own hair, close to pulling it out of the roots, if that would help wake him up from this horrible nightmare of a situation.
He remembered when Charlotte was dying because she had tried to skip out on Lachlan’s contract. He felt exactly the same way, except that had come more gradually before she had completely lost the ability to communicate.
This time, he was inside of this girl when this happened. It was unexpected and a thousand times worse. He had no idea where to go or what to do; he had no clue what was wrong with her.
He ran to the door and did the first thing that had shot to his mind. “Moriarty! Alice!” he roared desperately. He had never felt so stupid, so helpless, and yet the knowledge of the ages was still a wet memory.
Immediately he ran back to Maili who, upon return, looked worse than ever. Not because she was any more or less lucid, but because he realized that he had her naked, clothes torn, and—was that blood on the sheets?
Dear God in heaven, he was a monster! And he used to think his brother was bad, but had he…
Wait, cancel that, his brother was most certainly worse, but that was no standard to judge himself by. He still deserved to have his spleen ripped out of his body, which was no doubt going to be what Hoel would do when he was informed of what happened.
Just as Ashcroft was trying to cover her up, Moriarty ran into the room. “Dear Christ, man! What’s wrong—?” Moriarty caught an eyeful of his surroundings, the nakedness and blood, and jumped back. “What did you do to her?” he demanded, aghast.
“I don’t know what I can do!” Ashcroft boomed back, and covered her body with the sheet.
“Well, damn it all, why do you think I know what to do? You’re the one with all the brains and wizardry nonsense!” Moriarty yelled back at him, the tension in the air explosive. He whipped his gaze back toward her and marched to the bed. “Is she dead?” He grabbed her wrist and, after a quiet moment, he squinted at her in confusion. He pressed his ear to her chest and apparently realized she was breathing, so when he sat up and looked at her face and began to snap his fingers in front of her blank eyes, he said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know! I only did what you told me!” Ashcroft cried, happy for someone to blame, if just a little bit. He took a deep breath and then began to hammer out what happened, action by action, move by move, trying to relive it, trying to figure out what could have happened.
Moriarty was ruining his freshly combed hair with his fingers as he nervously brushed it away from his forehead. “Calm down, Ashcroft. Think.”
“I have to tell Hoel! I have to get his help, I need him as fast as possible!”
“If you call Hoel when she’s like this, he’s going to have your head on a pike! You can’t tell him what you were doing to bring this on, and how can he fix her if he do
esn’t know?” Moriarty exclaimed.
“I know, I know! He’s going to kill me!” Ashcroft agreed, beginning to pace.
“Calm down,” Moriarty said, taking a loud and very deep breath. “Now, let’s think about this. She’s not dying—I don’t think so, anyway. We can think this through!”
“I’ve never seen anything like this! What I felt was so strange I didn’t even pay attention to what I was doing, and then she was screaming and then this!”
“What the hell is going on?” Alice said, marching through the doorway. She gasped when she saw what she certainly thought was a body.
At once, Moriarty and Ashcroft both began to explain, at the same time only with different words, what had occurred. Alice surely couldn’t understand any of it, so she threw up her arms with exasperation and marched over to take a look for herself.
Ashcroft didn’t know why he had called her—perhaps because she was a woman and that was enough different from himself, but he knew she couldn’t do anything. She was his student, after all. It wasn’t as if she could know more than him.
Alice sat on the edge of the bed and rolled her hand over her forehead and then put a hand on the black-haired witch’s fair, rosy cheek. “I’ve seen this before,” Alice informed, and Ashcroft was nearly floored.
“What… what did—Where?” Ashcroft found himself stuttering.
“In the hive,” she said quietly, referring to her old home. Her hands reached up and pulled Maili’s eyes closed so that she merely looked like she was peacefully sleeping. “We used to call it mind-blindness—it used to happen when a young nymph consumed too much of the queen’s nectar wine. They’d fall deep inside themselves, their minds so overwhelmed that they just… shut down the world around them to keep any more stimuli out. To help them process what they needed to.” She looked up. “They always found their way back out… sometimes in a day.”
Moriarty found the nuance in her tone before Ashcroft did. “And sometimes longer?” Moriarty asked.
Alice shook her head and said sadly, “Sometimes a few years.”
Moriarty put his hand over his eyes. “Damn it all. What could have caused that? I bedded hundreds of virgins in my day, and this never happened before!” Moriarty huffed with frustration, gesturing at Maili.
“Moriarty,” Alice began to chide firmly.
“Including you,” he continued without apology, “and nobody lost all their marbles! And I certainly never had what Ashcroft says he had with her. It doesn’t sound like love—I know what you’re about to say, Alice—it sounds like witchery.”
“She knows barely any witchery, Moriarty. She’d been wearing a magic-impairing charm for years before a few days ago,” Ashcroft argued.
“Perhaps this is an enchanted chastity belt for all those who dare to take the virginity of the great Hoel’s daughter!” Moriarty guessed, eyeing the ceiling with annoyance. “Either way, I don’t like that we’re all likely to get killed for this. We have to set her to rights before Hoel figures out where she is, and he will.”
Ashcroft pressed his lips together before declaring with determination, “Moriarty, I would never let him think you’re involved.”
“Doesn’t matter!” Moriarty assured, as if he was merely caught in the middle of a very bad joke. “When a girl has had a bad sexual row, a Huxian can’t even be in the same country or else they’ll blame him. There’s a reason why my species is endangered! Which is ridiculous, of course, because women love us bedding them…” he muttered as an aside.
Ashcroft ran his finger up and down the scars on his face as he looked at Maili, completely flummoxed. “I don’t like this feeling,” he told Moriarty, knowing that he had to come up with a plan, and soon.
“What feeling?” Moriarty asked, probably figuring that Ashcroft could be talking about any number of things.
With the deepest humiliation Ashcroft had ever felt, he said, “Helplessness.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Charlotte woke up to cold water running down her arm, and then a wet towel playing at her fingertips. She felt wide awake, almost shaking with restlessness. Yet, for some reason her eyes were so heavy, her body was so unresponsive to her commands. She wanted to see who was with her, but then she realized it was obvious.
It was Alice. She could feel her soft hands and smell her scent of honey and sugar.
She had a sister—a really cool one, too—all this time and she hadn’t remembered her. Alice had easily become her best friend in no time at all, but they’d really only ever spent a long winter together. Charlotte hadn’t been in an easy situation and Alice had made it better; Alice would give her the patience that Ashcroft didn’t have to give her back then.
She had been too young for Ashcroft then. She was an immature brat, really. She hadn’t cared about her responsibilities, and she’d practically thrown her life away by cheating to avoid doing any real work. She had actually kept those features of herself even when she lost her memory until Hoel and Anwen had taken her so firmly in hand.
She wasn’t the spoiled Californian musician any longer. She had power, she had memories of a whole bank of spells and now all she could think about was how grateful she was for the knowledge. Not because she wouldn’t have to learn it, but because she knew what was out there…
Lachlan! Forever, Lachlan was a stain in her otherwise perfect world.
When Damen had flickered his true eyes at her that night at their ball… they were Lachlan’s; and unlike Ashcroft, Lachlan had known exactly who she was, and probably had from the very beginning. He was merely picking her back up after she had managed to fall right through his fingers so many years ago.
She was probably driving Lachlan insane right now. All he really wanted was to rule the world, and that was very difficult to do since he was born an archivist—the ability to know every spell and very little power to be able to pull it all off or to create his own. And there she was, making his life extremely difficult.
First, he surely thought he had her by contract. Then, in order to get her, he raised the stakes and faked his own death… and hers! Even then, he was too clever by half and his plans broke down. Probably if Pierce hadn’t brought her to Hoel that very moment, Lachlan would have collected her, healed her even, and then would have surely kept her as a pet.
Luckily for her, Hoel found her—the one being that Lachlan couldn’t just simply walk by. It seemed to Charlotte that Lachlan had to change his world-dominating plans to incorporate him being mundane enough that Hoel would just pass her over to him without realizing what he really was, but not so simple of a man that Hoel wouldn’t be interested in the connection with him. She imagined that Lachlan woke up every day for twenty years, looked in the mirror at his non-wizard visage and cursed Charlotte for making him stoop so low. Magi were normally very arrogant, so pretending to be anything else must have been quite a bitter pill to swallow.
Charlotte could remember Lachlan, guised as Damen, telling her that she had ‘broken’ Ashcroft, and he had been right. One glance at Ashcroft in the forest, wandering around and dirty, made her sure that he had lost his mind in the time they had been apart.
She lay for a while, contemplating how she’d tell Ashcroft she was actually Charlotte all along, just not knowing it, but then realized there was no good way of doing it. He’d probably go completely bonkers or would die of shock.
There was little choice in it. She couldn’t pretend that she was never Charlotte—she didn’t want to play that game. Now that she remembered who she was, she didn’t want to let that piece of her past die. Besides, she told herself, Ashcroft did need to know what happened if only to realize that Lachlan was still out there.
Opening her eyes felt as difficult as lifting a whale—a whale who had just overeaten. She was done putting the puzzle together. Her memories were back, her two lives stitched together as best as she could manage. Now the only thing to do was wake… and it was so hard.
“Poor thing,” she heard Alice breathe ov
er her. She was apparently being given a sponge bath. “You’ve probably had the roughest first time in the history of the world.”
Charlotte wanted to snort with derision. Surely, this was the first time ever that anyone had lost their virginity twice, and to the same man! It shouldn’t have been the case. Damn Hoel—he should have left her lack of virginity alone. Hoel simply couldn’t seem to get past the fact that Maili, his innocent little ward who had brought him hot cocoa on winter days, was touched. He felt like healing her maidenhead would magically return her virtue.
She supposed she was lucky that he saw her as more of a child than a pet. Hoel would have probably had her spayed. But the truth was, she was neither. She was a woman, and she should have been acting like it instead of like an abiding little schoolgirl—apparently, sex had been the key to unlocking all of her memories, all of her knowledge. Lachlan had probably meant to fuck her right after he faked her death and had her nice and trapped; he just never got the chance… but she would have had a hell of a lot less trouble the last two decades if she had only had sex with the nearest cute stable boy or traveling salesman who came to the door.
“My first time was quite wonderful,” Alice chatted to her now. Apparently, Alice was thinking that Charlotte needed company.
Alice was right.
“Well, actually, no. No, it wasn’t,” Alice admitted. “But the aftermath was quite good. Moriarty took it by accident, not knowing that it was my first time. You should have seen the look on his face when he’d realized what he’d done… But then he was so deliciously angry with me and so wonderful about grudgingly making everything up to me, that he was quite easy to fall in love with. Apparently I like a man who broods.
“Hopefully, you can love a man who’s half insane, because that’s where Ashcroft’s mind is right now. He doesn’t know what to do with himself… which is quite unsettling, since he is quite the savant most times… at least he used to be when I first met him. Poor Ashcroft has been through a great deal. He’s the settling-down type at heart—I think he wants children and a family. He should have been born an Englishman, maybe a university professor or something, but instead he was born a wizard. I guess I should be grateful about that; without him, there’d be no Moriarty. Moriarty would be long dead by now…
Her Master's Hand Page 24
