by L. C. Davis
“Careful,” I said, smiling against his lips. I could feel the energy surging between us, crackling like electricity. I didn’t feel all that different than I had before losing my virginity, even though I’d been raised to believe it was akin to plummeting off a cliff that left you a shell of the person you were supposed to be. When I was close to Locke, I did feel different, but not in a bad way. Maybe I had passed the point of no return, but I didn’t feel like I’d lost myself. In fact, in a weird way, I felt more like myself than I ever had, even if I had no idea what that meant.
I still didn’t remember the life we’d shared together for so long, but when I touched him, some part of me that was deeper than my conscious mind and the supernatural firewall that had been placed to protect those memories recognized the familiarity of it. The feeling of him in my arms, the way he responded to my touch even though nothing else ever seemed to phase him. It was new and flattering and confusing all at once, but for all that Locke was and wasn’t, he was my past and future and present all rolled up into one.
That should have terrified me, but it didn’t.
“Not like it would be the first time I fell for you,” he said in a dry tone, pushing me up against the banister, his eyes sweeping over me in that cocky way they always did. Judging, appraising, assessing. “I take it you’re not mad at me anymore.”
“I’m still pissed about what you did,” I admitted, running a silken strand of his hair through my thumb and forefinger. “But you do have a certain charm that’s hard to resist.”
His smile turned devilish as he pressed against me. “Does that mean my sins are forgiven?”
I laughed and the sound came out huskier than I wanted it to. Fucking incubi. “Locke, I may be an angel, but I think God himself would get worn out trying to absolve your sin.”
“Dirty talk bordering on blasphemy,” he purred, following me toward his room. “My favorite.”
One moment, Locke had me pinned against the door, the next, his bed. I dug my hands into his hair and lust overtook me so much faster than it had the first time. I still wasn’t sure if it was just a side effect of fucking an incubus or the aftereffects of my own supernatural awakening, but as I lost myself in his body, I lost the ability to care.
After all, there had to be some perks to the job.
Twenty-Nine
DANIEL
There was no sign of Asher outside the house or in the immediate vicinity of the woods. I thought briefly of going to his house, but I had promised to stay with Holden whether he wanted me there or not. My mind was still reeling from everything Locke had revealed. Finding out that Asher was working for the demon was shocking but not surprising. It was the rest I was having trouble with.
The moment I gave up running, my racing thoughts caught up to me. Dennis was gone. I knew he was gone. I’d known longer than anyone else, except maybe for Lilian and Colton. Death was supposed to be the end of it, but ever since I’d realized it wasn’t, there had been some small part of me that took consolation in the fact that his existence continued on in some plane I didn’t even want to believe in.
“Daniel?”
My pulse quickened at the sound of that voice the way it always did, but I couldn’t bring myself to face him. My best friend, my Achilles’ heel, my husband of only a few hours. Grief had a stranglehold on me, gripping my chest and making it hard to breathe.
Nick, Dennis, Asher. How was it possible for one heart to be pulled in so many different directions without a force pulling back on the other side from any of them? I could barely hear his footsteps through the ringing in my ears.
“There you are,” Nick said, planting his hands on my shoulders. He looked me over, his face set into a scowl that made him look stern, like Lucas. “Where have you been? Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”
I finally met his eyes, but while I was trying to process the questions he was asking so I could formulate an answer, they were all just words. I couldn’t extract any meaning from them. His face fell and concern erased the irritation that had been there a moment earlier. “Daniel,” he breathed, wrapping his arms around my waist, stepping closer. “I --” He froze and looked down, pulling the gun from the holster at my side.
“What the fuck is this?” he demanded, his voice strained with anger. At least, I thought it was anger, at first. Then I saw the look in his eyes and realized it was horror. “Why were you out here with this? Were you going to --?”
“No,” I said quickly, coming back to myself enough to put the pieces together. “No, of course not.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to think?” he cried. “You go dark after all the shit that just went down and I find you wandering around the woods with a loaded gun? And you look wasted. Have you been drinking?”
“No,” I growled. “I haven’t been drinking.”
“That’s funny, because there’s beer on your breath.”
“I had one drink with Holden! I didn’t even finish the fucking bottle.”
He checked the safety and slipped the gun into his waistband. “Then talk to me, Daniel. I try not to be the person who jump to conclusions, but you’ve been on the other side of this. You have to know how it looks.”
“I don’t care how it looks, I’m not gonna off myself just because your destined mate is back from space,” I snapped.
“Then why do you have a gun?”
“Because I own a fucking gun, Nick. We’ve been to the range enough times for you to know that. I had it on me because there was someone sneaking around the Victorian and I wanted to check it out.”
“So you’re a cop now?” He folded his arms. “Time traveling, vigilantism, is there anything else you’d like to make me aware of? Maybe a pack of little Daniels running around out there I should know about?”
I winced. No, just the fact that your uncle is your dad. “No.”
He watched me, his mouth doing that stretched line thing it always did when he was beyond pissed. “When I found you, you looked like you’d seen a ghost. Why?”
I thought of coming up with a lie, but it scared me how easily they came to mind. It scared me to know how easy it would be to keep lying, and to let the distance between us keep getting bigger and bigger until I couldn’t even see him anymore. There was comfort in lying, in knowing that if it all went to hell the way it had to, it would be because of something I did rather than simply because of who I was.
Lying was so fucking easy. Lying solved everything, and it was so easy to justify the little lies when you’d already justified the biggest one there was. “Dennis is gone,” I said without really meaning to. Maybe the truth was easy to tell, too. It just wasn’t easy to live with.
Nick stared at me and his anger faded to worry again. “Daniel, he’s been gone,” he said carefully.
“No. Holden saw him, in Hell,” I murmured. “Michael killed him, I guess. I didn’t...I don’t really want to know the rest.”
His eyes turned a darker shade of gold, filled with sympathy. I knew it wasn’t for Dennis. If there was anyone who’d hated him as much as my mother had, it was Nick even if I’d never been entirely sure why. “Daniel, I’m so sorry.”
“I knew he was dead,” I said with a shrug. “It’s not like I was ever going to see him again. It’s not like I wanted to see him again.”
Nick watched me, silent. I knew it wasn’t a challenge, but somehow, the longer he said nothing, the more I felt like I had to say and the words just sort of tumbled out. “He was a monster. The world’s better off without him. I’m better off without him. I fucking hated him, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”
My eyes burned and I turned away to wipe them, taking a sudden interest in the bark on the tree in front of me. I froze as strong arms circled around my waist from behind and Nick pressed his cheek against the back of my shoulder, nuzzling. It was a simple gesture of affection he’d done plenty of times both prior to and after marking me, but it unhinged something. I mana
ged to keep quiet, but my shoulders shuddered as the grief washed over me and not for the first time. Never had a monster been grieved as thoroughly as I had grieved Dennis Mills. I would have thought I was out of tears for him, but it seemed some things were infinite. The best, and the very worst.
Nick held me and didn’t say a word. He turned me to face him and buried his hands in my hair, kissing my forehead, my cheek, my lips. He held my face in his hands and pressed his forehead to mine as he said, “I love you.”
“You shouldn’t,” I laughed, humiliated not because I was crying--Nick had seen me through far more intimate moments--but because of who I was crying for. “Even Dennis’ own mother knew better than to grieve him, and I fucking loved him. I’m that fucked in the head.”
“You’re mine,” he said without hesitation, looking into my eyes. I got lost in those golden depths, which wasn’t unusual on its own, but there was something different about this time. They always pulled me in, but this time, it felt like something was pushing back.
“But Holden --”
“I belong to Holden and Locke because Herschel Whitaker made a deal with the devil,” he muttered. “You belong to me because…” He hesitated, shaking his head. “Because you’re you, and I don’t want to live in a world where you don’t. You’re my Daniel, my mate, my best friend, and I don’t care if part of your heart always belongs to someone else. I’d be a hypocrite if I did, all things considered.”
“I don’t care about the ritual.” Before he could voice the doubt in his eyes, I added, “Okay, so I care a little, but it’s not the sex itself that bothers me.”
“It’s not…?”
“No. Honestly, I wouldn’t even care if you still wanted to be with him. I’d prefer that to knowing there’s a chance that you might shut me out entirely like you did before,” I admitted.
Nick listened patiently and he didn’t respond right away. Finally, he said, “I can’t erase the part of me that belongs to someone else, and I can’t change whatever I did or didn’t do in the timeline you’re from, but I can promise that I’m never going to let anything or anyone come between us again. I know that doesn’t mean much. I haven’t given you reason to believe me, so I won’t ask you to, but this means something to me,” he said, brushing his fingers over my wedding band. “All I’m asking is that you take it for what it is: a promise that I’ll do better. Will you give me the chance to prove that, Daniel?”
He could have asked me anything in that husky tone and I would have said yes. I nodded because my throat was dry all of a sudden.
“Let’s go,” he purred in my ear, nuzzling my neck. “I know we’re not supposed to leave until tomorrow, but I think we could both use a change of scenery tonight.”
“I can’t,” I said, glancing back toward the Victorian.
Nick frowned. “What’s going on?”
“I promised Holden I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Seriously?”
“You’re not the only one who can keep secrets,” I teased. “If you want to know, you can ask him yourself.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’ll have the pack patrol the area. Whatever it is you’re freaked out about, there’s nothing you can do against it that half a dozen werewolves can’t.”
I hated to admit it, but he was right. “I guess. I’ll text him and see if he’s okay with it. Are you sure you’re okay with leaving?”
“I’m still going to protect Holden, but he’s chosen Locke as his de facto guardian,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve got a mate to think about, and I’m not going to miss my own fucking honeymoon, so send whatever text you need to send, get your shit packed and be ready to go in thirty minutes.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “So now that we’re married, you get to tell me what to do, is that it?”
“I always tell you what to do,” he said with a grin. “For once, maybe you’ll actually listen.”
“You still haven’t even told me where we’re going,” I reminded him, following him back toward the town square.
“Thirty minutes, Daniel,” he called.
I sighed and doubled back to the Victorian to grab my bag and tell Holden I was leaving in person since he had yet to respond to my text message. When there was no one downstairs, I headed to the second floor only to pause halfway when I heard the familiar sound of Locke’s pleasured moaning.
Okay, so apparently Holden wasn’t too concerned. I took my bag back to my apartment and finished packing for a vacation I didn’t know the first thing about. When in doubt, layers,
By the time I made it to Nick’s place, he was already waiting at the curb in his car. “Ready?”
“Not until you tell me where we’re going.”
“I know you said nowhere that requires air travel,” he grumbled.
“Hey, if you’d hopped between dimensions, you’d want to stay on the ground, too.”
“You always said you wanted to take a road trip,” he said, smirking. “I figured now’s as good a time as any.”
“Seriously?” The great American road trip had always been my dream, but it had been years since I’d given up hope on the circumstances ever aligning themselves. After all, Nick was the only person I actually wanted to be trapped in a tin can with for days on end. “I can’t believe you remembered that.”
“It’s kind of hard not to. You get these big dreamy puppy eyes whenever you talk about it. Well, eye…”
I flipped him off halfheartedly and tossed my bag into the backseat. He slipped into the driver’s seat and I pulled my door shut. I’d been slightly wary of long trips ever since my fatal accident, but the prospect of spending time with the man I loved made it seem like a risk that was well worth taking. “Any chance you’re gonna let me drive?”
He grimaced and seemed to be considering it carefully. “To have and to hold is one thing, to have and to let you drive the old girl is another. But maybe I’ll make an exception, just this once,” he teased.
I snorted, changing the dial on the radio station as we pulled out past the town limit. The night air was cool and crisp as it sifted through my fingers, and the further away we got from Stillwater, the more the reality of everything set in. “We’re married,” I said suddenly.
Nick looked over at me, tilting his head. “You just figure that out, big guy?”
I rolled my eyes. “I knew before, but, I mean...holy shit, we’re married.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, we are.”
I leaned back in my seat and contented myself with enjoying the view. The one outside the window wasn’t all that bad, either. I was absently humming along to a song on the radio when the car came to a screeching halt on the side of the backroad we were traveling. I looked around in a panic for any sign of a new supernatural menace we’d have to face. Nick was just staring straight ahead with a blank look on his face.
“What is it?” I demanded. “Did you hear something?”
He turned to me and blinked. “We’re fucking married, Daniel.”
I groaned. “Are you serious?”
He unbuckled and climbed over the gearshift to straddle my lap, resting a hand on either side of my face. “Daniel St. James,” he murmured, his gaze softening as he looked me over like he was seeing me for the first time and was trying to imprint every feature to memory. I knew because that was usually my schtick. “I married Daniel fucking St. James.”
“You know, my middle name is actually Christopher,” I teased.
Nick kissed me and there was an urgency to it like I’d never felt before. It was the same zealotry with which he’d marked me and every bit as violent in its own way. I ran a hand down his back and my head spun as he pulled the lever that let the seat back and landed on top of me.
“Nick, we’re on the side of the road,” I said, as if he’d somehow forgotten. He was kissing me so desperately I could barely get the words out.
“Middle of the night, no one’s around,” he said impatiently, nipping at the spot he’d marked so recently. When his teeth
grazed the flesh that was still sensitive despite the fact that it had already healed, I lost what little will I had to exercise my common sense. A night in a jail cell didn’t sound all that bad, if I got to spend it next to him. As we made love on the side of a deserted road with only the crescent moon to judge us, I decided that I didn’t care if we ever made it past the state line.
~
The Seven return in Queer Magick: Vol. 3 in August, 2017.
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About the Author
L.C. Davis is an author of LGBT+ fiction with a passion for representation. His series include Queer Magick, Pendulum, and The Mountain Shifters. He is always happy to connect with readers on Goodreads. Sign up for the L.C. Davis MM Romance Mailing list to get updates on new releases!
Website: LCDavisBooks.com
Twitter: @LCDavisBooks
Email: [email protected]
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