by Tasha Black
Grace held her breath, waiting for stretching pain that never came. Instead she felt her body clamp down on him.
He clenched his jaw and eased himself slowly out of her and then back in.
It was too much.
Grace sunk her nails into his back and angled her hips up to him.
He groaned in surrender and began to drive in and out of her.
As ecstasy approached, Grace bounced herself up, bucking her hips to help him.
Landon breathed through pursed lips, beads of sweat formed at his brow. It was obvious he was making a desperate effort not to climax.
“Again,” he urged her, looking straight into her eyes.
She screeched like a cat and came, hard.
He gasped and pulled out of her to explode in his own hand all over her stomach.
“Wow,” he breathed.
Grace finally felt the self-consciousness she had been dreading and smiled with downcast eyes.
“Oh, geez, I’m sorry!” Landon said, looking down to her belly, which shimmered with the evidence of their passionate encounter. He probably thought she had been looking down at the puddle on her navel.
“No, no, I’m a little shy. I’m not mad about that.”
“You’re shy?” he asked.
Uncertainty played on his features. Even his curls looked inquisitive.
Grace laughed.
“Hey, do you have a towel somewhere, Grace?”
“Yes, grab one from the kitchen,” she inclined her head to indicate which way the kitchen was.
He stood and gave her a view of his lanky form as he padded into the kitchen with one sock on.
The sex had been incredible. He was handsome and sweet.
But when he stood and left her, she didn’t feel empty or cold, or whatever you were supposed to feel when you longed for your lover’s embrace.
What had she done? This stupid magic.
Landon returned with a towel. He had wet it with warm water. He stroked her belly with it gently.
To her horror, Grace felt her libido rev up even more than before. Her hips moved of their own accord and her nipples crinkled into stiff pebbles.
“Mmm,” Landon murmured, placing the towel on the floor and returning his attention to Grace’s bosom.
He ran his hands up her ribcage to press her breasts together. It would take more than that to create cleavage, but it ached pleasantly and Grace didn’t fault him for trying.
Landon lowered his face and licked one nipple into his mouth.
Grace was pierced with a pleasure so sharp she almost lifted off the sofa.
Encouraged, he sucked the other nipple.
She cried out helplessly.
It was too much for Landon, he fell on her again, kissing, licking, sucking and tugging on her nipples with his teeth.
The pleasure blasted through Grace. She ripped his head off her breasts and sat up. Then she wrapped one leg around his waist, straddling him where he knelt.
He pulled her on top of him and she felt him squeeze into her again. His breathing was harsh already.
The pleasure radiated out of her body and made the air seem to pulse. She rode him frantically, rocking so hard that the lamp on the side table crashed to the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces.
They ignored it and continued to ravage each other.
After all, magic always had a price.
CHAPTER 12
A insley followed a few steps behind Grace, taking in the sights of the forest as the rising sun struggled to banish the chill of the night.
Heavy mist illuminated the shafts of sunlight filtering through the trees, making the college woods look like a scene from the cover of a Bible study pamphlet. A cloud of fog lifted a foot off the path leading to the amphitheater.
Ainsley usually felt her best in the early morning, but today she was off to a rough start. She tried to take comfort in the soothing presence of her best friend.
But Grace’s heart was beating a little faster than normal. And she smelled like that guy she had been dating.
And Erik’s wolf was gone.
It was hard to stay tuned in.
“So…will he be okay?” Grace was asking.
No. No he will never be okay again, I can feel it.
“Yes, he’ll be okay. But he can’t shift.”
“Is it like what you did to Clive? And what Julian did to you?”
“No, this is different. That spell just… held the wolf in check for a few minutes. I could still feel her banging at the bars. Erik says he can’t feel his at all. It’s just gone.”
The hollow feeling that had followed Ainsley since Erik’s first scream of agony threatened to encompass her. She took a deep breath of cool, wet air and tried to push it aside. If not for herself, then for her mate, and for her pack.
Optimism was a necessity now, not a luxury. She was going to have to keep things light.
“What does Julian say?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know. His tongue was pretty busy last time I saw him…” Ainsley teased, trying to bring back some sense of normalcy.
Grace’s lips tightened.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
Ainsley was mostly just messing with Grace. She knew the magic revved Grace’s engine.
But… with Julian?
It had been beyond weird to see Grace going to town with him.
In part, it was because they seemed to dislike each other so much. (Which in itself was an oddity, since Grace was so likable and accepting.)
It was also because she had never seen her friend display affection in public. Never. Not even handholding at prom.
And it was probably against some sort of girl code to get with a guy your best friend had been with - though Ainsley was not one to stand on ceremony.
Because the whole thing had happened practically over the body of Ainsley’s injured mate, she knew it was the magic. But was it all really a side effect?
“What’s going on there?” Ainsley asked.
“Nothing.” Grace’s heartbeat said otherwise. “You know what the magic does to me.”
Ainsley didn’t like using her heightened senses to gauge the truthfulness of her friend’s claims. It felt like cheating somehow. But it was hard to tune out.
“Yeah,” Ainsley said. “But I’ve never seen you act like that.”
“I’ve never used that much magic before.”
Fair enough.
The weight of what had happened hit Ainsley again and she took another deep lungful of morning mist.
“Thank you for what you did, Grace. You saved his life.”
Grace smiled and shrugged.
“How did you know what to do?” Ainsley asked earnestly, thinking of her own magical failings.
Grace shook her head.
“I had no idea. I just trusted my instincts, and hoped the magic would guide me.”
“You can just do that?”
“Of course. You have to trust the magic, and trust yourself.”
Ainsley bit her lip and studied the mist hanging on the surface of the creek. She thought of the energy she had sent Julian’s way when she thought she was defending Erik. It didn’t seem very trustworthy.
“That’s not what Julian says.” Ainsley pictured the tree she blasted into oblivion. “He says I need to learn to control it.”
“Ha!” Grace laughed. “You can’t control magic. It’s like a living, breathing thing. You can use it, shape it, and it can flow through you. But you could no more control magic than you could change the course of a river by dipping your toe in it.”
“He says if I master my mind, body and spirit, bring them to harmony, then I can master the magical energy too.”
“What do you think of that?” Grace asked.
Ainsley thought. The familiar earthy smell of the bright leaves turning back to soil grounded her in herself.
“It seems to work for him,” Ainsley replied after some consideration. “But it takes year
s of training and practice and sacrifice. I don’t think I can manage all that and still be alpha of the pack. It sounds like he wants me to lock myself up in a monastery or something.”
“He’s talking out of his ass.”
“Wow.”
“Sorry,” Grace said. “I just think he’s way off base. No one in my family has ever had any formal magic training. How does he explain that?”
Ainsley paused, not wanting to offend her friend, but hoping to be honest with her.
“He says your magic is…different.”
“Different how?”
Ainsley looked back at the creek.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” Grace said insistently. “I want to know what he has to say about my lowly cottage magic.”
Ainsley swallowed. If she really wanted to know…
“He says you can only get so far on raw talent. Like playing an instrument, or anything, really. You can’t get to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice, no matter how much of a knack you have for playing the piano.”
“What do you think, Ainsley?”
Ainsley studied her friend. There was no malice in her eyes, only curiosity.
“When he says it, it seems to make sense,” Ainsley ventured. “I mean, you have to work hard if you want to be good at something, right?”
“Did you have to work hard to be good at softball back in school?”
“Yes.”
“What about being a big shot Realtor?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Do you have to work hard at being smart, or funny or loyal?”
“Uh, no…”
“How about loving Erik?”
“Of course not!”
Grace stopped and placed her hand on Ainsley’s arm.
“That’s because those things are part of who you are,” Grace said. “They come naturally to you, but you can’t fake them. Like you can’t just go through the motions with the magic.”
Ainsley thought of the times she had used magic successfully. To avenge her parents. To protect her mate. She certainly hadn’t been faking it then.
“Is the magic part of who you are?” Grace asked. “Or is it some foreign thing to be mastered?”
“I… I don’t know,” Ainsley replied.
“Well.” Grace clapped her on the arm. “You’d better decide one way or the other.”
They continued to walk.
“Julian wants me to do it his way,” Ainsley said.
“Where would Erik be right now if it weren’t for my way?”
Ainsley’s stomach clenched at the thought of the way Erik’s wound had looked before Grace had intervened.
“True.”
“And besides, since when do you ever not do anything the Ainsley way?”
“That’s also true,” Ainsley admitted. “Thank you, Grace.”
“No,” Grace replied. “Thank you for coming out to help me today. It means a lot that you would do that with Erik…not himself.”
Ainsley gulped. It was time to change the subject.
“How’s Sadie?”
“She’s stable at least.” Grace frowned. “But she’s still comatose.”
“Aren’t wolves supposed to be speedy healers?” Ainsley asked, embarrassed at her own lack of knowledge on the subject.
“I thought so, too,” Grace said. “A better question might be, what’s going to happen to her on the full moon, Ainsley?”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. How had she not even considered that?
“I don’t know,” Ainsley admitted.
“That’s not good.”
It certainly wasn’t. How would they explain a comatose wolf to the decidedly non-lupine staff of the hospital in Springton?
It would have to be a question for later. They had reached the stone monument that marked the entrance to the amphitheater.
Ainsley looked down over the rows of carved stone seating. It was hard not to envision the faculty weddings and graduations that she had witnessed here over the years. As a little girl, she had run squealing up and down the rows after the other staff kids. She had never seen it hauntingly empty and hung with mist.
“Lilliana was down on the stage,” Grace whispered.
Ainsley nodded and they headed down together. It seemed silly to whisper, but the place certainly inspired a mysterious feeling.
When they reached the bottom, Ainsley lifted her nose to the sky. The moist, heavy air played tricks with the scents. It was like trying to smell through a pond. She’d have to shift to have any chance of tracking in this.
Instinctively, Ainsley wished for Erik and his amazing tracking skills.
Then she remembered that Erik couldn’t track anymore. A lump formed in Ainsley’s throat. She swallowed it down and began to search the arena for prints without much luck.
Grace pulled a zip-lock bag out of her jacket.
“This was hers,” she said, handing it to Ainsley.
Ainsley opened it and sniffed the yellow fabric of the belt inside. There was something… but she couldn’t quite catch it.
“Hold it a sec’,” she said.
Ainsley lifted her dress over her head and draped it on her friend’s shoulder.
In a breath, she sank into the form of her shimmering red wolf.
Her human’s world of sight narrowed and faded at the edges. And her sense of smell and hearing accordioned out into another dimension like the pop-up illustrations in a children’s book.
She lifted her snout and sniffed delicately at the belt in Grace’s hands.
Instantly, the scent revealed itself to her. It was sweet and flowery, the flavor of freshly baked bread and honey, as yellow as the coat.
It stretched out to Ainsley and beckoned into the woods. She trotted after it.
But the scent weakened and disappeared almost as soon as she hit her stride. It must have been the way the woman had entered the amphitheater, not the way she had left it.
Ainsley sauntered back out to the stage and lifted her muzzle to the breeze.
There was nothing.
Something familiar tugged at the edges of her thoughts, unraveling her concentration.
Ainsley slid up into her human form and took her dress back from Grace.
She pulled it back on and turned to her friend.
Grace was staring at her in shock.
“What?” Ainsley asked.
“I’ve just… never seen it up close before. It was amazing.”
“I hope you’re talking about my wolf,” Ainsley teased. “You’re not going to try to make out with me are you? Have you been using magic today?”
“You’re really not ready to let that go yet, huh?”
“Not even close.”
“So,” Grace asked. “Did you find anything?”
“No, I didn’t have any luck. But there was something strange.”
“What was it?”
Ainsley paused.
“What did you smell?” Grace asked again.
“Nothing.”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“Grace, I can smell the residue from the lamp you broke while you were having sex with Landon last night.”
“Oh…”
“I should never smell nothing.”
“Hm.”
“Can you use magic to hide your scent?” Ainsley asked.
“Maybe,” Grace replied. “I’ve never tried.”
“Let’s go ask Julian. He’s coming to my house to talk about Erik anyway.”
Ainsley turned toward the wooded path that led back to town.
“Actually, I have to go,” Grace said quickly.
“Sure you do.”
“I’m serious,” Grace said. “I have a possible suspect coming in for questioning.”
“I’ll tell Julian you said hi!”
CHAPTER 13
Grace arrived at the station twenty minutes before the appointed time. The interrogation room was blessedly free of parking meter change
today.
She grabbed the Lysol and paper towels from her desk drawer and used them to clean the table top until it shone.
Satisfied, she ran the cleaning supplies back to her desk, helping herself to a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge on her way past.
She sipped it slowly while looking out the single window of the interrogation room at the Haber’s elm tree across from the fire station. The elm’s nearly bare branches twisted in a way that made it look like it was in constant motion, though of course the only movement it actually made was at the microscopic pace of its growth. A classic example of the fact that things weren’t always what they seemed.
“Hello?”
Garrett Sanderson’s voice brought Grace out of her reverie.
“Thank you for coming in again, Mr. Sanderson.”
“Please, dear, it’s Garrett,” he said.
When she looked up at him, he gave her a wolfish wink.
“A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat…” he said in a sing-song way.
Grace studied him calmly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of the treasure that was here before.”
“Is that from a song?” Grace asked.
She knew full well it was Edgar Allen Poe’s Gold Bug. In high school, Grace had been a horror junkie. She moved through Poe and Lovecraft, and into King and Koontz, devouring all the books the librarian threw at her. Finding out she actually lived next to werewolves had been the coolest moment of her formative years.
“A book, actually,” Garrett replied, his tone dipping just to the border of condescension.
Perfect. Let him start off with some false confidence.
“Oh.” Grace wrinkled her nose a bit for good measure.
He sat down gracefully with a pleased look on his face. Once again, he held his cane like a scepter next to his elegantly crossed legs.
Grace smiled back, with practiced guilelessness.
“That is such an interesting cane.” She leaned forward to examine it. “What’s the carving at the head?”
“A wolf.”
“A silver wolf.” Grace nodded. “Does it have any special meaning?”
“It means I can walk without assistance, which isn’t always easy, especially when the weather is foul.”
Okay, so he wasn’t going to play nicely. Grace couldn’t help but think back to how fast the man from the amphitheater had been.
