“I know I should be offended that you don’t want to be a wolf.”
“Meh, too common. There’s nothing common about me.”
That drew out a chuckle from Venni as he looked at me in disbelief. “I’m going to have to agree with you. You are far from a common mortal like myself.”
My smile risked slipping away, and I barely won the fight to keep it on my face. His comment was innocent, but it was quick to turn my thoughts dark and scary, because he was right, I wasn’t a common mortal. In fact, I was told I was immortal. Outside of an unnatural death, I wouldn’t die. I’d never grow old, I’d never catch a disease, never get sick. I’d keep living year after year with no choice but to watch those around me grow old and die.
That meant Venni too. Shifters could live up to five hundred years if they didn’t get themselves killed before that.
“Speaking of mortal, how old are you?” I asked.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I’m dating a whole lot of old men. I’m curious. Shanton mentioned being over two thousand years old, Rhett is over six hundred, and I narrowed Dwight down to around three hundred, maybe under.”
“I’m a baby compared to them. I’m seventy-six.”
I whistled. “Damn, and I’m only nineteen. Well, twenty soon. My birthday is next Sunday.”
Raising an eyebrow, Venni asked, “Why is this the first time we’re hearing about it?”
I waved my hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
“We need to celebrate.”
I grinned big. “And we will. For now, enjoy your food.” I said it as our server came back with our dishes. I was right, the burger was as tall as Venni’s head. He didn’t seem to notice as he prepared to bite into it. I watched him, completely fascinated with how he managed to take a bite.
“What?” he asked after swallowing.
“Did your jaw unhinge? Do you have one of those weird, gross talents? Like how some people are double-jointed?”
“Eat your food, Laila.”
“Just wondering.” I took my own bite of my burger and probably would have enjoyed it if I wasn’t so distracted watching Venni eat his. I’d have been full after two bites, but he already had half of it gone.
As he was about to go in for another bite, his whole body stilled.
“Venni?” I asked.
His eyes darkened as he slowly, deliberately placed his half-eaten burger down and then straightened, his eyes training on something over my shoulder. I twisted in my seat and watched as a handsome man and woman approached. The man’s expression was blank, but the woman was frowning. Right away, their similarities to Venni popped out: the dark brown eyes, black hair, and bronze skin. They walked with confidence and their eyes held a predatory gleam in them.
“Venni, honey, I didn’t expect to see you,” the woman said in a silky voice. She leaned down and kissed his cheek, completely ignoring me.
“Mother, what are you doing here?” Venni asked in a careful voice.
“A meeting with the Alpha. We were discussing the future.” She straightened and finally glanced at me, moving her long straight black hair behind her shoulder.
“Who are you?” Iciness slipped into her voice.
“Dr. Laila Porter,” I said, letting my own coldness come out to play.
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re the trouble maker I heard all about. The vampires put out a warning against you.”
I smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment since they thought it was okay to kidnap me.”
“Well, I’m sure they had a perfectly good reason.”
As we went back and forth, Venni’s intensity grew, stifling the air with his energy.
“Miss Porter, I’d like a word with my son.” She tried to dismiss me.
“Dr. Porter,” I corrected her. “And if you want to talk to your son, I suggest calling him and making an appointment. Right now, we are on a date.”
Her nose flared. I doubted many went up against her. She tried to slap me metaphysically with her energy. It brushed up against me. She intended for it to hurt, but it felt like a poke to me.
“That tickled,” I said and moved to stand up, angry now. I was in every right to put her in her place for using her energy against me. It was a challenge. “Maybe I should teach you the number one lesson you’re taught as a little girl.”
“You’re still a little girl,” the woman sneered.
“And yet even I know what it means to use my gifts against someone else. Don’t think that just because I’m young, that I don’t know anything. I know far more than you.” I pulled on my powers, letting them fill the space around the woman.
Ever since my transition, my green eyes glowed softly. My anger made it easier to turn up the heat, turning up the intensity. I leaned forward, resting my hands on the table, preparing to metaphysically smack her. The room was quiet as everyone held their breath and waited to see what would happen. If they wanted a show, I didn’t mind giving them one.
Venni’s hand snapped out and grabbed my wrist. “Laila, not tonight. Not here. Please.”
That gave me pause. My eyes flickered around the room, noting staff that were gathering together, preparing to remove us from the premise if we caused any more of a disturbance.
The woman sighed. “Venni, once you get her out of your system, please give me a call. It’s time to discuss your future.” Her jaw tightened as she glanced at me before stalking off.
“Bye.” I sent a finger wave their way. The man scowled at me before resting his hand on Venni’s mother’s lower back and leaning to say something. She shook her head as they disappeared into the room at the back.
Venni sighed. “Ready to go?”
“Who was that man?” I asked.
“My brother, Ezra.”
I sighed. “Let’s go then. I lost my appetite.” We stood and I was able to pay before Venni could try to take that away from me. He scowled and I only got away with it because he wanted to avoid another run in with his delightful mother.
Wanting to lift the heavy mood, I ran ahead of Venni and opened the door to my truck for him. His lips quirked up at that, but his eyes were still a little distant as he climbed in, and I closed the door for him, too. I ran around my truck and climbed inside.
“Didn’t think I’d meet your family so soon,” I said as we headed to our next destination. “I think we missed a couple of steps.”
Venni didn’t respond, and I frowned, tapping at the wheel as we waited at a red light. Hating the silence, I glanced at him. The street lights lit up enough of his face for me to tell that he was getting gloomier the longer time passed.
“Your mom was a delight.”
“You know she wasn’t.”
“Meh, I’ve dealt with worse. You forget who I am. Disapproval from parents is something I’m used to. I grew up with it. If she didn’t bother me with her insults, then don’t let her bother you.”
“It’s frustrating that they still believe in purity and all that shit.”
I raised an eyebrow but let him talk. He looked like he needed it, and if I said anything, he’d shut down on me.
“Our family has always fought to marry good, strong wolves to continue the line and keep the wolves pure. My baby sister was married and pregnant before she was even twenty, which for a shifter is barely an adult. We’re officially adults at eighteen. My sister was engaged at sixteen, married at nineteen, and her first kid ready to be born a year later. She has three kids now, all males. They do this with all the females in the pack. My older brother hasn’t mated, but he treats women like shit. He would be in line for Beta if I hadn’t been foolish and beaten him in a challenge years ago. I’d hand it over to him, but he’s a stickler for the rules and won’t accept it. It’s just frustrating. They want to continue how they are, not realizing how things have changed. A wolf isn’t less just because both parents aren’t a wolf. Their attitude to those who aren’t pure is going to come back and bite them in the ass.”
He fin
ally ran out of steam and glared hard in front of him. I was still trying to process what he said. I’d never heard Venni talk so much in his life before. That meant seeing his mother had really hit a nerve. Or was it her treatment of me since I wasn’t one of them?
“You know what works to calm people down?” I asked.
“What?”
“Realizing how small and insignificant we are.”
He gave me a confused look.
“Just wait.”
A few minutes later, we pulled up to our final destination. Venni leaned forward as he read the sign.
“A planetarium?”
“Yup, nothing like being surrounded by millions of stars and planets to prove that in the grand scheme of things, we are nothing.” I jumped out of the car and joined Venni as we headed inside.
The building itself wasn’t anything special. We walked across a large parking lot that was half full and into a large boxy-looking building with a dome peeking out from the middle of the roof.
I winced when we went through the last set of doors as screaming kids ran by, already full of sugar and life. It didn’t take me long to get our tickets and we had an hour to waste before the show started.
“Come on, let’s poke around before we claim our seats.” Venni led the way further into the planetarium. The museum portion went into depth about space, space travel, technology, and the spaceships we had managed to launch.
The first being to ever set foot on the moon was Neil Armstrong, who had been a gargoyle.
Venni thought that was hilarious. “He’s a gargoyle, he doesn’t need to breathe if that becomes an issue.”
“Sending someone the most likely to survive, smart.”
I schooled Venni in the art of putting a space puzzle together, but then he returned the favor by building a plane that flew farther than mine. Mine took a hard nose dive a foot in front of me. If paper airplanes could have exploded, mine would have with no survivors. Venni managed to get his plane all the way across the room. By the time it was time to go see the show, we were both laughing and teasing each other. I had never seen Venni so relaxed, and I hoped to see a lot more days like that in our future.
When we settled in, the chairs tilted our bodies so we stared at the domed ceiling, almost completely on our backs. The seats filled up but no one sat around us.
“You’d think we had the plague with how no one is sitting near us,” Venni said.
I grinned and dug in my pocket, pulling out a handful of tickets. “I bought out the seats surrounding us. There are too many kids around. I didn’t want them practically in our laps as we enjoyed the show.”
Venni didn’t say anything as he raised an eyebrow. The lights dimmed, and I cuddled into Venni, using his body as a heater. The stars sparkled across the ceiling. A male voice spoke, bringing us on a journey through the galaxy. Between the darkness and pretty lights, with the smooth timbre in the background, I was getting drowsy.
“This is really nice, Laila. Thank you for taking me.” Venni’s voice was just above a whisper, his warm breath fanning across my forehead.
“You need to do more than work, Venni. And I noticed that you don’t, not as much as you should.”
“Says the woman who likes to work herself into a coma.”
“I also take time to myself when I need to.”
Venni gave me his bullshit look, both his eyebrows raised.
I smiled. “Mostly. I like to come here once a month if I can. I like getting lost in the stars. It helped me out a lot as a kid. I’d be so lost in the stars that the everyday nonsense became just that, nonsense. It all melted away, and I got a new perspective.”
Venni shifted us so that his arm wrapped around my shoulders and he could pull me closer into his body. “I used to make it a point to go camping. I love rock climbing. Not even Davies knows that about me. I used to make it a habit to go to some of the cliffs far away from here to climb.” He was silent for a moment. “You’re right. I hadn’t had a chance to do that these last few years. I’d been working a lot, using it as an excuse to stay away from my pack.”
“Promise me something.”
“What?”
“Use up a few days of all those vacation days you’ve been hoarding. I know you have months’ worth saved up. Use them, take a couple of weeks off, and go rock climbing. Go to a location you rarely go to because it’s too far or you never took the time to get to and climb to your heart’s content. Just you, the wild, and rocks that want to bash your head in.”
His chest rumbled as he held back laughter.
“Then come back to me.”
We kissed briefly, and while I wanted to deepen it and do so much more, neither of us were up to giving the kiddies in the auditorium a show if they so happened to look our way,
Once the show was finished, I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the bright lights.
“Come on, Venni, I promised to get you home by your curfew.” I smiled at him and we headed back.
And when I did drop him off at his doorstep, I finished the night with a chaste kiss, just like the gentlewoman I was.
Chapter Three
I was beginning to hate having powers. Sitting outside, I released a breath and closed my eyes. My power surged forward and mocked me. I wanted one thing and they kept deciding on something else.
I had no control and that chafed. The winter cold seeped into my body from the frozen ground and that was my motivation to work better. Reaching in, I carefully cradled my power and filled my thoughts with what I wanted—a nice toasty bubble of warmth.
Power thrummed through me, filling up every space inside my body and pressing outward. The pressure built until it was uncomfortable, and then as if my thoughts were the needle to pop the bubble, it exploded outward into the surrounding area. My skin heated and there was a soft pop and crackle.
“Shit.” I scrambled to my feet and gaped at the fire before me. Instead of heating the air around me, I had created a bomb fire. “Damn you.”
Using power again, I was able to douse the flames. At least I didn’t cause a flooding to do it this time. I glared at the scorched grass, wondering how I was going to get a handle on this. Yes, it had only been a couple of weeks since I “awakened” as the elementalists called it. After taking a concoction of herbs that I knew nothing about, my body was forced into a sleep, and when I woke up about a day later, I exploded with power as my body adjusted to the heady mixture of magic and energy.
It was a process I never wanted to do again. I had hoped with time, it would get easier. It hadn’t. It was like as time went by, I gained more power. On most days, if I weren’t careful, my body would feel like it wanted to explode. None of what I tried to do worked.
I shuddered, thinking about the first time I really put my power to the test. Padraig, an exiled elementalist with only energy, had tried to seek revenge against the elementalists. We had interfered with his plans, and as a last ditch effort, he tried to release what amounted to an atomic bomb to wipe out everyone, including the elementalist and a community of winged horses.
My first instinct was to create a ward, and I did successfully. The only problem was, Elliot and I were still inside that ward because I used too much power. Only a second ward had kept us alive, otherwise that bomb would have disintegrated us, along with everyone and everything else around us.
Never fucking again. I never wanted to be in that position again. Anger at myself welled up as I thought about that. Elliot would have died because of my idiocy. Only my determination had kept us alive.
Shaking my head, I tried again to warm the air around me as the winter air seeped into my bones. I had extra motivation to be successful, coming out here in only shorts and a tank top. I had hoped it would motivate me to try harder. Hadn’t worked yet.
My ears popped from the push of power, and instead of the air warming like I wanted, sparks danced along the ground. I sighed and relaxed myself, rolling my shoulders to relieve the build-up of tension in them. This wasn
’t working. I wanted to be further along before Atasha, my aunt, showed up tomorrow. Silly me wanted to impress her with my awesomeness, but at this rate, I’d be lucky if I could even use my power to lift something without it smashing against a wall.
There was a soft growl, and I looked up at Siitha. He was crouched down, butt in the air with a playful look on his face. His two barbed tails whipped around behind him dangerously. Groaning, I shook my head.
“No way. Anytime we play fight, I always end up with ruined clothes. I’m going to have to go shopping because of you, and I hate shopping.”
Siitha refused to listen to me as he pounced and took me down to the ground. We wrestled around playfully, and I allowed myself to have fun and forget about my failure as a power user. Siitha made it easier as he distracted me. No luck on defending my clothes, though there was never any when it came to Siitha.
My behesiff had turned it into a game to tear my clothes apart. He was lucky I didn’t have money troubles. Still, between buying the house, the renovations, and obtaining more supplies, I worried that he was going to empty my bank account with how often I needed to buy a new wardrobe. I was going to have to learn to say no to the big fluff ball. So far, he knew he could walk all over me, and I was more than happy to let him.
By the time he was done slobbering all over me, I had to get ready for dinner.
“Siitha, someday soon, we’re going to have to talk,” I grumbled. He just made a purring noise as he followed me into the house. He did his usual sniff around in case danger had managed to sneak through my wards and into the house without my notice.
I ignored him and went upstairs to the master bedroom. I had a ton of space now, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Well, I had ideas for the future and it involved all my guys.
That thought had my eyes drawn toward the box sitting on my dresser. It was the length of my hand and only two inches high, but it held my future in it. Next to it was the flowery letter from Atasha letting me know she’d be coming tomorrow. I had already prepared two bedrooms for her and the one guard I was letting her come here with.
Magical Collision Page 2
