by Callie Rose
What the fuck?
The air in this place must be laced with ecstasy or something. It was the only explanation. After the shit I’d been through today, there was no way I should be feeling this good. This turned on.
I glanced at the others, especially Hannah. She seemed nervous and shy, but had somehow avoided picking up on the darkly erotic vibe that seemed to permeate the room. Dru, Kyle, and Sonja were either immune or oblivious. They were also walking away from me, so I hurried to catch up. I bit back a moan as I moved my thighs, my clit throbbing from every bit of motion. Whatever this was, it was becoming a problem. It was becoming hard to focus, hard to keep my breath even.
Was it the light? The air itself?
No, I realized. It was a scent.
My nostrils flared, and my eyes went wide as I spun my head toward the source. How the fuck I knew which person was responsible for the incredible scent in a room full of people, I wasn’t sure. But I knew, beyond any question or doubt, that it came from a man standing across the room.
He smelled like some insanely erotic combination of money and sunlight and boredom. He was tall and slender, with an aristocratic sharpness to his pale face. His eyes burned like green fire, and his perfectly manicured brown hair shone softly in the light. He whispered something to the man on his left, who chuckled. I couldn’t tell what the other man looked like.
Oh, but what’s this?
Sea-foam and sandalwood and joy.
The scent tore me violently away from the green-eyed guy and redirected my focus. The new object of my attention stood several yards away from the first man, and he looked like a California god, tan and muscular. Wavy blond hair fell haphazardly over his cobalt blue eyes, which matched the stone in the center of the hemp necklace he wore. He grinned at me openly and winked. As if the wink had been a physical touch, a lick against my throbbing clit, a shudder of pleasure made my vision hazy.
When it cleared, it was only because another scent had caught my attention. This one was spicy and rich and sweet, like sharp ginger stewing in coconut milk. The man attached to it didn’t project his emotions as much as the other two had; he looked more bored and aloof than the rich moneybags guy, but as I came closer, I could taste his fury.
And strangely, it tasted good. I was wholly enticed. I needed to know more about this dark-eyed man with the toffee skin and so much controlled anger.
His eyelids flickered as he glanced toward me. Our gazes locked, and I felt a sudden pull rising up in me, the same way it had when I had persuaded Sonja to let me go. Something deep and powerful and completely out of my control.
But as the feeling reached my eyes, the beautiful, sharp-featured man snapped his gaze away. I gasped. The broken connection was almost physically painful.
I was growing more and more aroused as we walked. I wanted to turn around and corral those men, play the numbers and get one of them into bed. I wanted to stop Dru, to beg for a breather to collect myself before we continued. Or strip off my clothes and run down the hallway until somebody, anybody—
“Ow!” Hannah’s voice cut through my wild fantasies. “Piper, are you okay?”
“Hm?”
She lifted her hand, the one clasped in mine, to show me the purpling tips of her fingers.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” I let go of her hand and rubbed my sweaty palm on my thigh. Ohhh, God. That was a mistake. It felt too damn good for public viewing, and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to rub my hand over an entirely different part of my anatomy. I bit my lip until I tasted blood and took a breath so deep my lungs threatened to meld with my spine.
Hannah watched me worriedly. “It’s all right. Are you okay though?”
“I—I don’t really know,” I muttered quietly, my voice low and rough. “Don’t you feel that?”
She looked around, brow furrowing. “Feel… what?”
Liquid sex in the air.
But I couldn’t say that without explaining, and I couldn’t explain, so I just shook my head. As I did, though, I was nearly knocked off my feet by the most enticing scent yet. Fire. Not smoke or sulfur, but fire itself. The man responsible for that amazing aroma stood head and shoulders above the people around him, with skin like dark coffee and eyes like midnight. His dark hair was shaved close to his head, his hairline perfectly contoured, and I wanted to run my fingers over every strand. When he met my gaze, I noticed little honeyed flecks in his irises, like campfires on twin hillsides.
He narrowed those eyes at me suspiciously, as if I were responsible for this overwhelming feeling of sex vibrating the molecules of the air around us.
That certainly couldn’t be the case, could it? But no one else seemed to have noticed it. Just me and those four guys. Why those four? They hadn’t been standing anywhere near each other. Hell, they probably didn’t even know one another. But I knew them.
At least—something in me recognized something in them. Somehow.
“Ugh, I need a nap,” I muttered. “I think I knocked something loose in my brain.”
“That jump or teleportation or whatever was pretty rough,” Hannah agreed in a low voice. “I hope we won’t have to do that a lot.”
Sonja glanced over her shoulder with a sneer. “If you’d rather travel like a human, I’m sure we have a yak sitting around here somewhere.”
“What?” Hannah shot a bewildered glance at me. I shrugged.
Dru sighed. “This place is impossible for human vehicles to get to. You can transport, or you can use an animal. I suggest the former. The headmaster’s office is just up here. Be polite. He’s got veto power.”
The headmaster’s office looked surprisingly benign. Set into an internal hall, only the back wall was stone, and that was mostly covered in beige filing cabinets. I could have sworn I’d seen his exact desk at a furniture store in the mall the week before. Kyle and Sonja hadn’t bothered coming in when Dru had ushered us inside. I looked around at the utterly normal décor while the brown-haired man spoke with the headmaster in a low voice.
I didn’t pay attention to what they were saying, too busy trying to get the fog of lust in my head to clear. It’d started fading the minute we left the large main hall, and although my entire lower half still felt swollen and needy, I could at least breathe and think a little more clearly.
“Your name, please?”
“Piper! Hey!” Hannah hissed, elbowed me in the ribs.
“Oh, sorry,” I muttered. “I was distracted. I swear I’ve seen this exact office before. It reminds me of my middle school principal’s office. I kind of figured there would be tapestries and parchment. Maybe wands and crystal balls? Not filing cabinets from nineteen eighty-five.”
Hannah choked on a surprised snort of laughter, then looked horrified that I’d made her giggle in front of the headmaster.
The gray-haired man with a thick, bushy mustache blinked at me for a moment, and I wondered if he’d heard me. I’d meant to keep my voice low, but all my perceptions seemed to be thrown off at the moment.
The headmaster cleared his throat. “Your name. Please.”
“Piper Lawless.”
He raised a brow. “Not too fitting, I hope. My name is John Toland; I’m the headmaster of this institution. Have a seat. Dru tells me you were apprehended in the act of terrorizing an old woman.”
I scoffed, glancing at Dru a little defensively as Hannah and I settled into chairs in front of the headmaster’s desk. I’d thought the man was on our side, but I felt a little sold out by him at the moment. “She wasn’t that old. And we weren’t terrorizing her on purpose.”
“Oh?”
“Seriously. We went to her for help. She’s the one who claimed she could rid people of their demons. It’s not our fault she was full of shit.”
His mustache twitched. For an instant, I thought I saw a twinkle of laughter in his eyes. It turned to steel again almost immediately, but at least now I knew the guy had a sense of humor.
“In that case, I see no reason not to move
forward with your enrollment. Let me see—” He turned the ancient monitor toward him and typed something. “First-year, first-year… fortunately for you, we aren’t quite full this semester. We were forced to add staff last year. That was a fiasco. Ah, there we are. Now, you two are friends, correct?”
“Yes,” I said immediately.
Hannah beamed like I had just given her Christmas on her birthday. I grinned at her, glad she was on board with that answer. She was literally the only friend I had in the world right now.
“Mm-hm. I generally prefer to keep friends close the first year. A transition of this nature can be a bit overwhelming. Of course, that depends on whether or not you two think you could maintain focus on your studies if you were to room together. You aren’t in elementary school anymore. I assume you can be adults?”
“Um… yeah?” I squinted at him.
He sighed. “This isn’t a pass or fail situation, Piper. If you don’t do well here, you won’t be sent home with a transcript and a ‘better luck next time’. There’s nowhere to go but down. You catch my meaning?”
A chill shivered down my spine, but I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is that a threat?”
He looked at me, his eyes flat and cold, all trace of humor gone. “No, Miss Lawless. It’s a fact.”
Tension rose in the room. Silence stretched. I never let my eyes drift away from his steely gaze. After several long minutes, Hannah shifted in her seat and cleared her throat.
“Um… can I call my grandma? She’ll be worried.”
Toland’s expression softened into one of practiced sympathy. “I’m afraid not, my dear. As far as your family is concerned, you simply disappeared. It is in your best interests to keep it that way. There are rules. You’ll be given a handbook at the end of this meeting. I suggest you both go over it meticulously.”
Hannah’s eyes shimmered, and her breath caught. I wanted to comfort her, but I was afraid touching her would make her cry.
“Oh,” she said in a quivering voice.
I glared at the headmaster, who remained infuriatingly calm.
He ignored my obvious anger, switching topics smoothly. “Now then, your classes. I’ve kept you together for the most part.”
“For the most part?” I asked, crossing my arms.
“Mm. Your core classes are all the same. Your more intense power-building classes, however, are specialized to suit your individual needs. Of course, you won’t be taking those until the second semester.”
“Why not?” I asked, a note of disappointment creeping into my voice. Dammit. I’d love to build my power; hell, I’d love to find out exactly what all my new powers even were. Something useful should come out of all of this insanity. It seemed only fair.
Toland gave me a bland smile. “Basics first. History, social science, ethics. Basic magic and combat. We won’t be giving you the big guns until we know which direction you’re liable to point them.”
Okay, that made sense. It was irritating, but I could see where he was coming from.
He printed out our class schedules and handed them to us. I looked them over with a sense of familiarity. For as much as this place tried to be mysterious and supernatural, it was very human in the way that it worked—the class names might be a little different, but it looked a lot like my schedule at Seattle University had.
“Your dormitory assignments are on the back, along with a map of the school. You should go get settled in.” The headmaster started to rise, waving his hands to usher us out, then stopped suddenly. “Oh! Your handbooks.”
He pulled two thick, glossy handbooks off a shelf and handed one to each of us.
I blinked down at them, then back up at him. The handbook I clutched was so standardized I was actually surprised the cover didn’t feature a group of multi-racial demons laughing together on the grass under a tree.
Then again, I guess this isn’t really the kind of university that has to recruit students.
We have no other choice.
Chapter Five
“Looks like school won’t be starting for a week,” I said as we made our way, unescorted, down the hall.
“Great.” Hannah sighed.
“It is great. That’s a whole week of castle explorations. Plus, it gives us the chance to get to know some of these people before we’re stuck in classrooms with them all day.”
We found the stairs marked on the map and climbed them. The upstairs hall was quiet, and our feet echoed on the stone tiles. The heady erotic atmosphere was thinner up here, which was both good and bad. It was a relief to be able to think straight, but I found myself missing it—craving it—and picked up my pace a little, hurrying to find our room. We got lost twice but eventually found it.
Our room was tucked away in a little alcove overlooking the wild snowscape. It was the only room up here, though there were plenty of others lining the corridor that led away from the tower. A little bathroom sat across the hall from us, and I hoped it would stay at least a little bit private.
“Home, sweet home,” I said dryly as I let the heavy wooden door swing shut behind us. “God, it’s like a fucking convent.”
There was a small window on one side of the room which cast bleak light over two iron-framed beds and two identical, plain desks. Large wooden chests sat at the foot of each bed. A rough woven mat lay on the floor like a rug, and shelves were built into the stone walls. Incongruent laptops, barely newer than the one I’d left at home, sat on the desks.
“It’s fine,” Hannah said tiredly.
I looked at her sharply. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine. I just… I’m tired. And…” She looked around the room and shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “I just need some time.”
She had that hunted animal look again, and her energy was vibrating like spikes in the air. I’d never been particularly sensitive to auras before, but hers was wild and verging on being out of control. I stepped toward her to offer clumsy comfort, and her skin rippled like she was suppressing a wince. She needed to be alone.
“Well,” I said cheerfully, stepping away and straightening my shoulders. “I’m going to go explore the castle. If I find food, do you want something?”
She shook her head numbly but shot me a grateful look. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“Okay. See you in a while.”
I closed the door gently behind me and hesitated. A second later I heard her flop heavily onto a bed. A second after that, the soft sound of crying filtered through the thick wooden door. Part of me wanted to go back in there and try to cheer her up, to offer her some semblance of comfort; the other part told me to run very far away from the outburst. I chose the latter, more for her sake than mine. She really did seem like she needed a moment alone. And besides, I was terrible with stuff like this—I’d probably only make it worse.
I spent fifteen minutes trying to find a staircase and wished I had remembered to bring the map. Finally, I caught a whiff of that erotic darkness from earlier and made a beeline for it. Left, right, down a long hallway, left again. Ah! There! A staircase opened up at the end of the hall, and that lusty invisible cloud was rolling over the top step, guiding me down.
I don’t know if it was the sheer size of the place or that intoxicating aroma, but I was dizzy before I reached the bottom. I stopped when I reached the first floor, leaning heavily against the ornate old banister. As I breathed, the aroma changed. Within the vague cloud of misty eroticism, there was something else. Fire. My heart skipped a beat, and the dim corridor seemed to brighten. Sudden clarity charged me up, and I followed the thin river of fire.
It grew in intensity before it became entangled with the musty, sweet smell of money. My heart beat faster. I walked in a smooth ripple like a cat stalking its prey, slow and languid, until I reached a massive open door. I could hear murmurs from inside and saw the gray mountain sunlight filter through a soft blizzard of dust motes. The two men I’d somehow decided to seek sat back-to-back on a set o
f small couches placed against each other near the window. It didn’t even look like either of them knew the other was there. The aristocratic man was bent secretively over a huge tome, while the dark-skinned man who smelled like fire flipped through a magazine. No, not a magazine, I realized as I moved closer. A comic book.
“Seems a little redundant in this place, doesn’t it?”
He looked up at me slowly. I hadn’t startled him one bit. For some reason, I was simultaneously annoyed at that and aroused. Every move he made seemed to turn me on though.
“I like to see how humans view the supernatural,” he said in a voice as low and smooth as an obsidian rockslide. It sent a shiver down my spine. I cocked a hip against the arm of the couch, positioning myself to look over his shoulder.
“And how close do they get?”
He smirked. “Some of them have seen things. The origins are always amusing. Vats of nuclear waste?”
“It makes a certain kind of sense,” I argued defensively. I’d had a comic book phase once upon a time which I’d never fully left behind. “I mean, cancer is just cells growing out of control, right? So, what if they magically all grew the same way somehow, into something bigger and better?”
The man behind us choked on a laugh, turning slightly to look over at us imperiously. “Am I hearing you properly? You’re trying to make cancer out to be a good thing?”
“Well, no.” I was getting flustered, and his voice didn’t help. It shot straight between my legs like a fucking arrow and started a slow ache building. “But I didn’t think getting mugged would turn me into a superhero either. Or…super-villain, I guess?” I glanced back at the man with the short black hair. “I don’t know, how are we classified?”
His midnight eyes sparked with a heavy sort of humor. “Depends on who you ask. I’m Xero.”
He stuck out his hand. I hesitated for a brief moment—not because I didn’t want to shake it, but because I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to shake it. If I touched his skin, would I ever be able to stop? But I took it anyway, grasping his large, warm hand in mine. Before I knew what was happening, I was sliding off my perch on the arm of the couch to settle next to him, our hands still clasped. I watched those honey flecks spin in his dark eyes. The closer I came, the more colors I saw. Reds and ochers and sparks of gold, all ringed in a dark brown that was almost black. How could I not have noticed before?
