by L. L. Frost
No, his power is more than that. He is the tipping point, the dice unrolled, and while he may not be able to cover the world in ice, he can trigger that to happen. Or he can choose not to. As he has chosen to do again and again over the centuries.
When I went to the Library and opened his book, I saw him at the center of destruction, yes, but what stories did the book hold of all the times he chose life instead? His path weaves in and out of Kellen’s and Emil’s, both chaos and order going hand in hand.
Without Tobias, the other two would lose their battles against their natures. There would be no tipping them back toward restraint, no cautioning toward mercy.
His energy swirls around me, reminding me of his most recent choice, to come into the bottle with me. For a moment, I see the shadowed path of another choice, one paved with the bodies of those I love, before his power pushes me away from it, telling me not to dwell on what never happened.
Instead, he swirls around me like a cyclone, spinning me out until I’m stretched thin as a thread, before he spirals inward, twisting us together like a candy cane.
We take turns making shapes and rolling together, the freedom of being without bodies removing the tension that usually exists between us. Here, there are no questions of dominance or reservation, no expectations. There’s only us, and Tobias lets his playful side take control.
Time passes, though I don’t know how much, and it doesn’t really matter. With our bodies went the sense of urgency, the need to take action. In the bottle, we simply exist with—and sometimes within—each other.
And, for the first time in a while, I find myself at peace.
Light floods the darkness.
Tobias and I weave tighter around each other in the dark, knowing the light means separation.
The world around us turns into a vacuum, trying to pull us from the darkness that’s come to feel like home, and we cling tighter. But the vacuum won’t be denied, and with nothing to grab onto, it yanks us out of the bottle.
For a moment, we hang suspended in air, the room registering from every angle at once.
The house hums and pulses with life, its joists and walls filled with magic, though not yet sentient. It feels lonely, like it missed me.
Tally stands with Tac in the archway by the kitchen, holding Prem while Merp crouches between Tac’s large, tufted ears. They give off worried vibes, some focused on me and some on others in the room.
My imps and Sophia, huddled near the stairs to my room, clump together for comfort. They radiate distress, and I regret all the worry I continue to put them through.
Jax and Slater sit on the floor outside the circle, powering the barrier. They give off a sense of resolve, the feeling of doing a task that needs to be seen to completion.
Kellen and Emil hover in front of the roaring fireplace, as close to the shimmering wall of magic as they dare.
And inside, Flint, Xander, and Reese crouch over my and Tobias’s bodies, which lay on the floor between them. Tobias clutches my hand, while a sheet covers my still form.
For one heart-lurching moment, I think I’ve died like Julian did, that the sheet is a shroud, and the witches kneel in mourning. Then Flint looks up to where we hover, his gaze fixing unerringly on us.
In energy form, I see through the glamor that he wears. See the scars that cover his face and the missing eye that he hides. I see, too, the power that rages through him, and the dozens of souls that hover at his shoulders, offering up their energy freely. He shines brighter than Reese and Xander, so bright that it hurts to witness him.
That powerful light flexes, ghostly hands reaching out to scoop Tobias and me from the air.
We cling together, unwilling to be parted now that we know what it means to be together, but Flint’s pull is too strong to resist. With infinite patience, he separates us until we become two separate brings once more. With the division, the feeling of a vacuum returns, and the threads that bind me to my corporeal form yank me down.
I slam back into my body, my energy splashing outward to fill my extremities, flooding life back into me before rolling inward to my core.
Eyes snapping open, I lurch upright. The room spins around me, narrow and unfocused except for the demon beside me.
I reach for Tobias at the same time he reaches for me, and we cling together once more, our legs weaving together as we try to become one.
But corporeal forms aren’t designed for that, no matter how tightly we hold each other. A sense of loss opens a cavern inside me that only Tobias’s energy can fill, and my head lifts, my lips parted.
Tobias, knowing what I need, bends toward me.
“No, don’t!”
The shout hurts my ears, then insistent hands pull us apart.
The second separation hurts more than the first, and I fight, reaching for Tobias as the barrier drops. But Flint drags him outside the circle to where Emil and Kellen wait to take him and hold him prisoner.
“No!” I strain toward Tobias, but the energy that fills me is only enough to animate my body, and not enough to give me inhuman strength. I thrash, but Xander and Reese hold me firm. “Give him back!”
Flint returns to this side of the circle, and the barrier rises once more, locking Tobias and me on opposite sides.
The witch turns to me and lifts his hand, then presses it toward the floor. Weight settles over me, as if lead fills the surrounding air, and my thrashing slows.
Flint steps closer, his hand still out near his waist. “I have control of your core for a little longer, Adie. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
My eyes jump from him to Tobias, who snarls at his friends as he tries to escape them.
“Adie, are you with me?” Flint demands, pulling my attention back to him.
No, I don’t want to be with him. I want to be with Tobias. But something inside knows I need to answer, that if I don’t, I’ll go back into the bottle, this time without Tobias, and I can’t stand that thought.
My head jerks up and down in the semblance of a nod.
Flint kneels in front of me. “Try to speak.”
My throat clicks with dryness, and I swallow convulsively before I try again. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Good.” He sits cross-legged on the floor. “What you’re feeling right now will fade in a few minutes as you readjust to your body. But until then, we need to keep you both separated, or you risk trying to inhabit the same form.”
That doesn’t sound bad to me, and my eyes return to Tobias, finding the same longing mirrored there.
Flint shifts to block my view of my catalyst demon. “I need you to focus on me right now. Can you do that?”
It hurts, but I do. If I focus on him, maybe he’ll let me go to Tobias.
“Do you remember why you were in the bottle?” Flint asks.
I lick my lips, wishing for water. I feel brittle, like papier mâché in the process of drying. “To remove the curse Victor Hesse put on me.”
“Yes.” He nods and glances at the other witches. “That was the plan.”
“Was?” Nervous now, I look around for a sign of what could have gone wrong.
But everyone appears safe and whole, and the house looks the same as when I left. I search inside myself and discover I no longer feel the beast inside that pushed me to hurt those I love. Instead, a hole exists, an abandoned cavern that echoes without life. I don’t have enough energy in my core to fill that hole, and even if I did, I’m not sure I could. I feel scooped out, a piece of me gone forever to the beast’s hunger.
Unnerved, I focus back on Flint. “What happened? How long were we gone?”
“Less than six hours.” Slowly, he drops his hands to rest on his thighs, and the sensation of weight dissipates.
Reese and Xander slowly release their grips on my arms, and everyone holds their breath, waiting to see what I’ll do.
I stay where I am, the urgency to reconnect with Tobias still strong, but not compulsory. Lifting my bare arms, I look down and realize
I lost my sheet in the struggle. My naked skin bears black marks now where I remember Victor Hesse cutting his curse into me.
Lifting my forearm to my nose, I sniff and catch the distinct odor of Sharpie. I touch the other marks, prodding at my body, but my skin feels firm, if a little too tight. And it’s way too easy to feel my bones beneath. Starving myself of energy has left me in bad shape.
My attention shifts to Emil. Frost glitters on his cheeks and turns his lips blue. My mouth waters as hunger roars to life. With the beast gone, that means I can take winter from him. I can make him warm while replenishing what I’ve lost.
Flint waves a hand in front of my face, breaking my fixation, and I turn back to find his expression serious. “We weren’t able to remove the curse, Adie. If you feed, it will continue to strengthen the spell.”
I frown at him. “But I don’t feel the beast anymore.”
“That’s because we were able to extract it in a similar way as I extracted your core.” He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a red bottle. Holding it at eye level, he waggles it. “I chose red for Danger because, if you break it, this thing is going right back inside you.”
When he holds the bottle out to me, like some kind of twisted gift, I lean away as far as Reese and Xander’s bodies allow. “I don’t want near that thing.”
Flint stretches forward, insistent. “You have to take it.”
“No!” Desperate, I shove a foot against his chest to hold him back. “I don’t want it!”
“Adie, you have to keep it close,” Flint insists as he thrusts it toward me. “If you get too far away, you’ll stop feeding it, and it will escape.”
“What?” I look down at myself, searching for a link that connects me to the bottle, but all I see is bare skin and sigils. I shake my head in denial. “No, I’m not still connected to it.”
“You are.” Expression hardening, Flint tosses the bottle at me.
Frantic, I scramble to catch it before it breaks on the floor.
As the disgusting thing pulses in my grasp in a disturbing mirror of my heartbeat, I glare at Flint. “Why did you do that? It could have broken!”
“Just don’t let it out of your reach, and you’ll be fine.” He pushes to his feet, then bends and grabs the abandoned sheet, tossing it over my naked body. “We bought you time, but it’s not a fix. And unfortunately, we can’t fix what was done to you.”
“Then, why did you let me out of the bottle?” I demand as I pull the sheet up over my breasts.
“Because you can’t feed the beast from inside the bottle,” Xander squeezes my shoulder. “And if the beast isn’t fed...”
“It breaks out of the bottle.” I nod in understanding. “So, how do I feed the beast if I can’t feed?”
Silence fills the room, and I look up to find faces filled with uncertainty.
My lip trembles. “You don’t know?”
“We have some theories,” Flint hedges. “But we won’t know until you try.”
“Okay?” Confused, I twist to look at Reese and Xander for more explanation.
Reese glances at the barrier around us. “Ley line magic.”
I frown. “I can’t feed on witch magic.”
His brows shoot up. “Have you ever tried?”
I stare at him for a long moment before admitting, “No...”
He tilts his head to the side. “It’s just more energy, right? And not one the beast craves, or you would have tried to eat the barrier earlier, so it’s not what powers the curse. So you should be okay using it as a power source.”
My eyes narrow. “I’m not sure it works like that.”
“But you’re not sure it doesn’t work like that, either,” he points out.
Suspicion trickles through me. “Is this more of that belief matters more than reality business?”
“We don’t think any succubus could do it,” Xander cuts in with an exasperated look at his brother. “But you’ve already shown a certain level of compatibility for ley line magic, so it might be possible.”
“It’s not compatibility,” I argue. “It’s a refusal to let it destroy me.”
He shrugs. “If pure stubbornness is what it takes, then continue to be stubborn and try. You need this, because there’s one more thing we have to tell you.”
“It gets worse?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper. I don’t know if I can take another blow. Not after our big solution failed so epically.
When he reaches out to tap the spot over my heart, and I cross my eyes to stare down. I remember a mark being carved into me there, but I don’t see a matching Sharpie mark correcting its purpose.
Xander’s hand falls away. “We were wrong that this one was another separate mark. It’s a recall. It tethers you to Victor Hesse, and once his monster is complete, it will pull you to him. You will become his slave, and through you, he will have limitless magic.”
From the silence that hangs heavy in the room, everyone else already knew about this, and it doesn’t come as a surprise to me, either. Flint and Xander had warned me this was Victor Hesse’s intention when they came to me in the bakery. We had chosen to keep quiet about it then, but I guess the cat’s now out of the bag.
I trust everyone in the room to stay silent about it, though, and know any one of them would take the same oath Flint did to make sure this secret was never revealed.
The tether, though… Well, that’s a new level of psycho that I should have seen coming. Of course Victor Hesse would have a way to pull me to him once the curse was complete. He wouldn’t want a magic puking monster falling into just anyone’s hands.
Staring down at the trapped beast in my hand, I nod in grim acknowledgment. The bottle pulses back at me. Even trapped, it knows what I’m doing. It feels hungry, but its hunger no longer drives my actions.
Carefully, I set it aside and gather the sheet, tying it toga style at my shoulder, then tuck the bottle into the folds across my chest. I don’t like it there, so close to Victor Hesse’s intended leash over my heart, but I’ll have to get used to it.
With it secure for now, I gather the rest of the sheet into my lap and shift around to face the inner rim of the circle.
I study the shimmering barrier before I turn to peer over my shoulder at Flint. “Okay, so, just dive right in? Get to feeding?”
“You should go in with a little more intention than that.” Reese settles on the floor beside me, with Xander on the other side. “If you just grab it, it will fight you. You have to give it a purpose.”
“Right now, Jax and Slater are giving the ley line purpose, so they’ll have to drop their spell before you can try accessing it through the circle. Once they do, call the magic to you and give it direction,” Xander explains with confidence.
“Right.” I don’t feel any of the same confidence, but I nudge my fingers toward the gold circle engraved into the floor, anyway.
Every time I come in contact with ley line magic, it tries to unmake me to create something new. Simply giving it direction sounds way too easy, and at the same time, not something I’m equipped to do. How can a succubus of less than a hundred years of existence direct the very force of life?
Then, I glance at Reese and Xander. They have even less time to understand magic and power, but handle it with ease. Of course, they’re wired differently than I am. They were born with the ability to harness this vast power, while I was born of the smallest storm to ever create a succubus.
Tobias settles onto the floor directly in front of me, a shimmering barrier all that separates us. The yearning to be with him surges forth once more before quieting. If I can do this, I can touch him again, but I can’t be with him the way we’re meant to be, and I see the same loss echoed on his face.
He lifts a hand to hover just above the wall of magic that could destroy him. “I know what you’re capable of, Adeline Boo Pond. You can do this.”
Releasing a slow breath, I nod. “I can do this.”
Slowly, Jax and Slater lift their fingers fro
m the circle, and the barrier falls.
Tobias draws in a sharp breath but stays seated, and his hand drops to grip his thighs. His black eyes fix on me with determination. “Feed, Adie.”
I bite my lip and slowly press my fingers to the edge of the circle. Ley line magic, already close to the surface, snaps up to meet me, and iridescent light explodes from my skin. It resembles my glow, but brighter and uncontrolled as it tries to unmake me and remake me at the same time. I shiver, my bones trembling as they threaten to come undone, but I hold onto my form through sheer determination.
Reese crouches beside me, his hand fearlessly touching my shoulder. “Spindle it. Make it yours.”
Fissures form along my bones, and I grit my teeth. “How?”
“Give it purpose.” He squeezes my shoulder, helping me to focus. “You need energy to sustain you, and the magic wants to give you what you desire. Just let it.”
It’s hard to imagine this wild power allowing itself to be converted to food. It rushes through me like a conduit, replacing the blood in my veins and turning them into pathways that bring it back into itself. I try to catch the edge of it and divert it into my core, but it resists being contained.
“Come on, Adie,” Kellen encourages as he crouches behind Tobias. “This isn’t magic that’s already been tamed. This is like my lightning. You’ve wielded that before.”
I lift my head to glare at him. “This is nothing like your lightning.”
Reese nods in agreement. “She’s right. It’s what births the lightning. It’s more than elemental. It’s what creates the elements.”
“It’s choice.” Tobias leans forward. “You just have to choose.”
He reaches for me, heedless of the ley line magic that coats my skin. The magic that can unmake demons. Panic shoots through me, and I yank the magic inside, drawing it beneath the surface where it can’t hurt Tobias.
His hands settle on my knees, trusting me to keep him safe. “Remember what it feels like to choose. There are paths in front of you. Find the one that holds the outcome you want and take it.”