The thought was terrifying. But whereas once I would have shrunk away, I found myself mentally preparing myself. It was time to be a leader and take care of my family.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”
The Horned Mage
Book Five: Fel Heritage
Chapter One
Eleanor Hardin’s living room was comfortable and familiar. It should have set me at ease. It didn’t.
Eleanor herself had done more for me in the last few months than just about anyone ever had. I honestly don’t think I’d have made it without her help. She saved my life on at least one occasion and gave me a place to live and work. I wasn’t getting rich house sitting for her while she traveled but I didn’t have to pay for rent or utilities and I was still doing yard work for her and her neighbor. It was pretty much a charity gig. I lived over her garage in a loft with my two girlfriends and adopted sister turned girlfriend as well in a magically bound polyamorous group. To say our situation was complicated didn’t begin to cover it.
And now I was about to ask her for another favor.
She sat in front of me in one of her sundresses, her hands crossed on the head of her cane in front of her. She didn’t need the cane to walk. It was some kind of magic focus that enhanced her power. As best I could figure, it worked a little like a megaphone for her magic. Eleanor herself didn’t exactly inspire fear with her ageless features and beauty, but now that I thought of it, she was definitely in the list of top five most dangerous people or beings I knew. Before the start of this semester that list would not have been impressive. Now though…my life was crazy and dangerous, bordering on the absurd.
This was an attempt to take back control of it.
Eleanor lifted a manicured hand from her cane and picked up a glass of iced tea from the little table next to her armchair. The manicuring almost hid the pale scar that ran across her knuckles as though someone had come at her with a knife. Probably somebody had. She lifted a single finger from the glass and pointed at me, shifting the ice cubes inside with a little series of clinks.
“Let me see if I am understanding this correctly,” she said slowly. “You would like to intern with me this summer?”
She brought the tea to her lips and took a sip. Eleanor had confided in me that one of her magical affinities—the areas her innate magic responded to most strongly—was tea. It fit with her image of a Southern belle come into her own, but not with the renowned arcane-archeologist. She was like a modern day Indiana Jones, only she could probably blow up a Nazi camp with a wave of her cane.
“And,” she said when she finished. “This would be a paid internship?”
I swallowed. “Uh, that would be nice, yeah. I need the income. The girls and I can’t stay over your garage forever. I need real work experience and income to help support us.”
And both of those were hard to come by. For one, I was a freshmen in college who’d only ever worked odd jobs like what I had now. For another I was a cambion changeling with a pair of dark, wickedly tipped antlers growing from my forehead. My heritage had been contained by a magical curse that had left me unable to properly use my magical affinities, essentially crippling my magic. I’d broken the curse, discovered what I was, and it only justified potential employer’s reluctance to hire me.
Cambions were the result of an incubus and a succubus raping a man and a woman and getting the girl pregnant with the man’s stolen seed. A changeling was the half-breed result of a fae and human, usually with the human magically stoned out of their minds for the actual copulation. The odds of my creation were, quite frankly, staggering. Neither changelings nor cambions did well in human society. Both tended to be huge dicks, run wild, and die young. And I was both.
“What about your inheritance?”
I gave a hollow laugh. “That’s…tricky. Turns out when you kill the person who left you everything there’s a lot of legal red tape. Me and Sarah might not get anything for who knows how long.” I sighed. “Look, I’ve been completely reactionary with my life. I can’t keep doing that. I need to move forward and I need to…I need to work and support the girls.”
She smirked, a knowing gleam in her eye. “They’re not working?”
“They are,” I said. “I mean, Lexus is in high school—”
“Graduating this year isn’t she?”
“Yeah.” And I needed to ask after her college applications. They had been something of a sore spot with her and she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. But she should be getting letters in from the colleges she’d applied to by now.
“And Victoria’s working at that tattoo and piercing parlor—”
Eleanor interrupted me again. “I thought she had a more mechanical background?”
Victoria was a werewolf. Or had been when I met her. My magic did weird things to the girls I bound to myself and it had mixed with her werewolf magic. We all had the virus but it didn’t make us turn furry on the full moon. It did alter the way the girls shapeshifted though, and it mated them to me. Or at least it had with Victoria. That was how she’d ended up with me. Her inner wolf had liked me making her previous alpha, the leader of the motorcycle club she’d been a part of, back down. And now she was with us.
I nodded. “She does, but turns out there’s a lot of chauvinism in that industry and it’s not like Woodhurst is all that big. Right now, she’s just trying to bring in money.”
She nodded. “And Sarah?”
“Sarah is…all told, she’s doing amazing. But everything kind of blew up in her face.”
My adopted father, her father, had been raping her for years and keeping her mother, whom he’d told everyone was dead, locked away in a basement prison. She’d escaped by enlisting in the navy and letting them pay her way through medical school. She wasn’t finished yet when I found out all of this because he’d gotten her pregnant and started blackmailing her. I mean, it was a little more complicated than that—he’d kidnapped his wife, who we’d rescued, and also my best friend who was now not my best friend, Jadeite, and had planned this whole elaborate set up where I was supposed to choose which one to rescue. It hadn’t gone well for him.
Caroline, Sarah’s mom, was recovering. Slowly. She needed care and tending to. Fortunately Reagan, Lexus’s mother, had volunteered a room in her house. Sarah and Lexus spent a lot of their time over there with her now. That should have been the end of it, but Sarah and I had become…intimate. My magic had claimed her—or possibly reclaimed her, like I said, this whole thing was complicated—and now she was magically bound to me and infected with our weird version of lycanthropy.
Turns out the navy doesn’t recruit werewolves. She’d been honorably discharged, her college funding taken away, and awarded a purple heart to lessen the sting. Also turns out that hospitals and doctor’s offices won’t hire you if you are carrier. So, her residency, which had been on hold anyway because of the shit her father had been trying to pull, was permanently closed to her and so were most of the career options she’d been training to pursue. Oh, and she was now five months pregnant with her own father’s baby. Too late for an abortion if that was what she’d wanted.
“I can’t put any more pressure on her,” I said. “It’s time for me to step up. I mean, there’s not a lot I’m good at. My magical affinities are sex, fire, and hunting. Not a lot of traditional work for those in the day to day world, but what you do? Finding people and things, never having to carry a weapon despite going into some pretty dangerous areas…this I think I could do. I want to learn from you and I take care of my girls.”
Eleanor took another sip of her tea and smiled. “You know, I’ve always found your earnestness to be your most endearing quality.”
She set the tea down. “Your girls and you have a rather unique relationship. Have you spoken with them about this? You may be gone for the entire summer.”
Yeah, they wouldn’t like that and I sure as hell couldn’t ask Eleanor to bring any of them along
with us when we traveled. And there would be travel.
“Not yet,” I admitted. “But it’s my decision. This is a career that I could get behind. I’ve given it a lot of thought. When I graduate, with the right classes and experience under me, the girls and I could be a pretty formidable team.”
Eleanor nodded. “I will not say yes or no until you have talked it over with them. You may find that despite being bound to you, the girls have plans of their own.” That smirk was back and her eyes flicked toward the door leading to the backyard.
Noises had started filtering inside to us, indistinct voices and the general hubbub of activity. My senses over the past few months had been sharpening, but I had been deliberately giving Eleanor my full attention at the expense of paying attention to anything else. Truth be told I’d been so focused on her I was getting knots between my shoulder blades. Now that she’d brought it to my attention though, there was quite a bit going on outside. What were the girls up to out there?
“Also, you’re a freshmen with no other experience,” she said. “It’s late in the semester so there may be nothing you can do, but if you have anything less than a 3.7 GPA any possibility of an internship is off the table.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t a bad student, actually I was a pretty decent one, but her brother, Professor Hardin, had the toughest, stupidest class ever. I wasn’t doing poorly, per say, but if any of my classes was going to ruin my chances, it would be that one. And my best friend, who’d been helping me get by in it, was not happy with me right now. Dammit.
“Got it,” I said.
“Excellent,” she said. “Now go make sure your girls aren’t wrecking my backyard.”
Chapter Two
I stepped into the backyard and froze.
Sarah, Victoria, and Lexus were all there all right. So was Thomas Morrow from next door, the secretive programmer we’d somehow made friends with, and three other people I didn’t know. Two were men, one was a woman. They had complicated devices I quickly realized were cameras and these giant shiny things that resembled a cross between those covers you put under the windshield of your car to keep the interior from getting hot and a roll of aluminum foil. Shiny.
What was more distracting than the equipment or the shiny things though was that my girls were all scantily clad in string bikinis. My mouth went dry and I sprung an erection. They were…delicious.
My magic rose up inside of me in response to my lust. And it was answered by a gentle rumbling from the magic within the land itself. Eleanor and I hadn’t ever had a real conversation about this place, but her house was built upon some kind of wellspring of living magic. For some reason it liked me. With its help I had once been able to fight off a whole werewolf pack. Along with Lexus and Victoria. Actually they’d probably done a whole lot more than me in that fight. My girls were badasses in addition to being gorgeous.
Lexus was dark skinned and put me in mind of a cheetah with a feline face, lean and athletic build, and a smattering of freckles. Victoria, had some Blackfoot American Indian in her heritage and it gave her an exotic look that made her actual ethnicity hard to place with bronze skin and proud features. She was thicker than Lexus, but not by much, more muscular than athletic with a softness layered over it. And then there was Sarah. My adopted sister was pale and blonde and could never seem to actually tan. Her figure was lush and her smile lit up her entire face. You couldn’t even tell she was pregnant just from looking at her.
All of them were distinct, physically and mentally, but they all had my eyes. Bright emerald green and fiery. They were so different that it made that single similarity stand out, an already striking feature on its own, it was suddenly an element that made them absolutely captivating. Like matching gemstones set into unique pieces of jewelry. One dark, one golden, and one pale. They were beaming, laughing as they struck poses, and the newcomers snapped pictures while positioning the shiny thing to…I guess do something with the light.
The girl’s happiness was almost physical. It lit them up, shining from their green eyes, and washed over and through me. I smiled and felt the tension that had been resting between my shoulder blades evaporate. I loved seeing them happy like this. There hadn’t been nearly enough joy in their lives lately and that was mostly my fault. Trouble seemed to follow me around since breaking my curse and I couldn’t seem to keep out of it.
Absently I gave a mental stroke to the land’s living magic and it shuddered like a dog, overjoyed that its human had returned. That little shudder radiated out through the air, carrying a hint of my lust with it, and settled over the group. The male photographers and Thomas immediately looked uncomfortable and had to adjust themselves. The girls…their nipples were suddenly visible through their bikini tops and their eyes lit up with mischief. The poor female photographer actually looked a little confused beneath her blushing cheeks.
Instantly the poses became more provocative. My cock pulsed with need in my shorts. I swallowed and reached out with my magic to tone it down. I hadn’t meant to do that. The land’s magic, and my influence, withdrew from the group but the girls were on a roll.
Considering Sarah’s history with cameras and being recorded I was a little surprised to find her involved in all of this. Good for her though. All of this probably had to do with that modelling website they’d been working on with Thomas. I didn’t really get it but if anyone would, it was Thomas, and as I didn’t want to interrupt the girls and he was doing nothing but typing away on a tablet between bouts of staring, I decided to go ask him a little bit more.
Unfortunately I only made it about halfway to him before the girls spotted me and came at me in a collective rush.
“I thought you were meeting with Eleanor!”
“Why are you back already?”
“You’re early!”
I blinked at them. “Um, yeah, Eleanor and I had ice tea in her living room. We just wrapped up. What’s all this?”
Lexus and Sarah whirled to glare at Victoria. Victoria was the toughest girl I knew. She could be volatile, but it took a lot to get her there. Normally she was collected and just plain cool. A giant snake kidnapped you? That sucks. A serial rapist is after you? Let’s kill the fucker and be done with it. Between growing up with a pack of werewolf bikers and being the oldest here nothing ever seemed to phase her.
She blushed.
Victoria did not do girly little things like blushing.
“Uh…you said you had an appointment with her,” she said at me, trying not to look at either of the girls.
“I did,” I said and jerked a thumb over my shoulder and repeated, “We just wrapped up.”
“You had it in her living room,” she said. “Here.”
I was missing something. “Yes.”
“Not in town at a coffee shop or at an office or something?”
I shook my head. “I offered to buy her coffee but she likes to make her own tea.”
Victoria’s shoulders sagged. “Of course. I should have figured.”
Sarah laughed. “Oh well. Hey, this might actually work better. He should have a portfolio of his own and we should all get some with him. I mean, the site’s named after him.”
I blinked at them. “You want me to model?”
“Thanks for offering,” Lexus said and the next thing I knew I was being dragged across the lawn and my button up shirt pulled open.
I’d never been muscular but I’d gotten in shape with regular running this semester. Between that and my regular nightly exercise I’d completely burned away the results of over a semester’s worth of regular, cheap, junk food. In fact, since I’d broken my curse I’d actually become a little bit toned. I wasn’t sporting a six pack but I was doing pretty good for myself.
“He has their eyes,” the female photographer whispered when she thought I couldn’t hear. She was staring at me and I could feel little pulses of lust emanating from her. That was flattering.
“Or they have his,” whispered
back one of the guys as he adjusted his shiny thing-a-majig.
I’d never considered myself that attractive. Sure I’d toned my body a bit but really?
“Guys, I am so not model material,” I said.
The girls ignored me.
“This is going to be awesome,” Lexus said, bouncing in place.
The youngest, she was the most excitable of the group. I’d been a little worried about her recently after her friends had been kidnapped and her mother and I forced to have sex by a powerful vampire. But Sarah staying with us had had a soothing effect on her nerves and she was doing significantly better. I didn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize her newfound happiness.
“Come here,” she shouted, and pulled me into a pose, twining a leg around me in a rather suggestive fashion. The pose threw open my shirt and ground my erection into her. I think it was supposed to be reminiscent of a romance novel cover but I felt ridiculous. Could I say so without bursting her bubble?
“Just have fun with it, Caleb,” Sarah said from off to the side. “Get into it and don’t worry about how you look.”
I looked around at the girls, then at Lexus. She’d looked up from her pose, eyes wide and expectant and…happy. She was so happy right now. They all were. Oh fuck it. It wasn’t like I had much in the way of dignity anyway.
I posed. We posed. They posed. We all posed again. It got a little ridiculous. At some point my shirt came completely off and I went through at least two different outfits of clothing I didn’t know I had. I suspected the girls had planned and executed an assault on my wardrobe. I’d find out later. The girls changed outfits too, mostly sticking to bikinis.
We did all kinds of single shots and combinations, different girls pairing off with each other, taking it in turn to pair off with me one on one, coming in two at a time and then final with all three of us together. The shoot concluded with the all the girls soaking wet, stepping out of the pool on the steps, arms around each other. My eyes trailed the paths of the little beads of water as they slid down the girls’ curves, over their breasts, bellies, and thighs. My mouth went dry and my cock strained against my shorts.
The Horned Mage: Books 1-5 Page 32