by Kathryn Moon
“Mmmph.” Callum shrugged and I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
“Is it all dead?” I asked, stepping up to test a little undergrowth sapling. It bent and stretched under my hands, still young but without any of its lively green.
“No, just absent of a color,” Isaac said. “A significant color. Life, healing, growth, safety.”
“And the animals?” I asked.
“That I didn’t notice, actually,” Isaac admitted with a twist of his mouth, studiously avoiding Callum’s gaze.
“I’ll come back with Frost, look for tracks to see if they moved to a new territory or…”
Or if they’d gone the way of Cecil Pincombe and the circulation desk.
I swallowed and cleared my throat. “I should get back to the library soon.”
They walked with me, Callum sharing more of the sandwiches with Isaac and the pair of them with arms or hands settled around me. It was a solid, safe feeling and this time I didn’t mind the looks from others on campus. I don’t think I even noticed them.
“Come back and stay at the house tonight,” Isaac said as we reached the library doors.
“I need to get back to mine first,” I said. I needed fresh clothing and also to restock on the spelled anti-fertility tinctures, especially if I was going to be a nightly guest with these men. Even if falling into bed with Isaac had been born out of a need for comfort, it was certainly something I planned on repeating.
“Just don’t eat dinner before you come in,” Isaac said. “If I have to cook for Aiden and Callum you deserve to have some too.”
Callum looked as if he was fighting words at the tip of his tongue but in the end they both kissed me goodbye and I entered the library alone.
Gwen and Hildy were overseeing a repair on the desk. It looked patchy and temporary for the moment and the loss of the art of the original left my heart aching. Tatsuo was missing from my tables of books but Bryce was still perched on their stack, picking a bone clean from lunch.
They snapped it as I arrived and sucked on the marrow, teeth gleaming a grin at me as I sat.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ll have to do better than that to scare me,” I said and Bryce huffed out a laugh.
I stared at my paper, scribbled with tests of words and thought of the woods, all the green taken right off the plants. Like words off a page. A bone picked clean…
Words cannot be eaten I wrote.
“Oh!” Tatsuo shouted, sitting up from behind a table stacked with books. He had one in his hand and twisted it to show me the pages, full of tiny, perfectly lined print. “You’ve solved it!”
18. Joanna
I was finishing at home—there were letters from my sister-in-law and the new librarians in Bridgeston to answer—when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and narrowed my eyes at Aiden.
“I do know the way to the house,” I said.
Aiden only grinned and bent, pressing a kiss to my lips with his soft mouth. I chased the touch without thinking and he chuckled, the low sound ringing in my bones, a thrill low in my belly.
“I wanted to show you a shortcut,” he said. “May I come in?”
I stepped back to make room for him and laughed as he crowded in close, arms snaking around me. The door shut behind him with a low, abrupt, hum at the back of his throat. And then I was scooped up, my feet hanging free and Aiden’s face pressed into my neck, breathing deeply. I wrapped my arms over his shoulders and tucked my face down into his shoulder.
“How are you?” I asked as the moment stretched.
“Better now,” he mumbled into my skin, making goosebumps break out over my arms.
I felt unusually small and light in his hold and I settled myself more comfortably since he didn’t seem interested in setting me down.
“I’m exhausted,” he added after another deep breath.
“I almost fell asleep on Bryce Gast today,” I said.
Aiden looked up at that, our faces so close I almost went cross-eyed looking back at him.
“Gast let you?” he asked, eyes wide.
“No, they whacked me upside the head with a pamphlet,” I said, and the tightness in my chest eased at Aiden’s roar of a laugh that shook us both.
“Are you alright?” he asked, kissing my cheek and then my jaw before settling back at my neck and taking a long breath.
“I think so?” I said and he kissed my throat. “I haven’t really given myself a moment to think. And now I just feel…sort of like it was years ago instead of hours.” My head was foggy and my body was heavy and I felt caught between senseless giggles and tears.
“Take a nap with me at the house,” Aiden said. I smiled, noting the way Aiden forgot to ask. But at least he made the orders sound more like suggestions every time.
“Alright, but we should get going or there won’t be time. Even with a shortcut,” I said.
“Ah yes, that’s the other reason I came. Do you feel up to a little magic?” He set me back on my feet, hands rubbing at my back.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ve been writing all day but I haven’t felt anything like I did last night.”
“Good, now grab your things and find me a closet,” Aiden said.
I knew before he had to tell me what the idea was, and I drew the chalk out of my skirt pocket when we made it to the tiny pantry door.
“Will you even be able to fit through?” I asked, glancing at Aiden’s chest. Even if he turned sideways it might be a squeeze.
“Don’t be smart, just get us home,” he said with a mocking glare.
Door to Aiden’s bedroom I wrote on the outside of the door, biting my lip at his use of ‘home.’
I opened the door and my jaw fell loose as I stepped inside. The room was scarlet, with an enormous, dark four-poster bed staring at me from the opposite end. The windows were curtained with heavy black material that matched the drapes on the bed, and the only light came from a small golden lamp on a bedside table. There was a glossy blood red leather armchair holding a guitar and a dark armoire with one door open and revealing Aiden’s collection of clothes that would have had Hildy swooning.
“Scoot,” he said from behind me and I stumbled deeper into the room, the toes of my shoes catching on a dense patterned rug.
I was so dazzled by the room, the color and heat and intensity of a beating heart, that I missed watching Aiden squeeze himself through a too small door.
“I told Callum he could come and look at the portal after we arrived but since you picked my room and the bed is right here, I think we’ll just see if he notices,” Aiden said. He passed me, shrugging out of his suit coat and hanging it up in his armoire, along with the tie fixed around his neck. His shoes were toed off next and then he shuffled over to the bed and fell in with a creak of protest and a flutter of sheets.
“Coming, darling?” he asked, face down in the mattress.
I snorted, setting down my small case by the armoire where it would be out of the way and then untangling myself out of my boots. I touched the wallpaper which was stiff and shiny, something like a crest pressed in a matte pattern over every inch. I looked at the art on the walls, certain Isaac had painted the series of constellations that glittered inside of gleaming black frames. I dug my toes into the carpet and felt guilty for even stepping on something that felt like velvet.
“City boy,” I murmured, looking around.
Aiden rolled over on the bed, propping himself up on an elbow and staring at me.
“Isaac calls me that,” he said.
“But you did, didn’t you?” I asked, fingering the crystals hanging from the lamp at his bedside. “Grow up in the city? In the south?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding a little wary.
There was more I could say. That the contents of this bedroom probably cost more than my entire house in Bridgeston. Mine and my neighbors. That I had never seen a room like it before. Never met anyone like him before.
“Where can I leave my things?” I asked, not wan
ting to muss the place. I unbuttoned my borrowed shirt and pulled it free from my skirt.
“Are you undressing?” he asked, eyes brightening.
“I’m not napping in my clothes; they’ll get wrinkled,” I said.
“Leave them next to my guitar.”
I folded them up, standing in my slip, and then went to join Aiden in the bed where he’d moved over to make room for me. The mattress dipped like a cloud under my knee and I froze. Aiden watched me, barely stifling a laugh.
“C’mere,” he said, and then he grabbed my hand and pulled me down into silk and feather down.
I held my breath as the bed settled around me like an airy hug and then caught Aiden’s grin in the corner of my eye.
“Isaac keeps his bed like a country boy,” Aiden said. “I prefer a softer touch.”
I wiggled into the mattress and it shifted and curved around me until Aiden’s patience ran out and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling my back to his chest.
“Plenty of time to test the give later,” he mumbled into my hair.
I covered his hands with mine and he tangled our fingers, his knees drawing up to curve behind mine. Aiden’s heartbeat was at my back, the soft puff of his breath in my hair. And the house around us was quiet but active, the creak of floorboards not far off as someone came down the stairs. I was more comfortable than I’d ever been. And more weary too. But that wasn’t a cure for what happened when I let my eyes fall shut.
The dark of the library and the choking heaviness that had hung in the air. The scene of the circulation desk out of the corner of my eye, blurry and indistinct but no less gruesome. Something small and torn in a puddle of red.
So I kept my eyes open and studied the pattern of the wallpaper until it became abstracted. A red face sneering, and something in flight in the spaces between. Aiden huffed and held me tighter and my eyelids were heavy but there was nothing good behind them. So I found Isaac’s constellations on the wall and matched them with the familiar pieces of the night sky you could see over fields at home.
“You’re not sleeping,” Aiden rumbled and I shivered. “Tell me what’s wrong?”
“Too much in my head,” I answered and he released me a little, pulling at my hip to turn me on my back until he was hovering at my side.
“Would you feel better alone? You have a room here-”
“No,” I said quickly, twisting again and draping an arm over his side and propping my head up with the other.
“Then tell me what’s in your head,” he said, stretching his neck forward to kiss the center of my forehead.
I closed my eyes and this time the backs of my eyelids were simple and dark so I held still. “It’s just…nothing has stopped since I got to Canderfey,” I said.
“With us?” he asked, and I held him to me before he could try to move away.
“No, well that’s only a part of it. I never really left Bridgeston before, not far. Canderfey is new. The kind of place I knew existed but didn’t really believe because it was so…outside. And all the people here. And the magic.” Aiden’s fingers traced up and down my spine and the drowsy peace that followed made it easier to speak. “And yes there is you and Isaac and Callum, a coven. But there is the fact that I’m a witch. A real one. Every time I write something and it works I almost don’t believe it. And then…last night-” my voice choked in my throat and Aiden held me tight. I caught my breath and let the handful of tears that had gathered slip out.
“Last night was new for all of us,” Aiden said. “Well, for Isaac and I at least.”
I thought of that, thought of Callum prowling through the library like a soldier.
“Was Callum in the Enmaire army?” I asked.
Aiden sighed, a big deep breath that ruffled the top of my head. “Callum was in the war.”
I blinked at that. “That can’t be right, he’s too young.” The Red War in the North was nearly twenty years ago and Callum couldn’t have been more than a teenager.
“He was too young,” Aiden said, voice flat. I thought that if I pressed I could learn more but it sounded as if it hurt Aiden to speak of it and I imagined the same would be true for Callum.
“He doesn’t like to act the soldier,” Aiden said. “Still, it comes out in ways. Over-protective, quick reactions…gut instincts. He’s born to it and it suits him even when he hates the fact.”
“That’s why I always seem to have an escort now?” I asked, thinking of the way someone seemed to be conveniently placed to walk me to my next destination at any moment.
Aiden hummed in agreement and then added, “And why you’ll be talked into staying for dinner and the rest of the night as often as he can manage it. Mind you, I don’t disagree with him.”
I frowned against Aiden’s chest, chewing at my lip. I had a few thoughts about that but they deserved Callum’s ears, not Aiden’s so I’d hold onto them for now.
“We just want you safe,” Aiden murmured, kissing the top of my head.
I pulled back to look up at him and raised an eyebrow.
“With us,” Aiden added, smile growing. “Happy…satisfied.”
He was grinning now and my cheeks ached with resisting the urge to join him. He pulled me up, my slip rucking up my hips as he moved me closer, resting his forehead against mine. He was shifting us in small movements, bodies brushing together until I was on my back, pinned into the decadent mattress by his weight. It was simultaneously tender and carnal, the feel of him pressing me down, surrounding me.
“Do you want to rest?” he asked, and his head bent to mine, lips stroking over mine and then pulling away as I chased them.
“This feels restful,” I said, which was a bit of a lie because this felt stirring and left me wanting more. But it was certainly better than lying in a bed and staring at a wall.
“Oh good,” he said, dipping down again, body stroking mine with the movement and hitching my breath in my chest.
I wriggled underneath him, spreading my legs to fit him between. His body was thicker than Isaac’s and the stretch in my thighs travelled up my back and down to my toes as he settled closer. We both took heavy breaths, mouths open against one another.
“Been waiting to kiss you since the day you arrived,” he said.
I smiled at that, thinking of him in the window seat. The shock of him to my system, someone so beautiful and teasing. “You have kissed me,” I said.
He lifted his head, eyes wrinkled in the corners with his smile. Then he sank back down, taking my lips in a long draw, clasped between his. His tongue flicked out, tasting, and then he dove back in, our hips grinding together as I struggled to find purchase in the kiss. But with every stroke of his mouth and caress of his tongue I was being swept into a current, a vocabulary of touch well beyond my experience.
His hands framed my face, holding me to him, fingertips stroking along my jaw. Every whimper he drew out of me he answered with a melodic hum that travelled into the kiss and down into my belly, creating a thrumming warmth. It was magic, a melody made for pleasing. I couldn’t answer it with a written word so instead I wrapped myself around Aiden, clinging and accepting until I had to pull away to breathe. His mouth moved to my neck and I gasped, the music just as strong on my skin as it was on my tongue.