A Witch Among Warlocks: The Complete Series Box Set

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “Done already?” Montague said, his voice a tiger’s purr in my ear.

  “Not me,” I gasped. “Just Alec.”

  “Good. So there’s room for me.”

  “I’m not done,” Alec said. “I’m just getting started. I wonder if it’s time to start expanding your horizons.” He reached a hand down, gently cupping my mound, feeling my heat. “What do you think about trying us both at once?”

  “Nervous,” I breathed. “Excited…”

  “Have you ever played back here?” His hand reached back to my ass, a slick finger gently circling the hole.

  “I can’t say I’ve never experimented,” I said. “But just a little. With toys. Not boys.” I laughed nervously.

  “You’re definitely too big,” Montague said to Alec. “It’s my turn to explore new territory…”

  “Like, is it messy?” I asked.

  Alec chuckled. “You’re too cute. I’m a demon. I don’t even care if it’s messy. I’ll just clean you up.”

  “Well, there’s no shower here!”

  “People had sex before showers were invented. But I can haul in a bucket of water for you.”

  “Shirtless,” I said.

  “Well, it’s Alec, so I think that goes without saying,” Montague said dryly. “The trick will be getting him to put his pants back on.”

  Alec stepped out and came back a minute later, posing in the doorway with a bucket of water in one hand. He flexed one muscular arm and slowly lowered the pail to the ground. The light of the cave was dim, but just enough to highlight ever contour of his abs.

  “Bow-chicka-wow-wow,” I said. “I feel like I ordered a really weird stripper.”

  He grinned and slid into the bed beside me, while both of them started kissing and caressing my naked body. I was quickly rendered breathless and almost useless by the melting quality of their hands and mouths on me, this overdose of masculinity after a lot of warm, hungry summer nights where I could only dream.

  “Mm…you guys smell so good…and you feel even better.”

  “Are you ready to be filled completely?” Alec asked, circling my nipples with his fingers.

  “Yeah…I think so…”

  “You’re definitely hot enough to catch fire down here…” He moved to my nub of desire, slowly teasing a sensation out of me that almost felt like an orgasm, but in super slow motion, and it never quite fully hit. All I knew was that it was driving me out of my mind.

  Before I knew it, Montague was stroking lube onto his cock. He kissed me gently while sliding a fingertip up my nether hole. “Getting you good and ready…”

  Alec lay on the bed and pulled me toward him, his tongue sinking into my mouth, his hands running along my back, gently urging me to lift my ass. I felt Montague enter me, just the tip of his shaft, his cool skin quickly warming against my heat.

  I gripped Alec’s upper arms, groaning.

  “Slowly,” Montague said. “Ungh…you feel so good, Charlotte.”

  “Look at your face,” Alec said, grinning.

  I chewed my lip as Montague carefully slid into me. I was so turned on, it didn’t hurt as much as I feared, but it was unfamiliar and I felt really full, and a little scared because I knew Alec wanted more of me too. Oh yeah, I knew what I was in for when I agreed to this.

  “I’m in,” Montague said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah…yeah, I’m good…” I could barely speak. Alec’s cock was between my pussy lips, slowly sliding along the tingling nerves there, driving me insane. “Let’s do this.”

  “That’s our girl…we’ll take good care of you.” Alec nudged inside me, Montague shifting position until I was as close between them as I could be, my toes already curling as Alec’s thick length hit so many spots I was seeing fireworks.

  The only thing missing? Firian.

  When I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that some of the hands touching me were not Montague’s cool fingers or Alec’s strong hands, but Firian’s graceful ones. It destroyed me that he had to miss out on these moments, that we were unable to share our bodies anymore.

  Despite that tinge of sadness, I couldn’t hold onto it for long before Montague started to gently flex inside me, the motion also making Alec throb, my body clenching around them almost against my will. I was filled, spread, pinned. No matter how careful they tried to be, I was steadily driven toward a cliff of pleasure.

  “Ohh…” My fingernails carved half-moons in Alec’s skin. “Ohhh… you’re killing me…”

  “If only I could,” Montague said wickedly. “But only if I could bring you back again, and again…”

  I needed it to end. But I didn’t want it to ever end. It didn’t matter, I was reaching a climax anyway, and it wasn’t even until later that I considered everyone in the cave could probably hear me. Ohmigod.

  Well, in the moment I was just crying out incoherently as my body twitched and bucked, rocked by a full body orgasm that started in my core and rippled out to my fingers and toes.

  I think I only lasted about two minutes after that before falling asleep in their arms, dimly aware of Alec wiping me off with a cool washcloth and kissing my face. “Our beautiful witch…no more summers apart, okay?”

  Chapter Eight

  Charlotte

  In the morning, Stuart asked me to meet him by the Wyrd tree. First he—or rather, Orson and Penny—offered us a hearty breakfast of biscuits with the most delicious honey, lightly sugared berries and cream.

  “If this is a faery breakfast, I’m so down for it.”

  “The honey comes from our own bees,” Stuart said. “They feed only on the most pure mountain flowers.”

  “Who is ‘our’?” Alec asked.

  “Penny and Orson and myself,” Stuart said. “I am the son of a faery lord, but I don’t have a lord’s domain so much as I have a homestead. My father sent these two to maintain my household. I don’t ask them to do much, but they do keep the bees.”

  “This cream is delicious, too,” I said. “Do y’all keep cows?”

  “No, Orson went to Publix this morning. He’s a gruagach, resilient enough to handle the human world, and he needs his cream.”

  “I don’t need my cream as much as you need your coffee, Stuart,” Orson said, giving him a rather peeved expression.

  “Oh.” Right. Publix probably had a buy one get one on berries, and now I didn’t want to ask where the biscuits came from. If he told me they were Pillsbury I was going to lose the fantasy entirely. Note to self: read up more about faeries. If I was supposed to know what a gruagach was, I certainly didn’t.

  “If you’re done, let’s begin. We have a lot of work to do before school starts, and Ignatius is counting on me. Come alone.”

  “Have you heard from him at all?” I asked, as I finished off my last biscuit.

  “No. I am sure they haven’t allowed him any contact with his allies.”

  “He’s a she, right?” Harris said.

  “Harris, jeez,” I said. “It seems like he identifies with male pronouns, doesn’t he, Stuart?”

  “Er, yes, I think I know what you mean,” Stuart said. “Ignatius was born a woman but has lived his life as a man and I can’t really think of him any other way.”

  “And he was in love with Ina, right?”

  “Oh, yes. They were…both very much in love,” Professor McGuinness said hesitantly. “And she knew his secret, but if it troubled her, she never said so.”

  “I ship that,” I whispered. Ina was still alive, she was just in the Haven, and insane. Were they still in love? That would be the cutest thing ever.

  Professor McGuinness looked at me thoughtfully.

  “I envy you young American humans,” he said. “In the magical world, LGBT is not a community. One is tolerated quietly, but not accepted—celebrated, even—in the way I see in the human world these days.”

  “It depends where you live,” I said. “But you’re right. I mean, what kind of monster do you have to be to not enjoy Queer Ey
e. When they filmed it in Georgia we all wished they would come for our science teacher. You…I mean…is it true about you and Samuel?”

  He looked a little embarrassed. “I don’t know if I can say that.”

  “But you had feelings for him?”

  He was a fairly old dude, but he looked as nervous as a teenager when I asked him that. “Oh—well—”

  “It’s okay to say so,” I said. “Whether he liked you or not. Like…maybe you need closure?”

  “Closure…” He gave me one of my favorite looks of all time. It’s the look an old person gives you when they notice your generation is not all just morons hunched over phones. “It’s…true that I had feelings for Samuel. I would like to think maybe he felt the same. He was much more exciting than I was. I never dared to say a word. He was ambitious and I’m sure I would have hampered that.” He shook his head. “No need to dwell on the past.”

  “It’s not really the past,” I said. “You’re still here. I mean, it seems like maybe you guys could have been together and you didn’t take a shot.”

  “No,” he said, regretfully. “I didn’t. My parents told me if I didn’t want to get married I should become a professor or a scholar in a place like Merlin where women weren’t allowed. Happiness was not much of a consideration. I would hurt Samuel’s career. At this time, even humans were not tolerant of such things.”

  “How can it be good magic if no one is happy?” I asked.

  “It isn’t good so much as orderly,” he said. “But Sinistral is still worse.”

  “Which is why we must find a way to Wyrd. We have work to do,” Stuart repeated.

  “Right.” I tried to give Professor McGuinness a smile. Like, nothing was more sad than an older person with unrequited, forbidden love hanging over their head. He looked abruptly stoic, like his students smiling at him was a bridge too far. Okay, maybe that was fair.

  “Let me get my hiking shoes on. I really wish I had a more mystical outfit to get into the mood.”

  “If you are devoted to learning this magic, clothes are irrelevant,” Stuart said.

  “I am! But what happened to your 1970s jackets, Stuart? You sure changed your own wardrobe fast.” I laced up my boots and finished the hike up the mountain to the meadow of the Wyrd tree. Stuart didn’t walk with me, but he was waiting there.

  “How have you been doing with the exercises I gave you?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “Firian was a strict teacher.”

  Stuart brushed a hand just over several points on my body that were probably chakras. “Not perfect, but better than I expected,” he said. “It was probably a good thing he was trapped in fox form, for the purpose of the moment.”

  “But he’s so miserable…”

  Stuart gave me a deadly serious look. “Charlotte, up until now, I have treated you as any other student at Merlin College. That’s what we all wanted for you. A normal life, and a trial period to see if you were up for the challenge presented. But that time is over now. When your junior year begins, you are walking back into the hands of the council. I can tell that you did take your studies seriously, and I’m glad of it, but this is where it gets serious.”

  I did appreciate Stuart’s tact. He didn’t say outright that I needed to think about my magic and the seriousness of this mission more than I needed to think about making out with guys.

  But, message received. I tried to look resolved, like I was thinking about the gravity of my position and not how good it felt to be the center of an Alec and Montague sandwich. “I understand, Lord Stuart. Can I call you Lord Stuart? That sounds a little more faery appropriate.”

  He almost, but not quite, rolled his eyes. “If it helps, go right ahead.” He brushed a finger along the top of my wand, like he was testing it somehow. “You have proved yourself a talented magical user in a number of disciplines, but the one that intrigues me most is the same power Samuel had. He could summon the dead at will without succumbing to its darker side. You had never summoned the dead before, but when you were in St. Augustine you summoned powerful spirits to your aid. You are going to work on this all year, and you’re not going to tell the council or any of the teachers about it.”

  “Okay. What do I do?”

  “First, this is the reason I’ve been having you do deep focus exercises. You need to work on connecting to the place where you are and the spirits that dwell there, and you need to be good at wards so you can control the spirits if needed, but—you will be a Wyrd witch, so your focus is going to be on maintaining calm and accepting the flow of events. You are not a good witch or a bad witch. You’re a neutral witch. So you will summon all sorts of spirits, without judgment. But, you are still within your rights to defend yourself when a spirit turns violent.”

  “I understand…”

  “Most importantly, remember the definition of a white necromancer.”

  “Don’t get emotionally attached to the dead,” I said. “I have to let loved ones go.” I knocked on the tree trunk. “Hopefully, I won’t have to face that.”

  “You will,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

  “I mean, I know people I love will die,” I said. “I already saw my grandfather’s spirit…”

  “You are a witch,” Stuart said. “One day, you will lose someone who didn’t seem ready to go. It happens to all of us. You must let it happen. You must learn to believe it was their time. That’s how you will become great.”

  Montague. Alec. Firian. Harris. Daisy. Stuart. Ignatius. My dad.

  My brain was racing over all the people I knew, considering what I would do if they died. Whether I could handle it and let them go.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  Never mind! I want to go home! My brain screamed in panic.

  Stuart kept giving me that calm expression. “Clear your mind, Charlotte. Take a deep breath.”

  There is no way but forward.

  I’m not sure who was talking in my head now. My own voice, Samuel…?

  Oh, right, that was a line from Mom’s yoga video. It sounded pretty wise, so I repeated it aloud.

  “Very good,” Stuart said. “You are already connecting with the spirit of Wyrd. There was never any way but forward. There was never any path for you but this one. Of all the infinite paths, once you take one, all others become irrelevant, and so there is no mistake.”

  I twisted the ring that would never leave my finger. Fares Wyrd as she must.

  “Try to connect with the spirits,” Stuart said.

  “Right now?”

  “Yes. Right now.”

  “But…what do I tell them? I’m not in danger so I don’t know what I’m calling them for, or who I’m trying to summon.”

  “It is harder without a reason or person in mind. That’s why you need to practice.”

  I wrapped both hands around my wand and tried to focus on opening my mind to the spirit world, without knowing what I wanted to happen. I just needed to be able to reach into that channel any time, the way I was able to summon the lady spirits to help me before. I felt like Samuel’s spirit helped me out that time. I wanted to be able to do it on my own. His spirit wouldn’t always be there for me, would it?

  I knew Samuel didn’t mean to die. But…sometimes it felt like none of my magical family was there for me. All the adults ended up dying or going crazy or turning bad, so would that happen to me too?

  Would I lose the boys I loved so much?

  “Charlotte,” Stuart said. “Stop. Breathe again. What did we just discuss?”

  “There is no way but forward.”

  “Do you know why people die?”

  “Well, I’ve seen the sexist old council and I’m glad people do die eventually…”

  “Death makes the living stronger,” he said. “Death makes us live harder and love harder. Faeries don’t love or grieve the same way. We can live for hundreds of years. We envy you.”

  “Oh, right… I’m so sure.”

  “It’s true. Faeries still die, of course.
But it’s not the same. Now—go ahead and see what you can manage. Take your time.”

  I breathed. I tried to empty my mind. At first I didn’t try to do anything else.

  All summer, Firian had nagged me to improve my concentration and meditate. It was a real drag. I still didn’t like it very much. My mind was restless, thinking about how much I missed my guys, and all the things I wanted to do, and my worries. But when I got frustrated, Dad reminded me that it was like playing an instrument. “You know how long I had to keep practicing the same stuff over and over before I could finger pick a tune? And then I never really stuck with it. Even so-called prodigies have to put in the hours. I’ll always wonder if I would have made it in a band, you know? Keep with it.”

  Even though I was resistant, I was getting better at it little by little too, and some days I could feel it. Some days I saw a twinkle in Firian’s fox eyes that showed he was proud of me.

  I felt the world shift slightly. Sometimes magic wasn’t shooting fireballs and burning down Master Blair’s office. The real power seemed to be in the subtle stuff.

  Harris is better at that than I am, I thought, and that got me bristling.

  I felt the air spark around me, the mood changing, and a few ghostly figures swirled around me.

  “Excellent work!”

  “What do I do now?”

  “Ask them to lend you power.”

  “Okay—um—hello, spirits…” The spirits were whooshing around in these undefinable ghostly forms. I wasn’t getting awesome witches or a Native American hunting party this time. These ghosts were actually making a little “whooo” sound as they darted around like big fluttery hornets, and to be honest I felt silly talking to them.

  “More authoritative,” Stuart said.

  I threw out my arms. “O spirits, lend me your strength! —hey!” The spirits whirled away and vanished. “What the hell?”

  “They determined you weren’t a good host,” he said. “You don’t have enough command.”

  “Well, I don’t want to boss them around. I’m trying to be respectful. Plus, they weren’t the best ghosts I’ve ever seen.”