by Kayti McGee
“Then do it,” she panted. “Come for me. Thorn... Thorn.” My name fell from her lips continually, the way I liked to hear it.
I broke from her again to rummage through the bedside table drawer. I hadn’t needed a condom in far too long. When I turned, Rose was beside the bed, her eyes on my body. She looked as desperate as I felt. Her bra and thong were discarded on the floor. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders. I stared at her—I stared at all of her.
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
She touched my abdomen. Even there, tattoos coiled over my skin. She pushed down my jeans and underwear and I stepped out of them. She tried to pull me toward the bed, but I caught her hand and led her to the rug in front of the fireplace.
“Not there,” I said. “Not like humans.”
I guided her under me, onto her hands and knees, and mounted her like an animal. My shaft rested against her throbbing cunt. I covered her hands with mine, my lean thighs like iron against her soft legs, my stomach flush with her narrow back. She moved helplessly, desperately, trying to maneuver me inside.
“God,” she panted. “God, please.”
I reached under her, stroking her breasts.
“How could you leave?” I spoke into her hair. “Now that I have you like this...” I moved my have down, between her legs. I touched her swollen clit, her slick entrance. I trailed my fingers back up, over her breasts to her neck, and gripped her throat. “I think you want me as much as I want you.”
She trembled and bucked against me. My neck tightened, reciprocating my touch just as if she had two hands around me. My breath thinned.
“I can explain,” she panted.
“You’re... amazing.” My laughter came out raspy as she tightened her invisible hold on my throat. Her heart fluttered in her own neck. I stroked the pulse.
When she reached between us to put me inside, I let her. We moaned together. I slid out, then deeper, out and then deeper again. Her body constricted around mine. I released her throat and wound her hair like a rope around my hand, tugging it to the side. I bit the back of her neck as I rode her.
Every time our bodies locked, she gave a throaty gasp. As for me, I could barely breathe—and Rose seemed blithely unaware of what she was doing.
“Harder,” she pleaded. “You’re... holding back.”
She was right about that. The whole course of our association, at least on my end, could be described as holding back—especially tonight.
I nuzzled my lips to her ear.
“You’re hurting me,” I managed. A raspy chuckle escaped my throat.
“What?” She gasped. “How? Where?”
“F-feels good, Rose.” I slammed into her and she moaned hoarsely. The sensation was exquisite. I gave it to her the way we both wanted it—brutally, unrelentingly—and I rubbed her clit in time with my motions. Still, I wanted more. I kissed the nape of her neck and focused on speaking, which, at present, was more difficult than casting. “I want... to touch you... everywhere.”
Then I did precisely that, continuing to stroke between her legs while my shadows caressed her thighs, flanks, face, and lips. She whimpered and opened her mouth. I pushed two fingers inside while I lifted her breasts and rolled her nipples. A warlock needn’t merely wish for extra hands. I could have had Rose writhing in ecstasy without so much as laying a single physical finger on her. Black and purple splotches swam in my vision. The flickering candlelight dimmed and pinprick stars burst behind my eyelids. She was wringing the life out of my neck, some sort of protective instinct she seemed unknowing of. I could die, I thought giddily. What a way to go.
She came a moment before I did, her body convulsing around mine. A swirl of silver butterflies took flight from my peripheral vision—fancy and asphyxiation mingling—and we collapsed onto the rug. At last, she released my neck. I choked on the air.
“Thorn!” she panted.
I rolled onto my back, grinning deliriously. I reached for her face, missed, and tangled my fingers with her hair.
“Oh, God. Was that... me?” She stared at my neck. The skin was numb.
“How does it look?” I croaked.
She averted her gaze and began fussing over me, which I thoroughly enjoyed. She listened to my heart, put her ear close to my lips, and smoothed back my hair again and again. Even after I recovered, I may have pretended to suffer a bit longer.
“Hmmm,” I finally sighed. I gave Rose a warm, contented smile, and the anxiety melted from her expression. I lifted her and carried her to the bed. In passing, I caught sight of myself in the bureau mirror. The sight prompted a quick double take. Reddish welts encircled my neck in the shape of ten small fingers. I smirked as I laid her in bed. “You do this to all your lovers?”
I was attempting to lighten the mood, but Rose burrowed into the sheets and hid her face. She made a bleak little noise. It was adorable.
“No,” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean to. I had no idea.”
“Hey, I’m kidding.” I dragged the comforter over us and pressed up alongside her. I propped my head in my hand and gazed at her intently. When she emerged, I began to lightly trace the shape of her face with my fingertips. I arranged her hair over her shoulders and chest. I kissed her forehead. “Like I said,” I whispered, “it felt good.”
Her dark eyes met mine. She rolled onto her side we watched each other, not speaking for a long time, only contemplating the mystery of one another.
Fourteen
Rose
I lay next to him, next to Thorn, a sated, jellied ball of guilt. I had taken someone’s life. A witch’s life, which I wasn’t sure made it better or worse. And I’d been so close to killing another, the one whose life I currently valued over any other, and the worst part was that I still didn’t understand how I’d done it. I could accidentally do it again. Yet the smile over what we had together kept creeping back onto my face.
I’d never given much thought to the state of my immortal soul before. I wondered if I was damned now. I wondered if it mattered.
If Thorn would be with me, it wouldn’t.
My entire life had been sent into freefall, and he was a tether somehow, encouraging me to stay human and tempting me towards the occult at the same time. Both angel and devil. I could no sooner imagine my life without him than I could imagine going back to my old existence.
“Can anyone go to Summerland?” I asked him as he wound a thread of my hair around and around his finger.
“If you’re worried about Rue, don’t be.” Thorn’s voice rasped still, even though the marks were rapidly fading from his throat. A pity. I rather liked the idea of adorning him the way his tattoos did. He’d misunderstood, though.
“It honestly hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about her.” And what kind of person did that make me? Not merely a killer, but unfeeling. Unrepentant. Whatever the opposite of Summerland was, I probably deserved that. Eternal winter. The frost in my blood echoed in my torment. Hard to imagine while Thorn’s arms surrounded me. “It’s us I’m curious about.”
His fingers stilled. If at all possible, his eyes burned an even darker green fire.
“You did nothing wrong, Rose. It was simply the first time you’ve exercised your power. Your birthright. You were created in God’s image. How many lives has God taken? When we use our magic, we become closer to divinity. And divinity is both beautiful and terrible. At the end of our days, we all walk together.”
I buried my face into his shoulder, smelling his feral blend of woods and saffron, and considered. Of all my days, this one had been more memorable than any simple ceremony of baptism or graduation. This week truly had been beautiful and terrible. I’d been godlike. First reborn as a witch, then experiencing the closest a live body can be to death when I’d killed a person. According to my vision I may have killed a second simply by not being strong enough to run for a third time. If it’s true that the third is a charm, then I was powerless to summon it. Maybe I’d bound us, as he’d said, but the bond we’d j
ust made with our bodies felt like the summation of a pact sealed the moment our eyes met.
This was always going to happen.
Perhaps I’d performed the ritual, but it was he who had spellbound me.
And he who would suffer the price.
“Thorn…” I rolled back just enough to look up at him but lost my nerve, eyes lowered to protect myself from his unrelenting gaze. He kissed each of my lowered lids. The guilt could end me if he didn’t. “I’m going to kill you.” There was no other way to say it. He paused, all cool breath and warm skin.
“And here I thought that had gone well.” I could hear his smile, even in the rasp. I opened my eyes. He needed to see how serious I was.
“Of course that went well. We aren’t dead yet.” I gave the remnants of his bruises butterflies. “But you will die if we stay together. I saw it in a vision when you kissed me at Toil & Trouble. And before you even start, no, I’ve never had a vision like that, but also I have kind of seen things for my whole life, it’s just that—” He shut me up with a kiss.
“Rose. You’re a baby. The things you think you see, that you know, they’re not really worth spending much time on. Do you think Da Vinci treasured his own childhood drawings? No, because they weren’t even rough drafts. They were the scribbles of children. Not worth judgement, these small moments. And yet to you, the child, they feel momentous.”
I was quiet for a moment, feeling the weight of the years between us. I was a child, comparatively. But even a child can tell the difference between the voices of their imaginary friends and those of their parents. I wasn’t ready to accept the ultimate authority of Thorn’s pantheon yet, but I knew what I had seen originated closer to them than to my own mind.
“Does it bother you, our age difference?” I asked. This time, his hands didn’t hesitate as he continued to stroke my hair.
“There is no age to life experience. Nor to chemistry. So, no. Does it bother you?”
I thought again. “I don’t like the idea of you dying before me.” I still hadn’t forgotten the death-mask he’d shown me in the woods, but his body was shaking with silent laughter.
“I forget how much you have yet to learn. Trust me when I say the danger of you dying first is far greater, Little Red.” And then that condescending asshole booped me. I lifted my face quickly and bit his finger. I sobered quickly, though, at the reminder that both our lives were in distinct danger even as we snuggled under his fancy linen sheets.
“I’m still scared. I watched you die. You bleed out in the woods. The look in your eyes…” A shiver ran through me as I relived the scene. The wolves closing in, and the hunter sacrificing himself. “It’s my fault. And I don’t know how to stop it.”
He grasped my face in both hands and forced me to look at him. “None of this is your fault, Rose. This entire situation was engineered by the Maven—the head of our family. We’ll get to the bottom of it together.” The gravity in his voice made me want to believe him, but I knew better. The sucking feeling in my chest during the vision was immeasurable guilt. Whatever he said wouldn’t change that. “And speaking of family, there’s more you don’t know.”
I waited for him to tell me something typically batshit, that he was actually raised by wolves or bore an ancient curse, but what he said was far crazier than that.
“Did you have any idea you were performing a summoning spell for your mother after you left Rune’s the first time?” For once, I was speechless. “Clearly not,” he muttered. “So much to learn. Necromancers cannot casually pour one out for the dearly departed if they don’t want them to become the returned.”
“I can do that? I did that? How did you know? Could you feel it?” Even as I asked, the memories assailed me. The way all noise stopped. The anticipation of the trees. Something had been coming. I was the one who invited it.
“I spoke with her.” No. He couldn’t have.
I kicked off the covers and got up, not even caring that I was still naked. This was patently unfair. I came to Juniper Hollow to learn about my family, got him killed, and then someone else spoke to my dead mother without me? I was infuriated. Unintentional or not, it was my summoning. He drove me off and stole my moment. I should have been there. It should have been me. There was no way I could stay in his bed for even a second longer knowing what he had taken. I stomped over to the hearth so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
Looking at Thorn melted me faster than the fire and I wasn’t ready for that.
“Rose.” His voice was in my ear, the coolness of his body providing a counterpoint to the heat coming off the flames in front of me. I made a note to add his swift, stealthy approaches to the list of reasons I wasn’t speaking to him. Then I made a second note to tell my body that, as it curved back towards his.
“I didn’t know what you had done until you were already gone. Such a feat… no Blackmane has the power to raise the dead. We tend to fear necromancers. The darker forms of magic have a much higher risk of driving the witch insane.”
I was listening. I wasn’t quite certain I was ready to calm down, but I was listening. Necromancy… Rosemary and Sage had guessed that early on. There wasn’t much I knew about the concept, except that if it was scary to witches, it was fucking terrifying to mortals. The word itself brought up unholy visions. No surprise sanity ran counter to it. Had I inherited it from Luna? Was that power the cause of her downfall?
“Even if I had known, even if I had allowed you to complete the ritual, what would you have done? My simple tricks with the pepper spray and the water turned you from a confident, curious woman into a chattering idiot in five minutes. If that had been followed up with meeting your dead mother, you’d be in a straitjacket right now. Come back to bed. I’m telling you everything I know.”
His voice was returning, but it still cracked just a little at the idea of me being commited. That crack was echoed in my resolve, and the last of my sudden anger drained from my body as I allowed him to lead me back to our cozy nest.
“Did she… did she ask about me?” I wanted to know as Thorn carefully tucked me back in.
“She wanted to know what I wanted with you. I told her nothing. That I had sent you away to spare your life. And then I sent her away as well.” The last vestiges of bruising had left his throat, leaving only the necklaces he had chosen behind. “She told me I wasn’t a Blackmane.”
I rested my hand over his heart, the place where it seemed a new bruise was forming.
“Do you believe her?”
“The dead do lie. But she believed what she said. And it… rang true in there.” He covered my hand with his larger one. I ached for him. Nothing is colder than than being outside someone else’s home fire. My parents had never made a secret of my adoption, but it wasn’t until I was in second grade that I’d finally understood what it meant. Mother was not my mom. Father was not my dad. I’d cried myself to sleep for a week, wondering how they could possibly love a stranger they way they might have loved a child born to them.
Sometimes I still don’t think they do.
“What would that mean?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.” The moment of silence stretched into many as I traced the spot a knife would one day puncture.
“Can I call her again? Maybe she has more information.” I didn’t give a shit about information. I wanted her. Or, I did want information, but not about witches and land disputes. I wanted to know about my mother. Who she was. What she liked. Her hopes, her dreams, her failures and successes. If I was being completely honest with myself, I desperately needed to know where I fit in to all of it. Was I longed-for dream or a horrible accident? Did I cause her death or cause her to regret it? None of these were answers I could gain from any kind of online DNA analysis, and the idea that there was a way had my heart racing with the possibilities. Could I have a relationship with her after all?
This time, the husk in his voice was sleep. “Perhaps soon. You are not to step one foot outside this house until we know m
ore about why the Maven wants you dead. It’s not time for you to join your mother yet.”
“Okay, yeah, the woods aren’t safe, but what about on your property?”
“Rose, I live in the woods. I live on the mountain. ‘My’ property is more of a lease than an ownership. The landlord can generally always swing by. Magic of that magnitude would be apparent to everyone within a hundred miles, and they’d all want to know what was happening.” He stroked my arm, as though that would soothe me now that I knew what was possible. “Particularly the Maven.”
“So we leave together. We do it in KC. The drive’s less than a day.” His breath was slowing, he was paying less attention to me. I shook him a little.
“We can’t leave. Specifically, you can’t. You’re my guest, but to them you’re an enemy intruder. Leave, and what happened to Rune will look like a kindness comparatively.” I rolled my eyes, and he somehow managed to hear even that, superpowered as he was. In less than a second, he had rolled atop me, staring into my eyes with that jade fire, speaking with an intensity much hotter than any flame. “Rose, this isn’t something to be taken lightly. I forbid you from attempting to contact your mother.”
I dreamed of her that night, and of Thorn. Of blood and earth. Of the darkness of death and the void left in its wake. It was a relief to be woken by sunlight and the everyday sounds of Thorn getting dressed. I lay in his bed and watched him from under lowered lids as he covered the art on his body with yet another plain black shirt and a pair of jeans, wishing he’d take them back off and join me. I was sore all over, and I relished the thought of pressing the contusions even deeper into my marrow with his hips, his hands.
“You were very lucky last night.” He brought a steaming mug of coffee to the nightstand, not fooled for a second by my pretense at sleep.
“Don’t I know it.” I tossed him a flirtatious wink that he rolled his eyes at, but not before hiding a smirk.