“So, is it safe for you to tell me how my fate is tied up with yours?” she asks.
“I have seen nothing myself of our future together. My only sense around you has been knowing that I need to leave the hunter alive and unharmed. She has some purpose yet to play.”
“Maybe getting Ben out of town and out of my life,” Ivy says.
“Perhaps so, perhaps not.”
“Do vampires ever. You know, with each other?” she asks.
“No. They only feel those desires for the warm.”
“I suppose somebody in the equation needs to have some body heat.”
Ivy turns to the window and watches the darkness as I drive into town. As we approach her home, I reach out with my senses to the little imp watching the trail above her house. It reports that the hunter has not been up there for the better part of two days. Unless she is surveilling the house from a different location, it should be safe to bring Ivy there. Realizing that taking the hunter’s motorcycle away from her has also freed her to approach the house from directions previously inaccessible.
She had been focused on Carl until I destroyed her bike. Feeling the push away from him also freed her up to pursue other avenues into finding Ben. I release the imp from its binding at the upper trail, with strict instructions to circle the property, very carefully, seeking any sign the vampire has been back. I tell it to be sure to search especially carefully around the ritual circles, for as much as it will be uncomfortable being so close to the protective spells around them. I need to know if the hunter has any inkling that Ivy is a witch. If that knowledge caused Ben to push her away so intensely, it may be very significant to the hunter as well.
“What are you doing?” Ivy asks. “Demonic magic of some sort?”
“You can pick that up?” I ask.
“Yes. Loud. You’re talking to something, another demon, aren’t you? A subordinate.”
“Impressive,” I say. “I am in touch with an imp your grandmother has summoned and bound to help watch your home while the hunter is in the area.”
“I’ve only realized it in the last few days, but ever since Ben and I had sex, I’ve been becoming increasingly sensitive to all sorts of power and magic around me, and my power has increased. Tonight, I completely resisted Ben’s attempts to use his compulsion on me. I didn’t even have to try to fight it. I had been practicing some defenses against vampires, simple ones that Grandma had taught me as a normal part of my lessons, focusing on keeping them subtle so Ben wouldn’t notice it. Well tonight, when he saw Carl on the property, he tried to compel me to stay in the cabin instead of helping him track Carl. It did nothing at all.”
I spend some time focusing on her. The amount of power she is showing seems to be the same as the last time I saw her, on the surface at least. As I feel around her more, I can tell that she is a lot stronger, but it is also held tighter to her, closer, and it is brighter.
Now I want to know what is in Emily’s prophecy. What is it about either Ben’s claiming her, or the act of coupling with him that has finally unleashed those immense reserves of power that Ivy was born with. She was a smart and perceptive young witch a couple of weeks ago, but restrained. Technically proficient, but without art behind it, without a lot of force behind it. I cannot wait until I get to see her work now. Take her prior fastidious study, and couple it with the potential she has access to now, and the intuitive grasp of what magic is that she is now developing. It will be a truly wondrous and awesome thing, I suspect.
“Is Grandma home right now?” Ivy asks. “I have no idea what her schedule is, what day it is, even.”
“She is home. She has put off her overnight runs until things with you are sorted out.”
“I’m pretty embarrassed to see her quite yet. I know she’s going to wake up as soon as I get near the house.”
“We can drive for a while longer if you would like. I never actually sleep, so I can keep us going until dawn, just stopping for gas.”
“Not that long. I eventually want to sleep in my own bed. I can take down the protections at my circle. I would like to spend some time there with you.”
“Certainly,” I say. “But Emily will still know you are back on the property.”
“Yes, but if I go straight to my circle, she will give me privacy and time.”
This is true. A witch’s circle is highly respected by all other witches, and they do not enter another’s without invitation. With this decision made, Ivy seems to relax significantly. “Which route would you like to take to your circle?” I ask.
“I’m up for a little more walking,” she says.
I park my car downhill from her home, which leaves us a little over a half mile of a walk through the woods to get up to the property line. As we start to trek up the hill, Ivy remains silent, deep in thought. The imp assures me that the hunter has been nowhere near this side of the property, which allows me to relax my vigilance for her.
We reach the edge of Ivy’s circle. The routine protections she leaves on it between uses is nowhere near strong enough to deter me from entering it, but I never have, and do not now, out of respect for her. She stops at the edge of the circle and turns to face me. She looks a little up and to the right, and I realize what had her concentrating so hard on the walk up the hill.
“I will allow you to enter this space now, only if you promise to cause me no harm, now or in the future, in body, mind, emotion, or spirit, either through your action or inaction, by your own choice or by enticement or provocation of others. Do you abide by these terms, demon I know and have known as Nathan Marsh?”
It is her own variation on the standard agreement the Esseriya line has created for dealing with us. It is a good set of terms, covering most of the ways I could act against her. “I abide by these terms, young mortal Ivy Sparks,” I say.
“Good. Come here.” She takes a step backwards across the boundary of her circle. She takes on a glamour in my eyes as she does so. If I cross that same boundary, I will be subject to our agreement. She has offered nothing in return for my agreement to not cause her any sort of harm, which is wise. The easiest way for a demon to sidestep such an agreement is for a mortal to break it first. We are inconstant and distractible creatures after all. I can see no reason why I would ever want to cause her any ill so it should be easy for me to walk into her circle and accept that obligation. But my kind do not like having our future actions restrained. Part of our great aversion to others’ foretellings and prophecies, of our ambiguity to our own senses of the future.
Besides, just because I feel a certain way about Ivy now does not mean that I will always feel that way. Mortals. Inconstant creatures, ever changing, because your lives are too short to allow yourselves to be static.
Still. At this moment I can find no good reason, other than unseen future events, to not agree to not act against her wellbeing. Since I have been hesitating, she offers her hand. “Do you still abide by the terms and wish to enter?” she asks.
I reach across the edge of the circle and feel the entanglements I have agreed to start to wrap around my wrist. As I take her hand, they tighten until they almost feel solid. I step up to her, and once my whole body is inside of her circle, the words she spoke imprint themselves across my thoughts and my spirit. I am now, in some sense, a servant to her. My promise to not cause her harm by my inaction obligates me to help if she is in peril and I am able to assist. Being as powerful as I am, I think there is almost no place in the world from which I could not answer a summons to aid her.
Ivy gives me a second to catch my composure, to absorb what she has laid upon me, and she wraps me in a strong hug, holding tight to me for a long time. I wrap my arms around her as well, stroking her hair reassuringly. The way she clings to me tells me that despite her newfound power, her wisdom in laying her obligations upon me, she is still a mortal of just eighteen years, and that in the past few weeks everything about her world has changed in very deep and profound ways. She thought she was just a sh
ort time from leaving Stokers Mill to go to college and start charting her own future, only to be caught up in events much greater than she is.
She finally breaks the hug and steps back from me.
“I brought you out here for a reason, Nathan. To this specific place.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“What you have told me, that I’m supposed to end up with Carl somehow. Between some things Ben has said and the way you told me about Carl and I getting closer. We’re going to become lovers, aren’t we? The same way apparently Ben and I are fated to not be lovers.”
“I do not know your—”
“Stop,” Ivy says. “I don’t care what you see in my future or Ben’s or Carl’s right now. Just that I can tell that some entity has decided to tear me from Ben and throw me next into Carl’s bed for whatever reasons it has. And I’m not complaining about ending up with Carl. Once Ben lit that fire in me, I realized that Carl had always lit it for me, but I’d just been ignoring it, pretending he was more my brother than a rather attractive and beautiful man in his own right, who would do very well by me.”
“I should remain silent about that?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, very definitively. “Just listen, let me say this one thing, and hold your tongue about anything you know about anything until tomorrow, ok?”
I nod in agreement.
“I’m sick of feeling like fate’s plaything right now, and I know better than to fight any of it. I know. Grandma has always made sure I understood that any future I see is going to come to pass, and I should just woman up, face it on my feet with my eyes open, my middle finger out loud and proud if necessary.”
“I am sorry that your future with Carl feels tainted this way,” I say.
“It doesn’t,” Ivy says. “Like I said, I think I have always known that Carl and I could have been something good. Now I have confirmation.”
“But there is more you are feeling,” I say. “You are radiating defiance right now. Your middle finger is up and out.”
“I want to go to Carl with no regrets,” Ivy says.
I suddenly see where this is going. “That fire Ben lit in you. You realized you have always had feelings for another that you had suppressed as well.”
“Sate my curiosity, Nathan. Don’t send me off to Carl, always wondering what it might have been like with you.”
“No,” I say, backing away slightly, but not quite leaving her circle. She has no more authority over me within it or without, but I did enter into this space upon her invitation, and I would not be so rude to Ivy as to lightly leave it without her, or without her bidding me farewell. “Impregnating you would bring you great harm, and you just bound me to not do so.”
“You can’t get me pregnant, Nathan,” she says, stepping closer to me. “I already am.”
“That is not possible,” I say. “Vampires are sterile.”
“Turns out Ben isn’t. Trust me on this one, Nathan. A witch always knows.”
That last sentence is true. Witches learn a great deal about their own bodies as they learn their power.
“You have always wanted this, too, Nathan,” she whispers to me. “This is your chance. Take it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ivy Sparks
Nathan considers this new piece of information for a moment, looking hard at me. “This changes my feelings on your offer,” he says.
“It’s not an offer, Nathan. Consider it a demand.”
“Best I not think of it that way. Please be mindful to always watch your use of words around me.”
“Then give me something more productive to do with my mouth than talk,” I say.
“If you insist,” Nathan says.
He steps closer to me, runs one hand around to the back of my neck and grabs a handful of my hair. I expect him to pull me into a kiss, but instead, he puts his other hand on my shoulder, and makes it very clear that he wants me down on my knees. As I sink down in front of him, it is very clear that in the blink of an eye, all of his clothes have vanished. “Be careful what you demand,” he says. “I just might give it to you.”
Just as quickly, where I was feeling Nathan’s hand on my shoulder through the fabric of my hoodie, suddenly it is just bare skin on bare skin. And his touch is hot. Fiercely hot. As long as I’ve known Nathan, he’s always felt like he was running a mild fever, but now, he’s burning up in a most delicious way.
In the time I’d spent with Ben, touching him, when he’d fed his body would be warm to the touch, even hot the first time we’d been intimate together, but it was a very different kind of heat, seeming to come from within him, from under his skin which was always dry to the touch.
Nathan’s fire is all-encompassing, it seems like he actually heats the air around him, as if he is giving me that heat wherever his skin touches mine. My shoulder, where he is gently pushing me down, feels warm all the way down to the bone. After two weeks with Ben as a lover, and looking forward to Carl, I am ecstatic that I decided to take Nathan at least once, and that he accepted. And with that, I realize it is time to put my thoughts of those two other men completely out of my mind. If I will only have Nathan once, this moment needs to be completely about him.
I blink and give my head a little shake as a final, physical commitment to clearing my mind of those distractions.
“Good girl,” I hear Nathan say, with a little bit of a twist of the handful of hair he has. His left hand leaves my shoulder, and he takes a hold of his semi-erect member. Even at just half-mast, there is an almost intimidating size to it. As he pulls my face closer, I have no doubt in my mind what he intends, and how this is going to go. I offered my body to Nathan, and now he is going to take it, and it appears he has no intention of being a gentleman about it. And I decide I am going to give it to him, however he wants it.
As I open my mouth to take him in, I remind myself that he is bound to cause me no harm, and wonder where exactly the lines lie between harm, pain, and pleasure. The soreness in my jaw from opening up to accommodate him, the pressure at the back of my throat as he presses on the back of my head and pushes forward make it clear that I’m about to start learning.
Nathan holds me still, keeping himself deep in my mouth. I can feel his pulse with my tongue, and with every beat of his heart, he becomes larger, harder, and hotter. I finally have to put both hands on his hips and push myself back so I can take a breath. Between my excitement, a little bit of apprehension and fear at how assertive he is being, and just his size, I find myself panting. I look up at Nathan’s face, and see that he is determined, but he is also watching carefully the look on my face, looking into my eyes, watching me breathe. I realize that he may not be acting like a gentleman right now, but that he has no intention of mistreating me. This goes beyond his obligation to not harm me, I can see that he is also carefully watching my reactions to push me beyond what I’d be comfortable giving. I see in his eyes a promise to drag me right up to the limits of what I can and will endure, but to not cross them.
I nod my head to let him know I’m ready to continue, and before I know it, my mouth is wrapped around him again and I can barely breathe. I have heard of the trick of wrapping a hand around the shaft and stroking, to give the man sensation along his entire length, so he is not as driven to penetrate so deep into your mouth. It seems to work. The pressure at the back of my throat decreases, his hand at the back of my neck does not push as hard. Soon, we seem to wordlessly negotiate a rhythm, as I learn how to synchronize the work of my hand and my mouth. A few times, he even lets me back off entirely to catch my breath, and as long as I continue to stroke, he doesn’t put himself back into my mouth right away.
I put my free hand on the joint where the front of his thigh and his body meet. His hot skin is slightly slick with a fine patina a sweat. He adjusts his footing, to where he is standing square in front of me, solidly planted on the ground. I start to hear him moaning, and his hand on the back of my hand gets more insistent, upping he pace, sta
rting to push deep again. I know what is about to happen, and I don’t want it to. There is another part of me that desperately wants to embrace what I have in my mouth, to pleasure it, to take in what he is about to give me, but he tightens his grip on my hair, puts his hand back on my shoulder to keep me on my knees. I take both hands and put them on his hips, and start to push away. At that cue, his hands relax their hold on me. I can tell by the way his hips are undulating, by his breathing, by a quiver in his legs that he is right on the very verge. But instead of forcing me, I feel him forcing his own body to relax, to back away from the moment of climax, to offer me the chance to do something else.
On the one hand, I am dying to have him inside of me, aching for it. On the other, I did offer myself to him, and I did decide, when I saw that he was going to take me, to give him whatever he wanted. He does not know I made that promise to myself, but I know it is a bad idea to ever go back on your end of a promise where a demon is involved. I pull my mouth off so I can take a quick, deep breath. “Finish it,” I say, before I wrap my lips around him again, and suck hard to take as much of him in as I possibly can. Permission given, Nathan pushes himself deep into my mouth again almost, but not quite, to the point that I choke. He makes a dozen slow but very insistent thrusts, his thighs quacking, his hand twisting my hair painfully, a deep grunt of pleasure coming from his throat. As I feel him start to pump, I brace myself, wondering what it will be like to take a man’s climax in my mouth, especially one so strong from a man as endowed as Nathan. But he pulls out at the last moment, and mercifully spills the massive dose of hot fluid on my breasts.
I am curious about what it might have been like, so I run my fingertip through it and taste it. It is strong and bitter, thick and a little salty. I know of nothing else in the world that tastes like it, and I wonder if a man’s seed is really that strange compared to any other flavor, or if Nathan’s being a demon has something to do with it.
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