Night Magic: A Wing Slayer Novel

by Jennifer Lyon

  She arched, a soft sound building in her throat. “Phoenix …”

  Her raw voice, the wet heat pulsing against his finger, went through him. Right fucking through him. He drew his finger away, then rested his hands on her spread thighs. “Show me, Ailish. Show me what you look like naked.” He needed this from her, needed her trust.

  Her tank top and panties vanished. So did his clothes, but all he saw was Ailish spread out before him. Her breasts were exactly as he remembered them, small and proud, just like his witch. Her belly rippled with tense muscles. He felt her strong thigh muscles as he spread her legs more.

  He wanted her to know what he saw. “You have velvety olive skin and glistening pink folds. You’re swelling as I watch. Damn—” He had to swallow, then force his voice out. “Your clit is ripe and ready for me to kiss, and lick and suck.” Her scent was filling his nostrils and making his cock so damned hard … “Ailish?”

  Her hands fisted at her sides. “Hmm.”

  “I’m going to come just from licking you.”

  She tilted her head back, her body bowing.

  He drew one hand up the inside of her thigh, lightly tracing the lips of her sex. “You’re going to come, too, aren’t you, baby?”

  Her breasts jerked and bounced as she panted. “Yes, do it!”

  Her magic was rising; he could feel it swirling everywhere he touched. He had never wanted a woman like this, never needed her pleasure like this. He dropped to his knees, leaned in, and, using his thumbs to part her, drew his tongue along her folds.

  Her flavor filled his mouth, and his control shattered. Holding her hips, he lifted her, tonguing her clit, dipping into her, drawing in all of Ailish … her body, her magic, and her sheer essence.

  She tasted like paradise.

  * * *

  Ailish’s power surged, going wild with Phoenix kneeling between her legs, lapping at her. Sinking her fingers into his hair, she just … held on.

  Trusted him.

  The sensations built, her magic pulsed, her body sang, and she felt tears burn her eyes. So much pleasure. Then he moved, holding her hips in one hand, his finger circling her entrance, rasping gently over the skin. She curled her toes.

  He growled, actually growled, against her clit and filled her with one finger. Her body clenched. Then he added a second and thrust in and out until all she felt was his mouth on her and his sensual stroking deep inside of her. The pleasure spiraled higher and higher …

  A whisper of fear … she couldn’t …

  Feathers stroked her arms with such caring reassurance, she arched and cried out as hot pleasure exploded. Seconds later, strong arms dragged her off the bed and put her on his lap, her back to his chest, her legs spread wide.

  His cock, so hot and hard, slid along her folds, but not inside her. Phoenix put his mouth to her ear. “Again, Ailish. With me …” He canted his hips so the head of his cock slid against her oversensitive clit. He palmed her breasts, tweaked her nipples. “I can feel your hot juices on my cock.” He thrust again, rubbing himself deep between her folds.

  Her magic began to pulse and rush, going deeper and deeper between her thighs, trying to reach him, to pull him into her body. The need took her breath away. If she couldn’t have him all the way inside her, then she could touch him. She reached down and brushed her fingers over the head of his dick.

  He groaned, thrusting harder and faster toward her fingers while kissing her ear, her neck, her jaw. He clamped one hand on her hip. “Have to hold you, stop from slamming up inside you.” He shuddered. “Your magic is calling me, begging me, trying to draw me into you.” He kissed her shoulder. “The drive to seal our souls …” He sucked in a breath, his hips pushing his cock against her.

  Ailish turned her head and caught his mouth in a deep kiss. All the sensations crested—his cock stroking her folds, his hand on her breasts, their tongues tangled; she was surrounded by Phoenix. Her orgasm started as small shudders and she rocked against his cock frantically.

  “Oh hell, yeah!” Phoenix said against her mouth, his hand on her hip anchoring her as they both exploded.

  Her pleasure went wild, cries erupting from her throat. Feeling his hot seed spurting onto her thighs sent her into another round of spasms until she could barely breathe. “Too much,” she finally whispered. He brought out too much in her, too much pleasure, too much emotion. He exposed her very soul and made her yearn for more and more. Even now, tremors of aftershocks kept erupting.

  “I’ve got you.” Phoenix pulled her back to rest against his chest and gently stroked her stomach, as if to ease the muscles there. Her thighs were boneless. A warm contentment she had never felt, never experienced, settled with a gentle mist.

  He moved his hand down to the hip he’d grasped earlier. “Did I hurt you?”

  “God, no.”

  He laughed and kissed her shoulder. “I wanted to be inside you so badly, I almost couldn’t control it.” He sucked in a breath.

  Her peace fractured. “This was a bad idea.…”

  “This was the best fucking idea ever.” He turned her head and tilted her chin up. She saw his shadow, but she felt his gaze on her.

  “I’m not losing you, Ailish,” he told her. “We’re going to fight this handfast and break it. I’ve already talked to Darcy. She’s consulted the Ancestors, and they said there’s a price, we just need to figure out what it is and pay the demon. She thinks the answer is in the handfasting ceremony. We’ll set up a phone conference tomorrow so she can find out more from you.”

  Shocked, she said, “They’ll talk to me?”

  He laced his hand in hers over her belly and answered, “By phone conference.”

  Sure, she got it. She didn’t belong close to those gentle earth witches. But she was actually going to talk to them. She’d tried to learn all she could about being an earth witch, but there was so much she still didn’t know. Could she ask them questions? But then she had to wonder. “Why are you going to all this trouble?” Where did he see this going?

  He rested his chin on her head. “To give us a chance. And because I can’t let you die.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to get control of her feelings. “Then you need to know the truth. There is no future for us.”

  His chest, stomach, and thigh muscles tightened beneath her. “Why the hell not?”

  “Because if I die from not fulfilling the handfast, my mother and her coven dies with me. If I break the handfast …” She felt the cold invade her. And that invoked her memory of the dark nothingness when she’d nearly died. If she wanted to get into Summerland, she had to make the right decisions. “I’m going to kill them. I’ll use my power to do it, and witch karma will kill me.”

  Phoenix ignored the bird scratching and burning him. He understood just how the creature felt. He pushed Ailish up to her feet, keeping his hand on her, not daring to let go. When she tried to pull her hand free, he got in her face. “Don’t stop touching me. Your little announcement has me wired to kill, and if we let the bloodlust free, I’ll lose it.”

  She put her hand on his chest, hurrying to get it all out. “I should have told you. I came home to die. The only question is will I get into Summerland when I do.” She jerked her wrist up. “I need this off to even have a chance. If I do get it off and destroy the coven, then maybe they will accept me. Maybe I’ll be good enough.”

  The damn witch might as well have kneed him in the balls. Her soul was in limbo, with a dark claim on it by Asmodeus. She had a reason to be afraid the Ancestors might not be able to allow her in while she had that binding on, marking her as handfasted to a demon. He grabbed her hand and pulled her with him into the large bathroom. The travertine tile beneath his feet just added to the cold, burning feeling deep in his chest.

  He had feared caring about her, seeing it as another long-term burden, like she’d constantly need him to fix her problems, need him to keep her going. He wanted to laugh at himself, except he was too pissed off. Ailish didn’t ask
anyone to fix her problems, she did it herself. She actually thought he’d let her go after demon witches? Alone? Unprotected?

  Not while he was breathing.

  Yeah, that feeling in his chest for Ailish, that warm, terrifying mix of tenderness and pride, scared the everlovin’ shit out of him. But letting go? Walking away from her?

  That felt like razor blades to his heart.

  Keeping hold of her, he turned on the water and jets in the tub, grabbed a washcloth, and got it wet. He turned and dragged it across her thighs.

  She jumped.

  “Wiping off my semen.” The semen that should be inside her. His cock jumped and started to fill, more than willing to do the job right this time. “Step in, about knee-high,” he told her.

  She hesitated, then she raised her leg, got in the tub, and sank into the hot, bubbling water.

  Phoenix sat behind her and took hold of her shoulders to pull her back.

  She resisted.

  “Please, Ailish,” he coaxed. Holding her made it all easier. Everything.

  She reclined, fitting her back to his chest.

  Wrapping his arms around her, he knew he was falling and falling hard. She was the other half of his soul. She’d been his to protect since birth. The enormity of that unfolded in his mind—he and Ailish, they had always been connected. Always needed each other, always found each other. He told her, “I think I was around four when you were born. I kept having this dream that I was flying, heard a baby cry, and then burst into flames.” He told her what the nightmare felt like.

  She put her hands over his on her waist. “You were only a child! To be pulled out of your body and experience that!” A shiver went through her, then her magic poured through her hand. “Did you tell anyone? You must have been terrified to go to sleep.”

  She was comforting him! The warm energy swirled and caressed him. The bird tattoos shuffled and seemed to try to pull his wings farther from the flames to catch her magic. “It was just me and my mom.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth, stroking her. “She was … sick.”

  “You said you grew up on the streets?”

  He hesitated out of sheer habit, but he wanted to tell her. “My mom heard voices from the time I was very young, right before kindergarten, so I must have been around four.” He did the math in his head. “She would have been about twenty-six, about right for schizophrenia in women. It tends to show earlier in boys from what I read. Anyway, we ended up on the streets partly because she was running from something the voices told her was after her, but she could never define what it was. And partly because she couldn’t hold down a job.”

  She stroked his hand and arm as though she were petting him. “What about her family or your father?”

  Phoenix blamed his father. “Her family knew there was something odd about my father. Then she got pregnant and they disowned her. They refused to have anything to do with her if she kept me. Then my father died before I was born.” How could a man do that to a woman? Separate her from her family, then leave her defenseless? “She managed for a few years, but then … the voices started.”

  “You took care of her.” Her voice was firm and sure.

  The way she kept touching him went straight to his balls. It wasn’t sexual, it was warm and sensual and sincere. “She kept me and lost her family, her support. Even on the streets when she could barely figure out how to eat, she kept Social Services from taking me away from her. And later, when I met Key, she kind of adopted him, too.” He wanted to get across to her that his mom was more than a crazy street bum. She’d had a huge heart, too.

  “Isn’t that what mothers are supposed to do? Try to take care of you and protect you?”

  Her question made his chest ache. Her mother hadn’t loved her, and she’d never experienced what real love felt like. His mother had loved him, and even now, years after her death, that love stayed with him. That’s what made it so damned hard, so heart-stabbingly painful, to know he had turned his back on her. “I failed her. When she needed me, I wasn’t there. I was eighteen, working a construction job in another town and staying there during the week. I chose to work the long-distance jobs, I wanted my freedom.” The guilt nearly choked him. “Then she called, told me the voices were coming to get her.” Sick shame and anger burst up inside him, then calmed.

  He knew it was her magic easing his guilt and grief. He didn’t deserve that, though he craved it, needed it. He meant to explain that he just wanted a break. But the truth was ugly, and it spilled out of him. “I was sick of being her caretaker and never having a life. For the first time, I had my own life, going to bars with friends, getting laid. I figured I’d earned this break from worrying about her. My paycheck got us off the streets and into a small apartment. She was safe. So I told her to lock the doors, she’d be fine.” He could still remember his resentment of her desperate call, the sensation that he just couldn’t get a break, that she was suffocating him.

  Ailish tilted her head back, her sightless eyes drifting heavenward. The bathroom filled with the sounds of the bubbling water, the steam wafting up and curling the ends of her hair. “What happened?”

  The banked rage erupted. “Damn it, she should have done what I told her! Listened to me instead of the fucking voices! I loved her, I goddamned loved her.” He clamped his jaw so hard, his ears popped. “She knew I wouldn’t abandon her, not forever, not like her family. I just wanted a break. Just a break.”

  “Instead you got a lifetime of guilt,” she said softly.

  “I got what I deserved.” He lifted his free hand to finger the damp ends of her hair. “When I got home she was gone. Took me hours to find her. She had places she hid on the streets when the voices got too bad. She was in one of them, dead. She’d used a beer bottle and cut herself. She finally stopped the voices.”

  Ailish dropped a hand to the outside of his thigh. “She fought the best she knew how. Just like you fought the best you knew how. The cold truth is that we don’t win the fight every time.”

  Thick emotion gripped him, and he closed his eyes. She wasn’t talking just about him, she was talking about her battle, the one for her life and her soul. “Ailish …”

  She sat forward. “I’m another fight you can’t win. You were right—you can’t trust me with your soul.” She stood up.

  Her lean body glistened as the water sluiced down, sliding over her breasts, down her belly, dipping between her legs. He reached for her.

  She sensed it and jerked her hand back. “I won’t become a demon witch, but I will make sure the coven dies. If I can’t get the binding off, then they die with me on my birthday. But I’m going to try like hell to do the right thing, to break the handfast so I have a chance of getting into Summerland when I die. Then I’ll use my siren voice and kill them. It’ll kill me, too, and if we’ve bonded souls, that would shatter you. I won’t do that. I can’t.”

  She turned to get out. To walk away. Phoenix made her weak, made her long for what she couldn’t have. She’d learned her lesson with Kyle … she couldn’t be influenced by desperate longings and needs, she had to do the right thing. Make the right choice.

  He rose and caught her up in his arms before she’d finished stepping out of the tub.

  “Put me down!”

  “No.” Part of him thought about tossing her on the bed, parting her thighs, and pressing so deep inside her, she’d never try to walk away from him again. His cock throbbed with the need. Her coconut magic rose off her skin, trying to entice him to do that. Assuring him that he could seduce her in seconds.

  What stopped him was the hideous handfast bracelet on her wrist. Not because he didn’t trust her, but because she’d been forced into that bond. He wouldn’t force her into the soul-mirror bond.

  “We’re not done, Ailish. I’ve only begun learning the best ways to make you come. But if you refuse to let me touch you like that, then you’ll sleep with me, in my arms where the phoenix can keep you safe from the demon.” She was his. Had been his. He r
emembered the sweet call of her first cry as a baby that killed him. So he hadn’t been there all those years to protect her.

  Not until she’d called his phoenix to life.

  He was here now. And he was going to fight for her, fight the demon, her mother’s coven, and Ailish herself.

  DAYS REMAINING ON HANDFAST CONTRACT: ELEVEN

  When Ailish woke up, she knew instantly that Phoenix was gone from the bed. The room felt empty. She must have slept for hours, but she had no idea what time it was. Feeling disoriented and very much alone, she tried to get her bearings. She stretched out on the bed and her hand hit something plastic.

  Her cell phone. And next to that were a couple of bags. What the hell? She sat up, pulled the bags to her, and reached in. Clothes, her clothes, she recognized them. The second bag had all kinds of stuff from her hairbrush to her laptop.

  Phoenix had gone and gotten her things from her house? She pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, trying to squeeze out the feeling in her chest. The spot that had always felt empty and alone. Dear Ancestors, now that spot felt as if it were full of gently moving wings.

  She’d been alone for so long. She didn’t know how to do this, how to deal with it.

  Early this morning, after getting out of the bath, he had put her in his bed, then kissed her as though she were something to be treasured. He’d started at her eyes, moved down her mouth, over her jaw, taking his sweet time with her breasts …

  “Shit.” Damn tricky hunter was trying to make her … care. She wouldn’t care. Not like that, not in the way that would make her lose sight of her goals. She cared that her mother had tried to kill Haley, that she’d used Kyle, then caused him to get in an accident. She cared that she’d dragged Kyle into a handfasting ceremony.