“Oh, Arawn—”
“Do you want to be with me? Do you want us to be together? If you don’t, if these last six months changed things for you—”
“No. No, they didn’t. I want us to be together.”
“We never talked about it because I thought we couldn’t, but I have always wanted to mate with you or marry you.” He grabbed her hand and held on. “Do you want that? Would you have married me?”
“I would have.”
“I want to marry you. I want to be with you. Say yes. Say you will.”
She sucked in a breath, her eyes looking around the room in confusion, but she said, “Yes. I still want that. I’ve always wanted that.”
“Make a love potion for me. I’ll choose whether or not to drink it, so that’s my free will.”
Her eyes widened, looking scared. “I’ll look into it.”
Research
A few days later, Willow was mashing some bean sprouts and amethyst with a mortar and pestle, grinding them into a pale purple paste. She said, “And so I told him no, of course.”
“Of course,” Bethany said, aghast. Her long, dark hair framed her slim face.
“Of course,” Ember said, also aghast. Her fluffy curls were pulled back in a tight ponytail, emphasizing her glorious cheekbones that both Bethany and Willow envied.
They were both so aghast, it looked like they had both been turned into actual ghasts at the thought of a love potion: bug-eyed, slack-mouthed ghasts.
Bethany and Ember were both perching on barstools in the shining commercial kitchen where Willow was making yet another sea serpent vitamin elixir. Bethany was just passing through, she’d insisted, because her fiancé needed to oversee something at the casino and Bethany needed to check in at Desert Star to see how wedding preparations were going.
It sounded like an excuse because Bethany had gotten homesick. Even Willow had gotten a little homesick in Paris, and home-and-hearth witches like Bethany got bad cases of homesickness.
Willow wadded up some oxenflowers and rue and poured amber honey and rosewater over the pulpy mess, and then she put some muscle behind smashing it all up with the stone stick in the stone bowl.
Ember shook her head. “I can’t believe he even asked you to do that.”
“He’s not a witch,” Willow said. “I don’t think he understands.”
“So what is he?” Bethany asked.
Willow stopped before she said, dragon.
She just assumed that Arawn would know Bethany’s mate-fiancé, somehow, because they were both dragons, and don’t all dragons know each other?
Oh, that sounded shiftist.
Ick. She needed to watch that. That was gross.
They might know each other, though, because they might be members of the same den. The New Wales den was the only large dragon den in the Western US.
Arawn had moved to “north of Los Angeles” when he’d walked out on her.
Bethany had said that her fiancé’s den was the New Wales one.
Plus, they both worked for the same casino, the Dragon’s Den, and its parent corporation.
So, maybe they might know each other.
That would be weird. Willow was not up for that yet.
So, she hadn’t told Bethany and Ember much about Arawn at all.
Indeed, she’d told them precisely the minimum necessary, that an old college boyfriend of hers whom they had never met had reappeared, and they’d had ex-sex.
And then he had asked her, she’d emphasized, for a love potion.
Willow said to her friends, “But of course I would never make it for him. Free will, you know.”
“Yes,” Ember and Bethany chorused. “Free will.”
“And because An it harm none, you know.”
“An it harm none,” they repeated.
Willow scraped the pulverized amethyst mixture into a huge, glass mixing bowl already prepped with milk, flowers, herbs, and a circle of charged stones in the bottom. “So I would never do it.”
“Right,” they said.
“Never,” Bethany added.
Ember said, “It’s really weird that he even asked you that. Why would he even ask for such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said.
“Is he seeing someone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he going to slip it into someone else’s drink?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said.
“Is it for him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he want to fall in love with you? And how do you feel about that? And how do you feel about a guy who wants to use magic to fall in love with you, like he can’t do it on his own? Is he a psychopath or something?”
Willow sighed. “I really don’t know.”
“Until you know the answers to those questions,” Bethany said, “you should not even consider it. Not that you should even consider making such an unethical potion, anyway.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Willow said.
“Good,” Bethany said.
From the corner of her eye, Willow could see that Ember was watching her face closely.
Ember could see a lot, more than most people could. Being an elemental witch like Ember had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were that Ember could glance at a diamond and tell you its color, weight, clarity, and grade without blinking, and she usually could forecast the weather better than the meteorologists.
The problem for Ember’s friends was that Ember could tell when they were lying with uncanny ease.
And Ember was scrutinizing Willow like she knew something.
“So, I would never make the love potion for him, of course.” Willow stared at the five white votive candles flickering under the bowl and stirred it with her wand, a long, whippy dogwood kind. “But if I did just want to read about love potions, where do you think I should look?”
“Nuh-uh,” Bethany said, winding her black hair into a chignon behind her head. “I cannot condone this. The coven would at least censure you and might expel you.”
Ember nodded. “You totally should not look in the sub-Witchit, W-slash-forbidden-slash-potions-slash-love.”
Bethany backhanded Ember on the arm, landing a nice, juicy slap on her biceps.
“Ow!” Ember was wearing a dark red, sleeveless sundress.
Bethany told her, “Hecate’s boobs, shut up. She’s going to get shunned.”
Willow looked up at Ember, catching her eye, and asked her, “Oh, really?”
Ember nodded without looking away from Willow’s eyes. “Yes. You absolutely should not look there, in that particular sub-Witchit, the forbidden one. Nothing good would come of it.”
Willow let herself grin a little. “And you knew right where that was, huh?”
Ember shrugged. “When you play with fire elementals, sometimes you have to go with the more unusual spells or you might get burned. Let’s just say I have more than a passing knowledge of the W-slash-forbidden sub-Witchit forum.”
“Well, let’s see what’s in there.”
Bethany said, “Willow, don’t do it. It’s not worth being expelled from the coven.”
The potion Willow was stirring turned a deep, shocking shade of purple and had the consistency of thin, gritty mud.
Ember tilted her head, looking at the potion. “I would ask if it’s supposed to look like that—”
“Yeah, don’t. A Tincture of Scale Support is supposed to be pale lavender, clear, and effervescent.”
Bethany craned her head. “It’s not.”
“Yeah, I know, but color and consistency have no correlation with potion effectiveness.”
“Is there any way to test it?”
“Feed it to the sea monsters.”
“And if they don’t like it?”
Willow waved her hand over the bowl, wafting some of the fresh salmon-scented fumes toward her face. “Oh, they’re gonna like it. They go bonkers for anything fishy. The new shipment of halibu
t isn’t going to be delivered until tomorrow, anyway, so I’ll have one of the valets help me carry the fish down tomorrow morning. The sea serpents have gotten quite tame in only a few days.”
“Yeah, all dragons know who feeds them,” Bethany smirked. “They’re always hungry. It’s that dragon metabolism.” She unwrapped a protein bar and took a huge bite.
Willow glanced at Bethany, wondering what flavor the bar was, and then she took a longer look. Arawn had said that dragonmates took on the mature eye characteristic of the mated dragon.
Bethany’s eyes looked like someone was pouring a stream of dark glitter into a black hole.
Willow said, “Your eyes look different.”
“Yeah, well,” Bethany dithered, looking down. “Evidently, that happens when you mate with a dragon. It’s a dragon magic-thing. It happens to the dragon as part of the mating fever, and then the dragonmate gets it during the mating.”
“Does it hurt?” Willow asked. “The mating, I mean?”
Bethany cracked up. “Nope.”
Willow did not need any more information, not when Bethany laughed such a salacious cackle, so she returned to stirring the sea serpents’ remedy.
The purple sludge had developed clots.
Maybe she should test it on one serpent before she fed it to all of them.
And yet, there was nothing in this potion that could actually harm sea monsters, even if the potion had gone disastrously wrong. She didn’t think it had gone that bad, though. Willow always picked concoctions where the worst thing that could happen was that the potion would have no effect, considering her little witchy problems. She had drunk hundreds of her own potions that smelled and tasted terrible but worked as intended, at least somewhat.
She blew out the votive candles under the bowl, picked up her phone, and looked straight at Ember. “W-slash-forbidden-slash-potions?”
“Slash-love, but I never said that,” Ember told her.
“Right. Never said that,” Willow said as she typed the path into her phone.
The website opened up, and a big, black box covered the paths, stating FORBIDDEN! And DO NOT PASS!
Without even glancing at Willow’s phone screen, Ember said, “The password is ‘MayaMagic,’ both capitalized, no space.”
The Hindu goddess of illusions and hidden things, of course.
Willow typed it in, and a list of sub-forums appeared. She scrolled down to the Potions one, and then to the nested Love Potions sub-sub-forum.
When she clicked, recipe titles scrolled down her phone’s screen.
“There are so many of them!” Willow exclaimed.
“I wouldn’t know,” Ember said, studying the ceiling.
Bethany rolled her eyes so hard that eyelashes might have touched her ears.
“Have you used a love potion?” Willow asked her, trying not to look aghast, too.
“No.” Ember shook her head. “Not a love potion.”
“Okay, then.” Willow went back to the descriptions.
“Just binding spells. For the elementals.”
Willow stared at her phone and tried not to look horrified. Of the three of them, Ember always did have a dark streak in her magic.
“Here’s one,” Willow said. “‘Foolproof, Error-proof, Easiest Love Potion Ever!’ I like the foolproof part. I feel like a fool for even trying this.”
“Read the whole thing,” Ember said. “Sometimes there’s a catch.”
“It says, ‘Forms Undying, Unbreakable Love Bond Within Ten Minutes! Uses Easily Sourced Ingredients!’” She frowned, her nose wrinkling. “It’s like they’re trying to sell it.”
Ember nodded. “Some of them are heavy sells. I don’t know why. Might be for attention or validation. Or they might have a link where you can buy the ‘secret ingredient’ directly from them. Doesn’t mean the spells don’t work, though. A few of them are trolls, though, and the potions are very different than what they’re titled. You know trolls. They’re all assholes, whether they live under a bridge or not. Check the reviews and ratings.”
“Where’s the—Oh.” Over to the side of the spell was one arm of one star. The first review was titled DO NOT USE. “I don’t think that one’s very good.”
“You can sort by ratings.”
Willow tapped the menu to sort with the best at the top.
Bethany said, her voice tight, “You sure do know a lot about that slash-forbidden sub-Witchit, Ember.”
Ember didn’t even blink. “Nah. I’m just guessing.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, you are.”
Willow glanced up, one eyebrow raised and repressing a grin. “If you don’t want to be involved, Bethany—”
“Oh, you shut up. I’m not leaving you two alone with this. If you’re going to try one of these internet potion recipes, we’ll all get expelled together.”
“Right. Here’s a promising one. Four and seven-eighths stars out of five. Says that it’s subtle so you won’t get caught. I suppose that’s important, too. ‘Reliable and effective.’ Two hundred good reviews. I’m kind of horrified that two hundred witches have used a love spell to trap somebody.”
Ember shrugged. “Or a cat. Or an elemental.”
“What’s the first step?” Bethany asked.
Willow recited what the professors had chanted every day in her remedial potions class. “Read the instructions. Gather the materials. Charge the principles. Then pray.” She might have added that last part.
“Send me the link,” Bethany sighed.
Willow sent it to both of them.
Ember frowned, looking over the list. “Do you even have this stuff?”
Olive oil. Cloves. Ginger. Coconut milk. Essence of elderflowers. Millet.
Willow said, “I might. This place is stocked with everything. Come on. He can decide whether to drink it or not. I swear to all the Ladies of Magic that I won’t slip it in his drink. I will hand it to him. I will tell him exactly what it is, and then he can do with it whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Now, help me make this damn thing.”
Five hours later, three sweaty, exhausted witches stared at the few swallows of golden liquid in the bottom of a glass jar.
Bethany’s dark hair was knotted up in a messy bun.
Ember had something blue streaked across one cheek and was lying on one of the steel countertops, using her arm as a pillow.
Soot peppered Willow’s face and clothes.
But the potion looked correct. The clear, still, bright liquid had a slightly oily viscosity and emanated the scent of poppies.
“Would you drink it?” Willow asked Ember dubiously.
Ember frowned from where she was resting. “It depends on how desperate I was, but I probably would feed it to a fire elemental. They don’t really get sick, though. They just burn up anything they don’t like.”
Willow sighed. “Well, he’s pretty desperate.”
Bethany told her, “I really think you should tell us the whole story.”
Willow pursed her lips and shook her head, still staring at the Attachment Elixir. “Someday, just not now.”
Which Came First?
AFTER supper, Arawn gazed into the golden liquid, which was swirling gently in a crystal wine goblet even though he hadn’t touched it. “This is it?”
Sitting on the other side of the dining table in his penthouse suite, Willow nodded. “I don’t think you should drink it.”
She’d been staying with him in the penthouse for a week, and every moment had been like a return to Arawn’s previous life where he had moved from one minute to the next in a haze of serenity, bliss, and sweaty sex. Even now, when they had to be a little discreet about carrying on while they were at work, he hurried back to the penthouse every afternoon to see her, hoping she had beat him home.
Home.
He hadn’t thought about going home for six months. He’d thought about going back to the den or the ducal residence or whatever hotel room he had tossed his duffel bag in, but never home.
; Arawn hadn’t considered anyplace home since he’d taken one suitcase of clothes and walked out of their apartment in Las Vegas.
He stared at the potion, watching orange lights shimmer in the liquid. “It might give us a chance.”
“It might not work,” Willow said.
Arawn looked across the table at her. They’d ordered room service and eaten in the penthouse again that night. During the week, he’d taken her out to restaurants and shows any night that he could drag her from the penthouse, treating her to places that an executive VP could afford but a college student whose inheritance would not be released until he obtained a graduate degree could not.
The restaurants were high atop the casinos, and the lights of the Strip stretched away from their feet. They watched the shows from the front rows.
And then he brought her back to his lair—ahem, the penthouse—and devoured her as he’d wanted to do for the months they’d been apart.
Only a week, and already, he was dreading what would happen when his dragonmate walked into his life.
She would. He knew that she would. It was only a matter of time.
Which meant that it was only a matter of how long Arawn had left with Willow, the love of his life.
“Look, I need to tell you something,” Willow said, her lovely eyes wide and serious. “I’m not that good a witch. I can whip up some vitamin potions for the sea monsters because just about anybody can do that. This is a different class of potion. I might have made it wrong.”
He looked up at her, over the potion. “Will it make me hate you?”
Her pale eyebrows lowered, and she looked troubled. “I never thought about that. I don’t think it could do that. It doesn’t have any wormwood or anything acidic in it, and there’s nothing with animal protein, either. But it might make you sick. It might hurt you.”
“I don’t care.” Arawn picked up the wine goblet. The cut crystal was sharp and warm in his hand as if the potion was heated from within. “What I’m worried about is that it will force me into mating fever, and I’ll go find my fated mate, that I’ll seek her out instead of bonding to you. That haunts me.”
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