by E. M. Moore
Liam tapped his chin. “I don’t know. Finding you was your grandmother’s doing. It wasn’t magic at all.”
“That’s something we’ll have to look at then,” Gabe said. He hadn’t said much yet, and when I finally did look over at him, he seemed distracted.
“Well, I don’t know about you all,” Travis said, “But kicking ass and rescuing people makes me tired as fuck. I think I’ll catch some sleep. Liam, you mind?” Travis asked, pointing upstairs.
Liam shrugged. “Take whichever one you want. Except—”
“Yeah, I know, buddy.”
Gabe stood, too. “I’m exhausted.”
He left without a second glance, and I frowned after him. Randy gave me a quick squeeze and set me on the cushion next to him. “Liam,” he said, tilting his head toward me. “Norah needs some answers from you that I’m sure she’s been chomping at the bit for since we got here. I’ll leave you two alone.” He took a couple steps away and turned. “Feel free to come find me afterward, though.”
A flush of heat swamped my body. Randy winked and then left Liam and I alone. After watching him walk away, I got up and moseyed over toward Liam. I sat down and nudged my shoulder with his. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He smiled, but it didn’t last very long on his face. He went back to his serious, pensive look. The one that made me find him adorably attractive in the first place. “I bet you do have lots of questions.”
“Tons,” I told him, honestly, “But you don’t owe me any explanations. We can just sit here if you want.”
“It’s okay. Might as well get it out in the open now.” He sat back and pulled me along with him. My head hit his chest, and I picked my legs up to cuddle into him. “This is my parents’ house. My birth parents. They were Natural witches.”
I’d kind of sort of heard that term before. Granny and I were Natural witches. We had magic in our blood.
“They gave me up when I was a baby. I was adopted by a nice set of parents who were really good to me. I used to imagine all sorts of things about my birth parents, though, like how they were too poor to afford me, or that they were too young, or all these other things about them knowing they wouldn’t be good parents so they did the right thing and gave me up to someone who could be a good parent.”
“It was tough being a witch when I was younger. My adoptive parents didn’t understand why I could do certain things. In school, I was teased for being the weird kid. I had nothing to go on about why I was the way I was. My parents couldn’t help me because they knew nothing. It…sucked. But still, I got through it. When my parents realized there was something more to me, they took me to a psychic. Turns out this one actually knew what she was doing. She told them I had powers and encouraged them to practice Wicca so they could have a way to relate to me. Things in my life started to get better after that, and then I got the call to be in the Order. I met Randy first off and his knowledge of Naturals was so much more than what the psychic had. I finally felt like I’d found a home.” He took a deep breath. “That’s when I found out about my real parents.” He shook his head. “They weren’t unfit at all. They just didn’t want me. So, no, I don’t like coming to this house because it’s theirs. I don’t like the shit ton of money I have in the bank account because it’s theirs. They didn’t want me so why would I want anything of theirs.”
I squeezed him tighter, hoping I could soak up some of his pain. “Where are they now? Your real parents?”
“Dead.”
My heart skipped a beat. The way he’d said it didn’t open it up for discussion, so I just let the word hang in the air. “They’re stupid for not wanting you, Liam. You’re one of the best men I’ve ever met.” I looked up at him and kissed him softly on the lips, trying to transfer all the feelings I had for him in one kiss, in one moment. It was virtually impossible to do, but when I finally did pull away, he seemed much lighter as if I’d somehow eased some of his burden.
“It doesn’t bother me all the time,” he said. “Just…being here is hard. I feel like I’m trespassing, like I’m somehow getting the life they didn’t want me to have.”
“Fuck ‘em.”
His eyebrows raised.
“I mean it,” I said, pulling away. “Fuck. Them. This house is beautiful and sure your parents are shit, but you should be able to enjoy what they denied you, Liam. If I were you, I’d be throwing fucking parties in here, having someone else clean the mess up, just to do the same thing the next night. Screw it. It’s your stuff.”
He chuckled and rubbed his jaw. “Maybe one day I’ll feel like you, but not today. The only thing I am happy about is that we can stay here for right now and not have to worry about intruders. This place has magic upon magic. It’s literally a spelled fortress. No one’s getting through here. This is the safest place in the world for people like us.”
He looked simultaneously pleased, and pissed, to have said those words, like it ate at him a little on the inside to admit that this place helped him. Instead of answering, I leaned back on him and curled into him tighter. He kissed the top of my head and we both just sat there, staring out at the storm that was bulldozing up the coast. Lightning crackled through the air in a dazzling light display I’d never witnessed before. Nature could be so scary, yet beautiful at the same time.
Chapter Nineteen
Gabe, Randy, Liam and I stood in the outcropping at the back of the estate. It was a grassy area surrounded by enormous boulders that lined property before dipping down into the ocean. There were no remnants of the storm that had gone through last night. The sun shone down so much so that I could finally relinquish Liam’s hoodie I’d confiscated. It wasn’t New Orleans heat, but the sun here in Salem seemed to warm me from the inside out.
Or maybe that was the guys.
Randy raised his hands over his head, his body rippling with muscles. My mouth gaped open just watching the nuances of his exterior. Damn. This guy.
“Are you paying attention?” Gabe asked.
I shook my head as if I was literally coming out of a trance—a Randy-infused gawk-fest was more like it. Tearing my gaze away from him and his muscle tank, I looked up at Gabe. He wore a knowing smirk, and I couldn’t help the smile that curved my lips at being found out. “I am,” I told him. “I’ve seen Randy do it before, remember? It’s you and Liam who haven’t seen how awesome we work with one another.”
Gabe cocked his head. “I believe I know how awesome we work with one another, Love. I seem to remember…” He brought his hands up and started counting on his fingers.
“Okay! Okay!”
He snickered and gave me a devilish grin. “Looking forward to adding to it. I’m not sure what the proper protocol is, but can I claim helping you later when you need it?”
“Fuck off,” Randy said.
Both Gabe and mine’s gazes darted toward him. His face still held the serious expression he used when calling forth his magic, but good to know he still half-listened to what was going on around him.
“I think—” Liam started to say.
No doubt Liam’s thoughts would’ve been heaped in common sense about who should help relieve me of my energy after training with magic, but hell, I so did not want to go there. I held a hand up, and Liam peered over at me, his eyebrows raised. “Maybe,” I said, starting out softly. “We should just wait and see what happens.” I shrugged. “Maybe the other times were flukes.”
“Statistically speaking,” Liam said, looking confused. “You’re at one-hundred percent. If I were doing a study, you needed relief one-hundred percent of the time after using magic around us. Those are good odds.”
I hid my head in my hands. Not that I minded talking about sex with them, I so didn’t. It was hot as fuck, to be honest. It was just the act of predetermining what was going to happen that kind of put a downer on things. I peeked through my fingers, and Liam looked confused as ever. I stayed where I was in the grass and hooked a finger at him, begging him to come my way. He did so, stopping just in
front of me. I shielded my eyes from the sun while I looked up. “I don’t really want to plan out our sexual exploits, Liam Hon. Okay?”
“Oh,” he said, his face falling. He bit his lip, his eyebrows coming together in thought. When he locked gazes with me, he looked sincerely sorry. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know,” I told him. “Let’s just play it by ear. Kind of like how we did in the car last night.”
Liam’s face flushed as Gabe swore. “Bloody hell. I knew I was missing out on something. Next time we save some chick from an idiot, one of you two are taking care of her so I can make sure our Norah is safe.”
Before Liam could say that sounded reasonable, I playfully kicked him in the chin to keep his mouth shut. Spontaneity, I mouthed to him. His eyes sparkled after that and we all returned to what we were doing. Well, I wasn’t doing anything at the moment, just waiting for Randy to show Liam and Gabe what he could do. Travis was back up at the house, refusing to come down with us. I didn’t want to turn around and look, but I had a sneaking suspicion he was watching us from one of the windows. He’d acted weird when we proposed we should try to figure out what our magic could do around one another. Yesterday, it had seemed like we were getting somewhere, but maybe we weren’t. Maybe Travis and I just wouldn’t work out that way. What was I saying? Despite the rush of jealousy I’d gotten yesterday, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to involve myself with Travis in the way I shared with the other guys. Maybe our thing was to just be friends? Maybe he wasn’t into sharing? Maybe I didn’t want to share myself with him?
Energy buzzed through the air. My own magic awakened as Randy cupped his hands in front of him. Within moments, he shot his hand forward and the same thing that happened yesterday happened again. The Earth shook and a crater in the ground opened up, mud and rocks flying everywhere.
“Fucking Christ,” Gabe muttered.
Liam’s arms outstretched to the side, shielding me, and he took a step back. He had evidently thought we’d exaggerated what happened in Salem.
“Sorry about the lawn, bro.”
Liam’s natural stutter came back. “S-seriously? You know I don’t care about that. My turn,” he said, immediately after.
Gabe frowned, but took a step back anyway as Liam made the same motion as Randy. He didn’t wait as long to harness his magic, but an orange glow permeated his hands and stretched out as licks of flames conjured over his fingers and up his wrists. Liam immediately separated his hands and the magic disintegrated in front of us. “What the hell?”
“Was that bloody fire?” Gabe asked. “Were you trying to do that?”
Liam shook his head, his eyes wide. “I was just trying to conjure my magic like I always do. I wanted to put a hole in the ground next to Randy’s, but that happened instead.”
Randy shrugged. “I don’t even know how I did it either. I was just using my magic to send a burst at a target and that’s what happened. Try again, Liam.”
Liam’s eyes narrowed. He stepped back with his left foot and brought his hands together in front of him again as he conjured his magic. Once more, an orange glow encapsulated his fists and turned to burning flames around the edge.
“See if you can throw it, Mate,” Gabe urged.
“Where in the hell would you like me to do that?” he asked, his voice tense. “I don’t want to start the whole place on fire. We kind of need it right now.”
“We don’t even know if it’ll actually set fire to anything,” Gabe said, defending himself.
“Oh, like Randy didn’t put a hole in the fucking ground?”
I got to my feet and approached Liam slowly. His shoulders tensed, and he hunched over as if he was afraid to even move. His body practically pulsed with magic. The closer I got to him, the bigger the flames grew, licking up and over his hands a good half a foot or so.
“Stop,” Liam said, peeking over at me. “Don’t come closer.”
“Send it into the ocean,” I told him, watching the orange ball in his hands like a hawk. “It won’t hurt anyone there.”
Liam closed his eyes. Afterward, he swallowed, then pushed his arms forward in the direction of the ocean. Sure enough, a ball of flames flew through the air, sizzling and sparking when it hit the cresting waves.
“Son of a bitch,” Randy said, all smiles and coming at Liam with a bro hug. “How in the hell did you do that? Fire? What? That’s crazy.”
“My turn,” Gabe said.
Before any of us could stop him, he took the stance I was used to seeing from them, the same one Randy had put me in the other day, and held his hands in front of him. An unsteady wave flowed through my body as if I could feel Gabe conjuring his magic. It felt amenable, fluid, soft. When he thrust his hands forward, my body expanded and contracted. At first, I didn’t think anything happened, but then the wave that had just white-capped near the shore, rose in the air, and then crashed back down in reverse.
I blinked at the spot. Had I just seen that? It looked like something from a movie. “I suppose you’ve never done that either,” I said.
Three sets of eyes turned toward me. I tried to take a step closer to them, but wobbled on my feet. Liam was the first one there, steadying me. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong, Norah?”
I shook my head and the world slowed down, the images in front of me blurring from one to the other. When I spoke, my voice came out like an echo. “I don’t know-ow-ow. Wha-a-a-a-a-t?”
I shook my head again to try to bring myself out of it, but instead of making me feel better, a wave of nausea crashed into me. I fell against Liam’s chest and he carefully lowered me to the grass again.
“Talk to us,” Randy implored. “What’s going on?”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to talk because they were turning numb, for one, and two, I hated the echoing of my voice. It was unnatural, wrong, and I didn’t want them to treat me like porcelain. I pushed away from Liam and held myself into a sitting position.
“Does she need…you know?” Randy asked.
“Are you serious?” Liam snapped. “She couldn’t even stand.”
“It’s not like the time she needed it with me,” Gabe said, with more control. That was odd. Liam was always the one who had his head on his shoulders. All academics were like that. “She was crackling with magic. Now she looks like she can barely keep it together.”
“I’m right here,” I reminded them. “I can hear everything.”
“I didn’t know,” Randy said, his voice remorseful, almost desperate. “Water?”
“Water sounds good,” I said. “Food, maybe, too?” My stomach felt hollow as if everything had been taken out of me. “Chocolate is preferable.”
Gabe chuckled. “You should probably have something filling, like meat.”
I cracked a smile. “You want me to eat meat? I thought we just came to the conclusion that sex wasn’t what I needed right now.”
“Your mind’s always in the gutter,” Gabe said. “At least that means you’ll probably live.”
“Probably,” I said, matching his sarcasm. “If my mind’s in the gutter, I’m probably not as injured as you might think.”
“I don’t know about that,” Liam said. “I think there’s always something wrong with you.”
My mouth dropped. I looked at him and he smiled back. The slight shrug he gave me made me burst out laughing. Five seconds later, a glass of water was shoved into my face along with a bag of semi-sweet morsels. Randy, huffing and puffing, must’ve sprinted to the house and back to get these lovely treats for me. “Thank you.”
He nodded once as I eagerly took them from his hands. I motioned the bag of chocolate chips toward Liam, asking if it was okay to open. In answer, he took the bag from me and ripped it, taking my hand and forcing it palm up as he poured some in my hand. “If Norah needs chocolate, she can have chocolate.”
“I like the way you guys think.”
After I drank the whole cup of water and munched on some chocolate c
hips, I offered the bag to the other guys. Gabe was the first to take some and then handed the bag to Randy. We ended up sitting in a circle as we all waited to see if I’d return to normal. Ha. Normal. What was normal anyways? It was something I wasn’t familiar with. I’d never been normal, or regular, in my life, and in that moment, looking at Liam, Randy, and Gabe, I was glad I wasn’t normal. Normal girls didn’t have three boyfriends.
This time, the piercing glare from someone other was unmistakable. A shiver ran up my spine and I turned. Travis was at the window like I expected all along. I propped my chin up on my shoulder and just stared at him. Randy followed my gaze. “He’d already had the glass of water waiting when I ran back in there. Doesn’t care, my ass,” he chuckled.
Liam brought his knees up to his chest and rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, obviously we don’t have this magic stuff figured out yet. We thought that when you expended magic, it made you even more magic, therefore, being so hyped up with it that you needed release. That apparently only happens some of the time.”
“I didn’t even use magic this time.”
“But we did,” Gabe said. “Ridiculous amounts of magic that did badass shit, I might add.”
“And there were more of us this time than just when you and Randy were practicing,” Liam tacked on.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t figure out what’s going on.” I stared out at the ocean and watched as the waves broke onto the shore. The recurring motion soothed my soul, but also made me feel completely inadequate. Waves lapped against the beach, that’s what they did. Why couldn’t I figure out what I was supposed to be doing? Or what we all were? Or who this Jay guy was who wanted to do God knew what with me? Sure, New Orleans was a lot easier. I got up, I went to work, I closed up shop, I went home. Here I was living life on the edge of unexplored territory and even though part of me said this whole thing was crazy and that I should be taking the safe route instead, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Nope. Not at all. Despite this crazy shit, it was beginning to feel more and more like I was all-in with these guys.