Spirited

by C. M. Stunich

  She snapped an angry gaze in my direction and then redirected her attention to the prince.

  “You're not in trouble,” Air said, so flubbing handsome in his red military tunic, white breeches, and black boots. I was pleased to see that after he'd given his cousin a careful once-over, he turned his attention back to me, eyes shining. “And good save, Brynn … of Haversey and Hellim.”

  Reaching down, he pulled my hand out from where it was hiding inside the thick silk folds of my new cloak.

  The look that Felixa threw me was absolutely scathing but I ignored it in favor of meeting Air's eyes. He had that strange, shimmering hopeful look in his green irises again, the one that made my heart skip and jump inside my chest.

  “Let's go get you a dress,” he said, and without bothering to explain or apologize or clean up the mess I'd made—there were certainly pluses to being the prince—Air dragged me back outside with Elijah following silent and shocked behind us.

  I'd have slept through All Haunts' Eve if Elijah hadn't popped into my bedchamber and poked my forehead with a cold finger.

  Blinking awake, I forgot to be mad at him because he was staring at me with such a deep sense of relief that it made my wild fatigue worth it. All that shopping plus using Hellim's dark powers for the first time thoroughly exhausted me. Even though I came back from the market soaked in sweat with Air tossing me those strange, cryptic looks, I was too tired to accept his proposal that we visit the bathhouse together.

  And I liked visiting the bathhouse with Air because, well, I liked ogling his naked body. I wasn't too ashamed to admit it.

  “Jasinda has been banging on your door for the better part of an hour. She says you missed breakfast, the party starts in less than six hours, and if you want to eat lunch and get properly dressed for the celebration, you'll get up now.”

  “So you're using her as an excuse to invade my bedroom?” I grumbled, sitting up in the canopy bed that the queen had gifted me when Jasinda and I were paired together for the first time. I wondered if I got to take it with me when we moved onto the Royal College campus? If we'd been staying in the dorms, that would've been a definite no. But it sounded like Everess planned to put us somewhere more private, likely the staff apartments.

  “Maybe,” Elijah said, mouth twitching as he patted the head of the ghost mouse that was sitting in his pocket, staring at me with beady blue-white eyes. Elijah of Haversey was very much corporeal and beautiful in that moment, even if his hands were as cold as ice. But the mouse was a shimmery spirit still and I had no idea if it was the same one he'd picked up yesterday or a new one. As if on cue, the ghost dog he'd acquired at the market trotted into the room and sat at his feet. “And it's a very nice bedroom if I do say so myself.”

  Sitting on the edge of my bed—and doing a fairly convincing job of pretending to be alive enough to make the mattress dent—Eli looked around the room and made me blush furiously. Jasinda was the only person who was welcome in my room. Well, her and Air. He really had stayed in here, waiting for me to come back from Grandberg Manor, and I had a pillow soaked with his smell to prove it. I'd been hugging it close every night since.

  “Stop gawping and get out,” I said, but I didn't feel the words as much as I should have. It didn't really bother me to have Elijah of Haversey performing his admittedly sexy lazy king slouch on my bed.

  “You saved my ass yesterday,” he told me, glancing over with strands of dark hair curling over his forehead. He must've been clean-shaven when he died because not a lick of stubble marred his face nor would it ever again. That made me sad for him. Really flubbing sad.

  “Not really,” I said, because Eli was already dead. Hell's bells, maybe I'd actually done him a disservice by stopping Felixa from sending him onto a new life? He was clearly way too attached to this one, and he had a queen to back up his obsession. But … I was also glad he was here?

  Haversey's tits, did I have a crush?!

  I have a crush on a ghost. Shaking my head, I shoved fingers into the shock white strands of my hair and stared at him with critical eyes. Oh my Goddess, I do! If Elijah had been alive, I might've actually gone for him. He was fairly high-ranking, but he wasn't quite out of reach the way Airmienan was.

  Buuuuut … Elijah wasn't alive. No, he was dead, and the chances of my ever bringing him back were slim.

  “You cancelled a fucking exorcism,” he purred, letting his head fall toward me and stretching his wings out to their full-lengths behind him. Since he was dead, Elijah could curse as much as he wanted and never lose a feather. Guess that was one plus of being stuck between death and rebirth.

  “Yes, and I also cost your cousin about a million gems with all the ship I broke,” I said, quickly making a curse word substitute. Glancing in the dressing mirror last night before bed, I swear I saw a bald patch starting to form on one of my wings from all the lost feathers, my bronzed skin bright and obvious amongst the ebony down.

  “And he has a billion gems to spare,” Elijah said with a loose, languid shrug of his shoulders. The ghost dog panted and laid his head on Eli's knee, his fur matted and stuck through with debris. I wondered how he'd died? The poor thing looked like it'd been through the wringer. “Besides …” Eli started with a small sigh. “It was absolutely his pleasure.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, sitting up and letting the sheets fall around my waist. I'd forgotten I was wearing a sea green nightgown that was thin enough to show off the brown of my nipples yet again. Elijah glanced at them and I saw fire flare in his eyes. Ghost he might be, but if I invited him into my bed, he'd take the offer.

  And Gods, why did I feel like inviting him into my bed?! I did not sleep with spirits! Never had before, not once. Of course, I could count on one hand the total number of times I'd had a sexual encounter with anyone—living or dead—so I supposed that wasn't a particularly definitive statement.

  “What do I mean by that?” Elijah puzzled aloud, turning a look on me with those pale blue eyes of his like I was insane. “Airmienan is crazy about you.”

  Heat surged through my body at the same time I cocked a brow at Elijah's jealous tone. He couldn't possibly be jealous of me, right? Maybe he was just jealous that his cousin was alive and able to both crush on a girl and—

  Wait, what?

  “Air is not crazy about me,” I scoffed with a dramatic eye roll. “We're just friends.”

  “Just friends?” Elijah asked, scooping the mouse from his pocket and putting it on the floor. He sat back up and cocked a perfectly curved dark brow at me. “You've been spending too much time with dead people: the prince is in love with you.”

  I scoffed and stretched my wings out to the sides, hitting the kerosene lamp on my bedside table—the one Air screwed into the wood so I couldn't knock it over anymore. Hah! Take that natural clumsiness!

  “Air is not in love with me,” I said with a haughty wave of my hand. Only … the nonchalance was on the outside but it definitely wasn't on the inside. Inside, my heart was thundering and my emotions were going completely haywire. Heat suffused my cheeks as I sat forward and watched as Eli's eyes dropped to my breasts again. When he stared at them, they felt heavy and round, like they were as curious as I was what it would feel like for him to heft one in his hand.

  Argh!

  No. No. If Elijah were a man, I'd be interested. But he wasn't. He was a ghost.

  A ghost with an erection tucked inside his black Royal College breeches.

  Mother flubbing son of a female dog, I cursed internally. And it was then that I felt like I might've figured out the strange Amerin tradition of keeping the bedroom sacred. Now that Elijah was in here, sitting on my bed and staring at me with heavy half-lidded eyes … I was getting ideas.

  Clearly, all of that dark magic Hellim had lent me had somehow twisted up with Haversey's and confused the Hell out of my brain. My thoughts weren't making nearly enough sense.

  “He's in love with you,” Eli repeated, but I was already shaking my h
ead. “He is. Deny it all you want, but that's the truth.”

  “And how would you know that?” I asked, giving him a golden-eyed glare. Inside though … a surge of heat and feeling was rushing through me like fire, scalding me in places that hadn't been touched for a long, long time.

  “Because he was in love with you before I died, and it's only gotten worse.” Elijah paused and closed his eyes for a moment, running his tongue over his lower lip. I could feel him gathering energy—a whole Hell of a lot of it—and pouring it into his body, making himself so real that I had to reach out and touch him, finger a lock of dark hair. His skin, where I brushed it, was warm. “You like that little trick?” he asked me, cracking one eye and smirking.

  “You're one of the most powerful ghosts I've ever seen,” I said and Eli smirked at me.

  “Then you haven't seen enough ghosts.” I dropped my hand in my lap and pulled my legs out of the covers, flashing bronzed calves and thighs at Eli. He definitely didn't fail to notice.

  “I'm not a very accomplished spirit whisperer if you haven't noticed.”

  “A not-so-very-accomplished spirit whisperer that unbound and re-bound me, scored an exclusive decree from the queen, and has a double blessing from two of the more powerful gods.” He raised his brows as I stretched my legs out, my toes grazing the white feathers of his wings. “You seem like such a failure, Brynn of Haversey.”

  I wiggled my toes and teased Eli's white feathers, wondering how pretty it would be if we were having sex, my black wings and his white ones rubbing together. The thought made my cheeks feel hot. Well, that and the fact that I was touching Eli's most intimate part with my toes and he was letting me. Okay, one of his most intimate parts.

  The other, I had seen erect and lit up with runes.

  With a sharp exhale, I yanked my feet away from him and hopped out of bed. Swishing the curtains wide, I let gold streams of sunlight filter into the room. But even though it was a sunny day, winter still had her fingers in the weather pie and the stone floor beneath my feet was freezing cold.

  “Don't let all those things fool you,” I said as I moved over to the fireplace and knelt down, blowing on the logs and igniting the same fire whisperer spell that lit my torch in the Grandberg Manor basement. “I'm also a near-twenty-one year old spirit whisperer who's been reject from the academy seven times, who has one more shot to get in, and who—” I stopped abruptly as I turned around, smacking Elijah with my wings and flushing two shades brighter.

  Grr. I may as well have turned and whacked him in the face with my tits. But with the heat and tension evident in the room, it all felt more like a … caress. Suddenly, we were too close together and I was well-aware of how tall and handsome he was.

  If he were still alive, he'd have made a nice husband. And if Air really did like me? Imagine that, the prince and a high-ranking noble as my lovers. The fantasy was nice, especially when it extended to having both Air and Elijah naked and in my bed, two hot bodies pressed against me on either side.

  A nice fantasy, but still, a blatant stretch of reality that was never going to happen. Never. Air needed a strong, capable bride with connections, someone like Felixa (gag!) and Elijah was dead. Personally, I would be lucky to get one ordinary husband let alone two royal ones.

  Still … Elijah was a very powerful spirit whisperer and the only physical sign that he was dead was a very slight glow around his form, but almost like the sunshine was limning him from behind and not because this was the literal incarnation of his spirit.

  “Despite all of that, my cousin is in love with you,” Eli repeated, warming me up from head to toe. He reached out a finger and traced the rapidly beating pulse in my throat, making me shiver and cementing the idea that he was as much an incorrigible flirt as Air.

  “He can never have me,” I repeated and Elijah's lazy, sexy smile twisted up at the edges. “Air needs a woman who—”

  Elijah cut me off by cupping his long fingers around the back of my neck and leaning in close, warm breath feathering across my parted lips. He isn't real! Well, okay, he's real but that breath is all fake! That warm, sweet-smelling breath that's making my mouth tingle. It's all manufactured with Haversey magic!

  That didn't stop my lids from getting heavy, drooping halfway shut as Eli pressed his luck and touched his lips to mine.

  Magic sparked through me, hot and needy, and for a split-second there, I remembered one of the other reasons I didn't fuck ghosts: the magic overload was intense and heady, like a drug. I felt like a spook dust addict, snorting sparkles and wandering the streets in a haze, seeing shadows of creatures from other realms that no resident of Amerin should ever see, things that didn't exist here.

  Most people knew of, and believed in, other realms or dimensions, layers of existence on either side of as well as above and below our own. Flub, Hell and Heaven, Hellim's and Haversey's personal domains were thought to be directly above and below us. But nobody should ever see it, not while they were still a part of this world.

  I didn't feel like I was a part of this world with Elijah's warm lips against mine. They should be cold, they should be cold, they should be cold, my logical mind chanted, but I ignored it. I blamed it on All Haunts' Eve, the one day a year where the Otherside didn't feel so far away, where the dead and the living mingled without judgment, where spirit whisperers weren't the only citizens in Amerin that could see ghosts.

  Not only was Elijah almost literally made of magic, but it was in the air, the barriers between our world, between Hell and Heaven … were thin and passable. That wild energy surged through me, making my toes curl against the stone floors as the firelight flickered and danced, warming my left side and encouraging me to lean into Eli.

  His chest was muscular and flat, his belly traced with hard abs that I delightfully discovered by sneaking my fingers underneath his Royal College jacket, shivering with pleasure at the feel of his hot skin against my hand. For a second there, I decided to not care that his warmth, his breath, even his heartbeat were all falsehoods.

  I was riding the magic, and the high, and … does Air really love me? Even if I couldn't have him, it was a thrilling thought.

  Elijah pulled me closer, opening my mouth with his tongue as my lids closed the rest of the way, reveling in the sensation of our lips slanting together. It'd been too long since I'd kissed someone—even a ghost. I really should've taken that griffin guy, Vexer, up on his offer! My fantasy expanded to include a high-ranking member of the Travelers' Guild and I chuckled against Eli's mouth at the same moment I felt a rush of liquid heat between my thighs.

  Reflexively, my wings curled forward and brushed against his, ivory and ebony feathers tangling as a deep, aching groan burst from Eli's throat. In an instant, he'd dropped his hand from my neck to my hip, fingers curling tightly around my curves. He did the same with the other hand and angled us back toward the bed.

  As soon as my thighs hit the edge of the mattress, I fell back and Elijah leaned into me, his hard body encouraging me to spread my legs, let him grind the hardness of his arousal against my very bare core. My nightgown was short and clingy, and I never wore panties to bed.

  Never.

  “Mm,” Eli whispered as my arms tangled around his neck, our tongues dancing a violent, heated rhythm that obliterated all my rational and logical thoughts. How long has it been since I last did this? A year? Maybe longer. Oh Gods. Kissing Elijah was lighting up every nerve in my body, turning me into a limp, whimpering mess.

  Are those sounds really coming from my throat? I thought as I gave into my seraphic instincts and curled my wings up and around Elijah's body, encasing them in a dark cocoon of feathers. The peaks of my stiff nipples hardened to the point of being painful, and I came very close to letting out a scream when Eli dropped his left hand to my breasts and freed the right one from the silk, closing his hand over the full found and stealing my breath away.

  His hips ground against me and I wiggled back, muscles tightening inside of me, reminding me
that I was empty, empty, empty when I could be full.

  Arching my back off the bed, I pressed my breasts up and into Eli's eager hand, at the same time dropping my fingers to the buttons of his black Royal College jacket and frantically tearing them open. Not only were Royal College uniforms the finest made garments in the country apart from the royal family's clothing, but Eli was dead. If I snapped a button or two off, they'd fix themselves eventually. A ghost's clothes always returned to their original state after a while.

  My left hand took a short break to reach up and snatch the loose right sleeve of Eli's jacket, tearing the already rent fabric off and tossing it to the floor so I could smooth my hands over his beautiful biceps, caress and squeeze the tight muscles.

  “Gods,” I heard him grumble as he trailed his fingers down my rib cage, over the tiny curve of my waist, the overly generous swell of my hip, past the high hem of my sea green silk nightie and down the smooth bare length of my thigh.

  “Yes,” I whispered in triumph as …

  The door burst open and I glanced up in shock to find both Air and Jasinda standing there, gaping at us.

  “Oh my Goddess, Brynn!” Jassy choked out, clamping both hands over her mouth to stifle a chuckle at the same time Air strode into the room and gaped at his cousin. I'd never quite seen the prince look so shocked before.

  “Why are … you in her bedroom?” Air asked in a low, almost terrifyingly empty tone. His words were as cold as ice and his eyes were thunderous pools of dark green. “Elijah of Haversey.”

  Air ground his slightly pointed teeth together as Eli sat up slowly, pulling me along with him. Carefully, I folded my wings against my back and tried to get a read on the very awkward, very … interesting confrontation that was happening.