by Eva Chase
Jude shifted forward so swiftly I didn’t have time to take a breath before he was kissing me, and then I was utterly breathless. I curled my fingers into the front of his shirt with a whimper I couldn’t contain as he kissed me harder. When he eased back, not far, my whole body was buzzing with the passion of his embrace.
“You have no idea how much it means to me that you’d make that offer,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I don’t think you should have to throw your lot in with me that far before you’re totally sure you want that kind of commitment, but I don’t know if I’d be able to say no… except we can’t.”
It was my turn to blink at him. “What do you mean?”
The corners of his lips turned up. “Fearmancer law, specifically to stop over-eager young mages from leaping before they look. We can’t get married in any way the barons will recognize until we’ve both graduated from the college. For me, that’s almost two more years.”
“Oh,” I said with a weird mix of relief and disappointment. “I guess that makes sense. It doesn’t help you, though.”
“It’s okay.” Jude ran his hand over my hair in a fond caress. “I can’t officially separate myself from the family before the baby arrives without creating some kind of chaos about inheritance, but as soon as she’s here, I’ll let my ‘father’ know I’m stepping aside. I’ll sign a formal declaration. That should be enough. As long as no one ever tests my legitimacy as a Killbrook, which they shouldn’t have any need to if I’m not angling for the barony…” He shrugged.
I didn’t think he was as confident in his strategy as he was trying to sound. The impulse welled up in me to tell him about my own sort-of encounter with my birth mother this morning and all the conflicted emotions that had risen up with that contact, but I hadn’t mentioned the specifics to any of the scions for a reason. Until we knew where she was and what the blacksuits were going to do about it, the situation was hardly real. I wasn’t quite ready to deal with all the complications of that development just yet.
All I wanted was an evening away from that chaos with one of the guys I could call my boyfriend, as if my life was simple just this once.
“Well, if you do think of any way I can make a difference, don’t keep quiet about it,” I said.
“I know.” Jude’s smile turned wry. “I’m trying to keep the mess of my existence from poisoning yours as much as I possibly can.”
The comment brought an ache into my chest. Even when he was joking around, he couldn’t hide the fact that he still felt somehow a bit less compared to me, as if he were bringing me down by not being a scion, by having parents who’d lie about it. How could I prove to him that I didn’t see him that way at all?
Maybe I couldn’t convince him all at once, but I could keep showing him in every way I had at my disposal, over and over, until the idea stuck. And with the rush of his kiss still racing through me, I could think of one way that particularly appealed to me right now.
I stood up, tugging Jude with me. As I guided him toward the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the park, I trailed my hand down the smooth fabric of his shirt over his chest.
“You’re not a mess to me,” I said. “All of us got stuck with crappy circumstances one way or another. Even with all that, even with a father who treated you like garbage, you’ve still managed to become a guy that I’m proud to stand beside.”
I nudged him another step back so his back hit the glass. Jude cocked his head at me, his dark green eyes lit with curiosity if not total faith in my words.
We were high up enough that the people passing through the glow of the streetlamps below were little more than blobs of hair, face, and clothes. None of them were likely to make us out in any detail unless someone turned binoculars toward the window. But it’d still serve to get my point across.
I leaned in to kiss him, as hard as he’d kissed me earlier. His hand rose to grip my waist, shifting the silky fabric of my dress against my thighs with a faint but delicious friction. It was him I meant to focus on, though.
Lowering my head, I pressed my mouth to his jaw. “The whole world can see that we’re together and how much I want you, and I’m totally fine with that. Even if I’m not standing beside you but kneeling in front of you.”
“Rory,” Jude said in a ragged voice, somewhere between encouragement and protest. I was already sinking down, teasing my lips along his neck as I did, running my hands down his lean frame until one of them slipped over the buckle of his belt. When I brushed my fingers over his groin, he was already hard. He let out a soft groan as I traced the bulge of his arousal.
I came to rest on my knees, undoing his belt at the same time. He sucked in a shaky breath as I freed his erection from his pants. His hand caught in my hair, fingers tangling with the strands. They tightened as I lowered my mouth to take in the head of his cock. “Christ,” he muttered.
It turned out Jude didn’t have all that strong exhibitionist tendencies. I sucked him deeper, swiveling my tongue over the tender skin, and even as he groaned he managed to work out a casting word that flicked the living room lights off. Cloaked in darkness, we’d barely be visible at all to anyone outside. But that was fine. Actually being seen hadn’t really been the point.
His salty flavor with a hint of the sharp scent that always clung to him filled my mouth. I worked him over as thoroughly as I could in my limited experience at this act, letting the head of his cock bump the back of my mouth and pressing my lips tight to add to the sensation. His hips started to pump in time with the hitch of his breath. My fingers delved into his boxers again to caress his balls, and a choked sound escaped him.
“Fuck, you’re amazing,” he said in a rasp. “I can’t—”
His cock twitched in my mouth, and then Jude was urging me off him and tugging me up to face him. He dragged me into a sloppy kiss that was so urgent I didn’t mind.
As his lips left mine, he flipped us around, spinning me in front of him at the same time so that I was leaning against the glass. I found myself gazing out at the park. He jerked up my dress and cupped my already damp panties to provoke a shock of pleasure. I hummed encouragingly, pressing into his touch. The brush of his cock over my ass made me shiver in anticipation.
“Since you like being on display…” Jude’s teasing smirk carried through his voice. “Why don’t we imagine the whole world is watching me launch you into the stratosphere?”
I might have balked if I’d really thought anyone could tell what we were doing, but in the darkness, pretending only gave me a thrill. He yanked down my panties and pulled my hips back against him. His fingers dipped down from my clit to tease over me as he whispered the protection spell.
My pebbled nipples brushed the glass through my dress. His cock came to rest against my slit from behind, and I couldn’t hold back a whine of need.
“Jude…”
“Right here, Ice Queen.” He thrust into me smooth and fast, the position giving him the perfect angle to hit the most sensitive spot inside me on the first stroke. I cried out, my head tipping forward to rest against the cool surface of the window. “Although God knows you’re nothing like ice. Maybe I should call you Fire Queen from now on.”
“You said you liked me wild,” I reminded him, with another gasp as he hit that spot again. Bliss bloomed swift and heady from my core through the rest of me.
“I like you every way,” he murmured. “But you can bring out that wild side any time you like.”
The rhythm of his thrusts made my body rock against the glass. My breasts grazed it over and over, tingling with the sensation. Jude grasped my thigh harder as he drove into me with a harsher groan, and I trembled with the start of my release.
The wave of pleasure hit me so hard I saw stars amid the electric lights below. My breath stuttered. I reached behind me to clasp at whatever part of him I could reach, and he bowed into me with the spurt of his own climax.
Let the whole world see if they wanted to. For now, at least, this man was m
ine, and I was his, and anyone who tried to take him away would have to get through me first.
Chapter Nine
Rory
Now that Victory and her friends had agreed to an unspoken truce, using the dorm’s common room was a lot more pleasant. Rather than slipping back into my bedroom with my lunch, I stayed at the group dining table.
Two of my dormmates whom I hadn’t really talked to had already been eating their gourmet meals at the other end of the table. They both gave me a bit of a wary look, with shivers of nervous energy that seeped into my chest. Maybe not everyone was completely convinced I hadn’t murdered Imogen after all. Oh, well. I could ignore that.
I was happily polishing off my mac-and-cheese when Shelby emerged from her room. At the sight of her limp as she headed toward the kitchen, my stomach sank.
“Are you okay?” I asked her when she reached the table. “What happened?”
Her gaze flicked to the other girls before settling on me. She gave me a tight smile. “It’s no big deal. My knee’s just a little sore. I tripped and fell on it badly yesterday.”
I guessed I might have heard about that earlier if I hadn’t been at Jude’s apartment since yesterday evening. We’d only gotten back to campus an hour ago. Her story brought back memories of the bullying I’d witnessed between the fearmancer students and the Naries in the last couple weeks. The mages had always seen the Naries as easy prey to draw fear from, but lately their tactics had become a lot more overt, skirting the line of revealing our magic.
I waited until she’d assembled a sandwich and sat down kitty-corner from me. The two other girls dropped their plates in the sink with a clatter, leaving them for the maintenance staff to wash, and ambled off. I tipped my head closer to Shelby.
“What really happened—you tripped, or some jerk pushed you?”
She’d relaxed a little with the other girls’ departure. “I don’t know,” she said. “It felt like something tangled around my feet, but there was nothing there when I looked. A couple of the regular students were nearby and had a good laugh about it, but they weren’t close enough to have knocked me over. It was… weird.” She gave a little shudder with a frown.
The fearmancer bullies were definitely going overboard in their current campaign against the nonmagical students. I poked at my last few pieces of pasta, wishing there was something I could tell her to get them to back off beyond the strategies Jude and I had suggested not long ago, but to some extent, my hands were tied by the necessary secrecy. I’d also been able to protect her some by enchanting the violin necklace she was wearing to deflect direct castings, but a conjured invisible obstacle on a path wouldn’t be diverted by that.
“If your leg gets worse, definitely go to the health center and get it checked out,” I said. The mages on staff there might be able to get away with applying a little magical healing that would look too obviously odd coming from me.
My phone chimed with an alert. Malcolm was announcing his return to campus. A tendril of relief rose up through my chest, even though he’d already reported his recovery, in not so many words, yesterday. At this point, I wouldn’t have put it past Baron Nightwood to change his mind and detain his son all over again.
Everyone good to meet in the lounge in, say, half an hour? he asked.
I’ll be there, I wrote back. The other scions confirmed within the next few minutes.
I wasn’t totally sure what Malcolm wanted to discuss, but we hadn’t really talked about the older barons’ campaign against me in front of him before. After everything he’d been through to protect me from his father, he’d earned enough trust for me to let him in on those conversations. And I should probably fill all the guys in on the confirmation that my birth mother was alive.
I was just thinking that when my phone rang. Lillian’s name and number appeared on the screen. My pulse jumped as I picked it up. Had they found out more about my mother’s situation already?
“Rory,” the blacksuit said briskly, with a hint of urgency she couldn’t disguise. “I’m sending someone around to pick you up—they should be at the front of the campus in ten minutes. Whatever you’re doing, I need you to drop it and meet them there.”
“What?” I said. “What’s going on?” She’d given me plenty of warning for yesterday morning’s ceremony.
“I’ve gotten the impression that this is a good window for reaching out to your mother’s presence so we can determine her location, but I’m not sure how long that window will stay open. We don’t know when we’ll have a chance this good again. You’ll be there?”
She said it like a question, but I didn’t see how I could say no. The other scions would still be here when I got back.
“Okay. Of course. Do I need to bring anything, or—”
“Just yourself. That’s all we need.”
She didn’t even say good-bye, just hung up with a click on the other end of the line. I stared at the phone for a second, my nerves prickling.
It made sense that she wanted to get my mother out of whatever horrible situation she was stuck in as soon as possible, but the intense rush made me uneasy.
I gulped down the rest of my mac-and-cheese and rinsed the plate before adding it to the others in the sink. “Gotta jet,” I said to Shelby. “Be careful out there.”
She didn’t need me to spell out that I meant in terms of the other students, not her balance. She gave me a softer smile and a nod.
It’d been chilly when I’d made the walk from the garage to the residences this morning, so I grabbed a jacket from my room before heading out to the parking lot in front of Killbrook Hall. The breeze tugged at the fabric as I pulled it tight around me. It was a damp day, the sky gray with clouds and moisture lingering in the air, threatening rain that hadn’t fallen yet.
I made it to the front of the hall five minutes after Lillian’s call, but the car she’d sent pulled up at the edge of the lot just seconds later. A guy in the black dress shirt and slacks that made up the standard blacksuit uniform waved me in.
After the way the blacksuits had treated me over Imogen’s murder, my legs balked instinctively. I forced myself to get into the back of the car. This didn’t seem like the right time to pick a fight.
“Is there any particular reason we’re not doing this at the campus Casting Grounds again?” I asked the driver as he revved the engine.
“Ravenguard will explain everything you need to know once we’re out there,” he said brusquely.
We tore down the road and through town. I texted a quick message to the guys to explain my absence from the meeting, just saying that Lillian had called me away. After that, I sat tensed, watching the buildings and the landscape beyond whip by.
So far it seemed everything I’d been told was legit, at least. The guy pulled the car over beside a few other vehicles at the edge of a fallow field several minutes outside of town. The quiver of magic in the air as I stepped out suggested someone had cast a repelling spell to keep Naries away.
Lillian, Maggie, and several other blacksuits were moving around the field, laying down small objects I couldn’t make out. Conducting pieces of some sort? As I walked closer, I caught sight of one on the ground that seemed to prove that theory—it was a stone curved with an opening to a hollow at one end. Items like that could contain and amplify spells beyond what any given mage could manage on their own.
I couldn’t make any sense of the layout in which they were setting them, though. The grass had been marked with spots of blue dye here and there, and a couple of the blacksuits were consulting a paper diagram as they stalked from one point to another. It took a couple minutes before Lillian even looked up and noticed I’d arrived.
“Good,” she said, her gaze already darting away from me to someplace else on the field. “We’ll want you there.” She pointed at a larger mark in the midst of all the conducting pieces. When I walked over, I found a large one already resting in the grass there. To help conduct all that magic through me? To amplify it? The effo
rt had been pretty powerful with just six blacksuits focusing their natural abilities on me the last time.
Maggie meandered over as the others continued their setting up, carrying more of her lavender water. “Don’t worry,” she said in an amused tone as she started to dab it on my uncovered skin. “They know what they’re doing.”
Yeah, but I didn’t. “What’s all this for? It looks a lot more elaborate than yesterday’s ceremony was.”
“Focusing in on a location is a much more complicated process than just getting a general ID.” She tipped her head toward some of the nearer stones. “Using representations to stand in for major urban centers and so on, we can hone in faster and more precisely.”
They were creating a sort of map, then. Without any boundaries of state lines or bodies of water, I couldn’t tell what area it was mirroring. “Have they already figured out approximately where my mother is?” How large a territory would we be searching?
“Previous indications have made Lillian sure we should be looking at California or the edges of the neighboring states.” Maggie glanced at me. “She might have been very close to you the whole time the joymancers had you.”
The thought made my heart squeeze. Would my mother have had any idea I was nearby, being raised by the enemies who’d imprisoned her?
“Do you know how good an idea we’ll get of her exact location from this spell?” I asked.
“Lillian is hopeful we can narrow it down to a city, maybe even part of a city. We’ll need to go down there to get any more specific than that. At least it’s a lot easier with you here. They tried making use of your grandparents to find you while you were still missing, but that connection isn’t as strong.”
And back then when my Bloodstone grandfather was still alive, no one would have thought to search for a woman they’d believed was dead.
“All right, time to get started,” Lillian announced, and Maggie stepped back automatically. The senior blacksuit gestured to me as the others spread out around the clearing. “This will feel very similar to yesterday, though more intense. If you get a sense of your mother’s presence, train your own magic on her too. And hold strong. The longer we can focus on her, the closer we’ll get.”