No one said anything until we reconvened at Veronica’s shop. She sat behind the counter, on which she had arranged different stones. The hum in the air told me she’d been doing magic to strengthen the wizards. She moved from behind the counter and gestured to a couple of robes, and first Lonna and then I changed and put them on. Being human dampened my wolf senses, and I was grateful because every nerve felt raw.
“I don’t know what you did to get the angry witches to leave you alone,” Merlin told me, “but you’re lucky.”
“And where were you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do something, and what were you talking about with them?”
He shrugged. “We all have our secrets. I couldn’t intervene or I’d get caught. Besides, sometimes people like me need to sit back and let others make the hard choices. I’ve been punished for interfering before.”
“I should have anticipated that they would be awakened with the energy being used,” Max told us with a rueful shake of his head. “You can’t do that much magic in a place like Salem without attracting attention.”
Jared stood by one of the shelves, toying with a purple and green fluorite sphere. “What will happen to them?” he asked. He didn’t mean the witches.
Everyone exchanged glances. I honestly didn’t know. This was a new world for me, but I could guess it wouldn’t be good for Cindy and her crew.
All the hair on my body stood up whenever I thought about the ghost girl, even now when I stood in human form and tried to ignore how cold the floor was on my bare feet. I couldn’t blame the floor for my full-body shiver, though.
Jared pulled me close to him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I could have saved her.”
“So it was you.” Merlin approached and looked me over. “You have the makings of an alpha female, you know. You’re smart, tough, and have a good sense of when sacrifice is necessary.”
I blushed, and Jared asked, “What do you mean?”
“She struck a bargain with the witches,” Merlin said. “One of them told me. It’s how to get them to leave you alone, of a sort. What did they make you promise, or can you tell us?”
I shrugged. I would tell Jared later, but I didn’t want to go into it now. In fact, all I wanted was a nice, warm shower and to crawl into clean sheets.
“Let me take you home,” Jared said. He looked pale, his eyes darkened with grief. While I didn’t know how to help him deal with his sister’s death, I did know a thing or two about sibling rejection or betrayal.
I nodded. “I’d like that so we can at least have a little time together.” I tried to close my mouth, but all it did was make me scrunch my face as I stifled a yawn. “Such as it is.”
“Take all the time you need.” Lonna raised her eyebrows at Max. “You can’t take him yet. He still has a lot to do here.”
“I’ll have to bring his case to the Wizard Tribunal as well as their petition.”
“Whoa, what petition?” Jared asked.
“To let the two of you be a mated pair in spite of the fact that the lycanthropes and wizards don’t usually like their kinds mixing.”
“A what?” I asked. “We’ve only just reconnected.”
Jared put an arm around me. “We’ll talk about this later when we’re both not so exhausted.”
We left, and neither of us said anything on the ride home, although the question—mating, like marriage?—hung in the air between us. When we arrived at my grandmother’s house, we found the place clean—no salt rings in the foyer—and a change of sheets on the bed.
“Thank you,” I whispered and got no response. I took a quick shower, and when I looked in the mirror after and towel-dried my hair, I saw that someone had drawn a pair of interlocking hearts in the steam. As far as I knew, no one had been in the bathroom that day but me.
I found Jared downstairs on the couch.
“I don’t think I can make it back to Boston,” he said. “I’m too exhausted, and my brain can’t deal with everything right now.”
“Then come upstairs. I think it’ll be okay. We can just sleep if you need to.”
He grinned and rewarded me with his chocolate chuckle. “Oh, I think it’ll be more than that, and I want to do more than sleep with you.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll race you.”
Somehow we both found extra reserves of energy and ran up the stairs. He tackled me to the bed, and I squirmed.
“No fair, you’re wearing way too many clothes,” I said.
He opened my robe, and I felt the heat of his gaze.
“Gods, you’re beautiful.”
He slid the robe across me and followed the whisper of silk with his lips. Whenever he found a ticklish spot, I wiggled and made him take something off. And whenever he found a particularly pleasurable place—nipples, curve of my neck, lower—I arched into him and made him pause there. Once he had me panting, I made sure to return the favor and licked and sucked him into submission. Thankfully his dream self was modest, if anything.
“Are you ready?” I asked as I lay across him to get as much skin-on-skin contact as possible.
“Yes, you?”
I answered by sliding down on him, and I closed my eyes with pleasure as he moved beneath me. Keeping a slow pace proved impossible, as he hit all my most sensitive places at once. The orgasm crashed around me with a rumble of thunder, and he gasped his release as well.
“Was that you?” I asked him as we cuddled.
“No, at least I hope not. That could be embarrassing. The neighbors will know every time we do something like this.”
I laughed. “They might ask us to if they need their lawns watered.”
“And I will always say yes.”
“To what?” I held my breath.
“To—what did they say?—being a mated pair with you, or at least exploring the potential benefits of such an arrangement.”
I snuggled closer to him. “I like it when you talk business, Mister Steel.”
“And I’m always happy when such a lovely opportunity presents itself. Assuming you’re amenable to such an arrangement.”
“I am,” I said. “We can draw up the contract in the morning.”
The moonlight coming through the window illuminated his smirk. “I probably don’t want to know what your terms will be.”
“Just not too many vegetables. We can figure it all out later.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For everything, but especially for tonight.” He relaxed against me, and his even breathing told me sleep overtook him.
I drifted off to sleep in his arms knowing why my grandmother permitted our canoodling and then some—she knew it was meant to be.
On Halloween, we joined Veronica downtown. Tourists packed the area, of course, and I wondered what the ghostly coven thought about it all. When I asked Veronica, she shrugged.
“They’re probably used to it. I would imagine they enjoy it to some degree, as long as we also acknowledge their suffering and how they were punished for being different.”
Jared squeezed my hand. “At least you’re no longer punishing yourself for that.”
“True.” I tried not to think about how after the weekend, he would have to return to Boston to meet Kurt and Merlin to start training, although they’d told him they would work with his schedule so he could continue to run his company without Cindy and to come up and see me. I had agreed to help Veronica with the store through the holiday season, and I had finally found my stone. A rose quartz heart similar to the one the teenager had bought now lived on my night-stand as a reminder of both the lessons I’d learned and the promise I’d made to the girl’s many times great aunt.
There was no trace of Cindy, Thierry, and the air elementals. I shuddered to think what had become of them. Jared had reported Cindy missing, and the same detective had questioned all of us. Meanwhile, since evidence had pointed to Cindy, Veronica had been cleared, and the authorities assumed Cindy had skipped town.
Only we knew t
he truth, or what parts of it we could know.
Jared put his arm around me, and we went to stand in line to get into the Salem Witch Experience. It felt so natural and comfortable to be there with him.
Someone touched my arm, and when I looked down, I saw Nona. She gave me a thumbs-up and a wink, and then disappeared.
“What was that?” Jared asked.
“Just further confirmation that this is the right thing, weirdness and all.”
“Of course it is. I love you, my little wolf.”
“And I love you.”
We kissed, and the crowd moved around us. It was one thing to believe in magic; another to embrace it. I knew he would always be there to anchor me, and I would do the same for him. It was our new not-normal, and we were both okay with that.
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Sometimes you don’t want your dreams to come true.
About to embark on a major move with her husband, Emma can’t think about anything but her dreams. It’s not all that surprising given the seductive world she finds in her sleep - parties with Poseidon, Demeter and Persephone in attendance. Even more interesting, powerful gods like the super sexy Triton, son of Poseidon, and ultra-badass Artemis ask her to accomplish different tasks for them each night.
What Emma doesn’t realize until she’s in too deep is that her dreams aren’t figments of her imagination. She becomes part of the Collective Unconscious when asleep and plays a vital role in bridging the waking world and the dream world. But when the gods enact a punishment that affects her waking life, Emma is forced to choose between the C.U. and those she loves.
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About the Author
Cecilia Dominic wrote her first story when she was two years old and has always had a much more interesting life inside her head than outside of it. She became a clinical psychologist because she’s fascinated by people and their stories, but she couldn’t stop writing fiction. The first draft of her dissertation, while not fiction, was still criticized by her major professor for being written in too entertaining a style. She made it through graduate school and got her PhD, started her own practice, and by day, she helps people cure their insomnia without using medication. By night, she writes fiction she hopes will keep her readers turning the pages all night. Yes, she recognizes the conflict of interest between her two careers, so she writes under a pen name. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with one husband and two cats, which, she’s been told, is a good number of each.
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The Mountain’s Shadow
Long Shadows
Blood’s Shadow
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Noble Secrets
Eros Element
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Aether Spirit
Aether Rising
The Perfect Books
A Perfect Man
Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella Page 91