Chapter 6
Hudson
There’d been so much, so many things going through my head from the moment I’d received the call from the coroner. Dealing with the house. Reaching out to Grams’ contacts. Taking time off from my serving position at the local Applebee’s, not even having an answer as to when I’d be back.
Nonstop. Every minute of every day. I hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time, and then…
The warmest, most complete peace I’d ever felt in my entire life.
Safety and serenity. All at once. My heart had been broken some unknowable time beforehand, and suddenly it had been squeezed back together. Held tight in an embrace I never wanted to leave.
Consciousness returned slowly. Heat radiated between my back and a broad, muscled chest. My hand curled around the arm just below my rib cage. Unfamiliar. Far more hair than I’d expected.
Soft breath rustled my bangs, tickling my nose, and my eyes crept open.
Tyler.
My cheek was stuck to Tyler’s bare chest, the outline of his face barely visible in the dim moonlight drifting through my balcony window. I gripped the arm holding me tighter, sucking air through my nose as the events that led to my blissful sleep came grunting and moaning back to me.
Emery.
Not in my wildest dreams. Not in Morpheus’, the god of dreams himself, wildest dreams could that situation have been conceived. Tyler Hargraves and Emery Evans… in the same bed… holding me. Sharing me.
And I was bare-ass naked.
Trying not to disturb them, I moved the hand that wasn’t clutching to Emery, checking to see if—yep. Ty was naked too. That was his dick, pointed right at me and ready for another round, even in sleep.
Lifting my head, I leaned back, trying to assess Emery’s state. He had a death grip on me. Like he’d been waiting for that moment his entire life, and he was never letting go.
It crushed me a bit that there may have been some truth to that.
I wiggled my ass, just a little. That same bulge I’d felt at the bar earlier greeted me, contained by his pants but there all the same. A soft grunt tickled my ear, and Em snuggled into my neck with a sigh, melting my fucking heart.
Some slow-release, post-nut clarity hit me as I lay there, basking.
I had to do better with Emery. I should have done better with Emery in the first place.
He never would’ve hurt me, and my reasons for leaving him behind, well…
If he still cared for me after all this time, it was entirely possible I’d never had to leave him in the first place.
Whatever came next, I’d do right by him. However I could.
Carefully, I returned my cheek to Tyler’s chest. The moment I did, he turned and nestled against the top of my head.
Another wave of guilt. Part of me knew Ty had never meant those horrible things. It’s hard to see the best in people when they say the worst things you already think to yourself, though. I wasn’t sure I could forgive him. I was even less certain there was a way forward for us.
But he had tried. Here he was, making an effort. I owed him that talk at the very least.
I owed it to myself, too.
And for some reason, none of that scared me. My fears drifted away as I lay there, completely enveloped between the guys. Safe. Warm.
Wanted.
I dared to let myself dream, just for a bit, that this was mine. That they were mine. Both of them.
“All yours, baby boy.”
“Always yours, warlock.”
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes, and I buried my face in Ty’s chest. I pulled Em’s hand even tighter against myself.
Warlock. I chuckled to myself. I couldn’t believe Emery called me that in the middle of…
whatever that was we did at my balcony window.
That had been his and Ty’s nickname for me in high school.
Ty had started it. Knew it drove me crazy because the proper name for a male witch is still witch.
Fighting it had just made it worse. It never really went away, it seemed.
They never really went away, no matter how I tried to hide.
I had no idea what this was. I had said Emery’s name while Tyler was in the middle of rearranging my guts. That should have infuriated him. Instead, he asked what I needed. Basically invited Emery to join us.
The recollection of Ty sucking my cum into his mouth and then kissing Emery came back to me. My cheeks flushed instantly. My cock twitched.
What the fuck, I’ve never kissed Em. How come Tyler got to kiss him first?
I guess I was part of it, in a way.
It was too easy. Too fucking simple with the years of tension between them to suddenly be okay with an almost-threesome. Had they discussed this while I’d been gone? Was this the agreement if I ever came back to Felcove?
You're crazy about him. I’m crazy about him. Let’s share. Hell, maybe he’ll stick around for a BOGO deal on dick.
That was definitely not a conversation I could see happening.
But what did I know? Tyler had defied his dad, and Emery had called me out for being a shithead, even reined in my crazy. Had they grown while I was gone?
Wild.
I heaved a sigh against Ty’s chest. There was no way I was going to find that blissful unconsciousness again now that my thoughts were loose.
Being incredibly careful so as not to disturb either of them, I managed to pry myself out from under Emery.
His bushy red brows knitted together at my absence, riddling me with guilt as I knelt between the two of them.
I leaned in, taking his scruffy jaw in my palm with a whisper.
“Thank you for making me feel so safe, Em.” I placed a gentle kiss on his cheek.
My words seemed to reach him, and that disgruntled expression faded.
I turned to consider Tyler. Completely oblivious Tyler. A smile crossed my lips, and I leaned down, giving him a kiss to match the one I’d given Emery. “You’re an idiot.” I ran my fingers through his hair, just watching him for a moment. “And I’ve missed you every single day.”
Cautiously climbing off the foot of the bed, I snagged my sleep pants from the floor. After slipping them on, I chose a tattered black t-shirt from my closet, pulling the skin-tight fabric over my chest.
I ran to the bathroom to grab some cleaning supplies, returning to clean the mess we’d made of the balcony window. The moon was so bright, shining through the freshly cleaned glass.
My monthly ritual came back to me. Like the stove left on after leaving the house or a door left unlocked before bed. I turned on the spot to my candles in different corners of the room, finding every one of them extinguished.
I hadn’t put them out.
Had one of the guys done it to be safe before we fell asleep? I couldn’t remember either of them leaving my side, even for a second, after Emery came in from the balcony.
“No, no, no, no…” I whispered, moving quickly to the candle on my bedside table, trying to discern if it had burned any lower. I couldn’t tell. If it had relit, the circle would’ve been reinstated with Tyler inside of it.
A fever dream I’d used to start an offering I hadn’t followed through with—made manifest.
I turned to the guys, both still sound asleep. I hadn’t just been thinking of Tyler. Emery had popped into my head before I broke down. Tyler had become a part of the offering. My magic—my fucking family’s magic—had assumed I’d been envisioning my intent.
And it had called out to Emery, too.
My stomach caved in on itself. I held my hand over my mouth to stifle the gasp. I was a monster. A horrible, selfish little prick who let his own sexual appetite affect the people who cared about him.
A bad thing. A very, very bad thing.
Quickly and quietly, I padded out of my room, down the stairs, and through the kitchen to the sunroom. I snatched a sewing needle from the pincushion on the table beside Grams’ favorite rocking chair, jabbing my thumb.
Not all uses of blood in spellcasting were deemed unnatural, especially when certain familial secrets were meant to be hidden away from prying eyes.
Turning to the latch that held the slatted wooden door beside me in place, I smeared the blossoming red droplet along the metal. It absorbed my blood like a dry flower bed, and I swung it free.
I hadn’t stepped into that room since high school.
It had practically been calling out to me since I’d come home, but I wouldn’t listen.
I’d had enough to deal with without ancient family summons ringing in my ears, speaking to me of duty and destiny as if those that had come before had any notion of what I was going through.
“None of you were the last of us,” I muttered bitterly, stepping up to the altar in the center of the musty space.
Books and journals lined the walls, parchment spilling out along the shelves.
Bottles of every herb and compounding ingredient imaginable filled a cabinet behind Grams’ altar.
Hemlock, lavender, nightshade, and salts, aligned in neat rows with peeling, stained labels.
Odd trinkets, necklaces, brooches, rings, and other curios were kept locked in boxes on the higher shelves—lesser curses contained in appealing little prisons.
Why my family made a habit of sealing nasty magicks in shiny things never made sense to me. Why not stick a coughing hex in something gross like an old math textbook, or a perpetual dancing jinx in a ripped pair of underwear? No one is going to touch those things.
None of that was what I’d opened the door for, however. Not yet. Not until I understood the mechanics of what had transpired in my room. Or the balcony. Whatever.
My target sat in the center of that altar, practically daring me, whispering to me as I approached. Deep brown leather bearing the same inverted three-point star bound by a circle that decorated the skin over my heart. My family spellbook.
The Garland Grimoire.
“Okay, fam, don’t hate me,” I muttered, lifting the heavy binding. “Hudson’s been bad. Big shock, right?” I held my hand aloft over the pages, pleading. “Help me.”
As if a wind had kicked up in that small room, the pages fluttered. They flipped of their own accord, scouring the tome to answer my call, finally stilling roughly a third of the way through to land on—
“Ancestral Ascension: The Naming of the Garland Monarch,” I whispered, glowering at the book. “Nope. Try again.”
The pages turned furiously, landing on another section further in.
“The Rites of Guidance: A Witch’s Path to Accepting the Inevitable.” I growled in my throat. “Okay, now you’re just being bitches.”
Wildly irritated, I began skimming the grimoire on my own, turning page after page with as much anger as possible without tearing the parchment. “Stupid book.”
After countless pages, the sun had begun to filter through the open door behind me and into the altar room.
I hadn’t found anything even remotely related to offerings and their participants.
There was never going to be anything pertaining to sex magic in this tome.
The help I was seeking wasn’t exactly a Cursekeeper specialty.
I smacked my hands down on the altar on either side of the grimoire, hanging my head. I was always going to have to have a conversation with Tyler and Emery about all this, magical involvement or no.
I was just hoping to have something to work with beforehand. Anything to tell me I hadn’t manipulated them. That what happened was something they’d wanted, too.
That they’d wanted me enough to put everything else aside.
“Grams,” I sighed, screwing my eyes shut and shaking my head. “I fucked up. I think I fucked up really bad this time.”
The sound of the pages moving met my ears. I opened my eyes to see them turning, slowly this time, landing on a familiar image. My hand went to my chest, fingers curling around the small silver bar there. “My pendant…” I whispered, brushing the page with my fingertips.
The entirety of the text had been written in Latin, which, of course, I was fluent in, but the page was near the back of the book.
One of the earliest pages in my family’s written history, faded with time.
The words I could make out were gibberish, something about a curse—shocker—and someone who had hurt, possibly killed, a Garland witch.
Revenge. The oldest and most predictable reason for a curse’s creation.
The Garlands had been named the Cursekeepers because we knew how to contain the curses, however. Any witch could craft a curse. Sometimes those curses got bad. And sometimes those curses didn’t stay with the individual it had been intended for.
Of course, we’d become adept at containing those curses because we’d made some mistakes ourselves. Big ones. Lycanthropy, for example—a greater curse.
Sure, there had been a few versions of men that could become wolves or wolf-like creatures throughout human history. Apparently, Zeus was responsible for one of them. I don’t know, never met the guy.
But the werewolves we were familiar with there in Felcove and the surrounding areas—those were our doing.
Honestly, I didn’t really understand it all. Werewolves of the modern day were reclusive, keeping to themselves for fear of being hunted. Most just wanted to live in peace, like Emery.
The real power of the Garlands hadn’t been needed in my lifetime. And, other than the clients who would seek her out for the containment of lesser curses, if Grams had ever been called upon for some great Garland undertaking, she’d never talked about it.
With a sigh, I dog-eared the page bearing my pendant and closed the grimoire. I would just have to talk with the guys and hope they didn’t hate my guts for potentially having created a circle of gay sexual energy that had given me one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life.
I had to adjust myself just thinking about it. Ty had fucking wrecked me in the best way last night. And having Emery there watching, touching himself to the whole thing…
I wanted more. I wanted to experience that all over again, but with Emery touching me too. Kissing me. Fucking me even.
Fat chance of that happening.
My sinking spirits bottomed out with the shout that suddenly echoed down the stairs. “What the FUCK, EMERY?!”