36. Cress
Ben shared that it was common for those newly tied in a mating circle to disappear for several weeks before rejoining polite society. I understood exactly why. I’d had all three of my men in every possible way, often all of them at the same time, and had lost track of when and where I was.
When we started wanting non-carnal experiences, we did so as a unit, with a collective “Shouldn’t we be doing something else?”
As we prepared to get out of bed, Phaeron figured out how to borrow from me. I felt a tug on my magic from the strands that connected us and sensed a request coming from him. Can we trade eyesights and knowledge of technology?
I agreed and felt a shift between us, soon covering my eyes from the assault of the lamp lit right next to the bed. While lying next to me, he wove a tendril of shadow between my fingers, forming a blindfold of sorts. “You see why I expected to go blind on your world,” he said.
I heard the rapid clicking of his thumbs on his new phone’s screen as he set it up, then he turned the haptics off.
“Yeah. We’re getting you sunglasses,” I declared.
“Should’ve done that a while ago,” Ben commented from the other side of the bed.
“We’ve been a bit preoccupied,” Phaeron said. “Hmm. This was a lot easier than I expected.” He gave me back what he’d borrowed, and I glanced over to see his pupils narrowing to slits as he looked at the phone screen he’d dimmed until it was nearly black.
“You should ask Geo for tips,” I suggested. The gargoyle grunted from somewhere on the floor. He was retrieving clothes, the most determined of us to leave this room today.
Phaeron nodded, staring at the screen with utmost concentration. “Geo, why is the…” He seemed to wrack his brain. “…browser named after a hunting expedition?”
“It takes you on an adventure through the Internet,” he answered.
“Ah, yes. An apt name.”
Ben and I started to crack up. The next thing I knew, tendrils of shadow coiled under my back and rolled me off the bed. I sprawled on the carpet with a squeak of surprise. Judging by the nearby thud and curse from Geo, Ben had been pushed off too, on top of the gargoyle.
“Let’s get moving,” Phaeron said, turning into shadows and reappearing at the foot of the bed, standing and starting to dress himself.
I reached out and plucked away Phaeron’s sense of balance. There was a hint of resistance, but it seemed I didn’t need to ask to take an attribute from him. One moment, he was shrugging on his shirt and looking for his pants, and the next, he was tripping over his tail and stumbling.
I gaped for a split second, then rose with his usual grace to my feet. “You’re right. We should be practicing,” I said.
He hissed a laugh. “Fair play, bright soul, but I need that back.”
He already had his balance returned by the time he finished speaking. I didn’t know how to hold on to it for long, as it was naturally his soundless predator’s prowl instead of something I had practiced.
We dressed successfully without ripping the clothes right back off one another and relocated to the other room we’d claimed. We sat in a circle facing one another, our feet various weapons in the middle: my sun staff, Geo’s crystal shield and quartz hammer, Ben’s daggers, and Phaeron’s swords.
“It would be ideal if we got to a place of trust where any of us could pick up these weapons and wield them like the original owner,” Phaeron said.
“How do we do that without crippling someone else?” I asked, thinking of how easily he’d blinded me with a taste of his usual photosensitivity.
“Practice,” he replied. “And a clever mind, perhaps. Much as I would like to see you face Myuna carrying one of my swords and Geo’s shield, there are factors at play other than skill.”
I had a feeling I knew where this was going. “I can’t lift his shield. It’s too heavy,” I admitted.
“Therefore, you will need to borrow strength, as well as two separate skills from either of us,” Phaeron said. “Three separate attributes to channel continuously from us to you. Lose your attention on just one of them, and everything gets fumbled. In the meantime, we will fight by your side and share what you don’t need between the three of us. We will all need to learn a fine balancing act.”
I nibbled into my bottom lip. It sounded difficult, but we hadn’t joined a mating circle just for the hell of it. First, it was time for baby steps. We started borrowing from each other and testing what we could do while seated and relatively at ease. What we shared turned out to be more aligned to quirks of personality and small skills and attributes.
I worked up a headache concentrating, trying to hold on to a portion of Geo’s stoicism. I’d quickly learned that something so integral to who someone else was was almost impossible to keep in full. But Geo had patience in spades, so I could borrow some without immediately losing a hold of it.
The men had to reach through my magic to each other, a process that was tedious for all of us. They were bound to me, though, not each other.
After maybe an hour, I noticed Phaeron pinching Ben with little flickers of shadows. “Stop that,” the dimensional said in undertone.
The second time it happened, I felt the heat of Ben’s arousal and the way Phaeron tried to resist feeling the same way. “I can’t help it,” Ben said, swiping at the shadows before he could get pinched again.
“Think about something else, then.”
“Something unsexy,” I suggested, picking up on the problem. “Like Myuna.”
Phaeron’s flare of hatred was strong enough that we all felt it. There was an echo amongst us, a shared distaste for the goddess who’d tortured him and threatened the lives of those we loved. I thought of Carly’s uncertain future, worried for her continued absence, and Phaeron and Geo tensed.
This seemed to dampen Ben for a while, but it wasn’t long until I felt his attention running up and down my form in appreciation. I was no longer holding on to a portion of Geo’s steadiness, and my skin tingled with awareness.
All three men were focused on me within a breath. Here we go again, I thought, sure we were going tumbling back into bed for who knew how long.
The next moment, Phaeron and Ben disappeared in a swirl of shadows. Some time passed without them, during which I kissed Geo and then pushed at his chest when he tried to draw me in closer, murmuring, “We really shouldn’t.”
He rumbled an “indeed” with great reluctance.
The dimensional returned sans Ben. “He’ll rejoin us shortly, once he’s cooled down,” he said. I felt him tug on my magic in request, bit by bit trying to learn more about modern culture from what I knew. I sent him memes, and his nose wrinkled at what was a bunch of nonsense out of context.
“Where’d you put him?” I asked.
Phaeron shrugged. “A cleaning closet.”
I had a hearty laugh before explaining what a horny jail was to both of them. “It’s not usually a literal place, but I guess we’ve got to make an exception,” I said.
It was a lot less funny when I got distracted by the flex of Geo’s muscles that evening while we were still practicing and ended up the second member of the circle to go to horny jail. At least I knew where Phaeron had found a janitor’s closet—on floor negative one behind a door that’d been locked earlier.
I spent maybe ten minutes breathing in the cleaning product fumes before deciding I was definitely, most assuredly not horny anymore. The guys had called it quits without me and greeted me with a scavenged dinner and their caressing hands and…yup, we were in bed again.
Madigan arrived the next morning with her own mating circle in tow, and our real training began. “We gave you guys a couple days to get used to it. Sorry it couldn’t be longer,” she’d said.
With their arrival started the clock on four last days of practice before we would help escort a crowd of survivors to the ocean gate. The knowledge was like a bucket of ice water over my head. As much as I wanted my men, we were using up precious time.
The first thing they did was separate us into different containment rooms for a one-on-one talk. I was with Madigan, face flaming when the first question out of my mouth was if it would always be like this. She’d barked a laugh and hugged me, knowing exactly what I meant.
“Yes and no. It takes a while to get used to sharing strong emotions. But men outside of your circle will be entirely unappealing. And vice versa for your men. The stability of your shared relationships becomes quite comforting.”
“That’s a relief,” I said.
She patted my shoulder reassuringly. “When I was just coming into my power and circle, another woman took me aside to teach me everything I could do as the core of a mating circle. If you think I got to grow my reputation as Mad Ash without a significant amount of my men’s help, you’d be wrong,” she said.
“Every circle is different, of course. The secret to my success is that the members of my circle specialize in similar magic. We all manipulate earth, stone, and crystal with strength-based runes,” she explained. “Over time, we’ve figured out how my men can send me three different pieces of their magic and muscles so I seem unusually gifted in guardian witch spells.
“What I see in your circle is that you have one man specializing in each of the three measures of power level. If you can take something from each of them, it would boost your own power level significantly, to the point where you could hold off someone as strong as Myuna for a short time. It would take a lot out of all of you to maintain it for a prolonged battle, but we’ll work up your endurance as much as we can.”
We ended up chatting for hours, with my handbook floating nearby, recording every piece of knowledge Madigan shared. Milo curled up in her lap, purring, while my other two familiars spied on happenings around the library.
Bella had ended up in the room with Phaeron and Orthus, projecting happiness from all the belly rubs she was getting from the dimensional. I’d almost forgotten he liked cats and Bella in particular. There wasn’t an equivalent pet from Soiluire, as far as I could tell.
Meanwhile, Jin had avoided the ongoing conversations and was watching the powercore ripple with shadows and the points of purple-black claws. She was fairly sure Braza was practicing with her shadowborn magic within the confines of her living space.
Armed with the knowledge of those who’d gone through this before, we rejoined one another in a large room on floor negative five, fully equipped with weapons and armor. Phaeron had acquired a new leather chest piece from his nightly wanderings, though it remained free of the runic etchings of his original.
One of his gifts had been from the same store, and I wore it to get used to the weight and movement of the celestial witch robe partnered with a pair of dark pants built for my heavy librarian witch belt. It was an expensive ensemble due to the magic woven into the cloth, a concept that immediately fascinated the side of me that’d wanted to go into fashion design before meeting my men had set me on another path.
The stars and tiny crescent moons stitched into the robe formed celestial runic shapes, making it resistant to heat and light. With the gloves and hood in place, I’d never get a sunburn again, but more importantly, they’d dampen a fraction of Myuna’s light magic when we finally met to fight.
My men and I squared off against Madigan and her circle. “Hit me as hard as you can,” she invited, fully encased in her red crystal armor and resting the head of her warhammer on the ground. “I guarantee you I won’t break.”
“None of us will,” Orthus agreed.
Aaron, the less serious of the guardian witch twins, pointed to the shadowy claws lengthening over Phaeron’s hands. “We do bleed, though.”
“I shall be gentle,” he replied. I felt his eagerness for a practice match where he could use some of his considerable power.
But first, we tried sharing magic. First came Ben, who traded a part of his blood witchery for a portion of my celestial witchery. He carried his father’s staff, Evening Guidance, intending to practice with it first.
I held out my finger for Phaeron to prick with one of his talons and winced before drawing the blood rune for strength on my arm.
“Not like that,” Ben said, taking gentle hold of my hand to draw it a second time. With a squeeze on the pad of my finger, he drew out enough blood to etch the rune for energy right below it. There was a surge through my muscles, and I itched to use them, practically vibrating in place.
Geo offered me his shield. It was a massive slab of crystal, but I buckled it to my arm and lifted, amazed when it came off the ground smoothly. He gave me a measure of his endurance, necessary for taking hits in the thick of battle and continuing on without tiring.
Lastly, Phaeron drew one of his swords, offering it to me laid out flat against his palms. “A weapon of two worlds, yours to wield,” he murmured.
A sense of wonder that didn’t belong to the circle suffused me. Braza slid into my mind, her electric presence further augmenting me in a way that felt as familiar as sliding my feet into a pair of shoes. Together we admired the shining length of metal, polished to gleaming, with words in the dimensional language etched up the middle.
“He reforged his Soiluirian blades with Earth silver upon learning how deadly it is to unnaturals,” she told me privately. “This blade is Flame. It’s the shorter of his two swords, made for his left hand.”
“Thank you. Your swords are named?” I asked.
He nodded, tapping the gemstone set into the end of the pommel. It was a gleaming yellow-orange, tones I’d seen in his eyes countless times. The other, still sheathed at his side, had a red-black stone. “Shadow and Flame, to reflect myself,” he explained. “As long as you have my skill to wield it, I believe Flame suits you better.”
“And mine as well,” Braza said through me, creating a two-toned echo to my voice.
“Between us, she will be unstoppable,” he said. I felt him lend me some of his considerable knowledge of swordplay, honed over endless years at war.
Madigan picked up her warhammer, slinging it up at the ready. “All right, let’s see what you all can do,” she said. With a grin, she swung the massive weapon at me.
For all the skills of others swirling in my head, I still panicked and held up the shield, taking the full force of the blow. The crystal rang and vibrated my arm, and there was dissonance in my head. Geo thought I’d done a great job, but Ben and Phaeron would’ve sidestepped, and Braza was annoyed, wondering why I’d taken such a slow attack head-on.
I lost control of the connections with my men, and the shield tipped toward, threatening to take me toppling over with it. Several masculine shouts sounded as Phaeron caught me and Orthus did something with his magic to make the shield lighter.
“Let’s try that again,” Madigan suggested.
And thus began the first session of us practicing combining our skills under pressure.
We had little downtime as a unit from the moment Madigan and her mates started helping us train. My shadowborn side liked that—we were moving closer to our goal, even if we weren’t leaving the library yet.
Cress’s coven and friends moved back into their rooms by the second day of our training, many of them helping by pressuring Cress with their magics. She was figuring out how to channel for longer and flinching less when spells or weapons came her way.
I tried not to be too territorial when she spent much of the evening before bedtime in a communal area with her friends rather than her mates, but I felt her contentment too. She needed community and, sensing my mood, dragged me in to spend time with them too. As we chatted, she rested in the circle of my arms, where she belonged.
According to them, things were silent as the grave up on the streets. I knew that meant Myuna was also practicing her magic, testing the bounds of her army’s control through her new ascended.
“When will you tell her your suspicions?” Braza asked. Now that we’d exited the bedroom, she was privy to all my thoughts and worries again.
“I don’t know.” I still hoped I was wrong, but it made too much sense. Selecting Carly for ascension was akin to the twist of a knife. She was also the only target we’d hesitate to kill, as Myuna’s control would falter with the death of her chosen assistant. “There’s one more factor I’d like to consider. Why present Cress with a problem and no solution?”
Lucas was here. He was growing stronger by the day, and the unusual ripples that suffused his soul were flattening, smoothing into a new whole to represent who he was after his ordeal. I had to see what his new magic could do and that would only be possible if I witnessed how he healed one of Myuna’s victims. If he could mend the cracks and traumas that resulted from soul ties, perhaps he could help me remove a seed of corruption planted in Myuna’s chosen ascendant, regardless of whether it was Carly or someone else entirely.
“Promise me you’re not going to go after Carly on your own,” Braza said, nervous.
“Of course not.”
Grant was the only coven member not here. I intended to shake him for information on a certain blue-haired teenager once he returned from his spying.
Cress leaned her head back to look at me, and I took the opportunity to kiss her sideways. “Penny for your thoughts?” she asked.
Between our mating bond and our connection in the circle, she would feel my restlessness without a doubt. Maybe even that I was having a conversation with Braza and plotting over some of the finer details before the coming confrontation. “Aren’t pennies worthless?” I asked.
“Well, your thoughts aren’t,” she said.
I leaned in, whispering in her ear, “What if I was mentally undressing you?”
Braza’s presence in my mind faded in an instant, and both Ben and Geo faltered mid-sentence to turn their heads our way. Blushing, Cress reached up and tapped me on the nose. “You know what this means,” she whispered back. “Horny jail.”
I tugged on her sleeve, exposing the edge of my mating mark. Giving it a lick, I felt her tense and bite her lip to cage in a gasp.
“Oh no, horny jail,” I teased, stealing her away to the closet with me on a wisp of shadow.
It was much later that night that Geo and I sat at the base of the powercore and he allowed me to pull his crystalline heart free from his chest. I began the painstaking task of writing down the runes that encircled his heart, borrowing most of Cress’s drawing ability to diagram it.
I hadn’t had to ask for permission, since she was sleeping off our visit to the closet. It seemed the magic would continue working even if one member of the circle was unconscious.
I used her skill to write down and study the numerous chains of spell runes that led from the heart back into Geo’s body, noting them down on a separate page somewhere in the middle of Cress’s sketchbook. I felt Braza watching over my shoulder. “Do these match what you can remember?” I asked her.
“They are animation spells. None concern the identity of the soul inside of the heart,” she replied.
We both had the same translation spell, which made these human-made runes something I could read and understand. Unfortunately, she was right. At some point, I’d started copying down the same threads of runes—his heart was like a central nervous system while he was in gargoyle form, connecting to each limb, muscle, and tendon.
I manipulated these threads with care, relying on my shadows to keep from tugging one free of its connection by accident. They were intricately wrapped and would only unravel from each other so much before there was tension. The edge of a shadow brushed the strand of runes they were all wound around, and a fission of pain ran from it straight to my fingers and down my arm. I jerked away with a hiss. That’d felt like trying to grab a bolt of lightning.
“Let me try, Father,” Braza said. Her powercore presence pressed into the gaps where I’d threaded my shadows.
In the meantime, I inspected my new wound that ran from fingertip to shoulder, branching like the shock had been electricity. I noted it at the bottom of a page. Geo wasn’t entirely helpless even while his heart was exposed in gargoyle form. That magic had to be guarding the most important runes keeping him animated.
I flipped the notebook back to the first page while Braza hummed and shifted around the magic, murmuring to herself. The portrait Cress had drawn from my memories gazed back at me. Our son. She saw much of me in the boy, but in this quiet moment, I noted how he was human in his smile and the curve of his ears.
The Void had seen a future where he lived. I was struck breathless by hope, no matter how unlikely it seemed that a witch could carry a dimensional child to term. If we lived and Myuna died, he could exist. Perhaps Cress would agree to name him Teziel, meaning victorious. I had met many good males with that name in my time.
Braza tapped on my thoughts, and I glanced up. “May I see?” she asked politely.
“We have no other secrets. This one certainly is not one,” I replied.
She took in the drawing and squealed in delight. “He looks just like you both.”
“He was foretold by the same vision that showed me you and Ravai,” I told her, faltering for a moment. “He is still an idea, a kind dream before I remember I live on this unforgiving world now. I do not seek to replace you, Brazita.”
Her tone implied a smile. “I understand. You might have a future with both of us. I was able to inspect this.”
She pushed an image of the central link of runes connected to Geo’s heart. I flipped back to my sketches and added these runes, heart thudding hard in my chest as she sent two more memories from different angles. It was a woven braid of several spells concerning control, identity, intelligence, duty, and the protective spell meant to electrocute anyone who touched the chain directly.
I smiled to myself. Given time, I would unravel each of these runes into their component spells. My clawed finger followed the path of the identity spell, already spotting where it was written for the soul in the crystal heart to forget its past life and start again with a baseline of the duty that it was entwined with.
Geo shuddered back into existence and shifted back to his human form with a grind of clashing rocks. He coughed out a plume of dust. “Well?” he ground out.
I clapped him on the shoulder. “I will have my daughter back because of you. Words cannot express my gratitude…but perhaps you would welcome an idea that will elevate you in the eyes of our mate.”
He straightened slowly, having spent this whole time hunched over with his heart exposed. “I’m listening,” he stated.