Chapter 22
twenty-two
ExSpellementing
It’s easier than I thought to pretend nothing happened. He doesn’t mention it. I don’t mention it. We eat some delivered butternut squash soup from the Chubby Radish and look over the spells as we forget he just came all over my chest.
“This one specifies a domain,” he says, flipping to the next page. “It would require both of our magics and some of Oscar’s body. Bones would be best but blood—”
I gasp.
“Only a little blood!” he declares.
“We’re not making my poor baby bleed. Fur will be fine.”
Bastian grumbles. “Barely adequate. You obviously don’t love your poor baby as much as you could.”
I scoff, picking Oscar up and hugging him close. “I would do anything for this cat.”
“Except prick him with a needle to protect him?”
“The spell doesn’t specify blood or bones!”
“I know what parts will bind most strongly to the magic. I’m a dragon. Furthermore—”
“Dragon, shamgon! All I’ve ever seen is a lizard.”
Bastian leaves the spell book and stalks to me, the muscles in his shoulders rippling. Papery wings scarred with burns and holes push out from his back and flare wide.
“You’re fortunate to have not seen my full dragon form, lest you quiver into a puddle of fear,” he says, his voice searing into my brain.
But it’s not fear he’s inspiring. Hell, didn’t I just come like four times? How can I possibly be getting turned on by wings and a bit of posturing? It’s ridiculous.
Bastian stops in front of me and his expression shifts from menacing to wicked. “You have no sense of self-preservation, do you?”
I turn away, setting Oscar down as I walk back toward the kitchen.
I scoop a spoonful of soup in my mouth and shove a gluten-free cracker in after it to hold off from having to answer, or really just from saying something stupid in response because I don’t trust my mouth when Bastian is shirtless with wings.
He comes to stand behind me, planting his hand on the countertop to cage me in. “If you’d been the maiden they sacrificed to me every year, you would come running into my cave willing and legs open, wouldn’t you have, Kitty?”
“Maiden sacrifices?” I ask around the cracker.
He hums, grabbing a strand of my damp hair between his fingers. “They thought if they gave me their women I wouldn’t consume the town. Myths from other lands and other monsters I happened to look like.”
“What did you do to them?” I ask, my body trembling with an electric current that might be fear, or maybe jealousy. “The maiden sacrifices?”
“Read to them, mostly,” he says, grabbing another strand of my hair. “Sometimes…other things.”
“Like things that happened in the bathroom?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Fucking…damn it.
He smirks. “Does that make you angry?”
“No,” I say, stepping away from him.
I pick up my to-go soup cup and step out of his gravity.
“There were only three women in the century I lived there that successfully seduced me,” he says.
“Successfully…How many tried?”
Ugh, I don’t want to know this!
“Many,” he says, his smile growing wider.
“And so what did you do with the girls when you were done with them? Eat them?” I ask spitefully before shoveling in another spoonful of soup.
“I would give them a little currency and take them wherever they wanted to go.”
“Back home?”
He shakes his head. “I learned the hard way that if I ‘rejected’ an offering, it didn’t end well for the girls.”
A vision of all the horrible things that could happen to a poor young woman in a bygone age where dragons were real, and so was magic, flit through my head. Burned her, maybe? Beheaded? Abandoned in the woods?
“When was this? Where?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Many centuries ago, across the ocean. I made the crossing two centuries ago when stability came to the United States—along with rapid printing presses and bright young minds to spin stories for them.”
“So that’s why you have an accent?” I ask.
He quirks an eyebrow. “I don’t. You do.”
“Pft. I don’t have an accent.”
“You do.”
I roll my eyes. “Anyway, the spell. How do I use my magic for it if we don’t know what it is or how it works?”
“If you’re willing, I can inspire your magic to move to the surface, just the way the spindle on the ritual book does.”
I look at the needle sticking out of the front cover. “It’s magic?”
“The whole book is, of course. Forged with magic. The specific words you spoke were the unlocking incantation, but the magic was pulled from your blood by the book itself because you indicated you were willing.”
“How do you ‘motivate’ my magic?”
Bastian takes the soup from my hand and sets it on the counter. “Come with me.”
He stands behind me, guiding me to the door of the apartment. Each step feels charged, like any second our feet could explode off the ground, and we’d soar through the air. Would I ever be able to come back down if we did?
When we reach the end of the hall, he takes my hands in his from behind, and plants them on the frame of the door. He lowers his lips to my ear as he presses his chest against my back.
“Trust me now, Kitty.” His words flutter over me like silk.
“Okay,” I say.
“Tell me,” he says, his fingers sliding between mine.
“Tell you what?” I ask, my breath coming in shallow pants.
“You trust me.”
I swallow hard as I consider it. Do I trust him? He’s refused to tell me things about himself, but as far as I can tell, he hasn’t lied. He hasn’t hurt me, or Oscar. He’s kinder than he lets on, and I think maybe…
“I trust you,” I whisper.
Inky black magic with strings of gold encircles our arms. As it wraps down to our joined hands, bright orange light begins to thread between the gaps of black. It looks like Halloween, but with way more sparkles, and so much more wonder.
The joined magics hover against the wood frame, as if waiting for instruction.
“Now speak with me. Domum nostram protege.”
“Domum nostram protege,” I repeat, feeling the strings of something powerful pulling in my chest.
“Malum increpa. Bonum sustine,” he finishes, and I mimic him. “Good. Now together.”
We repeat the incantation slowly, our words twisting together like our magic. When the final word is spoken, our joined colors surge into the frame of the doorway, lighting it up. Ripples of black, gold, and orange cascade through the hallway behind us.
“We’ll need to perform this incantation at every doorway to create the boundaries of the spell,” he says, his hands lingering on mine.
“What about Oscar’s fur?” I ask.
He hums, turning his left palm to show me a tuft of Oscar’s whitish under-fur sitting in the middle of it. “It was sticking out of his side, so I plucked it.”
I giggle. “Yeah, he’s still shedding his winter coat.”
“Do you need to rest or can you continue?” he asks.
I take a deep breath and try to look into my self, sensing the place where my magic hides. I feel full, and excited. I’m not sure if that’s just my mood, or my magic, but I guess we’ll find out.
I smile up at him. “I’m ready.”