Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
When Ember emerged from the privy, her face was free of makeup, and she was wearing a short, black satin and lace nightdress that left very little to the imagination.
Nyte’s legs tensed as though they’d decided on their own to carry him toward her, but he willed his feet to remain in place, keeping his back against the wall and his arms across his chest.
There was so much of that lovely skin exposed.
He gritted his teeth and curled his claws into his arms. His tail, that wretched thing, happily wagged behind him. He pressed himself more firmly to the wall, pinning the appendage in place.
Ember raised her arms over her head and gathered her hair. The action lifted the hem of the nightdress higher on her thighs and made the fabric mold to her breasts.
Nyte’s gaze roamed up those long legs and fixed upon her chest, where he could see the outlines of her nipples.
Fuck.
Overwhelming sensations buzzed low in his belly and down into his pelvis. At this rate, his cock was going to form whether he wanted it to or not. Hells, he could almost feel it even now, could almost feel it twitching with pressure and anticipation.
“You can sleep beside me in bed,” she said as she walked past him, securing her hair atop her head in a messy bun.
Nyte’s eyes fixated on her ass, tracing its luscious curve.
And then her words registered. Lie beside her through the night?
Yes.
“No,” he said curtly.
She looked back at him with a cheeky smile. “Why not? Scared I might bite?”
To his frustration, part of him longed to learn the feel of her teeth marking him. “I don’t sleep, witch.”
“Oh. Don’t you ever get bored?”
“How could I get bored when there are infinite universal mysteries to contemplate?”
She smirked. “Soooo…that’s a yes?”
He let out a huff through his nostrils. “Occasionally.”
“Hmm… Ah-ha!” She moved to her nightstand and picked up a thin, rectangular object.
Nyte had to restrain his excitement as she approached him, especially as her sweet gardenia and vanilla scent flooded his senses. He could not allow her nearness to affect him. Would not.
But as she stood next to him and opened the object, he could feel the heat radiating from her, beckoning him closer, intensifying the ache in his groin.
Ember tapped a button, and the screen on the upper half lit up. It was reminiscent of her cellphone and the display on the counter in her store, but larger. The lower portion of the object had many buttons with glowing numbers and letters upon them.
“This is a laptop. A portable computer.” She used the small, flat pad to move a tiny arrow around the screen.
“If you double click this icon, you can watch movies.” She moved the arrow to another tiny image.
“If you open this one, you can browse the internet, allowing you to search anything and everything you can think of.”
Ember looked up at him. “Might help you catch up on things in the modern world since you’re four hundred years behind.”
Nyte’s gaze flicked from Ember to the screen. “Show me.”
She clicked on the icon she called the internet and a new screen appeared.
Then she pressed down on the lettered buttons like they were the keys of a harpsichord.
One letter at a time, the word demon came onto the screen, and then she tapped a button that read ENTER.
The screen immediately changed to another that described what a demon was, with religious and mythological stories tied to them and images of varying horned creatures.
“I’ve never seen a means of scrying that could produce information like this,” Nyte said as he looked over the text. “Though I cannot say if it is much use. Most of this is wildly incorrect.”
“Then I shouldn’t have to press it upon you to not believe everything you read on the internet.” Ember smiled and passed him the laptop. “You can look up current events to learn about how the world has changed from what you knew, or just…put on some movies and be entertained.”
She stepped away from him, and Nyte watched her go, resisting the urge to grab her and draw her back to his side.
Peeling back the covers, she climbed onto the bed and slipped beneath them before she reached over to turn off the lamp on the nightstand, plunging the room into darkness.
The only remaining light came from the laptop’s screen and the faint glow of the streetlamps outside, which crept in around the edges of the curtains.
But Nyte saw perfectly in the darkness. He watched his witch as she lay down on her side and drew the blanket over her.
“Goodnight, Nyte,” she said softly, closing her eyes.
“Goodnight, witch,” he replied just as gently.
Some part of him would’ve been content to keep his gaze upon her, but he forced his attention to the laptop.
It didn’t matter that the empty space in her bed was a void his body could perfectly have filled, didn’t matter how tempting the thought of lying beside her, wrapping her in his arms, and tucking her body against his was.
He dissipated his wings and sank down to sit on the floor, leaning back against the wall and holding the laptop on his lap. Based on its name, he assumed that was the intended method of use.
Nyte hesitated with his fingers hovering over the lettered keys. She’d said he could search anything and everything he could think of. How was one to narrow infinite options into a single choice? If he could look up information on anything, anything in all creation, what should he begin with?
His eyeballs itched to shift back toward the bed, but he kept them focused downward as his fingers set into slow, deliberate motion, pressing the keys.
E-M-B-E-R
He tapped ENTER like she’d demonstrated. The screen changed, but to his disappointment, there was nothing about Ember. Only the definition of the word, a list of locations that bore it in their names, and a few images of red and orange glowing coals.
Where was his witch? How could he find out more about her?
With painstaking concentration, he tried to move the little arrow to the box he’d written inside. After several tries, he finally determined the angle at which he had to hold his finger so his claw wouldn’t interfere with the strange pad.
He added another word to his search.
EMBER WITCH
This time, different images appeared—women in pointed hats wielding fire. None of them even remotely resembled his Ember.
Frowning, he let his eyes roam over the laptop. It was a strange thing, undoubtedly, but it possessed a wondrousness that could not be denied. Her granting him its use had been an opportunity, and he was determined to make the most of it.
If he could not learn about the woman who’d summoned him, he would learn about her world instead. He knew his time here would be far more bearable if he was more familiar with his surroundings.
He began with a simple but important question, though the question mark took no small amount of fiddling to produce, as the key it was printed on seemed predisposed to creating a slash symbol on the screen.
WHERE AM I?
His education on the modern world began with reading about the town of Salem, Massachusetts and its four hundred years of history. It seemed somehow fitting that the place Ember called home had existed for nearly the same length of time Nyte had been gone.
He read about the infamous witch trials, in which nineteen people had been hanged, one man had been pressed to death under stones, and five others had perished due to poor conditions in the jails holding them.
Death was part of the mortal world. Nyte had never given it much thought; countless humans had died during his existence, more than he could ever count, and some of those lives had been claimed by his own hands.
But these deaths stood out to him, as none of the accused seemed to have been actual witches—nor had they been guilty of the alleged crimes.
Was the abundance of witch-related shops and décor in the town now a reaction to that injustice?
The information on Salem shifted to its role as an important port city in the centuries following that dark chapter, having dealt in significant international trade. But as shipping interests had shifted to larger cities, the town had changed its focus to manufacturing.
It seemed this place was a prime example of the way human technology and interests had been in flux for all the years Nyte had been gone, how their civilization changed as swiftly and frequently as the wind.
Nyte expanded his searches from there, sometimes following trails of information as they veered into different subjects, sometimes exploring things he’d seen or heard during the day with Ember.
He devoured the information with surprising ravenousness.
He’d spent so long observing the human world, and he must’ve forgotten just how fascinating he’d always found it during his self-imposed exile.
Only when a soft moan broke the silence in the room did he realize that he’d been at it for hours and the night had advanced considerably toward morning. His eyes darted to the bed, where Ember stirred, rolling from her side onto her back.
Carefully, Nyte set the laptop on the floor beside him and stood up. His tail swayed behind him as he padded toward her, but his attention was on the sleeping female rather than his own body. He stared down at her from beside the bed.
Her arms were up, hands resting on the pillow to either side of her head with fingers slightly curled.
A few strands of silver hair had escaped her bun, one of them resting over her cheek.
Her face was serene, and as beautiful as ever.
The blanket had shifted with her movement, its top now below her chest. He watched, transfixed, as the slow rise and fall of her breathing made the material of her nightgown draw taut over her breasts.
She looked so soft, so warm and inviting. So tantalizing. He needed but to slip beneath the covers and he’d be next to her with that voluptuous body against his.
He balled his fists at his sides, ignoring the bite of his claws into his palms.
I don’t need that, however much I want it.
He was a nocturnus, an immortal demon of the night. He didn’t need a mortal for anything. He could find happiness and fulfillment on his own.
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps he could. But those things had eluded him for centuries. Impossible as it seemed, he’d been entirely lost…even though he’d been right where he had trapped himself the entire time.
Yet as he gazed upon this witch, whose life would run its course in a blink of his eyes, he saw something ephemeral, made indescribably lovely and moving in its lack of permanence.
There was a spark in his Ember like he’d not witnessed in any immortal creature, a passion more powerful and pure than any he’d encountered, paired with such kindness…
And it existed despite the loneliness she carried in her heart.
Delicately, he reached forward. The backs of his fingers brushed her forehead as he moved the loose strand of hair aside, guiding it behind her ear. Ember’s mouth curled into the smallest of smiles, and something inside Nyte’s chest thawed.
She wished for you, Nyte.
Foolish as he felt to even think it, perhaps some part of him wished for Ember in return.