Chapter 7
Ansell sighed tiredly. He hadn’t gotten much sleep thanks to the incident with Sascha.
Not to mention his back was killing him.
He’d had to have Rachel treat the claw marks the woman had left him as a reminder of his lesson.
Fortunately, he’d been able to treat the bite marks on his arm and shoulder with a little mirror assistance.
He’d known her kind got violent during love making sessions for centuries. But that hadn’t helped calm him when he’d actually experienced SkinWalker love making himself. What worried him though, was that it had actually excited him and spurred him on, driving him wild in the process.
He sighed, leaning back in the reception desk’s chair, hissing at the pain radiating from his back and pinching the bridge of his nose.
He couldn’t go back in his office right now.
There was too much of her there. Her smell permeating the room so strongly he’d had to open the window and put a fan in front of it in the hopes of airing it out.
Last night had been insanity. An insanity neither of them was likely to try repeating again.
Ansell groaned aloud, knowing he’d have to rewrite everything he’d been working on when she’d woken the night before.
He’d cut the power when he finished because he’d been careless and left several items running on open circuit electricity.
Then again. . . he hadn’t expected Sascha to jump his bones, now had he.
He groaned and sighed a heavy breath before the door chimed the entrance of a patient. Opening his eyes, he glanced over to see Warren entering with a self-satisfied smile on his face.
The bracelet on his wrist sent a heating, buzzing vibration into his skin and he swiped a finger to deactivate it. Ansell still wasn’t sure if he’d take off his signal charm, but for now he’d keep it on at least until he could send his assistant Rachel for a dose of caffeine or two.
Ansell stood, going around the reception desk to offer the other man a hand. “Warren. What brings you here?”
Warren was honestly one of Ansell’s favorite patients. He was young, as far as SkinWalkers went, and had an open mind and upbeat disposition. All of that made him a delight to be around.
“I’ve come for a Well Check.” The younger man took his hand, giving it a solid shake. His smile seemed more content than normal.
“Sure.” Ansell smiled tiredly, taking a deep breath and running a hand down his face. He’d have to find some time to take a nap today before he stopped by the bank later. If he was this tired, he couldn’t imagine what Sacha was going through.
Warren frowned, studying and scenting him, but not releasing his hand. “You okay, Doc?” He hesitated before suggesting delicately. “It smells like you got up to a wild night.”
Ansell cut his eyes at the younger man. “You first.” He muttered dryly before releasing the other man’s hand and waving for him to follow. “Did you get a signed contract?”
“No time.” Warren muttered a bit preoccupied. “Not that I had one on hand anyway.” He sighed. “That’s part of why I came.”
Ansell opened a door and led the younger man to the back. “Basic profile?”
“Well, she’s Mage, Carrier, and apparently SkinWalker recessive.” Warren said thoughtfully.
Ansell frowned. “You had sex with a Siren?”
It was a dirty, but accurate, term for a mix-breed of any kind that had both Mage and SkinWalker blood.
They produced the most potent pheromones and their voices and scents were heavily influenced by their magick.
It was a dangerous combination on both sides, to be the Siren and to be the siren’s victim.
Warren took a moment to grin in the older man’s face before passing him. “Yes, I did.”
“Well, that sounds eventful…” Ansell muttered as he followed Warren through the reception door and motioned around him to the first door. “Room number one, today.”
Ansell had basically created the equivalent of a Siren in Sascha the night before.
Driven by lust for him and harder to resist than any pheromones he’d ever smelled.
His magick had done that. He’d given to her freely, fully expecting her to have some horrible hallucinatory battle he’d have to immobilize her body against to ensure she didn’t hurt herself.
What he hadn’t expected was that the woman had been harboring lustful feelings for him that she stridently refused to acknowledge. . .
Ansell had never heard of such a thing during the first degree test, but he supposed it wasn’t often the test was given to a SkinWalker. They were bound to react differently than most Mage.
He followed the younger man into the room and closed the door behind them. “So.” Ansell grabbed the pen and clipboard from the counter. As he sat, clicking the pen to write, he muttered by rote. “I need her name and safe word for the record.”
“Janice and ‘Ansell’.”
Ansell froze on his stool and looked up slowly, uncertain what he just heard and why their names were together. Janice wasn’t a super rare name, so it could always be some other Janice and not his Janice, right?
Closing his eyes on the thought, Ansell grabbed it in mental hands and burned it to ashes. She wasn’t his Janice. She wasn’t his anything. The woman just happened to work with the root of his affections. That was all. The women were friends; the end.
But that didn’t explain why her safe word was his name.
A glance at Warren put him in a bad mood. The younger man grunted as though privy to some kind of joke.
“Honestly,” the younger man asked. “I’ve been wondering if the two of you had some kind of ill fated meeting or something, but I was a bit more concerned about how her Doc didn’t seem to have warned her about secondary characteristics.
” The younger man scrubbed a worried hand through his hair.
“I think her Doc is slipping in the sex education part of her education.”
Yes, Ansell thought briefly. It couldn’t be Janice, because the woman was part of his Coterie. He’d never seen her before, so she couldn’t have been Mage or anything else. It had to be some other Janice.
“I’ll make a note of it,” Ansell scrawled distastefully.
His arm didn’t hurt at the moment, but it was a bit difficult to write properly.
“If things don’t change, I’ll report it to Balance Co.
Don’t worry.” Sighing, he decided to push the idea of his name as her safe word aside. “Where are her markings?”
“Starred across the shoulders, chest, and upper back. She has a swath of lower back Painted.” Warren motioned with his hands.
“Will you be seeing her again?” Ansell, grazed his chin with the clicker end of the pen, eyeing his notes thoughtfully.
Unbidden, a vision of Janice, Sascha’s Janice, bent before him, ass in the air with her chest pressed into the examination table, flashed across his mind.
She wore markings in the same places as Warren had described. He choked. . .
Physically and violently choked.
Spinning away, he stood to go lean over the small sink in the counter, thumping his chest with a hard fist.
“Woah! You okay, man?” Warren was beside him in an instant, giving him a solid thump on the back that speared pain through his body.
Ansell hissed and choked on a cough as he slapped the younger man’s hand away, jerking his body away even as he did so.
It took a couple of minutes for him to clear his throat and the coughing, but he held up a hand for the younger man to stay away.
When he finally cleared his throat and had a modicum of normalcy back, he dropped his hand and went back to the sink, grabbing one of the little cups and filling it with water, before drinking it to clear out the last of the discomforting tickles.
“What’s wrong with your back?” Warren asked warily.
Ansell gripped the edge of the sink and took a deep breath to try and calm himself. That woman really wasn’t good for his moods. “What’s wrong with yours?” He countered sharply.
Warren breathed a dry laugh before whipping his shirt off over his head. Turning so Ansell could see, the younger man scoffed. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Ansell clenched his jaw. He didn’t have patience for Warren’s jovial mood today, but he looked anyway.
There were several long raking claw marks crisscrossing the younger man’s back. A couple still trickling a light trail of blood where they intersected. The furrows were deep and jagged, with swollen, puckered edges.
He was already healing, given about a week or two, the younger man’s back would have been as good as new, but that was a SkinWalker for you. With proper treatment, his wound would be gone in a day or two.
Sighing, Ansell washed his hands and dried them. As he reached up to open one of the overhead cabinets, he asked. “Anything else to report?”
“Besides the fact that we blacked out at completion, no,” Warren said quietly over his shoulder.
Ansell retrieved several containers before closing the cabinets. “Sit down on the bed.” When Warren moved to do so, he asked. “Why did you black out?”
“We tried mixing magick with pleasure.” The answer came innocently enough, but Ansell went rigid.
They weren’t supposed to share their magick with others anymore. And in the rare occasion they did, it was after extensive studying of the person in question. Not during some random one night stand.
“How long have you known this woman?” Ansell asked, trying for casual as he went back to preparing his supplies.
“I met her last night.” Warren said thoughtfully. “It was an interesting experience. She apparently had some kind of panic disorder and it was her first Heat, so I was gentle with her. But using her magick on me made her feel safe and I got a little kick out of it too, so I didn’t mind.”
Heaving a heavy sigh, Ansell reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Alright. Tell me everything that happened and I’ll treat your back while I listen.”