Chapter 15 Sleepless
Sleepless
He couldn’t sleep after she lost consciousness.
He wanted to. He wanted to stay in bed with her, wrap himself around her, maybe even tie her there carefully and with something soft so she couldn’t leave before he woke up.
He definitely had a long list of things he wanted to do to her while he had her tied to his bed, whether with magic or with something a bit more quaint, or preferably, both.
It would probably take both to keep her there, anyway.
He was intrigued to find out. He wondered if she would agree to it.
But for now, they hadn’t discussed anything like that yet, and he didn’t want to push, not like that, at least. It was his instinct to draw out everything with her, anyway.
With something like restraints, he’d want her to talk to him about it first. Preferably in detail, and at length, outlining every single thing he could and couldn’t do to her while she was under his power, until he was hard as fuck and leaking, and she was even more soaking wet and boneless and pliable than she’d been tonight. Gods, he had to stop thinking about it.
At least right now.
She’d been tired. He could feel how tired she was.
He knew he needed to leave her alone so she could sleep.
She’d been up drinking all night with his prick-friend, Greythorne, and while he believed her that nothing had happened between them, it still rankled. It rankled even more that Alaric had stripped down to his pants before getting into bed with her.
Knowing Alec, he’d done it just on the off-chance Caelum might show up.
Alec was enjoying himself way too much when it came to Leda and him. He was enjoying having a new toy he could use to mess with Caelum’s head.
He knew he wasn’t being fair.
He’d felt the same thing he’d heard Leda thinking about.
Alaric was fucked up from his time at Greythorne Manor.
He also clearly saw Leda as someone safe, someone he could trust, and he was probably sleeping in her bed at Valarian right now, that damned cat curled up somewhere by his face or in his arms. Caelum knew he should be more understanding, given that.
He also needed to pull Alaric aside and talk to him about what he’d seen and overheard while he’d been a captive.
All of that was hardly the point right now, either, though.
Whatever his lingering feelings about what he’d walked in on that morning, he should absolutely let her sleep now. Unfortunately, that meant he should probably get out of bed and leave her the fuck alone entirely, before that craving started pulling on him again.
He wasn’t trustworthy.
He knew that.
He could feel it every time he got close to her magic, or loosened his hold on his own magic for even a few seconds.
He knew that was a good chunk of the reason he’d lost control that morning with Alaric.
He knew it was why he’d struggled to keep his hands off her in front of Mocking and the others.
He should feel more stable now, after they’d shared magic.
He didn’t really, though. He could objectively sense that he was better, but he still didn’t feel fully in control, or entirely rational.
Which was exactly why he should go somewhere else for a few hours, at least long enough that she could sleep deeply, the way she needed, without his magic crawling all over her, trying to fuck her.
He should let Alaric sleep too, as he likely needed it as much as Leda, if not more.
In the end, he climbed carefully out of bed and took a shower.
The walls were thick. So was the door. He didn’t have to worry about it waking her.
Unfortunately, the bathroom, unlike the rest of his residence, hadn’t been cleaned up quite as well since his father had been in there, bleeding all over his floor.
They’d fixed the door, at least. He supposed he should be grateful for that.
Most of the blood was gone, likely due to an evidence-collection spell by the Praecuri, but his mirror remained half-smashed from something that happened either when his father ran inside to hide from Leda (the thought made his cock twitch), or when the Praecuri broke in and dragged Malefic out.
A deflected spell, maybe. Maybe an overly-zealous praecurus who slammed Malefic’s face into the glass for good measure.
If so, Caelum wouldn’t blame them.
He murmured a few spells to repair the glass as he showered, and to remove the remnants of blood the agents left, including on the tile around the area of the toilet.
He didn’t much like the images it evoked, seeing his father on the floor, his face purple with rage, his arm half-staunched with magic as he thought about things he planned to do to his son’s witch.
The thought made his chest constrict.
He didn’t know what his father had planned, but he would definitely have something planned.
No way Malefic Bones would sit idle in prison, waiting for his sentence to end.
Caelum tried to shake off the feeling of uneasiness that rose with that image, mostly because he knew his fear of his father was more likely to get in his way than not.
But he couldn’t forget who Malefic was, either.
He had to assume he didn’t have a lot of time.
Working with Lucifer Mocking on his pet research project would hopefully get him closer to finding a solution to his most immediate problem: namely, how his father was using humans and human blood to create unbreakable links to Magicals they wanted to control.
He already knew his own link to his father was unbreakable.
Well, apart from one of them dying, which was something Caelum spent a lot of time thinking about while he’d been in hospital.
What he didn’t know is why his father hadn’t been able to use him for the Sanctum Occulus job.
Caelum had known, suspected anyway, that his father had been using his body in some capacity without his conscious awareness for some time.
He had blackouts, so that was part of it.
He lost time. He woke up in places he couldn’t explain, with injuries he couldn’t explain. The worst of those had been right after the attack on the Praecuri house in the human world, presumably to kidnap Leda’s brother, Arcturus.
He’d woken up in his parents’ home in Exmoor, bruised from his hip down to his calf, burned on his arm and back by magical fire, and with his back in severe pain.
He still had no idea what had happened, exactly.
He’d known better than to ask his father, but clearly the prick fucked up and tripped at least one of the Praecuri’s defensive spells, and nearly got at least one of them killed.
Caelum barely made it to the carriage for the ride to school, which had always been a day he treasured, if only because it was the single day of the school year he was allowed to roam around outside the campus walls on his own, prior to the opening banquet.
Instead he’d spent the day trying to hide a limp and not succeeding, pain shooting up his back at every step, and that was after a carriage ride that hadn’t been one of his finest moments.
It was his own fault, for following her friends to the upper story of the carriage.
He’d been curious, after not seeing her for the entire summer.
That’s what he’d told himself, at least.
He’d just wanted to see her. It was fucking harmless to look at her, wasn’t it?
And, of course, he’d put on a show with that royal’s legs in his lap, and a part of him wanted to see her react to that, too.
At first, it had been almost a relief to see her standing there, even if it’d been fucking painful, too.
Overall, he’d thought he was handling it pretty well, right up until the instant the carriage lurched and she ended up in that Hollywood prick’s lap.
A reminder of her being all over Joran definitely wasn’t something he needed right now either, though.
He brought his mind back around to how he got there: the link to his father.
His father had no trouble accessing his magic and his body while he’d been at the Black Tower that summer.
He seemed to have no trouble with Caelum at Malcroix, either, given Leda had been forced to deal with Malefic on the night of her birthday.
While it had been disturbing as fuck to see that through Leda’s eyes, at least it confirmed he wasn’t losing his damned mind.
But what changed?
Caelum knew his father angry.
He knew the real anger from the manipulative, calculated, affected variety, and maybe more importantly, he knew when his father was genuinely unbalanced, even afraid.
Malefic hadn’t been putting on a show with his fury and disbelief that morning, when he accused Caelum of having “found some way” to block Malefic from accessing his magic.
But Caelum hadn’t found a way.
He hadn’t done anything.
Moreover, the link with his father was still there. He’d felt it even before he’d gotten that visit from Forsooth in the hospital, and the old man confirmed what he felt, and confirmed that the link was, by its very nature, permanent.
Caelum had needed to hear that, too, maybe just as a reminder that his father’s threats weren’t all attempts to fuck with his head.
He’d needed to hear that if he tried to kill his father, he would, in all likelihood, die.
He might have died just from trying to stop his father from killing Leda, and even then, he hadn’t been foolish enough to try to murder him, just to knock him out long enough to get Leda out of there.
He’d actually gotten up the nerve to ask Forsooth if there was anything that could effectively block the connection, even if he couldn’t remove it.
That wily old bastard looked at him almost like he knew what he was asking, or maybe like he knew Caelum wasn’t thinking about something purely theoretical.
In the end, Forsooth conceded diplomatically that of course it was possible in theory, but he would need to do more research before he could say definitively whether any kind of spell could accomplish that with his particular link to Malefic.
Caelum hadn’t had much to say at the time.
He’d been on a brutal concoction of potions, most of them painkillers of one kind or another, but also healing spells and several magical suppressive elixirs Dolens had fed him, the family doctor Caelum absolutely despised.
His head had hurt so badly he’d struggled to see, and he’d missed Leda, even then.
It took a decent chunk of willpower not to snap at the Theosophy master––about why he was bothering him, about where Leda was, and if anyone was keeping an eye on her, if anyone knew what Dark Cathedral was doing now, and who’d taken charge with his father out of the picture.
Likely because of his own preoccupations, he’d struggled to parse out a lot of what the professor had said.
Now it struck him that Forsooth had been trying to tell him something.
He’d been nudging Caelum towards something, at the very least.
As for Caelum himself, he wondered if he should have told Forsooth about his blackouts and lost time.
In the moment, he’d been in no shape to make that decision.
Even now, it struck him as dangerously close to getting into Caleum’s magic, and what it was about his magical abilities that might interest his father, particularly to that degree.
It hit him that he was thinking a lot more clearly now.
That had to be Leda’s doing, too.
He felt almost like himself again.
Mocking’s project, as opportune as it was, suddenly felt far too slow.
Maybe it was the magical connection to his father, maybe it was sheer paranoia, or some whisper of the Oracle ancestry on his mother’s side, but Bones increasingly felt like he didn’t have much time.
They didn’t have much time. By that he meant him, Leda, Luc, Alaric, Nyx, Forsooth, Blackstone, the Golden Sun, and anyone else who wanted to stop Malefic.
They certainly didn’t have enough time to fix the problem of Magical degeneration. They didn’t even really have enough time to use that as a cover to figure out what his father had been doing with those human and hybrid rituals.
Caelum had known for a while now that the big move by Dark Cathedral would be happening soon.
His father had been waiting for something specific, and he’d seemed to think he was close.
In the meantime, he had Orrin, and even Caelum at times, working on the royal families, trying to get them ideologically aligned.
He’d promised them power beyond what they could imagine.
Gold.
God-like abilities, with their magic fully restored to the time of the Pharaohs, at least once they’d fixed “the problem” of Separation.
All of those things felt like cover, though, at least to a degree.
Bones finished drying off with a clean towel, and entered his walk-in closet to find clothes.
His closet was still partly torn apart too, likely from the Praecuri searching his place.
He ignored the mess, found a clean set of black trousers and a grey button up, and put them on.
He threw on a vest and jacket over the shirt, then found a heavy overcoat.
Somewhere in that, he changed his hair color from platinum to black. He changed his eye color to blue, and altered enough in his face by memory that he shouldn’t stand out.
He gave one last look through the opening between the wall and the closet door. Leda sprawled out on his bed, her face mashed into his pillow, fast asleep on her stomach.
He suppressed the curl of heat that rose in his belly and focused his mind.
He picked up the gold-headed dragon cane. Aiming his steps for the stone wall at the end of the walk-in, he held out his free hand.
His mind honed in on his target, until that was all he saw.
Years of meditation and concentration lessons from all the way back when he was a child had honed areas of his mind to a diamond-like precision.
The wall barely factored into his thoughts as he passed straight through it.