11. Abra-freaking-cadabra
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AbrA-FREAKING-CADAbrA
AURORA
“ T here are nicer ways to tell someone they need a skincare routine than implying they look a thousand years old,” I joked past the anger that still suffocated me.
I wasn’t sure what the heck had gotten into me. Deke might’ve been sweet. He might’ve looked at me like I was something special and talked to me in a gentle voice that wrapped around me like the comfiest blanket. He might’ve always seemed focused on taking care of me without running a scoresheet of what I owed in return.
But despite what I’d been foolish enough to imagine, he was evidently still a typical man. One with needs. One who wasn’t mine and didn’t owe me anything. One who was free to do whatever the hell he wanted with whoever the hell he wanted, bless all their damn hearts.
The vision of him with those women still filled me with so much pain and jealousy, I wanted to curl into a ball and die . Clingy and dramatic, sure, but it was the truth. Instead of giving in, I settled for lashing out with insults and fighting the urge to claw his eyes out.
Neither reaction was like me. In all the times Ryan had come home reeking of other women, it wasn’t the sex that’d bothered me. It was the reminder that I’d failed yet again. With my curse. As a sinner. And as a woman. If he had shown some discretion—and not locked me in the prayer room—I likely could’ve buried my head in the sand and enjoyed the quiet time alone.
I definitely wouldn’t have spoken to him the way I spoke to Deke. Not because I hadn’t cared enough to get upset at Ryan—though that was true. Not because it would earn me a long weekend in said prayer room and a longer week of passive-aggressive silent treatment—also true.
It was because something about me was different, and it had nothing to do with Ryan or even Deke. The colors surrounding me were literally brighter. The world was bigger. Louder. Good, bad, bored, lustful, jealous … All my emotions were heightened.
It was like after years of sleepwalking, I was awake.
I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t understand it.
“You’re not a thousand years old,” Deke said, his thumb tracing my jawline. “I am.”
Oh for heaven’s sake, he’s unreal.
And not in the good way I thought.
“Right. You’re an ancient being with long-rooted biological needs. Got it. Have to give you points for originality, but this is wasted on me. I already said you didn’t owe me an explanation.”
“How did you know who I was with earlier?” he pushed again.
The first time he’d asked, I’d begun to answer before realizing it would mean admitting my secret. That time, I opted for the smarter choice.
I kept my mouth shut.
His too-sharp eyes studied me. “Could you tell that there were men there, too?”
“No, but whatever floats your screaming goats. I don’t judge.”
He chuckled as he ran his palm down his face and over his beard. “You’d be cute as fuck if that wasn’t nauseating, and this wasn’t so damn maddening.” Hesitating for a long second, he pulled me from the door and slammed it closed. He’d always said I wasn’t a hostage, but his ironclad hold on my upper arms and the rattling of the door said otherwise.
Guiding me to sit on the couch, he didn’t take his usual spot in the chair. He sat right next to me with his body aimed my way. “The woman with the pink and blue hair is my sister. Juno. Or at least that’s what she used to go by. I’m not sure about now. The other women were my brothers’ mates.”
Okay, never mind. He’s not unreal. He’s insane.
Leave it to my curse to deliver me to a man who’s even nuttier than I am .
“Mates. Right.” I inched away, not that there was anywhere to go. The couch was oversized, but so was the man himself. “So if this is a sex cult, I am not your girl. I don’t like it, and I have enough sins on my tab already. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“You didn’t like sex with whatever losers you’ve wasted time with before me. But that’s not what this is, and I wasn’t kidding about that being nauseating.” True to his words, he looked green as he grimaced and swallowed hard. “And now I also want to take time we don’t have to hunt down whoever you were with to kick their asses for touching you and then thank them for being incompetent at it.”
Lucky for you, it’s a short list .
I didn’t share that. Ignoring the warmth that filled me at his crazy possessiveness, I forced myself to stay focused on his crazy craziness. “Welp, now that that’s cleared up”—I hooked a thumb over my shoulder toward the door—“I’m going to go for a quick walk. To, uh, enjoy the weather.”
He glanced out the window that showed the snow had picked up until white was almost all we could see before looking back at me with one brow arched. “Hell, I’m fucking this up. Just… Let me get this all out, and then we can go from there.”
“Even if go from there literally means me going out there?” I tested.
His jaw clenched, and I had to hand it to him, at least he was honest. “No.”
That should’ve been terrifying.
It should’ve made me run for the door, him and the storm be damned.
It should’ve made me grab a knife or his phone or even Victoria. She’d bonded with me. I’d put money on her biting him in my defense.
What his answer shouldn’t have done was surge into a spot in my chest, filling it until I thought my ribs would crack. It disappeared just as quickly, making me hyperaware of how empty it was.
How empty I always was.
“Don’t do that,” Deke ordered, but it wasn’t firm. It was pleading.
“What?”
“That hollowness. It breaks my damn heart. I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t let you go. There is more happening than you know, and that includes danger.” He rushed on to explain, though I was lagging a couple of sentences behind. “Not from me. Fuck, never from me. At least, not directly.” Another rough scrub of his palm down his face. “Shit, this is hard. All this time searching for you, and I never planned what the hell I’d say once I found you.”
“You’ve been searching for me?” I shook my head. “Wait, what did you mean about the hollowness?”
Because he was right. That was the perfect word for how I felt because it was more than simply empty. There was an echoing, cavernous depth to it.
But how did he know?
“Let me start from the beginning.” He kept a watchful eye on me.
And then he was gone.
“ Why do you keep disappearing?” I shouted, my hysterical voice joined by Victoria’s angry barking.
It was a stupid thing to yell. He hadn’t just hightailed it away from me like he’d done before.
The man had vanished into thin air.
All six and a half feet of him, gone.
Poof.
Presto, change-o, abra-freaking-cadabra.
I stood and spun around, scanning for wires, mirrors, or something to explain the magic act.
Bent over, I was in the process of pulling the cushions from the couch to check for a trapdoor when he reappeared behind me.
Right behind me.
“It worked… Fuuuuck ,” he bit out on a rough drawl under his breath, his hands going to my hips for a second before he dropped them and backed away.
I stood upright and spun around to face him.
“To answer your question,” he said like he hadn’t just pulled off an act worthy of a primetime TV special, “I disappeared the other times because you test every ounce of control I have, and if I stayed, I’d have given in and tasted your mouth. Since I wasn’t sure how that would affect our bond, it seemed smart to hold off till we had time to talk. Disappeared this time because I knew you wouldn’t believe a word out of my mouth till I proved it to you.”
“Where’d you go?” I scrutinized the room and him, still trying to work out how he performed the fun little trick.
Magicians have made it look like the Statue of Liberty vanished or their pretty assistants were cut in half. With practice, this was probably nothing.
“Don’t like to do that with anything in my hands, just in case.” He lifted his flannel and gave me a distracting peek at tanned skin, defined muscles, and the exact right amount of dark hair. I might’ve been in the middle of the wildest experience in my life—and that was saying something—but I wasn’t blind. He pulled a book from the waistband of his jeans and handed it to me.
I glanced at it.
And then my legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the couch. “I forgot that at Black Horse yesterday.”
Him.
The part of my brain that I usually wished I could carve out seemed to wake up and stretch. And it stretched toward him. Like it was reaching for Deke. The sensation was even more disconcerting after a week of near total silence—other than the enraging vision of him with the three women.
Not that they were doing anything illicit in the barely formed image. From the little I saw, they were just standing in a kitchen, but so much of it had been clouded with a weird dust.
My history with Ryan had filled in those blanks.
“If…” I shook my head and cleared my throat. “If you were actually gone, how did you know I asked about you disappearing?”
“Could hear it.” He tapped his head. “In here.”
“And the hollowness?”
“Could feel it.” He tapped his chest. “In here.”
“Why? How ?”
“Need the backstory to understand that part, baby.” He took a long, silent moment to gather his thoughts. “A thousand years ago, give or take a century, the use of magicks?—”
“Why do you say it like that? Magicks, not magic.”
“Magic is bullshit. Magicks is real. And people had begun to abuse it.”
“Like beaming across town to get a book?” I deadpanned.
“ Dark magicks,” he clarified as he sat. Rather than returning to his spot on the couch, he took one on the coffee table in front of me. His long legs boxed mine in, keeping me in place. “Humans get a body. They get a soul. They get free will. And what they do with all three decides what their afterlife is. It’s part and parcel of the covenant between the heavens and humanity. Forces began to meddle with that format, stealing souls and using them to power dark magicks. Not only did that create an issue of breaking the promised package since stolen souls can’t reach their earned endpoint, it also left an unchecked evil to run rampant. Because Heaven and Hell and everything in between are dependent on balance, the powers-that-be were allowed to intervene to offset that evil. To save the stolen souls. To prevent the apocalypse.”
I was well-versed with the Book of Revelations. It’d been Pastor Gideon’s favorite scriptures to reference. The fear of promised damnation was how he kept his flock in line. It—along with the added threat of violence—was how he ran his home.
After a year living with the Gideons, I’d had the passages practically memorized.
The same dark cloud of doom I’d gotten every Sunday morning began to creep over me. A tension in my stomach. A bad feeling that lingered in the back of my mind to sour my mood even when I wasn’t directly thinking of it. Hopelessness that sank my heart.
Because I knew I was headed for the fiery hell that was described in vivid, horrific detail.
“So you were created to… what?” I prodded past the lump in my throat. “Fight off the Four Horsemen? I always interpreted them as more of an analogy rather than literal beings.”
Deke shook his head slowly. “Aurora, my siblings and I are the Four Horsemen.”