Chapter 14
When Nix’s eyes blinked open, her sleepy gaze settled right onto mesmerizing spirals. “Mmm?” She watched through heavy eyelids as the beautiful, hypnotic design spun over Bael’s large, pitch-black pupils.
“That’s it.” His primal horns gleamed as he licked his lips. “Look right into my eyes, baby,” Bael urged her in a low-bass voice at a frequency that speared right through her thoughts. “Fall into the spirals. Don’t they spin so prettily for you? Don’t they just swallow up your every thought?”
Nix struggled to think as she stared into the twisting and turning black and red.
SLEEPY. LISTEN. OBEY.
She shivered on the bed. It was so soft under her bare body…
“Don’t they just overpower your mind with how they go around and around, sucking your every thought away?”
“Mmm.” Nix lightly squirmed. “Yes…” Wait, what was happening? Didn’t Bael just…
His eyes flashed with a bright, dazzling red light for a second, grabbing her attention. “That’s it. Can’t even think when you’re looking into my eyes. Not unless I tell you to think.”
SUBMIT. RELAX. OBEY.
Nix’s brows furrowed as she felt ropes around her wrists and ankles. She tugged on a leg, trying to squeeze her thighs together, but she couldn’t.
“Uh, uh. You don’t need to worry about the ropes.” His low voice was so deep as he rasped, “The ropes are here to keep you nice and settled and calm.”
He urged, “Just keep staring right into my eyes, following down with the spirals. Feel them take away your every worry. You like the ropes. They help you from floating away. Because my eyes are making you feel so light and floaty and relaxed.”
“Mmhmm.” Nix wiggled again, but this time she did not fight the ropes. Her bare skin on the silk sheets just felt so good. So serene. So calming.
“So relaxing,” Bael whispered to her. “That’s it. That’s such a good girl. Such a good listener when I tell you how you can’t think. So submissive when I tell you to feel a certain way. Like how calm and relaxed you are. How open to my suggestions you are.”
Bael flexed his midnight-colored wings and dragged the dulled curve of a sharp, black wingtip pinion over the curve of her left breast. He pressed the cool, thick nail to her nipple. “It feels so good under my control, doesn’t it?”
“Mmhmm.”
He circled the cool talon around her nipple, careful not to hurt her. The sensation had the tips of her breasts tingling. “Tell me it feels good to be nice and relaxed and submissive for me.”
Dazed, Nix watched the spirals and slurred out, “Mm, feels good.”
“What a good, good, submissive you are.”
“Fucking speed this up, incubus,” Thierry snapped from somewhere behind Bael’s wings. Somewhere outside of Nix’s line of vision. Because she couldn’t tear her gaze from Bael’s mesmerizing, swirling eyes.
At Thierry’s demand, Bael rolled his eyes. For a second, Nix regained her bearings. “Hey, wait, what’s—”
“So sleepy,” Bael whispered to her, connecting their gazes once more.
Pretty spirals.
“Nix,” Bael rasped in his hypnotic voice. “I want you to answer my questions with complete honesty, okay? Can you do that for me, pretty, sleepy girl?”
“Mmkay,” she muttered drowsily.
“How did you know Persius was a pegasus shifter?” Bael asked.
Wait… She was worried about answering that for some reason… Right?
“Hey, hey,” Bael said softly. “Keep looking into the pretty spirals. Don’t they make you feel so good? So loose and sleepy and a little bit horny—”
“Careful, incubus,” Thierry scolded again.
Bael purred to Nix, “The spirals want to know. Be a good girl and tell them what you know, and they’ll make you feel so good. Don’t you want to feel good, baby?”
Her thoughts were moving so slow. So…sleepy.
BE A GOOD GIRL AND TELL ME THE TRUTH.
GOOD GIRLS GET REWARDED.
“How?” Bael repeated. “How did you know what he was?”
“Cause…” She mumbled back dreamily, “He told me.”
Bael blinked for a second, but the spirals were back immediately.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” Persius stressed in the background somewhere behind Bael’s glorious wings. “I don’t even know her.”
“People don’t lie during hypnosis,” Bael told Persius while keeping his eyes locked on Nix’s. He asked her, “When did he tell you?”
She squirmed again. The smooth back of Bael’s claw circled around her hard nipple. “Mm, future.”
Bael stared at her.
“Did she say future?”
Bael repeated, “When did he tell you what he was? Think back, let the spirals guide you to the memory. When, baby?”
“In the…future.”
“What do you know about the future?” Bael asked her, his voice sounding less seductive this time.
“Scary,” Nix muttered.
“What the heck is she talking about?” Persius piped up.
“A phoenix…” Thierry thought aloud, “When a phoenix shifter dies before reaching immortality maturation, she gets reborn.”
“From ashes,” Ryker’s low voice grunted.
“The rebirth is up to fate. But it’s been rumored that some were reborn in their past, with knowledge of the future. It was one of the reasons why the species was eliminated. Knowledge of the future was voted by the council to only be permissible for the Seers.”
“Fuck, you think she time-traveled?” Bael’s wings retreated, and the spirals left his eyes. “To do that, she would have had to…”
“Die,” Thierry finished his sentence.
With the spirals gone, Nix blinked and looked around them. Gaining back an understanding of her surroundings and how Bael had just hypnotized her, she sat up to slap him, but she was restrained by the ropes.
“Fuck you for that!” Nix spat at him. “You had no right to do that.”
“No right to get the truth from my own mate?”
“You don’t get to decide when I give you something you want. You have no idea what it’s like to be controlled and helpless.” Nix scowled at him so hard she imagined the force of her gaze might actually bruise him. “I want to slap you so hard right now.”
Bael’s head shot forward when both Ryker and Thierry smacked the back of the incubus’s head, following their mate’s desires.
Nix nodded at her dragon and gargoyle shifter. “Thank you. Good boys.”
Thierry coughed, fingered his glasses, and blushed.
Ryker began unknotting the rope around Nix’s left wrist.
“You’re not working with the Oadess family?” Bael asked.
“Fuck no,” she exclaimed and pulled at the ropes. “Set me free. Now.”
“I had to be sure, you understand that, right?” For the first time, Bael sounded worried, his voice no longer oozing its typical confidence.
“I don’t think the Oadess family is behind any of this,” Persius said in a benevolent tone from the back of the room. His eyes were slightly glassy as he added, “They are good people.”
Ryker freed Nix’s left arm from the rope, and she instantly pointed at Persius. “I knew he was bespelled!”
Persius scoffed. “Excuse me? That’s a little rude.”
“You just said the Oadesses are good people,” Bael stated. “I think Nix is right. You got too close, man. I told you they could pull the enchanting shit on you, and you were all ‘no, if I approach them with kindness and befriend them, they will be honest with me.’”
“You don’t know them like I do. Adar and Elle are so nice to me.”
Nix turned to Ryker, “The pink vial on your dresser. Get it.” Ryker immediately rushed from the room. Nix announced loudly, so Ryker could hear her, “It’s a protection potion for Persius. Should reverse any enchantments cast on him.”
“I am not enchanted.” Persius crossed his arms and told her, “I don’t even know you. I don’t know what ‘future’ you are talking about, but I would have never told someone what I am—”
“I am your mate,” Nix said. “You told me because I am your mate.” She watched in silence as his facial expression scrunched in disbelief. “Whatever enchantment she put on you, it’s why you haven’t recognized me yet.”
“Another mate?” Bael whined.
Nix jerked her head at Thierry, and Thierry obediently slapped the incubus again.
Ryker swooped back into the room, holding the vial.
Persius took a cautious step away from him. “Whoa, how do I know she isn’t just saying all this to use a love potion on me or something?”
Nix rolled her eyes. “It’s not a love potion.”
Persius pointed to the pretty glass vial. “It’s pink.”
“Professor Bowen gave it to us and said it was a protection potion,” Bael said. “She’s not lying.”
“It needs to be poured onto his skin. It should remove any current spells.”
Ryker moved forward, holding it. Persius put his hands up to reject it, but Ryker uncapped the tiny vial and tossed the liquid right onto Persius’s naked body.
“What if that was acid?” Persius yelled in alarm. “I’m naked. And I—”
Persius stiffened.
“I don’t know how long it takes to happen,” Nix said.
Persius’s back hunched over, and he slammed a hand to the wall. “Oh…gods.”
He clutched at his chest then at his head as the potion liquid sizzled and smoked over his skin. Once every drop absorbed into him, Persius pressed his face into the wall, showing only his naked back to them.
“Persius?” Nix asked, hope leaking from her.
Will he know me now? Or was this new timeline really a cursed one?