Chapter 13
CHAPTER 13
After such a long meeting with the professors, it was really depressing to realize we had very little additional information and we had no game plan.
Essentially, our plan was to wait and see.
I’d shared about my icy fire and how I thought I could use it to drive Zowen back into the shadows, but we weren’t sure how to weaponize my power to protect everyone in the Academy.
Basically, we were exactly where they’d been at the end of last year: determined to protect the students of the Academy, but uncertain how to go about it when every shadow was a potential entry point for a serial killer.
After that first week of classes, which had obviously been intense, things settled down and fell into a much calmer rhythm.
Elliot and I spent as much time together as we could.
He continued to tutor me, training Miki-Leopard and me to work together as one entity. It was interesting because we weren’t one being, we were two, but we definitely shared one body and we did have to learn how to maneuver it together .
It was more a matter of trusting Miki’s instincts and dialing back my own need to be in control of everything. Basically, it was the opposite of what my Inner Beast Management class taught since instead of seeking to control my leopard, I was yielding that control to Miki when in our leopard form.
I’d been doing that almost instinctively from the beginning, if only because I had no idea how to be a leopard, so this was just me being more aware of what I was doing and offering Miki encouragement and praise as she gained more confidence in herself.
Kasi also loaned me her shadow-kitten book, which gave me so much insight into Miki’s playful personality. I was letting her out more and more and really enjoying those times when we were in our leopard form.
We went on runs with Sunny and Daya every couple days and we spent time in the evening with Kasi and Jahrdran, just so that Shadow and Miki could run and play together.
I threw myself back into the routine of practicing with my magic.
This was something I’d spent my whole life doing: wielding my fire magic and practicing my control over that element.
This time, though, it wasn’t just fire. It was also ice. Lightning bolts of ice that sometimes rained down with the fire, like it had in the obstacle course when it froze the quicksand. Ice along the edges of my flames that sometimes froze whatever I’d intended to burn.
Elliot helped me practice. He would fly us to an area of the island that was pretty deserted where fire had little chance of causing damage, and we’d practice. We’d see which of us could blow our fire the furthest or burn a piece of paper the fastest or arrow our flames to the smallest of targets.
Invariably, our practice sessions ended with us on the ground, rolling around, tearing off our clothes and indulging our passions.
Elliot was seriously the hottest man I’d ever known and the things he could do with his tongue were un-freaking-believable.
I could get palpitations just thinking about his long and very talented tongue.
The craziest thing about the changes in my life was that I was actually starting to enjoy my Extreme Sports class. How completely ridiculous. However, it was the one class I had with Elliot and I loved spending the time with him.
There was always some ridiculous physical challenge we had to master and I enjoyed pitting my strengths against Elliot’s.
Sometimes we worked together, like the first time we’d gone through the obstacle course, but more often than not, we competed against each other, trying to win whatever course we were on. We often competed for sexual favors, which made the competition all the sweeter.
Miki-Leopard would totally get into the competitions, especially if we got to shift into our animal forms. She had fun flirting with Elli-Dragon by constantly chasing him and trying to climb onto his back.
No matter what the challenge was and no matter who won it, we always celebrated with hot, steamy sex.
The one class I still didn’t enjoy was Dragon Riding 101. However, I did what I needed to in order to pass and when it came time for me to ride a dragon—well, first I tried to convince Professor Vesely to allow me to ride Elliot instead. Unfortunately, that was an emphatic no. So, I rode a dragon. It was stressful and not very much fun, to be honest.
The dragons were cranky and they weren’t as comfortable to ride as Elliot. Well, they were smaller and they didn’t exactly care about my comfort. I’m also convinced they could smell Elliot on me and subjected me to wilder rides as a result.
When I complained to the professor, he looked at me like I was crazy and told me they were wild dragons. What exactly did I expect?
To make the situation even more ridiculous, Elliot’s reaction the first day I rode one of the dragons was completely over-the-top.
He beat me to the cafeteria for lunch that day, so there were a lot of witnesses when I walked in.
The minute I got close, Elliot’s nostrils flared. “You rode another dragon?” he roared.
The entire cafeteria froze and everyone stared at us, or more accurately, they stared at my crazy, possessive dragon mate, who apparently hadn’t thought through all the implications of my class schedule.
“Of course, I rode a dragon, Elliot. I’m taking Dragon Riding 101. You know, the class where we met for the first time?”
He just scowled at me.
“Are you serious right now? You cannot possibly be jealous of a wild dragon!”
“You’re mine!” With that declaration, he snatched me up into his arms, spread his wings wide, right there in the freaking Blackthorn Academy cafeteria, and flew out the door.
The Academy building happens to be a castle, so it has pretty wide hallways, but still, they weren’t built with dragon wingspans in mind, even if the dragons were in human form.
Elliot made it work, though. He flew us out of the cafeteria to the foyer and up the center of the staircase, all the way up to the fourth floor, where he landed in front of my door, muscled it open and carried me across the threshold.
He slammed the door behind us and tossed me onto the bed.
Before I could even move, he settled on top of me, kissing me voraciously.
I kissed him back and the heat we always generated together swirled through us both.
We rolled across the bed, ripping and tearing at each other’s clothes, desperate to get to each other’s skin.
Finally, we were naked, but instead of impaling me immediately, Elliot sat back on his haunches, hooked my legs over his arms and lifted my hips off the bed.
Glaring at me from between my legs, he growled, “Mine,” then lowered his head and feasted.
He stabbed his wondrous, long tongue inside my channel, scraped it along my inner walls and lashed some internal spot that caused tremors to begin deep inside.
His tongue was like a weapon in and of itself, so powerful and able to move at ridiculous speeds, rubbing and lashing and stroking my passion higher.
He lashed that one spot again, then kept doing it, alternating strokes with lashes at an increasing pace, without any discernible pattern, and dear goddess, I was beginning to break apart.
Two more forceful stabs sent me over the edge as my orgasm slammed into me with the force of a freight train .
My back bowed, I let out a shriek to wake the dead and writhed against his stabbing tongue.
As my tremors died, he slowly extracted his tongue, a look of pure bliss on his face as he savored my taste. He straightened his back, lowered my hips to just the right angle, notched his cock right where I needed it most and rammed forward.
My swollen tissues resisted at first before yielding to his unrelenting penetration.
The ridges of his cock rubbed in all the right places as he sank deep.
We were both gasping for breath when he finally bottomed out.
Wild eyes met mine as he braced himself over me. He leaned over and kissed me ravenously, growling, “Mine,” against my lips, in case I’d missed that declaration the first two times, then pulled back before surging forward again.
That first time was a wild and fast ride, as he plowed through all my defenses and made me scream through orgasm after orgasm.
“Mine,” he roared.
“Yes,” I cried out. “Yes, Elliot. Yours!”
I never did make it to Inner Beast Management that day, nor did we even attempt to pretend we were holding a real tutoring session.
Instead, Elliot pretended to “tutor” me on various sexual positions.
It was an intense afternoon, but also full of laughter and joy.
Most of my days the rest of the semester were like that. Joyful and full of hope and really great sex.
There were also downsides, of course.
Leslie never did show up, which left me feeling terribly guilty, for I’d failed to notice that she was in crisis the past two years.
There was also no sign of Zowen, which made for some really peaceful days, but also some worrisome nights. I saw no sign of him in my dreams and I was afraid that meant Leslie was gone from this world.
Kasi also reminded us about time in the Shadow Realm and how it was distorted, rarely matching how time passed in our world. Sometimes it stretched like it had when I was held prisoner there, and sometimes it compressed, like it had when we were in the simulation.
In other words, it was possible Zowen was gone for good.
It was also possible that he believed only a few moments had passed and was even now, plotting his return.
Though I knew it was highly unlikely, I was hopeful that maybe my icy fire had hurt him so badly in that last confrontation that he’d crawled off and died. Or perhaps simply didn’t have enough power left to cross over again.
The more time that passed, the more hopeful I was that this was the case.
Unfortunately, the peace didn’t last and when I least expected it, Zowen attacked in my dreams once more.
This time, though, I used my fire immediately and vanquished him fairly quickly, which is when I got the most brilliant idea .
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner, but if my icy fire was all that was needed to stop him, maybe I could build a fire shield around my mind so that he couldn’t visit me in my dreams anymore.
The downside to this plan was that I had to consult the one person who had the most knowledge about our brains and magic: Professor Diaz.
It turned out that inner beasts weren’t her only specialty.
Professor Diaz had many books out about the power of our minds, mind over matter, manifesting one’s future and my personal favorite, mental health and magic.
I still mostly thought it was a bunch of hooey, but I also figured if anyone could figure out how to build a mental shield with magic, it would be her.
Unfortunately, since she refused to spend class time on this project, it meant meeting her for some extracurricular tutoring sessions.
Elliot had class when Professor Diaz was available to meet, but Jasmine would often accompany me, if only for moral support, which was greatly needed since invariably every session began with, “Clear your mind, sink deep into your consciousness and just breathe.”
It took all of my discipline to keep from cracking up at Miki-Leopard’s observations.
Already breathe.
I know.
Silly-Breath always say breathe. Silly-Breath was Miki-Leopard’s name for Professor Diaz. Just like Bad-Breath was her name for Professor Puddlemoan .
She does, doesn’t she?
Maybe Silly-Breath forget.
Forget to breathe?
Forget how. My mind filled with the sound of leopard chuffs as Miki-Leopard giggled in her very leopardy way.
I had to hold my breath so that I didn’t burst into laughter.
“Breathe, Ms. Mitchell,” Professor Diaz exclaimed. “You’re not breathing !”
Mikaela forget too?
I exhaled on a laugh, shook my head as if that would help and said, “Sorry, sorry.” I took a deep breath in, slowly exhaled and focused, once more, on just breathing.
The truth was, although I found the concept a little hokey, the breathing did help me settle down so that I could find that spark inside a little faster and eventually, as time went on, I was able to visualize that spark expanding, then doubling and tripling.
With a lot of practice and a lot of headaches, I eventually managed to push the flames at my core toward what Professor Diaz called my aura.
“Visualize that spark, your light, your magic as an aura that surrounds your physical form, that allows no one to trespass.”
So I did that about a million times and managed to get an aura in place for a while, but it always seemed to dissipate, the flames returning back to my core, when I forgot to focus on holding them there.
So that was the next task. I had to practice holding it in place until it became second nature, as unconscious as breathing.
I was told to practice everywhere, at all times. In class, in the cafeteria, in the shower, in bed when trying to fall asleep.
Make sex? Miki-Leopard asked.
Okay, that was really disturbing. It had occurred to me after admonishing the admin that my leopard was in essence a toddler cub who needed to be shielded from some of the more scary aspects of life at the Academy, that I was just as bad since she was also being exposed to my wild and graphic sexual shenanigans with Elli-Dragon.
Unfortunately, there was no way to shield her from our very, very active sex life, so I’d given up. Sometimes she was sleeping and sometimes she was awake, offering commentary and causing us both to burst into laughter right at a crucial moment.
Miki-Leopard hungry, she announced one evening when Elliot had his head buried between my legs. That not food.
Of course, we both burst into laughter, then put a pause to our sexy-times for a quick run to the cafeteria.
We learned our lesson with that one, though, and now kept snacks in the bedside table.
Hey, in a pinch, a little bit of jerky goes a long way.
In any case, I finally got that shield in place and by the time we were getting ready for finals, it was no longer dissipating, even when I was sleeping. My magic was now so close to the surface that Elliot swore sometimes I glowed with it.
Of course, we didn’t know whether the shield worked or not. As long as Zowen stayed away, we had no way of knowing if it was because of the shield or if he was just taking another one of his breaks before trying again.
Then, right during finals week, he came for me, and not in my dreams.