ALICE #2
And even though I knew he was only doing what I told him, I didn't want to go inside.
I didn't want to be protected. I'd had a lifetime of being handled with care.
Of being gentle Alice, sweet Alice, poor fragile Alice who always needed watching.
Alice who got the soft magic and the soft voice and the softest, most careful version of everyone's love because they were all so sure she wasn't strong enough to handle anything else.
Aunt Judy did it. Alex did it. The whole coven did it.
And now Dae, who I'd thought was the first one who really saw me, Dae was doing it too.
And the worst part is that I had no reason to be upset with him, because I'd meant it when I told him he should stay away from me. And I'd seen how strong vampire bonds were for their mates. So I needed to be the one to keep it from happening to us.
I flung the quilt off. The room was too hot, the air too close, my skin too tight.
I wanted him to forget to be careful. I wanted him to want me so badly he stopped protecting me from himself, stopped protecting himself from the thing I was becoming, stopped deciding what I could handle.
I wanted to be chosen. Reached for. Ruined a little.
I wanted to matter enough that someone finally stopped being gentle with me.
My hand went down over my stomach, under the waistband of my sleep shorts, and I told myself I wouldn't, right up until my fingers slid between my thighs and found my sex slick and swollen and so ready I would've been embarrassed if someone else was touching me.
A shaky breath punched out of me as I silently fought with myself. Then I bit down on my lip, let my eyes fall shut, and gave in.
And there he was, waiting behind my eyelids exactly where I'd left him.
That first devastating drag of him against me.
I circled slow and pretended the pressure was his fingers instead of mine, broad and rough and sure, and my hips rose off the mattress to chase it the pleasure.
The heat of his chest under my palms. His voice gone to gravel against my throat, yeobo, yeobo…
I moved faster, using two fingers, my other hand twisting into the sheet, and I called up the moment his fangs had dropped.
The scrape of them against my pulse. How badly I'd wanted him to just do it, sink them in, take what he wanted and quit asking my permission with those reverent, careful hands.
In my head, he did. In my head he didn't pull back, didn't kiss my forehead, didn't send me inside.
He bit. He took. He pressed me down into this bed under all that warm, heavy muscle and finished what he'd started on that railing, and my need for him crested so hard and so fast that I shattered around my own fingers with my face shoved into the pillow so Aunt Judy wouldn't hear, a broken sound tearing out of me that might have been his name.
And then it was over.
The pleasure drained as fast as it had come and left me lying flat on my back, my chest heaving, damp and shaking and completely, crushingly alone.
The fantasy disappearing the second my body let go, and what remained was the ceiling fan above me and the cold empty stretch of mattress where he wasn't. Where he'd chosen not to be.
I never should've let him kiss me.
Pressing the back of my wrists to my eyes, I hated that they came away wet.
I sat up, dragging the heels of my hands down my face, and forced all thoughts of Dae-Jung out of my head.
My overnight bag sat slumped against the closet door where I'd dropped it a week ago.
I pulled it into my lap and dug past the tangle of clothes to the bottom, to the thing wrapped in one of my old towels so my fingers wouldn't have to touch it directly when I checked, every few days, that it was still there.
The spell book.
I unwound the towel in the dark and didn't bother with the lamp. I'd learned I didn't need it. The book had its own faint sourceless glow, a sick pearl-gray shimmer that lived in the glyphs themselves, and it lit my hands from below as I balanced its weight across my knees.
I don't know what I was looking for. Comfort, maybe?
Which was insane, because there was nothing comforting about this thing.
But it was mine in a way nothing else was.
My bloodline's. The one thing in my life that belonged to the part of me everyone else was so afraid of.
Much like the incomplete bond between me and Dae, the book called to me.
And I believed there was a reason it had ended up in my hands.
And maybe that reason was because I was the one who was meant to stop Marcus.
I opened the cover and found the page I always went to, the one near the middle where the blood script ran thickest, and I looked down expecting the words to swim and slide, ineligible as always.
I blinked. Looked again. The witch glyphs were the same as they'd ever been, the familiar half-known shapes I could almost but never quite parse, unchanged.
But the djinn script — the rust-red marks braided between them — sat quiet on the page now, patient, its edges crisp, and there were suddenly shapes that meant things.
Not all of it. Not even most of it. But more than the last time.
Enough that my eyes caught on a cluster of the blood-red marks near the top of the page and… read them.
Blood calls to blood. What was opened may be opened again.
The book didn't whisper it this to me. Nothing spoke in my head. There was no voice, no pressure behind my eyes, none of the coiled watching presence I'd felt during the possession. Just me, alone in the quiet, reading words in a dead djinn's language as easily as if they'd been written in English.
Horror slowly filled me.
Because I'd told Dae, weeks ago, before everything, when I'd first shown him the book, I'd told him what it would mean if the day ever came that I could read it.
It meant I was becoming more djinn than witch.
My hands began to shake, and the pearl-gray glow trembled with them, throwing the words in and out of shadow.
Blood calls to blood.
I could read it. I could read it, and I still felt like me. That was the part that turned my stomach to ice. There was no monster clawing at me, no gold flooding my vision, no ancient hunger speaking through my mouth. Marcus was gone. I'd felt him leave.
So if he was gone…
If the thing that had been inside me had truly burned itself out and left…
Then why could I read his language?
Why was I changing?
I shut the book so hard the sound cracked through the quiet room like a slap.
I sat there rigid, my heart slamming against my ribs, waiting for Aunt Judy's footsteps in the hall, for her voice, for the wards to spike at the fear pouring off me.
But nothing came. The house still held its breath. The fan turned.
I wrapped the book back in the towel with clumsy, frantic hands, then shoved it down to the bottom of the bag and buried it under my clothes and zipped the whole thing shut and pushed it back against the closet door.
It was as far away as the room would allow, but it wasn't far enough, would never be far enough, because the problem wasn't in the bag.
The problem was in my blood, and I wasn't ready.
Not yet. Please, gods, not yet.
I climbed back into the bed and pulled the quilt over my head, chasing the heavy dark that would drag me under.
But sleep didn't come. Instead I lay curled up as small as I could make myself and tried to distract myself with memories of Dae.
But it only made me ache for everything I wanted and couldn't have.
And in the corner, the book called to me.
Wanting and dread, braided so tight I couldn't tell anymore where one ended and the other began.
I held them both, alone in the dark, and waited for a morning I wasn't sure I wanted to come.