The roar of a motorbike raised his head and broke into the dream-like quality that held her in thrall. She gasped in a breath, and rolled away from him, regaining her feet in the doorway. Their eyes met, and he rose to standing slowly, with a lascivious smile.
“You…” She started to accuse him of using magic to seduce her, and the words caught in her throat. She had never spoken to anyone about her magic, or her knowledge of it, and yet, with this man, she had come so close.
“Can’t blame a man for trying?” He suggested.
“Oh my god,” she was appalled, and withdrew, finding her way down the hallway to her room. She pressed her back against the door. On heat? “What does that mean?”
Obviously, she understood what that meant, but she was not a dog… Was she? Cael did not look Other, but the effect he had on her, and his comments… He was something, of that, she was sure. Was she on heat, like he said? What did that mean? And how long did it last for?
She heard Paris’ and Brock’s voice in the hallway, and Paris’ laughter.
Once she heard the hammering of the old pipes straining under the pressure of the shower water, she emptied her purse, spilling out onto the bed the rubble of her life – chap sticks, tissues, small change, mints that had escaped their container, receipts, compacts, and old bus tickets tumbled out onto the tabletop, and amongst them, the indignant fairy with its crumpled wings.
She snuck out into the hallway. The door to Cael’s room was closed, and she was certain that Paris and Brock would be showering together, so she crept down to the kitchen and retrieved a pair of rubber-tipped tongs and a couple of slices of dried fruit from the pantry.
Lia used the rubber ended kitchen tongs to collect the fairy off her bed and took him to the solarium. Her grandmother’s plants still thrived here, despite Lia’s best efforts to care for them, the leaves shining in the bright light that spilled through the many little panes of glass, and the moisture from their pots filling the small room with the scent of soil and green life.
She deposited the fairy into one of the delicate glass houses and shoved a piece of dried apple it at it.
“That one is like a cat I once owned,” Lia’s grandmother’s ghost drifted into the solarium. The solarium, the kitchen and the hallway seemed to be the most common places that Lia saw her. “All hiss and attitude. But once you won that cat’s love, it was yours for life.”
“What is wrong with it?” Lia asked her. It was rare for her grandmother to talk to her. Most often, if the ghost spoke at all, what she spoke of was vague, disjointed, and often addressed to Lia’s mother, Clarissa.
“Nothing that a few days in an atrium will not fix, sweetie,” her grandmother was in one of her coherent moods. “Pop him in there, and let him rest a bit, and then set him out the window.”
Lia hoped for the best as she returned to the bedroom in order to scrape the contents of her purse away before Raiden returned from his meeting.
She locked her door and went into the walk-in-robe, striking the hidden catch that opened the wall into a secret staircase, shivering as the cooler air struck her. She went into this room as infrequently as she could, and it was musty as a result.
She wound her way up into the turret, the roughly finished stone bricks pressing in on her, and the wooden steps creaking, their treads worn treacherously smooth by generations of feet. In the turret room, the walls lined with bookcases heavy with arcane objects and ancient texts, she lit the candle over the desk pressed beneath a stain glass window and opened the grimoire.
She held her hand over it and tried to calm her heart and remember the lessons her grandmother had fought so hard to teach her. She had never been interested in this side of her heritage, preferring dance to magic.
“Heat,” she commanded, and watched the pages lift and flicker. The first spell it landed on was one for warmth. “Next,” she said impatiently. Perhaps she was doing it wrong?
A spell for starting fires.
“Heat,” she repeated, trying to think about the search engines of the internet. “Mage heat. Sexual heat. Mates.”
There was a pause.
The book flickered into life, flashing pages from werewolf to vampire, to angel, to devil, to gargoyle, as if presenting her with an array of choices, a catalogue of potential sexual partners.
“F-king great.” She closed the book in disgust and hesitated. “Contraception?” She asked it. There was no response. “Probably didn’t exist when it was written,” she chastised herself as she returned down the staircase.
She jumped into the shower. The hot water ran out quickly, as expected, she thought ruefully, after Paris’ and Brock had showered, but she felt better for having washed off the sweat of the day. She dressed again in tracksuit pants and a t-shirt – not very sexy, she thought, but shrugged. She wouldn’t be wearing them long.
“On heat,” she groaned. She had certainly been behaving that way since meeting Raiden on Friday night.
Dancing had filled all the spaces boys might have taken. There had always been a rehearsal or a class that meant she could not go out, and she had always been watching her weight, so drinking or going out for dinner simply held no appeal.
She had dated a couple of male dancers since joining the academy, kissed a couple of them, but romantic disputes caused so many issues for her friends that she had decided it was best to avoid them. She had dreams, she had told herself, and there was nothing a man could offer her that her vibrator couldn’t achieve.
But that was before she had encountered Raiden, and in since then she had brought the werewolf into her house, her room, her bed. She had never done that before. With anyone. But what there was between them was powerful… Or was it the heat and not the man? Did all witches and warlocks go on heat? Did the Others go on heat? Werewolves, she could understand, because of their nature…
Raiden would be able to smell she was on heat, she realized. Was that why he was interested? But, no, that just didn’t feel right either.
And Cael… Cael was a problem. He had to be a warlock. It made sense why he did not have the Other in his eyes, and how he had used magic to seduce her. Witches and warlocks were not Other, exactly. What they were was a little vague, but they were not the same, and they were very difficult to distinguish from humans, unless they did something specific to give themselves away, like use magic, as Cael had done.
She was not entirely sure that she wanted him living in the house after he had almost taken advantage of her. Using magic to do so was just… playing dirty, she added. How many humans had he used his magic on in order to seduce what he wanted from them? And he had asked if Raiden was her boyfriend, and she had told him yes. He’d had no place seducing her knowing that.
She would speak to Cael in the morning when she got his month’s rent from him. She would let him stay, she decided, but she would make clear that it was strictly hands off.
She heard a car pull up and ran to the front door, her heart leaping as she saw that Raiden had returned. She ran out to greet him and he caught her against him, kissing her as if they had been parted for longer than a couple of hours.
He ran his hands through her hair as she wrapped her arms around his waist and smiled down at her. “Does chicken salad for dinner sound okay?”
“Sounds good,” she released him so that he could open the passenger door and retrieve the grocery bags he had brought back. “Here, I will take one,” she held out her hand to help.
“No, I am fine,” he replied holding the two bags in one hand as he closed the Ute door and locked it. He held the groceries with ease, draping his other hand over her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand, and they strolled towards the porch together as comfortably and easily, she thought, as if they had been together for far longer than the weekend.
“So, what is the deal with the blonde guy?” He asked as they closed the front door behind them. “Did he end up take a room?”
“Cael. Yes, he did. He is alright,” she hesitated.
“Except?” Raiden had caught the hesitation.
“I am sure it is nothing,” she smiled reassuringly, dismissing her concerns. If she spoke to Raiden about them, the alpha in him would not let the threat pass, and she did not want to cause a fight. She led the way into the kitchen and helped him unpack the groceries into the fridge.
“It is a bit early for dinner,” he said as she closed the fridge door on the last ingredient. She turned slowly, her heartbeat picking up and her body heating. The Other flashed golden in his eyes, and she knew that it had risen to the surface in response to his desire for her. “Lia,” his hand closed on her hip and drew her slowly towards him until their hipbones met. She could feel his hardness against her and the hard thump of his heart beneath the press of her palms against his chest.
“We should…” She whispered as his mouth came down on hers, and sighed into the kiss, meeting his tongue with hers, her body melting against him in its ache. She slid her hands up his chest to sink her fingers into the silken curls of his hair, feeling them grip and slip around her fingers as he pulled her tighter to him with a groan of need.
“Take this to the bedroom?” He suggested, his lips against hers.
“Yes.”