She stopped by her bedroom to put the money into her safe, before continuing to the solarium. It was warm and moist in the glass room, the morning sun streaming in through the dirty windows. She sighed, adding cleaning the solarium windows to a never-ending list of chores that never seemed to get done.
The fairy had fashioned himself a round nest ball out of the dried leaf matter and poked his head out when she neared his atrium. He did not hiss at her but watched warily. She risked getting her fingers bitten and reached into the glass in order to place her the carrot before him.
“I have no idea what you eat,” she told him apologetically.
Her grandmother’s ghost wandered into the room. “I like your man, Clarissa,” she said, calling Lia by her mother’s name. “He seems strong. He should be able to help you with the Wingless now that the protection spell is faltering.”
“What protection spell, grandmother?” Lia looked at her in alarm. Her grandmother had never mentioned a protection spell before.
“Everything you need to know is in the book, Lia,” her grandmother’s ghost looked at her, her eyes sharpening with awareness. “I have always told you that. But you have to ask the right questions.”
“What questions?” Lia asked, but the focus had gone from the ghost, and her grandmother faded away as she drifted towards the door.
She returned to her room and closed the door behind her. Her room held the faded scent of citrus and lavender, she observed, with a small smile. She would bottle the scent, if she could, and wear it as a perfume. Scent of Raiden, she smirked as she locked the door and went into the walk-in-robe, through the secret entrance, and up the turret stairs.
The protection spell was failing, her grandmother had said. She had always warded Lia as she left the house. Lia had not continued to ward herself, thinking her grandmother’s habit to be part of the paranoia that had kept her housebound for most of her life. And yet, since Lia was no longer warded, she had come to the attention of a werewolf, a vampire and a warlock.
She lit a candle in the turret room, the shadows sliding eerily around the room as the flame flickered. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself as she leaned over the book. “Protection spells.”
The book flickered through its pages and showed her an array of minor wards.
She blew out her breath. What had her grandmother’s ghost said? That the protection spell was failing and that her man would be able to help her with the Wingless. But then, she thought, her grandmother’s ghost had called her by her mother’s name – perhaps she had simply been recalling something from the past.
“What are the Wingless?” She asked the grimoire.
The book opened to the first page and an illustration of a winged woman, crawling across the floor whilst a winged man stood over her, his sword lifted, holding one of her wings. Lia winced. It was obvious that the winged man was about to slice off the woman’s wing.
“The worst punishment for an angel is to have their wings severed. This punishment results almost certainly in death and as such is sentenced for only the very worst of crimes, such as treachery, betrayal of family, murder, or carnal knowledge with a slave species.”
“Almost certainly,” she repeated under her breath. That implied that some survived. Her grandmother’s stories about the Wingless had come from the book. “Why would I need a protection spell against the Wingless?”
The book returned to the beginning, but a page she had never seen before, the writing appearing before her eyes, along with an illustration of a perfectly balanced scale.
“The modern world exists in a delicate balance, with neither angel nor devil paramount. The war between the opposing positions has waged long and hard throughout history. Should a descendant of the Wingless be taken by either side, the fear is that their secrets would be discovered and unbalance the world.”
She read it through twice. “What does that have to do with me?”
The book flicked back to the first picture, but on the blank page opposite to the illustration, a family tree gradually appeared, starting with one name, Evelyn, and filtering down to Cecelia. She tilted her head as she traced the lines of the names to her own. “My family tree?”
Her grandmother had always said that their family was hunted by the Wingless.
She felt the hair rise along her arms. “Stories, Lia,” she told herself. “Just stories. Protection spell against the Wingless,” she said anyway.
The pages flipped back to the beginning of the book and that horrible picture.
She sighed and closed the book, and then hesitated. You have to ask the right questions, her grandmother had said.
She closed the book again. “Why would witches or warlocks try to abduct me?”
There was no reaction. “Keep trying, Cecelia,” she told herself, and then remembered another question she wanted the answer to. “Can witches become werewolves?” She decided to try another search instead, one that was more interesting to her than her grandmother’s deranged ghosts ominous warning about Wingless and protection spells.
The book opened to the werewolf page. She read it through again and sighed, as there was no answer to be found.
She wished her mother was still alive to talk to about Raiden. Such things were meant to be conversations between mother and daughter, she thought sadly.
She closed the book and retreated down the staircase. There was a message on her phone from Raiden asking if she liked spaghetti. She smiled, her heart warming.
“Yes,” she wrote back sitting on the bed that held the shadow of his scent. “We are spaghetti experts in this house.”
“We shall see. You haven’t tried my spaghetti,” he wrote back.
She held the phone against her chest. Did she want to be a werewolf? She couldn’t imagine what that entailed. Did it hurt to transform? Could she still dance?
If being a werewolf meant joining his pack, she would immediately inherit an extensive family. People to whom she would matter. And she would have him.
What about Paris? Would her romance with Brock last until the full moon? Maybe it would if they weren’t abducted in the interim
The man had been a warlock, she thought. She only knew one other person who might know about witches and warlocks.
She pushed off her bed and went down the hall to Cael’s room and knocked.
He opened the door, shirtless and spectacular. She recoiled in shock. He was beautiful, his golden hair wet from the shower, and a body that begged to be licked on full display. He smiled, and his smile was heavy with lusty promise as his hand closed around her wrist.
“Cecelia,” he purred. “I was just thinking about you.” His eyes dropped, drawing hers with them, and she saw that he sported a hard on straining against the loose tracksuit pants he wore leaving no question about just how he had been thinking about her. “Come and help me with this, hm?”
“Cael,” she protested as he tugged her into the room and closed the door behind her.
He pushed her up against the door and kissed her, his mouth demanding and un-giving against her, his tongue sweeping into her mouth and taking what he wanted, as his hands gripped the waist band of her work out tights and tore them.
She gasped, and sanity returned. She pushed against his chest.
“Stop it, Cael.”
“You say stop, but that is not what you mean, not what your body, your scent, says,” he said against her cheek. “You know you are mine, Lia, stop fighting it. Perhaps once I have had you, I can forget this obsession, and get back to my life.”
“What do you mean?” She wedged her arms between them, holding him back. “Cael, stop,” she protested as he continued to kiss along her neck, her protest more strident because a part of her wanted to succumb to him. “Stop it.”
“You remember me, Lia,” he peeled her leotard off her shoulders exposing her breasts to his mouth. “I know you remember me.”
“Finis!” She commanded, the magic flashing between them as it had between her and Lucian in the dark hallway of the club, like the strike of a match, a flare of light that brightened and bewildered.
Cael stopped, breathing heavily, his hair falling into his eyes.
She pulled her leotard back up and edged under his arm, feeling for the door handle.
“I told you, hands off,” she hissed at him, furious.
“I didn’t promise,” he grinned. “Isn’t this interesting? The little witch has power behind her.”
“I had hoped that we could be friends… That you could help me,” she managed to open the door. “I think that it is best if you start looking for another place to stay, Cael. This isn’t working.”
“Oh, I think it is working spectacularly well,” he replied, his voice soft.
She closed the door between them.
For a moment, she stood in the hallway, and shook. The real problem was, she admitted to herself, that she was more than tempted by the blonde man. It was like a bad habit, she knew she had to stop and stay away, but she was irresistibly drawn back again and again, addicted to the wrongness that was Cael.
She hurried down to her room and started the shower. The last thing she needed, she thought, as she scrubbed scented soap across her skin, was for Raiden to return and smell Cael on her. Maybe he would think it because they lived together, or maybe not.
But one thing she was certain of was that she did not want to jeopardize what she had with Raiden over a petulant warlock.