CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Elysian
Walt crawled up the bed and tucked his body in beside hers, wrapping his arms around her as she rode out the aftershocks of the most intense orgasm of her life.
“Oh my god,” Elysian said. Her heart was pounding and her chest was rising and falling like she’d just run a six-minute mile.
“Yeah,” Walt whispered, sounding exactly as pleased with himself as he deserved to be. He pushed her sweat-soaked hair to the side and pressed a kiss to her neck.
Her skin prickled, and she remembered their conversation in the shower. “Does the wolf still want to bite me?”
Her question made him jerk, and his rock-hard cock brushed against the still hypersensitive skin of her thighs. That was answer enough. She shifted her legs, so that he slipped easily between her thighs, and squeezed. He made a noise in the back of his throat, and she felt the brush of his teeth on her neck.
Biting had never been a part of her sex life before. She’d certainly never fantasized about it, never got herself off with frantic fingers while imagining teeth sinking into her skin. But she couldn’t think of anything else now, and she was sure that if Walt somehow slipped out of her life again, if she didn’t have his body above her or his tongue inside her ever again, the only way she would ever get off again would be through fantasies of his bite.
The idea of losing him in any way was almost physically painful. She’d had him twice already, and she wanted him again. Every hour for the rest of her life. They could just lay tangled up in this bed, fucking and napping and fucking again.
“You said that it would make me yours,” she whispered.
“You’re already mine,” Walt said. “Aren’t you?”
She shifted again, moving her hips so that the tip of his cock was at her entrance instead of sliding between her thighs. Walt drove himself forward, burying himself inside her with a groan.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m yours. But you should do it.”
“Mine,” he said, rocking hard against her. He slid one hand down the front of her body, and circled her clit with his fingertip. With the other hand he gathered up her hair, wrapping it around his wrist and pulling her head to the side. He pressed his teeth to her skin and then they weren’t teeth anymore, they were fangs. She felt an exquisite pain as he broke her skin, which washed away in a wave of euphoria.
“Yours,” she said.
Elysian woke up with Walt’s arms circled around her, holding her tight to his chest like he could keep her safe from anything that came their way. She turned her head so that her face was pressed against the soft skin inside his upper arm, and sighed. He probably could. She hoped he would never have to again.
Moving carefully so that she wouldn’t jostle him awake, she brushed the thumb of her free hand against the spot on her neck where he had bitten her. She’d expected a sharp pain, the kind you couldn’t help worrying at again and again, but instead, she felt only a faint tingling. The skin under the pad of her thumb had already knitted together into a scar, barely raised above the skin around it.
Weird, but not the weirdest thing she’d experienced lately.
She slipped out of Walt’s grip and stood up. He made an upset noise in his sleep, shifting into the warm spot where she had lain, and then sighed and fell back into deep sleep, face-down on the pillow. She smiled, leaned over and smoothed his soft brown hair, and then tiptoed out to the kitchen.
The house was still as full as it had ever been, the heavy drapes and mid-century furniture in the same places Annette had always insisted on keeping them, but it felt empty. Hollow. Elysian’s mood was a strange mix of bereaved and contented, but the contentment was winning.
To her surprise, Julia was seated at the kitchen table, her hands pressed against the varnished table-top as she read Elysian’s grimoire. It was still sitting where she had left it after the circle’s discussion at the party, open to the page with the ‘summon familiar’ spell.
“You weren’t here all night, were you?” Elysian asked.
Julia raised an eyebrow at her, and Elysian blushed. Right, she might as well have just outright announced that she was worried Julia had heard her and Walt making love.
“I thought the house was empty. I might have made different choices if I’d known there was another person left undefended when the wards fell,” Elysian lied.
“Mm-hmm,” Julia said, but she let it drop. She’d never been the kind to needle at someone to embarrass them, like Praneeta or Katie might. “No, I left with my daughter and Tila. I popped back this morning because there’s something you need to know about this spell. Am I correct in thinking your grandmother spoke French but no Latin?”
Elysian nodded. “It was my great-great grandmother who translated the Latin to French. Grandmere added the English notes when it became clear that my French was...” Never going to improve beyond basic pleasantries and ordering coffee. “Lacking.”
Julia sighed. “So you were working from a translation of a translation. Have you ever seen what happens when you plug a phrase into Google translate, run it through a couple of languages then translate it back to English?”
“Yes.” Elysian bristled. “But my great-great grandmother and grandmere weren’t computer algorithms.”
A strange feeling passed over Elysian. Despite the fact that she had her back to the closed bedroom door, she was filled with a certainty that Walt was awake.
“Your grandmother’s translation from French to English is pristine, don’t get me wrong. The French familier and English familiar have the same meaning in this context. The problem is your great-great grandmother’s translation of the Latin. In this context the word refers to ‘familiaris’ as in the domestic, the family. You didn’t summon your familiar, you summoned the person who is most intimate to you.”
“So the spell is to summon your…”
“Mate,” Walt said, in the doorway.