In the Shadow of a Wish, page 29
“The monster,” Auri said.
“I am a monster,” Lexa said. “I defy whatever the spell creates to face me.”
“But to do it here—Auri is right—you will need your powers.” Nix turned to look at Auri again. “It could work, but the wording must be just right.”
“And Poe has to show up.”
Nix looked at Luc, “She will. She’s too close to the end.”
“I agree,” Lexa said and looked over the rim of her glass at Auri again as she sipped the bubbly. “Let’s see what this mortal can do.”
That night, while lying in bed, Lexa ensconced in her own quarters and Luc’s promising to return, Auri and Nix refined the wish. They looped back around and over the words, considering how it might have an impact beyond the wish. Auri was lying on her side facing Nix, with her knee resting against his thigh. He was on his back looking up at the ceiling, his hands tucked behind his head, the sheet loose around his waist. She loved looking at him. Loved that he allowed her to see him this way, undone. She recalled their play a few nights prior, her hands tied to the bed frame, Nix pleasuring her from behind, and her blood heated her body, feeding the fire between her legs.
“It’s the obligation that bothers me,” he said and turned his head to look at her.
She kept her hands tucked up under her cheek instead of touching him like she wanted to. She imagined dragging her fingertip across the plane of his chest to circle his nipple, then running it lower over the ridges of his abdomen. Down… She blinked, reminding herself this conversation was too important. “Why?” she asked.
“If you’re wishing for power, that means you will pay with power, and what if Poe arrives while in the midst of the obligation?”
“She doesn’t know what we’re planning. If she does arrive, you can stall her.”
“Only if I’m not involved. But if the obligation were like the first one, or others that I’ve been compelled to act out. This wish creates another unknown, and I feel like I need to know to keep you safe.”
“The spell will have its way with the obligation, Nix. You know that. It won’t matter what we do.”
“What if, in the midst of the obligation, she arrives and disappears before we get her to break the spell.”
“She will resist. Are you willing to kill her to break it? Even if it might not work?”
Nix sighed. “We’re fucked.” He looked back at the ceiling.
“Luc and Lexa will stall her.” She pondered his concern. “We have another day?”
“Give or take. It could be anytime. I summoned her two days ago.”
“We don’t know you’ll be actively involved in the obligation. You weren’t with the last one.”
“No. I just had to face my own fear.” He turned his head again to look at her.
Auri watched the worry work his features, and he grabbed his shoulder to knead the muscle there. “If I make the wish now, then maybe we’ll get lucky, and the obligation will be paid before she arrives.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
He rolled toward her. “I’m fucking insecure and overthinking, and I don’t do this, Auri.” He grasped her face between his hands. “I don’t want to watch you slip away and–” He stopped, his eyes cast down.
She noticed the thickness of his dark lashes and leaned forward to kiss them. “If we do nothing, Nix, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I will be stuck on the outside, you’ll be gone. Poe and that demon will have collected your powers to unleash beyond the spell, and I will have done nothing to stop it.”
He drew her into his arms and entwined his legs with hers, his fingers drawing swirls over the skin of her back. Heat raced from their origin to her core. “It’s weird that I hate that we’re here, but I’m so grateful, too. Do you think if I hadn’t been stuck to the key, that I would have ever met you?”
“I don’t know. Did you do much roaming in the woods looking for peasant women?” She smiled against his skin.
He laughed, a low rumble in his chest that reverberated through hers and spoke to her heartbeat. “No. Not so much.”
“You would have offered your immortality to the first key keeper.”
He blanched at that. “Luc was right.”
“In a very twisted and untenable way, he was.” She closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of his hands, but his worried look earlier flitted through her mind. “What is the god-yoke?”
His caress stopped.
“You mentioned it before. During the first obligation.”
He signed and drew away from her, enough so that he could see her eyes. “I wasn’t sure if it was real or just a story.”
“There’s always a layer of truth in stories, wouldn’t you say?”
His lips curled for a brief moment with a smile, but it slid away just as quickly. “It’s a tethering between two gods—people, I guess—because they carry matching stars.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s the magic of the spell?” Auri asked, trying to understand, rationalize.
“Maybe, but there were six key keepers before you, and I didn’t tether to any of them because of the spell.”
Auri searched his face and could see he was worried. “Does it bother you? The idea of being tethered to me?”
Creases formed between his eyebrows, and he leaned forward, pressing his forehead to hers. “No. Absolutely not.”
His conviction made her heart feel safer. “Then why are you worried?”
He was silent for an extra beat that told her he was thinking about what to say.
“Just say it.”
“I don’t know enough about it. You heard Lexa—it rarely happens. So, I don’t know what it means, really. And it doesn’t make logical sense.”
“Because I’m a mortal.”
“Because you’re a mortal. Unless–”
“Unless?”
“Your parents?”
She shook her head. “They’re just ordinary folk.” But the thought niggled her mind with a curious doubt.
“Let’s worry about one thing at a time,” he said, lifting his lips to her forehead and pressing a kiss there.
But she heard—or maybe felt—his worry, because there was something he wasn’t saying. She wanted to push him on it but also felt as though it wasn’t the time. They had to worry about the spell and Poe and how to make a wish that would help them get through what was coming. She needed Nix safe and free. Whatever the god-yoke was and would entail could wait.
“Right,” she said. “Let me make this wish.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Here goes–”
“Auri, wait.” He pressed her back against the bed and shifted so he was between her legs, then leaned up onto his elbows, hemming in her upper body as he touched her hair, her cheeks, her lips.
She looked up at his beautiful face, at his dark eyes, and fell in love with him all over again.
His full lips formed a kissable pout as he considered what he was going to say. “I need you to know that whatever happens, I’m so grateful to have had this time with you.” He leaned down and kissed her, slow and filled with emotion, then drew back and added, “I love you. And just… in case something happens. I need you to kn–”
She reached up and pressed her finger to his lips. “First, let’s plan for the best. Second, though this isn’t what I would have expected of my journey, I’m so grateful.” She paused, her throat closing around the words, but she forced them out. “I don’t know how to face an after.”
“Let’s get through this,” he said, “then we can think about after.”
She nodded, running her fingers through his hair around his face, then grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down to meet her lips. She put all the feelings she could into that kiss, every emotion she felt for him that had bloomed inside of her. His body responded, coming to life between her legs. She tilted her hips to encourage him, running her hands down the length of his back before fitting into the curve there as she angled her head for a deeper kiss.
Nix adjusted, reaching between their bodies and guiding himself into her, agonizingly slow as he joined them, his breath ragged and moving the hair near her ear.
Auri moaned, wrapping her legs around the back of his thighs, pulling him deeper into her. She relished his pleasure-filled groan as if he’d been without her for a lifetime and had finally quenched his thirst.
“Auri,” he said against her mouth, unmoving, as if all he needed was to connect. He pressed his forehead to hers. “Auri,” he repeated.
She pressed her hands against Nix’s cheeks. “I love you,” she said. “I love you.”
“Auri,” he said again, as if her name were the only thing keeping him alive.
Then, with Nix deep inside her, Auri made her final wish, the words they’d decided upon together. “As the key keeper, I wish to be granted the capacity to modify the outcome of the spell holding Nixus Uraiahs and me, Aurielle Fareview, hostage.”
Nix altered his body, a slight movement that drew his breath and hers. He propelled his hips forward, pushing against her pelvis. She moaned, grasping onto his body for support as he began to unmoor her.
“Granted,” he answered. “The price for your wish, Auri–” His breath caught as she grabbed his hips, then the taut flesh of his ass, now moving with more urgency to hold him against her. The effort of attempting to hold himself back produced beads of sweat that worked its way through his dark hair, the curls caught against his face. “The price for your wish,” he repeated as Auri pressed her feet against the mattress and tilted her hips toward him, wanting more, wanting all. He groaned. “The price for your wish,” he said a third time, “is the loss of capacity about your particular circumstances within the spell.”
She slid her hands up to press them against the small of his back. “Is that’s all?” She offered a smile, then arched her back with a gasp as he grabbed her leg and forced it over one of his hips, pushing into her with more urgency. “Nix,” she panted, over and over.
He grabbed her other leg, pressed it up against her chest, and pushed into her again and again, until they were both wild with mutual need. Their bodies climbed the precipice together before jumping into the oblivion, but when they did, Auri thought she saw the room erupt with golden light around them.
Nix opened his eyes, a warm feeling of contentment lighting the otherwise dark room. Which, in the haze of sleep, seemed strange, given he was the god of dark and night trapped in a spell. A warm body was pressed against his side. He turned his head and smiled, rolling to draw Auri into his embrace. He loved sleeping with her, waking up next to her. He loved everything about her. Though he didn’t understand how it was possible they’d found one another, he wasn’t going to throw this joy away either because it seemed too good to be true.
She nestled against him, her naked backside rubbing against his cock, now wide awake and hardening as he smiled, pondering if he should wake her up with it. Pressing his lips to her shoulder, he slid the hand he’d fitted around her waist onto her belly.
His mind shuddered and slipped, like sliding in mud and getting stuck in it, knee-deep. He blinked to right the tilting, but when his vision refocused, it was as if he were looking at the world through a tiny keyhole, locked inside of a box.
Fuck. Fuck. No! Nix tensed. Not now, he thought even as his hand slid down to cup Auri between her legs when he would have pulled away. He tried to fight the movement but couldn’t. The obligation had begun, and he had no idea what the fuck it was or what to expect. Fuck!
Auri stirred against his fingers and moaned, a soft sound that made his dick harder.
He felt when she came awake. Her body tensed against him for as long as it took to take a breath. She tilted her head to look down at his hand moving between her legs and screeched. Flailing about, she caught him in the shin, and though the pain was distant, he grunted involuntarily.
She struggled from the bed until she was standing on the other side of it, a pillow held against her naked body, anger blazing from her eyes. “Who the fuck are you?” she screamed.
“Who the fuck are you?” spell Nix echoed.
No! Auri. no! I’m here, Nix thought but couldn’t say it.
She looked around the room, her eyes frantic, her chest heaving. “I don’t know where I am.”
“Here,” spell Nix replied. He smirked at her.
“Where are my clothes?”
Spell Nix flicked his hand and clothes—not hers—appeared on the bed.
“How did I get… How did you do that?” She took in the clothes, the bed, the rumpled sheets, spell Nix naked and kneeling on it. “Did we?” she asked.
Spell Nix smirked. “What do you think?” He grabbed the base of his hard cock. “I’m a god. I can do anything I want.”
Nix cringed and waited for Auri to throw something at his head. But nothing happened. Instead, she tilted her head and watched spell Nix fondle himself for her as a kind of invitation. The Auri he’d come to know would have said something sarcastic and stomp away while blushing furiously. But this was spell Auri.
Nix moved through the language of the wish in his mind. Capacity, or wisdom, with respect to the spell. Which meant what for an obligation?
He watched Auri watching spell Nix tug on his dick, but instead of revulsion, she appeared tentative but curious.
“Are we going to get caught?” spell Auri asked, reaching for the shirt laid out on the bed, her hand stopping before touching it.
“By who?” spell Nix asked and slid his hand up cock to its tip. “And why would it matter? I’m a god.”
“I don’t understand. How is that possible?” Auri clutched the pillow against her body with one hand and drew the shirt against her with the other, but her eyes tracked his movements.
Spell Nix’s hand wrapped around the shaft of his penis, moving, drawing his hand up to the tip, sliding his thumb over the head, wetting it before moving back down.
“Will the enforcers come?” She whispered the words as if any such person was lurking in the shadows of the room, her eyes locked on his movement. “I don’t want to go to a birthing house,” she said and swallowed, then straightened, her eyes jumping to his. “Or to jail.”
“They won’t,” spell Nix said. “But I will quickly unless you join me.”
His innuendo flew over her head. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m Nix.”
He’s not! Nix thought and willed Auri to know it.
“I don’t think–” She paused as if trying to get her bearings on herself, on the situation, and couldn’t. Shaking her head, her hair fluttering around her shoulders, she still gripped the pillow covering herself. “I’m Auri, and I don’t remember how I got here. With you.”
“Does that matter?” spell Nix asked.
“Because you’re a god?”
“Exactly. And as you can see, we’ve already gotten to know one another. Rather well. Obviously…” He looked around the room.
She blinked, slowly, as if caught in a tangle inside her mind and trying to remove the knots.
Nix’s heart twisted watching her try to think it through, but there was nothing behind her dull gray eyes, and he knew that Auri was probably inside herself, screaming, fighting. Just imagining Auri fighting made Nix want to fight, but the sensation of his hand working his cock was making thinking more difficult.
“I guess not,” she said and took a step closer, relaxing her hold on her pillow and the shirt. “Where am I?”
“In my house.”
“In Kaloma? Did we get married?”
“Sure. If that’s the way you want it.” Spell Nix stopped tugging on his cock and waited. Inside, Nix breathed. Think. Think. But stringing together coherent thoughts in competition with spell Nix was making it difficult.
“Am I your first wife?”
“Yeah, okay. Sure.”
Her eyes flicked over the top of the bed, to his face, to his stalled hand on his dick. “Why did you stop?”
“Why are you watching?”
“I’ve never seen… that.”
“You like it?”
“I don’t know. Am I supposed to?”
Spell Nix’s hand slid up and down his dick again. “Come over here. I’ll show you how I like it.”
She shook her head. “I’m confused.” She took a step away.
Spell Nix moved toward her, walking on his knees across the mattress, until he was standing on the same side of the bed. “I promise, you’ll like it.”
Auri hadn’t held her ground, backing up until her back was pressed against the wall. Nix hated that she was afraid but reminded himself this was spell Auri and this was spell Nix. Everything that was happening was the spell working to make him into the villain he was supposed to be. He thrashed around in his mind looking for a solution but couldn’t find one. Spell Nix was palming his cock like the reckoning was impending and coming was the only way to survive.
He wished he could stop, and closed his eyes to think, but things were happening too fast.
“I will?” Auri asked.
“You already did,” spell Nix said, his eyes drawing up and down her body, naked behind the pillow. “Why are you naked if we didn’t?”
“Why don’t I remember?” she asked. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her forehead with her hands, and the pillow slipped, revealing one of her breasts. “Why don’t I remember?” Her volume was shifting, climbing in tone.
Spell Nix’s eyes fell to her nipple. “We’re married? In Kaloma, right?”
She settled suddenly. “Married. If we are naked,” she reasoned, “it must be so.” She opened her eyes, her gaze on him, moving around his form.
“So why are you hiding from me? If I’m your husband?” spell Nix asked, manipulating her. He reached out a hand.
Fuck! Nix fought against the twisted nature of the spell working against him. A pervasive fear worked through him that everything he and Auri had been through was about to be torn apart.
Auri glanced at his hand, then dropped the pillow and the shirt. Her complexion was pale, fear on her face, but she didn’t question it, didn’t question the circumstances. She just accepted them as if she was unable to think for herself at all.
