“Except your parents.”
“Yeah.”
I pointed to two of the names I’d joined with a dotted line. I needed to distract Maeve so she wouldn’t ask me more about my family. “Colleen and Darren Beckett. They were the second people I tried to track down. The more spirit users a coven has, the stronger it becomes. Colleen and Darren were both spirit users, and according to the coven records, they had a child the same year my parents had me. Spirit is a recessive gene, so?—”
“So any child they had would also be a spirit user?”
“You really are brilliant, you know that?” I grinned at Maeve, who beamed back at me. Her scent invaded my nostrils – sweet and fresh, like the first summer blueberries picked straight off the bush. Just having her so close to me wiped away my exhaustion. “Colleen and Darren weren’t recorded among the dead after the fae attack, and I managed to track them to a house in Wiltshire. Unfortunately, they don’t live there anymore. No one does – the house is condemned. No one would buy it because of the gruesome murder-suicide that happened inside, so now it’s a mess, and it’s probably been torn down now?—”
“Back up a second – whatmurder suicide?” Maeve’s mouth hung open, her lips curling back. For a horrifying moment, Iimagined what it would be like to slide my cock between those lips, to feel her tongue run down the length of my shaft…
The air between us heated up, and I became painfully aware that the edge of her breast grazed my arm. From the sparkle in her eyes, it looked like she did, too…
I cleared my throat, tried to force myself to pull back from her, because it wasn’t her fault that being close to her made me into a beast. “Shortly after they moved into the house, Darren shot Colleen in the head and then killed himself with the same gun. But the weird thing is, the police records never mention a child.”
“That is weird.” Maeve’s words came out hushed, breathy. Her eyes smoldered. My cock pressed urgently against the fly of my jeans.
“Maeve…”Danger, Will Robinson.
She draped herself over the arm of my chair, her bangs flopping across my shoulder, brushing my skin, making all sorts of filthy visions dance across my conscience.
Don’t make a move you can’t take back. Never forget what you are guilty of.
“Corbin, I’ve been thinking…” Maeve drew a pattern on my knee with the tip of her finger, tracing a line of fire across my skin that shot straight into my cock.
“That sounds dangerous.”
This is dangerous.
Maeve had that look in her eyes, the look that said she was ready to act on her urges. And as much as I wanted her, as much as I thought I’d be the best candidate formagister,she absolutely shouldnotchoose until she knew everything.
“This spirit power I supposedly inherited from my mother, would it have anything to do with how I’ve been able to control everyone’s dreams?”
I swallowed.
“I don’t know. Spirit does occasionally manifest as dreamwalking and dream powers. So, ah, what happened in this dream of yours?”
The flush on her cheeks told me all I needed to know. “You were all in them. You all kept saying I had to choose, and I…I didn’t want to.”
Oh sweet bollocks.
My cock strained at the idea that Maeve wanted something so explicit, so kinky as what the guys had hinted at happened in those dreams.It hadn’t been done in so many generations, but?—
I wish like hell I’d fallen asleep the other night. I want to see every filthy corner of Maeve’s mind.
It was time she knew the rest, before the strain in my cock tore my whole body apart.
“I want to show you something.”
I flicked back through the pages in the grimoire, flipping between herbal recipes and birthing rituals. I located the page I was hunting for and let the book fall open.
Maeve’s lips pursed as she took in the drawing. It was a highly detailed scene, drawn by one of the grimoire’s earliest owners – a witch named Agnes from the Middle Ages. It showed a troupe of witches – mostly men, but a few women – all naked and writhing against each other in a great, heaving orgy. In the center of the image was a voluptuous woman reclining on a sofa, her head thrown back in ecstasy as five men pleasured her body. Her hands were wrapped around two hard shafts, and a third was being held out for her waiting mouth to accept, while the other two men penetrated both her holes.
Usually, seeing that picture had no affect on me – it was just an historical curiosity from a time when the church’s puritanical ideas about sex hadn’t quite penetrated pagan society. But now, I couldn’t help but seeing Maeve’s long neck bent back, her bodywrithing in ecstasy as the members of our coven worshipped her body.
And her expression didn’t help. Maeve stared at the picture with wide eyes, her lips rounding with an O of understanding as she took in the details of the erotic scene. My gaze darted down to her cleavage spilling out of her thin dress. A dark nipple – hard and round – jutted out from the fabric. Maeve’s hand gripped my knee hard, her fingers brushing within inches of my?—
Be strong, Corbin.
