She leaned against the bedpost and eyed him thoughtfully.
“You sound surprised. You don’t cast a lot of spells?” She couldn’t help but be curious.
His self-deprecating laugh pricked her heart. “Honestly? I can’t do any spells, not on purpose. It’s the one thing in my life I’m not good at.”
“What?” Calli gasped. “But I sense a lot of magic in you.” It was true, she sensed a very powerful magic in him. When she’d healed his arm, much of the power had come from him. She had merely tapped into it and directed it where it needed to go.
Malcolm sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I’m not a full-blooded warlock. My dad is, but my mother is non-magical. My power has been problematic at best, dangerous at worst. It’s why I avoid magic when I can.”
“Oh…” Calli wondered what it would be like, dreading what her magic might do every day. No wonder he avoided it. “So your crazy attempt at making pumpkin pie in the garden was…” she tried to tease him, but the defeated look he gave her tugged at her heart.
“Just my magic going haywire,” he sighed. “I’m really sorry. When Hades and I came through the portal, I had no control over my bike.” He was so sexy, so irresistible, so hot that every time he flashed a smile at her, she wanted to melt into a puddle at his feet, but this… this fear of something he was born with? It made her chest ache. No one should have to fear their magic.
“What about the fire?”
Malcolm’s face turned ruddy, accenting those handsome cheekbones of his. “I was actually trying to fix the damage and it didn’t work. It literally backfired… into an actual fire.”
“Don’t worry about that. I can make them grow back. Let me show you to the bathroom.” She showed him the guest bathroom across the hall, then got some towels out of the cabinets and handed them to him.
“Thanks.” He patted the towels in his arms. “I promise I’ll be gone in the morning.” Malcolm grinned at her from the doorway and butterflies surged to life in Calli’s stomach. She nearly tripped and fell down the stairs.
Stupid, sexy, fascinating warlock, she thought as she rushed back down to the kitchen. She enchanted a pair of bowls to carry some water and ground beef upstairs for the dog. Then she heated up a bowl of leftover black bean and pumpkin soup and sent a second tray floating upstairs for Malcolm. The soup would stay hot until he was out of the shower.
Calli cleaned up the kitchen, trying to distract herself from the fact that a stranger, a blood magic warlock no less, was in her house. Even though she lived in a magical town, blood magic warlocks rarely came here.
Her best friend, Sage Sinclair, was a hedge witch who specialized in weather and owned Mystic Mornings, the local coffee shop. The last time a blood warlock had passed through town had been a year ago. Back when her parents had been in love, Moonstone Falls used to easily attract witches and warlocks, both hedge and blood. In a strange way it felt like some of the magic of her hometown had faded when her parents had died.
They had perished in a car crash when she was twelve, and ever since, witches and warlocks seemed to pass through Moonstone less frequently as though the town didn’t call to them anymore. Calli was twenty-eight now, and Moonstone Falls had changed in a way she couldn’t quite explain. And it all started when her parents had died. But maybe that was just her heart and mind seeing something that wasn’t true simply because she felt that for her, that the specialness of the town had gone when her parents had.
Sure, hedge witches tended to be more solitary and rarely ventured from their small towns or forest homes. Blood magic users thrived in big cities. Hedge witches wouldn’t like the city, it felt barren to them by comparison. They’d feel the struggle of every living being in the city. They didn’t need to touch the earth, hear the wind in the trees, or smell fresh flowers to access their powers. Still, when she’d been a child, it had felt like the distinction between hedge magic and blood magic hadn’t mattered as much as it seemed to now.
That brought her back to the question plaguing her. How did a blood magic warlock open up a portal to Moonstone Falls when the wards should have prevented it? And why did his magic call to her like a siren? Whenever she touched him or was even near him, she wanted to wrap herself in his magic, in him. It was completely unlike her.
She’d never been one to chase warlocks before. She had only gone on the odd date over the last few years, the last one with an overly energetic werewolf passing through town. But none of the wild body-and-mind bending sex she’d had with the werewolf, or the seductive nights she’d spent with the occasional vampire, had felt like this.
Malcolm Wellesley, the disastrous half-warlock, had changed something inside her the moment she’d touched him to heal his arm. It felt like tectonic plates deep within her body and soul had shifted, and the effect was deep and irreversible.
Her grandmother, Celestine, used to talk about magic speaking to a witch or warlock. A magic that was not theirs, and how dangerous it could be.
“You must be careful, Calli, my girl,” her grandmother had said. “You mustn’t confuse magic-caused lust with love. If it’s love, you’ve been given a gift. If it’s lust, you’ll be cursed.”
Is this what she meant? Was Malcolm and his magic seducing her with lust? Because it certainly wasn’t love. How could it be? More than ever she wished that Celestine was still alive. Sometimes she got her grandmother’s portrait to talk but most portraits didn’t talk that much. When she died three years ago, Calli had inherited her house and her bookstore in town, Pages and Potions, but she would have given all of that back to have her parents and her grandmother back.
Calli started tidying up the kitchen, then the living room. She was about to start on the front porch when she realized that she was looking for reasons not to go upstairs to bed. Because he was up there.
She shook herself out of it. That was ridiculous. He had to be out of the shower by now. She went up the stairs, only to freeze as the bathroom door opened and a nearly naked Malcolm stood in the doorway, a small towel the only thing wrapped around his lean hips. Hadn’t she left him one of the bigger towels? She stared at his broad shoulders and the expanse of tan flesh on his body, the muscles on his chest and arms going on for days…
Oh, wow…
She blinked. She realized he had been talking to her the whole time.
“… and I have my clothes. Should I?—”
“I’ll take them.” She snatched the shirt and jeans from his hands, then bolted back down the stairs, yelling “good night” over her shoulder.
Once out of sight, she slumped against the wall and blew out a breath, waiting for her heart to slow down. She hoped she wouldn’t see him again tonight. She already couldn’t get the image of the half-naked warlock out of her head. He was the stuff of fantasies with that glorious half-smirk he gave her and the way his green eyes sparkled like leaves covered with morning dew.
