Open and warm, Raum’s smile was a bit crooked but full of humor and welcome. Interest, even. That left Ezra a bit adrift—he wasn’t in a club looking for a quick fuck, and he knew the difference between surface-level lust and keen interest, despite not seeing the latter focused on him all that much. How to proceed was a tiny conundrum and he hoped he figured it out before Raum grew disinterested.
They stared at each other until one of the sergeants coughed rather loudly, and Ezra blinked and looked away, breaking the spell Raum had him under. He glared at the sergeants. Chase waved and Harlan merely shook his head, both men clearly amused.
Lilithmerpedfor attention, tail thrashing as she stared demandingly up at Raum. The professor grinned, delight lighting up his expression. “Hello, lovely. And who are you?”
“This is Lilith, my familiar. She goes everywhere with me.” Ezra had no idea why he had to say that, since it was obvious, as she was in his arms standing in the middle of the library. He hoped his brain would catch up to his mouth at some point soon.
Raum nodded as if that was something he experienced every day, and Ezra was even more pleased that Nórsson didn’t just reach out to pet her without asking. Strangers typically tried to pet her first without asking when meeting Ezra out in public with his familiar. He found that behavior rude and presumptive.
“She is most welcome, as are you,” Raum replied. “This section is closed, so feel free to let her wander. No one else is inhere except the four of us, and I’ve requested it stay clear for the day. No need to worry about her running across a stranger. If you’re here for long, I can call for some water and food, though I’m not sure I can provide a litter box.”
“You’re a stranger,” Ezra breathed out, getting stuck in warm, whiskey brown eyes again.
“We can fix that, if you want,” Raum said softly enough that only Ezra heard him, leaning slightly into the narrow space between them, and the words shivered through him and settled deep in his bones.
“Oh,” Ezra gasped. His eyes went wide, startled, and his lips parted, and the heavy, warm gaze from the taller man had Ezra wishing he wasn’t smack in the middle of preventing the next apocalypse.
Raum
The pretty,dark-haired practitioner was practically vibrating with arousal and fascination, and Raum employed every bit of his professionalism and control and refrained from grabbing the delightful man and carrying him off to his office and locking them inside together.
The way Ezra Redmayne, the infamous curse-breaker and mysterious practitioner from the States, cradled his familiar and gazed up at Raum like he was the most fascinating person he had ever seen was enough to set his blood on fire with arousal. It touched a part of Raum’s heart that he was usually able to ignore. The part of his heart that was lonely in a city full of mundane, short-lived humans and quiet academics, sodifferent from how he was raised that even after a decade, he was still getting used to things in the largely mundane world of Edmonton. Making a concerted effort to step out of his isolated childhood fae community and into the realm of mortals and practitioners was an ongoing challenge, and he was still undecided whether or not it was worth all the upheaval and emotional toll.
While his senses weren’t as honed as a vampire or full-blooded fae’s, he was very aware of the emotions pouring off the pretty practitioner. Dark hair tousled like he’d rolled out of bed, a mouth meant for teasing nips and slow, languid kisses, and eyes that were a contradictory yet appealing mix of innocence and world-weary experience.
Ezra Redmayne was tired, yet excited, needed some caffeine, and he was looking for a place to rest, though Raum was certain the younger man was unaware of how badly he needed that rest. And that need wasn’t entirely physical, either. His aura was a mix of reds, purples, blues, and a deep wine-red that evoked hints of death magics. The other humans were dull swirls of muted colors and emotions compared to the practitioner, and Raum barely spared them a glance. It was uncharitable of him, but his fascination with Redmayne left him with little attention to spare for the soldiers.
It was rude of him to read the curse breaker without his consent—by human standards, at least—though Raum did not glance any further than surface impressions, his inborn talents making it hard for him to ignore that which was blatant to his senses. Whereas humans with the psychic ability struggled to see and interpret another’s aura, Raum did it as naturally as breathing, and stifling his innate gifts took effort. It was why he was glad to work alone amongst dusty books and ancient history—less people, and fewer secrets to unwittingly learn. His one class was a few times a week with graduate students who weredealing with their own hectic lives that left little time or energy for socializing.
While Raum appeared human in every way, he was not raised by humans, and his bloodlines were complicated, and switching mindsets from immortal fae ethics to human codes of conduct in polite society was difficult and trying at every encounter. Raum withdrew his inner, mental senses, the ones he inherited from generations of fae ancestry, and instead relied upon his physical senses to lead the way in his interactions with the practitioner.
Around mundane humans he could employ the barest of mental shields to protect himself and others’ privacy, but with practitioners and other supernatural beings he had to work harder. He was not expecting his guests from MERS to be so bright to his gifts. Or at least, one of them.
Ezra Redmayne.
Not at all who Raum had been expecting; with insufficient time to prepare, only learning early this morning from the dean that their guest would need assistance in his mysterious research project, he’d only had time for cursory research on his guests.
Even in a short time period, Raum deduced Ezra was a delightful mix of competency, nerves, and loneliness. He would not mention aloud what he learned by seeing the practitioner’s aura, not wanting to embarrass him or further violate his privacy. What existed on the internet about Ezra was topical and clearly based on rumors and speculation—and none of the articles or social media posts mentioned his death affinity, only calling him a fire mage when his affinity was mentioned. A dual-affinity sorcerer was nearly as rare as a necromancer— Raum had never heard of a necromancer with dual affinities, and he’d spent his entire academic life researching the magical history of the world. If there were more practitioners out there with dual affinities, one of which was death magic, they weren’t sharing that fact, at least not publicly.
Raum would not be the one to inform the world, either. It wasn’t his place, and he wanted to get to know Ezra better, not chase him away. He forced his mind away from speculating about his companion and returned it to the topic at hand.
“Relics, then? Perhaps ancient religious orders that carried remains of deceased fae as proof they were gods? Many ancient cults and nascent religious orders in the Bronze Age and after deified a variety of fae species and individuals. Blood mages were notorious for it, particularly in the late Neolithic and during the transition to the Bronze Age, and then in Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece. They popped up again in the Iron Age throughout the Mediterranean world.”
Ezra thought about it, a tiny furrow between his brows. “It doesn’t have the feel of blood magic to it, that decaying, cloying nastiness that seeps out of blood-magic relics, even the ones from antiquity. What I’m trying to find is something vastly different.”
“You know what blood magic feels like,” Raum stated, a bit incredulous. If anyone would know what blood magic felt like, it would be a curse-breaker, that was logical—but he’d never met anyone who had practical experience with it, and he’d never met a modern-day blood magic addict.
Blood magic as a structured discipline of magic was supposedly lost to the depths of history, leaving behind only those who tried it on a very basic, intuitive level in a desperate attempt to garner more power, succumbing to the destructive and addictive nature of the unnatural process. Very few humans survived the addiction once they took that first step into the darkness, killing and maiming unwilling, sentient sacrifices, siphoning the life energies from the living to shore up their own powers; each act was more addictive and abhorrent than the last.
Ezra nodded, humming a bit under his breath. “Yeah.”
Ezra took a moment, thinking, and Raum stared at him while rearranging his assumptions about how dangerous a profession curse-breaking must be—he knew it had some degree of danger to it, but dealing with blood-magic relics was a nasty business and most people never lived to tell the tale. Even mentions of blood-magic relics were incredibly rare, and he knew of no relics that weren’t destroyed in antiquity.
Raum let it go, focusing on the present. “Not blood magics, then. Relics made from deceased fae are not common—they tend to disappear completely not long after they surface in the historical record.” Raum knew that was due to the fae peoples themselves reclaiming their deceased. Relics were usually made by practitioners, and it was an even mix between those who were part of a religious order who worshiped fae as gods, and practitioners with less divinely inspired motivations, like conquest or power.
A truly divine relic was something else entirely—there were so few myths and stories of deceased gods and their bodily remains becoming relics. The gods tended to look after their own, and much like Elder fae relics, they disappeared from the historical record.
Once a relic was made from fae remains, it wasn’t long before the relic was destroyed or stolen, reduced to a footnote in the annals of history, if remembered at all. Very few were. And he could think of none that were accounted for in the modern day. He knew of the relics more from his fae family members and their warnings about the dangers of humans seeking power than he did from sources accessible and written by humanity, but what he knew he was honor-bound to keep secret. Lives depended on it.
