Chapter One
They called it the Shadow War, and it had raged for centuries. Magical families pitted against each other, vying for dominance and power, tearing artifacts and powerful spells from each other’s death grips. It was brutal, and it was fought in secret, away from human eyes.
My family, the Ethera, are one of the four great families that remain in the city of Boston, along with the Divergents, the Recondites, and the Diaboli. There are no minor families left—they were all destroyed during the Shadow War.
Destroyed, or absorbed.
Those who didn’t kneel to the Diaboli were sacrificed to their dark masters, or worse, bound by their infernal magic and twisted into demonic monstrosities. The Divergents pillaged and burned all they didn’t take and slaughtered whoever stood in the way of their lust for conquest and power. And the Recondites… they were the worst of them, because they hid their immorality behind masks of good intentions.
To this day, they insist they were touched by some celestial being and told to lay waste to others of their kind, all in the name of some greater good. They thought they were purging the unworthy, and in doing so, purifying the magic we all used, bringing us all closer to their celestial patron.
These days, a tentative peace has fallen over the streets of Boston. My family wrote up the Codex Magica Treaty, the accords were struck, and the city’s magical families have kept their hands and their offensive spells to themselves since.
For thirty long, quiet years, there has been peace.
When I was old enough to ask the question, what about our family, my parents told me we had blood on our hands as well, only we never took what didn’t belong to us or killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.
It was a convenient story which painted our family as having had a mostly defensive part in the Shadow War, culminating in our writing of the very treaty that called an end to centuries of violence. It was too clean a story for me to believe, not when faced with cautionary tales of demonic beasts and holy crusaders.
Having said that, I had yet to see one of either, so maybe the stories I had been told as a child were exaggerated, or at least embellished a little.
If the Diaboli, the Divergents, and the Recondites were so bad, why would we want peace with them? More importantly, why would they want peace? It sounded to me like what these magical families wanted was to be the last one standing, so something must have happened to bring an end to the fighting.
That story, weirdly, was out of my reach—tucked away under lock and key.
I had to admit, it made me a little uneasy sometimes, to think there was something my family wasn’t telling me. The older I got, the more I was starting to lose sleep over it, to wonder, to question. Tonight was another sleepless night, but this time, it was for a different reason.
“We’re going to get caught, Bee,” Max hissed.
Maxwell, my younger brother, was the only person in my family who called me Bee. To everyone else, I was Beatrice Patricia Aurelian Ethera, and I hated it.
“Not if you keep quiet,” I said, as I prepared to make my next move.
Max was turning twenty-one at the stroke of midnight. My parents had thrown him a party with candles, and cake, and dull music. There had been an exchange of gifts; a fancy pen, a bathrobe with his initials engraved into it. Old people gifts. I hadn’t given him one. Later, when he asked why I hadn’t gotten him anything, I pulled him aside, shoved him out of a window, and dragged him out into the night with me.
“This”, I told him, was my gift to him—though I had yet to tell him exactly what this was.
It was already late. A shining, fingernail moon hung high in the sky, which was clear of clouds. The coast was clear, the garden was empty, and the topiary allowed us to move from one piece of cover to another to avoid detection.
The only thing I would need to contend with on the way out and back into the grounds were my family’s defensive spells.
It was worth it for a night on the town, though. Max had barely been to the city. We generally weren’t allowed out of the mansion except on official, family business, and even then, only under strict supervision. My twenty-first birthday had sucked worse than Max’s.
I was determined to buy him his first drink.
“How are we even going to get out of here?” asked Max. “And even if we did get out, how are we going to get back in without being detected?”
“Will you relax?” I asked, throwing him a cocky grin. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“A hundred?!” he shrieked.
I wrapped my hand around his mouth. “See? That’s exactly the kind of thing that’ll get us caught. Just follow my lead, and keep quiet, okay?”
Max looked more than a little unsure. He tried to mumble, but I didn’t release his mouth.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
Finally, he nodded.
“Good. Now, let’s move.”
I pulled Max through the grounds, zipping from one carefully manicured structure to another. When I thought we were in the clear, I told him to make a run for it. We reached the outer walls panting, but also laughing.
“You’re insane,” Max said between breaths. “You’re gonna get into such deep shit.”
“I’m not letting your first drink be that old stuff dad likes to drink.”
“You mean whiskey?”
“Guh. I don’t know what it is about his whiskey, but it tastes like old socks. No, you’re going to drink something colorful, and fun, and then we’re going to dance. With real people!”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It’s your birthday, Max. You’re twenty-one. It’s time to live a little.”
He seemed a little less unsure now than he had been a moment ago, but his eyebrows still furrowed. “Alright, fine. But how are we going to get out?”
I reached into my top and pulled out the amulet hanging from my neck. It was a beautiful, golden amulet, ornate and made up of lines and curves that resembled a pentagram with a fingernail moon running through it. At the heart of the amulet sat a purple stone, which shone with whatever light touched it.
“That looks important,” said Max. “It also looks like something you definitely shouldn’t have.”
“This used to belong to Aunt Persephone,” I said. “When she died, she left it to me… but mom and dad decided I wasn’t ready to have it.”
“And it’s in your hand right now… because?”
“Because they don’t lock their safes carefully enough.”
“Okay… so, what does it do?”
I took Max’s hand. “Are you ready to find out why our family name is Ethera?”
“Ooh boy, I don’t like the sound of—” I didn’t let Max finish. Instead, I wrapped the amulet in my other hand, shut my eyes, and pushed a trickle of my own power into it, activating the magic inside.
In an instant, my entire world fell away—or more specifically, I fell away from it. My stomach lifted, as if it had suddenly become lighter than air. My skin prickled and turned cold. I felt airy, and light, and when I opened my eyes, everything was different.
It was like standing at the bottom of the ocean, if the seabed was flooded with pale green light instead of being infinitely dark. I could see my family mansion, the garden, even the moon in the sky, only these things were more like impressions than solid objects; impressions that swayed, and shifted, like underwater weeds.
Here, in the Ether, there was no physical matter. The wall behind me wasn’t a wall, but the suggestion of a wall. I could see all the way through it to the road on the other side of it; from the streetlamps to the benches, to the city lights twinkling far beyond. When I glanced over at Max, he looked a little more real than everything else, but the features of his face swam, and shifted, and swayed just like the rest of this strange, ethereal world did.
The poor guy looked horrified. His eyes were wide, he had clearly opened his mouth to yell, but I couldn’t hear him. I hadn’t figured out how talking worked in here yet. But I had learned I could move through solid objects, which I did, with Max in tow—pushing through the solid wall separating our mansion from the world beyond.
But that wasn’t all I could do while I was in here.
I looked over at Max and mouthed the words are you ready, but he only gave me a look like he wanted to throw up. I decided to do this quickly, then, and with another pulse of my power, funneled through my amulet, I made the world around us shift once more.
I didn’t bring us back into the material world, though; not yet. First, I hurled our nearly weightless forms through the Ether, toward the city. From our perspective, it looked as if we were standing perfectly still, and Boston was speeding toward us, its city lights growing larger, and larger, like stars zooming toward our direction.
Once the city reached us, we zipped through its streets, alleys, and boulevards, crossing entire districts in the blink of an eye. The first time I had tried this, I had ended up nearer to Salem than I would’ve liked, and miles off my intended target. But so long as I visualized the destination firmly in my head, I learned my instincts would guide me to it, and warn me when I was close.
As soon as I felt that urgent tug, I stopped us in our tracks, and pulled us out of the Ether all in one quick move.
The weird, almost soundless Ether gave way instantly to the hissing of car tires on asphalt, to horns honking, to the chatter of people on the street just beyond the alley I had brought us into. Max let go of my hand, headed for the nearest dumpster, and promptly threw up beside it.
I grimaced. “Sorry!” I called out, “It was like that for me at first, too. You’ll get used to it!”
Max wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t think… I ever will…” he said. “I just threw up. Gross.”
“If I have my way, that won’t be the first time you throw up tonight, baby brother.”
When he was done, he walked back over to me. I slipped the amulet into my top and took a deep lungful of city air. It was different, out here. Dirtier. Grimier. I didn’t mind it. That tang in the air meant I was free… for a while, at least.
“Where are we?” Max asked.
“We’re here.”
“And where’s here?”
“A nightclub I like to come to sometimes.”
“Sometimes? You’ve been here more than once?”
“I have.”
“And you’ve never been caught?”
“As long as I move through the Ether, I can get past our family’s defensive spells. All I have to do is make sure I don’t use the amulet near mom and dad, just in case.”
“In case?”
“They’ll probably notice me using it if I’m too close to them.” I shrugged. “Anyway, enough of that. Let’s go get you that drink.”
I started walking toward the mouth of the alley, where the people were. Already I could hear the thump of the bass coming from one of the side doors into the building to our left. I could’ve snuck us in through that door, but I felt it was better for Max if I gave him the whole going out in public experience.
When I realized he wasn’t standing next to me, I turned around. “What are you waiting for?”
He was standing where we had been a moment ago. He had a smile on his face. “Have I told you you’re insane yet?”
“You have.”
“Have I also told you what an amazing sister you are?”
“That one, no. Not yet.”
“Well, you are,” he said, approaching. “This is crazy… but I appreciate it.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Save the mushy stuff for now.”
Max frowned. “Why?”
“Because in about an hour all that mushy sentiment is going to ooze out of you, and I need to get at least one colorful drink in me before that happens.”
“Alright, fine,” Max grinned. “Let’s do this.”
“Atta boy,” I slapped him against the shoulder. Grinning, I added. “Welcome to Boston.”
******
Chapter Two
You’re dangerous, Beatrice.
I could almost hear my father’s voice in my head, stern, flat, and unmovable. If you go out there, among them, before you’re ready, you could get someone killed. He never gave me an explanation beyond that, and never explained when I would be considered ready.
It was always no; we stay away from them.
I had to admit, the first time I snuck out of the mansion, I felt a little fear. The way my parents had set things up, I was convinced I would accidentally turn someone to dust if I so much as bumped shoulders with them. It took a few trips and crashing almost face first into someone busily looking at their phone, to get that concern out of my head.
Even now, standing in this frigid line, with people pressing around us on all sides, I still felt mildly anxious. They had no idea how different our lives were, and maybe they were lucky for it.
They also had no idea that there were two of us in the line with them, and with this being Max’s first outing I could only imagine he was struggling with the same thoughts I once had.
We were surrounded by people. Many of them smelled good and looked good. For a few of them, After Dark wasn’t their first club of the night. Some of them were already well on the way to being drunk, shouting their talking points at the person standing next to them because they had limited control over their voices.
I watched them, listened to them, overheard their conversations. Max was doing the same, only his eyes were a lot wider than mine were. He looked almost afraid to move, like a deer in headlights. It fell to me to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.
I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Are you alright?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “This is just a little surreal.”
“They’re just people, Max.”
“I know, but mom and dad—”
“—they like to exaggerate so they can keep us under their thumbs. Family above all, and all that.”
“Family does come above all else.”
“Right,” I nodded, “Exactly. That’s why I’m here with you right now, on your birthday, trying to give you the best night of your life.”
A drunk girl staggered and bumped into Max. He got a little jostled, but he managed to stay upright. When the girl spilled all over him and laughed her apology, he looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself. When she ran her hand over his stubbly beard and called him cute, it was like he was screaming help me with his eyes.
I left him to it, grinning at him while the girl righted herself and went back to her group of equally drunk friends.
“I think she likes you,” I said.
“I think she may have thrown up on me a little,” he said.
I shook my head. “We need to get you to loosen up, but this line is taking forever.”
There was one bouncer at the front door, and a ton of people between me and him. At this rate, we wouldn’t get in until the wee hours, and we needed to be back at the mansion way before then if we wanted our little excursion to remain undetected.
I scanned the faces of the people around me. No one was paying me much attention except Max.
“Oh no,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I know that look.”
“What look?”
“The—I’m about to use magic—look,” he hissed. “You can’t! There’s too many people around.”
“I have an idea.”
“An idea for what? We can just wait in line, Bee.”
“Just follow my lead.”
I grabbed Max’s hand and pulled us both out of the line. Confidently, I walked right past it, heading straight for the bouncer with the tablet by the door. I ran a hand through my hair, shook it out, and roused the power inside of myself to attract his attention. In an instant, his eyes were on me, watching me as I made my way toward him.
I wanted him to look at me and believe he was about to come face to face with someone important, someone he probably shouldn’t put too many obstacles in front of. It was a simple bit of magic, nothing fancy, or terribly overt, but the presence of so many humans made things a little complicated.
I wasn’t sure why, but the more humans were around, the harder it was for a mage to use their magic. There were a few factors involved, namely how loud or how covert a piece of magic was. If you could keep your spells subtle, and quiet, they generally worked, even in big crowds.
Influencing the minds of a handful of people wasn’t too difficult—hurling a fireball down a busy main street was more problematic.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t the kind of mage interested in throwing fireballs.
This kind of magic was way more my speed.
Even with the heightened attention Max and I were getting for leaving the crowd and walking toward the door, my magic managed to take hold. I saw the bouncer’s eyes flash purple for an instant, as if a beam of light had shone past them.
When I got to him, he was staring at me, his mouth slightly agape.
“You know who I am,” I told him, glancing at the two couples standing at the front of the line. They looked about ready to kick off and complain, but the same purple hue igniting the bouncer’s eyes began to glow behind theirs. My spell was working better than I had intended it to.
The bouncer nodded. “I absolutely know who you are… how, uh, how are you?”
“Doing great, thanks! We don’t have to wait in line, though, do we?”
“Oh, uh, no. Not you. Come on in.”
The bouncer stepped aside, unhooked the velvet rope, and let Max and I through. The people in line didn’t complain—they just watched, enraptured; awed. I kept my eyes front and center as Max and I stepped through the club doors. He was about to tell me off for using magic in front of people, but the music was already too loud for me to hear him.
“What?!” I yelled at him.
He said something about crazy, and trouble. I smiled at him, threw my arm across his shoulders, and dragged him to the bar. The music in here was loud, the air thick with sweat, cologne, and perfume. Lights strobed and glided over the mess of writhing bodies dancing beneath them.
In here, I felt a little bit less like a sore thumb than I did out there. In here, I could melt away into the crowd, let it embrace me, and absorb me. By the time we got to the bar and ordered our first drinks, Max had already relaxed. I even caught him bobbing his head to the beat once or twice.
The barman mixed our drinks in front of us. It was bright, and colorful, and fruity, and each came in a fishbowl. Max stared at his while the barman finished it off by plopping an umbrella inside it. He had a look on his face of, what am I supposed to do with this?
Against his ear, I yelled, “Happy birthday. Drink up!”
The rest was a bit of a blur… at least until he finally showed up. Not only was Max well on the way to being legless after only one drink, but he had also reunited with the girl who had bumped into him outside. She had a hand on his lap, and he was talking her ear off about something or other.
I was lucky Max was busy with his spontaneous date… otherwise I wasn’t sure how I could’ve given him the proper attention.
Even in this crowded club, despite the darkness, and the haze in the air, I had noticed his entrance. I had felt it. He had come alone, like he always did, and he had searched for me from the moment he’d entered the club—like he always did. I was the sole reason he was here, and there was something incredibly exciting about that.
A final glance over at Max… he was lip-locked with that girl, and that meant my work here was done.
I stole away from the bar and carefully chose my path to meet him on the dance floor. He was taller than I was—easily six foot—and muscular without being obnoxious about it.
Approaching him made my heart race, and my chest tighten. His presence alone was enough to excite me and disarm me like nothing and no one else could, and that was what made him so dangerous.
Gingerly I walked up to him, locking eyes with him; eyes that flashed, and shone, and sparkled whenever the overhead lights hit them. I watched his throat work, saw his tongue dart past his lips to whet them. I knew what he wanted, and I wanted it too.
That slight movement of his tongue was all I needed, though; our cue to collide like stars falling into each other. He wrapped one hand around my waist ran the other through my hair. I slid my hands into his shirt to feel his skin underneath and pressed my lips against his, drinking deeply of his mouth and sucking in a breath of air at the same time, kissing him like my life depended on it.
He wrapped his fist around my hair and tugged on it.
I dragged my nails across his back hard enough to draw blood.
He moaned into my mouth.
I bit his lower lip.
It wasn’t long before we were dragging each other away from the dance floor, past the club’s darkest corners, and racing into the bathroom. I didn’t care which bathroom we went into or who was inside, and neither did he. We collapsed into one of the stalls, and while I worked at his belt buckle, he slid his hand up my skirt and between my legs.
“You came prepared this time,” he groaned into my mouth.
“Shut up,” I sighed, as his fingertips worried their way into my already soaked underwear.
In here, we didn’t have much time, but we didn’t need time; what we needed was to fuck like animals, because if we didn’t do it right here, right now, we were both about to die. That’s what it felt like, anyway. The urgency. That dangerous need.
“Don’t take them off,” I whispered against his lower lip. “Slide them aside.”
He moaned as I finally got his zipper down and held him in my hand. He was warm, and hard, and throbbing; ready.
I sat on top of him, sliding onto him without a moment of preparation. I didn’t need it, and neither did he. The exultant sound he made as he slid into me set my skin alight with pleasure. He slid his hands into my t-shirt, pulled it over my head, and tossed it aside. I wrapped my hand around his mouth, pressed my cheek against his, and sighed into his ear as I found my rhythm.
There was nothing glamorous about fucking in a nightclub bathroom, but there was something primal about it. Maybe it was the musky, heady aromas in the air, or the cracked tiles, or the writing on the inside of the bathroom stalls. Everything about this was about as wrong as it was right.
I heard someone else come into the bathroom while I was riding him. Whoever it was started instantly giggling and whispering. This wasn’t their first rodeo, and it wasn’t ours, either.
He shoved his foot against the stall door to keep it closed while I bucked, and panted, and loved every second of what was happening right now. I was so close, so close, the friction of our hips pressing together almost enough to bring me to the point of climax, if only he could—I felt him tighten, heard his breath hitch, and when he grabbed my hips and held me firmly against him, I knew, he was done.
I gasped against his ear as he let loose.
Tingles.
There was a moment, then, when I worried I wasn’t going to get there, but then he kissed me, and he worked his hand into the warm space between us. With his fingers he brought me to climax. It was quick—I was already almost there—and when I was done, he kissed me again.
“Good?” he panted against my mouth.
“Too good,” I said.
“There’s no such thing.”
“There is,” I whispered, “That’s why we can’t do this again.”
*****
They called it the Shadow War, and it had raged for centuries. Magical families pitted against each other, vying for dominance and power, tearing artifacts and powerful spells from each other’s death grips. It was brutal, and it was fought in secret, away from human eyes.
My family, the Ethera, are one of the four great families that remain in the city of Boston, along with the Divergents, the Recondites, and the Diaboli. There are no minor families left—they were all destroyed during the Shadow War.
Destroyed, or absorbed.
Those who didn’t kneel to the Diaboli were sacrificed to their dark masters, or worse, bound by their infernal magic and twisted into demonic monstrosities. The Divergents pillaged and burned all they didn’t take and slaughtered whoever stood in the way of their lust for conquest and power. And the Recondites… they were the worst of them, because they hid their immorality behind masks of good intentions.
To this day, they insist they were touched by some celestial being and told to lay waste to others of their kind, all in the name of some greater good. They thought they were purging the unworthy, and in doing so, purifying the magic we all used, bringing us all closer to their celestial patron.
These days, a tentative peace has fallen over the streets of Boston. My family wrote up the Codex Magica Treaty, the accords were struck, and the city’s magical families have kept their hands and their offensive spells to themselves since.
For thirty long, quiet years, there has been peace.
When I was old enough to ask the question, what about our family, my parents told me we had blood on our hands as well, only we never took what didn’t belong to us or killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.
It was a convenient story which painted our family as having had a mostly defensive part in the Shadow War, culminating in our writing of the very treaty that called an end to centuries of violence. It was too clean a story for me to believe, not when faced with cautionary tales of demonic beasts and holy crusaders.
Having said that, I had yet to see one of either, so maybe the stories I had been told as a child were exaggerated, or at least embellished a little.
If the Diaboli, the Divergents, and the Recondites were so bad, why would we want peace with them? More importantly, why would they want peace? It sounded to me like what these magical families wanted was to be the last one standing, so something must have happened to bring an end to the fighting.
That story, weirdly, was out of my reach—tucked away under lock and key.
I had to admit, it made me a little uneasy sometimes, to think there was something my family wasn’t telling me. The older I got, the more I was starting to lose sleep over it, to wonder, to question. Tonight was another sleepless night, but this time, it was for a different reason.
“We’re going to get caught, Bee,” Max hissed.
Maxwell, my younger brother, was the only person in my family who called me Bee. To everyone else, I was Beatrice Patricia Aurelian Ethera, and I hated it.
“Not if you keep quiet,” I said, as I prepared to make my next move.
Max was turning twenty-one at the stroke of midnight. My parents had thrown him a party with candles, and cake, and dull music. There had been an exchange of gifts; a fancy pen, a bathrobe with his initials engraved into it. Old people gifts. I hadn’t given him one. Later, when he asked why I hadn’t gotten him anything, I pulled him aside, shoved him out of a window, and dragged him out into the night with me.
“This”, I told him, was my gift to him—though I had yet to tell him exactly what this was.
It was already late. A shining, fingernail moon hung high in the sky, which was clear of clouds. The coast was clear, the garden was empty, and the topiary allowed us to move from one piece of cover to another to avoid detection.
The only thing I would need to contend with on the way out and back into the grounds were my family’s defensive spells.
It was worth it for a night on the town, though. Max had barely been to the city. We generally weren’t allowed out of the mansion except on official, family business, and even then, only under strict supervision. My twenty-first birthday had sucked worse than Max’s.
I was determined to buy him his first drink.
“How are we even going to get out of here?” asked Max. “And even if we did get out, how are we going to get back in without being detected?”
“Will you relax?” I asked, throwing him a cocky grin. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“A hundred?!” he shrieked.
I wrapped my hand around his mouth. “See? That’s exactly the kind of thing that’ll get us caught. Just follow my lead, and keep quiet, okay?”
Max looked more than a little unsure. He tried to mumble, but I didn’t release his mouth.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
Finally, he nodded.
“Good. Now, let’s move.”
I pulled Max through the grounds, zipping from one carefully manicured structure to another. When I thought we were in the clear, I told him to make a run for it. We reached the outer walls panting, but also laughing.
“You’re insane,” Max said between breaths. “You’re gonna get into such deep shit.”
“I’m not letting your first drink be that old stuff dad likes to drink.”
“You mean whiskey?”
“Guh. I don’t know what it is about his whiskey, but it tastes like old socks. No, you’re going to drink something colorful, and fun, and then we’re going to dance. With real people!”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It’s your birthday, Max. You’re twenty-one. It’s time to live a little.”
He seemed a little less unsure now than he had been a moment ago, but his eyebrows still furrowed. “Alright, fine. But how are we going to get out?”
I reached into my top and pulled out the amulet hanging from my neck. It was a beautiful, golden amulet, ornate and made up of lines and curves that resembled a pentagram with a fingernail moon running through it. At the heart of the amulet sat a purple stone, which shone with whatever light touched it.
“That looks important,” said Max. “It also looks like something you definitely shouldn’t have.”
“This used to belong to Aunt Persephone,” I said. “When she died, she left it to me… but mom and dad decided I wasn’t ready to have it.”
“And it’s in your hand right now… because?”
“Because they don’t lock their safes carefully enough.”
“Okay… so, what does it do?”
I took Max’s hand. “Are you ready to find out why our family name is Ethera?”
“Ooh boy, I don’t like the sound of—” I didn’t let Max finish. Instead, I wrapped the amulet in my other hand, shut my eyes, and pushed a trickle of my own power into it, activating the magic inside.
In an instant, my entire world fell away—or more specifically, I fell away from it. My stomach lifted, as if it had suddenly become lighter than air. My skin prickled and turned cold. I felt airy, and light, and when I opened my eyes, everything was different.
It was like standing at the bottom of the ocean, if the seabed was flooded with pale green light instead of being infinitely dark. I could see my family mansion, the garden, even the moon in the sky, only these things were more like impressions than solid objects; impressions that swayed, and shifted, like underwater weeds.
Here, in the Ether, there was no physical matter. The wall behind me wasn’t a wall, but the suggestion of a wall. I could see all the way through it to the road on the other side of it; from the streetlamps to the benches, to the city lights twinkling far beyond. When I glanced over at Max, he looked a little more real than everything else, but the features of his face swam, and shifted, and swayed just like the rest of this strange, ethereal world did.
The poor guy looked horrified. His eyes were wide, he had clearly opened his mouth to yell, but I couldn’t hear him. I hadn’t figured out how talking worked in here yet. But I had learned I could move through solid objects, which I did, with Max in tow—pushing through the solid wall separating our mansion from the world beyond.
But that wasn’t all I could do while I was in here.
I looked over at Max and mouthed the words are you ready, but he only gave me a look like he wanted to throw up. I decided to do this quickly, then, and with another pulse of my power, funneled through my amulet, I made the world around us shift once more.
I didn’t bring us back into the material world, though; not yet. First, I hurled our nearly weightless forms through the Ether, toward the city. From our perspective, it looked as if we were standing perfectly still, and Boston was speeding toward us, its city lights growing larger, and larger, like stars zooming toward our direction.
Once the city reached us, we zipped through its streets, alleys, and boulevards, crossing entire districts in the blink of an eye. The first time I had tried this, I had ended up nearer to Salem than I would’ve liked, and miles off my intended target. But so long as I visualized the destination firmly in my head, I learned my instincts would guide me to it, and warn me when I was close.
As soon as I felt that urgent tug, I stopped us in our tracks, and pulled us out of the Ether all in one quick move.
The weird, almost soundless Ether gave way instantly to the hissing of car tires on asphalt, to horns honking, to the chatter of people on the street just beyond the alley I had brought us into. Max let go of my hand, headed for the nearest dumpster, and promptly threw up beside it.
I grimaced. “Sorry!” I called out, “It was like that for me at first, too. You’ll get used to it!”
Max wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t think… I ever will…” he said. “I just threw up. Gross.”
“If I have my way, that won’t be the first time you throw up tonight, baby brother.”
When he was done, he walked back over to me. I slipped the amulet into my top and took a deep lungful of city air. It was different, out here. Dirtier. Grimier. I didn’t mind it. That tang in the air meant I was free… for a while, at least.
“Where are we?” Max asked.
“We’re here.”
“And where’s here?”
“A nightclub I like to come to sometimes.”
“Sometimes? You’ve been here more than once?”
“I have.”
“And you’ve never been caught?”
“As long as I move through the Ether, I can get past our family’s defensive spells. All I have to do is make sure I don’t use the amulet near mom and dad, just in case.”
“In case?”
“They’ll probably notice me using it if I’m too close to them.” I shrugged. “Anyway, enough of that. Let’s go get you that drink.”
I started walking toward the mouth of the alley, where the people were. Already I could hear the thump of the bass coming from one of the side doors into the building to our left. I could’ve snuck us in through that door, but I felt it was better for Max if I gave him the whole going out in public experience.
When I realized he wasn’t standing next to me, I turned around. “What are you waiting for?”
He was standing where we had been a moment ago. He had a smile on his face. “Have I told you you’re insane yet?”
“You have.”
“Have I also told you what an amazing sister you are?”
“That one, no. Not yet.”
“Well, you are,” he said, approaching. “This is crazy… but I appreciate it.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Save the mushy stuff for now.”
Max frowned. “Why?”
“Because in about an hour all that mushy sentiment is going to ooze out of you, and I need to get at least one colorful drink in me before that happens.”
“Alright, fine,” Max grinned. “Let’s do this.”
“Atta boy,” I slapped him against the shoulder. Grinning, I added. “Welcome to Boston.”
******
Chapter Two
You’re dangerous, Beatrice.
I could almost hear my father’s voice in my head, stern, flat, and unmovable. If you go out there, among them, before you’re ready, you could get someone killed. He never gave me an explanation beyond that, and never explained when I would be considered ready.
It was always no; we stay away from them.
I had to admit, the first time I snuck out of the mansion, I felt a little fear. The way my parents had set things up, I was convinced I would accidentally turn someone to dust if I so much as bumped shoulders with them. It took a few trips and crashing almost face first into someone busily looking at their phone, to get that concern out of my head.
Even now, standing in this frigid line, with people pressing around us on all sides, I still felt mildly anxious. They had no idea how different our lives were, and maybe they were lucky for it.
They also had no idea that there were two of us in the line with them, and with this being Max’s first outing I could only imagine he was struggling with the same thoughts I once had.
We were surrounded by people. Many of them smelled good and looked good. For a few of them, After Dark wasn’t their first club of the night. Some of them were already well on the way to being drunk, shouting their talking points at the person standing next to them because they had limited control over their voices.
I watched them, listened to them, overheard their conversations. Max was doing the same, only his eyes were a lot wider than mine were. He looked almost afraid to move, like a deer in headlights. It fell to me to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.
I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Are you alright?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “This is just a little surreal.”
“They’re just people, Max.”
“I know, but mom and dad—”
“—they like to exaggerate so they can keep us under their thumbs. Family above all, and all that.”
“Family does come above all else.”
“Right,” I nodded, “Exactly. That’s why I’m here with you right now, on your birthday, trying to give you the best night of your life.”
A drunk girl staggered and bumped into Max. He got a little jostled, but he managed to stay upright. When the girl spilled all over him and laughed her apology, he looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself. When she ran her hand over his stubbly beard and called him cute, it was like he was screaming help me with his eyes.
I left him to it, grinning at him while the girl righted herself and went back to her group of equally drunk friends.
“I think she likes you,” I said.
“I think she may have thrown up on me a little,” he said.
I shook my head. “We need to get you to loosen up, but this line is taking forever.”
There was one bouncer at the front door, and a ton of people between me and him. At this rate, we wouldn’t get in until the wee hours, and we needed to be back at the mansion way before then if we wanted our little excursion to remain undetected.
I scanned the faces of the people around me. No one was paying me much attention except Max.
“Oh no,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I know that look.”
“What look?”
“The—I’m about to use magic—look,” he hissed. “You can’t! There’s too many people around.”
“I have an idea.”
“An idea for what? We can just wait in line, Bee.”
“Just follow my lead.”
I grabbed Max’s hand and pulled us both out of the line. Confidently, I walked right past it, heading straight for the bouncer with the tablet by the door. I ran a hand through my hair, shook it out, and roused the power inside of myself to attract his attention. In an instant, his eyes were on me, watching me as I made my way toward him.
I wanted him to look at me and believe he was about to come face to face with someone important, someone he probably shouldn’t put too many obstacles in front of. It was a simple bit of magic, nothing fancy, or terribly overt, but the presence of so many humans made things a little complicated.
I wasn’t sure why, but the more humans were around, the harder it was for a mage to use their magic. There were a few factors involved, namely how loud or how covert a piece of magic was. If you could keep your spells subtle, and quiet, they generally worked, even in big crowds.
Influencing the minds of a handful of people wasn’t too difficult—hurling a fireball down a busy main street was more problematic.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t the kind of mage interested in throwing fireballs.
This kind of magic was way more my speed.
Even with the heightened attention Max and I were getting for leaving the crowd and walking toward the door, my magic managed to take hold. I saw the bouncer’s eyes flash purple for an instant, as if a beam of light had shone past them.
When I got to him, he was staring at me, his mouth slightly agape.
“You know who I am,” I told him, glancing at the two couples standing at the front of the line. They looked about ready to kick off and complain, but the same purple hue igniting the bouncer’s eyes began to glow behind theirs. My spell was working better than I had intended it to.
The bouncer nodded. “I absolutely know who you are… how, uh, how are you?”
“Doing great, thanks! We don’t have to wait in line, though, do we?”
“Oh, uh, no. Not you. Come on in.”
The bouncer stepped aside, unhooked the velvet rope, and let Max and I through. The people in line didn’t complain—they just watched, enraptured; awed. I kept my eyes front and center as Max and I stepped through the club doors. He was about to tell me off for using magic in front of people, but the music was already too loud for me to hear him.
“What?!” I yelled at him.
He said something about crazy, and trouble. I smiled at him, threw my arm across his shoulders, and dragged him to the bar. The music in here was loud, the air thick with sweat, cologne, and perfume. Lights strobed and glided over the mess of writhing bodies dancing beneath them.
In here, I felt a little bit less like a sore thumb than I did out there. In here, I could melt away into the crowd, let it embrace me, and absorb me. By the time we got to the bar and ordered our first drinks, Max had already relaxed. I even caught him bobbing his head to the beat once or twice.
The barman mixed our drinks in front of us. It was bright, and colorful, and fruity, and each came in a fishbowl. Max stared at his while the barman finished it off by plopping an umbrella inside it. He had a look on his face of, what am I supposed to do with this?
Against his ear, I yelled, “Happy birthday. Drink up!”
The rest was a bit of a blur… at least until he finally showed up. Not only was Max well on the way to being legless after only one drink, but he had also reunited with the girl who had bumped into him outside. She had a hand on his lap, and he was talking her ear off about something or other.
I was lucky Max was busy with his spontaneous date… otherwise I wasn’t sure how I could’ve given him the proper attention.
Even in this crowded club, despite the darkness, and the haze in the air, I had noticed his entrance. I had felt it. He had come alone, like he always did, and he had searched for me from the moment he’d entered the club—like he always did. I was the sole reason he was here, and there was something incredibly exciting about that.
A final glance over at Max… he was lip-locked with that girl, and that meant my work here was done.
I stole away from the bar and carefully chose my path to meet him on the dance floor. He was taller than I was—easily six foot—and muscular without being obnoxious about it.
Approaching him made my heart race, and my chest tighten. His presence alone was enough to excite me and disarm me like nothing and no one else could, and that was what made him so dangerous.
Gingerly I walked up to him, locking eyes with him; eyes that flashed, and shone, and sparkled whenever the overhead lights hit them. I watched his throat work, saw his tongue dart past his lips to whet them. I knew what he wanted, and I wanted it too.
That slight movement of his tongue was all I needed, though; our cue to collide like stars falling into each other. He wrapped one hand around my waist ran the other through my hair. I slid my hands into his shirt to feel his skin underneath and pressed my lips against his, drinking deeply of his mouth and sucking in a breath of air at the same time, kissing him like my life depended on it.
He wrapped his fist around my hair and tugged on it.
I dragged my nails across his back hard enough to draw blood.
He moaned into my mouth.
I bit his lower lip.
It wasn’t long before we were dragging each other away from the dance floor, past the club’s darkest corners, and racing into the bathroom. I didn’t care which bathroom we went into or who was inside, and neither did he. We collapsed into one of the stalls, and while I worked at his belt buckle, he slid his hand up my skirt and between my legs.
“You came prepared this time,” he groaned into my mouth.
“Shut up,” I sighed, as his fingertips worried their way into my already soaked underwear.
In here, we didn’t have much time, but we didn’t need time; what we needed was to fuck like animals, because if we didn’t do it right here, right now, we were both about to die. That’s what it felt like, anyway. The urgency. That dangerous need.
“Don’t take them off,” I whispered against his lower lip. “Slide them aside.”
He moaned as I finally got his zipper down and held him in my hand. He was warm, and hard, and throbbing; ready.
I sat on top of him, sliding onto him without a moment of preparation. I didn’t need it, and neither did he. The exultant sound he made as he slid into me set my skin alight with pleasure. He slid his hands into my t-shirt, pulled it over my head, and tossed it aside. I wrapped my hand around his mouth, pressed my cheek against his, and sighed into his ear as I found my rhythm.
There was nothing glamorous about fucking in a nightclub bathroom, but there was something primal about it. Maybe it was the musky, heady aromas in the air, or the cracked tiles, or the writing on the inside of the bathroom stalls. Everything about this was about as wrong as it was right.
I heard someone else come into the bathroom while I was riding him. Whoever it was started instantly giggling and whispering. This wasn’t their first rodeo, and it wasn’t ours, either.
He shoved his foot against the stall door to keep it closed while I bucked, and panted, and loved every second of what was happening right now. I was so close, so close, the friction of our hips pressing together almost enough to bring me to the point of climax, if only he could—I felt him tighten, heard his breath hitch, and when he grabbed my hips and held me firmly against him, I knew, he was done.
I gasped against his ear as he let loose.
Tingles.
There was a moment, then, when I worried I wasn’t going to get there, but then he kissed me, and he worked his hand into the warm space between us. With his fingers he brought me to climax. It was quick—I was already almost there—and when I was done, he kissed me again.
“Good?” he panted against my mouth.
“Too good,” I said.
“There’s no such thing.”
“There is,” I whispered, “That’s why we can’t do this again.”
*****
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|
They called it the Shadow War, and it had raged for centuries.
It was a time when magical families fought to tear artifacts and powerful spells from each other's corpses, leaving nothing but death and destruction in their wake. It was brutal, a war waged away from human eyes. Thirty years ago, the remaining four families came together to sign the Codex Magica Treaty, giving up their most dangerous spells and artifacts as part of the agreement. An uneasy peace was forged. Though the other families have been quiet for years, my parents remained vigilant, constantly on guard for potential attacks. My younger brother and I have been overprotected all our lives, never allowed to leave our home for fear of what may happen to us, but I long to experience the outside world. On the eve of my brother's twenty-first birthday, I sneak us both out of the mansion to give him a real taste of freedom. What he doesn't know is that I've already been sneaking out for months to see Him. I should've listened to my parents. Bound by Magic is the inaugural book of the Shadow War, a paranormal mafia urban fantasy romance anthology series that will keep you on the edge of your seat. But be warned, this book includes elements that may be triggering to some readers. PREORDER the eBook today on Amazon, and for a limited time only, order a SIGNED hardback of the book! |
