Page 16 of SIN Bone Deep

He leaned over and rubbed his cheek against mine. “Yes, Elenyx?” He murmured into my ear, and I felt a shiver of desire pass through me.

“Kiss me…” I turned my head so that my lips brushed against the corner of his mouth. “Like you did last night.”

I felt the curl of his lips against my skin before he lifted me so that I straddled his hips, my skirts gathering high on my thighs and my hands resting on his shoulders. The fabric of his top was soft and slightly felted and embroidered in black thread. My fingers traced the stitches, encountering small stones sewn into the pattern as I inclined towards him, closing the distance between our mouths.

Feeling him between my thighs as I gazed into his eyes was intensely intimate. Tasting him on my tongue as my hands explored the textures of his shirt and the muscle and bone of the man beneath it with my fingers and palms was a kind of madness.

I could feel the hard throb of his cock beneath me inviting me to rub wantonly against it. His groan as I squirmed fighting the urge to do so broke me, and my fingers threaded into his hair and cradled his skull as I tightened my body to his and ground down, pressing my aching cunt against his hard cock, following the patterns of instinct into a rhythm, finding just where it felt the best for me as I explored his mouth with my tongue.

His hands gripped my arse, angling my rock into him, and he arched his hips to meet me, his cold breath panted against my lips, and his eyes aglow with red highlights within their darkness. I could see bone through the translucence of his skin as his gaze intensified, his jaw tightened, and his moans changed pitch.

My ache reached a point that was almost painful and then broke, and I cried out raggedly as my cunt clenched empty, seeking that which had brought it such pleasure, and I panted out against his skin as his groan was caught on an exhalation and I felt his cock jerk between us.

Our eyes met, our foreheads resting against each other, nose tip to nose tip as we recovered, our breaths panted between us, mine warming his whilst his cooled mine. “Will I see you again?” I asked him, as I had before, knowing that I needed to return inside and to my room before this madness between us led us to more than what we had done. “Soon?”

“If you wish it…”

“I do.”

I stalk her in the dark of night,

I know I should stay away,

And yet I cannot do what is right,

I am the hunter, and she is my prey.

SEVEN

When the moon rides at her peak then your heart’s desire seek

- The Wiccan Rede

There were two ways to invoke a demon familiar.

If the witch knew the demon by name or had a particular ilk of demon that she wished to summon, then she could tailor the basic chant to be specific, and if that demon, or one of his ilk, were available, he or they would respond. Sometimes more than one would come, and then they would resolve the matter between themselves depending on hierarchy. If the witch had no particular preference, she could recite the chant as an open invitation and state the values that she held or sought to entice a demon to attend to her.

There was no guarantee that a demon would respond, and a risk that one that did might not be attending to bind to the witch as a familiar, but rather to stir up trouble.

As a result, it was advised that the witch perform her summons from within a salt circle so that she could negotiate the terms with the demon from a point of safety.

I was still indecisive about whether to summon one, and a part of that indecisiveness was a shadow-lurking, six-foot-something, pale-skinned, hoarse-voiced man with a propensity for black, who may or may not even be alive.

I closed the spell book on the owl feather that I was using as a marker with a sigh and regarded myself in the mirror. My black lace graduation dress was seeing far more frequent wearing than we had predicted when we had selected it a few months before, but it was the only thing I owned that suited a funeral.

I had braided my hair and wound it around my head in a coronet, but the look had been unnatural and too studied. Instead, I had brushed it out and left it free and now contemplated whether that was too informal. Did it matter anyway? I wondered as I leaned forward to apply my lipstick. It was highly likely that upon seeing us at the graveyard in town, the family would have us turned away.

“Fuck it,” I decided, and left the mirror, my spell books, and the room.

In the front hall, Aunt Callista and Aunt Fennel were fussing with themselves and each other, their nervous energy almost palpable. Neither liked to force their presence on the townspeople. It ran contrary to that instilled Vossen wariness born of centuries of violence and vitriol directed our way. But they were doing it for me.

“You both look beautiful,” I told them.

“Oh, dear,” Fennel adjusted her veil. “You flatter.”

“Of course, we look beautiful,” Callista retorted slicking her lips with vivid red lipstick almost defiantly. “We are mistresses of the arcane arts and benefit from centuries of witchcraft and knowledge on preserving our beauty and caring for what nature has bestowed upon us.”

“Plus, MAC,” Fennel winked at me.

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