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“Agreed.” His breath came flat, his pupils dilated until the black almost swallowed the glowing irises. “Except for one thing. I don’t do silent when I fuck. There’ll be talking. Of the dirty kind.”
Choice parts of her body fired up in response to his declaration. Her mouth went dry, and all she could do was give a curt nod.
“Your place or mine?”
The thought of getting it on with Tallak under the same roof as her kids… “Yours.” A hard swallow. “Let’s go.”
“No.”
She blinked, stumped, and stared at him.
A hint of that devastating smile on his face, though his eyes glittered hard. “I want the entire night. This one’s already half over.” Without warning, he grasped her head with both hands, tunneling his fingers into her hair, and nipped at her lower lip, then licked the sting away. “Tomorrow,” he murmured against her mouth, catching her frantic breaths. “You come to me tomorrow at sundown, and you’ll stay until dawn. Get some sleep now, because I won’t let you find any when you’re with me.”
CHAPTER 8
Afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows in the MacKennas’ kitchen, turning Merle’s hair into luminous fire as the younger witch studied the pictures of the sigil Hazel had just forwarded to Merle’s phone.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one before,” Merle said with a frown. “But my knowledge of these sigils is rusty.”
“Like mine.” Hazel exhaled roughly. “I was going through the books in our library this morning before I had to run some errands, and I had yet to find it anywhere.”
“I’ll keep looking, too.” An assessing glance. “Sure we don’t want to let someone else in on this? We’d figure this out faster with additional help.”
Hazel shook her head. “I told Lily. And that has to be enough. She can search our library with me, but I don’t want this to reach any other witch. The more people who know about this, the higher the risk of it leaking to the rest.”
Merle was quiet for a moment, picking at the label on an avocado. “Have you considered asking Arawn for help?”
Hazel grimaced. “Arawn is…the nuclear option. If we involve him, it’ll be because we’re at a point when the goodwill and trust of the entire witch community are not even on our radar anymore.” At Merle’s slightly quizzical look, she added, “It’s politics, Merle. Right now, the majority of the witches are not allied with Arawn yet. This case here is, as of now, a witch issue—no otherworld creatures involved. Arawn doesn’t have jurisdiction, and if he intervenes, regardless of whether he was invited by me to do so, what do you think it’ll look like to the rest of the witches who are still on the fence about the whole allegiance issue?”
“Ugh. Like he’s overstepping his authority. It’ll make him look even more like the overbearing, power-grabbing asshole they believe he is.”
“We’re already going behind the other Elders’ backs with this investigation by not telling them about it. If we pull Arawn into this, we’ll destroy any chance that they’ll come to trust him…and come to believe he’ll respect their autonomy even after they swear allegiance to him.”
Merle hung her head. “I hate politics.”
Hazel smiled. “I know. You’re like Lily—you’re more at home in battle.” She surreptitiously checked her phone for the time again. 4:32 p.m. A bit more than three hours until sunset. Something tight and anxious curled in her belly.
“Are you feeling okay?” Merle’s brows drew together. “You seem antsy.”
It sat on the tip of Hazel’s tongue. It yanked on the shackles she’d put on it, wanted out, pushed at her. She hated keeping secrets. Especially when they were so big. All those years she’d had to stay silent about Rose, about the changeling exchange and Basil’s true identity, and then later, when the magnitude of the other dark truth she could never tell had settled on her like a stain no one else could see…it had eaten away at her soul.
And now…all she wanted was to have someone with whom to share the silly excitement of the crazy, reckless indulgence to which she was counting down the hours. Merle was the closest thing she had to a best friend. Robert had made sure she’d driven away the ones she’d had at the time of their ill-fated marriage—another aspect that fit perfectly into a narcissist’s playbook. One more thing she’d only come to realize after Basil had opened her eyes to Robert’s true colors.
Emily MacKenna had been the only one who’d clung to Hazel despite her best attempts at pushing her away, and she would have been the one to wring the truth about Hazel’s nervousness out of her now…only to giggle and grin and chat about what would await Hazel come nightfall.
But Emily was gone, perished in the firestorm of Maeve’s phoenix seventeen years ago. And as much as Merle resembled her mother, she wasn’t Emily, would never take her place. She held a different part of Hazel’s heart, though, somewhere between a good friend and a beloved niece, but it was because of that nuance in the way Hazel saw her that she couldn’t talk about Tallak with Merle.
So she simply cleared her throat and adjusted her braid. “I’m fine. Just…stressed, you know.”
“Hmm.” Merle eyed her in a way that said she wasn’t quite convinced, but before she could press for more, the front door opened.
Merle straightened at the same time Hazel sensed the dark energy whispering into the kitchen from the foyer, raising all the hairs on her arms and her neck. The air itself seemed to hush.
She’d only met Arawn a handful of times, and this instinctive response, the lizard part of her brain screaming at her to tuck tail and run, it never let up. No matter that she’d sworn allegiance to him, knew that he was on their side, had seen the way he doted on Maeve, the Demon Lord—and fallen god—still managed to make every single cell in her body tremble in primal awareness of a being forged at the beginning of time, the sheer power of his magic a suffocating counterpoint to her own.
How Maeve dared to go toe-to-toe with Arawn, not to mention share his bed, Hazel would never be able to fathom.
The Demon Lord’s dark presence saturated the room even before he stepped inside, his massive frame filling the door. He inclined his head, the black of his hair swallowing all light. “Merle. Hazel.”
