Secret Worlds (46 page)

I was getting myself into trouble. Nothing could become of us—not if he lived forever. I would grow old. I
wanted
to. And immortality? How could life have meaning without death?

Charles caressed my arm with his thumb. “I was worried you’d be frightened of my nature.”

“The turning into an animal thing. I don’t find that scary. Weird, maybe. But not scary.”
Not that part, anyway
.

“Hey, watch it. We can be scary when we want.”

“You want me to be scared, or not?”

He laughed. “Not.”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “Maybe I better be careful.”

He returned my smile with a grin. “One never can tell. I might be dangerous to your good sense.”

The eye contact lingered long enough for me to realize how comfortable I’d become.
Too
comfortable. Having him here felt natural. Like we were
supposed
to be together. I needed to shift gears and remind myself why that wasn’t true.

“Earlier today you were talking about ‘the Universe’. What’s that mean?”

“We don’t know who, or what, the Universe is. Our council communicates with them.”

Huh. So the Universe was a
them
.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

His eyebrows pulled lower over his eyes. “What’s what like?”

“Shifting.”

“It hurts,” he said emphatically. “Your bones grow or shrink or rearrange. Your skin stretches or snaps smaller. Every muscle explodes and every bone breaks and resets.”

“That’d be interesting to see.”

He chuckled. “I just told you how painful it is.”

“Right.” I pressed my foot nervously against the base of the coffee table. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” He nudged me away and stood. “I’ll show you.”

“What?” I leaned forward, my muscles tense. Now that it wasn’t hypothetical, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.

I shoved my teacup aside, spilling a warm splash of tea onto my pajama shorts in the process. My eyes never left him as I blotted my pants with a napkin. “Really, you don’t have to.”

He shrugged. “If I trust you enough to tell you what I am, what’s the problem in
showing
you? It’s nice to—” He cut himself short.

“Nice to what?”

“Trust someone,” he said softly.

There was a pause where neither of us spoke, then Charles cleared his throat and rubbed his hands, as though he were trying to wash himself of his confession.

A bead of sweat pearled at the nape of my hairline and trickled a slow path down my neck. “I didn’t expect you to show me now.”

“Won’t hurt less if I show you later.” He winked and backed away several paces.

“Wait!” I lifted my hands to stop him. “Just—never mind.”

“I’ll be okay,” he said. He took off his shirt. “Watch.”

I was watching all right. Or maybe staring. His body was firm, lean. Not too muscular—not in a way that implied he obsessed over going to the gym—but defined and strong. Equally as strong was the heat spreading from my stomach down to my thighs and up to my breasts. I sat back, holding my breath.

His body trembled. Pain etched into his face as his figure blurred. My heart thundered in my ears. I wanted to tell him to stop, but the words remained trapped. Wild vibrations coursed through him.

Then, I heard it.

Several loud pops sounded over a deep growl. He hunched over as his skin forced his body smaller. His spine protruded against a thin layer of flesh. At the sound of bones crushing, I dug my nails into the couch cushion.

His face deformed. Hair pierced through his flesh as his form shrunk. I almost gasped in horror, but bit it back, my teeth digging into my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. At any moment, the tea I’d drunk might surge from my stomach.

The end of the transformation came suddenly, leaving a pile of clothes on the living room floor. A bushy-tailed squirrel pounced out of the pants and scampered over.

This was the man I was planning to move in with?

Perched on his hind legs, he tilted his head and chittered. I cupped my hands together and lowered them to the floor. He padded into them, and my hands shook as I brought his face to mine.

Charles was in there, somewhere. His eyes had changed, too—no longer teal but an eerie shade of green, like the squirrel I’d seen in the woods and the eerie, smoky eyes I’d seen outside my window after the ritual.

“Your eyes,” I said, lost in a sense of wonder and dread. “You were the squirrel in the woods.”

He placed his tiny paws together and nodded. Surprisingly, having witnessed his change firsthand made me feel less freaked out. If I was scared of anything, it was
for
him, not
of
him—scared of the pain he had to endure with every shift. And if I cared about that, I had to admit I cared about him. Somehow, some way, he was working his way into my heart.

I released him and watched as he returned to his human form, the process seeming quicker in reverse. He stood naked before me. Hastily, I dropped my gaze, but the image might as well have been burned into my retinas.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him smirking as he redressed, but I didn’t dare allow my peripheral to take in anything more than the expression on his face. Even after he dressed, my heart thudded over the memory of him without clothes.

He sunk onto the couch beside me, his brow heavy above his eyes. “You sounded afraid.”

“Your eyes—” I shook my head. “I would swear I’ve seen them before, and not just in that squirrel.”

“Happens to all elementals at night.”

“My attacker didn’t have eyes like that,” I said.

“He wouldn’t if he was hungry. The eyes only glow when the elemental has lifeblood in their system.”

“Why a squirrel?”

“It’s one of the easier ones”—he swept loose hair from his eyes—“and it doesn’t rip my clothes.”

“That was—I mean—” I paused to gather my thoughts. “An owl outside the woods had the same strange eyes. You?”

“I had to follow you to make sure no one else had. I wasn’t the only one hunting those grounds.”

This man was not good for me. My life might not have been normal before he showed up, but at least it’d made sense.

I was shaking just thinking about what would have happened without him. Charles cradled me against him. He probably meant for it to be comforting—and, at first, it was. But when I peeked up at him, and our gazes locked, all I felt was lust. I saw the shift in his eyes, too. The shift from wanting to protect me to simply…wanting me.

He released me and cleared his throat. “This—Well, you and me…You know it’s not a good idea.”

“Then what is it you
want?” I asked.

“You,” he said, his expression unreadable and his voice heavy and full of…full of what? Sadness? Regret? “To understand you. To know that you’re safe. To not have to avoid the only person I can be myself around.”

He swept the back of his finger down my cheek and nuzzled his nose against mine, eliciting from me a shaky breath. Maybe this was okay—giving into the physical—so long as I kept my heart out of things. So long as we didn’t commit to anything.

The urge to kiss him surged through me, but he pulled away. The missed opportunity left me a little sad, but I sighed quietly in relief.

Ancient man, Sophia. Remember that. How long can it last?

“And you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I can’t answer that,” I said.

I knew exactly what I wanted. It just wasn’t what I
should
.

When Charles excused himself to make a phone call, I added a few more notes to my Book of Shadows.

Charles wasn’t going to stop shifting.

***

WE SPENT THE REST
of the night and early morning talking. Charles wanted to hear about my life, which meant telling him about all the people who had died and left me behind. He seemed concerned when I told him about my parents, but, more importantly, he
didn’t
look at me like I was some kind of freak.

I asked him about the side-effects of Cruor blood, and he said sometimes a bond would form and the human might be able to ‘sense’ the Cruor whose blood they had drank.

Those types of side-effects would fade within a couple of days, as they had with me. But I didn’t tell Charles I’d been able to do more than just ‘sense’ Adrian. My Grandpa Parsons had always told me to never offer up anything I didn’t have to. While others gave their sage wisdom of ‘the only stupid questions are the ones that go unasked,’ it was his advice that resonated more: ‘Only ask questions you can’t resolve yourself.’

Without more answers, I didn’t know which questions were safe to ask.

Charles told me about his life, too. About his early urges for blood and his struggle to temper his supernatural energy. He’d never dated a human before—had always been certain they would run the second they learned about his true nature.

Was I any different?

Our chemistry aside, a mortal woman couldn’t have a future with an immortal man, though my reservations were no match for my impulse to live in the moment or my need to learn more about his world. The supernatural perhaps offered the only explanation for my ancestor’s missing body and my family’s curse, but I
couldn’t
turn to Charles about those things. Not because he’d told me not to ask any more questions, but because I’d made that mistake when I’d confided in Ivory, and I wouldn’t make it again.

I’d have to find the answers I wanted on my own. The question was, how was I going to do that under his watchful eye? Moving in with him might bring me some protection, but I wasn’t sure how much that protection could outweigh the looming complications.

SIX WEEKS HAD PASSED since I’d moved in with Charles. Six tortuous weeks of struggling between my physical desire for him and my mental determination not to get involved. I admit to deriving some pleasure in that he didn’t seem to be having an easy time with it either.

His demeanor around me had relaxed a great deal, but there were still times the tension between us was so palpable I feared I would toss caution to the wind. But anytime I thought something was building between us, a week would go by before I would see him again. In that way, living with Charles was fairly similar to living alone.

I had to admit, his house—which was once Belle Meadow’s old library—had some advantages over my own. For one, when my house was ransacked two days after I moved out, Charles’ house was not. Secondly, a moat of daffodils surrounded his lot. But this wasn’t an advantage because of my love for landscaping—which didn’t exist. Charles explained that narcissus, while only mildly poisonous for humans and animals to ingest, was outright debilitating to Cruor even to the touch.

After Charles explained the purpose to me, I’d immediately jotted down what I’d learned in my Book of Shadows, cross-referencing the new knowledge under both Daffodil and Cruor.

Between this information and Charles’ declaration that I would be safe so long as I traveled in groups, especially at night, I realized I didn’t have many options. I couldn’t move in with Lauren; she would freak if I overpowered her home with daffodils because of her whole ‘floral scents give me a headache’ thing.

I wasn’t exactly stuck where I was with Charles, but I couldn’t think of better solution, and I wasn’t sure I still wanted to. Our location was safe. All I had to do was leave the house during daylight and return before nightfall. The daffodil did the rest.

I wish that would have been enough forever.

***

OCTOBER 31ST marked the beginning of the darker half of the year. Red’s bandage had come off the week before, and I thought he’d be ready to fly home. Wherever that was.

I took him from his cage and lowered him to the ground. “Here’s your chance. Get on with your little bird life. Just be sure to build yourself a nest and stay there at night.”

Red walked across the cold ground, stared out at the muted clearing, then hopped back to the perch in his cage.

I crouched to peek inside. “Don’t you want to be free?”

After several failed attempts, I let out a sigh and headed back to my Jeep with Red still in tow.

With the fading of daylight, the voices returned. Slowly at first, pulsing into my own thoughts in place of the thudding silence, but then more rapidly, rushing by with renewed intensity. Unintelligible. Tangled. I didn’t know if it’d be better to understand them, or if that would only make me feel crazier.

This year, Samhain would be especially important. On this sabbat, the spirits of ancestors visit their descendants—to help them and advise them—and I needed all the advice I could get. This would be my last hope of getting answers on my own.

My friends would be joining me in Charles’ backyard to perform our ritual. Well,
my
ritual, mostly. Lauren wasn’t Wiccan—she was only joining the ceremony to support me in my beliefs, just as I often celebrated Christian holidays with her. And Ivory said she didn’t want to do a ritual for her ancestors but would come along for my sake.

We met at dusk. I draped an orange cloth over a stone I’d chosen as an outdoor altar and perched pictures of Grandpa Dunne, Grandpa Parsons, and Dad, along with Elizabeth Parsons’ court document, in a semicircle around the altar’s pentagram. I never included my mom in these things. Even with her gone, I wanted to honor her distaste for my beliefs.