American Goth (12 page)

“Please,” I asked softly as I glanced up to see her eyes dark upon me, “let me?”

Her fingers played against my temples. “I…you don’t have…” She shrugged, helplessly.

“I want to.” I took her hand in mine and kissed it. “Frankie, if you…if you don’t want to, if you’re,” I groped for the right words, “uncomfortable, we’ll stop, okay?”

Her fingers squeezed mine. “I’m just…you know…”

“I do,” I agreed softly because I did know, and I kissed her hand again to reassure her, to let her know I loved her, that we—that
this
—was more than fine, then brushed my lips along the demarcation where delicate skin ended and soft fuzz began. She sighed, a light note that sent a delicious shiver through me and I kissed her again, carefully, tenderly, just that much lower.

I was amazed by the slick, silky softness that felt like her mouth, a taste as warm and sweet with something so plainly, so intensely, purely sexual that if I’d thought I was aroused, this sent me to a state I’d never hit before.

There was so much to taste and kiss and suck, to explore and discover, and I did, everything, while I held her hand tightly with mine and her fingers first skated along my scalp, then pushed and urged and gripped while the gorgeous muscles in her legs flexed and tightened around me, the perfect arch of her foot skimming my ribs until…

God…thick, and smooth, and addictive. I was thrilled by the way her clit grew in my mouth, how it hardened and lengthened until it pulsed on its own, in time to the beat of her body, and then there was the pulse that beat on my tongue, the thickened ring that would bleed and bind us if it tore, no matter how gently, how carefully… As I teased against that beautiful opening with the tip of my tongue she gasped, her hands tightened on me, and her hips pushed up, a gentle body urging that sent the slight tang of blood over the sweet I drank of.

Her body opened, then tightened around me, and the images slammed sharp into my mind, so clear through her eyes.
Fran was five, she was running through the grass, she fell and her tooth came out. She caught it in her fingers and gave it to her father, who swept her up in his arms and told her how brave she was because she didn’t cry. Eight and crouched in a racing start, facing the water, scared, unable to explain to anyone how the fear pounded through her until the gun went off and she jumped into the pool, everything forgotten but the swim
.

Her fingers gripped and relaxed compulsively as the rhythm built between us, and I rubbed my palm across her stomach to tell her this was okay, this was unbearably, almost painfully, beautiful,
she
was beautiful as she moved and tensed below me, and when the clutch of her hands became a firm grasp, the pulse became a throb under my lips and my name, the name I’d been born with, was a soft cry from hers.
Ten and I saw myself through her eyes, the wonder and the recognition of a kindred, the…wow…an essential goodness…the same I’d seen in her. Fourteen and there was the sweet warmth of our first kiss and as the heat of her body embraced me I knew,
knew
she saw me, too, saw how I’d cried for my father, then again over the summer, saw the searing hurt and rage, the hounds that drove me until the sharp bite of metal sliced through my skin.

There were tears, whether hers or mine we couldn’t tell and didn’t bother to try as her muscles softened, relaxed, beneath me and I covered her body with mine, wrapped my arms around her. She pressed her mouth to mine, linked, bound, the binding done and done again over an astonished “I’m
inside
you” whisper at the revelation of the literal reality, the hot, wet, kiss of being within another, within
my
self, too, a baring of body and mind that joined the pure knowledge of who we were, who we had been, and who we would be. Flashes of a past beyond remembering and a future beyond knowing—mother, daughter, sister, lover, friend, always—immutably bound before and bound once again with her blood on my lips and hands and mine on hers, marked, sigiled and sealed as we were in ways primitive and profound in a deep magic that reached past the oldest of knowledge.

And the empty, the yawning empty eased, filled by her until I knew with the gasping breath I drew into the renewed tightening of my body that held her fast within me that I
wasn’t
alone, I
never
would be, and she knew in the answering surge that pushed so close and so tight around me that we lost all sense of separateness, that I would stay, and not merely because I had to but because I wanted to: I would stay for her.

This was our pact, made freely, willingly—bloody, beautiful, and unbreakable—and we would renew and reaffirm it almost every night until she left.

*

The next morning, when I glanced at Fran over breakfast, she smiled at me in return. Despite her recent shower, her eyes still seemed a bit warm and sleepy, her pretty lips still slightly swollen even as her hair hung over her shoulders in loose, damp waves. I wanted to brush it back with my fingers, kiss the bare skin beneath it, inhale the scent of it.

I could
feel
the return pulse in her neck, in mine, and that pulse flourished into a fevered blush the moment I realized I’d not really understood nor even
heard
a single word Elizabeth had said, until “I’m certain you find each other much more fascinating than whatever suggestions I may have had for you today” broke through in Elizabeth’s friendly tone.

The same red tide I felt crawl up my cheeks suffused Fran’s face, waved as a discernable heat off her as she sat next to me, and I took her hand in mine under the table to reassure her.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Elizabeth asked, hands on her hips and amused exasperation playing across her face. “Go. Back. To. Bed. The both of you.”

I didn’t even know what to say to that.

“Perhaps I’ll leave you to discuss it amongst yourselves?” she asked in that same tone, glancing at each of us.

I nodded and attempted to pick up my cup of tea as nonchalantly as I could manage it.

“It’s supposed to be warm out today—I’d recommend a walk over to the Green after lunch,” she said casually as she approached the door. “I’ll have Francesca’s things moved to your room, then.”

Silence stretched loud and hard behind the door as it closed, so complete I could hear my heart beat in my head.

I couldn’t take it anymore and stood, still holding her hand in mine.

“You know that? I think I’m going to do the unthinkable,” I told her and smiled.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

I tugged gently on her hand. “I’m gonna go back to bed, get up later, walk over to the Green with you after lunch, and then? We’ll go to the pub to meet Kenny, Hannah, and Graham—we’re scheduled to have little bit of a jam session.”

“That’s your big plan for the day?”

“That’s it—my big plan.”

Fran shook her head, but smiled back at me as she stood. “And you think I should…?” she shrugged her shoulders in question.

On impulse, I kissed the knuckles of the hand I held. “I think…you should come with me,” I said, then kissed her fingers again. “Stay with me—and
you
can decide later whether or not you want your things moved.”

I wanted her to have a choice about whether we shared a room or a bed—she didn’t have to, she wasn’t obligated. I didn’t want her to think I expected something from her that she didn’t want to give or do, and I wanted her to know that no matter what had happened between us, I fully respected her right to make that choice.

She gazed at me, the tiger in the lady prowling behind her eyes. Despite the difference in color, I was certain mine burned the same way.

The whispered caress across my cheek and the kiss that followed said very clearly that sleep was not the immediate consideration.

“Maybe we’ll just make your jam session and dinner,” she murmured into my lips as we pulled each other up the stairs.

Right. We’d already had breakfast, we could skip lunch, and I sighed against her in agreement as we fit to each other—we fit perfectly.

The link was already so complete that images were no longer of the distant past but of the night before, what she had enjoyed, what took her beyond, and when her hands and mouth landed exactly where I needed them, I knew she saw the same things too.

*

The decision to have Fran attend the jam session and then stay for dinner at the pub had seemed a good one at the time. Kenny and Graham had arranged it—with the promise to the manager that they’d work right after, when the “regular” band came.

But as below, so above. I didn’t know that a blood bonding would effectively act as the catalyst that would catapult my potential into manifest capabilities. Or rather, it had been part of the things Elizabeth had explained that made me squirm so much I couldn’t hear: the opening of new channels from the raw power exchange, the waking of things that hadn’t yet been roused—but now I truly understood, or at least, I began to.

I had already been welcomed into the Circle by virtue of my heritage and my training, and warned by my uncle that until my sealing, I would be its weakest link: I could still be corrupted, taken, the worm in the heart of the rose, even forcibly ridden by another entity and set off, a bomb within the Circle, because I’d not yet made the eternal promise, the promise that meant I’d placed my soul’s existence on the line, had yet to receive the literal flood of power that would accompany it and with that, the ability to complete, to close the Circle.

But the blood binding released a trickle of that power, began the Rite of sealing somewhat prematurely. In essence, I was now even more a part of the Circle than I’d been before. But the warding that had surrounded me no longer did since I had breached it, not because I’d connected to someone else, but because the connect was to someone outside of the Circle. It also meant that these new abilities I’d gained were more than partially out of control.

That was below. Above, the power had resonated across the Astral, the white light announcement that a new Wielder had arrived, but it was not the blaze my true sealing would have created, merely the burst of presence. And those that hunted, had hunted for eons beyond imagining, knew it meant a unique vulnerability, a unique opportunity: to turn a Wielder.

I grew tense as we stepped away from the door and began our way to the pub, and suddenly I knew why this neighborhood had been the one Cort had settled in and in which he’d opened his shop.

The environment, the madness of creativity, the overt and covert availability of sex and drugs…this was a hunting ground.

I could almost smell the trails left behind through the Aethyr, and the scent of hounds, and the presence of those they served, filled my awareness. This was what the warding had kept me from seeing, from knowing: the world was full of things that took, things that ate, things that existed only to destroy the Light.

“Hey, you okay?” Fran asked, her fingers warm in mine as we rounded the corner of Old Compton.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said and smiled at her as I adjusted my gig bag over my shoulder, then thumbed the door latch, “just hungry is all.” We’d talk about it later or tomorrow, I thought, as I waved her in before me.

Once everyone was introduced, I could tell that Graham and Kenny really liked Fran while Hannah shot me the occasional mischievous grin, a grin that disappeared when she looked past my shoulder.

But I could
sense
them before they’d even walked in, a tightening in the skin of my neck and the band of muscle across my stomach.

Without even meaning to, because my awareness was so fine-tuned I could feel them, I knew where and who they were before I even turned.

Hounds. And the hounds announced the near proximity, the presence of their masters, eaters of things living, of energy, of essence, of hope and love and goodness until it was gone, dissolved to nothing.

I watched them surreptitiously, and I wondered how it was I’d never really seen them so clearly before.

They may, on some level, have appeared nondescript: gangly, gaunt, thin and pinched with the look of hunger, of the use of too many soft drugs ringing their eyes, a grayish cast to their skin, no matter what its original shading. Nothing shone about them but their eyes, dark, fever bright, almost too wet. They gave sniffing, furtive glances, they jumped at sudden movements. They came out to inspect—whatever—then scurried back into the shadows.

And then
they
came. I watched one feeder, then another, with their thralls, living vessels, and I watched the hounds that looked for fresh food.

It was…interesting. The field that surrounded them seemed to literally draw things to it; energy fields of the inanimate were affected. People seemed to lean in their direction without even knowing, an attunement, pulled to that draw. Few seemed immune besides me, Fran, Hannah, and Graham.

Graham’s response intrigued me. He seemed not only unattracted but hostile, a red blush of controlled anger with a touch of fear tightly reined in washed over him as a pair swaggered past the bar to the table the hounds had saved.

I wondered what kept Hannah and Graham clear. Fran, though, I knew, or at least thought I did, since after all, we were bound.

My musings were interrupted as we set up for our session—rearranged amps and the drum kit to the right height for Hannah, then did the same for Kenny’s mic stand. It wasn’t a real gig in the sense that we wouldn’t play long and, really, we were doing it because we hadn’t been able to book the studio for the night. That, and I suspected Hannah wanted to see what we could really do in a “live” situation, while Kenny and Graham probably simply wanted to do something more than hear the sounds we made bounce off the four small walls of the studio and us the only audience.