Otherworldly Discipline: A Witch's Lesson (2 page)

“
No
,” Moriarty sneered. “Master
has revoked
your Earthside privileges, my dear. You’ve worried him.”

“Moriarty, let me go or else I’ll scream! This isn’t funny! Let go of me!” She tried to kick at him and wrench away, but he just turned and hauled her over his shoulder with as much effort as he would use swatting away a mosquito. “I don’t wanna go back to Ashcroft! I don’t wanna learn magic anymore!” she whined like a bratty four-year-old who was being hauled off to preschool.

“You’ve spent far too much time on Earthside, my girl, if you think anybody gives two damns about what you
do
or
do not want to do
anymore. Besides, it’s better that I found you. Ashcroft was preparing to send
trackers
after you. They’re not so gentle.”

“This isn’t comfortable, Moriarty! Stop—Owe!” he dumped her into the back seat of his car. She rubbed her head where she’d bumped against the far window. As she clumsily tried to adjust herself, he whipped off his belt, then leaned in to bind her hands with it.

Then she started screaming, although nobody was around to hear her. Once she was properly unable to escape from the backseat, he walked towards the driver’s side like a man strolling through the park.

She sat up and kicked at his seat as he drove. He put up with it for about sixty seconds. “Do you want me to come back there and bind your feet, too? Because I’m doing that after I give you a good hiding. And that’s
before
I hand you off to Master Ashcroft. You’ve ruined my evening. I should be onto my second woman by now.” He turned his eyes back to the road.

“Well, let me
apologize
,” she seethed. Moriarty knew that she hated to be threatened with spankings—especially since she’d taken off as soon as his master had tried to threaten her that way. “I’m sorry to spoil your weekly fuck-fest.”

“Apology not accepted,” he growled. “I don’t know what you were thinking by running away. We’ve given you everything, all the comforts you could ask
for
, and you just take off without a note?”

“Oh, I left a note,” she reminded.

“I don’t know if writing ‘
Fuck off, love Charlotte’
on the refrigerator with chocolate sauce constitutes as a
note,
” Moriarty argued. “Bad form is what it was. Your family is humiliated and worried, and Ashcroft is worried
, angry, and
insulted…
”

“I don’t care what Ashcroft thinks; he’s a bully. And I don’t care what my family thinks, because they’re not actually my family.”

“They love you like a daughter, and they raised you from
infancy
, you spoiled brat,” Moriarty snapped, glancing back with judgmental eyes. “I know several people that had it a lot worse off. They spoiled you recklessly.”

“And then they handed me to Ashcroft. The most bad
tempered wizard in the
universe
.”

“You’ve
made
him bad
tempered,” Moriarty replied tersely, but he could hardly deny her claim. Ashcroft
was
bad
tempered since she came upon the scene.

Ashcroft had
actually
been excited about his new apprentice being the last known alive
Byndian
Witch. His hopes might have been too high. His only apprentices thus far had been Archivist
Wizards—
his own different race of wizard
—
and even then, he had rarely taken on apprentices at all. “You make
everyone
bad
tempered,” he added.

That was probably also true. Charlotte could be unbearable and annoying.

“He has no right forcing me to go back there,” she added aloofly. “Let me go.”

“Where do you get off?” Moriarty found himself asking. “You know perfectly well he has the right. You’re the last Byndian—you have to keep your race alive or else your power will fade out of existence
with you
. And your guardians signed you over to Ashcroft, besides.
He’s in charge of your protection and your education.
”

“Only because they forgot what century we live in!” she argued. “They just can’t
sign me over!
People don’t do that anymore!”

“You signed, too,” Moriarty reminded simply. “In silver ink.” Silver was sacred to wizards. “
Your
handwriting.”

“Under
duress
,” she finished. He looked into the rearview mirror and arched an eyebrow at the term, ‘duress’. “I was guilted into it!”

“You mean you were, for a brief shining moment, understanding the responsibilities to your birthright,” he rephrased. “And then you turned into a brat.”

“Stop calling me that! I
still
have
some
rights
!
I have dreams! That’s why I left.”

“No, you left because you were lazy. You forget
, my dear girl,
that I was
there
. Ashcroft was finally putting his foot down with you.” More so, Ashcroft, after a whole summer of nothing but her showing up late and not doing a thing he said, had run out of ideas of how to get her to work and finally threatened to thrash her if she didn’t start becoming more responsible and if she didn’t
improve
. She responded by trying to weasel out of her apprenticeship contract. 

“He was a jerk the whole way through. He’s always yelling at me.” Moriarty saw her bottom lip pout and her eyes scuttle to the floor by her feet.

“He never yells,” Moriarty sighed. At least, Ashcroft hadn’t yelled at
her
; not yet, anyway.

“He nags. I’ve never done anything right.”

“I can agree on that,” Moriarty replied quickly, practically attacking at her jugular. Moriarty knew that she had it all wrong. Ashcroft was merely doing a “tough love” act, as he’d done with his
male
apprentices—and they were all Archivists, which meant that they lived for study as he did. The Byndian Witch,
strictly
bred by generations of wizard folk with the attention spans of gnats, was quite different. Where Ashcroft’s other apprentices had taken his negativity and had tried harder to appease him, Charlotte was more the type to just flip the bird and give up on the whole ‘being a witch’ thing, as if it was optional and not her
race
.

She gritted her teeth at Moriarty and stared quietly out the window, watching them leave the city and head out towards the country. “Just so you know—I was better off sleeping under a bridge.”

“My
ass
,” Moriarty snapped. “You were not. You were just too stubborn to crawl back and ask for forgiveness, a warm bed and a warm coat.” He shook his head, hoping she didn’t say anything so stupid to Ashcroft, who might actually have taken offense to such nonsense. “I hope you get a warmed bottom as well, for your trouble.”

Even in the dim light of the car, Moriarty could see her embarrassment in the rearview mirror. “Shut up! Don’t say that! What’s wrong with you?”

“You’ve left me with a very surly employer for the last six weeks!” he replied. “
That’s
what’s wrong with me. Also, it does anger me that someone that had been given so much could just toss it away and
hole
up in a dressing room with weird hair and hideous clothes.”

“That was, like,
temporary
.”

“Yeah? And when was, like, the last time you
ate
?” he threw back, mocking her Californian
dialect
.

She considered this, but then didn’t respond. His heart
wrenched
—when
was
the last time she’d eaten? “I was doing
fine
,” she said quietly sounding both angry yet surrendered.

So, she really couldn’t take care of herself at all. That must have been a bitter pill for her to swallow. He could just imagine her curle
d up in the freezing autumn air
in a rat-infested
,
closet-sized apartment, with only a violin and whatever she snagged from her apartment before leaving to make a living with, and obviously it wasn’t as easy to make money being a musician as she’d hoped. She had to have been
even
more stubborn than he had considered to not have come crawling back by now.

There was silence in the car for the rest of the drive. Moriarty was
becoming
very pleased with himself that he was dragging her back. Finally, in the middle of a field, he slowed down to park the car. As he put the break on, he turned his head towards the back seat. “Alright now—”

Charlotte elbowed him on the lip and ripped out of the car.

Oooh
! He couldn’t wait to deliver her to Ashcroft!

*
*
*

“Urgh!
Damn her
,” was what Ashcroft Medwin normally panted as he was spending from his own hand. It was frankly embarrassing. He had so
seldom
been urged to give himself relief before he’d met Charlotte. Now, he sometimes did it twice a day—something he hadn’t done since he was a teenager. It was the only thing that helped him think straight. Sometimes he felt dizzy from how fiercely he desired her.

He never realized that there could be someone so damn arousing. No; not just arousing, but appetizing in a way that made him actually
hunger
for her. Her scent, her looks, the way she moved, or walked, or bent over, and even the way she scowled at him when they were arguing had made him hard as a stone. Now, just
thinking
about her made him hard.

He hated this; she was his apprentice, for
god sakes
. His
student
. He shouldn’t feel this way about her. It was indecent.

Even if she was the worst apprentice
ever
. He never met a woman so insulted by being told what to do. In one way, it might have been because she was so young. She was only nineteen—she was a baby, and thus acted like a stubborn child. At the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder if the apprenticeship should have started when she was younger and more impressionable.

He’d asked to start her apprenticeship when she was thirteen, but her foster parents balked, saying she wasn’t mature enough to survive in the Otherworld and that she was
to
o
disorderly
to be sent to a great wizard like Ashcroft. They
only
signed her over to
him
when she’d finished human schooling and when they’d finally lost any and all hope of her growing to be
any more
orderly
or more mature, and finally surrendered to Ashcroft’s pressure
.

He hadn’t
actually
seen her until that last summer and thus had no idea what to expect. He certainly hadn’t expected someone so damn beautiful that she would make him miserable with desire.

“I should have treated her different
ly
,” he had snapped to Moriarty after she’d disappeared. “I should have worn out her perfidious little bottom for her long ago!”

Moriarty had just shrugged and bit into the apple he was eating without the slightest sign of concern about him, as was usual. He didn’t easily get upset over anything. “Why didn’t you then?” he had asked, chewing.

Moriarty was Ashcroft’s closest friend
, servant,
and
confidant
—a man who had fought next to him in countless battles and had served him well for centuries… And Ashcroft STILL didn’t want to give him an honest answer to that question.

Because the honest answer had been that the idea of spanking Charlotte was so damn arousing, that it
frightened him
.

“She makes me so damn angry sometimes, I’m afraid of lo
sing control with her,” he said
instead, making it sound like he was really just afraid of spanking her to death.

“
Come now
, Master,” Moriarty doubted openly. “A little
bottom smacking
never did any girl that sort of harm. When we get her back, you should really make a pact to be more firm with her. It would be the kindest thing you’ve ever done. She’s been spoiled enough. You’re the master, not her.”

Of course, that comment had only left Ashcroft feeling like he’d failed
Charlotte
. He’d only shaken a stern finger at her when she’d shown up late and left early and did whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. Obviously, she could care less if he was disappointed with her.