Chapter 10

To bind the spell well every time, let the spell be said in rhyme

– The Wiccan Rede

"If you are at all concerned about staying…" Aunt Callista said quietly as the dressmaker took the pinned uniform into the back workroom and I dressed in the curtained off changeroom. "You do not need to do so, Nyx. Whilst it is a good opportunity to make friends, the young men and women that Pinegrove produces are, in many ways, like a pack of wolves. They have been raised with a sense of entitlement and belief that their needs transcend basic human decency."

"Do you think I am wrong in coming here?" I asked her, curious, for she seemed to revile the school in so many ways.

She considered the question. "I think that your coming here, Nyx, will be the best thing to happen to this school and its students since Pinegrove Academy opened and I am glad to keep you near for three more years, but I also do not wish to see you harmed, in any way."

I opened the curtain and embraced her tightly before releasing her. "I am a Vossen," I told her. "We're tough."

"That we are," she cupped my cheek on her palm, and her eyes flickered over my shoulder. "And there is that young man from earlier," she said quietly. "Right on time."

"I will be fine," I told her as Xander met my eyes and smiled. "I'll see you later," I said over my shoulder already crossing to the door.

"All done?" Xander asked as I stepped out into the hallway.

"Yep, all done," I smoothed my hands down my dress and hoped I hadn't smeared my makeup or ruined my hair in trying on the uniform.

"Great, this way," he started down the hallway, and I had to skip a step to catch up. He did not adjust his stride to mine, so I was breathless trying to keep up, though he did hold open the doors long enough for me to duck through under his arm. As we moved through the school, he called out greetings to various other students touching his brow to some, his cheek to another, and tugging his ear at others. Some he did a combination of all three moves.

"What do those signals mean?" I asked. I could hear the recreation center, music pounding out now that the parents had departed. There was a shriek behind us, and a group of bikini-clad young women ran down the path, pursued by laughing young men in swimming trunks.

"Nothing… Just that the party has started," Xander brushed it off.

As we drew near, a young man touched his cheek and held up two fingers. Xander returned the gesture curling his fingers into his palm and out two times, which sent the other man into peals of laughter. He leaned into another man and covered his mouth with his hand as he whispered into his ear. The other man's eyes flicked up to mine, and he grinned wickedly.

We entered the recreational room where the bar was seething with activity. Three bar staff, distinguishable by their white shirts and dark waistcoats, seemed to never be still, laughing as they poured an endless round of cocktails.

"Here," Xander leaned into yell in my ear. "I'll get us a drink!"

Without waiting for an answer, he threaded into the crowd around the bar and was embraced by it, exchanging greetings and kisses. Abandoned awkwardly, knowing no one, I fidgeted and tried to look as if I wasn't uncomfortable whilst around me people danced and writhed against each other, slopping their drinks, and not caring. On a table, someone was cutting lines of a white powder, whilst others blew scented smoke out so thick that I could taste it on the air.

We occasionally used marijuana in the craft to help us focus during meditation - and because sometimes it was nice to just get stoned - so I was no stranger to the smoke or sensation that breathing it invoked.

The party around me was far beyond that of the bonfire at the beach to which Nova had taken me. There was an abandonment and sexuality to this one, whereas the other had been tightly wound and judgingly prim. With the smoke and music pounding, and the people grinding against each other, it was much more like the depictions of old coven meetings in the grimoires, I thought, but somehow this was dangerous as if the young and beautiful faces were just masks over the faces of grotesque demons…

The smoke was affecting me I realized and started to step towards the doors, seeking fresh air.

"Here," one of the men from outside intercepted me, holding a pill on his fingertip. His eyes were predatory as he watched my face. "For you."

"Thanks," I reached for the pill, intending to palm it.

"Uh-ah," he shook his head. "Open up…" He mimed sticking out his tongue, his stained with alcohol and the colour residue of pills that he had consumed. I reluctantly mimicked the move and as the pill touched my tongue, someone caught me around the waist, twirling me away from the man, dipping me to the music, and sealing their mouth over mine.

I recognized the fall of flame-like hair and Mal's dark blue eyes as his tongue stole the pill from mine, and then he righted me, keeping my body tight to his as he writhed us both into the dancers. His cheek stroked against mine, rasping slightly with the stubble that sought to break through his skin.

"Best not to take pills from strangers, Nyx, unless you want to find yourself in a back room being fucked by a bunch of horny Chads. If that's your thing… don't let me stop you," he laughed as he spun me out, and I came face to face with Xander holding two drinks.

I glanced over my shoulder, but Mal had disappeared into the throng of students. "Thank you," I took the drink that Xander offered and pretended to take a sip under his watchful eyes. I was beginning to suspect what some of the hand signals had been. Two fingers… or a V for virgin?

"We have everything you could want to party with," Xander told me over the music. "Feel free to help yourself… to anything or anyone," he grinned suggestively.

"Great," I forced a smile on my lips.

I felt like a lamb amongst wolves. Just scanning the faces around us was enough to know that I had been marked as a target, a newcomer, and prey for the night. Suddenly it felt as if my dress was too tight, too short, and my lipstick too bright. I had to stop myself from adjusting my clothing, knowing that it wasn't anything to do with me… it was all about them. I wasn't a person to them - I was fair game. A local girl, from a poor and un-influential family, at the school under a scholarship, I wouldn't complain, I wouldn't speak up about them taking advantage, if I wanted to make it in the school, and if I wanted to make it beyond the Academy into one of the elite Universities and from there into a prestigious career, so they could do what they liked to me.

Xander was distracted by a blonde and her friends who draped themselves over him in enthusiastic greeting, their words lost to the music. I took the opportunity to slip through the crowd and poured the cocktail into a potted plant before reaching the bar. I caught a bartender's eyes and watched as he mixed another cocktail, placing it on the bar before me.

"Thank you," I said to him, the words lost in the music, but he grinned and bowed his head in acknowledgment, knowing the words from the shape of my lips.

As I turned away, Mal appeared before me again, catching my waist and pulling me away from the bar and into the dancers. He encouraged my arm around his neck and leaned in to place his lips near my ear.

"You can call me your knight in tarnished armor if you like," he teased my earlobe with his tongue. "But let me show you the delicious deviousness that I'm saving you from…" He leaned back and raised his eyebrows in invitation.

The glass of the pool room showed that the afternoon had darkened into evening, and the room was bathed in shadow which convulsed with flesh. Coloured lights cut through the darkness erratically and played over his hair and face. It was an unusual face. Handsome, but not in the traditional way, his features were strong and sharp. Framed by the shoulder-length dark red hair, he was entirely enticing and exotic… and irresistible.

He'd saved me already, and I had no reason to think that he was anything other than my white knight… or red knight, as seemed more appropriate as the light shifted, there was a shadow of flame that burnt behind his skin and eye.

I shook it off, blaming the marijuana smoke that billowed and sifted through the air for making me overly sensitive and causing me to see things that were not really there.

I took his pro-offered hand.

Mal laughed, the warmth of it encompassing me, and drew me towards the pool room, where people were jumping in, the water seeming to boil with their motion. Many were fucking, I realized, gripping Mal's arm, my eyes on the water, uncertain as to what my reaction should be. The water, and around it, seemed to spill into sin as clothing drifted like strange seaweed and naked flesh wrapped around naked flesh, hands in hair, and… It was both repulsive and arousing.

"This way," Mal pulled me towards the changing rooms. We pushed past people leaving as we entered, their hair and clothing stuck to their skin with moisture, and their laughter trailing behind them. Someone was running all the showers, and the changing rooms had filled with steam so that the reflections in the misted mirrors were ghostly, and people seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Mal moved forward unerringly. People were leaning against the walls and cubicles, watching what was happening on the floor under the spray of half a dozen shower heads… It took me a moment to take in what I saw, the tangle of limbs distorted momentarily into the grotesque before my mind sense of them. A girl was buried beneath the writhing bodies of men.

She looked so… Blissful. My logical mind told me that women took longer to reach orgasm and that we were designed to take multiple lovers, and there was nothing truly sinful about sex or the enjoyment of it if all parties were of an appropriate age to consent and had done so soberly… and yet, here, in this environment, I doubted that her morning would escape the shadow of shame, and I did not envy her that.

Would the moment of pleasure and satiation balance the shame of the morning? Or negate that she had been used by men whose mornings would be free of the same element of shame? For they would be praised for their actions of the night, their lust accepted as normal and acceptable, whilst she would be shunned for hers.

"Yes," Mal said into my ear, his voice rich with lust and appreciation. "It's both glorious… and terrible, isn't it?"

"Yes," I breathed out my echo of the word. "It's… foul," I told him, turning my face away. I did not mean the act of sex, but what I knew would follow in the morning for the girl involved.

His lips dragged along my cheek. "Yes," he agreed. "Because of what they make of it." I looked up at him in surprise, and he laughed, derisively. "What?" He asked, arching a brow. "Did you think I would agree with what happens here? This is not the Devil's work. It is entirely that of Heaven. This is shame in its grotesque distortion. It's humiliation and disgrace. It's giving humankind pleasure and then condemning them for experiencing it. What type of leader does such a thing? And yet, the Devil is humanity's enemy…"

He pulled me out and away, and out of the changeroom, and suddenly we were amongst a group of people toeing the line of the pool preparing to jump in. Mal laughed, wickedly, and tugged me over the edge.

The water was lukewarm, so there was no rude cold shock, however, the pool was so filled with flesh and stroking limbs that for a moment I couldn't determine the surface, and then Mal dragged me out of its depths and pulled me to the edge. As I found my feet below me, he pinned me against the tiles, his hands in my sodden hair, his mouth on mine, the kiss tasting of chlorine, the water running down our faces, and yet still full of fire and desire… And my legs wrapped around his hips as he ground his cock against me whilst his tongue ravaged mine.

He reached between us, tearing away my underwear, and I watched the lace sink behind him as he thrusted against me, his cock behind the barrier of cloth that his trousers provided. Both our hands tangled at his fly, our eyes meeting…

Suddenly his attention shifted, his expression moving from desire to annoyance. I was hauled from the water onto the edge of the pool, and I sprawled in shock, looking up at Ender, whose dark cloak whipped out behind him as if stirred by a wind that didn't touch me. He crouched over me, his fingers touching the edge stones, his eyes on Mal, his legs splayed as if he'd fallen from a great height.

Mal sank back into the waves, disappearing under the surface into the froth of lust, and Ender gripped my wrist, hauling me to my feet and dragging me out of the steaming, seething environment of the pool room, into the coolness of the night.

As I doubled over, gasping for air, Ender took off his cloak and wrapped it around me, pulling me against his chest, his arms around me, his gaze on the poolroom that we had left, and his heart hammering.

"Ender," I said, looking up at him, shocked and uncertain if I had imagined the whole thing as I was feeling the drag of marijuana intoxication, alcohol, and something else…? Perhaps someone had managed to slip something into my drink despite my trying to prevent it.

"Nyx," he looked down at me, his expression softening, and cupped my cheek with his palm. "I am sorry."

"About what?" I was confused.

"I'll…" His eyes went to the pool room. "I'll take you home."

He scooped me up into his arms as if I were weightless and began to walk into the night-dark gardens. I shivered within his cloak. His body had not warmed the cloth, and I was too wet to warm it myself. The cold sucked at my energy, winding in with the effects of the marijuana, the cocktail on an empty stomach that I was beginning to suspect had been dosed right under my watchful eye…

"I don't know what happened," the words were stuttered around trembling breath as I shook in a combination of reaction and chill.

"Things are… complicated, Elenyx," he said softly. "You were caught in the game of those who care not for the innocent that they wound in seeking their desires. Do not let this night weigh upon your mind."

We were walking through the gardens of Vossen House as if he had simply walked over the valley through the air. Some trick of magic, I thought, although I was fairly certain that such advanced magic was either impossible or forbidden. Perhaps grim reapers were the exception as they crossed the veil in the course of their duty and needed to travel vast distances in mere moments.

Or perhaps I was more affected by the night than I thought as we were suddenly in my bedroom without me having been aware of passing through any door into or room of the house. He stripped my wet clothes off me and slid naked into the bed beside me, wrapping his arms around me, his fingers tangled in my hair, cupping my skull as he held me to his chest.

"Sleep Nyx," his voice rumbled through his throat and chest, a murmur that teased the focus from my eyes and the tension from my body. Without my wet clothes on, my body had heated the blankets and him, creating a warm nest. It was so wonderful to lie skin to skin with him, the incense that clung to his hair breathed in upon every inhalation and his heart under the palms of my hands.

"I'm sorry," I remembered kissing Mal, not once but several times, the wicked spice of his tongue and the hard heat of his body against mine. I would have had sex with him in the water, I realized with shocked shame. I had been caught in the atmosphere of decadence and depravity, and for a moment it had seemed almost inevitable that we would join in.

Ender pressed his lips to the crown of my head and spoke into my hair. "There are things that… I cannot tell you." He whispered. "Things that cannot be spoken of. You were not to blame for this night, Elenyx. You were the plaything of one who has reason to meddle in my affairs. It is best… To just forget what took place. Just forget and sleep, Nyx."

I slipped into sleep on an exhale and woke in the morning alone with a bracelet of hair to match the ring on my finger. I examined it closely. It was so cunningly woven that there was no join that I could see and sat so close to the skin that I could not slip a finger under it. The only way to remove it would be with a knife, and slicing through the artwork of the braiding would be a travesty.

Ender's hair, of that I was certain, the weavings made by magic. Were they the love tokens that I had first thought of the ring, or something more? Some sort of talisman of protection?

I felt my cheeks heat as I remembered the night at Pinegrove Academy, Mal, and the pool - and rolled facedown into the pillows before pounding my fist in sheer frustration into the mattress. "Damn it, Nyx," I cursed myself.

So what? I asked myself. So what? I had kissed Mal. What had Ender said? "You were caught in the game of those who care not for the innocent that they wound in seeking their desires. Do not let this night weigh upon your mind."

Was he implying that Mal wasn't all that he appeared?

"Nyx!" Fennel called from below. "Breakfast!"

Shit.