Page 121 of Bedeviled

And that silly, giddy feeling grows and grows until I feel like I can’t fully contain it all.

“Tell me something important to you,” he says as I lie sweaty in his arms.

“My education,” I say immediately. Because for the longest time, it was such a fight to simply achieve what many other witches took for granted—admission into a coven.

Memnon smiles at me, his eyes twinkling with true affection, and I want to melt, I want to die, I want this moment to never ever end.

“What?” I finally say when his expression lingers.

He shakes his head, his grin only growing. “You had the same drive when you were Roxilana. Always learning, always striving.”

I feel a twinge then; it’s something more hopeful than nostalgia, but it makes me feel strange.

I clear my throat. “Tell me something important to you,” I say, turning the question back on him.

“This,” he admits, his hand pressing into my soft skin. “Seeing you, feeling what you do to me.” I see his delicate swallow. “My power takes so much. I’ve become afraid it will…” He shakes his head, like voicing the thought might speak it into existence.

I frown as I search his features. “You’re afraid it will one day take your feelings for me?” I guess.

He shakes his head vehemently. “No. We—you and I, my queen—we are eternal.” He says it with the conviction of a believer, his smoky amber eyes steady on me.

And yet, I didn’t imagine his fear.

He must hear my thoughts because he says, “It is so easy to hate, est amage. So, so easy. Especially for me. My magic thrives on it. And yet looking at you, I feel like I’m alive again. You are the only thing that makes me feel something else.”

He kisses me then, but he doesn’t stop at my lips. He moves to the skin near my ear and presses a kiss there, and maybe I hear a stray thought of his, or maybe the touch simply dredges up an old memory, but I realize he’s deliberately kissing the freckles he told me of back when I didn’t remember who he was. His lips move down the column of my neck, and then he’s kissing my collarbone, my breasts, my arms, my sternum. All of it painfully intimate. The sort of intimacy that would have had me running even weeks ago. I’m free-falling into it now.

His mouth is still moving over my flesh when I hear a dull noise coming from the bathroom.

I pause, tilting my head, the sound somewhat familiar. A few seconds later, I hear it again. And again.

My phone.

The previous night rushes back like a bad dream, shattering the idyllic morning.

“Seven fucking hells,” I swear, sliding out of the bed and dashing into the bathroom. In there, tucked away in my discarded pants pocket is my cell phone. There’s notification upon notification on my phone—from Kane, my parents, Sybil, even Olga and two other coven sisters.

But perhaps worst of all is the email that I catch a snippet of.

I clutch my phone and return to our bedroom.

Memnon is already out of bed, a pair of low-slung pants pulled on.

“I have to get back to Henbane,” I tell him dazedly.

Memnon’s gaze flicks over my face. “Did something else happen?”

I exhale a shuddering breath. “I think my school might be closing.”

Henbane is in an uproar when Nero and I arrive. Swarms of Politia vehicles are parked along the paved road into the school, along with EMT vehicles that bear the logo of the House of Keys, the supernatural world’s governing body. Reporters from Lunar Times, The Grimm Guardian, and a couple other supernatural news outlets are scattered along the school’s front lawn, and a makeshift podium has been set up where, at this very moment, someone speaks, a crowd gathered around them.

Witches on broomsticks dart about overhead, and there’s a haze of colored magic congesting the skies.

I haven’t dared to pull out my phone again or clicked on any of the notifications. Somehow they make the situation more real than even what I’m seeing right now.

Several officers stand in front of Ravensmeade, notepads in hand. Across from them are coven sisters, their arms folded tightly against their bodies, like they might be able to physically hold themselves together.

I swallow as I take it all in. I glance down at Nero. “Maybe we’ll enter our house later.” When it looks a little less like a crime scene.