SUCCUBUS RISING 4

Months later, I sat in my room and thought about a wall of metal so thick nothing had a hope of getting through. It took about five minutes for Bane to break through the wall and turn it into a pile of flowers, or a whale, or a car, or any number of things. Finally, he knocked on the door and called, “We’ll stop for today, Jezza. You need to eat and get some rest. We can try again tomorrow.”This had become our routine. We would have breakfast and I would work on the newest set of runes or circles, then before lunch he would quiz me on what I was supposedly learning. After lunch I would go to my room and try to keep him out of my head for as long as possible. So far, my record was four minutes. Four minutes of staring at the ceiling. Then we would have dinner and sleep and do it all over again the next day. I sighed and sat up in the bed.

“Can we try the paint again?” I asked as I moved my food around on my plate knowing it wouldn’t fool him into thinking I had eaten anything.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he set his fork down and looked at me. “Last time you all but humped my hand.”

“It’s the only idea I have at the moment,” I stared at him. “The only reason I kept you out for four minutes before was because I was staring at the ceiling and thinking of the ceiling. Maybe the rune will help me focus or something.”

“I’ll think about it, but succubi don’t have strong shields naturally. They’re gained through years of practice. We’re trying to cram those years into a handful of months.”

“What would it hurt to try? If the worst that happens is I hump your hand, but I still am able to shield with the aid of the rune, then I think it’s worth it.”

“We’ll try it tomorrow,” he took his plate to the sink and then frowned at mine. “You need to eat more.”

“I’m not really hungry.”

“You didn’t eat well at breakfast or lunch, either,” I felt his power touch me then and sighed.

“I’m fine, just not hungry,” I started walking toward my room. “I’ll hold you to your word that we’ll try the paint again tomorrow.”

In my room, I sat on the bed with the binder I had started to keep the runes in. On the flat paper I couldn’t tell what they would look like painted on a body, but I had a pretty good imagination and let it run wild.

I fell asleep dreaming of painting some of the runes on Bane. Over the last few months I had gotten to know his build well enough that I could picture him nude and covered in blue paint. Blue was for power, and he was plenty powerful. In my dreams, I was painted in the red paint of control but I didn’t feel in control. Bane’s eyes began to glow white as my finger traced the tail of rune around his thigh and up toward his hips. Something stirred between us and I saw my power curling around my feet and ankles like some sort of feline.

As my power climbed up my legs, it left a green trail of runes blazing across my skin. Green was for sex, and Bane wouldn’t even allow me to use a green pen or pencil to practice the runes. The runes I saw were intricate and intertwined over my thighs and hips, across my stomach and over my breasts all the way to my hairline. Even my hair was streaked with green. Then I felt a tug and looked over my shoulder at a room full of men with white eyes, and I knew all of them were there for me because I had called them.

I woke with a moan and sat up in the bed. My hands were plain, without a hint of the green glow from the dream. I looked around and sighed when I saw that the room was empty. The clock said it was too late to go back to sleep, so I got up and went to the bathroom for a shower. In the bathroom I pulled the long tank top I had taken to wearing to bed over my head and stopped short when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My breasts had green handprints on them, as though someone covered in paint had grabbed me. I dropped the shirt and walked out of my room toward Bane’s end of the house.

The next sight that made me sure something was wrong was a smear of blue paint on the wall outside of Bane’s room. I knocked, but didn’t wait for an answer before I opened the door and went in. Bane was asleep on the bed, one arm thrown above his head and the sheets rumpled at his feet, and he was completely nude and covered in intricate blue runes.

“Bane,” I whispered, not wanting to startle him awake. When he didn’t move, I tried again, louder this time. “Bane, wake up.”

I reached out and flipped on the lights and that got him to wake up, “What the hell?” He blinked at me as he sat up in the bed. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”

“Look at me,” I said, and his mouth fell open when he saw the green smudges and handprints. “Look at yourself.”

“I told you not to use the green paint, Jezza,” then he swore when he looked down and saw himself covered in blue runes. “How…?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’re lucky your house isn’t filled with horny men right now.”

“What? Why would anybody be in my house?” Then I could feel him in my mind, and I saw the dream again. “Shit.”

I didn’t remember moving, I was just in front of Bane, tracing the runes that curled over his shoulders. The paint was smooth and dry, but it didn’t flake under my touch. My fingers slid up his neck to his cheek and he lifted his face to look at me. “This isn’t good, is it?”

“Probably not,” he said.

“But you’re not stopping me.” One rune ended right at the corner of his mouth, and I slid my finger over his bottom lip. His breath was hot on my fingertip as he sighed at the light touch. I took a step closer and he opened his legs so I could stand between them. “Am I still dreaming?”

“No,” he slid his hands over my hips and pulled me against his chest. Sitting, his eyes were about level with my chin, but that changed when he lifted me and made me straddle his legs. My power stirred and curled through me as his mouth caught mine, but it was different, slower somehow. It reached out to him and found his power and wrapped it around us.

I felt him harden under me and moaned against his mouth as I rocked my hips. His hands tightened and held my hips still as he broke the kiss. “Why’d you stop?”

“We can’t do this,” he hadn’t moved that far away and his lips moved lightly against mine as he spoke. “You need to wait for someone else.”

“I don’t want to wait, and I don’t want anyone else,” my power flexed inside me and for the first time I felt I might be able to control what happened. I looked at him, but then gasped and pulled my hands from his shoulders. We both stared as runes began to trace red lines from my fingertips to my elbows.

He caught my hand in one of his and turned it to press a kiss into my palm, making me sigh. Then the runes flashed and turned a dark purple. I didn’t know what that meant, but I caught a brief glimpse of something on his face that told me he knew what the purple meant before his own runes glowed brighter and he rolled us onto the bed. His hips pressed me into the bed as he bent to capture my mouth again for a rough but too brief kiss. “Are you sure?”

I nodded, not really trusting my voice or sure of what he was asking. I had a feeling he meant more than just if I was sure I wanted to have sex with him. That, I was more than sure of, and made as plain as I could with a move of my hips against him. Bane groaned and kissed me again, all but falling on me in his need. But in order to kiss me he couldn’t do anything else, so he propped himself up on his arm above me and used one hand on the back of my knee to pull my thigh up before plunging into me. I moaned and felt my power pulse when he was completely sheathed in me.

His eyes began to glow white as he stared down at me and started to move. I could almost see our power racing through the air above us as it twisted together until it felt like one unit. Then all that power flowed back into us and he shoved himself to the end of me with a roar as I screamed into his shoulder. He thrust a few more times making me writhe and moan against him before pulling out and falling to the bed at my side. When my eyes could focus again I noticed that his runes had changed to match the purple of my own, and a thought flitted through my mind that the color and the change was important but then I fell asleep with his arms around me and I didn’t care.

===

I woke on my stomach with a warm weight beside me and an arm draped across my back. At first, I flashed back to Asher’s bedroom and the arm tightened around me in my brief moment of panic. But Asher never let me sleep in the bed, and his room was never full of sunlight like this. Shit, sunlight meant it was after noon.

“I’m pretty sure Asher wasn’t your mate, either,” Bane rumbled from beside me, his voice still thick with sleep. He pulled me tighter against him when I tensed, “Calm down and go back to sleep.”

“Mate?” I rolled over to look at him.

“The purple runes,” he said, as though that explained everything. “Two days ago, you took me as your mate.” As though to prove his point, he sent power through his hand into my back and my arm lit up like a fucking dark Christmas tree with runes I didn’t recognize.

“So I’m your personal Lite Brite now?”

He huffed and quit the light show, “Only for a little while. It’ll wear off eventually.”

“Does whatever happened wear off with the nifty side effects?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me then, “You said you were sure. I thought you knew what would happen.”

“I was sure I wanted to have sex with you. I didn’t know what all the lights and glowing shit meant. You never told me that could happen,” I was beginning to panic, thinking I had somehow married him or something. I buried my face in a pillow and wondered out loud, “What does this mean?”

“I can’t hear you when you talk to the pillow, Jezza.”

I groaned and looked at him again, “What does this mean? Does this mean we’re married or something?”

“It means you are now a full-fledged succubus, and I am your mate.”

“That last part is what scares me.”

“I know,” he rolled over and sat up. “If I had thought you would take a mate when your power fully awakened I would have made arrangements. As it is, Chaz will be pissed but at least he can’t do anything about it anymore.”

He stood and walked to the bathroom and I watched him with conflicting emotions. Most of me wanted to follow him and have crazy monkey sex in the shower. The rest of me, which was a horribly small part, wanted to dig a hole and hide somewhere. The idea of sex only made the smaller part louder and the larger part more insistent until I was halfway to the bathroom before I realized it and he was already coming out. I found myself staring at his chest and wanting very much to reach out and touch it.

“If you deny what you want right now it’s only going to get worse,” he whispered as he closed the gap between us and pulled me into his arms. “We’re basically going to be that annoying couple who can’t keep their hands to themselves for a while until things even out.”

Just the touch of his skin against mine made a lot of the tension disappear and I sighed. His power flowed into me but instead of feeding on it, my power wrapped it around us and pulled it closer. I cuddled closer to his chest and smelled a sea breeze. That was odd because Bane’s power had never had a scent before.

“We all have a smell or taste to our powers,” I had to lean back a bit to look at him while he talked. “One of my abilities has always been to hide that from people.”

“Why would you need to hide it?”

“Because when I was a lot younger people mistook me for an incubus. It’s why I was trained to bring succubi into their powers. My own power is appealing to yours in a way not many others can boast. I had to learn to hide it.”

“Did you know what was happening?”

“Yes.”

“Could you have stopped it?”

“No. It doesn’t work that way. I could have fought you off for a while, but eventually you would have bound someone as a mate. Better to have a willing one than the alternative.” His hands had been moving over my back for a while, but now they stilled on my shoulders and he pushed me back away from him. “Go take a shower. I’ll be in the office when you’re done. Bring your notebook,” I groaned. “Just because you’re a mated succubus doesn’t mean the training stops. But now you can work on the runes that actually do things when you channel power into them.”

===

My back was pressed against the desk in Bane’s office as I tore another page out of the notebook and threw it into the basket beside me. I had tried sitting in my usual spot in front of him, but I couldn’t touch him from there. It hadn’t taken very long for us to figure out that I needed to touch him every so often just to keep my power from seeking him out. So I sat by his legs and cursed the small rune that was supposed to ignite the paper it was drawn on.

“Calm down,” Bane muttered above me. “Draw the rune, you’ve known this one for a while, and I know you’re not drawing it wrong. Concentrate on it and let your power touch it so it ignites.”

“I’ve been trying that,” I left off the part that every time I tried to channel my power into anything it only went to him.

“Try harder. You’re not concentrating on the rune if you keep touching me,” he rolled his chair to the far side of the desk and I scowled at him before turning back to the fresh page. “Now, draw the rune and then concentrate only on the image.”

The rune was a curving symbol of fire with a circle around it, supposedly to contain the flame when it ignited if I could ever get it to work. The rune was easy enough to draw and I had learned it sometime in the first week of being here, but when I tried to concentrate my power on the symbol it just sought Bane a few feet away. I clamped it back down and tried again, and again it went to Bane. This time it must have touched him because he groaned and stood up, turning away from me to leave the office.

Sighing, I got up and sat in his chair, tossed the notebook to the desk, and stared at it. I could feel him moving through the house, but the farther away he got the more I could concentrate. He was right, we were like that annoying couple nobody liked to have around. I couldn’t think straight with him in the same room, but now that he was out on the patio I was able to push my power toward the rune on the paper. The lines started to glow and then the rune itself burst into flames. I was surprised enough to let out a little squeak and jump to put out the fire on the desk, but it was already out. A perfect circle had been burned into the paper.

“Do it again,” I jumped at the voice that came from the door and looked up to see Chaz leaning against the door frame.

My concentration vanished and suddenly I didn’t think I should be sitting in the chair, or have my hair down or, hell, be wearing jeans. I wanted to be anywhere but in that room with him watching me. He shut the door behind him before sitting in the seat across from me, “Do it again, girl.”

I stared at the paper with its burnt circle in the corner and lifted the pencil to draw another rune. My hand shook so bad that it took me four tries to get the little image right before I concentrated, but this time my power found Chaz instead of the paper and I had to draw it back and try again. At some point I had shoved my fingers into my hair to hold it back as I leaned my elbows on the desk and stared down at the tiny drawing of a flame within a circle. Time after time my power would seek anything but the paper I stared at until I was shaking in my seat.

A hand slid across the top of the desk and tapped the edge of the rune, causing it to burst into flames before it died into a charred circle on the paper. Chaz turned his hand over and on the palm was a scar that resembled the rune, but the circle was missing. I looked up at him and he was too close, so I leaned back in the chair away from him. “Try it again, but don’t think about your power or the paper. Think about the fire.”

He drew the rune this time and got it perfect on the first try before leaning back in his seat and crossing an ankle over his knee. This time when I stared at the paper I imagined the glow the rune had the first time I got it to work and then the fire afterward. Almost as fast as it had when Chaz touched it the rune caught fire and burned a third circle on the paper. I caught a small smile on his face when I looked up and then turned when Bane walked in.

“Why are you here, Chaz?” Bane pulled a chair around the desk to sit next to me, putting one hand on my knee.

“I came to tell you Asher has been caught by the council and to check on my slave,” he glanced at me. “Or former slave, as it seems to be.”

“Asher was caught?” I asked, forgetting the fear of punishment for a moment and looking at Bane. “Did you already know?”

“I came back to tell you,” he lifted the paper with the burned circles and then looked at Chaz. “You didn’t make the trip just for that, Chaz. A text would have done the job.”

“Do you really think I wouldn’t feel her power? The pull was strong enough that I’m surprised you didn’t drag every weak male within a fifty mile radius into an orgy.”

“Not for lack of trying. The wards kept them out,” Bane sighed. “That’s still not a good enough excuse for you to be here.”

“How many hit your wards that night?” Chaz was leaning forward in his chair again, hands resting on the desk. I looked at Bane because this was the first I’d heard of anything like this happening.

“Ten or fifteen,” came the reply. “I think some of them snapped out of it before they got this far.”

“Not all of them were weak, though. At least not what we think is weak. I’ve had calls from two different council members,” Chaz sighed and leaned back in the seat, running a hand over his face. “Leon and Nevo are pushing to call her in front of the council, Bane. There hasn’t been a succubus like her in several centuries, and not in the living memory of our current council.”

Bane’s hand tightened on my leg until I squirmed and he removed it, “They can’t call a mated succubus in front of the council.”

“Mated?” Chaz looked between us and groaned. “That would actually explain a lot. They can call a mated succubus to chambers if her owner or mate agree to it.”

“I won’t agree,” I was trying to watch both of them, but then stared at Bane.

“Why can’t they call a mated succubus to chambers?” Their conversation had been beyond me for a few sentences already. I still had no clue who or what the council was, or why they would want to talk to me.

“It takes a lot of power for a succubus to claim a mate, more power than the council generally knows what to do with,” Chaz cursed as Bane spoke, and I paid more attention. “You called enough power up when you claimed me that even the most powerful among us felt the pull, at least in this area. They can’t hope to control you if you actually do answer a summons.”

“What does that mean?” I asked out loud, but inside I was doing a little dance. If having a mate meant I didn’t have to meet the council members for a while, I could be happy with that. It’s about the little things.

Bane hand slid back onto my thigh, “It doesn’t mean you’re protected from them completely, but they’ll leave us to ourselves for a while.”

“You’ll have to set up contracts with her,” Chaz said, standing and moving toward the door. “Even a new binding needs to be stretched, and her power will need more experiences.”

I looked between them before settling on Bane as the better choice. I so did not want to be contracted out if it was going to be anything like the contracts with Asher. Bane flinched at the thought and squeezed my leg to calm me. His power spread through me in a soothing wave and I sighed.