Why torment her with pain when I could make her ache with sexual desire?
I wanted her bent over my desk, slick with desire. I wanted to see her writhing, moaning in erotic torment beneath me. I’d make her throb with a sexual ache so deep that she’d tell me anything I wanted. The fact that she despised me would only make her desire all the sweeter.
My breathing quickened as I started to speak in her mind. It was a god’s voice, one she couldn’t hear in normal words. She only knew that heat was swooping though her body. Already, I could hear her pulse racing. Her chest started rising and falling faster, pupils dilated.
My eyes flicked down to her perfect breasts, her nipples straining against the wet fabric. When her full lips parted, I imagined what it would feel like to kiss her, my tongue mingling with hers. Her body temperature rose, her blood pounding.
My mind danced with the image of Aenor crossing to my desk, unbuttoning her shorts. Her eyes would burn with lust, and she’d wonder why she couldn’t control herself…
But with the look she was giving me, I could see right away that it wasn’t true lust in her eyes. Her body might be warming with magical desire, but her hatred for me cut through it like a blade of ice.
And that look in her eyes snapped me out of my trance.
I gritted my teeth, mastering control of myself.
What the hells was getting into me? What was that?
I was turning into the Salem of old, the animal with a rapacious appetite for sex and violence. The one who lost focus at the slightest provocation. No—not really. Even in those days, I hadn’t used this sort of magic to control women. There was no skill in that. Where was the glory in magical seduction?
I took a deep sip of my cognac, nearly draining it. Aenor had only been with me a few moments, and already I was losing control. The old beast was rising in me.
Don’t lose sight of your destiny. The goddess Anat had given me a deadline, and I’d keep to it. After October thirty-first, when the darker half of the year began, it would all be over.
Once I’d mastered myself again, I began walking around Aenor, sweeping closer.
“Tell me exactly what you remember from that day. You trapped someone under the sea. Where was it?”
She closed her eyes, her breathing growing even faster. She definitely hated my invading her mind, but she was powerless to stop it. Her chest rose and fell fast, and my gaze dipped to it.
“It was midsummer.” Her fingernails dug into her palms. “We had a big midsummer festival. You know how it goes. Apple groves, alcohol, dancing. People mating in the grass. Not me. I never did…” Her fingers dug deeper into her palms. “Well, there was one time—”
“I don’t care who you did or did not mate with.” Oddly, that was a lie. The idea of her locked in another man’s embrace filled me with a strange sort of rage, but I wasn’t going to examine that now. “Just tell me about when you slammed the ocean down on someone with immense magical power. That’s what interests me.”
“That night, I drank blueberry wine, and dandelion, then blackberry…”
“I get the idea. All varieties of wine. Move on to the part where you drowned someone?”
“The point is, my mom had given me all the wine. It was almost like she didn’t want me to know entirely what was going on. She didn’t want me asking too many questions, or knowing who we were trapping. She summoned me from the festival, and she had a boat waiting. She said someone was coming for Ys. Or… more than one person. She said our island would burn. It’s just like now, with the Fomorians.
“And there was only one way to save the island,” she went on. “And we had to act fast. We took the boat out to a smaller island, far out to sea—”
“What island?”
She shook her head, her jaw clenched like she was trying to keep her secrets. “I don’t know. I remember rocks and grass? It was somewhere between Britain and Ireland. I’d been throwing up over the side of the boat for the whole journey. Maybe we were in the Celtic Sea or the English Channel. Anyway, we docked on a small island. I mean, very small. A mile, maybe. And off the coast, a glowing cage bobbed in the waves. Someone was in it. I couldn’t see who.”
“Go on.”
Her nails dug deeper into her skin, drawing a little bit of blood. I wanted her to stop that, but I thought my magic was causing it.
Maybe she couldn’t enchant me, but Aenor was already getting into my head.
10
Salem
She opened her eyes, but they looked unfocused. “Then Mama grabbed me by the shoulders. She said, ‘Aenor, I know you can’t always handle all the power that the gods gave you.’” Aenor’s accent had shifted, from American to a lilting Cornish. “‘I know you feel like you’re drowning in your magic sometimes. But the gods gave it to you for a reason, and you have a destiny. And this is it.’”
Her eyes focused again, sharpening on me. “Then my mother pointed at the driftwood cage. It was glowing in the sea. She told me if I didn’t sink it, then Ys would be lost forever. I had to compel the ocean to cover it for good, so it could never rise again.”
“And that was all it took for you.”
She wiped a shaking hand across her mouth, like she was trying to stop herself from speaking. I saw a glimpse of the streak of blood on her palm, and my throat tightened.
“No. Like I said, I did a spell for myself. Back when I had my magic, I could do little spells to see the future. Or the possibilities of the future. I called them what if spells. I wanted to see what would happen if we let this fae do what he wanted. And what I found was pure destruction.”
“Is that so?” How very wrong you are.
“He was going to destroy Ys first, then the world beyond. Do you know what I saw?” Her voice had gone low, intense. “I saw seas boiling and drying up. I saw the future—a column of rock crushing my own skull, blood leaking over the hot marble. And all the little children of Ys turned to dust and blew away on the wind. Then the destruction moved on to the rest of the world, leaving a trail of death.”
She took a deep, shaking breath. She really believed this.
“So I did what they asked,” she went on. “We were the protectors of the sea, it was our job to keep it safe. Just like it’s my job to stop the Fomorians now. It’s the same thing, and somehow, it’s all connected to you.”
“And you’ve based this on your what if spell.”
“It’s never been wrong. I’d do one now, but you haven’t given me my power back. So yes, I used my power over the sea to drag your friend to the bottom of the ocean. I buried that cage, because I had to. And it’s still there.”
I felt a wild impulse to believe her, against my better judgment. And yet I knew the woman she’d drowned—a goddess who had no desire to burn anything. Coldness slid through my veins as I thought of her alone under the sea. If I’d known she was still alive down there, I’d have come for her sooner.
“What did she say when you drowned her?” I asked.
Aenor now looked completely alert. “She? She didn’t say a thing when I pulled her under the waves. I didn’t know she was female. All my mother’s enemies were men.” Her expression was resolute. “But I know what I saw with my what if spell. And if you unleash her on the world, she’ll burn it.”