Chapter Thirty-Eight

Havermouth, Present Time

Cameron reached over to the bedside lamp and turned it on, bathing them with a golden glow. He sat up, his back to her, his legs over the end of the bed, and his feet on the floor. The muscles of his back shifted, displaying the power of years of active manual labour, and his biceps bunched as he ran his hands through his hair, ruffling the russet curls.

“Maybe Rhett’s right,” he said under his breath.

“About what?” She asked wearily. She was done, just done with the day, she thought. She hurt in so many ways and places and felt as if Rhett had stripped her raw of every belief in her freedom. Her heart was an open, weeping wound.

“Maybe, we do need to… just break the rules and talk. He’s told us, time and time again, that you’re not… That you’re…” He struggled to say it. “Not normal,” he concluded. “Like we’re… not what you would think of as normal. Maybe… Maybe we just need to say, fuck it, this is how we’re… that we aren’t…”

“Normal,” she prompted, impatiently.

“Yeah.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Rhett says… said… that you know. You’ve known all this time, since we were teenagers.”

“Is it like… taboo?” She was intrigued, despite her physical discomfort. “To know?”

Cameron made a sound deep in his throat. “Yes,” he said, looking away. “Yes, absolutely. Forbidden to speak of. It’s one of the first things that we learn. Not to talk to others, that are not like us, about us.”

“Werewolves,” she said, and enjoyed how the muscles on his back tensed. “Yes, I fucking well know, and have known for over five years. Plus, Rhett partially shifted in my hallway the other day. Whilst you and Heath were in the kitchen cleaning up the coffee.”

“Did he?” He turned fully, his eyes wide. “Fuck. He didn’t say.”

“He sort of locked inside of me because of it,” she continued to lay her barbs. “So, it was really noticeable.” She saw his expression and knew that words would be said between the two men. She was maliciously gleeful for causing the dissent between them. “But you knew that I knew. You told me that you were my mates.”

“Fuck,” he grimaced and hunched his shoulders. “I know that I did. I was sort of… testing you, you know? To see how you would react.”

“Fine,” she was irritable enough not to care anymore. “What did my reaction tell you?” What could they do to her, anyway, she thought, that was worse than abducting her, piercing her, and tattooing her? “Heath also shifted in front of me, right before he raped me at the kitchen bench. But why stop there? Vampires run Zeus Forest Works. Most of this town are werewolves… Most might be an exaggeration,” she amended. “Most of the rich people in this town are werewolves. Fixed it. You, Rhett, and Heath are werewolves.”

“And what are you?” He demanded, turning, and rising to his feet. The golden light and the fall of shadow made his appearance dramatic, catching in the reddish-tinge of his hair, and the stubble just fighting its way free of his skin on his jaw, the hair across his chest, picking out the furrows and rises of his muscles, the broadness of his shoulders, the tight muscles of his stomach, and the v line of muscle over his hips that led to his very hard cock…

Fuck it, she thought, covering her eyes with her forearm defensively, it was not fair that the Triquetra looked as they did. If you lick it, you bought it, she thought to herself, and man, had she licked it as a teen, and it was tempting to do so again as an adult. “Aislen, I am Aislen,” she replied.

He reached into the drawer and pulled out the condoms. He placed them on the bed between them, leaving his hand on the package, as if not entirely sure that he wanted to surrender them. Their presence between them on the bed was a symbolism for the fledgling sexuality that had driven them apart, she thought. “That’s not all,” he said quietly.

She reached out and touched her fingertips to his hand, his thoughts tumbling into her. He suspected what she was, edging around the word. Even in the supernatural world, they did not encounter her kind often (Or at all really...) and he wasn’t entirely sure if they were myth. He wanted, instead, to call her a witch – those the werewolves had encountered before and knew to be true.

“I was trained by witches,” she said, “In Rideten, whilst I was studying art. My roommate was a witch and I studied what I could with her coven. But I am not one, and much of what they do… just doesn’t work the same for me.”

His inhalation was sharp, his thoughts scattering as he tried to make sense of it… “You can… You know what I am thinking,” he said. “Heath suspected it, Rhett… Rhett was convinced. You know too much, and yet no one ever seems to talk to you.”

Telepath, surfaced in his mind like a bubble rising, picturing a popular movie about one.

“Not really,” she said. “It’s… not like that. It’s more like… Those wise women who can read your fortune from your tea leaves, or palms… It’s not like… It’s not like I can just decide that I am going to dig through your thoughts and find out everything that you know. A mind isn’t like an index card. Things don’t flow logically. People think things that have no context – you get a moment, a flash, a word or two…

“It’s more like… walking into a room where someone’s having a conversation and you catch five seconds of it without having talked to either person before. I don’t know them, I don’t know what came before, or what came after… or, at least, not comprehensively,” she paused. “Sometimes I see the past and maybe the future… But it’s not…”

“Fuck,” he said softly. “What does this mean?” He mused on the question. “Why you?”

“A question that I’ve been asking myself since I turned thirteen,” she replied dryly and released his hand. “I’m tired and fucking sore. And yes, I have a good idea what you are up to. Heath told me that you’re going to try to break me. Well, this bitch isn’t so easily broken, so give it your best shot. But I’ll get you back for everything,” she tore open the condom package and reached inside the box. “In the meantime, you can put your cock to good use, carefully. We’ll both sleep better for having gotten off.”

He took the pouch from her and turned it over between his fingers, his shoulders hunching. “You can read thoughts by touch,” he said almost too quietly to be heard. “There was… There was always what we were saying and what we were thinking and feeling, and you knew. You could see those private things.”

He was feeling violated, she thought, watching him through narrowed eyes. “You want to know?” She asked him. “That first day? You asked me what happened before. Yes, I was attracted to you. You were… are… gorgeous. I was… I was just about to turn eighteen, and like every other eighteen-year-old virgin, I was horny as anything. And there you were in my classical studies class. Tall, handsome, and with a grin that could knock a girl onto her arse.

“I had no hope,” she told him. “I was… smitten by the time you picked up my books and offered to walk me to my next class, because, after all, I didn’t know the way. You took me there, and gave me back the books, and our fingers brushed…”

“I remember,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“And I saw, clearly, in the coarsest and most graphic of details, in your mind, how you would bend me over the desk in the classroom and fuck me, like an animal… And that was how you saw me in your mind, like an animal, not a werewolf, not your equal… Something to fuck. A hole to fuck.” She said the words through her teeth. “That was what I was in your mind in that moment. Just another human whore, another human slut. Something to make squeal as you took what you wanted.”

“I didn’t…” He swallowed hard and looked away. “I didn’t understand why I wanted you so badly. I was only eighteen, newly eighteen. We don’t reach our sexual maturity until then. And only then do we take mates, connect, and bond to them… I had connected to Heath and Rhett on my eighteenth birthday, but it was different with you… I didn’t understand really.”

“No, I know that.” she admitted. “Werewolves find their mates after they turn eighteen. You already knew Heath and Rhett, so that bond would have immediately snapped into place, and they were both older than you, so they would have known… and you would have known what was coming because they wouldn’t have hidden that from you, right?”

“Right.” His head bowed until his chin rested against his chest. “I fucked it up, didn’t I?” He breathed. “You hated me after that because… Because I didn’t recognize what had happened?”

He had entertained the possibility before, his thoughts, clear in the isolation of the house, in the rawness of the moment, crossing the bubble, despite the fact that they were not touching, revisiting an often-entertained pain. He had frequently lain in the bed and contemplated that the malcontent within the Triquetra, that their loss of her, had been because of him, and the guilt was a heavy burden.

She felt the weight of his feelings on her shoulders. “I was… scared,” she whispered the words. “I hadn’t even kissed a boy at that stage. I didn’t know what to do with what you were thinking. My reaction was to… to run and not show my own inexperience,” she admitted. “To protect myself.”

“I would like to think,” he closed his eyes and lifted his face to the ceiling, seeking control of his emotions. “I would like to think that you wouldn’t have needed to protect yourself from me. But… I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have done if you had… If you had... trusted me. I would like to think that if you had, I would have… taken care of you. But I was… I was young, and stupid, and full of myself,” he confessed heavily. "And girls were just there to get off with... Nothing more in my head... Until you."

“You would have treated me the same as every other human girl that you had fucked with before,” she predicted. “As something to fuck and then dispose of.”

He shook his head. “You weren’t like them.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that, when you treated me so much worse after…” She pointed out.

“I…” He met her eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Let me go,” she pleaded. “Let me go, Cameron. This is not going to end in happiness for anyone in this house. Just look... Look at what you have already done to me. Can you imagine, in any of your ideas of the future, this situation resulting in a happy, balanced relationship that you would want to bring children into? Darling son or daughter, yes, your mother is our sexual slave. We abducted and mutilated her…”

“We didn’t mutilate you,” he was immediately defensive, withdrawing from her physically, stepping back. “Mutilation is different.”

“You shoved metal through my nipples and clit, and permanently marked my skin with your initials and symbols, without my consent,” she told him through her teeth. “If I tied you to a bed and did the equivalent of what you have done to me, what would you call it?”

He looked away, and for a hopeful moment she thought that she had reached him. And then he sat back on the bed and turned out the light. “You don’t understand us,” he said as he laid back down. “You have never understood us.”

“You are right,” she agreed, and threw the condoms across the dark room, the sound of them hitting the wall in the darkness satisfying. “Because you are arseholes, and I am not. Fuck you, Cameron Edison. You will have to fucking rape me to get your cock anywhere near me again in this fucking life, and you’d better watch out. If it’s at all possible to manifest teeth in my cunt, I’ll fucking well do it and bite your fucking cock off if you try to shove it in.”

He swallowed thickly in the darkness. “You are seriously fucked up,” he commented.

“Honey, I have the badge and the five years sober token to go with it,” she replied grimly. “You have no idea of the fucked up shit I will unleash on this fucking hell hole of a town when I get away from you… and I will, I will get away. One way or another, I will find my way free of you three fucking arseholes. And when I do…” She chuckled ruefully. “I will make you pay.”