Everything is Magic When I’m With You
It’s way past the witching hour when Nix wraps the rose-colored couch-blanket around his shoulders and slides the patio door open. The October breeze blows the scent of fallen leaves and the hoot of an owl across the backyard. Thankful for its cozy warmth, as he’s currently as naked as the day he was born, and it would be a chilly walk to the Art House without it.
Nix wonders where the term witching hour comes from, whether it was coined by magic users or simply regular humans. Either way, it just feels right.
The trees sway and the branches creak, casting their skeletal arms up into the clear midnight sky. The stars overhead are almost eclipsed by the brightness of the Hunter’s Moon.
It’s easy to see where he’s going, thanks in part to that moon, and in part to the stepping stones Jamie had put in last year. Some of them have small luminescent lights built in when they cast them, and if you stand just right on a night where there’s no moon, you can almost imagine the path is a celestial roadway to somewhere divine.
Maybe it really is.
Nix chuckles at his own flight of fancy because on a practical note, no one but family knows that the stones are the only way to get to and from the Art House in the middle of the night without setting off the security pressure markers scattered throughout the yard.
The path was born of necessity after Grayson had set off the house alarms more than once when he’d stumbled back toward the house, tiredand coming down from his creative or his magical high (sometimes it was both.) The walk often proved enough to shake him out of his stupor so that the alarm to the house was no problem. But his meandering had to be curtailed in order to prevent Nix’s Sentinel colleagues from finding the artist naked under a floodlight, covered in paint, after setting off an intruder alarm in the middle of the night.
It happened four separate times before Arlo had suggested the path—much to the disappointment of the night watch team who responded to the calls. Nix thought it was because Arlo might have intercepted some of Rowan’s not-so-subtle threats for them to keep their eyes to themselves.
Nix had been impressed the threats had been in writing, not delivered in person in the form of the Wolf meeting them in the yard, fully shifted.
It takes mere moments along the path before Nix has his hand on the vintage brass doorknob in the shape of a helichrysum that Finn had given Grayson for Christmas last year. He’d found it in an antique shop, and the proprietor had claimed it was from the door to Claude Monet’s studio from his early years on the Rue de Lavoisier. It was romantic and thoughtful—as Finn so often is—and Grayson had cried every time he’d gone in or out of the Art House for weeks afterward, once it had been installed.
Weirdly, it always feels warm when Nix holds it in his hand no matter the time of year, and although he hasn’t ever told anyone, he thinks it’s the love Finn imbued it with when he’d carried it in his briefcase on a seven-city European lecture tour.
Candles light the main studio space, when Nix slips inside instead of the bright “daylight”-style lights Leo had insisted were all the rage for modern studio spaces.
Grayson prefers the candles for nights when he’s painting with his soul rather than his mind. There is something about being a Fire Affinity—the flames feed his magic.
Nix always knows when Grayson is using his magic to paint; the feeling is unmistakable. And tonight, it was that intense magical draw through their soul that had him crawling out from Leo’s bed—where he and Finn had crashed after family game night—because their family nest was overrun with the rest of their pack, grown-ups and children alike.
Grayson had escaped after the last game to finish a personal piece he’d been working on, but not for his show at The Nashville Guild, where he will soon beteaching.Nix is so proud of his mate’s Master status. After all the years of work he’s put into harnessing his magic—and all the crazy ups and downs—he can now use it to add beauty to the world, all while teaching the newest magic users to do the same. Yes, some of his new novices are Were—just a handful really, but times are changing, and they are alive to see it.
“Gray?” Nix whispers.
He’s quiet, not because he could actually sneak up on his soulmate, but because seeing the Art House cloaked in candlelight like this always takes him back to the night he and Grayson completed their bond. A frisson of desire coils low in his gut, a Pavlovian response conditioned over years with several such special “dates” and anniversaries.
His soulmate is a vision standing shirtless at his easel, still in the black trousers he’d worn to The Guild and then for a game ofTwisterand charades. His lean torso glows in the candlelight, his skin golden from the last few warm days in the pool and their recent vacation to Bali for Jamie’s thirty-fifth birthday.
Good-fucking-times—literally.
He looks up from his work, and Nix is filled with such desire that he has to lock his knees from the force of it. Black hair flows past his broad shoulders, while glittering blue eyes shoot heat into Nix’s core.
It’s not new, how could it be?Not after all this time.
But the desire Nix feels for all his mates has only grown over the years, and Sunday nights remain a treasured night of debauchery in the Rhodes household to this day. Nix spares a thought about whether they’ll still have Sunday night “pack bonding” when they’re a hundred years old.
He hopes so.
But nights like this are rarer than he’d like, these days, and Nix is glad he braved the autumn wind and followed his soul bond into the night.
“Angel,” Grayson smiles. “Why aren’t you still in bed? It’s too cold.” Heholds out a paint-covered hand in invitation, and Nix doesn’t hold himself back.
Grayson’s hand sinks into his hair and down around his neck before he draws Nix up into a lingering kiss. It’s not gentle, as he pulls Nix’s lower lip up between his teeth, sucking on it before pulling away with a slickpop. Their mouths are a hair’s breadth apart when Grayson languorously opens his eyes.
Holding his gaze, Nix lets his fingers wander across those cut-glass hips, imagining the candlelight painting them in shadows. He continues dragging his sensitive fingertips up over those incredible abs, to his nipple piercings, which he flicks with his thumbs.
“I’m not cold now.”
“Fucking hot is what you are,” Grayson groans, before diving back in for another kiss, this time using his hand to hold Nix’s jaw, licking in deep. The taste of basil and patchouli are like magic on Nix’s tongue.
