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I snickered and said, “No. I think it went rather well. In fact, I think we should do this more often. Maybe that will keep my monster satisfied.”
“I don’t mind being satisfied this way.” He kissed my forehead.
“Let me rephrase that.” I lifted a bit and looked at his beautiful face and said, “Your monster. This will keep your monster satisfied.”
“I do want to keep my monster happy.” He ran a finger along my cheek and said, “And for the safety of myself and everyone around us I will make it my personal mission to ensure you are satisfied as often as you need to be.”
I laughed and snuggled up to him again. “I love you. You know that, right?”
He squeezed me tighter and said, “I hoped. I’ve… loved you since you backed your ass into my horns in that library.”
I laughed again. “You liked it.”
He laughed with me that time and as I drifted in and out of sleep, I considered my future with Braz. Everything I knew about him, about me, about our goals for the future. Maxine was right. I might be a monster, but I was not going to be the bad monster. I was going to be the hero in this story, I just needed to convince the dean.
* * *
Two weeks wentby and I actually enjoyed the time in my room. I hung out with Maxine and Braz. I studied. I practiced the meditation from chapter three. I did a little workout and I summoned the book from my father’s bookshelf that I now understood was his dissertation. No doubt this is why the crystal ball in my closet was chirping for attention. I pulled it out and placed it on my desk. “Hello, Father.”
“Hello, Darling. I wasn’t sure I’d catch you in your dorm. We… haven’t heard from you for a few weeks so… I thought we should check in.”
“Did Professor Dunlap contact you about what happened?” I asked and waited a beat for him to respond since he was obviously thinking about what to say to me.
“No, but… I have friends who also have children there and…”
“And they don’t believe your theory anymore, do they?” I asked. Was this about me or the book I had in my hand and the fact that he had not tamed the succubus he was now married to and had three children with. She had tamed him. She had hoped that I only had magic in my blood. She was feeding off of his magic and mine and my aunts every time we did something in the human realm. “How is Mother?”
“Worried.” He at least had the decency to admit that. “This realm is basic, simple, not a lot of magic here so she can remain calm, feed just enough to sustain herself, primarily off the magic I provide and that garden you made for her.”
“Why won’t she talk to me like this, on the crystal ball?” I asked.
“Because she may get the… magic lust that she has been fighting for many years. Much like a warrior can get blood lust and lose themselves to the battle, the fight, the killing, she… may absorb magic, Darling, but magic can also fill a succubus to the point of breaking.”
That explained why I was using magic in the dome. I had to do something with all of it and didn’t know I was consuming so conjuring things helped me process. “So why did you let them bring me here? I could do magic fine in the human realm, basic witch stuff. I get here and I can’t even find a book on a shelf without reorganizing half the stacks. Then… it just started clicking and things started to get easy for me.” I shook my head. “I should have known something was wrong with me then.”
“No. No, Darling. Nothing is wrong with you. You… are exceptional. You always have been, but it wasn’t until your magic developed that others could see it, but they didn’t believe how special you were. I thought it was just the generational thing. Some of the Easternwinds get stronger powers than others. Knowing your mother was not really just a human led me to think that undercurrent of her species boosted your powers when you got adjusted. Apparently, you just had to… relearn what to feed on. But you found out. You figured it out before anything bad happened.”
“I turned an entire team of hunters into children.” I blinked at him.
“All men are children, you projected their actions onto them. You didn’t murder them, slaughter them. You didn’t even make them remain that way until they grew up again. You could have done a lot worse than startle them with childhood for a few minutes.” He was animated and serious. I guess Maxine was right since my father didn’t seem to think there was a problem. “I know your mother scared them. The realm. She was… in the woods, I couldn’t keep her in the dorm and she liked to hunt there so… one day… it was a miscommunication.”
My mother was the monster in the great forest. She was the one who ensured those two hopefuls did not return to play the game. I frowned. “She—”
“She did what they did, react to a threat. Only, nothing about their being was enough to withstand her pull and when she got a taste of one monster… she… couldn’t stop. Couldn’t. So we came to Earth where there are no monsters like that.”
“But there are monsters.” I thought back and then my eyes went wider.
“We live in a very safe neighborhood. All the children are safe. She doesn’t go beyond our town and our town is right outside of the city where there is no shortage of criminals to sustain her without alerting the authorities.” He justified every bit of what I already knew to be true just from the way I remembered her watching the news.
“Would she be able to… eat them all?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but we will never find out. Understand? Part of being here is the fact that she can sustain. She cannot return to her realm because she left with me, saved me, a prisoner who went to a place he had no right to be in and came back acting as though it all went to plan. They think I brought her with me as part of my experiment. She brought me back to them because she fell in love with me. She was supposed to kill me. Study me and then put an end to my life.” He was being honest and candid in a way that touched my heart because what he was also letting me know is that I was probably never going to be able to come home again.
“Father, am I… a danger to her?” I asked.
“She would be a danger to you, Darling. Now that you have absorbed so much magic that your aura is glowing so bright and pink, I… will be able to see you when I visit your grandmother. I’ll bring your brother and sister. I’m sure there is a place for you at the headquarters for the family business. I expanded us to this realm, but we are all family.”
He was painting his own idealistic picture of a life I would not be living.
