Genuine reader feedback: “There were many moments when sex scenes actually made sense for AE but were ‘skipped’… enrich AE’s reading experience … I need me some daily bits boost in the morning.”

Note: nsfw

Wyatt ran his palms over the silky black fabric and, more enticingly, the delicious shape beneath it, stifling a groan on the neck of this woman who he knew he shouldn’t be touching. It wasn’t just that she was mentored by, and friends with, his buddy’s ex that made her so forbidden; her dad would skin alive any man he caught with his precious daughters. Not to mention that Wartilda had, on more than one occasion, heavily hinted that a casual hook-up was not what she had in mind. Speaking of which…

“Look, Tilly,” Wyatt breathed, forcing himself to break from his hungry assault on her glorious skin. “I don’t wanna set any false expectations here; you know I’m not after anything serious, yeah?”

Wartilda let out a little huff of annoyance and pulled him back towards her. “Yeah, I know,” she mumbled.

“And that’s cool?”

“Sure. Whatever,” she sighed, silencing him with those ruby-red lips of hers.

Damn. Wyatt was lost. Maybe she’d cast something on him. Maybe it was the culmination of being cooped up with Caleb and his hot as heck self and the general lack of privacy with a house full of people, but Wyatt was seriously in need of release.

As he got a meaty handful of her fine behind, she pressed her hand to his chest, forcing him away. “No, Wyatt.”

Gutted. Wyatt tried not to show his disappointment. He had seen the flipchart enough to know that no was no. And thinking of the flipchart, and his mother’s miserable face beside it, was definitely helping him to honour Wartilda wishes.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, adjusting his crotch.

She bit her lip and followed his hand before she looked around. “Not here,” she whispered.

All of Wyatt perked right back up at the knowledge that this wasn’t over. “Oh, right. Yeah, OK,” he said, trying to look natural and not deliriously happy. “Shall we go back to yours?”

He realised before Wartilda’s face displayed pure horror that this was not an option.

“Oh my goddess, no! You know what my dad’s like; he’d hit the roof. We can go to yours though, right? It’s not far. And your house will be empty, what with your mother away with the High Priestess.”

“Uh, no that’s not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“…Reasons.” Wyatt mumbled.

Wartilda rolled her eyes and tugged her dress back into place with finality. “Reasons,” she mimicked. “Right. Look, Wy; I’m not doing it outside – I’m not a badger.”

He glanced up at the tavern. “We could rent a room?” if you’re paying.

“In that tacky place? No, thanks. Come on, Wy. I’m up for a casual thing, fine, but is a little privacy too much to ask?”

“Uh,” Wyatt said dumbly, looking around and trying to think with no blood in his brain. “OK, uh, we’ll go to mine.”

He took her hand and, like a pair of giddy teenagers, they ran towards the flower store. Wartilda was giggling, tripping in her heels, but Wyatt felt like he was headed to the gallows. Burny, sexy gallows, but still.

He tried to rationalise his decision; it was highly unlikely that any vampires would be wandering around randomly in the store area and, when his Mum got back, she’d definitely ‘port in somewhere in the apartment, downstairs. He might just get away with it.

He unlocked the door to the store and swiftly locked the door to the cellar in one motion.

“Wyatt? Aren’t we going downstairs—?”

“Nah,” he smirked. “It’s better up here.”

Wartilda pouted, which only made her hotter. “In the store? Really? Why can’t we go to your apartment? What are you hiding in there?”

“Nothing,” he insisted. “But my mum collects ceramic pigs and there are photos of my folks on literally every wall.”

“Even in your room?”

“Uh, yeah,” he lied. “Trust me, this is way more romantic.”

“This isn’t romantic, Wyatt!” she huffed, turning towards the door.

He stepped in front of her and took her hand. “Aw, come on, Tilly; it just needs a few magical enhancements.” He waved his hand in the direction of the wall speaker causing it to crackle to life. He even changed the station to something smooth but with a nice beat.

Wartilda was still unimpressed.

Wyatt drew a little more energy from his well and set a rolling wave throughout the room, lighting each candle. One set fire to a nearby fiscus, but luckily it extinguished itself pretty quickly and Wartilda didn’t notice.

“Oh wow!” she gasped, watching a few of the candles floating skywards. “You made that look so effortless!”

“Yeah,” Wyatt agreed, feeling his fingers burn. That was probably enough magic for now, but just to be sure he grabbed a fistful of petals from a nearby rose and threw them into the air, scattering them with a shower of soft stars.

By now, Wartilda was watching the show with a look of heated admiration.

“Show off,” she said, but she smiled.

Feeling like a kid in a candy store or, he supposed, a horny man in a flower store, Wyatt disrobed with reckless abandon and dived on to the rug that felt much plusher underfoot than it did under butt.

“I’ll be gentlemanly and take the floor,” he said. “Though I ain’t much softer, heh.”

Wartilda giggled, running her smoky gaze down Wyatt’s naked body then shyly looking away.

“Yeah, I can see that. Is that magically enhanced too?”

“Nope. All me.”

He couldn’t tell if she was impressed or worried, but he was used to that. She wriggled seductively from her dress and gave him a slow spin. “You like?”

He shrugged off the tell-tale tingle of overcharge in his extremities and the pain in his backside and nodded.

It’d all be fine.

Totally. How could it not?

“I like this one,” Faith stated with unrestrained glee as she flicked through the images on the camera. “And this one. Oh, and definitely this one; you can practically smell the piss in the rich brat’s dinosaur onesie.”

Seth glanced at the screen, at the stilled images of a cowering child. The boy’s eyes shone with tears, and a steady drip of mucus crept from his nose as he looked in terror at what, to him, had been nightmare come true.

Seth glanced back ahead, impassive. Faith, decision made on which pictures they would gift to her younger sister, switched the camera off and turned to face him. Her exuberance was infectious and raised a broad, if not fully sincere, smile on Seth’s lips.

“Thanks for doing this,” she gushed. “The little shit had this coming. Oh my god, Joy is going to freak out knowing that big, bad Max was afraid of his own teddy bear!”

Seth nodded, although not convinced – an untruth he seemed permitted to make. He had no doubt that Joy would be delighted, if she took after her sister at all. She would be thrilled to know that her arch nemesis had quivered in his metaphorical boots and begged not to be eaten alive by the stuffed toy that had, apparently, come to life in the middle of the night. But Seth wasn’t set on the notion that Max was ‘bad’.

What he had neglected to share with his delighted darling was what he found inside the mind of the chastised child, beyond his juvenile fear of talking toys, that is. Max was bitterly lonely, starved of affection and out to prove himself in whichever way he could. The Villareal’s may have had an excess of wealth in monetary matters but, when it came to love, the family were in abject poverty. Max was a mere product of the family’s poisonous cocktail; years of neglect, the absence of a mother’s bosom and the ingrained notion that, to survive, you had to use the tools at your disposal.

Whoever they may be. Whatever it may cost. With an upbringing like that, one lived to be loathed.

Faith stretched and stumbled to her feet. Dragging Seth behind her, oblivious to his inner musings, she eyed him with that mixture of flirtation and aggression she wore so well.

“So… you mentioned a little surprise for me…”

Well, damn. He’d all but forgotten about that. He couldn’t say he was truly in the mood for it now, not that he had been before, but he was a man of his word, whether he wished it or not. He glanced skywards, expertly gauging the time and determining that the window for his plans had not yet passed. He extended his hands to her that she eagerly took. By now, she knew this dance.

Thankfully, her earlier nagging had dried up and he didn’t have to field any questions of her curiosity about what the rest of the night would entail. Instead, he focused all his energy on disintegrating them both to the suspended state of mist; the sheer effort of physically containing a million fragmented pieces of himself and another leaving no room in his mind to ponder how exactly he had allowed himself to fall for the wretched creature in his arms, how that complicated his master plan, or to cerebrate on the dismal future of the urine-soaked child.

All non-essential thought was temporarily suspended, dissolving. For a few moments, his overworked mind was wonderfully, entirely silent.

Wyatt was never really one for swearing, but holy-fucking-goddess-on-a-bike.

It could have gone either way. Wartilda was fiery, for sure, but that could’ve been bluster. Wyatt’d had a fair share of partners in his lifetime who were all talk and, when it came down to brass tacks, they had no idea which end was up. That was still fun, being the teacher, but nothing compared to a partner who knew what they liked and exactly how to achieve it.

Geez, Tilly was wild; she could’ve made a small fortune from her oral skill alone. He loved the thought that this vixen was off defying Daddy’s chaste orders and indulging in casual sex on the regular, learning tricks that even Wyatt didn’t know.

She was a notorious, delicious tease. She’d taken him a second from the edge a half dozen times so, when she’d finally presented to him, panting and wringing wet, he’d almost lost it instantly.

He knew exactly how he wanted her, knocking over all manner of pots in his haste. She purred at him, licking her teeth and undulating her hips, the best kind of invitation.

Everything about her was so damn hot, figuratively and literally; she was practically alight. The energy coursed through her, through him, intertwining. Humans were great fun to bed, but nothing really compared to the freedom and high Wyatt felt when screwing a fellow witch. He knew that he was seriously running the risk of overcharge, feeding off her energy as she bucked and ground against him, but all rational thought had long gone.

She hooked her leg around his waist to drive him to the hilt and with it, found her release. The tension around him was all he needed. He couldn’t hold out any longer; he was gonna explode, one way or another.

She let out a whimper, pushing hard back against him and digging her talons into his thigh in a way that, in the heat of the moment, he assumed was passion.

His wired brain was focused on only one thing and not quite registering the changing shadows in the space around him. It was way too late and Wyatt was too far gone to stop, even he’d wanted to. Nothing could’ve held back the huge wave he was riding not even if the earth imploded, or if he imploded, or his Mum appeared—

His eyes shot open as that shifting shadow materialised into his worst nightmare at exactly-the-wrong-moment.

“O-oh my god!” Tilly sobbed into her hands, her body shaking from her climax and frozen from her shame. “This i-isn’t ha!-h-happening!”

Wyatt was struck dumb. Spent and softening faster than a popsicle in a furnace, his brain switched itself back on. Was it too dramatic to kill himself?

His mum had walked in on him before in various stages of undress with various people and various implements – he was rarely careful when he was horny, especially if he was also high – but not like this. This time she didn’t look amused, disgusted or annoyed. If anything, she looked shellshocked.

“Finished?” she asked with a faux smile, to which Wartilda responded with a wail and Wyatt a groan. “I’ll take that as a yes. Downstairs, Wyatt,” she said softly, averting her gaze. “Wartilda, you should transportalate straight home, as the High Priestess instructed.”

“Sage,” Wartilda cried, crawling away from Wyatt. “I’m so sorry – oh my god – please don’t tell the High Priestess that I defied her. And please, please don’t tell my dad—”

“Tell him what?” Sage said with a wink.

“That you caught me, here, doing this,” Wartilda spluttered, completely missing Sage’s joke. “I don’t usually do these kinds of things! I swear! I don’t know what came over me.”

“Luckily, nothing did,” Sage laughed but, again, this was lost on Wartilda. “He won’t hear of it from me,” Sage assured her. “But you really need to leave, dear.”

Wartilda really didn’t need telling again. She hastily tugged her clothes on and, in a flash, without even a goodbye, she was gone.

Alone with his Mum, with reality weighing him down, Wyatt could sense he was in for another lecture. “I thought you’d ‘port in downstairs,” he explained, pointlessly.

“I did. Then I heard noises up here and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t Caleb up to no good.”

“That door doesn’t have a key, Mum, yet it was locked…” he muttered, unconvinced. “That should’ve been a clue that it was me up here.”

“Might still have been with Caleb.” Sage tutted, shaking her curls and staring at the ceiling. “But what’s done is done and we have bigger issues.”

“We do? Bigger than you having literally no respect for my privacy?”

“Yes.” She sighed heavily. “For goodness sake, Wyatt. I can’t talk to you like this; for someone so private, you would do to cover that thing up.”

“Gah, Mum,” he choked, dragging over the nearest plant as his already flushed face burned scarlet. “Look, fine, I know this was risky, but I wasn’t gonna let her go downstairs or anything. And Tilly, she doesn’t know about the vampires. I doubt she knows there are any.”

Sage stared at him coolly, silencing him, as she unlocked the cellar door with a wave of her hand.

“No. She doesn’t,” Sage muttered. “But the High Priestess does. One of them killed her husband.”

“Wha—?” Wyatt gasped, leaping to his feet. “Shi-oot. Seriously? Which one?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Sage murmured. “I have strict instructions to catch and hand over the vampire, Wyatt. Dead and headless. I have three weeks.”

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