Witches' Waves (16 page)

She gasped, arched up, pounded her fists into the mattress in pleasurable shock. She didn't know where to put her hands after that, but she didn't want to leave them fisted in the sheets when there was so much wonderful male flesh to explore, so she let her instincts lead her and she wound up with one on Deck's head, one on Kyle's. The contrast between Deck's long hair and Kyle's short-cropped pelt added more sensation to the ones already washing over her. Deck had one hand on her belly. She thought the other must be touching Kyle.

A circle of touch. A circle of energy, energy that crackled through her until she saw the red of sex magic everywhere.

She knew from books that men sometimes went down on women and it supposedly felt amazing. But the books hadn't captured half of it—the vulnerability and the power, the contrast between soft, slick lips and tongue, and hard, probing fingers. Kyle worked in a third finger, and she was full, so wonderfully full. It was like nothing she'd ever experienced. It was as exhilarating as working magic, exhilarating as the ocean, exhilarating as freedom. Her blood felt carbonated again, her skin sparkly, and Deck and Kyle worked together in near-perfect rhythm, as if they'd choreographed the whole thing.

Her inner muscles clenched around Kyle's fingers, and he let out a soft, “Damn, girl!” She tried to stay quiet and not thrash around too much, but Deck's tongue was so skilled, and once in a while he'd nip her mound or pubic lips, not painfully, just enough to add a new level of sensation. She couldn't help yipping at that, and then moaning with pleasure as Deck laved the bitten spot with his tongue.

“That's right, Meaghan,” Deck crooned. “Let it out. Let us know how good it feels.” Then he returned his attention to her clit. Kyle didn't break his rhythm, but he bit the inside of her thigh.

The words and that lightly nipping kiss broke her control completely. She cried out, thrashed.

She'd felt secure earlier, sure that no visions could find her here, but as orgasm approached, she panicked and tried to hold back, at least long enough to warn the guys what might happen. But she couldn't speak, at least not to say anything that complex. When she tried, all that came out were more gasps and moans, the only recognizable words
please
and
yes
and
mor
e. Her brain might think she should play safe, but her body had its own ideas. And damn it if she didn't think her body had a point.

When she realized it was inevitable that she was going to come, she made a last frantic attempt to reinforce her shields. It wasn't the elegant structure Deck had taught her to make, but she thought she'd managed to cobble another layer of protection, fighting the bubbles in her blood, the tickling, dancing sensation on her skin, the storm surge of ecstasy that stole her thoughts.

Then it burst over her and she could do nothing except cry out and writhe and tremble. Deck and Kyle didn't stop but pushed her higher and higher. She felt like the top of her head had opened up, but no vision poured in, no terrifying images of death and destruction, just warmth and more bubbles and sparks and what she knew, though she couldn't see it, was light. As she exploded with a second, even more powerful convulsion, she gripped Deck's hair in her fist without meaning to, dug her fingernails into Kyle's shoulder. Her body was out of her own control, and it was like having a seizure in that aspect, but she was fully present, fully aware. There was no one in her head but her, no one in the room with her—or for all she cared, in the world—but Kyle and Deck.

It took her awhile, at first, to make out what Kyle was asking her: “May we fuck you? Please…we'd like to be inside you.”

She couldn't manage to speak, but she nodded eagerly.

Kyle and Deck chatted briefly, below even her keen hearing.

Then Kyle moved up her body. She felt his energy, lithe and aquatic and somehow contained, before she felt his cock nudging the slick opening of her sex. Gliding over her clit. Teasing and tempting. She pushed her hips up, tried to angle herself so he'd enter her
now
. Teasing was fun, teasing was lovely, but she was ready. So ready. More ready than she'd ever imagined being. “Please,” she moaned.

“Not yet,” Deck answered, surprising her. “I'm preparing Kyle. While he's in you, I'm going to be in him. And later, we'll switch. I want your pussy too.”

Meaghan hadn't thought she could get any hotter, but Deck's words, and the thought of him lying over both of them—fucking both of them, in a sense—aroused her even more. It must have worked on Kyle too because he made a strangled sound and sank into her.

“Impatient,” Deck chided, but he didn't sound like he meant it.

Kyle's cock felt perfect inside her. No, it wasn't just Kyle's cock that felt perfect. Kyle's energy, Kyle's spirit made the difference. His energy rippled over her skin as his hands did, touched places inside her deeper than his cock could reach. He was moving carefully, as if he didn't want to come too soon or he feared he might break her, but she could sense a great tension. She moved to meet his thrusts, hoping to encourage him to let go.

Then Deck added his weight and heat to Kyle's. Kyle growled deep in his throat and thrust harder into her. Deck's magic embraced her. When the auric rainbow started to flash in her darkness, she didn't fight it. She swore she felt it as Deck penetrated Kyle. Felt it as if he'd entered her, felt it as if she'd grown a cock and was entering someone's hot, tight ass.

Kyle's thrusts became harder, wilder, in time with the way Deck was fucking him, fast and furious and just what she wanted at this time. He bit at her shoulders, neck and breasts, staying just on the right side of the line between pain and pleasure. The one time he got too rough and she yelped, Deck murmured, “Careful, otter,” and apparently tugged on Kyle's hair because he eased up and raised his head.

She could feel the two men kissing then, feel their tongues intertwining, feel the slight strain on Kyle because he was twisted around, and the way Deck took control of the kiss even though Kyle nipped at his tongue with sharp teeth.

Then Kyle was kissing her. His teeth were sharper than they'd been before, as if the animalside wanted to get out but he was reining it in. And Deck was there too. Though his hands were on Kyle's hips and he touched her only with his legs, his saltwater and earth and lightning energy filled her.

Her magic swelled under their blissful assault, swelled so it filled her skin and then spilled over, a cool, damp ocean breeze teasing their heated skins. She didn't know what to do with the energy, but she felt Deck's magic, the red magic, reach out and seize some of it. “Ground,” he said, “Ground into us. I can make it work.” That seemed dangerous, but Deck touched one hand to her chest, over her heart, and suddenly she knew what to do.

The red flares in their auras surged until red was everywhere. “Now,” Deck ordered, and she had no doubt it was an order. “Now. Come for me.” Kyle cried out, a strange chittering, keening noise that didn't sound like it should come from his wordside body, and he surged into her. Her arousal peaked, carrying her higher until she was flying in their arms.

Then she fell, but she was falling through warm, caressing magic, and the men fell with her, keeping her safe.

When she came back to herself, still weightless yet full of magic and love, her skin tingling with shared energy, she started to cry.

Chapter Sixteen

Kyle jumped to attention at the sound of Meaghan's sobs. Had they hurt her? He'd been as careful as he could be, taking cues from Deck, trying not to pump her too hard or bite so he broke skin. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but words were far away, carried off by desire and kept away by panic. His otterside chittered, swimming in circles around a distressed raftmate, bumping up against her to keep her afloat—but what if his otterside had come out at the wrong time and that was why she was crying? He hadn't done anything really stupid, Deck wouldn't have let him, but who could say what might traumatize a woman with her history?

Luckily, Deck, with his fully human brain, could manage to put words together, ask the vital question.

Meaghan, now sitting up, beamed through her tears, her smile as brilliant as any Kyle had seen. Kyle let himself breathe again.

And then she spoke and his breath caught in his throat again. “Just such a relief…such a relief. So beautiful. I came, and came with another person, and nothing bad happened. No visions. No seizures. Just coming.”

Deck turned and looked at Kyle, a clear expression of “what the fuck?” on his face. Kyle was equally baffled until he remembered one of the more troubling things she'd said during their previous encounter. That it was “safe” to use her mouth. He made a frantic gesture at Deck that he hoped conveyed
we'll talk later
. Kyle was freaked and Deck looked furious, his blue eyes stormy, his jaw clenched, his mouth in an angry line. Not a Donovan face, not politically correct or controlled, but Kyle could imagine one of Deck's Thorssen ancestors with that kind of expression just before blowing invaders' ships onto the rocks.

Meaghan was happy, though. Meaghan apparently didn't know how tragic and wrong the story behind what she'd just said seemed to them.

So Kyle was determined not to ruin her pleasure in the moment. He wanted to pursue the matter, ask some questions, figure out what she might need to heal and who they might need to kill. But not right now, not when Meaghan was smiling like that. Otter duals didn't normally have mates, not the way many duals did. They were cheerfully promiscuous and proud of it. Everyone regarded each female's pups as nieces and nephews and pitched in to raise them.

But Meaghan was his. He'd known almost from the start that she belonged to him, just as he belonged to Deck. And, damn it, that meant his to protect.

Meaghan seemed to realize they were staring at her, trying to process what she'd said. “Don't you get it?” she exclaimed. “My shields held, even when we were fucking. I didn't even feel anything trying to get through except your energy and Deck's magic. Every other time I've had an orgasm, except last night, and that was because of magic, I had a seizure and then had a vision. But not this time. That's good, isn't it?”

“That's more than good. That's great.” Deck kissed her forehead, then said, “But don't you think you should have warned us that sex might be dangerous for you?”

She shrugged, the movement eloquent. “Sex isn't. Orgasm is. Used to be. But I wanted to touch you both so badly. I figured I could get you off, or at least be near you when you got each other off. Figured that would make us all happy. Then I hoped that with better shields and the protections on the building it wouldn't matter as much.” Her voice dropped softer, so Kyle had to strain to hear, despite his keen otter ears. “Then I just didn't care. It felt so good, and I'd come when you were licking me so I figured penetration would be all right too, and I just wanted to enjoy myself like a normal person…well, at least a normal witch.” She flushed as she said it. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?” Kyle moved closer. She sounded so scared as she apologized, like she expected to be punished.

A flash from the otter: rending flesh.

“Wanting too much?” she replied as a question. “Not warning you?”

As if she figured she needed to apologize for something and was punting to come up with an answer.

When Deck spoke, Kyle braced for earthquakes, tidal waves and lightning. The magic emanating from Deck felt more like ice, though, filling the room, filling his veins. His easygoing lover was holding back a killing rage. “Who did this to you, Meaghan? Who taught you to apologize for nothing?” His voice raised like storm winds. “Who thought it was all right to take his pleasure doing something that triggered your seizures?”

“He wanted the seizures. For the visions. He used the visions.” Her voice sounded small and defeated. She hunched in on herself and it took all Kyle's self-control not to fling himself at Deck and start beating him up for terrifying her.

Frankly, what stopped him was less self-control and more common sense. Deck was not only bigger and stronger than he was, but a witch whose magic did freaky things when he got emotional—and he was already emotional. Not to mention it would upset Meaghan even more if they started fighting.

“Who did this to you? I'll kill him.” Now Kyle definitely saw the Viking ancestors in Deck. And Donovans might be pacifists in this place and time, but he was willing to bet that hadn't always been the case. Irish history wasn't exactly sweetness and light, and Donovans had been part of Irish history, so they claimed, pretty much forever. Even if they couldn't kill with magic, ancestral Donovans undoubtedly bashed a few skulls and Deck looked ready to follow in their footsteps.

Which made perfect sense. His own ancestors were aquatic mammals dangerous only to fish and abalone, and he still wanted to get all medieval warrior on someone's ass.

He put a hand on Deck's arm, the same arm Deck had on Meaghan. “Make you a deal. You hold the bastard down and I'll kill him, since I'm the carnivore in this relationship. Then we feed him to sharks.”

“Too late.” Meaghan had struggled to her knees on the bed, brushing them aside. “He's already dead.”

“Shaw?” The word came out of Deck's mouth as a howl of fury.

Meaghan twitched her head, so small it might have been an involuntary movement. But Kyle was sure it wasn't.

And so was Deck, apparently. Lightning crackled in the room. A lamp blew out, sparking, though fortunately nothing else caught fire. The computer smoked. Outside, a massive storm hit, thunder and lightning and pounding, violent surf.

“Get ahold of yourself!” Meaghan exclaimed. “You're going to hurt someone.”

The atmospheric violence continued unabated, along with Deck's rage. “I want to go into hell and kill him again.”

“You don't believe in hell any more than I do,” Kyle ventured. It wasn't a time to make a joke, but his otterside was going crazy, chittering in his skull, baring his teeth, flashing images of holding something underwater until it stopped struggling. Only the person he wanted to kill was already dead.

And he was left in the weird position of trying to be the voice of reason between two witches when all he wanted to do was rip something to pieces with teeth he didn't have in this form.

Meaghan turned to Kyle, her unseeing eyes frantic. “I'm sorry!” she repeated. “I didn't want you guys to know. I knew you'd hate me for it. I'm sorry.” She began to cry again, and this time it was the kind of tears that hurt to see. The storm increased in violence, rain joining the lightning and surf.

“Shaw used you,” Kyle said, tasting bile and anger with each careful word. “He hurt you. We're not angry with you, not at all. We're just sorry someone else killed the bastard before we had a chance.”

Deck must have heard him, because lightning seared, with a boom immediately on its heels, and the electricity shut down. Meaghan grabbed Kyle's arm. “Do something! He's going to hurt someone. Or maybe he and I are, because we both lost control. That storm's not just here, it's all up and down the coast. But I'm trying to pull it in and he's not.”

Kyle weighed his options. He didn't have a lot. But he could sense the magnitude of the storm, the vast waves coming out of nowhere.
Trickster, give me an idea. A
good
idea. Things are going to shit here and I don't have any magic to counter them.

He didn't like the idea he got. But it would work. And, Powers, it would release some of the rage that was surging in him.

“You figure out what's going on with the ocean, see if you can calm it. It's centered about a mile offshore. I'll try to get Deck under control.”

Which he did by punching his lover in the jaw as hard as he could.

Kyle hit hard. Harder than Deck would have expected. Hard enough to jar him and make the room spin blearily. Hard enough that for a split second his focus went from fury at a dead man to pain, disorientation and a desire to do something truly vile to Kyle when his eyes focused again.

And in that split second, Deck felt the force of the storm.

So much enraged energy. His power fed on it, and he'd been so lost in anger he'd let it. His earth sense picked up tiny tremors, nothing you'd be able to feel without earth magic or sensitive instruments, but his earth magic told him they wanted to build up to something bigger—and his unbridled rage, pumped by all the red magic the three of them had generated, was feeding them.

Deck yanked in all his magical energy and threw up his shields so hard he half expected an audible clank. It didn't stop what was already in motion, but at least he wasn't feeding the self-perpetuating cycle anymore. In the sudden quiet, he forced himself to close his eyes, breathe deeply and recenter.

He couldn't kill a dead man. But he might kill other people if he didn't shut down the storm his anger had started.

He opened his senses gingerly, reached out to see how bad things had gotten when he was out of control.

Bad, but not deadly yet, as long as there were no small boats caught in it.

The earth was calm again, now that the minor fault near the house was no longer irritated by his magic. He said a few words in Gaelic under his breath, a simple soothing spell that saw a lot of use among the Donovan earth magicians. Right on top of a small fault and near the much larger Cascadia fault, the earth witches learned to play safe at an early age. Sometimes, though, a working had unintended consequences, especially if the caster was inexperienced or pushing limits—or, as he just proved, shunting power around instinctively in the grip of strong emotion.

He still felt the energy of a lightning storm outside, but diminished now, fading away as such storms naturally tended to do as they expended their energy. Deck had never figured out a formal way to deal with his lightning magic, but he'd figured out a few kluges, including the one he called upon now: roughly and rapidly yanking the energy away from the storm and shunting it somewhere else.

Most went to Donovan's Cove's defenses, because excellent as they were, you could never be too careful. He sent some to the vegetable garden, even though the family's green witches had it well in hand. Some went to his personal shields, which were obviously still leaky after he'd let them down to observe Meaghan better.

He gave the last bit to Meaghan.

As he did, he felt her magic reaching out to the ocean. She was finding the patterns of disturbance and disrupting them.

And it was working. Not as efficiently as a more experienced witch's effort, but it was working. Surprised, though pleasantly so, he opened his eyes.

Meaghan had scrambled off the bed and was standing near the open window. She was leaning on Kyle, who occasionally whispered in her ear. Maybe that was the secret. Kyle had a lifetime of experience sensing the water. He couldn't use that knowledge the way a water witch would—it had more practical applications, since otter duals spent most of their animalside time in the water—but he could pass on what he knew to Meaghan.

Amazing. Once things settled down, he'd pick their brains and find out how they did it, if they could even explain it. But at the moment he had more important things to do.

He closed his eyes again, refocused and began to chant in a combination of English and Gaelic, weaving his energies with the water and with Meaghan's, working to dissipate the waves before they did more harm to ship or shore.

At first, it was just the two of them working, with Kyle supporting. Meaghan's magic was erratic, as he'd expect from a beginner, and she didn't seem to know she could pull energy from the disrupted ocean or from the red magic that still zinged ungrounded around the room to power her work. Of course she wouldn't know that. She had to be winging this because she'd had only one formal lesson so far. He moved closer to her and put one hand on her bare back and one on Kyle's.

He couldn't remember the last time he felt less sexy, but connecting with their skin, their energy, called up a surge of red magic anyway. Power shivered through him, unlike anything he'd experienced before, a complex union of his magic and Meaghan's, with Kyle's fluid strength bolstering it.

Meaghan was using her water magic in a way he'd never seen before, almost as if…

No, not almost as if. She didn't read only the current state of the ocean, but saw ahead, weaving her seer's precognitive magic with the water power.

Her visions lacerated her, hurt her physically—yet she was invoking minivisions to help dissipate the storm.

There was so much Deck wanted to say, but he pushed it aside for the moment, focusing on following the waves and crosscurrents of Meaghan's magic and repairing what it pointed out. Before long, he started to sense other witches in the working as well: Heather, Gilbert, who wasn't a water witch but excelled at harnessing storm energy, Aunt Bath channeling some dead ancestor's knowledge. He even felt Portia, though she was heavily shielded and working on her own, not weaving into the group work so she didn't accidentally get entangled with Meaghan.

The sense of impending doom faded. The crashing surf diminished to its normal music, stronger than usual, but no longer a major storm. Reaching out his energy, Deck sensed the danger had passed.