Under the Dragon Moon (The Belamour Archives, #1)

by Mawce Hanlin

“And yet?” “And yet I’m scared, Mael.”

“I’m scared because I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to raise a magical kid—hell, I don’t know how to raise a kid, period. Remy so much as sniffles and I’m freaking out about her being sick, and now I have to worry about her actually dying from cracking a few pieces of glass? I have to worry about warlocks and dragons and fucking—fucking fire monsters who sneak into places without setting off wards? I have to worry about wards? It’s just–it’s so much. It’s too much, and I don’t know what I’m fucking doing. I feel like I was perfectly fine until magic came around and just—just ruined it.”

Both the Kid and I grew up with magic. We both found ourselves in a brand new world we didn’t know how to navigate, but at least I had my parents, and the Kid had me. Leo didn’t have that. He was handed a magical time-bomb without a manual and hadn’t even been told “good luck”.

“I just… you grow up hearing about magic all the time as a kid, you know? Fairy tales and bedtime stories about how wonderful it is. How it’s a gift. And it is, I’m sure. It’s awesome and so fucking cool, but right now it just… it feels like a curse. Like someone looked at my pitiful life and just said, ‘eh, might as well fuck this one over, why not?’” You’re a fucking curse.

“Hey, woah—” Leo flailed an arm behind me to close the door, chuckling when I finally pulled away for a breath. “Good morning to me.” “It’s three in the afternoon.”

He shone like a sun, casting away the shadows that surrounded me, warming the chill in my bones. More than anything I wanted to be Icarus. I wanted to reach out for him and let his fire scorch at my hands and melt my wings. Wanted to let him destroy me if only to get another moment of his attention. You’re a black hole, Mael. “We have to stop this.”

One dead by my hand, and countless others who might as well have been. Two terrible mistakes I would have to live with for the rest of my long life. Mistakes I couldn’t let Leo become. “Mael, seriously, you can’t kick me out of this.” His magic flickered like sunlight on the ocean’s waves, desperate and confused and searching. “This is my sister’s death, it’s Remy’s mom. Fuck, don’t you care about that at all?” I care about you, I wanted to say. “It’s too dangerous.”

“What happens to Remy if she has no one left to help her? Do you think the Slythes will treat her well? A half-breed kid with human blood? Our species may have mixed a lot in the past, and warlocks may be descended from humans in the first place, but they won’t see her as anything other than a—” A curse. I swallowed the word before it could spill out like vomit, shoving my shaking hands in my pockets. “A nuisance. They would see her as a nuisance.”

kid’s

“My shadows you saw in the alley? They kind of… I don’t know, consumed her.” They shouldn’t have. It wasn’t how my nier worked, how any sídhe magic worked. Even fifty years later I could still feel the strange effect of that spell. The way my shadows always hung in the distance like hungry beasts ready to attack. I didn’t control them now, not the way I used to be able to. Now I simply… managed them. Held them back when they grew too wild.

“The point is, Morgana is gone now because of me. Her soul can never reach its true end because of me. No one can honor her at an altar. She can’t hear the prayers of her loved ones or carry the gifts left behind for her. She’s just gone.”

“She was human, Leo, and even she wasn’t the first person I’ve ruined just by being around them. I have plenty of mistakes in my past and I don’t want you to be another one. I can’t let you be another one.” Maybe I loved him.

“You can’t take me off of this.” “I should.” “I can take care of myself.” “You shouldn’t have to.”

“Leo.” “Mael.” He sunk his teeth into my collarbone and my heart thudded so suddenly I wondered if he could feel it against his lips. Magic—vibrant and burning—etched into my bones like epigraphs of devotion. Like something deep in my chest—Anahm Croíaer, my heartname—reached out for him with grasping, desperate fingers. As if the simple utterance of my name was enough for him to take it. To own it.

He’d chuckle at one of my jokes, low and quiet like the lingering reverb of a bass guitar, and my face would burn as hot as a fever.

I swore I could see him. Swore I could feel him, regardless of the distance between us—a few breaths or an entire city, it didn’t matter. He was there. “Leo, move.” God, yeah. There was that too.

He was beautiful and terrifying and I wanted to lose myself to the disaster of loving him.

I didn’t want to risk damaging them by accident—much as I’d like to leave a scar there in the shape of my hunger. Mael didn’t hold the same courtesy as he seized under me and clawed rivers of burning fire along my shoulder blades. A string of violent sounding curses fell from his tongue, his walls clamped down around me, and I pulled back just in time to watch him arch and tumble and pitch off the edge of ecstasy.

The bruise on his collar splattered like ink—deep violet and indigo notes crawling to the bars of reddened teeth marks that caged it.

My mouth watered at the thought of notating my signature on the parchment of him.

“Where’s your head at, Leo?” “Here,” I breathed, rocking into him slowly, too slowly for how desperately I throbbed inside him. “Here, with you.” Mael hummed and with a sharp twist of his legs and a push, he had me sprawled out beneath him, the both of us heaving and gasping as the angle shifted. He sat with his weight on his knees, straddling my hips, and he held himself up with palms splayed on my chest. “Then be here.”

Mael yanked me into a searing kiss of tongue and teeth and spit, and it was all I could do to hold on for the ride. To grasp at his hips and pull him down on my cock as hard and as fast as he’d let me. Over and over again, desperate and hungry and unthinking. He met me thrust for thrust, the two of us moving in an uneven, polyphonic harmony.

Surprisingly enough, the quiet didn’t bother me. I’d always been fairly uncomfortable in the silence, always had the urge to fill it with babble and noise and music. Silence was dangerous in my father’s house, and something like that didn’t abandon you as easily as a parent does. But Mael’s quiet felt a different sort. He pillowed his head on my chest and his breaths played a gentle coda against my throat.

“Six people have died because of me. Morgana, the four she killed before I stopped her, and…” He swallowed and I tipped forward to knock our foreheads together in silent support. “And my dad.” Oh. “I don’t know if I could handle another person’s blood on my hands, Leo. Especially yours.”

I wanted to kiss him again and again, wanted to lose myself in him and damn whatever consequences he brewed up in his head. I wanted to flood his veins with reverence and leave his skin littered with the love bitten stains of my affection.

My entire life I’d been quick to fall and just as quick to move on. I loved wholly and completely, still held that love for each of my past partners in the scrapbook of my heart, but fire lit with gasoline dies just as quickly as it lives. I didn’t have a habit of lingering. Didn’t care to stick in roots.

“Have to be honest, I prefer you like this.” I raised an eyebrow. “Messy and sexed up?” “Comfortable.” Oh. Heat flared across my cheeks and up the tips of my ears, and Mael smirked at the sight of it. “Oh, you smooth motherfucker.” Before he could argue, I lunged forward and pushed him onto his back, settling back between his legs to stare down at him. “Well I happen to like you like this.” He raised an eyebrow. “Comfortable?” Yes. “Messy and sexed up.”

Calcaria’s club is full of cubare and they’ll eat you alive.” I tried to wrack my brain for the meaning of the unfamiliar word. Ever since I learned about the supernatural world I’d been trying to research more about folklore and mythology, but “cubare” certainly wasn’t ringing any bells. “It’s the species term for incubi and succubi,” Mael clarified at my confused expression. “Calcaria is a succubus. She feeds on pleasure and her thrall is strong, especially to humans, but if you tell her to fuck off, she will.” “Oh. Okay, yeah sure. No nickels and no getting eaten.”

“Holy magical wardrobe, Batman,” I muttered in awe.

“Nguyen.” “Crane.” Donkey, I mentally responded.

Locating the illustrious Calcaria proved easy enough. Mael mentioned she owned the club, so it only made sense that she would be spread out on the center-most couch, completely bare aside from the heavily-jeweled necklace decorating her throat. The center of attention, a queen on her throne. God, and she was gorgeous too. All thick curves and russet-brown skin, dark hair tumbling in sex-mussed curls and eyes the colour of rubies. She faced the door as if expecting us, perched on the cock of the person behind her, her own cock bouncing in the cliff of her hip with every thrust. Two others framed her on the couch, each one littering her breasts and thighs with bites and bruises until she was a canvas of purple and red. It was really a shame we weren’t here to have fun.

“Mael, baby! What a surprise! And here I thought you stopped coming to my parties.” What? I rounded on Mael just in time to see him grimace and shove his hands in his pockets. “You used to go to orgies? Mael—what—when? How did I not know this?”

“Aos Sì. You’d think the parties back home would be even better than mine, and yet you came back boring and old.”

“And you brought me a treat. I don’t think you’ve ever brought someone with you before,” the woman crooned. She smiled with pointed teeth, just shy of feral. “What is this one? I can’t taste his magic.” “This one,” Mael ground out between his teeth, “is not for you.”

The slutty Leo in the back of my head practically melted at that—the one that secretly read romance erotica and had way too many kinks involving possessive men. The professional Leo, however, who had been told to be on his best behavior, gave the club’s matroness a little finger wave and grinned. “Hi, I’m Leo, token human and completely out of my depth, but happy to be included in the experience.” Mael’s sigh sounded like the audible equivalent of a face palm.

“Do I have to have sex with her?” He blinked at my question, taken aback at how abruptly I asked it. Calcaria’s laughter filtered through the room again and Mael shot her a warning look. “Not necessarily. A thrall is just—it’s like a sensation, a power that floods you with heightened feelings. Like ecstasy—” “Been there, done that! Come on, why not?” Was I whining like a five year old trying to get some candy? Yes. Did I care? Not even a little bit.

“Oh don’t let him scare you,” Calcaria said in a low purr, the sound rolling through me like thunder. “I’ve fed from plenty of humans before and only a few of them have died.” Died? A few? “Calcaria!”

I wondered if they too were under what Mael called her “thrall” and if it felt as suffocating and intoxicating as mine had. I still felt shaky and hot, like I might cum in my pants like a teenager if Mael so much as looked in my direction.

Watching Mael try to explain the plan only to have Calcaria interrupt after every few words was like watching Saturday morning cartoons.

“You’re asking me to sneak a human into Katarina’s auction next weekend so that he can sneak you in?” “I’m asking you to bring a human to the auction, not sneak him,” Mael corrected. “Katarina doesn’t care who attends her auctions as long as they have an invitation and don’t cause trouble.”

“You know why I can’t go on my own.” Unable to bite down on the curiosity, I raised my hand and tried not to feel too much like a schoolboy when they both turned to look at me. “I don’t. You just said she wouldn’t let you.” A dark blush spread up to the man’s ears, which only served to egg Calcaria on. “Oh-ho, he didn’t tell you? Your little warlock here is blacklisted from half the auctions in Louisiana. He broke Katarina Franklin’s heart and robbed her blind. He just barely managed to talk her out of hunting him down for revenge.” She laughed and sent me a wink. “Or sport.”

“Well, yeah, I guess that makes sense.” I shoved my hands in my back pockets and shot the man a teasing grin. “Face like that? Can’t say I’m surprised you’re a heartbreaker.” Mael flushed even darker but he rolled his eyes at the tease. “I didn’t break her heart.

“But I don’t want the bullets as payment.” He jolted in surprise, eyes widening. “What? But you were so—“ “My grandmother was a transphobic bitch, and I’m glad to be rid of anything she might use to dig herself out of the grave I put her in.”

“Are you jealous?” I bristled under the teasing lilt of his voice, but before I could respond, Leo crowded me against the ugly porcelain sink. He grinned down at me, fingers tracing up the lines of ink on my throat. “Upset that I found her attractive? I’m a pretty free-love kind of guy, Mael. I can do monogamy if you want me to, but I can’t help looking when it’s spread out in front of me like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“It’s not that.” It was a little bit that.

“I thought about my head between your thighs, drinking you up until you begged for me to stop.” Heat rushed through me and I grasped at his shirt when he made to pull away. “Leo—” “Don’t get me wrong, Calcaria was hot—” I sneered at the words, but Leo just grinned and nipped playfully at my bottom lip. “Don’t pretend like you don’t think so too. She’s hot, but baby, she isn’t you.” She isn’t you.

“The way your back arches when you cum,” he continued, his fingers tightening in my hair, his breaths coming in little gasping pants. “I thought of your muscles t-twitching under my hands, your pleasure dripping from my chin—Fuck, Mael. I thought of your heart beating in my chest—”

If he became addicted to anything, I wanted him addicted to me.

What shocked me was Leo’s magic. He always had a soft glow to him, and on the few occasions where his emotions flared, that sunshine burst out in great tendrils of burning rays. This time it bathed him in radiance, the golden light shining from beneath my blooming void like a solar eclipse, little pinpoints poking through like glittering stars in the night sky.

I yanked my own hands back before my magic could do something worse. Something stupid. Already I could tell it’d gotten comfortable on his skin, as pulling away felt like peeling sap-soaked bark from a tree.