Entranced by the Basilisks (Monstrous Matches, #3)

by Lillian Lark

“Yes. We don’t know yet if I can really turn—” I cut myself off, still struggling to believe that any of this can be real. “Turn people to stone?” Rose asks. I breathe. “Yes.”

The vintage hair scarf tied in the fashion of a Hollywood starlet doesn’t hide the movement of my affliction.

“Um, well… Grace picked up some details from the book that did this, and she thinks that a way to break the spell is to find my mate.” My cheeks burn. “Or… find pleasure on a serpent’s tongue.”

I look up and no matter her steel spine, Agnes flinches. The effect is regrettable. It would be much easier to handle donors and their ridiculous requests if my very presence didn’t cause an instinctual wariness. But there is no way around being what I am.

I flex the hand at my side. The urge to lift Emilia’s pointed chin until her thick lashes don’t shield her eyes is wholly inappropriate and unexplainable.

Though we are the same kind of creature, Ari can control how people react to his gaze. It requires a thin amount of magic to comfort those around him. Magic I’m not capable of holding. It’s easier for his business if the people he’s working with aren’t on edge and flinching.

Our connection is only casual, but for some reason he’s who I spend the holidays with—not to celebrate with of course, unless that celebration is spent lust soaked and gasping. It’s him who I’ve shared the most meals with, our conversations lasting until the late hours. Ari’s presence has curled around so many memories that it’s hard to imagine my life before him. It’s why it’s so difficult to resist him even when I should let him go.

“So relax.” Ari’s bare foot strokes against my ankle, coaxing. It’s a tease, a gesture of what his tail would do if he were in his other form. It works.

“So grumpy.” He cuts me off as if he knows what troubles me. “Are you approaching a shed?” I make an annoyed sound that is much more hiss-like than I mean to. Our kind sheds our old skin a few times a year. It’s an unpleasant and itchy process. “You can’t say I’m grumpy just because I’m fighting you on something.” I should have said disagreeing, fighting between us holds significance. “But I love when you fight me,” Ari says, not one to ever miss out on saying something suggestive. His smile is wide and his fangs flash.

I need to stem the tide of useless feelings that I already have for the man across from me.

The underlying flavor of Ari is a homecoming. Everything I want and can’t have.

It makes it all the harder when he speaks about taking care of me as if it would ever be possible.

“Fuck.” It’s all I can say. “Yes, we’ll do that,” Ari says, almost sweetly. “And when I’ve conquered you, maybe you’ll let me take you on an actual date.”

“We can’t be together,” I say. Ari looks as if I’ve slapped him, but the expression is gone in an instant. “And why is that, lover?” “Don’t be purposefully obtuse.” “If this is about your family name—” “It is. Don’t minimize how being publicly mated to an Adder would affect you.” Anger and loss make me snap. “Don’t minimize what my life is like because of my status.”

“You would be mine. My name could protect us both.” Ari’s voice is fervent.

“And what about when they come for your business?” I ask. “When your contacts stop prioritizing you based on your status in our community? When your best customers won’t buy from you because of how you’ve lowered yourself? When rumors are spread about your allegiances?” Ari’s face slackens. His grip on my wrist falls, our physical connection broken. He’s obviously never thought of this. I have. I’m not stupid. Sex between us never felt casual.

“I don’t think I could handle having a mate right now.” I wouldn’t want to inflict myself on anyone.

The knock on the door is perfunctory and I roll my eyes when Rose strolls into the room. Our relationship is the odd kind that comes from witnessing the other in sexual acts. Intimate but distant enough not to be considered friends by the larger world. Rose is an exhibitionist. Anytime that Ari and I could get an invite to watch her and her tentacled lover, we took it. The forbidden sight always spurs our own sexual actions.

It’s always strange to see the scale skin pull from my human body. I never shift. Unlike Ari, the action requires too much energy for one with such thin blood.

Agnes. Warm and loving Agnes, with the can-of-hairspray updos and novelty sweaters, stares back at me, unmoving. Her colorful ensemble and rosy cheeks turn gray, turn to stone. A statue takes the place of my lovely coworker.

“You’ll have to remove the glamour for Ari. Are you comfortable with that?”

“Well, that’s your first problem. It’s not a curse. It’s a blessing from the Goddess.” “Uh, what?” I blink. “She’s bestowed powers to you that have been unheard of for decades.”

“There’s no reason it would cause this unless the Goddess took a special interest in Emilia.” “Why would she take a special interest in me?” I ask. Ari’s gaze rests heavily on me and his lips curve. “Perhaps you are noticeable.”

“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way for… Emilia… to become un-Chosen.” Jasper speaks slowly, some of the musical nature from before enters his voice and the presence calms me. Ari’s eyes sharpen on the director and something significant passes over his face before it’s gone in a quick twist of a grin.

Ari tilts his head up, inching his mouth that much nearer to my own. “I give my word that I will do everything in my power to find a way for Emilia to become un-Chosen.” “Okay,” I say, at once satisfied and hungry for something else. Ari’s lips curve as if following my line of thinking. “Just keep your mind open for me, my viper.” That, right there, whatever that is, is dangerous. I take a step back. This is what I rejected last night and the pain of that is fresh enough to warn me away. “What’s between us is settled,” I say. Ari’s grin is more fang than anything. “And this is something new.”

But the possibility of the years spreading before us dotted with intimacies where the man I love gives me fragments of happiness only to rip them away again made me careless.

Family is family wherever you go, but you only have one life and that’s for happiness and adventure,

“Jasper and I are the same type of creature, but he is much younger and…” Ari trails off as if searching for a kind way to say what we both know. “Thinner blooded,” I say, my voice scratchy. I hate my limitations, my inadequacies, but they exist whether I hide them or not. “I have more human in me.”

“I like her,” Ari says. “I think she’ll convince Emilia to stay with us.” “With you,” I correct in passing. I don’t know what Mrs. Rivera is going to convince Emilia to do.

“I didn’t suggest them because she’s Puerto Rican.” My blush is a vicious thing that spreads down my neck. “She brings back a taco order from a place near the library for lunch at least twice a week.” Ari’s brows rise in something that looks like triumph and I feel laid bare before him. I hadn’t meant to let that slip.

“I think you should move in with them,” Ma says from beside me. I almost spit out the coffee. “What?” “I have a feeling about this, a gut feeling.” Her voice is soft. “You’re different around them. More comfortable than you usually are with people you don’t know.”

Emilia belongs with us. I feel it in my bones, see it in the way that Jasper watches her too closely, but Chosen have always had the final decision about their matches.

The weight of losing the man I love and the woman I’ve only met but know to the core of my being will complete us. “I’ve been alone for a long time, and I recognize the opportunity not to be. I won’t ruin that for anything.” Not with Jasper’s fearful reticence or Emilia’s need for normalcy. Things just need a little push.

I feel something alright. Something with him and Jasper. Something so overwhelming that I can hardly make heads or tails of it. Something that I’ve been persistently ignoring. “I can’t do this right now,” I whisper. One thing at a time. “Okay,” he says and steps back. There’s no disappointment on his face, only acceptance and patience. “There’s no rush, but that’s what I’m after.”

You and Jasper are under my protection, and I take my responsibility for your care very seriously.”

All the years we’ve spent together, and I’ve never picked up on this craving of his to be needed. How tempted he is by Emilia because she needs him. Doesn’t he know that I need him too?

I’m struck for a moment with shame. My human features are dominant, I can’t shift into the half-snake form serpent kin have sex in and stay that way. It would take too much energy and focus, with my brain as fried from Ari’s presence as it is. Ari moans, gripping my cock. Scales gleam on his hand from his transformation. “So pretty here.” I shake my head. “I’m practically human.” Ari hisses in anger, gripping my erection too hard and I cry out in dizzying pleasure. “You are what I want. Never doubt that.” The directness of his words sears me.

If I break, I break for him, but he’ll never know that. I may not be able to hide how my body reacts to him, but he’ll never know how much further his reach extends, how embedded he is in my very soul.

He’s so thick, sliding in and out of my body slowly without thrusting his hips. “So perfect,” he growls. “You’re mine now.”

At the last moment, the memory morphs into my hand wrapped around Emilia’s throat and her soft-brown eyes dilating with arousal.

“Jasper seems to have left earlier this morning,” he says. And didn’t tell his host or me. That’s what has upset Ari. He had said last night how important it was to him to eat with company.

I don’t want to be here. I want to be with them.

“And the sizzle of power behind them is serious enough to take out a roomful of people if you will it,” he says. “I don’t want that.” He grins. “Then that’s what we’ll work on.

“Now that your body is relaxed, can you identify anything different? I say a burn because that’s what your power feels like to me.”

I’ve chosen to think of the ache as a gift. It’s proof that they existed.”

Once the individual who spearheaded the uprising was dealt with, the faction fell, disgraced forevermore by the memory.”

I nod. The balance of knowledge here is a careful thing. I made promises to help Emilia search for ways of becoming “un-Chosen” as she had called it. I know more about the subject than would be wise to tell them now. There are certain truths that will take time and our support for Emilia to accept. We’re early in our courtship still. There’s no need to face those revelations yet.

Ari’s smile is rueful. “I’m interested in having a relationship with you and Jasper. I don’t want to rush to physical intimacy, and I don’t want you to do anything with us because you think it could solve your current dilemma.” Jasper’s eyes snap to Ari, and Ari continues. “I’m trying to be open about my wants. I know I’ve struggled with that in the past. If it’s not something you’re looking for right now, I’ll respect that, but I’m asking for permission to… woo the both of you.”

I swallow. “I’m open to… being in a relationship.” I rush to add, “With the both of you.”

Emilia is interested in being with us. I’d avoided letting myself fixate on her since she arrived at the library. Years I’ve kept myself in check, not wanting to bother the pretty restoration expert, not wanting to make her even more uncomfortable around me than she already was. And after a single day with Ari, she’s agreeing to be wooed by us.