Supernatural Seduction (Book 2 of the Coffin Girls Series) (9 page)

“Yes,” Sophie agreed. “I’ve read a book on
the Salem massacres that indicated as such. It would make sense
that money would be the motivator, even then. Men, and women,
seemed to have evolved little over the centuries.”

Sophie nodded, “I always found it interesting
that the executors got wealthier with each capital punishment and
no one in the towns and villages said or did anything about it. I’m
sure some were afraid and others had their hands in the coffers,
too, but those who greased their palms were a minority. If the
masses had dug up the courage to stand against it, they could have
won.”

“Indeed,” nodded Sylvain. “Now back to the
tale. I was intrigued by what Conall was doing and grudgingly
admired it. I was also bored. Living millennia can be tedious. So,
I decided to help him out. The witch-hunts were expansive and while
Conall’s army was large, he could not span the expanse of an entire
continent. I didn’t remember you, not because you’re forgettable,
but because I’d lost count of how many women, I saved back then.
Also, I’m not a pedophile and you were a young girl. If you’d been
then, as you are now, I might not have dropped you off at the
convent.”

The gaze he raked over Sophie’s body seared
her through her clothing. Her breath caught as desire hit her hot
and hard. She looked up into his face and found herself drawn in,
held by the intensity of his gaze. Sophie leaned in to kiss
him.

Sylvain stopped her. “Why now? I’ve teased
you before and I’ve made no secret of my desire for you.”

When Sophie’s gaze dropped, he nodded
gravely. “I thought so. I won’t get into this with you now, Sophie.
Not because I find you undesirable.” He raked his hands through his
hair, “I find you too desirable for our own good. What I want is
for you and I to carry on as friends and should we become lovers,
and I really want that, I don’t want you to do so because you have
a misguided feeling of obligation. I want you to make love to me
because you want me back as much as I want you. If I want a fuck, I
can get one. That’s not what I’m looking for with you.”

Sophie reeled back, struck speechless, and
watched an angry Sylvain leave her room, the banging door barely
registering. What was that? So much had happened in the last few
hours that she barely understood it all. What she did know was that
she'd fucked up - big time. Groaning, she turned her head into the
pillow, and berated herself.

“Now that you have the shield in place,”
Arianna instructed Sophie, “visualize it as a force field, a type
of blanket you can wrap around your body.”

“I can’t feel a thing,” Sophie announced in
wonder. Despite her most excellent company and tutor, Arianna, and
the warm eccentricity of the sorceress’s home, it felt oddly
solitary. Sophie looked around in wonder at the objects in the
room. She picked up both the good and the bad from objects, people,
animals, plants, and well, anything. When she’d first walked in the
room where Arianna practiced her craft, she’d detected desire
coming from a large, earthen bowl. When she’d questioned her tutor
about it, Arianna had mumbled something about a love potion. Now,
there was nothing. Sophie concentrated and focused on Arianna,
noting her twinkling platinum-colored eyes, her elegant fingers
twining around the curls at the end of her raven locks. She saw
bemusement on Arianna’s face, but could pick up no definite mood.
Feeling uncomfortable, Sophie made to shake the shield off.

“No,” Arianna stopped her. “Look inside you.
What do you feel?”

“I don’t understand,” responded Sophie.

Arianna’s laughter trilled like musical bells
on Christmas Eve, “I’m not surprised, Sophie. You’ve been using
your gift intuitively for too long. You need to take the energy you
are feeling now to detect my emotions and use it on yourself. In
other wards, take what you’d use on others and focus it inward.
Picture it as a ball of light like you do when you perform witch’s
magick and redirect it to where you want it to go.”

Sophie did as requested and reeled back.
“
Mon Dieu
!”

“Exactly,” replied Arianna with a knowing
grin. “That’s your own feelings. They are raw and unmarred by that
of those around you. Staggering isn’t it?”

“Wow,” was Sophie’s inarticulate response. “I
had no idea that I felt so much. I mean, I know I feel a lot, and
often but..."

Arianna smiled knowingly, and yet kindly, at
Sophie’s confusion. “But,” she finished for Sophie, “you’re used to
feeling what others do. Now you’re faced with your own
emotions.”

Overwhelmed, Sophie nodded. There was too
much going on inside of her. Every emotion you could possibly think
of came to the forefront. Sophie was surprised at what was revealed
and insecure about how to handle it. She dug deeper and found love
for her friends and kinship. Slipping slyly through the cracks
though was lust and longing. Longing for that husband and family
she’d promised her mother she would find and lust for a certain fae
prince who’d captured her interest and earned her gratitude. She
also felt guilty, because she’d upset him the previous evening and
yet relieved that he hadn't taken her up on the offer. She wasn’t
sure she was ready for a lust-filled romp with Sylvain. Twitching
with discomfort, she looked up at Arianna, determined to focus on
the lesson. “It feels like too much, and all at once,” she
confessed.

“Again, not surprising,” stated Arianna
matter-of-factly. “You’ve been taking in everything around you like
a sponge until you could no longer distinguish between you and the
rest. Now you’ve had a peak into how you, as Sophie feels, not
Sophie the empath. You’ll need to spend time each day, doing
exactly what you just did. Focus on your own emotions and allow
them to make themselves known. Think of them as neglected children
who are finally getting their mother’s attention. They need that
attention and attending to. You’ll need to deal with it bit by bit,
every day, until you know how to deal with it.”

Arianna looked at Sophie squirming in
discomfort. “In fact, I think we need to begin each lesson like
this - with you accessing your emotions. I also suggest you
meditate, and I can show you how. It will help you clear your mind
and heart first and eventually aid you in finding that balance you
desire.”

It was a statement that also served as a
question, Sophie realized. “Yes, please,” she replied. “I’ll take
any help offered.” Now that she was faced with so much, her
confidence in her own ability to deal with her empath gift and
serve as a Coffin Girls was wavering.

As if reading her thoughts, Arianna advised,
“You have to do this for you though. I know there are
responsibilities you have to your fellow vampires, and the witches.
Perhaps even to our Prince. But, you need to do this for you first
and trust that the rest will follow.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Sophie
responded softly.

“I know,” acknowledged Arianna. “Being an
empath is not an easy path to walk. It is natural to put others
first. Again, the mother analogy: if a mother does not take care of
herself, she’ll be unable to care for her children. The paradigm
shift you’ll be required to make is perhaps the hardest of all the
lessons you’ll need to learn here and it is something you will need
to work on even after we complete your training.” Arianna shrugged.
“As I said, it is natural for empaths to feel as though they need
to take on the weight of the worlds, but in doing so they harm
themselves, and those around them, eventually.”

Seeing that Sophie had had all introspection
she could take, Arianna changed the direction of their lesson,
“Now, for another essential skill. I’ll teach you how to let in the
emotions of others and objects around you bit-by-bit. Again, I’ll
introduce you to the skill and during our future lessons. I will
revisit this skill with you until you’ve mastered it. Ready?”

At Sophie’s nod, Arianna continued. “Still
picturing the force field around you, comforting, and shielding you
like a heavy winter’s blanket, give it the mental instruction to
become lighter, thinner.”

“I can feel the emotions around me, but
just,” Sophie responded. “You’re feeling satisfaction at the
progress of our lessons…”

“You can feel my emotions?” Arianna
asked.

“Yes,” confirmed Sophie. Arianna looked
perplexed. “Why do you ask?” inquired Sophie.

“You shouldn’t be able to,” explained
Arianna, shaking her head. “I’ve been masking what I feel since you
entered the room. I didn’t want my emotional presence to interrupt
the lesson. This lesson is about you, what you feel and how to
filter slowly.”

“I don’t understand,” Sophie shook her head.
Arianna was a powerful fae sorceress and if she meant something to
be, it should have happened. "So what does this mean? How can I
sense what you feel if you’re shielding?” Sophie inquired.

“It means that you’re an exceptionally
powerful empath, Sophie. The good in that is that with training,
you’re likely to astound us, but the bad is that this training,
learning how to take care of yourself and what you feel, what you
let in, is more critical than we assumed.”

“Critical?” Sophie lifted a brow. “Isn’t that
a bit dramatic?”

“Yes, it is dramatic,” replied Arianna. “But,
accurately so. I am the most powerful empath I know of and have
been for a thousand years. So, you should not be able to feel
beyond my shield. Before that there was another - a fae sorceress
with empathic abilities - much like me.”

“Who was she? Your mother?”

“No,” Arianna shook her head. “It is
sufficient to say that the consequences for an untrained, powerful
empath are dramatic because her ability led to her death.”

“I sense your questions, but the tale isn’t
mine to tell,” Arianna said, standing up and taking Sophie’s hands,
bringing her up from the mat, too. “Suffice to say that a powerful
empath such as you needs training. I need to think on how to teach
you. Let’s call it a day and reconvene here tomorrow."

Dismissed from her training, Sophie made her
way through the quiet suburban streets to the bustling main street
of the hollow. Although the hollow was expansive, the village’s
business district was easily accessible from any point as it was
centered. It looked like a quaint, picturesque hub of a small town.
The exception was that in this hub, the inhabitants were beautiful
and magickal. Unlike human business districts, there were no
buildings selling goods and services. In fact, no selling occurred
at all. The fae had no need for money, and thus did not engage in
commerce. Magick unashamedly provided them with all they required.
Instead, the hub held buildings designed in and denoting the
purposes of the various fae. Sophie waved to fae in front of a huge
grass mound, colorful flowers pushing up around it. This building
housed the meetings for the fae responsible for growth and earthly
magick. Next to it was a tower, a tube really, that linked to the
nearby river. The building was a long tube of transparent glass
filled with water. The inhabitants of the tower all had gills or
could breathe underwater. This was the house of the water fae.
Sophie realized that as monarch, Sylvain could probably enter the
tower of water and converse inside it easily. He was, despite his
mischievous nature, unassuming, given the sheer amount of power he
held.

At her thoughts of Sylvain, she glanced
towards the top end of the magickal hub towards his castle, a
sentinel of power and magick. The castle’s location was not only a
strategic one to prevent the rare enemy that gained entry from
infiltrating the fae hollow’s stronghold, but it was there to both
add to, accept from, and ground the magick visibly swirling around
the business district. Sophie wondered where he was and what he was
doing. She wondered if he was still angry or at the very least,
irritated at her. Shaking her head at her own thoughts, she
continued towards the path that led through the hollow towards the
meadow on the outskirts of the hollow’s village.

She could still feel the residual effects
from her self-exploration exercise in Arianna’s home. Having seen
what the beautiful sorceress was capable of in just one empath
lesson, she thought she’d give the meditation a try and visit one
of her favorite places in the hollow. The meadow was beautiful.
Seas of green grass interspersed with wild flowers in a variety of
colors calmed and soothed as it swayed in the slight breeze. The
sun, a ball of yellow, gleamed in a sky as blue as Sylvain’s
roguish eyes. Horses, wild yet tame, trotted in the lea and
completed the picture of pastoral tranquility.

Sophie sat under one of the trees punctuating
the expansive green pasture and allowed herself to just breathe.
She had never tried meditation in the formal sense of the art, but
had explained to Arianna that to her, the ultimate relaxation was
to commune with nature and just be, even if it meant literally
sitting under a tree. Arianna had stated that to do so could be
seen as a form of meditation as long as solace and calm was sought.
Empaths, according to her, had always sought out the balancing
effects of enveloping themselves in the natural world. Sophie could
relate to that as she’d instinctively sought out gardens and places
of natural beauty whenever she had been in a state of agitation.
Since her mother’s death, she’d found solace under many different
trees - first at the Ursuline convent in France and then later at
Pierre, her late husband’s, plantation.

She started to feel relaxed, yet was still
agitated. It was perplexing. On the one hand, she could feel the
knots loosen in her muscles, and her breathing regulate, but there
was still something bothering her. Sighing in resignation, she
closed her eyes and dropped the shield around her, focusing inwards
as Arianna had taught her that morning.