The COMPLETE Witching Pen Series, Boxed Set (26 page)

"Oh, my God, Paul…"

Another growl saw her flush against Pueblo's body, the look of menace on his face sending a shiver through her body – only, she realised with much vexation, it was a shiver of lust rather than fear. Blonde bimbo that she was – she just didn't know when to run. And that brought up the memory of the last time she saw her mother all over again. Tears sprung to her eyes.

Pueblo suddenly looked shocked and dropped her. The loss of his heat made her feel cold.

"I'm sorry," he choked out.

"Pueblo—"

"No, you don't deserve me behaving like some total jerk—"

"Etienne took me from my mother when I was five."

He looked at her in silence.

Tears slipped from her eyes. "I forgot her. And now I remember. I haven't remembered her for twenty-two years… What kind of daughter doesn't remember her own mother?"

He reached for her, but she pulled away, forcing back the sobs that threatened. There was no time for crying now. She met his gaze again. "There's a whole bunch of stuff I need to say to you, for example, did you know I was a shapeshifter before you gave me your blood? Because I can sense that you're one now that I have all my memories."

He winced.

"Ah, I see. Honey, you've got
so
much verbal abuse coming your way."

She stepped up to him.

The tiniest amount of fear flickered in his eyes, for which she allowed herself a small moment of triumph, then she stood on her tip-toes and kissed him.

His face was a mask of astonishment when she stepped back.

"I also need to say thank you. Thank you for finding me, for … what just happened, and helping me get my memories back."

"Amy … they may not last. I really don't want to say this, but there's a chance that when you wake up, you may forget again. Our blood-bond—"

"Is powerful," she finished. "What happened just now when we had sex … that just doesn't happen to people. But it happened to us. I felt us
leave
our dream behind, didn't you?"

He nodded. "I did."

"Then I refuse to believe something like that can take place, and it mean nothing. I'm going to keep my memories. The desert will flood before I ever let anyone take them from me again."

He smiled at her, awe colouring his features. "You are one amazing woman."

"Well, duh."

"Shit!
Amy—"

"What?"

"Look!"

He pointed at her arm. She could see right through it. She was fading.

"You must be waking up." Panic sounded in his voice. "What date is it where you are?"

Her mind went blank, and for a moment she experienced that thing again where her life flashed before her eyes. Then it came to her.

"9
^th
October, 195—"

A scream ripped from her lungs as the snow leopard attacked Pueblo from the right. It sank its teeth into his shoulder, and she screamed again. She tried to run forwards to intervene, but her legs had started to fade as well. She saw Pueblo shift as he fought the leopard. His panther flipped over and slashed his claw into the leopard's face. Blood glinted in the sun, and that was all Amy saw before she was sucked back through time.

Chapter Seven

Gwain had not been exaggerating. Katarra – Queen Katarra – was one high maintenance lady demon. In the last half an hour alone, she had complained that her tea was too creamy, demanded she be given a nail file and hand lotion, as the human air was making her nails brittle, and she had needed extra cushions where she sat because her skin was too sensitive for the fabrics of this world. To top it all off, she refused to wear anything other than the sheer non-dress she'd arrived in, so everyone could see every part of her whether they wanted to or not. And Mary really didn't want to. But she stared at her anyway, because she didn't want to catch Gwain's eye for the rest of the evening until she could get her head together.

The fact that he knew so much about her from so little information was startling, for her especially, as part of her stability was founded on knowing that no one else knew
anything
about her. Well, Elena knew about the dreams, but not about the pain they caused, or the methods she went to to ease it. Exactly how much Gwain knew, was a question that gnawed away at her.

Unfortunately, looking at Katarra – the mere presence of the woman – was a flaring beacon to Mary. The beacon signalled,
look at me, I'm just like you.
 

Mary hated to admit it, but she related to the Brujii Queen, because she wasn't sure she knew the true meaning of pleasure either. In her twenty-eight years, she had only ever had two orgasms – both of them accidents. It was a damn shame, because after those two orgasms, she'd been dream-free for a whole week each time – a luxury she'd never thought possible. The problem was, that she could only orgasm when in a prolonged state of intense pain. Maybe it was a side effect of what she'd trained her body to do; how she'd trained it to cope.

The first time she'd experienced an orgasm was when she was fifteen years old. She'd been hit by a car. Her injuries had been bad. Lying on the ground, in excruciating pain and completely conscious, waiting for the ambulance, she'd relished in the anguish. And in the way the seam of her jeans crotch had twisted in such a way that it was pressing against her clitoris. It had taken her by surprise, and no one had noticed her little release, thank God. She was repulsed enough by her twisted self – she didn't need others to find her repulsive too.

After that, she didn't have a nightmare for a week. She'd automatically thought it was down to the accident itself, or at the very least the pain of broken bones, rather than her orgasm, until she'd had a second one.

That one had happened when she was eighteen. She'd been thrown off a horse and had kept on falling after she'd landed sharply on a rock that had given way under her. Fifty meters down a ravine, she'd finally stopped on a ledge. Ribs had been broken, a shoulder dislocated, an ankle twisted and a tree branch speared through her navel. And it was heaven. Pure heaven, because her mind was clear. There was none of the usual heaviness, no ache in her brain, no urge to vomit, and no desire to tear her skin from her body. There was just pain – pain that had nothing to do with her nightmares. And clarity. Lying there, broken, on the ledge, the need to climax had started as a burn between her thighs, until it became impossible to ignore. She had forced her less mangled hand between her legs, pressed once, twice, and that had been enough.

By the time she'd been found and taken to hospital – 'miraculously still alive', the doctors had insisted on telling her over and over again – she'd fallen into a peaceful, dreamless sleep, which had remained dreamless for eight blissful days.

That's when she'd understood the formula: intense, prolonged pain + orgasm = no nightmares. And so had begun her hunt for the situations that could provide her with what she needed, without getting her killed. She'd found The Lock Down, and for the first time felt she wasn't alone, that maybe it wasn't her fault she was … screwed up.

She'd found two Doms, Chris and Alex, willing to cut her as part of their play, as long as no one was looking and club management didn't find out, since it was against House Rules.

And sod all had happened.

Not even a hint of arousal from her – no burn between her legs – nothing. Maybe they held back, or maybe it was because she expected the pain. She'd spoken to them about ditching the safe word, but since cutting was involved they'd refused to do that … and they'd looked at her like she was a little insane. At that moment, she had realised that it was, in fact, her. Not anyone else –
her.
She was the one with the problem. She was the one that was different … fucked up might be more appropriate.

Rubbing her forehead, she brought herself out of the dark path her mind had gone down and forced herself to listen to what Katarra was saying.
She's talking about the Witching Pen, now
focus
, so you don't have to stay here longer than you need to.
 

"—after the fall of Atlantis."

Crap, she'd missed something. "Wait, what was after the fall of Atlantis?"

The Brujii regarded her with an equal amount of annoyance and wariness. "Which part were you not listening to?"

Bitch.
"Just repeat the last sentence."

"God lost faith in man after the fall of Atlantis. Also known as the fall of Eden, by the way – ring any bells? That's when he asked angels to forge the Witching Pen – of course, it wasn't known as the Witching Pen back then. That's just a name demons gave it to scare people away from it." She looked pointedly at Elena. "Witches were actually scary back then."

Elena glanced at Karl in exasperation. Karl just shrugged.

"Anyway, after Eden fell, God deemed all humans unworthy of having free choice, and the Pen was his way of making sure he could write their futures for them. Some angels disagreed with the creation of the Pen and
chose
to fall, so they could help humans find their free will again. This is when the war in Heaven began. When God realised that angels were helping humans to find free will, he worried that it would be Eden crumbling all over again, so he sent his right hand man – his very first angel – into the bowels of the Earth, to rule what you know as the Underworld."

"You mean Hell?" cut in Elena. "Are you talking about Satan?"

"Satan, Abaddon, The Deceiver, The Destroyer, The Beast … whatever you want to call him. Yes, Satan was the first angel, and the only one God trusted to remind humans of the consequences and responsibility of having free will – if you abused it, you would enter Hell instead of Heaven."

Everyone stared at her, dumbfounded.

"Are you for real?" asked Karl. "This is not the version we learnt at Sunday school."

"Hello? God is a total control freak. I mean, what kind of being creates an entire race in his own image, then goes all lunar when they don't do what he says? One with control issues! Can I carry on now? Good. So … Hell was created, Heaven was in disarray, and angels were flitting all over the place not knowing what side to be on, and while this was all going on, Lokoli, who was an angel that had been banned from Heaven and demonised, sneaked back in when no one was looking and stole the Pen from under their noses."

"Wait, wait, wait … so, Lokoli was an angel? But I thought she was the most bloodthirsty demon ever."

Katarra raised her perfectly arched, hairless eyebrows. "You don't think angels can be bloodthirsty? Angels can be bloodthirsty."

Everyone, including Mary, looked at Gwain.

He coughed. "Er … yes, some angels do have a rather interesting idea of what makes good play, shall we say?"

The unspoken question on everyone's lips hung in the air.
Do you?
 

Gwain didn't answer it. "Please continue, your majesty."

She flashed him a smile. "Thank you. Lokoli wielded extremely powerful magic. As soon as she got hold of the Pen, she wrote an entire new dimension into existence for herself to rule over, and then she wrote the seven demon tribes into existence. And I think you all know the rest of the story concerning Lokoli, her demon tribes and her demise, as well as how the Pen ended up in the Shanka's shadow world."

"Yes," mumbled Elena.

Mary was still staring at Gwain, trying to visualise him enjoying bloodplay, of all things. He shot her a glance. She looked away.

"What I don't understand," continued Elena, "is what we're supposed to do with the Pen now."

"Before Lokoli was murdered, she had some ambitious plans. She'd written a whole bunch of stuff set millennia in the future, because she was planning to still be here to see them through. One of the things she wrote involved this dimension."

"The human dimension?"

"Yes. She had plans to rule over all whom God had rejected. She wrote that two thousand and eleven years after the birth of the Failed One, the Witching Pen would be made manifest on Earth by the Great Shanka Witch of the Old Scrolls." She looked at Elena. "That's you, by the way. By her hand, the Earth would rumble and shatter, and all dimensions would bleed into one."

They stared at her blankly.

She let out a dramatic sigh. "Do I have to spell out everything?
Elena
is the Shanka Witch, The Failed One is Jesus Christ – he both failed and was failed, as far as Lokoli was concerned. Two thousand and eleven years after his birth is the year 2011 AD – i.e.
now
. And the rest of it refers to an apocalypse that will be caused by Elena, a.k.a. Shanka Witch. Capice?"

Elena paled. "I'm going to end the world?"

"The world as you know it, yes. So in answer to your question about what to do with the Pen, if I were you, I'd be looking to destroy it, as that's the only way to stop whatever was written with it that hasn't come to pass yet, and the only way to stop
you
writing whatever you're going to write that will end the world."

"How do you destroy it?"

"You can't. Only two beings in existence can destroy the Witching Pen: God and Satan. I'll bet you anything that neither of them are interested in destroying it. More likely, once they have it back in their hands, they would just want to keep it for themselves and continue to write away the free will of mankind. By the way, who actually has the Pen at the moment?"

"I do," answered Gwain, pulling the mundane looking, plastic, blue fountain pen out of his pocket. "Care to touch it?"

She scowled at him. "So what have you written lately, Gwain?"

Everyone stared at him again.

"Nothing. I wouldn't write with this Pen if my life depended on it."

Mary wasn't sure everyone looked convinced.

"It's true," Katarra said, with a sigh. "Such a waste of magic. But Gwain is one who
chose
to fall, aren't you? So your beloved humans could have free will… How's that going for you?"

He ignored her. "There are two stages of falling for an angel: the fall into Earth, and the fall into Hell. It's the second type of falling you want to avoid. It's why we don't travel into demon dimensions if we can help it. If I can find a way to destroy the Pen, I will, but the fact is, as Katarra has stated, that only God or Satan can destroy it."