“You okay?” Liam kept hold of Ryder’s face. Solid, fluid magic poured from his palms. Water flowed through Ryder, easing the tension that warred under his skin.
He caught the distinct outline of a small Band-Aid on Liam’s neck.
“Since when have you been this affectionate?” Ryder teased.
“Since I’ve needed to calm down an unstable necromancer in our best friend’s bathroom,” Liam said, a low grate to his voice that Ryder recognized as impatience. His tongue ran along the back of his teeth. Ryder listened to the click-clack, click-clack of his tongue ring. “Are you okay?” he repeated, more pointedly. The hand on Ryder’s neck fell to his waist and drifted under his shirt, fingertips tracing the symbol on Ryder’s hip.
“I’m fine. It’s just the moon,” he said, mocking Christy in a swoony voice.
“Yeah, it’s just the moon,” Liam agreed. He sounded winded and sore, unlike Liam in a way that was very Liam after all.
Ryder felt Liam’s heartbeat through the palm cupping his cheek. He tasted his magic, volatile and salty and alive. He wanted to kiss him. He wanted Liam to dig his fingernail into the cuts on his hip and break them back open. He wanted to be in control of something, anything. He wanted to make Liam moan and writhe and say his name.
“Did you set intention for tonight?” Ryder asked.
The darkness was thick around them. The full moon party went on outside the door, a cacophony of shouts and laughter and music.
Liam leaned back against the door. His hand fell away from Ryder’s face, but the other stayed put on his hip, fingertips drifting back and forth, up and down, across one line, over another. “I did,” he said. “But I don’t think it’ll matter.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there’s no going back now.”
Ryder felt the sharp edge of the reaver against his finger. He withdrew his hand and slipped it on.
Liam held his breath. His gaze stayed pinned to Ryder’s hand. Even in the darkness, it was easy to spot the silver pointed talon—a necromancer’s blood-spilling tool. Liam didn’t move when Ryder slid his clawed hand under his shirt; he just shifted his eyes to Ryder’s face and waited.
Ryder scraped the tip of the blade lightly along the lines of Liam’s stomach. He dipped it in the hollow beneath his hipbones, dragged it between each rib and over his sternum. Liam’s eyes closed and he gasped, pushing against Ryder’s hand. He stashed the sound of Liam’s breath gusting from him away, memorizing the lift of his chest, the flutter of his eyelashes.
Someone banged on the door. Liam jumped and flinched when the reaver caught his skin.
“You done in there?” Another bang. “C’mon, hurry it up.”
Ryder shoved the reaver back in his pocket, flicked on the light, and glanced at himself in the mirror. Normal eyes. Flushed. Whatever, fuck it.
“Ry,” Liam hissed. He scrambled to grab Ryder’s hand, but Ryder opened the door and slipped past him, sending Liam stumbling backward into the hallway.
The person who’d interrupted them said, “Hey, whoa, sorry guys.”
Ryder grabbed the beer he’d left on the kitchen counter and darted through the living room toward the front door. He felt Christy’s energy before he saw her. She ducked out of his way, a flurry of questions on her face. Her magic formed another shield. He glanced at her and shook his head, silently telling her to let it be.
A few of the white witches who had been channeling with her on the couch squeaked and gasped. One clutched her chest. Someone said, “Did you feel that?” Another replied, “That’s dark magic. Who…?”
Ryder fled. He walked straight to the fire pit outside and focused on it, gathering enough energy to pull a patch of flames into his palm. He danced the glowing, sparking energy between his fingers in one hand. Other witches watched, either enamored or impressed or jealous.
He didn’t need their envy or approval, he needed a distraction.
“No parlor tricks, Ryder,” Tyler shouted from a bench he shared with Donovan. “You know the house rules.”
The flame expanded before it fizzled out in his palm.
He flipped Tyler off, which earned him a lungful of laughter, and stalked around the side of the house. A couple made out beneath a window. Someone smoked a joint. A few people were doing a reading, encircled in burning white candles.
He dipped under the wire fence that divided the house from the rest of the property and walked through the yellow grass to the old rusted car. It’d been there for years, a junky mesh of metal, looming on its own in the middle of the pasture, at least half a football field away from the party and the partygoers. His muscles loosened as he put space between himself and the conjoined energies of so many witches. The voices from outside the house faded, along with the music and drums. He sipped his beer, and turned his reaver over in his palm like he had the flame.
Breathe. Ryder took a heavy, deep breath. He couldn’t keep this secret for long. It would show itself in one way or another, in violence or blood or a burst of nervousness. He’d been keeping it for too long already, and now that it’d crept out, there was no way to force it back in.
The hood of the abandoned car faced the forest with the house behind it. Ryder sat atop it and looked at the sky. He replayed the sound of Liam’s gasp again and again, and fished in the pocket of his coat for the maroon pouch he knew was there. Heat built low in his abdomen. He ignored it. Black magic tickled his throat. He ignored it. Ryder shrugged off his coat, hoping the bitter November air would cool him down. It helped, marginally.
“Give me something,” Ryder whispered to the tarot cards as he shuffled them. “Anything.”
Focus. He pulled the first card.
The Lovers.
“Fuck you.” He shoved the card back into the deck. Shuffled. Shuffled. Shuffled.
C’mon. He pulled another card.
The Lovers.
Ryder fell back on the hood. There was no avoiding it or changing it or undoing it. He heard his mother’s voice in his mind. The cards never lie, sweetheart. But the cards could lie. Sometimes they did lie. And this reading had to be a lie, because Ryder had wanted Liam for too long to be allowed to have him now. He blinked at the sky and picked out constellations, even as footsteps shuffled through the grass behind the car. Virgo. One step closer. Beetlejuice. Another.
“Pisces,” Ryder said. He raised his arm and dragged it through the air, outlining where Pisces glowed against the night sky.
Liam leaned his hip against the car and nodded, arms folded tightly over his chest. “Where’s Aries?”
Ryder pointed far to the left. “You can barely see it, but it’s over there.”
Liam hummed. He tapped on the deck next to Ryder. “What’d you draw?”
“What do you think?”
Liam’s caramel eyes stayed pinned to Ryder. His hair was pushed off his face, and Ryder had a hard time not looking at him. He swallowed and kept staring at the sky instead, hoping his feigned disregard would be enough to send Liam back to the party.
“Was everything you said last night true?” Liam picked up the deck and shuffled it.