An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 30

Winter break turned the campus into a ghost town—and Ellory loved it. Her shifts at Powers That Bean were quiet, her customers largely international students who didn’t have the money or the desire to hop on an expensive flight home for the holidays.

Snow had yet to fall, but the weather was preparing for it: every day was subzero, and the grass crunched beneath her boots when she crossed the frozen quad. Decorations appeared in the fir trees and building windows, cutouts of Santa and Stars of David, snowflakes and dreidels. A lake in town had frozen over, and she occasionally saw students heading toward the bus station with ice skates hanging by their laces off their arms.

The holiday season, for Ellory, was a gift and a nightmare. Retail shifts were hellish, packed with the kind of customers who made her wish it were legal to hunt other humans for sport. When she’d worked at Midtown Comics, she had been yelled at more times than she cared to remember for not having the exact issue of the exact comic series someone wanted at seven o’clock at night on Christmas Eve. But there was also a hopefulness in the air that was unmatched by the rest of the seasons, a sense of camaraderie and togetherness that she had always loved. It was like the world forgot to be cruel, because the sight of snow and the ringing of sleigh bells forced a collective calm.

Ellory would have felt calmer if Aunt Carol hadn’t taken her decision to spend an extra week at school so hard. “Don’t tell me that you’re starting to like it up there,” Carol had huffed over the phone. “This is your home. I’m your home.”

“And you always will be,” Ellory assured her. “But Liam invited me to his family’s Christmas party, and it would just be easier to get there from here. I’ll be back in Astoria right after.”

“ Liam ,” Carol repeated. “I thought you broke up with him.”

“I did.” Ellory winced at the reminder of letting that slip. “But we’re friends. We’re fine.”

It was Ellory who wasn’t fine. She had been able to think of little else but Hudson Graves and the way his breath had caught as he stared at her mouth on a cold bench just off the side of the quad. She had moved on so quickly that it was as if she had never liked Liam at all, and still he’d broken the stalemate between them with this invitation. He was a far kinder man than she had ever deserved, and her heart did not care at all.

“I guess I’ll see you after your fancy party, then,” Aunt Carol said, somehow making it sound like Ellory was getting kidnapped rather than choosing to spend extra time at school. “Don’t get arrested.”

Ellory had rolled her eyes and said her goodbyes.

The day of the Christmas party dawned without fanfare. Ellory took her time in the shower, getting dressed, and packing, luxuriating in having the room to herself. She took the bus to the Metro North, even knowing that Hudson probably would have driven her if she’d asked. It was over an hour from Hartford to Darien, so, of course, she hadn’t asked.

Where Hartford was bisected by a river but otherwise landlocked and forested, Darien was a small coastal town that looked like it belonged on a postcard. The Long Island Sound was a gorgeous ribbon of blue, lined with gray beaches, piers with white boats, and pink and brown boulders. She passed redbrick buildings, a school that looked more like a barn, and several long driveways leading to houses that were probably too expensive for her to look at.

The Blackwood house was one such manor. Her taxi carried her to a colonial-style stone-and-shingle home located on two wide acres of land at the end of a private lane that stretched for what felt like a mile. It was two stories tall, with three arched roofs and a chimney. Stone steps led up to a front door wedged between two beige columns. To the right was a wrought iron fence that led around to the back of the property, and after that was what looked like an attached garage.

Ellory already felt underdressed.

Liam opened the front door before she’d even ascended the stairs, beaming down at her. Christmas music poured into the yard, a Bing Crosby classic with muffled words. A smile tugged at Ellory’s lips at the sight of this bright and beautiful man, so unabashed in his enthusiasm for life. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t have mustered up equal affection for him? What was wrong with her that he hadn’t been everything she could ever want?

He hugged her so tightly that he lifted her off her feet, and Ellory felt nothing, absolutely nothing, except the faint desire for someone else to be holding her instead. She swallowed down a wave of shame. “Hey, Liam.”

“All good, Ellory? Come meet everyone,” Liam said as he set her down. “I can put your bags and coat in my room for safekeeping, buddy.”

He was trying. Ellory owed it to him to try, too.

Everyone turned out to be his parents, two polite white people who shared their son’s smile and golden tan. His father asked her about her classes and laughed at her jokes. His mother straightened his hair when he returned from putting away her bags and encouraged them to head upstairs to enjoy the party. Ellory hadn’t even noticed that every guest on the main floor was much older than them until they went upstairs and she began to see people under thirty. She wondered if Hudson’s parents had been among the main-floor attendees. She wondered if she would recognize them if they were.

The speaker on the second floor was playing more modern Christmas covers. Someone she recognized from the lacrosse team grabbed Liam to “deal with an issue in the master bedroom,” leaving her to make her own way through the crowd. Tai was supposed to come with Cody as her date, but she hadn’t texted since that morning. Gaia-not-Greer Hammond and Kendall Rhodes were in one of the empty bedrooms, laughing over their wineglasses. David Chang Vargas was beating someone at cards in another empty room. Two men were kissing fervently in what Ellory hadn’t known was a closet until it was too late.

Without a drink, she thought the party had too much noise and too many strangers for her to enjoy herself. She found a den brimming with coolers and grabbed a light beer to nurse while she explored the rest of the floor. It took her five minutes to realize she was looking for an empty room or a quiet balcony—or, rather, for someone who tended to escape to those places—and groaned internally.

She was such a mess.

Ellory wandered back downstairs, dodging the small crowds talking about vacations she would never take and assets she would never attain, until she reached the kitchen, where she had met the Blackwoods. A sliding glass door let her out onto a covered patio that overlooked an empty pool. A black iron table surrounded by matching chairs with tan cushions beckoned her. Evergreen trees blocked the view beyond the pool, and the night hid her from the lit-up windows. With the music and chatter muffled, Ellory took her first real breath of the day.

She was such a mess.

taiwo: omw. are you there yet?

Ellory replied in the affirmative and tipped her head back. The arched ceiling blocked the sky from view, but she could imagine that the stars cared little about her. It was oddly reassuring, how minuscule they all were in the grand scheme of the universe. How irrelevant.

She reached for her bottle and missed. It hit the floor instead, shattered glass and fizzing beer spreading before she could stop it. Ellory cursed, and then, because it felt good, she cursed again. She had nothing to clean the stones with, but she could at least pick up the glass before someone got hurt. She reached for a large jagged piece…

…and straightened, her body buzzing with anger and intoxication. She wished it were just the drinks—three, four, maybe five—that she’d had tonight, but she knew it was also him, his presence and the way it overshadowed everything until she could think about nothing and no one else. She held the glass shard like a weapon, and his eyes flashed.

“Are you going to hurt me, Morgan?” he said in a low voice, stepping forward. He bared the elegant line of his throat to her, all smooth brown skin. “Let me make it easy for you.”

She flicked the glass shard into the dark bushes. “I don’t need to hurt you to get you to shut up.” Now she was the one to step forward. She covered his Adam’s apple with one hand, her fingers poised to squeeze. “You think I don’t see how you look at me?”

He didn’t lower his head. His words were growled to the stars: “How do I look at you?”

Instead of pressing down, her hand slithered across his skin until it settled on the back of his neck. She forced him to stare down at her, burning gaze to burning gaze. His full lips were sneering; his dark eyes held a challenge. Ellory pushed his head down farther, until he was looking down her scoop neck.

“Like you want to fuck me,” she said. “Like you already have, and you’re aching for another round.”

He could have broken her grip so easily, could have put some distance between them, but he didn’t. Inside, a party raged, all drunken students and screeching music to dull the monotony of life, but, out here, Ellory had never felt more awake.

“As if I’m the only one aching.” He reached back, captured her wrist. Tugged her forward until she was pressed against him, the swell of his interest teasing her with dark promises that made heat pool between her legs. “As if I’m the only one who wants this.”

“—Morgan?”

Ellory gasped back into the present. Hudson knelt before her, gazing down at her hand, ignorant to the ghostly touches that had left her breathless. She followed his line of sight to see blood dripping from her palm; the pain caught up with her a moment later. She’d clenched her fist around the shard of glass she’d picked up while lost in her—what? Reverie? Memory?

It had been so vivid, so carnal . She could still hear herself moan as he entered her from behind, still feel his hungry kisses against the back of her neck. It was the first time she’d heard them, seen them, without Hudson already in front of her, and it was that more than anything that made her wonder if these flashes of memory could be real.

Could they really have…?

“Come inside so I can take a look,” said Hudson, extracting the glass shard from her hand and making a face at the mess she’d left behind. “Someone will deal with that later.”

Did we know each other before? Ellory wanted to ask. Sometimes, I—I see these things, or I hear these things, and they feel like things I’ve forgotten. And it’s always about you. It’s always you. Please. Please, it’s driving me mad.

Ellory didn’t realize she was swaying into him until Hudson’s breath hitched. She ached to feel his mouth on hers, his hands on her, even here on the back patio of Liam’s Christmas party. Between her vision and Hudson’s worshipful stare, she felt utterly licentious.

She moved closer. His eyes reflected the distant stars as they flicked down to her lips and up again. Otherwise, he held perfectly still, and she couldn’t tell if it was from shock or expectation. She tilted her head, and his eyelids lowered, and now he was the one moving toward her. Their lips were a hair’s breadth apart, and she felt hot all over, and he hadn’t even touched her yet.

It was irrational.

It was inevitable.

And Hudson pulled back, his expression shuttering. “Come inside, Morgan. You’re hurting yourself.”

He might as well have slapped her, because even that would have hurt less. Ellory swallowed all the things she wanted to say, settling for a simple nod instead. Without the warmth of her arousal, she felt hollow and cold. Her bloody hand still stung, but it was secondary to her bruised ego.

There was nothing she could say to explain or excuse herself—and he didn’t offer anything either. In the howling silence, all she could do was follow Hudson as he tugged her into the house, leaving the shards of her dignity behind.