The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) Read Online Free PDF Page B

do with as I pleased. But when his primal side turned on… I don’t know. It was like his sweat had some kind of pheromone that turned me to putty beneath his powerful hands. When he had me pinned against the bed and he was inside me, filling me, I was his .
    It was the sweetest surrender.
    Much later, I couldn’t say when—an hour, maybe three—I let myself slip into sleep with Aaron’s arms around my waist and his body tucked in behind mine. But the howling wind and the battering rain hadn’t abated, and the night kept calling me back to the waking world every so often.
    Sometimes I would nod off for ten minutes before being yanked awake by a grumble of thunder, another time a whole hour had passed since the last time I checked, and once—when the wind seemed to have died—it was that damned owl that woke me up with its incessant hooting.
    I shut the noise out as best I could, but it was no use. The owl won. In the end I decided to get out of bed and go to the window to try and find the thing, even though my chances were slim since I had only ever seen it once. I wasn’t going to hurt it obviously; I was only going to scare it off with a little Magick.
    What good was telekinesis if you couldn’t use it to touch things from far away, right?
    But when I opened the window the world came spilling in. It was as if I had opened the window to the back of a live jet engine; the air was hot, powerful enough to send me flying across the room, and loud. It was like a lion’s roar! I struggled to get to my feet but every time I stood the wind would knock me back against the wall and pin me there.
    Aaron, I thought. I could see him on the bed but he was fast asleep and immobile. How could he not hear the wind’s thundering voice? Why wasn’t he awake? I screamed, but the air wouldn’t leave my lungs. In fact, every time I opened my mouth it was like the gust was trying to force my voice back into my throat.
    The storm was choking me, and all I could think about was how helpless I was.
    Then I heard another noise; a kind of buzzing sound. I fought hard to open my eyes against the wind, turning my head just enough so that the blast wasn’t hitting me squarely in the face, and then I saw where the buzzing was coming from. Outside, hovering inches away from the window, was a hornet; a man-sized, ugly, hairy hornet.
    My heart jumped into my throat and started to beat so hard I could feel it on the sides of my head. Aaron! I wanted to say, get it quick, its right there! In my mind Aaron would have easily been able to grab hold of a swatter to smack the hornet away, despite its huge size; such was the nonsensical nature of dreams. Because, of course, that’s what it was. I was having a dream. Just a dream. Don’t be stupid, Amber, it’s only a dream. The wind, the roar, the inability to move and speak; I’ve been here before plenty of times, and I can totally wake myself up if I want to.
    I shook my head violently as I had done many times before when held tightly in the grips of a nightmare, rocking and shaking and thinking no, no now! But it didn’t work. The roar was still there, the buzzing still present—even if I wasn’t looking right at it.
    “Amberrr,” said a voice like a fork scraping on a plate, “I’m waiting.”
    It was the hornet. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, approaching, reaching for me with its insect-like talons. And then I woke up, cold, clammy, sweaty, with an iron shriek locked in the back of my throat. I went to shake Aaron, to wake him up and make sure I wasn’t dreaming again, but the bed was empty and before I had a chance to question where he had gone I was running to the bathroom.
    There, holding onto the toilet bowl as if for dear life, I retched until my throat went raw.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 5
     
     
    Hornets are assholes. I had never liked flying insects, but of all of them, hornets were the worst. They’re the worst because they serve no purpose