Exquisite Poison (Original Draft)

Chapter 51 - A Reprieve

Netta had recollections of falling asleep, resting atop of Ash.

When she woke up, it was alone in the bed that she had previously slept in with Erwinnia.

As she got out of bed, her head as lazy as her body felt dreadful sore. Netta felt a sick worry lodge and burrow itself inside of her.

Where is Ash?

As she brushed her teeth in the adjacent bathroom, Netta focused on the possibilities for why she had woken up, alone. And in that bed.

She could not shake off a bad feeling that she had been left by Ash, following a night of comfort and sex beyond anything that she had ever imagined - or was phobic of.

Sickly, she wondered if he had left her after she had proved that she wanted him.

She was walking down the stairs when she heard a loud, booming voice that she recognized, coming from the living room.

"-And so, I said, "Don't tell me that you didn't know that horns are a good sign of virility?"

The sound of ensuing feminine laughter rolled through the house and traveled up the stairs.

Netta clutched at the banister, afraid of not clinging mentally to the sound of his reverberating laughter. In a sprint, she rushed down the stairs.

Standing at the foot of the stairs, she looked into the living room to bear witness to a sight that she had never thought in her life that she would ever see.

Standing amidst a circle of the Witches of the Coven Gardenia, Ashwood stood in a glow of the multicolored christmas lights and the vague outside light added by the sun.

He stood heads above the women, dressed in a grey sweater that clung to the curves of his large, muscled body and wrapped partially around his neck to form a half turtleneck that opened at his throat.

His face - that gaunt, tanned, lined face that she had grown to know intimately - seemed to glow in happiness. Then there were the chaotic, massive, scythe-sharp horns that began just above his temples and curved over his head.

In the room full of milling Witches, with Ash looking as though he was just barely managing to remain standing with the ceiling of the room dangerously close to scraping against his horns.

It was impossible to for Netta to not keep her eyes stay riveted to him. She couldn't hear what was said in that room, but she saw as Ash smiled at a joke that was said, revealing for a brief moment, the sharp teeth that drove home the fact that Ash was not human.

Her mind swam and she found that she could not move.

Finally, it was Ash who turned to look at her, as though he had felt her eyes on him, or her preseance. The smile on his face faded a measure as he looked at her. In its place, however, was a burning that seemed to begin in his eyes, a roiling, kinetic energy that made Netta quiver.

It was only when Morgan, who came out of the kitchen behind her, shook her by her shoulder that Netta felt her gaze unlock from her Familiar.

"Ya awight?" Morgan asked, mouth full of a bite from a slice of fruit cake that she clenched in her bare right hand.

Netta said something to the Witch and looked back at Ash, unease trickling into her.

What she felt for him - wasn't it supposed to be that Witches were the ones who did the bewitching?

Ash looked at her, a knowing, somehow shy smirk on his lips.

From behind him and next to the Christrmas tree, Netta saw Lucia approaching through the throng of her family.