Chapter 20: The Morning After
Graves woke with a gasp, her eyes snapping open to the familiar water stain on her ceiling. Cold sweat clung to her skin, and her heart hammered so hard she could feel it in her throat. For a moment she was still there, inside the dark, the endless white tide pressing against her from every direction.
Then the room came back. The flickering violet glow from her salt lamp. The stacked grimoires. The smell of ozone and old parchment so thick she could taste it. She was in her dorm. She was alone.
She pushed herself up on her elbows and looked down. Flat stomach. Her pink bandeau bra, her panties, the ones with the little bats on the hip. No enormous belly. No skin stretched taut over oceans of cum. Nothing. Just her, nineteen, a girl who ate ramen and failed her morning classes.
But the ache between her thighs was real. Hot and deep and insistent, pulsing with every heartbeat. She swallowed, her throat dry, and slid her hand down her belly. The cotton of her panties was damp. She pressed her palm flat over her mound, fingers curling, and bit her lip hard.
"Fuck," she breathed.
The dream was already fading, slipping through her fingers like smoke. But she remembered the weight. The pressure. The endless flood pouring down her throat, and his voice booming from a sky made of skin. Drink, Graves. Drink it all.
She had. God, she had.
Her fingers pressed harder, a small circle, and her hips twitched off the mattress. Stupid. She was aching over a dream. A dream where she'd become a living vessel, a thing that swallowed and swallowed and never filled. She'd woken up slick to her knees.
She pushed her panties aside, two fingers sliding through her slick folds, and let out a shaky sigh. The heat was unbearable. Her clit was swollen, throbbing, and the moment she touched it, jolts of pleasure shot up her spine. She hadn't even needed the dream. Her body remembered all on its own.
Then her hand stopped.
She looked around the room properly. The rug. The thrift-store chair piled with laundry. Her desk, cluttered with tarot cards and a half-empty energy drink. And on the floor, faint but unmistakable, a circle of chalk rubbed thin by a bare heel. The pentagram. The summoning.
Her heart stuttered.
It hadn't been a dream. Not all of it. She'd summoned him. She'd traced that circle with her own blood, her own voice shaking on the Latin she'd copied from a book she wasn't supposed to have. And he'd come through, stitched and huge and real.
So where was he?
Graves sat up fully, her thighs pressing together, and scanned the room again. No Victor. No enormous, stitched, grinning creature. The air was still, the violet light steady. No hum of arcane energy thrumming through the floorboards.
"Victor?" she said, and her voice cracked.
Nothing. The silence pressed in, heavy with the smell of ozone she couldn't quite shake. She scrambled off the bed, panties still crooked, and dropped to her knees by the pentagram. The chalk was there. The faint rust-colored smear where she'd pressed her bleeding palm to the floor. She touched the stain with a fingertip. It was dry.
But here was the thing, she realized, staring at her hand: the power was still there. Under her skin, a low current like a wire humming. She could feel it in her blood, in her cunt, in the hollow of her belly. The magic hadn't gone anywhere. It was waiting.
The ache flared again, sharp and greedy, and Graves pressed her thighs together hard. She wanted him back. She wanted his cock down her throat, his cum flooding her guts until she couldn't move. She wanted to be full again, impossibly full, until the whole world was a wet, dark, sloshing place and she was the center of it.
"Come back," she whispered, and the chalk lines on the floor flickered violet.