Ashes

"Oh, hell!" Lydia's loud exclamation did not seem to fit the quiet atmosphere of her upstate New York apartment. The only other sound in the room - beside her infrequent but impassioned noises of frustration - was the soft strumming of guitar that floated out of the speakers she had set up in her kitchen.

The apartment had been a "total score," according to her friend Bethany. Spacious, inexpensive, just far enough away from traffic and city life to provide her with peace and quiet, but close enough that a drive to the office wasn't a pain or hassle.

The reasons for Lydia's current distress were the four dozen cookies she had promised a local elementary school she would bake for their spring bake sale. The icing process was a little harder than she had expected it to be and it became steadily more difficult as her temper rose. She groaned and pushed on the counter, purposefully propelling her body backwards into the living room.

She backed up until she reached her desk and flung herself into the barely cushioned chair in front of it. Her arm bumped the mouse and her computer began to hum and whir to life. Lydia sighed and looked up at the schematics and equations she had left earlier that morning. It had been incredibly hard for her to concentrate on anything in the past few days. Her temper had been out of control and her head had been in all the wrong places, including the gutter.

Thoughts that didn't usually bother her at work would not leave her alone, and her body was near thrumming with energy she could not find an outlet for. She hadn't felt so distracted since her teenage years and it was starting to annoy her, to say the least. A small bowl of chocolate candies sat next to her mouse pad and she idly put a couple in her mouth as she reflected on Bethany's reaction.

"You're not pregnant, are you?!" she had barely managed to squeak out over lunch a few days ago. The look in her eyes caught between hope and astonishment. Bethany loved children and had once joked that if neither of them had a child before turning thirty, the two women were going to adopt twelve girls and raise them together in a huge house, "like Annie, but without all the abuse." Lydia had laughed and shook her head at her friend's reaction.

"Definitely not."

She had gone on to vaguely explain that she hadn't done anything with a man in about a year. Lydia sighed and leaned back in her chair. Bethany had assumed it had something to do with Mark and did not push the topic at all. If only she knew.

Her friends might find it strange; that a one night stand was the last contact she had with a man - in a sexual way, at least - yet the idea of sleeping with any man who had hit on her recently repulsed her. There were nice men, attractive men, and some women who had shown interest in the past year, but she was not interested. A kiss was as far as she had gotten with anyone and she had been the one to pull away. She was stuck seeking some sort of spark that wasn't there anymore, except when she was home alone and her thoughts were allowed to wander...

Springing out of her chair and stomping through her home, she ended her short, angry journey by throwing herself across her small bed. Damn it! If only she could take her head off and try to screw it on straight again. Get it together, Martin!

A harsh knock at the door shook her from her thoughts and she walked across the apartment to stand in front of the pale blue door. She stopped and gasped at the whisper in her head that could only mean one thing. Great, she thought. She rolled her eyes and raised her voice.

"What brings you to New York?"

There was barely a pause before he responded.

"So you can tell it's me, and that's the first question you ask? If you must know, I wanted to buy my nephew one of those annoying T-shirts."

She opened the door to let him see her rolling her eyes. He looked at her for a moment and congenially reached for her shoulder.

"You cut your hair," he observed, not disliking the look of it hardly tickling her shoulders, straight and sleek.

And you haven't changed at all, she thought. He looked surprisingly good, too good, for his age. He didn't look like time had effected him much. Peter smiled knowingly and walked past her without waiting for an invitation.

"Really, Peter, what are you doing here?"

He shrugged and moved to rest in her desk chair, raising his eyebrows at the images on screen.

"Are you designing nuclear bombs now?"

She rolled her eyes, knowing he was smart enough to know what it was but was trying to bait her.

"It's basic molecular physics, just a side project right now."

He leaned back in her chair and nodded his head approvingly.

"Basic? This is brilliant."

"I know." She felt her lips purse in her familiar confident smirk. Lydia was in her element, he was in her domain. She tried to hide the thoughts flying through her head and her inner psyche was clapping for joy to have the opportunity to see him again. She'd love to see his face when he saw her real work, but that was still highly confidential. And he was hardly one to confide in.

"It's a nice apartment for someone's whose only been up here a couple years."

"The six-digit salary helps." He didn't react much and Lydia decided to take it as a compliment that he wasn't surprised.

"So, you left Mark, did you?" He changed the subject abruptly after sniffing the air to see if they were alone. The smell of the cookies tickled his nose, but he was unable to put his finger on why. His senses were more dull than they had been; still more fine tuned than a human's, but never as acute as they had been before his death.

She was surprised - and angered - by the self assured familiarity in his tone.

"It was a mutual agreement between the two of us and none of your business." She sniffed and walked back into the kitchen to check the timer. He followed, naturally. Just one room over, she thought, struggling to maintain control of the situation while appearing to have just the opposite. He reached for a cookie and bit into the small pink cat. She watched as he paused and chewed tentatively.

"Oh," he realized. "These are vegan." Lydia had to work vary hard not to laugh outright at his expression. He seemed socked and a tad bit disgusted at the thought of her diet. He looked personally affronted as if she had asked him to adopt her lifestyle too. How childish, she thought, but decided not to comment. She needed to encourage the conversation to move away from trivialities and into more trusting territory. Peter stopped trying to finish his cookie and gazed at the wall behind her as if he didn't know where he was or who he was with.

"I cut my hair and went vegan," Lydia interrupted whatever thoughts were running through his head. "Neither of these are a big deal, Peter. Stop looking so surprised."

He turned around and walked wordlessly into her short hallway. On his left was her bedroom, the door slightly ajar. To the right was an almost empty room. The floor was carved with a large circle and the walls were covered with neatly stacked bookshelves.

"What is this, exactly?"

Lydia leaned against the doorway nonchalantly and finished chewing one half of a miniature flower shaped cookie.

"It's my library, and my circle," she explained after swallowing. Her gaze drifted casually across the room. He turned to look at her again.

"So you're a magical, single, vegan who makes a salary of six digits. Well, you always were amazing." He didn't look surprised at all, warning bells started to play in her head.

She knew the time was right to do what she had to do.

"I'm sorry, Peter, but I don't really trust you."

With a swift but subtle movement of her hand, he was moving across the room. Her tone of voice had sent shivers down his spine and he began to shift instinctively into his Beta form. He gasped and growled when his back collided painfully with the one are of wall without shelves and some unseen force held him in place but allowed him movement of his neck and head. He winced as his head pounded from the impact and she glared at him but seemed to appreciate her handiwork.

"Come on, I thought we had something there for a moment." Even stuck to a wall, Peter could not avoid his usual snark. It was his best defense in the past few years, resurrection still didn't suit him.

"If that 'something' is even ground and a score to settle, then yes, we do indeed have something." She was confident, immovable, and completely at ease with the situation. With a wave of her hand, fire sprang from the floor in hungry, lapping tongues and drew a line across the room without smoke or scorch mark. He felt himself fall to the floor and barely appreciated the freedom to pace nervously.

His heart was hammering at both the proximity of such a fire and the inevitable soft glow the flames' light threw onto her features. Lydia was a vision. She was anger and fierce magic wrapped up in a petite, modern package. He watched as her confident form slinked toward him and couldn't help feel the stirrings of anger be chased away by something far more potent.

"Oh, Peter," she said softly, with only the smallest hint of regret. Though what part she was regretting, he didn't know. "Why did you come all this way? You weren't supposed to interfere."

"Interfere with what, exactly?" he replied, trying not to growl in frustration at the proximity of the flames.

"Well, maybe that was a poor choice of words, but if you look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn't try to use my magic to your advantage or drag me back to that wolfie dead end of a town - I might just let you go."

"I didn't-" he gasped when she emphasized her threat by sending a pulse of magic into the flames that caused them to flare briefly. "I didn't know about the magic. I just thought I'd stop by; buy you a drink; maybe talk about things. But hey, being burned alive again is not the worst second date I've had."

She smiled, a small twitch of her cheeks, and waved the flames away, but not before forcing him back against the wall. He watched intently as she grabbed a chair and sat in the middle of the room, clearly at ease with her present company. She held herself in a way that let him know she was in control of the situation and would have no trouble keeping him in line, even from a seated position.

"All right," she said pleasantly. Lydia had seen the look in his eyes as the flames surrounded him and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he hadn't known about her magic until she had revealed it, thought she still didn't believe all he was here for were a couple drinks. "Let's talk."

He coughed, more at the memory of smoke in the air after a fire than anything in real life. The air in her apartment was very clean and he allowed himself to wonder if it was her who was making his lungs feel crowded, through her magic or her tendency to make any man breathless, he couldn't tell.

"Isn't there some rule you witches have?" Peter danced around anything important, still unsure of her motives for revealing her powers to him. "Karma's gonna get you, what goes up must come down, that sort of thing? Maybe you shouldn't be doing this."

"Maybe it's coming back to you, Peter," she suggested while leaning back to see him better. "But to further answer your question: not all Witches are witches and not all witches are Witches."

He didn't even blink and continued.

"Are all Witches immune?"

"Ah." Lydia raised her eyebrows in a way that clearly said, good boy. "Yes. It would seem our bodies know we are meant for other callings before we harness our power. I could not become a werewolf because I was not meant to be one, yet I was not destined to die by your teeth either."

If a stranger were listening in, they might decide from the tone of their voices that they heard two old friends talking over tea, not a Witch and a Wolf in the middle of a play for power that she was definitely winning.

"My turn now," Lydia said. "How did I know-"

They were sharply interrupted by a loud ringtone. Lydia set her jaw and looked Peter in the eye before sighing and moving from her chair. Yet another wave of her hand freed him from his invisible bonds. He made no attempt to attack her, even after she had surrounded him by his own nightmares. It was part of the game they played and this round was simply over, though he would have liked to finish without the interruption.

"You just do whatever you want, I need to take this." With that, Lydia left the room and walked to her bedroom. She turned the sound down before answering, knowing his hearing was better than hers, but he wouldn't hear the quiet voice on the other side of the line.

"Hello, Lydia speaking."

...

"When did this happen?"

...

"No, this is good, really. I can be there in two hours. I have something important to finish here."

...

"That's right."

...

"Okay. See you in a few."

With a snap, her phone was shut and attached to her belt where she could reach it easily. She swiftly turned around to meet Peter's chest. He had removed his leather jacket and she could see his muscled forearms clearly as his sleeves were rolled up past his elbow. She didn't show her attraction, but she knew he could hear her heartbeat. He was so close... Peter spoke first, softly, as he reached out to put his hands on the soft skin of her shoulders.

"You said I could do whatever I want." He smiled and pulled her into him, their chests colliding gently. She felt his lips on hers and gasped just as he sighed in contentment, resulting in her breathing him in, deepening the kiss as she did. He pulled back and looked at her before descending again, this time insisting with his lips that she be gentle, slow.

He smiled against her lips as she growled and tried again. He acquiesced for a moment and let her have her way. She felt her back hit the wall behind her and thought she had won, until he pulled back again and grinned before touching his lips to the corner of her mouth, light as a feather. It was then that she realized; he wanted this kiss to mean something. This wasn't the same game they had been playing just moments ago. This was that night a year ago. This was a connection he truly wanted to rekindle. What she had thought was mere ashes was still warm.

"You really did want to talk," she whispered, astonished and a little frustrated with herself.

"It's fine," he murmured back, but all she could think of was her completely unnecessary admission. He never needed to know about her magic. Assuming the worst of people had protected her and her friends for years and managed to keep her little project a secret. Now she might have doomed herself to trusting the wrong person.

"Lydia," he said as she began to stare at the wall behind him. "Whatever secret you need me to keep, I will. You and I-"

"How did I know that was you outside the door?" She interrupted, trying to change the subject and regain control of the situation.

"Because you and I," he continued as his hands moved to her waist and his thumbs caressed her ribs in an attempt to get her to relax. "are connected to each other. It started with the Bite I gave you."

"Started?" Lydia was resisting the urge to slap him. She hated being in the dark about anything, especially the supernatural.

"I didn't think it would work," he explained nonsensically. "I had a mate once and lost her. I thought I was done."

Peter looked down at her and she refused to accept that his eyes were shining just a little too much. No one had a reason to shed a single tear in front of her. She had once fantasized about him crying in front of her, begging for forgiveness or mercy, depending on her mood. But she had grown up a long time ago and had tried her hardest to stop dreaming.

"But the Bite..." One of his hands moved to trace the scar on her side. "It called me. You called me. I had to see you because you were like the moon. I needed you. That night..."

She pulled away from him and stomped across the room with her back turned to him. She's furious and has no idea how to start. She hadn't even regretted that night until this moment, hadn't considered it. Through his murmurings he had told her what she needed to know. He had claimed her in his own way.

"I belong to no one," she stated simply and honestly without turning around. "And I never will."

"But I belong to you."

She spun around and glared at him.

"What the hell does that even mean!?"

"It means I need you, but you don't need me. And whatever you want, I'll do. I'll leave if you want. You never have to see me again. But you need to know that I know you owe me nothing. Until you choose, you needn't feel anything at all for me."

He saw her shoulders relax and knows she was calming herself down. She switched her brain to analytical mode and absorbed the mess of facts he was giving her.

"How long have you been in town?"

"Five days."

And that's when she understood. The dreams, the distractions, the unbelievable sexual tension with someone she didn't even know was there. It had all been because of him. All right then, she though, just one little experiment can't hurt.

She turned off the analytical side of her brain and allowed herself to take what she wanted. He bent nearer and she pulled him down, kissing him with everything carnal she had, yet not truly giving him anything worth having. Then they were on the bed and her teeth were on his neck and she was unbuttoning his shirt. It was happening so fast. She wanted to growl and fight him all the way as he took her. The passion inside her was almost a rage, a blind emotion she could hardly see through.

But then he stopped moving with her and sat up, gently rolling her over until he was kneeling over her. His fingers stroked the sensitive spot behind her ear and she felt her breathing begin to regulate from the gasps of only seconds ago.

"No, Lydia," he said. "Don't do this if you're going to regret it."

"Now is really not the time to be a gentleman, Peter."

"Oh, I'm not being noble, I just don't want to lose my chance any sooner than I have to. Believe me, it's really very selfish, what I'm doing right now."

"Good to know you aren't completely faultless then. I just-" She moaned as his lips lightly brushed the pulse point on her neck, deliberately teasing her. Asshole. "I need time."

"And I can wait," he said. Before she could move, his shirt was buttoned and he was standing up and looking down at her with that unfathomable, sarcastic expression she was so reluctantly used to.

"I expect you'll know when I have my answer." It wasn't a question, not even a guess, but a certainty.

He nodded with a smirk and she rose from the bed and walked across the room to fix her hair in the mirror. Her purse was waiting on a chair by the door and she grabbed it while checking her watch. She'd be early, but she had to get away from the tangled mess they had created. She would think about it later, most likely over a bottle of wine.

"No matter what I choose," she said suddenly and turned around to face him one last time before they separate for God knew how long. "I'm not going back, so you know you have something to think about too."

He nodded again, this time stiffly, and watched her walk out the door, leaving him to let himself out. The expression faded from his face until he was wearing the blank mask he had adopted. The discarded jacket was retrieved and he left the bedroom, walked past the still humming computer he could easily search for a hint about her work, and out the door without a backwards glance.

AN: This work is also published on AO3. I don't have a Beta, so any grammar/spelling mistakes are mine and I would love for you to point them out so they can be fixed. All reviews are appreciated. The conclusion to the Burning series will be a multi-chapter story, so it might take me a while, but keep an eye out.