It coils its way up and around her legs, around and inside and through her. Fiona is angry, very angry, and her magic makes the air around her prickle and crackle with her power. Dry heat, bright, slithering its way through Cordelia s body and down her throat. It quickens her heartbeat. It tugs at something low in her stomach. Cordelia shuts her eyes, tight, swallows, hard. Not again.
I told you not to let anybody in without a warrant, you incompetent imbecile, Fiona shrieks at Spalding. The police officers hadn t been too much trouble to get rid of, not for the Supreme anyway. A bit of Fiona s saliva into a glass of water and they had been on their way. Another wave flares through her body; Cordelia tries to keep a straight face.
Cordelia purses her lips, fiddles with the pearls around her neck. She tugs at the cuffs on her sleeves. She always feels Fiona s magic when they re near each other. Cordelia wonders for a second if others feel her mother s powers the way she does, wonders if Zoe and Madison felt their mouth watering when Fiona told them to leave the room, wonders if Spalding can feel hot tendrils curving around his groin while her mother berates him. She shudders.
I m in charge everywhere, Fiona had quipped at the officers, and Cordelia had looked down, away. She had crossed her arms, and exhaled carefully as the front of her body had been bathed in that warm, wet heat. It had made her lips and her nipples tingle. Shut up, Delia, Fiona had silenced her protests, and Cordelia had felt herself clenching inside as the flames flared. She had gasped.
Spalding puts his hands up, shakes his head. He looks small and old, and pathetically in love with the woman throwing all this rage at him. He cowers away. Fiona turns her head toward Cordelia. Do you know anything about this bus business? she asks, and Cordelia shakes her head. Fiona stares at her for a second, and Cordelia feels it like a scalding hand squeezing at her throat. No, she says finally, eyes glued to her mother s lips. Cordelia tastes blood.
She follows her mother out of the room, waits in the hallway outside of the bedroom that Zoe and Madison share. She hears the thud that their bodies make as they hit the white walls. Cordelia feels a pang of something stabbing through her. It couldn t be jealousy. Her hands twitch at her sides. Fiona s voice resonates. In this whole wide wicked world. Cordelia s mouth is suddenly dry. She licks her lips, The only thing you have to be afraid of is me. She walks away.
Later, she feels a strange sense of d j -vu as she pours the sacred circle onto the floor, pictures Fiona kneeling in that same circle behind her eyelids. A forgotten memory from her childhood, she s sure. She chases the thought away. This isn t a spell she want her mother around for. She sees Fiona again when Hank pierces her skin with the dart, flinches. Cordelia tries to focus on her husband s face, wills herself to look at the eyes of the man she married, at his jaw, his bare chest.
Cordelia wills herself not to picture softer features and blonde hair, not to smell cigarettes and Chanel No. 5, not to think about the breasts that nourished her. She hears Hank s voice murmuring the spell she taught him. This shouldn t be happening, Cordelia thinks. She usually only has these sorts of thoughts about Fiona when her mother is nearby, close enough to touch, when the magic ghosts over her skin like a warm wind. Cordelia slicks her bloody thumb over Hank s mouth, lets the spell take her over. The air rippling around her feels safe, familiar.
Cordelia closes her eyes and fucks her husband. The flames flare and the snakes slither. She hears Fiona s voice in her mind, for some reason, far away, foggy. We ll know what to do when the time comes. Hank s cock bottoms out inside her, yanks her back into the room with him. Cordelia looks down at him, focuses her gaze on his throat, watches his pulse through eyes that have bled to black. She grinds herself down on him, growls.
Hank flips her onto her back and drives into her, hard, and the visions stop for a while. She touches his chest and focuses on the sensation of being stretched, open, fucked. He comes in convulsions, gasping something she doesn t understand. Cordelia tastes blood again, and milk, and something else. Hank lays heavy on top of her, catching his breath. She runs her hand over his sweaty face. It s a waiting game, now.
She doesn t think about Fiona again until later, while she cleans the dried bood off her skin in the shower. Cordelia watches the red running off her body and staining the white tile, going down the drain with the rest of the water. She feels, more than hears, that her mother is back home from whatever errands she was running that afternoon, feels the heat in her bones, and elsewhere too.
Still worked up from the afternoon, Cordelia snakes a hand between her legs, parts her lips, rubs at herself hungrily. She pictures Hank s face, the parts of his body that she likes the most. His shoulders, his forearms, his scruffy beard. She pictures his hands working her cunt and she pictures him in the shower with her, body pressed hard behind hers, cock straining against her ass. But Cordelia doesn t come until she hears the click-click-click of Fiona s Manolos as she walks down the hallway, past the unlocked bathroom door.