#semperreadem

She flushed and bent down to pick them up only to push another stack with her behind. Mortified, she closed her eyes and wished the Goddess would whisk her far away.

“I’ll handle it,” the guy sighed and crouched in front of her to put the books away.

The first thing she noticed was that he had curly dark hair that resembled a bird’s nest. His eyes – when he glanced at her – were a startling rich brown color that reminded her of the black brown amber stones she kept at home for protection. And fuck, she hadn’t yet reached his freckles or his broad shoulders and she was already waxing poetics about his looks.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

He scoffed and picked the last book. “For a witch your awareness sucks.”

Clarke blinked twice and her embarrassment gave way to her indignation. “What’s that supposed to mean? And how did you know I am a witch?”

He shrugged and answered rather unhelpfully, “No one enters my shop without my permission.”

She wanted to push more but he seemed rather annoyed as it was and Clarke really needed the book she came in here for.

“I see,” she said at the end. “I’m looking for a book about transmutations. It’s a latin guide from the 17th century written by F. H. Carsten, edited recently by Velara Moss.”

His eyes narrowed and for a moment she thought that the amber in his eyes flickered to gold but then the lamp overhead buzzed and she blamed it on the crappy light.

“What do you need it for?” He turned around and led her in between the meandering shelves.

“Transmuting.” She was a little bit proud of the unimpressed look he gave her.

They took two left turns and then a couple of stairs down and damn but this place was huge.

“We have the book but it’s in the library section.”

“Oh.” The book stacks here were fewer and Clarke hanged her bag back onto her shoulder, carefully following into his every step. “But I can take it home, right?”

There was an old, chipped desk on the right side of the spacious room they ventured into,  in front of which there were six tables, surrounded bymore bookcases. The wall behind the desk was transcribed with symbols she wasn’t familiar with, but intrigued by.

“Actually no, that one is from the rare collection. You’ll have to read it here.”

Clarke groaned and he had the balls to chuckle, even smirked when he caught her glaring at the back of his head.

“Go sit, I’ll find it for you.”

She put her bag on the table furthest from the desk, and chose to sit with her back to the rest of the room. With her luck, he would hover somewhere in the vicinity and she couldn’t afford to get distracted by his face, his everything, really.

“Here.” He slid the book in front of her along with a pair of latex gloves. “No touching the book without gloves, no eating or drinking near it, and for fuck’s sake, no stealing or setting things on fire.”

She raised her eyebrow at the last warning – now that he had mentioned it, there was a subtle scent of burnt matches and charcoal in the air. “Does that happen a lot?”

“We’ve had few cases and despite all the signs plastered around, some people still try to push their luck.”

“Noted.” Clarke snapped the gloves on. “Anything else?”

“The store closes at seven.”

She nodded and rummaged inside her bag for a pen and a notebook – the curse was preventing her from taking photos and she had to jolt down every sigil and spell by hand. By the time she found what she needed, the guy had disappeared among the books.

“Same book?”

“Yes, please.” Clarke smiled and carefully maneuvered around the overflowing bookshelves. This was her third visit and she was getting the hang of it.

The guy – Bellamy, as she had learned on her previous visit – led her to the back and she slid into what was fast becoming her chair.

The fragile book was in her hands a moment later and Bellamy waved her thanks away; Clarke was all too eager to delve back into the complicated theory of transmuting crystals to liquid to pay him any more attention.

“C’mon, Clarke, it can’t be that bad,” Bellamy said from behind her chair as Clarke let her head fall against the table for the fifth time in the last hour.

She simply grumbled in reply and peaked from behind her hair when she heard a chair scraping against the wooden floor. Bellamy pulled the book towards him and leafed through the pages she had already read, fingers folded over the spine of the book almost reverently.

He had nice hands, she noticed absent mindedly, big and strong, with long fingers and fuck if his arms weren’t better – the way they stretched his shirt was so unfair.  And the shirt – deep blue in colour that emphasized the bronze undertones of his skin – was part of the reason why her research was going as poorly as it was; he was simply too distracting and he didn’t even seem to realize it.

“So what’s the problem?” He opened back to the page she had given up on, and Clarke shook her head to clear her mind.

“The stupid curse is the problem.” She frowned and pushed her notes towards him. “It’s not enough that it doesn’t let me take a photo or a scan, but in places it makes even hand coping impossible.”

Bellamy shuffled through her notes – some of the sigils and most of the translations had turned illegible, smudged as if Clarke had sprayed them with water.

“The author must have been really worried about that copyright.” He joked lightly and let her have her notes back, his knuckles brushing against the tips of her fingers.

Clarke ignored him. “It’s the editor, not the author. She’s really anal about stuff like that.”

Bellamy stifled a chuckle at her choice of words and Clarke actually smiled.

“You know Moss?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I was in one of her classes while in university. That’s how I learned about this guide, but we didn’t really get along so she has been rather… unhelpful with the curse.”

“Can’t you figure it out without the notes?”

Clarke stretched her hands over her head and felt – and heard – the pops of her spine as she relieved some of the pressure that had gathered there.  

“I have most of the theory down, but the cluster of sigils I need are way too complex to memorize at once and the more I stare at them, the blurrier they get.”

“Why are you reading about transmuting again?”

“I have a friend, a technomage, who hurt her leg rather badly and healing crystals don’t do enough for the pain. She built herself an enforced rune brace but some days it’s still a struggle. And well, I’m an art witch with an affinity for healing so I tried to paint her a piece that should have emitted calming and healing waves every time she was in the vicinity of it, but the waves were too weak to make much of a difference.”

Clarke shifted her chair a bit to the side and turned to face him properly.

“I thought I could crush charged healing crystals, mix them with my paint and do my magic. But it doesn’t work, the healing magic disappears the moment I break the crystal in two. So my only other option is transmuting the crystals to something I can work with without harming their entity.”

He tapped on the open page. “Those the sigils you need?”

Clarke glanced at them and nodded, “Yeah.”

“Tell you what,” Bellamy got up and leaned over her to close the book – the smell of burning wood assaulted her senses but she dismissed it as he continued talking. “Pick up all the supplies you need to test this and come tomorrow night, near closing time. I have an apartment over the shop where we can see if the transmuting actually works or not.”

She should have objected – could he let her take the book home instead? – but she couldn’t deny that she was curious to see what his home looked like, and well, over the weeks she had spent at his library she had come to appreciate their little chit-chats, his deadpan humor and his frankly concerning obsession with books.

“Sure,” she smiled and his grin was razor sharp.

His apartment was warm despite the open windows that let the chill night air in, and Clarke shrugged off her jacket, letting Bellamy hang it on the hook by the door. Here, the smell of charcoal and burnt wood was more prominent, darker, but not off-putting and Clarke was puzzled; that must have been one big fire.

There were books here too but not nearly as many as downstairs – it looked more like a personal collection, carefully chosen and well-loved judging by their worn-out pages and covers.

“Oh Goddess, you’re a librarian even at home.”

He gave her a funny look and ushered her to the kitchen. “I like collecting them; any type of history pieces, really, but books are easier to store.”

Clarke took the crystals out from her bag and arranged them on the small round table, followed by her purple-black octopus ink, five white candles, some parchment paper and a little brush – she had always been better at drawing the sigils than writing them. The latin guide was open on the correct page and pushed towards one end of the table, far from the ink.

“Now what?”

“Now I copy the sigils I need, draw an elemental pentagram, light the candles and hope it works.”

“Won’t the sigils smudge?”

“No.” She opened her ink bottle and dipped her brush into the water jar Bellamy had given her, before dipping it into the ink. “I’m going to tweak them on the go so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Just keep me company.”

It took her four tries and all of her parchment paper until she was happy with the end result. The pentagram was easy – she could draw it even in her sleep.

Bellamy lit the candles while she put the crystals on top of the sigils. The candles went in a circle around them and Clarke capped her ink, putting her brush back into the jar that now consisted of black water.

“Ready?” Bellamy asked and Clarke wiped her sweaty hands on her shirt, smearing there the ink that was still wet on her hands.

He squeezed her shoulders and she relaxed at the touch.

“Ready.”

She breathed in and out, and in and out, slowly, and she felt her magic tickle down her arms, gathering at the center of her palms. She let her hands fit over the sigils and her magic lit the ink, making it glow in soft blue light as it raced to every inked corner of the parchment.

A rush of power made her hair whip away from her face and distantly she was aware that Bellamy had moved closer, instead of further away.

The minutes passed by and she was starting to feel the strain, her hands shaking against the table. But the crystals were shining brightly, shifting, as if something was trying to mold them like clay. Just as she was about to call it quits, the crystals turned liquid, splashing on the parchment and covering the sigils, interrupting the magic transfer.

She stumbled back and Bellamy was there to catch her, meeting her wide grin with one of his.

“It worked!” She jumped to hug him and he twirled her around, laughing when she shrieked with happiness.

And Goddess, she hadn’t planned for it, but his arms were tight around her back and her magic was buzzing beneath her skin, drunk on her success, and his eyes were dark with emotion, his pupils dilated and she couldn’t help herself.

She crashed her mouth against his and trembled all over at his groan. There was nothing gentle about it – their teeth clashed and Bellamy’s hand tugged on her hair, tilting her head just so , and when she whimpered, he sucked her bottom lip into his mouth, teasing her with his teeth.

Her magic rose where her fingertips were still smudged with ink and liquid crystal, where she had clutched at his neck, at his bare arms and had left black lines behind, and he pushed her against the table when he felt the little zaps of electricity.

“Bell …” He muffled the rest of his name with another kiss, one that Clarke was all too happy to give into, and grasped at her thighs to pick her up and let her perch on the end of the table.

His touch was warm, burning, and she inhaled sharply when his hand slipped under her shirt and his naked palm traced the knobs of her backbone. Bellamy smiled into their kiss and pulled back only to duck down and bite just below her jawline, moving down when she tipped her head back to give him more access.

Her hands were grasping his shirt but she couldn’t concentrate enough to tell him to take it off. Instead, she gasped as his teeth found a sensitive spot on her neck and clenched her legs tighter around his hips, pulling at the offending material.

Bellamy grinned against her skin and kissed her again, his tongue making her dizzy as they broke off the kiss only to indulge in another.

It took her a while to notice that his face glinted with something more than sweat – then again, he was doing a spectacular job at distracting her – and when it finally registered in her mind, she froze in his embrace.

His hands stilled. “Clarke?”

She licked her puffy lips. “Bellamy, why do you have scales?” Her voice came out way too breathless and she didn’t sound in control at all.

He straightened up and her legs unwind from around his hips, and Goddess, it wasn’t fair that her body craved to have his heat back.

His eyes were intent on hers and Clarke watched fascinated as the tiny dark gold and bronze scales around his temples and neck disappeared under his smooth skin. She itched to trace her fingers over the places, to probe them and see if the skin there would be soft or hard, if she could feel the outlines of the scales beneath.

“You really have no idea, do you?”

He sighed as she shook her head, her throat felt too tight to speak.

“I’m a dragon shifter, Clarke.”

Her mouth opened and then closed again. That was-

“You what?”

Bellamy’s smile was crooked, sardonic.

“A dragon.”

“But- oh.“

The carving on the front door, the obsession with collecting – no, hoarding – books, the scent of fire in the air, the unnatural heat his body gave off, that glint in his eyes. Damn, she had been so distracted by her research and by his charm that she hadn’t put the clues together.

“Oh,” she said again.

He went to pull back from her but her hands tightened their hold on his shirt and he quirked an eyebrow in question. Clarke licked her lips again and didn’t miss the way he seemed to follow the action with unnerving amounts of concentration.

“That’s how you knew I was a witch.”

Dragons, after all, had an affinity for sensing other magical individuals, not to mention that he could probably smell the magic clinging to her skin.

And her arousal.

“Yes.” His teeth glinted in the low light and she shifted on the table, suddenly reminded how it felt to have them against her fragile skin.

“Well,” she let her hands fall down to the buckle of his belt, “that doesn’t really change anything on my end.”

“Oh?”

Her smile was wicked and his pupils expanded once more – Goddess, she was already getting addicted to the effect she had on him.

“If anything, my expectations just went up a notch, or two.”

Bellamy leaned down to nose at her neck, brushing his lips against her neck and up her jaw to whisper against the shell of her ear, “I better get started then.”

“You better.” She gasped as his fingers found her hips and tugged her towards him so she could feel just how into her he was.

But among the haze of lust, a thought rang clearly in her mind.

“The symbols above your desk, they-“

“Kapag madilim ang araw, gising na ang bakunawa,” he growled as he dragged her shirt over her head. “It’s Baybayin, and it means ‘when the sun is dark, the dragon is awake’.”

The sun had long ago sunk under the horizon, and as she felt the vibrations from his chest she realized that she was quite happy to catch the dragon when awake. And damn, but hearing him speak in the foreign language made the heat gather between her legs faster than she could have predicted.

“Good. Does the dragon stay awake all night long?”

He nipped at her lips and grinded his hips against her core. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into, witch.”

Clarke’s magic sparked back to life and made him shiver. “Show me.”