"Did you see who that child was?"

Netta, who had been reclining on her bed, glanced over at Ash.

The boy was standing at the window, looking out of it.

It was only for a moment, but the girl saw how the boy's shoulders rippled under his shirt. The movement was fluid, wavelike underneath the straps of the black suspenders on his shoulders.

"There was no child." His voice sounded falsely happy.

He turned around and gave Netta a warm smile that didn't quite reach his ruby eyes. He disappeared, then re-appeared over the bed, hand outstretched to Netta. "Do you want to play jacks?"

Netta swallowed and looked at her friend's hand. She wondered about the boy that she had seen, so clearly before Ash had moved in front of the window to block her view.

She knew that she had seen a boy approaching the house - a boy a few years above her age, maybe even one from her class - but now - now -

Ash sat on the bed, and the bed did not move, as though it had just been a feather that had dropped on the other end. He again held his hand out to her, and Netta found that she had almost compulsively reached her own hand out to take hold of his, before she realized that he was holding a bag of her jacks in it.

She found that her hand had already reacted to her instinct, her fingers grazing his outstretched ones.

She ripped her hand away, as though her hand had touched a hot coal. Her eyes darted up to his face.

When she looked into his eyes, she was astonished to see that the smile now seemed to reach his eyes. The flame of his eyes seemed to dance as though blown by bellows.

For the first time, the girl felt a strange, hollow fullness in her chest, the hitching in her throat.

So used to being cold in the cell that she was in, Netta lurched as she felt an enveloping warmth wrapping itself around her.

It was too much, on the verge of making her sweat through her clothes.

Still, she lingered in that heat, pressing herself more fully into it, a pleasure that crossed the border between pleasure and painful encumberance.

She stretched as she awoke, then froze as she felt that the heat's source was from a very phsycial preseance against her back.

She could smell him, earthy, thick in her nostrils. His smell, his heat, it was all consuming, pressing, assimilating into her.

Netta gasped and tried to pull away from him. The feel of a large arm wrapping itself, the size and muscle quality of a snake, around her abdomen, squeezed the scream from her lungs into a squeak.

She opened her eyes and saw Erwinnia, sleeping next to her, alseep.

The sound of him crying was what woke Erwinnia. His body shook as he wept, the movements cascading through Netta like alien emotions invading her in waves of soul-wrenching sorrow.

"Netta -" Erwinnia sat up and scooted away from her automatically, her knees held up to her neck, her eyes wide blues. "Oh my god, he's naked! Neith... Neith, I put wards up on the door, how did he break through them-"

Netta felt Ash pull her into him, his face pressing against the nape of her neck. She felt his tears as they fell against the back of her neck, the way his arm shook as he clutched her.

Finally, Netta spoke, too afraid to move and inch.

"A-Ash-"

He spoke in her mind, his voice so raw with emotion that he hardly seemed to be speaking with a human's voice. It sounded as though he spoke with a purity that rang in her mind like the vibrations atop a water's surface.

Nettles, please -

He didn't continue, but he spread in her mind the image of himself, crumpled on the ground, the massive horns that he had worn when he had worn his true form, absurdly large on his now small head.

Feelings of shocking pain and abandonment - something that Netta was no stranger to - wracked through her body, flowing from its source from him.

She was not used to thinking of Ash as vulnerable.

Instinctively, she reached a hand around and dropped it onto his arm.

She felt the shuddering in his body stop for a moment, heard his cries stop.

The one thing that Netta had never allowed to fall with Ash - the last and most crucial barrier, the one that would allow him to read her mind - came down as she allowed all of the misery in Ash, the heartbreaking sadness, to flow into her until she felt as though she could drown in it.

Ash clutched her, enfolding her with his body, both of his arms surrounding her then, his mouth pressed to the back of her neck as he let out a muted scream that she heard, tearing through her mind, primal. It was angry, resigned. Alone.

They stayed like that for Netta knew not how long, Ash imbedded fully in her mind, the shuddering force of his mind writhing as it tried to compress and stretch to form-fit against her.

What should have been a nightmare for her, feeling her mind filled with him until she could only feel herself in the corona of Ash - was, instead, almost like feeling her soul being shared, cradled in his strong frame and feeling something akin to the true potential of the Monster that she had so misjudged as being weak, flaring through her.

If they were to fuse then, Netta found that she did not have the will to stop him from assimilating their energies together, melding their sadness and, increasingly she could feel, their calm silence together.

Ashwood watched as the boy walked up the lane that lead to the Coven's home, could see the gentle, fostering hope in the human child's face.

A scant feeling of embarrassment once more threatened to stop Ash, but he persisted, stepping out from the bushes to stand in the middle of the lane.

The boy recognized him immediately, thought that standing fully in his ample height difference to Ash's purposefully chosen shorter persona would intimidate him.

Ash had to hide that savage grin of his and instead looked up at the boy, purposefully feigning tiredness to keep his eyelids covering his red eyes.

"You must be that boy that Neith says she's betrothed to," the boy accused it, a grin spreading on his face. "I see you sometimes, when she isn't lookin'. You're so creepy."

Ash looked up at the human boy and wondered if this was at all what Neith could possibly be "into".

He examined the dull, mortal quality of the human's eyes. He could feel his lungs being oppressed by the smell of the boy's skin, leaden with the smell of the testosterone that was coursing its way through the boy's body, dirty with the lack of magic clinging to him.

Ashwood decided with confidence that this one was as far from his Nettles as a cow was.

He held back a smile.

The boy took two steps towards Ash, one of those hands of his closed around the letter that he carried.

"You're gonna move and let me give this to her, or else I'm gonna go through you, brat." The contents of the letter were depressingly obvious to Ash - an admission of feelings to the eccentric girl in the one-room classroom.

Ashwood said nothing, only cocked his head to the side.

The boy took a step forward, the grin getting larger on his face. "Look at you, you're such a little brat-"

Ash felt the wind brushing from behind him, flowing through him more than against him. He saw as his own scent blew into the human's face.

He saw the boy's eyes widen, his nostrils flare as he repeatedly took in the smell of him with growing urgency.

A shudder went through the boy.

Ash looked up into the boy's eyes, saw the dulling look of fear that clouded his irises.

It was a look that Ash knew all too well - the expression of a herbivore as they realized that a wolf was stalking them.

The boy shrank back a step before he turned around, nearly tripping as he made a mad dash away. The letter he had been holding dropping from his hand, forgotten.

Ash glanced up for a moment, gazing at the sparse covering of the pitiable trees that could exist in the arid weather. Not for the first time, he wondered at how he came to be in a place so different from his homeland.

Ash let the wind carry the letter to him and opened it.

He sat on a nearby rock and read the boy's sloppy attempt at cursive, one leg thrown over the rock he sat on.

When Netta came walking down the lane, he was re-reading the embarrassing, adolescent lust-confused ramblings. They were the work of a teenaged boy to a girl that he wanted desperately to bed, honor or control in a confused mess of hormonal frustration.

It was Netta's smell that hit him first, and he inhaled her. He was relieved to feel that magical potential, devoid of the stench of testosterone and mortality.

Her eyes widened, the greens deep and drawing. Ash forced his gaze away from those eyes, onto the blooming of freckles on her upper cheeks.

"Ash, what are you doing here?" Her accent, learned from her Mother, was still clinging to her words, elongating them in a way that was more gentle and lush than the clipped way that the American human spoke.

The smile that fluttered across her lips was something that made Ash almost imagine that a heart was surely beating in his chest.

He allowed the smile to form on his lips without having to force it.

"Just waiting to take you to class."

Netta looked as though she was about to ask him something.

Ash tilted his head to the side and allowed the smile that had been building in him to spread on his face. "You have something that you wanted to ask me, Nettles?"

Netta glanced up behind him at the lane and Ash fought the urge to block her view of it.

She looked at him, blinking a little uneasily and pushing a stray lock of her lush, red hair out of her face.

"I - uh, it's not that I don't want to be around you, Ash, but I promised a b- someone from my class that they could walk me."

Ash knew then that his displeasure was showing, as he watched her green eyes darken with worry, maybe even fear.

"What's the matter?"

Ash blinked, smiled. "Nothing, especially since you're here."

Netta shoved her hands back in the pockets of her yellow and pink tweed jacket and kicked a light staccato rhythm in the lane. "Are you sure that you haven't seen anyone?"

Ash turned his back and feigned looking up the lane. He turned around and looked back at Netta, shrugging.

He was learning more and more how to feign physical manifestations of emotions -re-learning them. He relished chances to try his hand at practicing them, with his Witch.

"He must have decided against showing up."

A sudden twitch of her face, turning her lips into a frown, made Ash suddenly add, "Or else he didn't know where you lived."

Netta looked down at her hands. "Oh."

Ash shifted, uneasy in the physical body that he had constructed.

"I'm still here for you, Nettles." He focused on trying to make himself sound as upbeat he could manage.

When she kept looking down at her hands, Ash blinked herself next to her and pressed her against him in a hug.

The feel of her pressed to him made him feel good, warm, as though he had actual skin that could exude temperature. He suppressed a shudder of pleasure at the feel of her presence, her soul, as it sang against him.

He wanted her, selfishly, childishly, to only want him.

They stayed like that for what felt like an eternity as Ash felt an old urge - to take her, spirit her away as his kind had once done with young Witches who had no knowledge of their own powers or protection in the form of older Witches would do, return to him, fleetingly.

He waited it out until it passed.

She shivered then - an echoing, innocent answer to his own repressed desires?

Could he ever wish for such a thing?

"I know you're always here for me," she said, clutching him back finally.

She whispered in his ear then, and Ash closed his eyes. He could feel her words flowing through him as though he were a conduit of her emotions.

"Thank you."

He thought it before he could stop himself and it hurt - annoyed him.  I think I need you.

When Ash finally withdrew, Netta found herself feeling a twinge of loss at the way her back felt without his oppressive warmth against her. Was it a soft reaction to the dream that she had fallen into? It had to be a dream, even though it felt, strangely, as though it had been a memory that did not belong to her.

As soon as he left, she felt the psychic bond that he had created, a near fusion of their minds, break.

At first all she could do was gasp as she felt the sheer bereftness of her mind without his like a shock to her system.

Finally, then, she was aware of laying on the bed, sweating in spite of the cold.