“The what?”
“The leaders of the coven. The ones that most benefit from the souls harvested.”
Yup. My mind goes right back there, the memory imprinted crisp and clear, straight HD quality.
He nods this sage nod and somehow manages to take a drag of his cigarette although his mouth is covered by linen.
“Your coven is led by some weird fucking assholes.”
“You have no idea,” she mumbles. A small, maroon pouch appears in her hand and she flings it my way.
Dear God, her aim is awful. When it comes to anything but her fire, that is.
I manage to catch it anyway, my reflexes taking me by surprise, but not as much as the pouch itself once I look at it. “You’re kidding me, right? A gris-gris? Don’t tell me these things actually work.”
The look on her face is as respectful as it is grudging. “Wolf-boy knows a little something about magic.”
“Any New Orleanian worth his salt knows what this is,” I grumble. “What is this supposed to do for me, though?”
“You can’t mystically hide yourself. I can. It’ll help keep the humans from spotting you, recording any semblance of you . . . the mortal world believes you dead. Although that’ll soon be fact, it’s best to keep you hidden from them while we enact our revenge.”
“I haven’t signed onto anything.”
“Oh yes, you have,” she croons in a way that makes my skin break out in goosebumps.
And tells me there’s another fact that hasn’t escaped her:
I’d kill to spend my last moments near her.
Ten years trapped by the image of her, going through the motions of a “successful” life.
If this is how it must end, I’m going to milk every moment of it and I don’t give a damn what that makes me look like.
My idiocy is a well-documented fact, spanning a decade worth of bad decisions. Might as well stay true-to-character until the bitter end.
“Are you done mentally whining about your fate? We have places we need to be.” She straightens off the bookcase.
Any more sass from her and I’ll have her arched over one of these armchairs while I feast on her clit. Plain and simple. “Gee. And here I thought you’d be fixin’ to break some more of my stuff before we go.”
“Keep pushing me, werewolf, and you’ll be the next thing I break.” Heading to the entryway, she steps over the broken pieces of my things and throws over her shoulder, “Plain and simple.”
I freeze in my seat.
Can she freaking read my mind?
The question is left unanswered as she pauses right at the entry, feet away from the top of the stairs. I watch her back, waiting for her to speak.
She doesn’t. Instead, she raises a hand, snaps her fingers—
My things return to their proper places, in their original form, as if they’d never been broken.
Did she . . . she fixed my stuff.
Without a backward glance, she proceeds down the stairs, apparently heading for the ground floor.
CHAPTER 7
“You . . . I . . .”
“Pick your jaw off the floor, werewolf,” she snaps.
“But—”
“What is the problem?”
What is the problem? Trust me, I don’t expect this creature that wants to see me dead to have any form of empathy for me. Or, God forbid, understanding.
But she shouldn’t be asking stupid questions, either. “When you said we were going straight to your coven, I imagined some creepy place in the Bayou. You know, perhaps an old plantation surrounded by some cypresses, perhaps some mutated, flying bats—”
The mother of all side-eyes is thrown at me and I swear she makes the emoji proud. “Child, you watch too much television.”
“What? Anything’s possible as far as I’m concerned.” I wave a hand at the building across the street. “And anything’s more believable than that.” By “that”, I’m referring to the fifteen-floor structure we’re staring at.
The one I’ve driven past many times on my way to work and thought was just a condominium building. “You’re telling me that’s where your coven is?”
Laser-like focus doesn’t even begin to describe how she’s staring at that building.
I take her lack of response as an affirmative. “What floor are you guys on?”
“The whole building.”
Well, then. “A little hypocritical, don’t you think? Here you are, hating on my wealth, and it turns out you live in there.”
She seems like she barely checks the urge to slap me. “I don’t hate on your wealth, I just don’t like what you’re about.”
I’ve been judged by many people in my life. When I was a child, and during my teens, the lack of love or appreciation really ate at me. Left an unhealed hole. Then, I got over it. At least, I think I did.
Every time she judges me, baring a little of that disgust she has for me, I swear I feel phantom echoes of that emptiness.
And I loathe her for it.
I don’t know her.
It doesn’t fucking matter she’s haunted every aspect of my life for over a decade.
She’s no one to me and how she feels about me shouldn’t matter one bit.
Yet it does. On a pathological level.
I’ll be damned if I ever let her know that. “So, the plan is to stand here all night?”
“They should be aware we’re out here by now.”
“They?”
Jerking her chin toward the building, she draws my attention to the people walking in and out of it. “My kind.”
Does she mean fellow witches? And warlocks, it turns out.
What I would’ve once assumed are four regular people step out of the building—two men and two women. The insidious nature of what I’ve now a part of sinks in. A completely normal looking building.
Normal “people”.
Just how deep does this go?
“They look like average humans,” I blurt, waving my hand in their direction. “You—”
“What about me?” Her tone is curt and defensive.
The two warlocks are tense. In suits that probably cost more than the ones neatly arranged in my closet, they’re poster boys for business men.
Except for one barely noticeable thing.
A disturbing, new detail that sends my mind reeling.
There’s wisps of color trickling off their forms, outlining them . . . Auras. That answer slams into me, gluing me to the floor. I study the women, one blonde, the other a curly-haired, young-looking woman with skin even darker than the men. Their auras are even more colorful.
I can see the fucking power coming off them. What the fuck?
“Answer me, werewolf.”
Shaking my head, I rip my stare from them. “They’re dressed so normal and you look like what you are, witch.”
One of the men’s fingers twitch at his sides. His aura flares with another burst of power.
“Are you judging my fucking style?”
And that’s what she decides to focus on.
“Uh . . .” I motion to the guy who seems to be a nuclear reactor gearing to explode. “I’m pretty sure he’s about to aim something our way.”
“He won’t.”