Chapter 7
Griselda
Marcus’s kiss sent the heated memory of our night together surging through me. His scent, a crisp blend of masculine cologne and something more natural, more primal, filled my nose. I wanted to roll around and revel in it.
Firm hands held me a willing prisoner against taut muscles, pressing me so that I fit against him perfectly. I slid my hand, which had been by his ear, into the denser hair around his horns.
He’d worn his glamor when we first met, but I remembered how much he loved it when I pulled his hair or touched around his ears. It made sense now as I scratched the sensitive area at the base of his horns. He reacted by grabbing my ass and squeezing, pressing me against the large erection that had sprung up between us.
Now that I saw him for what he was, the feel of his lips made a lot more sense. When he’d had the glamor on his mouth felt much larger than it looked, but seeing was believing, and I didn’t question it despite knowing he wore glamor.
That was the thing about living in Darlington. Many people were covered by illusion, and this was especially true when meeting bed partners at places like Delirium. I just rolled with it.
I moaned into his mouth, my own hunger growing. The need started in my center, deep and aching, even as he parted my lips with his thick tongue and swept it into a dance with mine.
It was Triscuit who ended our kiss. He flew up in our faces and started harassing Marcus, who quickly scrambled away and put his arm up to protect his face.
This reminded me why I never brought anyone home. It was always their place, not mine. That was the thing about parrots. It was easy to trigger their overprotectiveness and jealousy.
Triscuit had actually quite liked Marcus when he first came in, probably because I had preemptively given him a treat to offer the bird. And he’d been relatively accepting while he vacuumed. In fact, Triscuit had been so unobtrusive that I’d forgotten he was there when the kiss had started.
“If you spring away every time, it’ll just teach him that attacking you will make us stop.” I pulled Marcus back onto the couch next to me. “Here.” I quickly tossed Marcus a pack of pistachios. “Offer him a few, but only if he’s nice.”
After a while, things calmed, and Triscuit started playing on the coffee table with some toys.
“I’m going to extend my ward to cover the entire building. It’s not foolproof though, so people can still look into the windows, but they won’t be able to cast any spells into the building.”
“Thank you. You don’t have to do all this, but I’m glad you are.”
“It’s for selfish reasons,” I admitted. “First, if you’re gone, that will give Arcane Development an in. And second, who else is going to vacuum topless for me?”
That had him grinning, and I was glad I could lighten the mood.
Triscuit was shouting about biscuits, which meant it was his dinner time. And any sexy or romantic feeling had to wait. Seriously, it was impossible with a shouting parrot.
“Before you go, can you put up the glamor and walk me around the building?” I asked. “I want to extend my wards to cover everything.”
Technically, I could cast a spell without drawing a demarcation by simply asking the spell to follow the outside of the wall, but it was a lot easier if I could see it. Just to save myself some energy, I grabbed a thick, black permanent marker so I could draw an uninterrupted ring around the property.
By the time I returned to my home, sans sexy neighbor, Triscuit was this close to tearing apart the fabric of reality because his dinner was late. Luckily, I’d put him back into his cage before leaving to fix the wards so all he could destroy were his toys.
I quickly fed him and myself, throwing together a dinner of whatever I had in the fridge. I really needed groceries.
But did I head to the grocery store? Nope! I went online instead, scouring the collective knowledge of the internet for any information I could find about minotaurs and mazes. I had to wade through pages of results repeating the same story from Greek mythology until I found something that mentioned a dragon. Except this was an unknown fantasy novel written in the late Victorian era, and aside from a single paragraph mentioning it, there was nothing else.
All I had was the author's name, not even a title! It was a nom de plume by the looks of it. Comtesse du Taureau. The Countess of the Bull. Interesting, because female authors at the time usually used a male pseudonym. This author decided to keep her female identity.
Was it the other way around? A man writing as a woman in the nineteenth century? That was very common now, but it was unheard of back then.
It was well past my bedtime by the time I looked up from my research.
Shit. It was Nick’s day off tomorrow so I had to wake up early to open, but I did get half the day off since both Jules and Alyssa were coming in tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I’d take a trip down to the library and see what else I could find about this Comtesse du Taureau.
It was just before noon when a car alarm started going off, and Faux Hobo ran off, leaving all of his change. Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.
“About flipping time,” Jules said. “I thought he’d never leave.”
A few minutes later, Alyssa stepped in, panting like she just ran a mile.
“What's wrong?” I asked, my eyes scanning the windows for danger.
She waved away my concern as she caught her breath. When she could finally speak, she said, “I just saw the most unbelievable thing. An animal I’d never seen before—black and gray, stocky, big claws—just ran out of the bushes carrying a wasp nest and launched it through a car’s windshield. Then it just ran off. The wasps started going crazy, so I booked it.”
“A wasp nest? In the middle of winter?” I asked.
“Yup! I have no idea where it got it.”
I exchanged a look with Jules before asking, “Did the car happen to be a Lexus?”
“I don’t know. All cars look the same to me. Maybe? It looked new.”
Hmm, I wondered if that was why Faux Hobo was running like the wind.
“What did you say the animal looked like?” Jules asked.
“Black and gray. Lighter bits on top. Short and stocky, with a big claws. And it didn’t seem to be scared of the wasps. And those wasps were angry as fuck.”
“What does a honey badger look like?” Jules asked.
Curious, I looked it up and showed her.
“Hey! That’s it!” Alyssa exclaimed. “But much, much bigger than in that photo.
Okay, so it was a honey badger.
“I don’t think we get them here,” I said
“Has to be a shifter.”
A lot of shifters’ animal forms are bigger than regular versions of the animals, especially if the animals they shifted into were usually smaller than humans. Magic was good with a lot of things, but mass was mass, and there was only so much it could fudge. That was why the human forms of bear, big cats, and wolf shifters were often heavier than they looked. It really messed up those guys at the carnival who tried to guess people’s weight.
“A honey badger shifter? Do they even exist?” Alyssa asked.
“No clue,” I said. I’d honestly never looked into it.
Once Alyssa got set up, I headed out to the library. Not just any library, though. Darlington’s Library of Magic it was how I recharged my magic. But while I had a decent number of spell books, I didn’t specialize in them.
Everyone knew about witches who recharged through sex and touch. They simultaneously intrigued and terrified the men of the world, and as such, they had been written about extensively by scholars. Education, for the longest time, had been a game only rich boys could play. This was true throughout magical and non-magical history.
But there were other ways for us to recharge our magic. Sleeping and eating were great options. And time does wonders. But to speed it up, many witches like myself surrounded ourselves with things we loved. For some, the items had to be magical. But for me, they just had to have a certain sentiment. My home was filled with wonderful objects, both magical and not.
And that was my little secret. Without all these objects, I was a shitty witch. I had magic, sure, and out of our little coven of three, I used to be the strongest. But I wasn’t born this way. It wasn’t until I’d learned to pull the inherent magic from the things around me that my powers became more notable. Now that Penny had found her incubus and tapped into her sex magic, I reckoned she was quite a bit more powerful than me, even though she’d started out as what she lovingly called “a special-ed witch,” her words, not mine.
She’d had so much difficulty learning witchcraft that she’d started an online website showing other non-neurotypical witches how to access and harness their powers. I remember struggling to teach her when we were in college. It wasn’t that she wasn’t strong; she just did things a little differently. She wasn’t a book learner, but rather, she had to learn through demonstrations or other more hands-on methods.
Currently, my home was too full for me to add to my collections. As much as I loved things, I also needed them to be well-organized and neat. I couldn’t handle piles of things on the floor. That just stressed me out. As a result, many of my collections have spilled out into the coffee shop. Interesting objects made great decorations; who knew?
It took me almost an hour of searching before I found anything on the Comtesse. Another quick reference about her work and this time, a title! Rencontre Avec un Minotaur . “Meeting with a Minotaur.”
That sounded interesting. It had been published as fiction, an erotic fantasy, but I wonder if it was an autobiography masquerading as a titillating story. I understood why she kept the female moniker now. It was a saucy recounting of debauchery straight from the fallen woman’s fountain nib.
I was searching for a copy of it when I felt the first unwanted prod at my wards. It was light at first, barely noticeable, and I thought I had imagined it. Then it became more insistent.
My home was under attack!