Chapter 9 #2
He picks me up and rushes out into the hallway where we damn near slam into Ms. Percy.
I grab her, positive the last thing I want to do is seduce someone, but if it means washing away this other magic, I’ll take it.
The magic hangs on tight, but after a moment it finally loosens its grip on me and I can breathe again.
“Dammit,” I mumble as I drop from Torin’s arms, pleased when my legs can hold my weight.
“What the hell happened?” Ms. Percy asks.
“Something not good,” I say as my fingers ache, but not as badly as they would if I’d used the foreign magic. “Is everyone okay?”
“They seem to be. I’m evacuating the building.”
“Good,” I reply.
We don’t even make it up to the ground floor before the Magical Interference Unit is on the scene. Always too late to help but right on time to clean up my mess.
“What happened?” Imani asks me.
“Another Door was opening up. Same person was trying to get through. Do you know who they are or what they want with our realm?”
Imani shakes her head as Vinny hurries up and looks me over. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s just a scratch.”
He cocks his head and then smiles fondly at me. “I wouldn’t mind playing doctor with you.”
Imani appears offended, glowering at Vinny and shoving him back before looking at me. “Only if I can be your nurse.”
Torin snatches me up before either of them can touch me. “I read this in one of your sex books! They are trying to fuck you!”
“No, they’re not, they’re…” I… don’t actually know what they’re doing. And then it dawns on me why two of my closest friends who have never expressed any sexual interest in me are now looking at me with half-lidded eyes, which I guess… is their attempt at looking sexy?
“I will nurse your body back to health and make you beg. I know just how you like it,” Imani says.
“Oh, they’re horny,” Torin unhelpfully adds in English.
“Not before I give you a nice big poke with my needle right in your perfect ass,” Vinny says with a leer. I hastily smack a hand down on Vinny, who has one too many buttons open on his shirt.
His magic erases the succubus magic, and I’m left staring at two rather ashamed people. Oddly enough, neither seem to want to look me in the eyes.
“What was that… what were you going to do to me? Vinny? Vinny, what were you going to do to my ass? Imani, how were you going to make me beg? What was I begging for, exactly? How exactly do I like it?”
Vinny, who has apparently decided that he hasn’t even seen me yet today, goes, “Oh! Riley! There you are! Good to see you for the first time today.”
“After you made the entire unit proposition you just last year, you promised us you’d never borrow the succubus’s power again,” Imani says.
“It was an emergency this time.”
“I lost a lot of dignity today,” Vinny whispers.
“Let us get back on task,” Imani says as she clears her throat, and I point down at her shirt. She discovers she’d also undone a few buttons, exposing the edges of her bra. She hurriedly rebuttons them and then proceeds to act like nothing happened. “Can you describe everything that happened?”
“Sure. When I walked up, my two closest friends started to disrobe and said things they wanted to do to me, which made me feel weird inside.”
“Not that, dammit,” Imani says, so I go through everything that happened while Torin stands beside me.
Around the time I’m done talking, he sighs loudly and then sets his head on my shoulder. I immediately look over at him. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
I turn to see what caused such a reaction from him when he seemed perfectly fine minutes ago. “What’s wrong?”
He lifts his head and shakes it. “Nothing. Can you ask them where the Door was that I came in through?”
I turn to Imani. “Where is the Door that Torin came in through?”
“I know the area, but Mickey is the one who found him. I think he was out looking for dead people. I’d ask him for specifics if you’re wanting to know more than just a general location. Why? Is he planning on going back?”
“I… don’t know,” I say before answering Torin in his language. “She said we would have to ask the person who found you for more specifics. Do you want to know the exact spot?”
He just makes some noncommittal noise before wandering off. I stare after him, not quite sure what any of that was about.
“Are you okay?” Imani asks me.
“Yeah… I was a bit… surprised when I was nearly pulled through the Door. The last thing I want to do is end up in some realm I can’t get back from. Have you figured out anything about who is trying to cross over?”
Imani sighs. “We can’t share information… with those outside of the unit. But if you wanted to rejoin…?”
I pretend like that doesn’t bother me as much as it does. “I’m going to go find my ward and see what he’s up to.”
“You mean when he’s not protecting you from our advances. I saw the way he shielded you from us,” Imani says with a smirk.
“Because you guys were being creepy,” I retort before leaving them to it and walking away, feeling kind of shitty about the whole thing.
It’s been years since I’ve worked with them, and while it was extremely hard at first, it’s become more tolerable over time.
It helps that I rarely interact with them while they’re working, so I don’t get that pang when I see them in uniform doing a job that was once my whole world.
At first, they tried to do stuff with me every weekend, but with how busy they are, it dropped to every other weekend, and now we’re lucky if it’s once a month.
“Has anyone seen the god?” I ask.
“He went downstairs,” Vinny says, so I head down, assuming I’ll find him in the room the Door was opened in—which is where everyone else is going—but he’s not there.
So I wander a bit until I find him in a room filled with ancient texts.
It’s a restricted room that not just anyone is allowed to waltz into, but there he is, perusing the texts containing ancient and possibly dangerous magic.
I mean… we are putting a lot of faith in a god we know very little about.
“How’d you get in here?” I ask curiously.
“Ms. Percy gave me a temporary pass to let me in.”
“This is where you two…” I grimace. “I hope you didn’t get all nasty on the ancient texts.”
“Had sex? No. I believe she thought this is where we’d have sex, but I’m busy right now. No time for sex.”
“What are you looking for?” I ask. For all we know, he’s tricking us so he can take over the world. So then why am I so trusting when it comes to him? Has my life really become so damn useless that I’ll latch on to anything?
“How are your hands?” he asks, completely dismissing my question as his finger hooks under my glove and pulls it down. The darkness has spread nearly to my wrists.
“I wonder if I’ll lose the ability to use my hands if it reaches my wrists? That’d be my luck for sure,” I say with a laugh. “I wonder what it’ll take next? My arms? My legs? My hearing?”
Torin gives me a look and I quickly turn my head away, fully prepared to make a joke out of all of this.
“The man coming through that doorway is not good,” he states.
“I assumed as much. But guess what? It’s not my problem. My problem is that I have to work until five and I want to take a nap.”
Torin watches me for a second. “I don’t know if your friends have any idea how ‘not good’ it is.” He grabs a few ancient texts and tosses them into a bag.
“Those aren’t meant to be checked out of the library. I’m sure Ms. Percy explained this. Or did you pretend you didn’t know English again when it came to something like that?”
“She sure did, while running a finger down my chest and fluttering her lashes at me,” he says as he zips up the bag and heads out the door.
Keeping pace with him while he walks, I ask, “Can you even read those?”
“If they talk about sex enough, I’m sure I’ll blast right through the texts.”
“Are you going to use them to blow up the city?”
“I wouldn’t blow up this city… the pizza is too good.”
“Did you know other cities have pizza too? Unlike us, there are cities actually known for their pizza.”
Torin pauses and appears to debate this for a moment. “Let us go to this place known for its pizza.”
“I still have to work. I can’t just pack up and drive across the country for some pizza.”
He reaches out and takes my hand, setting something strangely warm into it before he closes my fingers over it. I open it up and look down at the most beautiful gem set deep in a gorgeous bluish black metal, much like his scythes. It shimmers unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
“Go sell that and then I bet we could.”
“I’m not selling this for pizza! It’s gorgeous! Hang on to it.” I have to force it back into his hand where he stares at it in disgust like he’s disappointed it’s not pizza.
Torin seems perplexed why I wouldn’t sell some precious heirloom-looking thing for pizza.
Pizza!!! Instead, I’m left helping Ms. Percy deal with the aftermath while really wanting to just go home since I feel mentally exhausted and my hands ache.
When Torin realizes we’re not leaving, he parks himself in a corner of the empty library and flips through the ancient texts until we’re finally free to go.
When we step out, he looks at the spot where the horses were tied up this morning and narrows his eyes. “Where are my horses?”
“I… bet… a thief stole them. Did I not tell you how many horse thieves are in the area? They run rampant in these parts.”
His expressive eyes shift to me. “Did you ask the thief to take them?”
“Me? Gosh, no… I would never pass up an opportunity to get my balls smashed.”
“You nearly got them smashed earlier waving around that succubus magic,” he mutters.
“Yeah, but that would have been fun for me.”
Torin’s eyes widen. “I will make it very fun for you and yet you continually turn me down!”
“That’s odd.”
The sigh this man heaves when he discovers that the nearest subway station has an escalator gives me enough joy to make me forget about my hands for a short while.