Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Start your morning with blueberry pancakes and a man who isn’t afraid to shake his ass to a pop song. If that fails, add syrup and lower your standards.
Drool was not attractive. Keverin had somehow made himself fit so that his head was on the pillow next to mine, and the material was drenched.
“Hey, buddy,” I whispered, not wanting to startle an overprotective prehistoric tiger. His giant paw draped across my side, and I had zero chance of lifting it. He huffed in my face. Why did it smell like my aunt’s cabbage rolls? Was no one immune?
“Keverin,” I said a little louder, running my hand down his super soft nose.
It twitched. He was so cute sometimes. His eyes blinked open, a little unfocused at first before the golden orbs narrowed on me.
“Time to face the day.” His paw clenched around my back, and he dragged me closer.
He felt the same way about leaving this bedroom as I did, but wars couldn’t be won from the sheets. “Thank you for keeping me company.”
He purred low, and my eyes drooped. The damned cat was trying to coax me back to sleep.
My stomach rumbled. “As enticing as spending the day napping is, nature of the toilet and food variety calls.” I tipped my head back, ready to give him my best takes no shit stare.
His tongue snaked out and dragged from my chin to my forehead.
I squirmed. “Gross.” He disappeared with a snap of magic, but left me with the distinct impression he was laughing at me.
I rolled off the bed, treated myself to a long hot shower, and dragged on a pair of jeans and a pink blouse. I tamed my hair into a braid and caught my reflection in the mirror. I blinked. I looked different. A little sharper, ethereal even. A consequence of accepting my angelic half? Perhaps.
Following the smell of something delicious, I thudded down the first set of stairs, passing numerous drifting ghosts who offered me polite smiles and curious gazes.
Rebecca’s door opened, and a shirtless Ezra backed out with his hands held up.
“I will feed on whomever I damn well please,” she snarled while stalking out wearing nothing but a skimpy red silk nightgown.
She looked every bit the vampire princess as she pointed a finger at him. “And I decide who warms my bed.”
I paused and regretted not having a bowl of popcorn handy. It was normally my love life being played out for all like an episode of The Real Hauntwives of Louisiana.
He lunged, nipped her finger between his teeth and grabbed her hips. “You sink your fangs into anyone else, and I’ll make sure they can’t nourish another ever again,” Ezra drawled.
“You.” She thumped her fist on his shoulder as he lifted her off the floor. “Are.” He curled her legs around his waist. “Impossible.”
Rebecca shot me a look over his shoulder. She blinked like she was unsure how she’d even arrived out of her room. Ezra chuckled and strode back through the door, slamming it closed with his foot.
At least someone was grasping their happy moments. If you always waited for the big ones, you’d be disappointed most of the time. But savoring the things that made you smile, that made your heart beat a little faster was how you built happiness that lasts and endures.
I strode past a harassed Maggie, who was on the phone handling a query about a stag party. I was hoping that meant a group of guys trying to send off their buddy into wedded bliss and not a group of shifters looking for a party house.
I expected to find Aunt Liz cooking up some breakfast goodness.
What I got instead was my mate flipping blueberry pancakes while he shook his ass to a popular pop song.
I folded my arms and leaned against the door frame to admire him for a moment, to remind myself that life wouldn’t always be about pain and war.
It could boil down to a pair of jeans that molded to my mate’s butt like they’d been made for him and a simple yet delicious treat served with love.
“Are you just going to stand and stare, or are you going to grab some plates?”
Busted. I shook my head and twisted my lips to the side. “I think I earned a little staring and a whole lot of pancakes.”
“Fair enough.” He pointed at the chair with the spatula. “Then sit your cute ass down and let me feed my woman.”
“So caveman,” I scoffed, moving toward the chair.
He threw his head back and laughed. “On a scale of one to one hundred, this is about a level five caveman.”
That’s what I was afraid of. I took a sip of the orange juice from the glass before me.
Yum, freshly squeezed. He served up the final two pancakes onto two plates and slid one in front of me before dropping down on the seat next to mine.
His knee brushed my own, and he grinned as the familiar heat swept down my spine.
I cleared my throat and dug into the pancakes. Damn, these were good.
“How did you sleep?” he asked.
“Better with Keverin, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. We were both going nuts listening to your nightmares. But you’d made it quite clear I wasn’t welcome, so I sent him hoping you wouldn’t demand he leave.”
“Have you seen the size of him? Not sure anything I said or did would make him leave. He takes stubborn and makes it his personality.”
“See, I’m not that bad.”
I snorted. “You are worse, but with less fur.”
He grinned. “If the fur is a deal breaker, I can make that happen.”
I shook my head. “You are impossible.” I devoured another mouthful. “But your blueberry pancakes make up for it.”
A loud thud above our heads made us both look up. “Whose room is that?” he asked.
I glowered at the ceiling. “Rebecca’s.”
Aunt Liz strode in with Dave following a step behind her. She gave us a soft smile, clutching a large dark leather book in her hands. A Roberts grimoire, I believed.
“Good morning, Cora,” she said.
“Morning. Why do you have that?”
“Research.” She took a seat opposite me while Dave filled the kettle and popped it on the stove. Look at that. My aunt had domesticated Dangerous Dave.
“About?” I asked.
She darted a look at Hudson. I wasn’t keeping any more secrets from him, because they would tear us apart faster than any shifter chasing prey.
I’d already decided sometime last night to discuss with the rest of the Serpents of the Dawn how to do one of two things: leave and rid myself of the knowledge of their existence, or stay and inform Hudson of their existence.
He didn’t have to join, but I was done hiding this.
It wasn’t fair to me or him to do so. I understood the logic and need for such an organization, but it didn’t need me.
“This specific grimoire was my mother’s.”
I froze with a forkful of blueberries halfway to my gaping mouth. I’d already searched the vaults. My grandmother had taken all her grimoires, somehow bypassing my imitation spell, which would have given me a perfect copy. You didn’t become the ruler of the elementals by being careless.
“Close your mouth, niece.”
“Won’t she notice it’s missing?” Hudson wondered.
Liz’s mouth curled. “Did I tell you one of the things my mother used to drill us with as punishment?”
I narrowed my eyes and put my fork down. “I’m sure Eloise was winning parent of the year awards, but no, enlighten me.”
Liz spread open the grimoire, the pages creaking as they revealed my grandmother’s secret thoughts.
“Eloise used to make us copy her family spells over and over again until they became second nature.” Liz tapped her temple.
“Everything from charms to curses is stored like an encyclopedia in my mind.”
Dave placed a perfectly prepped cup of English tea in front of Liz and joined us.
“We aren’t looking for a basic cure me of the common cold or help me find some luck spell,” I muttered.
“You can do that?” Hudson asked.
I arched my brow. “Cure the common cold? No, but I can mask the symptoms.”
“Give me luck,” he corrected.
“Do you need it, Principal?” Sebastian asked as he rounded the corner. “Is your game off when it comes to my dearest friend?” He pouted.
I rolled my eyes. “Sit and stop antagonizing him.”
Sebastian blinked but didn’t question the olive branch I was offering. I’m pretty sure he expected me to throw him out the door. I couldn’t win this war alone, and I certainly couldn’t fight one on all sides. It would take all of us working together to defeat the common enemy.
Liz rotated the book and drummed her fingers on the top of the page.
“This isn’t Eloise’s book exactly, more like a copy I made of the books she made us study.
Actually, it’s a copy of all the things she didn’t want us to see.
But she was one person, and her daughters were many.
Between us, we worked out how to gather her knowledge, just in case. ”
“In case she became evil and tried to take over the world?” Dave drawled.
Sebastian snorted. “That woman was always evil, which was why you made a copy. Deep down, you knew one day it would come to this.”
Liz huffed. “This? No, never. But you are right that we suspected her plans wouldn’t always be contained to one faction or be for the benefit of all.”
“In her head, she believes this benefits everyone,” Hudson pointed out.
They bickered around me as I scanned the page with growing interest. A tendril of excitement and hope unfurled inside my chest. I read it again, making sure I hadn’t misunderstood, before meeting the watchful gaze of my aunt.
“We can use this,” I whispered.
“In a number of ways, yes,” she agreed.
“How?” Hudson demanded.
“This is a description of the curse she altered,” I explained.
Something scraped on the floor above us. We all paused and glanced at the ceiling for a beat. Silence. Maybe that was the end of their shenanigans for the morning?
“You already have the info on the curse,” Sebastian said.
“No, we have the original curse and the one adapted by my great-grandmother Eunice that made sure Eloise was a hugely powerful elemental. What we don’t have are the intricate details of how that change affected each generation after her. Liz was her first.”
“So that means she drained your father to produce you?” Dave checked, glancing at Liz.
She pressed her lips together. “That’s the story, yes.”
According to the family tree, my grandfather was a powerless nobody. But he was the only one who ever threatened to take her heart, and for that crime, he had paid the ultimate price—death by Eloise’s hand.
“Wait, shouldn’t you have drained Abbadon?” Sebastian asked me.
“No one can command the power of an archangel. My father would have flicked the drain away like swatting a fly.”
“So why aren’t you powerless?”
“Same reason. You can’t command the power of an archangel, even a half-born.”
“But you have elemental magic,” Dave said.
“Yes, I do, like all angels.”
He blinked, and I could see him storing every bit of information he gathered inside that vast, suspicious brain of his.
“To create this, Eunice basically fooled the blood into believing it wasn’t a Roberts. It made the curse invert on the man and twisted the power grab. But it was only meant to be used once, and then everything that was set into motion was to return.”
“But Eloise intervened,” Dave said.
I nodded. “This shows how she took the blood in her veins and separated it, creating what amounts to a separate bloodline. But it would only hold for one child before reverting back.”
Hudson folded his arms and leaned back. “Does that mean you aren’t a Roberts until you have a child?”
I met Liz’s steady gaze. “We can check.”
She nodded. “We can, but I have a theory that because you didn’t drain your father’s power, you were never a separate line.”
“What about you?” I wondered.
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Perhaps accepting the elemental power reconnected me.”
“Does anyone else need a diagram?” Sebastian grumbled.
“Can we use this?” Hudson asked.
“Yes,” I said with a smile. “First things first though, Principal. How do you feel about dancing under the light of the solstice moon?”
“I am struggling to make the connection, but I am sure it will be entertaining,” Dave said with a side glance at Hudson.
Liz patted his arm. “Luckily for you, you’ll be learning together.”
I smothered a laugh when Dave’s face slackened.
“I get a pass?” Sebastian said.
“Not a chance, vampire,” Hudson growled.
A thud sounded above our heads, followed by an honest to God growl. I pinched the bridge of my nose and prepared myself for the new TripAdvisor reviews. If the growling didn’t finish us off, the actions of a bunch of high elementals during solstice would. I should just rebrand now.
Cora Roberts—Mistress of the weird, the wonderful, and the wild naked folks.