Chapter 6
Six
Avery
He bit her fucking finger.
She screamed. He didn’t let go, only sinking his teeth deeper. She wasn’t in the business of animal abuse; in fact, she found it deplorable. However, she had never wanted to fling a cat across the room more than she wanted to now.
When he finally released her, his sandpaper tongue swept across his bloodied canines as if he’d just finished a delicious snack. And that snack was fucking her.
She jerked her hand away, breath coming ragged.
Pain blazed up her arm, a searing agony that made her vision blur.
She pressed her lips together to keep from crying out again.
How deep did he send his fangs? I wish I could heal myself right now.
She knew how to, in theory, but in practice, pulling magic from your familiar was something else entirely.
“Why?” she asked through gritted teeth. She couldn’t mask the hurt in her voice. A familiar wasn’t supposed to harm their witches. A simmering wrath boiled in her stomach, but it didn’t feel like her own.
“I don’t like to be touched.” His tone was infuriatingly calm.
“You could have said something!” She winced as another shooting pain ran up her arm.
He cocked his head, ears pricked in a way that looked innocent. Bastard.
“I taught you a lesson that needed to be learned, little witch.”
Wait. Wait. Was the familiar talking? Familiars didn’t talk. Was the pain making her hallucinate?
“How are you talking?” Her voice wobbled, half from the pain, half from the shock of hearing his voice in her head once more. Something like amusement glinted in her familiar’s eyes.
He tilted his head. “Meow?”
Did she imagine it? Was her familiar gaslighting her? She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Don’t play with me, Lucky. I know you can talk.”
“It’s Felix.”
“I knew it! You can talk.” Lying, asshole, bastard, cuntnugget—if she wasn’t in pain, she could have come up with a more creative insult. Her mother always told her it was deplorable—that’s why she did it so much. Instead, she settled on, “How are you talking?”
“The same way you are listening.”
“That does—that doesn’t even make sense.” She gestured with her bleeding hand for emphasis and immediately regretted it as fresh pain shot up her arm.
“You’re the one who summoned me, witch. You should know how the hell I’m speaking into your mind.”
“But...familiars don’t talk.”
Something like a pained strangle came out of him. “Well…this one does.”
Guilt turned her stomach. It must have been the forbidden part of the ritual.
Maybe he was more powerful than just a house cat?
In everything they had learned about familiars, the tutors never said that a familiar talking was possible.
She narrowed her eyes even more to shitty slits, assessing him with the same suspicion as he did her.
She supposed, in the witch world, nothing was impossible.
What reason would one of the goddess’s servants have to lie to her?
And, even if Lucky was an asshole that didn’t like to be touched, Cerituen blessed her with a familiar for a reason.
She was really trying to convince herself here. It wasn’t working.
Blood dripped onto the floorboards, dark drops that pooled between the cracks. She pressed her other hand over the wound, but it did nothing to stop the flow. The pain had evolved from agony to a deep, pulsing throb that matched her heartbeat.
“You’re bleeding on the floor.”
She whipped her head toward the cat. “You bit me!”
“And you ignored my warning.” He stretched out by the fire, completely unbothered. “I told you I don’t like to be touched.”
“After you bit me!”
“Semantics.”
Semantics. Fucking semantics. She wanted to scream. Or cry. Maybe she’d do both. Instead, she stumbled to the bathroom, leaving a trail of red behind her. Her reflection in the mirror looked pale. The bite marks were deep, two perfect punctures on either side of her index finger.
Running it under cold water made her hiss.
The stream turned pink, then red, swirling down the drain.
She counted to thirty, then forty, willing it to stop.
When she pulled her hand back, fresh blood immediately beaded at the surface.
This was it. She was going to get sepsis and die.
That was what Google always told her it would be.
Who knows where that cat’s mouth had been in the godly realm, if it had been anywhere as filthy as his personality, she was so fucked.
“Why isn’t it stopping?” she hissed under her breath, low enough that he couldn’t hear.
She rummaged through the cabinet with her good hand. Bandages. She needed bandages. Her fingers knocked over bottles of tinctures and healing salves until she found the small tin she kept for emergencies. Never thought the emergency would be her own familiar.
The gauze was harder to manage with one hand. She tried to wrap it around her finger, but it kept slipping, the white fabric immediately soaking through with red. Her hand shook. Whether from pain or shock, or anger, she couldn’t tell.
“Because you’re doing it wrong.”
She froze. The cat sat in the doorway, watching her while his tail flicked against the rug.
“Please enlighten me.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
“Do they not teach you basic first aid? You need to apply pressure first.”
“I know that.” She pressed the gauze against the wound, her jaw tight.
“Clearly not well enough.”
How did a cat know so much about patching up wounds?
Heat crept up her neck. Here she was, bleeding because of him, and he had the audacity to criticize her. She wanted to throw something at his smug cat face.
Minutes passed in silence while she held the gauze to her finger.
When she pulled it away, the bleeding had finally slowed to a sluggish trickle.
She managed to wrap the bandage around her finger this time, though it looked sloppy.
The white fabric already had spots of red seeping through, but at least it was something.
“There.” Her middle finger had been the one that had been affected, and she flipped him off to show him. “Happy?”
“You should clean the blood off the floor before it stains.”
Her fist clenched at her side. The good one. “You are the worst familiar in the history of familiars.”
The dorm was silent. The cat curled up next to the fireplace, its matted fur illuminated by the flickering orange light.
Guilt coiled in her gut. Lucky was still an asshole, but she had a duty of care to this familiar.
He must be so uncomfortable in his own skin.
Maybe that was why he was being so rude.
She had spent the night researching familiars on her laptop, including asking, Why is my familiar an asshole, and found nothing to explain any of it.
Nowhere did anyone say anything about them being able to talk to you.
It was unheard of. She had tried to ask him about it, but he was extremely reluctant to give out any information.
It was like trying to talk to a furry brick wall.
But researching was an excuse. She needed to present him as her familiar tomorrow.
To the class, to her mother, who was probably sending the enforcers soon to escort her out of the university to some shitty apartment in town.
A familiar was supposed to be the highlight of a witch’s life, the moment where all their hard work paid off, but when she thought about it, it was like a giant weight had been placed on her chest, refusing to let up.
Staying light on her feet, she tiptoed over to the fireplace and kneeled next to the cat.
She went to pat him, but before she made contact, she stopped, remembering he hated to be touched.
She wondered if a familiar had ever hated its witch so much.
A sadness throbbed through her, and she felt tears threatening to fall.
It seemed every road to being a witch would be a hard one.
It seemed most witches climbed a hill, where she was climbing an Everest—which, in her opinion, was a really dumb thing to do.
He slept soundly, more soundly than any familiar should when he just bit his witch.
Did he feel no guilt? She was this close to a mental breakdown.
The cat was still filthy. She had given him a day to clean himself cat-style, but he seemed to have no interest. He needed to be clean before she presented him tomorrow.
A bath it was, even though she knew she would receive many more bites and scratches, and some verbal abuse, too.
Fantastic. A small part of her reveled in getting back at him, though.
He’d bitten her. Now he’d get dunked. Revenge would be wet and soapy.
Before he could react, she lunged forward, scooping him into her arms, ignoring his startled yowls and claws digging against her bare skin.
“Witch!” he yelled into her mind. “Put me down, or you will regret it.”
She held Lucky—she refused to call him Felix—tight against her chest as he fought desperately against her grip, thrashing, twisting, and clawing his way to freedom, but she only held him tighter.
“I swear to God, let me go, or I will murder you.”
She ignored him and kicked the bathroom door shut behind her and locked it, all the while trying to contain the monstrosity of a cat in her arms. After many scratches, she let him go, and he bolted to the corner of the bathroom.
Its bright eyes stared up at her, and for the first time, she noticed they were different colors, one brown, the other green. She left it in the corner to sulk.
The taps groaned as she turned the handle, and the steam rose from the water as it started to fill the bathtub. For good measure, she poured a small amount of chamomile into the bath. Not that she was sure the cat would appreciate any of this, but it didn’t hurt to try.