Chapter 26
“I’m not enchanted anymore; I’m fine,” Nix yelped and pulled at the bars that burned her flesh.
“Stop touching them,” Thierry warned her, grabbing her wrists and pulling her fingers from the bars.
“I don’t understand,” Nix cried. In her cage. In front of her future captor and torturer. The scientist. Her malicious, sadistic keeper.
It couldn’t be him.
But it was. The same combed-over salt-and-pepper hair. The same beady black eyes that dissected you before he brought out the scalpel.
“I had another year left,” Nix wailed as she fell to her knees. Thierry still gripped her wrists as she kneeled, but he let go as sobs shook her. Breaths caught in her throat, choking her. “I—It was going to be different this time.”
“Flóga?” Persius asked in alarm, calling her by what he had always called her during their years of torment. My flóga. He had told her that she smelled like pure sunshine over a field of tulips.
“This is wrong.” She slammed a fist into the cement, and it cracked under the force. “Wrong. Wrong. WRONG.”
“What the hell is happening?” Thierry exclaimed, confused by her crazed reaction. “Professor Lemmuns?”
Was that his real name? Lemmuns. It was not sick and twisted enough to fit him.
“This is common, actually,” her future captor, Lemmuns, said calmly and in an almost amused voice. Gods, his voice made her sick. “Those who are bespelled often become combatant and hysterical at the idea of being cured. But don’t you worry, I should have all I need here to fix her…oh.”
“Oh, what?” Thierry asked, muscles tense and knotted under his tweed suit while listening to his mate’s wails.
“I am missing one ingredient.” Lemmuns turned to the men. “Maybe you boys could fetch some pondweed from the forest for me?”
Thierry glared at being called a “boy.”
Lemmuns continued, smoothing a hand over his white lab coat, “I’m not as spry as I used to be. I will be of more help here, preparing what I can of the potion until you bring me the final ingredient.”
Thierry nodded at Persius. “There should be plenty of pondweed by the small pool of water in the east forest—”
“Oh,” Lemmuns tutted.
Thierry’s head shot back over to Nix’s future torturer. “What?”
“I am missing agrimonia as well. Silly, silly me. It has been a while since I concocted a reversal or protection potion.”
Thierry frowned and glanced at Nix, who sat, now catatonic, in the cage. “Agrimonia would grow on the edge of the forest, in the west. Complete opposite direction.”
“I suggest you both split up, so you can return the ingredients to me as quickly as possible.”
NO. Nix cried, “DO NOT leave me here with him.”
“How silly. She will be safe with me; you needn’t worry.”
Thierry knelt by the cage, reaching through the bars to wipe tears from her face. “We will only be gone a little while. Trust me when I say we will be racing back to you.”
“You don’t understand. He’s going to kill me.” She pulled her legs to her stomach, placing her chin on a knee as she tangled her fingers in her hair. Fetal position. “He’s going to kill me.”
“No,” Thierry told her. “He’s here to help you. He’s just going to kill the enchantment. It will all be better once you take the potion.”
“Was supposed to have more time…with you all,” Nix said, sniffling as she accepted her fate.
Maybe she got a few days of happiness, and that was it. Maybe she was supposed to be grateful for the extra moments of joy she had in this second life.
I want more moments.
“I deserve more time,” she snapped, angry at fate. Angry at her mates for not listening to her. “Please, go separately. One of you stay with me. I will be good. Do not leave me alone with him.”
“Nix, we need to get you back to normal as soon as possible. What happens when you have a spike of energy again and explode half the campus?”
Only half? She would aim higher than that.
Staring at her knees, not willing to make eye contact, she said, “If you leave me here, in this cage with him, I will never forgive you.”
“Nix…” Thierry sipped in a sharp breath. “We are trying to help you.”
“Helping a woman without listening to her isn’t helping. Making choices that affect her without her opinion isn’t helping. Leave me here alone, when I specifically ask you not to, and I will never forgive you.”
“Yes, you will. Because you will realize I did it all for you, not to you.” Reaching between the bars, Thierry stroked his thumb over her calf from where she bunched her legs in front of her.
He added, “When given the choice between keeping you happy or keeping you safe, I will always choose safe. Alive. Because I, more than anyone, know not living is worse.”
Because his kind turned into immovable statues if they did not find their mates. Did he think becoming immovable, unbreakable stone was the worst fate one could endure? Nix begged to differ.
Thierry turned on the heel of his expensive leather shoes and waved for Persius to follow him out.
Persius promised her, “We will be back soon, my flóga.”
Cradling herself, Nix shook her head and snorted humorlessly. “Fate gave me mates in this life just to prove to me that having them would make no difference.”
Thierry stiffened but continued walking to the door, his back to her.
“I want you to remember, as you leave me behind, that without me, you will turn to stone,” she told him. “And without you, I will be indifferent.”
“Venomous words and lashing out are all normal under enchantment,” her captor assured them. “Please do find the ingredients and come back quickly.”
When the door closed behind them, Nix lifted her head and met the gaze of her torturer. “So… What are you going to do to me first?”
“Imean, Thierry and Pers can protect her without us, right?” Bael asked Ryker, thinking aloud as the two of them leaned back against the wall of the grand academy ballroom.
Arms crossed, they glared at the students enjoying the dance.
“She won’t hate us for leaving her to look out for other students? ”
Ryker grunted grimly and scanned the room for suspicious activity.
“I have this bad, inexplicable feeling that Stoney is fucking something up for us.”
A random female student bounced up to where they stood. She swished the green skirt of her dress and said demurely, “Um, hi, uh, I was wondering if you’d like to dance—”
“My mate would literally burn your eyebrows off,” Bael shot back and dug into his pocket for a new lollipop. “Run away.”
As the girl hustled away from them, back to the dancing crowd, something in the back of the dimly lit room caught Bael’s attention.
The incubus pushed off the wall, uncrossed his arms, and asked, “Is that…Professor Bowen? Spiking the punch?”
Within seconds, the two men surrounded the potions professor.
“You are needed to help Nix,” Ryker told him gruffly, grabbing his elbow to drag him away to where they had Nix in a cell at the edge of campus.
“Whoa, wait,” Bael said. “What the hell were you pouring into the punch bowl?” Bael knew a gross predator when he saw one, and Bowen was too straightlaced to do something like—
“It’s a protection potion.” Sounds about right. Bowen glanced around the room and whispered to them, “Dean Felling fired me yesterday after I went to his office to discuss the abhorrent amount of enchantments students have been experiencing lately. Nix called my attention to it, and she was right.”
“Yeah, well, she is enchanted right now and needs that protection potion. Also, the dean is in Hell now, so he can’t fire you. Loophole.” Bael eyed the punch bowl. “You got any more?”
“I made enough batches that I poured it directly into the wells and water systems of the academy.”
Bael grinned. “Damn, Teach, impressive.”
“In the next twelve hours, I think it is safe to assume that anyone in the academy currently bespelled will be cured and have their thoughts back in their own control by tomorrow morning—” Professor Bowen was interrupted by a spiteful blonde sprout of a woman.
Elle Oadess marched up to Bael and Ryker and glared at them. Lifting her pointer finger accusingly, she demanded, “Where are my brother and Nix?”
Bael deadpanned, “Who are you again?”
“I am Elle Oadess,” she huffed indignantly. “Where are they? Tell me now.”
“Do you have any idea who you are talking to, sweetheart?” Bael asked coolly.
“I could say the same to you,” she sneered.
“I think I am talking to the person or relative who enchanted Nix to like the asshole Oadess douchebag I sent to Hell earlier today.”
Elle gaped. “Hell?”
“The one and only.”
“I swear, if you—”
“Annoying.” Bael grabbed her shoulders and disappeared with her into the ether. When he popped back, he clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and said, “Welp, looks like she belonged in Hell, too.”
It was rare for Bael to transport someone who popped right back to Earth because they did not belong there. Surprisingly, the twisted incubus was a good judge of character.
“Did you…really just send her to Hell?” Bowen asked uneasily.
“Let’s get you to fix our Nix, shall we?”