Hexual Healing (One Hot, Hexy Mess #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

I slammed my car door with the kind of force that immediately announced to anyone nearby that it was not a good Tuesday, which was mighty damn impressive considering I was limping, swearing, and partially on fire.

“Drive, Gary!”

The snail did not, in fact, drive.

One eyestalk rose. Then the other. He blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. His version of, You brought this upon yourself, dumbass.

My fingers fumbled over the ignition rune etched into the dashboard. The faint blue swirl of magic flashed, but no activation spark came. I cursed for the millionth time and swatted at the hem of my skirt, which was quietly smoldering like an unattended campfire.

Behind us, the air shimmered, a visible distortion of heat and rage and the kind of draconic magic that made your teeth ache and your ancestors roll over in their graves and may have caused a bitch to pee a little.

Someone screamed my name like they wanted to wear it as a necklace made from my bones.

“Tansyyyyyyyyyyy!”

Gary blinked again.

“I swear on your overly bedazzled shell, if we die because your squishy little ass wants to make a point…”

He uncurled himself and finally sludged forward, antennae twitching. With a reluctant boop, he tapped the ignition rune.

The rune flared.

Nothing happened.

“Seriously?! You had one job, Gary!”

He turned to me slowly, somehow managing to look both insulted and resigned. He had the air of a creature who’d once been something terrible and ancient and powerful and was now…a mollusk.

“Okay, fine. Two jobs. But you picked the rune. I just drew it.”

The windshield cracked. Not from impact, but from sheer magical pressure. Hairline fractures danced across the glass like frost spreading in jagged spiderwebs from a central point behind my head.

Then I felt it.

A spell. But not just any spell. A hex.

It wasn’t the kind of hex that hits you like a slap or a stab. This one was surgical. Sharp, old, personal. It crept into my rib cage and settled behind my heart like it belonged there. Like it’d always been waiting.

You’ll never find love unless the one meant for you dies.

I froze.

The curse rang like a bell in my bones, like it was both spoken aloud and etched in silence at the same time. My pulse thudded behind my eyes. My breath caught in my throat.

And then I knew.

I knew who cast it.

“Illanya.”

The name scorched my tongue.

Gary stiffened. “She tracked the spell.”

“She probably recognized my signature,” I muttered. “Had to have felt it through him. I mean, we were together for years.”

Ten crazy years full of drama and emotional ups and downs. And I loved almost every second of it.

Illanya’s ex, my new client, said she was overwhelming. That she was too intense. That she didn’t get boundaries.

But he left out the part where she was a half-dragon. And whether he knew she was my ex or not would eternally be up for debate.

Gary didn’t reply. He just pressed his head against the glove compartment and aggressively retreated into it.

“You warned me not to take the job,” I whispered. “You said he was lying.”

He had been. I’d known it from the moment he used that tone. The one that men save for describing their exes when they want to sound wounded but not culpable. The one that always ends with “She’s just crazy, you know?”

I’d charged him triple, and he’d happily paid in cash, up front, without so much as blinking.

Rent doesn’t care if your moral compass is spinning.

A flicker of heat sliced across the back of my neck. I twisted toward the passenger-side mirror. Nothing.

Then the rearview reflected something else. I saw it for just a split second.

A flash of red wings. Gold-tipped claws.

A trail of green smoke curling through the cracked asphalt like a living thing.

My stomach flipped.

“Gary, she’s here. Now would be a really good time for a backup plan.”

Gary stayed silent, save for the soft squish of his body pressing into the glove compartment’s deepest shadows.

“I hate you,” I muttered, not so under my breath, and meant it with the kind of bittersweet affection reserved for old roommates who knew all the dark secrets of your browser history and didn’t judge you, but you still wanted to choke them out pretty much every day. Regardless of the inevitable fallout.

A hard knock against the passenger door jolted me sideways. The sound was like bone hitting bone. Magic flared hot across my skin, singeing the edge of my ward tattoos beneath my clothes.

Every instinct screamed: Run.

But the car was dead. The rune wasn’t enough.

Unless…

I reached beneath the driver’s seat, my hand closing over the last emergency sigil I had, etched on a leather square. A waft of burnt sugar and ozone tickled my nose and made me sneeze as it throbbed once in my palm. Angry, eager… Horny?

I would have pulled my hand away if it weren’t for the very loud thud above us.

“Brace.”

Gary vanished fully into the glovebox. One last eye stalk stared at me, unblinking, before he snapped the door shut behind him.

I slapped the rune.

The car didn’t explode. It ripped. Reality peeled sideways. Metal turned to vapor. Air screamed. Magic shrieked.

The world twisted inside out.

One second, I was in a broken-down 2010 Kia Soul with my vendetta-happy dragon ex-girlfriend breathing hell through the vents, and the next?

Everything stopped.

We were gone.

Silence. Blessed silence. Not the kind that you hear, but the kind that makes your ears ring from the pure absence of everything that made the world feel right.

I was weightless. Not floating. Not falling. Just…unstuck.

Untethered.

The pressure against my skin vanished. The cursed heat from Illanya’s breath evaporated. My lungs suddenly remembered how to breathe in one stuttering gasp.

I blinked.

Gray. Everything around me was a dusky charcoal color, like twilight smeared across wet parchment. Floating, muted golden motes of magic drifted through the space like fireflies too exhausted to glow.

I was in the InBetween.

The magical cul-de-sac between where you were and where you were going. It was usually skipped over in a blink when teleportation spells fired correctly. But I’d burned the rune half-finished. The sigil wasn’t completed with the standard grounding glyph.

I was well and truly stuck.

“Gary?” I whispered.

No answer. The glovebox was gone.

Duh!

No car. No Gary. No up or down. Just me and a half-formed curse nestled in my chest like a second heartbeat.

I felt like I was made of splinters and static. The curse hadn’t finished rooting itself yet. It was waiting. Lurking.

I drew a sigil in the air with two fingers, the rune trailing blue sparks behind them that faded out unnaturally fast.

Nothing.

Tried again.

Still nothing.

I was definitely tapped for now, at least. My magic hadn’t rebalanced yet after the last spell. I was barely holding it together with hope and caffeine. My nose itched from the leftover stench of sulfur clinging to me like a stinky cloud.

“You’ll never find love unless the one meant for you dies.”

I closed my eyes. For a second, I let the grief hit me. Not because of what it meant, but because of who cast it. Illanya didn’t make idle threats. She made promises she delivered in fire and blood and, apparently, custom curses whispered into the cosmic void.

She’d always been a little cray-cray, possessive, toxic, but this?

This wasn’t about the guy.

She hadn’t cursed me because of the hex I’d given him. There was no way it even would have worked on her. It was a standard, basic-bitch-level breakup spell. Dragons were resistant to magic like that. It never even stood a chance.

This was deeper. More personal.

A memory slipped in, the look on her face the last time I saw her. Her expression when I walked away. The way she didn’t scream. The way she didn’t beg. Just said, “This isn’t the end of us.”

Well, shit.

I floated in silence, breath shallow, heart pounding.

And then the world jerked back into motion.

* * *

The InBetween hadn’t just spit me out so much as it…sneezed.

One second, I was drifting in grayscale purgatory. The next? I was yanked by something primal and magnetic, as if a lasso made of familiar, frayed magic had decided I’d lingered too long. No sigil. No grounding glyph. Just a violent pull. Then a twist. Then…

Gravity.

I slammed back into the world with a full-body thud and a mouthful of dirt, covered in what I could only pray was my own snot.

Wheezing, magic sputtering, I rolled to my side and promptly vomited a whole lifetime’s worth of curse residue. The air reeked of truck stop incense and industrial grease. Concrete bit into my cheek. A blurry neon sign flickered and buzzed overhead.

I blinked up at the night sky. The stars didn’t answer. But the ground underneath me was blessedly solid.

Somehow, we’d landed at a gas station in goddess only knows where.

Gary was three feet away, curled inside a discarded slushy cup. His eye stalks slowly emerged like two very judgmental periscopes. He looked around. Then at me. Then at the sky.

Is he rolling his eyes?

“Don’t say it,” I croaked, dragging myself into a seated position and rubbing my temples, like that’d do anything for interdimensional whiplash.

Gary remained expressionless. But when I reached to pick him up, he made a sound. A wet, irritated squelch. Then extended one delicate antenna to point toward the convenience store like the diva he was.

“You want a snack,” I translated, already exhausted.

He held the pose.

I sighed and tried to stand. My knees buckled like a garage-sale lawn chair, but I was eventually successful in making it to the passenger seat of my freshly trashed, newly materialized car, also covered in goo, and fished four dollars in sweaty singles out of my bra.

“I have this. And a cursed punch card for a metaphysical laundromat that doesn’t exist anymore.”

No response.

“And a safety pin.”

Still nothing. Just one long, slow retreat into his shell.