Chapter 20
SLUBBING
gus to the rescue!
— gus
For one stunned second, all I can do is stare at her.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” I accuse.
“I was. Temporarily.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Olivia looks at me like she thinks I’m brainless. “You spend all your time either in the trash or around opossums, and you don’t know? It was actually the male who gave me the idea.”
The male? Oh, you’ve gotta be shitting me. “You played dead?”
“Something like that. Witches can’t go catatonic on cue… that’s such a ridiculous defense mechanism against a true threat… but with the right potion, even the biggest, baddest wolf in town could be fooled into thinking that an outsider killed a coven witch.”
Biggest, baddest wolf… Riordan. And outsider? That has to be Penelope.
“It was a remarkably effective plan,” Olivia adds.
“Once the idiot, Lobo, confirmed I was dead, my coven sisters reclaimed my body for funereal rites. They gave me the antidote, slipped me out of the coven house, and here I am. Now, if I can only find Morrigaine’s mirror, I’ll be welcomed back by the head of the coven, a hero to our kind. ”
It’s good to know that the entire coven isn’t involved in Olivia’s insanity.
From what I can tell, it’s only a few witches who know about her desperate plan to steal my compact, though she seems to think that, if she manages to pull it off, they’ll all forgive her for the little matter of faking her own death and framing another witch.
Outsider, I remember. Some covens are as secluded and anti-outsider as certain packs. If you’re not one of them, then you don’t matter.
That pisses me off. I live on the fringe of the pack, and most wolves irritate me on my good days, but I would never turn against them. We’re shifters. Supes. We should stick together when it counts… “So you’re just going to let everyone think Penelope murdered you for now?”
Something flickers across Olivia’s face, but it’s gone too quickly for me to name it. Instead, she shakes her head royally, knocking her thick braid down her back. “It’s her own fault. She complicated things.”
No, I think. You complicated things.
“All she had to do was figure out where you hid Morrigaine’s mirror.
But could she do that? I went through all the trouble to bring Morrigaine’s last descendent to Moonburrow after I felt the power in this cluttered mess, and she’s talking about duty and patience and earning the mirror.
I did earn it! I came to look at the opossum. I told you he was cursed—”
I don’t know what bothers me more: the way she referred to my organized chaos as ‘cluttered mess’, or how she continues to pretend that she did some great thing, diagnosing Ash as cursed when that wasn’t the case.
It all makes sense now. I’ll give her a speck of credit.
She could tell that there was some hoity toity, priceless witch artifact in my collection.
She knew it had to be Morrigaine’s mirror for some reason, and she used Ash’s ghostly state to advance her own plan.
Instead of correctly pointing out that he was dealing with silver poisoning, she lied and claimed it was a curse.
Ash had to wait more than a week for Penelope to arrive and actually fix him.
And, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m pretty fucking pissed at Faith, the wolf shifter healer. She’s a fucking shifter healer. If anyone should’ve been able to sense it was a silver needle in his foot that was keeping his soul out of his body after he played dead, it was Faith.
But that just goes to prove that there’s still prejudice between predators and prey, even in a town like Moonburrow. She probably thought she was wasting her time with a ‘dead’ opossum—a ‘dead’ prey shifter—and washed her hands of his case, handing it over to the witches instead.
Cursed? He was never cursed.
“He wasn’t cursed,” I snap at her. “And you know that.”
Olivia has the audacity to shrug. Then, to add insult to injury, she turns away from me as though a silly raccoon is no threat to a witch.
As I watch, a little shocked at her nerve, she starts gliding through the aisles…
no, prowling… as she grabs random pieces of silver and anything shiny, checking if it’s the compact that’s still in my jeans pocket.
“It’s gotta be here. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t feel it when I let myself in, but it’s clear as day. The mirror is calling to me… where are you? Come to Olivia.”
No way in hell. “Do you even know what you’re looking for?”
Am I buying time? Nope. I want to finish this before anyone sees the broken glass and calls it in—or the clan figures out where I’ve gone. So as she prowls, I flex my fingers, hooking them so my nails are on display, waiting for her to get distracted enough to come closer.
Here, witchy, witchy. Come to Roxy. No, don’t ready a spell. Really, I’m harmless.
So harmless.
“Penelope recognized it immediately,” Olivia murmurs, distracted enough by her search to answer my question instead of telling me to shut it. “After she took care of that opossum. She told me this morning that it resembled a mirror compact, and since I do know now what I’m was searching for…”
“You broke into my shop. Again.”
Her mouth tightens slightly. “The first time doesn’t count.
The lockpicks I bought from Joey the rat didn’t work.
I couldn’t get inside, and none of the spells I tried worked.
” Her nose scrunches. “In the end, I had to go with brute force. Nasty business.” She glances at her hand.
“I think I got a shard of glass in my palm.”
Boo hoo. “That’s not all you did. You shot at me!”
I wait for her to deny it. Instead, she juts her pointed chin over at me.
“I thought, if I scared you off, you’d be like all the other prey shifters.
You’d turn tail and run, and with no one to stop me from taking what’s mine, I’d have all the time I needed to find the mirror… with or without an outsider’s help.”
I call bullshit. Maybe that’s how she can explain it in retrospect, but when I look at Olivia… when I peer into her dark eyes… I see a fucking predator staring at me.
Good thing I’ve never been smart enough to be afraid of one of those.
“I may be a prey shifter, but I don’t scare easy,” I say off-handedly before I go in for the metaphorical kill.
“And you would’ve hit me if my mate hadn’t shoved me out of the way, taking the bullet himself.
The silver bullet, I might add. And no supe fires a silver bullet unless they’re trying to kill whoever they’re shooting at. ”
Olivia stills briefly at that, followed by an annoyed sigh. “I knew I sensed a soul hovering. I should’ve dipped it in wormwood. Now that I know he wasn’t a ghost, but a soul, that would’ve done the job.”
Oh, you monster.
I let out a high-pitched laugh that isn’t amusement. Nope. It’s my raccoon about to go feral on her ass. “Welp. Now you did it. You just crossed a line.”
Olivia scoffs. “Because of your junk?”
“No.” I bare my teeth slightly, showing off my raccoons fangs. “Because you shot my mate.”
As she watches me with barely contained amusement, I slowly lift one hand and admire my nails. Unlike predator shifters, I can’t tap into my raccoon and grow fangs on a whim. Instead, I have to keep them when I’m in my skin, and I’m proud of these beauties.
“You see this?” I show her one of my long, perfectly shaped, sharp nails. “You know what I can do with this?”
“Scratch my back?”
Be flippant all you want, witch. “Give you rabies.” I give her my craziest smirk. “Can your magic save you from that?”
Because I can sense it growing. I need to make my move quickly because Olivia’s finally realized that I’m not just going to let her go through my shit and find the compact.
To take it, she’ll need to go through me, and now that she’s basically admitted to wanting to murder me… murder Ash… I’m okay with that.
Buy some time of her own, she looks down her nose at me. “You’re only a raccoon shifter.”
“Exactly. That means I can give you super rabies.”
Am I full of it? Of course I am. But Olivia doesn’t know that, and when I launch myself at her and slash my nails down her face, the air suddenly full of the rusty stink of blood, she howls as though she believes it.
Unfortunately, she’s still aware enough to let loose a spell. And, just because she’s a healer, it doesn’t mean her magic doesn’t hurt. It does.
It does more than that, too. The magic slams into me hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs while heat ripples violently across my skin.
I scream in agony as fur bursts across my body.
Shit. When I shift, it feels like a rubber band snapping against my skin for a split second as I change forms. But as Olivia uses witch magic…
wrong magic… to force me to shift, there’s a few moments where I’m begging ripped apart before I finally collapse to the floor as my raccoon.
My t-shirt is destroyed. So are my jeans. And the compact lands with a metallic sound as it hits the floor.
I can’t let her have it. That’s all I’m thinking. She wants the compact, and I won’t let her have it.
I’m a raccoon now. I have fangs and claws and fingers that I sure as fuck know how to use.
Before she can dive for the compact, I launch myself at her thighs, digging my claws into her pants.
She tries to shove me off, but I’m not going anywhere.
I climb her body like it’s a damn tree and launch myself straight at her head, clawing and biting and tangling myself in her hair while she shrieks loud enough to shake the windows.
She stumbles, hits the corner of one of the displays, and falls on her back, taking an entire shelf—and me—with her.
I don’t know what exactly happens after that. I was a little distracted, whooping witch ass, but suddenly I get the very welcome scent of eau de opossum filtering past the blood and stink of magic in my nose.