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Cover Model: Ryan Lee Harmon
Model Image by: Reggie Deanching
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
About the Author
Chapter 1
It had been a long-ass day, in a long-ass week, and it wasn’t over yet. Morgan Jones sighed to himself, snapped the band from his wrist around his hair to hold it in a low ponytail, and looked at the house in front of him.
As houses went, it was nice. Unassuming. Very suburban three-point-four children and white picket fence. Golf and PTA. The problem was not the house, but the red glow in the windows.
An unearthly scream shattered the air, sounds of torment echoing from within the cream walls of suburban normal.
The homeowner moaned, her face pale with fear as she wrung her hands. “It’s getting louder.”
Morgan stopped his lip curling back as he flicked a glance over the stylish black clothes and the ‘gram-worthy silver pentagram around her neck.
A modern ‘witch’.
He used the term loosely. Very loosely. He doubted the woman had ever even been within pissing distance of serious magic. No, for her and her ilk, magic was prettily-illustrated ‘spells’ written in their bullet journals and crystals that matched their decorating aesthetic. They played with herbs to make spelled teas and picked tarot cards because they looked good.
Magic—real magic—didn’t work like that.
It was raw and powerful and primal. It wasn’t pretty, nor did it play nice if you wrote it down. The tarot deck of a real magic user didn’t look good, and often didn’t have cards that all matched, if they used cards at all. Some used runes, some used tea leaves and others, entrails. Crystals were powerful and contrary tools that often refused to comply with anything, much less a decorating scheme.
Herbs? He’d known battle-hardened mages avoid a witch’s herb garden, as did most of the local wildlife. Rumor had it a badger had wandered into his grandmother’s herb garden once. It had massacred three cow herds and caused a minor news incident before they’d gotten the situation locked down and out of sight of the humans.
And that was the number one law, upheld by all those of the paranormal persuasion.
Humans did not find out about them. End of story.
Which meant witch-wannabe here was in serious shit. She’d fucked up a spell and managed to summon a demon. Not in a midnight ritual somewhere out in the wilds of nature where it could have slipped under the radar. In her own damn house. In the middle of a human town, not even a para-controlled one like Beauty, the shifter town where Morgan had hung his hat since he’d left the army.
“Okay,” he growled. “Give me a rundown of exactly what you did. Don’t leave anything out. I need to know the spell you used, so I can figure out where you fucked it up.”
She blinked up at him, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t mess it up. I followed the spell exactly. To the letter. Someone has to have cursed me…”
He resisted the urge to facepalm. Curses weren’t as easy to pull off as everyone thought.
“…I can’t have gotten it wrong. I’m a good witch. A white witch,” she all but wailed.
“Lady,” he bit out on a growl, wondering why the hell he’d picked up this job anyway.
It wasn’t like he needed the money. He owned his own club, had more spare cash than he could shake a stick at, and it was all his—he was beholden to no one for what he had. He certainly didn’t need to pick up shitty little jobs like this that paid fuck all.
The problem was any other caster she’d have gotten for what she was offering… well, the demon would have eaten him or her for breakfast, and then Morgan would have had to deal with a demon in control of a warlock’s body. No, it was easier to just sort this crap here and now.
He sighed. “There’s no such thing as white magic or black magic. There’s just magic, and believe me, it will fuck you over given half a chance. It’s why you shouldn’t fuck with it unless you know what the fuck you’re doing.”
Normally he didn’t swear so much, especially in front of a woman, but people messing about with magic thinking it was harmless really got on his last nerve. In a stomped all over it in hobnail boots kind of way.
Magic was not harmless. Ever.
“No no no, my coven mistress says there’s good and bad magic,” she replied stubbornly.
“Yeah, right…” he drawled. “And your coven mistress knows fuck all.”
Witch-wannabe stiffened and looked him up and down. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? You don’t look… very… magicky?”
He chuckled. “Lady, you called for an oathbreaker, which means you get what you’re given. Unless you wanna ‘fess up to the authorities? And I ain’t talking about the police.”
Summoning a demon and potentially exposing the paranormal community to human scrutiny was a serious offense. If she was caught by the Guard and brought before the local Elders Council, she’d be in big trouble. She paled even further, and he seriously thought she was about to do a face-plant on the asphalt. Before he could put a hand out to stop her busting up her pretty face, she shook her head quickly. “No, no need for that. Are you sure you can deal with it?”
“The spell you used?” he prompted. “Can’t do jack shit without that.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I have it here,” she said, pulling out her phone and flicking through her social media.
“Of course you do,” he sighed. Not only had she written a spell down, but she’d taken a photo of it. Great.
She held it out to him. “Look, I did exactly as it said, down to the letter.”
Morgan scanned the image and closed his eyes for a second. It was in runic, a language older than dirt and notoriously wily. No magic user with any sense in their heads wrote a spell in runic. The damn stuff would always find a way to twist the outcome.
“Yeah. No, you didn’t,” he told her, easily reading it and making sense of the form of the spell. “This one here? You needed Daet… it’s almost the same, but you missed the crossbar. That’s Taez… and it’s a fucker. It’ll twist any spell you put it in. It’s one of Loki’s own symbols.”
She blinked. “The little squiggle thingie? It didn’t work with the birds. I-I didn’t think it would matter if I left it out.”
Oh, Mercy give him strength. She’d altered a runic symbol because it didn’t fit with her drawing. He growled and took the phone off her. Quickly, he deleted the post and rooted around in her hundreds of selfies to find the original.
“Leaving it out is what got you a fucking demon in your kitchen. You need to find this…” He showed her the image. “And burn it. Now… please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me you used a normal pentagram to do your spell? You didn’t alter it in any way, shape or form?”
She looked offended for a moment, then another wail from inside the house made her pale even further. “No,” she admitted in a small voice. “It was just a normal pentagram. I put flowers inside though, for…”
Her voice trailed off as he shot her a look. If she was going to say for social media, he might actually turn her into a frog. Or a toad. Or a horny-tailed lizard. Something fugly, and he’d make her stay like that for at least a month.
“Okay,” he muttered, pulling his talisman pouch from beneath his shirt and closing a big fist around it. “I can deal with this. You just stay back. Do not enter the building no matter what you hear, understand?”
She nodded, her eyes wide with fear. “W-what are you going to do?”
He grinned nastily, a white flash of teeth in his tanned face. “Show that demonic asshole exactly what a warlock can do.”
It had been a long-ass day, in a long-ass week, and she really needed a drink.
“Rack ‘em up, Ash,” Lilly ordered as she walked into the Beast, the lone bar in the town of Beauty, and headed straight for the bar.
“One of them days, huh, Braun?” Ash grinned at her as he reached for some glasses, lining them up on the bar before starting to fill them with ice and rum.
Normally, when she was out with the girls, they drank cocktails… or the Beasts’ version of it anyway. Mostly Ash just mixed different drinks, put an umbrella in the glass, and gave it a dirty name.
But not today. One look at her face, and he didn’t need to ask what she wanted. This was a hard rum sort of day.
“You could say that,” she groused, with far more of her bear in it than normal. Given that Ash was also a shifter, albeit a werepanther rather than a bear, she didn’t bother to conceal what she was. “Bennett’s getting clingy.”
She sighed as she downed the first rum and closed her eyes to savor the burn all the way down to her stomach.
“Oh?” Ash’s eyebrow winged up as he cleaned and dried glasses before putting them back in the rack. “He’s had a thing about you for years, so that doesn’t surprise me.”
“What? Bennett?” She blinked in surprise and reached for another glass. Hopefully after another five or so, she’d start to feel a pleasant buzz. If her bitch of a bear didn’t decide to dump all the alcohol out of her system in one go. It had done that once, in the middle of a girls’ night. Right out of her pores. Looked like she’d had a shower. Fully clothed. Not fun.
“Who else are we talking about?” Ash smiled as he leaned against the bar. “Unless you’d like to talk about Morgan instead?”
The heat flared over Lilly’s cheeks before she could stop it. Rather than fluster though and give Ash the reaction he wanted, she dead-eyed him. “Magic boy? Why would we talk about him?”
Her tone was disinterested, and she had the second rum. She wasn’t interested in the tall, handsome, muscled warlock at all. Uh-uh. No sirree.
“Huh, just thought you might be interested. That’s all…“ Ash smiled broadly. “Does that mean you might be interested in a little… kitty action?”
She grinned, back in familiar territory. Ash had hit on her the moment he’d first met her and hadn’t stopped since. It was the sort of friendly, never-gonna-happen type of flirting that she was comfortable with.
“Yeah, yeah… I know how that’ll end. Me, chained to the fridge, bringing you milk all the time as you demand tummy rubs.”
“Dammit,” the big werepanther chuckled. “And there I thought I’d be every woman’s perfect pet.”
“That’s a dog, handsome,” she threw back at him.
“Woof woof.” The cat winked.
The main door to the bar opened, and automatically she checked in the mirror behind the bar to see who had come in. Her hackles went up. They were all bears, but that wasn’t why she was on high alert. As enforcer for the Beauty clan, bears she could handle, even if they got a little rowdy as bears were sometimes wont to do.
No, the problem was Bennett.
For the last week, he’d been tailing her on the job as clan enforcer, on the orders of their prime, to see if Bennett would be a good fit for the team. Young, fit, and with a powerful bear, he’d make an excellent enforcer. She had no problems with him in that way.
No, Lilly’s issue with him was personal. Or rather, the fact he had steadily been getting way too personal with her. It had started with joining her for lunch. Which was fine at first, they were working together after all, but then the other day she’d needed to drop something off at the post office and he’d demanded to know where she was going, why, and who she was meeting. Not normal co-worker level of interest. No. It had verged on possessive. And since they weren’t mated, nor had she given any hints she wanted them to be, that was a problem.
“Uh-oh,” Ash murmured. “Watch your six, beautiful.”
Sure enough, Bennett stormed across the bar to stand behind her, bristling with anger. She ignored him for a moment, downing another rum.
“Where have you been?” He demanded, his voice deep with his bear. “You didn’t go home after we finished up at the Black place.”
“None of your business, Bennett.”
She met his eyes in the mirror. It was easy to tell Ash was a veteran. There were mirrors in strategic places around the bar, ensuring there were no blind spots. She wouldn’t expect anything else from a guy who’d served with her boss.
“Once we clock off, my time is my own.”
His eyes were dark with his bear and he curled his lip back. “Who were you with, Lilly? You were with someone. Who was it?”
She turned in her seat but didn’t get up. Not just yet. She didn’t need to. If Bennett was stupid enough to try anything with her, she could have claws in his throat in a heartbeat.
“I said it once, and I’ll say it again, none of your business. Your trial for the enforcer team is over, and I’ll be meeting with Dean to give him my recommendation tomorrow.”