Battle of the Hexes: A Paranormal Academy Series (A Witch Among Warlocks Book 4)

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “Lips tight,” he said. “Make me come as fast as you can.”

  “Mm!” I made a sound of protest and a little fear, although I stopped short of biting his dick off, because I knew that under this was my Alec in pain.

  He seemed to remember that like, women tend to be more willing when you make them happy, not that he had to do anything to make me happy. Just looking at him was good enough for me. Still, I wasn’t going to complain when he yanked off my underwear and thrust his tail inside me while groping his big hand across my clit roughly. At the same time, he groaned with agony while I was stroking my tongue around the head of his cock.

  Oh my god, there was no way they weren’t going to hear him. I tried to do everything in my power to get him off fast. He was slowly thrusting in and out of my mouth, helping me along, gritting his teeth. I think the pain was extending his orgasm, and at the same time, I think it was hard for him not to hurt me.

  But he didn’t.

  It sounds funny, but there was something super romantic about the fact that Alec didn’t hurt me. I could feel the agony in him, the restraint it took not to just choke me on his size or ignore the birth control thing. Incubi were not wired to care about their partners. They existed to seduce and use their magic to suck up power from the sex act. Alec, however, cared about me so much that every fiber in his being was fighting against his nature even now, and I loved making him happy.

  Not that I could make him happy in this situation. Not having sex made him crazy, but sex itself was making his light brown skin turn ruddy, his eyes bloodshot, his entire body sweating, his teeth grinding as he tried not to outright scream.

  As he started coming, he made a sound that was almost a sob.

  “Fuck…oh…fuck it hurts…”

  As soon as he pulled out of my mouth, he flopped beside me, writhing around a little. His tail was still inside me, twitching with his pain. I swallowed, rubbing my aching jaw and lips briefly.

  He pulled me against him, caressing my hair, but avoiding my eyes as his suffering seemed private. His hand slid down my back and bottom to reach between my legs, where he took hold of the tip of his own tail and stroked me with it fast, like it was a toy and not his own tail, but it was still twitching too. I don’t know why, but it was kinda hot the way he was gripping it.

  Pretty soon his hand and tail sent me over the edge. I mean, sure, I guess I understood why you had to be careful around an incubus, to know that they really loved you and not just having sex. But once you trusted that the love was real? Holy shit, the sex was never less than mind-blowing. And he was always so gorgeous.

  Even right now, when he looked like he was in so much pain.

  “My poor demon muffin,” I said. “I’m going to get you out of here, and the spell will fade. I promise.”

  “God, I must look like a mess.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “But it’s okay, Char. You don’t have to fix everything. It’s still worth it.”

  “Well, if you need to like, rip off my clothes and demand things again…” I licked my lips. “You know. I’ll survive.”

  He snorted through a little shivering aftershock of pain. “Damn, I love you,” he said. “Naughty girl.” He pulled me to him.

  “At least this doesn’t hurt, right?” I asked.

  “Kissing? Nah. I could do this all day.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Charlotte

  By the end of the week I had one recruit. She was a were-gator from Jacksonville, Florida, and actually Montague recruited her by getting into a conversation about Florida and then selling her on the idea of a faery husband. Did you know that ‘were-gator’ was a thing? I did not know that was a thing.

  I was very unsure about Polly the were-gator’s prospects in faery land. For one thing, she really was not an attractive witch. She kinda looked like if a gator became a person, with a strong brow and just sort of a weird face, and she was also big boned and heavyset. I felt like the faeries were going to be mean. Just a hunch. I don’t think faeries were going to embrace all types of beauty. On the other hand, she was very bookish and polite, like she had been trained to try and hide her gator-ness, and maybe the queen would like that?

  After I told her, she sat down at our table at breakfast. “Good morning.” She smiled. “So when is this happening, anyway? When do I get to meet the faeries? I’m sorry—did I interrupt a conversation?”

  “Girl, it is just too early for like…this question mark energy,” Daisy said, sipping coffee. “Anyway, I am trying to process what happened on the Bachelorette last night.”

  “Ohhh,” Polly said. “I understand. Because there won’t be any television or movies in the faery realm. Best to get it in now. Maybe I would like to see Pride and Prejudice one more time.” She smiled at Daisy like, I, too, enjoy the television.

  Daisy’s eyes locked into a gaze of horror. “Maybe I can’t do this.”

  “You know faeries don’t have electricity,” Montague said.

  “Yes, I know, but I had not actually thought about it.”

  I felt like I definitely needed to do better with the other eleven. If I showed up with Daisy and a were-gator, I was not going to get us into Wyrd in this lifetime.

  “This place is so boring,” Daisy said, looking around. “I thought there would be more drama.”

  “Don’t wish that on us,” Montague said. “It’s a good day if there is no drama here. When I was here before…I had a roommate.”

  I perked up from my own coffee. “Something happened?”

  “How do you think they pay for all this?” he said. “It seems fairly nice here, right? The food, the amenities? Just keeping the lights on? There are two ways you get to be here. If you’re lucky, you or your family pays, but if not, I wonder how they justify all this. Well, when they dragged Benjamin away, they said something about how his family wasn’t paying anymore and he—” Monty swallowed. “You know anything about this, Harris? With your family being on the council? He grabbed my arm and said, they’re going to treat me like a lab rat. He was really scared, and I never saw him again. I tried to ask about it and they said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re only here for temporary observation, and your family has the means.’ Benjamin was just a normal guy. He didn’t even know much magic. His mother was a single mom, living in the human world, doing some basic healing spells and calling it Reiki. He was turned into a vampire by a girl who didn’t even have her own clan.”

  “You’ve never talked about this,” I said.

  “The memory really upsets me,” he said. “Because…I’ve since tried to find out what happened to him, and no one would tell me, not even with a bribe. I don’t know. Maybe he was able to leave. Maybe he’s fine.”

  “Let’s just say it,” Harris said. “The Ethereals don’t like vampires. My family has been killing vampires for centuries. It doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge that vampires are intelligent and charming, but the opinion has always been that they are too dangerous to be allowed to live. Everyone here is considered dangerous and the longer they’re here, the less value their lives have to anyone outside of this place. This is where inconvenient things go to be forgotten. Benjamin has value now as an experiment, or else, they gave him a swift end.”

  “Harris!” I hissed. “That’s so creepy! Are you sure?”

  “We can all pretend to be horrified and speculate for another hour or two if you like.”

  “You’re just so…blunt.” I felt a little hopeless.

  “That’s terrible!” Polly said. “What do we do? How do we stop this? So you think Benjamin is dead?”

  “Shh,” Daisy groaned. “Polly, you need to take it down a notch. We can’t stop this. We just need to get our people and get out of here.”

  “You know…if Benjamin is dead, we might be able to talk to him,” I said. “Summon him. Ask him what happened.”

  Montague nodded. “Let’s try it. I hate to think he might have died alone here.”

  “Are you summoning the dead?” Polly
asked. “Are you a necromancer? We don’t get to study that in witch school. How does it work?”

  “Polly…,” Daisy said warningly.

  “Can you summon anyone or only other witches? And when you summon people, do they look like they’re on their death bed or are they young and beautiful?”

  Now Daisy looked at me like she actually was curious about the answer to that question.

  “I don’t think they show up looking like they’re dying,” I said. “I summoned Alec’s mom and she didn’t look like a cancer patient.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “I haven’t summoned enough people to be sure. And no, you can’t summon just anyone. Spirits move on, eventually. Sometimes they even get reincarnated. I don’t think you can summon Jane Austen, for example.”

  “Drat. Of course, I wouldn’t want to infringe on her privacy…”

  As Daisy rolled her eyes, I stuck next to her as we left our table. “I know Polly asks a ton of questions,” I said. “But she seems loyal, and she is literally the only person in this whole place that would agree to marry a faery she’s never met. Plus, I just have to note, as someone who was not popular in high school, not everyone is rich and gorgeous.”

  “You’re totally gorgeous,” Daisy said.

  “So you admit that is a factor for you?”

  “Ohhh, she’s just so hopelessly awkward,” Daisy said. “A gator shifter. Gawd.”

  “You can ask all your friends in Chicago to be faery brides instead so you can be best friends forever.” I knew Daisy didn’t really have amazing friends in Chicago.

  She slumped. “Charlotte, I’m just so bad at being nice. How do you even do it? My grandmother has never been unnecessarily nice to anyone a day in her life.”

  “Well, you don’t want to be like her, do you?”

  “Touche.”

  So, that evening, we all gathered around for a little necromancy ritual in the Charlotte-Harris suite. Polly showed up with a little notebook with a cover depicting a pastel-hued cup of Earl Grey tea. “I’m going to take some notes, if you don’t mind, Charlotte,” she said. “I’ve never seen necromancy before.”

  Daisy gave me a look like, You invited Polly to this?

  And I gave her a look back like, Remember what we talked about.

  “So what do you do first?” Polly asked. “How do you make sure you don’t summon a demon instead? Are we going to light those candles?”

  “We just put all these candles in the center of the room for no reason,” Daisy said.

  “Oh, haha, right.” Polly blushed.

  Sometimes I forgot that Daisy was still as spoiled as Harris or maybe even worse, because she was an only child with dead parents, and the only heir to her important magical job. I don’t think anyone had ever asked Daisy to do something unselfish in her whole life so it didn’t even occur to her to be nice to someone who rubbed her the wrong way. Maybe it would do her some good to go impulsively betrothing herself to a sexy faery. That faery queen wasn’t going to put up with much, I had a feeling.

  “A leopard can’t change its spots!” Daisy hissed to me. “It just slips out.”

  “You’re better than a leopard.”

  “Am I, though? Are any of us really better than a leopard?”

  I took out matches. Fire was the best thing for spirit summoning, and then Harris set up wards to keep unwelcome spirits out. I expected a fairly easy spell casting session, because either Benjamin was dead and he wanted to talk, or he was alive and we wouldn’t get anything. My main concern was the sheer number of ghosts here. I could feel them at all times, like a background hum, and I wasn’t sure if that would cause a problem. I’d never tried to do necromancy in a ghost-heavy area.

  “As a flame lives and dies, only to be brought back by the flick of a match, so shall your spirit be offered entry to the world of the living. Benjamin, answer our call to speak.”

  “Not terrible spell work,” Harris said. “See, you don’t have to rhyme.”

  “Please, you flatter me, sir,” I whispered sarcastically, just before—

  Oh shit.

  Three different spirits battled their way to life in front of me. No—four actually. Four ghostly figures started swirling around: an older man, a handsome younger one, a clean cut dad type, and a guy who kind of looked like a sad Adam Sandler. The first three were all claiming to be the Benjamin I summoned and Adam Sandler was just screaming, so I got a cacophony of “My name is Ben…” “It’s Ben…” “Let me tell you my story…” “NOOOOO—”

  “The good looking one is my Benjamin,” Montague said. “Hey, Benjamin…”

  “Monty?”

  “For over a century I have waited,” interrupted Dad Ben. “Please, young lady, you must help me take revenge!”

  “MY WIFE! THE BABY!” said Sad Sandler.

  “Shh, please, we must be cautious,” said Old Ben.

  “I guess we really needed a last name,” Firian said. “A lot of Bens have died here.”

  “A lot of everyone has died here!” Dad Ben said, his ghost whooshing around. “This is where the forgotten souls go to meet their ends…” The room had turned ice cold. Sad Sandler started flying toward the wall.

  “No!” I snapped. “Benjamins, I command you to stay within sight of me! I need you all to calm down and tell me what happened one at a time!”

  “FREE ME!” Sad Sandler rushed at me, although by this time his human form had sort of vanished and he looked more like Ghost Classic, just sort of a floaty mess of fog with a semi-human face and hollow eyes.

  “Monty, they killed me and they’ll kill you too!” said Monty’s Ben. “You need to get out of here. All this place is for is so the council can try out new techniques to battle and control Sinistrals, and if you die in the process, they don’t care.”

  “Ben, what about your family?” Montague asked.

  “THEY SAID I DIED. MY WIFE…MY POOR WIFE…”

  The frantic ghosts sizzled when they ran into Harris’ wards. Harris pointed his wand at Sad Sandler. “Stop making so much damn noise. We’re trying to get to the bottom of this.”

  “The only bottom you’ll get to is the bottom of a grave,” said Old Ben.

  I realized quickly that I needed to get these spirits under control. They were all flying around and screaming over each other and not giving us any important information.

  “I summoned you,” I said, holding out my arms, taking up space. “I can banish you again in a second, and no one will ever hear your story. Your screams will only alert the guards. I said, one at a time. Old Man, tell me who was responsible for your death.”

  “It was a so-called holy man, Father Thomas.”

  “Was he from this Order of the Blessed?”

  “Yes, miss, he sure was.”

  “Did you all have this experience of being killed by someone from the Order of the Blessed?” I asked.

  “Yes…” Nods all around.

  “I thought they were trying to help me,” said Dad Ben. “I was so ashamed that I had feelings for my own familiar. I had already tried everything I could on my own to keep our relationship confined to magic only, but I could call her any time of night and she was always there. No one else…was there for me like Dru…”

  I swallowed. That was hitting close to home.

  Sad Sandler looked near a break down as he calmed down. “My dad was an incubus. I cheated on my wife. I checked myself in here to try to recover but my wife cut off payments for my rehab and they moved me to the back. They would…just leave me tied up for hours…unspeakable things…torture… I never got a chance to try and make things right with her. Never saw my little girl again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So…this place is basically where they send witches and warlocks who have ‘tainted’ blood or do things that go against the rules,” I said. “Everyone knows that and thinks it’s a place where people go to get better, right? But in fact, ‘rehabilitation’ is reserved for people whose families pay the Haven, and it sounds
like some wizard families are happy to cut off their family members because they bring shame. When that happens, they are moved to the back rooms away from the more privileged magical folk, and can be tortured and killed. And this all happens under the watch of the Order of the Blessed. Do I have that right?”

  “Yeah, sounds about right,” Monty’s Ben said. “I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

  “Well, I’m working on a plan to get help from the faery queen,” I said, although I realized even as I said it that the plan involved escaping the Haven and ignoring the entire Ethereal witching world. Along the way, I might ‘save’ thirteen girls—by forcing them into marriage with strangers.

  Honestly, this is not my problem, I thought.

  Except, it also kinda was. Clearly, the corruption among the Ethereal councils had affected my family for generations now. It was the very thing Ignatius spent all his life trying to end. And seeing all these depressed ghosts still hanging around—and dear lord, this was only the ghosts named Ben—carrying regrets and missing loved ones, I really wished I could do something besides just running away.

  I thanked the ghosts and let them go, and then I turned to my crew.

  “Okaaay,” I said. “What we have is a pee in the Lego bin problem. But I am not just going to lose those Legos.”

  “The what?” Montague said.

  “When I was in day care as a kid, somebody peed in the bin of collective Legos,” I said. “No one saw who did it, and no one would admit to it, so the lady who ran the place said that we had to clean it up ourselves. And no one would do it. Because all each of us knew was that we didn’t coat all those tiny Legos in stinky pee. I mean, you know a boy did it, for starters. Anyway, the next morning Miss Heather was so mad she threw the entire bin of Legos in the Dumpster.”

  “Oh, man, I think I finally know what all your emotional turmoil in the spring of 2005 was about,” Firian said. “That’s insane. Legos aren’t cheap.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And what’s even more expensive is a man or woman’s life. So…we can’t throw anymore Legos in the trash. We have to clean up the pee even though we shouldn’t have to. Is this metaphor still working? Well, anyway—I think I need to go to the back of the building.”