by Lori Ryan
Mac held his ground, a small growl coming from his chest, confirming what Gideon had thought about his strength of character and status as an alpha. Fabio flinched, but stood strong. Zelda screamed and ducked behind Mac, then stared in fascination.
Great. She was one of those. Some witches and warlocks became a little obsessed with being frightened by him. He guessed it was similar to the way people watched horror movies. They seemed to get a thrill out of scaring the pants off themselves. Zelda reached an arm toward him, so he curled his lip in her direction and let the three-inch fangs he normally kept hidden away show.
She giggled and jumped back with a yelp before Mac caught her with an indulgent smile—gag.
Gideon took his warlock form again, locking down on the anger he was feeling for the time being. He’d release it again when he knew where the hell to aim it—other than at his sister, who at the moment was staring at Gwen. He glanced between the pair. Gwen looked as serene as Carol, seemingly unruffled by his display of teeth and steel.
He hadn’t been the Boguman when she’d last appeared on earth, but she didn’t look the least bit ruffled by his sudden change in appearance. In fact, he realized suddenly, she’d shown no hint that she knew him at all. Not even a glimmer of recognition. What the hell was that about?
He’d taken the position of Boguman after she left. When he had nothing left to live for and no reason not to walk the earth scaring the pants off children who misbehaved. Although nowadays, his role had changed. Now he only scared children who were cruel to others. He was like the equivalent of a scared straight program for the magical world. But being the Boguman didn’t do anything to alter his appearance when he was in warlock form. She should know exactly who he was.
“Zelda, Mac, Fabio,” his sister said. “This is my brother, Gideon, and this is Gwen.”
Gwen raised her arms once again. “I am the anchor of all magic.” She beamed, and he had to look away. She did look gorgeous when she wanted to. Apparently, right now, she wanted to dazzle her audience. There was an almost ethereal glow to her as she spoke. “I hold inside myself the very same magic that is inside every witch and warlock. Your magic is anchored to me to maintain balance and order in the magical realm. I’ve taken corporeal form for the first time ever to save, well, to save magic.”
Typical. She always was concerned with herself and no one else.
Gideon stepped in. If Baba Yaga wasn’t going to put an end to this, he would.
“It’s not the first time you’ve taken corporeal form. You were here two hundred years ago.” He dismissed Gwen, letting her ponder that little nugget, and turned back to his sister. “What the hell are you playing at, Carol? You knew she was coming and you brought me here instead of warning me to stay the hell away?”
She merely shrugged. “You’re needed. Plain and simple.”
“What do you mean I’ve been here before?” Gwen stepped forward, reaching to touch his arm. He stepped away before she could.
“Two hundred years ago, you came here at the behest of the Goddess to destroy a powerful tool that could be used to harm the balance of power and throw witches and warlocks into a civil war.” His sister was speaking in much too placid and tolerant a tone for him.
“You came, discovered you liked chocolate and wine, then took off when you’d had your fun.” And had me, he added in his head. “Apparently you got to forget all that while we had the pleasure of holding on to those memories. Yay for us.”
He didn’t bother to point out that he’d also had to feel her presence for the last miserable two centuries of his existence. Magic was, after all, everywhere. In everyone. And since all of magic was tethered to Gwen, the magic that ran through him ran through her as well. She was, quite literally, a part of him. And damned if that wasn’t a fucking punch to the ass.
Gwen’s elegant brows pinched together as she thought. “Nooooo, I think I would remember if I’d done this before. It took quite an effort, I’ll have you know. It’s no small feat to take corporeal form.”
“I think maybe you got a few things wrong,” Zelda said, then stepped forward and gestured toward Gwen’s feet. “Um, if you’d like, I can just make a few adjustments.”
“Oh!” This came from Carol, who seemed to be treating Gwen like a long-lost friend. “Yes, Zelda, go ahead.”
Zelda raised her hands and waved them in Gwen’s direction.
“Goddess on high, hear my call. Cinderella’s not quite ready for the ball.
She’s currently looking a little like Humpty Dumpty,
Put things in the right place, make it all look nice,
And while you’re at it, please give her a dress that’s not so frumpy.”
As Gideon watched, lavender lights shot out from Zelda’s fingers. In an instant, the small errors Gwen had made were corrected. Her feet were now on the proper legs—yes, she’d had her left foot on the right leg and right foot on the left leg this whole time.
She now wore an even shorter cute little black dress that showed off a hell of a lot more of those milky white thighs than he needed to see. With a final zap, Zelda turned Gwen’s ears right side up, trimming her hair into a shorter cut. Great. Now he could see her neck and shoulders.
“Slithering fuck,” he muttered again, before speaking up. “Tell us exactly why you’re here so we can fix whatever the hell threat there is to you and return you to where you came from.”
“Gideon! That’s enough.” Carol turned from him to Gwen. “But yeah, you really do need to tell us why you’re here. I haven’t picked up on any threat to magic.”
Gwen’s job as the anchor was simply to bind all of magic to her so that balance was maintained in the universe. She also monitored things to some extent, but for the most part, she didn’t actually act on any of what she saw. That was left up to Baba Yaga and the Council. Of course, there had been that one time the Goddess sent her to restore order, but that was another story altogether. The situation then had been critical.
“It’s not a threat, Baba Yaga. Not exactly.” Gwen looked from Carol to Gideon and back again, twisting her fingers together.
“Then why are you here?” he barked, and felt horns spring from his shoulder blades and the top of his head. Dammit. It was rare for him to lose control of the tools of his trade like that. The Boguman should only transform when he absolutely had to. With a roll of his shoulders, the horns receded.
“Someone is siphoning magic.”
“Excuse me? What the monkeynuts did she just say?” Zelda screeched.
“Oh my word, Zelda, get a grip on that mouth of yours,” Carol said. “And Gwen, explain yourself. What in the name of the Goddess are you talking about?”
“Someone is drawing more magic than they were born with. Like they’re siphoning it somehow. I don’t know if it’s a witch or a warlock. It’s someone who isn’t particularly strong, but they’ve somehow managed to draw a lot of power, which really makes very little sense, when you think about it. They simply shouldn’t be capable of it.”
Gideon watched his sister’s face to see if she’d ever heard of this kind of thing before. He’d always been able to read her. And right now, her face said she wasn’t feeling altogether calm about the situation.
“So, take it back!” Carol snapped at Gwen, all placid, calm Baba Yaga focus gone now. “You’re the anchor. Take it back.”
“All right, back this train up,” Zelda said. “Some of us need the CliffsNotes version of things here. What do you mean, someone is taking more magic than they were born with? For that matter, what do you mean, you’re the anchor of magic?”
“Didn’t you go to even one class in high school? Just a single course?” This came from Fabio, and Gideon remembered he hadn’t known he had a daughter until Zelda was an adult.
“If you wouldn’t mind, just the quick and dirty version for those of us who were sick that day,” Zelda said primly, not fooling anyone.
Gwen raised her arms again, but Gideon cut her off. He could
only take so many of her sanctimonious speeches in one century. “Every witch or warlock is born with a certain amount of magic in them, but that magic is also anchored to the universe. Tethered, in a sense, to Gwen. She’s in all of us. We each only have a certain share of her, a certain type of magic. It’s impossible to pull more than your share or to tap into a kind of magic that isn’t yours. If you aren’t a creator witch, you can’t draw on creator magic, and so on.”
“Then how did I get my Aunt Hildy’s magic in me?” Zelda asked. Gideon noticed she didn’t mention her mother’s magic, which she also currently had in her body. He would guess that wasn’t one of her more pleasant memories. She’d pulled the magic out of her mother, rendering her human after her mother had tried to kill her. That story had taken Carol twelve pages to write.
“Magic can be passed from one witch to another, or even taken, if the witch or warlock doing the taking is powerful enough.” Baba Yaga frowned. “But no one should be able to draw it directly from the source, so to speak.”
Gideon needed to move things past this little Magic 101 lesson. He needed to get back to his work. Back to his life. He had a life that needed living, and it didn’t include standing here listening to a tenth-grade history of magic lesson.
He did have a life to get back to. Sort of. All right, so it wasn’t the greatest life on the planet. He hung out at the bar a few nights a week with the Jersey Devil and a few Centaurs who were trying to convince him to join their pinochle group. So he didn’t have much of a life. But that didn’t mean he needed to waste his time helping Gwen solve her current crisis only to have his heart trampled again when she left. Because that was what she would do. She’d stomp on it all over again as she made tracks for the nearest exit as soon as magic was out of danger.
“All right, well, I’ll just leave this to you, big sister.” He tossed in the title he rarely granted Carol, hoping she’d go for it and let him leave. “Looks like you’ve got a good handle on things here.” Before Gideon could move, the gang of gnarled-ass warlocks Carol had inherited when she took the role of Baba Yaga began yammering something about another mission and danger all around them.
“Sorry, baby brother. They’re right. We’re on our way to put out another fire. Have to hunt down a nasty little band of chimera who’ve been, uh, who’ve been, um—”
“Chima-ering,” Zelda said awkwardly.
Before Gideon could say a word, the group was gone, leaving him and Gwen staring at empty space.
“The chimera situation is getting out of control. I need you here handling this, Gideon. I’m counting on you to handle this!” came Carol’s disembodied voice. She really had to stop doing that. Both the disembodied yelling thing and preying on his soft side. He might be the Boguman, and he might be madder than hell, but he would never leave his sister high and dry when she needed him. Even if it meant spending time with the woman he both loved and hated with all his being.
Slithering fuck.
Chapter Three
Gideon sat at one of the long picnic tables outside Zelda’s Assjacket, Virginia house and tried to decide if he should laugh, cry, or go crack open a shit ton of heads until he got results. Carol had sent a note—which she had delivered by an Owl Shifter as her own corny homage to Harry Potter—saying they could meet with some of the Shifter community at Zelda’s to find out if they’d seen anything unusual.
Gideon’s instincts said they shouldn’t be screwing around talking to anyone other than the Council right now, but Carol had been insistent and Mac had backed her. Apparently, the Shifters had a tight relationship with Zelda and Fabio, and they had as much to lose if the balance of magic went all wonky as any witch or warlock did. Zelda was their healer, after all. Without her and her powers, many of them might not survive the infighting that often took place among the various Shifter species.
Besides that, the Shifters knew Assjacket inside and out, and Gwen was sure the place they needed to begin their search was Assjacket. He supposed on some level, then, that meeting with the Shifters made sense.
Gwen was happy as could be, surrounded by Shifters, all vying for her attention. Out of respect for Bo, the four-year-old boy in attendance, Gideon locked down his Boguman side and stayed in warlock form. Bo was a good kid, even if he was currently shying away from Gideon just a bit.
Bo was flanked by his mother and father, Wanda and Kurt, both Raccoon Shifters. Kurt was the alpha of the raccoon pack, and Bo would follow in his father’s footsteps when he was old enough. Roger, a Rabbit Shifter and purportedly phenomenal sex therapist, sat nearby. Gideon wasn’t crazy about the way the rabbit kept looking between him and Gwen, but he was doing his best to ignore him. For right now, Gideon needed their help if he was going to figure out the whole siphoning magic thing and get on with his life.
“So, she’s all there’s a lot more to him than you think there is.” Wanda was still talking about someone named Minerva and the warlock she was dating. Tink or Tank or something like that.
Roger chuckled. “Apparently he keeps her happy where it counts.”
“It’s weird, though,” Wanda went on. “Minerva is usually such a social climber. She cares a lot more about social status than she cares about sex. Half the time, the warlocks she dates aren’t even all that good looking, but they have money or power, and that’s what counts with her.”
This had Roger shaking his head. “Maybe she finally discovered the big O and is shifting her priorities.”
Kurt reddened and Wanda giggled, while Bo looked from adult to adult in fascinated confusion. Gwen mouthed the words big O as though trying to process what the rabbit was referring to.
Time for a change in topic.
“Getting back to the issue of magic. So, none of you have seen anyone who seems to have more power than they should? No one suddenly doing things they shouldn’t be able to accomplish.”
The group as a whole began to fidget. All except for Bo, who spoke up with the utter lack of hesitation found in a child. “Zelda can do cool stuff now.”
Everyone froze, but Gideon laughed. “Don’t worry, Bo. We know Zelda’s dealing with more than her share of magic right now. That’s different. What we’re trying to find is someone who’s pulling straight from the spigot. Can you think of anyone besides Zelda who’s been able to do things they shouldn’t lately?”
Head-shaking all around.
Gwen was murmuring. “Big oxen, big opals, big octopus, big…big…” She frowned as she seemed to reach for more O nouns. Wanda leaned in and whispered in Gwen’s ear.
“Oh!”
“Uh huh,” said Wanda with a knowing nod and a grin.
“Roger,” Gideon cut in, shifting in his chair as his pants became uncomfortably tight. The last thing he wanted was to sit and listen to Gwen talk about orgasms and sex. “How many witches and warlocks are there in the community? This is primarily a Shifter community, right?”
Before Roger could answer, Gideon heard Wanda whisper to Gwen. “Which is weird, right? Because everyone knows warlocks are notoriously bad in the bedroom. They’re too self-absorbed to be thinking about anyone’s orgasm but their own.”
Before he could stop himself, Gideon was responding. “Bullshit. Not every warlock is like that. Believe me, I have no problems making sure the witch I’m in bed with comes so hard she blacks out a few times.” He didn’t mention that he typically teleported out of there as fast as he could afterward. Just because he left them sated and happy as shit didn’t mean he stuck around to cuddle. Been there, done that, and had the scars to prove it.
Gwen’s wide eyes turned to him. Well, shit.
“Anyway”—he turned back to Roger, who had an annoyingly wide grin on his face—“back to…”
He had no idea what was supposed to come out of his mouth next. His gaze caught Gwen’s, and he realized she was watching him with eyes that now said she wanted a lot more from him than simply being a partner in locating the magic siphoning suspect. Roger and Wanda were smiling like a
pair of Christmas elves on a joyride in Santa’s sleigh.
Shitshitshit. Not good. Particularly since certain parts of his anatomy were fully on board with the ideas Gwen seemed to have rolling around in her head.
Rolling around…with Gwen…shitshitshit.
“Um, anyway, going back to, um…” What the hell? He was the Boguman. He didn’t say um.
Apparently he did, though, because it had just come from his mouth not once, but twice.
This had to end. Now. Whatever Gwen thought he could do for her—crap, not good, not good.
Images of himself doing a lot of things for Gwen flew through his mind. Dirty things. Great things. Orgasm-inducing things.
Time to put a stop to her fantasies before his own got any more out of control. If she kept looking at him like that, there was no telling what he’d do.
Gideon turned and growled at Gwen, letting loose just a tiny bit of the Boguman for her. His nose turned into a jagged horn, his mouth fanged and rotting. The image was enough to send poor Bo running for the tree line, with Wanda racing after him. Roger let out a squeak and ran as Kurt shifted into raccoon form and planted himself, making his small body as large as he could, between Gideon and his retreating family and friend.
But Gwen did nothing more than stare serenely back at him. And sigh. She sighed.
Slithering fuck.
Chapter Four
Three, it turned out, was the number of witches and warlocks living in Assjacket. Zelda, Fabio, and Zelda’s former cellmate from her stint in magical prison, Sassy. They’d already met Zelda and Fabio. If either of them had been carrying the missing magic around with them, Gwen should have been able to see it, and Gideon had a feeling they wouldn’t have been able to slip that past his sister this whole time. Carol was no idiot.
They would need to track down Sassy at some point, but they had a bigger problem on their hands. A traveling carnival came through Assjacket on its way south every year for the winter season. They apparently spent a couple of weeks in town on a break before heading out. Assjacket allowed them the freedom to party with the Shifters and avoid humans more easily than they could other places without having to hide who they were.
