by Holley Trent
Clarissa blinked. “Neither. Long story, but suffice it to say I’m old enough to be your grandmother.”
Gail whistled low. Interesting. Now she was even more intrigued about the source of the woman’s power and whether it had contributed to her youthfulness.
“So, what’s a scrub?”
“A buster,” Sweetie said, and a torrent of giggles erupted the moment she got the words out.
Clarissa sighed and gave Sweetie the kind of look only a woman broken down by years in a maternal capacity was capable of. It was the same I’m getting real sick of your shit expression Gail’s grandmother wore.
Gail gave Sweetie a silencing nudge. “It’s a reference from a TLC song. Scrubs are no-account guys who have a lot of swagger but no assets. They typically live in their parents’ basements, don’t have stable employment, and instead engage in what they call side-hustles. They earn a little money doing this or that, but have no upward aspirations.”
Clarissa shifted her weight from one house shoe to the other and gave Gail an inscrutable stare.
“What?”
“You know, if you were one of my granddaughters, you’d have a hell of a lecture coming to you right now. The only reason I’m holding my tongue is because if I hurt your feelings, Claude’s going to be upset with me.”
Gail cocked her head to the side and propped her right elbow against the sofa arm. Sounded like fighting words to her. Ellery would have already told the lady what she could do with herself, and where, but Gail had a slightly more robust verbal filter. Even so, there was only so long she could keep her lips clamped. “Speak your mind. I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
“Damn, girl,” Sweetie said under her breath, but obviously she was more intrigued than frightened by the ensuing fall-out because she tapped the television volume down a few ticks and turned to Gail.
“All right,” Clarissa said. She folded her fingers together at her belly and stood up straight as if she were about to belt out an aria on the stage at Carnegie Hall. “You wanted it, so I’ll give it to you because I’m sick and tired of you kids treating each other like the other has no value just because they have different circumstances. Y’all were all raised different, and none of y’all is any better than the others. I don’t understand where all the snobbery comes from, really, because you’re all a little deranged. You too, Sweetie.”
Sweetie gaped. “Clarissa!”
Clarissa shrugged ever so slightly. “Well, it’s true. Y’all value all the wrong things, yet everything you’d need to be happy is usually right there in front of you. Y’all keep on scrambling for the next thing, whatever the hell that is, hoping it’ll blow you away and knock you off your feet when you could be floating on Cloud Nine if you just opened your eyes.”
Right. And they were deranged? “No offense, but I think you may have lost sight of how society works nowadays. The Struggle is something most of us strive to overcome, so of course we’re looking for the next thing. No, not the next thing. The best thing.”
“What if you’re not meant to find that so-called best thing,” Clarissa rolled her eyes, “until you figure out how to be happy with what you have?”
“If you know me so well, then you tell me what it is that I supposedly have. Tell me what I’m supposed to be so happy with. I live paycheck to paycheck, barely covering my bills because I had to be a good girl and help my family. I’ve got this expensive education, and I’ve made a laughingstock of myself amongst my former classmates because instead of preparing haute cuisine in an elegant restaurant, I deep-fry chicken wings in a titty bar and use pickle juice as a staple ingredient at the other place I work. My grandmother thinks so little of me and my abilities that she not only foisted a familiar on me that I can’t abandon, but I’ve been permanently disinvited from coven gatherings. If you didn’t figure that out yet, it’s ’cause I’m a weak-ass witch. Oh, and let’s not forget that my ex-husband is a psychopath and I have to think about him every time I drive my car, ’cause it was his and I can’t trade it in because I can’t afford to pay taxes on and register a different car right now. I—” The blood drained from her head as she realized it. She should have realized it before, but Clarissa was right. She was a snob and hadn’t seen it.
I’m kind of a scrub, too.
No, she fucking sucked. Nearly thirty, and all she had of value was a half-Persian cat that held grudges like a mobster, and a car that may not have technically been street legal.
Embarrassing. At least Ellery had a job that helped people.
“Oh, honey.” Clarissa’s stoic expression softened. “It’s all right if you’re mad at me. I just wanted you to understand that sometimes folks try as hard as they can, and sometimes it’s never enough.”
Gail knew that feeling all too well. Between her grandmother and ex-husband, it was a wonder she could stand up straight some days with all the criticism riding her. But who the hell were they to tell her she wasn’t good enough?
Don’t you dare cry in front of these people.
She wasn’t going to shed one fucking tear or waste yet another iota of energy on people who didn’t value her as she was.
She was going to suck it up and forge on. Mind over matter.
But then Sweetie leaned her head against Gail’s shoulder, and the tears that burned her eyes tracked down her cheeks.
She hugged her pillow. She needed something familiar. “You’re right. I’m not happy. I could try to be happy with what I have, but I’ve been fucking miserable for—”
Before she could get the words out, a sudden change of air pressure in the room stole her breath. Her ears popped and she clutched her chest, struggling to inhale.
What the hell?
Her head swam, thoughts muddled, and vision blurred. She closed her eyes and rubbed them with her fists, vaguely registering male voices in the room and Clarissa’s forceful, but calm, instructions. “Get him up to the guest room, Agatha. I’ll call the doctor and see if we can get him some blood.”
CHAPTER NINE
Claude came to with a gasp, and that fucking hurt.
As his vision cleared, he recognized the pale tan ceiling and light blue walls as belonging to the guest bedroom at Clarissa’s house.
What the hell had happened? The last thing he remembered was a blast, and suddenly there’d been a barrage of unfamiliar magic directed at him. It’d been just for him, tailor-made to harm him.
Where were his brothers?
He tried to sit up, and although his brain was willing, his body didn’t get the message.
All right. One thing at a time.
Cautiously, he tested his fingers. They wiggled. He flexed his toes. He lifted his right arm. It was so heavy, as if it were some foreign thing that hadn’t been attached to his body forever.
He dropped his hand onto his belly and cringed, closing his eyes to push back the pain.
Suddenly, he had help. Someone moved his hand away from his torso and set it on the bed beside him.
The mattress sank, and he opened his eyes and turned his head to see a wild-haired angel peering down at him.
A concerned angel, at that.
“We’ve got you bandaged up because your skin is raw. You broke a few ribs and punctured your lung.” Gail scoffed and clasped her hand around his. “You had to get a few pints of blood to wake you up, but Clarissa said the rest will heal on its own.”
He tried, and failed to force words from his throat, but they wouldn’t come out.
Shit. He envied Charles and Marion for their ability to communicate telepathically in close range, but the best he could tell was that Gail didn’t have that ability. It wasn’t common. Marion only had it because of what she’d inherited from her maternal line, which Clarissa wouldn’t discuss.
Claude thought he’d figured it out, though. It’d only taken him three years.
He swallowed, drew in a deep breath, and tried speech again. “It’ll heal,” he said in a rasp. He’d be back on his feet, raring
for a fight again in a couple of weeks, the best he could tell. Whatever had happened had to have been bad for him to be laid out like this. When he got his hands on his nephew again, he was going to blast him to kingdom come. He didn’t know how Ross had done what he did, but Claude knew the sadistic brat was responsible for it—the ambush.
Their leads had taken them to a rental house down in Concord that Ross had recently signed a lease for. Charles’s telepathic connection with his son was hit or miss and hadn’t been able to discern if Ross was actually inside. He’d been there recently, though. Calvin could smell it. There’d also been that odd sulfur smell that was so tell-tale of a demon, but not Gulielmus.
They broke in through the back door, only to find the house quiet and empty.
Until it wasn’t.
The lights went out, and things got loud.
Claude couldn’t see anything, and couldn’t react before the magic hit him. Before he passed out, he remembered thinking that the magic felt foreign—unidentifiable. It wasn’t an enemy he’d encountered before. Thank the gods John had had the foresight to have Mark on standby. Mark was an angel—Ariel’s angel, technically—and he regularly responded to their distress calls. He’d brought along the wind goddess Agatha, and the two of them had managed to get them back to Clarissa’s. Or so he hoped.
“My … brothers?”
She held up a hand. “Pretty banged up, but you got the brunt of it, from what Clarissa was able to piece together. Everyone’s here, though.”
“How long …” He closed his eyes and swallowed again. Dry. Hard to talk. “How long … was I out?”
“A day.”
A day, and she hadn’t left. Thank goodness. He wouldn’t have to go chasing her, didn’t have to worry about her being in harm’s way when he couldn’t protect her.
He groaned inwardly. Protect her? Shit, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to protect himself. He’d been cocky. There were few beings on Earth that could harm him when he was on his guard, and either he’d encountered one accidentally or that little fucker Ross had done his research. Everyone had an Achilles heel, and Claude’s was named Gulielmus.
The part of him that was demon was far easier to defeat than the witch part if a person knew the right magic. Someone had tried to rip that demon part right out of him, and because his two parts were so intricately entwined, he couldn’t lose one without the other. No one could really take him out that way, but having his essence shuffled like that would damn sure lay him out for a while.
Good job, pute.
He ground his teeth and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. Why would Ross want Claude down for the count, though, unless he needed to get his uncle out of the way for some other reason?
Maybe his plan hadn’t been to kill Claude at all, because he couldn’t without getting close.
No, the brat had something else planned—but what?
“Do you think you could drink something? My sister says you’re dehydrated, but I don’t know what that means for a cambion.”
Her sister was there? “Just means I’ll …” He swallowed and groaned at the pain. “Means I’ll feel like shit.”
“She wants to hook you up to an IV and get some fluids into you, but says that’ll…”
A tickling sensation traveled up Claude’s naked left arm, and he turned his head to the side and saw the cause was whiskers right before Candy Corn stepped onto his bruised chest. She turned in a half-circle and kneaded his belly, swishing her tail in his face before Gail picked her up and dropped her onto the floor.
“Shoo,” Gail said.
Candy Corn meowed petulantly, if such a thing was possible, and jumped back onto the bed. This time she settled next to his right leg.
Gail sighed. “Of all the beds in this house, naturally, she’d pick the one she shouldn’t be on.”
“’s’all right.” He needed to make nice-nice with the cat because he wanted to be on her owner’s good side, too. Evidently, Gail wasn’t the kind of woman who’d run off screaming at the first sign of trouble. The caveman part of him wanted to take care of his woman, but there was something incredibly desirable about a woman who was willing to dig in.
Or maybe she just wanted to see if he’d die so the ring would come off. When it came off, the ring’s spell would break. She would no longer be connected to him—couldn’t draw on his power when she needed it, couldn’t gauge his emotions when she wanted to. He’d wanted her to have the ring because it’d open a gateway of understanding between them. It’d help them communicate when words weren’t enough, when emotions were high. But at a moment like this, he got nothing from her. She was too calm.
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“What?” Gail asked.
“I think you really came in here to put a mirror under my nose.”
“I’m not that kind of opportunist. If I wished you dead, I would just smother you and get the chore out of the way. I know just the pillow I’d do it with.”
“It’s a nice pillow.”
“I know. I made it.”
“You have good taste. I like the stripes.”
She sighed. “I can’t resist them. Something about that pattern pulls me. Maybe I had a blanket or something when I was a baby that my memory is holding onto.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Nah. Wasn’t worth it. She’d think he was bullshitting her, and he didn’t blame her.
“Anyway, the cat just wanted a warm spot. As long as she didn’t decide my face is the ideal spot while I sleep, we’ll get along just fine.”
“Cool.” She leaned in over him, brow furrowed and lips slightly parted.
Bewildered, he tilted his chin up. He wouldn’t refuse a kiss if she was going to offer so freely, but she missed his lips by a longshot.
She gently parted his hair at the left temple and bent in for a closer inspection. “You had a nasty cut right starting at your eyebrow and going up to your scalp. I got all the blood out of your hair that I could, but looks like I missed some. I worried you’d have a big scar.”
“Why worry?”
“Because I imagine you have an ego the size of Pluto. You wouldn’t have brought me here otherwise.”
He rolled his eyes, and instantly regretted it. He felt like he had sandpaper in his eyelids.
“Anyway, like I was saying, Ellery said if she hooks you up to the IV, she’d have to catheterize you.”
“Fuck that. I’d rather have the dehydration headache than have some stranger with cold hands stuffing a cannula up my junk. I’d probably be able to walk to the bathroom if I needed to.”
He turned his head slowly to the left and spied the en suite bathroom. Goddamn, had it always been that far away? What was that, ten paces? Fuck that, too.
Perhaps a bedpan. That sounded far more reasonable.
Gail looked from Claude to the bathroom and back to Claude again, seeming to understand the cause of his most recent distress. “You … think maybe if Mark and … I don’t know, some other guy, helped you, you could make it to the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
The fact she didn’t volunteer his brothers, Calvin, or Mr. Thomas was quite telling. It meant they were in no condition to assist him. Were their women at their sides right now, nursing them back to their feet, and was that why Ellery—a stranger—had come to assist?
He opened his mouth to ask, but before he could form the words, Gail said, “I made a big pot of soup. I’ll bring you a bowl if you can keep your eyes open long enough to eat it.”
Of course he could. Sure.
“Bring it.”
“All right.” She gave his hand a gentle squeeze, and he tried to squeeze back, but couldn’t manage it. “Be right back.”
“Okay.”
She gave him one last look as she strode from the room, and he let his head loll to the side. She befuddled him in a way Laurette never had. Laurette had been simple and easy to read. When she was happy—which was most of the time—she showed it on
her face. Her words had always been direct, and left him no room for misinterpretation. No sarcasm. No snark.
He didn’t get Gail, not even a little bit. She shouldn’t give a shit about him, so why was she still there and bringing him soup?
Candy Corn stood and stalked closer to his head.
“Ne pensez même pas à ce sujet, chat.” Don’t even think about it, cat.
Candy Corn dragged her rough tongue across his right temple and settled onto the pillow next to his head.
He would have sighed if he’d thought it wouldn’t hurt.
CHAPTER TEN
Gail set the untouched tray down on the counter and wiped her hands on the plain blue apron. Claude had been knocked out when she’d returned to the room, and Candy Corn had been sprawled out next to him, displaying her orange-and-white belly to the ceiling and flicking her tail in her sleep. Gail hadn’t wanted to wake him up. She’d adjusted his head from what looked like an awkward position and propped her pillow beneath it. It’d always brought her comfort. Maybe it’d do the same for him. He was a stranger to her, and common sense said she should have left while she could, but seeing him brought back from his mission in tatters had chilled her to her core and she still hadn’t warmed up from it. Her instinctive reaction had been to fix him, so she’d run to him.
Clarissa had grabbed her and held her back, saying that she needed to stay out of the way, and that had made Gail angry. She’d wrestled out from under the other woman’s grip, and ran up the stairs after Claude, only to stop at the landing and think about what she was doing.
Why was she doing it? Because she was his fated mate? She wasn’t sure she believed that, but one thing she knew for sure was that she was less anxious in the chaos of Clarissa’s home than she’d been in her safe little life in Robbins. Something had to be very wrong. She actually felt like she belonged in this place.
