Witch Interrupted

by Wallace, Jody

  She sat up quietly and groped for her glasses. Cold air tightened her nipples. It was too late in the year to sleep nude, but she liked the opportunities it provided for more sex with Marcus. She checked the other side of the bed, expecting to see him missing, but he was there.

  The whites of his eyes glinted at her in the moonlight shining through the curtains.

  “Someone’s downstairs,” he said.

  “Are you not bothered by that?” she whispered.

  “It’s probably the cat. She’s curious about her new home.”

  “Cats don’t turn on sinks.” Katie slipped out of bed, put on pajamas and shoes, and grabbed a gun and a pouch of spell pods, which she buckled around her hips in a practiced motion. Protectiveness and anger at the home invasion woke inside her. Adrenaline surged. The wards hadn’t woken her. That meant the intruder was a witch. “Stay here. I’ll see who—”

  “Katie.” Marcus was beside her before she finished her sentence. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it together.”

  “If it’s one of the escaped keepers, you’re defenseless. Mostly.” She slid out the door into their darkened home. The grandfather clock downstairs ticked. Another drawer slammed. Shit, she thought they’d hidden their location better. How had they been discovered? “Stay here. I don’t want you caught in the crossfire.”

  She reached the top of the stairs, avoiding the creaky boards she’d already mapped. Marcus joined her, dressed now, carrying a weapon of his own. A cell phone.

  “You’re the brains. I’m the brawn. Get your ass back in the room and lock the door,” she ordered in a low voice.

  Ignoring her, he flowed down the stairs like a shadow—also avoiding the creaky steps, she noticed—and disappeared around the corner.

  Goddess save her from wolves with hero complexes. She chased after him, slowing when she saw that the lights in the stillroom blazed. Whoever was inside had zero discretion.

  Then she heard a voice she hadn’t heard in over a month.

  “Where the hell is the pennyroyal?”

  It was her father.

  Katie holstered the gun and raced through the den and down the hallway to the stillroom. “Ba!”

  Her father, wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a grimace, stood in the middle of the substantial devastation he’d wrought on her carefully ordered space. She ran to him and hugged him anyway.

  Zhang Li hugged her back for a moment, which was as much as she’d ever gotten, and took her by the shoulders. “I’m all right, girl. I’m all right.”

  His grip was firm and his posture was straight. His face had lost none of its familiar wrinkles, but his whole body exuded—not vigor, but not infirmity. His hair was thick and extremely overgrown. His fingernails and toenails—well, the less said the better.

  “What the fuck, Ba?”

  “I need you to use some pennyroyal on me.” He shot Marcus an irritable glare. “Wolf boy’s damn cat gave me fleas. And my ear itches. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “It worked,” Marcus told her. “Now you definitely don’t need to be disappointed in me. I’d like to keep the cat, though. I like her.”

  “Fleas?” He’d gotten the cat in order to give her father parasites? Parasites Zhang Li could more easily shed in human form. It was…

  Genius. Marcus was a genius.

  “Have you ever had fleas?” Zhang Li crossed his arms around his scrawny chest, thrusting his fingers in his armpits. “It’s hell. Stupid cat. Why’d she want to sleep with me anyway? It’s not like I’m a dog.”

  Katie opened her mouth to respond that hell was not knowing if her father was going to be a person again. Hell was not being able to discover if Tonya and Vern were alive. Hell was killing the man she loved with her tattoos and her magic. Hell was thinking Hiram Lars was going to murder them all.

  Hell was not fleas.

  Marcus slid an arm around her chilled shoulders, annulling the rant. She leaned into his warmth. The new house had many advantages, but she—in an effort to keep their bills down, because somebody had to be practical—decreased the heat to fifty-eight at night.

  “Why have you waited so long to change back?” Marcus asked her father. “Your intractability hindered several ongoing investigations.”

  Zhang Li put on one of Katie’s lab coats. “It’s freezing. You don’t have to be so cheap, Katie. Get back in the permabrand business.”

  “Can you please answer Marcus’s question?”

  Zhang Li swung his arms like a man warming up before his turn at bat. “I felt better in that wolf body than I have in thirty years. I was afraid when I started walking around upright, the arthritis would come back. So I just…stayed on four legs.”

  “The wolf cures ailments of that nature,” Marcus said. “All you had to do was ask and I’d have reassured you.”

  “Well, I know now. Are you going to get me some pennyroyal or not?”

  “Not,” Katie said, suddenly irritated beyond belief at her father. He’d been able to shift this whole time but hadn’t? He could have given them the answers they needed but hadn’t? “You could have communicated with us about the keeper stronghold. It sounds like you’ve regained all your memories.”

  “Hiram realized Tonya and I couldn’t tell him shit, so he and his punks reversed the life wipes.” Zhang Li laughed. “We still didn’t tell him shit. Took Hiram threatening to kill Tonya to get Vern to run his mouth.”

  “Vern protected Tonya?” Now Katie had heard everything. But if adversity had fused her and Marcus into lovers, it could have made Vern and Tonya civil. “Where are they now?”

  “No idea.” Zhang Li rubbed a hand over his hair, seemingly enjoying the feel of it. “After Hiram forced the location spell out of Vern, they disappeared.”

  Her stomach bottomed out. “Disappearing can mean a lot of things.”

  “It wasn’t that kind of disappearing. Hiram was pissed as a wet cat. We went to Millington to get Vern’s sister for that location spell even before Hiram used me to come after you. Talk about a nutcase. You should have killed him.”

  “You could have killed him yourself.” Zhang Li, in wolf form, had had his teeth on Lars’s throat. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Her father shrugged. “I didn’t want it on my conscience.”

  “But it was okay if it was on mine?”

  “You’re tougher than any of us, Katie,” her father said with an unaccountably serious mien. “When you turned out convex, I… Well, I thought I was doing the right thing, but you—you learned to do the hard thing. The thing nobody else would do. If you can’t find an agent for your permabrand business, you should take the council job.”

  “Hell, no. I’m finished doing the hard thing.” She crossed her arms, and her throat knotted. Her father had, a few times, apologized for handing her over to the council. For not fighting to keep her. She’d forgiven him—and he’d learned to appreciate her being convex—but it choked her up every time they discussed it.

  “Then you at least need to get married. The way you two have been carrying on is a scandal,” he said grumpily. “I’m too old for babies in the house.”

  “Babies? Come on.” Katie glared at her father. This past month, she’d been happier than—well, she’d been happy. But she and Marcus hadn’t exchanged declarations of love or permanence since they’d assumed it might be their last words ever. If he had been swept away by the gravity of the Hiram Lars situation, she wouldn’t force him to own his confession.

  She loved him, and she knew it. It was enough.

  “We’re not going to get pregnant.” She couldn’t hide anything from her father the wolf, but he didn’t have to be so…meddling.

  “Not anytime soon,” Marcus added.

  Katie’s eyebrows raised of their own accord. They’d definitely never discussed children, though they’d paid enough attention to birth control to make sure they were covered. Magically speaking.

  “You got a pet. That’s the beginning of the end,” Dad said.
“Right before Katie’s mother and I got pregnant, she came home with a cat too. I may not be able to do magic, but I mix a damn fine libido dampener. Ask Katie.”

  “The cat was for you, Zhang Li.” Marcus opened a cabinet at eye level, extracted Katie’s pennyroyal and handed it to her. “I would suggest holding this over your father’s head until he cleans up the mess he made in here.”

  “I have something for you too,” Zhang Li said. “Tonya gave me a message before she disappeared. It’s about your sister.”

  It was Katie’s turn to slip an arm around Marcus when he seemed likely to rant at her father. Not that Marcus was inclined to rant, but her father had spent an entire month feeling his wolfish oats. That probably wouldn’t change anytime soon.

  “And what might that be?”

  “Elisa’s not dead.” Zhang Li took the pennyroyal out of Katie’s limp grasp as they stared at him. “Lars lied about the accident. The wolf kissers got her to safety. Tonya couldn’t tell you because you’d thrown your lot in with the keepers.”

  Marcus eased himself onto Katie’s tall stool, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He remained like that, silent and yet somehow volatile, long enough that she exchanged a worried glance with her father.

  Was Marcus going to flip? Accuse Zhang Li of lying? Rage about Tonya’s duplicities?

  Was he going to find out where his sister was and leave?

  She had no hold over Marcus. She helped him with his research when he needed magic. They had sex. They lived together. They’d lived through hell together. She loved him. But she had no hold over him and didn’t want one. If he stayed with her, it had to be because he wanted to.

  Marcus dropped his hand and turned his attention to Zhang Li. His eyes were completely brown—whatever emotions he was feeling, he was handling them.

  “Where is she?”

  “Australia. The baby was a girl.” Zhang Li ambled toward the doorway, with none of the limp he’d had before he’d transformed. “I’ll let you two cogitate that. Me and the cat are going to have a snack.”

  As soon as Zhang Li left, Katie took Marcus’s hand. “Are you okay? That’s great news.”

  He glanced down at her, his expression relatively calm. On the stool, he was still taller than she was. “When can we go to Australia?”

  “We?”

  He frowned. “You won’t come?”

  “I… I mean, I…” Her glasses had inched down her nose and she wanted to see Marcus’s face, not a blur. She tilted her head back. “What about Ba?”

  “We’ll leave him primed wards and masks. I managed for a year without a witch at my side. So can he.”

  “Really?” She wasn’t sure if she was asking whether Marcus really wanted her to come with him to meet his born family…or if he really thought it was a good idea to leave her father without a warden.

  “Perhaps not,” Marcus said. “We’ll need to hire a sitter.”

  “You just found out your sister isn’t dead and you’re an uncle.” Katie’s throat, which hadn’t quite lost the lump from her father expressing his feelings about their history, closed more. She coughed to clear it. “I’m so happy for you. I am. It’s going to be—I imagine it’s going to be—emotional when you see Elisa again. I’m so happy for you.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Don’t you want a chance to be with your family? Just your family?”

  “That’s why I assumed we’d go together,” he said. “If you insist on taking your father, I suppose he’s family too, but I confess, I don’t look forward to a transpacific flight with Zhang Li.”

  “Are you saying you consider us family?”

  Marcus blinked. “Is that, ah, well…” He fumbled for words. “I thought we understood one another on this matter.”

  “I may have misunderstood a few things.” Giving up, she wedged her stupid glasses tight against her face. “We never discussed the particulars.”

  “I recall mentioning to you in no uncertain terms how I felt about you leaving me. As in, I’d prefer that you didn’t.”

  “That was when you were convincing me not to run off after Lars,” she said awkwardly.

  “That and more.” Marcus dragged her against him, parting his legs so their torsos would line up. “Did I not specify a timeframe? Ever. I’d prefer you didn’t, ever, leave me.”

  Ever. It had a solidity that comforted her. It promised she could live without constantly watching her back and wishing for something different. Like Marcus, it was something she could depend on. She slipped her arms around him and sighed.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she said gently. If Mr. Rational couldn’t state plainly and factually why he wanted her to go with him, she wouldn’t feel right encroaching on his reunion. He’d come back to her, wouldn’t he? “I love you, Marcus. I just don’t want to intrude. You don’ t have to—”

  “But I do,” he said. “Elisa is my sister. I’m overjoyed to know she’s alive and well and living her life. I hope she’s happy. I assume she’ll be happy to see me. But you’re the woman I love. The woman I choose. The woman who has killed me and saved me. The woman who means everything to me. Of course I want you to come to Australia. I’ll likely be gone for weeks. That’s too long for us to be apart.”

  “Well, okay,” she said, trying not to let delight turn her soppy. He’d be confused by tears of joy. “I don’t know Australian, though. Should we try to learn some of the language before we go?”

  Marcus lowered his chin, as if about to explain that Australians spoke English. She smiled. “Gotcha.”

  “I disagree.” His hands glided from her back to her ass, sliding under her pajama pants. His long fingers cupped her possessively, and she shivered. “I would say, more, that I have you, Katie. Now what should I do with you?”

  She had a few ideas involving once-per-second thrusts, but she decided to let him surprise her.

  * * * * *

  About the Author

  Jody Wallace grew up in the very rural South. Always eager to learn something new, Jody earned a master’s degree in creative writing. Aside from published author, her résumé includes college English instructor, technical documents editor, market analyst, web designer and general all-around pain in the butt.

  Jody currently lives in Tennessee with her family: one husband, two kids, two cats. One of her many alter egos is “The Grammar Wench,” which should give you an indication of her character. She is a terrible pack rat and likes to amass vintage clothing, yarn, books, Asian-inspired kitchenware, gnomes and other items that threaten to force her family out of the house. She also likes cats. A lot.

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  ISBN-13: 9781426897986

  WITCH INTERRUPTED

  Copyright © 2014 by Jody Wallace

  Edited by Gina Bernal

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the au
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