by Michele Hauf
She followed intuition, hoping it would guide her.
Something skittered off on a multitude of feet, not across the floor, but within the pages of the dark, bound volumes lining the shelves. Even though she fluttered her fingers along the spines, these books did not align as did all other things when reacting to her OCD magic.
“Most definitely malefic,” she whispered. Quickly she pulled up her white light. “Should have done that earlier. You’re slipping, Tam. Too much demon on the brain lately.”
But, oh, what a demon. And she’d had him on more than her brain. Her lips, her breasts, her stomach. Mmm...between her legs. Her thoughts drifted to the king-size bed and Ed leaning over her, tending her every sensual hot spot...
One slim book slid out a quarter of an inch, dusting the air with a mist of emerald smoke.
“Really? And I was just getting to the good part of the daydream.”
With a sigh, she snatched the volume, which moaned until she’d returned to the fore of the room and set it on the table right on top of the sigil carved into the wood that would render all magics useless. It was a contained spell and focused only on text, so it could not vanquish a spell tossed at her from a visitor or fellow archivist. Not that Tamatha worried. The Archives were secure.
She planted herself in a wicker chair that creaked, kicking off her high heels. Study of the heavy volume found the gold leaf had worn away from the title, but the words were impressed deeply into the scuffed brown leather. And the fore-edges of the pages were not deckled, but rather, when she pressed them tightly together and then fanned them slightly, revealed a scene that depicted horned and tailed beings. She loved surprises like that. Yet the book wasn’t a malefic grimoire, but rather a genealogy.
“Weird. Why was it shelved with those dark books?” It felt safe now that she preened over it in the light. “Why am I surprised? Isn’t as if there aren’t hundreds of misshelved volumes.”
She had been meant to pull out this volume, and that was the important thing.
It wasn’t difficult to track down a page detailing the witches of Les Douze. They had been burned in 1753 in the Place de Grève. The area was now the square before the city hall, and a merry-go-round held court where once violent hangings, burnings and all sorts of criminal executions had taken place through the centuries. A couple decades later, use of the guillotine had literally stained the streets red during the Revolution.
The page in the grimoire shivered under Tamatha’s touch and a minute twinge of sorrow entered her veins.
She quickly withdrew her finger from the book. “Whew! Powerful stuff.”
Many a grimoire or book in the Archives were filled to the endpapers with whatever magics it detailed and often harbored memories and emotions that could bleed into a reader’s very being. It was the reason most chose not to work in the Archives. Anything could happen. Including escape from the pages. CJ had captured an elemental the first week Tamatha had worked there. It had been left next to a book of cherubs, and the magics had combined. A drunken bacchanal had ensued. Of course, with no alcohol on the premises, the cherubs had stolen tea, and well, as CJ told it, tea could get a cherub drunk faster than vodka to a teetotaler.
Lifting the book to check the magic sigil was indeed directly beneath the volume, she set it down with a bit more confidence. She trailed her finger down the list of twelve, whispering each name as if a prayer as she did so.
“Macarius Fleche, Alyce Doran, Lucian Maldove.” The list included all twelve coven members and ended with “Martine Chevalier and...”
She paused before speaking the final name written in tiny cursive. A name all too familiar to her. Tamatha’s heartbeats sped. It couldn’t be. Her mother had never mentioned...
“Lysia Bellerose?”
Her heart dropped in her chest. She gasped to catch her shallow breaths. That was impossible. Of course, nothing was impossible. And there were no coincidences. It was right there in black ink on the stained page.
Her grandmother had been one of the witches of Les Douze.
Chapter 11
After Tamatha had left for the Archives, Ed dressed, slipped on his gloves and selected a deep purple tie to go with the steel-gray business shirt. He pulled on the black Zegna suit coat and stepped into his leather shoes. He would go in to the office because he wanted to put contacts on the alert should he need them.
And figure how dangerous it could be to piss off a warlock. Though it seemed as though, if it really was a warlock, he was already in fine fettle. Ed didn’t mind facing a new and powerful opponent, but he did like to know what he was dealing with. With hope, Tamatha’s research could fill him in.
He took the elevator down and checked the part in his hair in the mirrored wall. His finger dashed over a horn nub but it didn’t feel like it did when Tamatha did that. When she touched him there it was like sex coursing through his veins and congregating at the base of his cock to an instant hard-on.
For all appearances, he and Tamatha were hitting it off. Doing the boyfriend-and-girlfriend thing. But he didn’t want to get his hopes up. Because...he wasn’t boyfriend material. Women never stayed in his life for long. And when he finished with what he needed Tamatha for, she’d leave him. He felt sure of that.
He wasn’t meant to have love.
Besides, he was merely research to the witch. She wanted to study him and, yes, even have sex with him to see what it was like to have sex with a demon. She might like to believe differently, but he knew better.
He sighed as the elevator doors glided open. Striding out the lobby and through the main doors, he headed down the street toward his office building. Once across the street he felt something pull over his skin and he stepped through it, as if emerging from a thickness.
He stopped and looked back over the street. “Her ward,” he decided. “A powerful witch indeed. I’m lucky to have found her. She’ll help defeat Les Douze.”
And that should be all that mattered.
Of course, he knew better. Somewhere deep inside, the idea of love rattled his better senses and scared the crap out of him.
* * *
Hands shaking, Tamatha carefully sipped the mint tea. The one name on the list of twelve witches kept flashing at her like a warning light. Truly, was her grandmother involved in the terrible murders Ed had detailed?
It didn’t make sense. Her mother had never spoken a disparaging word about Lysia Bellerose. Petrina had not talked about her often, but when she had, it had been to tell Tamatha of her grandmother’s wisdom and spell-crafting expertise. Lysia had been kind, lovely and wise. Her magical knowledge had been vast. She’d had diabology under her belt and had sought to study angelology before her abrupt and cruel demise. She’d never caused a death, nor would she participate in magic that could result in such evil. Born in the early sixteenth century, she had lived two and a half centuries and had given birth to five daughters, three of whom had survived the birth. Yes, Lysia had been burned at the stake—the sad fate of many a witch who had tried to help humans by teaching them simple remedies that embraced herbology and healing skills.
“Burned at the stake alongside eleven others,” Tamatha whispered.
To imagine such a horror chilled her veins. Had all twelve pyres been lit at once? Or had one been lit and then the next, so that the witches at the end had to endure the screams and agony of their coven mates before the flames got to them? The thought of it made Tamatha moan.
Tea spattered her lap, and she set the teacup on the saucer with a click. Blowing and whispering a spell instantly dried the dark skirt fabric, which didn’t show a stain.
She turned the page in the book to read more. Within the fragile pages of a history ledger that detailed the bloodlines of witches of the Light, she located her grandmother, Lysia Bellerose. None of the females in the Bellerose family—should t
hey marry—had taken their husband’s name. It just wasn’t done. If they fell in love and felt the need to make a home with the man, they did so. Without the official document. All their offspring carried the Bellerose name.
It was how witches often did things. The matriarchs were the strongest and wisest in most families. Male witches were often considered lesser, which wasn’t necessarily true when comparing skills, but it was an old and revered train of thought.
Tamatha’s father had been a witch, but he and Petrina had drifted apart after fifty years with one another. People are not meant to have such long monogamous relationships, her mother had once said. But if it comes to you, try it, embrace it and welcome it for as long as you feel comfortable. But never stay beyond the expiration date, her mother had also warned.
Love often.
“And deeply,” Tamatha whispered. “For it never lasts.”
The idea of marrying a man for the romantic ideal of happily-ever-after didn’t fit when the twosome were immortal. Ever after took on an entirely new meaning when compared to the fifty or more years some humans enjoyed in marriage.
Yet Tamatha teased the idea of monogamy. Dating was tedious. Lovers were essential, though. And she’d never been bothered that they left her life more frequently than they stayed. Only three of her former serious lovers had died when they’d been dating. Henry had been a mortal who’d fallen off his bicycle, hit his head on a sharp rock and bled out. Joseph had been a fellow witch who had insisted that using arsenic in a spell was correct—he’d choked on his foaming saliva. The familiar had died after they’d broken it off. All the others she’d dated had come and gone with the same desire for freedom as she had. Save Byron, who had gone mad and had literally been carted away from her in a straitjacket.
And Ed, well...
Well.
She wanted him to last. To not go mad. To not die. And to be in her life longer than most. Because he fascinated her and appealed to her desire for the new and unknown.
But most of all, she wanted to help him. She’d agreed to help him with whatever he needed to figure out the situation of demons being murdered by witches. But could she? If worse came to worst, that may mean she’d have to kill her grandmother. That was, if Lysia Bellerose was really dead. And if the witches Ed claimed to have seen in the cemetery truly were the infamous Les Douze.
According to the notes on Lysia Bellerose and the others in Les Douze, each of the twelve had named their accusers as demons. The human witch finder had mocked them and further accused them of spewing lies and diabolitry. Could they not see the humans who had accused them were simply men and women? Demons had tails and fiery red eyes. Yet the witch finder had noted that he did not doubt Les Douze were in alliance with demons and the very Devil himself.
“Himself,” Tamatha corrected herself when she read the lowercased word. One always capitalized the name of the Dark Lord. And a wise witch would never say the name three times, for that would serve as an invite to Himself, who had a tendency to appear to a person in the guise of their greatest temptation.
She mused that should he appear on her doorstep, she might lunge into his arms and kiss him, for surely the Devil would appear to her as Edamite Thrash.
She shook her head of the terrible notion. Best not to spend time considering you know who. Back to the text.
“Grandma must have known something,” she said. “Of course, if they were really demons, she would know. She was a diabolotrist. If anyone could recognize a demon on the spot, it had to be Grandmother. But why had demons accused Les Douze?”
Had Ed figured it out? They had to compare notes.
She pulled up the ledger against her chest and settled into the chair, clasping the book as if it would fly away. “How terrible to have been burned at the stake. Alive.”
Prickles shivered her skin. Most witches shied from studying fire magic. Fire proved the witch’s bane. If something went wrong, it could kill with ease. Tamatha had taken decades to master it, and still, she never utilized it too often. A sudden gust of wind could turn a fire spell back on her. And to mix magics by applying water magic to back up the fire would result in disaster. She was no master at mixed magic, and it had resulted in more than a few mishaps. Earth magic combined with air and water magic could put a never-ending tangle of poisonous snakes on a man’s feet and render him insane.
But that was the past.
And now...
Had Lysia managed to come back on her own, along with her eleven coven mates? Didn’t seem possible. Which only left someone else summoning the dead witches.
“What malefic magic has brought back twelve witches from the dead?”
Tamatha set the book on the table and closed her eyes, placing her fingers lightly over the pages. She inhaled and exhaled deeply but could divine no hidden clues beyond the printed text.
Dare she involve herself in this? It couldn’t end well if it resulted in her grandmother’s destruction. And a witch never worked magic against her own. It was unheard of. The Light and Dark would ostracize any witch who worked against them, which was how some became warlock.
But if Lysia truly were back and killing demons, Tamatha couldn’t stand by and allow that to happen. Why hadn’t her mother told her the details of her grandmother’s death?
She had to give her a call, get to the truth.
Tugging out her cell phone from her purse, she texted her mother. Petrina never answered calls. She preferred her daughter text her and she would return a call when she had a moment. She typed: Questions about Grandmother’s death. Urgent.
If that didn’t result in a return call within a few hours, she’d worry that her mother was hiding something.
Until then, she had work to do. But she couldn’t concentrate on her demonic studies. Maybe there was something in one of these books about witches raised from the dead? Should she look up zombies?
Setting the teacup on the side table next to the teapot, she then pushed a tall wooden ladder along the dusty metal pipe to move it down toward the spell books. The books closest to her on the head-level shelves shifted to attention. This room was partially organized by topic, such as spell books, grimoires, herbals, incantations and hexes, et cetera. But within those categories there was no organization.
Looking over the vast shelves overstuffed with books, she shook her head. It was going to be a long yet interesting day.
* * *
Ed crossed a street lit with neon gleams from nearby restaurants and bars. It was midnight and he didn’t want to sit in the office or at home. Tamatha had called to say she was spending a late night at the Archives and not to look forward to seeing her. He never thought he’d miss seeing a woman daily, but he did. He tried to remember her scent. It was lemons, but he couldn’t summon the memory in his nose.
Really? He couldn’t remember the scent of a common fruit? He was acting stupid. Pussy whipped? Yes, he was.
Best he focus on business. He’d send Inego and Glitch to check on the cemetery guard. He hadn’t heard word from either, so he assumed no new zombie-witch action there.
A horn honked and he flipped off the driver as he crossed the street.
“Nice,” a familiar voice called from behind the wheel.
Ed turned a look over his shoulder and chuckled. “Kir! You see?” He splayed out his hands as he approached the car. “I knew it was someone worthy of my scorn.”
He joked. But he always sensed if either of the two of them held scorn toward the other, it was his brother for him. His werewolf half brother. They shared the same father, Colin Sauveterre. Kir had a thing about demons. He hated them. Although, he was getting better. He seemed to tolerate Ed.
And as hungry as he was for family, Ed tolerated the wolf’s tolerance.
Kir found a parking spot and the lanky wolf climbed out and gestured toward a tapas bar.
Good call.
* * *
The place was touristy, but Ed and Kir found stools at the end of the bar where one of the neon wall signs had blinked out, and it was as far from the ’80s-themed karaoke stage as they could possibly get.
Kir drank whiskey while Ed preferred absinthe. It had an acrid bite that appealed to his ultrasensitive palate. He could read old things and stale mossy forests in some of the better absinthes. This one was too processed, nothing but a chemical note.
“Thought that stuff was illegal,” Kir said of Ed’s foggy green drink.
“Only in the States. But it’s no longer like they used to make it in the nineteenth century, I’m sure. Rarely do I get a buzz off this stuff.”
“Maybe because you’re not human?”
“Possibly.” He clinked his glass against Kir’s and the two tilted back healthy swallows. “So what brings my werewolf brother to the red-light district? I thought you were married now? Would your faery wife appreciate you venturing into dark, seedy bars so late at night?”
“Bea is in a mood and the baby is teething. She sent me out for some groceries.”
“At midnight?”
“That’s her form of saying, ‘Don’t bug me—I’m cranky. Go have a beer. Chum around with your friends.’” Kir leaned his elbows on the bar counter. “Thing is, I don’t have friends after being banished from pack Valoir.”
“Aww...” Ed finished his drink and slammed the glass on the counter, signaling for another from the bartender. He clamped a hand across Kir’s shoulder. “You got me, bro.”
“You’re not looking much better than I am, my man. What’s up? You nearly walked right into my car out there. Deep thoughts?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Right. And my wife is a bundle of peaches and cream all the time. What is it? A woman?”
