“Here you go, baby,” Mac said, helping me brush the awful taste out of my mouth. “You amaze me, Zelda—your power, your compassion. I’m humbled by everything that you are and I thank the Goddess you’re mine.”
“I wanted to play Princess and the Penis at the hotel,” I whispered with a weak smile. “Not sure that’s gonna happen.”
Mac’s delighted laugh want all through me and my weak smile grew a little wider.
“You did not just say Princess and the Penis,” he said, still laughing.
“I most certainly did,” I shot back as I leaned against him and breathed him in. “It would have been so awesome.”
“I’m sure it would have been and don’t count the fairytale out just yet, my witch,” he said with a wink. “But I think we need to check on your patient first.”
“Shit,” I said, smacking myself in the head and then wincing. I’d been whacked enough for one day. I didn’t need to add to it. “Let’s go.”
Zorro was a new man. He was beautiful before, but now he was redonkulous. His purple leather suit was back on and he was moving around without agonizing pain for the first time in I didn’t even know how long. Tears streamed from his eyes and for the second time in an hour, he went to his knees.
“I am in your debt, Zelda,” he whispered reverently. “You are a miracle.”
“Nope,” I said with a relieved grin that he was fixed. “I’m a materialistic, profane witch who got saddled with healing furballs. Get up, dude. You’re making me itchy.”
“As you wish, gurlfriend,” Zorro said with a grin. “We shall see you at the witching hour?”
“Yep. Make sure Zach is there,” I replied, leaning back on Mac again. I was going to have to take a long nap this afternoon or there was no way I could stay awake until midnight. Repairing someone’s entire system of internal organs could tire a girl out.
“Zach will be there,” Willow promised, bowing to me as well.
Willow wrapped her arms around a beaming Zorro and they disappeared in a pine-scented breeze and a pop of green sparkles.
“Well, it’s a good thing I only blew up the living room of the suite,” I commented as I took Mac’s hand and headed for the bedroom… to sleep. “It would have sucked to sleep on the floor.”
And then I slept like the dead.
I was bone-tired, but I was proud of myself. I was becoming a beautiful witch inside and out. It sure as fuck wasn’t easy, but it felt very, very, very good.
Chapter Twelve
“Did you know that a pig orgasms for thirty minutes?” Sassy asked as we trudged through the woods looking for the X.
No one said anything because there wasn’t much to say. The map Zorro had given us was vague and we were all frustrated. I could feel the magic in the air, but it was elusive and strange. However, I did feel safe in the woods surrounded by the magnificent towering trees. I wondered briefly if I could call to the trees, but my BFF’s incessant yacking made it hard to think. Sassy had been educating us for the last thirty minutes with information she’d learned on Animal Planet. At this rate, I was going to disconnect her cable when we got home. Only Jeeves appeared interested and proud of the mostly gag-inducing facts his mate was spewing.
“A cockroach can live for nine days without its head before it starves to death,” she pointed out as she ran smack dab into an enormous tree. “Dang it. That smarts.”
“Youse is kiddin’ me,” Fat Bastard said as he, Jango Fett and Boba Fett appeared in a blast silver magic and smoke. “I wanna be a fuckin’ pig.”
I screamed. Sassy jumped so high she ran right back into the tree. Mac swore and Jeeves just laughed.
“Where have you fat asses been and how did you find us?” I demanded, with my hand over my rapidly beating heart. We were in the middle of thick woods about an hour outside of Lexington. I was pretty sure the dorks could track me, but I usually heard them coming.
“So youse decided to be a girl again?” Fat Bastard inquired accusingly, as he settled his porcine ass on a bed of pine needles and lifted his leg high in preparation for a nad lick.
“What are you talking about?” I snapped as I waved my hand and dressed his bottom half in a cement diaper so he couldn’t get to his giggle berries.
“When youse ignored us and pretended youse didn’t know who we was, weese figured dat was a sign,” Boba Fett explained as he gave me a pissy glare.
“A sign for what?” I asked, not following the story or their reasoning. Not that I ever could truly follow what was going on in their warped kitty minds.
Jango just hissed. Apparently, he wasn’t speaking to me. WTF?
“You dumbasses better tell me what’s going on right now,” I told them. “I have a lot of shit on my plate and I have no time for cryptic crap.”
“Zelda is speaking German,” Sassy told my pissed off cats. “She didn’t really mean shit on a plate. However, since we were at a poop convention this morning, she could have meant shit on a plate—which would be all kinds of fucking gross. But the shit—shit being a Canadian word…”
“Youse said Zelda was speaking German,” Fat Bastard said, perplexed.
“She was,” Sassy said with an eye roll. “German and Canadian are practically the same. It’s easy to get the accents confused. Anyhoo, the shit that’s not literal shit is that Zelda has a twin brother with a mother who drinks blood who is not her mother—which makes the twin thing slightly confusing to me. But since everyone else seems cool with that, I’m gonna guess they were speaking Swedish. Not to mention we found a gay goat shifter named Zorro who smokes menthol cigarettes with his butthole. Ohhh, and then there’s Willow who promised me a new dress if I didn’t set myself on fire. Also, polar bears are left-handed and lions have been known to bump fuzzies fifty times in one day.”
“I’m a little baffled here,” Jango stated, scratching his kitty head and trying to figure out if Sassy’s diatribe had imparted anything useful.
“I’m not. Maybe bein’ a lion would be better dan bein’ a pig,” Boba said thoughtfully.
“Lions are cats, youse douchebag,” Fat Bastard said, whacking Boba in the back of his furry head. “If dey can get some stanky on the hang down fifty times a day, weese can too.”
I almost puked in my mouth, but I had more important stuff to deal with right now. “Back to my original question. Where have you been?”
“Youse gots a twin?” the Bastard asked, narrowing his eyes at me.
“Possibly,” I told him.
“Well, dats certainly some farked up news. Also explains why youse pretended not to know us,” he said, as he struggled to get to his feet but collapsed under the weight of his cement diaper.
The facts supporting Zach actually being my twin kept increasing. My own familiars thought that he was me? Unreal.
“Oh shit,” Jango choked out.
“What?” I demanded. It was almost midnight and we hadn’t found the X yet. If we missed meeting up with Zorro, Willow and Zach it would suck tremendously. My damn cats needed to get to the point. Fast.
“Umm…” Jango mumbled, not making eye contact. “Weese might have been mad dat youse ignored us.”
“I didn’t,” I told them.
“Weese know dat now,” Fat Bastard said, also not making eye contact. “But weese don’t like bein’ ignored.”
“Oh my Goddess, what did you buttwads do?” I asked.
They exchanged glances and then shrugged in unison. Their unofficial idiot leader, Fat Bastard cleared his throat.
“Weese might have done a little tiny bit of graffiti work,” he admitted.
“How little?” I shot back, not liking the sound of this.
“Well, weese might have enhanced Rump Arena with a few cuss words,” Fat Bastard muttered.
“All of it?” I shouted. Rupp Arena was fucking enormous—it covered at least three city blocks.
“No, dollface,” Fat Bastard said.
I sighed in relief. My freakin’ cats were train wrecks.
“Only three sides,” Jango said.
My freakin’ cats were about to be dead train wrecks.
I inhaled through my nose and exhaled through my mouth. My cats grew wildly uncomfortable. They didn’t like it when I stayed calm… and they shouldn’t…
“Instead of tying you together by your tails and hurling you like a furry Frisbee into the great beyond, you’re gonna take your misdemeanor loving sphincters back to Rupp Arena. The three of you are going to paint the entire building. Tonight. If even one profanity is left on the walls in the morning, you will be licking it off. You feel me?” I ground out.
“But weese only defaced three sides,” Boba pointed out.
“Unless you can get paint to match the clean side, you will paint the whole fucking thing,” I snapped.
“Youse is a hard woman, dollface,” Fat bastard said with a grin.
“Thank you. I think this is a mature way to handle it,” I replied. “My first instinct was to shave you bald, take pictures and put them on the internet.”
“I’d wax them,” Sassy said. “If you shave them, you’ll get hair all over your fabu dress. With the wax, the fur will come off in bloody clumps. Waxing ensures there won’t be a bunch of excess hair floating around. I could film you doing it with my phone and we could send it to Animal Planet.”
“And on dat note, we’re outta here,” Fat Bastard said, smacking his little kitty paws together as the three of them vanished in a puff of smoke.
They’d been waxed by Sassy not too long ago for firing her chipmunk sons and had sequestered themselves for weeks after that. There was no way in hell my cats were going to hang out and see if Sassy was for real.
“You do realize your familiar is still wearing a cement diaper,” Mac commented with a chuckle.
“Not my problem,” I shot back with a grin. “We need to find the X.”
“You’ve found it,” Zach said as he stepped out of the shadows and took in our group.
“Where are Willow and Zorro?” I asked, watching him warily.
He wasn’t exactly happy to see me, but he didn’t seem like he was as angry either.
“Right here, gurlfriend,” Zorro said, dropping down from the branch of a tree.
“And Willow?” I looked up to see if she was about to drop in as well.
“Right here,” Willow said as she disengaged herself from the trunk of the tree I was standing next to. Or at least I thought she did.
I rubbed my hands over my eyes. I had to be seeing things. Maybe I’d needed a longer nap. Healing Zorro had almost wrecked me. Willow’s arrival was the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed.
“Umm… you have a twig in your hair,” I said as reached over and pulled it out.
Willow winced as it detached from her head and broke off in my hand. Quickly handing the twig back to her, I felt horrible. I was pretty sure what I’d just done equated to ripping hair out of her head. She smiled and placed the leafy stick back on her head where it promptly reattached itself. WTF? I mean I was a freakin’ witch mated to a man who turned into a wolf. Why was any of this odd to me?
“So… umm… You’re a tree?” I asked.
Willow shook her head and giggled. “Nope.”
“Could have sworn you just walked out of a tree,” I told her.
“Kind of,” she agreed.
“It’s just a trick,” Zach said, growing impatient.
Willow sighed sadly and shook her chin fell. Clearly, it wasn’t just a trick. Zach was too wrapped up in his own hell to bother to figure out the woman who adored him. I understood this all too well. However, I still didn’t know what Willow was.
“I haven’t much time,” Zach said flatly. “Who are these people with you? Can they be trusted?”
“We can be trusted,” Mac said coolly, staring at Zach in shock. “I’m Zelda’s mate, Mac. And this is my son, Jeeves. We’re all family.”
Jeeves was equally as surprised at how identical Zach and I were. It still freaked me out. And it definitely freaked Zach out.
“Thank you for healing Zorro,” Zach said begrudgingly. “As I’m never at full power, I haven’t been able to truly take care of him.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” I said flatly. “I did it for him.”
“Whatever your reason, I’m grateful.”
I nodded and tried to spot traces of the spell cast on him lingering around his aura. Nothing. Shit. That meant it was intricate or cast by a species I wasn’t familiar with.
“We have to touch each other,” I said, slowly approaching him and feeling more whole with each step.
“Why?” Zach asked as he too felt the pull.
“One, because I need to feel for the spell and see if I can break it.”
I took two more steps forward. He did too.
“And two?” he asked, looking ashen and pained.
“Because I need to,” I whispered, now face to face with him. I didn’t dare initiate. I waited for my brother to touch me first.
“Will this work?” Zach asked tersely.
He searched my face looking for something. Himself? I knew that’s what I was looking for in his eyes.
“I have no fucking idea if it will work, but since the moment I saw you I wanted to touch you. Did you feel the same draw?”
“I did,” he admitted though it seemed to frustrate him.
“On three?” I asked.
His nod was curt and his hand shook as he raised it to mine. My skin felt too tight on my body and my breathing came out in short bursts. As our fingertips met, a gust of light golden magic exploded around us. Closing my eyes, I felt the tears leak out and roll down my cheeks. I tasted the salty drops and knew this was just the beginning of the pain we needed to feel so we had a chance to heal… together. I wrapped my arms around the person I should have had by my side for the last thirty-one years.
Zach held me tight and pressed his forehead to mine. His memories became tangled with my own and I gasped at how degrading and horrifying his life had been. Placing my hands on either side of his face, I tried to absorb his pain. However, my twin was doing the same. The devastation I experienced seeing his past fly across my vision was tempered as he tried to absorb the pain of my childhood.
His touch was full of love. My touch told the same story. The love we had for each other was clear, true and simple—the love that had been stolen from us by a woman so heinous there weren’t enough words to make it make sense.
“I can’t find the spell,” I whispered raggedly. “Where is it?”
“I have no memory of it,” he said. “I was a baby.”
“I can find it,” Sassy said, stepping forward. “If you trust me.”
“How?” Zach asked, glancing over at my insane BFF.
“I can go into your mind and search your memories,” she replied.
“Nope. No way,” I said without missing a beat. “I can’t take that risk. I just found Zach.”
Jeeves stepped forward and gently touched my back. “Sassy is an expert now. She has practiced on me, her father, and Marge daily for the last two months. Marge insisted that she become a master at mind diving… and now I think I know why.”
“Fuck Baba Yaga and Cookie Witch,” I muttered still hanging onto Zach as if my life depended on it. “They probably knew all about this.”
“I don’t think so,” Mac said, coming to my side and placing his hands on both Zach and me. “I didn’t know that the pack in Lexington had scattered and were being systematically eliminated. Even though magic is everywhere, the details are not always evident. I can say with great confidence that Baba Yaga would not have let this continue to happen if she had known.”
“Gurlfriend, can I cut in here?” Zorro inquired.
“Sure,” I replied.
“The one thing Henrietta’s power can do is mask what is happening around her—it’s a dark power,” Zorro explained, shuddering. “She claims to be able to kill with a touch, but I’ve never seen that happen. I think it’s
a lie.”
“It’s not,” Willow said with a catch in her voice. “It’s not a lie.”
Zach said nothing, but his jaw worked a mile a minute.
We all mulled the awful nugget of info in silence for a bit. Henrietta Smith had to be done away with, but if that meant killing my brother it was out of the question. However, if I could break the spell…
“Sassy? If you can swear on Witch’s Honor you won’t hurt my brother, I want you to do it. I need you to find the spell in his memories. Or maybe the spell is in my memory too,” I said, getting excited. “Go into my head and see if I have it. Then we don’t have to touch Zach.”
“Absolutely not,” Zach snapped, pulling away from me. “None of this is a good idea. If there’s a chance of it going wrong, your friend will harm me—not you. If I die, my mother dies. I will go on to the Next Adventure knowing I did something worthy with my life.”
“I don’t like that,” I snapped as my fingers began to spark.
“Do I look like I care?” Zach snapped right back.
“Actually you do, dick,” I said with a raised brow.
“Maybe I do, asshole,” he shot back with a small smile on his lips. “But what I say goes here. My life means far less than yours. If someone dies tonight, it will be me. Goddess knows it will be a relief.”
Willow’s muffled cry didn’t go unnoticed by me, but Zach seemed not to hear it.
“I’m ready,” he said to Sassy. “Please avoid my other memories if possible. I wouldn’t want to put that on any living being.”
Sassy nodded. Putting down her broom, she centered herself and slowly approached Zach. Gone was the flighty idiot and in her place was a powerful, beautiful witch. Her blonde hair floated around her head and her skin glowed. Placing her hands on my brother’s temples, she leaned in and kissed his forehead.
“Relax, Zach,” she whispered in a voice full of confidence and love. “Let me in.”
The enchantment that floated through the forest was golden in color and laced with hints of pink. It tickled my nose and calmed my soul. Zach closed his eyes as Sassy wandered around his memories. She was as still as if she was in a trance and her brow was wrinkled in deep thought.
Switching Witches Page 10
