Nava Katz Box Set 2

by Deborah Wilde

  Ro had wrapped Grigory in a drop cloth and was carrying him into a stainless steel, walk-in freezer. Good thing we had another freezer in the kitchen upstairs. Separate kosher refrigeration for milk and meat was one thing, but food and corpses was a whole other ballgame.

  “Did you know who he was?” I hovered in the doorway, rubbing my arms against the icy draft.

  “Not until Baruch raged out. Ms. Clara said their relationship was kept need to know so Grigory wouldn’t get any preferential treatment.”

  “We don’t have the ability to prepare him for a Jewish burial,” Elena said. She directed Rohan to place the body on the top shelf of the metal rack that lined one wall. How many more of us would fill those shelves before this was over? “Apparently he didn’t have any other family. Ms. Clara is tracking down who his next of kin would be.”

  Elena emerged from the freezer and shut the heavy steel door. “I’m going to call my grandmother.”

  I brushed a lock of hair out of Ro’s eyes. “Did you know him?”

  “Not well.” He buried his face in my neck and sighed. “Having you here helps.”

  “Same. What did I do to deserve you?” I said.

  “Do you? Or I am just a very charitable dude?”

  “I’m your charity case?” I did a quick scan out the door. All was quiet, so I dropped to my knees on the concrete floor, scooting under the island in the empty space usually reserved for garbage and recycling bins. Totally hidden from view.

  I unzipped Ro’s jeans.

  “Sparky,” he warned.

  “If I’m a charity case, I have to earn my keep.” I snapped my teeth a couple of times. “Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of this.”

  “Uh, no thanks, Bitey.” Ro wrestled me for control of his jeans, but I zapped his hands away and pulled out his dick.

  “I take back the charity comment. My lovely wonderful girlfriend.” The corners of his eyes were strained in apprehension.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I flicked my tongue to the tip of his soft cock, slowly taking him into my throat, luxuriating in the feel of him hardening.

  He threaded his fingers through my hair.

  “Hands on the counter, buddy.”

  I swirled my tongue around the tip, licking my way down his shaft, and sucked his balls into my mouth.

  They tightened and jerked upward, like he’d been shocked by a live wire.

  Rohan watched the doorway, but when his gaze flicked down to me, they sparked a dangerous gold lava.

  Cuntessa throbbed. I pressed my legs together, hot and aching and inhaled his musky scent. I poured my heat and lust down the shaft of his cock with my lips and tongue, my magic buzzing against his velvet hardness.

  There had been a wariness to Rohan since he’d returned. He’d had flashes of letting himself go, but this wasn’t the boyfriend who had always been one hundred percent present and open around me. Sex was one place I could always get through to him, and if that was what it took to convince him that, with me, at least, he could drop that last wall and relax all the time, I’d do it.

  It was an exhausting way to live, for him and for me. We needed to be that place for each other where we could take a full, deep breath, completely at ease.

  Ro snapped his hips in a furious staccato. His fingers squeezed the edge of the island counter top while his mutterings were part begging for more and part exaltations that sent electric shivers through me.

  I shoved my hand down the front of my shorts, rubbing Cuntessa furiously.

  “Fuuck.” Rohan grabbed my shoulders, a predatory gleam in his eyes.

  “Yo, Rohan.” Footsteps pounded into the room.

  “Drio.” Ro sounded calm, but behind the counter, out of view, he tried to push me off him. “What’s up?”

  I deep-throated his length, holding his hips still with one hand while still getting myself off. If Drio came around the island, he’d find us. My nipples stiffened into peaks.

  “Got Durukti’s location,” Drio said. “Shivani is going to portal us to India and check for wards, since Nava’s gotten so testy about transporting us.”

  Still on my knees, hidden from view, I raised my middle finger.

  Rohan caught my hand, putting it on his iron-hard dick, his hand over mine, stroking himself. His expression remained calm but from the waist down, he was one long line of rigidity. “Great. Be there in ten.”

  “More like three. And for fuck’s sake, don’t let the witches see your cum face. It’s disturbing. Madonna Mia, the shit I have to deal with.” Drio stomped out.

  I snorted my laughter.

  Ro tried to disentangle himself from me. “He’s right. We can’t do this here.”

  “We can do it in a park, we can do it in the dark. We can do it in a ring, we can do most anything.” Still on my knees, I widened my stance, stroking my clit, my eyes not leaving his. “But it’s your call.”

  With a groan, he tangled his fingers in my hair and pulled me to him, thrusting into my mouth.

  Grinning, I clamped down on his thighs with a vise-grip and gave him a virtuoso blow job, sucking him off harder and faster.

  I ground my hips, my clit a sensitive bundle of nerves, and my fingers a slippery mess. Silver magic crackled off my skin, its brilliance reflected in the golden depths of his eyes.

  His cock thickened. I sucked on the head and with a growl that vibrated out of him, Rohan shuddered and came hard, pushing me into my own intense orgasm with a wanton moan.

  I swallowed every drop, then sat back on my calves, and daintily wiped the corner of my mouth off with my pinky.

  Chest heaving, he stared down at me, wild and disheveled, then he grabbed me by the shoulders, hauled me to my feet, and gave me a bruising kiss.

  Eagerly meeting his lips, I flung my arms around his neck, our tongues tangling.

  “I can taste myself on you.” He bit my lower lip.

  I squirmed against him, wanting him to bite me all over. “How long will you be gone?”

  Rohan shrugged, a flash of resignation in his eyes. “Not sure.” He pulled off the new hoodie he’d bought that had a cool blocky graphic design on it. “Here.” He draped the sweater over my shoulders. “My blue one you always wore burned up in the fire.”

  The fabric was the softest cotton. I stuffed my arms through the sleeves and rubbed my cheek against it. It already smelled like Ro, all iron and musk. I wanted to grab him and hide him away. I’d just gotten him back. What if this time, he didn’t return?

  But I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. He didn’t need to be worrying about my headspace when he was off to find a demon.

  I pressed a sweet kiss to his lips. “Stay safe. I’ll miss you.”

  He tucked a curl behind my ear. “I was wrong about the bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, then bliss. Bliss isn’t my end goal—it’s my every moment with you.”

  My chest swelled with the love and promise in those words. He’d be back. The bullshit wasn’t over, but neither was the bliss. Not by a long shot. “Rohan Liam Mitra, I kinda adore you.”

  He ducked his head, his lashes an inky smudge along his cheek, and a shy half-grin quirking his lips. “I kinda adore you, too.”

  “I’m leaving!” Drio yelled.

  Rohan caressed my cheek and left.

  “Sheket!” Baruch clapped his hands together to get everyone in the auditorium to be quiet. “Interviews are concluded and we’ve got your groups. Leaders will be Rasha or witches with experience killing demons.”

  Next to Baruch, Mahmud consulted a clipboard. “Any witch with fight training from their regular life is being paired with less experienced women.”

  Kind of like dance captains. Let them mentor the nervous or uncertain ones.

  Mahmud called out the groups and I crossed my fingers that I wasn’t stuck with Facial Piercing Witch, otherwise known as Jezebel. No, that wasn’t me being a bitch, it was her preferred name.

  “Nava,” he said. “You’re with Hua, Alice, Catriona, and Isleen.”

&nb
sp; We were one of the first groups in the training room and it became quickly apparent when I asked them to show me how they threw a punch that I hadn’t gotten the experienced witches. Hua, the Chinese woman working on the Hellgate problem was a committed pacifist who was uncomfortable with violence even toward demons, and the other three, middle-aged triplets from Ireland, just giggled.

  Oy vey.

  My stupid twin found my frustrations hilarious.

  I took a sip from the water fountain, having called a break after forty-five minutes of pointlessness. “It’s not funny.”

  “It’s a bit funny. You’re acting like a drill sergeant.” Ari glanced in the room at the four women huddled in one corner. “They look miserable.”

  “I was trying to motivate them.” I snapped my ponytail tight.

  “To do what? Self-medicate?”

  “Go away and harass your own group.”

  Telling them all the ways they could die if they didn’t commit to this training was not the way to go. I’d go with my forte—humor. Amazing how humiliating myself with the story of when my magic kicked in broke the ice. I followed it up by telling of my paralyzing fear with the half-demon that had come after me, and how if Ari hadn’t been there, I would have died.

  “I’m not going to lie and say you’ll never be scared, but I want to make sure you never freeze up. Demon hunting is your new reality. Will you help me to help you to stay alive and fight another day?”

  It worked. Even Hua agreed to follow the training regime that Baruch had detailed for us.

  Training had gotten off to a clunky start, but when we found our footing? We were unstoppable.

  About a week after my group had gotten onboard, Catalina came breathlessly running up to me, her hair flying free from its usual neat bun.

  A council of eight Rasha and witches was being set up to oversee all concerns moving forward. Raquel and Baruch were appointed as the first two seats. If we could make Hex Factor work, we’d have a better shot of convincing the rest of the witch community to get involved, which, let’s face it, they’d have to do eventually. As would the other Rasha once we found where Sienna had them imprisoned. When Catalina wasn’t busy with her group, led by Cisco, she was helping Baruch and Raquel out.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  She pulled a piece of folded paper out of her dress and pressed it into my hand. “The purification ritual to purge Lilith’s magic from you. I figured it out.”

  I unfolded the paper and read the words to be chanted. We had the magic flame and I was working on getting Satan’s blood. “What about the resin for the mikvah? Did you solve that problem?”

  Catalina pulled out her elastic and, deftly rewinding her bun tight, spoke a few words.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The cavernous room hewn into the base of the Mule Mountains in southern Arizona dripped with condensation, infusing the air with a fetid vegetative rot. Row upon row of demons slumbered in the shadows. The demons were dead-ringers for the Grinch, green, fuzzy and standing on two legs, except they had curved scorpion tails. Muted sun slashed the space, all hard edges, creating a path barely wide enough for someone to navigate sideways through the sleeping spawn.

  Making sure no part of me touched the shadows, which would instantly wake the scorpion demons, I crossed the room, sucking in my gut at a particularly narrow part of the sunlit path. A demon’s skinny frame was an inch from my nose, his sleeping face trapped in a sly smile, and his segmented tail curving up behind him.

  The hunger of these unnatural beings rolled off them. They pulsed with the desire to feed and kill, a tangible yearning that I had to navigate as much as the shadows. These demons gathered here twice a year, extracting copper from the mountain range and synthesizing it to produce their venom. They would then fan out over other remote mountainous regions and find unwitting human prey.

  The easy thing would have been to kill all of them except the leader, who produced the most concentrated venom which would form the basis of the resin to seal the mikvah bath, but easy was not in the cards. The damn creatures were all linked like those root systems of weeds that grew in between sidewalk tiles, and if I took out the hordes, the leader would die and I’d be out of luck.

  I may have been super powerful, but these fuckers were terrifying on a deep, primal level and there were hundreds of them jammed in here with me. Every tiptoed footfall sounded like a sledgehammer in this eerie silence, my senses heightened with the forbidding weirdness of being the only one awake, knowing that if I disturbed them, hundreds of eyes would snap open and rush me.

  I touched my lighter talisman for luck.

  Slowly, torturously, I pressed forward, despite the fact that my head throbbed so badly I’d have drilled a hole in my skull for relief. I had a slew of extremely capable magic people whom I could have asked for help, but I wasn’t yet ready or able to make myself vulnerable while someone had access to my mind. These headaches were a weakness I couldn’t afford, not with everything I faced and I’d have to seek assistance. Soon. When the thought didn’t make me break out in a cold sweat, swamped by the memory of not knowing what was real.

  Meantime, I sucked it up and forced one foot in front of the other, until I stood in front of the leader.

  Main Grinch was broader and wider than the rest. Instead of a downy pelt, his green body was a thick crustaceous shell. The bulbous chamber on the end of his tail was so heavy with venom that it curved over to bob at my shoulder height.

  The venom pouch was in direct sunlight, but with the shifting sunlight, I only had a couple of minutes to drain it before it would be in shadow and my opportunity would be lost. If I touched the pouch at that point, the demon would wake up, as would all the others, and I’d be fighting all of them in order to get the venom.

  I was milking a scorpion demon like some kind of ruddy farming wench. A new low.

  Catalina had provided me with magic-coated protective gloves, which ran from my fingertips to my shoulder. I uncapped the leather wine bladder hanging on a rope around my neck and positioned the container under the tip of the scorpion’s tail. Tamping down on my desire to run screaming, I squeezed the venom bulb, producing a few drops of a clear secretion.

  Oddly, the secretion smelled like mint.

  I kept one eye on sunlight and the other on the bladder.

  As I drained the sac, the demon’s pulsing hunger mellowed out. A familiar musky aroma teased my senses. The demon bulb became engorged, the secretion turned milky.

  Dear lord, I was giving a demon a hand job. Again. Nope. This was my all-time low. Catalina should have prepared me for this client like a good pimp. The bulb jerked in my hand and I shuddered. That’s it. Next time I had to jerk off a demon, I was getting an hourly wage. High-end escort pay, not “will blow for spare change.”

  Only the tip of the venom bulb remained in sunshine. Just the tip, ma’am. It throbbed in my hand, then with a convulsion, gooshed all over my arm. I strangled my hysteric laughter.

  The magic coating on my protective gloves flared, fighting the venom with a sizzle that stank of burned rubber.

  The entire demon was now in shadow. Problematic since my glove, dripping with toxic demon cum, still gripped his limp bulb.

  His eyes snapped open, a bright red fire swirling over them.

  I portalled the fuck out, back to the school, where I cleansed the outside of the bladder of venom and tossed the gloves. I’d just helped a scorpion demon to a happy ending, which was bound to scar psychologically, but I had two of the three ritual ingredients.

  It was a much-needed win and not the only one I experienced. The witches’ confidence was blooming on all fronts.

  My group had been herded to the computer lab. These women knew their histories and old demon lore, and in sharing that, they found a renewed sense of purpose, ownership, and connection to their foremothers in this fight.

  Pierre grabbed a slice of questionably-fresh pepperoni pizza from the mound of boxes on a t
able, his phone pressed to his ear. “Left or right?”

  I peered over his shoulder.

  “Elena’s grandmother,” he mouthed at me.

  He typed “zire kill spot left side base of horn” into the new demon database. Originally called “Orwell 2.0,” all had agreed the name needed to be scrapped. Leo ended up christening the information system “Ada” after Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter and the computer science pioneer from the 1800s, and it stuck.

  “Ladies, with me, please.” Leo beckoned my group over. She had volunteered to fight but also recognized that going into the demon realm might produce a less-than-desirable effect on her, so she’d committed herself to getting Ada off the ground, determining that’s where she would be of most use.

  She set my group up in front of monitors with detailed questionnaires on the screens pertaining to various aspects of witch lore about demons and magic history.

  I dragged a chair over to Kane, by himself at a desk in the corner, and sat down. “Working on Ada?”

  “No.” He swore under his breath and deleted a series of commands. “Mandelbaum keeps his group constantly on the move. There’s no pattern to his relocations, and my money trail investigation is stuck one step behind him.”

  “Sucks.”

  There’d been no success finding the imprisoned Rasha either. Sienna had someone on her side who was just as talented a hacker as Kane and, as we learned to our chagrin, was deliberately creating intricate false money trails.

  I patted his shoulder. “If anyone can find them, you will.”

  “Obviously, babyslay. It’s me and my genius at work.”

  We stuck to our schedules until a few days later, when Mahmud’s group destroyed a nest of demons fouling a critical water supply in Bangladesh. Hex Factor’s first big win.

  Rasha had a good sense of the hot spots for demon activity and adding access to the demon dark web into our tracking gave us both a clearer picture of what certain demons were up to and where to find them. This streamlined the hunting process.