by Rhys Lawless
He nodded with a grimace.
“We don’t have much choice, Graham. You heard them. They want to destroy humanity.”
“You are the one who accused me for justifying a wrong with a righteous attitude,” he said. “And now you’re doing the same thing.”
“Look how the tables have turned, huh,” I said. “If you’re so against what we’re doing, why didn’t you join your fucking gods?”
I’d had enough of his bullshit and him looking down on everything I did and any decision I made.
“How are we doing over there?” I asked the others.
Wade joined us and kneeled down.
“We think someone’s playing mind games, so Lloyd wants to be cautious.”
“We don’t have much time. If Danielle, or, worse, the demons get a whiff of what we’re doing, we’re toast,” I said.
“I’m on it,” Ash said, louder than expected, and he retracted the blade of his sword. “Time for Ash to play.”
He gave me a wink, and I braced myself. This wasn’t going to be easy to explain to these people after.
I watched Ash turn from a normal witch to a divine creature that emanated light. It was as if I was a ship and he was the lighthouse I was meant to avoid, but which I wanted to crash into so desperately. My breath slowed and the blood traveled down to my cock, giving me an instant boner, reminding me of the times we’d spent in bed and the countless orgasms he’d made possible.
I wanted to check on the others, but it was impossible to look at anyone but him. I could see Lloyd and his team were suffering a fate similar to mine.
“I need you here. Now,” Ash said, and his voice was not just a song, but also a command. One I couldn’t help obeying. I got to my feet and walked closer to him, brushing shoulders with Wade and Graham, and soon we were all hunched around Ash and his irresistible charm.
“Step aside. I only need him,” Ash said, and again I took a step back and watched as the others followed the same order.
When the space around him cleared, I saw the man opposite him take slow steps towards Ash, unable to stop himself.
The man finally stood right in front of Ash, and Ash gave the man his sword.
No. I wanted to shout. I wanted to stop him. What was he doing?
“Now, kill yourself,” he ordered the guy, and we all watched as the man placed the hilt in front of his heart and retracted the blade over it.
It was like I’d felt the pull of a magnet, and all of a sudden, that magnet stopped working. Ash looked like his normal self again, and I had control of my body.
I turned to Wade, who was staring at Ash as if he was still under his lure.
“What the fuck?” one of the hunters said.
“Remind me to never piss you off,” Lloyd said and nudged Ash’s shoulder.
“What is wrong with you, Ashton? When did you become heartless?” Graham shouted, and I rushed to shut his mouth with my palm.
The guy might be dead, but there were still others around.
“Since this guy was a convicted murderer who had miraculously escaped prison. The work of my lovely colleagues at the council I’m sure.”
“Who is this guy?” Wade whispered in my ear.
“In the human world? He’s an author. In the witch world? He’s an attorney for magical affairs. He’s the man whose house we robbed.”
“What? The man you were hired to protect?”
I nodded.
“He doesn’t look like he needs protection.”
“Trust me, he does,” I said, and we started moving again before I could explain to him. It wasn’t the right time to explain anyway.
We moved north, towards section C, and with the help from Lloyd, Ash, and their backup team, we took down more of the security witches inside.
Once we got to section C, we took the stairs down, and when we finally came to the restoration department, we put Graham to work.
“Work your craft, old man,” I said.
“You know, these old-man comments are getting exhausting. I’m not even a hundred yet.”
“Fine. Get to work, young man,” I corrected and let him take down the protection spells in the room.
“It’s done,” he said only moments later.
“Already?” I asked.
Graham smiled mischievously, like I’d never seen him do before, and rolled up his sleeves.
“I’m not a high priest for nothing, boy.”
“No comment,” was all I managed as I opened the door to let everyone in. Wade stepped in first, and before anyone else could walk in, a blue energy ball flashed and hit Wade right in the chest.
“No!” I shouted and jumped closer to him, already retrieving a spell from my gauntlet, which I immediately threw to the right in the direction of the witch who had attacked him.
The chaos spell swallowed him up and gave me a chance to get to Wade, who, despite the attack, was still standing.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He turned to look at me, and I expected to see him wincing, grimacing, or something to denote pain. I expected to see blood somewhere or burns from the electric charge of the energy ball. Something, anything. But there was nothing.
“I’m…I’m fine.”
“How is that possible?” Graham shouted and stepped inside too.
Maybe there was merit in Mother Red Cap’s words. Was Wade a witch? Or was this another outburst that had ended up protecting him from harm?
“I…we…we think he’s a witch,” I said, and both Wade and Graham looked at me like I was crazy.
“I’m not a witch.”
“He’s not a witch,” both Wade and Graham said at the same time.
“It was just another outburst,” Wade said.
“I would know if he was a witch,” Graham said.
“How else do you explain what’s happening?” I asked.
Lloyd stepped inside the department, followed by Ash and the rest of the hunters.
“Sorry, guys, are we interrupting some family drama? Are we here to steal something or recreate your favorite soap opera?” Lloyd said.
“He’s right.” Wade was quick to agree and looked around him. “Everybody look around for some really old shit.”
“You’re not helping,” Lloyd said. “Everything looks old.”
I turned in the direction of the witch still battling with the chaos spell. He’d be busy for a while. I walked around him and inspected the artifacts closest to him.
As expected, there was a glass case with a very old-looking book inside, written in a language I could not even begin to pretend to understand.
I walked around the case and looked for any clues. I’d known this plan wasn’t going to be foolproof, but I hadn’t thought we’d get stuck on the most important part.
Graham also made circles around with me, admiring the pages of the book, and Wade just watched us, trying to figure it out.
“Is this it?” Graham asked.
I wanted to reply with a “How the fuck am I supposed to know?” when I spotted it. A little label on the corner of the glass.
Artifact 332—1928/Isle of Wight, Demonology of Old Britain.
“This is it,” I said remembering the title of the upcoming exhibition.
“Great,” Graham said and placed two crystals at the left corners of the display and then walked around to place two more opposite.
“Absorb and protect,” he said, and the glass rippled.
I hadn’t known how he was going to do this, but now that I watched his spell take full effect, I had a newfound respect for his power.
The glass disappeared in a whirl, swallowed by the book, and the dust residue from the stones encased the entire tome and made it glow.
Within seconds a book that had to be kept in perfect conditions to stop it from decaying was exposed in the middle of an empty surface at normal room temperature, thanks to Graham’s spell.
“Okay, see, now that was cool.” Lloyd whistled just as my chaos spell expired
and the witch came out of its daze, but ready for a fight.
Lloyd didn’t even bother to look at him as he stabbed him with his sword, and the witch dropped dead next to him.
“We got it. Now what?” he asked as if nothing had happened.
Fourteen
Wade
Getting the book had been a task and a half. When Winston and his team had surrounded the guards, they’d had the upper hand, but as much protection as the swords Graham had laced could offer, they couldn’t do much against the witches’ natural powers. Winston lost three hunters, and as much as I wanted to stay behind and console him, we all had jobs to do. His job was to clean up the mess at the British Library before it opened again in the morning, and Caleb’s and my job was to get the book back to Mother Red Cap and get it translated.
Which was easier said than done. Not only did she have to find the right dictionary, but she also had to put together a spell to translate the book for us, but to do that, she’d have to bypass Graham’s protective spell.
Caleb and I rested by the fire pit while she was hard at work in her lab with the book.
“So,” I said to Caleb once Mother Red Cap had informed us she wouldn’t be much longer. “Tonight, I’ve met your ex and the boyfriend of another. You’ve had a few, haven’t you?”
It hadn’t been an easy night, and the thought had been bugging me since I’d seen Ash’s irresistible power, but it hadn’t been the right time to say anything. Not that now it was, but it was better than sitting in silence licking our wounds.
“Does that bother you?” Caleb said.
Did it bother me? I didn’t know. I didn’t care that he had a past. And I wasn’t going to be jealous of the men he’d been with. They were all there. In the past.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“But?”
“But…” I started, and I looked at him, his gray eyes had taken on an orange hue from the reflection of the flames. “It makes me think. When will you get bored of me?”
It sounded and felt wrong saying it, but if I was going to be honest with him, I had to tell him how I felt.
Caleb bit his lip and frowned.
“You…you think I dumped them? You think I got bored and moved on to the next toy?”
I tried to cut in and tell him no, but he didn’t let me.
“I never want to fall in love, Wade, but fucking hell, I do. A lot. And every time my heart gets twisted and pulled in all directions and then put through the fucking shredder for good measure.”
“What…what do you mean?”
“You know about Jin, but I’ve never told you about anyone else. Jin wasn’t my first, but he was my first love. And he was taken away from me in the most brutal way. And then it was Anthony, the cyclops.”
“Maximilian’s boyfriend.”
My comment took him by surprise. “Boyfriends? When I met them both they were just good buddies. I must have missed a few episodes. Anyway, yes, Anthony was the first guy I met after Jin. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that I’d met and lost you in the interim. I just knew there was a year’s worth of memories missing, and I didn’t know how to get them back.
“Anthony was good, but I was still grieving Jin’s loss two years later. For me, it’d only been a year. You know? He stayed with me for six months, and I let myself love him. I had my empathy by that time, so I could tell he loved me, and he wanted something more. But I couldn’t abandon Nora and Annabel. I had a responsibility towards the woman who’d saved my life, and I couldn’t leave my best friend to take care of her.
“But Anthony wanted to move in together, wanted a family of his own. Wanted things from me that I wasn’t ready to give him. I already had a family. I never really told anyone what Nora really was, so he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t let her go. I can’t blame him. When he got with me, he’d thought he was only getting me, not a whole package deal.”
“He didn’t like Nora?”
I didn’t know how anyone could say no to Nora and her charming little self, or how anyone couldn’t like Annabel and her no-bullshit attitude.
“No. It wasn’t just Nora. It was my life. Graham was hiring me for jobs all the time for the high council. Spying and things like that. He didn’t like what I was doing. Found it dishonest. So one day, he knocked on my door and told me he was done. He accused me of still being hung up on Jin, and that it had made me into something he didn’t like.”
“Fuck that shit. And you wanted to get rid of your emotions because of him? He sounds like an asshole. Which is a shame because Maximilian looks like a nice guy.”
Caleb shook his head.
“It’s not his fault. I am a lot to take on. And it’s not just Anthony. It’s a series of guys who all couldn’t be with me for one reason or the other. Ash was the last guy I put my faith in, until…until you.”
I took his gloved hand and squeezed it between mine.
“What did Ash do?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hate the guy.
“Graham hired me to protect this high-powered, high-class witch who had a stalker.”
“A stalker? Surely he could do what he did back there and make him disappear.”
Caleb looked into the flames and took a deep breath.
“He is powerful. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be a member of the high council, but his power comes at a cost. He can only manipulate people’s pheromones for so long before they lose their mind. And even if he doesn’t use it for long, as soon as they’re out of his radius, whatever he’s asked them to do doesn’t matter anymore.
“Which is how he got his stalker. Someone got addicted to the pheromone overload and lost their mind, so they started doing things no normal human being would do,” Caleb said.
“Okay.” I urged him to go on.
“So, I did. I protected him. But if you put an empath and a siren in the same room, things are bound to go kaboom.”
“And they did?”
“They did. We slept together. He used his power on me; I used my power on him. We had a wild run. And I’d thought it could last longer than the job. You know? Maybe we could keep seeing each other. But Ash…Ash would never be caught dead with someone like me.”
“How do you know?”.
“Because he told me. He said what we had could never be anything more because he could never present me to anyone. He had a status and a reputation to uphold.”
“I knew he was a douchebag!”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “So I walked out on him and on the job.”
“Good. He doesn’t deserve your protection with that attitude.”
“Too bad the council didn’t see it that way.”
“Fuck the council.”
“Fuck the council,” he agreed, and then silence filled the room once again. The only sound the crackling of the wood in the fire.
“The reason why I’m telling you all this is not because I want you to hate all my exes. It’s because I want you to understand that no one’s ever lasted, and I didn’t have much say in it. It’s not because I’m a player. It’s because I haven’t found someone who will take me as I am, bruises and all. The only ones who did ended up dead. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not going to get bored of you, Wade. But you might get bored of me, or I might lose you, and if I do, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
How could I have been so stupid? How could I have thought that Caleb’s feelings weren’t genuine. I’d been inside his head, had felt his emotions like he’d felt mine. I was an A-grade idiot for even starting on the subject, but at least now I knew. I knew that he was the guy I was meant to be with.
“I’m not going to get bored of you, okay?” I said. “And even if I die, I’ll find my way back to you. I’ll haunt you if I have to.” I put my hand on his cheek and turned his head so I could kiss those beautiful lips I’d missed kissing and stare into those handsome eyes I’d missed staring into.
“Glad to see you’ve kept busy.” I heard Mother Red Cap behind us,
and we both turned to look at her.
She was carrying the demonology book, which she placed on her desk. We rushed to our feet and huddled around the book, which now looked to be written in plain English.
“You’ve already cast the spell?” Caleb asked.
“It took precision and attention, but yes. It makes for an interesting read.”
Caleb leaned over the book and started reading:
“Before the age of man, a man made of fire and steel walked the earth. He wandered for hundreds and hundreds of years until mankind was born, looking for his one true love, but all he ever came upon was death and destruction.
“They named him the god of war because all he ever left behind him was blood and tears. His true name was Ealistair.
“One day, after a battle that nearly cost him his life, a raven came to him as he bled to death, and it fed on his blood. His power gave the raven so much strength that it turned into a beautiful woman unlike anything he’d ever seen. And she nursed him back to health by feeding him her blood. They were linked for life.
“Together they brought about the demise of kings and tormentors. They set slaves free, but there was something missing from their life.
“A child. After centuries of being together, they brought a daughter to life the same way the raven goddess, Rhafnet, had brought her husband back from certain death. And so Avalis was born.
“Avalis might have been made of blood and death, but she ruled with love and generosity. Her parents tried to raise her with their values, but her compassion broke through the darkest of days. She could bring to life anything that died.
“Rhafnet and Ealistair saw the beauty they’d created and had a vision of a world full of children like Avalis. The two parents came together and whispered the secrets of the universe to humans. No one had done that ever before. Those humans became something different, something else. They mastered powers beyond the physical realm. They became a mirror image of the gods that had created them.
“Avalis watched as the world became wrought with witches who took advantage of their powers to bring more destruction and chaos to the world. The witches, her parents’ creations, were nothing like her. They went against everything Avalis was and believed in. They didn’t help the world become a better place. They made it worse.
