Page 19 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
I found what I was looking for on the story below us, a hunting lodge full of mounted animal heads and taxidermic beasts from the 1920s. I remembered Violet bragging about it once, talking about her grandfather, the big game hunter with the safari hat made of bone who’d once possessed a prominent British prime minister.
Fan-freaking-tastic.
The idiot had also left an elephant head mounted to the wall of his hunting lodge with big, beautiful ivory tusks. An intelligent demon would remove all the ivory in the building, just for safety purposes.
But for a hundred-plus years, the elephant’s corpse had hung there safely, a morbid trophy, a grotesque death mask parading as art. And now … with a quick little summoning spell provided by my raven tattoo, it was mine.
The white tusk slipped into my hand, and I pushed it up and inside the sleeve of my robe, using yet another inked spell to bind it to my arm and cloak it from prying eyes.
Lastly, to keep up the illusion, I moved across the room and grabbed the glass vial. Violet let me do it, too, but I could see the smirk on her face in the mirror. Made me wonder if there wasn’t just a charm on this thing, but a curse or a hex instead.
I popped the top, gazed down at the liquid inside, and drank it.
I’d been the last one to join the Family Spells, so I had the least amount of firsthand experience with Graceley and Monster.
I knew her time with him was something nobody liked to talk about, and that she regularly took forget-for-now potions, so that she wouldn’t accidentally think about him.
But that was about it.
Watching them now … I wanted to tear that fucker’s throat out and watch him bleed. I cursed under my breath and caught the edge of one of my fangs on my lip, tasting copper in my mouth. Grace was stressed and, as per usual, it was my job to reduce rather than add to that stress.
Clearly, Hex was going to fall into the latter camp right along with Argent and Caine. And this demon fuck? This too-tall, too-muscular, too-handsome demonic skid mark, he was also clearly in the latter camp despite his lack of soulmate status.
It was comforting to know that, unlike myself, my wife only had one ex. There was only one man out there who’d felt her sweet embrace, the press of her ripe lips, the taste of her blood … Err. Actually, I was the only man who’d tasted her blood, but my point remained the same: there was only one dude in the universe who wasn’t a soulmate that had ever, uh, sampled Graceley’s carnal delights.
That is, had sex with her. Just one outside guy. As opposed to my sordid past (and Hex’s, it seemed), there wasn’t much there for me to be jealous over. Good thought. But watching Monster and the way his eyes followed Grace, the way hers followed him right back? Not good. Not at all. And even though he was an ex, he was also in the business of piling stress on my wife.
So, it didn’t matter if we were in Hael, in her garbage ex-boyfriend’s house, or on the bloody moon—I would stay calm. I would stay rational. I would massage my wife’s goddamn feet and rub her shoulders and murmur comforting platitudes.
“This sucks worse than O-neg blood,” I muttered aloud, swiping a hand over my face. Caine offered up a semi-sympathetic look and then shrugged.
“At least we can get rid of this demon urinal cake once this nonsense is over. Startin’ to wonder if we’ll ever be able to oust the one with the purple dick.” Caine paused briefly and tilted his head as he studied me with amber eyes. “What’s different about O negative blood?”
“Seems bland at first, but it has an aftertaste.” I paused for a minute to think of the right way to describe it as the endless glare of the red afternoon beamed down on us. We’d headed out of Monster’s cave-house and were now calf-deep in a field of snow-white flowers with teeth.
They nipped at my pants as I walked by, and I resisted the urge to start stomping on them. Just because I was freaking out about Grace’s possible pregnancy was not a reason for me to lose my cool right now. If our family was going to get out of this mess alive, we needed to keep our wits about us. Besides, what sort of kick-ass ex-rockstar vamp loses his shit on a bunch of pissed-off tulips?
“Alternative sweeteners,” I said finally, snapping my fingers. “That’s what O-neg tastes like. Fucking stevia or some shit. That aftertaste is gag-worthy.”
Caine and I paused our conversation as Grace swept past; she was talking to herself. Not a good sign.
