Page 39 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and I knew our backup was coming, the coven members Suze thought would be most likely to care for us after we passed out. The ones who could defend us if we were attacked in the middle of the spell.
I turned just in time to see … Clarissa Kate.
Cauldron and cocksucking brews.
This … was gonna be bad.
“High Priestess,” Clarissa—‘call me Rissa’—Kate said, pausing in the doorway. Her dark brown eyes drifted up to find Monster, and the expression dropped entirely from her face. She was blank. Nothing. Empty. Her eyes swung my way as her suitors—she also had four though she had yet to commit to a single one—paused in the hall behind her. “Why is there a demon in your mother’s house, Graceley.”
And there she went, dropping honorifics entirely. I wasn’t High Priestess anymore, just Graceley. Not a good start to the evening. I looked up at the clock on the wall.
We had an hour left.
The spell itself would only take fifteen minutes at most. If we fucked it up, there was no do-overs. This was it. We got one try at this or …
Rissa stepped aside when Spectre and Caine reappeared, my mother held on a blanket between them. They’d done the rest of us a service by covering up her lower half.
At this point, it didn’t matter much.
She barely looked alive.
My entire body went cold, and I shook out my hands, meeting Rissa’s gaze.
“Monster is irrelevant; he’s to remain unharmed until I have a chance to speak properly with you—”
Rissa’s eyes widened in my direction. She didn’t like me bossing her around. After all, I was only the High Priestess. She was the goddess-fucking Maiden. One of Coven Apothecary’s Three.
I could only imagine where our Crone was. Likely sitting outside in the shadows, watching the children dance around the bonfire. I shuddered. Hopefully she wouldn’t eat any of them. It’d never happened in our coven, but … but sometimes. I bet Coven Wyrmwood’s Crone chewed on infants as an afternoon snack.
“You brought a full-blooded demon up from Hael and didn’t think to tell me?” she whispered, her dark hair a raven sheet that she wore split down the middle. She was twenty-two and very pretty, with big almond-shaped brown eyes, skin like porcelain, a small pink mouth. She was also a total fuckface.
I disliked her to the point of fantasizing about the day she lost her virginity and could no longer be the Maiden. She flirted and teased and rubbed on her lovers to the point that she was just shy of crossing that line. Virginity, as such, is primarily a social construct. But any good witch could tell the moment a Maiden ceased to be a Maiden; it was in the eyes.
Not a bad thing, not at all. Mothers and Crones were far more powerful. It was just a life shift, and Rissa was on her way to the edge of it.
“Without him, we’d all be dead,” I told her, and from the look on her face, I could see that she would’ve preferred that. Me, my husbands, my mother, dead rather than put up with the presence of a demon in our world.
Pretty damn intolerant for someone whose race didn’t hail from earth whatsoever.
“How did I not sense him?” she demanded, but that was a question I couldn’t answer. Whatever Monster was doing, whatever glamour he was wearing, I didn’t know the essence of any of it. I turned away from Rissa and over to where the boys were laying my mother on the silken cushion in the center of the circle.
Rissa would keep us safe. That was easy. What she’d try to do to Monster after I passed out, I wasn’t sure. It scared me. I don’t know why, but it did. He could obliterate our coven if he really wanted to; I was certain of it.
I think.
“He’s under my protection, Rissa,” I continued, showing her the magic mark on my wrist. “Don’t touch him. Trust me.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, High Priestess,” she spit out, turning away and directing her lovers to take up on the roof outside the windows of the spell chamber, as well as at either end of the hallway. She would, it seemed, remain in the doorway.
While our ranks weren’t really synonymous, she was technically above me in power. As soon as she ceased to become a Maiden, she’d be just another member of Coven Apothecary, and I’d still be High Priestess. Or the Mother. Clarissa wouldn’t be eligible for that position until she was at least thirty and had birthed a child.
Alternatively, she could wait to age and hope to become the Crone one day.
You’re stalling, Graceley. And I was. For a number of reasons.
One chance, one try, weeks of darkness.
And not a pleasant, soupy, sleepy darkness, but one filled with dreams inked in perfect clarity, dressed in old pains and marked with distant sins.
