Page 20 of What The Hex (The Family Spells)
“Please don’t let me be pregnant with Hex’s baby,” she murmured under her breath, putting a hand over her stomach. My gaze shifted to her, and I felt immediate guilt over my own emotions. I was jealous and annoyed, but Grace was … Well, witches could sense pregnancy pretty damn early, but it’d been a matter of days since she’d slept with Hex, too early even for magic.
Either the demon was full of shit or … God, I could use my fangs on my wife’s femoral artery right about now. I was thirsty, and this gods-damned Hael heat wasn’t making it any better. I reached down for Grace’s hand and curled my fingers through hers, pulling her close. She tried to smile at me, but the expression didn’t come close to reaching her eyes.
“I don’t believe in prophecies,” Caine growled as he held his hands over his bare junk. Guess the flowers’ little bites wouldn’t be so harmless if one were to grab onto his foreskin. Reminded me of that one time he’d gone buck wild on a full moon and passed out naked on the living room floor.
Our dog—the wolf cub Caine found in the woods, the one Zavier drank blood from—had been a puppy at the time. He’d leapt playfully at Caine … only he’d nipped him right in the balls with tiny wolf teeth. I’d never heard such a howl. My only regret was that I hadn’t filmed the incident.
“Yes, well, there’s a gargantuan difference between prophecies and oracles, isn’t there?” Monster asked with no small amount of sarcasm, and Caine snapped at the air in his direction with another snarl.
“I don’t want to hear another fuckin’ peep outta you. You manipulative piece of shit, you’re going to regret that time above. Grace mighta promised you a shackle-free year up top, but she didn’t promise I wouldn’t kick your ass while you were there. I don’t give two shits if you are the demon king’s son.”
Monster ignored the werewolf’s threats as I simmered with quiet rage on Grace’s right. An oracle couldn’t predict the future on their own merit, but an oracle who’d studied divination could trace threads of possibility and make educated guesses about the future. Not quite the same thing as a prophecy, but close enough, I suppose.
“Back to the demon king …” I said finally as we left the horrid field with the biting tulips and found ourselves on the trail lined with glowing jack-o’-lanterns. “If Hex’s father is demon royalty, doesn’t that make him your brother? I’m finding that really hard to believe.”
“Are you?” Monster asked, pausing as the cry of a war horn sounded in the distance. The krampus had tasted our blood, breathed in our scent; they could find us anywhere. Granted, they’d have to get past the stone faerie cats first, but I had no doubt that this situation was liable to come back and bite us in the ass. Monster glanced back at me or rather, he looked past me, into the distance, as if he were looking for something in particular. “And you think the opinion of a Kingdom-less vampire would mean something to me?”
He turned away, and I grit my teeth, fangs scraping my lower lip. How the fuck did this guy know that I’d been ousted from my Kingdom? A Kingdom to a vampire was like a pack to a werewolf or a coven to a witch; it was home and family. Seeing as I was a half-witch, I had Coven Apothecary as a community, but that didn’t mean the insult didn’t hurt.
I ground my teeth together and pushed back my irritation. Like I said, I was the only one who could (or would) work to keep things calm. I wasn’t going to escalate matters when Grace was running her hands over her witch hat to check for missing charms, when she was alternately tickling her fingers across her belly, when …
It was hard to gauge time down here, with no sun to map it out, but my guess was that Grace’s mother had maybe ten hours left at most. Ten. Much as I disliked Abigail, I didn’t want her to die. And I really, really didn’t want my wife to be promoted to the Mother of our coven. My motivations for saving Abigail Spells were far more selfish than they should’ve been.
“We can’t kill an entire army of witch-eaters in half a day,” I said, the fine hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I was a spelling vampire for fuck’s sake; I was used to being the hunter, not the hunted. It was unsettling, to say the least.
“We need to get the Hael out of here,” Graceley said, licking her lips, and then because she couldn’t help herself, added, “pun intended. Then we find Hex, save Mom, and deal with the krampus problem later.”
