Page 2 of Hexual Healing
Illanya’s ex, my new client, said she was overwhelming.That she was too intense.That she didn’tgetboundaries.
But he left out the part where she was a half-dragon.And whether he knew she was my ex or not would eternally be up for debate.
Gary didn’t reply.He just pressed his head against the glove compartment and aggressively retreated into it.
“You warned me not to take the job,” I whispered.“You said he was lying.”
He had been.I’d known it from the moment he used that tone.The one that men save for describing their exes when they want to sound wounded but not culpable.The one that always ends with “She’s just crazy, you know?”
I’d charged him triple, and he’d happily paid in cash, up front, without so much as blinking.
Rent doesn’t care if your moral compass is spinning.
A flicker of heat sliced across the back of my neck.I twisted toward the passenger-side mirror.Nothing.
Then the rearview reflected something else.I saw it for just a split second.
A flash of red wings.Gold-tipped claws.
A trail of green smoke curling through the cracked asphalt like a living thing.
My stomach flipped.
“Gary, she’s here.Now would be a really good time for a backup plan.”
Gary stayed silent, save for the soft squish of his body pressing into the glove compartment’s deepest shadows.
“I hate you,” I muttered, not so under my breath, and meant it with the kind of bittersweet affection reserved for old roommates who knew all the dark secrets of your browser history and didn’t judge you, but you still wanted to choke them out pretty much every day.Regardless of the inevitable fallout.
A hard knock against the passenger door jolted me sideways.The sound was like bone hitting bone.Magic flared hot across my skin, singeing the edge of my ward tattoos beneath my clothes.
Every instinct screamed:Run.
But the car was dead.The rune wasn’t enough.
Unless…
I reached beneath the driver’s seat, my hand closing over the last emergency sigil I had, etched on a leather square.A waft of burnt sugar and ozone tickled my nose and made me sneeze as it throbbed once in my palm.Angry, eager… Horny?
I would have pulled my hand away if it weren’t for the very loud thud above us.
“Brace.”
Gary vanished fully into the glovebox.One last eye stalk stared at me, unblinking, before he snapped the door shut behind him.
I slapped the rune.
The car didn’t explode.It ripped.Reality peeled sideways.Metal turned to vapor.Air screamed.Magic shrieked.
The world twisted inside out.
One second, I was in a broken-down 2010 Kia Soul with my vendetta-happy dragon ex-girlfriend breathing hell through the vents, and the next?
Everything stopped.
We were gone.
Silence.Blessed silence.Not the kind that you hear, but the kind that makes your ears ring from the pure absence of everything that made the world feel right.