Page 60 of Hopelessly Teavoted

Preparing the potion had been the easy part; waiting for it to brew would be difficult. How he’d longed for the slip of his fingers against each other so that he could touch her, even if only with magic and not with his actual hands.

But longing looks from the back seat of the car would have to suffice. Evelyn was driving, and to avoid potential death, Priscilla shared the back seat with him like they were small children pranking each other with real snakes in cans again.

“Remember the time you almost killed me when I was ten?” Azrael asked fondly, though the recollection was harrowing.

“Ah, you were fine. You know how I love a classic copperhead-in-a-can trick,” said Priscilla, examining her black fingernails.

Once the venomous thing had bit him in fear, his mother had to snap her fingers to remove the poison quickly while his dad magicked the snake out of the car.

“Yeah, Prissy, almost killing your only brother. You’re hisssssterical,” Az teased.

Priscilla rolled her eyes, but Vickie laughed so hard that she snorted a little bit in the front seat, and the sound of it filled him with the sort of warm fuzzy feelings that he recognized from so many books.

He may as well have stretched out his arm toward a light, or declared how ardently he loved her, or compared her to the sun.

He was hopelessly devoted to her.

And somehow, in a moment more magical than anything he had ever wielded, she loved him too. She chose him, and had agreed to the binding. To set the seal. Their eyes locked as she turned back to look at him, pupils dilated.

“How long again until the spell work is ready?” Vickie asked.

“Seven hours precisely from when you began brewing it,” answered Evelyn.

They had five hours, then, to investigate, get to the megachurch, and stop Chet.

It was this or go through the staff directory at the church, asking intrusive questions or tricking people into magical scans until someone allowed them in, and he didn’t relish the thought of doing that, so they had agreed to break into the church.

A mundane crime, he supposed, was justifiable in this situation.

“Explain to me again why we can’t just portal in,” Az said, scrubbing a hand across his face. “Can’t Evelyn get a special exception to the portaling suspension?” He was tired, and he wanted to talk to Victoria again in private.

Well. Maybe he wanted to do more than talk.

“No special treatment. Especially since we don’t want them to know why we need it,” Prissy said pointedly.

“Besides, it would be detectable by anyone halfway decent at witchery, and it would give us away if we meet nonwitches. Chet’s been sniffing around enough as it is.

No need to appear out of thin air and confirm his suspicions if there’s a possibility that we can catch him unawares. The car is much more sensible.”

“Sure, sure. Totally normal to drive an enormous vintage Packard to a church in the middle of the night.”

Priscilla shrugged. “I’m a beautiful, eccentric lesbian, Azrael, and none of that is out of the ordinary for me, to tell the truth.” Evelyn glanced at her in the rearview mirror, winking.

The corners of Azrael’s mouth pulled up as he watched them flirt, without words or shame, in the little reflective glass.

He was glad his sister was happy, even if it was only for now.

Prissy reminded him so much of his parents, always knowing that she was perfectly normal and acceptable the way she was.

Never caring—relishing it, even—when people disliked her.

It had been true the whole time, and he had been too fucking foolish to acknowledge it.

Just like he had been too scared to tell Vickie how he felt that time in college, or before that when they’d parted ways after high school, and how he’d wasted so much time wallowing in his own agony.

Just like when he’d let her tell him it was just pretending.

All the pretending in the shower, and the library, and the car.

All the pretending that it was pretending, until it was crystal clear to him that it was anything but.

He patted his thigh for his wallet, thinking again of what he kept there, wrinkled and full of heartache and history.

It was the last thing between them, and he needed to be honest before they set the seal.

After this, he would.

The car stopped, and Evelyn parked it under the partial cover of enormous oak trees at one end of the parking lot. From the street, it was barely noticeable in the dark.

The clean modern lines of the building glinted in the moonlight, a sharp contrast to the graveyard that had housed Hallowcross’s dead for almost two hundred years.

The building had been destroyed in a fire in the late nineties and rebuilt in modern splendor on the dimes of the congregants, as such things usually went, while the wealthy pastors reaped the benefits and spilled their corruptions into fancy accommodations bought with tithing.

The hypocrisy of religion could be chilling, and Azrael, a witch named twice for devils, didn’t use that assessment lightly.

They broke in with little difficulty, Evelyn muttering about detection spells not being clever enough. But the desolate, empty aura of the building plunged them further into the cold.

Vickie shivered, and he snapped his fingers, adding, atop her jeans and shirt, a heavy cable-knit sweater he kept in the trunk of the car.

Evelyn and Priscilla, unsurprisingly, hadn’t bothered with jackets. Probably a warmth spell, which he didn’t care for himself; Azrael preferred the weight of actual layers. And the flexibility they afforded him in touching Victoria.

“Thanks, Az,” she whispered, sniffing it, and he wondered how he could have deluded himself into thinking she didn’t care.

It was so clear to him, not just in what she said, but in how he felt around her.

Home. He wanted to move to stand next to her, but it was too risky.

He would need to keep his fingers bare for any magic casting.

They walked, feet spelled against sound, disturbingly quiet on marble floors that stretched on forever. Finally, they reached a staircase that must lead to offices on the second floor.

A light at the end of the hallway upstairs and a cracked door let them know that someone was there, beyond the extravagant door marking the head pastor’s office.

Azrael gestured for them to go ahead, and Priscilla took the lead with Evelyn close behind, Vickie hugging the left wall of the hallway while Azrael stuck to the right, careful not to comply with the gravitational pull of their bodies toward each other.

They turned a corner, and Azrael stopped; Vickie stepped backward.

Priscilla snapped her fingers and the air turned bluish in a simple spell for detecting intentions. She blew at it, and waved her hand, the color seeping into the gap of the door that stood ajar. They watched as it turned purple.

“What the…” sounded the familiar voice, the one Azrael had expected to come from inside the room, as Priscilla kicked the door the rest of the way open.

She was a sight to behold in a sleek black pantsuit that he suspected had more give to it than it appeared to.

His sister always had been good at magicking her clothes to look like business but feel like loungewear.

Azrael would recognize that voice, and the middle-aged, gelled receding hairline of a man behind the desk that it belonged to, anywhere. Part of him had hoped it wasn’t his boss. That the man was just an asshole, no magic involved, who happened to also be a youth pastor.

But it was, and apparently the man’s assholery didn’t stop at terrorizing his coworker.

“Chet.”

“What the fuck are you doing here, Hart?” The man smiled, and there was something sinister to it. As though he wasn’t upset at all to see them.

Chet’s lecherous eyes raked up and down Priscilla, and he raised his eyebrows. “Did you finally decide to introduce me to your hot sister after all?”

Priscilla’s snaps should have restrained him with something quite horrific, but a greenish hue shimmered around Chet Thornington, at the invisible barrier where the intention spell had been blocked. A physical protection spell, with what looked like a four-foot diameter. Object-based, then.

Chet pulled a lighter from his pocket, tossing it in his hand, and laughed.

“I knew it. I couldn’t afford to act on it until I was sure, not after that fiasco with the fake psychic, but I knew you were witches.”

Azrael snapped furiously, but the barrier held, his magic having no effect.

“My preparations should have worked for this,” muttered Evelyn. “I was careful. It should have been enough to break his shield.”

Azrael snapped again, but to no avail.

“Ah, Hart, you couldn’t have thought it was that easy.

Now I suppose I’ll be eating three souls tonight.

I’ll save the fourth for Halloween, of course.

Seal in the kind of beautiful power that I have always deserved.

God, I wish I could savor each one of you, make it last. But I’m not fool enough to let more than I need live, not when things are lining up so nicely.

That’s a fucking shame; I’ll be bloated for days after that much consumption.

Nothing to be done about it, though, and I can’t say I’ll mind the power upgrade.

I haven’t had witches—yet. I was so cross when that psychic turned out to be a fraud, but no matter.

I have you now. Shame you’ll all have to die before you can find out what kind of powers I might be able to manifest once I’ve absorbed your souls. ”

Chet moved quicker than lightning. Before Azrael knew it, his hands were on Priscilla’s, cleverly keeping her fingers from connecting, just in case. She struggled and kicked at him with her pointed heel, and then headbutted him hard enough that Chet looked dazed before shaking it off.

“I’m afraid I’ve traded quite a bit to the king of the devils to be able to withstand physical attacks,” he said. “And I guess I should say thank you for the plants. They helped me trick old Frankie into granting me this protection spell in exchange for my dear old dad’s soul.”

Evelyn pushed angrily toward him, but the invisible barrier was impenetrable, and they stood there, magic jumping and flaring as they tried to free Priscilla, who was attempting to bite Chet with some success, though not enough to free herself.

“You cut a deal with Lucifer,” breathed Azrael.

“The one and only. I cut two deals with him, as a matter of fact. Did you know he goes by Frankie these days? A bit less intimidating than the original name, if you ask me, but hey, it works. I met him on a trip to Vegas this summer. My family was clever enough to be born wealthy, and I’m clever enough to gamble with more than just that money, it turns out.

Challenged him to a game of pool, drunk off my ass, but joke was on him—he had no idea how much time I’ve spent in bars all my life, and to be honest, I think he was drinking too.

By the time he sobered up, it was too late.

I had bargained to eat living souls, not just to reap the dead.

And I’d gotten him to throw in a personal protection sacrifice, which made the plant-based magic extending the spell that much easier to weasel out of him.

” Chet smiled, a sickly, scheming thing.

“He wasn’t too happy when I trapped him into more than he wanted to bargain for, but you get what you get, and sometimes it’s unfortunate. ”

“I’ll be devil damned,” said Azrael softly. He had to keep this man talking until they could figure out a plan. Whatever deal he had made must have been a wretched one, to grant a mundane power against a witch as mighty as Priscilla.

“I turned down a job from Frankie once,” Azrael said, as casually as he could while a monster gripped his sister by her hands.

The snapping wasn’t working, and Azrael couldn’t get around the barrier. He had to think, and he had to keep Chet talking.

Chet scoffed. “You’re exactly the kind of maudlin weirdo who would do that.

Just think, you could be collecting souls just like your pretty little girlfriend there.

” He winked at Vickie. “I like you better in the lingerie from your whorish tea shop.” He smirked, and Azrael lunged toward him, but the protection spell held, blocking any of them from going farther.

“Who knows, though, Hart? The night is still young.” He leered at Vickie, and Azrael knew then that it would not be enough to just defeat the man.

He needed to destroy this kind of evil, to rip it from the world.

But Chet wasn’t done. With the aura around him still intact, Chet whipped Priscilla’s head against a bookshelf, knocking her unconscious so that she slumped to the floor, still out of Azrael’s reach. Azrael snapped with all his might, but his magic, like Evelyn’s, bounced back harmlessly.

“You beast,” screamed Evelyn. “I’ll kill you for that.”

Chet smiled and shook his head slowly. His terrible, product-laden hair barely even moved.

“Ah, darling, that’s what they all say. Before they die.”