Page 28 of How to Flirt with a Witch

“Nope.”

I sigh back. “You know that makes me even more determined to figure it out.”

She frowns, her expression getting further from the smile I keep hoping for. “For your sake, Katie, I hope you don’t.”

Her words settle over me the same way the sight of the giant spider did. She’s dead serious.

But so am I. I might believe her about Lucy—that the kitten wasn’t what I thought, and I’m not going to get her back—but as for Natalie? She’s a mystery that needs to be solved. I’ve crossed over a threshold,peeled back the covers on a dark secret, and there’s no coming back from it.

I need to be able to contact her again. I don’t want this to be goodbye.

As she turns to the door, my heartbeat quickens. My mouth goes dry as the question I want to ask burns in my throat.

Say it. Just say it.

“Can I have your number?” My lips tingle as the words come out. I dip my chin and look up at her, trying to seem small and harmless. “Just in case?”

Natalie hesitates. I give her my best innocent face—one that says,in case I need you to come rescue me again?

Not the truth, which is,so I can crack you open like a puzzle box and find out what you’re hiding.

I tuck a lock of hair behind my ear, casually letting the bloody scratches on my arm linger in her line of sight. Poor me, so helpless.

I’m taking a chance here. I know this would work on a man—putting them in the position to become a hero in the face of a damsel in distress. The question is: does Natalie Zacharias care about a damsel?

Her gaze roves over me. She catches her bottom lip on her teeth, thinking.

Slowly, her expression softens. There’s a subtle lift in her posture as she breaks.

As she crosses to my desk and writes her phone number on a sticky note, I press my lips together to keep from smiling.

Chapter 8

An Alexander Christmas

So Natalie is notan ordinary veterinarian. She’s not even an ordinaryperson.She has something to do with possessed cats and dolls, and the need to figure it out consumes me day and night until my dreams are full of exploding dolls and purple butterflies.

Is ‘possessed’ the right word? Are we dealing with demons? Hazel’s petrified shouts are burned into my memory as Lucy climbed my bedroom wall. I thought that night was the scariest of my life, but little did I know what hell awaited me at a flea market.

As the days pass, I sometimes catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror to find haunted eyes staring back—the face of someone who’s realized the world isn’t the safe, predictable place she’d always believed it to be. Other times, the phantom sensation of Natalie’s body shielding mine rushes back, tingling through me, betraying me with a burning attraction to this woman I can’t trust. The woman who’s lied to me over and over again.

Huddled in a campus cafe one December afternoon, desperately trying to focus on studying for finals, I tip my laptop screen away from my study buddies and do a quick internet search on exorcism.

I’m with Clayton, Johnny, Mo, Andrea, and three others, a coffee on my left and an open statistics textbook on my right. We’ve been meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays to study between classes, a big change from my old routine of sitting in the library with headphones on.

Look at me, making friends.

Wikipedia tells me exorcism tends to involve some kind of ritual, religious amulet, or recitation—none of which match what Natalie did. But I could argue that the shimmering substance in the vial was holy water. Or… holy goo.

I grab my phone to text Natalie.

Katie

I figured it out. You’re an exorcist, and Rebecca and Lucy were possessed by demons.

I’ve texted her a few other theories since she gave me her number, and while I was hesitant to bother her and make her pull back, my messages don’t seem unwelcome.

“What possessed me to take calculus?” Andrea moans into her hands.