Page 1 of Sugar, Spice, and Magical Moonlight (Midlife Menace #2)

A few things to know about demons: They go crazy when they hear jarring noises.

They hate the taste of sugar. You can see red in their eyes when sunlight reflects on them.

They disorient you with magic in order to control you.

Witches know to ward their homes to drive away demons, though they can find your home if you accept a gift from them.

They can also possess your body if you tell them a secret.

The book opens with Luci, a talented witch, realizing she is no longer in love with her adulterous, farty-breath, whiny, small-dick husband, Colin, and asks for a divorce after he ruins their eighteenth anniversary celebration.

The next scene picks up a year later. Luci is the owner of a growing magical bakery and a single mother to her autistic preteen son, Des, choosing to homeschool him at the bakery because of his special needs.

Though Des isn’t very verbal, he has surprisingly powerful magic that Luci doesn’t entirely understand.

Luci has a crush on her best customer, a tall, tanned, and gorgeous hunk of burning love, mortuary owner, Ricardo Romero, who orders two dozen cinnamon rolls every morning.

There’s just one problem. Luci knows Ricardo is a shifter when she sees his eyes change, yet he’s not listed in the Directory of Magical Creatures, which means he’s an outlaw.

Luci knows that, as a responsible parent, she can’t get mixed up with a bad boy, no matter how much he makes her swoon.

Ethyl, her pixie cousin and bumbling witch apprentice, decides to intervene, thinking she’s doing Luci a favor by sneaking love potion into one of Ric’s cinnamon rolls.

Unfortunately, Ric’s annoying and lazy mortuary employee, Lenny, steals the cinnamon roll meant for Ric.

Even more unfortunate, Ethyl is terrible at making potions and accidentally uses too much siren shade, turning Lenny into a sex-crazed nightmare.

Ric discovers that the roll has been tainted and immediately suspects Luci, returning to her bakery to tell her off.

Upset that she ruined everything, Ethyl miniaturizes and flies into the rafters, leaving Luci to deal with their angry customer.

Lenny shows up at the bakery, too, and makes very inappropriate moves on Luci, forcing her to zap him with her lipstick wand.

Lenny hits the floor hard, leaving bloodstains on the floor from a gash in his head.

Before Ric can remove Lenny, Gus, the pygmy troll health inspector, pulls into the driveway at Luci’s bakery.

Knowing that Gus is looking for any excuse to shut her down, Luci panics, begging Ric to haul Lenny outside.

Ric dumps Lenny in the outside dumpster, and when they return, Luci is shocked to find her son cleaned up the blood with a spell and went back to killing bad wizards on his computer game.

Gus, as usual, threatens to shut down Luci’s bakery because he suspects she’s using unauthorized magic to sweeten her products, and then takes a free cake from them, saying he needs to test it in his lab.

Luci knows Gus is just a bully who threatens her for free pastries, but she’s terrified he’ll ruin her business, and she won’t be able to support her son.

Luci finally convinces Ric that Ethyl spiked the cinnamon roll without her knowledge, so Ric asks Luci on a date.

Luci accepts, and Ric leaves with a half-conscious Lenny slung over his shoulder.

Luci then regrets agreeing to go out with Ric, afraid of dating an outlaw.

Ethyl convinces Luci that shifters are amazing in the sack, and she needs to get laid.

Luci drops off Des with his father for his weekend visit.

Des tells her he hates it there, but Luci must honor the divorce agreement.

There, Colin’s new wife, Felicity, his former, much younger secretary whom he’d been sleeping with while he was married to Luci, begs Luci for her family’s secret apple pie recipe.

Luci refuses, and Felicity pouts. Then Felicity insists on giving Luci a present, a photo of Des, Felicity, and Colin together, saying Des would be more accepting of their new family if Luci hung up the picture in her condo.

Colin guilts Luci into taking it, though Luci throws it in the community dumpster the moment she gets home.

Luci goes to the movies with Ric, shocked when Ric almost bites her hand off as he devours a large popcorn in one swallow, bucket and all.

Embarrassed, he asks if they can leave the theater.

They get in his truck, and he explains he’s a sphinx shifter, the last of his kind, who can’t control his beast when he’s hungry.

She asks why he’s not in the registry, and he says it’s because he’s being hunted by a succubus who framed him 80 years ago.

Luci feels a kinship with him, because she’s been terrified of succubi ever since she was fifteen and witnessed one murder her parents.

Despite the fact that she knows a single mother shouldn’t get mixed up with a hunted sphinx, they return to his gorgeous mansion, where ghost servants wait on them and Luci has the best sex of her life with Ric.

After they wake and enjoy more fun in Ric’s massive shower together, they are attacked by mercenaries, including Gus the pygmy troll, who stun them both with magic and whisk Ric away, saying Ric is wanted for two murders, one in 1946 and one from the night before.

Annoying Lenny had been killed, and Gus tells her that Lenny’s grandmother says the murderer was a sphinx.

After the stun spell wears off, Luci gathers enough energy to chase after Gus’s van.

She tells him that Ric couldn’t have killed Lenny, because he had been with her all night.

Gus refuses to believe her and takes Ric away, saying he will be tried at the striga tribunal in Europe, where Luci knows he’ll be hung.

Luci panics and sneaks into the crime scene at Lenny’s grandmother’s house, noting that it doesn’t look like Lenny had been murdered by a sphinx, but there are many signs that a demon killed him.

Demons hate jarring noises, and the cuckoo clocks have all been destroyed.

Demons also despise sugar and love salt.

All the salty snacks are gone. Finally, Lenny has been turned into a pile of goo, a telltale sign of a demon attack.

She doesn’t understand why Gus failed to see the obvious clues and blamed Ric instead.

Ric’s ghost friends break into Ric’s vault for her, giving her money to go to Italy, so she can testify for Ric.

When she returns home to gather clothes for her and her son, she discovers that demons tried to break into her neighbor’s home while she’d been with Ric.

Luci suspects the demons went to her neighbor’s house by mistake.

It's clear now that whoever framed Ric is also hunting her, one more reason to free Ric from prison. Des calls Luci, telling his mama he wants to leave his father’s house because Colin and Felicity have been fighting all night.

Luci uses this as an excuse to flee with Des to Italy, though she doesn’t tell Colin where they are heading.

Colin seems visibly distressed when she picks up Des, telling her they never should have divorced.

Luci is repulsed by Colin’s behavior and tells him that she won’t bring Des back until he and Felicity stop fighting.

Luci, Des, Ethyl, and Ethyl’s disappearing pygmy dragon, Puffy, fly to Italy, where they are greeted by a cab driver who takes them to his bed-and-breakfast located within a secret city for striga within Rome that is warded from humans.

While at the bed-and-breakfast, Luci feels disoriented, and it takes her a few hours to realize her cab driver is a demon.

They pack in a hurry and escape using an invisibility spell moments before a group of Vindicti priests (witches who serve demons) arrive to attack Luci and her family.

Because Luci is running low on funds, they are forced to stay in a rundown hostel infested with gnomes who steal Luci’s vibrator (that had been left in her suitcase from her last miserable vacation with Colin) and tampons.

They keep Luci awake with the vibrations rattling the walls, but Des silences them with one word.

The next day, they meet with Ethyl’s friend and lover, Frederica, a minotaur with an autoimmune keratin disease, causing her horns to look like two floppy dildos.

Frederica is a custodian at the Tribunal, the gathering place for the most powerful striga in Italy, where they decide the fates of outlaws.

They dress up like custodians, and Frederica tries to sneak them in, but they can’t get past the wards until Des easily breaks them.

After arriving moments before Ric’s trial, Luci interrupts the proceedings and testifies, telling them a demon killed Lenny and Ric is innocent.

Luci realizes quickly that the head of the Tribunal, Maga Sagredo, is under her advisor’s spell.

She recognizes the advisor as the demon wife of her cab driver.

Maga Sagredo believes Luci is the Phoenix, a rare witch with incredible power who only materializes every five hundred years.

She says sphinxes and phoenixes are drawn to each other, because historically, the sphinx is the phoenix’s protector.

She explains that Ric is the last sphinx because demons have exterminated the rest of his kind in order to clear a path to the Phoenix.

Maga Sagredo orders Luci’s capture under the guise that she is trying to protect her.

Luci knows better, and Des breaks the powerful wards again by teleporting them back to the hostel, though they were forced to leave Ric and Frederica behind.

Luci realizes Des must be the Phoenix, and if the demons discover that an autistic preteen boy has this much power, they will stop at nothing to capture him.

Tribunal hunters find them, attacking the hostel.

Ethyl then confesses that she and Frederica have been working for the Insurgi, an underground rebel witch army trying to overthrow the Tribunal because they know it has been infiltrated by demons.

She says the Insurgi is their last hope and convinces Luci and Des to flee with them to their underground headquarters.

There, Luci meets her deceased mother’s twin, Generale Serena Sagredo, daughter to Maga Sagredo.

Luci never knew her mother had a twin or that she was a Sagredo.

Serena explains that her mother and father had erased their previous identities and had been hiding from demons in America, because the succubi were hunting them, believing Luci to be the Phoenix.

Serena told Luci she already knew Des was the Phoenix because she’d seen his powerful aura by sneaking into his nursery when he was a baby.

She promised to keep Des’s identity a secret and offered the assistance of the Insurgi to protect them and help them free Ric from prison.

Serena said the Insurgi needed Des to help them locate the demon’s lair, the bed-and-breakfast where they had been staying.

It was heavily warded, and the Insurgi have been searching for it for years.

Luci refused to let Des get involved, but she realizes she left her bra behind when they’d hastily escaped.

Using a retrieval spell, Luci tracks the bra and exposes the demon den.

The Insurgi kill all the demons and the Vindicti priests, though Signora Oscura, the demon controlling Maga Sagredo, the mother of all demons, wasn’t there.

They also discover their family’s fairy godfather, Shu, who’d been trapped in his djinn bottle for forty years by the demons with only an old television and jazzercise and Golden Girls VHS videos.

Shu is clearly affected after being trapped for forty years and is mentally still stuck in the 1980s.

They return to the Insurgi headquarters with Shu, and Des heals his broken spirit with a hug, though Shu still clings to ’80s nostalgia.

Serena tells Luci the only way to free Ric and to kill the last demon is to break into the Tribunal once more.

Des is the only one who can do it. As much as she wants to save Ric, Luci doesn’t want to bring her son into a war.

Serena convinces her that they need to free Ric to protect Des.

Little does Luci know that Ric managed to escape prison, something that Serena already knows, though she lies to Luci because she wants to go to war with the Tribunal.

They break into the Tribunal and are overwhelmed by demons, but Ric returns and saves them.

Realizing her aunt tricked her, Luci and Ric flee to Ric’s warded mansion, along with Des, Shu, Ethyl, Puffy, and Frederica, where Ric says they should remain in hiding until they are assured of Des’s safety.

After Luci and Ric rekindle their passion, she tells him that a demon broke into her neighbor’s house.

Ric also believes the demon meant to break into her house, so they watch security footage of her home and see that earlier that day, her nosy neighbor had gone into the dumpster and retrieved the photograph that Felicity had gifted Luci.

Because demons can break through a witch’s wards if the witch accepts a gift, Luci realizes that Felicity is a demon, and she had given Luci the gift and had also begged for her secret family recipe because she was trying to possess her.

The book ends here and continues with a bonus short story introducing the gnomes of Tribe Fungitoes in their quest to rid their den of the Purple Menace, the vibrator that has caused all the nannies to ignore their bucks.

The bucks are too hardheaded to realize the nannies turned to the vibrator because their bucks ignore them while making kissy faces at their phones.

Like all gnome bucks, they worship the Enchantress, WitchTok’s most beloved influencer, and watch her videos on their stolen cell phones all day.

The Enchantress tells striga to love all creatures, including gnomes, earning the bucks’ undying love, since most striga treat them like vermin.

After a harrowing journey filled with deadly cats, the gnomes finally deliver the vibrator to their forest cousins, who release the druid that had been trapped inside the wand.

The bucks return to their den to find the other bucks have formed a truce with the nannies.

The bucks realize they must watch videos of the Enchantress in secret while paying more attention to their nannies.