Page 36 of The Arcane Taste of the Witchwood Boys (The Witchwood Boys #4)
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“ Aw, Frank,” Kate growls out, her irises expanding to cover the whites of her eyes. “You know I don’t smoke no more.”
“Oh, fuck.” Marlowe is the first to grab her, putting Kate into a chokehold and knocking the cat loose from her arms before she can bite its head off. My wife goes from her easygoing, affectionate self to a monster in a blink.
Blood blooms on Marlowe’s white hoodie and he coughs crimson up all over Kate’s face. She’s just fucking stabbed him in the chest. I’m on her, pulling them apart and throwing Kate against the wall to buy both Marlowe and myself a second.
Brooks comes in hard and fast, throwing a rope around her neck. It’s been spelled to hold big game, a trick that Brooks and I used to hunt in the past. Even a gore-bear can’t escape rope like this.
Kate does. She snaps it like string as she stands up, feathers sprouting across her skin as she begins to change right in front of us. We’ve seen this plenty of times before, but in the last several months, only on a moonless night. We’re still two weeks out.
I’ve got a terrible feeling about this, but there’s no space to examine theories.
Only one thing is important right now: keeping me, Marlowe, and Brooks alive. Kate is immortal. She’s the aggressor. If we let her hurt one of us in this state, it’s all over.
“That’s a pretty bird,” I murmur, approaching her carefully as she shapeshifts in the middle of our foyer. Her clothes split as her form expands, feathers stabbing through her naked flesh. Brown ones, with silver and gold runes. Taloned feet, and a shape like a barred owl.
The monster looms over me. It has shadow horns on its round head, a mask of feathers surrounding a human face. Huge hazel eyes with dark lashes, a sharp beak where a human nose would be, a pair of pink lips.
Lips that I’ve kissed.
Kate opens those lips and the cries of her victims roll out. Slaver drips from that sexy mouth and spatters on the floor in front of me.
“ Do you mind if I take your car?” she asks in a woman’s mild, unassuming tone. I’m frozen where I’m standing, holding Kate’s attention while Brooks moves around to her right and Marlowe bleeds to death on the floor behind me.
I can smell the salve. It’ll be enough to save him, but I’ve got to keep Kate distracted until he’s back on his feet. Then we’ll figure out what to do next. Every second in this space counts.
“Let’s lure her to the tree,” Brooks instructs, thinking on his feet. “Put her inside and then we’ll come up with a plan. As of now, all we need is a fence between us and that pretty little mouth. Eh, Kate?”
“You’re a good girl, aren’t you, kitten?” I murmur, approaching with slow, easy steps. I’m moving myself into the living room and away from Marlowe as he slips in his own blood while attempting to stand.
The owl cocks its head to one side, and then it turns and snatches my shadow off the wall. I can feel it, the way that curved yellow beak closes over the pair of tails. A pressure in my spine as my shadow is ripped free, tossed into the air, and swallowed.
“Holy shit.” Marlowe has those few seconds to get the words out, and then he’s being smashed through the front door and thrown down the steps. The Hag Wytch is on him, tearing at his arms as he throws them up to protect himself.
I’m unsettled by the death of my shadow, aware that I’ve lost something important but unable to do shit about it now except grab the makeshift falconry hood from the hall tree. I’m out the door, boots crunching across the broken stained-glass, and then I’m on Kate’s back.
Birds hate to have their heads covered. Makes ‘em more docile. I yank the hood over Kate’s head, and she throws me. I slam into the tree in the front yard and fall to the ground, hitting my spine at an awkward angle and scrambling to my feet before I’m incapacitated by the pain.
I shove my way through the thick waxy leaves of the rhododendrons in the front yard, finding Brooks on his knees in front of me. His antlered shadow is squirming in Kate’s mouth as she rises into the air with powerful thrusts of her wings.
He draws a triangle on the ground, filling the shape with flames. I find my place in the east and do the same, tracing my own symbol into the dirt. Marlowe’s already done his part in the west.
Brooks starts a chant I’ve only heard him use once before—when Kate left three ghosts in the cottage and took off to make this horrible deal.
“ We call on the great tree that lives in the North,” he begins, summoning her magic without her consent, dragging it out of Kate against her will.
A sigil appears in the north, and a circle of light flows around the three of us. The owl monster that used to be our wife screams, trapped inside the narrow barrier we’ve just created. She takes that as a personal insult and comes at us again, claws snatching up Marlowe’s shadow this time.
The Hag Wytch uses a taloned foot to shove the mass of darkness into her mouth, trilling with pleasure as she swallows down an integral part of our power.
“We’ll need to get those back at some point,” Brooks mumbles, and then Kate is on us and the four of us are destroying the front yard in an attempt at gaining control. I’m stabbed through the shoulder first, speared by one of her talons. It’s not enough to incapacitate me, but it does cause her claw to get stuck.
When she pulls back this time, she takes me with her, using the talon that’s speared through my body to lift me into the air. I’m shoved up against her face, and she screams at me, smelling like carrion and misery.
Brooks stabs the dick-athame into her, and she thrashes, dropping me to the lawn. Marlowe is there to help pick me up, his blood and mine mixing together. Kate’s lips part, spilling locusts into the evening air. They cover Brooks in a swarm of iridescent Witchwood pests, but that doesn’t stop him. He twists the knife and Kate shrieks, dropping to the lawn and thrashing around as she begins to shrink back to her normal self.
Flames cover Brooks’ body, burning away the locusts with a haunting sizzle and a thousand chirping screams. The husks melt to ash in a circle around him as he stands there with the knife in his hand, staring down at our unconscious lover on the ground in front of his feet.
“Let’s get her upstairs,” he whispers roughly, and the three of us take Kate up together. All of us bleeding. All of us missing our shadows.
We drag her onto the bed, standing beside the mattress in a row.
“Do we need to put her in the woods?” I ask Brooks, my attention on Kate’s sleeping face.
“No.” He reaches down and fingers the silver piercing in Kate’s clit. She moans and writhes against his touch, arching her hips up for him. He gently inserts two fingers into her and drags them in and out of her slickness as she sighs and moans happily in her sleep. “That’s a good girl, you rest,” he murmurs, but the eyes on his hat are all closed in thought. “Could be that the ring is being drained of energy more quickly than it’s being replenished.”
He pushes his wedding ring inside of Kate on the next thrust and then withdraws his fingers, sucking them clean.
“You know I have no problem with the Sleeping Beauty routine, but how the hell do we fix this?” I ask, and we both look at each other. Brooks still has his fingers in his mouth, his eyes narrowed and thoughtful. He didn’t just violate Kate for fun. He’s tasting something in the heat of her, figuring out how to rework this spell.
Marlowe is fretting over Kate, covering her with a blanket and fluffing her pillows. He’s getting blood everywhere, but under these circumstances, who gives a shit?
“You know Kate’s going to be pissed when she wakes up and finds out that she gorged on our shadows, right? Fuck my life.” Lo rakes his fingers through his dark hair, knocking his hat to the floor in the process.
“I’ll go find her ring.” I leave the room, searching through the blood and shredded clothes downstairs for Kate’s wedding band.
Back upstairs, I slip it on her hand just in time to intercept the next bad memory.
The spell doesn’t have to work hard to find one: I see Kate, shifting from a woman to a monster in front of my eyes. And there’s me, fucking helpless to do a damn thing about it.
Marlowe’s right: this incident is going to send Kate into a panic.
Brooks taps his dirty fingers against the tip of his tongue, lighting all of the candles in the room at once. Whatever his bad memory was, he’s pushed it aside already. Marlowe is sitting on the edge of the bed now, his head in his hands.
“She doesn’t taste like Kate anymore,” Brooks admits, his words falling heavy in the quiet space. “She tastes like the fucking Hag Wytch.” He drops his arms to his sides, summoning a notebook and a pen to write with. “The sacrifices we’re making aren’t enough. We need more power.” He lifts his hand and stares at the red gem of his ring.
I hate to tell him this, but it’s looking more and more like Kate is right with each passing week.
She owes a debt on three lives, and we’re not getting out of this one so easily.
“Take your pants off and fuck her,” Brooks says, and I sigh. I love this kinky shit, but I miss Kate more. I’d much rather have her awake and present here with us. “That’ll buy us some time.”
“Fuck her, huh?” Marlowe repeats in the voice of a zombie, like maybe he feels the same way I do. “If you insist.”
He reaches up, tugs a lust spell off of his hat, and cracks it against his own cheek, spilling pink dust everywhere. I close my eyes and inhale plenty of that sweet-scented powder. I’m gonna need it to get hard, can’t lie about that.
Sacrifice.
I put my lips near Kate’s ear and whisper all the things I want to say when she wakes back up.
“I love you, kitten. And don’t worry. Anything you need us to do, we’ll do it. We’ll dig you out of whatever hole you’ve gotten yourself into. Climb through the fires of any hell.”
And then I grip the headboard, and I drive Kate’s moaning, bloodied form into the mattress.