Page 18 of Warlocks Don’t Win (Singsong City #9)

Chapter

Ten

W e put up the ladder and started stapling the plastic to the beams over the garden beds, green with moss and other less healthy things.

Mold, most likely. I was stretching out to staple the plastic above my head when a shock like getting hit by a defibrillator went through my chest. My body locked up, and I went over backwards, falling off the ten foot ladder like a statue toppling over.

Winston grunted as he caught me, his touch melting away the paralysis and leaving me with this craving for him that hadn’t ever gone away since the first time I danced with him at the ball I wasn’t supposed to go to.

The Sages weren’t invited to that kind of high-class soiree. We’d bring our pet spiders or seduce the life out of all the guests. Such a glorious reputation to try and maintain.

The trouble was, the shock had frozen my brain into the wanting of Winston, but not into the processing of what wanting him had led to in the first place.

“Are you all right? What happened?” he asked, voice concerned, almost angry, like how dare I fall off a ladder when he was the manly warlock who belonged in all the dangerous situations.

His voice was so beautiful, low, rumbling, filled with a threat of dire consequences if I ever fell off a ladder again.

I slid my fingers around his neck, pulled his head down and kissed him. It was an accident. I didn’t actually want to kiss him, but my brain wasn’t working. It was paralyzed, stuck on the wanting, needing, and then having.

He tasted so good, like hibiscus tea and chlorophyl, green, alive, almost too alive. He groaned against my mouth and pulled me closer, kissing me back like his brain had also stopped working. The kiss went on and on, until we landed on the couch in a cloud of dust.

His lips were so soft, persuasive, intent, like kissing me was the only thing he’d ever done and would ever do, the end.

He was so soft, so sweet, so pliable, like he was mine to do as I willed, but he was on top of me.

Not really, because his weight was supported around me so I wasn’t crushed.

His hand slid over the skin of my side, my shirt having ridden up.

Skin. We needed more of that. Less of everything keeping our souls apart.

I pushed up his shirt and then my hands were all over his chest. Had I ever touched him like this?

He stopped moving, started pulling away, so I rolled us until I was on the top of his brawny, muscular body.

It reminded me of the first football player I’d ever sucked the life out of.

It was fun to play games with arrogant jerks, but he became obsessed with me, which wasn’t nearly as fun as I thought it would be.

It was my turn to pull away, my brain happily back in my skull where it belonged, instead of floating up on the helium of lust. I was filled with his strength and energy. Seemed almost like he was feeding his strength into me. I hadn’t been stealing it. Probably.

I stood on my legs, fighting against the magnetic pull towards the mage. Cleaning with him was out of the question. Anything with him was out of the question.

I started on the spell I’d learned when I was seven and my mother made me dust the living room.

The magic took so much time and effort to do properly.

You had to memorize every curve of furniture, every place dust might rest, and then go over all of it in your mind.

But I’d gotten very good at it, and I knew this house like the back of my hand.

Probably better than the back of my hand.

I didn’t really stare at my hands a lot.

A poof of dust gathered in the center of the conservatory, then the house opened its windows and all the dust was sucked out into the surrounding woods and cemetery.

Winston was still reclined on the couch, shirt pushed up over his pectorals. My husband. I took one unconscious step towards him before I turned resolutely and marched towards the door.

“I’ll be in the library researching the curse while you focus on the way door.”

“What about the golem?” His voice was rough, dark, compelling.

Gulp. “What about it?”

“It’s from the show, Jessica’s show. Do you want me to ask her about it, do the investigative work, or do you?”

I shivered at the thought of Jessica, who really, really enjoyed seducing men, in the same room as Winston. Not that she hadn’t bristled with antagonism towards him in the woods, but hate could easily turn to lust, as I so very clearly demonstrated. And I’d married him.

I was full out sweating. Cold sweat. That was the number one problem I needed to resolve, right there. Being married to Winston the Warlock was the absolute worst outcome possible. I guess that meant things could only improve.

“I’ll deal with Jessica,” I said and hurried out, but not too fast. We wouldn’t want him to think that I was afraid of him.

Why had I kissed him? What had that shock been?

It had seemed like the house, messing with me.

Stupid house, sending me back into his arms so I could suck the life out of him like a proper Sage.

I went to the library, which wasn’t grand like Winston’s family library. It was more of an office crammed with books. No two-story sliding ladder for me. Too bad. I gathered up a pile of books on curses and bindings and then sat at my mother’s still cluttered desk to go through them.

After a quick perusal about curses based on bastions, like our house, I put the curse books to the side. I closed my eyes and stretched out my hands, opening myself to communion with the house.

Nothing happened. For a long time. Just…nothing.

Finally I opened my eyes and dropped my hands. “Why is the house closed off now?” It had no problem filling me with its lack of strength when I connected back in the woods. Fickle beast. And that shock, dropping me on top of Winston like that.

My mother’s glimmering haze coalesced in front of her desk, making me feel guilty for sitting in her place, also reminding me that she needed to be put to rest before she drove me mad. She put her ghost fingers on the top book. “It has secrets, just like everyone else.”

“The house has secrets? Also attitude. I thought I was supposed to be its mistress.”

“You’re Sage House’s caretaker. It needs to trust you before it will open up.”

“I cleaned it.”

“With a spell, like you don’t want to actually touch it. Poor thing, abandoned and unloved by its new mistress.” She reached a ghostly hand to a wall, all melodrama even after death.

I rolled my eyes. “Poor thing. I don’t have time for this. I’m here to break a curse, not humor a cranky old house.”

“If it felt like you were going to stay, it might be more willing to help you.”

I sniffed. I had absolutely no intention of staying there. I’d rather eat every single hat in my shop. “Fine. I’ll take care of it on my own. I’ve lived happily without a stubborn, irrational house to deal with for years.” Also my mother’s ghost. I stood up, chest aching as I hesitated.

The other way to figure out the curse was to test the subject, which was Winston’s grandmother, the only person in the world who hadn’t abandoned me when I’d gone to prison.

She must think that I was the one who cursed her, that I had no sense of gratitude or obligation, if she knew it was connected to my house.

How could she not? She wasn’t stupid. Maybe she was senile.

I really shouldn’t hope someone was senile, but there you go. I was a bad seed.

I shook my head and left the library, avoiding the sound of Winston’s voice as I slipped out a side door.

The path was overgrown to the point of ridiculousness.

Still, after shoving through the jungle, I made it to the woods, to the shaded depths where I’d spent so much of my youth.

Now, the trails were hard-packed from their use in Jessica’s show.

About me. I should watch it to see how humiliated I should be.

I hiked through the woods until I got to the edge behind the back of Tabitha’s house.

I passed a pitcher of sun tea in the wild grass, a spattering of seeds on a stump, and then reached her back door, a few steps from the old water pump.

I knocked until it opened with a creak, and Tabitha looked out at me with a soft and distracted gaze.

“Clary. They said that your hair got strange, but I didn’t think it would be quite that…

” She reached out to touch it, but I dodged her hand and stepped past her, into the depths of her kitchen.

A pot of something was boiling in the ancient, blackened hearth.

Soap? Soup? Perhaps she made her soap edible.

Not less likely than making her soup soapable.

“You’re the voice of the coven. Why would you allow a golem to be created?” I asked first thing.

She frowned, vaguely confused, but it didn’t feel real to me. She looked like a caricature of a Salem witch, stuck in a past age for marketing purposes. “My dear Clary,” she croaked, once more reaching out to touch me.

I turned at the last second so her fingertips caught air instead of me. You didn’t just let people touch you unless you gained their trust through years of sausage rolls.

“My dear Tabitha,” I said with my own sweet smile. “The golem. Who created it? Why did you agree to letting such a dangerous creature be made for something as frivolous as a television show?”

The pot on the hearth chose that moment to overflow with a hiss on the flickering flames below. Thick smoke swirled while Tabitha turned to deal with the pot.

So that’s how it was going to be. It would take hours to force her to tell me anything.

While she was focused on her intentional distraction, I walked back out the still open door, back past the seeds that for a moment reflected the light more like bone or teeth than seeds, but maybe I was seeing things.