His gaze fell to her lips. “Who knows. By then I’m rolling so hard on my bath salts that I’m a proper disaster.”
“Busted.” Wetness flowed from her core and into her panties. She couldn’t remember the last man with whom she’d enjoyed witty repartee. The sparkly pleasure of sparring with a guy she liked was as refreshing as an oasis in a desert. “If you were a true bath salts zombie, you’d know that one geeks out or tweaks out on bath salts.”
The point of his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, he looked her up and down.
“Ah, well, perhaps it was meow-meow I was hooked on.” His voice came out hoarse, a sandpaper scratch roughing up that polished accent.
A current of desire flowed from her nipples to her clit as if a wire connected her sensitive parts. Did he talk dirty during sex? Moan words or phrases in that voice of his?
Helen barked an awkward monster of a cough-laugh before her lust took over and she did something dumb, like vault to her tiptoes and plant a kiss on his lips. “We should debrief.”
Did Brian wear boxers or briefs? She’d like to slide either type of underwear down his narrow hips and sculpted legs. Ack, even her attempt to change the subject to buzzkill matters came out sounding like an innuendo and got her hot.
“Yes, well.” Brian chuckled. The apples of his cheeks pinked. “I suppose so.”
Masking her urges with a no-nonsense façade, Helen dragged her suitcase over to the couch and sat. She pulled out the grimoire and velvet bag of crystals.
Brian settled on the cushion next to her, close enough that his proximity caused butterflies to take flight in her belly. But no way would she let stubborn attraction lead her astray, or heaven forbid fall into bed with the man. Sex was too complicated. But what would sex be like with Brian? Methodical? Romantic? Filthy? Would he make her come?
Before she could quash naughty thoughts, the cloud of hex smoke burst in Helen’s core.
Tendrils coiled through her midsection, forming a tempest. Dread clomping in like the horsemen of the apocalypse, she laid a hand over her stomach and tried to guess what awakened the bad energy.
“Are you alright?” Brian touched her knee, withdrawing his hand seconds later. “Ouch. Shite.”
“What?” Muzzy fog filled Helen’s head. The pressure in her center loosened, pushing out of the front of her head in an ashy white plume. Bending the air with wobbles like heat waves, the emission slithered to the front of the room, flattened itself, and slipped through the crack separating door and floor.
Brian clenched his wrist, flexing his fingers. “I’ve been getting these pains. I assumed carpal tunnel at first, degenerative issues from playing guitar for so long, but I had a flare when I touched your crystal on the bus. And again just now.”
Five and five made ten. “The curse feeds off something in me, charges up and then goes off seeking the crystal. Whoever has the crystal is working this to their advantage. This entity is getting more powerful.”
Brian scowled, his gaze sliding to her big book of esoteric weirdness. “Entity? Curse?”
She sighed and geared up to barf out the truth. “Yeah. I accidentally cast a curse.”
“What? Why? What type of curse?”
“It was a byproduct of choosing my path as a witch. I wasn’t suited to the type of power I took, and the universe generated a hex to punish me.”
Brian fluttered his eyelashes, face bending into a grimace. “Why is this curse after me? You see how bolloxed up this is?”
“I do. Could be the curse needed someone to attach to, and you were the first person I paid sustained attention to that day. But now I think it’s more. I think whatever entity this curse is associated with, you’re already on the radar. Primed. Someone in your inner circle is messing around with the same type of magic I have, which helped the curse to identify you. There are people controlling the entity, encouraging demonic manifestation. So you made an easy target.”
Brian looked through Helen, not at her, his mind seeming to drift to a memory or thought horrible in nature. “They’re cutting people and taking out their organs.”
Shock came at her so hard that she got heartburn and saw double. “Who’s cutting people?”
He dug a thumb and a forefinger into the inner corners of his eyes. “Some secret society, I don’t know. But there’s multiple witnesses. The victims should die from the procedures, but they don’t. Which makes me wonder what they’re doing besides cutting and surgery.”
“On your bus, you alluded to other odd happenings. Tell me anything you can.” She could cross-reference Brian’s account with the grimoire and consult Nerissa. The incident with the clone in the mirror was a loose end, a weak flank, but telling Brian wouldn’t help.
Before casting a spell to undo damage, she ought to do her best to make sure she was as powerful as possible. In control of her magic.
“Joe got into mysticism a few weeks ago. I dismissed it at first as Hollywood nonsense, another pyramid scheme to separate fools from their money. But then he tells me about some ritual he went to, a workshop where he learned remote viewing. And you know what? He described, in perfect detail, what I was doing the other day on a different side of town. The implication, the implicit threat, was that he’s using this newfound power to spy on me. That’ll make you paranoid, right? That’s when I started suspecting him, but I tried my best to disregard my feelings. And shame on me. I wanted to use him for my own selfish gain. So I downplayed his dealings and went on like normal.”
“I get why you went into denial. This stuff isn’t easy to accept at first, and we’re hardwired to rationalize. Do you know of anyone besides Joe who might be in this cabal?”
Brian
