Midlife Witch Hunter (The Forty Proof Series Book 6) Read online

  “And that spell wouldn’t have worked on your gran,” Sarge said. “At least I don’t think it would have.”

  I looked up at him and then Feish, hoping they were right. “Why not?”

  “Because the whole reason Karissa borrowed Robert a while back was because she needed something from him in order to make the spell—at least that’s what Penny said.” Sarge helped me back to my feet. “You think that’s why Celia was being pissy? Because she didn’t know the spell was geared toward him?”

  He’d noticed it too. “Yeah. But wouldn’t she have realized what you just told me?”

  “Maybe she’s getting old too.” Feish clucked her tongue. “Do ghosts go through menopause? Do they lose their minds and memories? I read that somewhere.”

  I didn’t feel like pointing out that Gran was far past the stage of menopause, even if she’d been alive. Mostly because I was too busy staring at the person striding across the square, headed our way from the direction we’d come.

  Robert looked good in modern clothes—dark blue jeans and a slightly too tight light blue T-shirt. His hair was a bit on the wild side, but as he walked toward us, he pulled it back into a low ponytail.

  “You want a moment of privacy with him?” Sarge asked.

  “Yeah, so he can say thank you?” Feish said, loudly enough that there was no way Robert didn’t hear her.

  He stopped just in front of us. “I’d like to speak to Bree alone, please.”

  Sarge and Feish looked at me, and I gave them a nod. “Yeah, it’s fine. He has some grovelling to do.”

  Feish snort-laughed, and Sarge gave me a wink. “Get him on his knees, that’s a good place for a man.”

  Jaysus. My face flushed all hot and probably went bright red like a flaming light bulb. Feish and Sarge moved off, giving Robert and me some privacy.

  Robert took a step closer and brought his hands up to grab hold of my upper arms. His blue eyes were serious as he closed the distance between us.

  “Bree.”

  “Robert.”

  His hands tightened, and he leaned his head in, his eyes dipping to my mouth. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension between us. This was a terrible idea. I did not want a rebound with Robert. Nope. No. Not happening.

  Lips brushed against my earlobe, sending a shiver down my spine.

  “We are in danger.” And he yanked me hard to the left as something shot past us both, something hard and metallic by the sound of it.

  Not even one day since our last fight, and we were being attacked again. This was getting tiresome.

  Chapter

  Six

  Robert’s yank on my arms snapped us both to the ground as several projectiles shot over our heads.

  “Hurry! More are coming!” He kept his grip on my arm as he started crawling across the ground on his belly as if we were back in the Hollows being trained. I followed, though I cursed that I was back to this army-crawling business.

  “What the hell is happening? What is that?”

  He kept on dragging me, and I managed to get my body moving. The Advil had fully kicked in, but I was still sore, and so very ducking tired, so I was slow. Or maybe I just wasn’t in as good shape as I’d thought—that was a distinct possibility. With a grunt I got moving, dragging my body across the grass, but let me be honest, I was ridiculously slow. And moving like maybe an inch with each grunt.

  An inch was not going to get me out of danger any time soon. I pushed to my hands and knees, crawling far faster like that even though it hurt like a son of a . . . something dropped across my body in lines, like rope. I twisted around. Check that, it was rope.

  I rolled away, but the rope twisted around me as if it were alive. “Ah, crap!” I reached for my bag, but my arms were clamped tight to my sides so fast that they slapped my leather pants. “Really?” I stopped struggling and let out a slow breath. Fighting my way out of this was not going to work.

  I wiggled my fingers and bellowed for my friends. “Feish! Sarge!”

  “Yeah, nope!” Sarge yelled back. “We got roped too!”

  I didn’t squirm. Damn, this would have been the perfect time for Robert to pop out of my bag, and bite through the ropes. But by the sounds of it . . . “Robert, you caught too?”

  “Yes,” he growled. Oh, someone was cranky this early in being alive.

  I worked my hand toward my bag. I had a knife in there—the one Crash had left for me to replace the two I’d lost. My fingers flipped open the leather flap, and I kept right on wiggling them until they brushed up against the smooth handle. “There we go.” See, as much as having your friends around was good, sometimes you needed to save yourself. I gripped the handle and rolled my wrist just so. The blade popped out and cut through one of the ropes.

  The rope screamed.

  Yup, screamed. High-pitched, ear-piercing, making all the birds in the region fly away, screamed.

  Thrashing and shrieking, the ropes slithered off me, and I rolled to my hands and knees and sat up. Robert was fighting for all he was worth, and it looked like the ropes were just digging in harder. Feish was calmly lying on the grass, and even Sarge seemed to have figured out that the more he fought, the tighter the ropes got. Like some sort of Chinese finger trap.

  I went to Robert first. When I cut the ropes, they shrieked, and he came up swinging, his fist snapping out toward one of the ropes. It had no interest in him once it was injured. He spun and nearly caught me in the chin with a fist.

  I stepped out of the way, but just barely.

  His eyes were wild, his hair all mussed up, and for a moment it was like he was not there . . . “Chill out, Robert.” I patted his shoulder, and he turned his face toward my hand. Mouth open.

  Teeth bared.

  Teeth bared?

  I jerked my hand back. Took a few steps back and stared down at him. “Robert?”

  “Something’s . . . wrong,” he whispered and shook his head, stepping away from me. “Bree, this is not good.”

  I reached a hand to him, and he took it. “You’re new at this living thing. You probably just feel weird.”

  He squeezed my fingers and then let me go. “Help them.”

  I spun and hurried over to Feish and Sarge, setting them free with a quick slash to each set of ropes, though I use that term lightly. Whoever had sent the ropes hadn’t sent anyone to gather us up, at least not with any sort of urgency. The other people—humans milling around in the park—glanced at us but didn’t flinch. They couldn’t see the ropes. Didn’t hear the screeching as they were cut off my friends.

  “Weirdos! Get out of here!” a man yelled as he crossed, passing close enough to see Feish and Sarge lying on the ground, and Robert still vibrating. He’d probably seen us army crawling across the square.

  I flipped him off. “We’re practicing for a play, douche!”

  He cursed at me.

  “Go away, you are not important in this story!” Feish yelled as I cut into the rope.

  Feish sat up and rubbed at her arms. “That was terrible. Just terrible. Like being caught in the nets again.”

  I helped her stand up. “The nets?”

  “Yeah, when Karissa first caught me.” She shivered, and her gills flicked open and shut more than usual. “Terrible. They did a similar thing, wrapping tighter and tighter the more you fought.”

  I offered my hand to Sarge, and he waved me off. I noticed the tiny spider sitting on his shoulder. Jinx waved at me, and I glared at her and pointed a finger. “You could have helped!”

  Sarge grunted as if I’d punched him. “I was tied up too, remember?”

  “Not you, your freeloader friend there on your shoulder.”

  Jinx ducked down his back before he could see her, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. “Jinx!” Sarge snapped. “I told you to leave off! I’m not interested! I like men, not androgynous spiders!”

  “Which is why I didn’t help.” Her voice was loud for someone in such a tiny body. “And you said it yourself, you’re mostly gay.”

  “I should have said all the way gay,” he growled.

  “Let’s get back to the house,” I said. “Maybe we won’t get attacked there?” It didn’t sound convincing, but at least there we’d have Penny and the others to help against anyone wanting to harm us. The theory was as sound as any.

  Robert was on his knees, staring at the ground with his chin to his chest. I gave Feish and Sarge a ‘wait for me’ move with my hands.

  They shrugged in unison, though I could see that Feish was paler than usual. The ropes had stressed her out. Fair enough. She’d experienced them before, so this had to trigger some PTSD for her. Just one more reason to hate on Karissa. Did that mean Karissa had sent the ropes? If so, why?

  Also . . . if Feish was captured by Karissa, how had she come to live with Crash? Had he taken her under his wing to keep her away from Karissa? She’d been an indentured servant to him, too, but she was loyal to him by choice, anyone could see that.

  “Lawd help me, I do not need to give him a reason to be a hero.” I spoke under my breath, mostly to myself. Sarge grunted though. Of course he’d heard me with his wolfy ears.

  I went to Robert and crouched beside him, but he flinched away from me. “Something is wrong, Bree. I can feel it in my body. I’m not myself. And I don’t want to hurt you. Of all the people in this world, you are the one I want to protect. The only one I need to protect.”

  Gotta be honest, it took a lot for me to reach out and put my hand on his shoulder again. But I did it, and I gave him a little squeeze. “Maybe it’s just like vertigo. You’ve got to get used to being alive again, right?”

  “Like getting your sailor’s legs!” Feish offered. Apparently she had good ears too.

  He lifted his head, eyes on mine, face distraught. “I wanted to bite you, Bree. And I don’t mean in a sexual way. I wanted to bite on you and make you bleed.”

  “Like, you wanted to hurt me?”

  There was a hiss in the air that turned me around in time to see something flying through the big Spanish oak trees. More nets.

  I yanked him to his feet, and the four of us were running back toward the house as fast as we could go. Robert gripped my hand, and I held on to him too. Because we’d face whatever was going on with him as a team.

  We had to.

  The four of us—five if you counted Jinx—ran all the way back to the house, with the sound of slithering ropes following us. I didn’t look back. Sarge did at one point.

  “Yeah, not good! Keep running!”

  Like I was going to sit down and have a break right there. Okay, I wanted to—my breath was coming in sharp blasts and my heart felt like it was going to explode. More training was needed, obviously, if I was going to be put on the run like this on the regular.

  Who was I kidding? It was already happening on the regular.

  We blasted through the front door of the house, I tripped over the ledge, and we all went crashing to the floor in a pile. I landed on Robert, and his arms went around me, and we found ourselves nose to nose for the second time in like fifteen minutes. He stared at me, and one hand slid up my back to the side of my face and brushed across my skin as he mouthed my name. As if he were tasting it.

  “What in hell is going on here?” Penny barked, and I stiffened like I’d been caught as a teenager with a boy.

  “Someone came after us,” I said as I carefully pushed off Robert and got to my feet with only a little bit of a wobble. Feish and Sarge were dusting themselves off, and Robert got to his feet last, slowest.

  “Who?” Suzy poked her head out of the kitchen area. Her blond hair was swept up into a high bun, and wisps had curled out around her face. She was wearing an apron—baking lessons with Eric, no doubt. Eric leaned around her and rested his head on top of hers.

  “I think maybe Karissa. Feish said she’d seen nets like that before, but it doesn’t make sense. You guys have any idea?” I turned to Sarge, Feish, and Robert.

  Robert was the one who nodded. “I think it was one of the council members. He’s worked with the queen of the fae before. Since she’s the one who gave you the spell that”—he gestured to his body—“it fits.”

  I scrunched up my face and tipped my head back. “Seriously?” My guts gurgled with discomfort at the thought. The council had been less than helpful, to say the least, and I knew some of them also served on the Dark Council. Unfortunately, we weren’t certain which of them were pulling double duty.

  In general, they really didn’t like me, being that they were a group of old-school, misogynistic dink holes and I was a strong, gaining-my-confidence-back woman in her middle years. It kind of set us to locking horns about basic decency.

  So yeah, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of the council coming after me, or us, for any reason.

  I bent at the waist, and my lack of oxygen from running caught up with me, a mighty stitch forming in my side that had me grimacing and limping toward the kitchen. “What the hell could they want with us now?”

  “Probably not us,” Feish pointed out. “Just you. We in the way. You are the one with all the trouble around her.”

  I slid into one of the kitchen chairs that I’d so recently vacated, keeping one hand jammed into my side to help with the stitch.

  “Keep walking it off,” Sarge said. “It’ll fade faster.”

  I pushed to my feet and circled the kitchen. Eric put out a tray of muffins that looked a tad overcooked. Okay, they were black. “Look, Suze made these,” he said proudly. “Her own flavor profile! They aren’t burnt. Everyone take one and have a bite. See what you think.”

  He was obviously trying to lower the tension in the room, and everyone dutifully took a muffin. We bit into them at the same time. Which meant we all spat it out at the same time, spewing chunks of . . . well, I’d say muffin, only it tasted nothing like any muffin I’d ever had. Well, not quite all of us spat it out.

  “Squid ink muffins,” Feish moaned. “These are amazing! Did you make them for me?”

  Suzy smiled. “I did think you’d like them; you haven’t been eating the ones Eric made. The waterborn truly have a different palate than the rest of the world.” She winked.

  Robert slapped a hand on the table, and I noticed that he hadn’t taken a muffin. I mean, I got it. I’d only tried the black muffins out of loyalty. Then again, wasn’t he hungry? There were other treats on the table, right within reach, and he hadn’t eaten anything. “Wonderful, wonderful. Can we get back to the point at hand? Someone just tried to kidnap Bree. Again.”

  I sighed. He wasn’t wrong. “We’ll get there, Robert. Or they’ll come here. I mean, we don’t know who tried it. It might not have been the council. Maybe it was Karissa just being a stinky muff again.”

  He ground his teeth loudly enough that everyone went still. “I know who it was. Lucas Brave. He has been on the council a long time. A warlock with great power and great pull within the council.”

  I frowned. “How do you know it was him?”

  “Because that flying rope trick is his signature move. I saw them coming, but I didn’t realize what they were until I was right on top of you.” He breathed out a heavy sigh. “I was too slow.”

  Feish snickered. “I bet you want to be right on top of her, but no! That is not your place.”

  Lawdy gawd in heaven, I did not need her to start shipping me and Crash again. “Feish, ease off. It’s been a rough morning for Robert.”

  She bit into her muffin and mumbled something around it. Something about me putting dicks before chicks, and I did not want to know where she’d picked that up from.

  “I am not.” I pointed at her, then turned to Robert. His face was tight, and I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or concern. “Robert, any idea why he might have tried to net us all?”

  He closed his eyes. “Because you just brought me back from the dead.”

  I pursed my lips. “I didn’t use any magic; it was Karissa’s spell.”

  Robert’s jaw ticked. “I’m just guessing here, but what if Karissa slipped him a note suggesting it was your ability that rose me from the dead, not hers. Now Lucas thinks you know how to raise the dead back to true life.” He paused. “Your connection to the shinigami and Mori would only further cement this belief.”

  Dr. Mori was a newer friend. He and the shinigami had a connection to the dead, just like I did, and he’d offered to start training me in like a week. I was looking forward to it, if I were being honest. Up until now, I’d only used my connection to the dead accidentally, or by experimentation driven by desperation. The possibility that I could learn how to harness it was alluring to say the least. But flexing my power over the dead muscles obviously had some drawbacks. Or at least some associated problems.

  Basically, if Robert was right, this Lucas thought I could raise the dead and wanted that power for himself. Not good. I cleared my throat, and a knock on the door had us all turning our heads.

  “All your trouble always comes in through the front door,” Penny muttered. “At least it doesn’t try to disguise itself as something else.”

  Nobody moved toward the door.

  I mean, there was a chance it was just a salesman. Maybe a real estate developer. Someone other than Lucas Brave of the Savannah council. But let’s be real. We all knew it was trouble—Lucas, Karissa, or someone else intent on giving me grief.

  The stitch in my side was easing, so I went toward the door. The scramble of feet behind me made me smile. Sure, my friends didn’t want to answer the door either, but they weren’t going to let me answer it on my own.

  I held my hand out toward the doorknob and waited, feeling the pulse of energy coming off the steel. The pendant around my neck heated against my skin. I held up a hand to stop my friends. “The door is unlocked; you can open it.” I wasn’t dumb enough to invite him in, not when I’d just learned that vampires were a real issue and not monsters who were polite enough to ask for an invitation inside before chowing down on you.

  I took a step back. There was a muttered curse from the other side of the door, and I glanced at Robert. “That sound like your friend?”