Page 39 of Brimstone and Broomsticks
Chapter 13
Cassandra
Iawoke alone in my bed to the smell of bacon and coffee.
Last night…oh wow, last night. My hand crept between my legs as I remembered all the things Lucien and I had done. His tongue working its way up my thighs. His hard length driving deep inside me as I dug my nails into his fine ass. I hadn’t gotten much sleep at all, and I was looking forward to more. I hoped this demon stuck around, because a girl could get used to sex like this.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt as if life were truly good—cool clean cotton sheets, soft feather pillows, a warm down comforter. A sexy man who’d rocked my world all night long. He seriously needed to get that cute ass of his up here again so we could snuggle and more. And while he was getting up here, he should also bring some coffee and bacon to me in bed.
I was tempted to slide out from under my sheets and head into the kitchen wearing the tank top and underwear I’d gone to bed in, grab said coffee and bacon, grab the hot guy cooking it all, and take everything back to bed to enjoy properly, but the sound of multiple voices coming from downstairs ended that little fantasy.
Hopping out of bed, I did the morning bathroom essentials, threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, then headed down. In the kitchen I found Lucien along with my sister Glenda. Glenda was at the stove, her personal domain, cooking what looked to be a frittata along with French toast and the bacon I’d smelled from upstairs.
And clearly she’d brought her own supplies, since the only thing in my refrigerator as of last night was a half-empty container of ice cream and some moldy cheese.
“…non GMO, free range, and cage free. That’s important, you know. Beyond the ethics of treating other creatures in the most humane way possible, you can taste it in the eggs. Those poor things stacked on top of each other in tiny wire cages, their feet cut from the wires, poop falling down through to each chicken below it…those eggs taste of desperation and pain.”
“Lovely visual,” I announced. “Not thinking I’ve got the stomach for breakfast after hearing about chickens pooping down on each other.”
Glenda spun around with a smile that never failed to light up my world. “Nothing puts you off your breakfast, Cassie darling. Nothing.” She leaned over to give me a smooch on the cheek, then went back to the frittata and her lecture on the ethics of food-chain management. That was Glenda. She was smack in the middle of our line of siblings. Me, Bronwyn, then the twins Ophelia and Sylvie, then Glenda. Only Adrienne and Babylon were younger, but sometimes this quirky sister of mine seemed the eldest of us all. She’d been the one who’d deciphered the bookshelf full of cookbooks and kept us from living on instant oatmeal and frozen pizza once Mom had hit the road. I’d always thought she’d become a chef, but each year her food mantra got more and more dogmatic. Paleo. Keto. Whole Foods. Nothing that wasn’t strictly organic, grass-fed, locally sourced. Now she was making noises about veganism, although from the bacon and frittata on the stove, that seemed to still be in the “just talking” phase. Soon I expected her to be trying to convince us all that we needed to only eat seaweed and dandelion roots, or something like that.
Glenda healed. That was her specialty. And in keeping with her quirky nature, she only healed through her food. I was pretty sure that after eating this frittata, the blister on my heel from those new pumps would completely be gone, as well as the paper cut I’d gotten yesterday. Sadly she’d never cured cancer or anything life-threatening, but any time someone had a urinary tract infection, strep throat, or a bad case of athlete’s foot, they knew to call on Glenda.
“Morning, sunshine.” Lucien poured a cup of coffee, stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar, and handed it to me with a kiss on the top of my head.
Glenda shot me a perceptive side-eye. “So I come by to find this hottie half-naked in the kitchen about to open a can of beans for breakfast. Anything you want to tell me, Cassie?”
“Nope.” I sipped my coffee, marveling that Lucien somehow knew exactly how I liked my morning beverage. Was he a mind reader?
“I’m a client,” Lucien offered. “Although I’m hoping to become more than a client.”
“Well, this coffee is improving your chances,” I teased. “Any news on our favorite werewolf this morning? You’re not in jail, so I’m taking that as a positive sign. What’s your demon intuition tell you?”
“It’s telling me I have better things to do on a Saturday morning than worry about a werewolf.” He pulled me close, his arm around my shoulder.
“Ophelia texted me about what happened,” Glenda commented, eyeing us with a smirk. “She was on-call at the firehouse. Last thing either of us heard, Clinton Dickskin didn’t make it back to his den last night.”
I shrugged, but my stomach dropped a few feet at her words. “Full moon is tonight. Not surprising that a werewolf wouldn’t come home with their blood stirred up.”
“Clinton is an idiot, but not a suicidal one.” Glenda flipped the bacon and picked up the pan to gently slide the frittata out onto a plate. “A werewolf loses that much blood, he’s not going to continue looking for fights, sex, or any other shenanigans. He would have gone somewhere safe to heal. He would have wanted to make sure he wasn’t going into the full moon suffering blood loss and who knows what else.”
I frowned, thinking about what I knew about werewolves, which was a bit more than I knew about demons. “They go all out during the full moon, though. Run until they die. Bleed until they die. They’ve got no sense of self-preservation or restraint then. One day shouldn’t make such a huge difference in that. I mean, the shifters are already feeling the moon a few days before the actual event.”
Glenda nodded. “Yeah, but hyped up isn’t the same as moon-crazy, and Clinton isn’t some random pack member. He’s dominant in the pack. A wolf doesn’t get that way without knowing when to fold his hand and go home for the evening.”
I’d never experienced any of this with Marcus. Feline shifters didn’t have packs, and their behavior during the full moon wasn’t quite as crazy as the wolves.
“Your sister Ophelia said it was a lot of blood, even for a werewolf,” Lucien chimed in. “Maybe he was too weak to make it home. Maybe he was worried that whoever attacked him would be waiting for him to finish the job. If that’s the case, he could have decided to bed down in someone’s barn or garage, or old shed.”
I watched Glenda put the food on the table and debated my conflicting desires to go eat, and to remain here with Lucien’s arm around me. He decided for me, sliding his hand from my shoulder down to my ass and urging me toward the table. I sat, waiting for the other two before I snatched up a piece of bacon.
“If Clinton doesn’t turn up this morning, we’ll need to go search for him. Not that I think he’s going to stagger into the Stagecoach for our breakfast meeting after losing all that blood.”
“I don’t know,” Glenda commented. “Their pancakes are pretty good. I might just rise out of my deathbed for a short stack of pecan oat with warm maple syrup.”
True. Their pancakes really were that good. “Well, I’m assuming he’s not going to be there. Ophelia said he wasn’t attacked in the hotel room—that was a manufactured crime scene to set Lucien up for some reason we’ve yet to determine. If the werewolf is alive and he did decide to spend the night somewhere other than his home, then we’ll need to find where he was attacked and search in a radius from there. With that much blood loss, he can’t have gone far.”
“Unless he had help.” Lucien slid a pie-shaped slice of the frittata onto my plate. “A few of those other werewolves were with him after our fight last night. His buddies, I assume. Maybe he got into another fight with someone who was using claws or a knife, and his buddies gave him a lift.”
