Page 29 of Warmongers and Wands
“Yeah. And if you need me to raise the dead, then just call me.” Babylon drawled. “No? No one wants me to raise the dead? Figures.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Cassie insisted. Again, the message was that she wasn’t leaving me with Hadur, in the middle of nowhere, hurt, with possibly a werewolf attack in the future.
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be fine. As soon as Ophelia is done with me and I manage to choke down a couple of Glenda’s smoothies, I should be feeling okay enough to defend myself. Heck, I was almost ready to enchant this pair of nippers when you all got here. And Hadur isn’t going to let anyone hurt me. He’s a demon. He’s a freaking war demon. Some pansy-ass werewolves aren’t going to get past him.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Cassie walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Ophelia can bring back some clothes for the both of us. I’ll sleep here with you. He can sleep somewhere else. Like outside the cabin somewhere else.” She glared at Hadur.
Seriously? I wasn’t like this when she had started banging Lucien. My sister, the hypocrite. “You have a job—a lawyer job. You can’t stay here with me for twelve to fourteen or sixteen weeks—”
“Four,” Glenda announced.
“Four weeks,” I corrected. “You have a job. And I’ll be fine.”
She bit her lip. “I’ll work from here.”
“With no cell service and no electricity. What are you going to do, file briefs via smoke signal? Or send Diebin in with a packet of handwritten notes every day?”
“Mack and Russ will cover for me. The law firm partners are sphinx. They’ll understand. I’ll…I’ll take a leave.”
“We’ll take turns,” Babylon told her. “If each of us stays for a week, rotates staying here with Bronwyn, then you won’t have to deal with those sphinx assholes you work for.”
Cassie glowered down at the floor, her jaw set in that typical concrete firmness that told me she didn’t like our youngest sister’s suggestion one bit. As much as Cassie had chafed at having to raise the lot of us when she was only thirteen, she wasn’t one to give up her authority easily. She’d bitch and moan about it, but she liked being in charge. She liked taking care of us all. And she honestly didn’t trust anyone else to do as good a job as she did. It was like we were all little children still in her mind. Which was funny since I was only two years younger than her.
I reached out a hand to grip her shoulder. “Tonight only, Cassie. Then let someone else take a turn babysitting your thirty-one-year-old sister if you’re that worried. You can come out when you get off work to check on me if you need to, just to make sure we haven’t all been slaughtered in our sleep by werewolves.”
“Not helping,” she muttered.
“I’ll be fine. Hadur and I will be fine. And by tomorrow morning, you’ll realize that and stop thinking I need to have my whole family standing guard outside a cabin.”
“You’ve got a broken leg, Wynnie.” She reached out a hand to touch my cheek and I saw how worried she really was. “You’re hurt. I don’t know this demon. And if the werewolves really did cause your accident…”
“I don’t know that. I’m just conjecturing, and maybe I’m a little overly paranoid because the werewolves are jerks and in the middle of a turf war. As for Hadur, I trust him. And my leg…well it will heal in twelve or fourteen or sixteen weeks.”
“Four,” Glenda reminded me.
“Four,” I corrected myself. “Ophelia and whoever else wants to help carry shit down a mountainside and through the woods can come back with medical stuff and clothing. Oh, and books. I need the books from the attic. I need all the diaries from two hundred years ago and any spell books that might have information on demons and demon summoning.”
If I was going to be stuck here for four weeks in a cabin with my sister with no electricity, running water, or Wi-Fi, then I might as well get some research done. Besides, I was determined that by the time I walked out of this place, Hadur was walking out of here with me. Whether he chose to stay or go at that point was his decision, but I wasn’t going to have him trapped here for a moment longer than necessary.
“And smoothies and sexy reading material….” Sylvie was writing it all down on a paper towel with a pen she’d managed to find somewhere.
“And a porta-potty,” I added. “One of those portable ones. Chocolate. Wine.”
“We’re gonna need more than one trip.” Ophelia rolled her eyes.
“We’ve got it,” Sylvie said. “I’ll help Ophelia carry it all. And if we can’t get it all in one trip, I’ll come back later with more.”
My sisters all moved toward the door—well, all of them aside from Cassie.
“I’m staying here. Tell Lucien…” she appeared a bit flustered about what they should tell Lucien, and I knew why. The demon was going to bust a gasket over this whole thing. He barely let Cassie out of his sight. He’d even taken to lurking around the courthouse during her trials, and although she’d threatened to set his extremities on fire, I could tell she kind of liked the stalkerish behavior. Weirdo. Her, I mean, although he was plenty weird as well.
“I’ll tell him you and Bronwyn are having a threesome here with another demon.” Sylvie grinned. “I’ll even go into details.”
“No, you will not!” Cassie shouted at her back. “Sylvie! I mean it. Do not tell him that!”
She turned to me with a groan once they’d all left. “I’m so dead. So. Dead.”
“Lucien is a selfish, arrogant asshole, but I can’t see him killing the witch he bonded with,” Hadur commented. “You can make his life miserable, you know.”
