Page 50 of Filthy Little Witch
“So you want to stay here for the rest of eternity?” She shoved upright, getting in his face.
“Alright, knock it off.” I slammed my hands on the table to get their attention and break the cycle. “You said we had a week, right? We’ll keep researching. We’ll keep scouring the library and trying to connect to the other side.”
Atlas pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, man. Something’s wrong.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wrong, how?”
He glanced between us as a thick wave of trepidation coursed through the bond.
“I feel…different,” he said. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
That got my attention. “What dreams?”
He looked like he was about to say something life-altering, but instead he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want us to forget what brought us here. We created this liminal for a lust demon. Asmodeius. People were consuming each other, fucking each other to death.”
“Your point?” Marta asked, drumming her nails on her coffee mug.
“What if the demon’s here?” Atlas cleared his throat. “What if it’s inside us? What if it’s fucking with us? We already feel like we can’t control our impulses. This is just making it worse.”
“Even more reason to keep going with the rituals,” she said.
Atlas had a good argument. I almost hadn’t been able to stop last night, and even now, sitting next to them and not touching them took an incredible amount of restraint. I wanted to lick the sweat off Atlas’s abs. I wanted to bury myself between Marta’s legs. I wanted to fuck them both, consequences be damned, society’s ideas of taboo be damned.
“Look, creating that amount of magic at one time…” Atlas rubbed his hands over his eyes, pushing them back into his hair. “Demons feed off that shit. They live for it. It may not have shown itself yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here.”
Marta squared her jaw and nodded once, reluctant resolution settling in her gut.
“You’re right,” I said, glancing up at her. “Do we have to be outside for the flesh binding? Can we do it indoors, behind the wards?”
She nodded. “I think so. Outdoors is better, but as long as we protect ourselves and we start at the right time of day, it shouldn’t matter where we do it.”
Atlas sighed, his anxiety momentarily quelled. But my mind went back to something else Marta had said.
“What do you mean we’re running out of time?” I asked.
“In the human realm, it’s the middle of October. In two weeks, it’ll be November 1.”
“And?” Atlas raised his eyebrows.
“Día de Muertos.” She blinked as a wave of regret and anguish flickered down the bond. She explained it was the time of year when the connection between realms was at its most potent. “Usually we think about it in terms of the living and the dead, but?—”
“It could mean this realm, too,” Atlas finished.
“Exactly,” she said as a burst of exhilaration exploded from her chest. “If we could get my coven to pull from the other side while we push, maybe we could overwhelm the veil and slip through.”
“How do we get them to pull?” I asked. “You haven’t been able to contact them.”
“I think it’s time we leave the estate,” she said. “If I go to Tita’s house, I might be able to reach her from there.”
“How?” Atlas asked. “Do you and Tita have some kind of telepathic connection?”
“No, but we have a direct bloodline.” She took another sip of coffee and sighed. “It’s not like the coven, not like our blood binding. We share DNA. I’m hoping I can reach her through the mirror.”
He raised his eyebrow as a wicked heat of disbelief twisted through his chest. “A mirror?”
“Mirrors have long been believed to be the doorway to other realms,” I said. “You think that will work?”
“I’ve been trying to reach the coven from here, but I think the heavy protective wards around the space are keeping me out. Tita’s house is warded, too, but not by hundreds of years of witch blood. This is her blood, my blood. It could work.”
