Page 57 of Filthy Little Witch
A small part of me worried that might have been the demon, too. But no, I’d sensed the connection in my blood. I knew it was her.
I hadn’t forgotten her other advice. You need to pray.
Even as angry at God as I was, I couldn’t deny that I would need all the help I could get. Could I put that aside for the sake of getting out of here?
Anger into faith, faith into action.
“Did you happen to find anything else in the library about how to get out of the liminal?” I redirected the conversation, hoping to distract myself.
Wes shook his head. “I think rewiring the warrior bond is still our best bet.”
“If we could share magic…if we could pull from the earth together…”
“I don’t know of any other witches that can give their magic to their warriors,” Atlas said. “Then again, I don’t know of anyone who’s seen the other side of a liminal and lived to tell the tale.”
“True enough,” Wes said. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t be first.”
I appreciated his optimism, now more than ever.
Despite saying I would only have one drink, I was obviously full of shit because after my glass was empty, Atlas refilled it. The conversation continued, somehow veering into a memory of the night they’d snuck out while their dad was on a hunt and nearly got chewed up by the same demon their dad had been looking for.
“So then this idiot tosses a salt grenade at the son of a bitch, and it fucking catches it!” Wes was laughing so hard at the story, he almost couldn’t get the words out. “Boom! It explodes in the demon’s face. We run like hell out of there, only to smack face-first into Dad.”
“God, he was pissed,” Atlas said, shaking his head as he drank his scotch. “I got my ass handed to me that night.”
Xavier Colt sounded like a hard man, difficult to live with, let alone have as a parent. I counted my blessings that I had Tita.
“Yeah, we both did,” Wes said. “But you always got it worse.”
Atlas snorted, his gaze growing distant as if lost in a memory, a faint sense of shame and nostalgia twisting down the connection between us.
“You bet your sweet ass I never did that again,” Atlas added with a sense of finality, firmly closing the bridge on that trip down memory lane.
“After that, you were Dad’s good little soldier,” Wes teased, laughing as Atlas scoffed.
“I had to be,” he said. “One of us had to get shit done. We all couldn’t run off to college and ignore our responsibilities.”
“Hey!” Wes said, shoving his shoulder. “I wasn’t ignoring anything. I just…ya know…dreamed about it every so often. And then after Dad died?—”
He cut himself off and cleared his throat, the once jovial atmosphere coalescing into reality. I’d almost forgotten I was supposed to hate them. I’d almost forgotten the reason why I never spoke to them, never thought of them, before being matched as witch and warriors. They were there the night my parents died. They could have saved them. They could have done something, anything, and yet…
“I’m sorry,” Wes murmured.
I glanced at the half-empty glass of whiskey in my tumbler. “Stop. There isn’t enough liquor in the liminal to have that conversation.”
“I mean it,” Wes continued. “I don’t know if we ever…I don’t think we’ve ever discussed what happened.”
“And we don’t need to now.” I finished my drink, set the glass down, and stood. “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long day.”
“Marta,” Wes tried again.
“I mean it,” I said. “I just started liking you two. Don’t make me regret it. Not now. We have too much left to do.”
“He’s trying to apologize,” Atlas snapped, pushing himself to his feet. “You know, we lost our dad that night, too. It isn’t just you who’s hurt. It isn’t just you who lost someone.”
“I know,” I growled, turning to face him, my hands clenching into fists. “And if you had just done something?—”
“What were we supposed to do, huh?” Atlas snarled. “Dad told us to leave. Told us to save ourselves. We didn’t have a choice. I mean, Christ, what would you have done?”
