Page 8 of Filthy Little Witch
“And let you have all the fun?” I reached over to hit his book on the spine, sending it flying toward his face. “Not a chance.”
“Hey, knock it off,” he said, shoving my shoulder. I responded by knocking his book out of his hands again, which only made him punch me in the bicep. “Asshole.”
“Cunt.”
Wes pursed his lips and grabbed his phone to scroll through the socials for anything relevant. Marta said people were screwing each other to death, whatever the fuck that meant. Maybe it was a demon or a poltergeist, possessing all those poor fucks and forcing them to wear down their meat-suits. It could be an easy fix, and if it were, we’d be back in Asheville by the weekend.
Good. The less time we spend with her, the better.
It wasn’t that I was pissed about the warrior bond, though that was a whole other bag of cats entirely. It was just her. Why her?
Twelve years ago, Dad had taken us on our first mission, which was a mistake. I was twenty at the time, Wes only eighteen. It was supposed to be an easy job, in and out, a quick fix, and we’d be on our way. At the time, I’d been thrilled about becoming a warrior. I thought it was my destiny.
Killing monsters. Saving humanity. All that stupid, idiotic shit.
We got to the haunted house, quickly realized it was infested with demons, and tried to make a swift retreat. Marta’s parents got caught in the crossfire. Dad told me to take Wes and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him, leaving all of them. But always a good little soldier, I did what he told me to do. I took my brother back to the motel and waited for Dad, his witch, and her husband to return. They never did. We later learned all three of them had gotten chewed up and spit out, hardly a body part left to bury.
Marta blamed me for what happened, blamed Wes and me both.
Maybe that was why I hated her so much. She’d never heard our side of the story, and she didn’t want to. No, she’d rather simmer with her own wrath while Wes and I bore the brunt of the fallout.
“It could be a Cupid,” Wes said, drawing me back to reality. “Or maybe a siren.”
“Cupids don’t make people go rabid,” I said.
“Are we sure that’s what’s happening?” Wes asked, scrolling through the evidence Aradia sent to us. “A few videos don’t mean anything.” He clicked on his screen before leaning over to show me. “Check out the local PD reports. Ten victims so far, and six more they’re not sure about. Four of them were still…chewing…by the time EMS arrived.”
“Chewing?” I grimaced and skimmed the intel as best as I could while driving. Sure enough, the impacted people had escalated from fucking to cannibalizing each other alive. “Fuck. That’s gnarly.”
“Granny from the orgy was rib deep in human pit beef when they carted her off to the ICU. They had to sedate her to keep her from breaking out to finish him off.” Wes scrolled through a graphic, gory mess.
“So if it’s not a Cupid, are we going with a siren?” I looked at Wes, waiting to see his reaction.
He rubbed his hand over his mouth and sighed. “Maybe, but sirens usually only go after men.”
“C’mon,” I teased, grabbing his shoulder to give him a shake. “It’s 2025. Sex-obsessed monsters don’t care about stupid things like gender anymore.”
“You would know,” Wes added with a chuckle.
I shot him a glare. “Prude.”
Yeah, I’d been known to fuck around with anything that moved. I, too, didn’t care about stupid things like gender. Chances were, if I liked you, I’d probably want to play with whatever was in your pants. I guessed that made me pansexual or some shit, but I always thought of myself as an equal opportunity sex-enthusiast. In my short thirty-two years, I’d been around the block more than I’d ever admit. Practically run through, at this point. But that didn’t mean I’d stand for being shamed by it.
“No, this is worse than that,” he said as he ran his hand back through his dark curly hair. “If people are consuming each other, that’s heavy-hitting magic. My money’s on demon.”
I took a deep breath and ran through my mental monster encyclopedia. Demons in this world weren’t like the impotent villains in comic books or the snarky antiheroes from some long-running television melodrama for tweens. These fuckers were cruel and ruthless. They came from the darkest pits of the afterlife, here to wreak destruction and chaos. At least fifteen of the last twenty serial killers in modern history were possessed by demons, and it wasn’t as easy as exorcising them back to hell. The witches we ran with didn’t banish; they said it cost a witch part of her soul. Most of the time, demons crawled out of whatever shit-stained veil they could find and walked among us like average people. The only way to get rid of them was to trap them in a liminal or destroy every piece of them in this plane of existence.
Liminals were pocket realities created by magic, sort of like a bubble in the space-time continuum of the human realm. It was the easiest and safest way to ditch a demon. Gather a group of witches, create the porthole, and shove the fucker in it. Piece of cake. But the magic required to do the spell took even the best witches out for days afterward.
Destroying every piece of a demon was harder. Unfortunately, demons knew their own kryptonite, so they typically left chunks of themselves hidden throughout the human realm. A lock of hair here. A graph of skin there. A molar in a suit jacket sold at a thrift store. These bitches were relentless, and they could re-manifest using any piece of their body.
Because of their connection to the afterlife, they packed a mean punch. They had the entire weight of hell and the undead behind them, so they could influence humans in truly despicable ways.
“If it’s a demon,” I said, “there’d be other signs. Cattle mutilations. Desecrated ground. Dark rituals and?—”
“Low blood supply at the Red Cross,” he added. “A week ago, the local blood bank reported a break-in. Nearly sixty pints of O-Neg were stolen. They blamed it on local teenagers pulling a prank.”
“And there it is,” I said. “Did you replenish the salt stores and the holy water?”
