Page 23 of Battle of Witches
“I just gave myself indigestion, and I’ll probably be constipated for a week sitting in the same room with that asshole andnottrying to filter everything I saw. Ravyn is perfectly fine with two breasts, and Beyla will eventually meet a decent guy orseveraldecent guys since she’s a witch. Can we focus on the more pressing issue?”
Even Kaine was off-topic at this point, and I really needed to talk about it. Unless she had been planning this longer than I thought, Asfrid only got her necromancy spell to work because she learned about my vision and needed the eclipse. Loki blamed himself for this, but much of it was on me.
“Thank you, Bjorn. Right now, you’re my favorite,” Ravyn said.
Loki and Sleipnir sulked and took their seats. Killian wasn’t even remotely fazed. He was totally secure in his connection with Ravyn, and he looked like he was silently judging everyone for not focusing.
“First of all, Valentine has been recruiting. Asfrid’s social media posts sound like conspiracy theory nonsense on the surface, but they are a call to action. If someone comments, nothing happens because Asfrid and Valentine think they can’t keep a secret. I can’t seehowthey are doing it since both Loki and Balthazar can see their messages, but if someone reacts to the post a certain way, Valentine is meeting them and vetting them. If they pass, he brings them to Asfrid. So far, it’s a lot of shifters, but they desperately want witches, especially Gemini twins.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Loki said. “Shifters aren’t stupid, and they know the stories, too. After I got out of the cave and returned to our cabin's ruins, I visited the bear shifters that took up with my hybrids. They distanced themselves from the hybrids when shit started getting really crazy and was part of the mob that killed them in the end. They wanted all kinds of blood oaths from me to swear I’d never tell another person they were once friends and lovers. Shifters haven’t changed that much.”
“Asfrid isn’t going the crazy route this time. She orchestrated her death in a way that she could stay in this realm as a ghost to figure out a solution. She still doesn’t have it, but she thinks Ravyn and Ripley can help. All her minions are trying to figure out how to snatch them without getting smote by a god. Valentine’s solution was grabbing Beyla and using her as bait, but they are all too stoned to think straight.”
“I don’t like it,” Kaine growled. “The added element of whatever drug they are on makes them dangerous and unpredictable. I don’t need another junkie getting a bug up their ass to kidnap my kid.”
My head was pounding from the sheer number of visions that flooded my head while I was sitting with Valentine. I couldn’t force the answer if I wanted to see something, but I’d learned to filter it if I was sitting next to someone, or I’d get random snippets that meant nothing most of the time. Nevertheless, I saw a lot, and Kaine hadmuchmore to worry about than Beyla getting kidnapped.
“We have bigger problems. Valentine isn’t attacking everyone but shifters because he’s racist. Some of those shifters are in on this, and some he is going to try to recruit. Isawit. They are going to be helping him in here. If he has to leave this jail for anything, they will successfully break him out and get him back to Asfrid.”
“Well, that’s a big fucking problem because his lawyer will push for a bail hearing as soon as possible. He’ll probably get denied bail, but we can’t keep him from his day in court,” Kaine growled.
I shared a look with Loki and Sleipnir because therewasan answer to this, but Kaine kept saying we couldn’t blood eagle the fucker and be done with it. There wererulesnow, even if following them meant a lot of people were going to end up like those undead things on the television shows Ravyn and Killian liked to watch that looked like they smelled awful and had to get their heads smashed in to die. The stink coming off Valentine might be the only thing stopping the rest of the prisoners from beating his ass. It was so bad, I could taste it.
“Did you see what she’s promising, Bjorn? Loki is right. Shifters are cunning, and they don’t generally trust potions that aren’t made by shifters. The only time you can get a witch potion down their throat is if they are cursed or they need a type of healing potion only witches can make. They would also be able to scent that the potion she’s giving Valentine is doing way more damage to his insides than just making him not shower. I can’t imagine she could promiseanythingthat would get them to put that in their bodies,” Ravyn said.
Not all of them. Most shifters were proud of what they were and thought they were superior to other supernaturals. Even back in my day, some of them wouldn’t pollute their bodies with certain foods; much less nasty potions. Then you had a subset of shifters that thought their creator shafted them by not giving themmoremagic.Thatwas who Asfrid and Valentine were recruiting.
“She’s promising to make them hybrids. Remember that video Sleipnir sent us where a hypnotist convinced one human he was a horse and the other human he was into something called pony play?” I asked.
Ravyn tossed her hair over her shoulder.
“Sleipnir was so offended. It wasn’t a kink-shame thing, he just couldn’t believe people thought horses acted and moved like that. The werewolves feel the same about puppy play, but plenty of people are into it.”
“I wasn’t offended by that. Humans are weird. If a supernatural temporarily messed with your head and made you act out a kink you don’t even have for people’s amusement, we’d beat their ass. Theypayfor that and then upload it to social media.”
“Hypnotism is used for many things,” Loki said. “It can be helpful, too. Some people do it for comedy shows, and there’s a late-night X-rated version. If Asfrid has figured that out, I can’t think of a lesser person I trust with that power.”
“She’s not doing it like the man on the pony play videos. I can’t tell if the power sharing potion from the grimoire actually works, but she’s freely using it. It’s why Valentine looks like shit. Even if it doesn’t work,theythink it does because they are so fucked-up that they would probably see anything. Some of them only need to experience it once to follow her and are waiting for her to come through with making them hybrids. Others like Valentine get off on how it makes them feel, and Asfrid gives it to them often.”
“Do you have anygoodnews?” Kaine growled. “If one of the prison guards showed up impaired, they would be sent home. If someone hadn’t fired them yet, I could just send out a memo and have them removed if I hadsomethingto go on. I’m not going to punish every shifter here because a few have gone bad. Some of them are good people.”
“I saw four people helping him, but I only saw the backs of their heads.”
“Four I can work with. The prison isn’t really my domain, but I bowl with the warden. She’s a fierce she-dragon with a two-fifty average, and I’m eventually going to beat her and take home that solid-gold trophy. She’ll sniff them out, and we can focus on finding his deranged girlfriend.”
I hadn’t been exposed to bowling and didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but I knew how dragons got with gold, so it was probably some kind of fierce, exciting battle for treasure.
“Asfrid isn’t staying at a motel,” I said. “She’s recruited someone with a nice, old house that is letting her stay there. I didn’t seewhereit is, just some of the rooms. There are a lot of old treasures in there.”
“I can work with that,” Kaine said. “It sounds like someone with old money who thinks they should be running things because one of their ancestors was the Duke of Farts back in the day. I know where to look. Go home.”
“Valentine may have been working alone in kidnapping Beyla, but if they are trying to find a way to get to Ripley and me, they may try again. You’ll need to bring Beyla by so we can teach her to fight back.”
“Yes,” Killian said. “Not all witches get familiars, and it doesn’t look like Beyla is getting one, but I can be her mama bear familiar and help out. I know things.”
“It would have been pretty cool to get a familiar. Some of the witches in my school have them. I want to learn to fight back. Ineverwant to feel helpless again.”
“We’ll teach you to fight like a shieldmaiden,” I said.
