Page 4 of Battle of Witches
We were back to figuring out how to wake Killian. I wasn’t a witch, and I wasn’t a god. Breaking curses wasn’t something I was born to do.Castingcurses a god couldn’t break wasn’t something Asfrid was born to do, either. Something wasn’t right.
Loki and Reyson were different gods with different magic, but they could both heal any injury. That included curses. They had both tried laying their hands on him, and they couldn’t evensensethe curse in his body. Loki was trying again, and he was furious.
“This doesn’t make sense. ImadeAsfrid. I didn’t give her magic I couldn’t undo. I’m not a fucking idiot.”
“A curse is like something foreign in the body, no? You can sense it, and then you remove it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ravyn said. “We use potions since we’re not gods. Lilith didn’t make us all powerful, either. Every curse can be broken once you figure out how it works.”
“Killian isn’t a warlock anymore. He’s a hybrid like Asfrid. I have an idea,” I said, whipping out my phone.
I seriously enjoyed cell phones. They fit right in your pocket, but if you were feeling down, you could post shirtless selfies, and people would flock to cheer you up. I’d figured out how to have food deliveredwithouthaving to traipse around the woods hunting for it,andI could look up whatever I wanted and have the answer in seconds.
“Ha!” I yelled. I was pretty sure I had the answer. I adored it when I figured something out before anyone else. Especially since a lot of people seemed to think shifters were stupid. No one in this room did, but I had heard it before.
“Care to share?” Bjorn asked.
“Remember how the hybrids never wanted to do anything to prepare for winter? They said they could just shift, hibernate, and wake when the weather was better. I just looked it up. Bats either migrate or hibernate in the winter. I know you all think Valentine wasn’t paying attention, but he must have figured out Killian was Ravyn’s familiar.
“Killian isn’tcursed.Asfrid tricked his body into hibernating. Think about it. She knows you can break any of her curses, so why would she curse him? Asfrid also knew Ravyn wouldn’t be able to break it because it’s not a curse. She wants you distracted trying everything, and then she wants you desperate when you finally come to her to break it. Asfrid is betting everything on this getting Ravyn to join her and Loki being willing to make a deal with her like she had with Odin.”
Everyone just stared at me for a minute. It was agoodtheory, and we had little else to go on at this point. Loki broke into a huge grin, and Ravyn bolted off the couch and flung herself at me. I wasn’t in any danger of falling over because she weighed nothing compared to me, but I wasn’t about to let her bounce off me and hit the floor.
Loki would be furious, and IlikedRavyn. I easily caught her. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and squeezed me so tight that I grunted. Ravyn was pretty fucking strong for a witch. I’ll bet when we caught Valentine, she wouldn’t just need magic to kick his ass.
“That was brilliant!” she said. Oh shit. She was crying. “That isexactlythe answer. Bats are supposed to be nocturnal, but since Killian is a familiar, he never was. He was a morning person even when he was a bat,exceptduring winter. He was supposed to be hibernating, but he didn’t because he was magical. Killian always slept more in the winter. I want to kiss you and your big, beautiful brain for figuring that out.”
I couldn’t believe she asked first. Ravyn struck me as the type to just take what she wanted. I was glad she did. Bjorn and I swore when we got out of the pocket dimension, we weren’t going to kiss justanyone.Bjorn had his tongue down her throat all the time now, but I hadn’t.
Why, though? She flirted with me, and I flirted back. Ilikedher, and she’d been nothing but amazing since Bjorn and I popped out of that pocket dimension. Loki didn’t care, so why did I? We would have to lay down some rules because there were some things I was absolutely not okay with, and I was sure Loki had a list, too, but I was doing this.
I shifted my grip to cup her perfect ass. I’d seen a lot of asses in my time. Plenty of gods got naked in Odin’s garden, and I’d seen that, too. I don’t care what they said about the perfection of their asses because the Aether shat them out. They just could not fill out leather trousers like Ravyn did.
If this was going to be my first kiss inthatlong, I was going to make it worth it. I walked a few steps and smashed her against the wall before I took my kiss. She was grinding against me and pulling my hair just right. It was totally worth the wait. She pulled away first.
“I want two hours alone with Sleipnir and Bjorn if someone can tell me they know how to wake Killian now. You know how to throw a girl around just right, big guy.”
“I do,” Minerva said. “It’s an old Viking trick. Shifters don’thaveto hibernate if their animal does, but they have to fight the urge to sleep if they shift. It put them at a disadvantage if their village was attacked. The effects aren’t permanent. They have to drink it every day, all winter, but it allows them to shift without needing to sleep. I’ll bet money Asfrid reverse engineered the magic to do this.”
“I like that idea. Let’s do that,” Loki said. “Do you have the ingredients?”
“Ravyn will have all of them here. The most important ingredient in that potion is a tear from the one who loves you the most.”
“It has to be all of us. I know Ravyn loves him the most, but we all care about him,” Bjorn said.
“Yes!” Loki said. He went over and grabbed a vial out of Ravyn’s supplies. “Everyone, cry into this. Ravyn, take your pleasure. Then we all need to have a talk about boundaries when you are done. Then, we can wake Killian.”
I liked Killian and wanted him back, but I doubly wanted it for Ravyn and Loki. Ravyn hadn’t been the same since he was cursed. She wasn’t sleeping very well. I knew my way around the kitchen now and tried to take over for Killian making breakfast, but she was up before all of us now because she just couldn’t sleep. Ravyn was stressing too much about waking him up.
After two months of utter shit, things were looking up. We had the possibility of waking Killian, and with any luck, we’d have Valentine soon.
And as soon as we all cried into that vial, it seemed like I had me a new woman, too.
Chapter4
Ravyn
Ripley and I were manipulative, little shits who had mastered crying on command by the time we were five. Think one big-eyed kindergartner with tears in their eyes was terrible? Try two identical ones. Yeah, we tended to get whatever we wanted. It worked on grown men, too, when you needed to make a quick exit.
