Page 33 of Battle of Witches
So, I was counting on them to spill all the tea as soon as Kaine arrived. Which he did, very quickly and looked pissed enough to explore my kink about getting eaten by a dragon.
“I’ve dealt with cults before. It’s hard enough for one person to defect, much less twenty of you. I’m suspicious.”
I was older than Kaine so I would have been, too, but Asfrid only had two months to get her hooks in, and the men here weren’t addicted to her Kool-Aid. Plus, Killian saw the whole thing and grabbed them outside Scooter’s compound. Kaine didn’t even drop the grump when Killian told him that.
“She killed Huggy, and we aren’t drinking that vile potion,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt was a lion shifter and the alpha of his pride. He had no intention of turning his people into hybrids. Wyatt wanted that necromancy spell until he discovered it required killing two people. They were all mad about Huggy. I hadn’t met him, but I was angry about Huggy, too. I didn’t raise Asfrid like that.
“I think she kept those of us she suspected of not wanting to be hybrids close by,” Marlowe said. “Scooter and Valentine were the only two at the house who made that a religion. Asfrid isn’t stupid, and Scooter lives his life preparing for the government coming for him and masturbates over coming out the hero in that situation.
“She knows we have no chance in bum fuck of going up against Loki and a primordial to kidnap their girlfriends. She also knows all of us aren’t fully loyal to her. We’re cannon fodder because Loki made that video. So, she’ll be calling her more deranged followers to her side. It’ll be the junkie fanatics that started out wanting to be hybrids and are hooked on that shit she’d peddling and will do anything for a fix.”
“I’m not after her followers unless they’ve committed a crime. The Bureau has long held that addiction is a health issue, not a criminal one. I agree with that. Throwing them in jail and letting them out after a few years with no resources doesn’t fix the root cause, and they just go back to it. They need help, not punishment. I don’twantto arrest or maim your friends unless they do something stupid and make me,” Kaine said.
“You might not have to. I reverse-engineered that potion Asfrid used on us in the clearing and added a sleeping potion. I was trying to figure out why we all immediately dropped to the ground, but Valentine and Asfrid got away. It has a limited range. Once it’s in the air, you must get downwind and wait or run. If you’re in the zone when it hits, you’re fucked because it gets past magical shields, but if you’re the one throwing it, it’s easily avoided,” Ravyn said.
Seriously, how fucking sexy was my girlfriend? She lookedhotin black leather, and she just had that big, beautiful brain. Asfrid had done something with a potion that no one who came after her had done before. Ravyn took that as a personal challenge and decided to use it against her. I was so crazy in love with this witch.
“Patent it, and the Bureau will buy the recipe. Between that and the banshees, it could help when we bust up situations like this. It’s not always a cult, but they seem to pop up more frequently. I haven’t decided if they are better or worse than supernatural gangs or the mafia. They’re all stupidly loyal to some asshole at the top telling them what to do and how to think and willing to die for it.”
“There are twenty of you here,” Killian said. “How many can Asfrid call when you don’t come back?”
“A lot,” Wyatt said. “And it’s not just shifters. She has a clan of vampires, two witches who lost their covens, and this massive dragon who seemed normal at first, but then he started insisting Asfrid’s potion was better than some medication he’s supposed to be on and stopped taking it. He's seriously unpredictable.”
“Does he have a scar over his left eye and go by Duffy?” Kaine asked.
“Yeah. He brags about the scar but has a different story about how he got it every time we see him.”
Kaine let out this big sigh. It was a massivesick of everyone’s shitexhalation of breath.
“I was the one that gave him that scar. Duffy got cursed by a witch and didn’t go gently when we tried to remove it. He hasn’t been right in the head since. Beyla’s mom was a talented alchemist. She ran a pharmacy with Beyla’s dad that filled prescriptions for humans, but you could also buy her remedies for supernaturals. It took forever to get him to trust a treatment from a witch, and the only reason he kept taking it was that he could feel it working.
“Duffy didn’t really trust witchesorshifters after that. A witch cursed him, but a shifter was involved in it. Sorry to all the shifters and witches in the room, but dragons don’tneedmagical powers or to be hybrids. We’ve got fire, or we can just eat you. He’s not a shifter, so it’s not about the necromancy spell. Duffy doesn’t make sense.”
“Please,” I scoffed. “Youmight think that, and some people here might agree with you, but Duffy might think he’s been shit on by the supernatural community and then medicated into being tolerable to people. We didn’t just create all of you for ego. You’re all walking stories with different plots.
“Everyone who joined Asfrid has a reason they probably think is a good one. We thought it was the hybrid thing, but everyone here just thought they were getting necromancy. Scooter thinks he’s getting a one-up for when he has to fight the government. Valentine probably started out doing it for fame and one of his stupid, fucking books and ended up in jail. Just becauseyouwouldn’t do it doesn’t mean Duffy’s story wasn’t completely different from yours, and he thinks joining her is going to give him something the rest of the supernatural community can’t.”
“That’s the sanest, least antagonistic thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth,” Kaine said.
Ihadto. I could be a tame lion when I needed to be, but I was still fucking Loki.
“Do you think Duffy would be open to exploring my dragon eating kink?”
Kaine seemed to have the patience of my good friend Death. I could be as extra as possible, and he never tried to kick my ass. Freya usually just plotted and got me later, but she broke my nose one time. Reyson and I never officially went there because, ew, he was a good friend, but if I pissed him off, there was definitely some homoerotic wrestling that never went anywhere. How cosmically weird we both ended up here dating twins, and Freya was their mentor.
“No one is going to eat you, you twat. We have to stay shifted while we digest you. Dragons can’t exactly do that easily in this century. Plus, I’m guessingyoudon’t digest easily. It’s impossible to make yourself puke when you’re a dragon.”
I started giggling because I was going to make smoke come out of his nose today, or my name wasn’t Loki.
“Do you have wee, baby T-Rex arms? Can you even scratch your snout if it’s itching?”
“Not to stop your other fetish of poking Kaine, but we know where she is, we have twenty of her people, and she’s given us a deadline,” Killian said.
“I didn’tseethis,” Bjorn said. “I saw Valentine escaping from prison if he was moved because Asfrid has people in the prison. The ultimatum doesn’t make sense. Sheknowsshe’s fighting against her past. She could have done that entire video without throwing a gauntlet at Loki. Asfrid could have just waited for his bail hearing and had her people get him back. She made that video before we made ours. Why the ultimatum if she just had to wait? She doesn’t need her grimoire back, either.”
“I can answer that,” Wyatt said. “Her men inside the prison are mine. They are in my pride and loyal tome,not her. I told them if they wanted to be hybrids, that was their choice, but we are kings of the jungle and don’t need that shit.Of course,someof them wanted it. Breaking Valentine out of prison would have tanked their careers. Even if they made it look like they didn’t help him, they would have been fired and lost a very comfortable pension.
