Magic and Mayhem: Any Witch Way (Kindle Worlds Novella) (3 page)

“All right, well, I’ll just leave this to you, big sister.” He tossed in the title he rarely granted Carol, hoping she’d go for it and let him leave. “Looks like you’ve got a good handle on things here.” Before Gideon could move, the gang of gnarled-ass warlocks Carol had inherited when she took the role of Baba Yaga began yammering something about another mission and danger all around them.

“Sorry, baby brother. They’re right. We’re on our way to put out another fire. Have to hunt down a nasty little band of chimera who’ve been, uh, who’ve been, um—”

“Chima-ering,” Zelda said awkwardly.

Before Gideon could say a word, the group was gone, leaving him and Gwen staring at empty space.

“The chimera situation is getting out of control. I need you here handling this, Gideon. I’m counting on you to handle this!” came Carol’s disembodied voice. She really had to stop doing that. Both the disembodied yelling thing and preying on his soft side. He might be the Boguman, and he might be madder than hell, but he would never leave his sister high and dry when she needed him. Even if it meant spending time with the woman he both loved and hated with all his being.

Slithering fuck.

Chapter Three

Gideon sat at one of the long picnic tables outside Zelda’s Assjacket, Virginia house and tried to decide if he should laugh, cry, or go crack open a shit ton of heads until he got results. Carol had sent a note—which she had delivered by an Owl Shifter as her own corny homage to Harry Potter—saying they could meet with some of the Shifter community at Zelda’s to find out if they’d seen anything unusual.

Gideon’s instincts said they shouldn’t be screwing around talking to anyone other than the Council right now, but Carol had been insistent and Mac had backed her. Apparently, the Shifters had a tight relationship with Zelda and Fabio, and they had as much to lose if the balance of magic went all wonky as any witch or warlock did. Zelda was their healer, after all. Without her and her powers, many of them might not survive the infighting that often took place among the various Shifter species.

Besides that, the Shifters knew Assjacket inside and out, and Gwen was sure the place they needed to begin their search was Assjacket. He supposed on some level, then, that meeting with the Shifters made sense.

Gwen was happy as could be, surrounded by Shifters, all vying for her attention. Out of respect for Bo, the four-year-old boy in attendance, Gideon locked down his Boguman side and stayed in warlock form. Bo was a good kid, even if he was currently shying away from Gideon just a bit.

Bo was flanked by his mother and father, Wanda and Kurt, both Raccoon Shifters. Kurt was the alpha of the raccoon pack, and Bo would follow in his father’s footsteps when he was old enough. Roger, a Rabbit Shifter and purportedly phenomenal sex therapist, sat nearby. Gideon wasn’t crazy about the way the rabbit kept looking between him and Gwen, but he was doing his best to ignore him. For right now, Gideon needed their help if he was going to figure out the whole siphoning magic thing and get on with his life.

“So, she’s all
there’s a lot more to him than you think there is
.” Wanda was still talking about someone named Minerva and the warlock she was dating. Tink or Tank or something like that.

Roger chuckled. “Apparently he keeps her happy where it counts.”

“It’s weird, though,” Wanda went on. “Minerva is usually such a social climber. She cares a lot more about social status than she cares about sex. Half the time, the warlocks she dates aren’t even all that good looking, but they have money or power, and that’s what counts with her.”

This had Roger shaking his head. “Maybe she finally discovered the big O and is shifting her priorities.”

Kurt reddened and Wanda giggled, while Bo looked from adult to adult in fascinated confusion. Gwen mouthed the words
big O
as though trying to process what the rabbit was referring to.

Time for a change in topic.

“Getting back to the issue of magic. So, none of you have seen anyone who seems to have more power than they should? No one suddenly doing things they shouldn’t be able to accomplish.”

The group as a whole began to fidget. All except for Bo, who spoke up with the utter lack of hesitation found in a child. “Zelda can do cool stuff now.”

Everyone froze, but Gideon laughed. “Don’t worry, Bo. We know Zelda’s dealing with more than her share of magic right now. That’s different. What we’re trying to find is someone who’s pulling straight from the spigot. Can you think of anyone besides Zelda who’s been able to do things they shouldn’t lately?”

Head-shaking all around.

Gwen was murmuring. “Big oxen, big opals, big octopus, big…big…” She frowned as she seemed to reach for more O nouns. Wanda leaned in and whispered in Gwen’s ear.

“Oh!”

“Uh huh,” said Wanda with a knowing nod and a grin.

“Roger,” Gideon cut in, shifting in his chair as his pants became uncomfortably tight. The last thing he wanted was to sit and listen to Gwen talk about orgasms and sex. “How many witches and warlocks are there in the community? This is primarily a Shifter community, right?”

Before Roger could answer, Gideon heard Wanda whisper to Gwen. “Which is weird, right? Because everyone knows warlocks are notoriously bad in the bedroom. They’re too self-absorbed to be thinking about anyone’s orgasm but their own.”

Before he could stop himself, Gideon was responding. “Bullshit. Not every warlock is like that. Believe me, I have no problems making sure the witch I’m in bed with comes so hard she blacks out a few times.” He didn’t mention that he typically teleported out of there as fast as he could afterward. Just because he left them sated and happy as shit didn’t mean he stuck around to cuddle. Been there, done that, and had the scars to prove it.

Gwen’s wide eyes turned to him.
Well, shit.

“Anyway”—he turned back to Roger, who had an annoyingly wide grin on his face—“back to…”

He had no idea what was supposed to come out of his mouth next. His gaze caught Gwen’s, and he realized she was watching him with eyes that now said she wanted a lot more from him than simply being a partner in locating the magic siphoning suspect. Roger and Wanda were smiling like a pair of Christmas elves on a joyride in Santa’s sleigh.

Shitshitshit
.
Not good
.
Particularly since certain parts of his anatomy were fully on board with the ideas Gwen seemed to have rolling around in her head.

Rolling around…with Gwen…shitshitshit
.

“Um, anyway, going back to, um…”
What the hell?
He was the Boguman. He didn’t say
um.

Apparently he did, though, because it had just come from his mouth not once, but twice.

This had to end. Now. Whatever Gwen thought he could do for her—
crap, not good, not good
.

Images of himself doing a lot of things for Gwen flew through his mind. Dirty things. Great things. Orgasm-inducing things.

Time to put a stop to her fantasies before his own got any more out of control. If she kept looking at him like that, there was no telling what he’d do.

Gideon turned and growled at Gwen, letting loose just a tiny bit of the Boguman for her. His nose turned into a jagged horn, his mouth fanged and rotting. The image was enough to send poor Bo running for the tree line, with Wanda racing after him. Roger let out a squeak and ran as Kurt shifted into raccoon form and planted himself, making his small body as large as he could, between Gideon and his retreating family and friend.

But Gwen did nothing more than stare serenely back at him. And sigh. She
sighed
.

Slithering fuck.

Chapter Four

Three, it turned out, was the number of witches and warlocks living in Assjacket. Zelda, Fabio, and Zelda’s former cellmate from her stint in magical prison, Sassy. They’d already met Zelda and Fabio. If either of them had been carrying the missing magic around with them, Gwen should have been able to see it, and Gideon had a feeling they wouldn’t have been able to slip that past his sister this whole time. Carol was no idiot.

They would need to track down Sassy at some point, but they had a bigger problem on their hands. A traveling carnival came through Assjacket on its way south every year for the winter season. They apparently spent a couple of weeks in town on a break before heading out. Assjacket allowed them the freedom to party with the Shifters and avoid humans more easily than they could other places without having to hide who they were.

Gideon paced the small room of the hotel he and Gwen had just checked into. Instead of an adjoining room, he’d gotten one clear at the end of the hallway. The further she was from him, the less the temptation. Or so he hoped. All day, he’d wanted to reach out and hold her. To tell her they’d fix all of this together.

But that was just his dumbass male response to a needy woman. It had to be genetics or some stupid shit like that. She was the same Gwen he’d known, and yet just a little different underneath. As if she felt a little lost in this world. And damn if he didn’t want to fix that for her.

He shook off the feeling and focused on the magic thief. For now, he needed to get as much information from her as he could, then take his ass as far away from temptation as he could for the night.

“All right, let’s go through this again.” He thought about sitting down, but Gwen was on the bed, and the only chair in the room looked like it had a family of rats living in it. The place was a shithole. That seemed to be by design. He’d been told Assjacket kept the human population moving right on through town by making sure everything was as unappealing and inconvenient as possible. They were pretty good at it.

“Go through what again? The orgasm thing? Because I got most of what they were saying, but I wasn’t entirely sure I understood all of it. So, Minerva is with Tink for the orgasms?”

Gideon tripped over his own foot, but caught himself before going down. If she wasn’t one hundred percent genuine, it wouldn’t be so damned hard to resist showing her what it meant to have a man who could make you come until you saw stars.

Then he remembered that he had shown her that. Many, many times. She’d left him anyway, and apparently didn’t even remember any of it. Yeah, crisis averted. If that didn’t have a cold-shower effect on his dick, he didn’t know what would.

“No, Gwen. I’m not talking about Minerva’s orgasms or lack thereof. The magic. The siphoning. Remember? The whole reason you’re here?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” She didn’t sound overly enthusiastic about solving the mystery anymore, but what did he care? That was her problem, not his. He was solving this mystery and getting the hell out of Dodge.

“Tell me when you first realized this was happening.”

“I don’t really have any sense of time when I’m not in human form, but I don’t think it was too long. I just kept thinking Baba Yaga would get the magic back, but then she didn’t. So I came.”

Came.
Goddess help him, he would get through this. “And when you chose Assjacket, you did that because…” He let the sentence trail off so she could fill in the blank.

She rolled her eyes at him as though it should be clear. “I followed it. The magic has a signal. I followed it here. That’s my plan, you see. You don’t think I’d come all this way without a plan in place, do you?”

Gideon remembered then one of the things that had drawn him to Gwen all those years ago. She’d wanted so badly to help, to be part of fixing what was wrong. He understood why. As the anchor, she really had no duties at all. She served as a tether. But that tether did more than simply bind magic so chaos couldn’t reign. It bound Gwen. Her existence was isolated, almost amorphous. She had little sense of time and place. She didn’t
do
much of anything. As she’d said a moment ago, she simply watched for trouble. It was always actually fixed by either the Council or Baba Yaga.

When Gwen had to change to join the fight last time, she’d jumped at the chance. She’d wanted so badly to be a part of something. To belong in the world instead of being on the outside of this plane.

Until she got bored and left him. He cleared his throat and refocused. The past needed to stay where it was. In the past. “Okay, great. That’s fantastic. You can track it, so we can follow it now. We just follow it and bottle it back up or whatever, and you’re good to go.” Operative word: go. As in get the hell out of his life again.

“Yes! That’s my plan. I track and you get it back.” Her face fell. “Except now that won’t work. It’s not here now.”

Now his stopped pacing. “What do you mean it’s not here? Where did it go?”

She fluttered her hands together. “Easy come, easy trees.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Easy come, easy trees?”

“Yes.” She nodded in a way that made him think of that show
I Dream of Jeannie
. A little head bob. “Easy come, easy trees. Or maybe leaves? Easy come, easy leaves?”

“Easy come, easy go?”

“Yes!” She pointed at him, stabbing the air with a triumphant finger. “Yes, that’s it!”

“Gwen, focus here. What do you mean? Does the magic come and go?”

“Yes.” She said this in a tone that said he was an idiot for not following what she was saying. Honestly, who could follow a thing she said? “Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. It’s just gone.”

“So, let me get this straight. You don’t know if the magic is here anymore, you don’t know how long someone’s been siphoning this magic, and you don’t know if you can follow it?”

“Yes.” She smiled at him.

“Great.”

“That’s not great, Gideon.”

“No. I realize that. It’s an expression.”

“What’s an expression?”

“
Great
is an expression. Well, not really. It’s sarcasm.”

“Okay.” She bobbed a nod again.

“Good.”

“Gideon?”

“Yeah?”

“What is sarcasm?”

He dropped his head back and prayed to the Goddess for patience. The fickle bitch ignored him. Right. Status quo on that count.

He stayed that way, counting his breaths and hoping for some semblance of patience until her heard it. Soft, high-pitched voices outside the door. He rolled his head up and looked at Gwen. She didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.

Gideon kept his eyes on her as he moved to the door. When she opened her mouth to ask what he was doing, he gave one shake of his head then yanked the hotel room door open.

In they fell. Three men who must have actually had their ears to the door the way they landed at his feet, one on top of the other. Two of them tall and thin with plain brown hair and eyes, one short and round with white hair and shockingly reddish eyes. The two thin ones stood right away and began to talk, babbling on about being there to help and doing whatever they could.

“But we just didn’t know if we should interrupt,” said one.

“Right,” said another. “Because we didn’t know if it would be more helpful to wait or more helpful to, well, to help.”

The third man—the round guy with white hair—remained on the floor. He simply sat up and leaned his back against the wall, glaring at the other two as his nose twitched.

Mice
.
Freaking mice
. Gideon should have known from their voices alone. They talked a little too quickly, and they sounded like they’d been drinking and sucking on helium balloons at the same time.

“I didn’t want to interrupt or help,” said the one on the floor. “That was all on these two. I voted for minding our own damned business, but these idiots have this whole Cinderella thing going. It’s absolutely asinine, if you ask me.”

“You said you’d go along with whatever the majority vote was. And this is it,” said Tall Guy Two.

“Look, I’m not sure why you guys think we need help, and I sure as hell don’t know what all this has to do with Cinderella,” Gideon said, one hand pinching the bridge of his nose, “but we’re having a private conversation here.”

“We know, we know,” said Tall Guy One. Goddess, the nose twitching became more and more noticeable as the men shuffled their feet and—wait, was that a squeak? “It’s just that, um”—
squeak
—“well, the thing is we told”—
squeak
—“well, we sort of said—”

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake, spit it out,” the round guy said, getting up now. “We told Mac we’d come help you out. Correction. These idiots told Mac we’d come help you out. It’s all part of their Cinderella Plan—”

“The Glass Slipper Initiative,” Tall Guy One said. “On the whole, Mouse Shifters have been relatively underappreciated in the world. We’re not really great in a battle, and don’t have a whole lot to set us apart from any of the other Shifters, other than the cheese-eating thing. So, we’re setting out to change that with the Glass Slipper Initiative, our own little effort to be more like the mice in Cinderella.”

Tall Guy Two nodded rapidly. “Yeah, helpful and cheerful. Just like in the movie.”

“Maybe you should come in and start from the beginning,” Gwen said, stepping forward and waving an arm to invite them into
his
room. Was she serious? This day just got better and better.

“Oh, thank you,” said Tall Guy Two, bowing repeatedly as he entered the room, as though meeting Cinderella herself. Gideon felt like he’d walked into some bizarre fantasyland where fairy tales were lived out in twisted reality show versions you couldn’t get away from.

“I’m Gwen.” She offered her hand to each of the mice. At least she’d given up on the big speech announcing her corporeal form to everyone she encountered.

“I’m Mickey,” Tall Guy Two said, then gestured to the other brown-haired one, “and this is Mike, but we call him Mighty. That’s Moose.” The round guy nodded.

Gideon was speechless. He didn’t know which was worse. Mouse Shifters named Mickey, Mighty, or Moose, or the way Mighty was currently flexing arms that appeared to be as thin as toothpicks without a muscle—mighty or otherwise—in sight.

Gideon looked at Gwen. She beamed. Positively beamed at her latest fans.

Great
. And he meant that sarcastically.