whiskey witches 02 - blood moon magick (17 page)

“Hmm.” Tony picked up a Sig, ejected the mag and cleared the chamber. “This is all pretty impressive.”

Paige bent over to retrieve the .22 pistol with the cherry wood handle. “Took this one into a warehouse filled with demons.”

Dexx smashed his lips together and pushed them out. “Yup. That’s also where I nearly died.”

“Yup.”

“You brought a gun to a demon fight?” Tony stared at her in disbelief.

“Well, and a few knives. My gift was out of commission.”

Dexx pulled out a knife with an antler handle. Wide, curved blade. Runes and symbols etched into the side. “This blade in particular can take out any demon. Doesn’t matter where you stick the host. They can survive. Barely. Mostly. Not really well, but they can survive if you stabbed them in the right place.”

Jack took it from him, running his fingertips over the symbols.

They flashed and sparked as if an electrical current were running along the surface.

Paige jumped. “You know what, Jack?”

“Hmm?” He glanced up at her, then back at the knife.

Another spark.

Dexx took the knife back, frowning at it and Jack at the same time.

“I think when I go back to see Sam, you’re coming with me.”

“Um. Okay?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. What a strange day. What a strange, strange day.

S
ome officers of the law might flout the drinking and driving thing, but the officers in Paige’s apartment weren’t them. Tony camped out on the floor and Jack took the loveseat. She really needed to invest in a couch, or a bed for the spare room.

Dexx stayed in her bed. With her.

Yeah. She really needed to do something about that. Finalize the deal? Make a real man out of him?

He was wearing off on her. Good grief.

The next morning, Jack hummed in the front bathroom, the water turning on in spurts.

The smell of bacon permeated the bedroom.

Paige frowned. This was an awful lot of noise for her normally silent apartment.

Dexx rolled out of her bed in his boxers and started up a conversation with Jack. In the hall bathroom. Like it was every day two guys got up in a woman’s apartment and shared the bathroom.

Paige shoved the covers back and sighed. She slept in her underwear and a tank. Men didn’t get to see that. Men she worked with didn’t get to see the more womanly side of her. She felt uncomfortable just thinking about her partner and an FBI agent seeing her without a bra.

Screw it. She wasn’t sexually interested in Jack or Tony, and they both knew Dexx had shared her bed. Though that didn’t mean anything, really.

Wait. Why was she so concerned about what anyone else thought of her nonexistent sex life? She was a grown woman and could sex or not sex any man she chose.

She wasn’t going to sweat the underwear. The men in her apartment were her partners, and they were all trying to discover their “new normal.” If Jack and Dexx could share the bathroom—the sound of piss hitting water entered the protection of her bedroom—then they could all see her in her yoga pants.

She slipped them on as she hobbled to the door. She needed a good cup of coffee before the bra went on. No way of getting around that.

Jack exited the bathroom in front of her with a grin, his blue eyes sharp against his thick, black lashes. “Coffee?”

Morning people. They were all evil. “Kitchen.”

Dexx flushed the toilet, the door wide open.

Paige shook her head, her lips flat, and walked through the living room.

Tony met her in the dining room holding a steaming green mug as an offering. “Coffee. Untainted.”

She took it from him and clasped it to her, the aroma of widening her eyes into half-awakedom. For as awkward as this really
should
be, it felt comfortable. So, she had to reason with herself.
Make
it uncomfortable by allowing the standards of society inside the comforts of her home, or just go with it? “Thank you.”

“Bacon, hash browns, and eggs are cooking as we speak. Just scrambled. You didn’t have much else in your fridge.”

“Nope. Not really. I can make breakfast without too much trouble.”

“She is a
terror
in the kitchen.” Dexx dropped his comment off on his way to the kitchen like a toddler dropped a fart and ran.

She followed him and hopped onto the edge of the counter beside the fridge, hooking her toes on the opposite counter so she didn’t fall off. Closet-sized kitchen. “I can make breakfast without setting off the smoke detector.”

Dexx put the orange juice back in the fridge. “That would be because it’s in the hallway next to the bedrooms.” He closed the refrigerator door and left.

Bacon sizzled in one pan. Tony whisked eggs in pan number two, scrambling them with the few bits of vegetables she’d had dying in her fridge. Hash browns cooked up in a third pan. That was probably more pans than that stove had seen at once since she’d moved in. “A vamp who eats breakfast.”

He shrugged.

She brought her coffee to her face and let the steam waft up her nose. “What about evil vamps?”

“What about evil humans?”

“But you eat humans.”

“No. We drink blood. Doesn’t have to be human blood. We don’t have to drain anyone. But, just like humans have killers, we do, too.”

Paige sipped her coffee. Her brain made half-assed attempts at waking, but, for the most part, simply lounged.

Tony gave her a are-you-serious look. “Do you realize how much blood is in a person’s body?”

She scrambled. First, why was he overreacting, and, second, what was he responding to?

Then, she remembered. Draining bodies of blood. Right.

“Um, no.” She vaguely recalled from biology class that there was a lot.

“One and a half gallons.”

Yeah. That was a lot.

“Can you imagine drinking one and half gallons of milk in one sitting?”

She had a hard time finishing a tall glass of it in one sitting.

“Exactly.”

He had to be answering to something registering on her face. It was still too early for words.

“Our stomachs are the same size as yours.”

“Okay. Got it. You don’t drain people.”

Most myths she knew of showed vampires as bloodthirsty animals. Unless they glittered, then they were moody and blood thirsty. There were even romance novels that made vampires seem sexy.

Blood drinking. Yeah. Sexy. Oooh baby.

However, when she’d
read
the books, she’d completely agreed. It was all about the penetration. Purr.

“Witch,” he offered with a flip of his mostly empty wooden spoon. A piece of egg went flying and stuck to the wall next to the toaster. “You’re not all evil, either.”

He really needed to stop with the sharp conversation changes before coffee. “Oddly, no.”

Jack leaned against the wall beside the fridge, crossing his arms over his chest, his expression open.

“We grew up with horror stories of witches,” Tony explained. He turned off the heat to the eggs with a loud click and continued to turn them. “Witches controlling us—”

“I can control you?” Paige bit her lip and bounced on the counter, careful not to spill her coffee.

He gave her a dirty look. “Witches using the elements against us.”

“I am getting cooler by the minute.”

“Only if evil is cool.” Tony grew serious. “Your kind hunted us, Paige. Your kind enslaved us.”

Dexx lifted Paige’s legs to get in, then skirted around Tony to get to the cupboard. “Come on, guys. Such dark talk and some of us haven’t even had coffee yet.” He held out his hand to Paige. “Coffee me!”

She chuckled and set down her mug next to the sink still filled with wine glasses from the previous night. She opened the cabinet behind her head, ducking and contorting to do so, and blindly reached up to grab a k-cup. “And the winner is…” She closed the door and cringed, her eyebrows raised. “Chocolate chip cookie.”

He pulled his lips back in disgust. “Ew. Put that back and get me something real.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and tried again. “Downtown Motown. How about that?”

Taking it, he plugged it into the coffee maker. “One day, you’re going to get just regular old coffee.”

“I do! I just couldn’t reach it from here.”

“You could have hopped down,” Jack offered.

She hugged her cup to her.

Jack glanced at Tony and Dexx. “Is anyone else feeling…weird? We’re all standing around like this is normal, but this isn’t normal.
We’re
not normal.”

“
You’re
not normal,” Tony said, flipping bacon. “I am.”

“Also,” Jack said, “you told us last night to find a new normal. This is it. I like it.”

She did, too.

“Yeah.” The coffee maker stopped spurting water. Dexx took his cup. “But I’m normal anyway.”

“You dig up dead bodies.”

“And salt and burn their bones. I know. That’s what makes me cool.”

Jack snorted.

“Okay.” Paige sipped her coffee. “Just checking.”

“A vampire, a hunter, and a summoner walk into a bar,” Dexx said. “No punchline needed.”

“I thought after last night you were cool with this?” Jack gestured to everyone standing in the kitchen.

“I—” She interrupted herself, unsure of what she wanted to say. “Last night, I was. This morning, I’m wondering if I’m sane.”

Tony pulled the bacon out of the pan and stacked it onto a paper towel-laden plate, turning off the burner with a pop of the dial. “How are we supposed to act? Are we supposed to be flipping out? Are we supposed to be tearing apart Paige’s place?”

“Let the answer be, ‘no,’” Paige said.

Jack lifted one corner of his mouth.

“This
is
our life.” Dexx shrugged, his expression apologetic.

Jack tipped his head to the side and assessed Dexx. “How did you get into this?”

“Brother. Possessed by a demon. Killed himself after everyone thought he was crazy.”

Jack hmm’ed.

Paige tapped her fingers in a stiff staccato against her mug. “I’m okay with this because I have to be. We don’t fit into society, so society’s rules don’t apply here.”

“Yeah, but…”

“You’re looking at a woman who’s sitting in her kitchen in her yoga pants, without a bra, who hasn’t even brushed her hair, with three grown men.” Growing up in a house full of women, this made her very uncomfortable. “The vampire might be weird, but I didn’t bring my gun.
That’s
weird.”

Jack shrugged. “You look like one of the guys, if that helps.”

It did. Tremendously. She wasn’t the type of woman who could juggle multiple men’s attention. She didn’t like it when they noticed her breasts. She didn’t appreciate their appreciation. She was a woman in a man’s world. If they noticed her womanliness, she’d lost ground. “How are we going to figure out what you are?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “The only thing I know is that these gifts came to me after my dad died. I couldn’t find any journals, notes, a letter.”

“That happens sometimes.”

“With what?” Tony asked. He shoved Dexx out of his way to get to the cupboard, which housed the plates. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“Well.” Paige pulled open the drawer under her legs and rummaged for forks.

“You really could get down,” Jack said.

“You’re missing the good points of having a closet for a kitchen.” She set the forks on the counter at her toes. “There are gifts that really only need one person to carry them. Um, I’m trying to think of them, but I’m really struggling. Demon summoners, I guess. Grandma didn’t get her gift until after her aunt died. Um, shoot. I don’t know. Other sort of policing gifts.”

“Vampire slayers!” Dexx clucked his tongue and cocked his finger gun at her with a wink.

“’In every generation,’” Jack said, his voice deepening, “’there is one who is born—‘”

“I think your wording’s a little off.”

Her generation would always and forever have
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
to relate to.

Tony handed Dexx a plate with hash browns, bacon, and eggs.

Paige slid a fork under the potatoes.

He perched on the counters similarly to Paige on the other side of the sink so the two of them had Tony surrounded.

Jack shooed Paige’s legs out of the way with a frown, taking a fork on his way through. He found a place to perch. “Coffee me,” he muttered around a mouthful of eggs.

Paige chuckled and grabbed a k-cup from the cupboard, tossing it to Dexx. “Save those. I’m going to plant seeds inside them in a couple of days.”

“And plant them where?”

She shrugged. “There’s a whole creek bed in my back yard.”

“You don’t have a back yard,” Tony said, handing her a plate before propping himself on the sink. “Whew!” He wiggled his toes that were hooked on the stove. “Hot. Hot, hot.”

The four flew through their food with a little banter for spice.

“When are you supposed to be at work?” Paige leaned forward to see Jack around Tony.

“In fifteen minutes, but my boss knows I’m assisting you.”

“I didn’t realize the FBI was that flexible.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m thinking my boss is something…” He narrowed one eye and finished off his bacon, setting his plate in the sink. “…different. He said something about my track record with cases, but he seemed okay with it. I told him I was assisting you and he just agreed. Weird. Very weird.”