Page 18 of Hexy Beast

“Deep breaths, Wolfie,” Effie says, barely loud enough for me to hear over the blood rushing in my ears. “You were the one who told me to play it cool.”

No, I’d said she needed to watch her mouth, but she has a valid point—one that my wolf is intent on ignoring. So I do what I always do in these circumstances—I shut my wolf down. Hard. I box ’im up, click the lock, throw a couple of sandbags on top for extra weight, and then toss the whole thing into the abyss.

“She’s got a glitch with her magic,” I tell Nikos, Atlas, and the others at the leadership meeting. “Now she can’t be physically away from me. I thought this would be close enough to the jail—especially with the old charms above the door—but it looks like this little chaos witch just can’t get enough of me.”

Atlas is curious but cautious, while Nikos’s expression looks like he just found a black widow spider hanging from a web in his shower.

Effie scoffs at my announcement. “You snuck a charm on me.”

“You’re both wrong, and you know it,” Aunt Artemis says, punctuating her words with a series of tuts.

Fuck me.

It takes everything I have not to groan in misery.

Now that gets everyone’s attention. As our pack oracle, Artemis holds a special place of power. She’s unpredictable, knowledgeable, and more than a little mystical. To be honest, she scares the shit out of everyone. She’s been around practically forever. Even the oldest in our pack don’t remember a time when Artemis wasn’t around—one of the attributes of being pack oracle, I guess.

Nikos comes to a stop in front of me, all but invading my space. “What’s Artemis talking about?”

“Nothing,” Effie and I say at the same time, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Fuck me. By the end of this, I might be the one paying to get rid of this witch.

Until that happens, though, I am the alpha of this pack. I hold these meetings and value everyone’s input—well, almost everyone’s—but the final decision is always mine.

“The bottom line is she’s our prisoner, and we’ll send a message to the Sherwoods first for the ransom.” I pause long enough to appreciate the feel of her ass wiggling against me as she readies to launch a protest or a smart-ass comment. “If I don’t like their answer, then we bring in the Council as a bidder on the Sherwood witch.”

There’s some grumbling—some days I understand why my dad and grandma went all straight dictator even if that’s not the way I will ever run things—but no one argues.

Until, of course, the witch speaks up.

“The Council won’t want me,” Effie says with a shrug.

“Oh, witch, don’t sell yourself short. Everyone wants you,” I tell her. “Especially since, according to the gossip all over Witchingdom, your family and the Council seem to be locking horns right now. I’m sure they’d appreciate the chance to have a little leverage over the Sherwoods.”

She pivots on my lap—something that is both delicious and horrible at the same time—to look me in the eye. “You don’t want to do that. It won’t work out for you. Everyone who deals with the Council gets fucked over.”

“Around here,” I tell Effie, “we just call that life.”

Because if there’s one thing we know, it’s what it’s like to get fucked over by a coven of witches—a multigenerational bad luck hex will teach you that good and hard.

“Fine,” Nikos grumbles. “But we give the Council first bid on the spell book.”

Fuck. I’m so distracted by Effie that I’d almost forgotten about the reason why I’d been trailing her sister Leona in the first place.

When the word went out through back channels that the youngest Sherwood, Tilda, who everyone thought was powerless, but it turned out was anything but, had stolen an ancient spell book, it was all anyone could talk about.

Then, when she handed it off to the sister who is their family’s heir, Leona, her mission was to get the spell book into a secured facility before the Council got their hands on it. When that news hit, the unlicensed betting shops went into overdrive. You could bet on practically anything and everything in Witchingdom, from whether she’d get it there to if the guy she was with was really her secret husband.

I wasn’t following all the gossip to make a quick buck though—I wanted the Aetos pack to make the score of a lifetime to prove that the witch’s multigenerational pack bad luck curse had finally expired. Then everything would change, and our Aetos Werewolves’ future would be secured.

“Fine. The Council gets first bid on the spell book,” I say. “It’s settled.” I glance over at my aunt. “Let me get her back in the jail, and I’ll return in time for the feast.”

As soon as word had gotten to Arcadia that the spell book was ours, the whole town had pulled together an impromptu celebratory feast in addition to the lambs on the barbecue spits. Is it a bit early for that kind of excitement and hope that things will work out? Probably, but we’ve been lean on victories lately and we need one.

“Do you really think leaving her in the jail will work?” Artemis asks as she puts her tarot cards into the carved wooden box she carries them in, pointedly not looking my way.

My gut does a twisting crab-walk thing. “I’ll stick closer to the jail side of the park during the feast to see if that’s close enough for whatever is going on with her magic.”