Page 11 of My Blind Date is a Warlock

“Funny story. I had breakfast with Beverley this morning,” he began, and I raised my eyes to the heavens, swearing under my breath.

“And she sent you here?” I huffed, hands cocked on my hips and my bottom left eyelid twitching mercilessly. “How exactly did you come to have breakfast with her?”

“She found me napping on the beach at the crack of dawn this morning. I couldn't sleep, and being cooped up in a hotel room was not helping with my restlessness, so I decided to explore the town without tourists flitting around like pesky flies. This and that happened, I wound up on the beach to watch the sunrise, and then I was suddenly being poked awake by a blue-haired woman. I thought she was a water nymph at first. Interesting woman, your gran. She knew who I was right away and dragged me off to her place for the best blueberry pancakes I’ve ever had,” he told me with a mystified smile. “We got to talking about Tiberius’s Book of Shadows mostly, and the magic texts she collects for the store. And then she told me about the solstice celebrations and asked me to fetch you tonight and voila!” He waved a hand down his body. “Here I am.”

Here you are indeed, I groused mentally. So that’s why she’d sicced mom and the girls on me, to double down on her and Piper’s efforts to get me to come down to the coven circle.

“Before you go back into the house and slam the door in my face, know that I was only given the directions to your house and not the coven circle. I’ve been told that one of your coven sisters will be serving a special blend of moonshine and an all-you-can-eat buffet. If I don’t bring you along, your grandmother will let me starve. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?” He batted his eyelashes, feigning a boyish look of innocence that had my mouth tugging up at the corners. I squashed that little bit of mirth before it turned into a full-blown smile.

“Drama queen much? We better get going if you want to get your hands on a glass of that moonshine. I hope my grandmother warned you to bring a sleeping bag or something because there’s no way you’re driving back to the hotel once you’ve had Hutchinson’s Hooch,” I warned him as we walked down to his rented SUV.

Jacob waited until we were pulling out of the yard before he asked, “I don’t see yours anywhere. Where are you sleeping tonight?”

“I was planning on bunking with my nieces, seeing as how their mom and dad are probably going to want some time to themselves.” I smirked, thinking back to the spicy text message Piper accidentally sent to me earlier in the afternoon thinking that she’d sent it to her husband, Dave.

“So do you hate your brother-in-law’s guts as well, or is he the one warlock you like?” he piped up, keeping his eyes on the winding road in front of us.

My place was on the outskirts of town and well into the forest. The only other people who lived out here were a few witches and some wolves. The few homes were spaced out, giving everyone their much-needed privacy. My nearest neighbor’s log cabin was located about three and a half miles from my cottage. Tall evergreens lined either side of the road, their branches reaching out across the sky and creating a patchy canopy overhead. The road was a narrow, single-lane that led out of Mystic Cove and into Beckford, the next town over.

“Dave is human, as is my father. Both of them married into the Barnes family, of which my grandmother is the current head,” I explained to him. Most families in our community were matriarchal because our power tended to flow from mother to daughter. Witches outnumbered warlocks at five to one, so we couldn’t afford to be elitist about who we chose to bear our children with—most families couldn’t, at least. There was still a small minority who believed in keeping bloodlines pure and surprise, surprise! That faction was led by a group of warlocks who saw us witches only as incubators to give birth to their powerful, pureblooded offspring. To them, the most important thing when looking for a mate was not the qualities she possessed as a person. You could be the most black-hearted person in the world so long as you had great magic coursing through your veins. Seeing as how warlocks were twice as powerful as the average witch, one could argue that they were entitled to their arrogance. In fact, the jerks often claimed that they were the goddess’s favorite children. You’d be hard-pressed—even in this day and age when everyone claimed to be progressive—to find a warlock married to someone out of the community.

As if reading my mind, Jacob commented something along the same line of thought with a sardonic curl of his lip and squeezing the steering wheel in a death grip. “Humans…but they’re allowed to be full members of the community? People are not so tolerant where I come from. You get booted out of the coven if you so much as hint at wanting to settle down with a non-witch,” he spat with so much vitriol that I felt the air in the car crackle. An immense surge of energy filled up the enclosed space, with Jacob at the epicenter. He was the eye of the storm while the energy around him swirled chaotically and searched for something to lash out at. Unfortunately for me, I was the nearest target.

“Jacob!” I gasped in pain, cold tendrils of magic jabbing at me and my breath misting. The temperature had dropped so low it made my head and teeth ache, and yet paradoxically, there was a searing heat burning me from the inside out. A lance of hot pokers stabbed at my core. “Jacob, stop it! Stop it! You’re hurting me!” I cried out, tugging at the sleeve of his leather jacket.

“Oh, no! I didn’t realize—” he stuttered in a panic. Between one breath and the next, the air pressure in the car went back to normal. But for a moment, there was a vacuum void of air and magic, making my ears pop. I gagged, my chest heaving as I gasped for breath as if I’d been trapped underwater for a while. Blood and bile crept up my throat, their acrid and coppery scents clogging my nostrils and lathering across my tastebuds.

“Pull over. I think I’m going to be sick,” I croaked, slapping a hand across my mouth. Jacob swore under his breath, swerving the car and rolling to a stop along the side of the road, and I was already out of my seat. Kneeling on the deep brown earth, twigs and stones digging into my knees, I lost my lunch in one go. But that was not enough to purge the alien feeling snaking through my body, searching for a way out. I needed to…do something. What exactly that was, I didn’t know, but my whole body was tingling, much like two days ago when I experienced that bout of painful lethargy. My fingers digging into the earth, I continued to dry heave, expecting to spit out fire the way my throat was burning.

CHAPTER 11

I flinched at the touch of Jacob’s broad hand rubbing soothing circles around my back while his other hand gathered back my hair so that the ends would not trail in the puke. I didn’t hear him get out of the car and crouch behind me. He kept muttering apologies and comforting words while I was dry heaving. The man had a magic touch—a literal magic touch. He expanded his power again. Nothing caustic, raw, or wild this time around. Only soothing and healing. The bite of nausea slowly dissipated, my spasming muscles relaxing, and I was starting to get a little drowsy. Unlike his raw magic, which tasted of storms and smelled like lightning, Jacob’s healing magic was the first bite of frost in the fall, the crispy tartness of an apple orchard and glazed berries.

Without meaning to, I got up from my hunched position and buried my face in the crook of his neck, hoping to draw the scent straight from the source, but I suppose it must have all been in my imagination because all I got was a whiff of his woodsy cologne.

“I’m sorry for lashing out with magic like a warlock barely out of diapers.” He wrapped his arms around me, one hand cupping the base of my skull and gently massaging it. Biting back a groan at how good that felt, I buried my head deeper in his neck and closed my eyes, quietly enjoying the sensations he wrought on my weakened self. “As far as excuses go, it’s not the best, especially for a man my age. But all I can tell you is that I lost my temper and the hold on my emotions. Any time talk of purists pops up in conversation, all I see is red.”

“So do I,” I mumbled into his neck, my lips brushing against his skin. Jacob’s body shuddered beneath me, his arms holding me tighter. I could feel his heartbeat racing wildly in his chest, like a hummingbird fluttering its wings in a desperate bid to escape its cage. But then I seemed to wake up and pulled away. “But I don’t strike out like a deranged beast. You could have killed me with a single blast of your power, Jacob. Jeez! You almost did!” I pushed away from him, groaning at the needles and pins stabbing at my feet when I stood up, running a hand through my hair.

“I know, I know. That was a rookie move. Next time I pull a stunt like that, feel free to brain blast me.” He grabbed my wrist when I would have walked away. “I once made a classmate of mine poop herself for four hours straight when she tried to come after my sister. You could do that if you want; no one would blame you for defending yourself.”

“Don’t you think I would have if I could?” I snapped, snatching my hand back and stumbling a few steps. “You think I laid back and took your whip of power because….what? If I had the power to put you on your butt, I would have done it the second you shoved your magic down my throat. But I’m a dud! I have no choice but to run for cover whenever you lot think it’s a great idea to throw a hissy fit!” Words I’d kept buried rolled off my tongue, the images before me melding with memories from my time at Redwood. Instead of Jerome Clarke standing before me, tormenting me and punishing me for having the gall to attend the academy when I was all but human, I saw Jacob.

He was resplendent in the maroon, grey, and white uniform of Redwood, looking down at me from where I knelt on the gravelly ground, my knees and the heels of my palms skinned and bleeding. The slurs that had been hurled my way on a daily basis bounced around in my head, and the deep-seated betrayal and resentment I felt for those who enabled that monster and turned a blind eye to what was happening to me tugged at my heart.

“Sophia, snap out of it!”

Blood coated my tongue and dripped down the side of my mouth. I didn’t even realize that I was biting on my tongue hard enough to draw blood, or that I had my hands over my ears to block out the words and name-calling from my memories until Jacob gave me a good shake.

His eyes were wide, the pupils constricted so that the only thing I could see when I opened my eyes was miles and miles of blue-green ocean. His teeth were bared in a snarl, but I didn’t think he was angry with me. More like terrified. Of what, though?

“Where did you go?” he demanded, his fingers digging into my arms hard enough for me to know that I’d have finger-shaped bruises in the morning.

What was he talking about? “I’m right here,” I answered in confusion.

“Physically, maybe. But for a second there I couldn’t sense your power. It was if there was…a pit of nothingness. A void sucking in all the magic and erasing traces of you.”

I opened my mouth to spit out a retort, but it died on the tip of my tongue because nothing he said was making sense. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t have any power at all for him to sense and that he was imagining things, but my phone went off. A text message from Piper.

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