Page 15 of Mochas and Minotaurs

She waved away my concern as she caught her breath. When she could finally speak, she said, “I just saw the most unbelievable thing. An animal I’d never seen before—black and gray, stocky, big claws—just ran out of the bushes carrying a wasp nest and launched it through a car’s windshield. Then it just ran off. The wasps started going crazy, so I booked it.”

“A wasp nest? In the middle of winter?” I asked.

“Yup! I have no idea where it got it.”

I exchanged a look with Jules before asking, “Did the car happen to be a Lexus?”

“I don’t know. All cars look the same to me. Maybe? It looked new.”

Hmm, I wondered if that was why Faux Hobo was running like the wind.

“What did you say the animal looked like?” Jules asked.

“Black and gray. Lighter bits on top. Short and stocky, with a big claws. And it didn’t seem to be scared of the wasps. And those wasps were angry as fuck.”

“What does a honey badger look like?” Jules asked.

Curious, I looked it up and showed her.

“Hey! That’s it!” Alyssa exclaimed. “But much, much bigger than in that photo.

Okay, so it was a honey badger.

“I don’t think we get them here,” I said

“Has to be a shifter.”

A lot of shifters’ animal forms are bigger than regular versions of the animals, especially if the animals they shifted into were usually smaller than humans. Magic was good with a lot of things, but mass was mass, and there was only so much it could fudge. That was why the human forms of bear, big cats, and wolf shifters were often heavier than they looked. It really messed up those guys at the carnival who tried to guess people’s weight.

“A honey badger shifter? Do they even exist?” Alyssa asked.

“No clue,” I said. I’d honestly never looked into it.

Once Alyssa got set up, I headed out to the library. Not just any library, though. Darlington’s Library of Magic & Other Esoterica was one of the best places in the world to find information about magic or monster.

Before the fall of The Wall, Darlington had primarily been a shifter town, sprinkled generously with non-shifting monsters and human magic-users. Basically, anyone who wanted a safe place to be who they were. Our library wasn’t the only one of its kind in the world—far from it. It wasn’t even the biggest. Paris had been hiding one in plain sight right inside the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine. The magic was so strong that even mundane humans who’d worked in it for years hadn’t known about it until The Wall fell.

Considering the French name “Comtesse de Taureau,” I wondered if the Bibliothèque Mazarine was a better place to start. But Paris was a bit far, so our library would have to do.

I inhaled the smell of old books as I stepped into the building. I loved collecting magical things; it was how I recharged my magic. But while I had a decent number of spell books, I didn’t specialize in them.

Everyone knew about witches who recharged through sex and touch. They simultaneously intrigued and terrified the men of the world, and as such, they had been written about extensively by scholars. Education, for the longest time, had been a gameonly rich boys could play. This was true throughout magical and non-magical history.

But there were other ways for us to recharge our magic. Sleeping and eating were great options. And time does wonders. But to speed it up, many witches like myself surrounded ourselves with things we loved. For some, the items had to be magical. But for me, they just had to have a certain sentiment. My home was filled with wonderful objects, both magical and not.

And that was my little secret. Without all these objects, I was a shitty witch. I had magic, sure, and out of our little coven of three, I used to be the strongest. But I wasn’t born this way. It wasn’t until I’d learned to pull the inherent magic from the things around me that my powers became more notable. Now that Penny had found her incubus and tapped into her sex magic, I reckoned she was quite a bit more powerful than me, even though she’d started out as what she lovingly called “a special-ed witch,” her words, not mine.

She’d had so much difficulty learning witchcraft that she’d started an online website showing other non-neurotypical witches how to access and harness their powers. I remember struggling to teach her when we were in college. It wasn’t that she wasn’t strong; she just did things a little differently. She wasn’t a book learner, but rather, she had to learn through demonstrations or other more hands-on methods.

Currently, my home was too full for me to add to my collections. As much as I loved things, I also needed them to be well-organized and neat. I couldn’t handle piles of things on the floor. That just stressed me out. As a result, many of my collectionshave spilled out into the coffee shop. Interesting objects made great decorations; who knew?

It took me almost an hour of searching before I found anything on the Comtesse. Another quick reference about her work and this time, a title!Rencontre Avec un Minotaur. “Meeting with a Minotaur.”

That sounded interesting. It had been published as fiction, an erotic fantasy, but I wonder if it was an autobiography masquerading as a titillating story. I understood why she kept the female moniker now. It was a saucy recounting of debauchery straight from the fallen woman’s fountain nib.

I was searching for a copy of it when I felt the first unwanted prod at my wards. It was light at first, barely noticeable, and I thought I had imagined it. Then it became more insistent.

My home was under attack!

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