Page 61 of The Misfit Mage and His Devilish Desires

Damn. I hadn’t realized we were sitting with such an artillery at our fingertips. To think, I could’ve been throwing Molotov cocktails from petrified goblin eggs and the shavings of dragon scales this entire time during my training sessions with Wally. Then again, the wrestling really was the best part of the day.

“Why are you smirking?” he asked, growing flustered from his long list of spells he needlessly prattled on about. “I can’t believe we were robbed. These witches are the worst.”

“We don’t have time for witch drama,” I snarled. “We’ve got devils to contend with.”

“Devils whom you lot made a problem,” Mora noted, pursed lips in a judgy little face no matter whose body she wore.

“People with witchy wives who lose important things shouldn’t throw fireballs,” Wally added, continuing his evaluation of the inventory list.

“Hey, I’m not responsible for any of this,” Kell protested. “I think fireballs should always be thrown. In fact, I wanted to lightup all the thieving witches the first time they attempted to steal from me. It was Mora who wanted to play peacekeeper.”

“We’re running a kingdom here, not a free-for-all.”

“You won’t be running anything if Lilith flees to this world and slaughters us all as a practice run to regaining her strength,” I said.

“No one’s getting slaughtered,” Wally said. “I just need the scrying board and a few ingredients, and I should be able to locate the coven. Or, at the very least, one of their caches, which might lead to the coven. Or another cache. Or a person they sold part of their cache to. Or—”

“Wally,” I snapped. “You’re doing the overthinking worry thing again.”

“Oops.” He grimaced. “Yeah, I can find them.”

“If you think you can find them after the countless hours I spent searching for a workaround on their cloaking spells, be my guest.” Kell scoffed. “FYI—half of those stolen goods from our store are making it impossible to track them. Well, pinpoint them. The last spell very notably informed me that the witch coven was, in fact, still on earth.”

“Geez, you don’t even know if they’re still in the Diabolic Oasis or not?” I sighed.

“They’re in the Oasis,” Wally said with the cutest cockiest little grin. “No one steals a basilisk egg and then abandons it. They’re the size of a person and weigh about two solid tons. And anyone who would steal it knows it can’t undergo dimensional travel without proper preparation, which, if any of you remember, took a long time for me to situate when we bought it for the shop.”

None of us remembered because none of us really paid much attention to the rules of magics that Wally loved rambling about.

“You still can’t track them,” Kell said with a frustrated edge. It was rare to find someone with a spell that could outwither. The fact this coven had stolen from her and likely used Kell’s own preventative measures wasn’t lost on me. Oh, how it must’ve infuriated her.

“I’m not going to track them,” Wally said, holding up the list of lost inventory. “There are simple spells to find rarities that no protection wards can deceive. It’s just a matter of doing the research.”

“You son of a bitch,” Kell muttered.

“I won’t argue with you there.” I pointed at her, smiling until Wally frowned. “What? You are. Your mother’s the worst.”

The horrors of this situation, the dire existence-ending possibility, fizzled away for a few brief minutes as Wally muttered with aggravation over our aloofness while fighting a smile that came every time he sank into the joy of research. He couldn’t help but smile. After all, his nerdy, little obsessive need to study had truly paid off. I settled into this moment, savoring the calm between storms.

I allowed Wally’s joy to keep me calm while he prepared his little locator spell, ignoring the fact that if Mora hadn’t insisted I not involve myself, then I could’ve killed these annoying witches before we even went to Hell.

Why does no one simply accept my ruling as truly superior?

Thankfully, it didn’t take my budding genius long to pinpoint the enemy. We arrived at a collection of warehouses where Wally led the way, me at his side and Mora and Kell close behind. He breezed through the maze of buildings, muttering probabilities like he was the smartest rat about to snag the cheese until we reached a collection of trees leading to the nearby forest.

“I got this.” Kell sidestepped past Wally, confidently taking the lead since he’d solved a riddle in days that she hadn’t in the last several months.

Using Nature’s Blessing, Kell uncloaked the hidden glamours put in place by the plant life.

“Interesting sorcery,” Wally said, examining the plants that shriveled. “What spell is that?”

“It’s like the familiar bond,” Kell said. “Flowers seeped in magic by witches here and serving as familiars.

“Plants can be familiars?” Wally’s puzzled expression quickly tucked that piece away for a later observation. “Fascinating how the pollen carries the Mythic residue of magic in the air.”

“Yes, yes, yes, the coolest of the cool,” I said. “Can we kill now and study later?”

“Do we really need to kill them?” Wally asked. “If they understood the situation—”

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