Page 47 of The Fantastic Fluke

“If I could, Sage,” he said again. “I would take you back to that bedroom of yours and teach you not to talk back to me.”

I quirked a brow. “What, you’d go all disciplinarian and spank me?” It was a great kink and all, but spanking was not my kink. Still, if real live Gideon had wanted it, it wasn’t like I would have said no.

Instead of agreeing, he smirked. “Nah. It’d just be harder for you to talk back if your sweet little mouth was stuffed full of my cock.”

Well, that evoked a rather different image than spanking. I licked completely dry lips and took a deep breath. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Then I’d put you on your hands and knees and ream your tight little ass till you begged for mercy.”

“Would you give it?”

“Oh sweetheart. I’d give you everything.”

How the hell was I supposed to focus on learning magic after that?

Chapter Seventeen

Fluke dropped the athame on my chest, and I recoiled. It was covered in dirt that showered over my clothes and face as he dropped it, getting everywhere. The taste even filled my mouth. I tried to pull back, to escape the falling clods, but my head hit something hard: the ground. I was lying on the ground. My eyes snapped open in surprise.

Fluke’s intentions were good, even as annoying as the dirt shower was, I knew that. He wanted me to use it, to perform a ritual, and the goal was...

What was the goal?

I sat up, putting the knife as far from me as I could without outright throwing it, and looked around. I was in my mother’s garden. Not my garden, you understand, my mother’s. The garden she’d cultivated for a decade in the backyard, lush and beautiful and controlled. In the present, it was still the first two, but the last had been lost almost twenty years earlier.

My garden was a wild, jungle version of this civilized countryside paradise.

Also, it appeared to be spring. The rhubarb was growing in neat rows right in front of me, mother’s familiar, Cheese, peeking at me from behind the leaves of one plant. Why she’d named the orange tabby Cheese I’d never asked, but guilt twisted in my gut.

Alan had killed him that night too, and I’d hardly thought about him since. He’d died trying to defend my mother.

“I’m sorry, Cheese,” I whispered to him, and he ducked back behind the stalk. It was a game he had loved to play; pretending to be a great hunter like his ancestors, acting as though I couldn’t see him even when I was looking right at him. “I miss you, buddy.”

Fluke had the athame in his mouth again, trying to make me take it. I held up my hands. “I don’t want it, Fluke. I don’t know how you found it, but I don’t want it.”

“Dammit, Sage,” he said in Gideon’s voice, without dropping the knife, “if you don’t damn well open your eyes, I’m having the fox call your grandmother.”

My eyes snapped open, and I was most definitely not in the garden. It was not spring. Cheese was not stalking the rhubarb.

I was lying on the couch in my living room, my head reeling and achy like I’d been struck.

Gideon was kneeling on the floor next to the couch, and Fluke stood beside him, my phone in his mouth. I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to get it out of my pocket, but it was a neat trick. I glared at him half-heartedly. “No digging up my athame, got me? I buried it for a reason.”

He gave a pitiful, concerned whine, but obviously didn’t answer. Just set my phone delicately on my chest and then lay his head below it, on my belly.

“The hell are you talking about?” Gideon asked.

I rubbed my eyes, then my whole face, and yawned wide. “I had a dream that Fluke and I were in the garden with my mother’s familiar.”

Far from seeming shocked or put off, Gideon gave a small smile at the description. “And your athame?”

“I don’t like knives.” I wasn’t going to elucidate, but my stomach interrupted the discussion anyway, growling loudly. I poked it in protest. “I just ate. And had that huge lunch with Iris today.”

“Magic,” Gideon said matter-of-factly, like that was a complete argument.

I scowled over at him, then grabbed my phone off my chest, cringing a little at the feel of Fluke spit on it, which I wiped off on my shirt. What? I never said I wasn’t a bit of a slob. Stuffing the phone back in my pocket, I turned and pushed off the sofa.

Even if I hadn’t been planning on giving in to the need for more food, the dizzy spell when I stood would have changed my mind. I held my hands out for a moment to steady myself, and without turning to look at Gideon, asked, “Magic?”

---