Page 127 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

“The flower can be used to brew an anti-poison.” He turned the page. And with each page he turned, I started seeing a pattern. I absently pulled the amulet from my backpack and for the first time noticed the gem was porous.

“Connor, wasn’t this smooth before?”

His head jerked as he took in the bauble in my hand. “As a baby’s butt,” he replied.

“Extract the poison,” I told my brother. “Make it as potent as possible.” I started manifesting pots for more plants. Sim touched each new leaf, stem, or root and the dirt in the pot to create the plants. Each had a description above the name. As I read them, I understood why she’d chosen those particular plants from the garden. Our witches could use these plants to make the most powerful destructive and healing brews.

“What are you thinking?” Sim asked.

“I’m thinking that we make a brew from all of the poisonous plants and soak this gem in the poison before joining it to thehilt. This is what’s going to kill Beetle. This is what made Lilith’s dagger so lethal. It’s why no one could touch it—because the gem held the poison.”

“What good is a dagger without a blade?” Madigan asked.

“Let’s try this and see what happens.”

Well, there we had the start of a plan at least. As my brother tended to the plants from the Garden of Eden, I walked around the archives to let the witches and Lilium know that we had stronger plants to work with.

Seeing all these people from different walks of life working together for the sake of humanity did my heart good. We spent far too much time at each other’s throats because of this bullshit thing or that bullshit thing. Politics and narrowed points of view had separated us—all of us—for too many years. But now we’d come to a precipice. We stood together or we fell apart. Us against them. Them being demons of the underworld, which probably hadn’t been onanyone’s bingo card this year. I digress.

But here was the problem: I hated feeling useless and right now, I felt useless. Yes, I walked from group to group checking on witch and Lilium progress and fetching anything they might’ve needed, but all I could do was manifest. Since the moment my powers opened up to me, I’d been practicing and perfecting my manifesting game. So now there was nothing for me to do. I walked—no, strike that—I paced the room growing more and more agitated until Connor snagged my hand, dragging me to the special private room the archives had created for us.

He tossed me down on the purple beanbag chair. “What are you doing?” I asked, irritated.

“What areyoudoing?” he repeated in a dumb voice. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m calming my mate the best way I know how.” It hardly seemed like the time or place for this, but when his hands found the button of my jeans, I sort oflost all rational thought. He stripped my lower half but kept his pants on, unzipping and unbuttoning his fly and tugging his jeans down around his ass. Connor’s lips found my neck and his fingers, my center. Oh, dear god! As he sucked the skin into his mouth, I squirmed beneath him and his strong hold.

My eyes closed and I stretched my neck to give him more room to roam. “Connor, please,” I begged. He moved his fingers from my center to rub himself against me there. “Connor,please,” I cried this time. He tore his mouth from my neck to press a heavy kiss to my lips. I’d like to think he just couldn’t resist kissing me, but I felt like he’d done it more to shut me up. Ask me if I cared. In this moment, he had my permission to press his whole hand over my mouth if it meant keeping the ecstatic shivers coming.

Everything but the feel of neurons firing fled my brain as my body took over, reaching to get what it wanted by rocking and rubbing against Connor. He growled low, tearing his mouth from mine, pressing his forehead to mine, and draped each of my legs over his thighs. He plundered the spoils of this battle. A meeting of hearts and bodies and minds. We took off, lips and tongues and teeth. Touching everywhere we could touch. Moving with each other in a way that no other lover could give him or me. Mated sex reached heights that no other sex reached. For the rest of my life, I got this. I got Connor, a partner who read my mood and went out of his way to calm me. As our momentum built, the pulse of culmination reached the breaking point and I lost all sense of space and time. My damn mate drove in one last time and I lost it all over him.

While he came down, he pressed his forehead to mine again, sighing in that heavily contented way he had. I loved that sigh. It meant I gave him exactly what he’d given me. I felt humbled and powerful all at once.

Connor rolled us to drop his butt into the cushioned seat, pulling me onto his lap. Both our chests heaved while we struggled to find reality again. “I can die happy now,” I said, teasing him, but that wasnothow he took it.

His whole body went rigid. “Don’t ever say that again.”

“Connor—”

“I’m serious, Simone. Don’t say that shit again. You’re not dying now or anytime soon. I will not lose you. Do you hear me?”

Talk about an open mouth, insert foot moment. I tipped up my head to kiss the hinge of his jaw. “Sorry, babe. I won’t joke like that again,” I said, getting the words out over the hard lump in my throat. Joking about death with Connor came easy given our expert level banter. But with facing our impending doom, I needed to make better word choices. “I forget how intense the bond can be sometimes. I’ll get used to it.”

“Babe, even if we lost all our magic, including the mated bond, I couldn’t survive losing you. I’m in it.”

I threw my arms around him, pressing my face against his chest, holding on with everything in me.

Okay, enough of that.I shook my head, letting my arms drop from around him. “So we’re done with vulnerable Simone, then?” he asked.

“I have a reputation as a supreme badass to protect,” I said to his ensuing snicker. “Plus, I wanted to discuss something with you.”

“Shoot,” he replied.

“Adalaide said that Mr. Pooches is my familiar.”

Given how he nodded, I figured he’d come to that conclusion as well. “Does Sim have one? He got a hellhound for a mate, so it seems likely he’d have gotten a familiar, too.”

“Note to self, Baghest, do not bring up my brother when I’m leaning on you with my junk hanging out.”

He barked out a laugh. “Baby, what you got ain’t junk and it’s not just hanging out.Myjunk is hanging out. I could take you again in any position.”

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