Page 35 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
Aerin
Kerrigan Byrne
1
“Earth to release me from the land
Water to guide the task at hand.
Flame to hasten my course ahead.
Air to be the path I tread.
By earth, fire, water and sky,
Goddess bless this broom to fly!”
Thwack.The broom hit the distressed wood of the kitchen floor with the loud, plastic sound of failure. Aerin de Moray gave a surreptitious glance around the empty room to make sure no one had seen her millionth unsuccessful attempt before she directed her frustration at the stubborn inanimate object. It was one of those light-as-a-feather blue and white plastic jobbers with polypropylene fibers arranged into yellow angled bristles with a matching attached dustpan that she gripped in her hand.
Waving the bladed rubber edge of the pan at the prostrate broom, she unleashed her wrath, “Listen up, motherfucker, I’m going to try this one more time, and if you don’t at least levitate for a second, I’m going to have Claire melt you into a plastic dildo and give you as a Christmas present to Hank Miller down the street, and we all know what goes on in that house.”
The broom couldn’t have been more apathetic.
Aerin kicked it where she thought the kidneys would be.
“Unless this isyourfault, Grim.” She whirled on the ancient tome spread open on the table, distinctly emitting an air of innocence. The de Moray Grimoire had become a part of the family now that he’d been returned by Lucy. Aerin and her sisters all had the tendency to anthropomorphize the family spell book, going so far as to assign him a gender and nicknaming him “Grim.” He was bound in human flesh, after all, and he was immensely helpful, even opening to the correct page upon request.
By himself.
After it stopped being spooky, it was pretty rad.
Aerin squinted down at the spell again, magically disambiguated for her. The first time she’d come across this page, it had been in some ancient form of Gaelic. She’d asked Grim to translate it for her and, at first, nothing had happened. But the next time she’d opened the book, there it was, in the Queen’s own English.
It even rhymed.
She’d followed all the rules. Got a broom. Gathered four white fluffy dandelion heads and a puff of cottonwood, to which she was allergic, apparently, and blew them all over the damned kitchen and did the hokey pokey and turned herself about saying the spell.
And… nothing.
The bookspecificallysaid the air witch had to bless the broom before it could fly. Thatshehad to go first. “So what gives?” she demanded of Grim. “Are you fucking with me?” A grimoire with a sense of humor could be a dangerous thing.
Aerin didn’t trust ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people on a good day, and an ancient, sentient, rune-decorated, flesh book didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
“Did you just yell at the Grimoire?” Tommy queried as he sauntered down the stairs that led from the second floor to the kitchen.
“Did you just eat a raw steak?” Aerin made a sound of revulsion as Tommy rinsed a puddle of blood off the plate in his hands and put it in the dishwasher. He’d been around for two days, and they still hadn’t landed on what exactly to do with him. Claire seemed to be ecstatic that her ex-boyfriend was back, and Aerin had to give it to the guy, he may or may not be undead, but at least he was a decent houseguest.
Still, Aerin didn’t trust him, and not just because she prided herself on being a professional misanthrope. She couldn’t read him. Couldn’t feel any emotional vibrations coming from his body like she did with everyone else. Empathy was her ironic superpower, and Tommy was immune, which put him in the make-one-wrong-move-and-I’ll-put-you-back-in-the-coffin category. At least, from Aerin’s point of view.
Also, Tierra said he smelled weird. And at the moment, scent washersuperpower. Not because she was a witch, but because she was knocked-up.
Aerin shuddered with revulsion again.
Tommy’s blue eyes sparkled like the open sea. He had that kind of wide-shouldered, dimpled, all-American charm that belonged to sparkly-eyed men like Chris Pine and Channing Tatum. It was disarming and very,verydifferent than Drustan’s dark, exotic, dangerous, and otherworldly sex appeal. Claire’s spectrum of men was quite varied.
Aerin had to give her sister that.
“I like my meat rare,” Tommy said with a good-natured shrug.
