Page 102 of Hopelessly Teavoted
“No special treatment. Especially since we don’t want them to knowwhywe need it,” Prissy said pointedly. “Besides, it would be detectable by anyone halfway decent at witchery, and it would give us away if we meet nonwitches. Chet’s been sniffing around enough as it is. No need to appear out of thin air and confirm his suspicions if there’s a possibility that we can catch him unawares. The car is much more sensible.”
“Sure, sure. Totally normal to drive an enormous vintage Packard to a church in the middle of the night.”
Priscilla shrugged. “I’m a beautiful, eccentric lesbian, Azrael, and none of that is out of the ordinary for me, to tell the truth.” Evelyn glanced at her in the rearview mirror, winking.
The corners of Azrael’s mouth pulled up as he watchedthem flirt, without words or shame, in the little reflective glass. He was glad his sister was happy, even if it was only for now. Prissy reminded him so much of his parents, always knowing that she was perfectly normal and acceptable the way she was. Never caring—relishing it, even—when people disliked her.
It had been true the whole time, and he had been too fucking foolish to acknowledge it.
Just like he had been too scared to tell Vickie how he felt that time in college, or before that when they’d parted ways after high school, and how he’d wasted so much time wallowing in his own agony. Just like when he’d let her tell him it was just pretending. All the pretending in the shower, and the library, and the car. All the pretending that it was pretending, until it was crystal clear to him that it was anything but. He patted his thigh for his wallet, thinking again of what he kept there, wrinkled and full of heartache and history. It was the last thing between them, and he needed to be honest before they set the seal.
After this, he would.
The car stopped, and Evelyn parked it under the partial cover of enormous oak trees at one end of the parking lot. From the street, it was barely noticeable in the dark.
The clean modern lines of the building glinted in the moonlight, a sharp contrast to the graveyard that had housed Hallowcross’s dead for almost two hundred years. The building had been destroyed in a fire in the late nineties and rebuilt in modern splendor on the dimes of the congregants, as such things usually went, while the wealthy pastors reaped the benefits and spilled their corruptions into fancy accommodations bought with tithing.
The hypocrisy of religion could be chilling, and Azrael, a witch named twice for devils, didn’t use that assessment lightly.
They broke in with little difficulty, Evelyn muttering about detection spells not being clever enough. But the desolate, empty aura of the building plunged them further into the cold.
Vickie shivered, and he snapped his fingers, adding, atop her jeans and shirt, a heavy cable-knit sweater he kept in the trunk of the car.
Evelyn and Priscilla, unsurprisingly, hadn’t bothered with jackets. Probably a warmth spell, which he didn’t care for himself; Azrael preferred the weight of actual layers. And the flexibility they afforded him in touching Victoria.
“Thanks, Az,” she whispered, sniffing it, and he wondered how he could have deluded himself into thinking she didn’t care. It was so clear to him, not just in what she said, but in how he felt around her. Home. He wanted to move to stand next to her, but it was too risky. He would need to keep his fingers bare for any magic casting.
They walked, feet spelled against sound, disturbingly quiet on marble floors that stretched on forever. Finally, they reached a staircase that must lead to offices on the second floor.
A light at the end of the hallway upstairs and a cracked door let them know that someone was there, beyond the extravagant door marking the head pastor’s office.
Azrael gestured for them to go ahead, and Priscilla took the lead with Evelyn close behind, Vickie hugging the left wall of the hallway while Azrael stuck to the right, careful not to comply with the gravitational pull of their bodies toward each other.
They turned a corner, and Azrael stopped; Vickie stepped backward.
Priscilla snapped her fingers and the air turned bluish in a simple spell for detecting intentions. She blew at it, and waved her hand, the color seeping into the gap of the door that stood ajar. They watched as it turned purple.
“What the…” sounded the familiar voice, the one Azrael had expected to come from inside the room, as Priscilla kicked the door the rest of the way open. She was a sight to behold in a sleek black pantsuit that he suspected had more give to it than it appeared to. His sister always had been good at magicking her clothes to look like business but feel like loungewear.
Azrael would recognize that voice, and the middle-aged, gelled receding hairline of a man behind the desk that it belonged to, anywhere. Part of him had hoped it wasn’t his boss. That the man was just an asshole, no magic involved, who happened to also be a youth pastor.
But it was, and apparently the man’s assholery didn’t stop at terrorizing his coworker.
“Chet.”
“What the fuck are you doing here, Hart?” The man smiled, and there was something sinister to it. As though he wasn’t upset at all to see them.
Chet’s lecherous eyes raked up and down Priscilla, and he raised his eyebrows. “Did you finally decide to introduce me to your hot sister after all?”
Priscilla’s snaps should have restrained him with something quite horrific, but a greenish hue shimmered around Chet Thornington, at the invisible barrier where the intention spell had been blocked. A physical protection spell, with what looked like a four-foot diameter. Object-based, then.
Chet pulled a lighter from his pocket, tossing it in his hand, and laughed.
“Iknewit. I couldn’t afford to act on it until I was sure, not after that fiasco with the fake psychic, but I knew you were witches.”
Azrael snapped furiously, but the barrier held, his magic having no effect.
“My preparations should have worked for this,” muttered Evelyn. “I was careful. It should have been enough to break his shield.”
