A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums (Lilith and Co. #1)

Chapter 5

Chapter

Five

I typed the number for Beetle from Jeffrey’s phone into mine. My magic twitched beneath my skin, exactly as it would have if we were close to the full moon.

How? It never happened before, not in the twelve and a half years that my magic had been manifesting. It should’ve gone back to zero. A reset. At this point in the lunar month, the magic hibernated.

A deep voice answered. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

“This isn’t Jeffery,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, causing me to suck in a sharp breath. “You want to meet.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Meet me at Monnie’s in fifteen minutes. It’s a pool hall off of Porter Street.”

I ask you, what other choice did I have? “Okay. I’ll be there.”

He only gave me fifteen minutes, but my outfit didn’t feel safe enough for a pool hall. Too easy access to my girly parts. Quickly, I slid on a pair of jeans and pulled on a white T-shirt. A man’s shirt. Haines. V-neck. I’d always found them comfortable and made of a lighter-weight cotton, which helped keep me cooler in the summer. Then, I tied on my Converse.

I could run, jump, lunge, or any necessary movements to help me get away should the need arise. After shoving Jeffery’s phone in one pocket and mine in the other, I grabbed my purse and keys and took off for Monnie’s.

Finding Monnie’s Pool Hall on my map app, I backed out of my driveway and drove like my life depended on it. I actually arrived only a minute late. Go me! Though it would’ve been preferable to have someone at my back, seeing as I’d never want to pull any of my friends in on this mess, I went in alone.

A dark air surrounded Monnie’s. It felt thick, tense. Goosebumps prickled my skin. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. When I walked inside the smoky, dimly lit place, heads turned to take me in. The way the room was situated, the bar sat to the front and right. To the left and back, there were several pool tables. The rubber on the soles of my Converse stuck to the wood flooring covered in years’ worth of old, dried alcohol and— crap , I hoped it was only alcohol. A green hue covered my skin from the trapezoid-shaped green-glass light fixtures hanging from the ceiling.

Oh, and I knew immediately when I locked eyes with Beetle. A large man. Swarthy with a thick scar that cut across his cheek from his nose to his ear. His eyes looked at me with curiosity and disgust, black like Connor’s, but dead. So not like Connor’s.

He looked like a beetle.

Before I lost my nerve, I walked across the bar to stand in front of the man himself.

Show no fear.

“Something to drink?” he asked me. Voice even gruffer than over the phone.

“I’ll get it.” I didn’t trust this guy as far as I could throw him and I knew from the size of him that I couldn’t even pick him up. I didn’t need him slipping something into my drink.

I ordered a cola because impairment of any kind equaled death or defilement.

“Do you play?” Beetle asked, gesturing to an empty pool table.

“I do.”

I’d learned to play when I was a young teen. Jeffery and I actually met in a bar. He saw me playing with a couple of girlfriends and walked up to call next game. We were together from that day on.

I found the cue stick I wanted and chalked up.

“You first,” he said.

I bent over the table, aimed at the cue ball for the break, drew back my stick, and made my shot. The satisfying crack of the ball always made me smile as the triangle of balls spread out, hitting and bouncing off the sides of the green-felt covered table, sinking the seven ball. Solids. In pool, I had game. In interrogation, no game. Being completely out of my league and accepting it, I decided the best course of action was to simply go for it and ask. I mean, he’d been expecting my call. What did I have to lose?

“What business did you have with Jeffery?”

“Oh, Simone…” He tut-tutted me, shaking his head. “Are you sure you want to go down this road?”

Okay. Score one for Beetle. I took my next shot, sinking both the five and the one balls.

He raised his eyebrow in my direction. Clearly, he’d figured revealing he knew my name would mess me up.

I’d bite. “How do you know my name?”

“I make it a habit to know everyone close to the people who work for me. How do you think I got him to work for me in the first place?”

“Fair enough.” My ball narrowly missed the corner pocket. “Your shot.”

Beetle nodded, surveying the table. He lined up his shot, drawing his stick back, but before he took his turn, he said, “Tell you what, I miss this shot, I let you walk away scot-free. Neither me nor any of my people will bother you again. I make it, you belong to me.”

I laughed, managing to make it sound incredulous rather than the freaked out that I was. “You’re not the Devil. This ain’t Georgia and unlike Johnny, I’m not willing to make a deal,” I answered, referencing The Charlie Daniels Band’s biggest hit, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

“Sweet, innocent Simone…” He paused for what appeared to be dramatic effect. “You have no idea who I am.” Yep. Dramatic effect worked perfectly. Anyone who said that didn’t ooze threatening would’ve been lying.

“Where is she?” someone barked loudly in a voice that sounded remarkably like Connor’s.

I whipped my head up to look at Beetle, who glared at the door, and I turned my head in the same direction, locking eyes with the man himself. Then, twisting back to say something, I didn’t know what, to the man I suspected was responsible for Jeffery’s death, I found him gone. Poof!

“What do you think you’re doing here?” Connor yelled my way, so I had to presume he was yelling at me.

The room went quiet.

His eyes raged with molten heat as he stomped over to me, then, wrapping his hand around my upper arm, he started pulling me, dragging me when I stumbled over my feet, out of the bar.

“Stop,” I demanded.

Connor didn’t stop.

“Stop!” I yelled louder, wrenching my arm out of his hold.

Rather than argue with me any further, he flipped me over his shoulder again, storming out to my jeep. I pounded on his back.

“Put me down,” I demanded.

But the jerk didn’t put me down, he fished my keys from my pocket, bleeping the lock then dropped me into the passenger seat. He rounded the hood to climb into the driver’s seat, started the engine, then sped out from the parking lot.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” I railed against his caveman-like treatment of me and the situation and whatever else I could rail against at the moment. Oh how I wanted to hurt him.

“Have to work tonight,” he grumbled. “But I had to come after you…”

“Whoa,” I said. “I never asked you to come after me.”

“Yeah, I know you didn’t, which is why you snuck off without telling me where you were going.” He was yelling by the end of his tirade.

“Calm down, Cujo.”

“Cujo? Cujo ? You haven’t seen my level of crazy yet.”

I rubbed out the knot of tension at the base of my neck between my shoulder blades. “Take me home.”

“Right. So you can do something else ridiculously stupid again?”

“It wasn’t stupid. I needed to meet with him to see what he knows about Jeffery’s death.” Hearing Jeffery’s name seemed to set him off. What? Like it or not I was going to marry the man and he died because I needed ice cream. I owed Jeffery this. He lost his life essentially because of me. I wouldn’t ever forgive myself for that. But note to self: With the way Connor gripped my steering wheel hard enough that I was pretty sure he could rip it right off the mount, never bring up Jeffery without a leash and muzzle handy.

“Jeffery’s dead,” he barked, like I wasn’t totally aware of that by now. “He’s dead and you’re alive—at least for now. Those guys are bad news and you just waltzed your fine ass in there like other people don’t have a stake in whether or not you survive.”

He thought my ass was fine? That made me feel good— wait, no. Focus, Simone .

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You would’ve never married Jeffery.”

“What? Why would you say that?”

“Because you weren’t supposed to be with him. You’re supposed to be with me.”

“ Connor .” I sucked in a deep, lengthy breath, then let it out gently, gradually, trying to calm the vibe inside the vehicle. “We didn’t know each other then. And you don’t even like me.”

He slowly turned his head to glare at me, almost like he was possessed—yeah, like one of those possessed ventriloquist dummies—and I would have sworn on a stack of tarot cards, I lost my breath completely.

Connor drove us to his store, continuing around the back, where he pulled into a spot and cut the engine, then predictably, a little bit roughly, and totally aggrievedly, dragged me inside. “There’s food in the fridge. You know where the bedroom is. Watch TV or whatever.”

“Where are you going?”

“Work. At the cemetery.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because I need to know you aren’t going to do anything else stupid when I’m not around to bail you out.”

I had the overwhelming urge to punch him right in his handsome face. “I had it under control. You didn’t need to show up.”

Connor rolled his eyes.

“I’ll just leave as soon as you do,” I threatened.

“If you think you’ve got it in you.”

“I don’t need my car. I can call an Uber.”

“You could. But you couldn’t get outside to catch it.”

Excuse me? “What do you mean?”

He threw his hand out. “Try it.”

Challenge accepted. I walked confidently over to the door, twisted the knob, and pulled. Nothing happened. I twisted the deadbolt to make sure it was unlocked and tried again.

And nothing. Again.

“What did you do to the door?” I demanded to know.

He shrugged. “Wards.”

Oh, I narrowed my eyes on him, all right. “ Wards ? What in all of Hades is a ward?”

“Depending on what you need it for, they either keep supers in or out of a place. These wards keep you in.”

“But not you?”

“Not me.”

“Where did you get wards that keep me in but not you?”

“My boss, Luc. We’re tight. He felt bad for me and wanted to make sure I wasn’t late, seeing as I can’t exactly call in sick.”

“You don’t get personal leave days?” I asked, affronted for him until I remembered to be upset with him, then I started to pace. I didn’t like being trapped. As an adult with all my capacities intact, I couldn’t figure out how I’d ended up in this mess. “Why in the world do you even care what happens to me? I still don’t get it.”

“Because you’re mine,” he roared so loudly that I actually took a step back, hitting the door from the back of my head to my bottom, and I blanched.

“What do you mean, I’m yours? We kissed a couple of times, so what?”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“Yes,” I snapped back.

He pressed his palms to his eyes then dragged his hands up to rake through his thick, messy hair. “Simone, you said it yourself. It felt like we were meant to be together.”

“I was just… turned on ,” I admitted. He couldn’t really believe that he and I were… well—that was just ridiculous!

“No. You were just admitting the truth. You felt it because it’s true.”

“There’s no such thing as fate.”

I swore the guy looked to heaven for help. “You have so much to learn. Unlike humans, most supers have an ‘ other half .’ A life mate they’re meant to be with.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Well, don’t let me cramp your style.”

“Simone—you aren’t getting it. We’ve met. Connected. There’s no going back. I couldn’t go out with someone else if I wanted to.” He gestured to me. “And from the death glare you’re shooting me, you can’t stand the idea of that, either.”

I lifted my hands up to my face, feeling the scowl I thought I’d been hiding so well.

“Yeah,” he said, stepping close to me, reaching his hand out to snag my T-shirt to tug me against him.

“That means you’re staying here. I’m going to work. Then we’ll figure out what to do about you now being on a bunch of bad guys’ radar when I get home.”

“How do you know I’m on any bad guy radar?”

“Because you’re hot and you were playing pool in Monnie’s. No good guys hang out there.”

I geared up to argue my point again, I really did, but he bent in to press his lips to mine. I hated that it felt good. I didn’t want it to feel that good.

Connor drove me insane.

He didn’t even like me. The more I thought about that, the angrier I got. The angrier I got, the more frantic the kisses became. I pressed harder. My hands roamed. And unfortunately, I moaned into his mouth.

“No,” the infuriating man grumbled, tearing his mouth from mine, pushing himself back from me.

We were both breathing heavily. Sexy times could be had at any moment level of heavy.

“I don’t have time,” he said, staring at me through eyes declaring they were ready to devour me. “I need to get to work.”

Without so much as a goodbye, he walked out the same door I couldn’t pull open, slamming it behind him. Great. Just freaking great. I found myself trapped in someone else’s home with no way to get out. And as far as I knew, I was stuck for the entire night.