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

Chapter 9

Chapter

Nine

C onnor led me back to bed this morning, but we didn’t fall back asleep for a while. He’d definitely changed “with me” to “in me” a couple of times before we passed out.

When we reached my shop, he became all business. Not that he didn’t hold me or drop kisses to my head, but those appeared more about his protection instinct kicking in than anything lovey-dovey.

At around 10:30, the bell over the door jingled as Agatha walked in. She’d reached what I liked to call her “Stevie Nicks” stage of life, wearing her hair down long and flowing. Long flowing skirt and a black shawl. Just because she didn’t admit to being a witch didn’t mean she didn’t dress like one. I smiled, feeling her power. If she would be willing to help me, she’d definitely have the power to do it.

“Simone, merry meet.”

“Good morning, Agatha. What can I help you with today?”

“I need black cohosh, evening primrose, and red clover.”

I walked over to my jars filled with herbs. “How much of each?”

“How about two ounces of each? That way, I’ll have extra. I have a feeling that I’ll be getting more orders.”

“Of anybody, you’d know.” We both chuckled. While I weighed out the red clover, I casually threw over my shoulder, “I was wondering if I could pick your brain for a moment.”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Give me a minute.” I walked back behind the counter and waited for the non-super customer in the place to find what she wanted. After I checked her out, I looked back to Agatha. “Can you read my cards? I’d be happy to pay, but this is important. I need someone powerful and I feel your power radiate off you from the moment you step inside the store.”

“What’s going on?”

“Connor,” I called out to him. He smiled his panty-dropping smile at the both of us. “Can you lock the door and put the lunch sign up?”

“Oh, my,” Agatha murmured, noticing Connor standing off in the corner of the store on the opposite wall, but in reality, he’d just slipped in from the back room.

“This is my mate, Connor Baghest.”

He waved as he locked up the shop for me.

She eyed him up and down, eyes narrowed, assessing. “You’re a protector.”

The tension between them ratcheted up at least ten notches. “I am. How did?—”

Agatha put her hand up to stop him. “Not just a shifter, but a protector . You’re Simone’s protector. That’s why you’ve mated. Why would Simone require a protector?”

Then she pivoted to look me in the eye. “What are you, Simone?”

“We’ve talked about this before. Your guess is as good as mine. I take it most supers don’t have protectors?”

“Not in the form of shifters. Familiars more so, but shifters are saved for…” She trailed off.

“For?”

“Sorry—for important people.”

“I’m not important, I can assure you.”

“Your mate tells me different. Do you have a table? My cards are in my purse.”

I walked Connor and Agatha into the back room, where I had a table set up for when we ate lunch or dinner, depending on the work schedule. She set her purse down on the table, unzipped it, and fished through it until she pulled the deck out. She dumped them out of the box into her hand.

“Please, sit,” she said and both Connor and I pulled out chairs, dropping into them across from her. “Tell me what you needed from me this morning. Why did you seek me out? I need to know everything.”

“I’ve been gaining new powers.”

“New powers? At your age?”

I nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been growing since I connected with Connor. Aside from my taser fingers, I’ve been able to manifest my desires and now, I’ve started seeing this woman in my head. The first time, she said my name, but I couldn’t get more than that.”

“Was this before or after you connected with your mate?”

My cheeks flushed. “Um… we’d connected but hadn’t connected yet, if you get my meaning.”

“So that was the first time. I take it there’s been a second?”

“Last night,” Connor answered for me.

I elaborated. “When she came to me—it was while I was sleeping—anyway, she seemed relieved that I’d connected with Connor.”

“Relieved?” Agatha repeated questioningly.

“Yeah. She told me to use him. That he was my key.”

“Your key? She said that specifically?”

Again, I nodded. “Yes.” When Agatha dipped her chin, I went on. “She asked if ‘the brooch’ had presented itself to me.” I pulled the brooch out of my pocket to hand it to her. She reached her hand out but pulled it back right away with a hiss when she saw it.

“How are you able to handle that?” she asked.

What was she talking about? “I just picked it up. Connor can too. Why?”

“That’s an athame.”

What? I looked at her confusedly. “It’s a brooch.”

“No. That was once inset in the handle of a dagger.”

“A dagger—this?”

She eyed the piece and then me. “The dagger disappeared millennia ago.”

“Then how do you know that this is from that?”

“I feel the power and it’s been passed down in grimoires, detailed drawings. Witches can’t touch it. No supers can touch it.”

“Why is that?”

“That belonged to the dagger of Lilith.”

Connor barked out a laugh. “You had me going for a minute there. Simone, she’s not being serious. There’s no way you’ve been carrying around a token from the dagger of Lilith in your pocket.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Mostly because it’s impossible. It’s been gone for millennia as she said, and you and I have held it without any ill effects.”

“What kind of ill effects?”

“Excruciating pain. Draining power. Endless suffering after death. You name it, it’s responsible.”

“And how do you know so much about the dagger of Lilith?” I asked him.

“Luc has a book in his office. Sometimes on my down time, I’ll peruse his shelves.”

“Was there a picture?”

He shook his head. “No. It just talked about it.”

“What did it say?” Agatha asked. We both looked to her curiously. “I only know what was passed down in my grimoire. I’m very curious to know if there’s anything more.”

Connor shrugged. “Basically, it said that she and Adam weren’t a well matched couple because he thought a lot of himself, wasn’t real nice, and tried to act all superior. Lilith didn’t go for any of it. They had a couple of kids. The kids dug their mom way more than their dad because of above reasons. They divorced. She got the kids. He got Eve and used his new platform to continuously run down his ex.”

I bristled.

“What he didn’t understand,” Connor continued, “is that a true badass doesn’t need someone around to massage their ego.”

“Aw… honey, is that why you like me to massage yours?”

Agatha laughed while Connor hauled me over onto his lap, pressing a kiss to my temple.

“I like when you massage things, but my ego isn’t one of them.” Woo. The way he said that shot a thrill right through me.

“So it didn’t say anything about the dagger, then?” Agatha asked.

“Just that her daughter got into a heated argument with Adam and he ended up striking her. Lilith flew into a rage, attacking Adam with the dagger. She didn’t kill him.”

“She could have,” Agatha put in. “Lilith was the first witch. She cast a spell using the blood of Adam to protect her daughter and all of her daughter’s descendants from any men. Then she gave the dagger to her daughter.”

“So then how did it disappear?” I asked, totally enthralled by this story.

“Lilith’s daughter was betrayed… by a woman . A woman who’d been coerced or forced into hurting her. No one knows what happened after that.”

“Okay, but how does anyone know that this brooch belonged to that dagger?” I pushed.

“Because Lilith wrote it down in her personal grimoire. She showed it to those she trusted so they would know when they saw it, it would provide protection.”

“But I thought it was only protecting her daughter and daughter’s descendants.”

“Her daughter had children.”

Yeah, I got that. “How many?” I asked.

“That, we don’t know.”

“Do you know, Connor?”

He shook his head. “Lilith has been out of commission since well before I made my appearance into the world.”

“Would Luc know?” I asked.

“I’ll talk to him tonight.”

“So back to the matter at hand,” Agatha said, “you’ve somehow ended up with part of the dagger of Lilith. We don’t know why and we don’t know how you can touch it.”

Understatement of the century.

“We know you’re an orphan. You’ve told me as such,” she continued. “I think you need to tap into your past, to access memories that you don’t realize you have.”

“Can you do that?” I asked.

“I can, but not here. You’ll have to come to my home, where I have the things I’ll need.” She pulled a piece of paper and a pen from her pocket, writing down her address. “This isn’t my home where I sleep, but where I practice away from prying eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“Meet me there at midnight. The magic is strongest then.”

I leaned in to hug her. “Blessed be, Agatha. We’ll be there at midnight.”

As Agatha turned to leave, I told her not to forget the herbs on the counter. They were on me.

“Can you believe that?” Connor asked.

“No. But I knew if anyone could help us, it would be her. She’s strong.”

“I’m not leaving you alone today. Something about the day is giving me an off feeling—don’t argue.”

Snickering, I smiled through it. “I’m not arguing, believe it or not. I feel something on the horizon, too, and I don’t like it.”

We tried our best to get back to business as usual, opening the store back up. He actually behaved himself and stayed out of the way, pulling back his protective instincts with me, especially when men approached me for help. I put him to work as a salesman. When Connor Baghest wanted to be charming, he nailed it. Women and even a couple of men swooned when he turned it on.

Now, when a few of those women got a little too friendly with him , I may or may not have walked up to him, planted a huge kiss, and let him know explicitly what I planned to do to him when we got home tonight. He totally forgot about anyone else standing near us.

So maybe I had protective instincts, too.

At the end of the day, he helped me close up shop, we stopped off for BBQ takeout tonight, and headed home. Despite keeping up the low-key, nothing to see here vibe throughout the day, I thought both of us were a fair mixture of excited and apprehensive about tonight’s festivities.

“Had your sister met her mate?” I asked totally out of the blue—well, out of the blue to Connor. I’d been thinking about it since we’d talked to Agatha this morning.

He snapped his head back looking at me. “What?”

“Your sister. Your sister is a death hound, like you. You’re a protector and we mated, which—correct me if I’m wrong, but it felt like Agatha insinuated that you are supposed to be my protector. That’s why we mated.”

“I haven’t thought about it since this morning with everything else going on, but no, you’re not wrong. That’s how she made it seem.” He ran his hands over his hair. “And to answer your question, not that she’d told me.”

Well, shoot. “I was hoping that if we knew who she’d mated with, who she’d been tasked with protecting, that might help out in this situation.”

“Situation?”

“Well, it seems odd that all this is happening now. Your sister went missing around the same time Jeffery died. This Beetle guy is after me. You’re not just my mate but my protector. I’m no Nancy Drew, but even I can connect dots.”

“Simone, I’m liking this less and less.”

“Already beat you to it. But the events have been put in motion.”

“Because you went to Monnie's.”

Uh… no. “I’d be careful going down that road of accusation if I were you. The day we met, you told me Luc told you ‘something’s up’ or something close to it, and he’d sent you to that abandon building. I hadn’t contacted Beetle yet. Whatever this is, it’s bigger than you and me.”

“It can’t be bigger than you and me with us at the center of it.”

I spun my finger in the air. “Semantics. The point still stands.”

“Get your shoes on. We’ll grab ice cream before we head out to Agatha’s place.”

“Connor Baghest, I’m going to say this once and if you bring it up again, I’ll deny it until my death, but you are amazing.”

He laughed, pulling me in for a hug and kissing the top of my head. “I’ll never bring it up.”

“Bull,” I countered.

“Okay. You’re right. Be prepared to deny it until your death.”

That was fine. I’d suck it up for ice cream. We pulled our shoes on, grabbed my keys, and headed out to the jeep. Connor had a truck. A nice truck, but he must have sensed that I needed my jeep. The purple. He didn’t have to fully get it to get it.

He drove us through the drive thru at Dairy Queen and we both got Blizzards. Mine, strawberry cheesecake with chocolate chips. His was an amalgam of M&Ms, Reece’s Pieces, Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, and chocolate chip cookie dough.

We reached the address Agatha had given us about a quarter to midnight. She stood in the open door, anticipating us. Her witchy powers were so cool. As we stepped inside, I noticed Connor’s nose wrinkle as the air hung thick with incense, a highly flowery scent. It might not have been my jam, either, but clearly, Agatha needed it to get this party started, so to speak.

As it appeared that she grew several plants and dried them here, I wondered if she came to the shop more to connect with other witches than for my actual products.

“You’ve got quite the green thumb,” I pointed out.

She dipped her head sheepishly. “Okay, I’ll admit, I went to your store the first time because I was drawn to it, not because I actually needed anything.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I haven’t been able to figure out what drew me. So I kept coming back, figuring that the reason would present itself. Today, when you stopped me in the store, it presented itself. I’m supposed to help you.”

“Well, I hope after tonight, you’ll still come visit me, even if you don’t buy anything. I look forward to our Wednesday chats.”

“You do stock bark and leaves from trees we can’t grow here.”

I’d like to think that was her way of saying she enjoyed our Wednesday chats, too.

She ushered me over to a recliner. The soft, brown leather looked well-loved. “Please sit,” she said, then she looked to Connor. “You can take any of the other seats.”

We waited for Connor to get comfortable before Agatha walked over to the hearth, where she had an overly large, scuffed and dented tea kettle that I’d bet money had been passed down in her family for years. She used the hem of the apron she wore to lift it from the handle that it hung from over an open flame, bringing it over to the white mug sitting on a table made from a tree stump. She poured the bubbling liquid into the mug, set the kettle down to drizzle honey into the cup before dropping a tea ball into the drink, then brought the mug over to me.

I watched the brown from the tea swirl through the water in a very unnatural fashion. Once it stopped swirling, Agatha pushed the mug up to my lips. “Drink. Drink it all.”

Steam rose up from the surface of the tea. I blew on it so as not to burn my mouth and sipped carefully. It tasted of warm spice, something bitter, and the honey.

“What is this?”

“Shh… drink. I can’t start until you finish.”

I tried to drink fast, but the stuff still steamed. No matter. I chugged and gulped until I’d finished every drop.

“Good, good… close your eyes,” she directed. I closed my eyes. “Now take slow, even breaths in and out.” Right. In and out. I breathed, feeling a calm wash over me as soft words in some distant, foreign language reached my ears, knowing that Agatha spoke those words. “I need you to dial back the years as if flipping back a calendar.”

In my mind, I pictured a calendar, flipping back in time.

“I need you to go back to when you were born.”

The calendar flipped back through the years until I reached the time of my birth, or, I thought it was my birth. It looked well past my twenty-five years in a time period I failed to identify. A woman with raven hair, brown eyes, and a smile full of love held me in her arms. She spoke in a language I didn’t speak, yet I understood her.

“My Simone,” she said. Okay, well, she definitely used my name. A man stood next to the woman, one arm wrapped lovingly around her, the other brushing gently over my head looking down on me with his warm brown eyes. His hair he wore long. The brown strands tied back with a strap. He and the woman and I all shared the same tan skin tone. They made such a handsome couple. All I felt was love until suddenly, the man and woman whipped their heads up, fear on their faces.

The woman I’d spoken to in my dream stepped into the movie frame playing in my mind. “They’re coming. Get her out.”

Then a different man’s voice filled the room. “Give the babe over.”

The man I knew to be my father charged, the woman I’d spoken to in my dream grabbed me from my mother, and then we were surrounded by darkness, as if we’d traveled through a dark tunnel.

An explosion ripped through the room. My eyes opened in time for me to see splinters of wooden door shrapnel flying at Agatha and me. Connor dropped his man form, charging the intruder, whom I couldn’t see because I was trying to keep the wood from getting in my eyes.

Agatha’s eyes glowed warm orange, the color of flames, but she didn’t wield fire. The tea made me too sluggish to move with enough effectiveness to help them out. Still, I managed to think that Connor, Agatha, and I needed to get out of there.

The next thing I knew, the three of us landed by the base of a tree just inside the woods at the back of Agatha’s property. I saw the house in the distance.

“How did we get here?” Agatha asked.

“I told you I can manifest,” I said. “I thought that we needed to get out of there.”

She looked at me in amazement. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No spells. No chants. No teas or tinctures? You certainly have witch power, but you are no witch.”

“Well, we already knew that.”

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

“I saw my mother and father. But it felt like a time way in the past. So it couldn’t have been me or my parents. The woman I talked to in my dream showed up. Someone attacked and she grabbed me from my mother, then we were surrounded by blackness. That’s the last thing I saw.”

“Does it trouble anybody else that at the moment Simone is attacked in her memory, we were attacked here?” Connor asked.

Yes. That troubled me. It also troubled me that Agatha was seeing my mate naked. Connor needs clothing, I thought and it took everything I had to try to make that happen but I couldn’t. Agatha’s tea packed a punch.

“Someone is following you, Simone,” she added. “You and Connor. You can’t go home.”

“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.

“Whoever they are, they know I tried to help you now. It’s not safe for us to keep going.”

“Then we’re back to square one,” I said, sighing.

“No. You need to go talk to my ancestor.”

“Your ancestors? How would I go about that?”

“Get to Ireland. I’ll tell you whom you need to seek out. She’s a relative and she’ll help you reach the ancestors. Do you have your phone?”

I fished into my pocket to pull out my phone, unlocking it for her, then handing it over. She opened the note app and typed out a name, then handed it back to me.

“Now, go.”

I looked down at the name and tried to manifest us out of that treeline.

Nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Connor asked.

“Well, aside from you being naked right now, that tea she gave me is still in my system. Manifesting us out of there used up my strength. I need to rest, to recuperate before we can move.”

Connor looked down at himself.

Agatha laughed uncomfortably. “I was trying not to bring attention to that. Though, you should be very proud of your… um… physique.”

I used what strength I had to step in front of him. “She’s not wrong,” I said. “Very, very proud.”

“Woman.” He laughed.

“We have two choices here: You can either change back into a hound as we move out or I can give you my jeans.”

Connor stared at me incredulously.

“What? My shirt will cover my undies and the pants are stretchy.”

“Not that stretchy.”

“Then be a good boy and change for mama.”

I looked to Agatha. “I’m sorry to drag you into all this.”

“You didn’t. This is the universe’s plan for all of us.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about me. I have places to lay low without you around to track.”

“Safe travels, Agatha,” I said.

“Safe travels, Simone.”

Connor gave Agatha a silent thank you, dropping his head right before he changed into his hound form. “Get on my back,” he said inside my head. I climbed on his back and with a wave to Agatha, we took off.

“Where are we going to go?” I asked him.

“Only one place I can think to go where you’ll be safe.”

In an instant, I knew it.

Hades.