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

Chapter 25

Chapter

Twenty-Five

“ M y house ,” I cried in complete and utter shock. It’d been turned upside-down. Everything I’d worked so hard for lay in tatters on the ground. Stuffing pulled from furniture, glass shattered, tables upturned. My beautiful television smashed to pieces.

Suddenly, my head started to spin and I fell backward ass-first onto the edge of the sofa. I felt sick. Violated.

“It’s just stuff,” I mumbled, trying to rein in my emotions. “It’s just stuff…”

Connor dropped down next to me, pulling me onto his lap. “You’ve got magic and I’ve got money. We’ll get it all back somehow. I promise.”

I nodded, squaring my shoulders. “It was a shock, is all.”

“You don’t have to be strong around me, sweetheart.”

Call it the mania of the moment, but when he spoke softly and sweet to me like that, I lost it in that I shifted on his lap to straddle him and proceeded to kiss the crap out of him. I kissed him with possessive tenderness as if we had all the time in the world. His arms held me tightly against him while he dug his fingers into my blouse and my jeans right above my butt.

He gave me the strength to keep going. He did that.

Just as abruptly, I pushed back from him. “Right,” I said while collecting myself. He snickered at my change in attitude.

“Time to find the grimoire,” he replied.

I stood from his lap and walked over to the vent in the floor to see if Mr. Pooches might’ve hidden it there. “You’re just a good kisser.” I felt the need to defend my actions.

“Sure.”

“I’m a strong, independent woman.”

“Absolutely.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“Never.”

“Good, because I can be formidable even with you, Connor Baghest.”

“Noted.” He winked. I balled my fist, willing myself not to punch him square in his sexy, solidly muscled… What was I talking about?

We started in the living room. Okay, so the first floor vent probably wouldn’t have been the best place for Mr. Pooches to hide the world’s most important grimoire. Connor and I tore apart the house even more than what the demons had done, just with less destruction.

I plopped down on the kitchen floor, utterly defeated.

“Are you sure he hid it here?”

“It was here. There wouldn’t have been anywhere else for him to hide it. Otherwise, I’d have no freaking clue where to look.”

Connor grumbled. I felt like grumbling too, but as he did it so much better, I left it to him. My kitchen table had been upturned, as were the chairs. Every cupboard opened. Every pot, pan dish, or utensil lay scattered or shattered on the floor surrounding us. They’d even upturned Mr. Pooches’s litter box. Poo and litter all over the small corner. I looked at it. Then I looked at it again. Poo? His litter box had an automatic scoop that moved the kitty waste into a compartment that held a plastic container underneath the litter box so he had a clean box for every use and I didn’t have to discard the plastic more than every couple of weeks. If you didn’t know about the bin, you’d never find it. It’d taken me an hour to access the thing and I’d had the damn directions. The bin wasn’t open. But there was poo.

“I know where it is!” I shouted, totally startling Connor, which always brought me joy.

I crawled over to the litter box, flipped it right-side up, and pressed in on the back to release the compartment holding the bin. And there— my grimoire ! Mr. Pooches earned all the tuna and sardines his heart desired for thinking of this.

“It’s tiny,” Connor said, looming over me and the litter box.

“What did you expect?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s Lilith’s grimoire. I thought it’d be huge.”

“She left it with an infant.”

“Still… you’d think Lilith, of all people, would know more magic than this.” He picked it up from the bin. It fit in his hand. I pushed up from the floor to snatch it back, flipping it open. The inscription with my name appeared on the first page. As I turned each page, I read over names that’d never been there before. Names of Lilith’s descendants. They had to be, because I found Simeon, Lily Joy, and Karro in the book. A list of powers opened up to me too and I had to believe that these were powers I could tap into now that my magic was unbound. I saw the Taser fingers, the manifestation, the astral-projection, talking with spirits, and so much more. Lilith gave detailed explanations on how to master each power and corresponding spells to utilize them.

“Connor, you have no idea what’s in here.”

“I take it by your reaction that none of that was in there before.”

“No. None of it— look .” I shoved the list of names in his face. “Other Lilium. And here…” I turned the pages to show him the powers.

“Are you shitting me? All of those are yours?”

“I assume so. Maybe some are for Sim. Maybe some are for my cousins—” My next words got cut off by a loud knock coming from the front door. I looked to Connor. “No one should know we’re here,” I whispered.

“Hide, babe. I’ll answer. Something feels off.” Goosebumps rose up his arms, which happened just before he shifted. I held the grimoire close to my chest, kissed Connor, and slunk off silently to the back bedroom.

“Let me hear everything that’s going on.” I manifested and I heard Connor answer the door.

“Can I help you?” Connor asked.

“Is the homeowner home?” the person outside the house answered in a grumbly voice I’d heard before. Detective Shift. Shit.

“No. She ran to the store for garbage bags. Clearly, someone ransacked the place. Can I ask what this is regarding…” Connor paused and the detective must’ve pulled his badge because he finished, “Detective Shift .”

“The neighbors reported something going on at this residence.”

“But not when someone broke in and leveled the entire place? That makes sense. And since when does the police department send a detective to look into a possible B and E?”

“I was the closest,” he countered.

“Right. Well, she’ll be back when she’s back.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I live here. She’s the homeowner, but I moved in a couple of weeks ago. We’re getting married.”

“And you don’t want to file a report?”

“I asked her. She—wait, why’d you ask for the homeowner?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why did you ask for the homeowner? Why wouldn’t you have assumed I was the homeowner?”

Ooh… good question. Come on, Detective Shift. Let’s see you get out of this one.

“You tell the bitch that we want the grimoire.”

Connor growled. Literally growled.

“She gives it up willingly,” Shift continued, “Beetle will spare her life. He said he’ll make her his number-one concubine. She fights us, the rest of the demon population gets to play with her.”

Play with me? I burst from the bedroom in full charge, ready to take that asshole out, but the moment I reached the front door, a literal hole opened up beneath Detective Shift, sucking him down. A portal. The man showed up at my house threatening me and then used a goddamned portal to escape when it had gotten too real for him. And that ticked me off more. He’d chosen his side. He needed to stand up and fight for it. Clearly, Beetle hadn’t vetted his minion too well. Next time Beetle might want to check with resume sites like LinkedIn or Monster.

And because of my ADD ‘ooo—shiny’ brain, I giggled, thinking about searching up minion positions on Monster. Connor shot me the death glare of all death glares.

“You were supposed to stay hidden,” he raged.

“Whoa… down boy.”

He dragged his hand through his hair so roughly that I thought I spied a bald spot after he’d finished. Maybe it was just my imagination, but it still looked painful. “Simone… Swear to god… How am I supposed to keep you safe if you keep charging head-first into danger?”

“Right. Let’s pretend for a second that I’m not the granddaughter of Lilith and haven’t come into magic that no one on the planet has seen before—oh, right, we can’t . Because I am the freaking granddaughter of Lilith, which is exactly why they’re after me. I can’t hide from them. I’m in this. I am this… this… whatever this turns out to be. I’m connected and you know it.”

“But you’re my mate?—”

“Yeah. And I love that thing you do”—I twirled my finger in the air to remind him of the thing in question—“but I told you before, we’re partners in this or it’s not happening. I’m not about to play damsel in distress to bolster your ego.”

“It’s not my ego.” He sighed. His rage deflated for the time.

“Good. Now that we’ve got that settled, you’ve seen that detective before,” I said. Connor narrowed his eyes at me. “That first day we met. You tried to kidnap me.”

“You know damn well I wasn’t kidnapping you.”

I shot him my ‘ really? ’ eyes and waited.

“Fine. I kidnapped you but not in a creepy, want to wear your hair as a wig kind of way. You were doing something stupid that could’ve gotten you hurt or killed, per usual. I had to make sure that didn’t happen.”

“Aw… such sweet words,” I said sarcastically. “Keep talking like that and you might get lucky.” I tilted my head, smiling at him as I finished, muttering, “Or I’ll get lucky when I cut you while you sleep.” under my breath.

He reached out to grab my hand, tugging me against his solid, yet—I’d never tell him this but comforting—body and he just held me. Connor and I would get through this. The universe put us together for some reason. I still sort of thought it was a clerical error, but I the universe was the universe for a reason. I held him back.

“What do you know about him?” my mate asked into my hair.

“Not much. I first heard about Detective Shift from Jeffery’s mother. He’d come to visit her about Jeffery’s case, but it never sat well with me because no Detective Shift had ever come to talk to me and I wondered why. My Spidey-sense told me something was off about it. But then so much happened, I never thought anything more about it until years later when I went to the police station to pick up Jeffery’s effects and I literally ran into the man.”

“Then what?”

“He was incredibly rude. Again, I sloughed it off because I wasn’t exactly looking forward to retrieving Jeffery’s things. But then, Detective Shift was the one who responded to the kidnapping call. And I thought I recognized his voice in the cemetery when Beetle’s men attacked.”

“He’s human. Why is a human working with demons?”

“I don’t know. He has to be expecting some kind of major payout, right?”

“When will humans learn? Demon deals never turn out like you expect them to.”

“Luc would keep his word.”

He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Luc’s not a demon. His demons never strike deals. It’s not a job requirement. Plus, that whole pride thing—he’d never let one go back on a deal.”

Terror struck me as I realized that I’d set the grimoire down to storm out here and I tore myself from Connor’s arms to run back into the back bedroom. The grimoire sat on the hardwood floor exactly where I’d dropped it and I sighed all the relief.

Only seconds behind me, Connor entered the room in full-on hellhound mode. His red eyes glowed. “What happened?” he asked in my head.

“I dropped the grimoire to tackle Shift. While we were standing in the living room, it hit me that I’d left one of the two most important books in the world unattended. Stupid, I know,” I said before he could, then I turned to walk over to the pile of Connor’s clothing that had once been neatly folded in the drawers broken on the floor. I picked up a clean pair of boxer briefs, walking them back over to him as he shifted back to his man form.

He took the underwear from me without any negative comments for once, sliding them up over his powerful thighs. I paced the room, opening the grimoire again to the first pages where the names of all my cousins were written. I concentrated on the names, manifesting them to copy themselves onto paper that went directly into Karro’s hands, making sure to add a note explaining why the papers appeared in his hands. I wanted to send them to Lily Joy too, but I had no idea where she was at. Was she okay? Astral projection. It ended up being the only way I could think of to contact her and not risk her safety even more.

I turned my attention from the book to the destroyed room then back to the book. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

Being charged with saving the world sucked. Totally and completely. And being completely in my head, I missed Connor move until he reached me, grasping my arms in each hand, he walked me backward until my legs hit the bed and I fell onto the skewed mattress.

“Connor, there’s no sheet on the bed. The mattress is half on the floor.”

He shrugged. “You take care of the sheets. I got the mattress.”

Rather than get up and look for the sheets, I cheated, manifesting the fitted one under me. Connor used his brute strength to swivel the mattress back into place.

“We’re going to sleep in our own bed tonight,” he said.

“But the world?—”

“Won’t end tonight. They don’t have the grimoire.”

“But what about Shift and the demons? I don’t have wards. We need Luc for that.”

“I work around demons every night. They’ll think we’ve fled because of Shift’s visit. No one will expect us to stay. I promise. You need to rest. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the world.”

Well, I had to admit that sounded pretty perfect about now. Sleeping in my own bed. I missed this bed. I missed this house, even in its current upturned state. At least that was something I could control.

The food that had been pulled from the refrigerator and freezer for no reason except to vandalize my home more had started rotting and smelled pretty bad. If bugs and rodents hadn’t found their way inside yet, they soon would.

I concentrated on the mess. I concentrated on the smell. I manifested them gone completely, leaving behind a squeaky clean kitchen. For good measure, I focused hard on any insects or rodents that might’ve been hiding in my home and manifested them gone too.

And to think, everyone could’ve had magic if Adam hadn’t been such a major tool.

Connor kissed my cheek. “I’m hitting the shower while I have the chance.”

“What do you want to eat? I’m starved.”

“There’s nothing in the house and you’re not going out.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa… despite you trying to tell me what to do, let’s play the ‘all the ways Simone’s not stupid’ game.”

“Simone, I know?—”

I held my finger up, signaling him to zip it. “One,” I started. “There are demons trying to kill me. Two: According to you, the demons will think we’ve hightailed it out of town, so going out would give our position away. Three: I have magic. I can manifest us a freaking meal. Four: I don’t feel like leaving this bed until absolutely necessary. And let’s face it, that tops my list of important things right now.”

“You done?”

“Be a good dog and shower. If you’re clean, I’ll let you sleep in the bed and I might even give you belly scratches before you go to sleep.”

He charged me. I might’ve known exactly what I was doing. I giggled as he trapped me between the bed and his body. “Flea shampoo’s on the shower rack.” And that was where all teasing stopped, unless you counted Connor teasing my lady bits. I went from zero to naked from the waist down in .057 seconds. His mouth found me and— whoa! Thank you universe.

Every touch of his hand, every nip from his teeth brought me closer to my personal heaven. I squirmed beneath him, needing to touch him but whenever I reached a hand out to run through his hair or grab hold of his shoulder, he’d stop, leaving me in carnal agony.

I gripped the sheets instead, widening my legs to give him more access to me.

Everyone… should… have a Connor… I closed my eyes, letting the sensation from his mouth take me over. My heart pounded and my breaths left me in tiny spurts. Nothing in the world felt as good as Connor’s mouth—or other parts—on me.

In the middle of finding greatness, my grandmother popped into my head.

“You can’t be here,” I shouted.

She laughed. Laughed . “Simone, do you remember how many children I had? This is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing to me. And what he’s doing won’t make children.”

My millennials-dead, spirit-guide grandmother laughed even harder at me. I found myself stuck between trying to enjoy every new thing my mate did to me and not letting Lilith know exactly how skilled he was—if you get my drift. Finally, it got too uncomfortable.

“Is there a reason you’re here?” I asked. Not harshly, but Connor’s tongue made a special kind of magic, the kind that no one else on the planet made. Not even me.

“The vent in the room past the kitchen. There is dried blood from where the intruder scraped themselves while looking for the grimoire. You need to take it to Victoria Rivers.”

“Blood to Victoria,” I said. “Got it.”

“What?” Connor asked.

Lilith left me just as fast as she’d shown up.

If the choice was left to me—and let’s face it, all choices in this relationship were mine—I wanted to spend a normal night in bed with my mate recharging my battery, but Lilith showing up meant more than her giving guidance. How selfish of me to sleep soundly in a soft bed when so many of our witch sisters had already lost their lives, and I still didn’t know Lily Joy’s whereabouts. Was she safe? Was she alive?

“Connor, we need to get the vent from the den and get it to Victoria Rivers.”

“That’s incredibly random.” He started running kisses over my bared skin and it… felt… great. “You sure I can’t convince you to wait until tomorrow?” Yes. Yes, he absolutely could—no, he couldn’t. We needed to dress. We had to move.

I reluctantly shook my head. “My grandmother popped in while you were… well, you were entertaining me.”

He choked out a cough. “Lilith showed while I was going down on you.”

I shrugged. “Not the best timing.”

To be honest, I thought he’d blow a gasket, but instead, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling and sort of laugh-sighed. “Let’s get dressed.”

Disappointment. I’d been hoping he’d use his hands and mouth to protest my plan. I frowned, pulling my bra cups back into place under the T-shirt. At least I got to wear my favorite pair of Converse.

With Connor to my back, I walked into the den, over to the back floor vent.

“Fuck,” Connor said understandably, because of the blood pooled in a small corner of the vent cover and a disgusting piece of fingernail nestled in the congealed blood. We were staring at the blood and fingernail of our intruder. This person violated my life by destroying my home and was so cocky, he neglected to be bothered to clean up after himself. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I took a moment to let myself feel that hurt and then shut it down.

Time to get to work. Closing my eyes, I manifested a gallon-sized Ziploc bag big enough to hold the vent cover, and I was careful to only touch the sans-blood side, dropping it inside the baggie and zipping it closed.

“Oh, we need?—”

“Got it right here, babe.” We’d entered the ‘reading each other’s minds’ portion of this mated bond because he absolutely held the grimoire in his hands.

“We didn’t even get to eat yet,” I grumbled.

“If you ate more protein instead of junk, you wouldn’t be so hangry right now.”

“Shut it, Baghest. For your information, I planned to manifest a big, juicy double cheeseburger and fries. Cheeseburgers have plenty of protein. And I’m not hangry, more hirritated.”

His fingers curled into the shirt at my waist as he pressed a kiss to my hair and I manifested us to Weik Laboratories. We landed in the alley between the two looming block buildings again, but this time instead of shadows, we were cloaked in darkness.

“What time is it?” Connor asked.

I pulled my phone from my pocket to look at the screen. 2:00 a.m. “Early.”

“No one will be in. We could’ve slept in our bed.”

“Lilith made it pretty clear we needed to get this stuff here.”

“She’s dead. Time doesn’t mean the same to her.”

“I’m sure dear Granny still understands the concept of time for those of us in the meatsuits.”

“‘Meatsuits,’ Simone? Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“You wish you had my incredible sense of sass.” I loved playing around like this with Connor, but given the time crunch, I grabbed his hand, pulling him along with me out onto the sidewalk. I supposed I could’ve manifested us inside the building, disabling any security measures, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. As we walked, I spied light coming from the back of the alley next to Weik Laboratories. It happened like a blink, there and gone—or, like a door opening and closing.

“This way,” I said to Connor. A cooling breeze rippled over my skin. It hardly felt like the world was on the brink of ruin on nights like this with Connor and breezes.

These were the images I needed to hold on to in the coming days. My future life with the sexy hellhound deserved to be lived. I planned to live it.

With quiet steps, I led us down the darkened alley and to the second partial alley that ran behind the Weik building.

We held back, peeking around the corner to check out the lay of the land. Two women and a man stood under a cloud of smoke sucking down cigarettes like it was an Olympic sport. Given the way witches were being hunted, I couldn’t blame them.

I’d never smoked a day in my life, but if I smoked, I’d have been doing the exact same thing.

When they finished, the man knocked on the door—three quick raps and two slow. Then the door popped open.

They walked back inside. With lightning quickness, Connor jutted forward to stick his foot between the jamb and the door to keep it from clicking shut on us.

He nodded at me, knowing exactly what I was thinking, and I cloaked us before we walked in.

People—witches—milled about in the hallway. I figured if Victoria Rivers was here, she’d be in her office.

“Hold on,” I whispered to my mate, but a woman whipped her head up. Whoopsie. I needed to be more careful. The second Connor’s hand touched my shoulder, I manifested us to the top floor.

A woman and child, both in pajamas, walked from the restroom to one of the offices on the floor before Victoria’s. Air mattresses and sleeping bags took up the floor space. The desk had been pushed back against the far wall. It appeared they’d turned Weik Laboratories into a Holiday Inn.

We continued on past this band of offices to where the space opened up and Victoria’s secretary’s desk sat empty. Connor and I moved around the desk and I dropped the cloak before knocking on her door. After a few moments, the door opened. A sleep-disheveled Victoria’s eyes went wide.

“Nice jammies,” I said, smiling and pointing to the dancing kitties on her sleep pants. She blanched before gaining composure.

“Simone. Connor. What are you doing here?”

Connor handed me the bag with the vent grate. I handed it off to her. As she slowly took it, I explained. “Lilith came to me. She said we needed to get this blood analyzed. It’s important.”

“Uh, yes… Give me a moment.” She walked over to her desk, sliding on a pair of slippers and dropping a robe around her shoulders before joining us at the door.

We followed her to the elevator. She pressed the button to the basement laboratory. Victoria led us into one of the rooms, now empty, where she handed me the Ziploc to suit up. I handed her back the bag. She set it on a metal table before pulling the grate from the bag and placing it on the shiny surface. Victoria walked over to a shelf, grabbing a swab from a cylindrical glass jar with a fitted aluminum lid. She wet the tip of the swab from a squeeze bottle marked ‘Distilled Water.’

Victoria rubbed the dampened cotton over the dried blood. She did this three more times with three more swabs. Then, snipping off the reddened tips, she added those tips to a smaller tube containing a clear liquid. She added drops of two others before stoppering it, giving the liquid time to turn red, then used a dropper to suck up the red liquid that she squeezed into yet another smaller tube, and another, and another.

Each of the smaller tubes got the testing treatment. I’d never considered that Victoria would know how to test the DNA. When we met her before, she’d seemed so company president . Go, Victoria. Sisters doing it for themselves and all that.

“Now we wait,” she said. “Have you eaten? Are you tired?”

As my stomach grumbled from hearing the word ‘eaten,’ I shook my head.

“We’ve been busy,” Connor replied for the both of us.

“Since we’ve been hosting witches from covens all over the world, I’ve kept the kitchen open. Staff has been taking all shifts. If you go up to the cafeteria, you can get food. I’ll set you up with an office for a few hours of rest.”

“Thank you.” I reached my hand over to Connor. As he took it, I added, “Food is great. Rest depends on what you find with the testing.”

The woman turned a look of ‘ girl, please ,’ on me. “You might be Lilium, but you still need rest. Tired minds make mistakes.”

I should’ve thought of that.

“Fine. We’ll eat and rest for just a bit.”

The idea of resting or sleeping irritated me. I agreed because Victoria made a great point, but it wasted time we didn’t have to waste.

Connor and I took the elevator up to the cafeteria level. Several people sat at tables eating and talking. Most of them stopped to take in my mate. He still had that effect on me. Why should they be any different? So what if covens were being attacked and people were dying—a foin man was a foin man.

After scanning the room, my sights landed on just the thing to lighten the mood. “Pasta!” I semi-shouted, starting for the pasta bar set up on the far side of the room.

“I thought you wanted a cheeseburger.”

“Well, now I want pasta. Don’t judge me on my lifestyle choices.”

This pasta bar held every kind imaginable, I swear. They even offered a high-protein chick pea option that put Connor into the throes of foodie passion.

I opted for loaded mac and cheese and creamy chicken alfredo, then I finally got my baked ziti, this one with mini meatballs.

He laughed at the delicious disaster on my plate. “That’s gonna put you in a food coma.”

“Only for the untrained. I’m a professional.” And I plucked a meatball from my plate, popping it into my mouth.

We ate in comfortable silence until I started dozing off and Connor decided that we needed to rest for a bit. He cleared our plates while I waited at the table. A pretty woman maybe in her mid-thirties walked through the door. She stopped to scan the room and when her eyes landed on me, she smiled, making her way over.

“Hi. I’m Layne,” she said by way of introducing herself, uncomfortably tucking strands of her light-brown hair behind her ear when Connor joined us. I was totally aware of that feeling, internally listing all of your visible flaws and hoping that someone as gorgeous as him wouldn’t call you on them, or even bother to notice them in the first place. He never would. He saved his attitude for me alone.

“Hi,” I replied. “I’m Simone and this is Connor.”

She dipped her head to each of us. “I’m Victoria’s secretary. I have a room set up for you upstairs, if you want to follow me.”

Talk about timing.

Connor linked our fingers together and we held hands as we followed her to the elevator. She hit the button for the top floor. Then Layne, the secretary, led us to a conference room where the tables and chairs had been removed, and a queen-sized air mattress with pillows and sleeping bags sat on the Berber carpeting in the middle of the floor.

“This okay?” she asked.

“It’s great,” Connor replied. “Thanks.”

“Victoria will be in touch when the test results are in.”

“That’ll work,” I said, yawning.

“Well, that’s my cue…” she said, turning to leave us. As she shut the door, I kicked off my shoes.

Seriously, my eyes fell shut as soon as my head hit the pillow. The next thing I knew, my consciousness roused to the feeling of someone shaking me. My eyes cracked open. “Need sleepy,” I whined.

“The two hours you got is what you’re gonna get. Up. Let’s go.”

I narrowed my eyes on him. “I know twenty ways to kill a man without lifting a finger.”

He laughed at me, tugging me up. I stretched then slipped my Converse back on. Rather than hit the elevators again, Connor turned us in the direction of Victoria’s office. He gave one knock and opened the door.

“I’m sorry I had to wake you,” Victoria said. “I wanted to let you sleep a bit longer, but this seemed very important.”

That caught my attention. “Important?” I asked.

“Please, have a seat.” She flipped her monitor around for us to see the screen. “This is you.” She pointed to the line that represented me, the one she’d shown me before. “Now, this”—she pointed to a second line—“is the results from the blood on the vent.”

What in the…? I leaned in, trying to reconcile what I was looking at with some shred of reality.

“What exactly are we looking at?” Connor asked.

“He’s above me,” I replied. “Not below.”

Victoria nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

“What does that mean?”

She pointed out more lines. “This line here means that he—and yes, the DNA is male—he and Simone are related, but only through one line. In my opinion, you’re looking at the DNA of your half-uncle.”

“The fuck,” Connor spat, but I had a different reaction.

“Cain.”

“What?” Victoria asked.

“Cain,” I repeated. “Cain was my mother’s younger half-brother through Adam and his second wife, Eve. Hell, I suppose he could be Abel, but if history is at all accurate, Abel was a decent guy who was killed by his brother. Were there any others?”

Victoria shrugged her shoulders, shaking her head. “I’m a witch. We didn’t spend much time in church.”

Connor outright laughed. “I’m a hellhound.We hung out with Luc and his demons.”

“Well you know I was brought up in foster homes. I’m surprised I know as much as I do.”

“So, just to be clear, given our collective lack of biblical knowledge, we’re thinking Cain is in our time?” Connor asked.

“If it’s him, he’s definitely out of time, like you, Simone,” Victoria said. “But he holds no magic. We checked for markers and there was nothing. He’s completely human. Not one drop of super.”

“I feel it in my gut, we’re dealing with Cain, and neither Adam nor Eve held magic. That was why Adam wanted my mom to get with his son, to get the magic back in his family. But Lilith brought me forward. Only she’d have the power to do that and she’d never have. Never .”

“Lilith and demons,” Connor replied. Victoria gasped and I whipped my head towards him fast enough to cause whiplash.

“Demons can do that?”

“The kings can. And angels.”

“Like Lucifer?” Victoria asked.

“Not Luc,” I said sharply. “He’s good people. The man is on our side. He’d never stoop so low.”

“He wouldn’t, but Satan might,” Connor said. Freaking wrath.

Why did every road lead back to Satan?

“I guess it’s time to pay him a visit.”