Chapter 31

“You should eat up,”Lewellyn told me, drenching his third stack of pancakes with maple syrup. Stabbing a pair of pancakes from the platter in the center of the table, he leaned over and wiggled them loose onto my plate. Added another two strips of bacon alongside them for good measure. “Big day of kicking your butt.”

I was still in awe of how much he’d already stuffed into his stomach, and how that stomach was still flat. I would’ve been as puffed out as an overfilled party balloon.

“Burn a lot of calories sleeping out in the cold, did you?” Sawyer drawled, nibbling on his own mini pancake. His had been drizzled with melted butter instead of syrup, and he seemed more intent on licking off the fat than eating the pancake.

“Oh, I wasn’t out in the cold last night,” Lewellyn said with a wink. “Daphne let me come inside.”

The cat rolled his eyes. “Let the wolf into the hen house, did she?”

“She knew full well what she was doing.”

“Aaand that’s all I want to hear about my friend’s cougar activities,” I said loudly, pushing away the pancakes and retrieving the tea kettle. After refilling my mug with the last of the rooibos tea, I asked, “So what can I expect training against a Nemean wolf today?”

Earlier, when I’d been making enough pancakes to feed a one-man army, we’d discussed the best course of action now that Grandmother had activated my cuffs and was no longer leaving my capture solely to the retrieval expert she’d hired. Due to his oaths, Lewellyn would have to check in every day with her on my whereabouts, and since he couldn’t outright lie, we’d have to get creative. Lead her—and my father—away from Redbud. It was that or relocate entirely. Which was probably the safer option.

Yet one I didn’t want to think about right now, not when it would spoil everything from last night. Tonight, Arthur would return, and we’d talk before… anything else happened. I’d come clean, maybe even to the point of revealing my real surname. And then… we’d pick up whatever pieces remained.

In the meantime, I would pack in as much training as my muscles would allow. There was a possibility that I’d only leave Redbud to hunt down the Big Nasty whose emerald heart was embedded in the grimoire, not because I was fleeing an explosive family reunion.

But first things first.

“Nemean wolf,” I prompted again after taking a sip of my tea.

Lewellyn’s chewing had slowed. “You heard that, huh?”

“I also heard you call him a Coalition enforcer, but I’ll ask Arthur about that tonight.”

The wolf shifter let out a breath and took a swallow of his coffee before cutting out another bite of pancakes with his knife. “Well, since I’ve given you my oath…” He paused, shaking his knife at Sawyer. “What I’m about to reveal is privileged information, tomcat. The promise I gave her and the discretion I demand of her translates to you too, as her bonded.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not her familiar.” Sawyer’s tail lashed.

Lewellyn showed him his teeth.

“Fine, I get it. I get it! Zipped lips, sheesh.” Grousing, Sawyer hunched back over his plate to lick at the congealing butter.

The wolf shifter stared at him for a second or two longer, confirming Sawyer’s compliance, then said, “I’m assuming you’ve heard of the Nemean lion?”

I nodded. While Mom and Aunt Hyacinth had taught us all things green and hearth witchy, they hadn’t neglected the core subjects, like mathematics, reading and writing, and the classics. “The Nemean lion was slain by Hercules as the first of his twelve labors. Its hide was impervious to weapons, so Hercules had to strangle it.”

“He skinned it too, so he could take the hide back as proof of his deed. But what happened to the carcass and all that blood?” Lewellyn flashed me a wolfish grin. “My ancestors weren’t opposed to scavenging fresh kills. Of taking advantage of a fortuitous opportunity.”

Normally something like that wouldn’t bother me—the circle of life was part of Nature, plus we’d harvested our own chickens and rabbits at the manor, and whatever Boar or Dad had hunted in the forest—but it was the way Lewellyn had said it. Like they had desecrated the lion for its power. There was a greed there, even hubris, maybe exploitation. A type of bloodlust that felt… dirty.

My gaze dropped down at my teacup, full of red rooibos tea, and I pushed it away, stomach churning. Tea sloshed over the rim with the movement, pooling in the saucer. I tossed my napkin over it and looked anywhere else, my gaze landing on Shari’s demonic quilt I’d forgotten to burn due to the shifter fight, full of black, charcoal gray, and red— Jerking my eyes away, I focused on Sawyer with his sharp white teeth slicing and tearing into his pancake, the butter all gone.

Thistle thorns, was there nothing here that I could look at that didn’t conjure images of the Nemean lion’s demise? I jerked my chin up so I could stare at the ceiling.

“It’s what gives us our golden-white fur,” Lewellyn continued, oblivious to my queasy stomach, “masks our scent, to a degree, and makes us impervious to any laceration- or puncture-type wounds not inflicted by our own kind. It also makes us a bit hot-tempered—”

“You don’t say,” quipped Sawyer, who’d seen plenty of his aggressive territorial display last night before prowling off to hunt down the fiáin.

“Wait,” I said suddenly, an idea forming. “Hercules had to use the lion’s own claws to cut through its hide, and that’s why you never bled when the coyotes attacked, because your skin can’t be pierced by anything other than those exactly like you, and—”

Erupting from my chair mid-thought, I lurched for Shari’s quilt.

“Oh no, not that thing again,” Sawyer moaned.

I didn’t bring it to the table, rather unrolling it on the floor and searching for the squares of the mosaic that depicted the Big Nasties.

They can cut each other, I realized, my gaze skirting down from where they sacrificed their kin to where the starburst and the warriors with their swords fought to free Shari, but blades did not hurt them!

“Shot it, threw holy water on it,” Codrin Alder’s voice reminded me. “Even tried to stab it with iron but there’s some sort of protection spell that deflects it. Nothing works.”

“…makes us impervious to any laceration- or puncture-type wounds not inflicted by our own kind.”

My heart rose to lodge in my throat as I abandoned the quilt and raced for the kitchen. Chef knife in hand, I returned to the hallway and kicked aside the braided area rug, dropping down to my knees.

“Misty!” Sawyer cried. “The wolf—”

“He knows,” I interrupted, prying up the floorboards.

“Quick,” the tomcat snapped at the wolf shifter. “The curtains!”

Lewellyn obeyed without question, yanking on the holdbacks so the curtains swept across the dining room windows to obscure us from anything watching. As shade swept across my eyes, I bent into the crawlspace, plunging my fingers into the mound of powdery ashes. My hand closed on the wrinkled cover of the spell book and lifted.

“The Hawthorne family grimoire,” Lewellyn breathed as the heavy book thumped on the hallway floor.

But I was back in the crawlspace once more, fingers sweeping, searching, tightening on that cold crescent that the Big Nasty had left lodged in my cuff all those months ago.

It clattered against the floorboards, sliding next to the grimoire.

Lewellyn swallowed, golden eyes bright. “Is that… a demon claw?”

I rocked back on my heels, bracing my ash-covered hands on my knees, a triumphant smile on my face as my heart swelled with the relief it had sought for so long.

“A demon heart that can only be killed by its own kind.” I pointed from the emerald embedded in the grimoire to the claw as long as my hand. “Say hello to its own kind.”

“Y-you don’t have to use the Hunting Spell,” Sawyer blurted. “You don’t have to die fighting a demon!”

Beaming, I scooped my tabby tomcat into my arms. “Pack your bags, little cat. We’re going home tonight! Just as soon as—”

Behind us, the hearth fire suddenly roared, the entirety of its flames turning red. They swelled, spilling over the grate and onto the slate stones, scorching the underside of the mantle. I threw up a hand to shield my face from the blast of heat, tucking my cat out of the way into my side.

Something very big, and very bad, was on its way.

Then the hearth sent out a warning pulse that shook the very foundation of the farmhouse, bursting every window from its frame in a storm of broken glass.

“I don’t think you have that kind of time,” Lewellyn whispered.

The End of A Grimoire Grump.