Hexes and Hoarfrost

Chapter One

Lydia

"Lydia, you know I find the sexy librarian thing delectable, but if you touch another of those dusty old books written in a language you don't even know, I'm going to have to take drastic measures."

I glanced up from my reading with a guilty frown as Angelo's voice floated into the back room. I was laying down in my storage room, one leg folded over the other, kicking the air idly as I read. The book was leatherbound and heavy, and I'd bought it at an online store (insanely overpriced, I might add) earlier that month. It had pinched my already limited budget to buy it, but as Indie, my mental companion, had reminded me, the seller had no idea what he'd gotten his hands on. If the book had sold for its proper value, I could have been looking at a six-figure price tag, not four.

But Indie had insisted this one was important, so I'd hiked up my big girl panties and purchased the damn thing. And the truth of the matter was that the book would be worth its weight in gold if it revealed a way to pry Indie loose from my soul. Because two souls sharing one body? Yeah, not fun.

I snorted a humorless laugh. Now there was a thought you didn't have every day. Unless, of course, you were me, and then such thoughts became an hourly occurrence instead of a daily one.

Months ago, Indigo Hallewell had exploded onto the scene in a very literal way. She'd waltzed into my shop, spent a few minutes anxiously scouring my shelves for something, and then blew into a million fleshy pieces right in the middle of the store. Thank God it had been during the mid-afternoon slump, or I would probably have been paying some poor tourist's therapy bills as well as my own. No amount of horror flicks could have prepared me for what a human body looks like in pieces.

Well, human might have been overstating it. Indigo, or ‘Indie', as I called her, was a witch, not a mortal like me. Witches technically fall into the classification of ‘monster' in the supernatural world, even though they're physically closest to humans when it comes right down to it. Her guts had certainly looked human when I'd cleaned them off the cash register in my store.

Angelo, my demonic roommate, misinterpreted my snort as derision meant for him. He rounded the corner wearing a pair of black pajama pants and... nothing else. The pants used to belong to my ex, Rodney, and they'd made it into my moving boxes by mistake. Angelo had claimed them for himself rather than let me throw them out. I knew the pants were comfortable after years of stealing them from Rodney's drawer, so I didn't blame him for doing the same. I just thought it was incredibly unfair that he looked like a cover model while wearing them. And that was just Angelo in a nutshell. One of the perils of living with an incubus, I figured.

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Do I amuse you, sweetheart?"

"I'm not your sweet anything," I said, giving him a scolding look above the binding of the book. "And yes, you do amuse me, at least most of the time. Lifestyles of the Demonic and Destitute is my guilty pleasure watch, you know?"

Angelo pressed a hand to his chest and pulled a face, feigning hurt. "Ouch. You really know how to hit a man where it hurts, Lydia."

"In the wallet," I answered with a sage nod and a little smile, because he was amusing—I'd give him that much. I sobered, the smile dropping off my face. "And I am grateful, just so you're aware. For everything you've done and continue to do for me."

Angelo shrugged, expression morphing into something a little uneasy. I had a feeling that using sex as therapy was probably a species-wide pastime for incubi, leaving Angelo with the emotional maturity and coping skills of a fourteen or fifteen-year-old boy, rather than the forty-something he appeared to be. Not that age meant much to the emotionally constipated. My ex had certainly never matured, either. At least Angelo had grown enough of a conscience to save me from a black magic auction full of unsavory types. It was a step in the right direction, at least.

"Don't mention it."

It wasn't the pleased, offhand phrase most people uttered. He actually meant it. But reminding him he had a scrap of human decency in him somewhere always made him uncomfortable. And that's exactly how he looked now, with his arms folded across his chest as he stared at one of the shelves towering over us both, rather than meeting my eyes. I let my own gaze travel to the shelves and had to admit, there were some interesting baubles resting on the shelves and counters these days.

Folded squares with written spellwork, courtesy of the local warlock Maverick Depraysie. There were also potion samplers from my distant cousin, Poppy, who was also a fellow gypsy traveler. Not to mention the intricate charms and medallions wrought by faeries and other assorted creatures who lived in Haven Hollow. I might have complained about becoming a sort of advertising billboard for every other business in town if it hadn't paid dividends. My shop, Occult Oddities, catered to the type of tourist that liked antiquing or whiling away their hours with a good book.

Angelo cleared his throat when the silence stretched taut, shifting his weight uncomfortably to his back foot. "My point still stands, Lydia."

"And what was your point again?" I played with him.

He raised one brow at me. "That you really ought to take a break. The texts you're rifling through are enough to make my eyes cross, and I've been staring at arcane works since before you were born."

"I don't want to take a break—not when I need to find answers, like yesterday."

He frowned at me. "It's one thing to waste two weeks doing research, but it's a whole other thing to do two weeks of research without any results."

"I've found a few useful tidbits," I hedged, flipping the page before Angelo could swoop in and steal the grimoire from me.

He rolled his eyes. "Oh yes, the witch's cookbook from 1788 will provide all the answers we're looking for."

"Hey."

He shook his head. "Be realistic. This is starting to fry both of our brains."

"So, what do you want me to do about it?"

He cocked his head to the side. "Come out with me for the evening and rejoin the real world."

"Doing research isn't that bad."

He gave me a pointed look down the bridge of his perfectly sculpted nose. He probably didn't mean for the look to be laced with suggestion and lascivious potential, but both were there, all the same. And that was natural to Angelo. He was the ultimate seducer. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if he walked into a convent and come out with a harem.

"Yesterday, I ordered my drink in Latin. Latin, Lydia," he continued, like that was the biggest of all shames.

"So?"

"So, I thought I'd left that nonsense behind when I graduated from prep school, but your endless research has given me a refresher, and now I'm confusing baristas when I should be charming them."

"I'm sorry I'm killing your game, Romeo," I said, giving him an innocent smile.

Though, in truth, the thought that he was trying to get into the painted-on skinny jeans of the co-ed that worked in our local coffee shop irked me a little. Well, more than a little, if I were being honest with myself. Something which made no damned sense, when I poked at the thought. Angelo and I weren't dating. He'd made his intention to seduce me clear, but that alone didn't make me special. In the end, sex was food to Angelo—it was what he needed to survive. And I wasn't eager to be the delicacy he sampled once out of curiosity and never tried again. So that brought me back full circle: so what if Angelo wanted to bed the perky blonde who worked at the new coffee shop, Hallowed Grounds? He was free to do whatever he wanted, and I didn't have a right to be miffed.

If you insist on wallowing in denial, you could try this excuse on for size, Indie said inside my head. That perky little blonde works for one of your shop's competitors.

I seized on the comfortable thought at once and ran with it like a desperate baseball player in her last inning. Part of my shop's attraction was the coffee nook near the front. I selected the beans and syrups myself, so I knew for a fact that my stuff was better than whatever they served across town. My roommate shouldn't have to go elsewhere for coffee. Unless he wasn't going there for the coffee…

Humans,Indie muttered. So squeamish. Just admit you want him and be done with it.

Nope, I shot back. I'm not going there.

Of course not, Indie sighed, sounding immensely weary. Denial, thy name is gypsy.

Angelo watched my expression quizzically, and I turned my attention back to the book, just in case. Angelo liked to pretend that he was nothing but a pretty face in an overpriced suit, but I'd come to realize there was a lot more simmering behind those eyes than he allowed most people to see. I'd been getting a lot of sidelong glances from him lately, and those glances were along the lines of ‘hmm' instead of ‘yum.' My infernal roomie knew I was keeping something from him, even if he couldn't pin down just what that something was.

"Why are you so intent on removing Indigo's magic, anyway?" He piped up. "It's not like the old girl is missing it. She's dead. That magic is a part of you now, and there's no telling what removing it will do to you."

I chewed the inside of my cheek nervously, flipping to the next page too quickly to read anything of note. The truth sounded like insanity, even to the people that made their home in a monster refuge like Haven Hollow. What Indie and I had become was something new and unheard of, even in the exclusive circles she ran in. A lopsided spiritual chimera fused together by means unknown. It was a long shot that we'd be able to reverse our condition, but we sure as hell were going to try. But, of course, Angelo didn't know that because he thought Indie had died that fateful day and that I'd just absorbed her magic. He had no idea that she was still living—but inside my head. I gave him an answer that was truthful, if not woefully incomplete.

"Indigo was involved in something that got her killed. Forgive me for not wanting to go around reeking of her magic. It seems too much like tempting fate."

Angelo shrugged, accepting that at face value, thank goodness. "Are you still having her nightmares?"

I flipped to another page without really reading it. I was still having nightmares. Indigo was good about keeping her memories separate from mine when we were awake, but when I went to bed, our unconscious minds mingled so thoroughly, it was hard to tell where I ended and she began. That meant I'd relived dozens of nightmare scenarios that came back to haunt Indigo in the dead of night. I knew in horrific detail what it felt like to be ripped from this world one atom at a time. Her death had appeared quick and brutal from my outside perspective, but for Indie, the torture had seemed to last an eternity.

The specter of Murrain was always with us, a reminder of what could happen if we didn't manage to bring down the syndicate she'd worked with. The real trick was to figure out how to convey everything she knew to the authorities without tipping off Indie's continued existence to her enemies. She had a sneaking suspicion there was a mole in Lucretia Boline's organization—a mole who was leaking information to the syndicate and its allies, but we couldn't make the accusation until we were sure. For now, I had to give piecemeal information to the bodyguard assigned to my case.

And speaking of said bodyguard...

I snapped the book shut quickly enough to startle Angelo, who'd been leaning toward me. He was trying to be unobtrusive about it, but he couldn't entirely hide his interest when we were alone in the same room. True to his word, he wasn't amping up his pheromones or striking suggestive poses to get my attention. Just being himself was enough to keep my hormones in a permanent state of ‘tizzy.' He leaned back, trying to feign innocence, as if he wasn't about to brush his pant leg against the bare skin of my ankles to send goosebumps running over my skin.

"You're right. I should take a break."

Angelo's eyes brightened. "Good. The weather is lovely. We should go out."

I wagged a finger at him. "I said I was taking a break. I didn't say I was taking that break with you."

He frowned. "Then who are you planning on taking said break with?"

I smiled up at him. "I just remembered I have a meeting with Marty Zach in..." I checked my watch and did a double-take. "Fifteen minutes."

"That sounds super boring and, luckily for you, I'll figure out a way—"

"—you'll figure out nothing, because you aren't invited."

Angelo's handsome face creased into a scowl. It didn't decrease his appeal one iota, which I found incredibly unfair. Everyone should look unattractive while making at least one expression and frowns should have topped the list, as far as I was concerned. But, no, that frown looked just as sexy as his smile, which looked just as sexy as his expression of surprise, concern, and irritation.

"You're going out with him again?"

"Yep," I lied—well, not so much lied because Marty and I were going out, but not in the romantic sense Angelo seemed to think. "What can I say? I like him."

Another frown. "Why?"

"He's nice," I answered and cocked my head to the side. "Besides, we're not exclusive or anything. At least, not yet." I wasn't sure why I added that last little bit, but there it was.

Marty Zach and I weren't dating, but it was easier to let everyone believe the deception. Marty was actually my bodyguard, but he didn't like advertising his new line of work to his friends in the Hollow, and until he got the stones to confess, I'd keep up the charade. It was the least I could do for him. I mean, he was putting himself in between me and the most deadly monsters Indigo had ever had the displeasure to meet. As to what in the hell was going on with those monsters? I didn't know. Indigo still wouldn't give me anything but the most bare-bones explanation of what we were up against until I mastered the ability to close my mind to outside forces. And that was hard, given how receptive I was to the moods of others. Imagine trying to numb one of your limbs at will. It was difficult and often painful, but I was trying.

Angelo's voice dropped an octave when he spoke, and then it took on a rough sort of tone, sounding sexy as hell. "You should go on a date with me this Saturday, Lydia."

"Why?"

"Because then you'll forget about that mundane in five seconds flat."

I poorly concealed a shiver. He was probably right about that, but I didn't say it aloud. Instead, I stood, brushing the wrinkles out of my skirt primly, ignoring the sensual promise in his eyes. I had no doubt that sex with Angelo would rock my world in ways I couldn't even understand, but I also didn't want to go there. Not when I knew it was a dead-end street. Angelo was a sex demon—enough said.

I set the book on the counter and offered him an easy smile.

He's right, you know?Indie said.

Shush, you.

"Put this upstairs and flip the sign to closed, will you?" I asked him, very pointedly ignoring his comment. "I don't want a customer coming in and thinking the book's for sale."

Angelo pursed his lips but nodded. "On the coffee table next to Rodney's latest filing, I assume?"

I grimaced. Damn him for reminding me. I had another meeting with my ex-husband, Rodney, later in the week. The jerk was trying every angle he could to take a portion of my shop and profits for himself, the greedy bastard.

"Yeah, next to the filing."

Angelo paused, then breathed in deeply. "I've asked you this before, but I'm going to ask you again: do you want me to do something about him?"

I fixed him with a hard look. "For the last time, no. I don't want Rodney dead. He's an ass, but that's not a capital offense."

Angelo's expression was sly and unrepentant. "I wasn't planning on killing him."

"What were you planning on then?"

He cocked his head to the side. "I was thinking more along the lines of carnally convincing his lawyer to drop the case, but the homicide angle has merit too, I suppose."

"Don't get into Bonnie's legal briefs either," I said, tone sharper than I intended.

"We're not exclusive, are we?" he asked, parroting my earlier words as he then narrowed his eyes at me. His words sounded a lot more mocking than when I'd uttered them.

I turned away from him, striding for the door without giving the intended barb a response. All the while, I tried not to think about how much I wanted exactly what Angelo was offering.