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“Cool!” Eva reached for Prax and I clenched my jaw as she analyzed his key finger.
“Wait. Seth said that teleportation doesn’t exist, so what’s happening when you pop out of one place and into another?” she asked.
“I’m not teleporting. I’m dematerializing and turning transparent. I can travel extremely fast in that state, moving through barriers in a straight line. The only things I can’t go through are areas that have been magically warded. When I get to my location, I rematerialize again.”
“I understand…I think.”
“My finger can do a lot more than that, you know. Do you want me to show you?” The finger turned phallic in shape.
Eva made a revolted, gagging sound, quickly released his finger, and took back her keys.
“I’ll go grab your car now.”
“Just leave it in the driveway,” I said. “The ward will be going back up the minute you leave.”
Good riddance!
Chapter 13
Eva
I lay in bed in Mateo’s guest room, staring fixedly at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if I’d get a wink of sleep tonight. My brain was going a mile a minute from everything that had happened today, and it was hard to keep it quiet enough to close my eyes for more than three seconds.
After Prax had left to get my car, Mateo had shown me the posts he’d found online. He concluded that our yet unknown wizard had contacted my brother and offered him more money if he could find the other half of the locket and sell them to him as a pair.
Mateo further guessed that since most of the other collectors thought it was a fake and were only offering peanuts, Tony had agreed. Then, when Desmon put the locket back up on display at the museum, it had started the ball rolling. With the wizard’s help, Tony had snuck into the museum posing as a student volunteer, doing the same grunt work the others did.
Mateo had then gone back to work, looking up as much information as he could on the wizard now that he had a potential username to work with. He had still been in front of his laptop when I’d said goodnight and headed up to bed.
Alone.
So much for hoping for some more help getting to sleep. I guess I’d already had one ridiculously good orgasm today, so I was being greedy wanting another, but I had to admit, his method of helping was very effective.
Maybe tomorrow. We had plenty of time and many more opportunities, considering I’d managed to ask him out on not one but eight more dates in the world’s most roundabout way. I still couldn’t believe I’d had the guts to do that, but I thought it was pretty darned clever.
I blinked a few more times before deciding I wanted a midnight snack. I shoved back the covers and quietly made my way out of the guest room. The hallway was dark, and so was the kitchen downstairs. Mateo had thrown in the towel on his research some time ago and was already asleep in his room. I crept down the hall to the stairs, not wanting to wake him. I groaned mentally when the very first step creaked under my weight, much louder than I had expected.
I tested the next step gingerly and found that the stairs made much less noise if I tiptoed down the edge of them. Once in the kitchen, I made a beeline for the fridge to look for the box of leftovers we put in there earlier. It was gone. Mateo must have polished them off while he was working.
Now that I’d committed to a midnight snack, my stomach insisted I find a replacement. I got to work, searching his cupboards using only the moonlight shining in through the open curtains to see. His cupboard was shockingly devoid of anything that was instantly snackable. I found sauce mixes, a ton of spices, a bottle of liquid smoke, and four different styles of breadcrumbs. No snacks, but I guess he wasn’t kidding when he said he cooked a little.
I opened the next cupboard and was greeted by a gazillion protein bars and several options for protein shakes. That wasn’t exactly the type of snack I had in mind. I didn’t need “Max Muscles” and “Max Nutrition,” all rolled into a convenient simulated cinnamon-crunch-flavored cardboard bar.
Suddenly, the feeling of being watched, being hunted, had me freezing in place. The kitchen was plunged into darkness as something blocked all the light. The hairs rose at the back of my neck as I listened carefully for any sound, but heard nothing except my heart thumping in my chest. Silently, I closed the cupboard and turned around, ready to hightail it up the stairs or maybe call Mateo for help.
A massive shape was standing in the kitchen, blocking my exit. It was so dark that all I could see was the outline. It was half-man, half-beast, shaggy and hunched over, reminding me of a werewolf from a low-budget horror movie. It wasn’t the wings folded on its back that caught my attention and sent fear racing through my blood. It was the scorpion tail, silhouetted in the moonlight as it slowly swished from side to side.
What. The. Fuck.
I didn’t have anything against scorpions per se. I mean, they were living things too, but still. They creeped me the fuck out. Usually, Sriracha and I had a special patented double act when it came to dealing with creepy crawlies: I would shriek at them until he came to “take care” of the problem. But I didn’t think my feline fighter had a chance with this one.
The stinger attached to a tail like that would surely have enough venom to kill both of us many times over. Fuck, I didn’t know what to do. Scream? Right now, the only thing I’d managed to do was freeze. So much for natural self-preservation instincts. Well, at least this time, I wasn’t mouthing off to the monster.
My brain’s orders for my legs to run and for my lungs to scream reached their respective recipients at about the same time. I managed to lurch forward toward the creature — real smart, Eva — while simultaneously letting out something resembling a squawk. The hulking beast caught me in its massive arms.
Panicked, I struggled, flailing my arms, trying to get out of the monster’s grasp.
“Eva?”
