Definitely not shifter porn. Not at all.She crossed her arms, trying to hide the blush creeping along her face. “We don’t use crystal balls.”
“And we don’t eat children. Seems like we have both been told porkies.” Felix’s tail thumped the edge of the bookshelf.
It was annoying how good he was at getting under her skin, and it was annoying how good he looked while he did it. She hadn’t had theattentionof, well, anyone, in over a year—apart from fictional men. And she had never been in the presence of someone so frustratingly handsome. He was defying everything shifters were supposed to be. Witches talked about them as if they were ugly, bloodsucking beasts. Humans didn’t seem to mind them; in fact, they didn’t mind them at all, given the things she had read about them. They had far more respect than witches ever did, and quite frankly, they had done nothing to deserve it. Why were witches confined to their islands unless they had a visa, while shifters got to roam free? When she asked her mother about it, she’d said humans and shifters unjustly hated witches. That the shifters had conned the humans into making them glorified prisoners for their own agendas.
She envied the shifters for their freedom.
She yearned to see the world for herself, to see something different from the metaphorical four walls of the island. A healer was a start to leave, but the one thing she took away from the professor’s lecture today, which she’d half-slept through from exhaustion, was that she would be ‘deployed.’ The word stuck with her. She wouldn’t have a say in where she wanted to go; she’d be told.
Still, it would have to be better than her current culinary and tourist limitations. She wanted to try something different from the cafeteria food or the meager restaurants that littered the island. She didn’t care that they supposedly hired the best witch chefs; she wanted to make up her own mind about what was good and what was bad. She wanted to stand in the shadow of Stonehenge and smell the oil paint at the Louvre, not just scroll past them on a screen. Her days were a monotonous blur of the same.
It was pretentious motivation, and she should be grateful for what she had. But gratefulness didn’t get her closer to chicken nuggets, so fuck it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement.
An army of dust bunnies appeared from under a bookshelf, carrying a tome like servants carrying a royal carriage. Somehow, their little bodies made of light fluff could carry the thick leather-bound pages with surprising ease. Felix shot her a look to make sure he was seeing the same thing she was and hadn’t started randomly hallucinating.
Avery kneeled to meet the small creature’s height, which was minuscule. Had they been the ones to hide the tomes?Little bastards.
But when she got a closer look, the book was unique. This leather was worn smooth, the crimson coloring faded to a lifeless brown. The gold embroidered markings looked similar at first glance, but the old language was different, older somehow, the symbols more intricate and harder to parse. But she still recognized it for what it was: a book of riddles.
She picked up the tome from the dust bunnies that hopped back under the bookshelf. Except for one. It stayed, rearing on its hind paws, asking for a pat, which Avery complied with, using her pinky finger to give the small being a scratch on the head.
Avery blew off the remaining dust from the book before putting it on the table in front of them. She opened the first page, the leather creaking and cracking. It had been a while since it had been opened.
“Well?” Felix said, leaning in as she flicked through the pages.
She shook her head. Each one was blank, except for one verse in the center. A smile formed on her lips. Regardless of what it meant and why the dust bunnies had given it to her, one riddle was enough to excite the inner child in her. A riddle was a problem she could solve. Unlike the rest of whatever clusterfuck her life was going on.
Her fingers traced the words. Did the goddess want her to solve it? The very idea seemed preposterous. But a bunch of bunnies had just marched it to her—it had to mean something.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Felix asked.
“Because I love riddles.”
“Oh, yeah?” He had the same grin as a Cheshire cat plastered on his face. “I have a head but no face. I have no legs, yet I stand tall. I can be hard, but I have no bones. I am often hidden beneath a hood. What am I?”
Avery couldn’t help herself.
“PENIS!” she said it loud enough that the whole library could have heard before she slapped a hand over her mouth, her cheeks warming at the outburst.
“You’re disgusting,” she said through muffled fingers.
A dark chuckle made her blush for a whole different kind of reason. His fangs glinted in the witch lights. How would you kiss with those swords in your mouth?
Avery’s blush deepened as the thought of Felix kissing her played out like a lewd movie in her mind. A dappling of heat spread through her core as she pressed her thighs together to stop it from spreading further. She refused to be turned on by ashifter; there were plenty of fine witches who would indulge her once this was over. Perhaps she should take Callum, the sweet enforcer, up on the date. She needed a release that her own hands couldn’t satisfy any longer.
She ignored the shifter who was still chuckling to himself about his terrible riddle. She turned to the book to concentrate on something other than him. Was this the goddess’s will? But why? Why would the goddess want her to be bound to her enemy? Or maybe the dust bunnies just knew she liked a riddle.
The enemy cut through the noise of her thoughts. “How will a book of riddles help us?”
“I don’t know how it will help.” She only knew that her gut was pulling her toward it. And not just because she wanted to solve the riddle.
“Fantastic,” Felix said sarcastically.
“I think the goddess wants us to solve it.”
He narrowed his eyes at Avery. “Are you well, like, mentally?”
