”Devil Be Gone. Smells awful, but ultimately harmless.” She flashes a wide smile, glasses slipping down her nose. “Just like you.”
“I’m far from smellyorharmless.” Holding my breath, I close my eyes and lift the mug to my lips. Down the hatch it goes, because for some reason I trust this witch, which is an entirely new level of fuckery I didn’t realize existed before today, yet here we are. Tea-brewing. Witch-trusting. What’s next? Doing good deeds? Giving up drinking? Going tochurch? Apparently, anything goes in the topsy-turvy world of Pumpkinville!
The brew slithers down my throat and settles uncomfortably in my stomach much in the same way I imagine straight battery acid would.
“Well?” she demands. “Anything?”
“Tell me I’ve vanished,” I say, eyes still closed. “Tell me I’m back in the bowels of Hell, for there’s no other reason such a culinary calamity should ever be endured.”
“Damn it.”
“I’m serious, mushroom. I feel as though I’ve spent the better part of the week licking a camel’s arsehole—an ill-advised trend I swore off for good after the dark ages.”
“Okay, first of all? You need therapy. Second of all… ugh. I need therapy too, because my tea didn’t work and you’re still here and now you’re talking about dark-age camel butts and I’m just in averyfragile state so if you don’t mind, I’d—”
The door chimes, and a male voice cuts through the bickering.
“Vi? You open, babe?”
What. In the ever-loving. Fuck.
Chapter Fifteen
DEVLIN
I open my eyes to see a dim bulb of a man jiggling his keys free from the front door. The one Violet most definitely locked.
“Babeis most certainlynotopen.” I tamp down a surge of irritation. “The sign on the door should’ve been a dead giveaway. See also, thelockeddoor. And yet—”
“Can I help you with something, Brandt?” Violet asks, her annoyance as sharp and pungent as her Devil Be Gone brew.
Clearly, she knows the man.
Clearly, not as well as he’dlike, judging from the hungry way he’s staring at her… canisters.
It shouldn’t bother me. But suddenly I’m picturing this dead-eyed Neanderthal stark-raving naked with a pole up his arse, churning like a rotisserie chicken over one of Hell's many fires.
“I was just in the neighborhood.” His beady brown eyes flick to me, then back to her. “Everything okay?”
“Just in the neighborhood of your own office less than two blocks away?” Violet laughs. Not her real one. “Yes, what a mighty coincidence. I see you’ve brought my keys back—you can leave those right on the counter for me, then show yourself out.”
“I don’t mind hanging on to them. Checking in every once in a—”
“Keys. Counter. Now.”
He sighs and pouts in a way highly unbecoming for a nearly middle-aged male, but does as she asks, removing two keys from the ring and sliding them across the counter, his finger still holding them in place.
“You, uh, going to the Halloween Ball?” He flashes her what I suspect is his A-game grin, but I’d bet a small fortune it’s the exact face he’d make for the whole rotisserie-pole-up-the-arse scenario, so… hard to tell.
“Always do,” she says.
“Dressing up?”
“Halloween Ball, Brandt. Kind of a thing.”
“Got a date this year?”
That smarmy grin again. The dull brown eyes. The unchecked desire as he runs them up and down her lithe frame.
