Page 70 of Playing with Fire

“You don’t find the Calamity Queen. She finds you.”

I could always trust Quinn to be a smart ass. I sighed. “A coffee shop. I made him the best cup of coffee he has ever had in his life, and when he annoyed me, I spiked it with pixie dust so he could remove the stick he had shoved up his ass. Then he asked me to prove his ex-wife was a cheating whore, which I did. Then I got my full certification with the CDC, and the universe repaid me by smiting my ass and making him my contact within the NYPD.”

Quinn snorted. “She wants to kill Suzy.”

“Violently. I’ll like it.”

“Of course you will. You’re pure evil.”

“Why do you want to marry me again?”

The incubus snickered. “Lifetime supply of the best sex he’ll ever have.”

It didn’t surprise me at all when Quinn smiled his smug smile and shrugged. “I can’t argue with that.”

What had I gotten myself into?

Quinn’s great-grandparents weren’t human, either, and I grew numb to the insanity required for Quinn to have been born. “Let me guess. Your great-grandmother is a sphinx. Your great-grandfather is… a… okay, I give up. What is he?”

While humanoid in the sense the man had two legs and two arms, he had a dog’s head with an elegant, long snout, jet black with a crest of thick golden fur.

“His name’s Anubis. And yes, before you ask, when you mix Anubis and the Sphinx—not a sphinx, the Sphinx, you get a human—my grandmother on my mother’s side, to be exact. If we’re really unlucky, Grandmother will show up, too. Considering she’s been dead for at least fifty years, things get awkward when she comes to visit.”

Anubis shot a glare at Quinn and sat beside his mother. “Not today, you insolent puppy. She’s busy bullying some ingrates. I’m really intrigued I got invited this time, my darling dear. I was having fun watching my daughter bully the ingrates, but I didn’t want to miss this.”

Quinn’s mother chuckled. “His bellyaching caught his grandfathers’ attention. Turns out she only died a little when his cousins showed off their halos. She’s a tough one. I like her. She’s not at all like that other woman.”

An opportunity to nail Quinn so hard his family would talk about it for years didn’t present itself every day. “That other woman wants me to have her babies.”

With a low, whimpered groan, Quinn sank onto the bench beside me, leaned over, and buried his face in his hands. “You had to go there.”

“It’s not my fault your ex-wife was stalking your house looking for me so I could have her babies. It’s definitely not my fault you irresponsibly married the psycho.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Quinn’s angelic grandfather murmured.

“I’m still lost over how this turned from getting a bogus marriage license so your cousin would go away to a family reunion with a wedding.”

Half the hands in the room went up. In perfect harmony, most of Quinn’s family announced, “It was my idea.”

Indignant protests rang out. It took ten seconds for a brawl to start, and I retreated to the witness stand so I wouldn’t be caught in a supernatural fray. Quinn followed, sighing and shaking his head.

Only the angel escaped the chaos. “Call me Sylvester, dear. It gets tiresome listening to you think of me as ‘the angel’ all the time. Ah, Your Honor. I do believe it is time we married the children so they can run away and be happy together.”

The vampire sighed. “My poor courtroom. All right, kids. You want the pretty, romantic version, or do you want to sign and bolt?”

“Bolt, please,” I begged. Quinn glared at me. “I’ll sign first!”

“You better, or I’ll chase you down and drag you back here.”

The judge sighed. “Are you two even capable of being romantic? I finally get a wedding, and it’s a circus.”

“Your Honor, it’s a miracle there’s someone willing to marry me. I need him to sign the papers before he changes his mind. Hey, Sylvester? Is there a way to make sure he doesn’t get away?”

“Sex every day makes an incubus stay.”

In retrospect, it made a lot of sense. What didn’t make sense was how Audrey had been capable of cheating on him. “Audrey must have been defective. I don’t understand how it was possible for her to even think about wanting to cheat on him. He walks in the room, and all I can think about is not rubbing all over him and making an idiot out of myself.”

Silence.