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“Uh.” I glanced up at him and found he was grinning with a kind of joyful madness that made it hard to dislike him. “God, you’re annoying.”
“Infuriating. Enchanting. Maybe a little irresistible.” He bumped my shoulder with his.
I did not give him the pleasure of agreeing with any of those statements, no matter how true they might be. Actually, “I’ll grant you infuriating. That one is spot-on.”
“I’m also one of the best. Probably the best you’ll find in Louisiana, with the exception of La Sorcière.”
“You’re not giving me a lot of credit here. I’m the one who trained with her.” My ego was a tiny bit bruised that he wouldn’t acknowledge how awesome what I’d done back at the house was.
And then I remembered he’d done the exact same thing minutes before that and had managed to pull it off without needing any extra power to draw from.
Fine, whatever, he was super impressive. No need to get braggy about it.
“Seriously, though, what do you need tiger pee for?”
“It helps increase the potency of the lure. There’s a very specific combination of things we’ll need to have in place to get the demon to freely put itself inside our chosen prison.”
“Urine.” I raised an eyebrow at him, letting him know I wasn’t buying the explanation.
“You’ve never smelled a hell dimension, I take it.”
“I have Febreze for that.”
A snort. “Let’s just say when you’re surrounded by fire and brimstone and shit and despair all day, piss has its own unique appeal.”
“You know a lot about this for someone who has never encountered a demon before.” I narrowed my eyes at him, wondering if he might let something slip that he hadn’t previously.
He lifted his chin. His formerly tidy hair had become unkempt with all our running around, and long tendrils of shiny black curls were falling in his eyes. A very obnoxious and vocal part of me wanted to push those curls back, to touch them and find out if they were as soft as they looked.
Yeah, I wasn’t nearly as ready to be alone around Santiago as I wanted to be.
A day wasn’t enough to chase away the lingering initial attraction. Go figure.
He must have seen the way my expression shifted. His sly, joking manner changed into something darker. He didn’t move or do anything that could be construed as an advance, but the look on his face spooked me, offering its own kind of danger. There was an awareness there that bothered me because it meant he was recognizing something in me I was trying super hard to pretend didn’t exist.
Finally, just when I was ready to bolt out of the kitchen, he cleared his throat and took a deep breath through his nostrils like he’d forgotten to breathe for too long.
“I know a lot of things.”
It took me a minute to realize he was responding to my last comment and not anything more scandalous. I thought.
“Well you do have an extensive library.”
This made the corner of his lip curve up. “Stop flirting with me and focus.”
“I wasn—”
Santiago handed me a jar filled with blood. “Hold this.” He withdrew an elastic from his jeans and pushed his hair back from his face, tying it in a small, messy bun at the back of his head.
Ugh, he even made a man-bun look good. Someone needed to put this guy on a rocket and fire him into the sun. At least then I’d have a good reason not to stare at him.
I held the jar of blood against my chest and skirted around the island so I was facing him from the opposite side. There was more stuff to look at over here, things I was sure were ill
egal to own in the state of Louisiana. And that wasn’t counting the dried marijuana sitting there like it was any old smudge bundle.
For him it probably was. Witches looked at plants and herbs a lot differently than average people did. They also got high for “magical enlightenment” sometimes, so really, who knew?
I wasn’t a fan of giving up my control—I had enough of that with shifting—and much like getting drunk, getting stoned was a bit of a fruitless effort, but pot did have its uses in spells, which made it a pain when you couldn’t buy it.
