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Chapter 1
Sybil
Iswear,ifthatpounding didn’t stop soon, I was going to cut a bitch. Or in this case, the ridiculously hot naga next door. I’d gone over to say hello the day he moved in and oh, wow. He was yummy.
Yummy, but loud. The god-awful racket had started the day after he’d moved in and had continued on and off ever since. It had beendays. Desperate for some sleep, I’d called the front desk to complain last night, but by the time security had arrived, everything had gone silent. Then, it had started up again this morning.
Bang.
The whole side of my wall rattled, and along with it, the paintings I’d gotten at the local art show. Luckily, they were canvases and not mounted behind glass, so even if they fell, it wouldn’t be too dangerous. But still.
Bang. Bang.
This time, the console table with all my carefully-arranged candles and crystals shook. Sighing, I got up from my fluffy floor pillow to pull the table away from the wall. I did not need everything in my carefully crafted space messed up because my new neighbor decided to wrestle bears in his condo. I needed all my shrines and magical artifacts to work, damn it.
I called it my organized mess. Some of the items had real magic and boosted my powers. Others were there simply because I liked them. Either way, being surrounded by things I loved helped whenever I had to call on my magic to strengthen a ward, which was frequently.
People didn’t come to Auntie Syl’s Wards & Witchery unless they needed privacy and/or protection from magical intrusion. I wasn’t Auntie Syl; that was my late great granny, Sylvana. But Sybil was close enough.
Most of my clients had been with the company for a long time. So long that the internet and email hadn’t existed yet. Sylvana had always resisted modernization, preferring to keep all her handwritten notes, documents, and everything else in a single metal filing cabinet that looked like it had survived several nuclear detonations.
I’d spent weeks digitizing everything and transferring it all onto a very well-secured laptop. That was one thing I’d had to figure out in recent years: digital wards. We had developed a modicum of protection for telephones and land lines, but this new world we lived in was ever-changing.
Magic and technology weren’t all that different, really. I could feel radio waves and Wi-Fi same as I could a strand of magic. I couldn’t manipulate them quite as readily, but I could easily disrupt a signal with good old-fashioned magic.
Salt and Pepper, my two pet ratties, poked their heads out of the hammock hanging in their rat tree—a cat condo I’d modified for them. Salt pressed his little hands on the edge of the hammock and stretched, yawning.
Gah! It was so freaking cute. People who were terrified of rats didn’t know what they were missing.
“Hey there, sweetie, did the big bad naga wake you up?” I reached over to give him an affectionate scritch under his chin.
Pepper, jealous of the attention I was lavishing on Salt, immediately shoved his head under my fingers, demanding cuddles as well. Then he grabbed my fingers and started to groom them.
I grinned.
My little ratties weren’t just my best friends; they were also my co-workers. My familiars. Without them, it would have been hard to keep the dozen or so wards originally set up by Great Granny Syl in order, especially when the assholes from the Wizard’s Elder Council, aka the WEC, tried to break through them.
And boy, did they test them when they first found out that Sylvana was gone.
Bang.
Not again. The sound had Pepper scrambling back into the center of the hammock, trying to dig under Salt. Salt, being the smaller, less chubby of the two, batted at Pepper’s face repeatedly with his little claws. They were brothers from the same litter: Salt was white and Pepper was black.
They’d been with me for a very long time. Much longer than the two to four years rats usually lived. It was our little secret and the reason I never kept friends of the two-legged variety around for very long. There would have been questions.
I gathered my four-legged babies into my arms and carried them back to their cage. I only let them roam free when I was home. They were curious enough to get themselves into trouble, but not smart enough to get themselves out.
It was like having permanent toddlers. You never knew when one of them would stick a paw into a socket or something. Most of my space was rat-proofed enough: all the sockets and cords were covered, and I was lucky in that they didn’t really chew up my stuff, but I still didn’t trust them in here alone. I loved them too much to lose them to a preventable accident.
Bang.
That did it. I was going to head over there and give Mister Too-Fucking-Hot-For-His-Own-Good a piece of my mind.
I stomped towards the door but caught myself in the mirror just in time.
On second thought, maybe confronting a supermodel naga in my fluffy robe with mouse ears, not a lick of makeup, and my hair tied up in the world’s messiest bun wasn’t the best idea. If this was war, I needed my armor.
I paused to swipe on some magical confidence in the form of bold dark red lips and some eyebrows. I called drawing on my eyebrows putting on my feelings because my face looked expressionless without them. It was the curse of having thin, barely-there brows.
