Page 38 of Mate
It was encouraging that Samael was out, because if anybody might be able to kick our ass, it was Samael. But I wasn’t sure; we’d never completely gone at it before. Honestly, I thought I could take him.
Especially right now.
“What happened to your hospitality, Ombre?” Caelum asked like he wasn’t also simmering up into a storm. “We’ve always been good friends.”
“You’ve got a bad juju over you right now. I don’t like it. You want to be crazy, go someplace else. We’re full-up here.” The wall-shadow waved us in the direction of the door.
“Mon rougaroo!” said a smooth, young voice from the back of the store. It was Little Mama herself; she was covered in powdered sugar and smelled like a thousand herbs wrapped up into one tiny woman with an apron over her short skirt. “Bonjour, cher! Ça va?”
It was hard being angry when we looked at her face and realized that she was happy to see us. That didn’t mean she was off the fucking hook; it just made it seem unlikely that she’d fucked us over on purpose. I still felt a dick in my ass as far as this whole situation went.
Caelum and I exchanged glances, and I could tell that Caelum was also slightly disappointed that she wasn’t trying to hide herself in a hole out back.
“Things could be better,” I replied to her, remembering that they called her ‘Little Mama’ for a reason. She was small, and unlike other witches that seemed young but were old as fuck, she was actually only slightly older than Kaci. This did make it hard to bite her throat out, even if shehaddone this on purpose. “We need to talk.”
“Absolument!” she said, not even looking nervous. That was annoying to me because I wanted her to be nervous. I wanted her to not only be at fault, but I wanted her to know it. She grinned,looking us up and down with amusement dancing in her golden eyes. “What’s got y’all so riled up, then?”
“Wendy,” the shadow groaned like a loser younger brother, “Samael said no visitors.”
The witch snorted and waved at the shadow dismissively. “They ain’t just visitors!Çe sont mes amis, cher!”
“That’s… not… what the directions were…” he argued, but the shadow seemed to realize that she wasn’t about to cast us out of the store. He shrunk in defeat into a normal-sized shadow.
She was already wrapping her hand around Caelum’s arm and dragging him towards the back. “Allons!” she told us. “Come see what I got bakin' in the back, cher. I got some beignet waitin’!”
I should have been prepared for things going down this way. If it was just Samael, we would probably already be at each other’s throats right now, but Wendy was… well, she was a witch. Of course she could tame a couple of already pissed Lycans.
“Look, we have no time for pastries,” I started to tell the young Cajun girl as we entered her kitchen. She used to be a sexy thing to watch bounce around the place last I saw her, but now my dick didn’t even work properly. “We’re here because?—”
“Were you working here on Saturday?” Caelum asked her as she put down large mugs in front of us and started to pour chicory inside of them.
“No,” she replied, shrugging her small shoulders. “Of course not. It was a blood moon. I wanted to make party, but Samael has been fussin’ so awful lately to me, he say ‘no’ forno reason.” She pouted. “So I went down Bayou to the coven there, and we have beaucoup fais do-do. He tried to say ‘no’ to that too, maisI showed him! Went anyway.” She gave us a very mischievous smile. This was the exact sort of thing that made me not want a mate—when you had a girl, you had to deal with so much bullshit. Samael wasn’t even mated to her, and although I knew for a fact that he’d long ago started to spank her to keep her in line, there was no stopping her. Not just her, either, but all women. They had the devil in them more than these fuckingdemons.
I inwardly swore. If Wendy wasn’t here on Saturday, then her being an actual hand in things seemed unlikely. “Why is Samael not letting you throw a party?”
“He says he saw bad folk about. I have not seen these peoples!” she put her hand to her apron, immediately slapping more powdered sugar against herself. There was so much of it in this room, I almost worried about the amount I was breathing in. “He is making rules for no reason! He says he saw a bad witch wanderin’ ‘round here, mais I would’a picked that up, for sure and certain.”
“Did you hear about a new pack around here?” Caelum was asking now, getting far off the point.
“Oh,ouais.” She looked almost confused, as if this was very old news. “Didn’t Silas text ya’ll about it?” she asked, her eyes round with confusion.
“I beg your pardon. It slipped my mind,” said a cat who had been sleeping on a kitchen shelf, too high up for even me to reach. He did not sound sorry; he sounded annoyed at our presence, as usual.
Caelum and I both rotated our bodies to look up at the little fucker. As if he could feel us looking at him, he moved his body around.
“Firstly, my dear, I am not a secretary,” he drawled. His accent made him sound like some sort of aristocratic banker. “Secondly, it does not matter! It’s certainly none of our business whose pack takes the territory.”
“Mon dieu! You are such an asshole!” Wendy groaned in her Cajun accented voice to the cat (which obviously wasn’t a cat at all, but a goblin who I would have easily destroyed if he was a bit closer). ““Gonna snatch that phone right from ya if y'keep ignorin' my simple asks!” Turning back to us, she sighed. “Sorry, y’all. This news’s fresh, barely two, three weeks old.”
We slowly turned back to her. “Well, don’t strain yourself to get us important intelligence, Wendy! For fuck’s sake!” Caelum growled at her.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been busy!” she pleaded, but she took a step back and picked up a plate filled with donuts. “Beignet?”
“Beignets are not going to cut it today,” I said, but I took one and started eating it—hey, I was hungry. “You are on our shitlist, Wendy.” That was a fucking good beignet. I took another. Now I was talking around it. “Now you’re going to tell us everything about this book you sold…”
She listened to my garbled description of the receipt Beau had given us, but she was already shaking her head in confusion. “I do not sell spell books,cher. I sell some gris-gris, and some dis and dat. Mais I am no bookstore. Have a look-see yourself!” She shooed me around with her hand.
“No, no, Little Mama. Can’t be,” I finally said, leaning against her counter. “We have a receipt that says otherwise. Our mate got a book from here; a magic one.”