In Charm's Way by Lana Harper

Author:Lana Harper [Harper, Lana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“You’re really making a habit out of this,” Ivy remarked, flicking me a charged look over her shoulder as she knelt by an unconscious Cat sprawled out on my couch. “Should start charging you concierge doctor prices.”

After patching her up with the most rudimentary of healing charms, the magical equivalent of a flimsy Band-Aid, I’d managed to half drag Cat back to her rental car at the border of the woods and get us both back to my place. By the time Ivy had shown up, Cat’s eyes had fluttered shut and I hadn’t been able to rouse her at all. That frightening ashen pallor had only worsened, and now there were creeping little tendrils like black veins extending from the bandaged edges of her wound.

I was no Thorn, and my medical knowledge didn’t extend far beyond tinctures and poultices, but even I knew that had to be very fucking bad.

“Think of this one as a service to the community.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ivy muttered, her hands pressed to either side of the bandaged wound on Cat’s chest as she ran a magical scan of the internal damage. She’d managed to stanch the worst of the blood flow, but even so, the bandage had been seeping alarmingly since she began. “Who even is this person? She doesn’t look local. I’d have remembered a face like this.”

“She’s a visiting monster hunter. Protector against things that go bump in the night.”

“A monster hunter,” Ivy echoed, her voice heavy with skepticism. “One who isn’t all the way human herself? There’s . . . I don’t know what, exactly, I’ve never felt this kind of energy before. But I sure as shit know what it’s not, and it isn’t your garden-variety human essence. Lilah, where’d you find her? And what happened here?”

“She’s half fae, from a creature enclave in Chicago,” I replied, calculating how much I needed to tell her, and feeling like the most treacherous jackass even as I did it; there was no one closer to me than Ivy, and she should have deserved nothing but the truth. And I’d already dragged her too far into my mess as it was. “She followed a rogue succubus here, from the city. A succubus that attacked me.”

“A succubus here, in Thistle Grove?” Ivy asked, her voice skewing even more suspicious, even as she kept her head bowed in concentration. “We don’t get that type of nasty around here, as far as I know. And what would one want with you, Lilah, huh? Could it, I don’t know, have some connection with a baneful spell you recently cast?”

“That’s what Cat’s helping me find out,” I admitted. “We were exploring the Witch Woods, looking for answers, and we got ambushed by something else. A wraith. Like a demonic vampire, only more interested in souls than blood.”

“Well, I’ve never even heard of any heinous shit like that, but it did some terrible damage,” Ivy murmured, momentarily distracted by whatever she was sensing through her scan.

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