Page 1 of Witch Slap

Chapter One

Some memories never faded with time. Instead, they sank their teeth into my psyche, burrowing deeper with each passing moment until they became woven into the person I was forced to become. Whether that transformation was a blessing or a curse, I could never quite decide. Fortunately, a few good snippets of time remained, circling my thoughts like cherished fragments of a life I could never forget. Goosebumps peppered my arms as one particular memory flooded my brain, and my eyes fluttered shut from the sheer joy of it.

"I unleashed the magic who was eagerly waiting for this very moment. Screams split the air when all of them were lifted off the ground and slammed like flies on the walls of the chamber. I left Danika for last. It was comical to see her eyes widen when I picked her up with a rope of my magic and slapped her next to the rest of them on the wall. Her head lolled to the side, but I didn't care."

Here's the thing nobody tells you about the best moment of your life.

You get to keep them.

Forever. On a loop. In high definition, with surround sound, even at three in the morning when you're staring at the ceiling of a bedroom that isn't yours in a house that isn't yours, counting the seconds between one breath and the next like they're money you're running out of.

Or in a shoe store while blindly staring at a display, like I was doing.

I had eleven days of that particular gift so far. Eleven days of watching my grandmother's head loll to the side while my magic held her against a wall of black stone pinned to it like a moth to a board. Also, I had eleven days of one same thought arriving right behind it, on schedule, like a debt collector who knew where I slept.

"She let me do that to her."

Because Danika Byrne was the strongest witch on this continent, and I was a woman with a lot of bravado and magic but no aim. There was no way I could best her even in my wildest dreams. If that witch had wanted to peel me apart in that ritual chamber, my organs would be floating in a jar on her desk right now, labeled in her perfect handwriting.

If anyone thought otherwise they were a complete and utter fool.

She let me do it. She looked me in the eye and let me do it, and then she let me walk out the door.

You don't have to be a genius to know that when Danika gives you something for free, she already had the invoice ready in the mail.

"You're doing it again," Ace grumbled under his nose in annoyance.

"I'm shopping." I did not look up from the display case. "This is a sacred act. Show some respect."

"You've been looking at that one shoe for five minutes."

"It's a boot, you uncultured animal." I tapped the glass over it with one fingernail, and the sound was very satisfying, so I did it twice more. "And it's not just a boot. It's a suede stiletto ankle boot in oxblood with a covered platform, which means the heel is four and a half inches but it reads as five, and I can run in it. I have run in it. I ran a full block in this boot's ancestor while a Kishi demon bled out behind me, and that boot died a hero."

"You killed by using it as a weapon."

"I destroyed it." My hand slapped flat on the glass. "There's a difference, and I'd thank you not to speak ill of the dead."

Ace made a choking sound between a laugh and a cough and went back to standing where he'd been standing since we walked in. Which was two steps behind my right shoulder with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. He'd been doing that for eleven days too. Eleven days of a beta wolf built like a brick house parking himself in my blind spot, in coffee shops, in parking garages, in the doorway of a bathroom once, which we had words about.

The man had not softened a single edge since the shitshow of my personal disaster started. Six feet of him, give or take, packed into a white t-shirt that clung to his shoulders like it was afraid of heights. Light brown hair in a military cut. Sun-kissed skin and a jaw you could open envelopes with. Every female in the store had clocked him inside four seconds of the door chiming, and every one of them had gone back to pretending they hadn't.

Not me. I stared at him openly. I'd earned it.

The shop was called The Fifth Room, it was on the good end of Euclid Avenue, and it was the fourth store I'd dragged him through that afternoon. Pale gray walls, brass fittings polished to a shine you could check your lipstick in, and a rug so plush my heels sank into it like the floor was trying to keep me there. They played something with a cello in it, low enough that you felt it in your sternum instead of hearing it. The kind of place where the shoes sat one to a pedestal under glass, spotlit like relics, and nobody so much as breathed the word sale.

It was my kind of church, and I was very religious about it.

A girl behind the register kept glancing at me. She was twenty, maybe. Braces, a high ponytail, and a brass name tag that said BRYNN. The poor thing had been working up the courage to ask if I needed anything for a solid ten minutes. She'd get there eventually. They always do.

My reasoning for dragging the poor wolf here in this particular store was airtight. If I was going to spend the rest of my presumably short life being hunted by my own flesh and blood, I refused to do it in the same three pairs of shoes I'd had on pack lands since I decided to hide there like a coward, one of which had demon on it that would not come off.

Also, if I stayed in that house one more afternoon, I was going to start eating the drywall. With a fork.

Eleven days is a long time in a bedroom that isn't yours. Mornings belonged to Amber, who sat me down with tea I didn't want and made me tell her what I was feeling like I was a toddler in need of a treatment. Afternoons belonged to Alex, who threw me at trees. Somewhere in between, Sissily leaned on a doorframe and watched with that face she makes, the one that suggests she knows the punchline and has decided to let me walk into it.

Eleven days of being handled. Eleven days of being the reason a whole pack slept with one eye open.

You can see why the boots mattered.