Bad Influence (Seven Deadly Sins #2) ✅ Completed

Chapter Twelve: A Greek of Requirement

A Greek of Requirement

“Where’s the room of requirement when you need it?” Chase grumbled, moving onto the next moldy book in his ginormous stack. 

“More like the miracle of requirement,” I muttered, eyeball deep in my own grossly overlarge pile.

We were sitting at a large wooden desk Dante had trudged up and set in the middle of the shop floor. Stacks and stacks of books took up practically every inch of it, while the few pockets of space between the stacks held cups of cold coffee and discarded Subway wrappers. This was still a vast improvement over the deep scars and hinky-looking stains covering the actual top of the table. Whichever dump Dante fished it out of, I was pretty sure there was a dead body someone had dismembered on the table buried not too far away. 

To make room for the atrocity, Chase and I moved the old sofa and a significant chunk of Aunt Celeste’s junk into the rear stock room earlier that morning. After I’d woken up from my latest nap-attack courtesy of Asher, Dante wasted absolutely no time in setting us both to work. Chase, for his part, managed to get out of his own shift at the hardware store by telling his dad he was helping out at the Emporium while we were short-handed. Dante started a convenient little rumor about Celeste being called out of state to personally handle a lucrative estate sale. According to Chase, most people were buying it hook, line and sinker.

Just to be safe and to deflect suspicion, Dante was keeping the store open for shortened summer hours. Considering the only people who actually came into the shop were the ones looking to deal with Aunt Celeste on the ‘down low’, this didn’t seem to pose much of a problem for us. The best thing was it kept Justin from overly worrying about Chase being involved at the shop while we figured out the whole Andy situation. All of this had been set into motion while I was still passed out (again), so I was spared the brunt of the guilt of having been the one to lie to Chase’s dad.    

The rest of my guilt flew the coop the second I found out Chase had seen me in my underwear the night of Asher’s attack. I figured my humiliation was a fair price to pay for dragging Chase into my mess once more. Besides, there wasn’t any real point in getting rid of him. He’d seen me at my worst – it could only go up from there.

At least I hoped so. 

Chase peered at me from around his stack of books, his eyes a little glossed over from reading for so long without a break. “Seriously, how convenient would that be? Just step into a room and get everything you needed.”

“Like magic?” I suggested, “Unless of course you have a horrible, snake-like archenemy trying to kill you since birth. I bet something like that makes magic a little less awesome.”  

“I don’t know...,” Chase replied, “If you ask me, better evil wizards than soul sucking demons.”

“Think so? Something tells me magic is the kind of thing that corrupts. I mean if you believe in that sort of thing,” I added quickly. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore but I'd seen too much to be dismissive of such things now. 

Chase shrugged then looked thoughtful for a moment. “Maybe…besides, I bet wizards aren’t that cool anyway. I mean how many are going to talk with a British accent and charm cars into flying around?”  

“Can you imagine if they let us Americans into the club? We’d be jinxing Ford trucks and all kinds of idiotic vehicles up there,” I joked. We laughed as we came up with other ridiculous things we could do with magic if given half the chance.