I Just Kidnapped My Twin Alpha Mates

Chapter One (Part Three): We Know This Is Taking Forever

Author's Note: We know this chapter is taking forever. We'll keep it shorter in the future. Journey just got a little bit more excited than normal about it, and well, you see how that turned out. Fight us, haters. Our egos are steel.

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Rain spat torrents down my umbrella, and the hag turned. They didn't let their face show, but the arrow glinted  even more evily as the third lighting bolt of the minute flashed overhead. "I wish to speak to the witch who calls herself Selene."

Well fabloulous. That would be me. I wasn't sure what I expected them to sound like, maybe a raspy voice struggling to escape from shredded vocal cords, or if things were being creative, a high upper crust British sound like old world vampires. But I got neither of those. Listening to those words was like a snake whispering through a human throat. Take the baseline creep factor, add ten, then multiply it by twenty.

Bel rearranged herself on my shoulder and cried. "My mistress is away." Yep, when in doubt, lie through my teeth. "I can take your message for her."

A hand lifted talons pointing to Bel. My familiar didn't like this new development, and dug her claws into my wrist. There were going to leave bruises for at least a weak. "You have her creature on your shoulder."

Forcing my hands to stop tightening on the shaft of my magic umbrella, my face molded itself into a smile to match the cruelty in its voice. "You think that my master would allow an apprentice to perform her work unsupervised? Call the bird my mistress's security policy."

The thing bared its teeth. At this point in time, my brain was split into three not quite so equal sections. The first was trying to figure out what on earth I needed to do about the undead (Or at least that was my hypothesis) creature. That took up the most space. The next, slightly more analytical part, was trying to come up with a creature profile for whatever it was. That portion of my brain was trying to recall pages of Mort's Guide to Magical Species and Inhuman Creatures and flipping through them at an alarming rate. The third, and utterly useless section of my brain, was thinking about popped corn. Yep. If I could perform a lobotomy to trap it in a glass jar, belive me, I would have.

"Fine 'apprentice'." Its jaws curled. "Then give her this message. I want her to find me something."

"Of what nature?"

"An ancient artifact, one long forgotten."

Inside my pocket, the crystal ball burned frost marks into my leg. Chills rode up my spine. I could feel three sets of eyes pressing into my skull. Elliot lurked behind the desk, readying a crossbow behind my desk. Bel gave the whatever-it-was a death stare, and of course, the whatever-it-was was trying to skewer me with its eyes. "My mistress and I need more detail than that if you want us to find your artifact."

Air seemed to bed around the hag, warping my veiw of the street in ways I didn't like. Prickles radiated from my spine to my frontal lobe, and my thoughts seemed sluggish and tired. It took me longer than it should have to recognize the symptoms of mind leaching. It was Bel who pulled me out of it, thank myself for not listening to Elliot when he said I should have picked a tabby cat like most witches. She yanked on my ear, the one with newly pierced cartilage. Pain broke through my horizons, and my thoughts sped up.

It was time to end this, either by getting the hag to leave willingly, or chasing them off using whatever fire power I could muster. During buisness transactions, I liked to have full control of my mind and facilities, but during this one, something was playing with my head.

My right thumb clicked through rune combinations on the umbrella handle, and my left hand popped a pearl out of my thumb ring. From my back, right molar, my tongue unhooked a small ruby compound. I bit down on it, hard enough to crack the surface and send its magic rocketing into my blood stream. Awareness leached its way back into my head as rosewood and ruby combated whatever charms the hag had laced on me.

When I spoke, it came out a smooth, silky warning and not the snarl I indented. "Don't play games with me, or your deal's as good as gone." Bel cawed her approval and fluffed her feathers. More stars and buildings bend around the figure, refracting light off the arrow through its head.

"Very well, young witch. Bring me the Kitsaria, and these old bones shall not trouble you further." Silver light flared from a bracelet along my wrist, sizzling the hag's crinkled skin. "Don't test me so, child."

Kitsaria. It wanted the Kitsaria, and that I could deal with. Touching me? Not something I was going to let something like this do again. "Leave. Leace this place." The sheild grew, cutting the block in half with me on one side, and the hag on the other. It couldn't get through—no creature born of darkness could touch a pymanthian boundary without burning from the inside out. The hag seemed to know it too. Rage swarmed up its features (the ones I could see anyway), and even cloaked as it was, the thing raised itself, growning from hunched figure to towering giant within a matter of seconds. A roar of rage filled the streets, and instead of backing away, idiot me decided to press her advantage.

The sheild advanced with my outstretched hands. Bel screamed into my ear, and pressure made them pop. I didn't relax until I saw the figure round the coner, and I morphed back through the glass to a waiting Elliot.

"And?" He asked, setting his crossbow back down to the table surface.

"We are completely fucked."

My familiar cawed her agreement.