A whisper of wolf cockta.., p.1
A Whisper of Wolf (Cocktails in Hell Book 6), page 1
a whisper of wolf
S.E. Babin
Copyright © 2024 by S.E. Babin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by We Got You Covered.
contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Also by S.E. Babin
About the Author
foreword
Thanks so much for loving Violet as much as I do!
If you spot any typos, please do me a solid and send me an email at authorsebabin@sebabin.com. We’re only human around here (unfortunately) and make mistakes. I’d like to know so I can correct them asap.
Feel free to drop me a line there too, any time. I don’t have a PA, so I personally respond.
Happy reading!
chapter
one
"Is the royal harem meeting today?" Clara asked. She lay on the oversized couch, stretched out like a starfish, staring up at the ceiling.
Even though her face was in profile, I did not miss the smirk on her lips.
"For the fiftieth time," I said patiently, "there is no harem." Clara meant well, but her idea of romance was occasional bouts of violent carnage and having all her holes plugged by a man with multiple appendages.
"That's not what the men in your harem say."
I threw an apple at her, but her vampire reflexes were too quick. She snatched it from mid-air before it got anywhere near her face. No matter how hard I tried, I never made contact. Even sneak attacks remained unsuccessful. Granted, I wasn't trying that hard, but one day I hoped to get her guard down just enough to peg her in the face with fruit.
I hadn't doused her with a potion yet, but ol' Clara was cruising for a bruising if she didn't shut up about the revolving door of men in my life. Not that anything was happening with that door. It was like a door in a haunted house. Scarred, paint chipping off, and halfway off the hinges.
A fine metaphor to my odd, mostly unsuccessful dating life. I had a lot of starts and stops, though they'd all ended up coming to a screeching halt.
Except for Easton.
Not yet, anyway.
He was stalking me. Romantic in a novel, a little unnerving in real life. Could I blame him, though? Predators stalked. Asking them not to was like trying to teach a person mixology while speaking Swahili. Clara thought it all terribly romantic.
The vampire, like most of my new paranorm friends, was adorably psychotic.
Dave hadn't been around for a few days, and it was making Clara a little salty. Add pregnancy hormones on top, and my home life was a real bundle of laughs these days.
She had weird ass cravings. Some of the drinks she’d asked me to mix up lately were gag inducing, but since I was her bestie, I mixed the pickle juice, olives, and cranberry juices, the cosmo mixed with tequilas and rums without complaint. Don’t even get me started on the charcuterie boards. I was going to have to start charging her for them if she didn’t tone it down soon.
All of that was tolerable because I loved her. With Dave’s attention torn between her and his kingdom, she was lonely. But…ever since she found out she was pregnant, Clara had stuck to me like a leech. She rarely left the apartment which left me with a permanent, Clara shaped dent on her favorite side of the couch. My grocery bill tripled, and she hogged the remote control so much I hadn’t watched a single episode of my show in weeks.
She’d found a channel where every single show followed the same format and yet we remained glued to the television wondering if that big city girl was going to figure out that small town pine tree salesman was in love with her. I had to tear myself away from the television and at night, my dreams were plagued with images of Easton showing up at my door with an ax slung over his shoulder begging me to walk away from my corporate law job.
It had gotten to the point where I wanted to smash my television to bits, while simultaneously transporting myself into a town called Misty Hollow or Sandy Cove and finding a small-town lover.
Clara wasn’t the only thing different. Lucifer was gone, taken by Michael and his cronies, and it cast a sad pall over Swan’s. What I hadn’t told anyone yet is that he came to visit me in his dreams.
On the surface, he seemed fine. But every once in a while, he couldn’t maintain the illusion he presented to me, and I glimpsed a world of horror and pain.
He told me every day not to try to find him, that he was in a place unfamiliar to even him, and that my time would be better spent on finding a way to defeat Michael and the other angels banding together with him.
I agreed and changed the subject, trying to find things to talk about to take Lucifer’s mind off of what he was going through, all the while slowly gathering clues when Lucifer’s power slipped and he allowed me to see into the pit Michael had thrown him into.
I was a liar. Just like Michael. Just like Lucifer.
I’d find him.
And when I did, Michael would pay.
They would all pay.
“Seriously, though,” Clara interrupted my mental spiral. “When are you supposed to go on this big date of yours?”
“Don’t remind me.” I’d delayed Easton as long as I could. He’d shown more patience than anyone else would have, but the last time I tried to delay, he’d taken up residence at my apartment steps and said he wasn’t moving until I pinned down a firm date.
“How long?”
“Two days,” I said with a groan.
Clara shot up. “Two days? What are you wearing?”
“Uh. Clothes?”
She snorted. “Not for long, you aren’t.”
Easton had made the same point. Thus, one of the reasons I was doing everything in my power to delay.
Not that I didn’t want to share that with someone. It had been far too long since I’d shared that kind of intimacy with anyone. But…things were different now, and sex had some potential complications I wasn’t sure I wanted in my life.
Clara clicked her tongue. “You’re so paranoid. It’s a dick, Violet. Not a cobra.”
That made me laugh. “Sex can bring out latent powers. What if something weird happens?”
She slid a glance my way. “Like what?”
Good question. “Explosions? Natural disasters?” I shrugged. “I don’t know!”
Clara stared. “I’ve never seen a woman who needed to get laid more than you, friend.”
I rubbed my eyes. “He’s not a shifter.”
“Of course he is.” Clara unwrapped a chocolate and popped it in her mouth.
“He doesn’t smell like one to me. Partly, but not completely.”
Clara stopped chewing.
I’d thought about it over and over and had come to the conclusion that Easton was something more than an Alpha. Whether it was witch blood or something else, there was a power running through his veins I couldn’t put my finger on.
I didn’t like walking into the unknown, and Easton felt like so much more than the unknown. He felt like I was about to step off a cliff and dive into the unknown.
“What do you think he is?” Clara asked.
I shrugged. “Not sure. I’ve never felt anything like him before.”
“Interesting.” Clara unwrapped another chocolate. “I suspected he was mixed with something, but I guess he had enough wolf traits that I didn't question things too much.”
“Have you been to his compound?”
She laughed. “Vampires and wolves don’t mix. I have an uneasy relationship with all the heads, but we’ve never extended invitations to each other for brunch.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t be in this position if you had,” I muttered.
Clara grinned and tossed a chocolate at me. “Says the woman who’s been hiding her entire life.”
“Ugh.” She wasn’t wrong. I was more in the spotlight now than I’d ever been and it would get even worse by the time it was all over.
Her eyes softened. “It’s just a date, Violet. That’s all.”
My shoulders slumped. “But it’s not really, is it?”
“Of course it is. You set the tone for it. He might be a shifter, but you are the hybrid child of an Archangel and—” she paused. “Whatever the hell your mother is.”
Mom had been helpful during my training and at occasional times, but I had yet to see what she could do magically. Mom wasn’t technically a demon or an angel. She was just married to one for thousands of years, and when you lived in Hell for as long as she had, sometimes its magic seeped into you.
She was holding back for some weird reason.
Maybe this was one of those save the best for last kind of things. Not that I needed more surprises. If one more thing jumped up and slapped me in the face, I was going to lie down in the fetal position and literally just expire. Death by mental overexertion.
“Anyway,” Clara went on, “you can smash that wolf into the dirt. You don’t need his permission for anything. If you want to cancel the entire thing, you can.” Her
eyes turned calculating. “But I suspect you don’t want to cancel.”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I’m scared of the unknown.” Easton was handsome, powerful, interesting. All the adjectives my exhausted brain could think of.
The other men who tried to woo me were too, but I actually felt a little scared when I was around Easton, and I couldn’t figure that out. He made me nervous in a way I’d never been before.
“I’m a pregnant vampire who has assassins coming for her every time she steps outside. I live the unknown every single day, kid.” Clara shrugged. “It’s not for the fainthearted, but that’s what life is. Every day I wake up alive is a surprise.”
Was she alive, though? Maybe not the best time to bring it up. My friend wasn’t the best at pep talks, but I understood what she was getting at. “I guess I need help picking out something to wear.”
Clara shot up like a rocket. “Damn right you do.”
She blurred over to me so fast all I saw was a wiggly line. A pale hand snatched me out of my seat and dragged me to my bedroom closet.
chapter
two
Gary missed Lucifer. The jukebox spun the Bee Gees all night, much to the dismay of the patrons. Someone got up, stuck a fifty in the slot, and borderline sobbed for Gary to play something, anything else. That demon had a serious beef with that band, but Gary refused to comply. He’d been this way for weeks now.
I’d unplug him if I thought it would work, but Gary had proven resistant to the limitations of electricity. I could try dosing him with a potion, but it felt wrong. Everyone deserved to mourn in their own way. Who was I to take that away from him?
The usual dice games had lost its luster. Everyone knew Lucifer wouldn’t show up to surprise them and jump in for a game. The angels lurking a couple of tables in the back didn’t help the mood any. I was still wary of them, but they’d done nothing but help since they’d arrived.
They’d also shown me new sides of my power I never dreamed existed.
Perhaps that’s also why I felt like I was going through an existential crisis.
Plus, the wings.
I had wings.
Not normal angel wings. Of course not. I had harbinger of doom wings. Ebony like a starless sky. How I figured out I had them was not a story I liked to think about. It involved Alistair, Easton, a knife, and some real fucked up intentions.
Regardless of all that, those things came out to play when things got real. Az warned me to keep them hidden for as long as I could. I always listened to him.
Those bad boys were tucked firmly into my skin, only coming out when Az and I needed to train to fly. He, Clara, Dave, and only a couple of others knew what lurked behind my shoulder blades.
As if all this shit wasn’t enough, my wings pointed to an old legend about a dark winged angel meant to take the angelic realm down. Mainly, I wanted Lucifer back, the angels to leave me alone, and Michael to burn in a fiery pit of Hell.
Oh, and I forgot for a brief moment that Ellie and Toby had disappeared into thin air. Easton had heard from them but, like me, he had no idea where they were. Once Az found out they were alive, he relaxed some, but I could see he was itching to burn the world down to find her.
But my foster father hadn’t survived this long by acting rash. If Ellie was alive and telling me to keep recruiting, she was as safe as she could be. And if Toby was with her, she was keeping him safe, too.
I could only believe if they were gone from their families, from us, they had good reason for it. And, if things were really going my way, they’d come back with answers for some of the problems we were facing.
Easton blamed me for Toby’s absence, though he seemed less angry about it once he’d heard from him. If he knew more, he wasn’t saying.
“You’re bringing this place down,” a voice said from the doorway.
I blinked, wondering how I’d heard him over the caterwauling jukebox, and looked up.
Jesus stood in the doorway.
Gary’s music switched for the first time in weeks, and the strains of Hallelujah rang out through the room.
Jesus grinned. “Appropriate. A little dark, but I’ll allow it.”
The song was the only sound in the entire bar. A stillness unlike anything I’d seen before settled over the place. Demons and angels alike gawked at the sight of the robed and sandaled man. It seemed like an illusion, but I knew better. He’d come to me during one of my darker hours and a few times in my dreams.
Was he helpful?
Not so much. He reminded me of that annoying cat with the wide grin in those stories who spoke in riddles to that poor little lost girl trying to find her way home. At least I hadn’t drunk a potion that made me shrink.
Still time for that before I went to sleep tonight, so maybe I shouldn’t test the waters. If Jesus were here, something had gone either terribly wrong or terribly right.
Guess which one I was betting on?
The angels shot out of their seats like a rocket and dropped to their knees, their faces pressed against the wooden floor. I grimaced at the sight.
Mopping the floors wasn’t on my priority list right now.
We were paranorms. Communicable diseases were out.
Still. Germs. Eww.
“Messiah,” Metatron breathed.
Jesus winked at me. “Rise and be well.”
I never thought I’d see anyone bossing the Archangels around, so I was taking great pleasure in this. Technically, I was a hybrid, so maybe I should be on my knees, too.
But Jesus hadn’t done a thing for me so far except confuse me, and I didn’t want to get my pants dirty.
Metatron came forward, tears shining in his cerulean eyes. “We thought the worst. Where have you been?”
Jesus held his hand up. “I’m sure you all have many questions. There will be time for all of them.” He took a seat at the bar and pulled a menu over.
My brows lifted even as the witch inside of me cackled with glee. Was he going to order a drink? Or a drink. Would my magic affect him? I wanted to tap my fingers together like a mad scientist, but I refrained. Appearing too eager would make him suspicious.
“What would you recommend?” he asked, a tan, well-manicured finger moving down the menu.
Jesus once told me I wouldn’t remember what he looked like after our first meeting. He was right in a way. His memory became fuzzy, and it was difficult to recall his features. Until I saw him again. Whether his magic wore off or he allowed me to remember him, he looked the same.
If you saw him walk down the street, you’d think he had the best cosplay ever.
“What are you craving?” I asked, hoping he was craving something magical.
A smile played over his lips. “Something…fun.”
“Oh. My. Goodness,” I squealed. “Is this for real? Are you going to let me try?” My heart beat so fast it felt like it might come right out of my chest.
Metatron sent me a look of disapproval. “I hardly think this is the right time for this—” he began.
Jesus lifted his eyes. “I think I’ll decide what time it is, Historian.”
Metatron’s head dipped. “Of course, Messiah. My apologies.”
The other Archangels stood behind Metatron, silent and watchful. Uriel, one of the friendlier angels, looked like he was struggling to hide his smile.
I thought about it for a long moment, then pointed to the bottom of the menu. He might not like me after this, but a lot of this was his fault. After we lost Lucifer, I’d lost myself in potions for a while, retreating to the lab and creating things I’d never dreamed of. Lucifer’s gift boosted my magic stores in such a way I rarely tired anymore. Not like I once had. Potion making had always been hard work, even when I was training the other half of my powers.
Now it felt simple. Like I could do it in my sleep.
The first thing I’d done was create a drink for him. When I got him back, I planned to make it for him. That potion was outlined in a black frame of intricate, hand-drawn ivy. It was a smoked whiskey bourbon with potion soaked cherries and aged Grand Marnier. I called it Freedom. This drink would bring Lucifer ultimate peace. Not forever. Taking away one’s memories wasn’t the way to heal. But retreating from them for a while could make all the difference in our mental health. The drink would temporarily wipe them away, placing them behind a wall of the thickest Adamantine.
