Courts and Cabals by G.S. D'Moore (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

to get back in the field, but the one downside from all this was not getting to see Wood. They’d been texting a lot lately, and hearing from her made him smile. He’d probably still end up in a bar with some local shifter groupie bobbin on his knob after he successfully brought down this coven, but it wouldn’t be as satisfying as having the sheriff-shifter doing the dirty.

***

Lilith strutted into her room and collapsed on her bed. She’d just failed a pop quiz that she should have known was coming. “Suck it up,” she ordered herself to stop wallowing, and moved to the small refrigerator in the corner.

Inside was a good amount of regular food for her and Xamira. The imp, being half-human, had a vivacious metabolism, and boasted a hefty per-diem from the cabal to prove it. The bottom three-fourths of the fridge was always filled with snacks and drinks. In the back were a few wine coolers, but Lilith hadn’t touched them. It wasn’t because she didn’t need a drink. It was because she didn’t want to develop that habit. Her race lived a long time, and habits were easy to form.

Carefully, she grabbed one of the specimen containers on the top shelf and a chilled eye dropper. She unscrewed the lid and tried to keep her mouth from watering. To everything but a succubus, cum smelled like cum; which was not good. To her, Cam’s seed was a bouquet of aromas. Even better, the aromas varied. It had something to do with his state of mind at the point of release, and she had her favorite jars marked. Today, she went for the first one Dani had ever collected for her.

In the month and a half since the trial, Dani had played grub hub, and collected four other samples from Cam. The dwarf might complain about running errands like a Starbucks barista, but every time she came back with a smile. Lilith was more than a little frustrated that she couldn’t get what she wanted from Cam herself, but it still wasn’t safe. The cabal’s labs were still gene mapping her First to see why his jizz had the power to incapacitate a supernatural of her power, but there was nothing yet.

In fact, they were passed the deadline. “Any day now,” she told herself as she dipped the stopper in and sucked up .2 ml. A little trial and error, and she’d found that was the perfect amount to fulfill her needs. She held the stopper over her mouth and braced.

The chunky liquid dropped into her mouth. An explosion of flavor hit her tongue. If surprise had a taste, this was it. She’d heard all about Dani catching him wanking it to some cat shifter, and the fantasy of Cam stroking his hard cock had kept her up at night more than once. For such an ordinary human, he was absolutely extraordinary.

She felt like she was sinking through her bed as the seed worked its way into her body, and her body devoured it like a pack of hungry wolves. She gave a little gasp, and her eyes rolled back into her head despite her attempts to stay focused. No matter how hard she tried, this batch always put her out of it for a few seconds.

When she finally opened her eyes, she could see the glow of power reflecting off the ceiling. She felt fully charged, alert, and ready to tackle the rest of her day; which meant extra credit for the quiz she’d just failed. She was trying to think of a good topic for the essay when her computer beeped.

She went to check on it, and felt a surge of excitement. It was from the cabal. It was routed through proxy servers, and an icon told her it was heavily encrypted, but it had to be the results. She greedily clicked on the email and waited as the decryption software ran. It took several minutes, which told her just how close to the vest the cabal was holding Cam’s genetic data.

“I definitely picked a winner,” she gave herself a mental pat on the back.

When the gibberish finally solidified into intelligible words, she frowned. It was not a comprehensive genetic layout of Cameron Dupree. It wasn’t even from the lab. It was from her mother, and only contained seventeen words.

Make all attempts to reconcile with your sister. No harm should come to Cameron. That’s an order.

Lilith’s mother wasn’t known for being a warm creature, but this was blunt even for her. Lilith looked for any hidden meaning in the words, but found nothing. She sat back in her chair and scratched her head. From her purse, she heard her phone vibrate.

“Now,” the text message came from an unknown number, but Lilith knew exactly who it was from. She knew there were cameras in her room, and right now, her mother was watching.

She took a deep breath, nodded, and stepped. Teleportation was a gift she’d inherited from her father, and like all Fae, it wasn’t instantaneous. In fact, she had stepped out of her world and into some place in-between. She suspected the noble Fae’s ability to manipulate subspaces was born of this power as well, but she couldn’t be sure without a teacher.

What it did mean was that she had to walk in a world of shadows, smoke, and off-putting light. She swore there were creatures here, something that called this place home, and was just beyond her vision. Despite the sensation crawling up her spine, nothing bothered her. As she made her way through the space, where time and distance worked differently than in her home realm, there were chunks of white interspaced among the black and gray. She knew from experience the white blotches were water that met some magical threshold. She couldn’t move through those portions of space. There wasn’t much blocking her