“How the…” he broke off in midanswer, face scrunching up in concentration as apparently something occurred to him “Ah, like within the next ten minutes, I think. Although I don’t know how I know that. Say, maybe this explains why she was so… energetic in the sack.”

“Well. Mack’s f-boy observations aside, we wouldn’t want to be bad hosts. Let’s get ready for her,” Stacia said, her tone light but her eyes narrowed.

“Yeah,” Jetta said, rubbing her jaw where her brother’s first punch had landed. “We wouldn’t want to be rude.”

Chapter 32

Lilith approached the odd little school for witches and weres from the north, stepping out of the lightly treed strip of land that separated the school’s parking lot from the next property’s parking area, her demonic cloak at full power.

The repurposed building looked quiet, a little over half the lot taken with vehicles. Her supernatural hearing picked up the sounds of an active property: young voices chatting, sounds of cooking from the cafeteria, and multiple sources of loud music from students’ rooms. Her demonic senses picked up serious wards, powerful protections that gave her immediate pause.

Focusing her senses on the entryway, she dialed in on the voices of two adult males, probably guards, talking about shifts and lazy coworkers. She would likely have to kill them, which was not ideal. That’s if she could even get in past the wards. All of which was going to create too much of a commotion, which would complicate her extraction of the witch, and she wanted no more complications. So much had already gone wrong. It wasn’t so much that her primary plans had failed, it was the sheer inaccuracy, no, the outright blatant absence of vital intelligence about her quarry that had her teeth clenching and her talons threatening to pop right out of her currently human-looking fingers. The elves of the Summer Court would answer to her, even if she had to go behind her liege’s back.

Inside College Arcane, a new voice addressed the guards, laughing and joking with easy familiarity. Mack Sutton. One guard addressed something to someone else but didn’t get an answer and repeated himself, saying, “What’s up, Declan? Coming down with something?”

“Oh, he’s mad at one of his professors. She embarrassed him in class,” Mack said. “I’m taking him out for a Nutella milkshake on Church Street before he does something… unfortunate.”

The front door opened and two figures stepped out. Behind them, she heard one guard say to the other, “That professor has no idea how lucky she is that he’s so easygoing!”

“No shit. You weren’t here when he had that fight in the parking lot with the girl witch. Trashed my new car all to shit. The school bought me that new RAV4 to replace it.”