A Werewolf, A Vampire, and A Fae Walk Into A Bar (Book 1 of The Last Witch Series) novel Chapter 11

“Jesus Christ, AJ!” I guide her out of the cold, trembling with fear and rage. I disliked John when they started dating, loathed him a year into their marriage, and now I finally get to kill him.

We move toward the loveseat, and my sexy, irritating, home remodelers all gather round. I’m too focused on AJ’s wound to consider the scene she finds herself walking into.

“Sweet Lord have mercy,” AJ mutters under her breath, her head on a swivel as she looks between my gorgeous guests. “Shit, Bernie, did you win the lottery?”

AJ’s the best. The bullet wound could be in her head and she’d still crack wise. I get her seated and, before I can make the request, Zev is there with a towel and some unmarked glass bottles. Those weren’t here a day ago, so I guess he found an apothecary while he was piano shopping.

“Hi…” AJ manages to say as she falls into the wilderness that lives in Zev’s green eyes.

“Good morning,” Zev replies in his gruff but soothing voice. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“I’m Anna Jane,” she says softly, with an obvious subtext of “please ravage me.”

Hearing AJ use her full name throws me. She hates her name, even more than I hate Bernadette. Clearly, she’s overwhelmed by the magnitude of hotness in my apartment. Hell, she hasn’t even noticed the million-dollar renovation yet--or my freaking baby!

Rune walks over with a glass of water for her. The manners on these intruders consistently surprise me. As he hands her the glass, he pours a single drop of something from another unmarked bottle.

“Here, this will help with the pain.”

I stifle a laugh. Since walking in and laying eyes on Darius, Zev, and Rune, I don’t think AJ’s felt a thing.

“Thank you, I--oh my.”

Her reaction to Zev ripping the sleeve off her undershirt is ridiculously muted. Oh my? This girl normally swears like a sailor, and now she’s trying to pull off the demure act while my Sexies tend to her gunshot wound? I catch myself getting possessive and try to dial it back. These uber-hot creeps are here to steal your baby, Bernie. Don’t forget that.

“It’s a deep cut, but the instrument passed through surface tissue and didn’t hit the bone,” Zev explains, his words entirely lost on AJ as she studies his woodland god-like face.

“AJ,” I say firmly, kneeling down and putting my hands on her knees. God, it feels good to kneel again. That’s something you take for granted until you’re eight months pregnant and trying to put on a shoe. “AJ, what happened? And where is that son of a bitch?”

She finally turns away from Zev and looks at me, a sadness settling in behind her big brown eyes.

“He was drunk and mad, because, you know, that’s just his natural state of being,” she starts, and I can see there’s more anger than sadness in her look. It’s a hard shift to notice, but after a few thousand heart-to-hearts with this girl, I pick up on her mood pretty fast.

“Then the power went out and he started getting drunker, and that made him madder. We yelled at each other a little last night and then he passed out, so I thought that was the end of it. But the bastard started drinking first thing this morning. I called him a deadbeat loser and may have said a thing or two about his mother, then I got shot.”

She’s a little too casual in her storytelling for my taste, but I know she’s trying to keep her rage at bay. John started making life more difficult the day he and AJ met when he transferred to our high school senior year, but she always thought she could fix him. I wonder if this will be her breaking point.

“I’m so sorry. Of course you can stay--”

I’m interrupted by a cry from the bedroom, which serves as a great reminder that I have a baby. It also alerts AJ to a few of the changes.

“Holy shit! Bern! You’re not pregnant!”

That was the obvious one. I’ll give her time to catch up on the other tweaks as the day goes on.

She bursts to her feet and pulls me into a strong embrace, thwarting Zev’s efforts to clean her wound.

“Where is she?” AJ asks, happy tears in her eyes. “I have to meet her.”

“Stay right here, I’ll bring her in,” I say, giving AJ a gentle squeeze on her un-shot arm as I go.