Free nancy werlocks diary s02e12 by julie ann dawson Page A

going?”
    “I…I don’t know.”
    “I can’t hear Mom’s side of the conversation, but I’m just gonna agree with whatever she said.”
    “My smart boy.” Mom blows a kiss at him.
    I play-sneer at my brother. “Kiss up.”
    Scott shrugs then gets up from the table. “I gotta get to the office. I got a conference call with Sales at 10.” He turns toward the sink and sighs. “I miss you, Mom.”
    Mom’s hand reaches out and brushes his cheek. He shivers and turns to me. “I’ll get you copies of the ultrasounds.”
    After Scott leaves, I promise Mom I won’t go to the graveyard…at least any time soon. I then head out to the shop. The shop still has the Closed sign in the window even though I had talked to Houston before I left the house. I go inside and find Houston in the storeroom straddling a succubus who is lying in the middle of a salt circle.
    “This is not what it looks like, Boss,” he says.
    The succubus waves cautiously at me and smiles. “It genuinely is not what it looks like. I wish it was.”
    I step into the storeroom and close the door behind me. “Who’s is she? Why is she here? And why are…and why are you standing over top of her like that?”
    “This is Toranala. She…works with Vash at the Hellsmouth. And I’m trying to block her energy signature to prevent her from being summoned by her crazy ex.”
    “I thought Vash would have this fixed before you got here. My bad.”
    “We kinda hoped to have this done before you got…yeah, I should have totally called you.”
    The Hellsmouth is an interdimensional pocket domain inside the Philadelphia Evocation Academy. It was formed around a century ago when someone sneezed during a banishment ritual to get rid of a rogue balor. The balor was banished, but the ritual accidentally pulled a piece of one of the infernal planes into the material world. Now it serves as a nightclub for witches and assorted supernatural entities. Club manager Vash is a Jorōgumo, a type of spider-demon that traditionally seduces and then drinks the blood of men. But these days she just drains their wallets.
    I made the mistake of taking Houston and Eric there once, as witches below Rank Three can’t even get into the Hellsmouth without an escort. They keep pestering me to take them back. Finding Houston straddling one of Vash’s employees in my storeroom isn’t helping their cause.
    Toranala’s body convulses violently. Houston returns to concentrating on holding her in place. Houston has done an admirable job of setting up a circle of anchoring, but whoever is hell-bent on summoning Toranala is obviously stronger in demonology than my apprentice. I activate Third Eye and see a void of energy around the two of them, almost as if they were inanimate objects.
    “What exactly are you doing again?”
    “Psion trick I learned from Risha,” says Houston. Toranala stops spasming and he takes a deep breath. “Works like Iron Wall, only on a bigger scale. You temporarily seal off your energy and become invisible to scrying and stuff like that. But you have to actively focus on it. If I focus hard enough, I can also hide anything sharing my personal space.”
    “Which is why you are straddled over her. Got it.”  I grab a box of lead filings off the shelf and use them to reinforce Houston’s anchor. “Okay, that should give us enough time for one or both of you to actually explain this to me. So start at the beginning.”
    Toranala sits up, careful not to accidentally break her anchoring circle. But sitting up puts her face about groin level with Houston. She sighs and bites her lip.
    “Focus!” I clap my hands in front of me.
    “Yeah, yeah. Sorry,” she says. “Max lives in L.A. He thinks he’s an actor but the only stuff he’s ever done are commercials. I mean commercials pay decent and all but it isn’t like he’s doing real acting, you know? I tried to get him into porn because it pays a lot better and he has an