Southwest Days (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 2), Kal Aaron [book recommendations based on other books .txt] 📗

Lyssa nodded and let out a sigh of relief. She didn’t want to have to go through an entire biker gang before going home.

The biker nodded and shot a satisfied expression toward the downed thief. “He dead?” he asked in a casual tone. “I know a guy if you need to dump him somewhere. And no, it’s not Tempe Town Lake.”

Lyssa chuckled. How many bodies did the man need to dispose of on a regular basis?

“He’s not dead, just busted up.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “But hey, since you’re asking, could you do me a favor?”

“A favor?”

“Yeah. Can you call the cops on this guy and tell them what you saw?” Lyssa motioned to her bag. “I’ve got ice cream and I’ve got to eat it before it melts, and I’d like to do that at home, not in the parking lot. You know how it goes; I don’t want to deal with the cops. Too much paperwork, and it’s been a crap day, but I don’t want this guy wandering around in a bad mood and taking it out on someone who can’t handle him.” She pointed at a security camera over the door. “If they question what happened, you can tell them to pull that footage.”

She had acted in clear self-defense. Even if the cops came knocking, she had nothing to worry about. Samuel couldn’t complain about her beating down a Shadow, given that she hadn’t used sorcery during the fight.

The biker nodded at her bike. “Get going. I’ll knock his ass out if he gets back up.”

Lyssa smiled and grabbed her helmet off the back of her bike. “Thanks.”

“Nice shirt,” the biker remarked. “I’ll remember to never mess with a chick who likes unicorns.”

Chapter Five

Lyssa attacked her pint of ice cream with an oversized spoon. She’d just finished relating to Jofi what had happened at the store and was ready for the hard-earned reward on her dining room table.

It wasn’t like she was attacked every time she went to the store, so she wouldn’t read too much into the incident. That didn’t mean the timing didn’t annoy her.

“Might I suggest,” Jofi replied, “that you start bringing me along on your shopping trips? The level of human societal disorder suggests that would be a useful general preparation strategy.”

“I handled it without guns, and the news hypes everything up to get more clicks and viewers,” Lyssa said, breaking through the surface of the strawberry ice cream. “It was just some idiot who thought he could get away with it. This is the price I pay for having such a nice bike. It’s not the first time someone’s tried to steal it, but at least the last time, the guy wasn’t so blatant.”

“What if the next thief is carrying a weapon?”

“Running around armed to the teeth on my basic errands is going to tip my precarious balance away from what can only be charitably called sanity. Besides, no reason to escalate a fight.”

“You misunderstand my suggestion. My presence would lower the overall risk by raising the potential danger for any engagement. Would-be thieves would need to weigh the risk of losing their lives before choosing to fight, unlike what happened earlier. Ignoring that, you were fortunate he wasn’t armed. Given your vocation, I think it unwise to travel without at least one firearm.”

“I might be a Paranoid Patty and turned you into one, too, but come on! Most of my shopping trips don’t end in fights or gun battles.” Lyssa rolled her eyes. “And I’ve been training in hand-to-hand fighting techniques since I was five. If I needed to, I could have blinded him with a spell, even without the Night Goddess. You’re worrying too much.”

“Blind men can still hit if they rely on hearing,” Jofi replied.

“This might be the state of Tombstone and the OK Corral, but cops still frown on gunfights in parking lots.” Lyssa shook her head. “The last thing I need is to end up on the news and have a lot of reporters sniffing around. It’s not like it’s impossible to trace me back to California and start figuring out that Lyssa Corti left California around the same time Hecate started popping up in Arizona. Right?”

Lyssa gulped down a bit of delicious ice cream and waited for another response from Jofi. None came.

Could spirits be embarrassed? All her years with him, and she still didn’t know the answer to such a basic question. From what Lee insisted, most of Jofi’s personality was a fraud anyway, reflections of parts of her psyche rather than true and autonomous traits from the entity. She didn’t know how much she believed that, given how uptight Jofi was, but she couldn’t prove Lee wrong either.

From what she’d heard, it wasn’t like the great spirit Sorcerers understood much more than she did. Binding a spirit to do a Sorcerer’s bidding didn’t grant insight into its mind or possible soul.

Lyssa frowned and jammed her spoon into the container, no longer interested in her treat. The stupid thief had ruined her night by forcing this conversation. She’d mentioned her childhood training to Jofi without thinking through the implications of the number she’d tossed out.

“I never even thought about it,” she said.

“That seems unlikely,” Jofi replied. “We’ve discussed the merits and disadvantages of bringing me with you on more than one occasion. I thought the incident highlighted the necessity.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about when I started my martial arts training.” Lyssa looked at her hands, the same hands she’d used to take down someone much bigger than herself minutes before. “Everyone in my family was a Torch before I started training, both my parents and my brother. I don’t even know if I understood what it meant to begin my training at the time. I just knew I wanted to be like my brother and my parents. They were all tough, even without their sorcery and regalia. It gave them this