Frosting Disaster

by Zoe Arden

  I have enclosed a sneak preview of the next book.

  Is FREE on Kindle Unlimited. (around 330 pages)

  Check it out below . . .

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  Colt Hudson checked his texts again as he made his way toward the elevators at the Council on Magic and Human Affairs.

  I need to speak with you. Today. ASAP.

  Dean had sent the message early this morning—or would it technically have been late last night? When Colt hadn't immediately responded, he'd sent another identical text. And another. And another. Until finally Colt had sent him back one. Okay.

  It wasn't that the late-night texting was such a big problem in and of itself, it was just that this was the third day in a row it had happened. His eyes were red and droopy, and it gave him the appearance of being severely hungover rather than simply sleep deprived. Normally, Colt's job did not involve him checking in with Dean every day but this new assignment was different.

  Today, Dean expected an answer from him. Colt still wasn't sure what that answer was going to be.

  Colt's job consisted of many things he didn't particularly enjoy doing. As an agent at the Council on Magic and Human Affairs (COMHA), he sometimes had to deal with magical creatures that were considered dangerous. There were the obvious things like vampires and werewolves, though most of the time they weren't nearly as dangerous as most people thought they were. Heck, his own father was a vampire, and he wouldn't hurt a fly... well, unless he was provoked. Then you'd better stand back.

  No, the truly dangerous creatures were the humans. If he hadn't known that before, he knew it now. Humans—full humans that was, half humans were much different, much safer—were curious. They had an expression they liked to use that he'd always thought was rather strange—curiosity killed the cat. He didn't like to think of this expression as he was particularly fond of cats. His girlfriend, Ava, had a fluffy white cat named Snowball who was more than adorable and liked to lick the tips of his fingers after he'd eaten fried chicken.

  He often thought that the correct expression should have been that curiosity killed the human. That's what seemed to happen so often, after all. At least in his world. A human accidentally saw a bit of magic that they shouldn't have, went to investigate, and bam! Dead!

  Now, sometimes it was their own fault, and sometimes it was the fault of the witch or paranormal using the magic. Witches and wizards had a hard time showing restraint when they were up to a particularly good bit of magic. He imagined it was the same way for writers or artists. You got on a roll with something that was really good, and you just didn't want to stop. By the time you were through, you'd painted the Mona Lisa when all you'd set out to paint was a toaster.

  Of course, if you were Leonardo Da Vinci, you might have set out to paint the Mona Lisa from the very beginning but then Leonardo Da Vinci had been a master wizard. Yes, a wizard. He'd always thought it curious that humans assumed he was one of them. Had they not seen and heard of the things Da Vinci could do? And unless you were a master wizard like Da Vinci, you were bound to make mistakes. Heck, even the masters made mistakes sometimes. This was when humans were most likely to die. If he could, he would warn all of them—don't investigate things that go bump in the night.

  Colt shook his head as he stood staring at the newspaper stand in the lobby.

  "Want anything, Mr. Hudson?" asked Ernie, the guy who ran the stand. Most people didn't buy newspapers anymore these days; you could get everything online. Except, of course, when it came to magic. Though there were hidden websites only the magical community knew about, sometimes it was just safer and easier to put them into a newspaper. Newspapers could be destroyed when you were through with them but what you put out on the web lasted forever.

  "No thanks, Ernie. I'm just looking."

  "You've been standing there for five minutes already. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but..." He shrugged.

  Colt took a breath along with the hint. Time to move on.

  "See you later, Ern," he said as he resumed his trek to the elevators. This time, he made it without stopping. He got in and pushed the top button.

  There were two junior agents in the elevator with him. They kept shooting glances at him, pretending not to look while obviously looking. He couldn't entirely blame them, he supposed. Despite being constantly at odds with Dean Lampton, who ran COMHA, he'd risen to the top of the agency in the last year or so.

  Someone had told Colt at a lunch meeting recently that cadets were studying him in their training courses now. That was flattering but it also made him feel old. He was just in his mid-twenties but he supposed that in this business that was old enough to have made your mark. Especially when you were constantly at the center of things, as he had been ever since he'd moved to Heavenly Haven, an island off the coast of Florida that catered to its paranormal inhabitants and human tourists.

  Colt walked up to the reception desk. "I'm here to see Dean Lampton."

  The middle-aged woman with cat-eye glasses and a large bun on top of her head nodded. "He's expecting you. Go right in." She looked back down at whatever magazine she'd been flipping through, her job complete now that she'd given him this information. When he continued to stand there, she looked back up, blinking at him. "Something else I can help you with?"

  He shook his head. "No, I guess not. Thanks."

  He stepped in the direction of Dean's office, paused, and turned back. "Where's the bathroom?"

  She cocked her head to the side. "Down the hall on the left. You've been here a million times, I'd have thought you'd know that by now." Her mild chastisement over, she resumed flipping through her magazine.

  Colt made his way down the hall and pushed open the door. He stepped inside the washroom and went straight to the sinks. He looked at himself in the mirror. He wished he could have talked to Ava about this. His girlfriend was the best sounding board he had when he needed to bounce ideas around. She could have told him immediately what the right decision would have been. Should he or shouldn't he? She would have known the answer.

  But he couldn't tell her. Dean had expressly forbidden it, and Colt supposed he understood why. They couldn't risk things getting out, news spreading. More than that, though, it might have put Ava's life in danger, as well as the lives of everyone she loved.

  Colt splashed some cold water on his face. If his answer to Dean was no, he would be out of a job as of now, but if his answer was yes, he would lose everything he had. Including Ava.

  Maybe not. Maybe you're underestimating her. Maybe there's still a way...

  He screwed his face up, thinking. His thinking face was not one of his more attractive ones. He looked like a moose.

  "Maybe..." he said, an idea occurring to him. He hadn't thought of it before but now that it came to him, it seemed so obvious. The only problem was he didn't know what Ava would think about it. He liked to think he knew her well enough to read her mind but she was constantly surprising him.

  Colt dried his face off and went to Dean's office.

  "Enter," Dean barked from behind his closed door.

  Colt entered.

  "Took you long enough. Did you get lost?" It wasn't a serious question. Dean sat with his face red and pinched. One too-bright bulb glared at them from the side of the room, shining off Dean's head and highlighting his scalp, making him look even balder than he was. A bead of sweat ran down his temple. Dean wiped it away with his sleeve.

  "Are they ever gonna fix the air in this place?" Dean shouted. He pushed the button for his intercom and his secretary's voice rang out.

  "Yes, Mr. Lampton?"

  "Mildred, find out what the devil is going on with the air, will you? Tell whoever's in charge that if it doesn't get fixed soon, they're fired. As of yesterday."

  "Yes, Mr. Lampton." There was a click and then she was gone.

  Colt considered pointing out that the rest of the building's air seemed to be working okay. If Dean was that bothered by it, he could probably
switch rooms for the afternoon until it was fixed. Part of him wondered if maybe whoever was in charge wasn't taking just a tad longer to fix Dean's air than they had to, for reasons which would boggle Dean's mind no matter how well someone tried to explain them to him. He thought that all his employees loved him.

  "Well?" Dean asked, lifting sweaty eyebrows.

  Colt rounded his shoulders back. "Yes. I'll do it."

  Dean smiled. "Good. I knew you would." He began rummaging through a stack of papers on his desk. "Now all I need you to do is sign a few papers, mere formalities, you understand. Says that you won't sue us if things go wrong, there's a few words about life and death, that sort of thing, nothing major. Nothing for you to worry about. Just sign the papers and you can be on your way tomorrow."

  "No, not tomorrow."

  Dean looked up now, the V in his forehead deepening. "What was that?"

  "Not tomorrow. It's one of my conditions."

  "Conditions?" Dean asked. "I don't like the sound of that. I don't like it at all. I set the conditions, not you or anyone else."

  "You need me. If you want me to do this for you, then you need to listen."

  Dean's eyebrows drew tightly together. "You listen—"

  Colt turned around and headed for the door.

  "Where are you going?" Dean shouted, rising from his desk. "Get back here."

  Colt stopped and turned around. "If you won't listen, then my answer is no."

  Dean shook his head, his hands balling up into sweaty fists. "You can't give me one answer and then take it back."

  "You can't send me to do a job like this and not expect me to tell the people I love what's going on."

  Dean chuckled now. "I see. This is about Ava Fortune."

  "It is."

  Dean was shaking his head again, much more sympathetically this time. "You can't tell her. In fact, you'd do well just to break it off with her now. There's no way you can ever tell her the truth."

  "Not all of it but I can tell her some. Enough to satisfy her. Enough that I don't lose her."

  "It's impossible. Regulations stipulate—"

  "Regulations stipulate there's only one way that I can share that information with her."

  Dean's eyes widened. He scratched at his chin and took two paces left, two paces right. "If that's what you want to do... I suppose I can't stop you."

  "Good. Then give me two weeks."

  "Two weeks and then you'll go? No matter what happens with Ava?"

  "That's right."

  Dean nodded. "All right. I accept." He went back to his desk. "Now come and sign these contracts."

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Oh, please," Lucy Lockwood shouted sarcastically, a loud giggle escaping her throat. "Zulubar is the goblin king. You think he's lonely? Do goblins even get lonely? I bet he's got women throwing themselves at his feet, ready to smear ketchup on his peanut butter sandwich or whatever it was you said they ate."

  I shook my head and suppressed my own giggle. "Mayonnaise, and I hear it's quite good." Lucy made an icky face. "I'm just saying that every time I've been down there to see him, he's never with anyone."

  "He's surrounded by people constantly." Lucy tilted her to the side. "Well, not people. But you know what I mean. His own people. Goblins."

  "Yes, but they're not really with him. They're more like following him. It's not the same thing."

  "Well, meddle if you want, but I'd keep my nose out of it."

  Aunt Eleanor's head shot up. "No!" she shouted. "No meddling." She turned to me. "Ava, honey, I love you. You know that. Like you were my own daughter. But if you mess up the Goblin Ball for us, I'll kill you."

  "I'm not going to mess up anything," I reassured her.

  "Do you know that this is the first time an outside bakery has ever been asked to cater the Goblin Ball? Do you know what an honor that is?" Eleanor spied a cookie that was ready to tumble off the display tray it was sitting on. She set aside the cake she'd been decorating and straightened it.

  "I do know," I told her, "because you won't stop talking about it."

  Eleanor blushed. "Well, it's just such an honor."

  Trixie, my slightly ditsier, slightly younger aunt, blew a lock of blond hair out of her eyes. "I think they only asked us because of you and the sheriff," she said to her sister.

  Eleanor looked back up from the cake she'd resumed decorating. "That's not true!"

  "Then why ask us? Why not ask Sweets n' Treats or one of the bakeries in Mistmoor?"

  Eleanor shook a spoonful of frosting in the air. "Because the Mystic Cupcake is the best bakery on the entire island, not just in Sweetland Cove."

  "Heavenly Haven only has a handful of bakeries on it to begin with," Trixie said.

  "Precisely, and we're better than any of them."

  "I don't disagree but you've got to admit that being married to a man who's part goblin has its advantages, at least in this case. Don't you think?" When Eleanor said nothing, Trixie turned to me. "Ava, you agree with me. Tell her."

  I blinked. "I... uh... I think that I'd better check on my dad. He's been in the back all day, for all we know he could be burning the brownies and adding caramel to my raspberry syrup." I paused. "Actually, that sounds good, doesn't it? Maybe we should try that."

  "Good job," Lucy whispered to me. "Better to distract them than take sides. Even though Trixie's right."

  Eleanor looked at us. "What was that?"

  "Nothing," Lucy said.

  I made my way to the door leading to the back room where we did most of our baking and decorating and collided with my father, who was pushing through from the other side.

  "Ouch!"

  "Ava! I'm sorry," he said, putting his hands on my head and holding me steady long enough to look at my face. "Are you seeing double?" he asked, holding up two fingers in front of me.

  "No."

  "But I think I am," a woman's voice said from behind my father. Sadie Belle stepped out of the back room looking worse than when she'd gone in there. She was holding a tissue in one hand and her wand in the other. Her nose was so red it almost matched her hair.

  "You're not feeling any better?" I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  "I'm just going to take Sadie home," my dad said, slipping his arm around her waist so that she could lean on him. She put her wand into the pocket of her cardigan. She must have used an expansion charm on her pockets because I couldn't even see the tip of it poking out.

  "Good idea," Eleanor said.

  Sadie sneezed just then... right into a plate of cupcakes that Trixie had left sitting on the counter.

  Sadie's pale face turned as red as the rest of her. "I'm so sorry," she said, sneezing again.

  "It's all right, dear," Eleanor said, taking the cupcakes and throwing them into the trash. She shot my father a look and cocked her head toward the door.

  "Right," my dad said. "We're going." He gently helped Sadie toward the door, stroking the back of her neck as they moved.

  "I should never have come down here," Sadie complained, her short hair bobbing up and down as she sneezed a third time. "I've just been working so much at the hospital the last couple of weeks I haven't had much time to see Eli. I thought today... achoo!"

  Her lone tissue wasn't enough to cover the job this time.

  "I'll get you some more tissues," Trixie said, hurrying to the back room for a box.

  "Don't bother," Sadie said and pulled out her wand. "Tissue compari-ah-ah-ah-choo!" A raw steak appeared in her hand just as she let out the loudest sneeze of all. Sadie made a face and handed the steak to my father. She was a vegetarian.

  "I'll just put that in back," my dad said and hurried off with it.

  "Tissue compari..." Sadie tried again. This time, she managed to get more of the words out before sneezing. "Comparianunu-ah-ah-ah-choo!" A giant pillowcase materialized in her hand. She looked over at us. "That was closer, at least."

  I nodded as Trixie and my father r
eturned with a box of tissue each. They handed them to her.

  "Thanks," she mumbled, blowing her nose. "It's so embarrassing. Even with my wand, I'm having a hard time conjuring anything."

  "You're sick," my father said, kissing the top of her head.

  "I know. And I'm supposed to work tonight, too."

  He frowned. "You're not going in to work like that. You can't. You'll only make yourself worse." His face scrunched up, and he let out a big sneeze.

  "Sounds like you're catching whatever she's got," I told him.

  "I'm fine," my dad said. “Just allergies."

  "If you go in to work, you'll make everyone who's already sick that much sicker," Lucy added.

  Sadie paled. "You're right. I'll call Dr. Dunne and let him know."

  She blew her nose again, a loud honk that seemed to go on forever.

  "I'll bring you some soup later," Eleanor said. "Just go home and rest."

  Sadie nodded and let my father lead her outside. The bell above the door chimed as they made their exit.

  "Poor thing," Eleanor said. "I hope she doesn't get Eli sick, not that I'd blame her, of course. It's only that with the Goblin Ball coming up, we can't afford for him to go taking off."

  "I'll brew him up something to ward off a cold," Trixie offered.

  "No, your brews always come out bitter," Eleanor said.

  "No," Trixie countered. "Your brews are the bitter ones. Mine are sweet as honey."

  "That's because you try to hide the bitterness by adding an entire jar of honey to one little cup. Even then, the bitterness still comes through."

  "Whatever honey I add is in there for its health benefits and nothing more."

  "That's what you—"

  "Ahhh-CHOO!"

  Sadie's latest sneeze was so loud we heard it even though she was now outside. We all looked out the window and saw her drop to the ground.

  "Sadie!" I shouted, worried something was wrong. I ran outside, followed by Lucy and my aunts. Sadie wasn't lying on the ground though, she was kneeling on it. My dad was at her side.