Magical Midlife Invasion

by Breene, K. F.

  Elliot Graves.

  I’d never officially met him, but everyone who had agreed he was the biggest, baddest mob-boss mage in the world. He’d been trying to take me by force, thwarted at every turn by Ivy House. If this was his doing, he’d just found a way around my best defense.

  “We need to move you,” Austin said, his voice low and rough. “You’re not safe here.”

  “She’s as safe here as she is anywhere,” Mr. Tom said. “More so, because elixirs don’t last forever, and the second the mask is peeled back, Ivy House will spring.”

  Austin’s jaw clenched, but you couldn’t argue with that logic.

  “It’s fine. Right now, that deer is just checking things out,” I said. “It doesn’t suspect we’re onto it, so we still have the upper hand.”

  “Even if it did, it would come back anyway,” my dad said, reaching us. “When it comes to eating flowers, they have a short-term memory. I chased one with a tire iron early one morning. I sure scared it something good. You should’ve seen it take off. Came back the very next night.” He put a hand to his hip, the other holding up a half-eaten sandwich, and looked at the ground. “Well, no wonder it’s a great mystery,” he said. “A bunch of geniuses, standing around tracking in the dark. Go grab a light, Jacinta, and we’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “I’ve got it.” Edgar loped back into the area, a camping lantern in each hand.

  My dad watched him. “That man sure runs funny. Though for his age, it’s a blessing he runs at all.”

  “You have deer in L.A.?” Mr. Tom asked.

  “They live in the burbs on the edges of a nature preserve,” I said as Austin flicked on the light and studied the ground.

  He traced a small indent with this finger. “I don’t get a scent. All I get is the smell of flowers.”

  “Yeah, the stink of the flowers will nearly blow your hair back,” my dad said. “That’s hard-packed dirt. If that deer was just walking around, you aren’t going to see much. Get it wet tomorrow night. You’ll see a track, all right.”

  Austin stood. To me he said, “I’m going to have Jasper show me the trail. I’ll report back when I’m done. It sounds like…” His eyes flicked to my dad and back. “It sounds like we’ve been down this road before”—he was talking about Elliot Graves sending someone for me—“though this time, I’m not sure what the end goal is.”

  My father’s face scrunched up. “Well…they don’t have any end goals. They just forage. That’s what they do. The flowers are tasty, and they come to eat them.”

  I ignored my dad. “I’m going with you. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the deer is a lure in the eventuality someone—usually you—checks it out. He’s already figured out how to circumvent Ivy House’s defenses. It would make sense if he tried to take out my next strongest defense.”

  “Or maybe he knows we’ll all check it out together, since it’s on Ivy House property, and is waiting to ambush us. If I go alone, I’ll be the only one who gets—”

  “No.” I grabbed his arm, an uncomfortable feeling coiling tightly in my stomach. “We go together. I’ll…go high, so we’ll be separated, but we’ll check it out together.”

  Austin stared at me for a long moment, clearly not wanting me in danger, but probably recognizing a hopeless cause when he saw one.

  “Well. You crazy kids have fun. I think I’ll retire now.” My dad about-faced and headed for the house.

  Mr. Tom watched him go. “That man is the prime example of a Dick ignoring anything that doesn’t fit into his world view. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, I’ve heard about it, but never actually witnessed it.”

  “Oh yes, it’s quite extraordinary,” Edgar said. “I’ve seen it a lot.”

  Austin shook his head. “Fine, but you will stay with me, not in the air. Call Ulric and Cedric down here. What about the few you have in the hotel?”

  “Leave them there. I don’t want to bring any more people into my world who don’t expressly belong. Those guys aren’t great anyway.”

  “If they aren’t great, why haven’t you turned them loose?” Austin asked, stripping out of his pants.

  “I know, I know, don’t push me.” I glanced at Mr. Tom. “Anything from Niamh?”

  “Yes. She saw him or her leave, someone clad in leather. They were not glowing. Near as I can figure, the person at the front must’ve left about when that deer did.”

  “There was another one?” Austin asked.

  I blew out a breath and nodded. “No Dick or Jane prowler would care about a deer, even a glowing one. They’d just think their eyes were playing tricks. Only a magical person would know it was a shifter, and likely one using a potion or elixir. Them taking off means they were not happy to see one another.” I put my hands on my hips and thought for a moment. “Keep Niamh watching the front. Tell her to call if the person at the front comes back. We’ll check out the trail of the deer. I’m more concerned with whatever circumvented Ivy House’s magic than a person in leather. Get Cedric but leave Ulric in the front, just in case. Let’s go while the trail is still fresh. We’ll circle back to the front after.”

  “Maybe they are working together and just pulled back at the same time?” Mr. Tom said.

  “I don’t know if that would be worse or better. Regardless, my parents will be caught in the crossfire. We have to find a way out of this, for their sakes.”

  Ten

  Martha grabbed the shoes from Jessie’s floor. That girl had never learned to put her shoes away. If a body wasn’t careful, there’d be a shoe garden in the living room, housing all of the discarded shoes that were never picked up. She placed them in the enormous closet only a quarter filled with clothes. Martha clucked her tongue. All of that time with no job and no child to look after, and she couldn’t pick up a few things. Martha would never understand it. She loved shopping.

  Speaking of which, she needed to take a tour of the downtown area. She’d seen the cutest little shops as she was passing through.

  A pop caught her attention.

  She straightened, bracing her hand against her lower back. These old bones were not what they used to be.

  A crack had formed beside the dresser, from the floor nearly to the ceiling. More siding popping loose, no doubt. This house was falling apart!

  A wave of worry washed over her. Poor Jessie. First Jimmy moved away, then Matt up and left her, and now she’d been taken for a ride by that Havercamp woman. This house might look okay on the outside, if a bit spooky, but it was clearly a fixer-upper. It would be an absolute money pit. Hopefully those nice young boys planned on sticking around for a while and paying rent. Jessie was going to need it.

  Martha placed her palm on the wall and leaned into it, popping the siding back into place with a click. A few nails should do the trick. She’d let Pete know. He could hammer the problem spots back into place, easy.

  Back in the room, she noticed a doll sitting on a pillow in the middle of Jessie’s bed.

  That was odd. She didn’t remember seeing that doll when she’d come in. Then again, she hadn’t been paying attention to the bed she’d made earlier, noticing instead the discarded shoes. Jessie must’ve set the doll up there, trying to make nice after putting them all away last night.

  She left the room, and the butler fellow was out in the hall. The tuxedo was overkill and the cape just plain odd. She didn’t dare mention it to Jessie so as not to upset her, but he was a weird man. Very eccentric.

  “Good morning.” Martha smiled at him. His coloring box might be shy of a few crayons, but manners were free and friendliness went a long way. Maybe he was just depressed and acting erratically. With a new house owner, he’d had some adjustments as well. He didn’t seem dangerous and treated Jessie with the utmost respect, and Jessie did have good locks on her doors—Martha had tested them—so there didn’t seem to be anything to worry about.

  “Yes. Good morning. I trust you slept well,” he said, the words polite but the tone stuf
fy. It was like he fashioned himself after the butlers in those black-and-white British movies. Someone should tell him he’d gotten the dress code wrong. She’d never known a butler to wear a cape, not even a British one. Although all the men in the house except Austin seemed to wear them. It must’ve been some sort of peer pressure situation, or fashion sense gone wrong.

  She smiled brighter to break through those clouds. “I did, yes, thank you.”

  “Martha!” Pete’s voice rang through the hall. “Martha! Come look at this.”

  “Will he be needing a bullhorn? I’m not sure the neighbors heard.” Tom—or maybe Earl; everyone called him something different, perhaps contributing to the poor man’s confusion—lifted his chin and walked on by.

  “What is it now?” she grumbled to herself, startling at the sight of a red-haired doll with a devilish smile standing at the end of the hallway, where the path turned right to another set of rooms and then some stairs leading to the back of the third floor. Standing, on its own. But a doll like that shouldn’t have been able to stand; its feet were too small and body top-heavy. The thing had an enormous head. Maybe it was leaning?

  She slowed, Pete momentarily forgotten. There was definitely a feeling of something being off in this house. Like a presence, or presences, resided here. She’d seen two different doors move on their own—one opening, and another closing. Pete had said it was probably the wind, and that if she didn’t watch it she was the one who’d get shipped off for losing her faculties. She had no idea what he was talking about, but she knew what she’d seen. No breeze in this house could’ve blown those doors open and shut that fast. He might not believe in ghosts, but she did, and this house was plenty old enough to have a whole bunch of them.

  That didn’t explain the doll, though…

  She approached it slowly, half wondering if it would come alive, like in those scary movies.

  “Don’t go scaring yourself, Martha. Those are only make-believe,” she murmured, getting within feet of it and peering over, trying to see if it was leaning.

  “Martha!”

  She jumped and squeaked, slapping her hand onto her mouth.

  “I’m coming!” she hollered at Pete. “I don’t have a jetpack on. Hold your horses.”

  A little closer and she could see over the doll’s head. The back of its head touched the wall. It was leaning. Someone had clearly placed it there.

  “Of course they did.” She shook her head. “Of course someone placed it there. It couldn’t have just walked there on its own.”

  She rolled her eyes at herself and took a deep breath. The house was getting to her.

  Pete stood at the base of the stairs that led up to the third floor, this set reserved for the house staff of old, she bet. There was a larger and grander set nearer the front of the house. He held a big battle-axe positioned across his body, the edges gleaming. There wasn’t a stich on him.

  “Pete!” She jammed a fist onto her hip. “For the love of God, put some clothes on!”

  “Why? Martha, the whole place runs around naked. It’s like a damn nudist colony. If they can do it, I can do it. You don’t have a set of begonias, you just don’t understand.”

  “Would you stop saying—” She tried to will herself some patience. “Maybe not, but I have a set of garden shears and have done a lot of pruning in my day.” She paused to let that sink in. “Pete, you are a guest in your daughter’s house. She doesn’t want to see you with your testicles out. Put on some clothes.”

  He gave her a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. But look at this.” He hefted the large axe.

  “Where on God’s earth did you get that? Go put it down before you slice off a thumb. Or something else.”

  “There’s a whole attic of this kind of stuff. I found it when I was looking for some mousetraps. Come on, come look at it.”

  Curiosity getting the better of her, she said, “Oh, all right.”

  By the time they scaled the two sets of stairs, she was feeling it. The fatigue didn’t last long as she surveyed the attic, the far wall absolutely covered with various weapons, polished to a high shine. Above each hung a small white square of paper with elegant scrawl in black. She squinted at them in surprise—each bore a fairly common person’s name.

  “And check this out.” He placed the axe on its pegs below the name Jake and crossed the space with bare feet.

  “Careful, you might step on a nail.”

  “Or a spike!”

  “Yes, fine, or a spike. I don’t know why you insist on one-upping me all the time…”

  He opened a drawer and extracted a large red stone. “She’s got a whole drawer full of these things. Looks like a ruby, doesn’t it?”

  “Pete, now, I don’t know about looking through her things.”

  “She said all this stuff came with the house. Maybe she doesn’t even know they’re here. Boy, wouldn’t it be something if it was a real ruby?”

  “Of course it isn’t a real ruby.” She peered at the costume gemstones. “This is probably for crafts or something.”

  “Or look at this one…” He pulled out a blue stone the size of the end of his thumb. “This could be worth more than our car.”

  “No one with precious gemstones like this would keep them in a drawer in the attic. Why are those weapons labeled with names, do you think? That is a bit odd.”

  “This whole place is a bit odd. They went looking for a deer last night, acting like it was some first-rate spy or something. They launched into some big talk about tracking and smelling and defenses—build a fence, you know? Deer can’t climb fences. That’s all the defense you need. I think that big guy is some sort of plant nut or something. He really seemed worried about that deer eating Jessie’s flowers.”

  “He’s caring. Don’t you see the way he looks after her, pulling out her chair and guiding her through doorways? He’s a real Prince Charming. I’d say she still has the chance to meet the love of her life. Matt wasn’t it, we always knew that. What if Austin is the real Prince Charming?”

  “Prince Charming had a castle, not a flower complex. Don’t start, Martha. She doesn’t need to be set up. The kid just got out of a marriage. She’s bruised. Let her find her own way.” He pushed the drawer closed. “Do you remember seeing a garage? I don’t think chasing rats through a house with a battle-axe is the right way to play it, no matter how fun it sounds.”

  “Sometimes she just needs a little push, is all.” Martha made her way down the stairs again, gripping the handrail tightly. Thinking about that red-headed doll down below. “Careful here, Pete, these are steep. I wonder if maybe I won’t round up those dolls and put them away after all.”

  Click.

  “Jiminy crickets,” he said, “there’s another bit of plaster coming loose down the hallway there. This place is going to fall down around us.”

  Eleven

  “Here we are.” Mr. Tom stopped in front of what looked like a small house with a wraparound porch, heavily screened by two large maples. The noonday sun dappled the uneven sidewalk in front of the establishment, the tree roots pushing at the concrete. No sign announced a business and no cars waited in the parking lot to the right.

  “This is Agnes’s?” I asked, just to be sure, so tired that I barely knew my name.

  We’d traveled through the entire wood last night, finding just one spot where Austin could pick up a scent. Just one. No scents, beyond the usual floral bombardment, trailed to or from the spot of munched flowers. Jasper had pinpointed the location perfectly, halfway from the flowers to the property line, the place where the deer had disappeared. If Jasper hadn’t remembered the exact path he’d taken, Austin might never have found it.

  The intruder was definitely a shifter—I didn’t know how Austin could tell, but he was sure—and shifters couldn’t also be mages. Being a female gargoyle came with sorceress/mage perks, but whatever gene or magic turned a person into an animal shifter allowed only that one kind of magic. Which meant the deer shifter was usi
ng potions or elixirs—potions apparently being the stronger of the two—created by a master craftsman who may or may not be Elliot Graves.

  The person at the front of the house hadn’t been concealed. Their scent was all through the yards along the right side of the road. They were not a shifter, but beyond that, Austin couldn’t tell.

  The deer’s late-night visit had opened up another question: if intruders had the ability to visit Ivy House unseen, were there others besides the deer that had walked around the property? Ones who didn’t have a taste for flowers?

  We still didn’t know if those prowling the front were connected to those prowling the actual grounds. We didn’t know much of anything, actually.

  We’d gotten home just before dawn, and any sleep from then until midmorning had been fretful and plagued by dreams of fire-breathing deer sporting glowing red eyes. Some even had rocket launchers mounted on their backs. I kept waking up thinking the house was under attack.

  Maybe it was, albeit silently. Stealthily.

  “Yes. This is it.” Edgar beamed, standing down the sidewalk a little with Niamh and Ulric.

  “This is a lovely little spot,” my mom said, she and my dad having tagged along with the group. She looked around the quiet street, somewhat removed from the downtown strip. “It is just so lovely here. So peaceful and green. Just gorgeous.”

  “Shall we?” Austin lightly touched the small of my back, the absence of pressure giving me a chance to linger on the sidewalk if I wanted.

  “Do you guys want to check out the downtown shops and the tasting rooms?” I asked my mom. “This is just about gardening stuff, in here.”

  “Insects,” Mr. Tom said.

  I nodded and rubbed my eyes. “Right, yeah. Bugs.” If my parents thought it was actual gardening, they might want to check it out. “We’re just looking for something to take care of bugs.”

  “Flowers and capes,” my dad said, shaking his head. “I think you’re too wrapped up in flowers and capes.”