Morgan’s fingers dug into my hips gently, her hands resting against my waist, their reassuring presence warm and unwavering as she held me firmly. She kissed me back, opening her mouth to me, tasting me and drinking me in.
I wanted to see her kissing me, wanted to see how close we were, so even though it felt strange, I opened my eyes wide, saw her own eyes closed, and so near to mine, her glittering eye shadow flashing in the porch light.
My heart was beating so loudly within me that we seemed to follow a rhythm all our own as we stood together, linked and embracing and kissing one another fiercely.
She broke away, smiling down at me, her eyes sly as she began to chuckle. Then we laughed a little—that awkward moment after the kiss, when I wondered if I should make a joke, or if I should kiss her again, and everything was silly and golden, and she looked so happy.
She put her fingers on my shoulder, slid them up to the curve at the base of my head, gently turning in my hair. “That was lovely,” she said, then leaned a little closer. “You are lovely.”
I didn't know what to say. No one had ever told me I was lovely before. I could feel the blush creeping over my skin and flushing my face, and I breathed out, suddenly aware of how close she was, how warm she was, how she held me like she might never let go. It felt right; all of this felt so right, and when she lowered her head to kiss me again, I savored the moment, savored the starshine and the way her long red hair brushed over my forehead as she bent over me, and the way that she reminded me of apple cider—warm and hot and spicy.
Despite potentially evil fairies and that shady Allen MacRue…my terrible night had turned out to be not such a terrible night after all.
In fact, it was positively magical.
Chapter 8: The Mermaid
So…the Witch Way Café had been open for approximately—I checked my watch—four hours, and thus far?
Not a single customer.
“Don’t worry,” Winnie assured me as I stood, hands on my hips, and stared out the open front door at the people walking on the sidewalk, striding right past. “Your aunt never had that many customers to begin with,” she said, stretching overhead as she floated in a seated position next to me. She put her see-through chin in her see-through hands and cast me a sidelong glance.
“Well, I am worried,” I told her with an agitated sigh. “I mean, no customers? I’ve put up a sign that says ‘We’re back in business!’ and I’ve lit up the open sign, and—let’s be honest—it’s not as if there are all that many places to eat in Wolf Town.”
“You’re forgetting,” said Winnie with raised eyebrows, “that a lot of these residents don’t exactly…um…eat what’s on your aunt’s menu.”
I paused and bit my lip, letting her words sink in. “Okay, that’s a little creepy,” I told her with a small smile. But, joking aside, I was worried that my aunt would come back from her vacation all happy and rested, and go to check the cash register…and realize that her niece had netted her a big, fat, whopping zero.
I supposed it was time to do a little magic.
I sighed again, turned and strode back to the counter. I stood behind it, straightened my shoulders, and stretched my arms overhead, taking a deep breath. And then I closed my eyes.
Used to my witchy shenanigans by this point, Winnie didn’t even remark.
I imagined:
All of the folks of Wolf Town coming into the cafe—every chair and booth in the café filled, coffee brewing and bubbling, the teapot singing, me flipping pancakes and omelettes over the back stove. Everyone who wandered through Wolf Town stopping at the café, ordering a plate of bacon or flapjacks, drinking the magical coffee and filling my aunt’s cash register with well-folded and creased cash.
I imagined this for as long as I could hold the image, my heart warming at the vision. And then I opened my eyes, took another deep breath. I’d set the intention for the space. Now I just had to believe it utterly and keep doing what I was doing.
“So mote it be,” I whispered.
A knock at the shop door shattered the silence. An apologetic Burt Halek peered through the glass.
“So sorry to trouble you again, Amy,” he said, out of breath. He huffed in and out as he stood in the doorway, leaning on the doorjamb like it was the only thing keeping him upright. “I wanted to let you know that the water is going to have to be turned off again—”
“Again! Wow…” I faltered, but nodded encouragingly to him. “Please don’t worry about it—it’s all right, Burt. You can turn it off right away.”
“Wish us luck, Amy? This is getting ridiculous. I don’t really know what to do, what keeps blocking it… It almost seems hopeless,” he sighed, and turned to go.
I remembered what Winnie and Morgan had said about lake monsters—and the likelihood of Ellie’s dubious offspring clogging the pipes.
“Wait, Burt!” I called, grabbing my hoodie from the peg by the door. It read “Salem Witch,” which was only half true, but it was very warm. “Maybe I can help?” I offered. I felt, in my bones, that I needed to offer him assistance.
Burt didn't refuse me, which demonstrated just how desperate he really was. I wasn’t a plumber, after all.
He nodded, gestured for me to follow him, and after I switched off the open sign on the café window, we trotted off down the street, the October sun honeying the noon hour.
---
The water pipes for the entire town were connected beneath the old Gymbon plant, a factory that Burt had informed me once made shoes. Now it was abandoned—really one of the only places in Wolf Town that wasn't well kept or loved, it seemed. The large brick building squatted on the far edge of town, overgrown with trees, shrubs and sumac, the windows smashed—probably by rowdy teenagers. Burt let us in through the chainlink fence recently erected around the property, unlatching the big lock affixed to the gate.
“Originally, we thought it might have been one of Ellie's get that kept messing up the pipes,” he told me, as he swung the gate closed behind us and we walked up to the plant entrance. “But we’ve found no trace of any of them, and Ellie hasn't been reproducing this past month. Henry said he took away all of her eggs.” He sighed and cast his eyes heavenward. “How a lake monster manages to reproduce without a sire helping the equation… Well. I guess there are weirder things in Wolf Town.”
I laughed, then sobered as I realized that he hadn't meant his words to be funny.
“Hey—do you hear that?” I asked suddenly.
Singing. A woman’s voice, high and sweet. I couldn’t make out any of the words...
Burt and I exchanged a glance and then ventured into the abandoned factory.
Since most of the windows had been broken, shattered glass littered the ground, sparkling and reflecting the sky peeking through the holes in the faraway roof. There were exposed beams curving down to meet us from overhead, and the eerie sound of a chain clinking against the sheet metal wall made the hair on the back of my neck stand to attention. We startled a small flock of pigeons roosting in the rafters, which flew from one end of the room to the other. A few disturbed white feathers drifted down at our feet.
My skin pricked again, and I put a hand on Burt's arm. He paused, took a flashlight out of his coat pocket, flicked it on.
In the darker recesses of the factory, eyes glittered when he shone his light. But they were small eyes, probably belonging to a rat, and when the little creature turned and scampered back into the far shadows, I knew it had definitely been a member of the rodent family.
Still, I felt alert and uneasy. I closed my eyes, stilled my breathing (trying, and failing, to calm my rapidly beating heart; I’ve never been a fan of abandoned, spooky places) and listened.
Again, that singing. It was the sweet, soprano female voice, lilting a wordless melody. The voice seemed to waft from everywhere and nowhere; it surrounded me, making it impossible to locate its origin. Was someone here in the building with us? I doubted that anyone would have left a music player here tu
ned in to the Enya station.
We ventured forward a few more steps, just as I felt the presence in front of us rise.
There was a hole in the floor a few feet ahead, a vast chasm that showed the water pipes below and led down into what was once probably a basement. One of the pipes lay open and broken, the water flowing through said basement at a very low level, sluggish and slow. As I looked down through the break, I thought I saw a shadow…
Burt turned the flashlight to the break in the pipe, and a pair of eyes—large eyes this time—shone in the beam.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: pale green skin covered something skeletal and scaly, something slowly crawling out of the pipe to stare up at us. I…thought it was a woman. But no… Only part of it was a woman. The being had long green hair, and long sharp teeth protruded from a wide mouth, but the lower half of its body was most certainly not woman-shaped. At all. Possibly it was part…reptile? Or fish? Either way, the lower body was sinuous and slick, and coupled with the long, claw-like arms, the overall sight was a nightmarish vision, like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. But I knew—by instinct, I guess—what it was supposed to be: a mermaid.
Burt and I stared down at it, and it stared up at us, and, so slowly that I thought I must be imagining it, it distended its jaw and—quite a bit like a cat—hissed at us. It was low, that sound, but it made my skin crawl, and I stepped back away from the hole. The thing below us—the mermaid—was much bigger than a human, probably twice as tall as me, if you counted the tail, and it wasn't that far from us, only ten feet or less.
“What is it?” I asked Burt, because I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted to be sure. Actually, I wanted him to prove me wrong, because this couldn’t be a mermaid. Not this…
Burt shook his head slowly with a slight shrug, switching the flashlight off. The creature blinked, then lowered itself, coiling its scaly part beneath it, as if it might, at any moment, spring.
“I think we’re in a mess of trouble,” said Burt in a very small, low voice.
I took a deep breath. Granted, I didn’t have much (or any) experience with sharp-toothed, monstrous mermaids, but I’m not a sit-there-and-do-nothing kind of witch, either. I put my hands out before me and brought up a shield of protection as quickly as I could spin it, and I felt the energy crackle about me.
Psychic protection was all well and good, but some physical protection was always a good idea, too. I picked up a tree branch that had helpfully fallen through a window at some point in the recent past, and I brandished it in front of me. Burt was fishing around in his pocket, but when he drew out his hand, all it held was a pen.
The creature cocked its head, flicked its eyes from us to the wall it would have to climb to reach us. And then, like the stuff of nightmares, it slithered off of the pipe, down over the water-covered floor of the basement, and placed its long, sharp fingers on the wall, digging claws into the metal, making it shriek. Inexplicably—but probably magically—the mermaid began to climb.
“Oh, crap,” I said, which really didn't cover my horror. This was way beyond my area of expertise, and, honestly, I'd never hurt anything larger than a gnat, but I figured I might have some sort of fighting chance, if Burt could be helpful. The poor guy was trying, but he'd just tripped on a larger, non-wieldable branch, falling backwards into a small pile of leaves; he was currently scrabbling as he tried to rise and find his lost glasses at the same time.
It was so sudden, how the thing peered up and over the edge of the hole, that I felt my heart throw itself against my ribs. One clawed hand came over the edge, and then two, and then it was heaving itself up, jaw open too large—like a snake trying to swallow something bigger than its throat. A hiss mingled with a high-pitched, musical song that I had, before I'd known where it was coming from, thought lovely.
So, upon waking this morning, brandishing a stick at a really angry mermaid had not been on my list of things to do. But here I was, so I held the stick a little higher, shot a prayer of holy-hell-I-need-a-little-help-here to the Goddess, and braced myself.
And I felt something…changing.
I raised my head but didn't dare remove my eyes from the creature's eyes as it drew closer. And then, all at once, the mermaid sort of flew to the side, tumbling end over end as a wolf ran into it. Or rather, onto it.
A wolf…
It was a wolf.
My wolf.
Morgan in her wolf form (I recognized her from the markings around her muzzle, and the tuft of white fur on her tail) bit down into the thing's neck, eliciting a shriek that shattered the rest of the glass in the place, bringing me to my knees, hands clamped over my ears. Somehow, the mermaid slithered away from her, and it began circling her, its long, fish-like tail twitching. It moved like a snake, and it was dripping green ichor out of a hole in its neck. Where the fluid fell, the flooring sizzled.
Morgan was a large wolf, but she was dwarfed by the angry creature. Not that that deterred her. As I brandished my stick again, Morgan growled, hackles high, and snapped at the creature's tail, keeping it moving. It was being cowed and gradually backed away from her, towards that hole in the floor. I held the stick a little higher, and when the mermaid tried to crawl away from the wolf and away from the hole in the floor, I waved my stick threateningly.
It hissed at me, its teeth glittering wickedly in the light that shone through the hole in the roof. It wouldn't turn its back on the wolf, and it wouldn’t turn its back on me, so as it writhed backwards, it half-fell, half-climbed back down into the basement. It sat growling at us in the water for a long moment, but Morgan was having none of it: she snarled, the sound ricocheting around the enclosed space. At this, the mermaid backed slowly into the pipe, disappearing from view, its hiss fading around us to nothingness.
I felt the tension leave me all at once as the adrenaline leaked out of me. I let the stick drop, and Burt stood, brushed off the knees of his jeans, wincing as he straightened. I retrieved his glasses from the ground and placed them in his hands.
Still feeling the aftershocks of heart-against-ribs, I watched Morgan as she trotted over to us, licking her lips and shaking like a very wet dog after a particularly violent rainstorm. She sat down, yawned hugely, then looked at me with imploring eyes.
I knelt down beside her, awkwardly patting the top of her head. Her wolf rolled its eyes at me, and she dog-laughed, opening her mouth wide and shaking her head. She was amused, definitely. Maybe I shouldn’t have patted her head. She glanced to Burt.
“I'm fine, Morgan. Thanks for asking,” he said, picking up his baseball cap from where it had fallen and placing it back on his head. He smiled at her. “Got here just in the nick of time, didn’t you?”
If a werewolf could shrug, Morgan shrugged now; then she stood and stretched. She huffed out a sigh, and before our eyes, her face became smaller, her nose less elongated, her fur growing back into her body…
She transformed into a human.
Morgan stood before us, utterly naked.
“I don't have any clothes around here, see,” she said, arms draped over her breasts and pelvic area. Burt didn't look phased at all as he glanced mildly at the hole in the ceiling, but I wasn’t nearly as cool. A blush began to rise in me as I stared at the impossibly beautiful woman before me, at the curve of her muscles, at the curve of her breasts.
I would like to point out, again, that she was standing in front of us naked. Again, she seemed amused by my reaction, chuckling a little before she became serious. “And all this time, I'd been blaming poor Ellie’s kids, and it was a mermaid. Ah, well. I'm glad nothing too serious happened, and no one got hurt. I've never heard of a mermaid coming in this far from the sea. I mean, we're not that far out, but still…”
“True, but what I don't understand is how the town let her in. The protections should have caught her, stopped her,” sighed Burt, shrugging. “I'll have to bring this up with your father.”
“Yeah—he’ll get to the bottom of it,” said Morgan w
ith a soft smile. She turned to me, inclining her head and dropping her voice to a low, throaty growl. “Amy…did you get hurt?”
I glanced up into her eyes, my heart hammering against my ribs. God, if Burt hadn’t been there (and it was pretty damn awkward that he was, poor guy), I would have wrapped my hands over her waist, my fingers gliding over her hips, drawing her close to me, her warm body oh so close to mine, and kissed her with the fierceness that was rising in me as I stared at her.
“No,” I whispered, then cleared my throat, emotion making my words low. “I didn’t get hurt,” I told her. Her hair was tangled in knots, bits of leaves and twigs stuck in her waves, but as she stood there, utterly confident, utterly predatory, I don't think I'd ever seen her look more lovely.
“I'm glad,” she growled, and for a moment, it seemed that she wanted to say something more, but she took a deep breath, then sighed, the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth mischievous. “I'll see you tonight—for dinner?” she asked.
Did a naked werewolf just ask me out on a date? I grinned like a fool and nodded quickly. Yes, yes, she had. And, yes, dinner would be wonderful.
She took one step closer, leaned down and brushed her warm, soft lips against my cheek, such a gentle, unexpected gesture that a shiver coursed through me. Then she winked at me again, and, taking a step back, she began to change. It was so surreal, watching the fur drift out of her skin, watching her skeleton morph and change, and almost instantaneously, there was a great big wolf in front of me, where Morgan the human had once stood.
She shook her pelt, licked her snout, and with a little wolfish smile, turned and trotted out of the building.
My blush deepened, my breath came short, and my heart was in danger of bolting out of my chest.
Part of me thought: I could totally have managed by myself. I could have kicked that mermaid’s butt (if she’d had one, and not a fish’s tail). I hope it doesn't come back, but—if it does—I'll be ready for it!
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