The regular harassment visited on him by the ghosts of his irate and moronic ancestors didn't count as company. In Lance's book, their constant badgering and bemoaning of their fate was punishment for a crime he hadn't committed. Yet, anyway.
He was doomed to loneliness if he didn't get rid of the curse, but where could he find a Faerie Princess to kiss him? Too bad he couldn't advertise on the Internet for a Faerie Princess. This wasn't San Francisco, and he wasn't interested in that kind of faerie, thank you very much.
Besides, with the weight of his ancestors' ire resting on his shoulders, he was more likely to do some skewering of his own if he ever ran into a real Faerie, rather than ask for a kiss. Lance knew better than to hope that kind of an encounter would turn out well. He didn't want to find out what could be worse than turning into a disgustingly cute little mouse at the dark of the moon.
Sometimes he wondered if his frustration was the only reason he stayed in the extermination business. It was rather healing to destroy his nightmares and win the eternal gratitude of pretty ladies. Too bad that gratitude never seemed to help them get past the ugly, furred, cheese-nibbling truth. Witness his great-uncle Myron's frustration in finding a ladylove. Which was why Lance was the only living descendant of Sir Mortimer.
Not that he wanted to have children to pass the curse on to, but finding a lady to love him despite everything would free him from at least one small portion of the curse. After all, his mother's love had saved his father from the small print of the curse, so to speak. Where could he find a woman like Mom, in this day and age?
Half an hour later, Lance pulled up in front of Glori Day's Daycare. He was halfway out of his truck when he took a good look at the tree-sheltered building. His jaw dropped so low, he nearly tripped over it.
The place looked like a set from Hansel and Gretel. He hoped those gingerbread people decorating the picket fence, and the gumdrops framing the windows, weren't really sugar-frosted. That would explain part of the problem right there. Would the Health Department have allowed a place like this to open up if the owner was that stupid? Lance shook his head and walked around to the back of the truck to get his basic preliminary examination kit. The woman who called him sounded way too young to be the owner. Maybe the owner was a wicked witch, complete with warty nose, hunched back, black robes and green complexion? He wouldn't be surprised. After all, several dozen foul-tempered, male chauvinist pig ghosts haunted him. What was an ugly witch or two, compared to that?
His first touch on the candy cane gate sent a pleasant jolt through him that put peppermint in his mouth, warmed his belly and put tingles in his feet and hands. That feeling of power reminded him of the energy that encased him just before he popped--sounding like a soap bubble bursting--into Itty Mouse. The peppermint taste turned sour, and the tingle in his feet turned into an itch to run. What the heck was going on with this place?
"Mr. Knight?" A young woman's voice cut through the jangle of reactions and cleared his head.
Lance took a good look at her and forgot all about his apprehensions. A completely different jolt ran through his anatomy. His best buddy in high school had always greeted pretty girls with "Hubba hubba." Lance had thought the guy a jerk when it came to being cool, but the words nearly spilled out of his mouth now.
Golden-red curls hung down her back to her waist, decorated with jewel-winged butterflies. Those couldn't be real, could they? Big eyes like emeralds, framed in curly lashes. A full, bow-shaped, cherry-colored mouth. Golden-tanned skin. Lots of golden-tanned skin, revealed by a sleeveless top and knee-length pants, both in a stretchy green material that covered her decently and invited lots of speculation about the sweet, sleek curves they hid. She wore matching green sneakers with sparkly laces and ankle socks with glitter on their lacy cuffs.
She dressed like a little kid, but the heat building up inside Lance told him she was sure enough a big girl. Did she want to come out and play?
"Mr. Knight?" she repeated, and met him at the gate. She held out her hand. "I'm Glori Day. Thank you so much for coming out so late in the day. It's an emergency. This has never happened to me before. It all just sort of exploded into a problem over the weekend. I don't know how I can ever thank you enough for rescuing me."
"That's what Knights are for, Ma'am," he managed to rumble. Lance prayed he wasn't drooling. He nearly wiped his mouth to make sure, before stretching out his hand to shake hers.
That same jangling, tingling jolt of magic shot through him as her long-fingered hand with its gold glitter-painted fingernails slid into his grip.
* * * *
Glori stared into his square-cut face, framed in heavy black five o'clock shadow, while her knees turned to cotton candy. She felt his pulse racing under her fingertips, and saw a few tremors race through his body. Funny thing was, her pulse and shivers were ten times worse.
No! This could not be happening. She refused to be attracted to a Human. Especially one named Knight. Every female in her family line had sworn never to have anything to do with a knight. Ever since that abysmally rude, tin-plated, egotistical, foul-smelling oaf attacked her third cousin Feathedora when she rescued Matilda from her disgusting, lecherous uncle and brought her to live among the Fae.
Nothing in the world could make her...
Glori looked down at her hand, so gently gripped in his huge, calloused, hot paw. She liked his touch. How much magic would it take to whisk him off to her cozy little cottage outside the city, clean him up, and make a nice dinner for them to share...and then find out if he believed in the Fae?
No! Bad girl! Not the right way to think at all.
Besides, she had a daycare center full of bugs, and bugs were his specialty. Right? She glanced at the knight skewering an enormous rat, painted on the side of his truck. Thank goodness there were no mice in her daycare.
"Ah... If you'll come inside, maybe we can get started?" she managed to say in a reasonable tone of voice. Somehow, Glori slid her hand free of his grip and took a step backwards. She pulled the gate open and gestured for him to walk down the yellow brick walkway to the front door.
"Are you free for dinner, ma'am?"
"Mr. Knight--"
"Call me Lance." He offered up a grin that showed off nice, white teeth and a dimple in his left cheek.
"You might not be free. The bugs could keep you very busy." She turned her back on him in desperation. If she looked into his big cobalt blue eyes for a few seconds longer, they both might be frozen there until morning. That wouldn't look good for her business, would it?
"No bug ever kept me that busy," he mumbled, behind her.
Glori closed her eyes as she gripped the door and spelled the lock open. She took a deep breath and braced herself to bolster the magic, altering it just enough to let them in without letting the bugs out. The door swung open. Every surface in the main room was...moving.
How could this have happened to her? It had never happened before, in all the years since she bought the building. How could so many bugs have showed up in just one weekend? It wasn't as if her children were messy. No more messy than any ordinary children. Just a few buckets of paint and modeling clay, two spilled glasses of juice, maybe a cup of cookie crumbs spread over a playroom thirty feet by thirty feet. Glori thought about it again, even knowing that considering her problem would create another headache--and she was totally out of chocolate.
No, the only explanation she could come up with was that her magic had decided to take a vacation without warning. And whatever "temporary" magic had come to take its place was working totally backwards!
Lance took one look, braced his arms on the doorframe, and went pale.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat."
The music whispering through the back of his mind, in time with his racing heart, didn't sound like the theme music from Jaws. But it came close.
Chapter Two
"Get out of here, boy," a cracked, creaking voice whispered in Lance's left ear. A chill breeze reeking of r
usty iron blew down his collar.
"This is the last place you want to be," another voice agreed in Lance's right ear. An aroma of vinegar and ink came with the chill trickle of air that followed the pronouncement.
Lance glanced around the deserted daycare room--deserted, but for a plague's worth of bugs and him. Miss Glori Day was nowhere to be seen, doing some end-of-the-day paperwork. Thank goodness the children were gone. Had she sent her students home when they arrived this morning, or had she just kept everyone outside on the playground?
Lance imagined the mess that had greeted her when she opened the door this morning. How bad had it been on Friday when she closed up for the weekend, and why hadn't she called him sooner? There was no way the infestation could have become this bad over one weekend. He couldn't imagine Miss Glori letting the children come back into this place for at least a week. Maybe more. He felt sorry for her, that was for certain, but not sorry that this mess had given him the chance to meet Miss Glori Day.
Gloria, Gloriosa, Glory-Hallelujah-I-have-seen-the-Promised-Land!
If there was ever a woman who made him want to break the family curse so he could propose marriage and settle down for a honeymoon that lasted about ten years, she was it.
He was glad she wasn't there in the room with him. Her cute little sparkly tennis shoes and all that gleaming hair and those curves made it hard to concentrate. Almost as hard as the ghostly voices hissing and whispering behind his back. Why did the spirits of his ancestors have to follow him to work, too? Thank goodness some of the younger ghosts--at least, those under two hundred years old--were happy to stay home and watch TV. That still left more than two dozen nasty, sniping, grumbling ghosts and their manifestation phenomena to follow him onto the job and make his work just that much harder.
"Will you shut up and let me do my job?" he growled, and didn't bother turning around.
Sir Mortimer, Rector Willoughby, Squire Randall and the other Knight family ghosts weren't visible to anyone but Lance. He wished they were never visible--especially during the dark of the moon--but that was part of the curse, too. He got a preview of what his eternity would look like, trapped with all the men of the Knight clan, unless he found a woman who would love him despite everything. The lucky few, like his father and his great-great-grandfather, had been able to escape the eternal meeting of the Bitter Old Men's Club, part of the fine print of the Faerie's curse, because of their wives' love.
If only he could find a Faerie Princess to kiss him and break the spell.
His chances of that were about as good as getting a pretty girl like Miss Glori to fall in love with him and put up with the curse. Modern girls simply weren't made that way.
"Your job is to stay away from Fairies, you nincompoop. And if you can't stay away from them, drive them out of town," Rector Willoughby grumbled. His constant presence made Lance wish the family had stayed Catholic instead of turning Anglican for a century. Then he would have been Father Willoughby and never married, and the curse would have ended with him.
"My job is to kill bugs and keep them away from nice people like Miss Glori," Lance shot back. He almost let his voice rise above a harsh whisper. That just wouldn't do. He didn't need her to get scared of him, thinking he talked to himself, and send him away without giving him a chance to win her heart. Or at the very least, a couple dates.
"She's not nice and she's not people, you blithering idiot," Sir Mortimer said. "On three, boys. One--two--"
"She's a bleeding twinkle-butt faerie!" the ghosts roared in chorus, with enough force to knock Lance onto his backside. He squashed about a dozen roaches that had been so stunned by the spectral howl they hadn't fled fast enough.
Lance didn't care about the mess, but the sudden appearance of Glori from the back office startled him. She couldn't have heard that howl from the Afterlife, could she? He prayed that she didn't have any sort of magical talent, or an affinity for ghosts. He didn't want a girl in touch with Otherness. He wanted a nice, normal girl who could bake apple pies and go to football games with him and yell at him to pick up his socks and put down the toilet seat. And, yes, endure the Family Curse two nights out of every moon.
"Are you okay?"
He loved her voice. Pure music. And that cute little frown of concern made him think she cared about him personally.
Common sense told him Miss Glori looked at all the children in her daycare center that way, when one of them fell down and got a booboo. He wished he could ask her to kiss it and make it better, but he was too much a gentleman to drop his coveralls and asked her to kiss him where it hurt.
Besides, she might take it entirely the wrong way. He didn't want that.
"Fine."
"Did...did something just happen outside?" She snorted. "Like a twenty-car pileup?"
That sank his hopes. Glori had heard something. She obviously didn't have much experience with hauntings and curses, if she didn't identify the sound of angry ghosts making like a cheering section at a football game. Which meant she couldn't be a Faerie, right?
Lance felt his heart skip a couple beats at that thought. In all the years he had known the ghostly roundup, they had rarely been right, so he usually ignored anything they told him. But what if, for once, they were right and Miss Glori was a Faerie? That would solve his problems, wouldn't it?
Well, only one problem. That meant he couldn't have anything else to do with her. Lance had to admit he was thinking purely with his anatomy when it came to Miss Glori.
Besides, Fairies didn't live in the real world. His grandfather and father had spent the family fortune trying to track down a Faerie, to break the curse. They had proved that even though the curse remained, Fairies had died out. And that meant Miss Glori was nothing but a pretty girl.
Nothing but? Far from it. The reactions she provoked in him proved there was at least one kind of magic still available in the world.
"I might have let out a yell. Or a curse." He discretely looked around, seeking a flicker of light that meant the ghosts were still there. As far as his ears and the absence of that creeping feeling up the back of his neck could tell, they had gone elsewhere. For the moment, at least.
"This place is enough to make a stone saint start screaming," she agreed. He saw a twinkling in her eyes. "Please, Mr. Knight, are you able to help me? And nothing that'll linger and hurt my children, of course."
He was about to groan and curse. He should have known she was taken already. Then he realized she meant the daycare children.
"I'll do my best, ma'am."
He cringed, thinking he sounded like an Old West sheriff, but Glori just smiled and turned to go back into her office. Lance sighed and got back to work, checking into all the corners, looking for burrow signs and gnaw holes, cracks in the plaster and the flooring and droppings of all kinds. The more he knew about the nasty little buggers, the better he could fight them. It was more than just his reputation and his pride in doing a job well, now. He wanted to impress Glori Day. He wanted her to be grateful to him. He wanted her so glad to see him she'd go out on a couple dates. Maybe so grateful she'd kiss him before he asked her.
"Get your brains out of your jock strap," Sheriff Mitchell suddenly snarled, his presence accented by prickling in the hairs on the back of Lance's neck.
The other ghosts appeared around him, frowning and nodding, seeming all too solid in the shadows. He had to get them to leave. Ten years ago wasn't soon enough. He didn't want a single flicker or scrap of magic to be anywhere around Glori or her daycare center. It implied things he'd rather forget.
"That girl's a Faerie," the sheriff continued, helpfully diverting Lance from depressing thoughts. "Either slice and dice and get back at her kind for what they did to us, or get out of here. For Heaven's sake, boy, don't waste time helping her out."
"There are no more Fairies," Lance reminded himself under his breath, and turned his back on the cloud of grumps.
At least, he tried to. They had the annoying ability to float around so
they always stayed within his range of vision, no matter how he turned, no matter where he went. Sort of like those eyeballs suspended in clear plastic balls, that always looked straight up no matter how fast the balls rolled.
"You wish!" Sir Mortimer cried. "As long as there are Fairies, the curse stays strong."
That made Lance pause for a moment. Then he shook his head. Glori was pretty and she made his heart sit up and pay attention like no girl had ever done before. She dressed kind of funny, but she spent her day playing with little kids, right? What woman wouldn't sort of dress and think and act like the rug rats who surrounded her? Besides, he kind of liked how she looked, like a cute little girl.
A cute big girl, hiding inside the cheerleader outfit, ready to ambush him.
In his wildest dreams.
"He's useless," the squire groaned. "Come on, boys. If he won't listen to us, why should we make ourselves miserable hanging around this place? It reeks of Fairies and magic."
Lance bit his lip to keep from saying, "Don't go away mad--just go away." The ghosts didn't appreciate sarcasm, and if they thought leaving would make him happy, they'd hang around, giving him advice and criticizing everything he did, until he was ready to tear his hair out.
There was a sound like dozens of soap bubbles popping--soap bubbles the size of pickup trucks. The light in the daycare center brightened. Lance sighed, welcoming the quiet and the lightening of the atmosphere. He glanced around, just to be sure. Yep, the ghostly roundup was gone. Sometimes family was a bigger pain than anyone could imagine.
The squirming carpet of roaches and ants thickened, as if the presence of the ghosts had kept some intimidated and in hiding. In ten seconds' time, the number of bugs visibly doubled. Well, at least there was one good use for his miserable dead relatives. Too bad he couldn't get them to stay in the places that had serious bug problems. That would clear out his personal life, but Heaven forbid his ancestors should finally become useful and make someone happy. Lance glared at the bugs, reminded himself they were his livelihood, and got back to work.
Day and Knight Page 2