by Mindy Klasky
“Goddess smite you
Zap with ease,
Leave your target,
My main squeeze!”
In one crimson wave, a dozen platypuses popped out of existence.
I couldn’t believe it. How was Zelda casting spells like that? She was clearly making them up on the fly, pulling together rhymes as the spirit drove her. There wasn’t a spell book in the world that would contain the phrase “main squeeze.” No goddess I’d ever heard of would respond to the commands Zelda strung together like some sort of misbegotten lullaby.
But I couldn’t argue with results.
The Shifter Wanker swore, and she pointed, and the platypuses dissolved into scarlet jelly. First the ones around Mac. Then the ones closest to the bedroom door, closest to breaking through to the stairs, to freedom, to the vulnerable streets of Assjacket.
Sassy offered up her own spells, and the Baba Yaga too. Before I could even think about summoning the Guardians of Fire, Water, and Earth, only half a dozen platypuses remained. Then, five. Four. Three. Against all odds, we were going to escape.
I actually turned toward the corner, reaching for the Goldthwaite that was still sheltered behind David, Neko, and me. My fingers slipped over the leather binding, igniting all over again that familiar sense of rightness, of belonging. I spread my palm against the gold-traced title on the spine.
I was so drawn by the book that I nearly missed the disaster in the middle of the bedroom. I barely registered Mac’s whimper of dismay. A new stream of profanity from Zelda, Sassy, and Carol didn’t even register as anything out of the ordinary.
But Neko’s fingers clutching convulsively on my arm made me look up. And David’s curses—low and steady and a thousand times more deadly than Zelda’s casual exclamations—made me realize everything had changed.
I almost dropped the Goldthwaite when I peered around my warder’s stalwart shoulders. Because the massive four-poster bed was rising toward the ceiling of the bedroom, pressed up by an enormous mound of matted, dank fur.
For a dozen heartbeats, every creature in the room was frozen.
And then the bed shattered against the ceiling. The few remaining platypuses collapsed in an ecstasy of greeting. Mac roared in lupine despair. And a wombat the size of a mobile home started lumbering toward the Assjacket witches.
Chapter 5
Librarian-me knew a few things about wombats. Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept one in a cigar humidor. Wombats had cubical poop—yes, cubes. Look it up. The females had pouches, like all marsupials, and those pouches faced backwards, presumably to keep their joeys from being buried in dirt when mama burrowed for food.
But not a footnote in studies led me to expect a mountain of fur, claws as long as my forearm, and chisel-like teeth to match.
And absolutely nothing prepared me for the grunting, hissing, growling sound the giant wombat was making.
A trio of zaps, and the last three platypuses popped out of existence, victims of lightning bolts directly targeting their furry derrières. Mac tossed back his head and howled, a clear celebration of the Assjacket witches’ success.
Even as the wombat advanced, my heart swelled with Mac’s cry. For the first time since I’d entered the chaotic bedroom battle, I drew myself up to my full height. I clutched the Goldthwaite to my chest and threw my shoulders back with pride. I was a witch, like Zelda, like Sassy, like Carol. I was sworn to Hecate the same way they were. I’d had a part in defeating the platypuses.
At least, my warder had. David had taken out one of the beasts. And Neko had helped me concentrate on summoning the Guardians of Air. Maybe we’d distracted some of the pack.
Not that our platypus clean-up made a shred of difference to the wombat.
She—I could see her pouch, gaping like a mouth from Hell—rounded on the still-howling Mac. Her grunts escalated to the roar of a freight train. Her short legs shouldn’t have been able to move so quickly. Her dagger claws shouldn’t have been as agile, slashing at a wolf’s furred throat. Her spade-like teeth shouldn’t have cut through wiry wolf flesh as easily as they did.
“Quick!” Sassy shouted. “Pop that mother out of existence!”
“No!” shouted Zelda. “Don’t!”
Her sheer panic made me glance away from the imminent carnage. The Shifter Wanker’s face was as pale as the pages of the Goldthwaite I still clutched close. Her hands stretched toward Mac, as if she longed to call down Hecate’s own storm of lightning bolts, but before the first flicker of electricity could leap the gulf, her fingers curled into fists.
“No,” she repeated, her voice jagged, like she’d dragged it over broken glass. “Mac will be popped, too.”
The wolf must have understood the danger he faced. He was thrashing in the wombat’s grip, jackknifing his long, lean body. His neck twisted as he fought for a purchase, trying to slash at the wombat’s fat, furry wrists. His snarl ratcheted up in volume as his forepaws pressed against her broad chest, as he struggled to keep her incisors from finding his jugular.
“David…” I urged, but my warder was already fighting for a clear angle with his sword.
The bedroom was too small. Too crowded. And even as David took a step back, calculating the necessary timing as he sought to drive his blade deep between the wombat’s shoulder blades, Fabio threw himself onto the wombat’s back.
The warlock scrambled for a purchase on the matted brown-grey fur, shouting, “Not my son-in-law!”
Carol shrieked, ordering Fabio back to safety.
Zelda hollered, “No, Dad!”
The wombat thrashed, trying to maintain her hold on Mac, even as she crashed Fabio against the splintered ruins of the bed. Zelda swore an incandescent streak, each curse louder than the last as she fought to be heard over Mac’s yelping, the wombat’s hisses, and Fabio’s grunted words as he punched the wombat at the base of her skull: “No. Next. Adventure. Not. For. Mac. No. Noble. Death. Not. Today. You. Miserable. Shit. Eating. Monster.”
David had no room to place a blow, not with a crazed warlock blocking his only possible angle of approach. The wombat wasn’t yielding, though. Fabio’s beating seemed to have no effect. Carol was sobbing. Mac’s growls were fading to gurgles. Zelda had fallen to her knees; Sassy could barely hold her back from the carnage.
Someone had to do something.
I half-turned, shoving the Goldthwaite into Neko’s arms. He caught it, surprise bright on his face. Even as he tried to shove it back to its safe corner, I shifted my weight, making sure my side was pressed close against his.
He was my familiar. He steadied me without hesitation. He opened up the mirrors of his mind to receive my spell, to amplify it, to feed it back to me larger and louder and clearer than anything I ever could have worked on my own.
“Goddess damn you to freaking hell!” The words surged out of me. “Watch out, wombat! I call on Hecate to smite your miserable ass!”
Magic rose inside me like lava pouring out of a volcano. I was plugged in to the base of my magical abilities, directly connected to the core of other that I’d discovered in the basement of the Peabridge cottage just four months earlier. I was wild. I was free. I was a witch, and I knew exactly what to do with my power.
My arms were bars of iron as I pointed at the wombat. Fire and smoke and pure raw energy surged through me. Lasers burst from my fingertips, ten perfect beams of gold.
I aimed my power away from Fabio’s sprawling form. I directed my strike around David’s upraised sword. With the pinpoint accuracy of a nuclear weapons system, I sent my killing beams past Mac’s ripped ruff, past the rents in his flanks, into the marauding wombat’s paws and legs and body.
More energy. More. Every angry thought I’d ever harbored, every frustration I’d ever known. The memory of being chosen last for fifth-grade softball, the shame of being jilted by my college boyfriend, of choosing the wrong guy to crush on for month after month after month in my job at the Peabridge.
All of that darkness, all of those
hateful emotions, all of the jagged curses I’d never dared to say out loud—I poured them into the wombat.
She filled with golden light. Like a water balloon tied to a spigot, she swelled with my destructive power. Her paws stretched tight. She threw back her head in agony, abandoning Mac’s throat just before she could slash his jugular.
She howled as she burst—a wail that was long and high and piercing.
A greasy cloud of smoke filled the room, heavy with the stench of sulfur.
As soon as it reached Zelda, she started to choke. Her body heaved, but she still fought to crawl forward on all fours. Her fingers stretched toward Mac.
Fabio reached Zelda before anyone else could. He tried to pull her to her feet, saying, “Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe!”
But Zelda only growled, “Out of my way, Naked Guy.” I heard the words, but they didn’t make any sense. Fabio wasn’t naked. None of us were. Nevertheless, Zelda struggled forward on her hands and knees.
Fabio didn’t seem to take offense, though. He just knelt beside the retching witch, trying to settle a calming hand on the back of her neck. “Take a moment, Zelda.”
“I’m fine!” she snapped. “It’s just my gag reflex.”
Carol finally intervened, taking Fabio’s hand in both of hers. “You know we witches have very strong gag reflexes, darling. Let the Shifter Wanker do her thing.”
I shook my head. I didn’t have a strong gag reflex.
But then, I saw Mac’s mangled body, and I my own gorge rose. The wolf’s sides were laid open, stripped to the bones of his ribs. His throat was a quivering, bleeding mass. His lungs worked like bellows, but he didn’t have the strength to lift his head. Foam flecked his lolling tongue.
I didn’t realize I was sobbing until I felt David’s arms around me. He tried to move my head, to make me look away from the disaster. I fought him, though. I had to see the result of my failure.
Because I hadn’t worked my magic quickly enough. I hadn’t discovered the path into my powers until it was too late. I’d hesitated for too long before I’d given in to the soar of emotion, the pure, unadulterated energy that Zelda and Sassy and Carol tapped with such abandon.
I’d had the power to save Mac, but I hadn’t trusted myself.
David sighed helplessly, wiping his sword clean on the ruined bed’s bloody comforter before he sheathed it. Neko whimpered beside me, clearly exhausted and devastated and more than a little repulsed by the mutilated corpse of the wolf.
No. Not corpse. Mac was still breathing, barely sucking air past his ruined throat.
Zelda lay beside him. She pressed her Saint Laurent blouse against his bloody pelt. Draping his heavy paws around her shoulders, she lowered her head against his slavering jaw and closed her eyes.
For just a moment, nothing happened.
Then, a purple cloud formed around both of them—violet and lilac and mauve, orchid and lavender and lilac all swirling in a glinting aura. Zelda’s body stiffened. Every muscle seemed to cry out in agony, but she didn’t let go of the wolf. She didn’t pull away, didn’t leave him to suffer alone.
The amethyst halo grew brighter. I tried to blink, but I couldn’t. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I caught my breath, held it, waited forever, for a single, split second.
And when the mist drifted away, Zelda held a human man. Mac was himself again, whole, uninjured. He pushed himself up on one arm. Reached out to tuck a strand of red hair behind Zelda’s ear. Rested his palm against her cheek. “Hey there, Shifter Wanker.”
“Hey,” she said.
“It’s a good thing you found your way to Assjacket.”
“You bet your ass it is.”
“I may be imagining things,” he said. “But did you just add an inch to my Bon Jovi?”
Zelda laughed. “Or are you just happy to see me?”
Mac growled in a way that made it perfectly clear we were all invited to leave the bedroom. Carol just laughed, reaching up to her earlobe and tugging hard, three times. The chaos in the room immediately cleared away—platypus guts and cubes of wombat poop, torn sheets and splintered posts from the bed. A wiggle of Baba Yaga’s nose, and the carpet was cleaned as well, all traces of mud and slime vanished.
“Okay,” she said. “Show’s over. Let’s head down to the kitchen.”
That’s when I understood exactly how strong a witch she was. Because no one considered refusing to move. No one stopped to ask a question—not even David and Neko. We all just did what we were told to do.
Except Mac and Zelda. They stayed behind, taking only a moment to slam the bedroom door closed with a twitch of Zelda’s little finger. The last sound I heard from in there was the crash of the no-longer-four-poster bed, collapsing onto the immaculate carpet.
Before the echo could die away, Carol had gathered us all—David, Neko, Fabio, Sassy, and me—in the kitchen. I suddenly found myself too tired to keep my eyes open. Swaying slightly, I settled a hand on the kitchen counter.
“Afterglow,” Carol said, with a curt nod that included David. “It’ll catch you every time. Let me just poof you two out to the treehouse, and you can sleep away what’s left of the night.”
“Treehouse?” I barely had enough energy left to ask the question.
“Don’t worry,” the Baba Yaga said. “It’s a lot nicer than it sounds. Mac made it for Zelda, so he’d have some place to give her his mating bite.”
Mating bite. From Carol’s knowing smile, I was pretty sure what that had entailed. I was suddenly aware of how close David was standing. Not that there’d be any biting between us. Ever. Ew. “Um, I don’t think so,” I said.
“You won’t have to climb up a ladder or anything.” Carol put her hands on her hips, which made her metal Madonna bra poke out like the prongs on an electric plug. I imagined what David would say if I wore an outfit like that.
“It’s not the ladder,” I said, running out of places to look in the suddenly too-small kitchen. I was too tired for this. I could barely stay on my feet, much less figure out some diplomatic excuse to avoid sleeping with David in Zelda’s love nest.
But then I remembered my escape. Miraculously, I’d made a promise to Gran as I’d taken her Lincoln Town Car. It had seemed ridiculous at the time, but now… “I know this sounds absurd, but I promised my grandmother I wouldn’t sleep in a treehouse.”
“You’re right,” Carol said. “That does sound absurd. I’m offering you a perfectly good treehouse, just waiting for a witch to…recuperate there.”
It seemed out of character for Carol to shy away from the word she really wanted. She wasn’t talking about recuperation. She was talking about the type of gymnastics Zelda and Mac were executing upstairs.
As if David and I would ever… I tried to be offended, but that took too much energy. I barely blocked a yawn with the palm of my hand.
Taking advantage of my delayed response, Fabio slipped a hand around Carol’s waist. “Well you know what I always say,” he leered. “Waste not, want not…”
“You’ve never said that a day in your life,” Carol said, but she was smiling. Her grin grew even broader as I lost the fight and yawned as wide as the Grand Canyon. “Make yourself at home here, then,” she said. “There are three guest rooms upstairs. I’d take the one closest to the stairs. Zelda never remembers to set a sound-dampening spell when she and Mac get started.
Right on cue, there was a wild soprano shout, followed by some baritone grunting I didn’t want to begin to parse.
Sassy looked at the ceiling. “Imagine,” she said. “Spending nine months in the pokey with that.”
Carol’s lips twisted. “You know I never allowed conjugal visits.”
Sassy grumbled, “That didn’t keep her from—”
“I’ll head upstairs, then!” I interrupted. Neko and David were more than capable of handling themselves. They could toss a coin for the bedroom closest to Zelda and her shifter mate.
I took the stairs two steps at a time. And I was tired enou
gh that I fell asleep before the next round of the master-bedroom soundtrack kicked in.
Chapter 6
I swam to consciousness in a sea of old-fashioned quilts. For just a moment, I considered diving deep again, yielding to the soft warmth of the bed around me.
The gigantic bed around me.
The gigantic, completely foreign, canopy bed around me.
I sat up, automatically pulling the quilt up to my chin. Which was a good thing, because a quick peek confirmed that I was wearing nothing but my bra and panties. I blushed, wondering if one of the Assjacket witches had undressed me.
Or, infinitely more embarrassing, if David had added one more job to his repertoire.
My clothes were folded neatly on a chair beside the bed. Beneath them sat the leather-bound volume of Goldthwaite.
David had done the dirty work. I couldn’t imagine Sassy, Carol, or any other Assjacket resident taking the time to avoid unsightly wrinkles. And Zelda had certainly been too busy to even consider my sleeping arrangements.
Then again, maybe one of my new witchy friends had just tugged on her earlobe, or waggled her fingers, or wrinkled her nose to fold my clothes into a perfect little stack. The thought of unlocking that type of power sent a shiver of excitement coursing down my spine.
I shimmied out of bed and pulled on the clothes in question. No sense being cold—and vulnerable—while I attempted to master a new form of magic. When my feet were safely encased in my battered tennis shoes, I turned back to the thoroughly rumpled bed.
There had to be some spell to clean up a messy room. Witch children from decades past must have perfected the magic, committed it to some grimoire, somewhere. But I certainly didn’t know the magic words.
And I shouldn’t need to use them. Zelda hadn’t spoken any spells when she cleaned up the disgusting platypus guts. The only spells I’d heard her utter were the decidedly haphazard ones that had popped the invading hordes.
I was going for something a lot simpler. No living creatures would be harmed in the making of my magic. Narrowing my eyes, I concentrated on moving the quilts into their proper place. I kept my hands close to my sides—no need to offer up my mind, my voice, my heart. Not if I was going to master Zelda’s madcap methods.