by Linda Wisdom
So instead of a blissful morning rolling around on his bed with Blair, he was entering the wolf den he’d hoped never to see again.
“I told her my life was complicated.”
Chapter 8
“Wow, talk about going from a total high to a total downer,” Stasi said. Getting her boutique ready for the week ahead, she opened the armoire doors and hung up delicate camisoles in winter colors of ice blue, silver, and white. Once they were displayed to her satisfaction, she scattered vanilla and lavender scented sachets across the bottom, giving the armoire a delicate and delicious scent. “This Vera sounds downright nasty. I’m scared to death of meeting Trev’s mother, although he says she’s wonderful. She sure doesn’t sound as intimidating or nasty as Jake’s mother. I didn’t believe what Trev told me, because he’s perfectly capable of lying so I wouldn’t stress out over meeting her. But I do believe what Mae told me. She said his parents had one of the most civilized divorces in history, and that all Trev’s mother wants is for him to be happy.” She smiled with fondness at the thought of Trev’s assistant, who enjoyed instilling fear into the young legal associates she felt obligated to train; but she had already shown she had a warm spot for Stasi.
“Well, I don’t think Jake ever went to his mom for comfort after he had a nightmare. That bitch of a Were is more the type to cause one.” Blair flicked the top of Horace’s head with her fingertip when he twisted around in a vain attempt to look up her sweater as she sat on the counter. The disgruntled gargoyle grumbled his way back to the opposite corner of the counter. “New sachets?”
“None of these have even a hint of a spell in them,” Stasi said, picking up a blue silk rose sachet and waving it back and forth to release the calming scent of lavender and vanilla. “Bespelled sachets are a thing of the past for me now, even if I do have a capable attorney on retainer.”
Blair hopped off the counter and wandered around, picking up a book here and there. “50 Ways to Hex Your Lover,” she chuckled. “Isn’t that the title of the spell book Jazz was late returning to The Library?”
“Yes, but this is fiction. I still wasn’t going to put the book out until after she left. It’s still a sore point with her. It’s a cute book, though.” Stasi carefully wrapped a narrow white and silver garland around a basket handle. She glanced down at Blair’s ankles. The blue topaz in her broom charm winked in the light while Fluff and Puff grinned at her from their spot on her other ankle. “Jazz is well and truly gone on what’s probably the river rafting trip from Hades, guys. There’s no reason for you to continue to torment Blair. She can’t send you back.”
“Wanna bet?” Blair mumbled.
Fluff rattled away while Puff just yawned.
“Wouldn’t you know they’d think being a tattoo is more fun? Although they weren’t happy when we covered them up last night. There are just some things they don’t need to see.” She looked down at the sound of the protests. “Hey, I don’t care what goes on with Jazz, and I sincerely doubt you’re allowed to do any peeking when she’s alone with Nick. Right now you’re with me and as long as you insist on staying with me, you’ll follow my rules. If you don’t like it I’ll find a way to zap you two right back to Jazz and that raft.”
Fluff and Puff erupted in protests.
“Oooh, tough witch,” Stasi teased. “As if Jazz would allow herself to be found right now. So, on a scale of one to ten, where does Jake rate?”
Blair’s grin split her face.
Stasi broke out laughing. “Okay, off the charts. I get it. At least his dog self already knows you snore.”
“Do not!”
“Do so!”
“You do, Blair,” Horace added. “But they’re cute girly snores. Not train whistles, or anything.”
“If Blair would hang me in her bedroom once in awhile, I could offer up my opinion, too,” Felix called out from Blair’s shop.
“And that’s why I don’t.” Blair frowned in response to a rumbling sound in the street as a flash of color went by the shop window. She walked to the front of the store and looked out. “Wow, there’s an RV that’s seen a lot of country and looks it. Yeesh! It looks like someone barfed all over it.”
Stasi followed her to the window and looked out. She grimaced at the vivid greenish-yellow vehicle parked in front, effectively taking up several parking spaces. “Uh, Blair? Why doesn’t this look good? And I don’t just mean the RV, either.”
Blair experienced the same really bad feeling. She wasted no time running for the door. “Oh no! Because it’s not, and it’s all Agnes’s fault!”
High-pitched chattering voices could be heard as the RV’s door opened and a stream of men, none of them over three feet tall, poured out of the vehicle.
Blair hissed a curse when she saw the sign Elves 4 Your Party painted on the RV’s door.
“Agnes will have a stroke,” she muttered, practically running to the RV. “Hold up!” She held up her hands to stop them. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to go up to Snow Farms Resort, where you’ll be staying while you work at the carnival.”
“Hey, toots.” A bearded elf smoking a large cigar that smelled like something out of a dung heap ambled up and winked at her. He wore a wrinkled T-shirt carrying unidentifiable stains, one of them moving, and dirty jeans that hung at his hips and revealed eye-bleeding red boxers. She tried not to stare at something that seemed to be crawling along the point of one of his ears. “No one told us witches lived around here. Good to see ya.” He glanced down at her ankle where Fluff and Puff gnashed their teeth. “Wicked cool tat. Who inked it for ya?”
“Hey!” Stasi clapped her hands on her rear and spun around to glare at another elf who was grinning broadly. “You pinch me again, you little pervert, and you’ll find yourself stuffed face first down a reindeer’s butt!” Sparks flew out of the finger she pointed at her attacker.
“Oooh, I like ’em when they talk dirty.” He pursed his lips at her in a parody of a kiss that had Blair and Stasi gagging. “Hey, baby, whatcha doin’ tonight? I got me a private bunk.”
Blair pointed at the one she took to be the leader. “You do not move one inch.”
“I want you to remember this moment the next time you call me gross,” Horace grumbled from just inside the shop door. He waved his claws to keep the cigar smoke away.
Blair pulled her cell phone out of her pants pocket and quickly punched in Agnes’s number. “Agnes, you need to get over here right away,” she ordered without bothering with a polite greeting and hanging up without saying goodbye. This was no time for proper etiquette. She sensed the situation wasn’t going to improve once the mayor’s wife got a look at the creatures that passed for the cute and smiling elves she thought she’d hired for the carnival.
“So, babe, whaddya do for fun around here?” Another elf with a fuzzy beard belched loudly as he lifted his beer can. He drank deeply then crushed the aluminum container against his forehead and dropped it on the sidewalk.
Blair closed off her nostrils to keep out the alcoholic fumes. She flicked her fingers at the flattened can and it immediately flew back up, smacked the elf in the face, and dropped into his hand.
“Okay, okay, I get the idea,” he mumbled, tossing the can over his shoulder to land on the RV steps.
Blair narrowed her eyes at him. “One of my favorite computer games is Elf Bowling. Now I know why.”
She was never so thankful the town wasn’t all that big, because it wasn’t long before Agnes’s navy Lincoln Continental rolled down the street and parked behind the RV. She climbed out of her car and tottered over on high heels.
“What is going on?” she asked, staring at the bus and its inhabitants in horror. She took several steps back as a couple of them advanced toward her. “And what are… they?” She clutched her handbag to her chest.
“They are the elves you hired through Mickey Boggs,” Blair informed her, wrinkling her nose against the beauty shop vapors that rolled off Agnes’s obviously recently permed hair. Great, first the
beer fumes, now hair salon chemicals.
Agnes reached inside her tote bag and pulled out a pair of glasses, perching them on her nose. One look showed her that nothing had changed as one elf leered at her while another idly scratched his butt.
“These aren’t elves,” she proclaimed, waving her hand in front of her face as if to stave off the stench of beer and body odor. “I don’t know what they are, but they’re certainly not the cute Santa-type elves Mr. Boggs assured me we’d receive.” She started to take a deep breath and immediately realized it wasn’t a good idea. She pinched her nostrils shut. “They’ll just have to go back and I will demand an immediate refund of my deposit. This is unacceptable.”
“Who’s the broad?” the head elf asked Blair, crooking his thumb at Agnes.
“The broad is Mrs. Pierce, the mayor’s wife, and the one who contracted with Mickey for your services,” Blair explained, keeping a safe distance from the drunken elves who were still climbing out of the RV and making a wide circle around her. Considering most of them were only in sleeveless undershirts or, Fates preserve her, no shirt at all, she was amazed they weren’t freezing in the cold winter air. Of course that was unlikely, given the high alcohol content that had to be coursing through their veins. “Except you guys are not what Mickey said he was sending her. Tell me something, have any of you ever worked for Santa?” She sincerely doubted it, but she wanted to give it a shot. “Do you understand what that kind of elf gig involves?”
“That piker?” He snorted. “No elf in his right mind wants to work for him. Trust me, he’s not as jolly and ho-ho-ho as everyone thinks he is. And he pays shit for all that he wants us to do up there. Do you know he won’t even put central heat in the workshop? The Elves’ Union said we didn’t have a proper grievance against him, so we gave him and the Union the finger and struck out on our own. Mickey took us on and he gets us pretty decent gigs.” He peered at Agnes, who rapidly backed up, then he turned back to Blair. “I’ll stay with you, sweetcakes. I hope you got a big bed. I like lots of room.” He grinned, sidling up to her.
“Do not even think it.” Blair let him see just enough of the power radiating from her to warn him not to try anything. Stasi went a step further and zapped the one who’d goosed her. “Besides, you’re supposed to stay up at Snow Farms.” The idea of the grungy elves staying at the exclusive resort was enough to bring a smile to Blair’s face. Since Roan Thorpe had persuaded Agnes to have elves at the carnival, he could just deal with them.
He continued to stare at Blair’s breasts until she zapped him between the eyes. “Okay, I get it. Don’t ogle the boobs,” he sighed. He gestured toward Agnes as he idly dug his finger in his ear. He pulled out the digit, inspected something wiggling on the end of his fingertip, and scrubbed it off on his grungy pants. Agnes almost fainted. “So she’s the one in charge and not the dude up at Snow Farms?”
“She’s the one paying the bill.”
“Oh no, I am not! I will not pay for these… these…” For once words failed the woman as she fanned her face with her handbag.
“Alberic,” he told her. “The name’s Alberic.”
“And I’m Elrohir.” An elf with green-stained teeth that matched the wispy hair sticking out on his head in all directions grinned up at Agnes. His eyes, a brilliant amber, glowed as he studied Agnes the way a PMSing woman looked at a hot fudge sundae. “You know what they say about good things coming in small packages, baby? That’s me.”
“This is so wrong,” Agnes wailed as Stasi took charge and guided the nearly hysterical woman into her shop.
“You,” Blair pointed at Alberic, “come with me. The rest of you go back inside your RV and stay there.” She speared Alberic with a look that said it all. “And don’t you dare touch a thing.” She waited until he moved to enter Stasi’s shop ahead of her. No way she’d have him walking behind her!
Alberic groaned his disappointment as he sauntered inside.
“Blair, is there a problem?” Cliff, who owned Sam’s Dry Cleaners, called from across the street. He eyed the RV and its residents with a wary eye.
“All taken care of, Cliff. Thanks!” Blair called back with a confidence she didn’t feel. She flashed him a smile and walked inside the shop, where she heard Stasi’s soothing tones, Agnes’s shrill ones, and Alberic arguing with Horace. “Absolutely not!” Agnes was railing at Alberic. “We cannot allow things like you around small children who could be corrupted just by looking at you! Mr. Boggs will just have to give the deposit back, and we will not pay him another penny. This is fraud! You are not the cute elves I ordered!”
Blair sighed as she saw the arrogant stance Agnes took when she felt she was in the right. A posture that meant nothing would move her.
“Lady, I don’t give a diddlysquat what you say. Mickey negotiated our contract and that means we get paid, along with having our food provided for us and a place to park our RV. We haven’t had a gig in some time, so there’s no way you’re going to back out of this one. You should be grateful you don’t have to house us, too.” He gestured toward the street where the RV was now rocking with the hip-hop sounds of Trick Trick in gloriously explicit stereo sound.
“I am sure they have all the food you will require at the resort along with a large parking area to hold that thing out there.” Agnes did her best to stare him down.
“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re down here. I drove up to that hotel first. Thorpe took one look at us and said there was no way we he’d allow us to sully,”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“his precious resort. He said it was better if we stayed down here, since the carnival was held down here around some lake. When I started to point out the terms of the contract, he said we had two minutes to leave before he set the dogs on us.” He shot Blair a telling look.
“I didn’t know they had guard dogs up there,” Agnes wheezed.
She breathed through her nose and swung around, grasping Blair with one hand and Stasi with the other, pulling them into Stasi’s stockroom.
“Do something,” she ordered under her breath, turning toward Stasi. “Your boyfriend is a famous attorney. Can’t he help? He said he was a wizard, so wouldn’t he know what to do with elves and a contract I refuse to honor?”
“Stasi and I talked to Trev the minute you told us you hired them through Mickey,” Blair told her. “He said there’s no way to get out of a contract drafted by Mickey Boggs. His paperwork is as ironclad as a contract can be.”
“But those creatures out there aren’t elves!” the woman wailed.
“But they are,” Blair said gently, feeling sorry for her. After all, she was a human and had no idea what trouble can be brewed if you worked with the wrong members of the preternatural community. “True, they aren’t the storybook elves you hoped for and I’m sure you even asked Mickey for that kind of elf. But the creatures out there are actual elves. You contracted with Mickey for elves, and that’s exactly what you got.”
Agnes sighed. “There must be something we can do. We can’t have them running around town. What if we appeal to Mr. Boggs?” She turned to Blair with a clear “by we I mean you appealing to Mickey Boggs” look. “Surely he would understand the worries we have about this… wouldn’t he?”
“Mickey understands money and that’s all he understands,” Blair told her. “What if we ask Grady if they could park on that empty lot out behind his restaurant?” she suggested. “It’s plenty big enough for the RV and far enough off the road that they’d be out of public view.”
“I don’t want them here at all!” Agnes groaned. “You saw those little men. They’re disgusting!”
“We’ll tell them they have to bathe, wear appropriate clothing, and behave,” Blair assured her, fighting down an irrational fear that her idea might not work out, because their luck wasn’t going that way lately.
“You gonna be back there much longer?” Alberic called out. “I gotta take a dump.”
Agnes’s eyelids fluttered and she started to tip to the s
ide.
“Breathe, Agnes, just breathe,” Stasi ordered, looking around and finding a paper bag, which she fitted over Agnes’s nose and mouth.
“Floyd won’t be reelected after this,” she moaned into the bag. “Roan couldn’t have known Mickey Boggs would send up such horrible creatures.”
Blair walked out to the shop and immediately zapped Alberic, who had started to finger a pair of lace thong panties.
“They’re for my girlfriend!” he protested. “I’ll pay for ’em.”
Stasi sighed, walking in behind Blair. “Just take them, but nothing else.”
Blair wasted no time in calling Grady, who was willing to allow the RV to park there even after she tried to explain the elves wouldn’t be what he’d expect. He was used to Agnes’s schemes sometimes going haywire, and he seemed to understand the need to get the elves out of sight fast. She quickly ushered Alberic outside and toward the RV, giving the head elf quick directions to Grady’s BBQ Pit. She just knew the elderly man wouldn’t be happy once he saw what she couldn’t adequately describe, but she couldn’t think of any other place where there was enough room to park the RV and keep it out of public view. “Do not go near the restaurant until we come down there, and do us all a favor—think about all of you taking baths and putting on clean clothes.”
She waited on the sidewalk, watching the smoking vehicle lumber its way down the street and turn up the road toward Grady’s.
“I was hoping for all these cute little elves in a wonderland setting,” Agnes sighed. “Little red and green outfits, with the hats and bells and curled toe slippers.”
“It’s not Christmas, Agnes. It’s a February winter wonderland. We would have been better off with penguins,” Blair said then quickly added, “Toy ones, not real.”
“We’re going to need someone to keep them in line,” Stasi brought up.
“I know the perfect candidate for herding a bunch of unruly elves; too bad he’s probably visiting his mom at the moment,” Blair said, wishing she was a fly on the wall for that meeting, but shape-shifting wasn’t one of her skills. Plus, with her luck, Vera would be carrying a can of Raid and wouldn’t be afraid to use it.