by Tara Quan
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Fireworks at Midnight
Copyright © 2014 by Tara Quan
ISBN: 978-1-61333-771-4
Cover art by Mina Carter
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC
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www.decadentpublishing.com
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Fireworks at Midnight
A 1Night Stand Story
By
Tara Quan
~Dedication~
To anyone who has tried to find parking in downtown D.C.
Chapter One
Dulcina Gato hated few things more than going through the day without coffee.
After she got her high school diploma and landed a minimum-wage job, she rode the independence high and turned down her parents’ allowance. When she made the mistake of spending her precious paychecks on a bachelor’s degree, she downgraded from Starbucks flavored lattes to less-than-adequate espresso shots. After spending years in online and night classes to earn a piece of paper that hadn’t increased her income by a single cent, she went on a descending spiral past donut-store drip to land at the bottom of the caffeine rabbit hole, fast-food chain budget brews. Even this luxury went the way of the dodo when she had the bright idea of quitting her dead-end day job to turn her jewelry-making hobby into a small business.
The ten-dollar coffee maker she’d bought at a flea market had long since died a slow and torturous death, and all she had left to keep her going at 7:00 a.m. on New Year’s Eve was an instant cup of Joe. She stared at her orange mug through the grease-stained translucent door of the circa-1980s microwave, wondering why it took so long to heat up water. As soon as she got her hands on the money Flowers Forever had raked in over the Christmas shopping season, she’d invest in one of those electric kettles.
Her vision hazed. Through fluttering lashes, an overlay of smoke and flames flashed over the worn laminate counter. Starting from behind the appliance, a black smear snaked up the peeling wallpaper to reach the dirt-encrusted popcorn ceiling.
Shaking her head to dispel the burst of foresight, she yawned. Shit. How fucking inconvenient. She glanced down at her torso, too sleepy to remember what she’d pulled on last night when she got out of the shower. Bright-blue nighttime shorts and a matching tank top might not be ideal for greeting a cavalry of firemen. Washington, D.C.’s prolonged arctic winter had turned her once-tanned skin a sallow yellow, which acquired a sickly sheen when paired with her clothes’ clashing aqua. Considering she’d scheduled her next beach vacation in ten years, she needed to avoid cold hues for the foreseeable future.
If push came to shove, she should have enough time to pull on something more flattering and run a brush through her hair. Upsides of the shoulder-length schoolgirl bob included the ten-dollar price tag and extreme low maintenance. Since highlights grew out faster than she could save up money, she eschewed artificial color in favor of her natural drab brown. She hadn’t been born with her sister’s brains, and lack of scholarships meant she came out of the undergraduate rip-off with a mountain of student loans.
Growing up had turned out to be a huge bummer. The year’s end came with an insane amount of incidental expenses for the fledgling company she’d started with Shelley Dupree, her best friend since pre-kindergarten. While she and her business partner could legally buy alcohol at long last, affording any seemed out of their reach. Paying next year’s fee for their website, which she’d put off until the previous evening, had almost netted them bank overdraft fees. No way could they get a new microwave in the foreseeable future.
“Shells,” she bellowed. “The kitchen is about to catch on fire.”
Her short-legged pal bounded in less than a minute later. Wearing a pink sweatshirt and matching pajama bottoms, the petite twenty-one-year-old earth mage could pass for a high schooler. Leaves and flower petals dusted her chestnut hair; dirt smudged her flushed café au lait cheeks. “Sweets, I swear to God—if this is your idea of a joke, I’ll bury you.”
Dulcina preferred the nickname Sweets to the name her parents had bestowed upon her in an unfortunate moment of nostalgia—the single reason she could come up with to explain why both she and her sister had such distinctly Spanish names. And while her sibling’s Catalina got shortened to a neutral Cat, Sweets’ legal name always ended up as some permutation of Douche, Dull-Chai, or China. “Why are you so grumpy?”
Shelley placed her hands on the lush hips Sweets had been green-eyed about since they’d turned thirteen. “I’m in the middle of harvesting blooms. If we leave them out too long, they’ll be useless.”
As always, Shelley had woken before dawn to mess around in the greenhouse they maintained in the backyard. The tropical flowers the witch’s elemental powers kept alive would soon be dried, coated in several layers of resin, and fitted with silver findings. Once done, they sold the jewelry online and at their stall in the Sunday market in Georgetown.
Though they both loved the work, the start-up phase came with more expenses than profit. Placing one elbow on the peeling counter, Sweets stared at the coffee she’d never drink. “I saw it happen. This piece of crap is going to fry.”
Few people knew about her foresight. To help keep it a secret, Shelley accepted attribution for all premonitions they disclosed. Her ancient supernatural bloodline made the emergence of a weak secondary power plausible, and her privileged status as an elemental witch allowed her to keep the Mage’s Council at arm’s length. “Well this sucks. How long do we have?”
“You know how short the fuse is on visions. Plain old vibes gives us a few days, but when I see things happen in Technicolor, the goose is almost cooked.”
Moving closer and bending down to squint at the old appliance, Shelley suggested, “Should we turn it off? Unplug it and stuff?”
Sweets canted her head. “If it’s an electrical thing, would
n’t touching it zap us?” She looked down at her bare feet. “So being ‘grounded’?” She used her fingers to form air quotes. “Is that when you’re wearing shoes or not wearing shoes?”
Scrunching her nose, Shelley shrugged. “I don’t know. And are we supposed to be grounded before we touch the outlet, or the other away round?”
Sweets narrowed her eyes at the humming hunk of metal. “How can you not know this, Ms. Smarty-Pants? You’ve got a science degree.” At times, she questioned the veracity of their standardized test scores. According to the numbers, Shelley had scored a tenth of a percentile below genius while Sweets fell smack dab in the lower half of average.
“In biology, not electrical engineering.” Shelley sniffed the air. “I smell something burning.”
Sweets filled her lungs. “Me, too. It should have pinged already, and the dial isn’t turning.”
“Can’t you unplug it with your mind, or, I don’t know, dematerialize it?” An elemental mage, Shelley had the ability to control one thing—the earth. They both agreed this might be the most useless form of magic imaginable. As her friend’s familiar, Sweets could process that raw energy and turn it into more useful spells, including telekinesis, teleportation, illusion, and enchantments. Since she hadn’t applied herself much to the study of magic, her actual abilities didn’t extend far beyond moving stuff around with her mind.
One minor problem prevented the plug’s safe evacuation. “I’m out of juice. I haven’t turned into a cat in two weeks.”
“Well, the visions haven’t stopped. Didn’t I tell you going cold turkey would bite us in the ass?” Shelley loved few things in life more than saying, I told you so.
Foreseeing bad shit came hand in hand with the compulsion to do something about it. While Sweets had managed to wiggle out of each sticky situation, she didn’t want to push her luck. She processed leaked power best by assuming her familiar form. Since she and Shelley didn’t have the most compatible energy profiles, they shared little magic while she stayed human. As an experiment, she’d sworn off her feline persona in hopes that the premonitions would cease. But while every single other ability petered into nonexistence, the one she wanted to purge continued to plague her day and night.
She huffed out a breath and admitted defeat. “Fine. Hold on.” With a pop, she turned into a plain coffee-colored cat. None of the good genes had been left by the time she came around. Not only did she have nondescript brown hair and eyes, a body with more angles than curves, and a rare power that painted a giant red bull’s-eye on her back, her animal alter ego couldn’t be less memorable.
As soon as sleek silky fur covered her skin, raw energy poured into her—more than she’d expected. If she didn’t know better, she’d have guessed another elemental mage was close by, one who shared more synergy with her than Shelley. The charge built at an exponential rate. A few more seconds and—
Flames erupted from the back of the microwave. Scampering to hide behind her friend’s legs, she focused on the burning metal box and lifted it into the air. The power cord swept forward, upending the canisters lining the wall. Digging her claws into linoleum, she yanked the plug out of the socket with a telekinetic pull.
Suspended in the middle of the kitchen where the fire couldn’t spread to the walls or ceiling, the old appliance continued to release a steady stream of pungent black smoke. Loud, high-pitched beeps filled the small room and threatened to burst Sweets’ oversensitive feline eardrums. Needing to concentrate on keeping the darn thing up, she swatted Shelley’s ankle with her tail in an attempt to urge the witch into action. Talk about being useless in a crisis.
Shelley looked down at her. “Where’s the fire extinguisher?”
Come to think of it, that particular item might have fallen under the useful-but-not-necessary category when she came up with their list of things to buy. Pawing her face in shame, she meowed. Witches and familiars communicated on a cerebral level somewhere between telepathy and miming.
“I thought so.” Covering her mouth with an arm, Shelley began to cough. “Let me think. What are the chances that thing is all metal?”
Sweets turned her head from side to side in the most emphatic no she could achieve as a cat. In theory, Shelley should control all solids originating from the ground, which included plants, minerals, sand, and therefore their metal and glass derivatives. Petroleum fell into a gray area in the elemental Venn diagram between earth and fire, and the presence of plastic in any item messed up Shelley’s already unpredictable mojo. While the witch’s powers gave her a supernaturally green thumb, her actual ability to manipulate metal seemed to miss more often than it hit, leading time and again to catastrophic consequences.
Sweets lifted her front paw to shield her eyes while meowing an inarticulate plea. Ignoring the protest, her friend squared her shoulders and raised her hands. As she wiggled her fingers in a weird, creepy pattern, the rectangular box crumpled to form a ball, closing the flames within. Smoke continued to puff out, but the fire soon smoldered.
Okay, perhaps the witch deserved more credit. Before the notion took root, the ball exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions. Hissing, Sweets halted their progress with a telekinetic blast, freezing them in the air a split second before sharp metal hit her friend’s face. Using more magic than she thought she possessed, she forced the shards to drift to the floor.
Her lungs burning, she shifted back to human form. Pointing to the back entrance, she hacked, “Need. Air. Move.”
Wearing a guilty expression, Shelley blocked her ears with her hands and ran to open the door, her fluffy slippers making squishy sounds as she covered the distance. “Where’s the smoke detector?”
Sweets slumped onto the linoleum floor with a tired groan. Magic was draining work. “This is your grandmother’s old house.”
She flopped onto her back and closed her eyes. When her head started to pound from the continuing squeals, she drew a fortifying breath and tried to summon the energy to get up. Before she gathered enough motivation, a gust of wind blew through the kitchen, pushing the thick, pungent smoke outside. By the time her eyes stopped watering, sweet-smelling, pristine air filled the small room. Aside from the scorched metallic mess, all signs of smoke dissipated.
She didn’t need visual confirmation to be certain which wind mage had reconditioned the environs and provided the source of her extra energy. Forcing her lids open, she met the dark, judgmental gaze of a familiar mahogany-skinned warlock. Standing by the kitchen entrance with his head grazing the sill, Mikal Knight lifted his long arm to pound at a piece of round white plastic above the wood frame. A few seconds later, the electronic wail stopped.
His gruff, masculine voice soon interrupted the brief, blissful silence. “Good morning, brats. Celebrating New Year’s Eve with some fireworks, I see.” No one had the right to sound this upbeat at a quarter past seven, not even him.
“Midnight. Oh, my gosh!” With a headache-intensifying squeal, Shelley leapt across the room to wrap her arms around her older half-brother. “What are you doing here? I thought you couldn’t take time off work.”
Letting her head fall to the rubbery tile, Sweets stared at the disintegrating ceiling and contemplated turning back into a cat. The last thing she wanted right this second was a chat with the walking Armani advertisement. What was he doing in an open-collar white shirt and dark-blue suit at this time of day?
She could smell his spicy cologne from where she slumped, and his short beard was trimmed to ruler-straight lines alongside his mouth and under his dimpled chin. Of course he’d show up looking like a GQ cover model while she wore unflattering pajamas and reeked of burnt plastic.
After a tedious extrication from Shelley’s bear hug, he marched forward. “Need a boost, Dulcina?”
His continued use of that god-awful name baffled her. Even her parents and sister had switched to calling her Sweets, but this guy couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around the preference. Of course, the three syllables somehow gained a hin
t of sexiness when he said it in that Southern drawl. The word rolled off his tongue with a lilting musicality that appealed to some traitorous part of her psyche, the unwelcome effect getting on her nerves in a big way.
On top of that, the weird physical reaction she had to his mere presence irritated her. Ever since she’d hit puberty, being within five feet of the boy she’d known all her life—one who’d since grown into a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old man—did weird shit to random body parts. Her cheeks burned, her breath quickened, her palms got sweaty, and her heart rate turned erratic. The smug grin he wore, along with the patronizing tone he’d used, earned her best friend’s half sibling a temporary place on Sweets’ list of least-favorite uninvited guests. “You’re blocking my view.”
He offered his hand. “Of what?”
“Water damage.” Before she could accept his assistance, the empty space between them distorted. Transparent, flickering waves created a blur, as if two realities had shifted out of sync. Frozen in place by the premonition’s onslaught, she watched a version of herself meet his palm with her own. Their fingers twined, and he hoisted her up too fast. When she crashed into his chest, his arms lowered to circle her waist.
He drew her closer. She tilted her head back and parted her lips. A storm brewed in the depths of his almost-black eyes, coloring them with swirls of white and gray. A light furrow formed between his brows, certainty and possession lending his face a dangerous edge.
Alarm bells ringing in her ears, she blinked away the vision and clenched her hands into fists. Keeping them at her sides, she did a full sit-up. Talk about a close call. “Thanks for taking care of the smoke. It even smells nice in here now.”
Lines bracketed the sides of his mouth. He scrutinized her through narrowed eyes, as if he somehow suspected she’d altered their course. “No problem. I haven’t used magic in weeks.”