by K. F. Breene
Daisy reappeared in the doorway of her and Mordecai’s shared room. She stalked toward me with a clipboard in hand, red blotching her porcelain, doll-like face. She was the sweetest looking kid ever, but with a very colorful personality.
“I need your phone, Lexi. The cordless is out of battery.” She stopped in front of me and put out a hand.
I let my stare beat into her for a moment, not moving.
She gave me a dramatic sigh. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?” I left it at that. Like Mordecai, she was in hormone hell. Right in the thick of it, too. Fourteen going on fifty going on nine, she was at war with her body and womanhood. She was non-magical and had been sucked into the system as a toddler when her mother died of a heroin overdose. Bouncing from one foster home after another, she’d been battered and beaten, ignored and forgotten, until she’d run away at ten.
I’d found her offering herself to a homeless guy in a box in exchange for food and a place to sleep. At ten. Hunger would drive a person to extreme things.
Because of me, she was still a virgin. Also because of me, she had been declared lost and presumed dead in the non-magical zone. She lived in the crack of the societies with us because she had nowhere else to go. Not if she didn’t want to be returned to the system until she was eighteen.
Over my dead body.
So here we were. Irresponsible me and two teens, one magical, one not, both with troubled pasts. It could be worse.
“Okay, here’s how it is.” Daisy jutted out a hip. “I sold this guy weed, right? And—”
“I’m going to stop you right there.” I held out my hand. “Selling drugs is a nope.”
She rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t real weed. Hello? How dumb do you think I am?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
Her glare could’ve peeled paint. “It’s just a bunch of herbs all mixed up,” she said. “And before you ask, the coke is actually flour.”
“Nope.” I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into the kitchen.
“Ew, stop!”
She tried to pull her arm back, but I held on tight until I deposited her in front of the judge and jury.
“Tell Mordecai what you are doing,” I demanded.
“I heard. The house isn’t very big.” Mordecai slid the peeler over the potato in purposeful motions.
“I’m going to go ahead and say that selling fake drugs is worse than selling real drugs.” I braced my hands on my hips.
Mordecai nodded slowly, and Daisy aggressively crossed her arms over her chest.
“I second that,” he said, not losing stride with the peeling.
“Collecting money for fake drugs is going to result in a bad situation, like a broken bone or a crushed head,” I continued.
“And it is morally wrong,” Mordecai said.
“Right, yes.” I pointed at him. “Morally wrong. That’s the real reason not to do it. And also because of the busted-head situation.”
I already mentioned I was irresponsible. In fairness, my mother hadn’t been any better, and I’d turned out okay, all things considered.
“Either way, though, you need to stop.” I faced Daisy. “You can’t do anything illegal. You know that. You have to stay out of trouble.”
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened, as though I was the most irrational person alive. “Denny owes me two hundred bucks. With what you have already, we’d be able to get Gollum’s serum.”
Mordecai rolled his eyes, an action he rarely did. “I should’ve never let her watch Lord of the Rings.”
“Really? Because you’re somehow in charge of the movies I watch, Sauron?” Daisy tilted her head at Mordecai in what I could only describe as a snarky way. A teenager’s body language spoke volumes.
“Wait…what?” I asked, easily distracted.
“Mord-ecai has the same start as Mord-or,” Mordecai said dryly, pushing the peels aside on the table and pulling the cutting board closer.
“Ew, really? Look at the mess you’ve made.” Daisy stomped over to the counter. She slapped down her clipboard and snatched up a rag. She scraped the peels off the table and into her palm before depositing them in the trash.
“I can’t very well stand over the sink right now, can I?” Mordecai retorted, stooping to her maturity level, as he so often did. It was hard to rise above it, I had to admit. “You saw me earlier. And you should put the peels in the compost bin.”
“It all ends up in the ground—”
“What happened earlier?” I asked, rounding on Mordecai.
“He tripped over his own feet and fell on his face.” Daisy grabbed her clipboard again. “Seriously, Lexi, I have this covered. Denny is a complete moron. He’ll smoke it and think it is legit. I said I’d smoke it with him just to help his buzz along. I figure I’ll do— Stop shaking your head. I figure I’ll do some weird stuff, laugh a lot, and he’ll have a good experience. I’ll even kiss him. That’ll take his mind— Lexi, seriously, stop shaking your head. This is a good plan. Ol’ One-Eye needs that serum. His coughing is driving me crazy.”
“Touching speech,” Mordecai said, but his soft eyes didn’t match his dry voice. You couldn’t show too much compassion around Daisy for entirely different reasons than you couldn’t show it around me. Where I would burst into tears and be hard-pressed to stop the waterworks because of my worry and anxiety over the kids, she just didn’t know how to handle emotion. She’d had no experience with it in her life. Pity she’d seen a lot of, anger she was an old pro at thwarting, but honest-to-god compassion stopped her up and made her blink stupidly.
We were a messed-up lot.
“All of that is a no.” I shook my head at Daisy. “Hard no. You are not going to sell fake drugs—or real drugs, for that matter, to anyone—and you most certainly are not going to offer PG-rated sexual favors. I’ll get the money. I have a plan.”
“You always say you have a plan. Working and saving is not a plan.” Daisy looked over her clipboard. “And fine. I’ll draw the line at selling him the fake coke. I don’t know how that would go down anyway. But the fake weed is harmless. And it’s not sexual favors, give me a break. He’s cute. I’d totally hit that.”
“You’re not hitting anything. You are way too young. Do we need to have another sex talk?”
Her face soured. “I meant I would kiss him. Not have sex with him.”
“You don’t have a firm grasp on your sexual slang,” Mordecai mumbled.
“Shut up. Like you know.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, putting out my hands. “Enough. Daisy, no fake anything, and no extorting money for kissing. Have a little respect for yourself.”
“I have a ton of respect for myself. I’m a damn good kisser. People should be paying for that shit.”
“No. Stop.” I looked at her in exasperation. “No swearing, no getting money for kissing—just no to everything. No across the board. Like I said, I’ll get the money.”
A sound very close to a growl rose out of Daisy’s throat before she stomped to the junk drawer and extracted a pen. She wildly scratched items off the list on her clipboard.
“Stop stomping around; it’s giving me a headache,” Mordecai grumbled.
“Also…” I put my finger in the air. “I’m pretty sure you guys shouldn’t be talking about sexual stuff. Right? You’re too young.”
“Oh my God, you are the worst at parenting,” Daisy said.
“Yeah. I know. That’s why you two need to help me. Because, spoiler alert, I’m not actually your parent.”
“We’re not children, and we’ve seen far too much to be sheltered now,” Mordecai said, ever the voice of reason. “And don’t worry, your mother, God rest her soul, wasn’t any better.”
My mother was the one who’d taken in Mordecai when he was five. She’d gone to a local market to steal food, and had ended up saving a starving boy instead. He’d lived in my crammed room until she’d died of an undiagnosed internal infection si
x years ago.
“Thanks for trying,” I said, heading back to the vegetables, “but she somehow managed to support three strays and her daughter on a meager salary. I can barely feed you two ingrates.”
“I think you’re forgetting that you’ve been working since you were Daisy’s age. She had two meager salaries.” Mordecai smiled sadly. “I miss Jane and Eddie, though. I wonder what they are up to. We haven’t heard from them in a while.”
Jane and Eddie, both of them my age and old enough to go out on their own, had taken off after my mother passed. They’d worked, too, but my mother had insisted they save all their money so they could get a good start when they flew the coop.
“They both have families now in the Midwest. They’re busy.” I washed off the cursed Brussels sprouts.
“When are you going to settle down and have a family?” Mordecai asked.
I huffed as Daisy said, “Don’t worry, Samwise. Master will never leave us. No one would have her.”
“Well…I might leave,” I grumbled.
“Okay, so fine.” I heard scribbling on the clipboard. “Fine. No selling fake drugs. So I’ll just take his offer to work for the family vet business under the table. I’d rather not clean up dog poop, but I will do it.”
I stilled as guilty excitement ran through me. “You shouldn’t have to work at your age.”
“Kids my age don’t work because they are usually in normal school. Since I can’t go to normal school because my society thinks I’m a missing person and likely dead, and my online classes can be done at any time, I can just move my studying to the evening or night, when I’m not working. My social life is limited. I have time for all this stuff. Like you guys.”
She had a point there. Mordecai was forced to be a recluse because of his condition, Daisy was forced to be a recluse because of her situation, and I didn’t have any money to go out and meet anyone. The extent of my social life was the local pub filled with derelicts where the owner, an ex-boyfriend who knew I was dirt poor and enjoyed lording it over me, paid for my drinks. His pity tasted like stale beer and stress relief. Dumping him was the smartest thing I had ever done.
Daisy dropped her clipboard onto the table and grabbed a bell pepper from in front of me. “That’s settled. Pretty soon we won’t be forced to be vegetarians.”
“I don’t think it’s a bomb,” I heard yelled through the front door. “But you may want to be careful, just in case.”
I exhaled and slumped against the counter. Freaking Frank. I sure wished he’d find somewhere else to be on a permanent basis.
“Looks pretty benign…” Frank’s words were muffled, but I still heard them over Mordecai and Daisy’s chopping. “There’s hope for you, after all. He’ll do just fine. Strong and sure. He’ll make a good match if you’d let someone take care of you.”
“What is he on about now?” I muttered, debating going to the door to check.
“What?” Daisy asked.
“Is it Frank?” Mordecai dropped the knife next to the chopped potatoes.
“You’ll want to come out and grab it before someone steals it off your porch. I’ve got my eye on things, but you never know,” Frank said.
“Yes, it’s Frank,” I said.
“Oh, gross.” Daisy shook her head.
“No note that I see, though,” Frank hollered, clearly desperate to be heard. “He’s trying to be a secret admirer. Well, I won’t spoil it for him. I don’t want to quit his game, as the kids say.”
“They don’t say that,” I muttered, losing my battle to curiosity and heading to the door.
“Say what?” Mordecai asked.
“Don’t encourage the situation,” Daisy told him.
I took the few steps out of the kitchen and to the front door. Frank stood on the stoop, his back to the house and his head moving from side to side, standing guard.
“What’s the—” The words died on my lips. Shock bled through every fiber of my being.
Just off to the side, behind the browning bush, sat an opened brown bag with Bed, Bath & More written on the side. Inside lay the gravity blanket I’d been fawning over. The one that had been way too expensive for me to seriously contemplate buying.
The super-handsome psychotic stalker had bought a blanket for a sick kid.
Tears clouded my vision and gratitude melted my heart.
6
Alexis
“I probably shouldn’t accept it, right?” I asked Frank quietly, a tear running down my face. “I mean, when he first followed me, he didn’t even know about Mordecai. Maybe he just intended to bully me. I mean, later on, even after hearing about the blanket being for a sick kid, he talked about punishing me. That suggests dangerous intent. Not to mention, rich and powerful people only perform acts of goodwill to get something in return or as a tax write-off.” I wiped the tear away with the back of my hand. “The situation is suspicious, at best. I mean, he looked up my house! He just took his stalkerdom to a whole other level. Despite the blanket situation, that’s not good.”
“It’s a gift to a woman,” Frank said, lifting his eyebrows as though I were dense.
“Yeah? And?”
“Of course he wants something. Gifts are down payments for sex.”
I ran my hand down my face. “Great. Good input,” I said dryly. “Except I don’t think that applies here.”
“Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? You’re a pretty girl.” He scratched his permanent white five o’clock shadow. “Granted, you could put in a little more effort. Some makeup and a hairbrush, for starters. Maybe clothes that actually fit—”
“Yes, Frank. Thank you. I know what I look like.” And I did. My stringy blond hair was in a ponytail with a messy halo of flyaways. My sports bra flattened what a padded bra could turn into a C-cup, minimizing my already scant curves, and my pants ended at my ankles because the cheap-o store didn’t have my size in long. Except for good skin that hadn’t seen much of the sun (living in eternal fog will do that to a person), I was a wreck when it came to most beauty standards. But I worked in a place that merely tolerated me, with people who rarely spoke to me, and had the resources of a pauper. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, and no one wanted to be impressed by me. There was no point in getting gussied up, even if I had the energy. Or makeup from this decade.
I smoothed my somewhat wrinkled shirt down my stomach, thinking of the stranger’s chiseled face, his stylish jeans, and the way his plain T-shirt fit his perfect body in all the right ways. Somehow, the arrogance he wore like a cape didn’t detract from all that unreal beauty, or that power and athletic grace.
His stormy, vicious blue eyes invaded the mouth-watering image. A tingle of fear worked up my spine at the haunted depths to his intense, unwavering gaze.
He’d looked at me like I was prey. I had felt like prey, and not of the sexual variety. He was dangerous, and if he was playing a game of cat and mouse, the blanket was bait. He probably hoped I’d let my guard down.
“Everything okay?”
I jumped at the sound of Mordecai’s voice and spun around, smoothing over my expression. “Yup,” I answered automatically.
He slowly walked from the kitchen, clutching his threadbare blanket around his bony shoulders. Each step jolted his body in ways that a healthy shifter would never experience, even on his deathbed.
He was hurting, and I bet the cold had already settled deeply in his bones.
Desperation tugged at me. Maybe the blanket was a trap, but it was one I’d happily walk into if it would help Mordecai. “Get this! I won the most awesome blanket. Check it out.”
Without another thought, I turned back and snagged the handles of the bag. It was probably a bad idea, but if it gave him a warm night in an otherwise shitty existence riddled with pain, I’d handle whatever came of it.
“It’s the Rolls-Royce of blankets,” I said. “It was going to be a surprise, but…well, you ruined it. Here.” I pushed the bag toward him.
“What?” he s
aid slowly, clearly confused. I had that effect on people.
“You shouldn’t lie—”
I shut the door on Frank to shut him up. Also because I hoped he’d eventually get the message and buzz off.
“What’s going on?” Daisy peeked around the corner, saw that the front door was closed, and fully emerged. “Did you say something about a Rolls-Royce?”
Mordecai extracted the folded blanket with more effort than it should’ve taken, even for him. His eyebrows knitted together as he hefted the bundle.
“What?” Daisy pushed in close. “What’s the matter? Wow, this looks— Oh my God, this is so soft.” With rounded eyes, she looked my way. “Did you steal this?”
“No! I said I won it,” I replied.
She gave me a flat look. “We all know you are the unluckiest person on the planet. Even if you’d cheated, you still wouldn’t have won it. How’d you get it?”
I sighed and headed back to the kitchen. “Fine. Don’t believe me. It’s awesome, though. It’s a weighted blanket to…like… It’s therapeutic. And super soft. You’ll love it.”
“Where did you really get this?” Mordecai asked, carefully putting the blanket back into the bag and stepping away.
“Honestly, Mordecai, I did not steal that. Or buy it. You can relax, since I didn’t spend money on you.” I gestured with the knife. “Use the thing.”
“I’m with Viggo, here—”
“Viggo is the actor,” Mordecai said in a pained tone. “The character was Aragorn.”
“Fine, whatever. I’m with noble Aragorn here. You clearly found that bag on the front porch, you’re acting shady, and this isn’t adding up. Where’d you get it? Because you know you can’t get caught stealing. Three strikes means you stay in jail. I ain’t running this bitch on my own, I will tell you that much. Although then I could sell those fake drugs to that hot moron…”
Was nothing in my life easy?
“Fine!”
I gave in. I always did. As I made dinner, I went through what had happened at the shopping center, including finding that Burberry bag, because I knew these two would be just as excited on my behalf. By the time we set the table and sat down to eat, I’d told them everything.