by Lena North
“What did she say?”
I blinked and wondered what they were up to.
“She asked me what a troll-penis looks like,” I shared.
Mom blinked, and the Az huffed out some air, but they didn't respond to this, which actually was quite understandable. I hadn't known what to say either.
“Look, Mom,” I said. “Just tell me what you want, please. I don't want to be late for work.”
“Hazel needs to help us find something that has been misplaced,” the Az drawled.
“Stolen,” I corrected him. “She told us.”
“Hibiscus,” Mom snapped. “The Azdjakzian amulet can't be lost.”
“Why?”
They stared at me, and I shrugged. I had not been entirely awake during some of the which-classes I'd had to take, and this seemed to have been covered in one of those.
“If used the wrong way, it will crack the Cascadia fault wide open.”
Okay, yeah. That was actually a pretty big deal. Movements in the Cascadia fault would mean earthquakes and other shit so I could see how finding that amulet sooner rather than never would be a good thing.
“I'll ask Grandma to scry,” I offered.
“Now,” the Az said.
“I'm working tonight,” I said. “I'll ask her tomorrow.”
“Tell her there's a reward offered by the Wizard's Council. One million dollars to anyone who finds the amulet.”
“I'll tell her,” I said, knowing that Grandma Hazel couldn't care less since she owned half of Wisconsin. Or Wyoming. Or Winnipeg. Something with a W. “Have to go now, but I'll call you, Mom.”
Then I got back into the car and got the hell out of there.
I had to call Joel and ask him to do his thing, which he did, so I had green lights all the way through town, and walked into the bar with two minutes to spare.
It was a slow evening for being a Saturday, so I had time to think during my shift. It also wasn't a job that anyway required extraordinarily high brain activity since the orders were either a grunted, “Beer,” a friendly, “Beer and a Jaeger, babe,” or, “Give me a shot of the strongest shit you have.” The strongest shit also meant Jaegermeister, I'd discovered, and had learned the hard way that when they said it like that it was a good idea to hand out quadruple napkins and keep them coming. The napkins, that was.
My thoughts that evening kept circling back to the night before and the date with Jackson, and it did that stupid circling because we'd actually had a good time.
Except perhaps when the owner of the bar, who incidentally also was Jackson's uncle, had told him to wipe the fuzz away from his face, sharing with Jack that he looked like, “A fucking Christmas tree.” Jack had not found that nearly as hilarious as I did.
Or when Melissa Moose walked in and sat her fat ass down at the table next to us. She hadn't stayed long, though. The fern hanging in a clay pot next to her had started slapping her in the face repeatedly, so she left with a sour look at me, which was unfair because that was not something I knew how to do. I might have given the door a little extra oomph though, but how was I to know that it would slap her in the back, making her stumble on the doorstep and fall flat on her face. Her nose hadn't been broken, so her whining had been a little over the top if you asked me. Which no one did.
I'd tried to thank Grandma Hazel for the fern-bitch-slap before Jackson came back from shoving rolled up paper napkins up Loosey Moosey's nostrils, but she waved it away with a breezy, “Pooh.”
Then Jackson returned, carrying two more beers and laughing so hard he almost dropped them. Grandma looked at him and then at me. And then at him again.
“I'll just go talk to the very nice-looking bartender for a while,” she chirped. “It will give you some time to kiss a little, or talk about the size of his private parts, or whatever.”
I'd stared at her back and closed my eyes.
“I'm guessing you don't want to know the size of my -”
My squeak cut him off.
“Kiss?” he asked.
I wished he'd sounded a little more hopeful and a lot less like he was laughing at me.
“I think we should go with whatever,” I mumbled.
We'd ended up talking about the place he'd had down in Salem, and how he was working around the clock to renovate one of the bathrooms in his house since this apparently was the roadblock to him moving in.
“I refuse to shit outside,” he shared.
I stared and him and told him the obvious.
“But you're a wolf.”
“Yeah, well, most of the time I'm not, babe. It's not like I'm gonna step outside and squat like a fucking moron.”
Before I could come up with a witty retort, Grandma Hazel came back.
“I got his number,” she stage-whispered and waved a small piece of paper.
There was absolutely nothing to say to that either, and since Jackson apparently shared that sentiment, he took us home instead.
For some reason, I'd said that I might go on another date with him. Maybe.
Crap.
“Hey, Kitty,” a thin, wily-looking man greeted me, and I smiled widely, glad for the distraction.
“Benny, hey,” I said and reached for the beer I knew he'd want. “Got something for you.”
Then I gave Benny printed copies of the pictures I'd taken of his wife and the troll and promised to email him the originals. He stared at them for so long I started to worry, but then he howled.
I winced. If you aren't a wolf, you really should avoid howling.
“You just saved me close to a million dollars,” he shouted.
Huh. Benny was apparently loaded, but the foxes usually were, so that wasn't exactly a surprise.
“Here,” he said, and I stared at the big pile of cash he held out toward me.
“There's no need to -”
“I've paid a PI four times that and he came up with nothing. Now I can cancel that contract, so you earned it.”
Okay. If he put it like that, I wasn't going to object, so I didn't.
I was tucking it into my pocket when something hit me. It wasn't a scent. Or a sound. It felt like a soft wave of warmth washing over me, and I straightened.
Tall dark and handsome had entered the bar and walked straight up to me.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
His voice felt like warm honey sliding over my skin, and my step-mom was a bear, so I totally knew how that felt.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
His mouth widened in a smile and glitter started to form in his eyes.
“That's my cousin,” he said calmly. “I'm Rafael.”
My racing mind came to a screeching halt.
He couldn't be a cousin to the actual Jesus Christ, could he? There were many kinds of others around, but still. No. Of course not.
“I'm -”
“Kitty,” he cut me off. “Let's go.”
Let's go? Was he nuts? Gorgeous, but nuts. Mostly gorgeous, when I thought about it, but still.
He had started to walk away but turned and frowned at me when I didn't move.
“Let's go,” he repeated a little more forcefully
“I'll pass,” I said.
He walked back through a room that suddenly was silent and stopped in front of me with a frown.
“You'll pass?” he asked slowly.
“I have a sub-zero desire to walk away with a complete stranger in the middle of my shift,” I shared. “So, yeah. I'll pass.”
He watched me for a while, but then he smiled.
“You just became a whole lot more interesting, Kitty Brown,” he said.
I was not at all sure this was a good thing.
When Silenus suddenly started laughing, I suspected that it was, in fact, a very bad thing.
“So, Kitty. Tell me about yourself,” Rafael murmured.
“No,” I replied and walked away to hand Benny another beer.
Silenus laugh turned hysterical.
Rafael frowned.
Benny was grinning like a fool when I handed him the beer.
What the hell was going on?
Chapter Eight
An electric blue speedo.
I was sitting in a deck chair, sipping pink lemonade and munching idly from a big bowl of popcorn as I watched my grandmother scry. Don’t get me wrong; it was something I’d seen tons of times before, and it wasn’t as if it was a huge source of entertainment, but it was Sunday, and I had nothing better to do.
Grandma Hazel sat calmly in her circle, staring into a plastic bowl filled with water and mumbling witchy words of encouragement. Every now and then she winced or twitched, and then she grinned.
“What’s with the grin?” Joel murmured next to me.
“How would I know?” I asked.
“Maybe because you’re a witch too?”
“Only half,” I mumbled and shoved more popcorn into my mouth. “And they wouldn’t let me scry.”
“Remind me again why you let that stop you,” Elsa said sleepily.
The sun was out, and she sighed a little as she leaned back and closed her eyes again. Unicorns were not good in direct sunlight, even in their human shape. Elsa had explained that it was somehow related to the fact that they glittered.
“Scry the wrong way, and you’ll release all kinds of shit.”
“Huh,” Joel said and nabbed some of my popcorn.
“Hey,” I snapped. “Eat your own. It’s like you don’t want your share of the cash I got from Benny,” I added, but put the bowl down and pulled out the pile of money.
They both straightened and stared as I started splitting it up into three piles. Then I handed them one third each and grinned.
“I see a night on the town coming our way,” I shared.
“I see a return to your place coming your way,” Joel said and put the cash back on my lap.
“Don’t need it,” I protested. “I have half of what I need already. Last night was weird but highly profitable.”
“Great tips?”
“Beyond,” I said and turned back to look at grandma who had started swaying a little from side to side.
That was an understatement, actually. I'd thought Rafael would leave, and had looked forward to watching his back as he walked out the door, and not only because his buttocks were each like a priceless work of art. The way he kept his eyes locked on me had been unnerving, and it had taken most of my energy to keep smiling blandly.
Instead, he planted his fantastic ass on a stool and started chatting with the other customers, most of whom he seemed to know surprisingly well. Now and then, someone would ask for a drink, and when they did, they handed me enormous tips which I apparently deserved for being entertaining.
“I’ll stop by Tiaso’s tomorrow,” Elsa said. “The place seems like fun, and I want to meet sex-on-legs.”
Joel scoffed, and I turned toward him.
“If you didn’t like girls so much, you’d get it.” I thought about that for a while and added, “He might make you gay, actually.”
Joel grinned at me and shared that he'd come and see for himself.
“I got it!” Grandma Hazel shouted.
I got up and reached for my phone, knowing that Mom was waiting for news, watching her own phone, tapping her fingers on the table next to it and arching her carefully groomed, albeit stubby brows.
“Where is it?”
“Where is what?” Grandma asked. “Oh, yes. The amulet. It’s shrouded in secrets and whoever has it didn’t want me to see.”
I blinked.
Grandma Hazel grinned.
“I knew he’d made a mistake,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked slowly.
“That nice looking bartender at Bubbas,” she explained, sounding as if I’d taken a trip down the slow lane. “I called him yesterday, but he’d given me the wrong number by mistake, so I ended up at a car-wash all the way over in Hillsboro.”
Oh, God.
“Um, Grandma,” I said, ignoring the suppressed laughter from my less than helpful friends. “It probably wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what?”
Could she be that naïve?
“I’m pretty sure he didn’t give you the number by mistake.”
“He could have seen my car, and it does indeed need a wash.”
Yes. She could apparently be precisely that naïve.
“Grandma Hazel,” I murmured. “I do it all the time. Fugly dudes, or whatever dudes that I don’t want to see again… I give them the number to Marcobelli’s Pizzeria.”
Understanding hit her, and she turned to Elsa and Joel
“The dean’s office at Reed,” Elsa said laconically.
“Environmental Protection Agency,” Joel murmured.
She stared at us, and then she started laughing.
“Hilarious!” she squealed. “I will have to go back to Bubba’s. I only called to let the poor dear know I’m not interested. You know? In case he was waiting by the phone.”
I made a mental note to call Bubba and tell him to warn the staff about her upcoming visit.
“What about the amulet?” I asked.
“I only got that it was old, which I knew. It’s involved with something small, or it could have been many small things. The dwarves might have it? Or the brownies?” She thought about it for a while, and added, “Someone was naked, I think, so it’s probably the brownies who have the amulet. Dwarves are never naked.”
“I’ll call Mom,” I sighed.
“Tell her I’ll try again,” Grandma Hazel said. “No need to tell her about –”
“I won’t,” I assured her, wondering why she’d entertain the idea that I’d share with my mother that her mother was unsuccessfully trying to pick up young bartenders.
“Hello everyone,” a loud voice boomed behind me, and I turned.
“Hey, Gramp –”
The rest of my sentence came out as a hoarse, gurgling sound through a mouth that had fallen wide open.
Grandpa Hunter had walked out on the porch with two of his friends. Wearing only a pair of electric blue Speedos. His friends’ outfits were lime green and leopard print respectively.
I closed my eyes and wondered just how much bleach I’d need to pour in my eyes to erase the sight of three men in their dotage wearing trunks which I was pretty sure flossed their butts, regardless of whether the manufacturer had intended for them to do so, or not.
“I went for the biggest version, and I think the ladies will like it,” Grandpa Hunter said. “Or?”
My eyes flitted down to look at the garment because it hadn’t seemed that big to me. Then I squealed and closed my eyes again.
His crotch was huge. Like, enter the door five seconds before he did, huge.
I’d heard my father brag about swimmers and his ability to produce triplets for as long as I’d lived but he’d refrained from discussing dimensions, which would just have been plain wrong. I was suddenly even more grateful for his restraint.
“Say again?” I asked when no one said a word and Grandpa just kept grinning.
“Found it on the internet,” he shared. “It’s nifty. You tuck your willy inside and bada bing.”
He made a sweeping movement in front of his crotch.
I promptly did what any girl would do at such a moment.
I opened my mouth and screamed, “DAD!”
My father came rushing through the woods and reached us at my fifth shriek.
“What’s wrong?” he shouted.
Then he caught sight of Grandpa, and his rush came to a screeching halt, which made Jackson run right into him. Not even Jack’s big frame could apparently move dad out of his frozen stupor, and Jackson ended up plastered to his back, watching the spectacle on our porch over dad’s shoulder like some weird ventriloquist-doll.
“Wha…” Dad said, swallowed, and tried again, “Wuh?”
He was apparently not stunned into silence but at the same time not able to verbalize his astonishment,
which was understandable considering the sight in front of him.
“What do you think, Son?” Grandpa Hunter asked amicably. “Looks nice, huh?”
“Can I touch it?” Grandma Hazel breathed.
“No!” Elsa, Joel and I shouted.
A scuffle ensued during which dad got the story out of Grandpa. Grandma Hazel butted in, and the other two gentlemen helped explaining how the contraption worked. They had apparently thought it prudent to purchase a slightly smaller version, something I took their word for. Wolves were usually pretty hairy creatures also in their human shapes, and I feared seeing a minuscule, leopard print Speedo surrounded by tufts of gray hair would be the fastest way to have an actual stroke.
During the commotion, my brothers had appeared from nowhere, and then the screen door slammed. And I exhaled.
Salvation had entered the fray in the form of my step-mother.
“Janie,” I whimpered. “I can’t do this. You have to do something, or I will find the closest bordello.”
“What?” Dad barked.
“I think I could be a highly successful hooker, Dad,” I whispered. “That will easily give me the rent money I need. You always said I didn’t spend nearly enough time on my homework and way too much time on my back, so I’d just –”
Dad was suddenly roaring, my brothers were snickering, and both Joel and Elsa were laughing so hard they had to lean on the house.
My eyes met Jackson’s, and he was grinning crookedly.
“You have got to let me take you on another date,” he murmured.
“If you’re looking for a nice bordello, there’s one just ten miles away that seems to be above average,” Grandpa cut in, and his friends nodded. “The girls are really friendly. I can give you the address.”
“What?” my father barked again.
“We had to make sure everything was in working order.”
Everyone went silent.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware that solicitation is a crime, Hunter?” Jackson asked quietly, but I could see the tips of his mouth quivering, so I figured he wasn’t planning to arrest Grandpa anytime soon.
That was probably a good thing because jail time in that outfit would not end well for Gramps.
“Of course I know that, Jackson. I used to be the chief of police, remember? We didn’t do anything,” Grandpa shared jovially.