“Sorry, buddy. It’s on the no-no list for preggie ladies. You’ll have to deal with French until I go shopping.”
“I wonder if they have any baby glitter backpacks on the market with crystal designs? Maybe a little sparkly pentacle? Or a triple spiral?”
I snorted. “I think you’ll have to bedazzle your own witchy backpack. That’s definitely a missing niche in the baby items business.”
* * *
After dinner, Gus took care of the cleanup, while I settled down with a book.
“The kitchen is now spotless milady,” he said with a flourish, as he flopped down on the couch next to me.
I squeezed over to give him more space.
“I even got rid of the coffee stains on the counter. You really need to clean those as they happen.” He popped open the top button of his jeans and took a deep breath. “That’s better.”
I glanced at him. “Between your belly and mine, we’re going to need a sturdier sofa.”
Gus narrowed his eyes. “I may have put on a few pounds, but I’m not that big.”
I snorted. “Have you looked in the mirror, lately?”
“Motherhood has made you mean. Knock it off.”
“Sorry,” I said, smiling.
“Besides. It’s your fault.”
“How do you figure?”
“I blame your pregnancy. I have never been so famished in my entire life. I swear, I’ve been eating for the three of us.”
“I can tell,” I laughed.
“Glass houses, honey.” Gus stared at my stomach as I stretched and rubbed my lower back. “You didn’t have a baby bump when I left, did you?”
I groaned. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Surely, not that long.”
“Last week, I dreamt that instead of giving birth to a baby, a seven-year-old dictator walked out of me, demanding the car keys. The next morning, my pants wouldn’t fit.”
“You woke up with a belly?” Gus hooted with laughter. “That’s impressive.”
“I already had a little belly. I just woke up with a bigger one. Check this out.” I held up my shirt so he could see the wide elastic band supporting my baby bump.
Gus made a face. “That’s spectacularly unattractive. What is it? A slingshot?”
“Pregnancy band.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s hire an Oompa-Loompa to walk underneath you and support your belly on his head.”
I laughed. “I think I’ll stick with the pregnancy band.”
“Don’t be hating on my little orange men. They may be small, but they’re mighty.”
“You just have a thing for dwarfs.”
“Don’t judge me. I’m all about equal opportunity,” he said, lifting my legs on top of his and massaging my feet. “So, how’s our toad doing? Have you been checking on him?”
Gus had made a stone cairn for Grundleshanks outside and enclosed him in it, so he’d be protected from predators while ants and beetles helped him decompose. At least, that was the theory.
“Are you kidding me? I’m pregnant. I can’t check on eggs frying without hurling. There is no way I’m going to check on a decaying corpse for you. No matter how much you rub my feet.”
Even thinking about it made me nauseous. I shuddered and tried to get the image out of my head. When I opened my eyes, Gus was giving me a pained look and holding out a piece of candied ginger.
“Thanks.” I popped it in my mouth. “If it helps, the weather’s been a bitch since you’ve been gone.”
“It is winter.”
“It’s been beyond winter.”
“Morgue-cold, by any chance?”
“More like Antarctica, igloo-building, and the Poles flipping. There’s cold and then there’s Devil’s Point cold. Did you see the six-foot drifts of snow out there? They’re frozen solid. It’s gotten too cold to snow anymore. The only thing that’s keeping me from turning into an ice sculpture is that this baby has turned my insides into a furnace.”
Gus frowned. “That’s not good. That means Grundleshanks is probably more toadsicle than he is decomposed pile of bones. Maybe I should bring him indoors.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said. “How long does it take a toad to decompose anyway?”
Gus looked stumped for a moment, then he stopped rubbing my feet and whipped out his iPhone. “The magic of technology...”
Chapter 3
A few minutes later, Gus was frowning at his phone. “Fifty years. That can’t be right.”
I hooted with laughter and almost choked on the ginger. Gus’s patience was taxed if he had to wait half an hour for his meal at a restaurant. Fifty years might as well be three lifetimes.
I got a sudden mental image of Gus at eighty, camped out at the cairn in a pentacle bedazzled folding chair, with a stopwatch in one hand and a blackthorn cane in the other.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it’s rude to laugh at frustrated people and Internet misinformation?” Gus’s frown deepened.
“I’m sure that’s not right.” I said, patting his arm. “They must be thinking of fossilization, not decomposition.”
He made a noncommittal noise and kept scrolling through whatever website he was on. “Weird. Have you ever heard of exploding toads?”
“Spontaneously exploding?”
“Yeah. Boom.” He said, gesturing with his hands. “It’s a bird, it’s a frog, it’s a toad bomb. A domestic toadarist. A whole new definition for Toad in the Hole.”
Well, that didn’t help. I started laughing all over again.
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation,” Gus said, grinning. “So, knock it off, Chuckles.”
I took a deep breath and tried to think about Grundleshanks and what a special toad he was.
“No,” I said, in my most serious tone of voice. “I’ve never heard of toads spontaneously exploding.”
I tried to look over his shoulder at the phone screen, but my eyes were still light-sensitive.
Gus noticed and darkened the screen for me. “Toad liver is a delicacy for crows in Hamburg, Germany.”
“I know where Hamburg is.”
“Of course you do.” Gus said, patting me on the arm.
I rolled my eyes and felt a stab of pain. I really needed to stop doing that, before my eyes got stuck in that position.
“Wouldn’t it be a delicacy for crows everywhere?” I asked.
“You would think. But I haven’t heard of anything like this happening in the U.S. Maybe German crows have a more advanced palate. Anyway. The birds figured out how to get livers out of living toads.”
“Wait. Living toads? As in alive toads?” I asked, trying to catch up.
“Is your brain ticking along two beats slower than normal?” Gus looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “Generally, yes. That is what living means. I have yet to run into it as a synonym for dead. Alive, living, non-dead. Undead. Hey! The crows created an army of undead toads!”
“That’s just… gross.”
“Gross and cool. Oh, hold up. You’re going to love this,” he said, and continued reading. “In retaliation, the toads would swell up to three times their size and explode, spewing their innards up to one meter.”
“Ewwww! That’s disgusting.”
“What’s even freakier is the toads were still alive after exploding.”
“Are you kidding me?!” I screeched. “That’s not even possible. They were alive after getting their livers plucked out?”
“Apparently.”
“And then they were still alive after their innards exploded?”
“That’s what it says.”
“For how long?!” I asked, fascinated in spite of myself.
“All it says is a short time.” Gus replied.
“That’s just… insane. Freaky. Freakily insane. Attack of the Zombie Toads.”
Gus kept reading from the tiny screen. “A thousand toads exploded over three days.”
“Holy crap. And then it just stopped
? That can’t possibly be right. No way can anything still be alive after having their livers plucked out and their innards exploded.”
Gus grinned. “Demon Crows vs. Zombie Toads. It’s an Otherworldly Smack-Down. There’s no other explanation. Crows and toads are both messengers of the underworld. There had to be something supernatural at work. Besides, if birds suddenly developed the ability to pluck their favorite yummies out of living creatures, with surgical precision, why would they stop?”
“Maybe they ran out of toads?” I said, guessing. “Or they got tired of being drenched in toad entrails?”
Gus shook his head. “We’re not talking normal toads and crows here. We’re talking demonic. Or Daimonic. What if it was Voodoo? Voodoo practitioners can create all sorts of unnatural phenomena.”
I shuddered. I had experienced some of that kind of power first-hand recently, thanks to Mama Lua and her zombie powder.
I suddenly got a mental flash of Gus, terrified, ducking, his hands trying to protect his face, as a giant black bird came barreling at him. I shook my head to clear the image out and tried to replace it with a visual of happy Gus, walking through a field of flowers, on a sunny day.
Gus rubbed his hands with glee and raised his eyebrows. “Or… what if toads and crows are just a front? What if the words are code for something else? Like Templars and Crusaders? Hey, maybe we can—”
“—Stop right there,” I said. I knew where this was going. “I don’t care how bizarre it is, or how Voodoo-ish, or what they actually mean by toads and crows. I am not getting on a plane to Germany to go check it out. You'll just have to let this one be.”
Gus shrugged. “If it happened once, there’s a good chance it'll happen again. Just in case…” he pointed at me. “Keep one eye on the skies, and one hand over your liver.”
I looked down at myself and tried to figure out where exactly my liver was…
Just in case.
Chapter 4
The next morning, I was startled out of a sound sleep by a subsonic boom. I felt it, more than heard it. Like my body was a drum skin, stretched taut over a kettledrum, and someone had struck a warning thud.
My heart raced. My mind tried to swim through its morning fog. Where had I felt that sensation before?
The house wards.
I jumped out of bed and raced downstairs, the Dobies at my heels. My cottage was known for having a magickally proactive defense system, with a history of having turned at least one would-be arsonist into a rowan tree. There was no telling what the wards would do if they were triggered.
* * *
I tore open the front door and was practically knocked over by the wind chill. My eyes teared up from the cold and I tightened my robe around me.
There was a large box on the front porch.
That would explain the wards going off. Someone must have thrown the box on the porch, instead of gently placing it.
I looked around, trying to spot a hapless delivery person sprawled out on a bush, or an additional piece of shrubbery that hadn’t been there before, but everything looked normal.
There was a Sunset Farms logo on one side of the box. This must be the organic fruit and veggie bi-weekly delivery Gus had ordered while he was in Chicago.
I made a face. When I tried to talk him into an all-fruit box, Gus accused me of being a sugar junkie and lectured me about fruit addiction.
I picked it up and carried it into the kitchen, trying not to trip over the Dobie menaces who, for some unknown reason, were feeling compelled to do figure eights around my feet.
After I started a pot of decaf coffee brewing, I fed the Dobes, put winter sweaters, hats and doggy booties on them, and let them out into the run Gus had built for them before he left for Chicago, so they could play. Gus would be laughing his ass off when he saw their wardrobe, but it was ridiculously cold outside.
How did people deal with this kind of cold year after year? I’d only been dealing with it since Samhain, and the novelty had definitely worn off. If I could pick up the cottage and grounds, and move them to Los Angeles, I’d be on the first plane back to sunny California.
I tossed a starter log into the fireplace and lit it. Once the flames were merrily crackling away, I went upstairs to check on Gus and tell him his delivery had arrived. But he wasn’t in his room.
I looked around, surprised. I couldn’t imagine where he would have gone so early. Gus was a big believer in getting his beauty sleep. I quickly searched the rest of the house, but he was nowhere to be found.
I started feeling anxious. I know he’s a grown man, but I’m a worrywart and this was Gus we were talking about after all. If anyone could figure out a way to get into trouble, it would be him. So I went to my bedroom, sat on the carpet in front of my altar, and did a quick check of the web using my sixth sense.
* * *
It took me awhile to locate Gus. For me, Gus was usually a gold light on a glimmering green/gold string. Today, his light was partially hidden by a dark cloud. It didn’t feel immediately menacing, but that cloud worried me. I’d never seen anything like it before. I tried to poke at it, but my attempts were completely blocked.
The alarm on my clock/radio went off, shooting me back to reality with a nasty screech. I stood up and half ran, half hopped over to the nightstand, my right foot all pins and needles from being under my body.
I slapped at the alarm to turn it off, but—like most electronics—it totally defied me. Every time I turned it off, it would turn itself back on. Finally, I gave up and pulled the plug out of the wall.
Great. Gus was being stalked by something that looked like it was out of the Abyss, my concentration was shot, and according to the alarm, it was time to get ready for my breakfast date with Paul.
I sent up a prayer to the Goddess to watch over Gus, then quickly showered and dressed in my best hide-the-baby-bump fashion.
* * *
I don’t know how I managed it, but I was actually ready to go twenty minutes before I needed to leave. So I stopped in the kitchen, poured myself a cup of decaf and unpacked the box. Of course, the good stuff—oranges, plums, apples—were at the bottom. I had to dig through all the veggies first.
Fennel bulb after fennel bulb. How much fennel can two people eat? And since when did fennel become a vegetable? I always thought it was an herb.
Green peppers.
A head of lettuce.
A bunch of weird-looking green stuff—I checked the invoice, and it was kale.
Small oblong heads of endive.
Human head.
I dropped the head and screamed. From the floor, Gus’s face looked up at me.
“Help me,” it said.
I screamed again.
Chapter 5
Gus slammed through the back door.
“Why does your cottage have to be this far north?” He grumbled.
I looked at him, shocked. “What…?”
“In its next life, I expect it to reincarnate itself south of the equator. Brazil would be nice.”
I looked down at the floor, where a head of cabbage rolled against my feet.
Cabbage?
I looked back up at Gus.
“I’ll have a talk with the Daimon of the cottage,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “I’m sure, by its next lifetime, it’ll be ready for a warmer climate.”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the cottage did actually have a resident Daimon.
“Thank you.” Gus replied.
I nodded and looked back down at the head by my feet.
Still cabbage.
I picked it up and put it on the counter.
What the hell just happened?
“Hey! My delivery is here.” Gus said.
I turned to Gus, uneasy. “Gus, what are you up to?”
He looked at me, blankly. “Trying to give you a balanced diet? You can thank me at any point. I’m sure the baby will appreciate it.”
I narrowed my e
yes at him and concentrated. He had one hand on the counter, and the other behind his back. “What are you hiding? I don’t think it’s a grapefruit.”
He gave me a sheepish grin.
“Seriously.” I said. “What are you up to? There’s some massively dark energy around you and it’s freaking me out a little.”
Gus reluctantly held up a perfectly preserved Grundleshanks, encased in a clear brick of ice. “Necromancers-R-Us. Care to dance with the dead?” he said, waving Grundleshanks at me.
I yelped and jumped back as a drop of melting ice water hit my arm.
“Knock it off,” I batted Gus’s arm away. “Put him in the sink before he drips on the floor.”
Instead, he thrust Grundleshanks closer to my face and, doing his best Al Pacino impersonation, said: “Say hello to my little friend.”
As the smell of decomposing toad and melting ice hit my nose, I felt my stomach turn and heave. I barely made it to the kitchen sink in time.
Gus sighed. “Seriously, is it too much to ask for you to be a little less disgusting? All this vomiting is making me queasy.”
“You’re standing in my kitchen, waving a dead body at me, and I’m making you queasy?” I said, running water down the garbage disposal side of the sink to clear it out.
“There is no possible way you can smell him. You can barely see him. He’s an amphibian Han Solo, dipped in watery carbonite. Look at him. I’m never going to get this ritual done.”
I ignored the toad and rinsed out my mouth. When I looked down, I noticed I was going to have to change my clothes.
“Crap. This is my nicest shirt. Now what am I going to wear?”
“It’s not my fault.” Gus said, defensively. “You can’t blame me if being pregnant has turned you into Super-Smeller Girl. I wouldn’t have brought Grundleshanks in if he was decomposing and stinky to normal noses.”
“Sure you would have.” I scrubbed at the stains with water and dish soap, but I only succeeded in making the shirt slimy and sudsy.
He thought about it for a bit and nodded. “You’re probably right. A boy’s got to get his kicks somehow. If you’re done, move over so I can thaw him out.”
Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie We're In Trouble! (The Toad Witch Mysteries Book 2) Page 2