And he was also partially deaf. She woke him each day with gentle strokes to his back because he startled easily, and he didn’t always like new people.
If whoever had broken in here had startled him or…
Oh, God. She couldn’t think about how terrified he’d be.
But what if…
Her heart began to speed up, thinking about her life without him, and she had to force herself not to project.
“Is this a Pancake?” she heard Nina coo in a baby voice from somewhere down her hallway, in the polar opposite of her normally gruff, husky tone. “Who is this pretty baby? C’mere now. Come see Auntie Nina. Don’t be afraid. I love the babies. I love all the babies. Love-love-love!”
Murphy blinked into the darkness. Was that Nina, “I’ll rip your skin off and pick the flesh from your bones,” talking to her dog in a baby voice? And then Murphy’s knees almost collapsed out from under her with relief that Pancake was alive.
There was a pause and some rustling and some wet kissing noises, and then Nina said, “That’s a good-good boy. Who’s such a good boy? C’mon. Let’s get this off you and go see Mommy, okay? You scared her.”
She heard Pancake yip, and then Nina appeared from the dark hallway with her chunky dog in her arms, and a piece of duct-tape in her hand.
Nina’s eyes were angry and hard as she handed Pancake to Murphy. Her dog didn’t appear at all beside himself with terror, the way she’d expected.
“The motherfucker put duct tape on his muzzle, to keep his ass quiet, I suspect,” she spat. “Let me tell you this fucking much, if I find the shitstain who broke in here and did that to him, I’ll make him eat a whole roll of duct tape right before I make spaghetti from their intestines. And before you crack wise, I love kids and fucking animals, in no particular order. I love most old people, too. So if you have something to say about it, rethink and remember I don’t like people—almost all people—and you qualify as a fucking people.”
Murphy wanted to laugh because Nina’s reaction to Pancake was so unexpected, but as she directed Alexa to turn on the lights in her house and draw the drapes to let the mid-morning sun in, and was able to see the damage not just to her apartment, but to poor Pancake’s face where he was missing some hair from the duct tape, she thought she might cry instead.
On a shaky breath, she hugged Pancake to her protectively, burying her nose in his soft fur, and said, “Who would do this, and why?”
It didn’t appear as though they’d taken anything of value, though she hadn’t checked her bedroom yet. Still, there wasn’t much to take. She didn’t have expensive pieces of jewelry or electronics aside from her TVs.
Nina’s eyes flickered hot as she looked around. “I don’t fucking know, but I’d bet my damn arm it has to do with the knee-deep shit your sister’s in. I’m gonna text Sten and send him over to your sister’s place to see if they tossed her apartment, too. Marty or Wanda will go with him. We can meet him over there if we need to after you get your shit.”
Setting poor Pancake down on the floor with one last kiss to his face, she grabbed his leash to prepare to walk him, but before she did, she pulled out her phone and sent Nina the code for Nova’s apartment.
“Send that to Sten. He’ll need the code to get into Nova’s. I’ll call her doorman to see if he saw anything strange and to let him know to expect Sten.”
Nina’s one eyebrow rose. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“I have to walk Pancake. It’s been hours since he’s been out, and he needs to eat.”
The vampire shook her head. “I’ll do walkies. You get his food ready, and lock the door behind me. You go nowhere without one of us with you. Hear me?”
Nina held out her hand for the leash, but Murphy hesitated. “He’s not usually good with strangers. It takes him a while to warm up. He’s still warming up to Nova, and I’ve had him for three years.”
But she wiggled her fingers at Murphy to hand her the leash. “Does anyone ever fucking warm up to Nova? Just trust me. Gimme the leash and pack a damn bag. You’re not coming back here until we find out what the fuck is going on and I know you’re safe.”
Murphy’s lips thinned despite Nina’s protective words. “Okay, but I’m telling you, Pancake doesn’t…” As she spoke the words and began to hand over the leash, her stout little dog went directly to Nina’s feet and looked up at her with adoring eyes, waiting for her next command.
Nina smirked at Murphy before she reached down and stroked Pancake’s head to praise him. “Who’s the bestest boy in the world? That’s you, Pancake! Now, come with Auntie Nina and we’ll do some walkies. Then when we get back, while Mommy packs her bags, we’ll find a big steak or something for such a good-good boy.” Nina made her way to the door and called over her shoulder, “Lock that behind me, Troll. I’ll text you when I get back so you can let me in. Go nowhere.”
Murphy trailed behind her and, as the door hushed closed, she set the code to lock the door. Turning, she pressed her back to the cool steel and fought a meltdown as she looked at the mess her apartment was in.
That was when she saw a slip of crumpled purple paper sitting on her small entryway table, in the midst of the basket that held the keys to her storage unit and miscellaneous loose items.
Snatching it up because it didn’t look like familiar stationary (who used stationary anymore?), Murphy read the flowery writing.
Five p.m. on Thursday, in The Realm, north corner.
Chapter 9
What the hell did that mean? Obviously, it was some sort of location in Troll-ville. Sten had called it The Realm. So what was going on at the north end of The Realm next Thursday?
A shiver of terror ran along her spine when she allowed herself to think about a stranger going through her things and invading her personal space. She felt watched, and that frightened her almost more than figuring out how to be a troll.
As she stared at the purple paper, Murphy had to wonder if whoever it belonged to had left it here by mistake. Maybe a clumsy criminal who’d broken into her house and wasn’t smart enough to leave the crime scene clean had mistakenly dropped it? Certainly no one who wanted her to find a note would leave one crumpled up on her table.
With one last glance, she stuffed it into her pocket to share with Nina and decided she’d better make a bowl of food for Pancake before he got back from his walk. Surely, he was starving at this point.
Then she’d do as Nina said and pack a bag—for who knew how long—to take to the Castle of Doom for an extended lesson in trolling.
Murphy stepped over the mess of picture frames and pillows that had been tossed to the floor and entered her small, square kitchen in white with only hints of color, in the stem of fake greenery she had in a glass vase on the island or the fake boxwood plants she kept in white containers.
How ironic that they hadn’t been tipped over when whoever had tossed her apartment had run through here like a wrecking ball.
Grabbing a bag of Pancake’s food, she poured some in his bowl and set aside the rest to take with her, closing drawers left askew as she went.
And then she decided to tackle her bedroom.
Lifting her chin, she headed down the hallway toward her bedroom decorated in more soothing white and beige. She’d chosen the colors because life as Nova’s assistant was so chaotic, she needed something easy on the eye after a long day.
But her bedroom wasn’t so soothing when torn to pieces, and it was definitely torn to pieces.
Her clothes had been pulled from her old antique white dresser, the one she’d painted and sanded and distressed herself. They lie strewn across the room in a colorful array of material.
The creamy stoneware lamps on her early American stained nightstands had been toppled over and one of the oyster-white lampshades was halfway across the room, collapsed in a heap.
Her enormous California king bed, a splurge on her part, with lush, ruffled bedding and an assortment of oatmeal and white knobby pillows,
looked as though someone had danced across it.
As she picked her way through the clothes on the floor, separating what she wanted to take with her to Nina’s and what would have to be put away, Murphy caught sight of her bathroom—and gasped.
There were a lot of things you could do to hurt her, but scratching up her vanity, with the raised square white sink set atop a crisp white quartz countertop, was probably one of the worst crimes you could commit.
She’d paid a fortune to have someone bring the estate sale find up the elevator for her so she could refinish it, and another fortune to have a plumber hook up her sink to it, and now, it was totally trashed.
It appeared as though someone had keyed the entire face of it. Deep, thick scratches covered the drawer fronts and the cabinet doors. In fact, the one cabinet door looked as though someone had tried to scratch their way in.
Her heart sank as she added calling her homeowner’s insurance company to her list of things to do. Sure, it was the least of their problems, but she loved her apartment.
She’d worked hard to turn it into a soothing hug from the minute she’d walked in the door, and now it was broken shell of its former self. She had to live somewhere when this was over, and her apartment was no longer the haven it once was.
Then she discovered that wasn’t the whole of it.
As she turned, she caught a glimpse of her bathtub—a freestanding oval with black fixtures—and almost passed out.
Gripping the trim on the door—trim she’d cut, painted and installed herself—she pressed her forehead to the light beige wall just outside the bathroom to keep from falling on the hexagonal-tiled floor which, in places, was also smashed to smithereens.
Dear God. A sledgehammer. Someone had used a sledgehammer to crush her bathtub. The pieces of porcelain were everywhere, some in enormous chunks, others in tiny chips, leaving behind a pile of dusty debris.
Swallowing hard to fight off hysteria, Murphy tiptoed over the mess and headed for her vanity to grab some toiletries…and caught a good look at herself in the cracked oval mirror.
Pulling off the ball cap Nina had loaned her, she let her hair swing around her shoulders and assessed. Maybe it wasn’t so much fuchsia as it was magenta.
And in all honesty, it really wasn’t so unusual. Lots of people had different colors in their hair—some might even consider it fun. The same went for her eyes…once mud brown, now a brilliant purple framed by her brown eyelashes. People wore colored contacts all the time, why couldn’t she?
Her horns and ears, however, not as much fun. The two sprouts poking from her head that felt like velvet would be comical if they weren’t real. In fact, if she went to Comic-Con, folks would likely assume she was wearing one of those fun headbands the vendors there sold—like unicorn-horn headbands.
But her ears? They looked real. Really real, and while she could hide them with her hair for now, that couldn’t last forever.
Looking at her skin under the bright fluorescent lights, she pushed up the sleeve of her coat and held up an arm.
Damn, she was pink. So Barbie pink.
But she reminded herself, Sten had promised to teach her how to change back to her human form. There’d been no time as they’d begun to sort out what needed to be done to help Nova, but he’d promised when things calmed down, he’d show her.
Murphy didn’t know what that entailed, but she hoped it wasn’t as horrifying as Marty’s shift—for which, the werewolf declared, she hadn’t even shifted into her full werewolf form.
Running a hand through her hair, Murphy grabbed a brush and a bottle of perfume, noting with a sigh of relief that the one piece of jewelry that meant anything to her, her mother’s locket, was oddly still in her jewelry box.
As she put it in the pocket of her jeans, tears stung her eyes when she thought about her parents, how they’d feel about what was going on now, but she shook off the sad thought when she heard Nina calling out her name.
It felt wrong to cry in front of a woman like Nina. It felt weak. It felt like you were showing her your soft underbelly in submission, and even if Murphy wasn’t the toughest girl on the block, she did have some pride.
Pancake bounded down the hall, his paws clattering noisily into her bedroom, where he promptly dropped himself into a pile of her clothes and rolled around with grunts of delight. Nina poked her head inside the bedroom and clucked her tongue.
She pulled her hoodie off and shook her head. “Jesus Christ in a mini skirt, kiddo. What a mess.”
Murphy nodded, wiping the corner of her eye because she reminded herself of her previous thought. No way would she cry in front of this tsunami—this force of a woman.
Looking down, rather than at the vampire, she sighed. “Yeah. No joke.”
Nina placed a hand on Murphy’s shoulder and squeezed. “Listen, kiddo. We’ll figure this out. It sucks right now, but it won’t always, and when we’re done figuring out who the fuck did this—and only after I fucking make them wish someone would flay them alive rather than leave their asses in my hands—we’ll help you clean up. It’ll be like it never happened. Promise.”
Murphy’s head popped up. “Is that compassion I hear in your tone, Mistress of Evil?” she teased, unsure if her ears were deceiving her.
Nina stooped and began scooping up her clothes to throw on the bed. “That’s Mistress of The Dark, thank you very fucking much, and nah. That’s the truth you hear. We’ll find whoever this fuck is who sold the curse to that shallow bitch Bellamy, the same fuck that’s also probably responsible for tearing up your digs, and then we’ll fix it.”
The enormity of that task alone, especially when Bellamy appeared to have convenient amnesia about where she’d gotten the curse, worried her.
This concerned her in more ways than one.
“But Bellamy said she can’t find his contact information. I mean, I don’t know how you misplace something as important as the name and number of the person who sold you the curse you used to clobber your competition, but that’s what she said last night.”
Nina made a face and rolled her eyes, planting her hands on her lean hips. “You misplace that shit because her plan was to never turn her fucking victim back, Murphy. You know, eliminate the competition? If I’m reading those damn Instagram and YouTube stats right, Nova’s wailing her in the numbers—or she was until the shit went down with the assistant, right?”
Boy, was that ever the truth, and probably the last straw for Bellamy, who had gone ballistic, causing her to post what she had last night, provoking Nova to post what she had.
“Right. Nova’s numbers did suffer as people took sides, but maybe not enough to satisfy Bellamy.”
“Exactly. So why wouldn’t Bellamy just leave her lookin’ like she crawled out from Middle Earth forever? It only works to her benefit to leave your sister fucked sideways. Nova’s not getting on the Internet with a slew of selfies lookin’ like she does now. If she never gets changed back, and she can’t keep taking stupid-ass selfies of her food and all the amazing places she flies to in her private jet, Bellamy wins, right? Like, she gets the crown. So why would she wanna fix that shiz?”
Shit. That hadn’t occurred to her. Though, the war between the two women was fierce enough that it should have. But still, that was some seriously comic book villain thinking. Murphy had never considered this was maybe more than just a prank to Bellamy.
“So you think she’s lying about knowing how to find the person who sold her the curse?”
Nina sucked in her cheeks. “How many fucking people have a curse like that at their fingertips, Murphy? Of course she’s full of shit. She doesn’t want to rat out whoever it is. I’d admire that in most cases. If the case didn’t involve me and my goddamn time, that is.”
Sitting at the edge of her trashed bed, Murphy squeezed her temples. “That’s a good point.” And then she wondered, “You know what’s been niggling at the back of my brain, Nina? What makes Nova so valuable in the troll world, anyway? I’m no
t sure I ever heard Sten give a reason. Last night’s still kind of a blur.”
Nina folded a couple of her T-shirts and shook her head. “He didn’t give specifics. I don’t know if that’s because it’s gonna freak you two out even more, or if he was too busy trying to make his sister give up the fucking information. But he did say she was still in transformation, and you’ll know when it happens.”
“I don’t get it…”
“It means Nova’s a type of troll yet to be fucking determined. You know, sort of like breeds and sub-breeds of dogs. Cocker spaniels have varieties. A king cavalier, English, American and so on. So do trolls. I guess we won’t fucking know until it happens.”
Murphy winced. “Did he mention the assortment of breeds?”
Nina scowled and shook her head. “Nope, and for now, we won’t worry about what we can’t fucking control. But I’ll tell you this much, he should have let me have a crack at Bellamy. I’d have gotten the info, and some of her perfect teeth while I was at it.”
Looking at Nina, her eyes blazing, pale face devoid of any color other than her raven eyebrows and lashes, for a moment, Murphy forgot about their troubles and asked a totally unrelated question. “Have you ever considered Instagram as a form of income?”
Nina stopped folding and looked at her with hard eyes. “What the fuck are you squawkin’ about?”
“Instagram. You could make a fortune as an influencer, you know. You’re insanely beautiful, but I guess you know that already. In fact, you’re leaps and bounds better-looking than half the influencer models out there. I bet you’d have tons of gigs in no time flat.”
Nina pulled her phone from her pocket and took a selfie and then she showed Murphy.
“There’s nothing there…” Murphy cocked her head and muttered.
“Well fuck. There goes my Instagram modeling career right down the goddamn drain. That really sucks because there’s nothing I’d rather do than take pictures of myself in a bathing suit made of toothpicks and dental floss while I sit at a beach and drink martinis with kitschy names all goddamn day long for some likes on the Internet.”
The Accidental Troll Page 8