The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2)

by A. K. Caggiano

  “Um, hey, I don’t mean to change the subject—”

  “—please do—”

  “—but is that a…well, that’s not a pigeon, is it?”

  The creature was pigeon-sized, with a set of wings, big eyes on either side of its head, and jewel-toned colors all over its body, but it was covered in scales where it should have had feathers, and its wings were leathery and run through with veins, and when it snuffled in the grass, a tiny plume of smoke rose out of its snout.

  “Oh, yeah. They were going extinct,” he said as if that explained everything. When she just looked at him, he went on, “Some conservationists wanted to help preserve them a couple hundred years ago or something, but it’s apparently difficult to make safe spaces for multi-ton, flying, fire-breathers, so they just shrunk them. Turns out they’re really good at surviving when they’re small, and now they’re basically an invasive species.”

  “You just…you shrunk dragons?”

  He stood, gesturing for her to follow. “Well, I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER 14

  CONGRATULATIONS OR CONDOLENCES

  “The phoenix has burnt.”

  Lorelei screwed up her face, the check-in desk phone held to her ear. Mr. Ingram in 756 was saying something about a polliwog giving off little electric zaps in his shower drain, but Grier’s words as he stood in front of her were even stranger.

  “The basilisk hunts at midnight.” He was leaning over the edge of the desk, his eyes pried open wide, scar taut over his face.

  What? she mouthed as Mr. Ingram’s voice went on, complaints of burnt toe hairs mounting in her ear. The alalynx walked across the counter between them, fluttering her wings in both of their faces for attention.

  Grier rolled his eyes and leaned back, scoping the foyer for anyone else who might be around. “The kraken,” he whispered, leaning back in and pushing Aly out of the way, “has one short tentacle.”

  “Are you having a stroke?” Lorelei stared back at him as the voice on the other end of the line gasped. “Oh, no, not you, Mr. Ingram! Just a little…medical emergency downstairs. I’ll send Ren right up for that polliwog.” When she hung up, she glared at the lycan. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Carr,” he whispered through grit teeth. “He’s headed into town tonight.”

  “Oh!” Lorelei immediately glanced around the foyer too and shushed him despite that they were still alone and already whispering. “Are you sure?” That didn’t actually sound much like Mr. Carr.

  Grier nodded just as Ziah came into the foyer from the sitting room with Mr. Ecknees’s empty teacup. “So,”—he raised his voice, stilted—“that’s why I need you to come shopping with me for my secret Santa gift tonight.”

  “You haven’t done that yet?” Ziah clicked her tongue as she passed, shaking her head. “I guess I’m not surprised. Lore, keep him on track, okay? Oh, and I have a client coming in a few minutes, so I’ll be unreachable for the next hour or so.”

  Lorelei gave her a thumbs up as she disappeared into the dining room. She also had not picked out her secret Santa gift, but it had only been a couple weeks since they’d been given the names and Christmas was still a few weeks away.

  Grier grinned, waggling his eyebrows. “So gullible. So, tonight, we gotta—”

  Lorelei cleared her throat loudly as Arista and Seamus swept in through the front door, shaking off the cold. Seamus greeted them, letting the whole manor know the temperature and just how many birds they’d seen on their walk while Arista caught Lorelei’s eye and gave her a curt nod. The woman had been making rounds every day, uncharacteristic according to everyone else, but Lorelei knew why—she was refreshing her wards and checking that everything was secure. The nod told her nothing was amiss, and Lorelei was grateful they didn’t have to exchange words. Arista told Seamus quietly she was headed off for a nap, the task always taxing.

  “Grier, can you please grab Ren and get up to 756 to take care of Mr. Ingram’s problem?”

  He snorted, crossing his arms, his white eye looking particularly angry. “Did you hear anything I said?”

  Lorelei watched as Arista and Seamus went into the dining room, then she leaned forward, both hands spread out on the counter. “Of course I did! I’ll meet you when we’re both off, okay? Just be cool until then.”

  He grinned, his canines a little pointier than she remembered, everything about the look screaming mischief was on the horizon. “Right. Cool. Cool as a yeti.” Then he rushed out the door.

  Lorelei cleaned up the morning’s notes in time for lunch, sent Ziah’s client, a tall, dark-haired man, upstairs, and checked in two more guests, but her mind was firmly planted on the day before.

  Conrad hadn’t been in the mood to divulge much more of the specifics about Byron on the way back from Bexley, so she didn’t really get to ask how he had gone from a warlock without a spark—which, as far as she was concerned, was indistinguishable from a human—to a being powerful enough to master seemingly every school of magic. Of course, it was very possible Conrad just had no idea, but he avoided the topic, reverting to his snotty and taunting self on their walk back through the forest. That, she was at least comfortable with, perhaps finding it even endearing though she was coming to realize it was just a mask in almost the same way her fae glamour was.

  She’d have to bring it all up with him again in the future, but the task didn’t seem so daunting in light of his recent behavior, especially relative to how tense things were a few weeks prior. She chuckled to herself at the memory of how panicked he’d been in the attorney’s office when Mr. Abara called her Mrs. Rognvaldson.

  The front doors to the manor opened, sunlight flooding in with a gust of blustery wind. As the almanac that Ren had made her predicted, it was a cloudless but exceedingly low temperature day, and if he continued to be right—which was about eighty percent of the time—it would get below freezing by sundown. Lorelei’s wistful smile faded into a deep frown.

  Bridgette stood in the foyer, all smiles and pink and blonde. Lorelei couldn’t even bother to fake a greeting back as the witch called to her. Aly hid her head under a paw at the end of the counter.

  “Hey, girl!” Bridgette crossed the foyer, her heeled boots clacking, and she set two Moondoe’s cups on the counter. “Ooo, I love this. So. Cute. On. You.” Bridgette pointed at her top to punctuate every word, surprisingly cheery considering she had been dumped so recently.

  Lorelei glanced down at herself. Her community college logo, a bobcat, glared back from the front of the two-sizes-too-big sweatshirt. “Thanks? I, um, like your nails.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie: they were lavender with gold tips and looked like they could gouge out an eye.

  “Oh, my gods, don’t you just? Got them done at this new place last night in Bexley, that was so, so cute.” She admired them then glanced at Lorelei, pursing her lips, the next part coming out strained. “You should totes come with next time.”

  Lorelei wasn’t sure what to say, but was relieved she and Conrad hadn’t bumped into her in the city.

  “So, I heard,” she said, rifling through her bag and pulling out a compact, “that you got into some stuff a little while ago.” She was looking at herself in the handheld mirror and using a finger to smooth down a flyaway hair, but her eyes snapped up to Lorelei just long enough to stab right through her.

  “Stuff?” As Lorelei thought, the stairs creaked, and Ziah’s latest client came down into the foyer, meandering over to the counter.

  “At the house with my boyfriend and his brother.” She kept her voice low and snapped the compact shut. “Just don’t get any big ideas about that, kay?”

  Lorelei swallowed, the witch’s glare boring right into her soul. She wanted to agree just to get it to stop, but also, what the hell did she mean about getting big ideas? She almost died in that house for crying out loud, but she made it sound like it had been a date. And, really, why was Bridgette even here? Conrad said he broke up with her, and she almost pointed that
out, but instead shifted her gaze to Ziah’s client, a dark-haired man with a long, skinny bag strapped to his back standing politely a pace off from Bridgette and waiting. “Sir?”

  “Ziah asked I give you—” As he leaned toward her to hand over a thick stack of bright red envelopes, he paused, looking down at the counter where the Moondoe’s cups were sitting. He took a deep breath and narrowed his eyes, then frowned and focused back on Lorelei. “Uh, these are meant for the outgoing mail,” he said, handing off the stack.

  As the man walked off, his apprehensive gaze passed over Bridgette and the cups once more though the witch didn’t notice. Instead, she was still just staring daggers at Lorelei. Well, that was enough of that. “So, I heard you guys broke up.”

  Bridgette’s face went purple. “Ugh, gods, no, we had one, teeny, tiny disagreement, but you know how boys are—they just cannot handle communication properly and think when you’re mad, you’re done with them.” She picked up her drinks and took a sip from one then sighed. “So silly, almost more trouble than they’re worth, right?” The angry color drained from her face, and she started to grin, a sort of pleasant yet ill-placed look. “They just don’t know what they want, so you have to tell them.” She winked, about to walk off, then paused. “Hey, um, has anything else…weird happened around here?”

  “Weird? Here? No, never.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Since our little trip? Anything a little Zyr-ish?”

  Lorelei squinted at her. “Not really. Why?”

  “I dunno, I just sorta feel not good about tossing that bottle out of the time stream or whatever? Like maybe it was a…a…”

  “A mistake?”

  “No, just, like, maybe not the best choice, ya know? It felt so icky, I figured we should obliterate it, but now I’m not sure. But if you say stuff’s fine,”—she took another sip—“I guess it is. Just, like, maybe be careful or whatever.” Any other time, Bridgette’s warning would have come across as a threat, but her dark eyes looked Lorelei up and down with something more sincere than she’d ever mustered up before. “For real,” she added. “Like, for real real.”

  Then there was a shout and clatter of silverware from the other room, and Aly raised her head with a trill.

  “Uh oh, work never ends, huh?” Bridgette scurried to the hall that led to the basement stairs and skipped off.

  Lorelei pushed Bridgette out of her mind as she crossed the foyer to the dining room. Inside, the guests had been enjoying lunch until a few moments earlier. Now, Ms. Brimstone was standing beside a table and shouting at a dryad who was sitting on her fiance, Mr. Suwanee’s lap. He looked horrified at the whole situation, but the dryad was completely ignoring both Ms. Brimstone’s shrieking and Mr. Suwanee’s protests, and instead was nuzzling into the warlock’s neck.

  “Get off of him!” Ms. Brimstone shouted, and grabbed a fistful of the dryad’s curly hair. She howled, finally yanked away, then shook herself free of the witch’s grasp. The dryad slapped her hands together just in Ms. Brimstone’s face, and an explosion of flowers popped into existence, raining down in pink and white petals and a fine yellow dust.

  “Oh, please!” The witch swatted at the blooms. “Come on, Craig, let’s—achoo!” She sneezed so violently it threw her whole body back, and the dryad cackled before turning back to Mr. Suwanee who, petrified, didn’t get out of his chair in time.

  “Lassies, please!” Seamus was there, his hands out, face twisted into a mix of humor and fear. “We can sort this out. There’s enough of the lad to go around, surely.” Mr. Suwanee looked like he might cry.

  “You!” Ms. Brimstone pushed up her sleeves and cracked her knuckles, eyeing the back of the dryad as she straddled the warlock’s lap. “I’ll turn you into a—choo!” As she flexed her hands and green sparks jolted out of her fingertips, another sneeze wracked her body. The sparks flew, sharp and straight, but missed the dryad completely and instead landed squarely on Seamus’s chest.

  With a snap and a flash, the man’s body went completely stiff, eyes stuck wide open, and then he started to fall forward. As his body plummeted, it condensed on itself, glowing with that same green magic until in its place a frog appeared, croaked once, and plopped onto the ground.

  “Seamus!” Lorelei sprinted across the room and scooped him up just as he went to leap away. He was bright orange with little emerald bumps all over his back, his bulbous eyes turning on her. Then she turned her own eyes on Ms. Brimstone, her mouth hanging open.

  “Damn it, I missed!” The witch raised her hands again, but Mr. Suwanee finally broke himself of his petrification, hopping up and knocking the dryad off his lap.

  “Honey, please, no more transmutation today.”

  She sneezed in his face.

  Then there was a ping, and a shot of something bright pink knocked the dryad in the back of the head followed by a wisp of black smoke curling around her hair. The dryad gasped, straightening, looked down at her own hands, then back up at the two. She covered her face and backed up quickly into another dryad who had been standing, watching the whole thing with the kind of anger only seen on a very pissed off significant other. “What in the great forest is wrong with you?” the woman asked her.

  “I don’t…I don’t know?” Her dark face had gone grey, and as she glanced around the dining room, the eyes of the rest of the guests and the frog on her, she devolved into tears and ran out of the room, her girlfriend chasing after.

  Ms. Brimstone huffed, ready to run out as well, but Mr. Suwanee convinced her to leave through the back door instead, and they too were gone.

  Lorelei was left holding a frog and surrounded by quickly wilting blossoms and pollen. She caught Mr. Carr’s eye who was frozen, his fork halfway to his mouth, a bit of potato salad hanging off of it. She spun away from him to see Philomena and Hana standing in the corner of the dining room.

  Lorelei’s sense of not knowing what to do focused on the two, and she stomped over with a purpose.

  “I didn’t realize they were with other people,” the cupid said, holding out her hands, the peashooter in them.

  Hana was chewing on one of her nails. “They really looked like they would be cute together.”

  “The last time Ms. Brimstone and Mr. Suwanee visited, the chandelier fell practically right in front of them, they got a door slammed in their faces, and they stormed off. This was supposed to be a redo to see if they wanted to have their wedding here. That’s definitely ruined now.” Lorelei had a hand wrapped tightly around Seamus’s squishy body, and she held him up so the two could see. “And now my boss is a frog!”

  Seamus croaked.

  “Toad,” Hana corrected her meekly. “You can tell from the skin.”

  “Most people would be happy if their boss were a toad. It’s why I went freelance.” Philomena gave her a strangled smile. “You see! This is why I need Ziah’s help!”

  Lorelei rolled her eyes. “I have to figure out how to fix this, but you—both of you—have to promise no more of these random acts of love, all right?”

  Philomena gave her an innocuous smile. “I promise I will not mess up like that again.”

  Hana nodded. “Cross our hearts.”

  Lorelei watched the two draw Xs on their chests, opened her mouth to tell them she meant it, but then Seamus croaked again, and she knew she had more important things to deal with.

  Back in the foyer, she held Seamus up to her face, giving him a pitiful look. Ms. Brimstone was a witch, but she’d stomped off before offering to put him back into his body. Thankfully she knew one other charmed person who was pretty good at transmutation. Regrettably he was downstairs at that very moment with Schrödinger’s girlfriend.

  “I hope you appreciate this, Seamus,” she said.

  Aly meowed from the counter, and Lorelei saw her drop her head down and raise her butt up to wiggle it hard in the air. “Oh, no you don’t!”

  The alalynx propelled herself from the counter right at Lorelei’s face. She ducked out of the way
, and to her surprise, Aly kept gliding right past. It was apparently a surprise to Aly too as her wings managed one good flap, she trilled with the excitement of a creature realizing it just might be able to fly, and then plummeted out of the air like a rock. A rock, granted, with wings, but ones she just didn’t know one hundred percent what to do with yet.

  Lorelei checked she hadn’t squeezed Seamus too hard, but he seemed okay. “This is Seamus,” she said, pointing to the toad. “You know, with the goatee and the hats?” Aly looked up at her, frustrated and embarrassed by the fall. “He’s not for eating. Watch the counter for me, all right?”

  She took a breath and went down the basement steps. Seamus only struggled a moment when he saw the pond and all of the rocks perfect for hopping on at the base of the stairs, but Lorelei passed it quickly to get to Conrad’s bedroom. She steeled herself to knock, but when she did, the door was already ajar, and she ended up pushing it open. No one answered, so she pushed it a little more. “Uh, hey, Conrad? Do you have a—oh, geez!”

  Bridgette was on top of him, and they were making out ferociously, if at the very least still clothed, though had she been a couple seconds later she might not have been so lucky.

  Lorelei covered Seamus’s toad eyes. “Hey, excuse me!” she shouted, turning her head away since they had yet to stop. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I have an emergency.”

  “Huh? Oh, Lore!”

  Lorelei hesitantly peaked out of the corner of her eye. Conrad sat straight up, knocking Bridgette away. She shrieked and landed with a huff in the blankets.

  “Hey, are you—” He looked down at himself then over at Bridgette, blinking. “What’s, uh, what’s up?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Lorelei blathered, holding Seamus at arm’s length from her spot in the doorway.

  “Frog?”

  “Toad.” She sighed. “Well, no, actually it’s your uncle. Er, your first-cousin-once-removed-in-law.”

  “Seamus?” Conrad scrambled off the bed then Lorelei averted her eyes once more as he fumbled with the button on his pants. Why was it every time his clothes were half off the rest of the situation was always so inopportune?