by Mina Carter
Belatedly, his survival instincts kicked in and he realized her agreeing with him was not a good thing. The glare strong enough to punch holes in steel also clued him in to that fact.
Motherfucker... He should have kept his mouth shut.
The door behind him crashed open and saved him from the necessity of a reply.
“Troll!” the newcomer gasped as he fell into the room. It was young Davidson’s lad, a bear on the cusp of puberty who hadn’t yet learned full control of his beast. He straightened up, an audible swallow in the back of his throat as he caught sight of the woman in the cell.
Brock bit back a growl. He could tell what the lad was thinking. He didn’t want the lad thinking what the lad was thinking. No one should be thinking what the lad was thinking.
Unless it was him, the little voice in the back of his head teased. He ignored it again. She was so not his type.
“What?” he demanded, turning toward the teenager. “A troll?”
“Yes!” the boy squeaked, his not yet broken voice choosing that moment to be a few octaves higher. “There’s a troll on the town green! It’s got Mrs. McGinty’s youngest!”
Shit. First brownies and now trolls? What had he done in a former life? Kicked puppies or something? He’d been dealing with the brownie problem. Just. But a troll? The whole damn pack could attack and it would still kill the kid. Even he, as alpha, wouldn’t be able to put a scratch on the thing. He could bench press semis, but a skinny bog dweller like a troll could beat him with one hand tied behind its back. Talk about a blow to his masculine pride...
His gaze landed on the woman in the cell in front of him and he made the connection. Things weren’t always about strength. Not physical strength anyway… Trolls were creatures of magic, and therefore, presumably, susceptible to it.
Reaching out, he unlocked the cell and motioned to her as the door swung open.
“Out. You need to come deal with this troll,” he ordered, voice firm. Women always responded to a firm voice. They needed a man’s control.
The damn woman folded her arms, her expression mulish.
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head, that purple hair dancing over delicate shoulders. Her eyes shone with amusement. “Not a witch, remember?”
He gritted his teeth, the temptation to grab her by the upper arms and shake her almost overwhelming.
“You said you were!” He ran a hand through his hair. What was it about the woman that made him want to throttle her?
“You said I wasn’t,” she reminded him, her voice sickly sweet.
Yeah... He was going to throttle her. Or kiss her. He wasn’t sure which yet.
“For shift’s sake, woman!” He all but roared, his voice deepening with his bear in frustration. “Either you are, or you aren’t. Make up your goddamn mind. Because I got a kid about to have his bones snapped by a freaking troll. So... can you help or not?”
Fuck.
Livvy bit back her sigh. Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea... Or, more accurately, between the troll and the werebear.
Her inner voice sniggered. That so sounded like one of the erotic paranormal stories she liked to read. Her nanna had gotten her an e-reader for Christmas one year and she’d read the living hell out of everything she got her hands on.
She’d like to see him as the star of a werebear erotica. The werebear and the witch... She shook that thought down right there. She was absolutely not engaging in any sort of pants off dance off with him. Not even in a blue moon, which apparently happened quite a lot. The blue moon, not the pants off dance off. That was so not happening.
He was a jerk. Sexy, but still a jerk.
She shook her head, bringing herself back to the present. How the hell did she get out of this? Despite her words to him, she wasn’t a witch. Plenty of people had called her a witch... And a bitch ... And a cow... And lots of other things. But she wasn’t a witch. Not a real one anyway. As soon she went out there, it would become bloody obvious. And, if it did, there went her room and board... Along with staying out of eighteen’s clutches.
“Fuck it. You are helping!”
She yelped as Sheriff Blond-but-Furry yanked her out of the cell with hard hands.
The movement was so quick and unexpected that she fell against him, looking up in shock.
No one had laid hands on her that way since David Smith back in school. The class bully, he’d thought he was something, and had cornered her behind the bike sheds when they were both bunking off lessons. She’d sent the little prat packing with his tail between his legs. No magic required, thank you very much. Just a good old-fashioned knee to the bollocks. He’d spent the rest of term avoiding her and speaking in a significantly higher voice.
But as she stumbled and caught herself against Sheriff Sexy-Jerk’s broad, well-muscled chest, she could summon none of that ire.
Hellloooo... ovarian combustion.
Her hands spread out, testing the solidity of the body under them. Oh my... He was nicely built. Very nicely built indeed. If she’d stumbled into him in a bar, she’d have taken him home for a bit of ride-him-hard-and-put-him-up-wet.
Bears have lots of stamina, the little voice in the back of her head added helpfully. She had no clue if that was true or not... But she had heard weres were animals in the sack. The little voice sniggered again. She ignored it and its dirty laugh.
“Oh my... Hello.” She couldn’t help the softness of her voice and inwardly winced. Oh come on, when had she ever sounded so breathy? She sounded like a damn phone sex worker!
Blue eyes locked to hers and the world stopped turning.
“Nice as this is...” he commented as he removed her hand from where it had landed on his belt buckle. She flushed. How on earth had it ended up there? “But I really do have a child to save.”
“Oh heavens, yes of course.”
Her hand still in his, Livvy found herself hustled outside, and within a minute she was standing on the town green. The troll and his captive were just in front of her, about a hundred meters away, and strangely appeared to be sitting around a table.
She leaned toward Sheriff Sexy-If-He-Wasn’t-Furry. “Are they having... a tea party?”
His eyes narrowed, a tiny muscle jumping in the corner of a jaw strong enough to double as the prow of a ship, and he nodded.
“Looks like it, yeah.”
O...kay. That was something she wasn’t expecting. Admittedly, all the info she had on trolls came from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. As far as she knew, they lived under bridges, and she thought they might eat goats. Either that or goats outwitted them. She couldn’t remember. Goats figured somewhere, that much she knew.
The sheriff stepped back, and she gasped. “Hey! Hey, where are you going?”
He didn’t reply, just winking at her as he left her and Fuzzy standing together in the middle of the green.
“Fucking arsehole,” she hissed, turning her attention back to the tableau in front of her.
The troll was average height, but so skinny she couldn’t believe it could stand upright. Long thin limbs ended in overlong fingers topped with grubby-looking claws. Dude needed a manicure. Possibly a facial. Either that or a bag over the head. Either would work.
The troll sat opposite a small child. The boy was rigid, terrified and unable to look away from the horror on the other side of the table, sipping gently from the teacup with its pinky finger raised like the queen of England.
Livvy had never met Her Madge but given that the old lady was the matriarch of a large family, she was sure that when out of the public eye the queen probably drank tea from a mug, most likely with a healthy shot of whiskey.
Crap. In a word. Crap.
What the flaming hell did she do now? Pulling her cards from her pocket, she shuffled them nervously as she tried to think. It wasn’t like a troll would be interested in her reading, now would it? What was a troll reading likely to be? Tuesday... Murder and mayhem. Wednesday... Kidnaps small children. Th
ursday... Take a trip over the ocean and meet a tall dark stranger. Nah... Just not happening.
“Do something, witch!” the sheriff shouted from behind her.
“Great...” she murmured as the troll’s eyes rolled sideways and spotted her. She and Fuzzy gulped, the familiar drawing closer to her leg for protection. She didn’t have the heart to tell him he was shit out of luck.
Remember... The wind whistled. Remember who you were before you forgot...
“Go away! My snackage!” The troll snarled and she realized the kid wasn’t a guest at the tea party, but dessert.
Her face set. Not on her fucking watch. Fury hit her hard and fast, and she smacked her cards together. She didn’t think, didn’t plan, didn’t do anything... But words bubbled up out of nowhere to spill off her tongue.
“From boggy swamp this terror came,
a young lunch its terrible aim.
Elements, hear me now as I speak,
to stop the havoc it would wreak.”
Almost before she finished the last sentence, her voice whipping through the air across the green, something poured from her fingers. Purple smoke and sparks raced toward the troll, wrapping it up in lavender coils. The creature screeched, its teacup launching upward to crash down on the table and the tea within staining the pristine white tablecloth.
The troll struggled, screaming blue murder as it tried to escape its lilac-colored prison. But the smoke and sparks got tighter and tighter until, with a pop, the foul thing disappeared. Gone as if it had never existed.
She blinked in surprise. What the...?
“Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!” Fuzzy yelled in triumph. The little dog did a victory twerk around her feet. Which was disturbing. There were things she couldn’t un-see, and the strange little dog’s hip thrusting was one of them.
But she was too busy staring at her hands in shock to say anything.
She’d done magic. She’d actually done magic.
Real magic.
Remember... the wind howled.
7
Having lived in London all her life, Livvy was used to things not being as they seemed.
Back home what appeared to be a grubby little alley could open out into a shopping mews with more shops than your average department store. The ghost train ran side by side with the tube network, with its gargoyle platforms and other magical stuff normal people never saw. Or the emergency see-me-not stations that allowed those of the magical persuasion to escape normal eyes... while all the rest of the non-magical world saw red phone boxes, anyone in the know would instantly identify the glyph marked above the door.
It was a weird and wonderful world, with its hidden secrets. And that was the operative word—hidden. So nothing prepared her for an honest to goodness witch’s cottage right at the end of the street.
But there it was, in all its gnarled glory. Like a little thatched cottage from Medieval England... But three-story with a rickety little tower on the side. Livvy squinted as she looked up at the top window, half expecting some princess to let down her hair. But the window was dark and shuttered, no long-haired royalty in sight.
Sheriff Abandoned-Her-to-the-Troll parked where the road petered out into a dirt track. Not by choice. As they approached the end of the asphalt, his engine spluttered and died, the vehicle rolling to a stop.
Muttering something under his breath, he put the thing in park and yanked the handbrake on. She couldn’t make it all out, but it sounded very much like “Goddamn witches and their wards.” Sliding her a sidelong glance, he realized she was watching him and snapped his jaw closed with a click.
Good boy. He learned fast.
He should shut up. She was the hero of the hour, not Sheriff More-Muscles-Than-Sense. She sat primly, Fuzzy on her lap, and waited for him to open her door for her.
“This is our home?” Fuzzy’s bulbous eyes shone as they stared at the little cottage. “For reals?”
“Yes. For reals.”
The little dog’s happiness was infectious, and she laughed as he wriggled in her arms.
“I’ve never had a proper home before,” he admitted. His tail still wagged. It operated independently from the rest of him. “I had a chain, but I was never big enough to get a space in the kennel. Do you think...” He looked at her with hope in his dark eyes. “There might be a... basket?”
Oh my god... Her heart ached and went out to him. A chain. All he’d had was a chain outside? That was so sad. Abruptly, she grabbed him and hugged him tightly.
“Yes, Fuzzy,” she said and dropped an impulsive kiss on the top of his furry little head. “Or even better, your very own bed.”
The little dog pulled back to look at her, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly in shock.
“A bed? An actual bed?” he squeaked. Then he burst into tears.
She didn’t even mind the snot this time and held him close as the door was opened for her. Sliding out of the truck, her glare warned Sheriff Were-Asshole not to say a bloody word. He was still on her shit list for leaving her to the troll.
“So... what happened to the witch before me?” she asked as they walked toward the cottage.
He carried her suitcase because, with it being all busted up, he couldn’t roll it. Totally his fault. If he hadn’t run the damn thing over, the wheels would still work. But he had, so it wouldn’t, and he had to carry it. So, it looked for all the world like he was cuddling a sorry, beat-up zebra print suitcase.
She sniggered slightly. Probably a whole new kink. If dino porn was a thing, then case porn had to be. Surely?
He jostled the case around until he could look over it. All she could see was the top of his head, two bright blue eyes, and his nose.
“She died,” he said, his voice muffled. “Old age.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said automatically.
“Why?” he demanded, moving the case more so she could see his mouth. “It’s not your fault, so why are you sorry?”
Her anger flared again.
“Are you always this much of an arsehole, or are you making a special effort today?” she snapped. “I said I was sorry because it’s polite!”
And to think, she’d wanted to kiss him. Arsehole. She was glad she hadn’t. Ignoring him, she stomped the rest of the way to the cottage in silence. Then she realized she didn’t have a key.
His lips quirked as he caught up with her, and he rooted in his jeans pocket for a moment. A second later he fit a key into the lock on the big wooden door. It gave with a clunk before the door swung open with a drawn-out squeal.
“Well, I’ll just leave you to get settled then.”
And just like that, Sheriff Hugs-a-Suitcase did his best impression of an Olympic sprinter off up the dirt path toward his truck.
She watched him go for a moment... Or several. Seriously, for all his faults that man filled out a pair of jeans nicely. He wasted no time once he reached his truck. Within seconds the big vehicle had backed up, spun around, and roared off up the road.
Once he was out of sight, she turned around and looked at her new home.
Definitely Middle Ages chic. The main room was large, dark and cavernous, with tiny high-level windows. She ducked back outside for a moment. Small cottage... She looked through the door... Big room. Okay, smaller on the outside then. A pricey bit of magic, and no mistake.
She’d seen it back home. In an old city like London, space was at a premium. Ancient and Medieval buildings sat cheek by jowl with modern ones. Nothing like walking out of the tithe hall and straight into Marks and Sparks to pick up some bread and milk.
Whatever, it meant sky-high property prices. So anyone with access to that kind of magic used it to get around them. She’d seen mansions crammed into the smallest gaps between office blocks or cottages hung like birds’ nests on the sides of buildings.
Hell, rumor said old man Bannock had built a four-bedroom cottage under a manhole cover in Baker Street. Apparently, he’d popped up cursing a blue streak i
n front of a maintenance team and scared the shit out of them.
She stepped through the door, Fuzzy (for once speechless) at her heels.
An enormous hearth and fireplace dominated the room, the flames dancing merrily. From the chill lingering in the air, she guessed the fire had only just been lit but she couldn’t see anyone around. Did witches have servants? They didn’t tend to back home, not unless they ran a large establishment or had a few titles attached to their names.
A comfortable-looking armchair sat to one side of the fire, a small table with a book and reading glasses on the top next to it. On the other side was...
“A basket!” Fuzzy found his voice to squeak in delight as he pushed past her.
She smiled as the little dog took a flying leap into the big wicker basket with its plush pink cushions. Wrong color for a boy dog but she didn’t want to ruin his delight. At least, she thought Fuzzy was a boy dog. She couldn’t tell, and it was rude to ask.
She walked around the room instead, trailing her fingers over the big wooden table in the middle. It was large enough to seat at least twelve people or possibly perform surgery on, and she had the feeling it had done both. Rough-hewn with a scarred surface, it really should have been in a museum somewhere. Yet, she could tell scores of witches had practiced their craft at it. The remembered power rose like steam on a mug of coffee from the surface worn smooth by countless hands.
Her gaze took in the well-stocked shelves. She’d been in enough magical apothecaries to recognize spell ingredients when she saw them. Glass bottles and jars of different sizes, shapes, and colors filled the shelves. She turned her head sideways to read the labels. Some were old and faded, written in cursive and ink, others were newer, written in bold black permanent marker.
