by Sam Cheever
He winced. “I didn’t think you’d welcome my business.”
My eyes vibrated with a desire to roll. I jammed my hands on my hips and glared at him. “But you thought I’d be happy to have you buy it at my competitor’s and then use Croakies to get it signed?”
He didn’t wince again, but his face flushed to a nice…yes…heart color. “I guess I didn’t think.”
I shook my head, fighting to regain my good humor. Even though it would be a miracle if I did since I’d lost it somewhere around a month ago and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of it since.
I knew I was cranky.
Okay, I’d left cranky behind twenty-nine and a half days ago, buried so deep beneath a wave of irritation that it would take the entire crew of Raiders of the Misplaced Aardvark to find it. But I gave it the old Keeper of the Artifacts try anyway. I sighed. “Look, this is the first I’ve heard of a signing.” It was highly possible there was one scheduled. After all, why would I, the owner of the bookstore and the niece of the author need to know such a thing? Don’t be silly. It wasn’t as if I had any say at all in how my store was run. I mean, my cat had sparkles, my frog had puckery lips, my hobgoblin was rocking a diaper and shooting toothpicks into the cookies on the platter with his bow.
“Hobs! Stop that. Leave the cookies alone.”
He shrugged and headed into the library to see what other trouble he could get up to.
On top of everything, my almost, possibly-already-ex-boyfriend had cheated on me with Frugal Freddy.
That last part was beyond galling.
“What does Frugal Freddy have that I don’t?” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Grym’s heart-red cheeks flared brighter. “He’s not mad at me.”
That stopped me in my verbal tracks. “Oh. Okay.” That made sense.
Grym looked disappointed, as if he’d expected me to deny it.
Uh, no.
“Are you ever going to forgive me?” Grym asked, his manner sliding along the scale from mortification to pique, nudging perturbed.
I thought about that for a minute. The minute stretched uncomfortably between us, turning to two and then three minutes.
Grym’s broad shoulders rounded. “Got it. I’ll just get out of here then.”
Watching him head to the door, I chewed the inside of my cheek. I’d been waiting for Grym to apologize to me, but he clearly expected me to do the apologizing. Our fight actually had been a tiny bit my fault.
Okay, maybe ten percent my fault.
Twenty.
I’ll go forty-five, but that was as far as my pride would let me go.
Dangit!
Well, that was awkward. Le sigh… “Grym, wait.”
He turned back, one large, square hand clasping the doorknob. His eyes were cold, his expression stony. “Yep?”
I opened my mouth to try to break the ice between us.
A horrific jangling sound basted through Croakies. A red light of unknown origin flashed through the room, bathing everything in a Valentine-ish hue.
Trouble!
“Is that…” Grym started to ask.
“Yes.” My eyes went wide, and my gaze swung to Grym. “Lock the door!” Without waiting to make sure he did as I asked, I took off running toward the artifact library.
Sebille joined me in the center aisle as I ran. I spared her a quick glance, shouting to be heard over the jangling warning bell. “What’s going on?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t seen anything.”
Grym’s heavy footsteps pounded up behind us. “Toxic Magic Vault?”
I shot him a look, frowning. “Hang back a little, in case whoever it is gets past us.”
He nodded and slowed, his big body nearly blocking the aisle.
I glanced at Sebille and she nodded, popping to sprite size and buzzing higher for a bird’s eye view.
Without warning, the jangling bell shut off, and the resulting silence was shocking. I skidded to a stop twenty feet away from the vault, my gaze widening at the sight.
The door was open, the light of the protective ward flashing through the space like a silent beacon. The pulsing light painted the mess inside the vault with an amber glow.
Behind me, Grym swore softly. “Can you tell what’s gone?”
I grimaced, moving slowly toward the breeched vault. The secondary ward, the one that protected the vault while Sebille or I had the door open, had fallen, its remnants glowing a soft green along the floor where it was anchored.
The floor inside the vault was covered in debris, the detritus of what were powerful and dangerous magical artifacts spread across the dusty concrete floor.
The magic mirror lay on its back in front of the shelf where it had been stored, the wooden frame intact but the glass shattered into a million pieces around it. The old Black and White television stood where we’d left it, but its screen was also shattered. The theme song from the Andrew of Mayberry shows a soft echo of its death.
The other items I’d placed there had been swept off the shelves and lay in a tangled and broken pile on the floor.
I didn’t go inside. The magical artifacts were no doubt leaking their poisons into the air of the vault. I’d have to get a toxic magic cleanup crew into the vault to verify its safety before we entered.
Pale green energy flashed as Sebille buzzed down to hover beside me. Her brightly hued dragonfly wings painted the air in a rainbow mix of purple and green as she hovered, the green glow of her eyes fierce as a result of what she saw in the vault. “Goddess in garters, what a mess.”
I expelled air in agreement.
Grym came up beside me. “Can you tell if anything’s gone?”
I shook my head. “Not until we dig around in the mess and take inventory.”
“I’ll help,” he said, his tone deliberately upbeat, probably to offset the slow sinking of my body toward the ground.
I forced my legs and shoulders straight. “Do you know a toxic magic cleanup company we can call?”
To my surprise, he nodded. “I have people.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ll get them here right away.”
Gratitude made me smile, despite our recent tiff. “Thanks, Grym.”
He nodded, but he was already speaking into the phone, moving away from me.
Sebille was strangely silent. I glanced her way and saw that she looked more perplexed than concerned by the mess. “Can you read a magic signature?”
It took her a few beats to answer, and when she did, her tone was distracted. “I’m not sure.”
“Not sure? Could the signature have been affected by the toxic magic?”
She blinked, her face clearing. “That actually would explain…”
When she didn’t complete her thought, I asked, “Explain what?”
“They’ll be here in twenty minutes,” Grym told us, striding back down the aisle. “I told them to come around to the back. Do you want me to go meet them?”
“Yes. If you don’t mind. Sebille and I need to stay here to keep an eye on things until they get here.”
He nodded and spun on his heel, moving briskly away from us.
Sebille and I spent a too-long beat staring after him before we both blinked ourselves out of our perusal. We shared an embarrassed laugh.
Flushing softly, Sebille waggled her brows. “He looks as good going as he does coming.”
I couldn’t argue the point. So I didn’t. “Finish your sentence. It would explain what?”
“It’s too weird. It has to be wrong.”
“But worth mentioning,” I told her in a firm tone. Something very strange had happened in my artifact library, and I needed to know what.
“Aside from the usual signatures of the people who live here. There was something else.” She frowned. “The best way I can describe it is Love.”
I blinked in surprise. “Huh?” The sprite had definitely bought her own Valentine’s Day promotions.
She popped into full size and put her hands out, palms up.
“See? I told you it doesn’t make sense.”
Eyeing the destruction in the vault, I had to agree. “That doesn’t look like love to me.”
“No,” Sebille agreed. “It doesn’t.”
After a moment of trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for that dichotomy and failing, I shook it off and tackled a different problem. “Any idea who or what could have destroyed the wards like that?”
“Not who,” she responded. “But what…there is something that could have done this. Though, I thought the ogres had destroyed it.”
“Ogres?” I felt my eyes go wide. “What ogres?”
Sebille grinned widely. “Oh, that’s right, you haven’t met the ogres.” She clapped her hands. “Fun!” She spun on her heels and hurried back down the aisle, her heels smacking smartly against the concrete with every step.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“To speak to my mother,” she called over her shoulder. “She’ll get us an invitation to visit King Rhorr.”
My gaze narrowing on her retreating form, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t going to enjoy my visit to the ogres. I had nothing to base that feeling on, except my assistant’s glee at introducing me to them.
The sprite’s glee was never good for my health and happiness.
On the flip side, I doubted the ogres celebrated Valentine’s Day. That meant, even if only for a brief time, I’d get a respite from the overdone and obnoxious Valentine’s Day décor. I was already heartily sick of it.
Grym and I stood back and watched the two men work. I’d never formally met the Phoenix shifter who was currently performing a controlled burn to extinguish any lingering strains of toxic magic in the vault and around the open door. But he had saved my life once. I’d since learned his name was Brad Spence. I’d also learned the soft-spoken fireman…yeah, I see the irony of a Phoenix shifter becoming a fireman…had a soft Southern drawl, warm golden-brown eyes, fiery red hair to rival Sebille’s, and a fondness for red hot candies. No surprise there.
Towering over Brad’s stocky five-foot-eleven inch build was Abe something or other. I hadn’t caught his name. Abe’s magic was undetermined. I thought he might actually be a witch of some kind, but nobody explained it to me.
“What exactly is Abe doing?” I asked Grym.
“Reconditioning the air after the toxins are gone.”
I nodded, then couldn’t help asking. “Why?”
Grym gave me a smile that made the toes inside my sneakers curl. “Think of Abe as a magical crime scene cleaner. He detoxifies, cleans, brightens, and just generally refreshes and returns the scene back to normal.”
I eyed the broken bits of dangerous artifacts inside the vault. My gaze narrowed as it fell on the black and white television. “Does that demon TV look less damaged to you?”
Grym nodded. “Unfortunately.”
“Is Abe doing that? Because if he is, I’d like him to stop. None of the things in this vault need to be in working order. In fact, it would be best if they weren’t.”
“He’s not doing it.” Grym looked at me. “You should know by now that things always balance out in the magic world, Naida.”
“I do, but when something in the library breaks, it usually stays broken unless someone repairs it.”
He shook his head. “Non-toxic magic doesn’t need to change form to create balance. It exists within a balanced environment that isn’t affected by the form the artifacts take. If the magic escapes from a normal object, it’s simply absorbed into the universe and will be used in another way.”
My eyes went wide. “Are you telling me the toxic magic from these objects will be absorbed into the universe?”
“I’m telling you that’s what happens with normal magic items. But toxic magic degrades and destroys. The natural world abhors toxic magic. It repulses and tries to expel dark magic.”
“So it’s not absorbed?” I asked, just to make sure I understood.
“Not absorbed. With nowhere else to go, the toxins put themselves to work rebuilding their own magical identities.”
I eyed the magic mirror, which was back on its shelf and covered with the cloth again. I wondered who had put it there.
The sound of someone hurrying toward us had me turning.
Sebille nearly skipped in our direction. She wore a wide smile and held a page of some kind of paper in her hand, waving it at me. “I got it! I got our invitation.”
I sighed. “I’m pretty sure I’m not going to enjoy this.”
“Enjoy what?” Grym asked, his dark brows lowering with concern.
“Sebille thinks the ogres might know how the vault was opened.”
He stared at me for a long moment and then his lips twitched. “Oh. Yikes. You’re going to see the ogres?”
I lost control of my calm. Grabbing one of his big hands, I squeezed it hard while imploring him with my pleading gaze. “What? Tell me why everybody keeps smiling about me meeting the ogres. You’re scaring me.”
Grym let the smile turn into a laugh and then, leaning down, kissed me on the tip of my nose. “Give me a call when you get back. Just to…you know…let me know you’re okay.”
He strode down the aisle, looking like he’d just won the lottery. As he and Sebille passed in the narrow aisle, he put one blocky hand into the air and slapped her high five.
I stood there quivering in my sneakers.
They’d bonded over the horror of what was about to happen to me.
This could not be good.
3
All Is Not What It Seems
“I really should be doing inventory on those artifacts,” I said again, knowing my feeble protests were going to be ignored like a puff of powder in a wintery snowscape.
“They’ll still be there when we get back,” the sprite said.
“But, I’m not sure the new ward will hold.”
Sebille sent me a blustery look. “I personally rebuilt the ward. Are you saying you don’t think I know what I’m doing?”
Alarm swept through me. The last thing I wanted to do was hack off the sprite when she had my very life clutched in her knobby-knuckled fingers. “Of course not. I didn’t say that. Did I say that?”
“Sounded like,” she responded, her good mood returning.
Crickets on a crab! She was planning my demise. I just knew it. But why had Grym gone along with the outing? Yeah, we’d had a little spat. But we’d had those before. Would he really want me squashed beneath an ogre for revenge?
“…find the thief.”
I realized Sebille had been blathering on while I was panicking. I’d probably missed something important. “Huh? What thief?”
Sebille rolled her iridescent green orbs at me. “You really need to learn to pay attention, Naida.”
I bit down on my tongue to keep it from shooting out between my lips and branding me a five-year-old in an almost 25-year-old woman’s body. Instead, I tucked a strand of my long brown hair behind one ear, fixing a hostile blue gaze on my assistant. “I have a lot on my mind.”
“Mm-hm. Try to stay with me now. We need to find out who broke through the vault’s wards and how they did it. This trip to the ogres is the first step in that process.”
“I get that we’re focusing on the how. But I’m just as worried about why they broke in.”
She looked thoughtful for a moment, as if she was actually considering my argument. Then she flipped a hand in dismissal. “One thing at a time, Naida,” she said, mind firmly closed.
I sighed. Sure, I could pull rank on her and return to Croakies. But part of me knew she was right. If someone had an artifact that could break into the toxic magic vault, nothing…no one…would be safe.
“Tell me what I’m about to walk into,” I demanded in my most authoritative voice.
Sebille snorted. “You’ll see.”
Bat blisters! I was really going to regret the current excursion into ogreville. I just knew it. I tugged out my phone and hit the button to call G
rym.
He answered on the second ring. “Are you there yet?”
I pulled my phone away from my ear and frowned at it. “Am I where?”
His voice wobbled suspiciously as he responded. “Did you meet the ogres?”
I never got a chance to respond. In a single beat of my heart, three things happened almost simultaneously.
One, something massive slammed into me from the right, my body sinking into it like the softest down pillow and my nose overwhelmed with the scent of flowers.
Two, my traitorous assistant popped into sprite form and shot skyward, presumably to avoid the third thing that happened.
Another pillowy attack slammed into me from the left, squishing me between the two sweet-scented bodies with only my eyes, nose, mouth, and hands free. My hands were plastered together in front of me, my cell still clutched between them.
I could hear Grym’s voice like a distant life line I couldn’t reach.
The dual-sided pressure smooshed my cheeks together, making my mouth pucker unattractively. The pillowy forms shook and rumbled like giant bowls of jelly in the middle of a rock slide.
“Help!” I whispered as my chest tried to expand under the onslaught.
The sprite dropped from the sky to hover in front of me, her tiny face alight with hilarity.
“Princess Sebille,” the deeper voice said in a reverent tone. The mass shifted in what felt like a bow.
“Call me later,” said Grym’s tiny, disembodied voice. The distant sound of a call disconnecting had me fighting to pull in a breath so I could yell. “No!” But the sound puffed out like a gasp.
The mass on my right jiggled with delight. “Ah, pretty Princess. Welcome, welcome!”
Sebille didn’t seem at all offended by their deference. Her grin stayed locked in place on her long, freckled face. She was enjoying my dilemma way too much. “Naida, meet Rick and Maxine.” Sebille lifted her gaze to a spot two feet above my head and grinned. “Kids, this is the Keeper of the Artifacts, Naida.”
The jelly jiggled harder. More verbal rocks tumbled down the mountainside.
“Herro,” I said through my smushed lips. I scanned my eyes from side to side, trying to see who’d made me into the squishy center of a giant s’more, but all I could see was a vibrant green mass on one side and an eye-searing pink wall on the other. “Ith nithe to meet you,” I said.
