Mick clenched his jaw. “I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t bring back my Louis XVI chevet, now, does it?” she scoffed at him, thumping his shoulder with her hand.
“Are you sure, Tessa? What you’ll see can be very disturbing . . .” Wanda warned, shrugging out of her singed shawl. What was so disturbing she had to partially undress for it? Mick wondered.
Tessa nodded her head, her resolve evident to Mick. He knew that look, too. It was the one that said, if you and my brother can plunge into the lake on a swing rope from twenty feet above, I can, too. Except, she’d broken her leg. “I’m sure. I can take whatever this is.”
Nina shot Tessa a skeptical raise of her eyebrow. “That’s what all the girlies say.” Cracking her knuckles, she didn’t wait for Tessa to respond. Instead, she glanced at her two friends. “Let’s get it on.” And then she laughed.
Which left Mick a little uneasy.
Well, a lot uneasy.
Mick reached for the edge of a torched wing back chair, gripping it so he wouldn’t topple over. He was, under normal circumstances, pretty solid. Nina hadn’t nicknamed him Gigantor without reason. But what he’d just seen had left him weak and so close to mewling like a newborn kitten that he had to hang on to something to prevent his knees from buckling.
And the story that went with all that fur and power lifting? It was just this side of unreal. There were teeth accidentally lodged in another person’s flesh, and poodles, and making potties, and dental hygienists, and blood drinking, and life-threatening illnesses, and levitation, and veterinarians who were cougars, and genies, and even an accountant who’d drunk a baby-making formula by accident and turned into a werewolf. All accidental incidences as relayed by Wanda. Wanda the halfsie. Half werewolf, half vampire.
It was a cornucopia of crazy.
Mick pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes and rubbed hard, forcing himself to say something—do something. He pointed at Nina, sucking in a deep breath. “You just . . .”
“Picked up a fucking car.”
“With . . .” he faltered.
“One hand. Yeah. Nifty, right?” She repositioned a passed-out-from-fright Tessa on her shoulder like she was a blanket and not a one-hundred-and-forty-pound woman.
“And you have fa . . .” he grunted.
“Fangs,” Nina provided with a saucy wink, stretching her free arm over her head and rolling her shoulders.
Had he really seen this woman’s teeth jut from her mouth like she was an extra in that movie Twilight? Yes, Mick. Oh, yeah.
“And you! Jesus Christ, you . . .” Mick’s gaze swung to Marty when his words continued to fail him.
“Shifted.” Marty brushed at her boots to remove the stray bits of werewolf hair lingering on the suede, then broke out her compact to check her makeup and gasped at the sight of her burned hair.
“You looked like . . .” No. He couldn’t say it. Would. Not.
“A dog.” Marty let out a small, bored sigh. “I get that a lot.”
Mick shook his head as if the motion would clear the visual that remained in his mind’s eye. He looked to the most reasonable of the bunch. Halfsie Wanda. “What . . . ?”
“Just happened?” Wanda filled in.
“Yes.” It was all he was capable of.
“We proved to you the paranormal exists. I told you our stories and how we ended up like this, and I have to say, this streamlining Nina suggested really is the best way to introduce a client to our world. No fuss, very little muss. So again, I’m a werevamp, Nina’s a full vampire, Marty’s a werewolf, and my absentee sister is a demon. We were all turned by accident—well, of course with the exception of me. That was on purpose and never to be spoken of outside this circle. We’ve dealt with many paranormal incidents since ours, which is why we formed OOPS. So, in closing, you, sir, are as yet unidentified, but definitely paranormal from the looks of this place.”
Nina tugged on a still-unconscious Tessa’s hair with a gentle yank for someone so ready to rumble. “Hey, sissy pants—wake up.”
Well, if nothing else, when Tessa did rejoin them, Mick had bragging rights on the last man standing during a paranormal event. With a roll of his head on his neck, he carefully pieced his words together.
He would take this like a man, and he’d gather the kind of information a man would hunt down and gather. Yes, he would. “So what does this mean for me? I’m not any one of those things you showed me—how does that make me paranormal?”
“You don’t think breathing fucking fire means you’re still human, do you, dude? You. Breathed. Fire. From your piehole, pal. Don’t start with the delusional shit now, okay? I wanna toboggan down that big-ass hill, and if you’re going to do the denial thing, these two saps are gonna wanna hang around and make your boo-boos all better. But me? I’m just not up to it today, buddy. I’m not up to it any day.”
Wanda snapped her fingers in Nina’s face. “Hush.” She turned to Mick and said, “Obviously, this was the first time this has happened to you. So can you tell us what you did just before you blew Tessa’s store to smithereens?”
“I came to the store to check on her like I always do.” He kept his words purposely evasive. Not just because it was none of their business what his reasons were for coming to Tessa’s store, but because he didn’t exactly want to share the childish nature of his arguments with her. The neener, neener quality to them, as dubbed by Tessa, didn’t exactly scream mature.
Wanda flapped one of her gloves at him and then rolled her eyes not just at Mick as one of the fingers of the glove broke free and fell to the soiled floor. “Oh, don’t be cryptic, silly-billy, or I’ll have Nina root around in your mind. You don’t want that, do you? It’s so invasive. Now, just tell us all of it. Even the smallest detail can factor into this mess you’re in.”
His skeptical eyes met Wanda’s. “May I offer a misgiving first?”
“Fucking naturally. Anything to hold this shit up,” Nina moaned. “I thought you were a bigger man than that, Mick. My bad.”
“Shhh, Nina,” Marty chided, giving up on restoring her makeup to shoot Nina a look of disgust. “He has every right to be suspicious, and ask questions. Or do we have to remind you of your turning, whiner?”
That’s right. He had every right to ask questions. This way there’d be no buyer’s remorse if he bought their desire to help him. “How do I know you ladies are on the up-and-up? Doesn’t it seem a little suspicious that you three just happened to show up when this went down?”
“You don’t,” Wanda replied succinctly. “All you have is our word and the fact that we’ve helped several people in predicaments much like yours. Add in what we just showed you, and I’d think you’d at least consider our help. We clearly know a thing or two about the supernatural. So take it or leave it. We can remove ourselves at any time.” She crossed her arms over her chest in a clear go-on-and-see-what-happens-if-we-leave-the-playground-and-take-our-toys-too stance.
The idea of them leaving did nothing to ease Mick’s fears, either. What a double-edged sword they were wielding.
But what choice did he have? They definitely hadn’t been lying about that process thing. He clenched his fists. Fine. “Like I said, I came to check on Tessa. We had an argument . . .” Like one of their biggest ever. Lots of yelling and name-calling. Only this one had had an edge to it he couldn’t put his finger on.
“And what did you argue about?” Marty asked from behind him, poking her head around his back.
He bristled, then forced a calm response. “Why does that matter?”
Nina paced like some caged animal, Tessa still limp over her shoulder. “Dude, cough it up or I’ll beat your ass with your lady friend as my stick, okay? And hurry it up. The night ain’t gettin’ any younger, and I wanna toboggan.”
Mick didn’t doubt Nina’s words. He was used to intimidating people with his size—though typically it wasn’t on purpose—but this slender, easily-riled-to-the-point-of-violence woman gave him
pause.
Fine again. Maybe there was something in the details. “I got word from the guys at work that she’s seeing a total jackass. I, being the good best friend I was and continue to be to her dearly departed brother, came over to warn her to watch out. She, being the confrontational, difficult, infuriating woman she is, threw something at me. Much screaming ensued.”
Marty tugged at his shirt. “And then?”
“And then I had a headache—which is par for the course with Tessa. So I asked her for some aspirin. Only she never has the kind in the bottle—she’s all about that hokey, organic crap when an Excedrin Migraine would do just as well.”
Nina nodded her head, her eyes sharp and watchful.
Mick ignored her in favor of finishing his tale “Anyway, Tessa, and not without more yelling about what a pain in the ass I am, sent me to the back to the bathroom, where she said she had some packets of this powdered crap that would fix my fat head right up. I was desperate enough to take whatever she had, because Tessa could give even Mother Teresa a headache, if she were still alive.”
“So you took something,” Marty drawled as though she suddenly understood.
He nodded while trying to stay on track and go over every detail. For his own sake as well as the women’s. “I grabbed the packet, washed it down with some froufrou designer blueberry acai juice she has in the fridge back there. Yeah, it was a little rough going down, and it got a little stuck in my teeth, something I can’t say I remember happening the last time she gave me a powdered aspirin, but I was on a mission. So I come back up front to finish giving her hell. We go another round about the douche bag she’s dating—she makes me even angrier because like I said, I’m just looking out for her. I open my mouth to yell some more, and this”—he spread his hands wide—“is the result. There was projectile fire flying out of my mouth like the kind of vomit ten drunks spew. The entire place went up in flames in seconds, but most of it burned out just as quickly. Then there was screaming and the sprinklers went off, and, well, you three were here. You know the rest.”
“I’d bet Marty’s ovaries whatever he shoved down his gullet was what did it,” Nina guessed.
“What did it look like, Mick? Taste like?” Marty asked, her blue eyes shiny in the mask of black soot covering her cheeks and forehead.
He shrugged his shoulders. “It tasted awful and it looked just like the powdered aspirin she always gives me. But it was a little chunkier this time.”
Tessa’s head popped up suddenly as she hung from Nina’s shoulder, her smooth hair stuck to the side of her mouth. She spat it away and raised those accusatory eyes at him again. “Which packet did you take, Mick?”
Mick took the two short steps toward Nina and looked Tessa in the eye, suspicious. “I took the one you told me to take, Tessa. The one by the fake flowers in the vase in the bathroom.”
She struggled her way out of Nina’s grasp, sliding down the vampire’s body and landing on the floor with soft knees that wobbled.
Wanda came to her rescue, putting a hand at her elbow, but Tessa moved out of her grasp and stuck a finger in Mick’s chest. “That’s not the one I told you to take, you imbecile! I said the one on the stand by the shower! Oh, sweet baby Jesus. That was a client’s! A client who paid me well over ten grand to locate it and have it shipped here from India. It’s some rare spice he’s been looking for for twenty years, Mick! Do you have any idea how long that took me to find?”
Mick planted his hands on his hips, his lips forming a thin line. “Like I was supposed to know that? Why the hell would you leave something so rare like that lying around anyway?”
Tessa’s eyes glittered at him. “Ohhh! I was in a rush, Mick. I had customers in the store when I got back from the post office. If you’d listen to me just once instead of blowing in here like you have some right to tell me who I can and can’t date when I’m thirty-five years old, you would have heard me!”
“Hey!” Nina shouted into the room with a wince. “Both of you—corners, now. Shut the hell up. It hurts my ears when you screech like that.”
“You mean your sensitive vampire ears, Nina?” Tessa challenged, her cheeks puffing outward.
Nina was in front of her in the blink of an eye. The. Blink. Of. An. Eye, he marveled. “Yeah, that’s what I mean, loudmouth. You got the gnads to say otherwise?”
Tessa went a little pale under all the soot, leaning her upper body backward. “Sorry. Tense moment. A lot of money on the line. My apologies.”
Nina gave her a sly smile and jammed her hands in the front pockets of her hoodie. “Okay, so, it doesn’t take Angela Lansbury to figure this out. It had to be whateverthehell you accidentally took, Gigantor.”
Tessa shook her head, her eyes wide once again. “But it was just a spice. How could a spice from India make him breathe fire? I mean, he incinerated my entire store with a spice? That’s crazy.”
“Lady, you don’t know crazy. I bet a day or two ago, you would have called what we showed you tonight crazy. Now? Maybe not so much, huh? So can the talk about the crazy and save your ‘oh-em-gee’ for later when I’m tobogganing by moonlight and you’re all alone freaking out while you replay the horror of Marty’s shift in your mind. Right now, let’s figure this shit out. Something I know Marty and Wanda are gonna make me do whether I like it or not while they swing the BFF bat in my face.”
Wanda’s nod was brisk and no-nonsense. “Nina’s right. We’re here to help however we can. I’ve tweeted some of our sources because, to be quite honest with you, I don’t know of any fire-breathing paranormals. But we’re a tight community and someone’s always willing to lend a hand.” She held up her iPhone to show she was on it.
Mick turned to Wanda, who’d begun scrolling through her messages on her phone. “I appreciate the help, and if you find anything, I’ll give you my cell number or catch up with you at the inn, but for now, it looks like it’s over. There’s nothing to suggest it isn’t. Maybe whatever it was that I took only had temporary side effects.” Yeah, you keep telling yourself that spewing fire is temporary, Mick.
Forgetting his paranormal counselors for the moment, he turned to Tessa and shot her a genuine look of apology. “Okay, yes. I set the store on fire, and I’ll probably end up apologizing for it for the rest of my life. I’ll have the guys at the station come over and help clean up. Promise.”
Tessa made a face at him and scoffed. “And what will you tell your Neanderthal firemen friends, Mick? How are we going to explain this? I can’t believe that no one has shown up already. The glow from that blowout had to be visible from at least a mile away. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing I’m tucked so deep into the village now, huh, Mick? Remember when I opened the shop and all those criminals you were sure were going to rob me blind right here in Valley View, Vermont, population four hundred twenty-five, were just waiting to use their deception on an innocent, unsuspecting woman?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’d worried. But she was young and pretty, and they had a lot of tourists when the foliage changed. City tourists who thought a pretty woman was prey—Tessa, in particular. “Look, we’ll just make something up. We’ll figure it out. I’ll take care of it all. For right now, everything’s calm and my flaming vomit seems to have passed. Oh, and as far as I’m concerned, this is all your fault. Who leaves a packet of”—he swiped his fingers in the air to make quotation marks—“ten grand worth of spices in the bathroom, cupcake?”
“My fault? Mine?” Tessa squawked. “You have some nerve, Mick.” She stopped short in front of him, and the confrontational glow in her eyes was suddenly doused, replaced by concern.
She reached upward, trailing a finger over his cheek. “You have blood on you,” she said softly, her hazel eyes skating over his face. “Must’ve been all that flying glass from the shipment of mirrors I got in. C’mere.” She swiped at his cheek with her thumb, nurturing and gentle.
Leaning into him, she stood on her toes and whispered like she was sharing a secret. The way she had
when they were kids and he still didn’t realize she was an icky girl. “Wow, what a day, huh?”
And so it went. Tessa could never resist baiting him, but she also couldn’t stand to see him hurt. That meant his reaming was on hold for now. Mick swatted at her fingertips, soft and soothing against his skin. It was easier to go balls to the wall with Tessa than to give in to the fire she created in his gut. One he’d never give in to.
“Yeah, wow, and I’m fine. Stop hovering, and let’s call it a night.” He tacked on a smile to ease the abrasiveness of his words.
Wanda put a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should wait, Mick. I have a bad feeling, and truthfully, it’s rather naïve to believe this is entirely over. No one launches fire from their mouth if something fishy isn’t going on. Stick around for just a couple of more minutes while I read through these tweets. Just so we can see what we can see.”
“Oh. Fuck,” Nina said from behind him.
A chill ran along his spine. He was afraid to ask. But ask he did. “What?”
“Goddamn it. I want to go tobogganing. I sure as hell don’t want to stick around for this shit,” Nina groused with a stomp of her feet.
What shit?
She tapped him on the shoulder, forcing him to turn around. “Well, I guess we’re gonna see what we can see whether we want to see it or not.”
He cocked his head, his eyes catching Tessa’s. Eyes that were filled with that special kind of horror reserved just for today. “What?”
Nina reached up and over his shoulder to flick her fingers at something, something that when flicked, sent the oddest vibration from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. “So, dude. How do ya feel about wings? On a big guy like you, you’d figure they wouldn’t be so flattering, but I gotta say, you wear ’em well. Nice span.”
The Accidental Dragon Page 3
