I rang the bell sitting on top of a desk with the word REFERENCE on it. The bell chimed, sounding more like a scream than a ding.
From behind a stack of towering dictionaries stepped the muskrat-faced librarian. But this time instead of granny glasses, she wore green tinted contacts and a pink wig.
“May I help you?” she asked in the same sour voice.
“Ummm,” I motioned to the front of the library, “weren’t you ...” I shook my head. “Never mind. I need some help.”
“Self-help is two stacks up. I recommend The Joy of the Female Orgasm.” She looked down her nose at me. “Or in your case, Are You There, G-Spot? It’s Me, Man.”
“No. Not that kind of help.” Not today at least. “I’m looking for some information on Nigel de Wolfe.”
“Should I know that name?”
“I’m not sure.” I scratched my chin, my fingers coming away rust-colored from dried blood. No wonder the librarian didn’t want to help me. I must look like an escaped little piggy from the crazy hospital. “I believe he might be related to the former king, de Wolfe.”
Her eyes widened, causing her tinted contacts to slip. The dark brown of her iris bubbled from underneath the greenish tinting. She blinked them back in place. “This is the reference section, not information. If you’re looking for Nigel de Wolfe, try four-one-one. The library can’t help you.” She twisted on her heel and vanished behind a row of yellow pages.
“Wait,” I called, but to no avail. “Darn it.”
I slapped the desk. The stack of reference books next to me started to topple. An avalanche of fonts crashed to the floor, choking me in a whirlwind of book dust. The noise was loud enough to wake the Book of the Dead, but the weasel-faced librarian didn’t return to admonish me. Must be her crazy break.
Swiping my hand in front of my face, I cleared the air, only to discover a book as old as time itself. Or at least it looked that old. Smelled that old too. Sort of like that elderly lady with all those kids who resided in size-eight housing.
I picked up the book, examining the cover. The text had no title, only the imprint of a paw and the name de Wolfe etched in the worn leather.
Cracking open the book, I choked on years of dust mites and papyrus. Tiny lettering greeted my bruised eyes in an Old English font with lots of Thous, Thees, and Yeas. Oh Yea!
I skipped the foreword (does anyone really read them?), past the early years of Maledetto history (yawn), and into the last century. The de Wolfe name appeared prominently. In fact, it appeared every fifth word or so, sort of like Old MacDonald’s manifesto, but without the racial slurs. Then, about fifty pages and years later, the name Nigel de Wolfe finally graced the yellowed pages of the book in my hand.
With the final clue to solving Cinderella’s murder hidden inside the book, I plopped down on the reference desk, popped open a beer, and began to read a story as old as time itself, filled with revenge, love, lies, and the occasional reference to lusting after one’s mother.
What was wrong with royalty?
Chapter 29
The following morning, bleary eyed and stinking of hops, dust, and knowledge, I stumbled through the front door of Prince Charming’s bungalow. My brain swirled with clues, some of which made no sense. Okay, most of which made no sense. Like the fact the current king wasn’t the original heir to the throne. His older brother, Prince Nigel de Wolfe, was, until one fateful day when Nigel and his little brother went into the woods to fetch, as near as I could tell, a pail of water. Nigel apparently fell down and broke his crown, after being shot in the chest. The king came tumbling after, scooped up the broken crown, duct-taped it together, and presto, long live the new king.
There were whispered suspicions and accusations of foul play, but no one came forward. They must’ve been chicken. For the most part, though, the kingdom rejoiced at Nigel’s passing. Dear old Nigel wasn’t well liked by friend and foe alike. The old tome suggested Nigel was actually madder than the Hatter and smelled worse than the Cheshire Cat, not to mention his proclivity toward siring offspring like a Catholic school rabbit.
But what did it all mean?
I wasn’t sure, but one thing was clear.
The rabbit hole went deeper than I first imagined.
The book provided a big clue, however, in the form of an artist’s rendering of Nigel de Wolfe. The image captured de Wolfe’s arrogance perfectly. Nigel looked like royalty, his face tilted toward the heavens as his white-blond hair flowed around his broad shoulders, his tail wagging in the wind.
Nigel looked familiar, as if I’d recently seen him.
Inside the palace.
Nigel de Wolfe, former prince of Maledetto, currently graced the tiled floor of the palace library, his white blond hair wrapped around a set of rollers, his broad shoulders and shaggy tail hidden inside a flowered housecoat.
The Big Bad one himself, the king said.
I guess it was true.
I had two theories as to why Nigel de Wolfe’s signature was on the bluebird receipt. Either Nigel de Wolfe had mastered the art of reincarnation, or someone had used his identity and his fur ... coat to commit murder.
And that someone had easy access to the palace, which left me with about a couple thousand suspects, including my sweet, murderous princess. Damn.
With the exception of my unscheduled and brain-damaging. . . naps, I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. I was exhausted, burned out, and ready to call it quits. This detecting shit was for the bluebirds. I was no closer, was in fact further from solving Cinderella’s murder than I had been yesterday. Damn Miss Muffet and her nimble fingers. Without the bluebird receipt, even if I unmasked the killer, I couldn’t prove it.
Like lack of evidence had ever stopped a villain before. Remember that trial with the ill-fitting mitten? Those kittens got away with murder according to their recently released biography, BTW, I Did It!
Yawning, I staggered inside Charming’s bungalow. The soft sound of snoring filtered through the house. Prince Rotten dreamed the dreams of the moronic while I spent hours searching for his fiancée’s killer. Which one of us was the idiot?
As I closed the front door, a tiny slippered foot with a bell on top wedged itself between the door and frame. The door flew back open, smacking me in the head with a dull thud.
“Ow!” I rubbed at the newly formed bump that matched perfectly with the four or so other dents I’d recently acquired. With all the new lumps and bruises, I was starting to resemble the ugly duckling before all the plastic surgery.
“What the heck?” I said to the dwarf standing in the doorway. He wore green tights and a green and red jester collar. The outfit should’ve looked cute, but instead, he looked down on his Rice Krispied luck.
Snapped, as I’d nicknamed him, shoved a clipboard full of papers at me. “Sign here,” he said in a high-pitched squeak.
I glanced down at the paper, my eyes too blurry to read the first line. “Fine, but if you’re the devil bargaining for my soul, I don’t come cheap.”
Snapped pointed to a patch on his shirt. “Fey-Ex. Rain, sleet, snow, the dark of night, I’ll get your package there in thirty years or less.”
“A point of pride, I see.”
Snapped pressed the clipboard toward me once again. “Just sign by the X.”
I did so with a flourish reserved for parking tickets and autographs at the airport. Snapped barely glanced at my signature when I handed the clipboard back. “So where’s this package?” I asked.
“It’s on the truck,” he said.
“Okay.”
He frowned. “It’s pretty big.”
“Uh-huh.”
He rolled his tiny eyes. “Heavy too.”
“Oh,” I said. “You better lift with your legs, then.”
“Stupid ... villain ... ,” Snapped muttered as he turned on his heel and headed to a white truck barely big enough to fit a unicorn. The words “Fey-Ex” covered the side in large red lettering.
Rather than wa
it for his return, I strolled into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. If I was to survive the day, I needed caffeine, and lots of it. As the smell of boiling coffee beans filled the air, Snapped returned with a cardboard box half his size. The dramatic dwarf grunted under the weight as he hefted it onto the kitchen table.
“Well, here it is. Came all the way from the Orient,” he said, reading the delivery slip affixed to the top of the box.
The Orient, huh? I’d always wanted to visit, but never found the time. A villain’s work was never done.
“It sure was heavy,” he said, his tiny pink Vienna sausage–like fingers wiggling expectantly.
I slapped him a high five. “Thanks.”
He frowned and then frowned some more. Finally, he turned for the door, his belled feet jingling all the way.
“Hey, wait a second,” I called.
“Yeah?” He quickly turned around, his hand extended for a tip.
“Close the door on your way out,” I said, pouring a cup of coffee into Charming’s World’s Greatest Prince mug. What a tool. Like anyone would give him an award. Try to kill him in his sleep, yes, an award, not so much.
Hell, I bet the jerk bought the mug for himself.
The front door slammed shut, reminding me of the mysterious cardboard box. I assumed the delivery was for Charming, but what if it wasn’t? What if the package was the king’s “signal,” or better yet, my subscription to Sprites Illustrated, the Nymph Issue? I set my coffee down and picked up the box. The damn thing wasn’t that heavy, maybe two stone. Attached to the box was an envelope.
I opened it and read the words aloud: “To a villain among princes.” I glanced toward the staircase where Prince Rotten slept. Yep, that was me, a villain smothered by a flaming prince.
Grabbing a knife from the kitchen drawer, I peeled back the edge of the packing tape. The sticky residue clung to the edge of the knife. The faint sound of ticking reached my ears.
A bad sign on the best of days.
Snapped was right. The package was from Asia, just not the continent. Damn it! I chucked the box toward the door. The room exploded into a wall of blue flames, licking at everything in its path, including me. My Levi’s quickly ignited, aided by my chicken dance around the room.
“Hot ... hot ... hot ... ,” I muttered, flapping my arms, which only enraged the flames. My skin bubbled underneath my smoldering clothes, smelling faintly of roasted villain and marshmallows. Overhead, a fire alarm blared the chorus to “It’s Raining Men.”
Get out of the house, my mind screamed.
Through the thickening black smoke, I found the front door, half my body consumed in a fireball. Like a ballerina after one too many drinks, I did a jerky pirouette off the front porch and onto the dew-soaked lawn. I dropped and rolled, but forgot the most important part. I failed to stop. Instead, I rolled onto the middle of the street. A Fey-Ex truck bore down on me as Prince Rotten chased me around, beating me with a wooden spoon.
“... twit ... house ... fire ... idiot,” Charming yelled, emphasizing each word with a paddle to my skull.
In the distance, a siren screamed, moving closer and closer. But it was too late. Charming’s bungalow was now a towering inferno. I, on the other hand, had stopped smoking like a kielbasa. Thanks in part to my new best friend, Snapped, and his Fey-Ex truck. When the truck struck me the first time, it smothered the flames with its tiny tires, but not completely.
Blue flames flickered up my boots, threatening to ignite the unblackened patches of skin left on my thighs. Being a pal, Snapped shoved the truck into reverse and backed over my flaming body once again.
Disaster adverted.
Or so I thought until Snapped’s Fey-Ex truck engine again revved in my ear. That was my last coherent thought before, like the sky, my world turned black.
Chapter 30
I awoke sometime later wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I wasn’t sure where I was, or how I got there. The last thing I remembered was the grinning face of a determined yet demented dwarf bearing down on me.
However, one thing was sure. Wherever I was, I wasn’t alone. Asia’s body lay curled behind me, her silken hair tickling my bare back. For some reason, she smelled different, as if she’d recently started smoking. A nasty habit, but one I could accept. It beat her constantly trying to murder me.
I yawned and rubbed a hand over my face. The fire had singed my facial hair, leaving patches of five o’clock shadow. But all in all, I survived the fire fairly unscathed. Too bad I couldn’t say the same about being run down or my princely smackdown. Adding to my list of previous complaints, my ribs now ached and my nose curved to the right. Too bad the fake detective business, like the union, didn’t offer medical insurance.
Holding my breath, I pinched my nostrils and snapped the cartilage in my nose back in place. The pain brought tears to my eyes, but I held my screams in check, afraid to wake my sleeping princess hidden beneath the covers.
Mostly for fear she’d try to smother me with a pillow.
The bedroom was dark, but it didn’t take me long to recognize it as Cinderella’s much-too-pink room. I slowly sat up, checking each body part. Everything seemed to be in working order. Some parts more so than others. I turned to Asia, running my hand down her downy-covered leg. She let out a loud snort.
“Sweetheart,” I began, slowly pulling down the comforter. I stopped mid-much-too-broad-shoulder and screamed. “Ahhhhh!”
“Ahhhhh!” Prince Charming echoed.
“What the hell are you doing?” I dropped the blanket as if it was infected with princely cooties. Which it was.
Like a true Southern belle, Charming shielded his body with the sheet in one hand and fanned his face with the other. “I was sleeping,” he said. “What’s got your panties in a bunch?”
“My panties?” I yelled. “Men don’t wear panties.... Oh, never mind... . What are you doing here?” My fist waved to the bed, where up until two minutes ago, I’d innocently slept while Charming spooned me. Bile rose up my throat. It wasn’t like I was homophobic, but damn it, if I was gay I could do a hell of a lot better than Charming.
“After you burned my house down,” he said with a frown and released the blanket in his hand, flashing me his hairless, gym-sculpted chest. It reminded me of a rat without fur. What had Asia seen in this doofus? He continued, unaware of my assessment, “The king and queen graciously took us in.”
“Be that as it may,” I stalked to the opposite side of the darkened room, “it fails to explain why, out of the two hundred or so bedrooms in the palace, you ended up in this bed. And not, say, in bed with Dru, the woman you’re about to marry?”
He shivered. “Ew.”
“If you find Princess Dru so repulsive,” which I really couldn’t blame the guy for, “then why marry her?”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s what a prince does. We marry princesses. Duh.”
As much as I wanted to shake the idiot prince, my need to pee outweighed our ridiculous conversation. First, I needed to set him straight. Well, as straight as a musical-spouting, lacy pirate shirt–wearing prince could get. “Listen,” I started. “I appreciate your hospitality. And I’m sorry about your house, but the next time I find you within ten feet of my bed, I’ll break you into tiny prince pieces and feed you to a bluebird. Got it?”
I didn’t wait for his response. Instead, I yanked open the bedroom door, nearly colliding with Winslow, who was eavesdropping at the door. The troll-like butler’s hair stood on end in contrast to his perfectly starched tuxedo.
“Sir,” Winslow said, straightening from his spying crouch. “I was just ...”
I held up my hand. “Whatever. I need a shower.” I motioned to the Charming-filled bed. “Maybe two. Do you think you could rustle me up some clothes?”
“Of course, sir.” Winslow bowed. “Right away.”
“I wouldn’t mind a cup of hot cocoa. And some whipped cream. Cherries if you have them,” Charming called out from the bedroom.
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Winslow glared at the prince, spun on his heel, and headed down the corridor, his boots echoing against the hard wood floor.
“Don’t forget the marshmallows,” Charming yelled to the retreating butler, who muttered something akin to “I hope you choke on it, you selfish twit.”
Charming turned to me. “What’d I do?”
I shook my head and limped to the bathroom at the end of the gold-lined hallway, passing photograph after photograph of the Maledetto family. The king’s smiling face caught my eye. He sat on his throne, his arm around Asia’s sour-faced mother. The happy couple looked anything but. What had possessed the king to marry Asia’s mother?
In the next photograph, a teenaged Cinderella stood on the king’s right, looking angelic in a white dress. Dru knelt at the king’s feet, her eyebrow covering most of her face. Asia stood behind the throne, beautiful as always, if slightly overweight. She didn’t look happy. In fact, no one in the picture did.
With one disgusting exception.
Prince Fucking Charming.
He stood on the king’s left, dressed in military blues, a sword in his hand. The smile on his face matched the king’s. The picture was at least ten years old, but Charming looked the same as he did today. Minus the sword, of course. The nameplate under the portrait read: THE MALEDETTO FAMILY.
If those were my relatives, I’d ask to be disowned. Poor Asia, stuck with this group of clueless morons as family. I smiled at the photograph, vowing to save Asia from her family as well as any other curse she could throw at me.
My fingers brushed Asia’s two-dimensional face. I missed my princess, and thankfully, she had missed me too. Three times to date. Either my princess had really bad luck or she didn’t truly want me dead. I could live with that.
“Better aim next time, my sweet.” I smiled, pressing a two-fingered kiss to the picture. I was one badass villain, able to defy death and my murderous princess in a single bound.
Curses! Page 15
