A Bundle of Trouble (The Lynlee Lincoln Sets Book 1)

by Olivia Hardin

  When she closed her eyes, I narrowed mine at Helene. Her lower lip trembled and she dropped her gaze, looking contrite.

  “C’mon, Helene... What gives? You haven’t been taking your potion, have you?”

  It was a silly question. There was only one reason her hooved legs would reappear. Another few hours and her horns would begin to show as well. It took a very strong potion to keep a satyress’ true identity hidden. I was pretty annoyed that she would take this sort of chance.

  “Helene?”

  “I hate keeping secrets from Letty. I mean, if they’re my friends, won’t they like me for who I am? Can’t anyone understand that? ”

  “Helene, seriously? You stopped taking your potion so your friends would learn to like the ‘real you’? Do you really think this little twit won’t mind that you have the ass of a goat and horns in your head?”

  When Helene covered her face and began to wail, I started to think my comments were a little uncalled for. Okay, so it was a lot uncalled for. I was being more catty than usual because she had interrupted my date with Beck. We’d been having trouble getting time to ourselves and I was almost desperate to have him alone for a little while. I loved the kids and all, but Justin and Jilly weren’t really conducive to reigniting a romance.

  I rubbed my palm across my face and shook my head. This wasn’t working out like I’d hoped. I glanced at my watch and hissed a breath of air from between my lips.

  “Helene, don’t you see what happens when you try to invite humans into our world. Your poor friend Letty freaked out and nearly got both of you killed. Is that what you want?”

  Helene shook her head wildly, hiccupping with tears still streaming down her face.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you what. The EMS are coming down here now. Let’s get your girlfriend fixed up, give her a bit of time to recover from this accident, then you and I will tell her about you together. If she can’t accept it, I’ll wipe her memory and you can choose what you want to do about your friendship. Okay?”

  Helene sniffed, wiping her runny nose and brushing her brown hair out of her eyes. “But what if she can accept it? Can I stay as my true self?”

  I bit my lip. That would be almost impossible. She couldn’t go on living as a satyress. She’d either get stoned to death by the neighborhood kids or someone would shoot her and mount her on their wall. “I don’t know how we can work it, Helene. You know it isn’t possible. Perhaps we can design a potion that allows you to be yourself when you’re with her, but the rest of the world can’t know.”

  “What about Hideaway Land?”

  Crap, I thought. How the heck did she know about Hideaway Land?

  The paramedics arrived and began treating Helene’s unconscious friend so I didn’t have to worry about answering that question … yet.

  ~oOo~

  I had to orb back to my home before I could go from there to Beck’s place. My power didn’t allow me to just jump from one place to another—just from my home base to a designated location. It wasn’t very late, so if I was lucky, Beck and I could still spend some time together alone. I ran into my house and grabbed a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio.

  I was out of breath by the time I returned to the stone grotto that was hidden inside my rickety old storage shed. With my free hand I used my wand to draw a glowing rectangle into the air.

  Placing the wand between my teeth, I grabbed the amulet I kept around my neck and swung it in front of the glowing rectangle, concentrating on Beck as I did. Each of my charges had a stone cut from the same rock as my own amulet. Beck’s daughter Jilly was a nymph and in my care, so she had one too. When the little girl’s father and I started dating, I decided he should have one as well.

  As the stone danced back and forth, a map appeared, showing his location with a star in the center. He was home and I grinned, all manner of wickedness playing in my mind as I imagined us sans children for a while. I touched the stone to the star before plugging it into a slot in the grotto. The blood in my veins cooled then left tingling trails just under the surface of my skin, and within a few seconds I appeared in the yard beside Beck Hale’s little, rural family home.

  I found Beck inside making a grilled cheese sandwich. I smiled and approached him, ready to slither behind and wrap an arm around his waist. I stopped short, my hand about midway to his hips and almost groaned in frustration. There were three plates on the counter, two of them with half a sandwich and a few potato chips.

  Rolling my lower lip between my teeth a few times, I forced a smile and brought my hand down to grip the bottle of wine in front of me. “Hey there.”

  “Hey, darlin’,” he grinned over his shoulder and turned back to the griddle. “You’re just in time for dinner.”

  I sighed, struggling to suck up my utter disappointment. “Sounds delish.”

  The deep rumble of his laughter did something to me. A warmth bubbled up in my stomach and I chuckled along with him as I plopped the Pinot on the counter with a thud.

  He chuckled and tossed me a hot look as he flipped the finished sandwich on the third plate. “Just because Jilly’s here doesn’t mean we can’t open that, you know?”

  Nodding, I took a seat at the bar and tapped my fingernails on the Formica. “Just Jilly? Three plates here. Did you know I was gonna show up?”

  “Jilly’s friend Celia’s here too.”

  “Justin?” I asked, watching him pop a chip into his mouth.

  He winked as he chewed and leaned across the counter. After he’d swallowed, he puckered his lips out to me and I put mine out to him for a chaste kiss. “Justin’s still over at a friend’s house.”

  “His friend Bobby?” I could have bitten my tongue when I said it. Beck didn’t notice my look of alarm as he went back to the stove and buttered two more slices of bread.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just continued on. “I guess Justin probably mentioned him. I’m sorta surprised actually. I didn’t think they were friends anymore. I mean, before we left they were always together, but when we got back things were different.”

  Beck and the kids had lived on the road for a few years because little Jilly was having terrors here at their home. That was how Beck and I got back together. He came to me for help when he couldn’t figure out how to help his little girl.

  I was pretty unhappy that Beck would come to me and unearth all of the old feelings I had for him. We’d been an item years before until Beck decided he didn’t want to be with a witch—but then that’s another story…

  He motioned to the napkin holder beside me and I grabbed a handful and passed them to him. When he took them, his fingers brushed mine, the simple touch reaching me deep down inside.

  So, it turned out Jilly was a nymph, just like her deceased mother. Wasn’t that the irony of life? Beck didn’t want to fall in love with a “magical” person, and unbeknownst to him he’d married a nymph. Go figure.

  After I helped Jilly by banishing the troll invading her home territory, Beck asked for another chance at “us.” So I was back to dating my former sweetheart, and Beck and his kids were back living in their home again.

  “Well, sometimes it takes kids a bit of time to warm up again,” I offered, referring to Justin’s friend Bobby.

  “I guess,” Beck shrugged. “It was just surprising. The way Justin told it, I thought they hated each other.”

  “Hmmm…” I muttered, glancing down at the sandwiches. I knew the story behind the troubles between Beck’s son and his friend Bobby. It all came to a head a week ago when Bobby shoved Justin and Justin in turn punched his former friend in the jaw. I’d just happened to be here at the house when the call came in from the school.

  Beck started chatting on about Jilly and her little friend, and I tried to concentrate, but guilt was gnawing at me. I hadn’t told Beck about the incident because the only way I could get Justin to tell me what happened was to promise to keep it a secret. It seemed like the right thing to do at the t
ime. Justin was unsure of my relationship with Beck so the incident became a way to build some trust with the boy.

  It certainly isn’t going to help win any trust with Beck, though, my subconscious reminded me.

  “Dinner, kids,” Beck shouted down the hall.

  Two little girls, one topped with red hair and the other with blond came rushing out of Jilly’s room. They were both dressed in mismatched adult clothes and high-heels. I figured they were Jilly’s mother’s clothes. I met the ghost of Beck’s deceased wife the same time I got rid of the troll. These clothes looked like something Cheri would have worn.

  “Say hello to Lynlee, Jilly,” Beck instructed his daughter as he placed both girls at the table with their sandwiches and glasses of milk.

  “Hello, Lynlee. My friend, Cile, is here.”

  “You are two very pretty young ladies,” I said, my heart swelling with affection for the lovely little girl. I sighed and turned to Beck, fighting the urge to go all gooey with the kids.

  He pointed to the bottle of wine as he picked up our plates. I opened a drawer and rustled around until I found the bottle opener. Then I grabbed the Pinot and some glasses. I was almost through the doorway to the living area when I heard Jilly call my name.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Yes, ma’am?”

  She picked at her sandwich then looked up at me through her lashes with an impish grin. “Daddy says you might help us do makeup for our dress-up party.”

  The part of me that wanted to get tipsy and make-out with my boyfriend shrank back into some recess of my heart. I lifted an eyebrow and nodded. “I bet we could do a little something.”

  I looked down at the bottle in my hand and mentally shook my head. It seemed I would be limiting myself to just one glass of wine tonight.

  Rhiannon was busy stuffing her face with a very rare steak and hadn’t yet noticed that I was pissed. It shouldn’t have been hard to figure out. I was scowling like a demon and had not said so much as three words since the moment we sat down for lunch.

  “Want those?” she queried, jabbing at my side of onion straws with her fork and shifting a pile of them to her plate.

  I didn’t answer. She kept eating without missing a beat. It wasn’t at all unlike her. She was a werevamp which, in her case, meant she was a werewolf turned vampire. That made her an odd sort of undead hybrid, one who retained her ravenous werewolf appetite for real food— although she tended to like her meat bloody.

  Popping a piece of chicken in my mouth, I chewed without tasting. I knew my friend, and she wouldn’t pay attention to anything else around her until her stomach was satiated. So I waited.

  I called Rhiannon this morning and invited her to lunch after I woke in the dead of night from a very restful sleep with a nagging thought in my mind. She had treated Helene only a few weeks ago. It stood to reason that Rhiannon had likely been the one to tell the satyress about Hideaway Land.

  I met Rhiannon when she got into some trouble with a nest of vampires. Her personal mission in life was to work with vamps to find alternative means of feeding—alternative, as in not sucking the necks of an unwilling human. Some vampires didn’t particularly like that idea and sometimes that put her in over her head.

  Rhia, a veterinary and a medical doctor, was invaluable to the MAUCs—something that annoyed her pack to no end. For some unknown reason she didn’t care for the outdoors, didn’t like heavy labor, and just didn’t fit into the pack mentality. So she left Montana for New Orleans and got an education.

  “You’re not hungry?” she asked, just awakening from her food gorging coma to look at me.

  “Not so much. You worked on Helene not long ago, didn’t you?” I jumped right to the point. Weres are fast and not just physically. She’d get where I was heading really quick.

  “Okay, Lynlee, what’s the deal? Is Helene okay?”

  “She stopped taking her potion and she nearly killed her human best friend. Now she wants to go to Hideaway Land.”

  “D’oh!” Rhiannon slapped her hand to her face to hide her eyes and brushed her light brown locks back before looking at me again. “I felt sorry for the girl. She’s lonely and maybe that would be the best place for her.”

  I took a moment to swallow the bitter response I wanted to make while I shoved my chicken around on my plate. Hideaway Land was something Rhia and I disagreed vehemently on. It was the bright idea of Gerard Latham, a Warlock. He thought all MAUCs and humans should be able to live together in peace. To prove his point, he created a “hidden” country where a select group of MAUCs and humans were allowed to live. It was an experiment that many MAUCs, especially those in my line of work, believed was a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Let’s not even discuss how I feel about Hideaway. Helene can’t go there without an invitation and they aren’t handing any more of those out right now. Why would you set her up for the kind of disappointment that would bring?”

  Rhiannon took a deep breath and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “I wasn’t the one to tell her about it. The word is starting to spread. To most it’s a fantasy or a rumor, but for someone like Helene, who needs help—to her it’s a dream. She needed something to cling to.”

  “Oh, Rhia, sometimes people just have to learn to live in their circumstances. She can always go home if she’s that lonely. She made the choice to leave the shelter of her people.”

  Satyrs and centaurs both lived deep in the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea. When one of their group chose to leave the safety of those mountains, their hierarchy only allowed it under the guidance of a Neutralizer. I wasn’t Helene’s original protector, but I took her on when she moved to the United States. She always seemed too young to me, even though she was nearly eighty-five in human years.

  “Is she okay?” Rhiannon asked again, and this time I could see the concern glistening in her green eyes. Her actions weren’t ones of malice, just an overriding need to do good. It made her impetuous sometimes, but I chose my friends carefully, and there was a reason she was one of them.

  “Yeah, she’s okay.”

  I watched her rub her left hand with her right, something I knew she did when she was nervous or worried about something. I rolled my eyes and smiled; any remaining frustration I had for her depleted. “Want some bread pudding?”

  I was pretty sure I heard her growl before her green eyes sparkled and she laughed. “Did you even have to ask that question? Waiter!”

  ~oOo~

  Before Rhiannon and I finished our dessert, I got a call from Tig Durhman, my mentor. He’s a goblin–which is pretty much a very unattractive elf. He taught me the ropes of being a Neutralizer. These days he’s retired, but he still sends me clients every once in a while. I could tell he really wanted to talk to me, so I said goodbye to Rhia and drove home.

  He was waiting for me at my back door when I pulled my little Ford Focus up close to my storage building. Leaning against the house, he tugged a piece of paper off my door with a grin and stepped forward to greet me.

  I’m only about 5’4”, not tall by any standards, but Tig is at least a foot shorter than me. I looked down at him and ruffled his wiry black hair, dodging his attack when he tried to smack me.

  “What’s that you stole off my door there?” I asked, moving past him and unlocking the house to let him into my kitchen.

  “Looks like trouble to me. You forget to pay your homeowners association dues or something?”

  My eyes widened and I turned to snatch the little envelope from his grasp. It did indeed have the logo for the Lake Mayberry Homeowner’s Association on the front. Damn!

  I stuffed the envelope in my pocket without reading it and opened the fridge to see what I had to offer my guest.

  “Got any beer?” Tig asked without waiting for me to speak.

  I rolled my eyes and handed him a bottle. He used his huge yellow teeth to pop the top then took a swig.

  “Ahhhh.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Now that hits the spot. Didn
’t think you were ever going to get home. I was waiting out there in the heat for hours.”

  “Oh, please, Tig. It’s only seventy degrees outside.”

  “Hehehe, but goblins are hot-blooded creatures. Seventy is stifling!”

  I grinned as I grabbed a bottle of water and motioned him out of the kitchen and down the hall to my office.

  “You have a new client for me?”

  Tig sat down on the couch near my desk and rubbed his thumb along a big mole on his chin. I knew this look. Whatever he had to tell me wasn’t as simple as a new client. I also knew it wouldn’t do any good to press him. I shuffled some papers while I waited.

  “There’s this lady, a witch, I used to have as a client. She decided she could take care of herself and cut me loose. Sort of uppity, you know?”

  I nodded. I had a few of those clients myself.

  “I told her she still needed help. There was more trouble in her pinky finger than in most people but she moved on. I always thought she might be dealing in black magic and that I should have been glad to be rid of her.”

  I wrinkled my nose. Witches and warlocks who practiced the dark arts gave the rest of us a bad name. And many times their “mistakes” would blow up to such extremes that it would take half a dozen Neutralizers just to clean up the mess. I had taken a few of those calls in the past.

  “So she wants a Neutralizer again?” I asked, taking a sip of water to match his gulp of beer.

  “Eh, no. I heard her name come up. Seems she’s got a bounty on her head or something. A spell-gone-bad.”

  I sat back in my desk chair, balancing so that I could prop my feet on the desk. “She sells, huh? Never good when a dark witch sells. Do you want me to take the bounty or something?”

  “No, I don’t care a wit about her.” He flashed his hand at me in overemphasis. “Something’s nagging me. I feel like something big is bubbling under the surface. I want you to find out who’s paying the bounty.”

  I groaned. “You want to know about the S-G-B.” SGB was the MAUC colloquial for “spell-gone-bad.”