“I just sent Stanley’s application yesterday, Doug.” Paige understood the shelter supervisor’s frustration. He had worked in, with, and around the system for years, and sometimes it felt like the wheels of bureaucracy didn’t turn at all. “I’m hoping to get word by the end of the week, next Monday at the latest.”
“Right, and just in case you’re wondering”—Doug hesitated as though to emphasize the point—“Kevin’s working here all week.”
Paige hung up, but she could imagine Doug laughing. Annoyed, she pushed a potted cactus toward the corner of her desk and flipped open Stanley’s file to update her notes. Although Doug probably wouldn’t believe it, the only spot Kevin Graves had in her future was standing beside her on the shelter food line.
The ride home last night had been totally uneventful. She and Kevin had talked about her work at the clinic, the construction accident that shattered his leg, the shelter, and Stanley. There had been no awkward, lingering moment of hoping to prolong the conversation as she had gotten out of his older, fuel-efficient, sensible car. Just a quick “good-bye, thanks, see-you-tomorrow,” and Kevin had driven away.
Paige frowned, puzzled. She didn’t think she had imagined the intense chemistry between her and Kevin, and she felt positive he had sensed it too. So what happened to dampen the attraction? The fact that she kept dozing off between sentences on the ride home probably hadn’t helped. What if Kevin thought he bored her? That would certainly explain his sudden lack of interest.
“Not scintillating soap opera material, that’s for sure,” Paige mumbled.
“Did you say something?” Lila paused by Paige’s desk.
“Nothing important.” Paige was deliberately evasive. Until she figured out what was going on with Kevin, she didn’t want to be pressured for daily progress reports from her curious, well-meaning coworker.
“Okay.” Lila snagged her sweater on the spines of Paige’s new cactus as she turned to leave. She didn’t notice and kept walking.
Paige winced as the micro-disaster unfolded.
Her first thought was that the slow-growing plant might be irrevocably damaged in the fall.
Secondly, since Mr. Cowan occasionally complained about the cards, candles, and other knickknacks in her cubicle, she didn’t want to call his attention to her expanding collection.
When Lila’s sweater pulled the pot off the desk, Paige instinctively tried to save it.
“Plant,” Paige hissed, expecting the endangered cactus to orb unharmed into her hands.
Instead the small pot hit the floor and broke apart. Then shards of terra-cotta, a pile of dirt, and the uprooted plant vanished from the floor in a swirl of light and materialized in her hands.
Paige clamped her hands together to keep loose soil from falling between her fingers onto the floor. A cactus spine pricked her palm. She dropped the whole mess as Lila looked back.
“What happened?” Lila asked.
That’s what Paige wanted to know. What had just happened?
“Don’t worry about it, Lila. I’m sure the cactus will survive.”I’ll worry instead, Paige thought as she bent over and carefully picked up the plant. Bits of dirt and chipped clay pot were stuck on and around the sharp needles. She had been working a lot and not sleeping enough lately, but Piper and Phoebe had never warned her that fatigue might affect her powers.
Paige forced her heavy eyelids open as she scooped dirt into her coffee mug and placed the cactus in its temporary home. Maybe taking a nap would cure orb delay.
“You haven’t said much about your Web site class.” Piper rinsed a peeled potato and glanced over her shoulder as she dropped it into a pot on the stove.
Phoebe looked up from the laptop on the table. “It’s too soon to tell if I’m wasting my time or not.”
Actually, that’s only partially correct, Phoebe thought. She hadn’t said anything because the whole evening was a blur. She didn’t remember much except that the instructor was boring and she had enjoyed talking to Kate Dustin at Compute-A-Cup afterward. She didn’t recall the details of the conversation, but then she wasn’t angling for dates or obsessing over the latest fashion fads. Fortunately she had taken copious notes in class or she’d be completely lost in the next session tomorrow night.
“But you’ve always been the technical brains in this outfit,” Piper said.
“Yeah, well, driving around a neighborhood is a lot easier than building a house.” Phoebe sighed. “The same goes for cruising the Web and constructing sites. Cruising is a snap.”
Phoebe stared at the text displayed on the computer screen. She had no trouble creating a link to another Web site when the instructions were in front of her, but she couldn’t seem to commit the simple exercise to memory.
“I bet building a Web site is a lot easier than building a house, and cheaper, too.” Piper chuckled softly as she stuffed the potato peels into the garbage disposal. She turned on the water to fill the receptacle, inserted the black stopper in the drain, and flipped the disposal switch.
When Piper shrieked, Phoebe’s heart lurched. She looked up as the plastic drain stopper shot into the air on a geyser of mutilated vegetable skins.
Piper burst out laughing.
“Hit the switch!” Phoebe slammed her laptop closed to protect it from spraying potato peel mash.
“Got it!” Piper shut down the disposal, but the fountain of ground garbage and water didn’t stop.
Saving the laptop was Phoebe’s only priority. With the device clutched to her chest, she started toward the hall and barely escaped being clobbered when Leo threw open the basement door.
“What’s the matter?” Leo asked, breathless from racing up the stairs. For room-to-room emergencies, running was sometimes quicker than orbing.
Piper was laughing too hard to talk. She waved at the gushing fountain in the sink and turned off the tap. The water plume subsided, but resumed at full force within seconds.
“We seem to have a major malfunction in the garbage disposal.” Phoebe shoved the laptop into a drawer.
“It won’t shut off,” Piper sputtered. She reached for a dish towel to wipe her splattered face, realized that the towel was dripping watery potato gunk, and tossed it over her shoulder in frustration. She caught her lip in her teeth, but she couldn’t stifle her giggles.
Standing outside the spray radius, Phoebe smiled too. It would take hours to clean up the starchy glop that clung to everything within several feet of the sink, including Piper, but at least her older sister was seeing the humor in the situation and not freaking out.
“Maybe it’s a broken pipe.” Leo took a step toward the sink and slipped on the potato slime coating the floor.
“Careful!” Phoebe winced as he grabbed the counter to stop his fall.
A huge guffaw escaped Piper before she clamped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry, Leo.”
“That’s okay. If a little slapstick keeps you laughing, I’m happy to oblige.” Smiling, Leo opened the cabinet door and stuck his head inside. When he backed out, his expression was grave. “It’s not a broken pipe.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Phoebe asked, puzzled by his sudden change in demeanor.
“That depends.” Leo turned a valve to shut off the water to the faucet, closed the cabinet door, and stood up. He ran his finger around the wet drain and held it out for Piper and Phoebe to see. A roughly circular, paper-thin, shiny green disk half an inch in diameter stuck to his skin.
“What’s that?” Piper asked.
“Bad news,” Leo said.
Phoebe frowned. The upstairs toilet had overflowed yesterday, and now the garbage disposal had run amok. Neither event endangered life or limb, but they probably weren’t a coincidence, either. “Bad like in some kind of sludge demon with a warped sense of evil?”
“Bad like in gremlin,” Leo said. “They’re like underworld rats, only uglier, nastier, and smarter. A lot of them are immune to magic, but they all shed scales.” He flicked the green gremlin s
cale into the trash can under the sink.
“Then how do we get rid of it?” Piper leaned over the sink to peer down the drain.
“Trap it and turn it loose in its natural habitat.” Leo glanced at the floor. “Down there.”
“Is there some kind of no-kill taboo on gremlins?” Phoebe asked.
“No,” Leo said, “but when a gremlin dies, others sense it and move in to fill the vacated niche. The only way to break the cycle is to catch the first squatter. When a gremlin is trapped or forced out, it releases a warning pheromone. We can’t detect it, but the scent repulses other gremlins and breaks the species’s territorial bond.”
“Figures. There’s not even an easy way to vanquish evil vermin.” Now that the rubbish rain had stopped, Phoebe moved closer to the counter. “See anything, Piper?”
Still bent over the sink, Piper shook her head. “No, but it’s dark down—”
The cabinet door burst open, and a screeching, slimy green creature that resembled a foot-tall frog with teeth bolted between Leo’s legs.
“Look out!” Piper’s warning rode another wave of surprised laughter.
As the mini–swamp thing charged, Phoebe’s levitating power engaged. However, instead of rocketing toward the ceiling to evade the unexpected assault, she floated upward. The critter slashed at her boot with glistening fangs as it barreled by, leaving teeth marks in the leather.
Piper coughed to silence a chuckle and asked, “Was that a gremlin?”
Leo nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
Phoebe settled back to the floor with more than an evil rat-frog and a scarred boot weighing on her mind. Why had she drifted out of danger when zooming to safety would have been a more appropriate response?
In her psychology courses, Phoebe had learned that stress often caused physical and mental aberrations, which might account for the weakened flight response and her sudden inability to retain a few, simple facts. Was she suppressing anxiety about Cole’s physical and emotional absences without being aware of it? Would that affect her ability to function?
Or was she allergic to gremlins?
Either way, Phoebe thought, I’d better figure it out and snap out of it soon. For safety’s sake, she couldn’t afford to have her brain and her magic misfiring.
Phoebe didn’t want to alarm Leo and Piper unnecessarily, but all magical glitches were cause for concern. “I think we might have a problem.”
“I know we do. How much trouble is this little green gremlin gonna be, Leo?” Piper was no longer amused. “On a scale of one to ten.”
“One, if we’re talking about life-threatening evil,” Leo explained. “There are different classifications of gremlins, but this one looks like the common household variety. It’s not particularly dangerous, but it rates a ten for annoying and destructive.”
“In other words, expensive.” Piper sighed.
“What’s it doing here, though?” As she posed the question, Phoebe had the uneasy feeling she had forgotten something important.
“Running loose in the house.” Piper cocked an eyebrow at Leo, as though it were his fault.
Leo glanced toward the hall. “Actually, it’ll probably head for the nearest way back into the plumbing.”
“I meant why did it decide to infest our house,” Phoebe clarified.
“Because the Manor is full of magic and old pipes.” Leo closed the basement door. “Both of which would attract a displaced plumbing gremlin.”
“You mean it’s lost?” Phoebe blinked.
“It was until we found it,” Piper quipped. “Now we just have to—”
“Freeze it!” Phoebe yelled as the critter raced back into the kitchen and leaped into the sink.
Piper’s hands shot out as the grotesque beastie stuck its head in the drain. “Gotcha!”
Phoebe wrinkled her nose as she studied the creature in the sink. A mottled, greenish brown body was immobilized in an upended position with two powerful hind legs splayed. Webbed, amphibian feet were armed with hooked, retractable claws. The front legs and feet were smaller versions of the back pair, just like a frog or terrestrial toad. Toads, Phoebe noted, are cuddly cute by comparison.
“That’s a lucky break,” Leo said. “It looks like magic works on this one.”
“Look again.” Piper pointed. The double-jointed critter began to ooze into the pipes as the effects of her power wore off.
Leo grabbed the gremlin’s foot, but he couldn’t hold on to the slippery appendage.
Phoebe shuddered as the fanged frog vanished into the plumbing. “Okay. That was fun, but you guys are on your own for the hunt-and-trap phase of this operation.”
“Can’t handle the slime, huh?” Leo teased.
“No, I have to study for my class tomorrow night.” Phoebe grimaced as she glanced around the kitchen, which was covered with potato paste. “In the living room.”
“Yeah, it is kind of messy in here.” Piper wiped a smear off her nose. “Go study. Leo and I will clean up.”
“Thanks.” Phoebe turned toward the table and paused. “What happened to my laptop?”
“It’s in the hutch, where you just put it.” Leo reached under the sink to turn the water back on. “Middle drawer.”
“Oh, right.” Phoebe retrieved the computer and made a quick exit before Leo or Piper questioned the lapse of memory.
Piper paused outside the attic door, her arms loaded with clothes sealed in plastic bags. She was tired of jamming his and her wardrobes into one small bedroom closet and had finally packed several outfits she hadn’t worn for months. Since she wasn’t sure she wanted to part with the chic but outdated fashions, she had decided to store them in the attic. One of these days she and her sisters might actually agree to sort through generations of accumulated Halliwell stuff and have a gigantic yard sale.
“But probably not,” Piper muttered as she braced the stack of clothes against the wall and reached for the doorknob. When she saw that the door was unlatched, she kicked it open and hurried inside. She dropped the pile of clothes in the nearest unoccupied space and turned to see Paige rummaging through one of Grams’s old trunks.
“Hey, Paige. What are you doing?”
“Looking for this.” Paige held up a small ceramic bowl painted with a delicate floral design. “It’s perfect.”
“It belonged to Grams,” Piper said, her tone crisp. “She kept pins in it.”
“Jewelry pins?” Paige asked, yawning.
“Straight pins for sewing, diaper pins, safety pins, hat pins—you name it.” Piper walked over and flopped down on a pile of pillows. “No matter what kind of pin we needed, we knew right where to find it.”
“Then this is even more perfect.” Smiling, Paige closed the trunk. She settled back on her heels and sagged slightly, still holding the fragile bowl. “Something that Grams used, I mean.”
“Perfect for what?” Piper leaned forward, anticipating a fumble when Paige’s eyelids began to droop. It was only nine o’clock, but the double-duty schedule of working all day at South Bay Social Services and the early evening hours at the Fifth Street Shelter was obviously wearing her down.
Paige jerked her head up, but her hands and the bowl dropped into her lap. “A cactus plant at work. The little spiny dude needs a new pot so I can have my coffee mug back.”
“Uh-huh.” Piper started to protest, then hesitated. Like her, Phoebe would be upset if something happened to the antique bowl, but she couldn’t say no. Paige could have bought a cactus pot for a couple bucks. Instead she had deliberately looked for something with a family connection. Grams’s pin bowl was just another means of bridging the years Paige had been excluded from the Halliwell family history.
“What happened to the old pot?” Piper asked.
Before Paige could answer, Phoebe burst through the attic door. Her frantic gaze focused on The Book of Shadows.
Startled by Phoebe’s abrupt entrance, Paige shifted position. The bowl rolled off her lap. She extended her hand to orb it j
ust as Piper raised her hands to freeze.
“Bowl!” Paige commanded.
Piper tensed as the irreplaceable heirloom froze for an instant, then continued its forward roll. It landed, unbroken, on the worn carpet.
“That’s what happened,” Paige said in answer to Piper’s question about the old pot.
“Nothing happened.” Piper frowned when the bowl suddenly orbed into Paige’s hand.
“Exactly.” Pale and shaken, Paige cradled the bowl against her stomach.
Piper stared at her own hands.
“Did someone call a meeting?” Phoebe paused, looking confused as she cast a sweeping glance around the attic.
“No,” Piper said. “We just all had stuff to do up here.”
“Bowl.” Paige held up the pin bowl, which was firmly clasped in two hands.
“Pack and store.” Piper pointed at the pile of plastic clothes bags and looked at Phoebe expectantly. “You?”
Phoebe blinked. “Not a clue.”
“Meaning what?” Piper had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing aloud at her sister’s perplexed expression. Her freeze power had just failed, which wasn’t even remotely funny, but she couldn’t seem to muzzle her glee. What was up with that?
Phoebe turned her palms up and shrugged. “I don’t remember why I came up here.”
“Don’t you hate that?” Paige rolled her eyes and yawned again. “Happens to me all the time. I’ll go into the kitchen to get something and draw a total blank.”
“And then remember what it was you wanted right after you leave,” Piper added. “Or you put something somewhere and can’t find it two minutes later. That happens to me all the time too.”
Smiling tightly, Phoebe sank into the old rocker beside Paige. “Me too, but this is different. I’ve had a couple dozen short-term memory lapses today, and that’s never happened to me before.”
Paige’s brow creased in a thoughtful frown. “I’ve never had orb delay before, either.”
“Is that what just happened with the bowl?” Piper asked, muffling another chuckle. “A delayed reaction?”
Dark Vengeance Page 4
