Heat coursed through my cheeks in a heady rush.
“And you do?” Adonis scoffed. “What kind of future could you give her? I can’t see the doctor being interested in an open relationship. And given your track record…” he trailed off.
“Better an alpha male than someone’s bitch,” Crixus bit back.
“Guys,” I said. “This topic of conversation is fascinating and everything, but could we please get back to discussing the two goddesses who want to use my intestines for shoelaces?”
“There’s only one solution to that,” Crixus said. “Adonis has to go back.”
“Never,” Adonis vowed. “Now that I’ve known love, I could never go back to the kind of shallow, self-serving existence I’ve known. My life, my heart, are Matilda’s to do with as she wishes.”
I placed a hand on Crixus’s chest to keep him from surging across the table. “I can’t believe I am actually going to say this,” I began, “but, Crixus is right. I think your sudden attachment to me is more than likely just the intense emotions that often come when ending a long-term relationship. Or two long-term relationships, in your case.”
It was hard to know how Adonis took this.
“Especially given the circumstances of our first meeting,” I continued. “That was my fault, and I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Adonis said, a trace of sadness in his voice. “I’m not.”
“Well, I’m getting sorrier by the moment.” Crixus sighed. “This maudlin crap is killing me.”
“Wish it would kill me.” Marvin had climbed onto the windowsill and was watching cars pass by with a glassy-eyed gaze.
“Looks like we’re ‘O’ for two, Doctor,” Crixus said, turning to me.
“What do you mean?”
“I bring Adonis to you, and instead of getting him back on track, you have him proclaiming his undying love for you. That, and Marvin here, whose suicide attempts have actually increased under your care. At this rate, the world ought to be toast in the better part of a few months.”
My guts churned with a volatile soup of fear, anger, and hurt. “When did I ask you to drag a parade of dysfunctional supernaturals into my office? I spent the better part of eight years just learning how to deal with human psychology. Since you showed up, my clients are dropping me left and right, and my life has become a complete shit show.”
Crixus’s brows lowered, casting his eyes into shadow. “Your life was a shit show long before I got here. You’re just constitutionally incapable of scrutinizing yourself as eagerly as you do your clients.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed and completely unable to compose a response.
“And, unless I am mistaken,” he added, “without the gold from the leprechaun I dragged into your office, the Westies would have trimmed you for meat.”
Before I knew what had happened, my knuckles were stinging from having punched Crixus squarely in the bicep—an act that only succeeded in teasing a grin to his lips.
“I play much harder than that, Doctor. Want to try again?” he invited.
“Ooh! Me! Hit me!” Marvin said, hopping across the table to me. “Maybe if you really put some power into it you could jar my brain hard enough to—”
“No!” I shouted, realizing just how loud when the patrons from several tables around us stopped talking to stare in our direction. “Uh…no. I don’t want the omelet. I think I’ll just have a fruit salad.”
My phone buzzed in my purse. I frowned at the foreign number flashing on the screen. “I better get this,” I said. “Dr. Schmidt.”
“Well good morning, Doctor.” The Ferret’s voice oozed into my ear. “Do you have my key yet?”
“I’m afraid not,” I answered, mouthing blackmailer to Crixus, who held out his hand as if to take the phone. Adonis slapped the demigod away and made his own attempt to grab it.
I picked up a fork and pointed it from to the other, but pulled the utensil back before Marvin could try to skewer himself on it.
“Rolly’s here at the office, but you aren’t. How exactly were you planning to acquire the key?”
“I’m still formulating a plan.”
“Sounds to me like you’re stalling,” the Ferret said.
“I’m not stalling. I just have a lot going on at the moment.”
“We all do, Doctor. That’s why we have to establish priorities. I would suggest you make getting me what I need a priority of yours, before I make finding these pictures a nice public venue one of mine. “
“Understood,” I said, and disconnected.
No sooner had I placed the phone in my purse when it began to ring again.
“I’ll know if you tell Rolly,” the Ferret added. “If that happens, you’ll have much more than a few nudie pictures to worry about. I wanted to make sure we were clear about that.”
“Crystal,” I said, hanging up for a second time. I had placed it back in my purse and was preparing to rake over my irritation at Crixus when the phone vibrated yet again.
“For the love of God,” I barked. “What?”
“Where the fu—frick are you?” Liam’s voice bore the dangerous edge of a measured rage he’d had all night to hone.
“Liam,” I said aloud. “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
Crixus’s expression was something between irritation and amusement. Adonis, in the absence of a brow to furrow, folded his arms across his broad chest. I wondered how much, if anything, he knew about my brief history with the hit man.
“Where are you?”
“With a client?” Not technically false, seeing as I was tasked with treating two of the four beings currently seated at my table.
“Nice try,” he said. “I’ve already been by the office. Your car is there. You’re not.”
“You’re here?” I asked, failing to keep the shock out of my voice. “In Plattsburgh?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because first I’m going to kill whomever is blackmailing you, then I’m going make Adonis’s skin into a new raincoat.”
“No,” I insisted. “There will be no killing. And especially no skinning.”
The eyeholes in Adonis’s paper bag took on a worried, downcast shape.
“That’s not up to you,” Liam said.
“What about your sister’s kids?” I asked, hoping to neutralize a fraction of his ire.
As if on cue, a shrill sound crackled through the phone. “Maddy bit me!” whined the petulant little voice.
“Caden took my fruit snacks,” a voice I assumed to be Maddy’s replied.
The phone had begun to sweat against my ear. “You brought children with you when you intend to commit acts of violence?”
“Acts of violence may be committed sooner than later,” Liam sighed. “Caden, give Maddy back her fruit snacks.”
“Can’t,” Caden replied. “They’re all gone.”
Maddy’s whine ratcheted up to a full wail. “He ate all my fruit snacks!”
“We’ll get more,” Liam promised. “Just be quiet while I finish talking.”
Something about the cheerful chaos of Liam bickering back and forth with his niece and nephew outlined a particular vacancy in my chest. It wasn’t something I missed; as the only child of a mother with undiagnosed schizophrenia, it was a life I had never known. Even so, a sympathetic ache clenched in my ribcage.
“But I wanted those ones!” Maddy’s voice had broken into air-sucking sobs.
“Quiet!” Liam bellowed. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Where are you?”
“Tangie’s Café on Broad Street.”
“Who’s with you?”
Out of the three potential answers to this question, Marvin seemed like the safest. “The Easter Bunny.”
“Is that all?”
“Crixus,” I said.
“And?”
“Adonis.”
“Don’t. Fucking. Move.” The line went dead.
“That was Liam,” I announced.
“I gathered,” Crixus said dryly.
“He’s very excited to meet you,” I said to Adonis.
“He’s also looking forward to making a coat out of your skin,” Crixus reported.
“Never happen,” Adonis said. “A mortal man has nothing on me.”
“Except this one has slept with the good doctor several times.” The expression on Crixus’s face was impossible for me to deconstruct. Ever upredictable, his motives were as mysterious as his history. He might simply be enjoying Adonis’s distress. Or then again, he might be trying to weed out a competitor he felt to be more of a threat than Liam.
Adonis’s knuckles whitened as his hands tightened into fists. “He’s coming to find us? Good. I’ll be here waiting for him.”
“No, you won’t,” Marvin said. He had hopped back onto the table and was grooming the soft fur behind the ears I had to sit on my hands to keep from stroking.
“Why not?” Adonis asked.
He paused mid-lick to jerk his toward the window. “Because of them.”
My head swiveled on the tendons of my ever-tightening neck to follow his line of sight. A river of white rolled through the street, covering cars, overflowing into alleyways, throwing off small, white, wriggling projectiles in all directions.
“What the…” Crixus began.
“Rabbits!” Adonis announced. “They’re rabbits!”
“Aphrodite’s found us,” Crixus barked, sliding sideways out of our booth. “We have to go.”
Cries of disbelief and alarm sounded through the restaurant as heads popped up around us like spring tulips. I could barely process what I was seeing, and I had a head start getting acquainted with the unbelievable. The faces around me bore the representation of the conflicted feelings I had come to know intimately in the past weeks. “I thought you said they couldn’t do magic around people!”
“Technically, this could be explained by natural phenomena,” Adonis said. “There are plenty of examples of—”
A shriek marked the beginning the restaurant’s invasion by the writhing sea of furry bodies. Diners ejected from their seats and scrambled toward the door as their plates and coffee cups were overtaken by the onslaught. Silverware clattered to the floor. People shoved, pushed, and clawed at each other in their haste to escape.
Some of the hopping bodies peeled away from the herd to munch on parsley garnishes or abandoned plates of salad. Others, their black eyes shining with an eerie knowing, pointed their twitching pink noses toward me.
“Go now. Explain later,” Crixus said, grabbing Marvin and hauling me against him.
The ocean of white became a swirling vortex of black as the world disassembled itself around us for the second time in one day.
*****
My legs liquefied beneath me. Only the steely grip below my shoulder blades kept me from dissolving into a puddle of pleasure on the floor at Crixus’s feet.
Lips were hot against my ear. “Good thing we’re getting in so much practice. We need to work on your stamina if you’re going to last a night with me.”
These words served only to melt me further.
“Hands off,” Adonis ordered, peeling me out of Crixus’s grip with his one free hand. The other held Marvin tucked under his arm like a yellow-vested football.
Senses returned in scattered bursts. The long, tiled hallway fitted itself together like puzzle pieces from my memory. I knew this place. A low hum of thousands of conversations buzzed overhead as a steady stream of people passed by at the hall’s entrance. Bathrooms. We were by the bathrooms. At the… “Mall!” I shouted. “We’re at the mall!”
“Very good, Doctor,” Crixus replied.
“Are you sure this is the best way to stay safe?” I asked, smoothing my skirt. “It doesn’t seem like the number of people were an adequate deterrent last time.”
“I don’t know how she found us,” Crixus said. “She doesn’t have a tracker on you, does she?”
“Not since the Salem witch trials,” Adonis answered.
Crixus turned an assessing eye on the paper bag sitting atop Adonis’s head at an owlish angle. “We need a better disguise for you.”
All four of us glanced up at the figure making its way down the hall towards us. Dressed from head to toe in a white-bellied suit of pink fur, he shuffled toward us on over-sized three-toed feet, the costume’s head wedged beneath his arm, long ears dragging on the tiled floor.
“Fucking stupid suit,” he grumbled. “Why couldn’t they install a zipper in the front so a guy doesn’t have to get bare-ass naked just to take a piss?”
His fluffy, oversized cotton ball of a tail bounced over the costume’s sagging hindquarters as he walked away.
We stared after him in silence for several moments.
“Now that is just damned insulting,” Marvin said. “Not to mention hideously inaccurate. What kind of idiot puts on a full-body costume so a bunch of snot-nosed brats can snap a picture?”
Crixus and I glanced at Adonis at precisely the same moment.
“No,” Adonis said, holding up beautifully shaped hands against the unwelcome ideas being fired at him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Where are we going to get a more perfect cover?” Crixus asked. “This is like a gift from the gods.”
“Curse is more like it,” Adonis sulked.
“You have a better idea?” Crixus challenged. “Or should we just sit tight and wait for Aphrodite and Persephone to catch up with us and split you down the middle like a wishbone? And that will be nothing compared to what they’ll do to Doctor—”
“No!” I found myself saying, the threat of violence a little too near for someone who wouldn’t pop back into shape as easily as my three immortal companions. “Adonis, please go put on the suit,” I implored. “Just until we can get this figured out.”
His broad shoulders slumped downward with the weight of his acquiescence. “All right,” he agreed.
“We’ll be right back,” Crixus said, angling his attention toward the restroom the headless rabbit had disappeared into.
“Be gentle,” I advised.
“I don’t do gentle, Doctor.” Crixus sent me a wink that nearly scalded the skin from my bones. “You should know that better than anyone.”
I ogled his back until it vanished.
“I don’t really look like that, do I?” Marvin’s small head bobbed from side to side as he examined himself in the foggy brushed-metal surface of the old payphone stall where Adonis had set him. He pulled his pink lips back to reveal two protruding front incisors. “My teeth are nowhere near that disproportionate.”
“No,” I assured him. “Not at all.”
My phone rang within my purse, and the attendant anxiety descended as quickly as a clap of thunder. Liam’s name flashed across the display screen.
“Hi there,” I said.
“What the fuck—”
“Uncle Liam!” a chorus of squeals sang.
“F-frack…freak” he stuttered, mining his vocabulary for a suitable alternative. “What the freak happened to this place and where the hell are you?”
A brief shout echoed within the bathroom, followed by a deafening crash. “Hold still,” I heard Crixus shout.
“Still with my clients,” I reported. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Tangie’s Café. You’re not here, and neither is anyone else. Unless you count a shit-ton—”
“Uncle—”
“A lot,” he corrected. “Unless you count a lot of rabbits.”
“Bunny, bunny, bunny!” I heard a voice squeak.
“Maddy, put that thing down!” Liam growled. “It could have rabies!”
“Your mom could have rabies,” Marvin huffed from the payphone shelf.
“What did you say?” Liam asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Put it on!” Crixus’s disembodied words floated out into the hallway.
“It doesn’t fit.” Adonis’s voice took on a shr
ill edge that brought to mind the fruit snack fiasco of a few moments past.
Crixus’s angry roar sent three approaching mall-walkers scurrying back down the hall. “It will stretch. Put. On. The suit.”
“But it’s only my face that needs to be covered. Why do I have to wear the rest of it?”
“For the gods’ sake we’re trying to blend in! If you walk around with just a rabbit head on, that will be even worse than a paper bag!”
“Where are you now?” Liam asked.
“At the mall,” I reported.
“Stay there.” He disconnected.
“I’ll try,” I said to the empty air.
Adonis’s cartoon rabbit feet shuffled around the corner seconds before the rest of him caught up. His ankles were bare above the slippers, the line of pink fur catching him just below the bulge of his shapely calf. I got as far as mid-thigh before I had to train my gaze to the tiles. The undisguised shape of his package strained against the costume where it gathered at the juncture of his thighs.
Long forearms poked from sleeves near three-quarters length on his lean body, the zipper hovering at half-mast to accommodate the mounded muscle spreading across his torso.
The smooth skin of his neck disappeared into the rounded edge of the costume’s head. Painted screens affixed behind the rabbit’s eyes allowed Adonis to see out without giving me the benefit of drinking in the face behind the frozen expression of crazed joy.
My nipples hardened painfully against the fabric of my bra.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Crixus muttered. “I have you half naked in the bed after a spontaneous orgasm and you turn me down, but this guy dresses up in a rabbit suit and you pop a lady boner?”
“It’s an involuntary physical reaction,” I said, glancing at a mother with a gaggle of little ones in tow making their way toward us. “What do we do now?”
“Hey look!” one tow-headed squirt said, aiming a chubby digit at Adonis. “It’s the Easter Bunny!”
“It sure is.” His mother stroked Adonis paws to ears with a sexy sideways glance.
Crixus elbowed Adonis, who fumbled into the Easter basket with a clumsy paw and knocked out a few bags of rainbow-hued jellybeans, which the children fell upon like a pack of jackals.
“What do you say?” their mother asked.
Unhoppy: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #3 Page 7
