“Nothing wrong with it at all. Knitting is great. For people. And scarves.” I swallowed a snicker as my treasonous mouth jerked with the effort of not smiling.
He looked up at me, a mock-wounded expression plastered on his face. “Here I am, saving your life, and you’re going to make fun of me?”
“I’m not making fun,” I said. “Knitting is a great hobby. And strong fingers are important. Especially when you’re a knit—I mean hit man.”
“Oh, Doctor,” he said, shaking his head gravely. “I’m afraid you brought this on yourself.” He dug his fingers into the sensitive spot where the muscles of my thigh joined my knee. I squeaked and squirmed, stifling a completely unprofessional fit of giggles. “So she’s ticklish,” Liam observed, redoubling his efforts. “Good to know.”
“Stop it!” I begged. “You’ll wake up Flick!”
“I’m not the one making all the noise,” Liam replied. His hands were higher now. Halfway up my skirt and drilling into the tender muscles inside my thighs. “Maybe you should quiet down.”
I muffled a shriek against the meat of his shoulder and tried to kick my way out of his grip. I only succeeded on driving my skirt further up my hips.
The torment ceased as the look on Liam’s face morphed from playful to pleased. “You’re wearing them,” he said.
“Wearing what?” I asked, trying to recover my breath.
“These.” He hooked his finger through the side strap of the G-string panties he’d commented on the night before. His knuckle traced the line of my hipbone over my skin.
My stomach muscles bunched with the contact. “This is a really form-fitting skirt,” I said. “Almost anything beneath it shows. It was this, or—”
Hands grasping my ribcage pulled me out of my chair. The edge of my desk bit into the bones of my hips as I was shoved against it, my glasses falling from my face and onto the files Julie had left for me the night before.
Liam was behind me, pushing my skirt up over my hips, pressing his erection into the exposed flesh of my backside.
If catching my breath had been an effort before, now it was utterly impossible. The weight of his torso came down on my back, compressing me into the desk’s unyielding oak.
“Liam,” I whispered, my warm breath bringing up the scent of lemon oil Julie used to polish my furniture. “What are you doing?”
I heard the clink of a belt buckle, a metallic zip, and the tearing of a foil packet. “Think of it as occupational therapy.” He ground his hips against mine by way of punctuation.
“We can’t do this now! Flick is sleeping right over there.”
“Then you’d better be quiet.” His finger traced the line of my panties to where it disappeared between my curving flesh. “I think we’ll leave these on.” He tugged the fabric backward, moving it to the side. The resulting friction threatened to relieve me of my knees.
“Crixus is right outside the door,” I reminded him. “And he can hear my thoughts.”
“Then I hope he likes to listen,” Liam replied, sliding rough fingers between my legs. I felt the appreciative rumble ripple through his back at the moisture he found there. “You’re getting fucked, Doctor. That’s all there is to it.”
He speared me.
The world ceased to spin. A point of perfect silence distilled in my overwrought mind, and for the space of one instant, there was only the sound of our mingled breathing.
Delayed time slammed into us with the force of a train wreck, sensations converging at once. Every molecule singing with beautiful, violent animal pain and pleasure.
One hand came down at the base of my neck, pinning my face against a manila file folder. Gripping my hip with his other, he drove into me again.
And again.
Pausing at the apex of each blow, waiting for me to catch a breath before driving it back out of my lungs with another brutal thrust. Working in concert with my body’s rhythms to syncopate a song written in sighs, gasps, and muffled moans.
My back arched with unbearable pressure as I scattered papers off the desk to find purchase against the slick surface. A white-knuckled grip on the wooden corners was all that stood between me and collapse.
“I’m going to fuck you on every surface in this office,” he promised. His pace quickened, his hands leaving my neck and hip to sandwich my hands to the desk with his own. He grazed my earlobe with his teeth, flicking his tongue against it before he curled it into my ear. Words followed the wet, hot path he left. “Been thinking about it since the first moment I saw you.”
Sensation tingled down my neck to my spine, where it set off an avalanche of pleasure down my entire body. A cry built in my stomach, threatening to erupt with a force that would shake the building down to its foundations.
Liam’s hand cupped my mouth, trapping the screams inside me as he buried his own against my shoulder.
We collapsed forward together, too wrung out and rapt in our own fervor to see the gun until it was pointed at our heads.
*****
The figure stood six times taller than it was wide, its trench coat-clad body undulating at odd angles like gnarled twig. The head on top of its narrow shoulders was the size of an apple and crowned by hair springing out all angles like orange fusilli. Its eyes were no bigger than thumbtacks punched into the dirt-smudged skin of its cheeks.
It had a toddler’s smile, with three lone teeth poking up from its pink gums.
Stranger still, it pointed the barrel of its weapon not from its hands—which were absent, like the arms they should be attached to—but from a waist-high gap in the trench coat.
Neither Liam nor I had moved an inch or so much as drawn a breath for the space of thirty seconds. My skirt was still gathered above my ass. Liam stayed pressed against my back.
The thing seemed to be as transfixed by us as we were by it.
It was Flick’s shrill keen that collected my disparate observations into a solid notion.
“It’s a Tato Man!” I declared.
“We are Tato Mens,” the figure corrected in a voice that brought inhaling helium to mind. “We are many.”
The coat buttons popped open to reveal six burlap-clad bodies stacked foot to shoulder, each armed with a similar contraption of bent pipes and what appeared to be a CO2 cartridge.
They all hopped down in one perfectly synchronized movement that sent me scrambling up onto my desk with the words “Oh God! They’re fast and small!” tripping from my tongue.
“Fuck me stupid!” Liam shouted, zipping up in a hurry, the action reminding me to adjust my skirt. “They’re real!”
“Of course they’re real, you bloody idiot!” Flick waved a fist from within his shelter of books. “I’ve been sayin’ it all along, haven’t I?”
The orange-haired figure was the first to step forward. “We’ve come for the gold-hoarders,” it said. “The she-people will give them to us.”
Crixus! Where in the ever-loving fuck are you? When he didn’t answer me, and I realized no one else had said anything either, I opened my mouth to speak but only an “uhh…” dribbled out.
“You can all rot in the ground you were dug from!” Flick said from his book fort. “Ye’ll never get me gold!”
“The gold-hoarders!” shouted six little mouths. “There they are!” Six grimy hands pointed to my bookcase in the coordinated movement of a flock of birds.
“Why do you need him?” Liam asked.
Six sets of eyes, black and shiny as buttons, turned to him.
“Careful, Liam,” I whispered. “Those things are packing heat.”
“Please,” he scoffed, drawing out his own gun. “What are these little fuckers going to do?”
A brief, loud whump, and something sailed toward Liam, catching him squarely in the center of his forehead.
“Fuck!” he swore, blinking rapidly and staggering backward. “What the fuck was that?”
“A potato?” I said, trying to get a better look at the dirt crusted object as it came to r
est by his shoes.
“The she-peoples blasphemes!” the Tato Mens shouted in unison. Another whump filled the office, and a similar muddy object hurtled into the side of my head. Stars exploded in my vision.
“Ow!” I cried, bringing my hand to my head. “That really fucking hurts!”
“Choose your words carefully, the she-peoples,” Orange Hair admonished. “We would never hurt one of our own. We use only the yams for the shooting. They are inferior to the Tato Mens.”
Liam stepped in front of my desk and pointed his pistol down at Orange Hair. “I’ve had about e-godamned-nuff or your creepy little voices and your abuse of the third person. Drop your spud shooters, or I turn you into hash browns.”
“The he-people used a death word!” Orange corkscrew curls shook with rage. “They are rotten and must be culled.”
Whump.
A scream of pain tore from Liam as he clapped his hands to his crotch and crumpled to the carpet.
“We have shot the he-peoples in their tots!” Orange Hair cheered.
“Tot-shot! Tot-shot!” the others chanted.
Whump. Another projectile hit Liam in the windpipe. His cough sounded like a flute breaking as he collapsed to his side.
“Liam!” I jumped down from the desk to kneel next to him on the carpet.
“Look at the he-peoples’ head!” a Tato Mens with feathery tufts of blond hair shouted. “It turns the beet color!”
“And their mouth!” another cried. “It foams like the fermented wheat things!”
“Oh dear,” whispered a third. “The he-peoples’ face will make the rainbow soup now.”
“The rainbow soup?” I asked. But the realization came too late.
Liam folded in on himself as he vomited on my skirt.
“That’s it!” Flick said, pushing his way out of the books. “You don’t go shooting a man in the bollocks. You skeevy knackers have called down the McThunder!”
Whump.
“Shytehocks McGoldrick!” Flick squeaked. The yam—nearly as big as he was—caught him in the chest. His arms and legs wrapped around it like a cartoon character that had run face-first into a tree.
I watched in horror as the yam propelled Flick backward and into the side of Sigmund’s tank, shattering the glass on impact.
“You starchy little bastards!” I found myself screaming. “I just replaced that!”
Whump.
I yelped as a yam made contact with my ribs, agony knocking air from my chest.
Whump whump whump.
Pain burst in my arms, my legs, my face as I army-crawled toward the wreckage to retrieve Sigmund. Taking up his slippery body, I frantically searched my office for some vessel to hold him.
I spied my yoga bag and knee-walked over to it to retrieve my water bottle. I made a mental note to purchase about a dozen more and keep them all over my office.
Just in case.
Liam grunted from across the room.
By the time I turned to him, Flick and the Tato Mens were long gone.
*****
“Give me your gun.” I held out my hand and flexed my fingers.
We stood in front of the closet door by Julie’s desk, having thought for a moment the Tato Mens might have managed to trap Crixus when we overheard his masculine grunts.
When girly giggles followed, I had started looking for a weapon.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Liam said in a voice several octaves higher than the one I was used to.
“Oh my God!” Julie moaned on the other side of the closet door.
“Only half,” I heard Crixus’s deep voice rumble.
“Did you hear that?” I hissed, looking from the door to Liam. “He got that line from me!”
“I bet I know which half,” Julie purred.
“The gun,” I said, looking down at Liam, who was propped against one of the chairs in the waiting room, still not quite able to stand on his own power. “Give it to me.”
“Can’t,” he said. “No way a jury would believe this was self defense and you’re too pretty for prison.”
“Fine,” I said, turning on my heel and stomping toward my office. I returned with a handful of yams and one of the guns the Tato Mens had left behind in their hasty departure.
“Don’t do anything rash,” Liam grunted. “You’ll regret it.”
“Oh believe me. There will be no regrets.” I grabbed the handle and flung the closet door wide.
“Dr. Schmidt!”
I took a small measure of delight in the stunned and horrified expression on Julie’s face. Seeing the rest of her gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Her sweater dress had been pushed up to her waist, her tanned, taut legs wrapped around Crixus’s hips, locked behind him at the ankles.
Crixus, whose hands cupped Julie’s ass, was shirtless, his pants open at the waist, his eyes soft and unfocused with an addict’s satiation.
“So this is awkward,” Julie said at last.
“Again?” I asked, looking at them both.
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Schmidt. I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t mean to? Like it was an accident? You tripped and fell on his dick? I guess being so sick must have offset your equilibrium.”
“But I really am,” she protested. “I remembered that I had some antibiotics left in my desk drawer and was just stopping by to get them so I didn’t have to go to the instacare when I saw Crixus and—”
“And you figured having sex at work seemed like a perfectly fine use of a sick day,” I finished for her.
“No!” she said. “It wasn’t like that that.”
“You’re one to talk, Doctor.” Crixus said, examining me from the shoes up. “What do they call it when you do the exact same thing that you criticize others for? Oh yes. Hypo—”
“This is my office and my practice,” I interrupted. “Don’t you dare compare your situation to mine!” Whump.
“Fuck!” Crixus jumped back and clapped his hand to his biceps, sending Julie sliding down his body to the floor. “What fuck is that thing?” he asked, eyeing the gun.
“Oh, this?” I asked. “This would be a little souvenir left behind by the Tato Mens. Who, as it turns out, are very, very real! Which you might have known if you had been at the desk like you were supposed to be instead of screwing my assistant in the coat closet. Again!”
Julie took a wide step away from Crixus and chewed her lower lip. At least she looked sorry.
“That’s impossible,” Crixus said. “I know every single species on this planet. There’s no such thing as a Tato Man.”
Whump.
“Gods damn it!” Crixus cursed. “Would you knock that the fuck off?”
“Tato Mens,” I corrected. “Always plural. And they took Flick.” Whump.
“Fuck a fucking unicorn on a stick!” The growing red splotches on his perfect body brought me the first smile of the day. “Where did they take him?”
“How should I know?” I asked. “Flick seems to think they’re after his gold, wherever that might be…Oh!”
“Oh? What oh?” he asked.
“I think I know where they might have taken him! Crixus, do you remember the cemetery where you stopped to let Flick hide some gold?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It wasn’t too far from an airport, I think.”
“St. Peter’s Cemetery! That’s right by the Plattsburgh International!”
Whump.
“Gerbilsucking fucktrumpet!” Crixus lunged forward and snatched the gun away from me. “What the fuck was that one for?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I got a little excited. Let’s go!”
*****
Liam’s face had recovered most of its normal color by the time we pulled into the parking lot of St. Peter’s Cemetery. Unable to walk without a limp, he had still insisted on driving us in his rental car, muttering something to effect that he’d rather be bullwhipped than allow Crixus behind the wheel.
“Would have been faster for me to m
aterialize us,” Crixus commented from the back seat.
“I wasn’t sure you would be up to it after your recent expenditure of energy,” I said, refusing to look back at him.
Julie, the recipient of said expenditure, had graciously offered to reschedule all my appointments for the day and see to Sigmund after her sudden recovery. Whether she hadn’t been ill to start with, or humping a demigod was like an antibiotic booster shot, it was difficult to say.
Crixus only laughed. “If you persist in questioning my stamina, Doctor, I’ll be forced to give you a demonstration.”
Liam glanced in his rearview mirror as we pulled into a parking spot. “You keep talking like that, Crickets, and the only thing you’ll be demonstrating is how well you can run your mouth while I’m strangling you with your own intestines.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone’s making big threats to compensate for a little gun, Liam Thingamafucker.”
“Did you tell him?” Liam accused, turning to me.
“No!” I insisted. “Of course not. He probably read it from my mind.”
A brief smile splashed across Liam’s face. “That mean you been thinking about me?”
Crixus managed to wipe it off as quickly as it had arrived. “Too bad I wasn’t around Vegas in those days. Your mom would have remembered my name.”
Liam’s gun was out before I could blink and pointed toward an empty backseat.
We both jumped when Crixus’s face appeared in the driver’s side window. “Face it,” he said through the glass. “You’re good. I’m better.”
The window exploded into thousands of shards, the bullet sailing off toward the yellowing lawns housing those who had already met their end. Crixus leaned against a tree yards away, grinning.
“Liam! This is a public place. Put that thing away.”
He tucked the weapon back in his coat pocket, eyeing Crixus through the windshield.
I reached down by the floorboard and picked up the yam gun along with the grocery sack of extra ammunition we had grabbed on the way to the cemetery.
“Glad to see you guys could make it,” Crixus said as we approached.
“Shut your mouth and be useful.” I heaved the five-pound sack of potatoes at him.
Unlucky: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Page 8
