Auntie sighed, shook her head, and gave Jasmine a dismissive hand gesture. "Okay, okay..."
The two women hugged each other goodbye, and Auntie watched Jasmine leave from her kitchen window, arms crossed over her chest. I placed my feet on the floor, watching Auntie watching Jasmine. She had her back to me, leaning on one hip, and she wore one of her long skirts and a snug t-shirt. And she was shoeless, which had puzzled me ever since we'd arrived.
Then she whirled around and did something no one had done to me in 1,000 years.
"Who are you, and why are you hanging around my niece?"
Chapter Two
Auntie
I have seen some fucked up shit in my life. When you're a conjure-woman in a town of shifters, demons, psychics, telekinetics, and the like, life is all about the weird. The unexplained. The fucked up.
But this asshole here.
This asshole currently gaping at me like a fish on a hook? This is about the most fucked-up thing I've come across in a long, long time.
"You heard me," I tell him, since the cat seemed to have got his tongue. "Who are you, and what are you doing hanging around my niece?"
"You can see me?" he asks, looking dumbfounded. He's a great big, strapping dude, blond and beefy, with features at once brutish and aristocratic. He's about a foot taller than me, and he looks exactly like some kind of conquering Viking chieftain, ready to pillage and plunder as part of an invading horde. In fact, he looks like Thor in a well-tailored suit.
"Um, yeah," I tell him. "How the fuck do you think I'm talking to you?"
The asshole looks like he's about to cry.
"Are you some kind of demon? A ghost? What?"
His mouth flaps again soundlessly. "You can see me?" he repeats. He blinks rapidly, which seems to be his default when confronted with a puzzling dilemma.
"Yes." I stalk to him and poke him in the chest. "And I really do not appreciate invisible motherfuckers haunting my niece and having the unmitigated gall to saunter in to my house and prop their stinky feet up on my goddamn coffee table."
Angry as I am, I note that his chest is rather firm. Like a prime side of beef. This motherfucker wears a suit, tie, and top hat and looks like a daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln from a history text. That is, if Abraham Lincoln had been a strapping, blond bastard with an aquiline nose and lips that look like they'd be good at cunnilingus. This is a good-looking bastard of a ghostly stalker. And bizarrely, I want to grope his muscles, testing their firmness under my fingertips. He even smells good, which is not my experience with ghosts, who mostly smell like brimstone, AKA sulfur. This guy smells like pine and musk...and man. Like sexy, alluring, panty-melting man...
"I'm not haunting your niece," he tells me, snapping me out of my desire to sniff him. He has the nerve to look offended that I'd suggest such a thing.
Something about this asshole seems familiar. Something about his eyes, but I can't put my finger on it. I squint, trying to place how I might know him.
"Really? What are you doing here? Why are you lounging around my apartment like you own the place? Who are you?"
The suit-wearing, pervy asshole now looks sheepish, suddenly finding his wingtip shoes deeply interesting, his blond eyebrows knit together. It can only mean I got it right.
"I'm here to help her," he tells me, but I don't believe him, and tell him so.
"If you're here to help her, why are you being so sneaky about it?" I demand, hands on hips.
The handsome stalker speaks again, "I'm not being sneaky. She can't see me!"
I eye him carefully. It's easy to look at him; the man is the dictionary definition of "eye candy." Seriously, a pervy ghost has no earthly right to look like a marauding Viking movie star. It is curiously difficult to be mad at someone who looks and smells as good as this guy, whose bones I want to jump and whose blond head I want between my legs. What is he saying again?
Since I've lost my train of thought, I fall back on scowling at him, arms under my breasts in a way I hope is forbidding, censure in my voice, when I say, "Explain."
His eyes drop to the V of my t-shirt, causing me to pull up short, because, hello! Inappropriate!
I give him an affronted glance, even though visions of cunnilingus have danced in my head.
He sighs, removes his top hat, places it on my coffee table, and settles in with the air of a man about to tell a very long story.
He tells me he was cursed by a Danish witch during the Viking Age, glossing over the reasons for the curse with a vague "she had a vendetta against my family" and explaining he is cursed to be something between a djinn, a matchmaker, and a familiar.
I now know why he looks so familiar. I look into his eyes, which are not blue or green as I expect, but a pale, caramelized brown. Kind of like...
"Fat Joey? You're Fat Joey, aren't you?"
He freezes in the middle of his tale of woe. Startled, he only blinks at me.
"Yes," he says. "How did you know that?" He sits up straight on my couch and squares his shoulders. He looks a little uncomfortable.
"Never mind that," I say, annoyed. I feel the need to keep some things close to the vest. "Have you been watching my niece getting undressed?"
He has the nerve to blush to the tips of his ears. Pervy bastard.
"No!" he barks in shock, looking even more uncomfortable. "At least, not on purpose." He looks away.
My mind grapples with how this all came about, trying to put the pieces together.
"How long have you been with Jasmine?" I ask, trying to remember what Jasmine has told me about her cat.
"I just...showed up on her back porch one day," he says, shrugging. "I don't get assignments, per se," he explains. "I just show up in different places."
I consider this revelation for a moment, thinking about how much it would suck to live like that. I feel a twinge of sadness. I feel sorry for Fat Joey. Suddenly, it occurs to me that this cannot be his real name.
"What's your real name?" I ask.
He blinks again. "You're the first person to ask me what my human name is in...a thousand years." His expression is thoughtful.
I sit on the chair opposite him, thinking he looks horribly uncomfortable on the antique sofa my mother gave me, which is obviously not made for a giant Viking-era marauder like Fat Joey.
"Gunnar," he tells me, his name guttural, and frankly, sexy as fuck rolling off his tongue in a gruff, sensual grunt. I lick the corner of my mouth, thinking of what else I might like to lick on this man. His amber eyes follow the motion with interest. His body coils with tension, and he looks like he's about to hop off the couch and tackle me. I imagine him in his feline body, chasing his prey with his eyes, just before pouncing...
His eyes flicker with lust, and his lips set into a firm line. He breathes heavily and his well-shod foot taps impatiently while his rather large fists clench and unclench. This interaction is going off the rails, I think, and I need to stay on task to make sure this thousand-year-old djinn or whatever is not about molesting my niece.
I mean, what if he's just a horny bastard who has a woman in every time period? But didn't he just say no one has asked his name in a thousand years?
"Why doesn't anyone ask your human name?" I ask, both excited and dreading his answer. My heart beats double time, and for some weird reason, I'm holding my breath.
I'm a conjure-woman. I have second sight. I see things other people cannot see, sense things others cannot perceive. I knew Jasmine was leaving her asshole abusive boyfriend before it happened. I knew she'd be moving to Perdition. I often go shoeless to help me detect the vibrations of things about to happen. I know the good townsfolk of Perdition think I'm a nutcase, but I try to honor my gift. And right now, my gift is telling me something I categorically reject: Gunnar is at least partially here for me. My suspicion is confirmed with his next words.
"No one else has been able to see me...before you," he says, giving me a pointed look. A hopeful look. A meaningful look. I knew he'd say that
.
I ignore this revelation because being a spinster is better than becoming involved with a djinn, no matter how hot he is. A djinn under a curse lasting a thousand years, no less; the witch who originally cursed him no doubt long dead, her curse strong enough to live on. There was no way any of my hobby magic could touch this particular curse. I am a conjure-woman, a catch-all category for a combination of second-sight, supplemented with book learning and on-the-job training on white magic. I taught myself to read tea leaves, can pull together a serviceable gris-gris, and have a way of "knowing" shit and turning the knowing into actionable information.
Which is how I know my niece, Jasmine, is meant to be with AJ Cotter. I have been suggesting this to Jasmine for some time now. Jasmine is understandably gun-shy. She thinks I am merely engaged in idle match-making. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I decide Grunting Gunnar and I have a basis for mutual collaboration, and thus, this should be the basis of our interactions. He looks at me with open, blatant sexual interest, and licks his lips as what I imagine is a parade of filthy thoughts and images strut through his mind. He has the unmistakable look of a man mentally undressing a woman. I shift uncomfortably in my seat.
"Are you here for Jasmine and AJ?" I ask. He blinks and snaps out of the reel of porn images no doubt flitting across his brain. I uncross my legs, then cross them the other way. He is distracted by the movement of my legs, his tongue once again grazing his lips. I'm wearing one of my long skirts, an ankle-grazer that is dotted with tiny mirrors and all sorts of embroidery. It is not a sexy skirt, but he looks at me like I'm flashing my muff at him. He graces me with a knowing smirk. And to my horror, the attraction simmering between us causes my underwear to literally flood with moisture, and my body to figuratively go up in flames.
When he speaks again, his voice is a husky growl.
"Not just Jasmine and AJ..." he begins, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees and gazing at me with rapt attention with his uncanny pale brown eyes. He's so big, when he leans forward, he is practically sitting in my lap.
Alarmed, I swiftly get to my feet, noting a persistent hum of vibration travelling up my legs. It is the vibration of things to come, more noticeable since my feet are bare. For once, I have no interest in honoring my gift, because this man is not the man for me. He is a djinn or ghost or whatever. He is the epitome of here today, gone tomorrow. In short: not a keeper.
I pace and launch into a monologue.
"Jasmine is going through a hard time right now—" I say, avoiding eye contact with Gunnar.
"I know, I was with her in Ohio," he says. "It wasn't easy to get her through that. She was afraid to leave." His voice is soft, compassionate. I decide to keep on not looking at him. I do not want to see the play of emotions I suspect are written across his face. I am convinced he is watching me as I pace.
"Right," I say, getting all explainy. "I have a bit of the second sight."
"That's probably why you can see me," he offers.
"Right," I say again. The concession seems reasonable. "That makes a lot of sense."
It occurs to me that my second sight explains a lot. The attraction I feel for the big, weird Viking simply has to do with the fact that I can see him. Similarly, his panting over me could be explained by the fact that I can see him. Pleased to have figured out the mystery of my blazing attraction to this man, I continue my mental train of thought.
We are colleagues, I reason, with the mutual goal of getting my niece together with her fated mate. We are brainstorming, I tell myself, which makes this little chat perfectly reasonable, and not like a chat between two people who might otherwise act on a mutual attraction. Simple.
"I knew she would leave Jesse," I go on out loud. I pace faster, a spring in my step, gesticulating excitedly as I walk because this man is now neatly wedged into an appropriate, non-sexual category in my life. "I knew she would wind up here. I'm not a matchmaker with a thousand years of experience, that's true, but I think things are moving in the right direction."
This is my wind up to clarifying to Gunnar/Fat Joey that our relationship is that of co-workers.
"They went a long time living ten yards away from one another, without actually meeting," the Viking says. His English is perfect, with enough of a guttural accent to excite my lady business. The kind of accent I can imagine saying filthy things to me, his lips brushing the shell of my ear as one of his giant hands holds my throat and he pounds into me from behind.
I pause in my pacing, then remind myself that we are colleagues. No inappropriate sex thoughts, Auntie.
"I know," I sigh, talking with my hands again. "And it's been a week since they met, but nothing else has happened."
"That was me, by the way." His voice is thick and deep, and startled, I forget that I'm not looking at him and whip around to address him...
I turn to face him and find a broad chest in my face. I look up, up, up to find penetrating amber eyes peering down at me.
"Um, excuse me," I say, flustered. This is not going according to plan. His paw-like hands dart out to steady me, and I look away, then step away, then find myself tits over teakettle, my feet disappearing from below me, as I fall backward on the sofa before bouncing and rolling onto the floor. He's right there, helping me up, although I'm pretty sure actually touching this man is not the best idea.
His hands are damn strong, and I'd be happy to lean into his strength to test just how firm his whole body is, but I refrain. I step away from him, smoothing my hands down my skirt.
"As I was saying," he says, "I moved things along by making Jasmine break an egg." When I step away from him, he follows. I am not even sure he's aware of it.
"Break an egg?" I ask, stupidly. I look around myself furtively, realizing I'm about to back myself into a wall.
"Late in the evening. Baking cookies to bring to you, she said. She talks to herself a lot, you know." His amber eyes unsettle me. He looks at me like there is no one he'd rather be looking at, no one else in the world to look at, and the intensity scares me. Delicious man smell fills my nostrils. My mouth falls open in alarm, and I squirm under his perusal.
"I—I don't understand what the cookies have to do with anything?" I say, the statement coming out as a question. Like I am a middle-school girl who has become aware that her crush knows she is alive.
"Well, she had to borrow an egg, so..." His words fan over my face as he says them. His breath smells good, just like the rest of him. He does not respect my boundaries, and my back is now against the wall. He cages me in his arms, and his face comes closer until his eyes seem to fill my field of vision. "A few days later, she made him cookies."
He executes a slow smile. His teeth are whiter and straighter than I imagine a set of 9th Century chompers would be. I toy with, then discard, the idea of asking him about his uncannily bright teeth. Best not to encourage the dude, I think, who still has the look of a wolf eyeing a rib-eye.
He is close enough for our breaths to mingle. My eyes dart anxiously between his, like a cat tracking a laser pointer. His body is large, male, and virile. I can almost feel the rasp of his stubble against my skin.
Alarms crowd my brain. Danger! Danger! and Here today, gone tomorrow, in flashing hot pink neon. He is old, but not permanent, and I am not hard up for a man, no matter how hot he is. I do a neat duck and evade, and come up outside the circle of his arms. He gives me a hard look over his shoulder and says something grunt-like that I imagine is an Old Norse curse.
"That's good, right?" I say, circling back to our conversation. "In my experience, once the mating spark has been lit, it cannot be extinguished. I'll just...get ready for opportunities to assist the process," I say with a shrug. I am back to not looking at Gunnar.
"I don't move to my next assignment until this one is completed," Gunnar says. He's underscoring the urgency of resolving Jasmine and AJ's match. The longer the matchmaking takes, the longer he waits for the next assignment, the longer it takes to break
the curse—according to Gunnar. I have no issue with moving the match along, if only from the perspective of one supernatural weirdo helping out another. I nod in acknowledgement.
"Jasmine has terrible insomnia," I say. "She will come to town this Saturday. If AJ comes as well, I can arrange to give her a sedative around the same time he comes to town. Perhaps, she'll need a ride home?" I speculate.
Now I do look at Gunnar, who frowns contemplatively from a few feet away, his thin, cruel lips set in now-familiar line. His eyes have been tracking me, I suspect, but I ignore this uncomfortable certainty in favor of helping Gunnar along to his next assignment. The attraction between us, the conversation Gunnar wants to have about that attraction, are easy to ignore in the moment. I return his thoughtful expression.
"I can arrange that," he says, nodding back at me.
I let out a shuddering sigh, relieved. I even smile a little, which he returns with a blinding movie star grin that wants to draw in my reluctant heart. After a thousand years, he is, no doubt, anxious to move along himself.
"Good!" I say nervously, a tad brightly for the occasion. Excellent, I think.
Gunnar looks at me and nods again.
"I will return," he says finally, and in an instant, he is gone, leaving me to stare at the empty space where he had been.
Chapter Three
Gunnar
In all the years I've been cursed to roam the earth as a matchmaker, I do not often cross paths with shifters, nor those with supernatural abilities. As a result, my knowledge of the shifter and human-plus communities and the lore surrounding them is scant.
Why, you may ask? It is simply because, in my experience, unless one of the partners is human, shifters in particular are already open to the concept of fated mates, and thus, require little assistance to make their match. Indeed, shifter younglings are conditioned to accept the premise of a person or persons whom the universe has deemed their other half. Or other 2/3rds or 3/4ths, depending on the mating situation. Shifter youth are brought up to respect the mysterious concoction of pheromones, personality traits, sexual compatibility, etc., that comprise a fated mate situation. The only exception to this rule is the minotaur, who tend to be stubborn bastards resistant to the idea of being so vulnerable as to find themselves in the thrall of a mating frenzy. The stories I could tell about minotaurs...
That Time She Broke Her Viking's Curse Page 2
