A Witch's Handbook of Kisses and Curses (3 page)

I let loose a bloodcurdling scream and ran stumbling out of the kitchen, through a screen door, and into the moonless purple light of early evening. With my eyes trained behind me to make sure it, whatever it was, didn’t follow me, I slammed into a solid, warm object. The force of my momentum had me wrapping my arms and legs around it as I struggled away from the fanged menace.

“Oof!” the object huffed.

The object was a person. To be specific, the shirtless, sweaty person who’d been standing in my back garden earlier. Dropping a couple of yard tools with a
clank,
he caught my weight with his hands, stumbling under the impact of struggling, panicked woman. Certainly as surprised to find me in his arms as I was to be there.

Slashing dark eyebrows shot skyward. The full lips parted to offer, “Hello?”

Oh, saints and angels, I was doomed. He was even better-looking up close. Tawny, whiskey-colored eyes. A classic straight nose with a clear break on the bridge. Wide, generous lips currently curved into a naughty, tilted line as he stared up at me.

Completely. Doomed.

Focus,
I told myself.
There’s a mutant rodent in your cupboard, waiting to devour your very soul, then terrorize the townsfolk
.

“In my kitchen!” I shouted in his face.

“What?” The man seemed puzzled, and not just by
the fact that I seemed to be wrapped around him like some sort of cracked-up spider monkey.

“In. My. KITCHEN!” I yelled, scrabbling to keep my grip on his shoulders while leaning back far enough to make eye contact. Despite my all-out terror, I couldn’t help but notice the smooth, warm skin or the tingles traveling down my arms, straight to my heart. He smelled . . . wild. Of leather and hay and deep, green pockets of forest. As my weight shifted backward, his large, warm hands slid around my bottom, cupping my cheeks to keep me balanced against him. “Th-there’s a creature!” I cried. “In my kitchen! Some demon rat sent from hell! It tried to bite my face off!”

The fact that his hand was ever so subtly squeezing my unclothed ass managed to subdue my mind-numbing terror and replace it with indignant irritation. I didn’t know this man. I certainly hadn’t invited him to grope me, spider-monkey climbing or no. And I had a perfectly lovely boyfriend waiting for me at home, who would not appreciate some workman’s callused hands on my ass.

“You can move your hand now,” I told him, trying to dismount gracefully, but his hands remained cupped under my left cheek.

“Hey, you tackled me!” he protested in a smoky, deeply accented tenor.

I narrowed my eyes. “Move your hand, or I’ll mail it back to you by a very slow post.”

“Fine.” He sighed, gently lowering me to my feet. “Let’s get a look at this creature in your kitchen.”

Struggling to keep my towel in place, I led him into
my kitchen and tentatively pointed toward the home of the Rodent of Unusual Size. I could hear the beast hissing and growling inside, batting at the closed door with its claws. I was surprised it hadn’t managed to eat its way through yet. But somehow my would-be rescuer seemed far more interested in looking around, noting the pile of luggage by the door.

“Haven’t had much time to unpack yet, huh?” he asked. I glared at him. He shrugged. “Fine, fine, critter crisis. I’m on it.”

He opened the cupboard door, let out a horrified gasp, and slammed it shut. He grabbed a grimy old spatula I’d left on the counter during my rummaging and slid it through the cupboard handles, trapping the monster inside. He turned on me, his face grave while his amber eyes twinkled. “You’re right. I’m going to have to call in the big guns.”

He disappeared out the door on quick, quiet feet. I stared after him, wondering if I’d just invited help from a complete lunatic, when the early-evening breeze filtering in through the back door reminded me that I was standing there in just a towel. I scrambled over to my suitcase and threw on a loose peasant skirt and a blue tank top. I wondered what he meant by “big guns.” Was he calling the police? The National Guard? MI5?

I was slipping on a pair of knickers under my skirt just as my bare-chested hero came bounding back into the kitchen with a large, lidded pot and a spoon.

“Are you going to cook it?” I gasped, ignoring the
bald-faced grin he gave my lower quadrants as the floaty blue skirt fell back into place.

“Well, my uncle Ray favors a good roast possum. He says it tastes like chicken,” he drawled, holding the lid over his thick forearm like a shield as he tapped the spatula out of place. “Personally, I have to wonder if he’s eaten chicken that tastes like ass, but that’s neither here nor there.”

I darted away as he opened the cupboard door. A feral growl echoed through the empty house as he maneuvered the pot over the front of the cupboard. He used the wooden spoon to reach over the grumpy animal and nudge the possum into the pot. Slapping the lid over it, he turned and gave me a proud grin.

“Thank you.” I sighed. “Really, I don’t know what I would have done—”

The giant rat began thrashing around inside the pot and making the lid dance.

“I want that thing tested for steroids!” I yelped.

“It’s just a baby,” he said, placing one of his ham-sized hands on the lid. “These things burrow in pretty much wherever they want to, doors and walls be damned.”

“This is a baby?” I peered down at the dancing pot. “How big do the mothers get?”

He shrugged. “Better question: where is his mama?”

“Oh,” I groaned as he opened the back door, crossed the yard, and gently shook the possum out of the pot and into the tall grass near the trees. I called after him, “Why did you have to say that? I have to sleep here!”

Climbing my back steps, he looked far more relaxed than he should have been after evicting a vicious furred fiend from my kitchen. Shirtless. “I have to sleep here, too. And if it makes you feel better, there’s a good chance that the mama could be sleepin’ under my side of the house,” he told me. “I’m Jed, by the way.”

I giggled, a hysterical edge glinting under the laughter, as he extended his hand toward me. “You’re kidding.”

He arched a sleek sandy eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”

I cleared my throat, barely concealing a giggle. “No, I’m sorry. I’ve never met a Jed before.”

He chuckled. “I’d imagine not, with that accent and all.”

Now it was my turn to raise the bitch-brow, a super-extension of the eyebrow combined with one’s best frosty expression. He of the sultry backwoods drawl was mocking my accent? That was disappointing. Since landing in New York, I’d worked hard to control whatever lilt I’d picked up in the fifteen years I’d lived with Nana Fee. It wouldn’t do for the locals to know where I was from.

“Your accent,” he said, his forehead creasing. “Boston, right? ‘Pahk the cah in the yahd’?”

I blushed a little and regretted the bitch-brow. I’d forgotten how muddled my manner of speaking was, compared with my new neighbor’s Southern twang. My accent was vaguely Boston, vaguely Irish. Nana Fee had tried to correct my lack of Rs in general and attempted to teach me Gaelic, but the most I picked up were some of the more interesting expressions my aunts and uncles
used. Mostly the dirty ones. So I spoke in a bizarre mishmash of dialects and colloquialisms, which led to awkward conversations over what to call chips, elevators, and bathrooms.

“Oh, right,” I said, laughing lightly. “Boston—born and raised.”

Technically, it wasn’t a lie.

Jed looked at me expectantly. I looked down to make sure I hadn’t forgotten some important article of clothing. “If you don’t give me your name, I’m just gonna make one up,” he said, leaning against the counter. “And fair warnin’, you look like a Judith.”

“I do not!” I exclaimed.

“Half-dressed girls who climb me like a tree are usually named Judith,” he told me solemnly.

“This happens to you often?” I deadpanned.

He shrugged. “You’d be surprised.”

“It’s Nola,” I told him. “Nola Leary.”

“Jed Trudeau,” he said, shaking my outstretched hand. “If you don’t mind me sayin’, you look beat. Must’ve been a long flight.”

“It was,” I said, nodding. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go back to bed.”

There was a spark of mischief in his eyes, but I think he picked up on the fact that I was in no mood for saucy talk. His full lips twitched, but he clamped them together. He held up one large, work-roughened hand. “Hold on.”

He disappeared out the back door, and I could hear
his boot steps on the other side of my kitchen wall. He returned a few moments later, having donned a light cotton work shirt, still unbuttoned. He placed a large, cold, foil-wrapped package in my hands. “Chicken and rice casserole. One of the ladies down at the Baptist church made it for me. Well, several of the church ladies made casseroles for me, so I have more than I can eat. Just pop a plateful in the microwave for three minutes.”

I stared at the dish for a long while before he took it out of my hands and placed it in my icebox. “Do local church ladies often cater your meals?”

“I don’t go to Sunday services, so they’re very concerned about my soul. I can’t cook to save my life. They’re afraid I’m just wasting away to nothing,” he said, shaking his head in shame, but there was that glint of trouble in his eyes again. He gave me a long, speculative look. “Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“Thanks,” I said as he moved toward the door. I locked it behind him, then turned and sagged against the dusty sheers covering the window in the door. “If there are any greater powers up there—stop laughing.”

I massaged my temples and set about making my tea. Jed seemed nice, if unfortunately named. And it was very kind of him to give a complete stranger a meal when he knew she had nothing but angry forest creatures in her cupboards. But I couldn’t afford this sort of distraction. I’d come to the Hollow for a purpose, not
for friendships and flirtations with smoldering, half-dressed neighbors.

Just as I managed to locate a chipped mug in the spice drawer, a loud, angry screech sounded from somewhere to the left of my stove. I turned and fumbled with the locked kitchen door, yelling, “Jed!”

Love affairs between the human and the nonhuman rarely end well for the human.

—Love Spells: A Witch’s Guide to Maintaining Healthy Relationships

B
y the time Jed had reunited the mama possum and her young, I determined I was far too awake to go to bed. I went through the house making lists of everything I would need to survive here, things such as food, sheets, towels, and mousetraps. Big ones.

I needed to go shopping, but I didn’t have a car, and I thought it would be pushing already-fragile “good neighbor” impressions by asking to borrow Jed’s. And now that I was able to recall more clearly moments from Dwayne-Lee’s drive to the house, I wasn’t about to take the cab service. Iris Scanlon proved that my love for her was not in vain. All it took was one phone call for her to send “more discreet transport” right to my doorstep.

Miranda Puckett was a slender thing, with long dark hair and keen green eyes. What she lacked in size she made up for with the obscenely large black SUV she maneuvered from my driveway to the gravel road with considerably
fewer bumps than Dwayne-Lee. Aside from knowing where the all-night grocers were, Miranda was also a veritable font of information about the locals. She’d grown up in the Hollow and was happy to share what she knew of local history and gossip.

For instance, Miranda’s boss was not a freelance miracle worker but ran a concierge service for vampires called Beeline. The special arrangements Iris had been making for me were on behalf of my landlord, a vampire named—of all things—Dick Cheney. Miranda admitted to having a “soft spot” for Dick since he’d served as her knight in shining armor months earlier when she’d had car trouble.

“He comes off like this sketchy con artist, but underneath it all, he’s a marshmallow,” she told me, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “Totally devoted to his wife, which is a good thing. Otherwise, Collin would really frown on all those book club meetings.”

“Book club?” I asked, my brow furrowed. But Miranda had pulled into the car park of the local twenty-four-hour Walmart Supercenter, so I couldn’t question why a vampire and a chauffeur would join the same book club. Or who the bloody hell Collin was.

The Hollow, Miranda informed me as we shopped, had become quite the vampire-friendly place since the vampires had emerged from the shadows in 1999. That was the year a Milwaukee-based vampire named Arnie Frink demanded that his employers change his work hours to lessen his chances of bursting into flames. But seeing as they were as blind as the rest of the world when
it came to the existence of vampires, the human resources department insisted that Arnie keep bankers’ hours. Arnie’s counterproposal was a massive lawsuit, claiming that he suffered from porphyria, a painful allergy to sunlight, and the company was not accommodating him. When the allergy discrimination argument failed to impress a judge, Arnie had a hissy in open court and declared that he was a vampire, a medical condition that rendered him unable to work during the day, thereby making him subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.