Love Croakies Sam Cheever (red queen ebook txt) 📖

into patent leather tap shoes before I got them contained. I had no idea what they’d been trying to do with that particular form. They generally tried to entice the wearer into slipping them on by selecting a form with specific appeal to the target. I really had no hidden desire to tap dance. Though, I had enjoyed watching old Shirley Temple movies with Grandma Neely. Thinking of her wiped the smile caused by the memory right off my face. I’d recently learned that Grandma Neely hadn’t really been my grandma. She’d been a nanny, hired by my mother to keep me safe while Narina ran all over the universe doing goddess knew what.

Narina’s activities might have been important. I didn’t have any way of knowing because she’d shoved me out of her life, leaving me with a troll for a nanny and effectively depriving me of my magic in the process.

Bitter? Not me.

I shoved the thoughts away for another time when the world wasn’t in danger of ending at the hands of a bunch of cranky cherubs armed with killer serum.

It seemed a reasonable excuse for putting off thinking about my dysfunctional family.

The magic mirror had partially rebuilt itself, which told me the attack hadn’t completely neutered it either. The myriad pieces of glass, like a fragile, glistening jigsaw puzzle, were mostly reassembled. A few pieces still lay at its base, glowing softly as if being reenergized for the trip to the mirror’s face. And the cracks between the pieces still showed.

I figured that, given time, the mirror would completely rebuild itself. As would all the artifacts locked in the vault.

The coin purse that created golden coins and spurred killer greed in its owners was unchanged from the attack. One of the cleaners had already shoved it into a magic quelling pouch and put it on the shelf.

By the time I finished, it was clear to me that everything on my list was accounted for—except for the serum.

I climbed wearily to my feet an hour later. All of the items had been contained and returned to their assigned spots. I sent an extra wave of my Keeper magics over the shelves, giving them an additional layer of resistance from outside interference.

Then I closed and locked the vault, adding a ward to the one Sebille had created that would require both of us together to open it.

It was all I could do until I spoke to Madeline Quilleran about adding further protections. I couldn’t allow the vault to be breached again. It was bad enough that the love serum had been taken. But if any of the other deadly artifacts had been taken with it, we’d be looking at an array of possible disasters that could have risen to biblical proportions.

Stretching my back and legs, I headed wearily toward the communicating mirror at the front of the library. If I was lucky, I could catch Bandy Joe in his other-dimensional Croakies before he left for the day.

I wasn’t lucky. He didn’t answer my call.

As I disconnected and threw the cloaking shroud back over the mirror, the connecting door opened, and Sebille stuck her head through. Her fire-engine-red braids snapped around her narrow face with the abrupt movement. “We have a problem.”

I bit back a sigh. “Just one?”

“Come on. Grym’s already on the way.”

“On the way where?” I asked, grabbing a sweater off the back of the desk chair as I hurried toward the door.

“I’ll explain it while you drive.”

The sprite did a poor job of explaining anything during the short drive to the local mall. Her cell and mine kept ringing with frantic calls that were short on real information and long on shrieks and calls for the goddess.

By the time we screeched into the parking lot and squealed to a messy stop in the nearest spot we could find, people were running shrieking from the glass doors along the front of the building. Some of the runners appeared terrified, and some had decidedly predatory expressions on their faces.

“What in the name of the goddesses favorite bowl cleaner is going on?” I asked, my eyes widening as a terrified elderly woman threw herself into my arms, sobbing.

“Please, help me!”

Distinctly uncomfortable with the unexpected full-body contact with a complete stranger, I lamely patted her back, meeting Sebille’s startled gaze over the woman’s shoulder.

Sebille shook her head, as flummoxed as I was.

“Help!” screamed a twenty-something woman with wild eyes and spittle dotting her chin. She threw herself toward Sebille, only to meet empty air as Sebille neatly sidestepped her. The woman barely blinked before turning and flinging herself at the sprite again.

She got a face full of magic dust and blinding pale green light as Sebille popped into sprite form and shot skyward.

Blinking in confusion…and probably from the sprite dust in her eyes…the young woman turned to me. “What just happened?”

I was still ineffectually patting the elderly woman. I shrugged, my teeth grinding together. “Some people are just really bad with human interaction.” My tone clearly stated my disgust for the cowardly sprite hovering somewhere high over our heads.

Her response was to sprinkle me with magic dust.

I sneezed.

Heavy footsteps pounded toward me, and I looked up just in time to see a wild-eyed man, probably in his mid-forties if I had to guess, barreling toward the woman in my arms.

A burly biker chick lumbered toward Sebille’s abandoned charge, a hungry glint in her narrowed eye. “There you are, my pretty. Now stop flirting with that bunion on a frog’s butt and come with me. We’re meant to be together.”

“Hey!” I objected. “I’m no bunion. Besides, frogs don’t have butt bunions. Toads do have bumps, which are generally mistaken for warts, but they’re not really war…”

A massive, tattooed hand snapped out and punched me in the face. Agony razored through me and my vision went wonky. I stumbled sideways. The sobbing woman who’d been clutching me as if I were a lifeboat on storm-tossed seas quickly released me rather than follow me to