Love Croakies Sam Cheever (red queen ebook txt) 📖

I landed on my hip, pain radiating up my body and into my jaw. Or maybe it was the other way around since my jaw felt crooked on my face. “Hehya! Daltpt hurbpt!”

I clasped my estranged jaw and felt my eyes go wide. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. “Dyoupt pbrokt bmy djaw!”

The forty-something man reached the sobbing elderly woman and wrapped her into his arms, cooing softly as she tried to extricate herself from his determined clutches. “My love,” he said, “Your eyes are pools of liquid…urp!”

The woman kneed him in the family vault, and he turned green as she smacked him on the head with her purse. “Hands off, Romeo. I ain’t your Juliet. Now off with ya, son.” She stuck a gnarled hand into her oversized purse and pulled out a gun. “Or I’ll finish the job I started with my knee in a more permanent way.”

Keening like a newborn, the unfortunate lothario shuffled away, one hand up to hold off her hostile response, and his body doubled protectively around his injured stick and pebbles.

A shrill scream rent the air. I turned to find Sebille’s abandoned charge kicking and shrieking her outrage from her spot on the biker chick’s broad shoulder.

Sebille buzzed down and popped back to full size. “You just going to stand here and watch that happen?” she demanded.

My hands clenched into fists. “Ibpt tabpts dnervbe!” Agony speared my face from trying to speak and I groaned, clutching my jaw.

She rolled her eyes. “You sound like an idiot.” She touched my jaw and heat flared through the fractured bone and bruised tissue. Painful heat. Pits of Hades-type heat. I’d have screamed from the feeling of being boiled alive, but my entire face was locked into Sebille’s healing magic. I couldn’t so much as blink.

A few frantic beats of my heart later, the sprite lowered her hand and the heat sifted away, leaving me pain-free and able to talk again. “You’re lucky I need to deal with this mess, or you and I would be having a discussion.”

Her iridescent green eyes mock-widened. “Oooo! Not a discussion.” She clutched herself, fake shaking. “Not that!”

“Shut it!” I growled, stomping after the still-shrieking woman. “If you hadn’t flown off like a scared little girl, that poor woman wouldn’t be in the clutches of a maniac right now.”

Sebille caught up with me. “What can I say? I panicked. I don’t people well.”

“You don’t people at all,” I corrected. “But Grym asked for our help for…whatever this is. So try to be more helpful next time.”

“Whatever.” The sprite flashed forward and smacked the biker chick on top of the head. Green light spurted from her palm as her hand connected to the woman’s dark, closely-shorn skull. The oversized woman jerked to a stop and slowly folded toward the ground─sleeping like a giant tattooed baby.

Apparently, I just needed to point Sebille at the right kind of problem, and she was happy to step in. Violence seemed to be the key ingredient necessary for her “help”.

I stuck that one in the memory banks and grabbed the biker chick’s almost-prisoner, easing her to her feet. “Are you all right?” I asked the wet-faced woman. She sniffled noisily, dragging a hand underneath her glossy nose. “I think so.”

I grimaced at the slime on her hand. “Uh, okay. You should get out of here then.”

But she didn’t immediately leave. She glanced at the fallen biker chick. “What happened to her?”

“She fainted,” Sebille offered, shrugging for effect.

“Oh.” The woman frowned. She didn’t look convinced.

Behind me, the mall doors opened again and a chorus of screams filled the parking lot until they were sliced off by the closing doors. “We need to get in there,” I told Sebille.

She nodded and fell in beside me as I hurried toward the mall.

“Wait!” the young woman behind us called out. “We can’t just leave her here.”

Since that was exactly what we were going to do, I lifted a hand and waved her off, calling over my shoulder. “Go home. We’ll send her some help as soon as we can.”

“But…”

Her worried protestations faded to the background as I caught a glimpse of the chaos inside the mall.

Actually, chaos was too moderate a word for it.

Sebille and I shared a look as our determination wavered. Did we really want to insert ourselves into that?

With a sigh, I grabbed the door handle. “This is going to be okay,” I told my assistant, not even convincing myself.

“Yeah? Then why is returning to the Jurassic era starting to look like a better option?” Sebille asked. “I could definitely use me some T-Rex about now.”

I sighed. She wasn’t wrong.

9

Get Your Hand off my Boob, Lady!

I’d never seen the mall in such an uproar before. And I’d been there for the big Black Friday electronics sale. Two times. Once, they’d had fifty-inch TVs on sale for two hundred dollars. That had been a zoo.

But this…

This…

A slender form flew through the air and smacked into me, knocking me into Sebille and sending all three of us to the ground. The woman on top of us groaned and tried to shove herself free of the tangle.

A strangled squeak told me she’d shoved against something belonging to my assistant that wasn’t public touch approved.

“Get your hand off my boob, lady!” Sebille shrieked.

I’d never heard the sprite sound quite so outraged.

The woman gave a little yelp and yanked her hand back, rubbing it against her jeans as if trying to wipe off the boob cooties.

The three of us took a moment to disentangle ourselves from the messy pile. It wasn’t easy to do without inadvertently molesting each other.

Finally, we stood fairly upright. In my case, even my hair was upright. I reached up to shove the messy strands relatively flat. “What happened? Why were you flying through the air?”

The woman harumphed, crossing slender arms over an abundant chest. “It wasn’t my fault.”

I dug deep for patience. Sebille, who wouldn’t know patience if it gave her boob cooties…heh…rolled