Chapter 2

Chapter

Two

R oberta Tisdale wasn't the kind of girl who fainted—per se. Had she felt faint before? Sure. Had she actually fainted? No. Not to date. Not even when Hervé had skittered out of her pantry and scared the daylights out of her. But today?

Seeing the murderous look on Nina's face after she'd burned off one entire side of her hair, after she'd scorched half her glorious locks off, leaving only at best, a half inch of hair sticking up? Today might be that day.

Her stomach turned, rocking as though in a boat on rough seas. She was gonna be in big trouble

But then the logical side of her took over and her mind began to race like a wild mare.

When Nina's hair turned into a fiery ball of orange and red, she remembered Wanda's words about Nina and the devil. If this woman had taken on the devil (which Robbie was sure was a metaphor for someone evil. It had to be, right? The devil wasn't real), she remembered that must mean she was, at the very least, capable of real violence against a perpetrator, and in this case, Robbie was the perp.

Gulp.

As Marty and Wanda raced toward Nina, using a throw blanket to combat the flames, begging her to stand still while she swatted their hands, she screamed, "I'm gonna fuckin' kill this bitch! Fuck whatever her problem is!"

Robbie took a really deep, fearful breath, reaching for Hervé and stuffing him behind her back to protect him. She didn't know why. Hervé scared the absolute shit out of her, but she didn't want him hurt.

Yet, she truly believed this woman would kill her.

She believed.

Tottington skirted the three women, pushing both Hervé and Robbie behind him. Almost as if in slow motion, he grabbed the vase on a nearby table filled with sunflowers and marigolds, yanked the arrangement out and threw the water at Nina's head, dousing the flames.

The room went entirely silent—after the round of surprised gasps, that is.

"Oooo," Robbie stuttered, falling forward to reach for her. "Oh, Mrs. Statleon! Omigod, I'm so sorry!"

But Nina held up a finger in warning, her eyes ablaze, water dripping from her hair and down along her beautiful face. "Do not. Do not come any fucking closer, you GD walking disaster!"

Robbie started to protest, but Tottington decidedly shook his distinguished head in the negative, pressing a single finger to his lips for her to pipe down.

Marty draped the throw blanket over Nina's head and gave it a scruff to dry her off, but when she dropped the blanket, Robbie had to fight another gasp.

Oh, heavenly mother… No, no, no, all that glorious hair, burned to within an inch of her scalp.

Well, not all of it. It was only one side. Just like hers.

They matched!

Then Robbie did what she tried so hard all her life to avoid. She said something stupid.

Holding up a piece of her own singed hair, Robbie sang out, "Twinsies!"

There was a roar like she'd only heard in movies before Nina came at her, both barrels loaded.

However, Marty and Wanda were quicker than the speed of light, heading her off at the pass, knocking her to the ground and wrestling her like a live alligator. Steve Irwin would shed a proud tear.

"Get the fuck off me, you assholes!" Nina howled, but Wanda hiked up her skirt and straddled her like a mechanical bull, holding her down, gripping her slender wrists high above her head while Marty soothed her, lowering to her haunches above Nina's head.

She leaned down into Nina's face and stroked her cheek with the back of her hand, sweetly whispering, "Stop, Nina. It's all fine. You know it's all going to grow back in a day or so anyway. Quit behaving like an uncaged animal. Now ."

Robbie blinked. Grow back in a day? If that wasn't some bullshit, nothing was. Her hair was as long as Nina's, and it had taken two years to grow it this long. No amount of Rogaine would make that happen.

Marty booped her friend's nose. "Nina, I'm telling you, get yourself together. It was an accident. I'm one-hundred percent sure Robbie couldn't help it. So knock it off ."

Robbie coughed and nodded, waving at the lingering smoke in the air. "I…I didn't. I swear?—"

Tottington's frown of discouragement cut off any further protest.

Nina continued to struggle, bucking against Wanda's thighs of steel. "Get the fuck out of my goddamn face, Blondie, or I'm going to rip your intestines straight up outta your throat and cook them for Waffles's dinner!"

Robbie stared in abject fear while Hervé cowered behind her, his bristles quaking against the brick floor.

"She is a savage, mon amie. Beautiful, but ze savage," he muttered in her ear.

Oui. Mon ami was ze savage.

Wanda looked down at Nina as she began to settle and calm. "Do you still want to choose violence? Or can I trust you enough to let you go?"

Nina narrowed her eyes at her friend. "She burned my fucking hair, Wanda. Burned it right the fuck off my head. She has to die."

Wanda smiled at her friend, loosening her grip on her wrists. "She did, but like Marty said, it was an accident and it's going to grow right back. You know that. Stop being so insufferably unreasonable."

"I'm still gonna kill the bitch," Nina said with, if Robbie was hearing correctly, a little less hatred in her tone.

Wanda smiled again, only this time it was indulgent and saccharine sweet. "You stop this nonsense right now or I'm putting you in time-out. You're not going to kill anyone. Now," she let Nina's wrists go and sat back, "do we understand each other? Or do I have to sit in this unladylike position in a skirt, of all things, until we do?"

Nina rolled her beautiful eyes. "Get the fuck off me, Wanda."

Wanda leaned over and dropped a kiss on Nina's forehead. "I'll take that as a yes." She swung her graceful, long leg over her friend's body and took the offer of Marty's hand to help her rise.

Brushing off her slim skirt, Wanda looked in Robbie's direction with warm eyes. "Let's begin again, shall we? I'm Wanda Jefferson, and it looks like you have a problem on your hands, Roberta Tisdale. No pun intended." She winked, sweeping her hand toward the plastic-covered opening, and said, "Why don't you come in and sit a spell while you tell us all about it, yes? I'll have Arch bring us some tea."

Robbie was so caught up in taking in the basement dungeon in Nina's castle, she almost couldn't finish her story about how this had happened.

There were tapestries on the walls in deep, rich colors depicting battles with…vampires? She squinted. Were those vampires fighting wolves? How odd.

Swords hung in crisscross fashion, shiny and heavy-looking. There were several long halls with lights made to look like old torches lining the walls. The wall opposite her had been demolished and an alcove was in the making.

There were suits of armor and even an old Victrola on a stray table, covered in dust. Three desks were stacked on top of one another in the corner, a tarp haphazardly covering them.

It looked like someone was a collector of some very old pieces.

After the women took their places—two of them on an ornate settee and Nina in a wingback chair—they'd all listened to how she'd gotten here.

"So, Twister? The game Twister?" Nina barked from the deep crimson chair, interrupting her thoughts.

Robbie nodded. As terrified as she'd been by the display of their tussle earlier, she'd willingly followed them into the part of the dungeon undergoing construction.

She didn't really have a choice.

"Robbie?" Marty coaxed.

Blowing out a breath, she nodded again. "Yes. Let me explain. I'm living in a…new place, and I decided to invite some of my building mates for wine and weenies in a blanket?—"

Tottington gagged (he hated weenies in a blanket), but quickly covered his mouth in shame, looking down at his feet.

Shrugging, she tucked her hand against her chest. "Anyway, I was just trying to be neighborly. It was sort of a case of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?"

"What the fuck does that mean?" Nina asked, cracking her knuckles.

Robbie looked down at her sneakered feet, the incredible guilt of setting her hair on fire still raw. She shrugged. "It means, I come from…from a different place than they do, and I wanted to get to know these people, even if we didn't grow up the same way. I like them. It doesn't matter to me where they come from, or where anyone comes from, I guess. Anyway, some people in my building recognized me, and I wanted them to see I wasn't like my…"

Man, she hated telling people where she came from. Who she came from.

"What Roberta is saying is, she was raised in a very wealthy family and some people in the building took exception to that. Naturally, the assumption is she's spoiled and pretentious and rude, of which Roberta is none of those things. The purpose of the party was to engage her neighbors and show them she isn't all that different than them. Something about reaching across the divide."

Robbie smiled gratefully at Tottington for yet again being her mouthpiece…until Nina said, "So poor little rich girl, rootin' around in the mud with the fucking peasants?"

Wanda clucked her tongue and pointed a manicured fingernail at her. "Stop being so dang rude, Mistress of the Night. You're rich. You have no room to make judgements." Then she turned to Robbie, her eyes warmer still. "Please continue, honey."

Feeling like an absolute jerk, she decided it was better she didn't go any deeper into her "we all bleed the same color" speech. It felt vapid and cliché. No one believed she truly felt that way, anyway. She'd once had more money than she knew what to do with, but it had never stopped her from trying to prove she was different from her elitist family.

Resigned to the stigma of poor little rich girl, she sat up straight, crossing her feet at her ankles, smoothing her jeans over her thighs. "A couple of my neighbors brought some board games, and I remembered I'd found an old Twister game in the back of the closet of my apartment when I moved in. So I grabbed it. It seemed like fun at the time, but we didn't have the usual spinny thing that comes with it. You know, the card with all the colors and the arrow? But there was this…" She looked to Tottington, who knew the name of it.

"Planchette," Tottington provided. "According to Google, it was a planchette, typically used for a Ouija board."

"Ooo," Marty whispered.

Robbie winced. "Yes. It was in the box with the game. So we drew a circle on a piece of paper, labeling all the colors, and used the planchette to spin."

Marty cocked her head, taking a delicate sip from a cup of tea as her bracelets clacked together. "And then…?"

"I'd had a little bit of wine, but things were going fine. I mean, okay. Mrs. Campisi was a little drunk, and Blonda and Mick the Tic had a small fight, but nothing like they normally do. We were still having fun and amazed at her propensity for acrobatics—in a housecoat, no less. I mean, who knew an eighty-year-old could bend like that?"

"Mrs. Campisi," Tottington filled in. "She's quite elderly and makes the most horrific fish, but she certainly can, as Roberta said, bend ."

Robbie's tendency to ramble when she was nervous had kicked into overdrive. Thank God Tottington was around, he probably knew her better than she knew herself, and he knew she was struggling to put the words together so she didn't sound like a grade-A nutjob.

Robbie jabbed her finger in the air. "Right. Anyway, Mrs. Campisi was bending over— backward , mind you—and yelling at me to hurry up and spin the spinny thingy because she was getting dizzy, so I did…and that's when it happened. It felt like it zapped me or something, and then my left hand felt like rubber. It was the oddest thing, but I didn't think a lot about it until…" She gulped hard again, her legs shaking.

"Until the party, if one can call it that, was over, and Roberta set her hair on fire. Then we gave great thought to her appendage."

"And then…" Robbie used her right hand to point to Hervé. "Then he showed up out of nowhere and he was talking and it was like a Disney movie gone sideways."

She could almost see Hervé seethe at her from where he had propped himself up by a medieval suit of armor, but he remained silent.

Wanda folded her fingers together and basketed her knees with her arms, leaning back on the fancy peacock-blue settee where she sat next to Marty. "Did anything else happen, Robbie? Anything else that was unusual?"

Robbie blinked. "Does it get any more unusual than fingers of fire and a talking broom?"

They'd briefly given her a quick synopsis of what they dealt with in terms of the paranormal, but come on. They were behaving as if her talking broom was a battery-operated Energizer Bunny.

But Hervé had no batteries, because she'd looked for some. How odd that these women weren't at all fazed by her talking broom.

Wanda smiled again, her tastefully made-up eyes warm and reassuring. "You'd be surprised. Now, every small detail is crucial. Is there anything else you can remember?"

Now that she thought about it, the rest was a bit of a blur. She remembered spinning the planchette and then everyone leaving right before she set her hair on fire and her talking broom showed up, but not much else until they were in the Uber, headed here to Nina's castle. The in between of it all was blurry.

Tottington cleared his throat, still standing, even though the women had offered him a place to sit. "There was the voice, Miss…" he reminded. "Lest ye forget the voice."

"The voice…" she whispered. She had a vague recollection of T mentioning something about demonic tones or something. She couldn't remember exactly.

Standing up straight, Tottington squared his shoulders as though remembering what happened was something he'd always have to endure . Like cleaning toilets or scraping gum off the bottom of school desks.

"Yes. There was a voice . When Roberta touched the planchette, she jumped back as though she'd been struck. Then, in what can only be described as an insidious incident, she said, or maybe it was growled, ‘ By the power of the forgotten gods, give back what is mine. Snatched from me as long as time, return my magic, so entwine! ' in a tone that, for all intents and purposes, sounded as though she were possessed."

Robbie shivered. She'd said that? It sounded like something out of a damn movie. What did that even mean, and did it have something to do with her hand?

Hervé shivered, too, his bristles scratching the brick floor. He shrank farther into the medieval armor, almost whimpering.

Nina sat upright and pointed at him before she zipped across the room in a blur and snatched him up. "You know some shit. I can smell it, you little motherfucker. What is it and where the fuck did you come from?"

Hervé quivered against Nina, the scent of his fear almost palpable. "Unhand me, you glorious beast!" he all but squeaked, despite his brave words.

Robbie was quick to approach Nina, putting her hand on the fierce woman's arm, not thinking about the fact that she didn't appear to mind threatening a broom .

"Please don't hurt him," she mumbled. Robbie didn't know why she felt so protective of him, but some weird instinct to keep him safe kept rearing its head.

When Nina growled at her, she didn't recoil in the typical way she'd react when confronted by a snarling, albeit gorgeous monster—or confronted at all. She hated confrontation, but Hervé, even though he didn't have a face, per se, looked terrified.

Instead of showing her fear, as she held out her other hand, Robbie said softly but firmly, "Please."

"Give her the broom, Nina," Marty said, low and menacing, pushing herself to the edge of the settee.

"Please give her ze broom," Hervé peeped again, a tremble in his voice.

Nina shoved Hervé at her, but she didn't entirely back off. "What the fuck do you know about what's going on and where the hell did you come from?" she sneered.

Hervé tucked himself into her body, pushing against her puffy jacket. Robbie wrapped her arm around him, whispering, "If you know something about what's happening to me, I think you'd better fess. Because you know…scary lady."

Nina growled again to reinforce her scary.

Hervé straightened a little as they all waited for an answer. "I do not know why I came to you, Robbie. The universe is my guide, and it has sent me to you…"

She couldn't believe she was doing this, but Robbie gave him a slight nudge with a gentle finger to encourage him. "And?"

Hervé sighed. "And ze words…ze words ze snooty British man says are…are from a very bad witch. It is, I think, a very bad spell or maybe a warning..."

Robbie's mouth fell open. "A what now?"

"He said it's a spell from a very bad witch. You deaf now, too?" Nina asked, making a face.

Wanda sighed, hopping up from the settee and approaching them, her tone gentle rather than demanding like Nina's. "How do you know this, Hervé?"

"Witches are my business, of course, mon amie. All witches have ze broom, and I am a witch's broom. Robbie must be a witch!"

Letting go of Hervé, Robbie began to laugh out loud, the sound echoing around the enormous chambers of the basement as she gasped for air, bending at the waist.

Tottington put his hand on her back. "Roberta, do remember your standing."

She threw her head back and laughed harder until tears streamed down her face. "My standing ? My. Standing? Fuck my standing, Tottington! This is crackers! A witch?" She took a deep, ragged breath to control her laughter. "We're standing here in a damn castle, with a violent supermodel and two hot babes who haven't blinked twice since we told them my story, with a talking broom named Hervé, and he's telling me I must be a witch—and you're worried about my standing? Have you lost your stiff upper lip's mind?"

Tottington gave her a haughty look of disapproval, the only sign he might be even a little angry were his flashing eyes. "Surely, there's a better way to express your disbelief than with foul language."

Just as she cocked her head at T, preparing to let him have it, a tall drink of water sauntered into the room with a short blue man in a suit a lot like Tottington's, cutting off her rant.

A blue man.

But forget the blue man.

There was a tall man with chin-length hair the color of a good whiskey (and she knew good whiskey) with deep gold streaks threading through it, the greenest eyes she'd ever seen, wearing a pair of worn jeans that clung to his muscled thighs and a flannel shirt under a puffy black vest.

He was so good-looking, Robbie caught her breath, stopping cold as the blue man (the blue man!), introduced him.

"Ladies," he said in a rich British accent, again a lot like Tottington's. "This is Master Greer Winthrop, and he claims to have vital information involving your newest client, Ms. Roberta Tisdale. Do make him feel welcome."

Everyone, including Robbie, stopped all motion and looked his way.

He eyed them all with a hard but curious glance, and said, "As Archibald said, I'm Greer Winthrop, and I believe you ," he pointed at Robbie with a flare of his nostrils, "have my grandmother's hand."