Moonbeam threw her hands up, clearly miffed. “Costume?Costume?”
With that, she turned on one dainty gold heel and stalked away. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to upset her, but I doubted I’d be getting the family discount at Witch City Collision, now.
Blast.
* * *
After Moonbeam’s abrupt departure, I figured the situation couldn’t get much worse. I, however, was gravely mistaken. Not only was acrid smoke still billowing from beneath my hood, the battery percentage on my cellphone was essentially nil since I hadn’t charged it for a while. There wasn’t much point. I had no one to call. I only ever used the thing for emergencies.
Emergencies precisely like this one, you unprepared ninny.
I didn’t have time to dial a tow — heck, I barely had time to roll my eyes at the 25 MISSED CALLS notification (Adrian really needed to take a chill pill) — before the screen turned black as the phone powered off.
The hits just kept coming…
A quick glance around the rapidly darkening roadway told me what I already knew — this was not the late 1900s and, as such, there were no convenient pay phones anywhere to be found. I was on my own. Literally and figuratively. The street was deserted, the nail salons and tattoos parlors in the strip mall across the way were long since buttoned up for the day. I glanced at the (somewhat seedy looking) bar down the block with great reluctance. Squinting, I could barely make out the black letters scored into the wood on the sign above the door.
THE BANSHEE
A muffled melody of male voices spilled out the open windows, along with the occasional clatter of ceramic balls colliding on a pool table. Even without the row of Harleys parked by the curb, I’d worked enough service industry jobs to spot a dive from a mile away. Desperate though I may be, I wasn’t desperate enough to step foot in that joint.
At least, not yet.
I tossed my useless, dead phone on my passenger seat with a frustrated grunt as I contemplated my options. There weren’t many.
1. Wait here and hope the car magically regenerated itself
2. Brave The Banshee and beg to use their phone
3. Attempt to diagnose my auto-related woes on my own
4. Hurl myself off the nearby bridge and hope that in my next life, I had better luck
Of the four, the third option seemed like the best place to start. Maybe it was something so simple, even a car-illiterate individual like myself could handle it. Maybe I could just top off the coolant fluid and be on my merry way.
Or maybe you’re deeply delusional.
Ignoring the defeatist voice in the back of my head, I yanked off my gloves and threw them down to join the phone on my seat before I returned to face the horror beneath the hood. I’d only just begun fiddling with the greasy cap of the translucent coolant tank when the unmistakable sound of tires rolled to a stop behind my clunker.
God, who was it this time?
Another elf?
A centaur?
A unicorn, perhaps?
By the time I’d stepped around to the side of my car, the stranger’s vehicle — a large, black SUV with deeply tinted windows — was parked by the curb and its driver — a tall, broad-shouldered stranger with dark hair, wearing a pair of wickedly cool aviator sunglasses — had alighted from the front seat.
I sucked in a sharp breath the second I clapped eyes on him. The man looked like Superman, for god’s sake. (If Superman wore crisp white button-down shirts instead of red lycra and a cape.) He headed straight for me, no hesitation in his stride. As he did so, I couldn’t help noticing that he walked from the hips, an undeniable swagger that made my throat lump as the distance between us shrank from fifteen feet to five.
There was authority in that walk. An innate confidence that commanded every bit of my attention without even trying. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why — at aforementioned swaggering hips, there was a shiny gold badge clipped to his belt beside a holstered handgun.
Seriously?
Could this night get any worse?
Chapter Three