It Never Rhines but It Pours (9 page)

“Yeah?” she spread more peanut butter on her pancakes.

“Yeah,” I tried not to snarl. “It’s pretty.” Translation: “I hope that pancake gives you thunder-thighs.”

“Thanks,” she crunched on some bacon. I might have ground my teeth.

Fortunately, Cecily chose that moment to appear. I slowly released my death grip on my fork and leaned back in the booth. She looked much better. There were still dark circles under her eyes, but they had lost the blood-shot, hungry look. On the one hand, I was glad. Hanging out with a hungry vampire is not a good idea. On the other hand, Eww! She had been drinking blood!

The waitress brought the check and I gave her my credit card before Cecily could order anything to eat. I’d had about all I could take of watching people eat things that would make me fat if I
dreamed
about eating them.

Our only agenda for the day was to go back to Pravus’ house and question him. Then we could go home. I was getting pretty homesick. I missed my privacy, and my kids, and Mark. I missed Mark a lot.

We found our way back to the witch’s house and knocked on the front door. It was still early enough in the morning that if you had tried to cook an egg on the sidewalk it might have taken at least ten minutes to fry. In a couple of hours we would be able to feel our brains boiling inside our heads in direct sunlight. Cecily was back in her dark shades and wide brimmed hat. In addition to not crying, it looked like vampires didn’t sweat either. Lucky them. If we stood out here much longer I was going to need another shower and a change of clothes. Barring that I could just jump in someone’s pool. I couldn’t possible get any wetter.

A dog barked down the street and I heard the sound of a lawn mower. I knocked again. All was quiet. I rang the doorbell a couple times and gave the door a few heavy bangs. Still no answer. Cecily cocked her head and closed her eyes.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said. Her eyes opened wide, “Nothing at all.” She drew the Sword of Justice and crept around the side of the house. Sarah and I watched her go. It was too hot to go crawling around in a backyard. Besides, if she ran into trouble what good would we be? Better to stay put in the front porch shade.

I heard footsteps finally approaching the front door from inside. “Cecily!” I hissed. “He’s here!”

The door opened. It was Cecily. “He’s not here,” she corrected.

I pushed past her, “How did you get in?”

She shrugged, “The sliding glass door was broken.”

I stared, “You didn’t!”

She gave me a wide eyed look. Sarah laughed.

I made a face at her and made a visual sweep of the living room. It could have been my neighbor’s living room. Nothing screamed “a goat worshipper lives here!” Cecily disappeared down the hallway.

“Piper!” she called.

I joined her in the master bedroom. It was a wreck. Someone had thrown clothes all about. Drawers were left hanging open and the closet doors were ajar. I checked the shoes, there were spots for missing ones. And an empty place on the shelf that would have been the perfect size for a suitcase.

“Drat,” I cursed. “He’s gone.”

Chapter Nine:

Diapers, Santa, and Visiting Relatives

“Mommy’s home! Mommy’s home!” my gleeful daughters cheered. It was nice to be missed and loved.

“What did you bring us?” Megan, the oldest, wanted to know.

“What bring? What bring?” Cassidy echoed.

I swept them up in a big hug and pretended that the warm welcome had been for me, and not for the presents they were hoping I had brought.

“I brought me!” I said brightly.

Mark was standing a few feet back, waiting his turn for a hug. He snorted. I glared at him. “Well,” he said, “that’s good enough for
Daddy
,” he wiggled his eyebrows in a suggestive way. “But probably not for the little materialists.”

“You had to bring us
something
,” Megan added, placing her little hands on her hips and giving me the eye. “You were gone forever.”

“What do you think I was doing while I was gone?” I asked.

“Shopping for presents?” she guessed.

I hid a smile. “Who would I be getting a present for?”

“Me!” Cassidy cheered.

I kissed the top of her head. “What if the present is having Mommy home?”

The girls looked at each other. They had to confer. Cassidy shook her head. Megan answered for them both. “That’s a
nice
present, Mommy. But a
real
present is even nicer. Where is the
real
present?”

I smacked her bottom and caved. “It’s in my suitcase—” I was drowned out by the screaming stampede to my bag. A fight quickly broke out.

“I open! I open!” Cassidy yelled pulling on the handle.

“No! I’ll open it. You’re too little!” Megan tried to shove her little sister out of the way.

“
No
one will open it if you don’t stop your rotten attitudes
now!
” I said in my best mother voice.

There was instant silence and they both quickly sat and placed their hands in their laps. “That’s better,” I said in a quieter voice. “Now,
I
will open the suitcase and give you your presents.”

“I need to practice that tone of voice,” Mark commented. “I got walked all over this weekend.”

I kissed his cheek in passing. “You need more practice,” I smirked.

He threw his hands up in the air. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed in mock horror. “Please, anything but that!” He snagged my waist and pulled me close, “
I’m
very happy that you’re home. I’ll show you how happy later.”

I giggled and rubbed up against him, “Promise?”

“Promise!”

“Mommy,” Megan interrupted. “We are waiting patiently.”

“You are,” I agreed. “And here is your present!” I pulled out the two princess coloring books I had purchased for them. The girls were ecstatic and ran off to color.

“I’m a genius,” I informed Mark.

“I never said you weren’t,” he said and then all further conversation was impossible.

“How was your weekend?” he asked me later, after the girls were in bed, and we had sufficiently demonstrated how much we had missed each other.

“Good,” was my evasive reply.

He was running his finger along the outside of my earlobe. “I love your ears,” he said, completely apropos of nothing.

“Really?” I asked, flattered.

“Yeah,” he kept playing with them, “they remind me of something.”

“What?”

He thought for a moment. “You know that movie where they go off in the jungle and find that little dinosaur? Baby! That was the dinosaur’s name.”

I sat up. “That dinosaur was a brontosaurus. They don’t have ears.”

“I know,” Mark grinned, “but if it
did
have ears, it would have had ears like yours. It just had cute little holes in its head.” He pulled me close and nibbled on my ear. “It just reminded me of you.”

I took his finger off my ear and bit it lightly. He snuggled me closer and took a deep breath of my hair. “So, what’d y’all do?” We were back on the topic I would rather avoid.

“Umm,” I was glad we were spooning and he couldn’t see my face. “You know, the usual. Ate out, shopped, things like that.”

He was losing interest. Men’s eyes start to glaze over whenever you try to talk about things that women find fun. Mark was an only child, so he had an even harder time understanding a weekend spent with a sibling. He knew it was important time; he just couldn’t imagine what in the world we talked about for three days.

He had no idea that magic really existed in the world, much less that his wife was cursed with a special ability. Or that his sister-in-law had changed his memories on occasion in the past. If we truly had been just shopping and eating, I might have worried about running out of conversational topics with Sarah. Since we had little time to talk about much other than the Synod and our hit, I felt like I had hardly spent time with my sister at all.

I was feeling very stressed again. Joining the stupid USB had been bad enough. Working for them was giving me an ulcer. Why couldn’t they come up with a more creative punishment than death? Not a member of the USB? We’ll kill you. Don’t fulfill your hit? Ditto. Let people know about magic? Ditto again. It was annoying. Every time I turned around I was facing another death sentence. Couldn’t these people just leave me alone?

So I hadn’t killed Pravus. Big whoop. He was innocent. Five minutes in court and he would have been able to prove his case and walked out. But, oh, no, not in the USB. In the USB we don’t believe in mundane, human things like
trials
, or a jury of your peers. What was it that Cecily had said once? Oh yeah, here we act
preemptively
to fix problems. Preemptively. Good thing that none of us were telepaths. I could just see how that would go. Instead of covering up magical messes, we’d be working as the thought police.

Even with all the worry and stress, I still managed to sleep well. There’s something about your very own bed that is a beautiful thing. Your bed, your pillow, your usual night sounds, and of course, your husband cuddling you in the night. Well, cuddling until he tells you that you are hotter than a blazing furnace in hell and could you please scoot over to your side of the bed. Ah, romance.

The next morning things were back to normal. I awoke to the sound of singing. Loud singing. It seems that Mark had let the girls watch
Ni Hao, Kai-lan
a few times when I was gone. I was repeatedly invited to join our good friends because it was time to play on a super special day. It’s not that bad a theme song, as children’s theme songs go, but hearing anything sung over and over, even in a cute off-pitch voice, starts to grate on your nerves.

I threw on my bathrobe, poked a snoring husband with no response, and tromped across the house. A rhythmic thumping sound was added to the singing. I quietly opened the child safety gate that keeps little visitors from joining Mommy and Daddy early in the morning, and stepped into the girls’ room.

Cassidy was sitting on her bad, back against the wall, bouncing in time to her song. Now that I was in the same room the song sounded extremely garbled. On the other side of the house my brain had filled in the missing consonants of the song. Here, it was like listening to a foreigner sing English without having a clue what he was singing. Cassie was matching the sounds of the song, but she didn’t really understand the words.

For a wonder, Megan was still sleeping peacefully. How in the world she managed to sleep through the racket, I have no clue. I sat down on the bed by Cassie and put a finger on my lips to tell her to be quiet.

“Hey, sweetie,” I whispered. “You need to stop singing.”

She closed her mouth with a smile but kept bouncing back against the wall.

“Stop bouncing, baby,” I pulled her into my lap. “Why are you awake so early?”

“Singin’” she whispered.

“I can hear that,” I said. “Megan’s still asleep though. You need to be quiet.”

“Me sing, ‘eg’ll tet up.”

I nodded. “Yes, if you sing loud enough, Megan will get up. But that’s not very nice. You need to let your sister sleep.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I stopped to think. It was early. My brain wasn’t fully functioning yet. “Just because.”

I stood up and scooped her into my arms. Quietly we tiptoed out of the room and back across the house. Far worse than the Rhine Maiden thing, I was cursed with the inability to fall back asleep after being woken. It’s truly a burden. I deposited Cassidy on the bed, where she burrowed in next to her father, who didn’t stir at all, and went to get a shower. At least I would be clean and ready to face the day.

I like to sing in the shower. There’s great resonance. All those tile walls mean that your voice sounds fantastic. I had just finished a stirring rendition, Whitney Houston style, of “I will always love you,” was toweling off my hair and stepping out of the shower when I heard a little voice.

“Singin’ pitty, Mommy.” It was Cassidy. She was awake and standing in the middle of the bathroom. I covered myself with the towel and shooed her out of the room.

“Go wake up Daddy!” I suggested. “Jump on Daddy!”

“I heard that!” came a muffled voice from the bedroom.

“Oh,” I said in mock surprise. “You’re awake!” I tucked in the edge of the towel under itself in an impromptu dress and followed Cassidy into the bedroom. “Fancy seeing you this early in the morning.”

Mark groaned and pulled the covers over his head. “
Very
early in the morning,” he said, sounding muted through the fabric.

“Go tickle Daddy,” I whispered to Cassidy and boosted her up on the bed. She went at it with a vengeance and a pillow fight had started by the time I finished getting dressed and doing my hair and makeup.

“Alright,” I said, catching Cassidy in mid-leap across the bed. “That’s enough. Let’s let Daddy get up while we go start breakfast.”

“Pancakes?” she asked.

I shrugged, “Sure. Why not?” She ran squealing into the kitchen, looking a little saggy in the rear. Whoops. I’d forgotten to check her diaper first thing. It definitely needed changing.