nancy werlock's diary s01 - episodes 9 (5 page)

Houston smashes the broom on top of the wisp and then bends over to pick it up. He cups his hand to make it look like he is holding something.

“You shouldn’t kill bees!” says Anastasia. “Because bee colonies have been collapsing from pesticides and stuff!”

“I’m just going to…take it outside,” says Houston.

“Is he holding a live bee in his hands?” asks one of the customers at the table.

“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s really good with animals. And insects.”

“
I’m going to flush it,”
he thinks to me as he goes into the back.

“Set it free so it can go back to its hive!” yells Anastasia after him.

“Yep, setting it free now!” he yells from down the hall. Anastasia resumes her tarot card readings. I hear the sound of the toilet flush. Houston comes back into the showroom. “Just another day at the office,” he quips as he resumes his position behind the counter.

“I’m going to go place Mr. Shan’s order now. Maybe they can rush it and add it to my existing order.” As I walk toward my office, I notice the damn pride wisp sliding under the restroom door. “Are you kidding me?” I say. “What did you do, cling to the seat or something?” As I approach it, it flashes bright green with excitement and two little pseudopods emerge at the front of the wisp. “Don’t even think about it,” I say. With no witnesses to worry about, I zap it with a concentrated bolt of electricity that vaporizes it. I retrieve a disinfectant wipe from the canister on my desk and wipe up the residue from the floor.

I place the special order and get some paperwork done. By nine o’clock, Anastasia has finished her tarot card readings and her customers all leave happy…and with bags stuffed with additional purchases.

“I am getting so good at this!” she exclaims. “Houston said we should record them and post them on YouTube!”

“What did I say?” I glare at him.

“Think of the publicity,” he says.

“Think of the crazy people,” I reply. “We get enough strange people that wander in here. I don’t need to go actively looking for them online. Besides, I would think her parents wouldn’t want her plastering herself all over Youtube.”

“Oh my God, Nancy. It’s a YouTube video. Not like I’m sexting people.”

“I will break his face if I ever find out you did that with some guy,” says a suddenly serious Houston.

“
I love how you assume she would be sexting Eric
,” I think to him.

“
That isn’t just directed at Eric. I’ll find the boy. She won’t be able to hide him from me.”

I pat Houston’s arm. “Down, killer.” I turn back to Anastasia. “And I would have to talk to your parents, first.”

“I could have my own YouTube channel! I’ll be famous!” I inconspicuously check to make sure no additional pride wisps had attached on her. Her anima is snuggled up against her neck, pulsing soft white light. “But then too I could end up with a stalker,” she adds. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

“Now you realize my concern,” I say, confident the anima will calm her more prideful thoughts moving forward.

Anastasia’s father picks her up just before ten o’clock. Houston and I close up the shop. As we get ready to leave, I get an alert over my phone from my vendor telling me they can add the extra egg to my existing order. I tell Houston to call Mr. Shan in the morning and let him know we can have his order in earlier.

We get home and the house is still messy. I look in the kitchen and upstairs for Harlan, the house brownie that we hired to clean. I call the Flugalmorph Agency and they apologize for his absence and agree to send a replacement over immediately. I tell them not to worry about it tonight and ask Houston to take out the trash before he goes to bed.

As I prepare for bed, Houston thinks to me, “
Come out here for a minute.”

“I’m in my pajamas.”

“Just come outside for a minute.”

I go outside and find Houston kneeling down next to the trash cans with one hand hovering over a spot on the sidewalk. “It’s cold right here.” I kneel next to him and hold my hand over the spot. It is noticeably colder. I then notice tiny little footprints in the grass next to the trash can. “There is still fae residue on these footprints,” I say. “Harlan was here.”

“Sure it was him?”

“How many fae would have a reason to be around our trash cans?”

“What the Hell is this cold spot, then?”

“I don’t know.”

We start looking around the yard. Houston finds a tiny red shoe in the bushes along the fence. There is a streak of fae blood on one of the planks. Houston hops the fence into the neighbor’s yard. I hear a cat hiss and something run across dried leaves.

“Harlan!” he exclaims. He hands Harlan’s little broken body over the fence to me and jumps back over just as the neighbor’s porch light flips on. “I think he’s still alive, but barely.”

“Go call Flugalmorph,” I say as I wrap him inside my robe to keep him warm and rush back into the house. In the kitchen, I grab a hand towel, place it on the counter, and rest his body on it.

The cat had done a real number on him. There are huge gashes across his face, chest, and back. Usually a brownie would escape across the Veil if attacked by a cat. Why didn’t Harlan run? How did the cat manage to drag him out of the yard and over the fence?

“They’re sending someone over,” says Houston as he comes back into the kitchen with the first aid kit. “When did the Itos get a damn cat?”

“I don’t know.” I take the kit from him and remove the restorative gel, unfortunately the only thing in the kit that will work on fae. I gently tab it onto his wounds. Three more brownies manifest in my kitchen and immediately start performing emergency treatment on him with fae magic. Houston and I step back and let them work.

“Where did you find him?” asks a brownie with bright purple hair and lavender eyes. Houston tells him what happened. “He’s lucky you went looking for him. A few more minutes and...I can’t think about it!”

After ten minutes of frantic effort on the part of the brownies, Harlan’s eyes pop open and he gasps for air. There is a collective sigh of relieve, followed by a flurry of more activity. As he begins to stabilize, he starts pushing away the other brownies and reaching for Houston. “Don’t trust...don’t...”

“It’s gonna be okay, little guy,” says Houston. “Let them help you.”

“Don’t trust her!”

“Don’t trust who?”

Harlan starts breathing rapidly. “He’s going into shock!” says a green-haired brownie. “We need to pull him into the astral plane stat or we’re going to lose him!”

“Something drained his fae energy?” says the blue-haired brownie. “Are you sure it was a cat that attacked him?”

“We have to move him now!” says the green-haired brownie. They quickly stabilize him and vanish across the Veil.

Houston and I just stand there in a state of shock for several moments. “Where did the cat go?” I finally say.

“It ran toward the Itos’ house. I wasn’t paying attention to it because I was worried about Harlan.”

“We’ll have to check in the morning, somehow, and see what is going on with that cat. Mr. Ito’s grandmother is visiting them from Japan. I hope she didn’t bring a bakeneko or something with her.”

“So now we have to banish the neighbor’s cat?”

“I’m going to tell Flugalmorph to just suspend the house service until we can resolve the damn cat issue. I don’t want to risk another brownie getting hurt.”

“Maybe it will resolve itself when Mr. Ito’s grandmother leaves?” says Houston with a sliver of hopefulness.

I throw my hands and go upstairs to try to get some sleep.

New to the Nancy Werlock Series?

Get caught up with
Nancy Werlock’s Diary: Season One
,

which features the first seven episodes of the series in one collection.

And visit Nancy at her website to explore her world.

https://sites.google.com/site/nancywerlock