Midlife Witch Hunter (The Forty Proof Series Book 6) Read online

  “What about Crash?” she asked, her voice low.

  I sighed and brushed a finger through a stalk of velvety flower petals. “He’s working for the Dark Council, Bridgette. He’s the one we are racing against to find the first witch. There is nothing else between us.”

  There couldn’t be. No matter how much I wanted it.

  Bridgette looked over her shoulder and sucked in a sharp breath. “Someone’s coming.”

  I followed her gaze in time to see a group of fae men racing through the meadow toward us. Even at a distance I could make out their shining hair and bright green and blue armor. Each one carried a long, shining piece of . . . I squinted. Shit, they were each carrying long swords. “Can we make it to Goblin Town ahead of them?”

  Bridgette shot me a look and pushed me forward, smacking her hand against my leather pants. “We have to. Those are Karissa’s executioners.”

  Chapter

  Ten

  Karissa’s executioners were damn fast, even carrying their oversized weapons. “Eric, pick up Penny!”

  “Do not!” Penny snapped and she flung her hand out around us, a dusting of something sparkly hitting the group. Kinkly shot high into the air, dodging it. Robert grabbed me and dove to the left.

  As if he knew what it was. Maybe he did?

  Oh . . . crap. We hit the ground and lay there as the others gulped and yelped. “Thanks.”

  He smiled down at me, winked and nodded. “You do not have to thank me. It’s my job to look out for you. While I can.”

  While he could? I wanted to ask just what the hell that meant, but we didn’t have time to discuss it. Bridgette was looking at us. “Um, there’s a new problem now.”

  We sat up together. “The dust hit them all—Penny, Eric, Eammon, Sarge and Suzy,” Kinkly squealed, “and they just disappeared. Gone!” She was freaking out, and I didn’t blame her. What had Penny just done?

  “Robert, what are you doing?”

  He was moving around on his hands and knees, as if he’d dropped a contact. “I’ve got Eammon and Penny!” he yelled as he stood with his hands cupped. It looked as though a very angry cockroach was jumping up and down in his palm. Holy crap, Penny had made the shrinking potion! On the plus side, it clearly worked.

  I hurried over to where Eric, Suzy, Sarge and Penny had been standing, careful of where I planted my feet.

  Sarge waved up at me, no bigger than my pinky finger. I scooped him, Eric, and a very confused Suzy into my hands and then tucked them into my hip bag. Robert dumped Penny and Eammon into my bag, which set off a string of high-pitched yelling.

  An arrow thudded into the ground at my feet, making me jump, the bag bounce, and my friends inside it holler.

  “Sorry!” I said.

  “You are trespassing!” the executioner closest to us snarled. “And your apology means little to us!”

  I grabbed Bridgette’s hand and took off running. I threw my words over my shoulder. “Wasn’t apologizing to you, tit face!”

  Kinkly landed on Robert’s shoulder, and the two of them quickly surpassed me and led the way.

  Despite her size, Bridgette was keeping up easily. I couldn’t say that Penny had made a bad decision, to be honest—she and Eammon would have slowed us down, between her age and his short legs.

  But I could hear him cursing from my bag. I mean, he was really letting fly with the stream of f-bombs. Another time I would have been giggling my ass off at the high-pitched ducks.

  As it was, the pair of fae at our back were shooting arrows in a near continual stream, and I didn’t have any extra breath. I kept dodging left and right as if that would help. Actually, since I didn’t get shot, I guess it may have helped. I’m sure a fart slid out of me, but over the cacophony of thudding feet, zinging arrows, and heavy breathing, no one else heard. I guess that’s the blessings of being attacked.

  I offered Bridgette a hand, and she took it. Together we ran, me half dragging her along. She yelped out as we slid down a sudden embankment, flowers and tiny bugs shooting up all around our group.

  We hit the bottom of the embankment, rolled through thick mud, and then we were jostling out the other side.

  The high-pitched hollering from my bag intensified, but there was nothing I could do about them.

  “Busy running for our lives!” I gulped out.

  On Robert’s shoulder danced someone I hoped was truly on our team. “Jinx, can you slow them down? Please!”

  How she’d missed getting hit by Penny’s magic, I had no idea. Maybe it didn’t affect her because of her ability to shapeshift.

  Jinx leapt off Robert’s shoulder and as she did, she shifted into her much larger spider form. The one I’d first met. “I’ll do what I can!”

  An arrow sung past my head, clipping my right ear. The pain was . . . intense. “Duck off!” I yelled back at the group of fae even while I clamped a hand over the wound. Tiny, it was so tiny, and yet . . . my legs wobbled on the next stride. “Oh, no.”

  Robert was at my side in a flash, helping me run. “We’re almost there, we can see the outskirts of the city.”

  “Skeletor,” I whispered the horse’s name as my knees kept buckling. Poison or sedative, I couldn’t say which one the arrow had been dosed with. Either way, it was working pretty damn fast, and I could hear more arrows thudding into the path and greenery around us. The executioners screamed, signaling that Jinx had intercepted them. “I’m about to delete you out of this story!” she bellowed at them, and there were a few screams in response.

  “Editors all be the same,” I whispered. “Always trying to take out extraneous characters.”

  But even though she was buying us some time, I knew that some of them would get around her. Jinx couldn’t stop that many fae.

  The ground just in front of me heaved, and the big black horse I’d summoned threw himself out of the dirt, faster than he’d ever managed before. I grabbed his mane when he was still low to the ground, and Robert shoved me up onto his back, leaping up behind me, one arm going around my middle and pinning me to his chest.

  “Can’t outrun Bridgette,” I mumbled as my head bobbled forward.

  “I’m here,” Bridgette said. “Just go now, as fast as you can, horse!”

  I pressed my face to Skeletor’s neck and breathed him in. He didn’t smell dead; he didn’t even feel dead anymore. He was warm, and the pulse of a heartbeat thrummed under my cheek. Whatever magic had brought him to me the first time seemed to be making him more and more whole. I grabbed at his mane, just managing to stay on as Robert’s arm left me. Maybe he was pulling Bridgette on with us?

  Skeletor leapt forward, and in moments the sound of his hoofbeats shifted from the thud of dirt to the ping of cobblestones under us.

  “We’re sort of safe.” Kinkly fluttered around, her wings fanning my face. I struggled to focus. I looked over my shoulder to see flashes of Bridgette’s worried face behind Robert. That was good. She was with us still.

  “I feel like I’m going to puke,” I mumbled.

  “We stay on the horse, Kinkly, you stay between his ears.” Robert’s voice was solid, even though the rest of my world most definitely was not. I managed to sit up, and again, Robert’s arm went tight around my middle and held me to him, though I’ll admit the squeeze on my belly was not welcome. I belched and groaned.

  “Go there,” Bridgette said. For a moment, we were riding down the main street, which seemed unwise, but Skeletor followed Bridgette’s directions and quickly took a left-hand turn down a narrow alley.

  I opened my mouth, and nothing but a stream of wickedly strange words came out. What I wanted to ask was if I was going to be okay. Or maybe do we need to find someone who can help. What came out was: “Penis wrinkle.” I tried again. “Titty bobber.” Nope. No, that was definitely not what I wanted to say. It felt like Robert might be laughing if the shaking behind me was any indication.

  “Here,” Bridgette said, and then I was being pulled off Skeletor’s back. The knock of knuckles on a wooden door. “Leland, it’s Bridgette. I need the pills for the executioner’s poison! Don’t argue with me, now!”

  I’d never heard Bridgette sound so authoritative. I smiled. Mumbled something that was supposed to be badass. “Blubberbutt.” I hiccupped. Maybe it was just a sedative. “Donkey licker.”

  Robert rolled me in his arms so he had one arm behind my shoulders and the other under my legs. Like he was going to carry me across the threshold on our wedding night. “If you weren’t dying, I’d say this was damn funny as hell.” He grabbed my jaw and popped my mouth open.

  A hard, smooth object dropped into my mouth. Like a gobstopper, only smaller. More like a metal bead. Tangy and metallic, it tasted exactly like I would have thought a metal bead would taste. I mean, if I was into eating beads.

  “Keep it under your tongue. It’ll melt that way,” Bridgette said. Her hand was on my ankle and she gripped me tightly. As if she were worried I’d slip away.

  “Snakepiss,” I muttered. “Slapmyass.” Yeah, none of this made sense. But the hard pill in my mouth was dissolving, and I blinked up at Robert, who was still grinning.

  “Slap your ass?”

  I tried to speak normally. “Only in the sack.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “It’s not working. She’s still muttering gibberish. Can we give her another one?”

  I scrunched my face. “No, that was me. I’m coming around.” I reached up and touched my ear. The tip had been completely taken off, leaving a divot there. “Damn.”

  Bridgette scrambled back up onto Skeletor’s back. “We go now. The executioners are still behind us. The horse bought us some time.”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw a taller than average goblin with spiky white hair waving at us as we took off. He grinned and winked at me, like he knew me. But I didn’t know him. Did I?

  Robert drummed Skeletor’s sides with his heels, and the sort-of-dead horse shot forward. The motion threw me backward into his chest, and he held on tight.

  Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

  We raced down the alley, and Bridgette had us weaving through the goblin city at top speed. Kinkly clung to the tips of Skeletor’s ears, her wings spreading out behind her. This path we were on felt exactly like a maze, which matched my impression of Goblin Town when we’d first come here, not long before. We cranked hard around corners again and again, until finally there was nowhere left to go. Literally, no more turns. It still felt like a maze, a labyrinth all its own.

  We were at a dead end of sorts. If you didn’t count the massively thick iron doors that were secured shut with a chain and a single lock, we had nowhere to go if the executioners caught up to us.

  The doors were covered with spray-painted messages.

  Nothing to see here.

  Turn around by order of the king.

  Not your place.

  Go back or have your balls eaten.

  “Subtle,” I whispered. Yes, whispered. Because the gate we’d slid to a stop in front of had the feeling of being . . . dark. Evil, even. The area around the gate was dim. Trees were rooted into the top of the wall beyond the doors, and their branches and the Spanish moss that clung to them hung over the dead end, creating a moving mass of shadows. I tried to shake off my reaction. I didn’t want to think that the doorway and path we were on were inherently evil, seeing as we were planning on going farther in.

  “You sure about this?” Robert asked.

  I looked at Kinkly and then Bridgette. They both nodded, and I trusted them. “Yes.”

  The three of us slid off Skeletor. I patted his back. “You coming with us to Paris, my friend?”

  He blew out a long hot breath and then collapsed in front of me, not unlike the way Robert used to. All that was left was a tiny, boat-shaped bone, porous looking with tiny holes all over it. I scooped it up and tucked it carefully into my bag. Maybe he couldn’t just appear on soil on another continent? That was my only guess. I could call him up here, whenever I wanted, but the ocean between us was too much.

  My friends stared up at me. Eric waved, his voice weirdly deep and high-pitched at the same time. “We’re good! A little bruised, but good!”

  “Tell me if you feel funny,” I said. Robert had deposited Eammon and Penny into my bag. “’Cause if you’re going to get big all of a sudden, I’d like to know.” While my bag seemed to be bottomless, I didn’t want to test the limits of its capacity as a bunch of people became full size within it.

  Basically, I didn’t want to wreck my bag, thank you very much.

  Eammon screeched something, but it was so high-pitched I couldn’t decipher it. He was really working himself up into a state if I couldn’t understand him now.

  “Good, that’s great!” I grimaced out a grin. Eammon was going to kill me. As if this was my fault and not Penny’s doing.

  My gran huffed and turned, showing me the row of buttons down the back of her shirt, and I tried not to think about the fact that she was still pissed at me for not bringing her back to life, even though it hadn’t actually been possible. Or at least I thought that’s why she was pissed. I sighed. Nothing was going right.

  “Is it Monday?” I asked as I walked up to the big doors. “Sure feels like a ducking Monday.”

  “The better question would be how are we getting through these?” Robert touched one of the chains. “Roderick said Crash had been through here first. He seemed to think it would be open, but . . .” He flicked the chains. “Not so much.”

  I looked at him and he grimaced. “And hurry. I think Karissa’s friends are getting close.” He looked over his shoulder, blue eyes pensive as if he could see the executioners.

  “I have a key,” I said.

  “You do?” Bridgette gasped.

  I pulled my knife from the sheath on my thigh and grinned at her as I put the point into the lock holding the chains on the central part of the door. One big breath and I pushed, using all my weight as I wiggled the tip.

  Get your mind out of the gutter.

  The metal screeched, and Robert, Kinkly, and Bridgette clapped their hands over their ears. I had no such luxury and just gritted my teeth and kept on pushing. I was banking on the knife that Crash had made getting me through.

  The knife tip began to glow a deep red, and the chains it was touching vibrated, humming with a deep thrum that made my bones ache and my teeth grind. The door fought back with a pulse of energy that had me bracing my legs until my boots skidded across the cobblestones. I managed to get a toe in a cobblestone crack and use it as leverage, but I was still shoved back some.

  “Help!” I yelped the word over the crackling of the metal.

  “Here.” Robert wrapped his arms around me and put his hands on mine, helping me push the knife into the lock.

  The added weight forced the blade deeper into the lock. Robert’s hands gripped mine, and I couldn’t help but notice . . . that he was rather happy to be tucked in tight behind me.

  “Really? I thought we were just friends!” To be fair, the whole leaning forward, pushing for all you were worth into the lock thing kind of . . . well, it begged to be sexual.

  “It’s been a long time, Bree,” he gritted out, “since I’ve had any sort of physical contact with a woman. I can’t help it. Don’t take it that way.”

  I twisted my hands on the knife handle, trying to force the lock open. I laughed at him. “So you’d react to just any old warm body? Nice. Good to know. I’ll be sure to tell Jinx that. She’s looking for love.”

  “No, of course not!” He tightened his hands further and leaned with me. He huffed, and I realized he was laughing at me.

  I snorted. “Or Missy? Maybe she’s a bitch because she’s just lonely!”

  We were both laughing now. “Well, if we’re going to matchmake me, then I pick Eric. He can cook at least. And I’ll bet he’d be plenty warm.”

  Okay, have you ever had a fit of giggles when there is danger? Yeah, that was us two idiots. We were giggling away, throwing out all sorts of options for Robert’s nonexistent love life, each one more ridiculous than the next.

  “Corb. He’d have a go at you,” I offered as I tried again to wiggle the tip into the right position. “He likes pretty men.”

  “God in heaven, a siren? No offense, Suzy!” Robert grunted as we lost traction again. The door flexed in front of us, like it was Schwarzenegger trying to prove he still had the muscles.

  From my bag Suzy yelled something.

  “Stop talking and push!” Bridgette yelled and smacked the side of my leg with the flat of her hand.

  “On three,” I yelped. “One. Two. Three!”

  Robert and I shoved together, and this time the knife slid right through the big lock. The steel mechanism shattered, cracking like glass, and the fissures spiderwebbed up through all the chains that held the door shut.

  Chains that Crash had put on the door after he went through? I had no idea how he would have managed that. Unless someone had locked him in? Hard to say, but I was guessing he found a way to lock it behind him, seeing as he was the only fae I knew who handled iron.

  Bridgette shoved the door inward, and I stumbled after her, putting my knife away, and shoved aside my thoughts about Crash too.

  Robert grabbed at my hand just as the big doors shut behind us, taking the light with them. Well, that wasn’t good.

  “You close those?” I asked, instinctively tightening my hold on him. What the hell, did we have self-closing doors now?

  “No, I did,” Bridgette whispered in the dark. The sound of a match striking followed her words, and then a lantern bloomed, held by the goblin. “Come on. Karissa’s men won’t follow us in. They might not even realize there were chains on the doors.” She gave a shuddering sigh. “I hope.”

  With a grimace, I put myself right behind Bridgette.

  Kinkly landed lightly on my shoulder, shivering. “It’s cold in here.”

  I actually didn’t mind the temperature change. My skin was flushed from the exertion and probably as a side effect of either the poison or its cure. But if I didn’t know better it felt like I was still heating up, my skin getting incrementally warmer with each step. I frowned. “You think it’s cold?”