Page 14 of Strike It Witch

“You deserve some down time.” I scritched beneath his chin. “I shouldn’t have sent you in there last night. I’m sorry, Fennel.”

“Meow.”

“Yes, I know. You wanted to do it. But, Fennel, no matter what anyone says, you aren’t my familiar and you don’t have to protect me.”

He drowsily winked both gold doubloon eyes.

“I love you, too. Now where is the miscreant? I have to stop him before he destroys all our tools.”

Fennel’s sleepy gaze zeroed in on a spot over my left shoulder.

I turned to find the garden gnome fuming in the middle of my French lavender, purple-fringed blossoms ruffling with his breath, pudgy white toes digging into the dirt. His rosy-tipped bulbous nose was the only visible part of his face besides a pair of bushy eyebrows that occasionally emerged from under his pointed purple hat. The hat was dusted with golden pollen, his gray robe coated with soil, his snowy beard pristine.

It was the magic in him, I supposed, that allowed him to be so dirty, yet maintain a clean beard.

Cecil squeaked out a sound of complaint that was a cross between a bird’s tweet and the clatter of dry bones.

“Fennel asked to go. I did not,would not, force him. You’ve lived here for a year. Have I ever done anything like that?”

He made a less aggressive squeak.

“Exactly.”

The gnome’s nose twitched. His toes dug deeper.

“Are you telling me you’re sorry? Is this your version of contrition, Cecil?”

The purple hat bobbed as he nodded, pollen shaking loose from the fabric and coating the lavender leaves.

The garden gnome’s remorse seemed less than sincere, but I let him get away with it. At least he was acting out because he cared about someone. It was a nice change from his usual modus operandi of biting, scratching, and throwing rocks at people he just generally disapproved of. Or mailing threatening manifestos to major news outlets for reasons that made sense only to him.

Thank the gods he spoke and wrote in Elvish, or I’d for sure be on a government watchlist by now.

“Brought you something.” I reached into my pocket for the new penny I’d pocketed before leaving my trailer. I held it up so it caught the sunlight and gleamed with a freshly minted copper shine.

If there was one thing Cecil couldn’t resist, it was a shiny trinket.

Also, boysenberry wine and sour apple Four Lokos, but it was a little early in the day for those.

He froze.

“Like it?”

In a burst of action almost too fast to track, he leapt out of the planter, darted up my leg, down my arm, and snatched thepenny out of my hand. He tucked the coin into his robe then zipped across the floor and up the side of the lavender planter and launched himself back into the purple flowers, pollen scattering like sunlit dust motes off his hat.

“Can you please grab the protection spell I asked you to craft yesterday?”

He nodded and took off again, scampering across a salvaged dresser, inside the drawers of which I’d planted garlic and vegetables—carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, onions, radishes—and disappeared. He reappeared seconds later in a pot of aloe vera, a twine-wrapped swatch of burlap in his tiny arms.

I walked over and took the herb bag from him, examined it. “This smells nice. Cedar, rosemary, and is that sunflower petals?”

He nodded briskly.

“No surprises?” At times like this, I wished I could push back his hat and look directly into what had to be a pair of beady little eyes. I supposed I could ask, but it seemed rude. “It won’t explode or make burping noises or stop working the second I need it?

His purple hat bobbed up and down.

“It’ll keep me from being poisoned?”

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