Page 40 of Wicked Witch of the Wolf

Scared brown eyes met mine. She nodded.

“Fennel, show Maya why she doesn’t need to be afraid.”

“Meow.”

My partner made a low, roaring sound. His eyes went from his normal gold to bright, glowing green. He slapped both paws on the dashboard, and electricity crackled in the car, a ticklish, nonlethal force for us, but …

“Watch,” I said and threw Ida’s keys at the windshield.

They hit the electrical field and rocketed into the backseat. Cecil leapt into the air and caught them, juggling the red-hot metal pieces until they cooled.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah. And that’s not counting whatever Cecil’s carrying in his bag of tricks.”

Maya, Fennel, and I turned as one to face the gnome. He snickered and held up a lit match.

“Why am I more scared of him?” Maya whispered to me.

“Because Fennel is lawful good. You know he’s on your side. Cecil is somewhere between chaotic good and chaotic neutral. He wouldn’t hurt you on purpose, but you could easily see yourself living without eyebrows after being hit with the backsplash from one of his spells.”

“That sounds specific,” she said.

“It does, doesn’t it?” I narrowedmy eyes at the gnome.

His snowy beard parted around his lips, and he blew out the match.

Fennel took down his spell, and I pocketed the keys. There was no need to leave them in the car, since Ida didn’t have a security system on the LTD. No one in their right mind would steal it. It was a V-8, which meant you practically needed to take out a home equity line of credit to fill the tank.

I was halfway between the car and the door when I felt a disturbance in the force, so to speak.

“Moonlighting at DiscMart, trailer trash? What’s the matter? Isn’t my son taking care of you? Or is he already tired of your bullshit?”

Nails on a chalkboard, fork tines squawking across a ceramic plate, ice cream applied directly to the exposed nerve of a broken tooth. There were myriad words to describe Floyd Pallás’s voice, but it wasn’t enough to say he sounded mean and rude. One had to get visceral.

I chanted a protection spell under my breath. It wouldn’t stop a bullet, but it would keep his claws from slitting my throat.

I hoped.

“Are you following me, Alpha Pallás?” I asked, without turning around.

“I don’t need to follow you, witch. I always know where you are.”

Great. I was surethatunwelcome thought wouldn’t repeat inside my head right before I fell asleep tonight.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want. Everything you have on me.”

“Is that right?” I pivoted on the ball of my right foot and faced the elder wolf. I was suddenly less scared, though he was no less physically threatening than before.

He was still tall and solid with a gut that added to his dense build—the kind of man who looked like he worked hard and drank harder. Because Floyd treated the disparity in our sizes as a cudgel,he came across not as a solid man but a spiteful bully. Someone to fear, not respect.

“Ready to hand it over?”

“Do I look like I took stupid pills this morning?”

Floyd’s already flushed face went florid. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

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