Page 21 of Pixie Problems
But I never got the chance. Something snarled behind me in a low, menacing growl, and I turned, ever so slowly, hands in the air, toward the noise. At the same time, a voice I knew very well because she haunted my dreams pounded on my door. “You have my wolf!”
“Nice wolf,” I said in a soft voice, watching him carefully for any sudden moves while I crouched down and scrounged a pair of sweatpants out of my dirty clothes basket. “Very nice wolf. You don’t really want to take a bite out of me, do you?” Without turning away from the angry predator, I pulled them on and backed cautiously out of the room. Once I cleared my bedroom door, I breathed a sigh of relief. The wolf was still snarling.
I opened my front door and Dice almost fell against me she'd been pounding on my door so hard. I eyed her with disfavor. “Why did your wolf just scare ten years off my life?”
Her gaze went to my naked chest and arms, and then they traced my tattoos. I would have preened at the way she couldn’t take her eyes off my chest in other circumstances, but her wolf had just almost taken a bite out of my backside, and I was strongly attached to my butt. Call me crazy.
She shook her head, clearly making some kind of effort to clear her befuddled thoughts. For some reason, the obvious evidence that she wasn’t immune to me and found me attractive made the tips of my ears hot. And for a moment, I had no idea what was happening to me. I was notshy.Not even a little bit.Blushing was not a thing I did, ever.
Clearly this was somehow Dice’s fault.
“I don't know,” Dice said, clearly vexed, pulling her gaze away from my chest and up to my eyes. “One minute, we were leaving my townhouse and I was leaning over him, petting him, and the next, I was outside your townhouse, and he was gone.”
I folded my arms over my chest and leaned against the doorjamb. “And you made a brilliant leap of logic with your Sherlockian deductive skills and decided he'd gone into my house?”
She scowled and pushed past me. “Naut! You in here?”
I smirked. “Who names their wolf Naut?”
She looked back at me from the bottom of the stairs. “You know? Short for astronaut? Going where no wolf has gone before?” She huffed at my blank look. “He's a teleporter. Obviously! Because he just teleported into your townhouse!”
Oh. Yeah, I hadn't made that leap of logic yet. In my defense, it was barely light outside, and I was still exhausted even though I’d slept seven hours.
Naut came down with the pink fluff-ball of doom in his mouth, and I wanted to cheer because I thought he was going to eat him.
“What do you have there?” Dice asked, kneeling down and freeing the doominator from Naut's mouth. “A swix?” Dice said in shock. She whirled on me, her eyes wide with laughter. “Ben gave you aswixto take care of?”
I scowled. Ben and I would be having words. Obviously the brownie was becoming senile in his old age.
“Yes.” I mean, what else could I say? The fact that I had been moments before going to toss him off my second floor balcony to see if he bounced conveniently didn't come up in the conversation.
As if she could read my mind, Dice narrowed her beautiful emerald eyes at me, and I tried really hard not to twitch.
“Why did Naut think it was important to barge in here?” I swear I wanted to unload all of my secrets when she gave me that look. Instead, I did the smart thing and employed my most innocent, guaranteed-to-get-me-out-of-trouble, expression. “I have no clue. I was just getting out of the shower.”
Her gaze raked over me again, almost unwillingly, and I puffed out my chest a little and sucked in my stomach. It didn't really need sucking in—I had a six pack—but still, I wanted to look my best for Dice. She pursed her beautiful red lips, looked at my hands, found them weapon free, and decided to drop it.
She snuggled the doominator to her chest and rubbed it under its pink little chin. Its beady little baby-blue eyes looked at me in triumph before its wheezing purrs filled the room. It was in doominator heaven, and for just a moment I felt offended. Was it because I wasn't a pixie? Was the swix only able to link with pixies and not other races?
I could be cuddly!
I almost smacked myself on the forehead. I didn't want to be cuddly with the doominator. He was evil, obviously.
“I was going to call you anyway,” Dice said, moving around the bottom floor of my townhouse, and eying the décor in each room. I'd kept it pretty simple. My favorite color is blue, so it had lots of grays and blues in the main living room, while the kitchen had been done in stainless steel appliances and a lighter blue. It had warm accents, and the artwork on the walls . . . reminded me of home.
I shook away that thought.
“What do you need, Dice?”
She turned. “I called Ben. One of the girls called me and asked if I’d cover her shift at The Laughing Elf tonight, and I told her I couldn’t, I was already working tonight. It made me realize we both shouldn’t be gone at the same time from the club. Anyway, I called Ben, and he said he has some time for us this morning. He wants to check the animals over and see if we—or they—need anything.”
Yeah, that would probably work better than both of us being gone during our busiest hours at the club. “Alright. Let me get dressed.” I picked the doominator up by his scruff and carried him upstairs with me. Naut was in my bedroom before I even opened the door, and I glared at him. “I do not need help getting dressed.” He growled at me. Somehow he’d known that I was going to toss the swix off the balcony earlier. Obviously there was a magical animal telepathic conversation ability that I was unaware of.
I could hear Dice snickering downstairs, and I scowled in that direction on basic principle. It was suddenly way too crowded at my house. I tossed the fluff-ball on my bed, and crouched down so we met beady eye to elven eye. “I know three hundred and forty-seven ways to make you disappear without a trace,” I said in a silken whisper. “I know you don’t like me. I don’t like you either. But we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future. We need to play nice with each other. Especially around Ben. He’s an animal whisperer savant. He knows all.”
Wait a minute. Ben would see that my swix hated my guts, and that the feeling was mutual, and he would put him in a different home! Why was I trying to fix that?
“New plan. Let’s go back to hating each other.”
