Rock Candy

  For a price.

  I wasn’t into the bad-boy type. But there was no denying he had this...smolder, plus flashing eyes and muscles for miles.

  Bathin was hard to miss, but he was not hard on the eyes.

  I could see why Myra might not want to resist all that.

  But before she made a move, before he made a move, I needed to know more about him.

  What would hold a demon down? Chains? Spells? The Home Shopping Channel played backward to summon a portal into a dimension of unknown horror?

  That was totally a thing. Do not try it at home, kids.

  There had to be a way to find out what his intentions with Myra really were. Lock him in a cell in the middle of the night when Delaney and Myra were off shift? Handcuffs, zip ties, holy trinkets and chains? Oh, yeah. That would do it. I could make him talk.

  Because I was good at that. Good at being everyone’s friend. Good at being the one who was easy to talk to, the one who didn’t ever let the world get to me. I laughed a lot, played a lot, and was never shy about giving my opinion.

  I could be a hardass when I needed to be.

  That was a side of me I didn’t let out very often. A side of me I certainly hadn’t let Hogan see yet.

  Something like fear knotted my stomach, and I checked to see if this was a bad-feeling omen courtesy of my family gift.

  Nope. It didn’t have that edge to it that hit me like a javelin to the brain, then kept on digging until I felt like I was going to toss my cookies.

  This was just regular old dread. Worry over the just-for-fun relationship with Hogan that was starting to feel like something just-a-lot more to me.

  Something deeper. Something honest.

  Being the youngest Reed meant I had two other siblings who were quick to take on any and every responsibility. Though I’d never asked for it, Delaney and Myra had always tried to shelter me from the harsher aspects of life.

  I didn’t want to be sheltered. The only way I’d convinced them of that was not letting them see how much my bad omen ability really affected me. So I smiled. I laughed. I joked. I didn’t show them that I woke up with nightmares so real sometimes, it took me hours to stop shaking. I didn’t tell them that once I knew something bad was going to happen, I carried it in me, the sounds, sights, smells, and touch of it as if it were happening to me, over and over.

  I’d been determined to follow right in Dad’s footsteps despite my family gift. And in my sisters’ footsteps too. I’d become a police officer and, as a Reed, I’d become a guardian of Ordinary and Ordinary’s secrets.

  Somewhere along the way I’d decided it was my job as the youngest to make sure my sisters fell in love and lived happily ever after.

  Even if that meant interrogating a demon behind my sisters’ backs. Even if that meant scheming for years to get Ryder and Delaney to finally look at each other and see what they could be.

  But my love life? That I had always been determined to play easy-breezy.

  Did it matter that Hogan and I were coming up on our six-month anniversary of dating?

  Did I want it to matter? Yes, yes, I did.

  “Ordinary to Officer Reed,” Hatter said. “You are cleared for landing. Copy that?”

  I blinked a couple times to focus. Gnomes all looking up at me with beady eyes. Hatter standing closer than he had been just a...however many minutes ago.

  Still night. Still dark. Still a little drizzly. Still no headless Abner.

  “You at full capacity, Reed, or should I call this in?”

  “I just got a little derailed for a second there.” I so didn’t want him calling my sisters on me.

  “You should install a brake on that brain of yours.”

  “What, and give up all the random scheming? You’d miss it.”

  “All right. Say I would. How about you scheme our way out of the thundergnome that’s about to go down here.”

  I chuckled. “All alive gnomes of Ordinary,” I started in an authoritative tone I’d heard Delaney use since I was six years old and she’d decided she was the boss of me, my stuffed animals, and our cat that, according to her, didn’t like rides in the clothes dryer.

  How did she know what the cat liked? She couldn’t speak cat.

  “You will not forget that, while you are alive, there are rules you must follow to remain in this town. You may not harm any human, creature, or god or else you will be exiled.”

  There was a collective gnomey gasp, and a whispered “gno!” though I couldn’t tell who said it.

  “You are a creation of Ordinary. A gift.”

  Ha! A curse, more like, or spell. But from their perspective, I had to assume they considered life a gift.

  “Outside of this town, you will no longer be alive. You will be stone statues every day and night of the year. So I suggest you choose your new leader peacefully. Understand?”

  They still stood there, staring at me. Oh, right. I had to say the magic words. One of them sort of “meep”ed.

  “Green light.”

  And that’s when the gnomes attacked.

  Okay. Attacked might be a little dramatic. They were small. And shuffley and had flat teeth. But they were also armed with hoes and pick axes and purple apples and a gun, for chrissake.

  For being such little things, they could carry a hell of a punch if they got in punching range.

  When they all closed in as quickly as their little flat-cone legs could take them, they were a force to be reckoned with.

  “Red light,” I commanded.

  Yeah, we were way past that. They just kept shuffling. At least they hadn’t gotten to chanting yet.

  “Whose gnight? Gnomes’s gnight!” A brown-bearded fellow with a wheelbarrow said.

  And yep. Here came the chant.

  “Whose gnight? Gnomes’s gnight! Whose gnight? Gnomes’s gnight!”

  “So I’m gonna go ahead and call for backup,” Hatter said.

  “Naw, we’ll just round them up.”

  He looked down at the pointy hatted mob. “Don’t think I have cuffs that small.”

  “These are gnomes, Hatter. Cuffs don’t work.” I reached into my jacket pocket, and pulled out two thin paper packets. I tossed one to Hatter.

  He caught it, turned it between his fingers. Read the front. “Radish seeds.”

  I ripped the top off of my packet of carrot seeds. “Sprinkle like your life depends on it,” I said with a chuckle.

  Hatter took me at my word. He tore open the packet and sprinkled, casting out far past our shuffling hoard, while I did the same.

  The tiny, and I do mean tiny, radish and carrot seeds tumbled into the damp grass.

  As soon as they hit the ground the gnomes all cheered, “Seeds!”

  And then: “Gno!”

  As if a switch had been flipped, they suddenly started moving more smoothly and efficiently. They worked the wet, grassy soil with whatever tool they might have, or with their bare hands, tending the tiny seeds.

  Hatter stood beside me watching the industrious little crew. Even the gnome with the gun was shooting tiny holes into the dirt, though I wasn’t sure what good that would do.

  “Huh. So this is a thing. You couldn’t have given me a head’s up?”

  “It doesn’t work every time, honestly.” The annoyed look he gave me was awesome.

  “Stop scowling. Most of these garden gnomes are actually garden gnomes. Their first instinct is to garden. They’re going to track down, sort out, and replant every one of these seeds into neat little rows. Mr. and Mrs. Denver might have a nice little veggie garden if the seeds make it through winter. This should keep the gnomes busy until sunrise.”

  “And by then they’ll be stone again.”

  “Not only stone, but by then, they will have forgotten all about this. Very short attention spans. They only remember one day at a time, though they have some kind of long-term memory that allows them to remember they’re only alive in October, and during that time they have to live under the rules
of Ordinary and follow what their leader says.”

  I strolled toward the truck.

  “Now that Abner is gone, they don’t have a leader,” he said.

  “I know.” I got into the truck. Time to cruise the neighborhoods where other gnomes might be wandering. “That’s why we need to find out who killed Abner.”

  Chapter Five

  Delaney rolled into the station before sunrise. I was at my desk, having already written up my reports. Hatter had left about an hour ago to get some sleep.

  Hogan and I had been trading dirty texts since 4:00 am. Owning a bakery made Hogan an early riser. I hadn’t been willing to give up the night shift for a couple reasons. One was that it gave me time to deal with my nightmares if they popped up. Another was that I liked Ordinary at night. Most of the time it was quiet as a cotton ball.

  Every once in a while the nocturnal members of our town would be out and about causing trouble. I loved to see what the vamps, weres, ghouls, and other people got up to at night.

  I’d been known to join in if it was a bit of fun.

  I’d been known to tell them to knock it off, if it was illegal, too.

  This morning I’d been trying to talk Hogan into bringing me donuts. It was the middle of the morning rush and he couldn’t get away since it was only him and Billy manning the place now that all the barely legal high school labor had gone back to school.

  “Morning.” Delaney hung up her coat and headed straight for the coffee pot. “Anything I should know?”

  “Headless Abner is missing. Dead or disposed of. The gnomes in Mr. and Mrs. Denver’s yard tried to riot, and the Higgins’s cow got out, ate a box of apples, and got stuck in their neighbor’s pool.”

  She glanced at me.

  “Empty pool.”

  She nodded. “So, just a normal night.”

  I threw the pencil I had been drumming on the desk edge at her. It missed because she knew how to dodge.

  “The gnomes have no leader. It’s a problem. No, wait, I got this.” I spread my hands like I was envisioning a marquee in lights. “Missing Headless Abner Leaves Gnomes Head Less.”

  “Boo.”

  “You like it.”

  “Maybe it’s time for the gnomes to get a new leader. You’ll need to gather them up and walk them through the process.”

  “Right. Sure. Happy to. Except I don’t know what the process is because there is no process.”

  She grinned at me and took a sip of coffee. “Like that’s going to stop you.”

  I groaned and let my head fall back between my shoulders, eyes locked on the ceiling. “Why? Why me? Myra would be better at this. You would be better at this. I’m the worst choice for this job.”

  “Oh?”

  I held up my hands and ticked off points on my fingers even though I didn’t look away from the ceiling. “I’m impatient. Impulsive. Easily distracted. Blunt. Not the kind of person you want to guide a tiny terra cotta culture through a big political adjustment.”

  “You forgot something,” she said gently.

  I tipped my head down and met her sparkling gaze. She pointed at her own finger. “Dramatic.”

  “You suck and I don’t like you anymore.”

  She laughed and leaned against my desk. “I’ll let Myra know you need some suggestions on how to get a new leader in place. You’ll need to get it done soon.”

  I covered my eyes, imagining the horrors of Halloween rolling out with a bunch of murderous gnomes roaming the streets.

  “We could round them up. Lock them up, just for the month. It’s not like they would remember what was happening from one day to the next.” I knew, as soon as it was out of my mouth, that it was a bad idea. We didn’t lock up a person, creature, or god simply because they were an inconvenience. There were laws in Ordinary. Rules.

  And we Reeds followed them.

  “What’s going on?” Delaney asked. I was glad she didn’t call me out on the gnome incarceration idea. But I wasn’t sure where this was headed.

  “With?”

  “You. This.” She waved her finger at me, sort of taking in my slouch, my messy desk, my pile of tiny ripped up pieces of paper standing like a mountain, a snowstorm, an avalanche between my Snape and Dr. Orpheus dolls.

  “Nothing’s going on.” She’d buy that, right? Because it wasn’t like I was feeling the dread, the horrible something-is-going-wrong-really-soon thing.

  As a matter of fact, it was sort of the lack of that feeling that was making me itchy.

  Hogan and I had been dating for months. Months. I couldn’t remember the time I’d dated a boy for more than a few weeks. By Halloween, Hogan and I would have been dating for half a year. That was not like me. I was the fun one, the young one, the sister who wasn’t looking for a full-time mister.

  And yet Hogan had shown up in my life (okay, I’d totally hit on him until he sent me fancy donuts to get me off his back) and he just hadn’t...left.

  That’s not how things worked for me. All my past boyfriends, and yeah, that one girl I’d messed around with in middle school, had left as soon as the fun ran out, as soon as the laughs ran out.

  I did not blame them. Who wanted to date a doomsayer?

  No one.

  No one wanted to be a doomsayer either. But I didn’t get a choice in that.

  Delaney snapped her fingers in my face. “Testing, testing. Do you copy, Rubber Duck?”

  “Annoying.” I pushed her hand away, but smiled. She was funny. Sometimes.

  “Talk.” Delaney rolled a chair over and sat. I watched to see if any of her injuries were bothering her today. She wasn’t favoring her side at all, which was good. It still made me furious that she’d been shot.

  This was a small town. We didn’t solve our problems with guns, no matter what the big city folk would like to believe.

  Okay. We didn’t do it very often.

  “I don’t want to be on gnome duty.”

  “Liar. Next.”

  “There is no next.”

  “Jean.”

  “Delaney.”

  She just stared at me with those big sister eyes.

  I blew out a breath. “Fine. It’s almost been six months since I’ve been seeing Hogan.”

  “And?” she asked when I didn’t say anything else.

  “Six months is a long time.”

  She sighed. “I thought that’s what you wanted? A long-term relationship? Something more than just friends? Or are you getting bored with him?”

  My phone chimed with a message from Hogan.

  SexyMuffin: All out of frosting. Rolled through a metric ton of pumpkin-spice cinnamon buns in a half hour flat. Who’s a baking god? Worship at the altar, baby.

  I grinned, then texted back quick.

  Hotcop: No! You didn’t save one for me? *crack goes my heart* You’re a terrible god.

  SexyMuffin: If only I’d saved some frosting, I’d patch that heart right up for you.

  Hotcop: Ha! Gonna take more than frosting to fix this, buddy.

  SexyMuffin: Name it. Anything. (Except frosting, natch)

  Hotcop: How are those mint brownies holding up?

  SexyMuffin: Six left.

  Hotcop: What? What kind of god can’t sell a plate of brownies?

  SexyMuffin: Who said they’re for sale? Boxed ‘em up for you, baby. *god mode: winning*

  Hotcop: God-smod. I don’t see them in my mouth.

  SexyMuffin: Three…two…

  I tipped my head, wondering what he was up to.

  “…one.”

  I knew that voice, and couldn’t stop the squeal of delight that shot out of my mouth. “SexyMuffin!”

  “Hey there, Hotcop.”

  Delaney groaned like she had just had enough of us already.

  “How’s your morning going, Officer Reed?” Hogan strolled into the station like he owned the air, the ground, and every single one of my heartbeats that inexplicably synched up to the rhythm of his steps.

  He was built lean,
with wide muscular shoulders, tight, flat stomach, and a bubble ass I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. His skin was darker than mine, inherited from his Jamaican mother, his hair long black braids that he kept tied at the base of his neck.

  That face I couldn’t get enough of was angled, but softened around all the edges so it always seemed like he was about to break into a smile, his eyes a startling blue he’d gotten from the dad he never talked about.

  The man was summer and sunshine and happiness. And love. Anyone could see that from a mile away. Anyone would be amazed to be around him, to be with him.

  Just like I was amazed. Happy. Giddy, even.

  Except...except when I thought about how long we’d been together. And that if he and I revealed all our secrets of who we really were to each other, maybe we’d both give up on this.

  “Hey,” he said, stopping on the lobby side of the counter like everyone in Ordinary should. Like he should, even though I hadn’t thought of him as just another person who lived in town for months now. “Did someone here say they couldn’t wait to get my brownies in their mouth?”

  Delaney snorted, but didn’t move away from my desk. She was watching Hogan, probably using her cop eyes to take in his body language: relaxed, his voice: sexy, his eyes: happy. Happy to see me. Not a mask, not a flicker of fear or lies.

  I held back a sigh.

  I sucked at this relationship thing. Which was weird, right? Because I could tell Delaney what she needed to do to make her relationship with Ryder work. I could tell Myra to stop not-flirting (totally flirting) with Bathin. Because, c’mon: demon.

  I could poke at Hatter when he used those cheesy pick-up lines in the bar that worked for him, but only because he laid on the fake Southern accent so thick and followed it up with those puppy dog eyes.

  I could even give out advice in all my gaming groups, both online and in person.

  I was good at this. Good at helping people be their best selves, their honest selves so they could be with someone else. Build a best togetherness.

  Like, if cupid was a job and not an actual person (who currently wasn’t living in Ordinary) I’d so be shooting heart arrows at anyone who so much as made eye contact with me.

  But when it came to my heart, my own honest self, I wanted to duck and cover big time.