Page 32 of Eye on the Ball

We were almost at my house when I realized Jack had said “our place.” A wave of warmth slid through me, and I smiled. It really had become our place, even though Jack, for the first time in his life, owned a house of his own.

Rose laughed. “Ah, I can feel the love in this car. Jack, you are truly caught, aren’t you?”

“Definitely.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry. This pregnancy has made me so sensitive to people’s emotions that when Tess just thought of something that made her aura light up, I felt it strongly.”

“Awww,” I said, blushing, and then tried to change the subject. “How did you two meet?”

She burst out laughing. “We had a basilisk infestation, and P-Ops sent Alejandro and his partner. My true love, there, came loaded with weapons that could have stopped an invasion by an army of angry giants.”

I was confused. “For basilisks? Aren’t they basically just angry lizard-chickens?”

“Yes,” Jack said, chuckling.

Alejandro sighed. “In my defense, I was the new guy in my P-Ops division then, just out of the training academy at Quantico. It was ‘haze the new agent’ day, evidently. My coworkers put stuffed chickens on my desk for weeks afterwards.”

P-Ops was acronym-speak for the Paranormal Operations department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, opened when supernaturals came out of the coffin.

“For weeks? That’s a lot of taxidermy,” I said, marveling. I’d only seen two or three stuffed chickens in all my years at Dead End Pawn.

Now Alejandro was laughing. “No, Tess. Stuffed like children’s toys. Not like your alligator.”

He’d been in my shop before, on more than one occasion.

“By the way, Rose, what was that with Nigel? I’ve never seen him act like that.”

“Ogres and garden witches have always been in harmony,” she told me. “We both respect and love nature in the same way. I’ve only met a few in my life, though. He was so sweet, wasn’t he?”

When we got to my house, I showed Rose the bathroom first, because pregnant women and bathrooms were a no-brainer. Then Alejandro got her settled on the couch with her feet up, and I rustled up pie and ice cream for everyone, coffee for those who wanted it, and a giant glass of milk for Rose.

“You are a wonderful woman, Tess. I can tell we’re going to be great friends.” She sighed and dug into her slice of apple pie.

“I’m glad.” I placed the pie dish on the trunk I used as a coffee table, near enough that she could easily get to the last slice in the dish if she wanted it.

Jack, maybe not understanding the nutritional needs and cravings of a hungry pregnant woman, finished his pie and reached for the pie dish.

That’s when the armchair he was sitting in flew up into the air, taking him with it, and headed for the front door.

14

Jack

I’m pretty good at remaining calm under the most unexpected and even dangerous circumstances, but a flying chair was a new one. I jumped down, yanked the flying furniture to a halt, and wrestled it to the floor.

“Rose? You could have just said you wanted the last piece,” I said as mildly as I could manage while fighting an overstuffed inanimate object.

Rose’s face turned bright red, and she clapped a hand to her mouth. The chair stopped moving, and I gingerly put it back where it had been. Tess, unhelpfully, was laughing so hard she was bent over the back of the couch where she’d been standing. Alejandro, who’d probably been through more than his fair share of this kind of thing over the past nine months, sat hunched over on the couch next to his wife. He groaned and put his head in his hands.

“I’m so sorry, Jack! It’s the babies. They are fierce about food,” Rose said.

“Thebabiestried to launch me and my chair out the door,” I said dryly. “That’s what you’re going with?”

“That’s her story, and she’s stick … stick … sticking to it,” Tess gasped out between peals of laughter. “Jack. What were you thinking? You should know better than to get between an expectant mother and her food, let alone a powerful witch. Oh! The look on your face!”

Rose sighed and slumped back. But not, I noticed, before waving a hand and levitating the pie plate into her hand. “Babies like pie, too,” she muttered.

“I have more pie,” Tess said, finally straightening and catching her breath. But before she could move, Rose reached back over her shoulder and patted Tess’s hand.