The dance floor at the prom erupted in screams and running as Jimmy staggered around with his hand pressed to his neck. Hannah, the girl who had just bitten the bejesus out of him, was still standing where she’d been when the incident had occurred, with bright crimson blood running down her chin.
She had bit the hell out of that poor guy.
I got up out of my seat, flying over the crowd, and landed in front of her. “What the hell are you?” I demanded. She was still smiling, but rather than just the two fangs I’d seen earlier, she had a whole mouth full of razor sharp teeth. They were long and pointy and there seemed to be more than one row of them. If Jaws the shark could fit in a ballgown, this is what his mouth would look like.
Hannah did not answer me, but slowly, she began to change f
Prom night had not gone as expected. Just as the night of the homecoming dance had not gone as planned. Thankfully, this was the last dance we would have in high school, so maybe there would be less opportunities for craziness to ensue.Somehow, I doubted that, though. Craziness seemed to follow me wherever I went.After the wood nymph/vampire girl attacked Jimmy, and I made sure that he was fine, we got the blood cleaned up off of the floor, and debated what to do next.The chaperones had all scattered when the kids did, so there wasn’t anyone left in the gym other than my pack and a few of Jimmy’s friends who hadn’t run off and abandoned him. I was exhausted so I went over to the table where we had been sitting earlier and collapsed in one of the chairs.
It was quiet in the limo on the way home. None of us knew what to say about anything that had happened that night. I had blood on my clothes. Ben did, too, but he didn’t ride back with us. He’d shifted as soon as he got off school property, and Joshua brought his suit home.We had six weeks of school left. Graduation was coming up. I’d already applied at my online school of choice and been accepted. But I couldn’t help thinking about how this wood nymph business had the possibility of interrupting all of that.I was planning on going to Europe over the summer, too, to try to win back my ancestral homes. I just didn’t know how I’d have time to do that if I had to keep fighting monsters in my back yard.My thoughts just kept returning to how in the world did we get rid o
Sam never backs down from a challenge. I’d asked him to show me that he loved me, so that’s exactly what he did. He scooped me up off of the couch and carried me up the two flights of stairs from the movie room in the basement to my bedroom. Once we were in my room with the door closed, he laid me down on the bed and kissed me in a way that made my toes curl. I began to peel his suit off of him, pulling his jacket off first and then losing his tie. I broke away from his mouth long enough to take his tie off of him, and then his mouth was on mine again, our tongues tangled together. My fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt as his hand slipped beneath my shirt. I managed to get his buttons undone and tugged his shirt out of his pants as his mouth went to my neck. I traced the defined muscles of his pecs down to his abdomen as he pulled my shirt off over
The next morning, I woke up with Sam’s arm still around me. That was a rarity. Most of the time, whenever I fell asleep with Sam, he’d be gone by the time I woke up. The fact that he’d stayed with me all night spoke to me almost as much as the fact that he’d carried me up to my bed and made love to me when I’d asked him to show me that he loved me.I rolled over and met his gaze. “Good morning,” he said, brushing my hair off of my forehead. “How did you sleep?”“Good,” I told him, smiling up at him. “Did you sleep?”He nodded. “A little bit. Mostly, I watched you sleep.”That might’ve sounded creepy coming from anyone else, but it made me smile at him. I leaned up and kissed h
“Hi, Jimmy,” I said, keeping my distance from him. “How are you feeling?”“Better now that you’re here,” he said with a broad smile. “It’s time to go home.”“Yep,” I said. “I heard you the first time. And where, exactly, is that, Jimmy? Where’s this home you keep speaking of?”“You know.” His eyes focused somewhere across the room, a vague expression on his face. “Where the rainbows live.”He had to be talking about that other realm, the one I’d dreamt about, the one that Melanie had been temporarily sucked into by Harold. “That’s not your home, Jimmy. You are already home. This is your home,” I told him.
I got up off of the bed and pulled Jimmy along with me as the essence that I’d just distracted from his body went into the portal opening. Jimmy was limp, so I had to use my magic to move him. “Guys, I could use a hand,” I said, hoping Sam and Ben were listening closely enough that they’d come bursting in through the door even without me calling loudly for them. I didn’t want to alert Harold, or whatever the hell was about to come out of that hole.It was him all right. He was in his regular form, the giant green monster that was so revolting to me. He was even slobbering this time as he entered Jimmy’s bedroom. The piece of him that he’d left behind must’ve gotten sucked right back into him because I didn’t see it anywhere, and he was certainly at full strength.“What do you want us to do?” Ben
“Francis!” I repeated, disgusted that that stupid mage had lied to me yet again. “I should’ve guessed.”Harold Woodpecker was a mage, not a wood nymph. Francis had done something to him, though, either cast a spell or put a curse on him, assuming those existed, and now he was something different than the rest of us mages. At least, he had been. Now that I’d transformed him back into his human form, perhaps he could recover and become a regular mage again.The color was coming back into his face, and he wasn’t breathing so heavily anymore. I waited a few minutes before I asked him anything else. I needed to know, though, exactly what had happened, so that I could deal with Francis. She really was becoming a pain in my ass.Once Harold was sitting up, looki
“No, I don’t want to be next,” I told Harold as he continued to use his powers on Francis Flamingo, keeping her from moving or getting out of his grip. “I also don’t want to have to hurt you, Harold. I just saved you, for crying out loud. But I can’t let you kill Francis. She’s my friend’s mom.”“I don’t care who she is to you!” Harold snarled. “She ruined my life! She locked me up for years. She deserves to die!”“Why don’t you do the same thing to her that she did to you?” I asked him. “Can’t you send her into the other realm, the way she did you? You said you were going to seal them up, right?”I could tell that he was considering doing what I’d suggested, that the wheels in his head were