11. Have I ever told you I love it when you’re being sneaky? #3
Shit. “Guess no need to look at com-pu-ter then. Who is she?”
“She’s one of Audrey’s friends, the daughter of a New York senator. Her name is Kendra. A nice enough woman, tends to prefer a vanilla way of life, but she was always pretty open about practitioners, general magic usage, and even pixie dust usage, so she’s not precisely like your asshole parents.”
“How long Kendra missing?”
“I wasn’t aware she was missing. She doesn’t live in Manhattan, and while she was a friend of Audrey’s, I didn’t see her often. Please be careful with her. She’s nice enough—and her father is actually a pretty decent man for a politician.”
“You get praise from politicians for this,” I warned. “You dislike praise from politicians.”
“Hey, you actually said that without having to sound it out carefully. Good job, my beautiful. See? You’re already getting better with English with practice.”
“You bad in-flu-ence.”
“Bad?”
“Very bad,” I replied in my most solemn tone. “Naughty, even.”
While my husband chuckled and rewarded me with a nip on the shoulder, I took care of checking Kendra’s clothes for anything important and flammable, discovering a pouch tied around her wrist. “Find thing!” Careful not to gouge her with my teeth, I gnawed through the leather and dragged off my prize, clawing through the string until I could peek inside.
The smell informed me I dealt with gorgon dust. “Rude! Dust. No gorgon-incubus doohickey ex-posed.” I picked the pouch up in my teeth, went to a deeper patch of snow, and set the pouch down.
“Both make big flame on it. Big flame make it go away. Big snort. Extra big snort. Actually, me make biggest flame. You watch, admire my biggest flame.”
My husband joined me, pawing at the snow-covered ground with a clawed hoof. “Use that column of fire you eliminated that gorgon with,” he suggested.
“Must run fast and get hot to do extra big fire. That is biggest flame? May-be.”
“I will make sure the pouch doesn’t escape while you go run.”
I tore off and did several circuits of the garden before skidding to a halt near my husband and blowing as much flame as possible at the pouch.
Blue fire burst from my nose and engulfed the pouch, which vanished in a flash of white before the blue overtook it and eradicated the pouch and reduced its contents to a fine powder.
“Pow-der!” I pranced in place and snorted more blue flame. “All gone, now ash.”
“I’ll shift and bring Sunny to see if she can detect any dust,” my husband said before trotting off in the direction of the SUV.
I snorted more flame at the smear in the smoking ground. “Dust no like blue flame!”
“Better safe than sorry,” my husband retorted.
I pawed at the ground before eyeing Kendra’s statue. “You make shit choice in friend. Audrey no good. Me introduce you to nice people, you do better next time. Me better friend than Audrey.”
The statue didn’t reply, and already bored waiting for Quinn to return, I rolled on the ground and kicked my hooves. When that didn’t help alleviate my boredom, I played in the snow to learn if cindercorns could build snowmen.
To my dismay, hooves did not work well for packing snow into vaguely ball-shaped objects, although I could make ice statues using little snorts of fire on the piles of snow I made and carving it with my claws.
By the time my husband returned, in his human form, I’d crafted a small ice sculpture of a cindercorn.
Well, if I tilted my head to the side and squinted, my artwork almost resembled a unicorn of some sort.
“What are you doing?” my husband asked, keeping a firm hold on Sunny’s leash.
“Bored, bored, bored,” I complained, shoving more snow into a pile so I could try to carve another ice sculpture. I snorted little flame, waiting for it to partially melt and freeze over before layering on more snow. “Sunny no bark!”
My puppy sat and regarded me with one ear flicked forward.
Damn. Even my puppy recognized I was more than a little crazy.
“That’s a good thing. Apparently, pregnant cindercorns are rivals of phoenixes for heat and flame generation. I’m not going to allow them to study this, for the record.”
“Left no dust for them to study.” I snorted, checking to make sure my flames no longer glowed blue before resuming my work checking the statutes.
I discovered no more pouches, and I took care to be gentle with burning away the clothes covering them.
“No be per-vert. Go to car and not look at pretty women not me. Cuddle pets. Make CDC bring me pink pow-der.”
“I think everything will be okay. Come on, Sunny, before Bailey gets jealous enough she bites chunks out of me. I’ll see if I can get an identification on any of the other victims and look into Kendra’s case, assuming there is one.”
“Good luck. Enjoy in-ter-ro-gay-shun later. Ex-wife stupid.”
“That she was. Be careful. If you want to roll around in any other snowbanks, do so near the SUV, please.”
“I check statues, do more flame to make sure extra safe. You stay out of dust, Queeny!”
“I’ll be careful,” he promised.