After another solid two minutes hemming and hawing, Lorcan finally slumped in defeat.

  “Sweetling,” he said, in the most high-pitched, cartoony voice I’d ever heard in my life. It sounded like he’d inhaled helium.

  “Your voice!” I called out, shocked.

  He nodded. “This ridiculous voice just started today. I assume it’s the tail end of the curse? I’m not certain. All I do know is that it’s a little embarrassing. And I can’t actually… well, I can’t tell you what the curse is… or… you will be cursed by it, as well. Suffice to say, I was afraid of being too close to you, lest you end up cursed such as I am. Thus, I have been keeping my distance as I tried to work out a way to break it.”

  I wanted to blame it on the stress I was under. I wanted to say it was the relief of days of running around trying to keep people alive that did it, that it was just catharsis. But I would have been lying, because that was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in more than a century of life.

  I laughed. I laughed hard. So much so that I was a wheezing, teary mess, forced to clutch at my own ribs to try and stop them from hurting by the time I managed to rein it in. And even then, a few little giggles managed to slip out.

  It didn’t help that Lorcan was pouting when I straightened up, his lower lip a little jutting cliff of petulance.

  I slapped his shoulder lightly. “Why didn’t you just tell me? Yes, I understand, your manly ego is grievously wounded by that ridiculous voice. But really? Lorcan, you’ve been dodging me for days over a curse? Why wouldn’t you have just asked me to take the watch off?”

  His shoulders slumped again, and, instead of answering, he gave a sharp, and very shrill, whistle.

  To my shock, Hellcat came stalking out of the living room. His tail was already puffed up and lashing irritably when he sat to face us.

  “Well? Have you finally confessed, you great lummox?” Hellcat’s voice came out about a dozen octaves higher than normal, like a squeaky toy was trying to speak. His voice was just as ridiculous as Lorcan’s, which was when I realized the curse had attached itself to Hellcat as well.

  I couldn’t stop myself, I doubled over laughing again.

  “Stop that at once!” he said in his helium voice. “You vile harridan! Irreverent slattern! This is no time for levity!”

  I felt like I was being scolded by a deflating balloon, and I had to sit down right there in the hallway when my legs gave out on me.

  Hellcat arched his back and spat, and it sounded like a kitten. “If you’re done braying like a simple-minded donkey, perhaps you could try doing something worthwhile and removing the corpse’s curse.” And then he paused. “Which is now also my curse.”

  I wiped my eyes, careful of my makeup. “How did you get hit with it?”

  Hellcat glared for a long moment before deigning to answer. “You addle-brained paramour wanted to avoid confessing his shame to you, so he came to me for advice. As it seems, directly confessing the curse to another passes it to the other party. He didn’t want to risk spreading it to you for some foolish reason, so we were attempting to find a way to rid ourselves of it. A ridiculous endeavor, and I told him as much. I was left to lament in indignity, and for no reason at all!”

  “Yes, yes, no one has suffered quite like you, Hellcat.” I turned a smile on the sheepish Lorcan. “Silly man. Come here.”

  I took my time, picking the curse free. It wasn’t difficult, especially after the mess of the Tsuchigumo, but there was no need to rush. And listening to Hellcat mutter threats in his little Muppet voice was more joy than I ever thought I’d know in a single lifetime.

  Through a series of increasingly ridiculous hand gestures, Lorcan managed to convey that once it was on and the curse active, he couldn’t get the watch off by himself. He’d gone to Hellcat, and that hadn’t worked out well. I just shook my head at him and pressed a kiss to his chin.

  Such a stupid man.

  “It does seem a bit of a shame,” I said as I teased another thorny bit of curse up. “It’s a nice watch, and it doesn’t seem quite fair that both of our souvenirs from our trip ended up turning out to be duds.”

  Lorcan arched a brow, sending an unimpressed glance towards his watch.

  “Exactly.” I nodded. “Two cursed items? That’s pretty obvious culpability. What kind of business are they running? Zero stars, would not recommend to friends.”

  I managed to tease up the last bit of the curse, and swiftly unbuckled the watch to remove it. There was a little pop in the air, like the pressure had changed.

  “Finally,” Hellcat muttered in his own voice, and then turned tail and disappeared through the doorway. The little ingrate.

  Lorcan pulled me into a kiss. “Beautiful. Brilliant. Magnificent. Thank you, sweetling.”

  I smiled into the kisses, letting Lorcan’s real voice shiver through me. I’d missed it. I’d missed him. And I was also deeply resentful of the people who had made it so that I hadn’t seen my husband in far too many days.

  “Why didn’t you just come to me in the first place?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I wanted to solve something myself for once.”

  I arched a brow at him. “And look where that got you.” A little evil thought then occurred to me. “You know, Lorcan. I wondered if you might like to do another little trip? Since the first one feels a bit spoiled in my mind.” I slipped my arms around his neck, my fingers twining through the strands of blond hair just brushing the back of his collar. “And maybe we could stop by the auction house again. Convey our displeasure with our experience… in person.”

  Lorcan pulled back, a slow smile spreading across his face, until the tips of his fangs peeked out. “Oh, I whole heartedly agree, Sweetling. What did your devious, brilliant mind come up with?” I smiled, my most witchy smile, and Lorcan groaned, running his hands up and down my back. “The things you do to me, woman.”

  I let him pull me into his arms, and I went up onto my tip toes to meet his kiss eagerly. It really had been far, far too long.

  ***

  If the following weekend found us heading back to Seattle for a make-up vacation, well, there was nothing suspicious about that.

  The fact that the backseat was full and yet not full of a bunch of ghostly passengers was a complete coincidence. So, maybe I’d dropped by the ghost hotel at the edge of town after visiting with Darla and getting a list of names of ghosts that were more physically capable, mischievous, and who liked both messing with technology or jump scaring the living, well, I was sure that was just a coincidence too.

  It hadn’t taken much to convince a bunch of bored ghosts to go on an extended vacation. The chance to go to a completely different city didn’t come about that often in the afterlife, apparently.

  My purse twitched and grumbled, and I laid a hand over my bag to quiet it, smiling wide.

  Darla had put in word to Henner, and he’d managed to dig up something called a Gremlin, and apparently, they liked to cause all kinds of trouble. Unscrewing caps, opening drawers, unlocking things, and unscrewing furniture.

  Lorcan reached over and took my hand, and I gave his fingers a squeeze.

  The next auction was promising to be even more exciting than the last one.

  The End

  Return to Haven Hollow in:

  Blood & Ice

  Haven Hollow #41

  (Princess Procedural)

  by J.R. Rain & H.P. Mallory!

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  Don’t miss the release of the first book in the all new MISTY HOLLOW series!

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  Misty Hollow #1

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  Return to the Table of Contents

  Also available:

  The Good Daughter

  Dragon’s Birthright #1

  by J.R. Rain

  and H.P. Mallory

  (read on for a sample)

  Chapter One

  The Wilderness

  I woke when I rolled over onto a rock.

  It seemed there was no way the rock was there the night before when I went to sleep or surely I would have noticed it. I mean—why would I go to sleep on a rock? Which left three options: either some mischievous animal was screwing with me, or perhaps rocks led a secret nocturnal existence I knew nothing about, or I simply remained the punching bag of the gods.

  Option three seemed most likely. Recently it felt as if my life was a catalogue of ‘if it can go wrong, it will go wrong’ and it was so much more satisfying to be able to blame the gods rather than fate or simple bad luck.

  Sitting up, feeling various joints click in a way that a twenty-one-year-old’s really shouldn’t, I looked for the man who had slept beside me, out here in the wilderness under the stars.

  “Uther…?”

  He was gone.

  “Uther!?”

  The thick, rough grass was still pressed flat to show where he’d slept but there was no sign of the man himself.

  I sprang to my feet, as quickly as I was able, other bits of my body complaining bitterly, and scanned the endless skyline. The wilderness was vast, and it rose and fell in ways that were topographically interesting but very unhelpful if you were trying to find a man who had wandered off.

  “Uther!”

  No response. I rushed towards the apex of the mound in the lee of which we’d slumbered, still yelling, now in desperation.

  “FATHER!”

  But that was probably futile; he’d ceased to respond to that name a while ago.

  From the top of the mound, I got a somewhat better view, and I cast about desperately. At first, he seemed to have been swallowed up into the constant movement of the waving grasslands, but then I caught a flash of color amongst the dull greens, greys, and yellows.

  “Fath… Uther?!”

  I ran towards him, calling his name, and as I got closer, I saw him look around mildly, as if hearing me for the first time and wondering what all the shouting was about. He put a thin finger to his lips, and I skidded to a halt.

  “Look…” The old man who I used to call ‘father’ pointed at a butterfly.

  As he pointed, the insect took to the air and, with a cry of childlike delight, my father chased after it, laughing and clapping his hands.

  “Wonderful! Wonderful!”

  The sight had a sweetness and innocence about it, yet also a horror that nearly broke my heart. I steeled myself against the tears that threatened; I had to be strong. For him.

  “Uther…” I laid a hand on his shoulder and he turned to me.

  The beatific smile faded to a frown of confusion as he looked at me. “I know you. Don’t I?”

  My heart started thumping in my ears. “Yes. Yes, you do. It’s me—Selena. Your…”

  I paused. Several times over the past week I’d tried to explain to him that I was his daughter, that he was my father, but he always became upset or even angry, beating me with his weak fists, screaming at me, calling me a liar and dissolving into floods of tears insisting ‘I have no daughter!’ In fact, he had three daughters, but perhaps I couldn’t blame him for blocking all of us out.

  “I’m Selena,” I finished.

  “Selena,” he tried out the word. “Yes. I know you. You saved me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Selena. I’ll remember you. My name is Uther.”

  “I… I know. I know.”

  We went through something similar every morning as his disordered mind put itself back together enough to at least recall the previous few days. But his past beyond that remained a tangle that he couldn’t unravel.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” I suggested. Our supplies were getting low—we’d have to pick something up the next time we were near a town, and that would come with problems of its own.

  Uther nodded. “That would be lovely.”

  Yes, I’d started thinking of him as ‘Uther’ rather than ‘father’. Frankly, it made things easier because this vague, troubled creature in front of me was not the father I remembered. That father had been far from perfect, but he was still mine, and to see him reduced to this low state tore at my heart. So, I buried it and told myself this wasn’t my father, just a stranger named Uther.

  Breakfast was in fact a long way from lovely because my rations were running low and I didn’t feel like I could leave ‘Uther’ alone so I could go off to do some proper hunting or foraging. There was a real danger of him wandering off or, worse still, talking to strangers. I was sure there were plenty of good people living out here, eking out what meager living they could in the wilderness, but right now, everyone who saw us was a potential enemy, if only because of who they might tell.

  Uther didn’t seem to mind a breakfast that was more half-hearted than hearty. I wondered if he tasted it at all, or if in his mind he was eating sides of bacon or thick, rich porridge with honey. It was so hard to tell what was going on behind the vacant stare.

  “Horses…”

  Though he sometimes seemed immeasurably distant, Uther was right there, it was just that his ‘right there’ was not in the same place as the rest of us. Even so, he heard the approaching hooves before I did and I cursed myself for not paying proper attention.

  “Come on.” I grabbed Uther’s arm and dragged him to where a hollow in the side of a hummock created a natural hiding place.

  “But… Horses…” Uther protested, pointing back. He wanted to see the horses. He’d always liked horses as a boy. I remembered him teaching me to ride, so proud when I wasn’t scared of the horses that seemed so huge to me. I remembered how jealous my sisters had been.

  “You need to be quiet.” I pressed a finger to his lips. “It’s a game. Understand?”

  His eyes lit up at the word ‘game’ and he clamped both hands over his mouth.

  Leaving him, I crawled through the long grass to peer around the edge of the hummock across the broad, uneven landscape of the wilderness.

  At first, I saw no one—that was the problem with the wilderness; it was good for hiding but that cut both ways. Then, from behind one of the more prominent hillocks, a quintet of horsemen road into view. Even at this distance, I could tell they were soldiers, and the bright, armorial colors they wore identified them as coming from Gaunt. Not that their origin mattered that much right now; Gaunt, Latran, or even Wincham, soldiers of any stripe equaled bad news for us.

  The horses stopped as their riders, armed with pikes, stood up in their stirrups to survey the landscape. I ducked back down, my head nestled against something prickly that I hoped was vegetable rather than animal, as vegetables won’t bite you.

  When I dared to look back up again, the horses were already trotting away. I wondered which way they were heading. By night I could get my bearings by the stars and by day the sun was a useful, if limited, guide, but knowing what rough direction we were heading was not the same as knowing where we were going. Though I’d grown up in Wincham, I hadn’t lived here for five years and even when I had, I hadn’t immersed myself in the wilderness much.

  Now, it all looked the same. To those who lived here, its rough contours were like signposts and they could navigate the wastes like a salmon finding its way home. But to me, no—it all looked alike. I knew there were towns and villages out there—some surprisingly large—but I had no idea where, so the best I could do was chart a course for the mountains and hope we arrived before we ran out of food.

  The mountains represented safety.

  Actually, that was absurdly optimistic; the mountains truly represented not so much safety, but less danger, and that would have to do for now.

  “Did we win?” hissed Uther with childlike excitement.

  “Win?”

  “The game. With the horses. Did we win?”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, we won.”

  My father beamed, happy even if he didn’t understand why, or perhaps because he didn’t understand why. It was horrible to see my father, who in his youth had been thought the quickest mind in the kingdom and even as he grew older had remained sharp, reduced to this. On the other hand, he did at least seem happy, and I wasn’t sure when I’d last seen that. Not for five years, of course, but not for some time before that either, not really happy anyway.

  We struck out through the wilderness, always keeping the mountains ahead of us, which was a nice big target to aim for but I wanted to head specifically for Greville’s Pass, and at this distance, I couldn’t be sure if we were going the right way. It could mean a long detour if I got my bearings wrong. Complicating matters still further was the topography of the wilderness; it was impossible to go in a straight line. We kept getting side-tracked while wandering around the steeper humps, and those we climbed always seemed to descend at a different angle, throwing us off course.

  And of course there was Uther himself, easily distracted by wild dogs or a soaring buzzard. After lunch (another meager affair) I turned my back a moment to pack things up and when I turned back, he was off gathering wild flowers by the armful.

  “For you,” he said, smiling as he handed me the bundle.

  I hid my tears. It was a nice gesture, but he didn’t know who he was giving the flowers to. To him, I was just some woman called Selena, nothing more. Still, it was a nice gesture. In fact, it was a lot nicer than many of the things he’d said and done when he still knew who I was. We hadn’t spoken at all for the last five years, and that parting had been… well, neither of us had come out of it well.

  As the sun declined in the sky, I saw a small town nestled into the landscape as if the hills had been built around it rather than vice versa.