accidental 11 - accidentally ever after (5 page)

“Again, I ask, why me? What in my aura says I can’t be a fairy godmother, too?”

Brenda’s shoulders, covered in poofy material, collapsed. “Because your aura’s plain miserable, Red. Getting to the castle is the key to your happiness. Ya gotta trust ol’ Brenda on this. You need a happily-ever-after like a good southern girl needs her pearls and pumps.”

Perfect. She was so pathetic, so pitiable, even some shoes thought she needed a happily-ever-after.

Speaking of sisters and shoes, Toni gathered the courage to ask the question she dreaded the most as she finally looked to her left at the woman who lie in a lump under a snow-topped bush with red berries. Her body was tucked into a loose ball, the red and gold skirt of her ball gown flowing behind her.

Horror and shame washed over her that she’d waited this long into her conversation with Brenda before she’d asked after her sister.

“I’m sorry about your mediocre sister. Or whatever her name is. I would never hurt someone. Did I…kill her?” She gulped, holding her breath and crossing her fingers.

Brenda reached out a perfectly manicured hand and tweaked the tip of Toni’s nose. “Don’t be silly, Punkin’. She’s just passed out cold. I’ll give her some hair of the troll and she’ll be fresh as a little ol’ daisy in the time it takes you to say goober, and then she’s hittin’ fairy godmother rehab. On that you can count.”

Toni inhaled a shuddering breath.
Thank God
. “Okay, so let’s address this happily-ever-after then. I don’t care what my aura says, I’m good, really. I’m about as happy as I’ve ever been. So if you could just use your magicthingamajiggy and poof us to the castle, I’ll give the king his shoes and we’ll ask him to send us home and roll on outta here. That work?”

She used to be a pretty good negotiator in her old life in Jersey. Ask anyone at the flea market. She was infamous for talking the sock guy down on his prices. There was no reason she couldn’t be one here in Shamalot.

Brenda’s eyes, ringed by blue eye shadow and curly lashes, widened in reproach. “I can’t do that. It’s against the cotton-pickin’ rules, and it’s all kinda bad manners to ask me to just zap you on outta here. That’s an abuse of power I ain’t willin’ to touch, sister. The realm has rules, and if I break ’em, I’ll upset the balance of order. You have to make the journey to happiness on foot, and your gal-pals here are your guides.”

“Point of contention?”

Brenda looked confused as she cocked her head, her hair cascading over her shoulder. “
A what
? Speak English at me, Red.”

“Why is it just me who needs a happily-ever-after and none of them? I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but how did I get the kewpie doll? And I hate to be petty, but why does everyone get wings but me?”

“The answer’s simple—because you’re not a fairy godmother and they’re already happy.”

Toni’s shoulders slumped as her head throbbed. “But I’m telling you, I
am
happy.”

Mostly. Sometimes. Happiness was subjective, and if she wasn’t exactly skipping through fields of sunflowers, at least she wasn’t being held someone’s terrified hostage. It was as close to happy as she’d been in a long time.

“Now, now, Red,” she chastised. “No one gets to the realm if they’re shootin’ rays o’ sunshine outta their butts. It was you who wished you were anywhere but that outlet mall, wasn’t it? Somethin’ ain’t right in your life, and it’s gotta be fixed or you can’t ever leave Shamalot. You wished for it, you got it. The realm knows your heart, and there ain’t no foolin’ it. This is your journey.”

Her stubborn streak, the one that had saved Stas killing from her, kicked in. “Okay then, what if I refuse to go on the journey?”

“Then I guess you’d better see a man about rentin’ yourself one of those cute little cottages over yonder and settin’ up housekeepin’ for life. Oh, I know just the person, too! Sweet as peach pie on a summer day. You want his card?”

Toni didn’t have the chance to say one way or the other before Nina was in attack mode.

She circled Brenda and made a fist. “Hold the bloody fuck on!” Nina yelped, stomping her foot in the snow. “I’m no GD fairy godmother. I hate people. I hate
all
people, and the hell I’m wearin’ this stupid—”

But Brenda was no longer listening. With a wave of her wand, the tip of the silvery stick emitting a glistening silver dust, she said, “There’s nothing more I can do for ya, Dumplins. The realm has spoken. But here’s to you, Toni! Go on and get ya some of the good stuff. Bye, y’all!”

And then she and her unconscious sister were gone.

When the silence of Brenda’s departure became painfully awkward, when their mouths could no longer hang open without freezing in position, suddenly Nina became animated, her eyes darting around the clearing.

“Aw, for fuckity-fuck’s sake! Has anyone seen Carl?
Where’s Carl?
”

Chapter 3

“C
arl?” Nina hollered, frightening the villagers who’d begun to disperse and go back to doing whatever it was villagers did when they were done gawking at the realm-jumpers.

Nina lifted her skirts with an angry growl and began searching the perimeter of the village in a blur of motion Toni still couldn’t believe she was witnessing.

“Carl! If you don’t come back here right now, I’m taking away your broccoli cupcakes for snack for a solid week, and you’re gonna get coal in your stocking, mister!”

Carl had looked pretty pale back at the store. Maybe he was sick. Fear struck a chord in Toni’s belly, spurring her to action.
Fear
she understood. Fear had been her fuel for three years. This was her fault. She’d done this. She had to get her shit together and help find him.

“Is Carl the young man who was with Nina in the store?” Toni asked Marty with trepidation.

Marty nodded, her blue eyes full of worry. “That’s our Carl. He’s a zombie and the sweetest thing ever. He’s not used to being alone. We need to find him right now or—”

“Carl!” Dannan yelled, his tiny voice whipping in the blustering wind as he headed into the woods, selflessly helping to search for someone he didn’t even know. “Come to us, lad!”

“How about we split up into small groups? We’ll cover more ground that way,” Toni suggested, forgetting everything but finding Carl.

The tall pines to the left of them, separating the village from the path, rustled and parted as yet another tall figure emerged, and everyone stopped all motion.

Dear Realm, please don’t let this be Maleficent.

For a brief moment, the skies, their dark-purple clouds spewing snow, brightened. Magically so. The heavens opened, and shafts of light mimicking rainbow prisms shone down upon a head of shiny ebony hair.

Birds chirped, frogs ribbited, and just shy of angels singing, Toni was sure she heard the strains of a gentle harp playing somewhere in the distance.

And from the tall trees, out stepped a man. A man so perfect, so magnificent, so chiseled and hard, each of the women, Nina included, stopped and stared as though he’d cast a real live spell on the lot of them.

His thighs bulged beneath the rust-colored pants he wore, the laces pulled tight in a crisscross pattern, ending at his tapered waist; his chest wide and muscled beneath his green shirt and dark brown vest.

Eyes of the bluest sapphire, fringed by a thick down of dark lashes, stared at her. His hair was wet from the snow but it gleamed in all its ebony-ness, slicked back from his face, the ends falling to his jawline.

His cheekbones were high, sharp, and his jaw square and lean. And his arms—oh, those arms. Just thick enough from heavy labor, but not so thick he couldn’t put them down at his sides.

There was a collective breathy sigh as everyone’s eyes glazed over. He was the most beautiful specimen of man she’d ever seen and it took all she had to keep from letting a breathy sigh escape her throat, too.

As he tromped from the woods, the snow swirling around him, he had his arm around the neck of a reindeer—a very pale and green-around-the-gills reindeer. “Milady?” he called, his voice like liquid warmth, washing over Toni, bathing her soul, and leaving her weak in the knees. “Would this be your Carl?”

Nina approached the newcomer slow and steady, lifting her glasses as the prisms of light above his head faded and the clouds returned.

The reindeer covered the distance between them, running toward Nina with a slow, crooked gait. The animal stopped in front of her and patted his hoof on the snow before tucking his head, antlers and all, into her hip.

Nina’s long fingers lifted his muzzle as she looked down into his eyes. “
Carl
?”

The reindeer reared his head up and tapped his hoof on the ground again.

“Aw, for Jesus’s sake, Carl! What happened, little buddy?” She ran her hands over his back and head, checking him thoroughly.

Toni stood off to the side as the women gathered around “Carl” and stroked him, and she wondered…what the hell?

Some inventory was necessary if she was going to go any further. Her brain was a jumbled mess of what was real and what was make-believe.

So far today, she’d been pitched down a rabbit hole in a dressing room, dumped in a strange land, knocked a drunken, kind-of-irritated witch out cold, heard talk of vampires, werewolves and zombies, nabbed a pair of cute shoes she couldn’t take off, met a blue ogre and a good witch with a magic wand, discovered she was going to be forced to have some happily-ever-after she’d never asked for, and now the sweet, shy man-child she’d met in the outlet mall was a zombie turned reindeer.

And none of it—
none of it
appeared to make these women question a single second of what was happening to them.

“Milady?” the devastatingly handsome man said, bowing regally before her. “Jon Doe The Stable Boy, at your service.”

And then there was this. Jon Doe. The stable boy. Seriously? A man of this ilk deserved a much bigger name than Jon. Maybe something like Perfect or Granite or Flawless, perhaps. But Jon seemed much too simple.

“Milady?”

She licked her chapped lips and swallowed, holding out her trembling hand. “Toni. Toni Vitali.”

He nodded his perfect head and smiled, pressing his warm, yummy lips briefly to the back of her hand. “A lovely name for a lovely maiden.”

Her eyes would’ve rolled if they weren’t now frozen in their sockets.
Maiden.
Hah. But there was something else. Something new and unfamiliar to Toni. Her heart literally fluttered in her chest as though it, too, had wings just like these women, and her stomach gurgled. Not unpleasantly, but with an excited skip.

“Milady?” he asked, his eyes curious.

“Thank you for finding, um, Carl.”

“No trouble at all,” he offered gallantly. “He was just grazing in the woods, and his unusual coloring made me stop and ponder his breed—it’s like no other. He looks nothing like my stable of deer. It was then he began to whimper, and I worried he’d lost his mother. I see I was right. Odd as that seems.”

Toni snorted, condensation escaping her lips in a puff of white. “Odd? You don’t know the half of it.”

He pointed to her shoes, sparkling in the twilight. “I see you have the king’s shoes. How did you manage that?”

“The king’s shoes are pretty popular around these parts, huh?”

Jon ignored her question and instead asked, “Speaking of parts, what land is yours?”

“Land?”

“Yes, from whence you hail.”

“I hail from the land of designer outlet malls with wormholes. Better known as Jersey,” she said as she shivered, her teeth beginning to chatter.

Jon tilted his head, his blue-blue eyes twinkling. “Jersey? I’ve not heard of this place. Is it far?”

Toni shivered again, crossing her arms over her chest. “Far is a subjective term at this point. But you best believe, it’s a long way from Shamalot.”

Pulling off his vest, he wrapped it around Toni’s shoulders, his fingers brushing her exposed skin and evoking another shiver as a ripple of awareness shot along her spine.

“Have you sought lodging? The eve is upon us, my lady Toni, and the weather will sour quickly.”

Now, homeless and penniless, she knew. She had this. Rubbing her hands together, she asked, “Got a match?”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Listen, do you know how to get to the castle? Because according to Brenda the Good Witch of the South, I have to give these babies back.” She pointed to her shoes—shoes that were killing her frozen feet right now.

Jon’s face darkened for a moment and then it was as though an idea formed, because he smiled wide, his ultra-white teeth as perfect as the rest of him. “I do know the way to the castle. Do you need an escort?”

“She don’t need nothin’ from you, Hot Breeches,” Nina crowed, Carl nestled close to her side.

Marty and Wanda joined Toni, their eyes on Jon. Because really, whose eyes could will themselves away from a long hard stare at all that man?

Toni unglued her own gawking stare from his hulking physique and made introductions. “Jon The Stable Boy, this is Marty, Wanda, and Nina. All fair maidens dumped in your backyard.”
Because of me
.

Jon bowed once more, his thick, dark hair gleaming as the last of the day faded. “Miladies, the pleasure is mine. How can I be of assistance?”

Marty whistled and fanned herself with her hand, looking to Wanda, whose wings had taken up a mad whir. “Are you warm? Is anyone else warm?”

“On fire here,” Wanda croaked then swallowed, the light-blue veins in her neck working when she nodded. She grabbed the hand Marty was using to fan herself and pointed it at her own face as she lifted the back of her fancy hairdo.

Before she spoke, Nina eyed Jon, a little longer than Toni suspected was the norm for someone as gruff and indifferent as her. “You can assist us by telling us how to get the fuck out of here,
Jon
.”

He looked directly into Nina’s eyes, his expression one of confusion. “This word—fuck—means what? Is that from your land?”

Wanda groaned a sigh as she rolled her head on her neck while rubbing at her temples. “That’s just Nina behaving badly. My blanket apologies in advance for every word that comes out of her mouth until we part ways. Now, Jon, how do we get out of here?”