Wild & Hexy (37 page)

She crept through the trees, making sure she didn’t rustle leaves or step on dried branches. The sound of the blimp’s motor would probably block out any noise she made, but she still didn’t want to take a chance on being spotted. At last she had a clear view of the lake.

The blimp approached, barely skimming the trees, its Goodyear label making it look completely authentic. But Annie didn’t think Goodyear owned this particular model.

‘‘Almost there, Norton,’’ Dorcas called out to the blindfolded lake monster as she and Ambrose flew underneath the two-and-a-half-ton beast. She was giving her broom a true test, but so far it had kept up nicely with Isadora’s sporty model.

Besides disguising Norton as the Goodyear blimp, the magical trio had disguised themselves and their brooms as the undercarriage. Ambrose was in charge of making the noise of the motor, which meant he couldn’t talk, but so far he’d done a fine job. He sounded exactly like a blimp.

Dorcas couldn’t believe they were going to pull off this caper, especially because no one had slept at all, but things were looking good. Once Isadora had described her idea last night, she’d left Dorcas and Ambrose to scry a soul mate for Dee-Dee. They’d come up with Norton from North Lake, only twenty-six miles away as the witch flies.

Dorcas and Ambrose had traveled there immediately and done some fast talking. Fortunately, Norton was as lonely as Dee-Dee. In spite of an intense fear of flying, he’d been willing to grab this chance to meet what Dorcas and Ambrose had convinced him was his true love.

They’d summoned Isadora by cell phone, and she’d reluctantly left the poker game to help them create the spell and fly Norton to his lady love.

‘‘By the way,’’ Isadora said, ‘‘you might want to know that George is pissed about this lake monster matchmaking deal.’’

Ambrose’s motor sound stopped. ‘‘Dear Zeus, why did you say anything?’’

‘‘Motor, Ambrose, motor,’’ Dorcas reminded him, although she felt like swearing, too. ‘‘I wish you’d let us tell him, Isadora.’’

‘‘I couldn’t help it. When you called on my cell, I was holding the nuts hand and had to throw it in. Naturally George demanded to know what was going on, so I had to tell him. Like I said, he was pissed.’’

Dorcas groaned. ‘‘What exactly did he say?’’

‘‘That this proves you like Dee-Dee better, and now there’s gonna be
three
magical creatures when there should only be one, and, oh, yeah, why didn’t you fly Dee-Dee to Norton’s lake, instead. I had no answer for that one.’’

Dorcas wasn’t about to admit she’d become attached to Dee-Dee and wouldn’t have wanted to see her go. ‘‘Logistics,’’ she said. ‘‘North Lake is more secluded. We could take off from there. A blimp taking off from Deep Lake would have aroused too much attention.’’

‘‘Whatever,’’ Isadora said. ‘‘One other thing George mentioned was that he might like a soul mate, but obviously you didn’t care whether he ever got one.’’

‘‘And he’s never getting one if he doesn’t earn his golden scales.’’ Dorcas saw this as a definite setback for George, but she couldn’t worry about it now. She reached up and patted Norton on the tummy. ‘‘How are you doing, Norton?’’

‘‘I’m really scared.’’

‘‘We’re almost ready to land. You’ve done great.’’

‘‘Not scared about flying. I got over that after a while. I’m scared I won’t be the lake monster Dee-Dee needs.’’

Isadora laughed. ‘‘Are you kidding? She’d take—’’

‘‘You in a heartbeat,’’ Dorcas said, cutting off whatever lame-brained thing Isadora had been about to say. ‘‘She’s going to love you, Norton.’’

‘‘I hope so.’’

‘‘We all hope so,’’ Isadora said. ‘‘Because—’’

‘‘Hey, gang, we’re here,’’ Dorcas said. ‘‘Ambrose, start throwing your voice and make that motor seem as if it’s receding in the distance.’’

Ambrose nodded.

Dorcas cocked her head and listened. Her husband was good at this. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear there really was a blimp leaving the area. ‘‘That’s great. Everybody ready?’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ Norton said. ‘‘Maybe—’’

‘‘You’re ready.’’ Dorcas patted him on the tummy again. ‘‘Here we go, everybody. It’s showtime.’’

Annie stood transfixed as the blimp began sinking toward the lake. The sound of the motor was no longer attached to the blimp. The sound alone moved off over the trees as if the blimp was flying away. It wasn’t, though. It was right here . . . and then it wasn’t a blimp anymore.

Annie forgot to breathe as she got her first look at the full body of a lake monster. It was bigger than she’d imagined, larger than the eighteen-wheeler she’d compared it to earlier. It had flippers instead of legs, and a whiplike tail. The head was triangular, like Dee-Dee’s, but the brow was more pronounced.

At first she couldn’t figure out how such a huge creature was floating gently down to the surface of the lake. But then she saw Isadora on a broom underneath the monster’s belly, and on the far side, barely visible, were Dorcas and Ambrose on a second broom.

She raised her camera. Then she lowered it again. She couldn’t see as well through the camera, and she couldn’t bear to miss anything. A little to the right of where the monster would land, Dee-Dee lifted her head, gazing upward in obvious anticipation.

Annie’s heart squeezed. She remembered how carefully Dee-Dee had carried Jeremy last night and how gently she’d laid him on the sand. Without her, he could be dead. And now this sweet-natured being was getting her reward, the lake monster of her dreams.

When the creature was almost at water level, the two brooms zipped out from under its belly and shot into the air. The lake monster landed with the mother of all cannonballs, sending waves onto the beach that might have been surf worthy.

Then the creature popped up again and bobbed in the waves for a moment, looking around. Dee-Dee was bobbing not far away. They looked at each other and slowly began swimming through the heavy waves. At last they were close enough to reach out and touch noses.

Annie felt wetness on her cheeks and realized tears were streaming down her face. She might not have found true love, but Dee-Dee had.

Movement in the sky caught her attention. As she looked up, she laughed in delight. The three who had orchestrated this were obviously celebrating, with Dorcas and Ambrose on one broom and Isadora on the other. They sailed over the heads of the creatures, doing barrel rolls and high-fiving each other every time they passed.

Once again she raised her camera . . . and lowered it. She would not be taking pictures this morning. She would never tell anyone what she’d seen. Dee-Dee deserved that much.

Glancing again at the lake monsters, she noticed they had started to submerge. Slowly they sank under the surface, until only a trail of bubbles showed where they had been.

Still smiling, Annie turned and walked back through the forest. So much for fame and fortune.

Twenty-four days, six hours and . . . Annie paused to glance at her watch . . . fifteen minutes since she’d last seen Jeremy. Not that she was keeping track or anything.

She succeeded better at not thinking about him when she was at the
Trib,
but she couldn’t hang out there every day of the week. That would make her look pathetic. So sometimes she had to come home to her boring apartment, like now, and while away a couple of hours surfing the Net.

She usually started by checking out Ambrose’s MySpace page. Ambrose had joined the Knob Lobbers softball team and played left field. Through his page she kept up on the team, which was currently at two and two. Jeremy, who played third, had four hits for the season. Not that she’d searched for that stat, either.

Oh, hell, she might as well face the fact that she missed him desperately. She’d been reading the
Big Knob Gazette
online and thinking they could use a features writer with some talent. After being certain she wanted the big stories, she’d covered a high-profile murder case and had hated every minute of it. She didn’t know if she could be satisfied writing human interest pieces for the
Big Knob Gazette,
but the prospect of having Jeremy around 24/7 would give her another kind of satisfaction, a kind she craved.

But it wasn’t only about the sex. Granted, it was partly about the sex, but mostly she missed the guy himself. He was funny, smart, considerate and very brave. So what if he wasn’t the smoothest dude on the planet? So what if he couldn’t make a rabbit appear from a hat? Whenever she’d been with him, she’d felt happy.

And yet . . . she kept coming back to the enhancements Dorcas and Ambrose had given him. How much had they had to do with his attractiveness? She’d thought about taking a weekend off and going back to Big Knob to find out, but she’d always chickened out. She’d rather miss Jeremy and hang on to her fantasy than risk discovering he was not the man she thought he was.

As she scrolled through the Knob Lobbers’ stats on the official Knob Lobbers Web page, a Web page probably designed by Jeremy, she heard the click of an e-mail coming to her in-box. Probably Kendra from work asking if she wanted to go out for drinks and a little manhunting. Annie did not. No guy she’d meet in a bar could possibly compare to Jeremy, or at least the image she had of Jeremy.

But she clicked on her mail icon, anyway. No point in leaving Kendra hanging. When she saw the e-mail address, her breath caught: [email protected].

She’d thought about e-mailing him a million times. She’d held off, having no idea what to say. She was even more worried about what he’d have to say. What if, after all they’d shared, his e-mails turned out to be boring? She couldn’t bear the disillusionment.

But here he was, e-mailing her. She wasn’t physically capable of ignoring it. The curiosity gene was dominant in her, which was why she’d felt so at home with journalism, essentially a career of voyeurism.

Heart pounding, she opened the e-mail.

She groaned. Talk about an unimaginative e-mail. Well, she could be unimaginative, too.
Hi—I’m fine. A

The response came back immediately.
U busy?

Why would he ask if she was busy? She hoped that didn’t mean he was about to call her. She couldn’t think of anything more awkward than a telephone conversation. The longer this inane communication lasted, the more she decided that she’d been harboring false hopes that she and Jeremy had a future.

Always,
she typed.
Going out the door in two minutes.
That should forestall the phone call, if he’d had that in mind.

She hit REPLY and simply typed
Bye
. Then she turned off her computer and discovered she was trembling. The exchange had been stupid and ordinary, but the words had still come from Jeremy. She didn’t seem to be as over him as she would have wished.

She got up and began to pace her living room. Could it be she
liked
boring, if it could come packaged with hot sex? Or could it be that she’d fallen in love with the guy and he could type a message that included the weather report and she wouldn’t care, because he had sent it. After all, she’d been cherishing each and every Knob Lobbers stat because Jeremy had compiled and posted them.

God, she was a mess. And furthermore . . . She stopped pacing as she heard something right outside her front door. A dog whined. Then it scratched on the door.
What the hell?

She lived on the third floor of an apartment building. Stray dogs couldn’t just wander up here. She crossed to the door and unlocked it. Maybe her neighbor’s toy poodle had slipped out and—she gasped. Megabyte sat there brushing the hall floor with her humongous tail. She held a rolled newspaper in her mouth.

Adrenaline rushed through Annie and she glanced up and down the hallway. ‘‘Jeremy?’’

He stepped around the corner and smiled at her. ‘‘Hey, Annie.’’

‘‘Hey, Jeremy.’’ She couldn’t stop smiling herself. She supposed to anyone else he’d look like a regular, glasses-wearing guy dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt. But they didn’t know him the way she did. Or at least the way she thought she did.

Suddenly her old reservations returned. ‘‘I thought you were still in Big Knob, since you were e-mailing me.’’

Jeremy held up a BlackBerry. ‘‘The marvels of modern technology.’’ He glanced at her ratty shorts and T-shirt. ‘‘But I don’t want to hold you up. You said you were leaving.’’

‘‘Oh.’’ A flush warmed her cheeks. ‘‘I . . . ah . . .’’

‘‘Wanted to brush me off?’’ He strolled toward her, still smiling. ‘‘I can understand that. You don’t know me very well, but that’s going to change.’’

She looked into his eyes and saw the kind of determination and confidence that had always turned her on. But she didn’t know what to believe anymore. ‘‘Did Dorcas and Ambrose give you any—’’

‘‘Special herbs? No. And I can’t do magic, either. You’re going to have to love me for other reasons.’’ He paused about two feet away.

"L-love you?’’ The minute she said that, she knew it was already a done deal.

‘‘That’s right. But if you have places to go and things to do, I can come back another time so we can work on it.’’

She began to tingle all over, exactly the way she did when she was on the trail of a good story. This could turn into an outstanding story, and she wanted to work on it
now
. ‘‘That’s okay. I can skip it.’’ She backed into her apartment. ‘‘Why don’t you come in?’’

‘‘Then I guess we will, won’t we, Megabyte?’’ He motioned the dog through the door and followed after her. ‘‘By the way, Annie, that newspaper is for you. It’s a special edition of the
Big Knob Gazette
.’’

‘‘Why, uh, thanks.’’ She reached for the newspaper, but Megabyte didn’t want to give it up.