“Could she be in disguise as a black-haired chick with a bullnose ring? This guy here lives under her register. However, I know for a fact that woman hates me,” I said.
“That would be Morgana, the witch,” Chad sang, as he continued to strum.
“If you can enter Morgana’s store, she likes you,” Ace stated it as a fact. “Those she doesn’t like get flung away from the store if they even get close. But Morgana is not the goddess Freyja. Freyja is also the Goddess of Love and Fertility, and Morgana powers her drugstore on death magic. Were you especially kind to any cats?”
“I did give a stray cat my last can of tuna as I was walking into town,” I said.
Ace nodded. “There you go.”
“So, is having Freyja interested in me a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.
Ace winced. “Mixed. The ethics of gods and goddesses don’t always line up with that of human society. But the good news is their attention spans are shorter than a two-year-old’s, so she’ll probably move on soon.”
“Well, I don’t mind the cat love.” I leaned down and scratched behind the cat’s ears. “So, Ace… do you know a lot about Norse Mythology, or do you just know a lot about everything in general?”
I was getting the feeling it was the latter, but I wanted to check.
“Ace knows every random fact that you could ever not want to know,” Chad sang as he strummed his guitar.
Ace’s nostrils flared. “For someone who has so many ex-lovers and one-night stands, Chad, I’d think you’d take more of an interest in the supernatural abilities of the enemies you’re making.”
“Am I going to have to separate you two?” I asked sensing something a little more than annoyance between them. Maybe a past wrong. “So, Ace, are you the resident expert on Grayhaven?”
“Yes,” Chad sang. “And, he’s got a dozen fancy degrees to prove it.”
“One degree, in Classics, and I was going for my MA in Mythological Studies when I got a little too close to the truth and ended up becoming what I was studying.” Ace gestured down to his body. “Really, I’m just the resident bartender, meaning I come in contact with everyone in Grayhaven and learn more than I want to know about the residents of our fair town.”
“I seriously want to pick your brain sometime…” I trailed off as the big fluffy Skogkatt cat started hacking. His stomach moved up and down as its head arched toward the pavement. “Poor guy,” I said as he continued to hack, and then a wad of paper came hurling out.
“No wonder,” I said through gritted teeth as the cat continued to hack.
Next, the cat spat a thick chain, tangled into a ball. After he’d expelled his guts, the feline yawned, rubbed its head against my legs, and wandered back up the driveway.
“This looks like iron.” Ace poked the chain, and it fell apart to reveal a thick necklace with two charms on it, one of a tree with a twisting decorative trunk and another of a four-leaf clover.
“It looks like it could double for a weapon,” I said on a laugh. The necklace wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing piece of jewelry. The iron chain was clunky and the charms looked like worn hunks of metal.
“I think it’s a talisman to protect you from the fae.” Ace poked a charm that resembled a twisted tree. “This is a rowan tree, which should keep the fae from tricking you, and this here…” he pointed to the four-leaf clover, “It was said that if you carried a four-leaf clover you could see past fae glamour. And… this is as close as my fingers can get to the necklace. There’s some sort of force pushing my hand away.”
Chad set his guitar down and came to crouch over us. He reached for the necklace but yanked back and shook his hand. He nodded to me. “Feels like static. I’m guessing it was meant for you, Beautiful.”
Next to me, Ace rolled his eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be creative, Chad. Beautiful is the most overused expression of appreciation out there.”
“There’s a reason it’s overused,” Chad said, smoothly, and his shoulder pressed into mine.
Ignoring the two, I reached down for the necklace and my fingers met no resistance. I wrapped my hand around the chain, and the moment I did, the driveway around me changed. Where there had only been a gasoline tank before, now there was a thick tree root piercing up from the ground and into the tank.
“There’s a tree growing up into your gas tank,” I said as I pointed to it. “The moment I touched the necklace, this massive engorged root appeared out of thin air.”
“I wonder if this would work now that you’re touching it…” Ace reached up and wrapped his hand around the chain, meeting no resistance this time. “And, clearly the fae have been stealing from us for some time.”
The fae had stuck a leaf onto the monitoring system to fake out the reader.
Chad wrapped his hand around the necklace too. “Damn it. You’d think the fae would leave our gas alone since nine out of ten times the calls we respond to are reports of fires blazing in the forest,
