He frowned. “Why did you whisper?”
“Hobgoblin,” I told him by way of explanation. If the man knew hobgoblins, he’d know that nothing made of chocolate or sugar was safe. The only way anybody else ever got a sweet treat in Croakies was to hide and sneak.
I picked up the empty cookie plate from that morning and took it along with me into the kitchen. It had still been full when Sebille and I had left to go see the ogres. Clearly, Hobs had been hungry.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I said as I moved some glasses in the cupboard and opened the hidden compartment in the back, expecting it to stick as it always did. But it opened smoothly, surprising a smile out of me. Sebille must have finally fixed it. We’d argued for two days over who should do the repair. She’d begrudgingly given in when I reminded her that I almost always mutilated some part of my body when I tried to work with tools.
Not that she’d jumped right on the repair. It had been a week since we’d had the argument.
I felt around until my fingers found the fat bundle I’d hidden there earlier, pulling it out. The sweet scent of chocolate assailed my nostrils and my mouth watered.
“Lovelace,” the man said from just behind me.
I jumped at the sound of his voice so close. Spinning on my heel, I nearly dropped the package of brownies.
“Lovelace Cupid,” the man said.
My eyes went wide. “Cupid?”
And then he shot me with a tiny bow, sending a teeny arrow into my throat before I could even think about moving.
And the world went black around me.
5
Heartily Sick of Pink
I woke up in my worst nightmare.
No, not the Jurassic era again. This was arguably worse. I was also not surrounded by monsters or stuck inside a really bad black and white TV show. But it was even worse than those situations had been.
“Ugh!” I groaned, feeling the ground around me and shoving myself upright. The residual magic from the tiny arrow caused my head to pound and my stomach to roil. Or it could have been pink overload.
The entire room was pink, occasionally spotted with white hearts.
Pink shag carpet, pink walls, pink draperies, pink chairs, and a pink table. The only thing breaking up all the pink was the occasional slash of white lace and white hearts of every size. There was even a pink comforter on the pink postered bed.
“Triple ugh!” I groaned again, shoving to my feet. I grabbed a slim pink post on the bed to steady myself when the pink world went wonky around me.
When the dizziness passed, I looked for a door or a window or anything I could use to get out of there before angry Cupid returned.
There wasn’t so much as a portal or a trap door.
“You can’t leave,” a disembodied voice said with a tinge of smugness. “Not without my help.”
I jerked my gaze in the direction of the voice and found crabby Cupid draped over the pink heart-splashed bedspread. I narrowed my gaze on him. Had he been there before?
I didn’t think so.
To my chagrin, he’d exchanged his nice suit for an ugly pink cardigan, matching pink slacks, and a pink bowtie with white hearts dotting its ugliness.
Goddess in a girly phase!
“You really should consider adding a few more colors to your pallet,” I told him. “This ‘all pink all the time’ thing you’ve got going on is hysteria-inducing.”
He glanced around in surprise, his eyebrows lifted into his hairline. “I couldn’t. This is my family’s signature.”
If that was true, he had a strong argument for divorcing his family.
“I’d have thought red would be your color,” I said. “I mean, actual hearts are red, not pink.”
“Do you know that to be a fact?” His tone was smug as if he knew something I didn’t.
Had somebody changed the color of real hearts without telling me? Was pink the new red in the organ world? I shrugged. It wasn’t important. What was important was that I was stuck in heart-Hades with crotchety Cupid.
I’d prefer to deal with happy Cupid. The one wearing a diaper and sporting rosy, cherubic cheeks.
“What’s going on? Why’d you kidnap me?” I demanded.
“Kidnap you? Don’t be absurd.”
“Absurd? Me? Don’t be obtuse.” I barely resisted putting my thumbs under my armpits in oversized pride. Yes, I do get a daily Word of the Day email, and I’m not afraid to use it. Color me smug.
Crusty Cupid blinked. “I simply wanted to discuss an important matter with you.”
“We could have discussed it at Croakies with a lot less drama, headache, and pink.” I grimaced.
“But then I couldn’t have shown you this…” He performed a dramatic sweep of an arm. In the space of a single blink, we were outside the horrible room.
Standing in a wasteland of grayness and rot.
The air was moist and cold and I suddenly wished I had on more clothes. Squinting against the wind, I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to figure out where he’d taken me.
I was pretty sure I’d never seen the place before. I’d have remembered it.
We were standing in some kind of courtyard. At least that’s what I assumed it had been. Once upon a time. The concrete fountain in the center was cracked and slimy with dead vegetation. The cupid in its center was missing large chunks from its cutesy form.
The bricks beneath my feet had crumbled into tiny pieces, red dust puffing up with every step. The trees that had probably once provided shade for the area were blackened, dead husks, their branches reaching to a steel-gray sky like bony limbs with clawed, gray fingers.
Small stuccoed homes surrounded the fountain square, their lines and coloration offering vague shadows of what had probably once been cute and cozy little cottages in pretty pastels. They’d sunk into broken and cracked corpses of homes, with roofs that had collapsed and windows without
