“You know werewolves aren’t real, right?”
I grin. “If pixies are out there...”
Jovie turns as a lecerid spreads its gooey feet over its cage wall. “Ah!”
Her body slams back into mine. I claw up my fingers and tickle her hard, sending static zaps into her sides.
Jovie arches, freaks, spins away from me, and shivers. “Oh, come on!”
I purse my lips, trying to hide my amusement, but fail miserably. “I won’t let anything or anyone hurt you. You should know that by now.”
“We’ve known each other for two days!” Jovie crosses her arms like she’s mad, but there’s a faint glimmer of amusement hiding in them.
It’s enough to make me break the emotional barrier she’s erected and scoop her up. “You’re not that mad, are you?”
Jovie’s jaw cocks to one side as she looks away. “No. Just need time to get used to your sense ofhumor.”
I kiss her lips and set her down. “If you had known me when I was younger, you probably would’ve run.”
“Why’s that?”
“You think my little lovezaps are annoying?” I focus a shred of electricity through a finger into her ass. Jovie yelps, covers her mouth as others turn to look, and blushes. “I was a big prankster as a kid. Mostly of people I didn’t like.”
“What kinds of pranks?”
We continue walking the maze of featured creatures as I tell her about my rowdy days. “I made mine embarrassing. Only ever did pranks on Royals.”
Jovie loops an arm around mine when she sees an upcoming glass terrarium with an acid-spitting chameleon. I pause until she looks up at me. Then I smile and keep going. “There’s a Queen of a mothership that’s particularly uptight, like she has a perpetual stick up her ass. So when she put on a Royals-only dance on her ship, I may have slipped a static disc under her throne that made her hair stand on end when she sat down. I wish you could’ve seen it. She screamed like someone had died.”
Jovie giggles. “Did they ever figure it out?”
“No. Far too many guests. Then, there was the Royal delegates’ transport. Elders have officials they select to represent them because many are too old to travel. A few are younger. But anyway, there’s this textile manufacturing chemical and one used in metal refining that I mixed to make a stink bomb.”
Jovie gasps. “Aura!”
“I may have made it a bit too strong. A couple of them got sick.” I hold up a finger. “But a wastewater system had malfunctioned on one of our ships. Instead of trying to solve the problem, where people were dealing with the smell, the delegates were escaping to a planet for animpromptuconference.”
“How convenient,” she mumbles.
“Yeah. I had a problem with that.”
“So you came up with a putrid protest,” Jovie says. “I like it.”
I chuckle and hang my head. “That one I did get in trouble for.”
Jovie admires a small woolly creature curled up in a leaf. “What’s your favorite prank?”
“That’s a spinatiss caterpillar. Never touch that. The little hairs are coated in poison.”
Jovie straightens and wrinkles her nose. “Darn. Why does everything cute want to kill me?”
“I don’t.”
She smirks. “You think you’re cute?”
I shrug. “I thought you did.”
Jovie wraps herself around my arm again and takes my hand. The little zaps between our fingers as she laces hers between mine fill me with relief and make me hope we can find a way through this week and into forever together.
