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Her gesture almost dislodged the black sunglasses he always wore to shield his presumably pink eyes from the light.
“I’m going to need a human investigator in my corner very soon, Grizelle,” he whispered into her large, tufted ear.
The white big cat eased down onto all fours before rising in her human form, shaking her stripes into velvety black skin and satiny black hair. Her flashing emerald eyes evoked the glitzy green costume of Envy in the Seven Deadly Sins band.
“I’m your security chief,” she reminded her boss. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I told you. Delilah Street isn’t here.” His voice held the sharpness of command now.
“She doesn’t like you,” Grizelle half growled, sounding cattier than a soap-opera diva. “It might be difficult to convince her to jump at your call.”
“I’m sure you’ll devise a plan. Don’t wait. Something wicked this way comes.”
* * *
You’d think a girl could get a peaceful night’s snooze in a cozy Enchanted Cottage. Sleeping Beauty managed it for decades in a drafty old castle.
My bedroom isn’t located in any fairy-tale joint, but in a replica of a 1940s honeymooner’s nest from a movie named The Enchanted Cottage. Inside it, the film story line went, true love had overlaid movie star looks on a plain old maid and a disfigured war hero.
I awoke to the sound of repeated gunfire and sat up, blinking like a gothic heroine in my filmy-curtained four-poster bed, and immediately scanned for intruders.
One of my two casement windows was open and banging against the wall. The light sweat of alarm on my skin didn’t detect so much as a breath of night air, never mind a window-sash-crashing wind.
Checking the bedroom floor, I saw no sign of my devoted rescue dog. Quicksilver was known to enter and exit the cottage windows at night, though discreetly and without drama, but never on the second floor.
Next I noticed that the creepy “bugs-moving” feeling along my thighs wasn’t my nightshirt riding up. It was the crocheted bedspread slowly ebbing to the bed’s foot.
Since this is post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas and not your father’s Sin City, but one crawling with supernaturals, I had immediate suspects. The first were the often unseen domestic “helpers” that came with the Enchanted Cottage. The second most likely suspect was a first on my list—a genuine ghost.
I grabbed the absconding coverlet with both hands and jerked it up to my waist again.
It jerked back down.
I leaned forward to jerk harder.
Something grabbed my T-shirt front and tugged even more. I fell facedown on the foot of the bed as that unseen “something” outflanked me to pinch my now-exposed rear.
This indignity ruled out a disembodied ghost, but not the mischievous pixies, gnomes, and poltergeists that abound in the borders between the paranormal and natural worlds. My house “spirits” so far had been as good as two-thousand-dollar-an-ounce gold. Something you could count on.
They’d never resort to anything as crude as this spectral horsefly bite.
I rolled over and off the bed, my slender ankle bracelet thickening as I went into uproot-and-expel mode. In seconds, my silver familiar had migrated to my rear and transformed into a really heavy and cold metal fanny pack.
That form was Vegas-appropriate, sure, but not helpful. Nothing would pinch my butt again, but I didn’t need a rear anchor right now either.
My yell and karate kick were meant to clear my immediate space.
Instead, the unseen Something grabbed my extended ankle and jerked again.
I would have gone belly-down on the floor if I hadn’t caught hold of a bedpost, spun around it, and kicked my legs back onto the bed to crawl over the crumpled coverlet and jump off the other side.
“Show yourself, coward,” I shouted from the floor as a diversion.
I launched myself at the wall near the door, hoping to run into my invisible visitor. I detected a momentary brush with something so elusive, I ended up plastered against the wallpaper, a floral design with blossoms bigger than my hands.
I heard a high-pitched, self-satisfied … giggle.
“Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet,” a crazy voice sing-songed.
