Marty's Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day Read online

  Clapping her hands in glee, she waved Nina, Wanda, and a glowing Marty over to their corner in the living room, then she turned to him and grabbed his hands.

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember us or anything, for that matter, Hudson. I’ll remember. We’ll all remember for you, and when you reincarnate five hundred years from now, I’ll be waiting. I’ll remind you who you are. Who we are. Look…” She pointed to her phone. “Scroll the photos and the video.”

  As he touched the app on her phone, a video played, of all of them sitting around the table, laughing and joking when Arch had creamed them all at a rousing game of Jenga by Matrixing his Jenga piece out of the pile.

  And another with him and Hollis, Nina, Darnell and Carl, making snow angels and laughing themselves silly, while Wanda called to them from the door of Marty’s to come in and have some hot chocolate.

  Hudson smiled at the memories he was making, his throat tightening. Despite everything that had happened, he’d never felt more included in his life than he had with these people.

  Then there were pictures of everyone, a bunch of them Rocky had taken during Marty’s recuperation as she’d grown stronger, during her physical therapy, and several from the time they’d marked Marty’s one-month milestone of health by throwing her a party, where she’d donned his lab coat and stethoscope as a joke while they ate cake.

  Hudson shook his head, incapable of speaking. These people… These people had invited him into their world, and he’d never be able to express his gratitude.

  He belonged somewhere with them—with Rocky, who really loved her new desk job at Reaper Central that she’d managed to negotiate after saving the cosmos from one of the biggest mistakes ever made in reaping history.

  How could he ever thank them for giving him the one thing he’d been missing for centuries? A framily.

  Running a hand through his hair, he looked at them—all of them—in astonishment. “I… You mean like that movie we watched, 50 First Dates.”

  Rocky grinned, her raspberry lips sliding upward. “Just like that, except you’re way cuter than Adam Sandler.”

  He began to speak, but he found it almost impossible to manage more than, “I don’t know what to…how to thank…”

  Wanda reached up and pressed a finger to the corner of his mouth. “You don’t have to. Just know we’ll be there with bells on. I mean, as long as no one has a stroke, or a heart attack, or ends up in a coma in the next five hundred years.”

  Marty’s laughter tinkled in his ears as she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. “There will never be enough ways to say thank you to you, Dr. Sexypants, but I’ve got five hundred years to find as many as possible.”

  “Actually, it’s like four hundred and sixty-nine. I’ve been back in this reincarnation for thirty-nine years.”

  Nina knocked his shoulder with the heel of her hand. “Are you fucking telling me you don’t know when your goddamn birthday is?”

  As he realized what she said was true, he nodded, pulling Rocky close to him. “I guess I never felt like it was a birthday-birthday. You know, with cake and candles? It’s just the day I rise from the ashes. I only happen to remember the date of my last reincarnation because I rose by a newspaper stand.”

  “Well, Birdman? Today’s your lucky fucking day, because guess what? From here on out, on this day every year, we’re going to celebrate the shit out of you,” Nina said with a grin and a slap on his back.

  At that moment, Carl burst from Marty’s kitchen, an enormous sheet cake with a blazing batch of candles on a cart pushed by his duct-taped hands. “Haaappy… Haaappy birthdaaay,” he began to sing, and everyone else joined in.

  And there was laughter and clapping, and babies and happy couples, and lots of cake and, above all, when the singing and eating was done, there was Rocky.

  He didn’t know it was possible to care about so many people.

  “Hey.” She stood on tiptoe and tweaked the elastic chinstrap on his birthday hat and whispered in his ear, “Have I told you that I love you yet today?”

  He pulled the ring from his pocket and held it up, the gleam catching the firelight in the huge fireplace. “Have I told you that I love you back?”

  Rocky cocked her head, her eyes filling with tears as she cupped his jaw, running her thumb over it, “Really?”

  Hudson pulled her into his arms. “Yep. Really. So will you have me? Five hundred years is a mighty long time to be attached to one guy.”

  Rocky held out her finger so he could slip it on, and then threw her arms around his neck, kissing his lips, her eyes bright with happiness. “It sure is, Birdman, a mighty long time indeed, but you know what that means, don’t you?”

  “What does that mean, Miss McNally?”

  She gave him an impish grin. “It means I have at least two hundred years to plan the biggest wedding the cosmos has ever seen. How do you think Nina will feel about wearing yellow for a bridesmaid’s dress?”

  “No fucking way, Reaper!” he heard his favorite vampire yell from across the room.

  Nina’s yelling and swearing was music to Hudson’s ears.

  And that was how he knew he was exactly where he was meant to be.

  The End

  (I so hope you enjoyed this little foray back into the lives of the women who started this all and I really hope you’ll join me when we venture back into our normal format with The Accidental Unicorn—coming soon!)

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  Chapter 1

  * * *

  “Left, Stevie! Left!” my familiar, Belfry, bellowed, flapping his teeny bat wings in a rhythmic whir against the lash of wind and rain. “No, your other left! If you don’t get this right sometime soon, we’re gonna end up resurrecting the entire population of hell!”

  I repositioned him in the air, moving my hand to the left, my fingers and arms aching as the icy rains of Seattle in February battered my face and my last clean outfit. “Are you sure it was here that the voice led you? Like right in this spot? Why would a ghost choose a cliff on a hill in the middle of Ebenezer Falls as a place to strike up a conversation?”

  “Stevie Cartwright, in your former witch life, did the ghosts you once spent more time with than the living always choose convenient locales to do their talking? As I recall, that loose screw Ferdinand Santos decided to make an appearance at the gynecologist. Remember? It was all stirrups and forceps and gabbing about you going to his wife to tell her where he hid the toenail clippers. That’s only one example. Shall I list more?”

  Sometimes, in my former life as a witch, those who’d gone to the Great Beyond contacted me to help them settle up a score, or reveal information they took to the grave but felt guilty about taking. Some scores and guilty consciences were worthier than others.

  “Fine. Let’s forget about convenience and settle for getting the job done because it’s forty degrees and dropping, you’re going to catch your death, and I can’t spend all day on a rainy cliff just because you’re sure someone is trying to contact me using you as my conduit. You aren’t like rabbit ears on a TV, buddy. And let’s not forget the fact that we’re unemployed, if you’ll recall. We need a job, Belfry. We need big, big job before my savings turns to ashes and joins the pile that was once known as my life.”

  “Higher!” he demanded. Then he asked, “Speaking of ashes, on a scale of one to ten, how much do you hate Baba Yaga today? You know, now that we’re a month into this witchless gig?”

  Losing my witch powers was a sore subject I tried in quiet desperation to keep on the inside.

  I puffed an icy breath from my lips, creating a spray from the rain splashing into my mouth. “I don’t hate Baba,” I replied easily.

  Almost too easily.

  The answer had become second nature. I responded the same way every time anyone asked when referring to the witch community’s fearless, ageless leader, Baba Yaga, who’d shunned me right out of my former life in Paris, Texas, and bac
k to my roots in a suburb of Seattle.

  I won’t lie. That had been the single most painful moment of my life. I didn’t think anything could top being left at the altar by Warren the Wayward Warlock. Forget losing a fiancé. I had the witch literally slapped right out of me. I lost my entire being. Everything I’ve ever known.

  Belfry made his wings flap harder and tipped his head to the right, pushing his tiny skull into the wind. “But you no likey. Baba booted you out of Paris, Stevie. Shunned you like you’d never even existed.”

  Paris was the place to be for a witch if living out loud was your thing. There was no hiding your magic, no fear of a human uprising or being burned at the stake out of paranoia. Everyone in the small town of Paris was paranormal, though primarily it was made up of my own kind.

  Some witches are just as happy living where humans are the majority of the population. They don’t mind keeping their powers a secret, but I came to love carrying around my wand in my back pocket just as naturally as I’d carry my lipstick in my purse.

  I really loved the freedom to practice white magic anywhere I wanted within the confines of Paris and its rules, even if I didn’t love feeling like I lived two feet from the fiery jaws of Satan.

  But Belfry had taken my ousting from the witch community much harder than me—or maybe I should say he’s more vocal about it than me.

  So I had to ask. “Do you keep bringing up my universal shunning to poke at me, because you get a kick out of seeing my eyes at their puffiest after a good, hard cry? Or do you ask to test the waters because there’s some witch event Baba’s hosting that you want to go to with all your little familiar friends and you know the subject is a sore one for me this early in the ‘Stevie isn’t a witch anymore’ game?”

  Belfry’s small body trembled. “You hurt my soul, Cruel One. I would never tease about something so delicate. It’s neither. As your familiar, it’s my job to know where your emotions rank. I can’t read you like I used to because—”

  “Because I’m not on the same wavelength as you. Our connection is weak and my witchy aura is fading. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I get it. Listen, Bel, I don’t hate BY. She’s a good leader. On the other hand, I’m not inviting her over for girls’ night and braiding her hair either. She did what she had to in accordance with the white witch way. I also get that. She’s the head witch in charge and it’s her duty to protect the community.”

  “Protect-schmotect. She was over you like a champion hurdler. In a half second flat.”

  Belfry was bitter-schmitter.

  “Things have been dicey in Paris as of late, with a lot of change going on. You know that as well as I do. I just happened to be unlucky enough to be the proverbial straw to break Baba’s camel back. She made me the example to show everyone how she protects us…er, them. So could we not talk about her or my defunct powers or my old life anymore? Because if we don’t look to the future and get me employed, we’re going to have to make curtains out of your tiny wings to cover the window of our box under the bridge.”

  “Wait! There he is! Hold steady, Stevie!” he yelled into the wind.

  We were out on this cliff in the town I’d grown up in because Belfry claimed someone from the afterlife—someone British—was trying to contact me, and as he followed the voice, it was clearest here. In the freezing rain…

  Also in my former life, from time to time, I’d helped those who’d passed on solve a mystery. Now that I was unavailable for comment, they tried reaching me via Belfry.

  The connection was always hazy and muddled, it came and went, broken and spotty, but Belfry wasn’t ready to let go of our former life. So more often than not, over the last month since I’d been booted from the community, as the afterlife grew anxious about my vacancy, the dearly departed sought any means to connect with me.

  Belfry was the most recent “any means.”

  “Madam Who?” Belfry squeaked in his munchkin voice, startling me. “Listen up, matey, when you contact a medium, you gotta turn up the volume!”

  “Belfryyy!” I yelled when a strong wind picked up, lashing at my face and making my eyes tear. “This is moving toward ridiculous. Just tell whoever it is that I can’t come to the phone right now due to poverty!”

  He shrugged me off with an impatient flap of his wings. “Wait! Just one more sec—what’s that? Zoltar? What in all the bloomin’ afterlife is a Zoltar?” Belfry paused and, I’d bet, held his breath while he waited for an answer—and then he let out a long, exasperated squeal of frustration before his tiny body went limp.

  Which panicked me. Belfry was prone to drama-ish tendencies at the best of times, but the effort he was putting into being my conduit of sorts had been taking a toll. He was all I had, my last connection to anything supernatural. I couldn’t bear losing him.

  So I yanked him to my chest and tucked him into my soaking-wet sweater as I made a break for the hotel we were a week from being evicted right out of.

  “Belfry!” I clung to his tiny body, rubbing my thumbs over the backs of his wings.

  Belfry is a cotton ball bat. He’s two inches from wing to wing of pure white bigmouth and minute yellow ears and snout, with origins stemming from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, where it’s warm and humid.

  Since we’d moved here to Seattle from the blazing-hot sun of Paris, Texas, he’d struggled with the cooler weather.

  I was always finding ways to keep him warm, and now that he’d taxed himself by staying too long in the crappy weather we were having, plus using all his familiar energy to figure out who was trying to contact me, his wee self had gone into overload.

  I reached for the credit card key to our hotel room in my skirt pocket and swiped it, my hands shaking. Slamming the door shut with the heel of my foot, I ran to the bathroom, flipped on the lights and set Belfry on a fresh white towel. His tiny body curled inward, leaving his wings tucked under him as pinhead-sized drops of water dripped on the towel.

  Grabbing the blow dryer on the wall, I turned the setting to low and began swishing it over him from a safe distance so as not to knock him off the vanity top. “Belfry! Don’t you poop on me now, buddy. I need you!” Using my index and my thumb, I rubbed along his rounded back, willing warmth into him.

  “To the right,” he ordered.

  My fingers stiffened as my eyes narrowed, but I kept rubbing just in case.

  He groaned. “Ahh, yeah. Riiight there.”

  “Belfry?”

  “Yes, Wicked One?”

  “Not the time to test my devotion.”

  “Are you fragile?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word fragile. But I would use mildly agitated and maybe even raw. If you’re just joking around, knock it off. I’ve had all I can take in the way of shocks and upset this month.”

  He used his wings to push upward to stare at me with his melty chocolate eyes. “I wasn’t testing your devotion. I was just depleted. Whoever this guy is, trying to get you on the line, he’s determined. How did you manage to keep your fresh, dewy appearance with all that squawking in your ears all the time?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and avoided my reflection in the mirror over the vanity. I didn’t look so fresh and dewy anymore, and I knew it. I looked tired and devoid of interest in most everything around me. The bags under my eyes announced it to the world.

  “We need to find a job, Belfry. We have exactly a week before my savings account is on E.”

  “So no lavish spending. Does that mean I’m stuck with the very average Granny Smith for dinner versus, say, a yummy pomegranate?”

  I chuckled because I couldn’t help it. I knew my laughter egged him on, but he was the reason I still got up every morning. Not that I’d ever tell him as much.

  I reached for another towel and dried my hair, hoping it wouldn’t frizz. “You get whatever is on the discount rack, buddy. Which should be incentive enough for you to help me find a job, lest you forgot how ripe those discounted bananas from the whole foods store really were.”

&nbs
p; “Bleh. Okay. Job. Onward ho. Got any leads?”

  “The pharmacy in the center of town is looking for a cashier. It won’t get us a cute house at the end of a cul-de-sac, but it’ll pay for a decent enough studio. Do you want to come with or stay here and rest your weary wings?”

  “Where you go, I go. I’m the tuna to your mayo.”

  “You have to stay in my purse, Belfry,” I warned, scooping him up with two fingers to bring him to the closet with me to help me choose an outfit. “You can’t wander out like you did at the farmers’ market. I thought that jelly vendor was going to faint. This isn’t Paris anymore. No one knows I’m a witch—” I sighed. “Was a witch, and no one especially knows you’re a talking bat. Seattle is eclectic and all about the freedom to be you, but they haven’t graduated to letting ex-witches leash their chatty bats outside of restaurants just yet.”

  “I got carried away. I heard ‘mango chutney’ and lost my teensy mind. I promise to stay in the dark hovel you call a purse—even if the British guy contacts me again.”

  “Forget the British guy and help me decide. Red Anne Klein skirt and matching jacket, or the less formal Blue Fly jeans and Gucci silk shirt in teal.”

  “You’re not interviewing with Karl Lagerfeld. You’re interviewing to sling sundries. Gum, potato chips, People magazine, maybe the occasional script for Viagra.”

  “It’s an organic pharmacy right in that kitschy little knoll in town where all the food trucks and tattoo shops are. I’m not sure they make all-natural Viagra, but you sure sound disappointed we might have a roof over our heads.”

  “I’m disappointed you probably won’t be wearing all those cute vintage clothes you’re always buying at the thrift store if you work in a pharmacy.”

  “I haven’t gotten the job yet, and if I do, I guess I’ll just be the cutest cashier ever.”

  I decided on the Ann Klein. It never hurt to bring a touch of understated class, especially when the class had only cost me a total of twelve dollars.

  As I laid out my wet clothes to dry on the tub and went about the business of putting on my best interview facade, I tried not to think about Belfry’s broken communication with the British guy. There were times as a witch when I’d toiled over the souls who needed closure, sometimes to my detriment.