The Accidental Troll Read online

  Was this woman Marty really talking about something as ordinary and mundane as redecorating when she’d just made herself explode into a hairy, drooling werewolf with teeth that jutted from her head and looked like long porcelain dentures of death?

  “You should have seen the fight we had with her over the kitchen. Honestly, if I’ve ever wanted to kill anyone, it was the during what we fondly called our Storm the Outdated Castle period.”

  Yep. She sure was chatting about this as though they were making small talk…

  Leaning forward against the plump off-white sectional that spanned the better half of the living room, Murphy noted the frozen television screen that was almost as long and as wide as the wall itself, and saw they really had been watching 90 Day Fiancé when she’d called.

  Why Murphy chose to cling to that particular truth as though it gave them some kind of credibility—normalcy—could only be chalked up to her addled brain and sheer terror.

  The outrageous reality show—a show that featured Americans going to foreign countries to meet and possibly marry their Facebook hookups within a ninety-day period…a show she couldn’t help but get sucked into in suitably horrified train-wreck fashion—felt almost normal compared to this night.

  And that was when she found herself making small talk back, because it was what you did when you met a vampire, a werewolf and a halfsie, right?

  “It really is beautiful. You did a lovely job. When Nova had her penthouse done, it cost a fortune. I can’t imagine what a house this size must have run.”

  She’d never forget how outrageous initial estimates from interior designers had been when Nova had bought her penthouse in Manhattan.

  Murphy had scoffed and complained, but ultimately, her sister had the last word—and she had to admit, it was beautiful and ultra-posh, and everyone had wanted to make over Nova LaRue’s apartment. But it still had cost more than an actual house in Queens.

  Marty curtsied and smiled that warm smile as she readjusted her purple scarf. “Thank you for saying so. It wasn’t easy, but I think we pulled it off quite nicely for a couple of amateurs.”

  Nova had calmed at this point. Maybe she was still frozen in terror. Or maybe she was feeling the totally odd sense of comfort Murphy felt when she’d entered this stunning home that looked like it belonged in Better Homes & Gardens. It was hard to tell how Nova felt as Nina held her up under the beautiful driftwood chandelier’s dim light for inspection.

  Nova’s stubby legs dangled, her bare, block-like feet—with only three toes—wiggled. And her head? First, it was surely much too big for her stout but tiny body because it flopped back on her shoulders. Second, her eyes, once sultry and green, were now tiny and beady as they darted past her sausage-long nose and upward at Nina.

  Third: her hair. Oh, God in all his mercy, her hair was like a bushy pelt of dried brown strands that stuck out everywhere. Man, Joaquin, her hairstylist, was going to shit a curling iron when he saw this.

  Nova paid a hefty amount of money for hair masques and conditioners to keep her gorgeous mane of blonde hair in premium condition. She wasn’t going to be pleased when she really wrapped her brain around this mess of a bird’s nest on her head.

  There wasn’t much that was as important to Nova as her looks, and all that beauty was long, long gone.

  Nina popped her lips and shook her head as she gazed at Nova with a frown. “Damn. I’m here to tell ya, I’ve seen some shit since I became a vampire. Mermaids, cougars, demons, dragons, bears—you name it. A bunch of crazy shit, but this is the craziest shit I’ve seen so far.”

  “Nina,” Wanda scolded with a frown, her clothes exactly as they were before she’d turned into a dog—unwrinkled and flawless. “Put Nova down, please. You’ve already caused enough grief for one night. It was in no way acceptable for you to do what you did to them for your own amusement. I won’t allow you to treat her like a science project now.”

  Nina set Nova down on the large square of cream and aquamarine rug beneath the beechwood coffee table with a bulky piece of decorative driftwood on its surface, and scoffed.

  “Shut the fuck up, Wanda. If the two of you ninnies would do a better job of vetting the clients before inviting their lying asses over for a fucking tea party, we might not have the problem we had last month when that motherfucker called and told us he’d been turned into a goddamn beaver or some shit. I wouldn’t have to make them dance like little circus monkeys to prove they need our help if you two would stop acting like this shit we do is some kind of Queer Eye for the Accidentally Turned.”

  Marty made a face at Nina. “First, I don’t know what’s wrong with treating this like a makeover, Mouthy McMouth. It is a makeover. Second, he didn’t say beaver, Nina, and you know it. He said he was a jaguar.”

  “And was he, blondie? Nah. He was a little asshole who thought it would be funny to punk three dumb bitches into believing he’d been accidentally turned. It took me two hours to sort through all that crazy in his head and make him forget he’d ever met us. So fuck the two of you if you don’t like my precautions. If the client wants it bad enough, they’ll dance like the little motherfucking puppets they are, and this way we find out if they’re for goddamn real—because we have shit at stake here, too, Miss Clairol 222. Shit I’m not willing to risk just because we’re GD superhuman—or as you so delicately fucking put it, Wanda, someone’s science projects.”

  Wanda appeared to percolate those words and then she gave Nina a nod and reached out to squeeze her friend’s hand. “You’re right, Vampire. And that was a beautiful guise to cover for the fact that you were having a go at them, and it had nothing to do with protecting us and our superhuman powers and everything to do with your sadistic side. But nice try.”

  Nina cackled and squeezed her friend’s hand in return. “Thank you for sharing.”

  Murphy watched the exchange and noted how familiar these women were with each other—how comfortable they were in expressing their feelings no matter how harsh, how they appeared to move as one…and that struck another chord of comfort in her.

  That was certainly odd, wasn’t it? They’d just done something so frightening, so much like a scene you’d see in a movie, she shouldn’t be at all comforted by them. She should be terrified of them.

  Yet…

  With a long, raspy sigh in Nina’s direction, Wanda pointed to the kitchen and smiled at Murphy. “Please, won’t you join us for some tea? It’s freezing outside and you were out there for quite a while doing the…”

  “Wobble,” Nina provided, and then she laughed again as she rolled her hips to imitate the one-time popular dance move.

  “Actually, Nova did the Wobble. I was doing the call of the whippoorwill,” Murphy couldn’t help but remind her.

  Nina rolled her eyes. “And a shitty one at that. I looked it up on Google and that was a fucking weak impression if there ever was one.”

  Marty flicked her fingers in her friend’s face. “Leave her alone.” Then she turned to Murphy and smiled, her blue eyes soft and inviting. “Please, join us for some tea, and we’ll have a sit down and see what we can do.”

  A sit down. Again, the normalcy of those words attributed to this madness struck her as insanely curious.

  But…

  Murphy wasn’t sure what made her agree, but she didn’t do it before grabbing Nova’s hand and tucking her protectively against her side—a lot like the way she’d done when her sister was little.

  “Okay,” she consented, following Wanda, who didn’t so much walk to the kitchen as glided on graceful feet, her low-heeled conservative shoes barely making a sound.

  Sweeping her arm toward the wide kitchen island with a dusky gray and black-veined countertop, Marty directed them to a row of beige, padded stools.

  “Make yourself comfortable and I’ll get the tea,“ Marty murmured politely.

  Murphy stooped to pick up Nova and sit her in a chair, ignoring her squeaks of protest at being treated like a child.

&n
bsp; Looking around the kitchen with its German smeared-brick arch over the eight-burner stove and the insanely beautiful, rustic beech cabinets and shiny appliances, Murphy slid onto the stool next to Nova and placed her hands on the counter, folding them together. Strangely, she still didn’t feel anywhere near as panicked as she had earlier.

  Maybe she was in shock.

  Wanda stood on the other side of the island, placing her palms on the quartz surface to brace herself. Murphy caught her trying not to stare at Nova, but in all fairness, it was hard not to stare at Nova.

  When it had first happened, Murphy wasn’t even able to speak. It was all she could do not to scream and frighten Nova any more than she already was. But she had stared as her sister’s helium-like voice poured out of her tiny transformed body.

  She’d stared long and hard.

  Lifting her chin, Wanda smiled at Murphy, sweet and reassuring. “So. What in all of blazes happened? I mean, how in the ever-lovin’…” She paused and cleared her throat. “How did this happen?”

  Nova squirmed uncomfortably on the stool, but she’d quite suddenly gone mute, leaving Murphy to do the talking. That was nothing new, really. Whenever there was trouble, Murphy always talked Nova’s way out of the problem if being coy and cute didn’t get her sister what she wanted.

  And it was going to be really hard to pull off cute looking the way she did right now.

  Murphy tucked her ponytail behind her shoulder and ran her fingers over her temples. “I don’t know, Miss…”

  Wanda smiled and patted Murphy’s hand. “It’s Jefferson, but please, just call me Wanda. No formalities here.”

  “Wanda,” she repeated. “I swear to you, I don’t know. I was at Nova’s, working on some numbers for a deal she’d been offered for her own line of clothing, and Nova was in her office, posting to her Insta page. The next thing I know, she’s screaming her head off and this…this was the result.”

  Wanda looked to Nova, whose eyes were cast downward toward the floor. “Nova, do you know how this happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she squeaked with a shrug of her tiny shoulders. “I swear it, I don’t know.”

  Murphy paid particular attention to the tone with which Nova answered. It sounded a lot like the one she used when she was the suspect in a crime she swore she hadn’t committed.

  Not that she was a criminal, not in the illegal sense, but Nova wasn’t above all manner of shenanigans when she wanted something. She could play dirty, and that’s what scared Murphy right now, and exactly what made her press her sister for answers.

  “Are you sure, Nova? I mean, this—whatever this is—doesn’t just happen.” Then she looked at Wanda, her brow furrowed. “By the way, what is this… I mean, what is she, anyway?”

  Wanda paused for what felt like a very long time before she spoke, and it was painfully obvious she’d chosen her words carefully when she finally did.

  “I’m going to be honest here. I don’t know, Murphy. I don’t even have a guess. In all our accidental turnings, I’ve never seen anything I couldn’t identify or at least guess at the origin, some being more obvious than others, of course. But this…I just don’t have an answer for this.”

  Nina clapped her lean hand with shortly trimmed nails on the edge of the counter. “I call fucking gargoyle. I mean, look at her little hands and that nose? She’d give Karl Malden a run for his money.”

  “Who?” Murphy asked.

  Nina rolled her eyes. “The Streets of San Francisco? You know, guy with the big nose, he played a cop…”

  Murphy gave her a blank stare.

  Nina shook her head with a husky chuckle. “Jesus. Kids. Never mind. Either way, I’m laying bets on a gargoyle.”

  “Gargoyle?” Nova screeched, her beady eyes flitting from face to face.

  “Nah,” Marty said with casual nonchalance, bringing a steaming pot of tea and some mugs to the island. “She doesn’t have wings, Nina. Don’t all gargoyles have wings? And her feet aren’t nearly big enough. Look how tiny and flat her feet are.”

  “Hobbit?” Nina guessed with as much casual detachment as Marty. “I’ve seen LOTR eleventy billion times with Greg, and I could see it.”

  “Hobbits aren’t real, Mistress of The Dark,” Marty scoffed as she poured the tea.

  But vampires and werewolves were…

  Nova began to sob, tiny, phlegmy, gasping sobs, curling her small but chunky hands into fists and pounding them on the counter. “I don’t want to be a gargoyle, Murphy!”

  Murphy didn’t want her to be a gargoyle, either, but wish in one hand and shit in the other, right?

  Rubbing her hand over her sister’s back, she made soothing circles with her palm like she’d done when Nova was little. “Calm down, Nova. Please. It’s just a guess. We don’t know for sure what you are. First, we have to figure out how you got this way to begin with,” Murphy soothed.

  Marty winced and shot her sister a look of sympathy. “Oh, Nova, honey, I’m sorry. That was so insensitive of me. Listen, I have feelers out to all my paranormal friends as we speak. We’ll figure out what you are, I promise. Now, let me just take a quick pic of you to send with my text and we’ll get to figuring this out.”

  As Marty pulled her phone out, two things happened at once.

  Well, three, if you were really into counting for accuracy’s sake.

  Murphy’s protect-Nova’s-image-at-all-costs kicked in. She hopped up from the stool, quicker than even she would have given herself credit for, though admittedly she’d had plenty of practice—and jumped in front of Marty to prevent her from taking a picture by holding up a hand.

  Unauthorized pictures of Nova weren’t allowed, but they especially weren’t allowed when her sister looked like a hobbit from a Happy Meal.

  As Murphy instinctively went to snatch the phone from Marty, Nina rushed in, a blur of limbs and glorious hair, and knocked her out of the way, shoving her into Nova, who fell to the floor in a screaming fit of shrill, squeaky outrage.

  As Murphy tried to right herself but instead ended up stumbling and tripping, out of nowhere, a strong arm grabbed at her just before she felt a stinging prick to her upper arm.

  A sting so sharp and white-hot, it made her cry out.

  Then there was a flash of green hair, some deliciously big muscles, and the scream of all three women before she sagged against something really hard.

  And if she did say so herself, what she’d sagged against wasn’t so unpleasant.

  Not so unpleasant at all.

  Chapter 4

  Sten Peerson stared down at the beautiful woman lying beside him on the couch in deep slumber, her hand curled under her chin, her long, smooth, rapidly turning-dark-pink hair fanned out behind her, and sighed.

  Jesus Christ, he was going to kill his sister Bellamy. Half-sister, if you were a stickler for details. They shared a mother, and he’d been her full-fledged protector for as long as she’d been alive, and he loved her—even if she was probably the biggest pain in the ass he’d ever known in all his many years on this Earth.

  She’d done this. He knew it. It had Bellamy’s name written all over it. It smelled like her, too. It smelled like her brand of revenge.

  And he’d just made things a million times worse. He hadn’t meant to, of course. When the strangely pale-green young man had let him into Nina’s house, he’d planned to introduce himself properly, but then the woman passed out on the couch had tripped over her sister, and he’d rushed in to help her.

  This was the product of his “help.”

  So he’d awkwardly introduced himself, and the three women—legends where he came from—had welcomed him with the kind of warmth and understanding that had earned them the title legendary.

  The sleeping woman’s sister had passed out, too, but he figured it had more to do with seeing a man who was almost six-foot-five with green hair and orange eyes, than any harm from her fall. In fact, as of this moment, she snored softly on the other end of the big sectional in
this serenely decorated room.

  “Sten?” The lovely, soft-spoken woman named Wanda called his name. “Can I offer you some tea? Coffee maybe? Or something stronger? You look like you could use something stronger.”

  He could use a whole bottle of something stronger, but he’d stick to caffeine for now. “Coffee could be the difference between me staying upright or falling on my face.”

  Wanda tinkled a light laugh and nodded. “I’ve got you covered. Let me go brew some for you.”

  As she took her leave, the ethereal creature named Nina flopped down on the opposite couch and stared at him with hard, glittering eyes. “So, you’re a fucking troll? Shit, man. You don’t look like any troll I’ve ever seen, and you sure as fuck don’t look like that little wind-up hobbit, snoring like she’s gettin’ paid to saw logs.”

  He heard that a lot. Smiling at her, doing his best to keep from angrily punching a hole in the wall of her very nice house—or rather, castle—Sten nodded.

  “I hear that a lot from other paranormals,” he said with a small chuckle. “It just happens to be the variety of troll I am. We’re all Scandinavian, but the little one is a different breed of troll than I am and what eventually this woman will turn into once she transitions…” He frowned and rubbed a weary hand over his temple. “What was her name again?”

  “Murphy.” Marty filled in the blank for him.

  He eyed the petite blonde from across the room, where she stood by a wall of water, cascading into a pool of mutely colored rocks, still quite obviously a bit pale and shaken from their first meeting.

  “Yes, of course. Murphy.”

  The very lovely Murphy, who was going to wake up and flay him alive for what he’d done in an act of innocent chivalry.

  Goddammit, he should have sheathed his knife, but when he got the semi-hysterical call from Bellamy, he’d gone to Nova’s apartment, zapping himself inside to find a laptop open to the OOPS website. Being familiar with the group of women, he realized what Murphy’s intent was and reached out to a werewolf contact of his, found the address to their homes and had lucked out when he tried Nina’s first.