Obsidian Curse Read Free Page B

human.
    “Pickle!” I hissed, careful to say his name just the one time. If I said it three times in a row it would surely summon him, although I didn’t think my cottage was on a leyline, which is how he would travel here. The woods behind the Geraghty Girls’ House—the bed-and-breakfast owned and operated by Birdie and her sisters—was most certainly linked to the realm of the Fae, however.
    This, I learned all too well on my twenty-ninth birthday some weeks ago. That was the day I officially blossomed into a true Geraghty. A true witch.
    I looked at Thor. He sat, ears perked and alert, one pointed forward, the other to the side listening for the slightest rustle.
    “Anything?” I asked.
    Thor harrumphed, frustrated that he didn’t catch his target.
    I crossed my arms, scanning the woods for signs of a fluorescent green light, a clear indicator that the fairies have come.
    Again, nothing.
    “Maybe we imagined it,” I said to Thor. “It’s getting close to Samhain. The veil between the worlds is thinning. Maybe it was just an energy surge. A crossed wire that picked up on their realm.”
    Thor cocked his head toward me.
    “I know.” I scratched behind his ear and looked back toward the woods once more. “Even as I said it, I didn’t believe it.”
    But if it was Pickle I saw on the monitor, what was he doing here? What danger had he come to warn me about?
    Because I had to say, I could have gone an entire lifetime without seeing Danu and the Morrigan again.
    I showered and dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and boots as quickly as possible, trying not to think of the Otherworld, or the Web of Wyrd, as I had since learned it was called, and prayed that I wouldn’t wake up in a freaking birdcage tomorrow.
    Yeah, those Celtic goddesses could be real whacknuts. They loved messing with humans. I wouldn’t recommend mouthing off to one, as they desperately lack anything resembling a sense of humor. They’re like the mean girls of the divine.
    I tossed my work laptop into a bag along with a yogurt for me and some roast chicken and mashed potatoes for Thor, and we were on our way to the newspaper.
    The office of the paper was only a few blocks away so we usually walked, but I was running late, so we drove through the fall morning sunshine down to Main Street.
    There were a lot of cars parked along the street for a Monday morning, but fall was the busiest season for tourists. Many of the hotels, restaurants, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts were booked solid in October. In fact, though we were a town of just a few thousand, most years a million visitors passed through our neck of the woods. Amethyst, you see, was one of the gems of the Midwest. Perched on the corners of three states—Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin—it wasn’t pancake-flat like so much of the heartland. Rather, it was hilly and lush, with gorgeous bluffs, the occasional waterfall, the mighty Mississippi, rolling green pastures, and a quaint Main Street filled with restored buildings that seemed to have sprung straight from a Dickens novel. It was an old steamboat and mining town, and it had seen its share of hardships as well as triumphs, including the nine Civil War generals and one president the locals were proud to claim as their own.
    While business was excellent for the economy, it was hell on parking. The paper had a small parking lot, but overflow from the nearby lodging facilities often spilled into it. I finally squeezed my car into a spot after three loops around, and Thor and I headed inside.
    Monday morning meetings were my partner Derek’s idea. Personally, I hated meetings. I thought if you were adult enough to hold down a job then you were adult enough to work unsupervised. Besides, there were only five employees total, so anyone who needed to discuss an assignment could just walk across the hall, tap the person on the shoulder, and, well, discuss it. But Derek liked to think of himself as a young entrepreneur and he read in Forbes