Six Times a Charm by Deanna Chase & Angie Fox & Julie Kenner & Mindy Klasky & Rose Pressey & Liz Schulte

Author:Deanna Chase & Angie Fox & Julie Kenner & Mindy Klasky & Rose Pressey & Liz Schulte [Chase, Deanna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Bayou Moon Publishing
Published: 2013-09-18T18:30:00+00:00

There was a flash of darkness.

Okay, I knew that didn’t make any sense. I knew that a “flash” was supposed to be light, that I was supposed to use the word to describe stars and glinting and color.

But this was an explosion of darkness.

My candle flame disappeared. The light from the stairs disappeared. The sight of my fingertips, pressed against the jet black word “wist” on the parchment page, the book itself, the table, the room—all of it just disappeared.

And then, it jumped back into existence, except that everything was more than it had been before. Everything was sharper, clearer. I felt like someone in the projection booth of my life had just responded to an audience member’s drunken roar: “Focus!”

This time, I didn’t try to swallow my scream, but I still didn’t manage a full Friday-the-Thirteenth Chainsaw Massacre shriek. More a startled exclamation: “What the hell?”

And those three words changed everything. One moment, I was alone in my basement, surrounded by an impossible collection of books, holding a wavering beeswax candle and trembling in my bunny slippers. The next, I had company.

The statue beside me awakened.

At first, it moved like any other waist-high cat you might choose to imagine. It uncurled its tail from around its paws and stood up from its seated position. It shook its head back and forth. It stretched its front paws forward, digging its claws into the crimson and indigo Turkish carpet and extracting them one by one. It opened its mouth in a gaping yawn, showing me the ridged roof of its palate and its hand-long fangs, sharper than the knives I’d thrown into the kitchen drawers upstairs.

Before I could speak or move or even think of retrieving my cell phone, the cat tucked its head toward its chest and bunched all four feet together. It arched its back like a Halloween symbol, a rigid curve of spiky fur.

But when it came out of the arch, it was no longer a cat.

I found myself looking into a man’s eyes. In the candlelight, I couldn’t decipher their color—they might have been green or amber or hazel. They were slightly almond-shaped, complementing strong, angular cheekbones that I would have given my own eyeteeth to possess. His hair was jet black and very short, standing on end as if it had been gelled. He wore the most close-fitting black t-shirt I’d ever seen and a pair of black jeans that were stretched so tight across his crotch that I glanced away immediately. His shoes were sleek leather, vaguely European.

He surveyed me from head to toe, taking a long moment to linger over my bunny slippers. He took his time licking his lips before he settled his right hand on his hip and shook his head. When he spoke, he sounded positively disdainful. “Girlfriend,” he said. “We have got to get you some better shoes.”

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