The Ex Hex (Ex Hex #1)(25)

None of them broke, but they skittered drunkenly, bumping into each other, spinning around, and Rhys kept moving forward, sweeping the broom back and forth, clearing a path to the three girls in the corner.

“Ladies,” he said with a smile when he reached them, “hopefully we’ve all learned a valuable lesson about ordering things off dodgy websites!”

He kept grinning at them even as they stared at him. He saw one glance down at the hole in his pants, and directing them to follow him said, “Lucky thing I had a lighter on me.”

Given that he was currently cursed, Rhys knew using magic on them was dangerous, but charm, he’d found, was a sort of spell all its own. As he moved the girls toward the door, sweeping skulls all the while, he kept up a sort of inane chatter about checking the batteries in things before you put them out on the store floor, on the strongly worded email he was going to write to the manufacturer and on the discount Something Wicked would be sure to give them the next time they came in.

By the time he got them to the door, he was sick of his own voice, but the girls seemed less freaked out, one of them turning around to offer, “I once ordered an iPod off the Internet, but, like, some random website? Not Apple? And it, like, totally started smoking in my pocket.”

“Even so,” Rhys said, ushering them out onto the sidewalk. “Thank you for shopping at Something Wicked, please come again!”

The raven over the door shrieked as Rhys closed the door with a decisive bang and reached up to pull down the little shade over the window.

Once the door was firmly locked, he looked over at Gwyn and Vivienne.

Gwyn was still on the counter, her hands close together as a greenish light sparked back and forth between her fingers.

“Nicely done, dickbag,” she said, and before Rhys could object to that—which he wanted to, vociferously—she nodded at Vivienne.

Nodding back, Vivienne moved to the front window, dodging the skulls with surprising grace.

Do not notice how nice her legs look as she’s stepping over possessed pieces of plastic, you absolute pervert, Rhys thought to himself, but it was no use. Vivienne may have cursed him, may have been the cause of every bad thing that had happened to him since he set foot in this town, but his cock had clearly not gotten the message.

Stepping to the window, Vivi lifted one hand, white light glowing there. She was using magic to close the massive velvet drapes bracketing the shop’s front window, Rhys realized, and before he could call out a warning, the light jumped from her hand to the curtain.

And promptly set it on fire.

Vivienne shrieked as one of the skulls snapped at the toe of her shoe, and Rhys crossed the store, kicking the skull even as he reached up with the broom in an attempt to bat out the flames.

The smell of burned plastic filled the room as the bristles kindled, and out of the corner of his eye Rhys could make out Gwyn directing her magic toward the window.

“Don’t!” he shouted, and to his immense relief, he saw her drop her hands.

He was slightly less relieved to realize there was now a small crowd growing outside the window, which was very much open to reveal both the utter chaos inside and all the magic they were doing to try to stop it.

Wonderful.

All around them, the skulls were still moving, jaws opening and closing, and Rhys reached for Vivienne’s hand. “The storeroom!” he shouted over all that chittering, and Vivienne nodded, taking his hand.

Up on the counter, Gwyn looked from the window to the pair of them, then back again. “So what?” she asked. “We just hide from Night of the Living Tchotchkes and hope for the best?”

“Do you have a better idea?” Vivienne asked, but before Gwyn could reply, the door to the shop blew open, slamming hard against the wall.

Rhys turned slightly to see who had managed to come in—he was sure he’d locked the damn thing—but before he could, there was a nearly deafening blast and a flash of blue light that had him throwing his free hand up against the glare.

When he lowered it, he saw that there was nothing left of the skulls save for a few stray pits of smoking plastic and one red blinking eye that flashed off and on a few more times before slowly dying out.

In the silence that followed, Rhys was very aware of the smoky haze still lingering over the store, the scorch mark now scarring the floor in front of him and the fact that Vivienne was holding his hand.

He looked at their interlocked fingers, her palm almost hot against his, and then up at her face. Her cheeks were pink, eyes wide, and when she sensed him looking at her, her gaze shot to their hands.

Flustered, she dropped hers, stepping away from him as her aunt moved farther into the store.

“What,” Vivienne’s aunt said, her chest moving up and down with the force of her breathing, “have you two done now?”





Chapter 11




Maybe those toy skulls actually killed us and now we’re in hell, Vivi thought as she sat in her favorite chair in the storage room, the golden velvet wingback that she’d spent so much time in, there was probably an impression of her butt in the cushion.

It seemed like a good explanation for why she was stuck in this night that wouldn’t end. First the caves with Rhys, then that nightmare here at the store and now, despite being nearly thirty years old, she had to explain to Aunt Elaine that she’d broken one of the most sacred rules of witchcraft because a guy hurt her feelings.