Bearly Hanging On (The Jamesburg Shifters #6)(47)

But when Thursday dawned, life was still normal, and the pair still hadn't booked off and taken up residence with the possums in Ryan's getaway cave.

And Jamie? She was starting to come to grips with the fact that she was dating a jewel thief. Good thing it was time for therapy with the only man capable of helping Jamie talk through her problems.

The cauldron bubbling by the front door of Jenga's "medical" practice carried a scent similar to what Jamie assumed a pot of turpentine boiling a bunch of rhino dung would smell like.

"Oh my God," she said, pinching her nose shut and frowning. "What the hell are you cooking?"

"Atlas's lunch," he said, smiling and stirring the bubbling, roiling, acrid mess. "Sara's too, I guess, but she's watching her figure."

Jamie wrinkled her nose. "I thought he just drank cologne. What is that, anyway?"

"Atlas's lunch," Jenga said. "Sara—"

"Yes, I heard you the first time, but what's in there? It smells like hell vomited up a pot of stew. Uh, is that a bat?"

"No," Jenga said, poking a bat down back into the pot with his spoon. "Well, maybe. But it ain't nothin' personal."

"Right," she said, still wrinkling her nose. "Listen, do you have a minute? By which I mean, are you almost done cooking that, uh, lunch?" A frog leg, and then what appeared to be half of a ham, both bobbed to the surface and quickly were sucked back down into the greenish-brown abyss. Jamie felt the back of her throat tighten just a little, but she couldn't look away. "What else is in there?"

"Oh," he said, looking off to the side like he was trying to recall. "Couple salamanders, ham sandwich, roll of sausage, couple bats, frog or two, hamster, I think? Hard to remember. They were all already dead. Don't you worry none about that, I wouldn't kill anything to feed 'em. Hell, Atlas is so soft-hearted, he'd get upset if I did."

"That's sweet of him," Jamie said, fighting back the nausea. "So, do you want me to come back?"

"Naw, come on in! I just have to finish this right quick. Have a seat, enjoy a magazine, anything you want. I'll be right back."

Jenga jangled off, his beard swaying to and fro, trinkets, chicken feet and whatever else he had tied in there, clanging along as he went. Jamie took a seat near the window at the front of his office, and opened it to at least let some of the ripe stink escape. In the magazine caddy near her seat were no less than six copies of the same issue of a baseball card pricing guide, a National Geographic about the hunt for Bigfoot from the 1970s, and every single issue of Soap Opera Digest since 1984.

She grabbed the latest issue, and was vaguely amazed to see that Beau and Hope were somehow still a thing, as she waited for the witchdoctor to finish whatever he was banging around with in the kitchen.

He emerged, still jangling, still whistling a tune. In one hand, he carried a blender. With a thud, he set the blender on a table next to his cauldron, and plugged it in.

"You're not actually going to..." Jamie trailed off, not willing or able to vocalize her horror without it becoming even more real.

"You ever seen that old Saturday Night Live skit?" Jenga started chuckling. "With Dan what’s-his-name? Bass-o-Matic?"

Jamie felt her stomach lurch. "Ugh," she said, swallowing hard. "Dan Aykroyd, and yeah, I have. Why?"

The answer came in the form of a gloppy soup plopping into the blender. From the very first drop, the liquid was so thick that it just settled into the vessel, not splashing back at all. When half a frog fell into the mixer, Jamie finally managed to tear her eyes away.

"Camp town races, doo-dah, doo-dah," Jenga sang happily.

The sound of the blender's blade catching on something as Jenga kept on singing "doo-dah, doo-dah" reminded Jamie of some kind of surrealist horror movie. If only he was singing some kind of opera, she thought, she'd be in the middle of a David Lynch movie.

"There!" Jenga announced. Jamie turned to face him just in time to see him pour the now-smooth mixture into a gallon milk jug, and then a second helping into a quart-sized one. "Lunch is ready!"

Suddenly, he took on a very sad look.

"What's wrong?" Jamie asked, as the old witch doctor sat down opposite her, in his makeshift waiting room.

"I keep forgetting he's got a job now," he said. She'd never seen anyone go from that happy to that sad in so short a time. "It's for the best though. They've both got such a sense of purpose now. If'n they ever build that stoplight, I'll have to find something else he can do."

"Wait," Jamie said, "I forgot he was doing that. They're both acting like stoplights at that intersection? How have I never gone to look at this? Distracted I guess."

"Oh yes, indeedie-doo," Jenga said, smiling again. "It's like they're both all grown up. I've got him reading Robert Frost now, you know."

The mental image of the eight and a half foot tall, Frankensteined-together zombie bear reciting "two roads diverged in a yellow wood," with heart-felt gravity was just about too much for Jamie to bear. "Does he, er, like it?"

Jenga shrugged. "Seems to. He's only eaten a couple of the books so far. Don't seem partial to the sad ones, which I can understand."