off, bitch don’t you get, biiitch ?” Somewhere, way deep down, she knew she’d tacked on that extra bitch because it would make Nina freak. And she liked it—reveled in it—relished it with lip-smacking anticipation.
Somewhere, way deep down inside, she also knew her ass was so in for a lickin’. Yet, also somewhere way deep down inside—she didn’t give a flying fuck. So she emphasized that way deep down inside disregard by pointing at Nina again and screeching, “Bitch!”
At the top of her lungs.
While Casey Louise Schwartz, always the calm in the middle of chaos, watched flames, bright orange and crackling blue, shoot from her fingertips and headed straight for her sister’s “not as scary as she once was” friend.
And then . . . oh, holy Heaven.
Set Nina’s hair on fire.
CHAPTER 3
So pandemonium and four women became one swirling, writhing entity of high-pitched screams, foul language, and tangled appendages.
Wanda, eyes wide, limbs slicing through the air at a freakishly blurred, breakneck speed, launched herself at the blanket Casey had left on the couch. Throwing it squarely at Nina better than any rodeo-roping cowboy, javelin-throwing Olympian, she managed to envelop her friend in it. Wanda became a distorted ball of color, catapulting herself onto Nina’s smoking head and knocking her to the floor with a hard grunt. Straddling her friend, Wanda tamped out the crackling flames with haphazard thwacks of her palm to Nina’s skull while Nina flapped her arms and swore.
And a frantic-eyed Marty, mere nanoseconds behind Wanda, scanned the room. Her feet beat a thumping path to the small table in the corner of Casey’s living room. Marty’s eyes honed in on what she was apparently looking for, and, wasting no time, her fumbling hands reached for the desired item. Grabbing Casey’s fishbowl, containing her beloved goldfish, Shark, Marty promptly dumped it over a smoking, screeching Nina with a triumphant howl.
A gush of water and colorful rocks splashed over Nina’s head, compressing the blanket flush to her face and leaving an ominous sizzle of extinguished flames in its wake.
Casey viewed this with an almost out-of-body observation while she lingered.
In the atmosphere.
That observation was mingled with an eerie calm. Vaguely the thought flitted through her mind that she should be more than a little panicked. Be it her on-the-job training, or maybe that her feathers didn’t ruffle very easily, she simply took in the scene below her feet, versus allowing the kind of hysteria one should experience when they levitated to flip her out.
“For Christ’s sake, Nina!” Wanda hollered. “Stop fighting me and hold the hell still or I’ll knock your teeth in!” Clutching the lapels of Nina’s leather jacket, Wanda gave her an almost violent shake, laying Nina flat out and pinning her to the floor.
Casey—from her vantage point still ten feet off the floor and now rising—gasped, breaking her strange, cloudy haze of indifference. Who was this Wanda? A Wanda who not only took the Lord’s name in vain but had managed to wrestle the scariest woman Casey had ever encountered to the ground with nothing more than a hard shake.
Never mind that , her conscience called. Who. Are.You? All floating in the air like you’re the newest member of Cirque du Soleil .
Right. There was that. The panic she wasn’t experiencing just moments ago made a sudden appearance—spiky and resonant.
Casey’s fear and surprise by this turn of events were only side-tracked by some of the most creative cussing she’d ever heard.
Nina heaved her hips upward, shoving at Wanda to no avail while she tore at the sodden blanket plastered to her face. “Wanda, get the frig off me now, you fucktard! When I get up off this floor, not only will I kick the shit out of your mouthy, ungrateful sister, but I’ll whip your ass while I’m at it, too.” Droplets of water flung in all directions from lips that had anything but