Armageddon Rules Read Online Free PDF

Your teachers love you.” Admittedly it probably wasn’t their fault. Princesses had that effect on everything.
    Ari sighed in frustration and put her head down on the table. “I met someone.”
    “As in ‘I ran into or over the postman again’ or I met someone met someone?”
    Ari’s groan gave me the answer I expected. “I wasn’t studying for the civics exam on Thursday. I was out with him.”
    “I had to exorcise the Hukkkuti brothers by myself so you could play kissy-face with some guy? The least you could do would be to introduce me. I’m your best friend; I should get to make sure he’s good enough for you.”
    Ari looked up, her eyes wide with fear. “No! He doesn’t know where I work.”
    “You mean he doesn’t know what you are.” I put my hand on hers. “He’ll find out. People love princesses. They can’t help it. And you’re a seal bearer. That’s got to count for something.” Though the royal families pretended otherwise, their true purpose was to make sure the realm seals remained intact, and in order to do that, one woman from each generation per family would be bound to a realm seal.
    Ari rocked back in her chair, her mouth crumpled into a frown. “I don’t want someone to love me for what I am. I want them to love me for who I am.”
    I understood that. “You’ve at least got to tell me his name.”
    “Wyatt.” Her eyes got this distant haze in them, and a smile crept across her face in spite of the bite marks.
    “What are you going to tell him when he sees you bitten like that?” I went to the cupboard and took out a box of adhesive bandages, sticking them to her until she looked like a mummy.
    Ari grinned. “I’m going to say I volunteer at a shelter for dogs with neurotic biting tendencies, and I tried to take six of them for a walk at once.” The only dog walking Ari did was when she’d take Yeller out for a walk at night, when people could mistake him for a Clydesdale.
    “All right. But you have to tell him the truth at some point. Now we need to get going. Grimm’s going to be upset as it is. I need to feed blessing and curse.” I kept a pet cat once. We won’t go into exactly what happened to Mr. Sniffers, but let’s just say after that I kept things I didn’t have to feed or water, and planted an azalea bush in the courtyard in Mr. Sniffers’s memory.
    My current pets were a mix of spells and creature, called harakathin. You can think of them as a combination ghost and cat. I’d say psychotic cat, but that would be redundant. In theory, these two were charged with giving me good fortune. Unfortunately, they rarely took my personal safety into account.
    When Liam moved in, my jealous harakathin turned from silver-eyed monsters to green-eyed monsters. They spent the first few weeks tripping him in the dark, setting his clothes on fire, or turning the boiler up to 300 degrees while he was showering. The usual stuff.
    So we bought two cat beds, one for each of them, and most days I dumped a can of cat food on a plate. Harakathin fed on attention. My daily routine mollified them, and I considered it practicing for a real cat. I opened two cans and put them near the cat beds.
    Ari wrinkled her nose at the smell of cat food. “You’ve been making offerings to them?”
    “Works even better than naming them. Call it community service. Feed my blessings, feed the hungry.” I left the plates sitting for a minute while I waited. The lights dimmed and flickered, but at least the pipes didn’t break and the drywall didn’t crack. “Can you see them?”
    Being a seal bearer, Ari had spirit sight. That meant she could see all the things that went bump in the night, whether they wanted her to or not, whether she wanted to or not. Being relatively normal, I relied on her to tell me where my pets were. Ari glanced around. “No. They’re here, but I can’t see them.”
    I’d never seen them even take a bite of cat food, but just offering it to them made all the