Magic and Mayhem: Any Witch Way (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page A

past needed to stay where it was. In the past. “Okay, great. That’s fantastic. You can track it, so we can follow it now. We just follow it and bottle it back up or whatever, and you’re good to go.” Operative word: go. As in get the hell out of his life again.
    “Yes! That’s my plan. I track and you get it back.” Her face fell. “Except now that won’t work. It’s not here now.”
    Now his stopped pacing. “What do you mean it’s not here? Where did it go?”
    She fluttered her hands together. “Easy come, easy trees.”
    “What the hell are you talking about? Easy come, easy trees?”
    “Yes.” She nodded in a way that made him think of that show I Dream of Jeannie . A little head bob. “Easy come, easy trees. Or maybe leaves? Easy come, easy leaves?”
    “Easy come, easy go?”
    “Yes!” She pointed at him, stabbing the air with a triumphant finger. “Yes, that’s it!”
    “Gwen, focus here. What do you mean? Does the magic come and go?”
    “Yes.” She said this in a tone that said he was an idiot for not following what she was saying. Honestly, who could follow a thing she said? “Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. It’s just gone.”
    “So, let me get this straight. You don’t know if the magic is here anymore, you don’t know how long someone’s been siphoning this magic, and you don’t know if you can follow it?”
    “Yes.” She smiled at him.
    “Great.”
    “That’s not great, Gideon.”
    “No. I realize that. It’s an expression.”
    “What’s an expression?”
    “ Great is an expression. Well, not really. It’s sarcasm.”
    “Okay.” She bobbed a nod again.
    “Good.”
    “Gideon?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What is sarcasm?”
    He dropped his head back and prayed to the Goddess for patience. The fickle bitch ignored him. Right. Status quo on that count.
    He stayed that way, counting his breaths and hoping for some semblance of patience until her heard it. Soft, high-pitched voices outside the door. He rolled his head up and looked at Gwen. She didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.
    Gideon kept his eyes on her as he moved to the door. When she opened her mouth to ask what he was doing, he gave one shake of his head then yanked the hotel room door open.
    In they fell. Three men who must have actually had their ears to the door the way they landed at his feet, one on top of the other. Two of them tall and thin with plain brown hair and eyes, one short and round with white hair and shockingly reddish eyes. The two thin ones stood right away and began to talk, babbling on about being there to help and doing whatever they could.
    “But we just didn’t know if we should interrupt,” said one.
    “Right,” said another. “Because we didn’t know if it would be more helpful to wait or more helpful to, well, to help.”
    The third man—the round guy with white hair—remained on the floor. He simply sat up and leaned his back against the wall, glaring at the other two as his nose twitched.
    Mice . Freaking mice . Gideon should have known from their voices alone. They talked a little too quickly, and they sounded like they’d been drinking and sucking on helium balloons at the same time.
    “I didn’t want to interrupt or help,” said the one on the floor. “That was all on these two. I voted for minding our own damned business, but these idiots have this whole Cinderella thing going. It’s absolutely asinine, if you ask me.”
    “You said you’d go along with whatever the majority vote was. And this is it,” said Tall Guy Two.
    “Look, I’m not sure why you guys think we need help, and I sure as hell don’t know what all this has to do with Cinderella,” Gideon said, one hand pinching the bridge of his nose, “but we’re having a private conversation here.”
    “We know, we know,” said Tall Guy One. Goddess, the nose twitching became more and more noticeable as the men shuffled their feet and—wait, was that a squeak? “It’s just that, um”—