Piped croakies, p.1
Piped Croakies, page 1
Piped Croakies
Sam Cheever
Electric Prose Publications
Copyright © 2021 by Sam Cheever
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Stay in Touch
1. Prestidigitation, Legalese, and Larceny
2. Don’t You Want to Get Buggy and Help?
3. That Doesn’t Get Any Easier With Repetition
4. You do Look Pretty Tasty
5. Option 1, Make a Run For It
6. Shooting Like a Rocket Across the Room
7. It Was Reckless of Him to Breathe So Loud Like That
8. Don’t. Call. Me. Ever. Again.
9. Your Dimension is Really Stressful
10. How Are Things in Paradise?
11. Yeah, Yeah. Stop Talking
12. You Are Aware That He’s Pulling a Shload of Power, Right?
13. He Thinks Flies Are Better Than Crickets. Clearly, He’s an Idiot
14. Your Head no Longer Has a Hole In It. You’re Good
15. Can You Read These Etchings?
16. 9-1-1! 9-1-1!
17. They Are Drawn to the Kind of Heart and the Keen of Mind
18. He Looked Like a King Who Was Going to War
19. Like a Jester in a Bad Medieval Movie
20. You Look Alarmed
21. It Was Bad. Really, Really Bad
22. A Goddess-Blasted Ogre Summit
Don’t Miss Out
Also by Sam Cheever
About the Author
Praise for Sam Cheever
“You have that essential Je ne sais quoi that it takes to tell a story so mesmerizing you cannot stop reading once started. You are not telling stories to your readers…you are taking them with you on your adventures so that the experience can be shared by all as it happens and not simply replayed like a memory on the page of a diary! You are indeed gifted and it is my pleasure to read your books!”
Valerie Irwin
The Pied Piper shall lead them all astray…A captured audience helpless to its sway. The pipe’s infectious music bids them come…and come they will…two by two or one by one.
* * *
Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any weirder, life upped the strangeness quota to a never-before-seen level.
When a long line of critters, dazed and seemingly oblivious, marched past Croakies, I knew we had a situation on our hands.
Actually…if you counted being unwillingly affianced to a big old pink ogre…I had more than one situation.
Le sigh.
Then someone died. A king declared war on Enchanted. And my situation became a crisis. It would be up to me to find the perpetrator and bring him to justice while wrangling the rogue pipe artifact he used for his nefarious deeds.
Buffalo buttocks! I really do need a vacation.
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1
Prestidigitation, Legalese, and Larceny
“We need an anti-ogre ward on the front door,” Sebille growled before flinging two garment bags onto Shakespeare’s desk, where I was studying ogre law.
I frowned at the bags. “What are these?”
Rather than respond, she reached over and unzipped the one on top, pulling it open to show me something from a fashion nightmare.
I shook my head, widening my eyes at her. “A really ugly dress? Where did it come from?”
“Where do you think, Naida!” she screamed, surprising even herself if the excessive blinking was any indication. She scrubbed a hand over her face, her hand shaking. “Sorry. This stupid wedding thing has me twisted in knots.”
I could certainly understand that. I was spending ten hours a day, to the detriment of all my other work, trying to find a loophole in the contract we’d signed.
“These are supposed to be our wedding dresses.” She grimaced. “I’m not marrying that ogre,” she told me, her tone seeming to imply that I thought she should.
I raised my hands in self-defense. “I’m with you. We’re not going to marry them. Even if we need to take a really long vacation on another dimension to avoid it.”
She nodded, appearing mollified.
I tugged the bag away from the fluffy pink, black, and white dress, grimacing at the abundance of tule puffing out through the middle and over the hips. The dress seemed custom-made for ensuring its wearer looked thirty pounds heavier than she was. I forced my lips to uncurl and held it in front of Sebille. “At least you have the figure to make the most of this,” I told her, earning a sour look in response.
“That’s your dress, Naida.”
I was pretty sure all the color drained from my face. “What? No. It can’t be.”
She showed me the card that had been shoved into a small pocket near the hanger. My name was scrawled over the cream-colored square in heavy black ink.
Whatever blood I had left in my face fled south. My five-foot-eight-inch, slightly fluffy frame would look terrible in the dress. “I can’t wear this! I’ll look like a really big piece of ugli fruit.”
Sebille snorted. “You will. Thank goodness mine is more tasteful.”
I cast a jaundiced blue eye over her current outfit of a short-sleeved forest green dress with hot pink polka dots, which she wore over striped pink and purple socks that disappeared beneath the flounce which landed below her knees and were tucked into her usual shiny red Wicked Witch of the West shoes. At least the shoes matched her fire-engine-red hair.
As usual, her fashion choices literally hurt the eyes and were an assault on good taste. “You don’t say?” I responded.
Sebille rolled her eyes. “You’re just jealous.”
I flapped my lips, not sure what direction to go, and then gave up, shoving the nightmare in tulle toward the bag. “If I wasn’t already determined to avoid this wedding, that dress would be enough to do it.”
Sebille flopped down into Casanova’s chair, twitched unhappily as the over-sexed furniture pinched her left buttock, and then reached down to smack the velvet seat hard enough to make the chair jump and try to scurry away. The sprite flung an immobility spell at the unfortunate thing, and it screeched to a halt on the concrete. Finally, the horrid piece of perverted furniture had met its match.
The door dividing the bookstore from the artifact library opened, and a tiny face peeked through. “Miss?” Hobs, our resident hobgoblin, said. “Something’s wrong.”
I closed my eyes, striving for calm. Something was always wrong. Casanova’s chair creaked as Sebille stood up. “I’ll go,” she said crankily. “You keep looking for that loophole.”
Sighing, I shoved the garment bags aside and bent over my book again. Prestidigitation, Legalese, and Larceny in Ogrish Law: How to Maneuver around the Rocklike Obstinance of an Ogre King’s Law wasn’t exactly compelling reading. Nor was it particularly helpful. My uncle Archibald Pudsnecker, a.k.a. Pudsy, told me the hard-to-read tome was my best chance to find a way out of the contract Sebille and I had signed without reading the small print.
In our defense…and I believed it was a really good defense…the contract had been written on the wide, pudgy back of the ogre king. It was a long contract, and the part that got us into trouble was located in the nether regions. And I mean that literally.
I’d closed my eyes and slashed the pen over my side of the posterior parchment without studying the last paragraph of the diabolical contract.
I’d know better next time. Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice, and I’d put holes in your posterior paper with a quill pen.
The door opened again. Sebille’s head poked through. “Um, Naida.”
I dropped my forehead onto the book, pounding it a few times against the aged pages. My long, brown hair flew around my head from the repeated blows.
She ignored my tantrum. “You’re going to want to see this.”
I lay there another beat and then sat up with a sigh. “I’m coming.”
When I came through the door, I frowned at the sight in front of me. Mr. Wicked, Fenwald, Mr. Slimy, Hobs, and our newest member of the Croakies household, Baca the brownie, were all lined up along the windowsill, staring at something on the street.
What was really strange wasn’t so much that they were lined up there. It was the way they all sat, so completely still, that seemed unnatural enough to give me pause.
Especially Hobs. He rarely sat still at all, let alone for any length of time.
I glanced at Sebille. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Huh?” She frowned at me. “Not them, Naida.” She motioned for me to follow her to the window.
Not a single one of my housemates looked up when Sebille and I joined them. I looked out at the scene in the street and felt my eyes go wide. “That’s…”
I fell into a kind of daze, watching the parade on the street with uncommon focus.
A long line of animals, lined up as far as I could see in both directions, moved quickly past without so much as a glance from side to side.
Cats walked in front of dogs. Dogs walked in front of ferrets. Fe rrets walked in front of bunnies. Bunnies hopped in front of squirrels. Birds flew above frogs, and frogs hopped in front of ducks.
It took me a moment to yank myself out of the light trance the sight had dropped me into. I literally shook it off and stepped away from the window, feeling dread tightening my chest. “What’s that about?”
No response. I glanced at Sebille and discovered that she was enthralled as I’d been. “Sebille?”
Silence.
I reached over and poked her shoulder with a finger. She blinked and frowned. “Ouch, Naida.”
“You were in a trance.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I wasn’t.”
I shook my head. She had been. “Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?”
“Not a clue. I tried to go outside, but the door wouldn’t open.”
“What do you mean, the door wouldn’t open?”
“I mean, it wouldn’t open. It was like there was some kind of spell holding it closed.”
I hurried over to the door and turned the knob, pulling it open. Giving my assistant a look, I arched a brow.
“I’m not lying, Naida,” she snapped. “It wouldn’t open before.”
I stepped outside and looked around. The street was empty. “Where’d they all go?”
“Naida?”
I turned at the familiar voice of my friend Leandra. Lea was an earth witch, and she had an herbal shop next to Croakies. She was standing on the sidewalk outside Herbal Remedies with Mystical Properties, looking slightly dazed. Mr. Wicked’s littermate, Hex, was clutched tightly in her arms. “Did you see that?”
I frowned down the street. “They were just here. Did you see where they went?”
Lea looked more spooked than I’d ever seen her. And that was saying something because she and I had been in some really weird situations together. “I was tugging on the door, trying to get out here. I couldn’t open it. And then it suddenly…” She stared at her hand, her voice trailing off.
Sebille hit the sidewalk, all three cats and Slimy in her wake.
I threw a panicked look at the shop, but she shook her head. “I told Hobs and Baca they needed to stay out of sight.”
“Good.” The last thing we needed was for the humans in the neighborhood to see a hobgoblin and a brownie standing on the street.
Lea walked over and placed Hex on the sidewalk next to the other cats. The three of them immediately started twining together like some kind of furry, three-looped infinity symbol.
Something bad is coming, Slimy said inside my head. I nodded, knowing he was right. Residual energy bit along my arms, and a sulfurous stench still clung to the air. I looked at Sebille. “Talk to your mom. Maybe she can read the energy signature and tell us what that was.”
For once, Sebille didn’t argue. She strode away toward the enormous greenhouse behind Lea’s shop. Her mother, Queen Sindra of the Enchanted fae, was currently living in the huge space, paying Lea for her hospitality by making her garden grow. The queen had recently been making noises about moving to one of the magical forests nearby. But, so far, she hadn’t made any serious movement in that direction. Lea…and even though she’d never admitted it, Sebille…were hoping she didn’t. I had to agree. The queen was powerful. But more importantly, she was experienced in the ways of the magical community. She’d been a vital ally for us on many occasions.
“Did you hear the music?” Lea asked.
Ripped from my thoughts, I turned a blank look in her direction. “Huh?”
“The music? It wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard. It was strangely…” She frowned. “I’m not sure how to describe it.” She placed a hand over her belly. “It felt like fingers grabbing my guts and tugging me forward.”
I hadn’t felt that. Had I? “I didn’t hear any music,” I told her, hoping I wasn’t lying. I had a vague feeling that I might have heard something, but I didn’t think it was music.
“It didn’t sound like music,” said a voice from the street.
Lea and I looked up to find our friend Rustin striding toward us. Sadie, his tiny amalgamate dragon, was perched on his shoulder, her rainbow-hued wings lifting and falling with every step. The usually cheerful little dragon appeared subdued.
Rustin was a little older than me, in his late twenties, with a strong jaw, a piercing blue gaze, thick black hair, and the cutest pair of wire-rimmed spectacles sitting on his classically perfect nose.
“Hey,” I greeted my friend.
He stepped onto the sidewalk, and Sadie flew off his shoulder as he stopped. She joined the cats and the frog on the sidewalk behind us. “It was more like a hollow chiming sound,” Rustin said. He frowned, rubbing his temple almost absently with two fingers. “It gave me the devil of a headache.”
Sadie rose off the concrete, giving him a little trill as she fluttered around us with almost manic excitement.
He nodded. “Sadie says it was a lullaby. Like her mother used to sing to her.”
I looked at Lea, lifting a brow in question.
Still rubbing her stomach as if it pained her, the witch seemed to be considering her response to my unspoken question. “I’m not sure. I have a vague impression of a specific memory. I was sitting around a campfire at Enchanted Lake with a bunch of my friends. Somebody was singing. It was a beautiful, haunting melody. That’s what I heard.”
“Odd,” Rustin said. He shoved his glasses up his nose. His piercing blue gaze was contemplative. “It’s definitely some kind of magic.”
“But focused on animals?” I asked, shaking my head. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“It’s a spell of some kind,” Lea said. “I’d stake my store on it.”
Judging by the sulfurous stench it had left behind, I tended to agree. I settled a speculative gaze on the small group of our animals, which had grown bored and were heading back into the store to see what trouble they could get into. “We need to find out what that was. If it was an artifact, I need to wrangle it. The potential for it being used for bad things is monumental.”
“I agree,” Rustin and Lea said in unison.
Lea nodded toward the disappearing backside of my mentor’s black cat. “What’s Fenny doing here?”
I sighed. “Alice showed up with him last night. Apparently, she’s going to be island hopping for the next month. She’s in search of a magical pitcher of Margaritas.” I peaked my brows as Lea laughed.
“Margaritas, huh?” Rustin said, grinning. “The cat doesn’t like Margaritas?”
“Fenwald tends to chunder when Alice moves around too much. At least that’s what she keeps insisting.” I shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’ve actually come really close to telling her to just leave him here. Being around the other cats is good for him. And he’s good company.”
“That’s a great idea,” Lea said. “She can come for visits whenever she misses him.”
I grimaced. “Way to talk me out of it,” I told her.
“I’m going to go research music-based spells,” my friend told me. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “We’re getting Sindra’s opinion too. And I’ll research possible artifacts.”
I turned to Rustin as Lea headed back into her shop. He was staring off down the street, tension evident in the way he was holding himself. “What?” I asked my friend.
He gave a little twitch and turned to me. “Huh?”
“What’s got you so bothered?”
“I have a really bad feeling about this, Naida.”
I couldn’t agree more. “Slimy thinks it portends bad things.”
“I agree.” He pointed toward Croakies. “Do you mind if Sadie has a play date today? I’m going to do some research too. Between all of us, we should be able to figure this out.”
