Going Nowhere

Chapter 25 - Plain sight

Janie was a fantastic step-mom. Beyond fantastic, actually.

And she was above her usual awesomeness when one of the cubs were injured.

Which I was.

It wasn't life-threatening, and it would fade in a few days, but I had a shiner the size of Montana from Melvin-the-troll's fist.

He was crying all over me when I came to, flat on the floor of Bubba's, still clutching the photo of Grandpa Hunter and his cronies to my chest. Then I was picked up and placed on Rafael's lap. Jackson pressed ice to my eye. Pen was uncharacteristically unhappy and threw trolls around in a whirlwind of troll-mucus which didn't stop until Elsa stepped in and got him to calm down.

"I'm so sorry," Melvin sobbed. "I only wanted to thank you. Mellie told me what you did for us, and we are blissful." He sniffled and added, slightly louder, "Delightful."

"Okay," I murmured.

"JOYFUL," Melvin suddenly roared and started crying again. "And I clocked you."

It sounded mostly to me as if he was full of nothing but shit, but I decided to not share this and asked for a Jaeger, which I got. It tasted just as awful as it smelled, but it perked me up.

When the trolls had calmed down and withdrawn to a dark corner of Bubba's, we had a surprisingly fun evening. It was slightly disturbing that both Rafael and Jackson treated me as if we were on a date, but then Loosey Moosey got rolled up paper napkins pressed up her nostrils to stem a rather persistent blood flow from hitting the floor with a troll on her back, and they made her look perfectly ridiculous.

That perked me up too.

Elsa and Pen had a heated discussion in a corner which ended with Pentagon laughing, shaking his head in apparent disbelief, and kissing Elsa's knuckles.

Joel hooked up with one of Melissa's friends and disappeared early, grinning wickedly.

Parker disappeared with another of the Moosey-girlfriends, grinning the same way.

Then Rafael kissed my cheek and murmured that he'd see me at Tiaso's the next day, and Jackson took me home.

I didn't get any kisses on the porch because Janie waited for us. Someone had called her, apparently, and she went into über-stepmom-mode immediately. Jackson was unceremoniously shoved toward his car, and I was led inside to eat large quantities of cookie-dough and lie down with an ice-pack on my face. For some reason, my troll-misfortune relieved me from chores for the next seven days, and since I hoped to be back in my apartment within that timeframe, it meant that I'd done the last dishes in a long, long time.

Eating cereal straight from the box might be pathetic, but it meant a lot fewer dirty plates.

I fell asleep with the pack of ice still over my eye, and a steady trickle of cold water over my cheek and neck woke me up the next morning.

When I'd showered, dressed and felt ready to face the day, Janie gave me a latte and told me to sit on the porch for a while. I sighed sadly, hoping this would put her in a pancake-making mood, and walked outside to watch Lulu run around in circles.

The spot where Grandma Hazel had scryed to find the whereabouts of the amulet was apparently a good place to chase mice. Grandma had seen something old and something small in her visions, and I wondered if it simply had been the mice running around her bowl.

Leaning on the wall, I thought about the evening before and had to chuckle a little at the stupidity of using a framed photograph to protect myself from a troll.