I had noidea.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “You’re quite the trendsetter. So, about headless Abner. Have you seenhim?”
“Why would you think Ihad?”
“You’re in the most heavily populated gnome yard in town. I just thought someone would have brought him thisway.”
“He’s gnot at thehall?”
“No.”
She turned around, a shuffling, rocking motion as if her legs were made out of flat-bottomed ice creamcones.
She made a show of looking at the gnomes who had all crowded up to stand behindher.
“He’s gnot here,” she said, as if justnoticing.
“Right. Do you know where heis?”
“Gno?”
Iwaited.
She shuffle-rocked back around to face me. “He’sgone.”
“Gone, gone, gone,” the gnomes whisper-chanted behindher.
Great. They’d gone from unalive to culty in ten secondsflat.
“We are without aleader.”
“Leader, leader,leader.”
“A gnew leader must bechosen!”
“Gnew, Gnew,Gnew!”
“Only the most worthy shall lead us. The most trendsetting.” She reached into her basket and grasped a plum, then held it up over her head as if it were a torch. “She who holds the plums ofprophecy!”
Hatter shifted, his hand lingering at his hip. “On a scale of one to get-the-grenades, how crazy isthis?”
“Hatter, it’s always get-the-grenades in thistown.”
Both his eyebrows rose slowly. “Want me to call forreinforcements?”
“Naw. We can handle this. Behold my power.” I held out my hand, palm flat forward. “Redlight.”
Just like in the kid’s game, Red Light/Green Light, every gnome went dead still and looked up at me. I had no idea why a kid’s game worked on them, but I was glad itdid.
If I’d never dealt with these little statue people before, it might be unsettling, those eyes of stone with a frightening kind of longing filling them. It might be a tad bit terrifying to realize that those eyes hungered for a life less fleeting than theirown.
Gnomes weren’t exactly stable. But we dealt with dangerous creatures everyday.
We’d recently had a demon blackmail his way into town via stealing Delaney’s soul. Also, he seemed to be way too interested in Myra. Whenever he and Myra were in the same room, they werearguing.
It would have been entertaining to watch Myra get all riled up–okay, who am I kidding? Itwasentertaining–but there was a lot about demons I didn’t know and didn’tunderstand.
There was no chance he was harmless. And I didn’t care what Delaney said. He enjoyed getting Myra worked up a little too much for it to be passed off as just a ‘demonthing’.
