“Things start out manageable,” she said. “I’ve summoned plants?—”
“Cool.”
She gave me a withering look. “Not cool. They weren’t from earth.”
I blinked.
“Sometimes I get rocks, sometimes weapons.” She sighed. “I have no idea what’s going on, but I can’t seem to stop whatever is happening.”
She held her fingers out and twisted her wrist. “Whatever this is feels…large.” Her brow furrowed.
“Can you stop?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been fighting it all morning. Whatever this is wants to come through.”
A frisson of nerves zipped through me. “Should we go outside?”
“It’s never too big,” she tried to assure me. “Mostly inanimate except for the plants.”
Thunder cracked through the shop. Darkness crawled along the ceiling, shadowy veins creeping down the walls.
“Um,” I said eloquently.
A swirling portal opened above our heads. Before I could swear and dive out of the way, something fell through and landed on the ground with a bone-jarring thud.
Thunder cracked one more time before the darkness zipped back up the walls and disappeared with a disturbing pop of sound.
Moira stared at the ground, horror written all over her face.
A naked man lay unconscious on the store floor.
Ash pushed through the doors from the back and stopped abruptly, blinking in surprise at what Moira had summoned.
“Errr,” he said. “Do we need to call the police?”
Moira’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.
“No police,” I said. “Moira brought him here.”
Ash’s brows flew together. “Naked?”
“Summoned somehow,” I shook my head. “He looks human.”
Ash let out a breath, put down the flower arrangement he’d been holding, and crouched beside the prone man. He placed two fingers over the stranger’s pulse. “Alive. Thready heartbeat.”
“Interdimensional travel will do that to you,” I said dryly.
Moira let out a panicked squeal. “What did I do? Ohmygods, ohmygods.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Breathe. As soon as he wakes up, we’ll figure this out.”
She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath.
“Good.” Internally, I was freaking out, but someone had to be calm because there was a freaking naked dude on our floor, and we had customers starting to mill outside the door. They couldn’t see in very well, but the Joy Springs rumor mill was alive and well if someone spotted the guy.
“Help me,” I said to Ash. “I’ll take his feet, you take his shoulders. Let’s get him inside the office. Moira, stand in front of the door and wait until you hear us call out the ‘all okay’ before you open it up to customers, okay?”
She stared at me.
