I’d woken up right when his fingers had found the clasp of my bra, and there was a tiny, stupid and utterly insane part of me that was now staring at the ceiling fan, disappointed.
Good God, I needed help.
Lots of mental help.
A soft purring sound drew my attention as I willed my heart to slow down and my body to get back on the sane and safe path. I turned my head to the right and found myself eye to eye with two yellow eyes.
Meow.
I frowned as the all gray cat—except for its tail, which looked like it had been dipped in white paint—stretched out his little legs and yawned right in my face.
“How did you get in here, Dixon?” I asked the cat, which was named after a character on The Walking Dead. Dixon didn’t belong to me, but he was kind of a package deal at the moment. Not that I minded. I liked the little guy.
Dixon flopped on his side and twisted his head so he was staring at me upside down. I raised a brow and then heard a soft creaking noise. I rose onto my elbows. The iPad slipped off my chest and fell to the floor, the soft thump drawing a sigh from me. I’d fallen asleep… putting a jigsaw puzzle together.
Again.
Kind of lame, but it always relaxed me, helping shut my brain down so I could sleep, but I really needed to stop falling asleep mid-puzzle like a narcoleptic.
I scanned the large dimly-lit bedroom, but the buttery glow from the bedside lamp only held the shadows back from the bed. The thin slice of silvery moonlight seeping through between the curtains did very little to cut through the darkness, but I was confident no one was—
A lump formed under the thin bedspread near the foot of the bed, about the size of a crab. A reallylargecrab.
What in the holy hell?
I watched the lump work its way up the bed, stop every couple of inches, and then start moving again. I waited until it was near the top and then leaned over, gripping the bedspread and ripping it back.
Thecrablet out a surprised shriek as I revealed the actual owner of the cat. Tink was… well, he was not of this world. Obviously. He was a brownie, a creature that stood about twelve inches tall, had a major addiction to sugar, TV and film, and Amazon Prime. He’d gotten trapped in this world several yearsago while trying to close one of the doorways to the Otherworld. Ivy had found him in St. Louis Cemetery with a broken leg and wing. Instead of putting him down, like all members of the Order were required to do at the time, she’d felt bad for the little guy and taken him home, helping him recover.
What Ivy hadn’t known was how crazy powerful Tink was, and that his current state, when he was about the size of a Ken doll, was a size hechoseto be. Tink was what I liked to call giant-sized when he wanted to be. Ever since he’d come to stay with me, he’d been this size. Why, I had no idea.
Tink used to freak me out. I like to think a flying brownie would freak any normal person out, especially because he was the only brownie ever to be seen in our world. But not only had he grown on me, he was the reason I hadn’t bled out on the sidewalk alongside my mom the night I was attacked.
It had been Tink—full-sized Tink—who had found us.
And since then, since I returned home from the hospital, it was like I suddenly had joint custody of Tink. Not that Ivy or I really had custody of him, but he spent the same amount of time with me as he did with her nowadays.
“What are you doing, Tink?” I asked.
The brownie was still flat on his stomach, mid-military crawl. One gossamer wing twitched. Vibrant blue eyes were wide and blond hair a spiky mess. “Hi?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Tink.”
He sighed heavily, as if I was the one who had disturbed him, and pushed up on his small arms. He rose onto his knees. “I woke up.”
“Okay.”
“And I was bored.”
“All right.”
“Then I went downstairs to finish watching Stranger Things, but someone turned the TV off. Not going to name names or anything—”
“You know it was me, and you could’ve turned the TV back on.” I didn’t even bother pointing out that I knew he’d watched both seasons at least eight times. If I did, it would’ve started a conversation about how he was comparing the upside down to the Otherworld, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that conversation at the moment.
“I could’ve, but then I was like, that requires effort. You have no idea how long it takes these little legs to get down all those steps.”
“Couldn’t you just fly?”
