Page 3

With a chuckle, I looped my arm in his and we wandered along the arrow pathways, checking out all the immaculately presented rooms, which despite the bargain price tags we couldn’t afford. We could dream though. Zee, of course, loved the rooms full of candy colors and sparkle. We both agreed that Victor would have loved the all-black and very boring vampire kitchen.

After weaving through the fancy showrooms, we reached the kids’ section, where Zee made a beeline for an enormous box of small, colorful rubber balls.

“Not for eating,” I warned.

He rolled his eyes and grinned, as he plucked a ball out of the mound of thousands like it and gave it a squeeze. “What’s it do?”

“It’s kinda doing it, I think.”

The rubber ball twanged from his fingers, pinged off the floor, and struck a lamp on the end of a shelf filled with desk lights. The lamp toppled. Zee poofed to the shelf and caught the teetering lamp, but the bouncy ball was on its own mission to wipe out anything in its path. It boinged off a mirror and hurtled toward a shelf of glass ornaments.

My heart dropped.

Zee poofed again, and reappeared in front of the fragile shelf. He snatched the ball in the air and froze.

Hand up, ball clutched in his fist, he blinked as though expecting to hear fifty glass trinkets raining to the floor behind him. But he’d stopped the ball. The glass trinkets were safe. And nobody had died.

Disaster averted.

Zee grinned, shook himself all over and shrugged the whole escapade off. “Lightning fuckin’ reflexes. Did you just see that?” He tossed me the ball.

And that was his mistake.

I had my hands shoved in my pockets and struggled to yank them out in time to catch the bouncy ball.

It twanged off my forehead.

I reeled, surprised, and nudged the giant box of balls. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what happened after that, just that the entire container of bouncy balls exploded, springing balls in all directions. Several struck Zee like rubber bullets, knocking him into the shelf of fragile things. After that there was a whole lot of noise, some screaming, sounds of lots of fragile things breaking, and . . . So. Many. Rubber. Balls.

Everywhere.