Bewitched (Betwixt & Between #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,53

couple jerks while trying to help people.

Nothing.

“You don’t know. Then why?” I asked again. “You’re just being cautious.”

Nothing.

“I’m going to take your silence as a yes. Percy, I need to check on this guy. You have to let me out.”

The tiny roses folded into themselves like ballerinas, closing once again to create the beautiful little buds that dotted the vine in a resounding no.

Frustrated, I tried the door again, groaning through gritted teeth, then I stepped back. “You know what? Fine. I give up. I’ll just take a shower and go to bed then. But if something happens to Leonard Quinn, it’s on you, buddy.”

I trudged up the stairs, sliding my jacket off as I went. I kept an iron grip on it as I entered my bathroom. As nonchalantly as I could, I hung it on a hook on the side of the shelves. The shelves that led to a super-secret, super-cool passageway. The passageway that Percy couldn’t enter.

Roses blossomed in the corner where the wall met the ceiling.

I started to pull up my sweater, then slammed the sweater back down over my decolletage offended. “Percy, I told you. Out of the bathroom.”

The vines shrank back, and I tried not to let the astonishment I felt show on my face. He’d fallen fell for the oldest trick in the book. Or the second oldest. I couldn’t be certain.

Before he caught on, I grabbed the hook—and the jacket off the hook— and pulled the shelves open. Jumping into the narrow passageway, I flung my jacket on the ground next to me before he caught on.

Which he did pretty quickly, unfortunately. He tried to close the shelves, but it was too late, I was mostly through. In my haste, however, I fell. My foot was still inside the threshold when the shelves shot toward me. I gasped, thinking my ankle was a split second away from being crushed when they stopped suddenly, like they’d been frozen in time.

They hadn’t.

The shelves immediately opened again, and I wondered why until I saw a vine wrapped around my boot.

Uh- oh.

Percy jerked me toward the bathroom as I released a screech worthy of a barn owl.

“Percival Goode!” I shouted as he slid me inside. He was like Jaws. Or the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Or—gasp—Jason Voorhees!

I anchored my other foot against the door frame and pushed. My resistance must have surprised him, because I got far enough out into the hall that parts of him shriveled and shrank back. He immediately let go, and I boomeranged into the passageway, hitting my head on the other wall.

Grabbing it with both hands, I lay in a fetal position for a solid twenty-three seconds before shaking it off and struggling to my feet. I looked back at him. The threshold was sprinkled with black dust.

I knelt down and picked some up. “Percy, I’m so sorry.”

He’d withdrawn all the way back into my bedroom, and I didn’t dare peek around the doorframe to check on him. I lay my head against the wall at an angle where I could see much of the vines in there. They were okay. Only the part that was pulled across the threshold had withered and died.

With a soft intake of breath, I checked my wrist. The bracelet was gone. I looked at the wood floor beneath my feet. Black ash dusted a small area. I must have flung it off me when it withered and died.

Surely there was more than just salt at work there. What would do that? Magic was certainly a fickle thing. Like when it wouldn’t work on the bar covering Clara’s window.

So many questions, so little time.

Reaching for the jacket I’d flung inside the passageway, I put it on. Then I scooped up what ash I could with my hands, cupped it into my palm, and transferred it to my jacket pocket. For what, I didn’t know, but it broke my heart that I hurt Percy who’d protected me so fiercely. I apologized again.

“I’m sorry, Percy,” I said, angling my head.

Percy slid back into the bathroom.

“Are you okay?”

Roses blossomed, black and bloodred, dark and gruesome and beautiful.

I rubbed my wrist. “I didn’t know that would happen. I’m sorry.”

The vines curled languidly like a cat’s tail before he closed the shelves behind me.

The only way out from the passageway that I knew of, without going through the house, of course, was through the cave. I became lost almost immediately and took any stairs I found that were going