Chapter Five
Sarcasm is not the most attractive quality when you’ve got half a dozen ghosts bearing down on you, intent on adding you to their ranks. I was all prepared to run but he decided to make a stand. I didn’t know how he was going to fight them, but I decided to stay and find out.
What really happened was my feet froze and while my mind was screaming at them, “Get the hell out of here,” they were saying, “Huh?”
When the first ghost was just a few feet away, the man snapped his hand out, his fingers spread apart, and a bolt of bottle-green lightning shot from his fingertips and vaporized the ghost… construct… whatever. I’m pretty sure bottle green is the correct shade. It was a bit too light to be described as pine and too dark to be described as spring, so I’m going with bottle green. Too busy trying to come up with the correct shade of green the man was shooting out of his fingers, I didn’t notice until it was almost too late that while most of the ghosts had decided to gang up on him, one of them had decided to come after me.
When I finally did notice my imminent demise, I shrieked and instinctively my hands came up, making the same motion the man’s were. White lightning shot out of my fingers and vaporized the ghost, who was almost as surprised as I was. White lightning. Ha. Probably a leftover from all the moonshine I drank during my rebellious youth.
Anyway, back to the epic ghost battle going on. I had just vaporized one ghost and there were four more bearing down on the man. So I turned to ride in like the cavalry saving the day, but I was too late. He had already taken care of the rest of them. I was all revved up with no ghosts to kill.
Disappointed in the lack of available ghosts to take care of, it took me a minute to realize that the man was staring at me. Normally I’m all for a gorgeous man staring at me, but I couldn’t decipher what he was thinking. Based on the surprise covering his face, he wasn’t thinking anything flattering.
“What?” I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to act like I shot lightning out of my fingers and fought ghosts every day.
He just shook his head and began gathering up all the jewelry the now-vaporized ghosts had taken, shoving it all back into the bags they’d used. Once the jewelry was stored, he turned and walked down the stairs, not even asking if I was okay. Perturbed now, I followed after him, planning on demanding answers, but he was out of the house and already halfway down the block by the time I made it outside.
I began to seriously reconsider if this was actually the man or just another jerk, gorgeous butt or not. I followed him back to the store, this time not bothering to run, still planning on demanding answers and causing a scene if he didn’t give them to me. There was also the matter of the ring. I needed one more chance to look at it to make sure it really was what I thought it was. With the man acting like an ass, maybe I’d messed up and the ring wasn’t anything special, either.
This was originally published in the book Magicae Terra Episode One. The full story is currently available on Amazon.
The image was created using canva.com