| |
I hustled around to the back door and ran into the room. Killian was still sitting there with the washrag over his eyes.
"Killian!" I whispered loudly, trying not to attract my mom's attention. "Killian! Get up!"
"The world had better be ending..." he groaned.
I put the cookies down on the coffee table and ignored the cold chills that kept washing over me, informing me I was encroaching a bit too much into the personal bubble of some of Mom's guests.
"It had better IS!" I hissed.
That got his attention. He took the cloth away from his face. His eyes were red and bloodshot and his skin was as pale as a fresh corpse after a vampire drained it.
"Ooooh noooo..." he said.
"Oh, yes," I answered.
"MAGGIE!" my mom shouted.
"And here comes the other end of the world." I picked up the plate as she came into the room and tried to give a cheerful smile. "I brought in the cookies!"
She pointed towards the front of the house. "There is something out there that scared my guests half to death—"
"...because they hadn't already managed the whole way on their own?"
She pointed her finger at me. "Stop."
I stopped.
"Now, I went out onto the porch to see who it was, but they were gone, and there was a piece of my porch railing impaled in your car!"
I looked over at Killian. "Yeah... about that..."
"WHAT DID YOU DO, MAGGIE?"
"Me? Why is it always MY fault?"
"Because people are screaming and my porch is in pieces!"
"One piece! I did nothing!"
"No one just goes around impaling things with metal objects."
"I do all the time! Impaling things is my job!"
"My point exactly! YOU do. OTHER PEOPLE don't. Now, I want you to go speak to this person or creature and find out what you did and apologize."
I could barely control the eye-roll. "I was already on my way."
"Well, get on your way faster." She took the plate of cookies from my hands. "And thank you for these," she added before turning on her heel and walking out of the room with purpose.
I turned to Killian. "You couldn't have just gotten up the moment I said we needed to go?"
"Why is there a piece of metal impaled in your car, Maggie?" Killian asked grimly.
"There is a ghost captain that thought my car was a white whale and harpooned it using my mom's front porch railing."
"Naturally."
"It's the same ghost, I'm guessing, that you promised Lacey we'd track down."
This time it was Killian's turn to wince. "I was under the influence of witches' brew..."
"You think Lacey cares about that? If we show up at the prison tomorrow with nothing better to tell her than you were nursing a potion hangover, you're going to have to find a new girlfriend, even if she was the one who dosed you."
Killian pushed himself up off the couch. "I hate Halloween."