All Hallows' Hangover Read Online Free Page A

one.
    “Spells cast by word,” Lilibeth said, “can be broken with the right word. My mother taught me many of them. Spells cast by potion?” She shook her head, her copper gold hair cascading over her shoulders.
    Potion. He’d been turned into a dog by a potion.
    The bubbling, steaming bottle of booze that had tasted so wonderful.
    The empty bottle wasn’t on the coffee table where he remembered leaving it. Teddy trotted out to the kitchen and nosed through the trash. He couldn’t remember what the potion had smelled like, but he certainly remembered the scent of the woman who’d brought it.
    There!
    He pushed the bottle onto the floor with his nose. Not having hands was a pain, but at least he’d figured out how to move things around with his nose.
    Lilibeth picked up the bottle with two fingers, like it was poison. Teddy supposed that in a way it was.
    The bottle had a label pasted to the bottom, but Teddy couldn’t read it. The words seemed to blend and blur, and he had a horrible thought that he was losing the ability to read.
    Teddy nudged the bottom of the bottle.
    “Dude, I think he wants us to look at something,” Daniel said.
    Teddy barked, feeling less like himself and more like Lassie trying to tell people Timmy was stuck in the bottom of the well.
    Lilibeth tilted the bottle to look at the label. “Emporium Magique. I know this place.” She smiled down at Teddy. “Now we have a place to start.”

 
     
     
     
     
    6
     
    The little bell over the front door of Emporium Magique rang at exactly eleven fifteen, rousing Tabby from a sound sleep.
    She’d just put her head down on the counter for a few minutes. She’d managed to inventory half of the store—without any help from her familiar, thank you very much—and she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes open any longer. But the bell certainly woke her up, especially since the front door had been locked.
    Two people and a dog stood inside the store.
    Tabby recognized the woman, a gorgeous half-elf named Lilibeth who purchased herbs from Tabby on a semi-regular basis. She didn’t know the man she was with. He looked like any number of regular guys on the street. Skinny in a wiry kind of way, brown hair a little long and messy, and just the slightest glaze of something mood altering in his blue eyes.
    And thankfully not a hint of lovesickness when he looked at her.
    He wasn’t the guy.
    Tabby didn’t allow pets in her store—Terrique wasn’t a pet by any stretch of the imagination—and she was about to tell Lilibeth that when she got a good look at the dog.
    Specifically, at his eyes.
    The soulful brown eyes of the man in her fantasies.
    Tabby felt the pull of those brown eyes as the dog looked back at her.
    And growled.
    Lilibeth pulled a bottle from the man’s backpack. “We need to break this spell,” she said.
    The dog’s growl got louder.
    “Soon would be good,” Lilibeth added.
    Tabby agreed. Her familiar had turned this poor man into a dog. No wonder he was pissed.
    “Coming right up,” Tabby said. She only hoped the brief nap she’d taken had recharged her batteries enough to cast the reversing spell.
    She ducked into the storeroom and down a long aisle to where the transformation potions were kept. She would have never guessed in a million years that her familiar would have used a transformation potion, although it made a certain amount of sense now that she thought about it. Halloween was the time when Terrique transformed from her usual cat form to human.
    But why a dog? Terrique hated dogs.
    “Because he couldn’t keep his paws off me.”
    Terrique was stretched out on top of the box that held all the ingredients Tabby needed to break the transformation spell. Her front paws were crossed in something Tabby thought of as her diva look. She had a snooty look on her face and tip of her tail was twitching.
    “I was going to turn him into a cat,” Terrique said. “I know how you love cats.”
    Not so much at this moment,