All Hallows' Hangover Read Online Free Page B

Tabby thought.
    “I heard that.” Terrique’s tail flipped over her back before it beat a rhythm on the box. “Anyway, I’m not sure who disappointed me the most. This man, because he’s such a hound dog, I believe the expression is. Or you, because you’ve allowed yourself to form a connection with him.”
    The dog in her store was the man she’d been daydreaming about? The literal man of her dreams?
    And he’d thrown himself at Terrique?
    Well, of course he had.
    “You went out looking like me!” Tabby threw up her hands in exasperation. “And in that outfit. What did you expect? I wouldn’t even wear something like that.”
    “That was the point.”
    “Augh!”
    Tabby didn’t have the time or the energy for this. “Off the box,” she said. “I need to break your spell before that poor man out there becomes a dog for real.”
    The spell had lasted beyond sunrise, which meant Terrique must have given him a double dose. Or, heaven forbid, a triple dose. If that was the case, Tabby didn’t have much time and neither did her fantasy man.
    Terrique took her sweet time stretching, but she eventually sauntered off the box. Tabby ripped open the top and sorted through ingredients as fast as she could.
    Show tunes sung in her familiar’s off-key caterwauling started playing in her mind.
    “I am going to cut you off catnip,” she said.
    “Idle threats,” Terrique said before she resumed a truly horrible rendition of “Memory.”
    Tabby threw the ingredients into a plastic bag, zipped it shut, and shook it. Then she took a piece of chalk from her pocket and drew a circle around herself on the storeroom’s concrete floor.
    Out front, the dog started to bark.
    The caterwauling got louder.
    Tabby tried to shut it all out and concentrate on the ingredients in the plastic bag. She needed to infuse the ingredients with a bit of power from herself—more than a bit, considering the power of the spell he was under—but that power was just out of reach.
    She wasn’t strong enough yet.
    Terrique started in on “Rum Tum Tugger.”
    Tabby heard Lilibeth shout, “Teddy, no!” and the man she was with cry, “Dude!”
    The dog burst into the storeroom at a dead run, claws scraping on the concrete floor. His barks echoed inside Tabby’s skull as he made a beeline right for Terrique.
    The caterwauling ended in a screech as Tabby’s familiar took off across the boxes, the dog in hot pursuit.
    He must have recognized her by smell. Either that or he’d transformed all the way into a dog who hated all cats on sight.
    How was she supposed to work like this? Dead on her feet, power drained to almost nothing, and a man’s life in her hands. Not to mention her familiar’s life. Terrique wouldn’t be afforded a new shape if the dog ripped her to shreds. She’d be doomed to live the rest of eternity as an unbound spirit, and Tabby would never see or hear from her again.
    The mere thought of that nearly made her cry. As annoying as Terrique could be, Tabby couldn’t imagine life without her little Terri, a nickname her familiar thoroughly hated.
    “Concentrate,” she muttered. She could do this. She’d created spells under far worse conditions, although at that moment she couldn’t think of when.
    Emotions amped up her power, and right now Tabby was riding the crest of an emotional tidal wave. She reached deep within herself, grabbed that power with both hands, and threw it at the plastic bag.
    She’d over-estimated herself. Power ripped into the bag and combined with the ingredients Tabby had mixed for the spell. The bag disintegrated in a shower of bits of plastic while the spell itself, now a living thing, roiled in the air, held inside the confines of the chalk circle.
    She only had one shot at this. When she broke the circle, the spell would be set loose inside the storeroom, but it wouldn’t last. Dissolution spells by their very nature were short lived.
    She needed the dog to run through the spell in order for