Ghost of a Chance Read Online Free Page B

my neck, where the
muscles were beginning to tense up despite the lovely migraine
meds. I had a horrible foreboding that the next month was going to
be one long drama… as though I needed any more of that in my life.
“What else are you interested in? Boys? Books? Movies?”
    “What is this, the third degree? I don’t
have to answer your questions!”
    “No, you don’t, but a little common courtesy
wouldn’t be amiss here. We have to spend the next month together,
Pixie. Let’s just try to get through that without drawing any
blood, all right?”
    “My name is Desdemona Macabre,” she
said, grinding the words out between her teeth.
    “I’ll make a deal with you: I won’t call you
Pixie if you promise to be civil.”
    “Define ‘civil,’ ” she said quickly.
    I smiled to myself as I turned onto the
highway that would take us to a small resort town an hour’s drive
away. She might not be the most pleasant teen in the world, but she
seemed intelligent and, despite the defensive posturing, needy. For
some inexplicable reason, I empathized with her. I certainly knew
what it was like to not belong. “It must be my biological clock.
Nothing else would explain it,” I said to myself.
    “ Deus , you’re old enough to have a
biological clock?” she asked, looking at me as if I was some sort
of scaly monster.
    “We will leave my age out of it,” I
answered. “ ‘Civil’ in this instance means making an effort to get
along. That includes participation in conversation, keeping your
room relatively clean, and generally staying out of trouble.”
    She tossed her head, still refusing to look
my way. After a few minutes of silence, she finally capitulated.
“All right. I will recognize your dictatorship, but you have to
call me by my proper name, respect my privacy, and not
intrude in my life any more than you already have.”
    “I agree to the first two terms, and will do
my best on the last within reason.”
    An uneasy peace was reached. I kept silent
for most of the ride, preferring to let her have a little time to
sort through her no doubt tangled emotions.
    “Where exactly are you dragging me?” she
asked, breaking the silence forty-five minutes later as we exited
the highway and headed down a narrow country road.
    “Otherworld petting zoo. The owner is a
summoner, and said she wouldn’t mind if my imps ran free on her
acreage. There should be a sign somewhere around here pointing the
way… Ah, there it is.”
    “Ew. Imps. They light fires and things. Why
don’t you just kill them?”
    “These aren’t common imps. They’re
Australian House Imps; they’re quite friendly, and not in the least
bit destructive, as normal imps are, unless they are
mistreated.”
    “An imp is an imp is an imp,” she muttered,
directing her frown to the back, where the dog crate sat. “How come
you’re taking them to live outside if they are house imps?”
    “They’ll have a nice imp shelter to snuggle
into when they are done romping around outside,” I answered with
confidence, more to convince myself than her. I wasn’t sure how the
imps would take to life on a farm open to the public, but Simone,
the summoner, assured me that they would have the run of a distant
pasture and bordering woods, and a chicken coop that had been
specially customized for imps. They certainly seemed cheerful
enough as I let them free from the dog crate. They eek-eek ed
happily without a glance back at me as they scampered off to
explore their new home.
    “Let’s hope they stay there this time,” I
said after telling Simone good-bye.
    “This time?” Pixie asked as we bounced our
way down the long unpaved driveway.
    I was pleased. She hadn’t said a word the
whole time we were releasing the imps, contenting herself to stand
behind me like a big unhappy black and red rain cloud. This was the
first thing she’d said that didn’t concern just how miserable she
was.
    “I’ve tried to set them free two other
times. Each time they