Karma's Shift (Magical Midlife in Mystic Hollow Book 2) - Lacey Andersen (black female authors .TXT) 📗

dress like that. Heck, I think they’d be flapping around in the wind on a boat, looking like stretchy arms.”

Oh my gosh, I could freaking picture us all on that boat. One of us would have our skirt over our head. Another one would have boobs flopping out. And I’d be the one burnt to a crisp with my hair so tangled that people would scream when I got back to land.

Man, they should make a show about us. Real Middle-Aged Women, Caution: Horrifyingly Realistic Women Up Ahead. There would be whole episodes about us diving into pre-menopause. Viewers would find themselves losing their appetites and wondering why it’d been so long since I last shaved. They’d watch us eat and be inspired not to look like us one day. Yeah, right. Like old age wasn’t coming for everyone, one day.

I started laughing, and Beth finally looked in my direction.

“What?”

“Just thinking about us on a boat.”

“We can rent a boat, but I’m not shaving,” she muttered.

“Me neither! We’d end up on some Big Foot sighting websites!”

She grinned.

I reached for my glass, then remembered it was empty. Stupid wine. There was never enough when I wanted it. And the kitchen seemed so far. But no, I was here for Beth. If we were out of wine, I’d be the hero who brought us more!

Empty glasses in hand I popped up from my seat, or tried to, my knee locked up slightly and I had to bend it again to loosen it up and headed into the kitchen to refill our glasses and get us each another brownie.

Sure, Beth hadn’t asked for one, but her glass was empty just like mine and if I was getting another brownie then the polite thing was to bring her one as well. Plus, she was much more engrossed in the show than I was. I preferred those baking shows where everyone was super nice and helpful to one another. Their accents were adorable as well, so that didn’t hurt matters.

Something or someone tapped on our kitchen window as I poured more wine for Beth. I froze. What the hell was that?

Peering outside, I didn’t see anything. Just my old familiar tree. Still, I kept staring for a long minute, not feeling comfortable until I noticed leaves dancing along the grass in the glow from the backlight. Dancing. Sigh. In the wind, of course.

I blamed my nervous reaction on my tipsy state. It was probably just a branch being knocked against the window by the wind. I bit into one of the brownies before I filled up my glass with wine as well. One thing I’d learned about living alone for most of my life is that I couldn’t jump at every tiny sound, or I’d go insane.

I hadn’t thought things through though, and when I tried to carry the brownies and the two glasses of wine back, I nearly spilled. Losing the wine and the brownies would have been a tragedy.

As I moved to return to the living room, with the brownies precariously balanced on top of the wine glasses, someone tapped on the back door. I startled and my brownie fell into my glass, the missing bite making it more unstable than Beth’s. I cursed under my breath and turned back to the kitchen, setting everything down on the counter. Chocolate and red wine went together, right? Surely, I didn’t just ruin both.

Okay, now. Somebody had to be teasing me. Maybe Deva and Emma had finished investigating and were back to freak us out. They should know better, but I also remembered how mischievous they’d been when we were all younger. I yanked open the back door. “Gotcha!” I yelled.

But nobody was there.

With a sigh, I stuck my head outside and looked around. The trash cans were where I’d left them, the flowers were swaying in the night breeze, but there was no explanation for the tapping noise I’d heard.

Nobody.

“Weird,” I murmured to myself as a chill broke out over my skin.

I turned back inside, pulling the door closed with me, and shrieked when I found a man standing behind me, holding a knife up in the air. My knife if the pearlescent handle was anything to go by. Seemed like a silly thing to notice but I loved my knife set. A black hood covered his head, hanging down over his face shadowing it, but even so, I could tell that he was wearing something under it as well, some kind of mask that made him look animalistic. He roared at me and lunged, striking outward and making me scream once more. Fear clenched around my heart as my mind went blank of any spell I could use.

One of my cats jumped off the table that sat between the living room and the kitchen and onto his back, sinking her claws deep into his skin. The man screamed and dropped my kitchen knife as he lurched forward. I stepped to the side and grabbed my kitty around the waist, yanking her back toward me as the man bolted out the back door, swinging it open with such force that it bounced backward and smacked him in the face before he could actually get away.

Kitty’s claws came back with a bit of the guy’s back, so he screamed louder as he finally made it out of the house.

Beth came running in, also screaming, or maybe it was supposed to be a war cry with the way she was brandishing the TV remote. I wasn’t sure. This kind of thing demanded action though, so I put my kitty down and yanked open the kitchen drawer that held emergency hex bags for just such a time as this. “Come on!” I yelled.

We ran out the back door, going as fast as we could, around the house and up the street. We were a ways back, not a chance of being as fast as our attacker, but we saw him cross the road and disappear into the