“Aye, boss won’t.”
“Help!” I yelled louder and tried to wrestle my wrist away from Irv.
No one in camp so much as looked my way. I wondered where Gregory was, and why he wasn’t where I needed him to be: namely, conveniently located adjacent to the stream. Damn the man for going off and doing his job.
“Better you don’t rough her up at all,” the second man said, having evidently completed some great undertaking of thought processes.
“Aye,” Irv said slowly, then nodded his head. “That way, boss can rough her up.”
“No one is roughing me up!” I bellowed, and making a fist, punched Irv in the nose as hard as I could.
He caught my fist about a quarter of an inch away from his face. “Here, now!” he said, clearly offended. “There’s no call for that! Frankie, did you see? Daft hen tried to smack me in the gob.”
“Aye. Feisty wench, she is. Best we take her to the boss afore she hurts herself. Boss won’t like that any more than he’d like you to rough her up.”
“Helleeeeeeeeeerp!” My last cry for help morphed into a startled scream when Irv bent down and hefted me onto his shoulder. “Put me down, you great lummox!”
“What’s a lummox?” I heard him ask his friend as they crossed over the tree to Ethan’s side of the stream.
“Don’t know. Might be another fruit.”
“Daft hen.”
“Aye, daft hen.”
“I’m not a hen, and I’m not daft. Oh, for the love of the stars and moons, would you put me down?”
“Imagine someone calling you an orange,” Frankie said conversationally as the two men strode along.
“I didn’t—wait a minute. Why aren’t you taking me to Ethan?”
I had fully expected that the two bully boys would go straight into Ethan’s camp and deliver me to their boss, but they didn’t. They made a sharp right at the camp and headed for the woods that ran along the far side of the encampment.
“Who?” Irv asked.
“Ethan! The man who owns . . . runs . . . the camp just there.”
“Oh, him.” Irv made a gesture with his shoulder that had me sliding down his back a few inches. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Daft hen doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Frankie offered.
“I’m going to be sick all over you if you don’t set me down!” I warned them.
That did the trick. Irv stopped and set me onto my feet, retaining a hold on my wrist as he did so. “Don’t be thinking you are going to get away,” he warned. “Boss said we wasn’t to let you get away.”
“Aye, he said that.” Frankie nodded and took my other arm in his beefy hand.
“Who, exactly, is this boss?” I twisted around to look over my shoulder at Ethan’s camp, stumbling when the men started forward. I had half hoped to see Gregory lurking about the edges, in the process of thieving, but although I could see people moving around in the camp, we were too far away for me to yell for assistance.
“Boss is boss,” Irv answered in a bewildered tone, as if he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured that out.
“Yes, but what is his name?”
“Oh. Tessersnatch. Baldwin Tessersnatch.”
I froze, and was promptly jerked off my feet when the two men kept walking. They paused to help right me. “Tessersnatch?” I cleared my throat when my voice came out a squeak. “The lawyer?”
“Aye, that’s him.” Frankie gave me a pitying look. “You’ve gone and made him angry, you have. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”
“No good being in your shoes,” Irv agreed, marching forward again.
My brain whirled those two words around and around. Baldwin Tessersnatch was a mortal lawyer who had ties to the Otherworld, most recently with my two moms. Desperate for funds for their school, they—foolishly, and quite illegally—had agreed to sell, through Baldwin, some incantations to another mortal man.
The dread that filled me at the name turned swiftly to hot, consuming anger. “Well, now. How about that. Baldwin Tessersnatch, the man who threw me off a cliff to my death when I told him my moms wouldn’t be fulfilling the transaction. You know, I think I’d like to see him. I have a thing or two to say to Mr. Murderous Tessersnatch.”
“Baldwin,” Irv corrected me.
“Daft hen was making a funny,” Frankie said. “At least I think she was. You never know with one what calls you an orange.”
I shook off their respective holds on my wrists and marched forward, saying in a voice that should have dropped the birds from the trees, “Oh, I have several things to discuss with Baldwin Tessersnatch!”
“It’s a good thing that we got to her before that other hen,” Irv told Frankie.
“I wonder if I can remember the spell for shriveling up a man’s testicles,” I mused as we entered the woods. “I know it started off Misbegotten wart on the backside of humankind, but I can’t remember if the second line is Go and boil your bollocks in a vat of rime, or barrel of lime. Hmm.”
“Aye, she gave me the willies, she did.”
“Maybe it’s Shrivel the stones till the end of all time? Damn my crappy memory for spells. Wait—what other hen?” I stopped again, turning to look back at them. “A woman is looking for me? Is her name Holly?”
“Don’t know her name. She never said, did she, Frankie?”
“I’m of a mind that she didn’t, Irv.”
“All she said was that her boss wanted to see you, and that she would see to it that we were paid twice what the boss pays us if we’d help her find you.” Irv looked thoughtful again. “We were tempted, weren’t we, Frankie?”
“We were,” his buddy admitted. “But only until she told us who her boss was, and then we figured we’d be better off with our boss.”
I was a bit confused by which boss was which, but managed to sort it out enough to ask, “Ethan, you mean?”
“Naw, he’s not badass like the hen’s boss.”
“We like Ethan, don’t we, Irv?” Frankie said, apropos of nothing in particular. “We were helping him.”
“He had the wrong idea about how you wage a war,” Irv confided. “He didn’t once think of using a car bomb, or offing the competition’s family.”
Horror filled my veins. “You guys are hit men, aren’t you?” Really stupid hit men, but still, obviously, professionals in the art of killing.
“Not us,” Frankie said at the same time Irv answered, “Yes, but we don’t always do that.”
“That’s right. It’s only sometimes we take care of the boss’s bigger problems.” Frankie didn’t even blink over his sudden change in story. “Mostly we’re the boss’s right-hand men.”
“And enforcers.”
“Sometimes we do a hit or two, just to keep our hands in.”
“It doesn’t pay to get rusty,” Irv agreed.
“Messy.” Frankie nodded sagely. “It can get messy if you don’t keep your hand in.”
I was tempted to run screaming away from them, but given this new and more deadly light on their characters, I felt a little subterfuge was in order. Subterfuge and distraction. “So who is this woman’s boss if it’s not Ethan?”
“Badass,” Irv said, giving me a little shove forward. To my relief, he didn’t try grabbing my arm again.
“Really badass. Badder than the boss, and he’s pretty bad.”
Just the thought of Baldwin had me squaring my shoulders. “Yes, well, you haven’t seen my ass. It’s going to whup your boss’s.”
They both looked at my butt. I made an annoyed sound and charged forward through the woods. I would deal with this woman once I had vented my spleen on Baldwin. “Where is your boss? I want to get him taken care of quickly so I have time to see my moms before I’m due for my shift.”