"He had a good reason." Miranda jumped to Buck's defense, for which he would forever be grateful. "This is love, and Freddie is his mate. He needed to know where she was." Bopping the end of the grizzly's nose with the tip of her finger, the bunny added, "You would've done the same thing if I'd have gone MIA."
"Yeah, okay," Chase conceded before pointing his finger at Buck and ordering, "But she's not MIA. We know where she is, right?" With another heavy sigh, he reprimanded, "But I get it. Just don't do that shit again. You get caught and not even I can save your ass."
“But he would try.” Miranda nodded emphatically as she pulled her phone from her back pocket and swiped her thumb across the screen. “Freddie called me just a little while ago.”
The little hairs on the back of Buck’s neck stood on end at precisely the same second his inner beast snarled, “What the hell? Why are we just hearing about this now? Didn’t you tell them like five minutes ago that Freddie was our mate?”
“Chill, Harry. Let the woman talk.”
Hanging on the bunny's every word, sweat trickling down his back and his right foot tapping a steady tempo on the rung of his barstool, Buck didn't even breathe. He only asked, "And?"
“Oh, yeah,” Miranda chirped, lifting the phone to her ear. “I was handing off a detainee and had to go. She said we’d talk later.”
Tuning in to the ringing of the phone, Buck counted the seconds. Praying to hear Freddie answer with some snappy reply, Buck's fist closed so tightly on the empty bottle in his grasp that amber shards of glass flew in every direction when her voicemail happily replied, "You've reached Freddie Lightfoot. You know what to do."
4
No sooner had Rainbow Bright screamed her warning than Freddie was forcing their shift with a flash of magic that had her head spinning and the bagel she ate right before takeoff threatening to make an all-too-real reappearance. Snatching the control of the five-foot-eleven-inch winged tree frog from Freddie, Bright flapped her wings like she had suddenly become an angel, it was Judgment Day, and St. Peter was ringing the golden bell while hollering, "Last call."
Cutting through the air stream better than anything Boeing ever made, Bright's magic popped and crackled all around them. She was leaving the jet stream of all jet streams in her wake, burning the rubber of the sky. Whatever she'd seen had put the fear of the goddess in her beautiful butterfly booty, and the princess wasn't wasting any time getting them both the heck out of Dodge.
Looking one way and then the other, using Rainbow Bright’s eyes like they were glassnoculars, Freddie screamed, “What the fuck? What is happeni—” Gasping when her eyes finally found the what, the why, and most definitely the who, her tone changed from mildly worried to completely freaked out and was heading at a high rate of speed toward a nervous breakdown.
Going up an octave and getting louder by at least ten decibels from one syllable to the next, Freddie screamed, "Shut the front frikkin' door. What the fudge nuggets am I lookin' at? And when the schnickey doodles did I forget how to cuss?"
She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was something out of her worst nightmares and, actually, a couple of her daydreams while getting her doctorate in prehistoric lifeforms.
“I have no clue,” Bright panted, her enormous rainbow-striped wings working triple time. “Did you make this crap happen? Will it into existence? Let the hocus pocus you got from your momma get loose without supervision? Didn’t you—”
“Yes, I did,” Freddie snapped before becoming so befuddled she sounded like one of her first-year astrophysics students. “But I didn’t… I couldn’t… It can’t be… Can it?”
The silence spoke volumes. If she couldn’t answer her own questions and Rainbow Bright was coming up empty-handed, one of two things was going on—(A) They'd accidentally opened a portal to an alternate dimension, or (B) The whole coffee bean caper was a ruse.
She was going with B.
Having studied on every continent in the world, some more than four times, and having cataloged lifeforms that modern science said did not exist, Freddie freely admitted, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”
“Would you be pissed if I said, Duh?” came Bright’s sarcastic reply. “Since we share a brain and eyes and experiences and—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, smartass.” Freddie sighed. “What I am asking is, in your other lifetimes, or whatever it is you call the time you’ve spent with the other, umm… well, shit… the…”
“Other half of my soul. I only had one of those that wasn’t you. It was your great-grandmother. She was killed way too early, and I was given another chance by the Great Goddess. We’ve had this conversation more times than I care to remember.”
“Well, forgive me for forgetting. I am looking at a dozen…. No. Wait…” Muttering to herself, “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…” Then right back to Bright, she rushed on. “Fifteen. Yes, that’s a ten plus five for those of you who chose to be mean to me in a time of crisis—ahem, Bright—let’s call them, well, fuck, I don’t know what to call them. How about lifeforms?”
"You're more eloquent than me," Bright grumbled, a compliment that didn’t come very often. “I was thinking fucked-up fuckers from Fucksville.”
“Bright!” Freddie gasped, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud. "What were you just telling me about cursing? Something about it lowering my IQ, as well as yours."
“Oh, shut up.” Landing on the same outcropping they’d taken off from not ten minutes before, Rainbow Bright clipped, “Time to switch back, sweetcheeks. That trip took all the jet fuel I had and then some. Goddess, give me a shot of tequila and a stage full of naked men. Momma needs a recharge.”
“No worries.” Freddie readily agreed. “Thanks for saving my ass. Oh, and I thought we were staying outta strip clubs since you high-jacked my body and spent 252 dollars in singles disappearing down G-strings.”
"It's my ass, too, and Delilah explained that it was my heat and she destroyed the pictures."
"Yeah, okay, but remember, I'm watchin' you. Don't make me put you in time-out again."
“I’m gonna let that one go.”
Thinking she might actually have won an argument, Freddie groaned, “Well, shit.” Bright came back with, "I can't. Just can't do it. If you, Winifred Lightfoot, lock me up again, I promise to take over your body, spend all your money on vibrators, and have them delivered to the Academy in a box marked ‘open at assembly.’"
“Okay, you win.”
“Thank you.”
With her own feet back on solid ground, Freddie was able to pace as she thought aloud. Walking back and forth, sometimes in circles, sometimes a square, and a couple times in perfect equilateral triangles, helped the way-beyond genius reason through any and all problems.
"So, before you 'duh'd' me, I was gonna say, in a somewhat freaked-out shriek, holy shit, are those militarized dino super soldiers?”