“Hey, Mr. Shepherd,” one of the kids said, racing up to my open window, clearly unaffected by his near brush with death. “Are you looking for Granny G, too?”
“Yeah,” the other piped in while jumping up and down behind the first, her cheerfully freckled face shining with enthusiasm. “You’re a tiger, right? That is so cool! I wish I could be a tiger! I’d roar and roar and scare off all my cousins when they’re mean to me.”
She aimed a fierce look at the back of the boy’s head.
“Well, tigers are pretty fierce,” I drawled. “For example, we don’t like to see kids run in front of traffic, where they might get hurt. It makes us think about how tasty they might be.”
The little girl grinned, but her cousin gasped, his eyes widening. “No!”
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Can you really use your tiger nose and find Granny G?”
I sighed, but before I could answer, the girl jumped in.
“No, Bug, that’s wolves and dogs. Tigers have super hearing, not sense of smell, right? Right, Mr. Shepherd?”
“That’s right. You’re pretty smart,” I told her, pleased to see her face light up. She must not be much older than Shelley. “Hey, shouldn’t you be in school?”
Both immediately looked anywhere but at me and started backing away.
The boy started stammering. “Um, well, we…”
“We are on the way,” the girl announced firmly. “Bug made us late when he spilled milk all over the kitchen, and we had to clean it up. We didn’t even get breakfast. But we’re going now.”
The boy, who must be Bug, groaned. “Aw, Lily. We’re already in trouble for being late. And I’m hungry. We may as well skip.”
I heard a car pulling up behind my truck and made a quick decision. “How about you both hop in the car, and I’ll take you to school? We can stop at Mellie’s, and I’ll buy you donuts for breakfast.”
I watched the battle between donuts and school on Bug’s face for a moment, but the donuts won.
“Okay!” the boy shouted, and they scrambled around to the passenger side of the truck and clambered in.
The two of them chattered nonstop on the way to the bakery. I listened with half my attention, constantly scanning the area for any sign of Mrs. Gonzalez, but saw nothing. When I parked and followed the kids into Mellie’s, I said hello to the people I knew and the very few I still didn’t. A couple of them gave me curious looks when they saw the kids, but I didn’t offer explanations.
When we reached the counter, Mellie smiled but raised an eyebrow. “Are you the new McKee babysitter?”
“Nope. Just found them roaming the streets. I’m getting them breakfast and taking them to school.”
“We’re notbabies,” Lily said haughtily. “I’m in sixth grade.”
“Me, too,” Bug said absently, staring wide-eyed at the array of delicious pastries in the sparkling glass case before him. “I’ve never seen so many donuts in myentire life.”
He spun around and stared up at me. “Can I have one of each?”
I shrugged and opened my mouth to say “sure,” but then I caught sight of Mellie narrowing her eyes at me.
“Jack will be happy to buy each of you two donuts and a carton of milk, and then he will drive you to school,” she said, using what all three of us recognized as a Mom Voice. “I’m sure Jack doesn’t want to explain to your parents why you’re in the nurse’s office throwing up.”
I flinched. “No, Jack definitely does not.”
“Anyway, we can’t get sick today. Today is the day the new high school chemistry teacher starts, and we want to see what goes wrong this time,” Lily said in her prim voice.
Mellie and I stared at each other in amusement, but the kid might have a point. The first chemistry teacher, who’d been there since Tess was in high school and even before, had been a snake shifter—not thatthatwas the problem. He’d also been a criminal who’d threatened Tess and her Aunt Ruby with an enchanted dagger. He was currently enjoying the ungentle hospitality of the Fae queen and was no doubt regretting his life choices.
His replacement had unknowingly brought a hibernating baby gargoyle to school. When the baby had woken up and cried out for his family, a horde of angry, full-sized gargoyles had rampaged through the school. When she recovered from the fright, the teacher ran away, never to be seen again. Who knew what might happen this time?
“Surely not,” Mellie said. “What are the odds that yet another chemistry teacher will cause problems?
