accidental 11 - accidentally ever after by dakota cassidy Page B

her at a bar when she was chasing after her out-of-control twin charges. Poof. Instant demon. But you have an entire realm doing this to you, an unseen entity. How the fuck do you fight that?”
    Yeah. Good question. How the fuck?
    Pushing her tangled hair from her face, Toni nodded and turned around. “I’d like to know, too. Listen, I don’t know if I thanked you properly for saving me today. I would have been a grease spot if not for you. I guess I didn’t think the whole thing through, but it was like not being in control of all my faculties. Brawn over brain or something…Anyway, thank you. I’d have never survived without you.”
    Nina stopped gathering limbs for the fire and looked her directly in the eye. “The best way to thank me is to not wander off by yourself. There’s obviously some crazy shit out there, and I don’t know if it was luck or what that saved your sparkly ass, but we might not be so lucky next time.”
    “Who’da thunk a Starbucks could cause so much trouble?”
    “You do realize the Starbucks was basically Snow White’s apple, don’t you, Boogie Shoes? A metaphor or some such shiz?” Nina asked, her gaze hard and unflinching as her wings pumped softly.
    She’d thought long and hard about it as they’d continued their walk to the campsite earlier today. “I do now. I guess at the time, because I was desperate for coffee, my impulse control got the better of me.”
    “From now on, just stay close. I can’t protect you if I can’t see you, dipshit.”
    Toni chuckled, bending at the waist to arrange the limbs. “Is that what you’re doing? Protecting me? You’re not such a bitch after all, huh?”
    Nina cracked a branch in half, the sound harsh in the silence, reverberating off the trees. “I’ma say this once. Respect for having the balloon-size clangers to stand your ground with me. I like a chick who can handle her own shit. You’re in a small class of people who’ve lived to tell the tale. But do it again? Die. And it’ll hurt. Oh, Jesus and your lady brains spattered from here to kingdom come, it’ll hurt.”
    Toni shivered, wrapping the blanket Jon had given her from his pack tighter around her. She didn’t doubt Nina meant what she said. She also didn’t doubt there was much more to Nina than met the eye.
    Nina came around to her side of the fire and plopped down on a fallen tree trunk next to her. Pointing to the pit they’d made together, she said, “Breathe, Fire Starter.”
    Tension coiled in her stomach. “What if I can’t do it again? Or worse, what if I can?” What if, for the rest of her life, she was going to set things on fire? Like Marty’s hair again? Or a house?
    Not one to mince words, Nina looked right at her, her pale face sharply contrasted by the dark night. “Then you’ll deal. We’ll help you.”
    Help. No one had given her much of that in a long time. Not the police. Not the people she’d once worked with. No one. “Why would you help me? You don’t even like me. I’m the one who’s responsible for this whole mess. You should hate my guts.”
    “It’s just what I do. It’s what we all do. I bitch about it plenty. I complain. I swear. But I do it because the other two windbags need me to do it. We’re ride-or-die partners for life.”
    She did it, whether willingly or not, because their friendship meant something deep, something she cherished far more than she’d ever let on. “Would you do this OOPS thing if it wasn’t for Marty and Wanda?”
    Nina paused for a long moment as she looked off into the depths of the forest before she said, low and husky. “I dunno. We’ve come really close to losing each other, and even a client or two. That fucking sucks some harsh ass—to always be so damn freaked about the safety of the people you love. Not that I’d take any of it back, because we found some awesome shit and some awesome people along the way. And that’s not to say if somebody needed help, I wouldn’t help. Because