Paranormal Romance audiobook scripts

The inn had one room left, and the room had one bed. My business partner solved this by unzipping a coffin out of a garment bag. "You travel with a coffin," I said. "You travel with four pairs of shoes." "Shoes are normal!" "I am three hundred and six, Mabry. Normal and I parted ways some time ago." Lucan patted the lid. "Take the bed. I do not snore. I do not even breathe." Somehow, that was not comforting. Somehow, I slept fine.

"You are going to spill that coffee," said the psychic, and I, a rational adult with a physics degree, held my cup very carefully for the next ten minutes out of pure spite. "Still dry," I said. "Give it time." "That is not a prediction, Ms. Okonjo. That is gravity and patience." She smiled into her tea. "You also think I am pretty." I spilled the coffee. "There it is," she said.

According to four hundred years of pack tradition, I would know my fated mate by a lightning bolt to the heart. What I got was a man in the frozen food aisle, sneezing on my cart. "Sorry," he said. "Allergies. Do you have a dog?" "In a manner of speaking." He sneezed again. My heart, the traitor, rolled over like a puppy. Perfect. The moon had picked me a soulmate, and he was allergic to me.

There is a curse on the Hartigan men, and everybody in town can recite it: kiss one, and you forget him by morning. "So nobody ever has," I said. Teodor shrugged and kept sanding the boat. "Twice. Nice women. They wave at me now like I am the postman." "That is the saddest thing I have ever heard." "Then stop looking at my mouth, Wynn." I had not been. I was now.

Nobody asks why a laundromat is open all night until they need one at three in the morning. Then they are just grateful, and they do not look too hard at the owner. I looked. I am a nurse. Looking is the job. "You have no reflection in the dryer doors," I said. Anselm did not glance up from his crossword. "They are very old dryers." "I can see myself in them." "You are very reflective." He tapped his pencil. "Seven letters, 'unwanted attention'." "Scrutiny." "Thank you." He wrote it in, slowly, in handwriting that belonged on a treaty. "Your scrubs are done, Josie. I added fabric softener. You seemed to have had a long night." A vampire. A considerate one. I was in so much trouble.

Werewolf pack politics used to mean blood on the snow. These days it means my aunt Roswitha typing in capital letters at six in the morning. The chat is called Moon Business. There are forty-one of us in it. Yesterday's emergency was who left a deer in the shared freezer without a label. Then, at 6:14, a new message. From Dario Venn. Dario of the Eastside pack, who has no business being in our chat, and who I may have added by accident after one cider at the solstice mixer. "Good morning," it says. "The deer is mine. So, I suspect, is the embarrassment." Forty people have seen it. My aunt replies with a single question mark. I reply with a heart. By accident. Mostly.

The court of the Ninth Circle sentenced Azrik to one thousand hours of community service, and Parks and Recreation got him on Tuesdays. "You cannot set the leaves on fire," said Hattie, for the third time. "It would be faster." "It would be arson." "I have been convicted of worse." He picked up the rake between two fingers, like a dead thing. "In my realm I commanded legions." "In this park you command that pile." She handed him a juice box. "Hydrate. You are doing great." Nobody had told Azrik he was doing great in six thousand years. He stared at the tiny straw for a long moment. Then he raked. Quite carefully. In case she was watching.

In a town of nine hundred people and eleven witches, you cannot keep a crush secret. The weather tells on you. It had rained on Main Street every afternoon since Jonah Beckett came home to run his daddy's hardware store. Just Main Street. Just around four, when he swept the front step. "That your cloud, Delphine?" Miss Odessa asked, not looking up from her snap beans. "No, ma'am." "It followed you into the post office, sugar." "That is a coincidence." "It is raining on your shoes. Indoors." I looked down. It was. Across the street, Jonah leaned on his broom, squinted up at the one gray cloud in a blue sky, and smiled like a man who had finally done the math.

Cassius Vane had survived two plagues, one shipwreck, and the entire eighteenth century. He was not sure he would survive his new neighbour. "Good morning!" she called over the fence. It was six. She had a watering can and a sunhat with daisies on it. "It is morning," he allowed. "I made too many muffins. Do you like blueberry?" "I do not like anything." "Great, so you have no objection." She passed the basket over. "I am Poppy. You look like you have not slept in a hundred years." "Two hundred and twelve." She laughed. She thought he was joking. And Cassius, who had not been surprised since the invention of the steam engine, found himself holding a warm muffin, with nothing to say.

City magic is not cauldrons and moonlight. City magic is knowing which subway car to stand in, and never, ever feeding the pigeons on Calloway Street after dark. So when the new guy in 4B chalked a protection ward on our shared landing, and got it backwards, I knocked. "Your ward is inviting things in," I said. He blinked at me. Flour on his glasses. Spell book open on a pizza box. "It is? The video said clockwise." "The video was filmed in the southern hemisphere." "Oh no." "Oh yes. Something with too many elbows has been sitting on the fire escape since Tuesday, waiting to be asked." I held out my hand for the chalk. "I am Ines. Scoot over. I will show you."

I signed a twelve-month lease on a haunted apartment, and the ghost is the best roommate I have ever had. He does not eat my leftovers. His only flaw is that he died in 1926 and has opinions about my hemlines. "You are not wearing that to dinner," says Emmett. "It is a dress." "It is most of a dress." "He is an accountant, Emmett. He is not going to faint." "An accountant." The lamp flickers, which is how he sighs. "You deserve a man who would cross an ocean for you. Not one who would ask if it was deductible." I laugh. It takes me a moment to notice that the mirror has fogged over, except for one clear patch the size of a man's hand. "Emmett?" "Have a lovely time, Clara," he says. Very politely. From very far away. I do not have a lovely time. I spend the whole dinner wondering why.

The rules of being dead are few, and the first is this: you may not want anything. Wanting is what keeps you here. I managed it for ninety-eight years. Then Clara moved in, with eleven boxes of books and a habit of saying good morning to an empty room, just in case. "You are not wearing that to dinner," I say. "It is a dress." "It is most of a dress." She laughs. I have made her laugh. I shall think about it later far more than I should. I tell her she deserves a man who would cross an ocean. I do not tell her that I once did, for a great deal less. She fastens an earring. I reach for the mirror beside her face, and the glass goes white under a hand I do not have. Wanting. There it is. "Have a lovely time, Clara," I say, and I go and stand inside the wall until I hear the door.

Nobody warned me that the Coyle family reunion was a werewolf pack, so I showed up to cater it with a vegetarian lasagna. Forty people stared at it like a live grenade. "It is very brave," said the tall one. He had a serving spoon, kind eyes, and shoulders like a barn door. "I am Rafferty. I will eat it." "You do not have to eat it." "I am going to eat all of it. Loudly. Where they can see." He took a bite. Something happened to his face. He set the spoon down, like a man who had just heard his name called from a long way off. "Is it bad?" I asked. "No." He was looking at me, not the lasagna. "No, it is, um. What did you say your name was?" "Bex." "Bex," he said, as if he were writing it somewhere permanent. Behind him, a grandmother dropped a whole tray of ribs, and the whole reunion started to grin.

My grandmother says you know your mate by scent, and that it will knock you flat. I have spent thirty-one years assuming my grandmother exaggerates. Then the caterer walks in smelling of basil and rain, carrying a vegetarian lasagna into a yard full of wolves. Nobody moves. Somebody has to be kind. "I am Rafferty," I tell her. "I will eat it." "You do not have to eat it." "I am going to eat all of it. Loudly. Where they can see." One bite. And the whole yard tips sideways. Basil. Rain. Her. Every instinct I own sits up and says, there you are. I put the spoon down before I bend it. "Is it bad?" she asks. I will have to explain this to her. Not today. Today I just need her name, and for my grandmother to stop looking so pleased with herself. "What did you say your name was?" "Bex." Bex. Fine. Good. I only have to rearrange my entire life.

Detective Trask did not believe in me, and he had a way of not believing that took up the whole room. "So the dead man told you where the ledger is," he said. "The dead man showed me a blue door and the smell of oranges." "That is not an address, Ms. Linwood." "It is not supposed to be. It is where you start." He wrote something in his notebook. Probably the word fraud, underlined. And then, because the dead have no manners, I got one more thing. Not about the case. About him. A kitchen. A woman singing off key. A boy on a stool, laughing so hard he fell off. "Your mother sang while she cooked," I said. "Badly. You miss it." His pen stopped. I had meant to prove a point. I had not meant to watch a hard man's face come apart and put itself back together in one breath. "Blue door," he said quietly. "Oranges. Let's go."

For the record, I do not believe in psychics. I believe in fingerprints, phone records, and people lying to me before lunch. So I had my speech ready when Vada Linwood closed her eyes in that dusty parlor. Cold reading. Lucky guesses. "Blue door," she said. "Oranges." "That is not an address, Ms. Linwood." She did not take the bait. She never does. She just looked at me, patient as a Sunday, and I wrote down blue door, oranges, and underneath it, why does she never get angry. Then she tilted her head, like someone listening through a wall. "Your mother sang while she cooked. Badly. You miss it." Nobody knows that. I have not said it out loud in thirty years. I would like the report to show that I remained professional. I said, "Let's go," and I held the door. The report does not need to show that my hands were shaking, or that she pretended not to notice.

My grandmother left me a bakery, a mortgage, and a curse: anyone who eats one of our pastries before noon cannot tell a lie until sundown. Business was terrible. Nobody wants honesty with their coffee. Except the man from the bank. He came in every morning at eight, ordered one almond croissant, and ate it right there at my counter, on purpose. "You know what it does," I said. "I do." "You are a loan officer." "Which is why I hold my meetings in the afternoon. Ask me something, Tilly." "Is the bank going to foreclose on me?" "Not if I can help it. I have been losing your paperwork for six weeks." "Why?" He opened his mouth. I watched him try three different polite answers and fail at every one. "Because I like it here," Julian said at last, pink to the ears. "Because of you. Mostly because of you. Oh, this is dreadful. Could I have another one?"

The 2:40 night bus is not on any timetable, and the driver only stops if you hold out a coin that is older than you are. I held out my grandfather's lucky penny. The doors sighed open. "You are new," said the driver. He had tired eyes and a flask the size of a fire extinguisher. "First rule. Do not talk to the gentleman at the back. He is a weather front." "He is a what?" "Very moody. Second rule, no spells while the bus is moving. Last week somebody summoned a goose." "Is the goose all right?" That got me a look in the mirror. Then, slowly, a smile, like a streetlight coming on. "The goose is fine. The goose has a seat. Nobody ever asks about the goose." He pulled away from the kerb. "Where to, miss?" "Anywhere," I said. I had meant to say home. But it was warm on the bus, and the driver kept finding my eyes in the mirror.

The Briar County coven meets Thursdays in the back of Tucker's Feed and Seed, between the chicken wire and the salt licks, and I have been its secretary for thirty-one years. Item one was the drought. Item two was Loretta's ex-husband, who remains a toad, by unanimous vote. Item three walked in late, carrying a pecan pie. "Evening, ladies," said Wendell Tucker. Widower, sixty-three. He has never once asked what the candles are for. "This is a closed meeting, Wendell," I said. "I know it, Maybelle. I just figured witches get hungry." Seven women turned to look at me. I kept my eyes on the minutes. "Who told you we were witches?" "Nobody. I have been sweeping up your salt circles since 1994." He set the pie down. "I also figured, after thirty-one years, a man could ask the secretary to supper." Let the minutes show the secretary said yes. Let them also show it rained that night, for the first time in two months.

I have tempted saints and toppled two small kingdoms, and I am telling you, nothing in all the pits prepared me for a one-eyed kitten named Biscuit. "He likes you," says Orla. "He is climbing me. That is different." "Hold your arm steady, Malachar. You are going to make a grand cat tree." Three hundred hours of service, the tribunal said. Feed the animals. Clean the cages. Harm no one. They said nothing about the shelter manager having a laugh like a door opening on a warm room. "You are smiling," she says. "I am baring my teeth. It is a threat display." "It is not a very good one." She reaches up and plucks the kitten off my horn. Her fingers brush it. No mortal had ever touched me without a contract. "There, now. Same time Thursday?" My sentence ends in the spring. I have already begun committing small crimes to extend it. Yesterday I jaywalked. Twice.

Bellamy's Flowers opened at dusk and closed at dawn, and in two years of driving his van, I had never once seen my boss eat lunch. "Hospital order, ward six," he said, sliding a box of white roses across the counter. "And this is for you." It was a sprig of rosemary. "For remembrance. You forgot your scarf on Tuesday. I have started a shelf." "You could just say, Anjali, you left your scarf." "I could." Mr. Bellamy adjusted his cuffs. He wore a full suit, at three in the morning, among buckets. "But I have been speaking in flowers since eighteen forty, and I find I am out of practice with the other way." I laughed. He did not. "Eighteen forty," I said. "Give or take." He looked up, and for once he let me see how old his eyes were. "I would rather you heard it from me than from the garlic you keep in the van. Which does nothing. I rather like garlic."

The old way to become alpha was to fight for it under a full moon. The new way is a three-hour meeting in the community hall, with a tea urn and a show of hands. I am losing. To Isla MacRennie, who has a slideshow. "Slide four," she says. "Patrol rota. Fairer shifts, and nobody runs the north ridge alone." "We have always run the north ridge alone," I say. "Aye, Lachlan, and you have always come back with a limp." She clicks to the next slide. It is a photograph of me, limping. The whole pack laughs. I should be furious. But she is right about the ridge, and the rota, and worst of all the limp, and she is looking at me across the hall as if she is waiting to see what kind of wolf I am. So I put my hand up. For her. The room goes very quiet. Isla forgets which slide she is on. "Seconded," I say. "Madam Alpha."

I read tarot out of a shopfront between a kebab place and a phone repair stall, and I am right about nine times out of ten. It is the tenth one that walks in on a Friday. "I do not believe in this," he says, sitting down anyway. "Lovely. That will be forty dollars." He pays. I shuffle. The cards come out all wrong. Not bad wrong. Personal wrong. The Lovers. And then a card that is not in my deck at all: a little hand-painted woman in a purple shopfront, holding a deck. "What does that one mean?" he asks. "No idea, mate." "She looks like you." "She does not." "She has your earrings." She does. I turn the card face down. It turns itself back up. "Right," I say. "The universe is being a bit forward today. Do you want a cup of tea while I have a word with it?" He grins. "I am Eamon. And yeah. I reckon I do."

Sir Peregrine Ashby-Lowe had been dead for two hundred years and charming for none of them. In life he had been shy. In death he was shy and also transparent, which did not help. So when the museum hired a night guard who hummed, ate crisps and talked to the paintings, he resolved to say something witty. He drifted through the gallery wall. She looked up. "Oh," said Dot. "You are the cold spot." Peregrine had prepared a remark about moonlight. What came out was, "Crisps are not permitted near the tapestries." "Sorry." She held out the bag. "Want one?" "I cannot eat." "Want to smell one?" It was the kindest offer anyone had made him since 1811. He leaned in. Salt and vinegar. Extraordinary. "I am Peregrine," he managed. "I know, love. You are on the plaque. Go on, then. Sit. Tell me which of these portraits were nice people." He sat. He had a great deal to say. He had only been waiting two centuries for someone to ask.

There are two magic shops on Wickerby Lane, and for eleven years the owners have communicated only by hexing each other's signs. This morning mine read: Moonflower Apothecary, Now With Fleas. I marched across the street. Rowan Castellane was up a ladder, repainting his own sign, which I had changed last week to say Overpriced Sticks. "Fleas," I said. "Really." "I thought it was restrained." "I had a bride in at nine." "Did she buy anything?" "A love charm. Which I had to discount. Because of the fleas." He came down the ladder. He was trying not to smile, which has been the most annoying thing about him since we were nineteen. "Juno. Your charms do not work." "They work perfectly." "Then how come you have been selling them across from me for eleven years, and I am still only painting your sign?" I had a reply. I had several. They all left at once. "That," he said gently, "was a hint. I can do it again, slower."

My boss is four hundred years old, allergic to small talk, and has fired eleven assistants. I have lasted nine weeks, and I think it is because I bring snacks. "Good morning, Mr. Hallowell!" "That remains to be seen." "I alphabetized the grimoires." "They were arranged by century." "Now they are arranged by century and alphabetized. Also, I named the gargoyle. He is Gary." Mr. Hallowell closes his eyes, the way he does when he is counting to ten in Latin. "Miss Abara. In four centuries, no one has named the gargoyle." "Well, that is very sad for Gary." Silence. I brace for assistant number twelve. Instead he makes a sound. A rusty, startled, undignified sound, like a gate nobody has opened in years. It takes me a second to work out that it is a laugh. He looks more shocked than I do. "You will not mention that," he says, "to anyone." "Mention what?" I set a cookie on his desk. "Gary saw nothing."

City Hall has a window that only opens after midnight, and I am the one who sits behind it. Permits, licenses, and complaints, for the part of the city that does not show up on maps. Tonight's last customer has a raincloud on a leash. It is a small cloud, and it is raining on his left shoe. "I need to register a familiar," he says. "That is a weather event." "She is a very small weather event. Her name is Drizzle. She followed me home in April. I have tried releasing her over three reservoirs. She comes back." "Sir, the city does not license loose precipitation." "What does the city do?" The city, according to section nine, sends a containment team with a very large jar. I look at the cloud. The cloud drifts up to the glass and rains, gently, on my side of the counter. On my hand. It is warm, like a bath. Eleven years I have followed section nine. "Species," I say, and I write down: dog. "You cannot put dog." "Small gray dog. Sheds water. Sign here." I slide the form under the glass. Our fingers nearly touch, and the lights on the whole fourth floor flicker. "Renewal is in one year, Mr. Ibarra. In person." "That is a long time." "There is also," I hear myself say, "a noise complaint form. If she thunders. You would have to come in weekly." He signs. He is smiling at his shoes. "She thunders constantly," he says.

Nobody tells you how to meet your girlfriend's family when the family is a wolf pack. I brought wine. I should have brought a steak, or possibly a lawyer. There were nineteen of them around the table, and every one stopped chewing when I walked in. "Everyone," said Tamsin, "this is Oliver. He is a dental hygienist. Be normal." "He smells like mint," said a small cousin. "Thank you," I said. "It was not a compliment," said her grandfather. Tamsin squeezed my knee under the table, which helped, and her father watched her do it, which did not. "So, Oliver." "What are your intentions? In my day, a suitor ran the ridge at midnight and brought back a stag." "I have a gym membership," I said. "I mostly use the sauna." A fork clinked. When I am scared, I tell the truth. It is all I have. "My intentions are to be wherever she is," I said. "I am allergic to most of the outdoors. But she laughs with her whole face, and I would like to be the reason, for as long as she will let me. Also, I can get all of you a very good deal on cleanings." Then the grandfather laughed. One bark, like a door slamming. Her father put down his knife and looked at me properly for the first time. "Tamsin," he said. "Get the boy a real plate." She had not let go of my knee. She was looking at me as if I had brought back the stag.

He had been walking the same stretch of river every evening for three hundred years, and in all that time nobody had ever offered him half an umbrella. "I do not mind the wet," Ambrose said. "You are soaked through. Come in under, will you." He hesitated, the way a man does at the door of a house he has not been invited into. Then he stepped in, and the rain closed around us like a curtain. "Niamh. I have told you what I am." "You have. You are very gloomy about it." "I will not age. You will. I buried her in 1794. I am telling you it does not end well." "Nothing ends well, Ambrose. That is what ending means." My hand was shaking on the handle, so he put his over it. His fingers were cold. They did not stay cold. "I am not asking you for forever. I would not know what to do with it. I am asking you for Thursday." "Thursday." "There is music on at Doolan's. You would hate it. Fiddles." He laughed. Then he bent his head, slowly, giving me all the time in the world to step back. I did not step back. It was a short kiss. It tasted of rain. And when it was over, the oldest man in Ireland looked at me as though he was the one who had just been given a little more time. "Thursday," he said. "I will bring my own umbrella." "Do not," I said.

The demon Sorrowgast was assigned to the Willowmere Rest Home for crimes against three archdukes, and by his second week the residents had him reading mysteries aloud. He did all the voices. The murderers especially. "You skipped a page," said Mrs. Abiodun, ninety-four. "The page was dull." "I will decide what is dull, young man." He was eleven thousand years old. He turned back the page. From the doorway, Grace watched. Grace ran the place on four hours of sleep and a budget held together with tape. Afterward he stacked the chairs. Nobody had asked him to. "You stayed late again," she said. "The detective had not yet gathered the suspects. It would have been cruel." "Sorrowgast. You are allowed to like it here." He put down the chair. He had a poor face for lying. It showed everything, like a lamp. "I am not allowed. Each month they ask if I have suffered. If they learn I look forward to Tuesdays, they will find me something worse." Grace thought about it. She picked up the sign-in sheet, and under Comments, she wrote: Complains constantly. Hates every minute. "That is a lie," he said softly. "You lied for me." "I rounded." She held out her hand for the last chair. He gave her, instead, his own hand, clawed and enormous and very careful. She did not let go of it. He had four hundred Tuesdays left, and for the first time in eleven thousand years, that did not seem like enough.