Page 46 of Head Witch in Charge (The Sherwood Witches #2)

LeLe…

Snookums has the zoomies, which is an activity that always makes me laugh when it’s my sister’s rooster familiar Barkley running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but I’m not chuckling now.

Why? Because witnessing the zoomies, with its high rate of speed and hairpin turns, is downright terrifying when it’s a dragon the size of two jumbo-sized elephants stacked on top of each other that’s running in circles in a cave the size of a hunting cabin.

Erik yanks me back just as Snookums speeds over to us and drops a piece of vulcanized rubber at my feet that is more the idea of a chew bone than an actual one.

It’s the same bone Erik and I spent the past ten minutes struggling to heft into the dragon’s toy basket.

Snookums pauses in his one-dragon race, his lilac tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, long enough to stare at me and wag his spiked tail.

That motion sends another toy flying through the air and the dragon lets out a bleat of excitement before taking off after it, moving so fast from an absolute standstill that his claws leave grooves in the cave’s stone floor.

“That explains why so few have managed to complete this challenge,” Erik says as he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me closer so my back is tucked up against his chest.

It’s really not the time—we do have a literal countdown clock for this challenge floating in the air above us after all, and it has less than twenty minutes to go on it before our time in this forest is literally up—but I relax back against him anyway.

The truth is even if we make it out of the forest, get The Liber Umbrarum tucked away safe in the secured facility, and Erik participates in the divorce spell that’s all I’ve wanted for the past year, I’ll still feel like I lost because my shouldn’t-be husband won’t be anymore, and right now I can’t imagine a fate worse than that.

Some fucking heir I am. I have literally one job—do the best thing for my family always, more specifically divorce Erik and marry someone who could help us politically as we fight to save Witchingdom from the Council, you know, just a little inconsequential thing—and yet I’d rather be stuck in these woods forever than do it.

As the Sherwood heir I have one job.

One!

And it’s not doing what I want, but what is best for the family.

There is no question about what I should do when it comes to the fate of my family and Witchingdom as a whole versus getting to be with Erik.

Still, no matter the shame that makes my whole body flinch, if given the choice, I’d roll the dice and hope the fates could find a way to make it all work out.

Love has turned me into an absolute selfish asshole.

Grumbling under my breath, I push back all thoughts of how I ever let this happen and try to focus on how losing Erik and finally getting what I’ve wanted all along is the best thing ever. I suck at that even more than I do at not falling in love with my husband.

Erik gives me a comforting squeeze. “What’s wrong?”

Wrong? Oh, nothing. Just that I have fallen in love with the absolute worst person for me to fall for in all of Witchingdom.

Oh, and yeah, if we survive until the morning—a big if—he’s soon going to be my ex-husband who I’ll never see or talk to ever again.

Neither of those is going to make me freak out and cry.

Nope. Not going to happen. No matter how much panic is gripping my lungs so tight I can’t breathe in any oxygen or how hard I’m having to blink my eyes to make them stop watering.

I am the Sherwood heir, and damn it, I’m going to behave like it.

“What makes you think something’s wrong?” I ask, cursing the fact that my voice cracks on the last word.

Erik brushes a kiss across the top of my head. “The fact that you went all stiff and mumbled ‘fuck me’ under your breath might have tipped me off.”

Way to go, Leona. Way to keep your shit under wraps. Totally heir behavior there.

“We can’t keep doing this,” I say as I look up at the countdown clock, hoping he’ll believe my play that I am just stressed about the challenge—which you know I am. “It’s not working.”

“Hard agree,” Erik says as Snookums drops another toy at our feet and then races off. “You got any ideas?”

“No, I—” The solution hits me smack-dab in the face just as the dragon scoops up a bedraggled stuffed bear the size of a grizzly off the floor. “I know exactly what to do.”

“Well, don’t keep it to yourself.”

“I stand over here and Snookums does the work for us.”

“How?” He cocks his head in confusion for a second, then his gaze drops to where I’m pointing and his eyes go wide. He lets out a laugh that echoes off the cave’s high stone ceiling. “Fucking brilliant.”

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

I climb up the boulder behind Snookums’s tall, woven toy basket and make eye contact with the dragon. “Toy?”

He lets out a whine of excitement and races over to me, the bear’s butt and hind legs sticking out of his mouth.

“Drop it,” I say as I point to the basket.

While Snookums stares at the basket and contemplates what to do next, I nod my chin toward a massive bouncy ball close by. Erik winks at me and sprints over to it.

“Ball?” I ask Snookums.

The dragon’s tail starts wagging fast enough to kick up a serious breeze and he drops the bear in the basket.

“Over here, Snookums,” Erik calls out in a singsong voice.

The dragon whines with glee and heads right for him at light speed, stopping just short of stomping on my husband to pick up the ball and head back to me.

“Look at you!” I tell the dragon. “Such a good Snookums. Now, drop the ball in the basket.”

As he’s doing so, I watch Erik run over to a hard rubber femur that looks big enough to have come from Big Foot.

“Bone?” I ask Snookums. “Go get the bone!”

The dragon does, and each time he retrieves one of his toys, Erik and I cheer like our favorite team just won the Witch’s Cup, which makes Snookums run even faster to retrieve the next toy.

By the time he drops the last stuffy—an oversized turtle—there’s forty-five seconds left on the countdown clock for this challenge.

I have just enough time to make eye contact with Erik and wonder which one of us is grinning bigger when the world goes dark around me and once again I’m sailing through the ether heading back to the pixie queen’s throne room.

Either I’m getting used to the blink-and-you-miss-it form of travel or I’m just riding high on completing two out of the three challenges, but I barely want to puke my guts up when the pixie magic unceremoniously drops us off in the throne room.

“Your odds of survival keep getting better,” the queen says, disgust thick in her voice.

“However, there’s only ever been one person to complete the final challenge and neither of you have the coordination and skills of an alpha werewolf.

Do you really think you can beat an alpha?

” She opens her palm, revealing the all-too-familiar pile of pixie dust. “Now get out of my sight.”

She blows the dust straight at us and then we’re flying in nothingness with only each other and one last challenge standing between us and what for me is beginning to feel like a bittersweet victory.