Page 33 of Wishing for a Werewolf

“Matt was an asshat.” My eyes roll at the very thought of him. “He was nice whenever Naomi was around and a bully whenever she wasn’t.”

“When he wouldn’t do it, you made him look even worse by doing it yourself!”

“I still stand by my decision.” I grin. “He never quite recaptured his Prom King shine after that.”

“You’re evil.”

“Only in the very best of ways,” I say.

We share a glance and burst out laughing.

Hannah walks out of Town Hall and trots over to us. “Where are we eating?”

“Skye’s picking,” I say.

“Then I say waffles.”

“Waffles for lunch? I’msoin.” Hannah glances back andforth, taking in our smiles. “Did you find a way to break the wish swap spell?”

“Nope.” I shake my head.

Hannah’s brow creases. “But you were laughing…”

“About Matt and the waterfall.”

“That was epic!”

“Sure was.” I link arms with both of them, and we chat the whole way to Slice of Life.

Hannah’s right, though. Normally, I’d be a lot more upset at having failed to figure out what’s going on with this whole wish swap mix-up. So what’s changed?

When we enter the pizza place, the pixies chorus hellos and Kayla waves from the table in front of the biggest window.

“Hi!” I say. “Can we join you?”

“Sure thing.”

We sit and order coffee and one of the special silencing candles that will allow us to talk about witchy stuff without any regular humans overhearing. When our pixie returns to take our orders, Kayla slips and asks for a cinnamon waffle and gets a five-minute lecture on why all the best foods are called pizza.

“We only serve pizza!” The tiny imp winds up her argument by pointing to items on the menu, which now have pictures, to help everyone use the “correct” terms. “There’s pizza, sweet pizza, egg pizza, meat pizza, and potato pizza.” Which means they serve pizza, waffles, omelets, bunless burgers, and round hashbrowns, but waffles and pizza are the stars of the menu.

“Okay, okay.” Kayla holds up her hands in defeat,showing off today’s slogan tee:Yes, I really am this fabulous. Don’t make it weird. “I’ll have a cinnamon sweet pizza.”

Four groups of pixies fly our waffles to the table in a coordinated effort, and when they all shout “Pizza!” at the same time, it’s so loud my ears ring. But we join in with everyone else in the restaurant, echoing the joyful cry. It’s become something of a town ritual by now.

Once we light the silencing candle, I tell everyone how Rune and I accomplished one of the swapped wishes. “As soon as we finalized his new security business, we felt the magic release us—or partially release us, I guess.”

“This is such good news!” Hannah points at me with herfork. “It means even if we can’t break the wish swap spell, all you have to do is complete the tasks.”

“We still need to break it,” I say, remembering my third wish. Who knows how long it’ll take me to find true love? I can’t be tangled up with Rune for years!

“I couldn’t find anything in the palace library,” Hannah says. “There’s not much about wish magic in the fae histories. It seems to be a human thing.”

“Maybe so, but I haven’t found much of anything yet in the books I already have at the town library.” Skye gives a disappointed pout. “Everything’s about granting wishes, usually a morality tale about the whole ‘be careful what you wish for’ concept.”

“Or in your case—” Kayla toasts me with her coffee cup. “—be careful what the werewolf wishes for.”

“Yeah, me as a bodyguard!” I snort and shake my head. “Though I gotta admit it’s pretty funny to see people ask him for homemade PSL soap.”