Page 42 of Vengefully Matched

“I have a car,” said Priscilla.

Agatha breathed a sigh of relief.

“Can you walk out of here? I can bring it around.”

Prissy nodded. “I’m sore, but walking is probably good.”

Xiomara nodded. “It’ll help to move. Just take it easy, take the elevator, and if you need to, rest.”

Still, Agatha threaded an arm through her good side, the one without the bandages, and guided her toward the elevator, rubbing her fingers together to make it appear right away, and magic a little bench in it before it opened so that it would just happen to be there if Hart needed it.

To Agatha’s surprise, Hart got off on the first floor and walked in the direction of Main Street, and not the parking garage under the Council.

“You didn’t park in the garage?”

“No, I left the hearse behind Hopelessly Teavoted again,” said Prissy.

“The hearse?” She had assumed she would be driving the beautiful old Packard that Hart shared with her brother, but Agatha realized her white-knuckling was about to reach new levels.

Prissy smiled, and it was wan, and tired, and yet still a teeny bit wicked. It was comforting to see that she wasn’t too badly injured for that.

“Yes, honey, a hearse. Do you have a problem with places dead bodies have been?”

“No,” Agatha muttered. What she had was a fear of driving large vehicles, but it was no matter.

Agatha tried to calm herself with facts. Amaxophobia was the fear of driving a vehicle, and though about one in five people suffer from some sort of phobia, there were no actual statistics on how many people specifically were afraid of driving in cars. Agatha was very careful not to let herself spiral and learn the statistics regarding car crashes; she already knew that tired old reminder that cars were more likely to crash than planes were, and fuck if she didn’t think about that every time she got behind a wheel.

Still, fake or not, Priscilla Hart was hers now, and she would take care of this woman, even if it meant overcoming her fear of dying while driving.

In a vehicle literally used to haul the dead.

CHAPTER 14 Priscilla

She could shut her eyes and still see the way Agatha had clutched the steering wheel of Uncle Larry’s hearse, shoulders tense at her ears, a muscle working in her jaw.

A week ago, Priscilla had taken what Agatha called “a reasonable recovery period.” Despite the Council president’s worrying, Priscilla’s burns had only been superficial second degree, and she had made every case for returning to work earlier. Agatha banned her anyway.

In Priscilla’s opinion, this was a forced temporary expulsion, but Agatha proved unflinching, parking the hearse in the garage, seeing her to the door, and going a bit green in the gills when Azrael offered to let her drive the hearse back.

She’d shuddered and summoned a bicycle and a helmet instead, and taken off at a breakneck speed, as though afraid that if she stuck around, the hearse might be pressed upon her. About a week later, and Priscilla still could not forget how she’d hopped on the back of that purple Schwinn and sped off into the sunset. Azrael had jokes for days about Priscilla driving women to flee the grounds of the manor after that.

Speaking of Azrael, she could hear him knocking at the door to her bedroom.

“Prissy,” he yelled, pounding it again.

She turned up the volume on the comfort show she was streaming, the one about the girl who spent her summers at the beach in love with two different brothers, which of course she would never be caught dead admitting she’d watched several times through at this point.

“I can hear you in there,” he yelled.

“Shut up. I’m not home,” she yelled back.

“Priscilla, either you come out and talk to me, or, so help me, I will tell everyone what you’re watching in there.”

She jammed the laptop shut and vaulted off the bed, which she immediately regretted. She felt better than she had the first two days after the explosion, but she was still sore, even with the muscle relaxers the human doctor prescribed and the plant craft that Azrael assembled from their mother’s best recipes in the family grimoire.

Snapping her fingers, she unlocked the door. She was at least pleased to see him tumble into the room, the force of one last attempt to barrel through it sending him onto the floor.

He rubbed the hand that he had landed on, standing up.