Even Tree Nymphs Get the Blues E-Book

Molly Harper

• Herausgeber: NYLA
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 169

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A hilarious new standalone novella brimming with otherworldly charm from the reigning queen of paranormal romantic comedy Molly Harper! Ingrid Asher is the newest resident of Mystic Bayou, a tiny town hidden in the swamp where shapeshifters, vampires, witches and dragons live alongside humans. Ingrid doesn't ask for much. The solitary tree nymph just wants to live a quiet life running her ice-cream shop in peace. Unfortunately, she can't seem to shake her new neighbor, Rob Aspern, head of the League's data science department and so good looking it just isn't fair. If there's one thing Ingrid doesn't need, it's someone poking around in her business. But the more she gets to know the hunky mathematician, the more she finds herself letting her guard down. Can she trust him with her secrets, or will her past destroy everything? This book is based on the Audible Original audiobook.

Leseprobe

EVEN TREE NYMPHS GET THE BLUES

MOLLY HARPER

This book is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

This book may not be sold, shared, or given away.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Even Tree Nymphs Get the Blues

Copyright © 2019 by Molly Harper

Ebook ISBN: 9781641971331

Print ISBN:9781660645916

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This ebook is based on an Audible Original audiobook.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

121 W 27th St., Suite 1201, New York, NY 10001

http://www.nyliterary.com

CONTENTS

1. Ingrid

2. Rob

3. Ingrid

4. Rob

5. Ingrid

6. Rob

7. Ingrid

8. Rob

9. Ingrid

10. Ingrid

Acknowledgments

Sneak Peek at Book 4, SELKIES ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

Also by Molly Harper

About the Author

1

INGRID

Sometimes, being an ancient supernatural creature meant making strange choices to pay your rent. Sometimes it meant sacrificing your dignity. Sometimes it meant riding down the highway on a Greyhound bus, past a giant billboard image of yourself dressed like a Swiss milkmaid, and hiding your face so the other passengers didn’t recognize you.

Edelweiss Hills Dairy ads had become the bane of her long existence.

Ingrid Asher never meant to be the face of an aggressively quaint dairy, headquartered in pastoral Detroit. But a decade before, an exec for the dairy’s advertising agency—not headquartered in Detroit—had spotted her while working her temp job in the agency’s mail room and the money he offered was simply too good to pass up.

It was one of the few moments of serendipity she’d experienced in her long, relatively luckless life. By the time her high cheekbones, icy blue eyes and milky complexion were “discovered,” she’d lived a mostly spartan existence in New York City for close to fifty years. And at one point, she’d been close to burning the tiny sapling that gave her eternal life and walking into Central Park to die. And then she’d discovered something that made life worth living—ice cream.

She’d been living in a forest (and then a fourth story walk-up in Queens) for the last five hundred years. There was no Baskin Robbins in the deep northern forests of Norway. Once she’d discovered the healing power of frozen sweetened delights, she’d made it her single focus to learn everything she could about ice cream—the science of how it was made, the way varying milk fats affected the texture, the various flavor combinations that tickled her palate. She bought a dozen different ice cream machines to try out techniques and recipes at home. She’d eaten sundaes at nearly every ice cream parlor in the five boroughs. And she’d never gained an ounce, because that was one advantage to being a nymph. Once you were fully grown, you stayed in that form until your death.

And so she’d agreed to wrap that form in a ridiculously not-accurate-to-any-culture blue milkmaid costume and pose in false pastures with “model cows” that had never worked a day in their bovine lives. The moment she saw the number of zeros on her first Edelweiss Hills check, she knew what she would do with the money—open her own creamery. She would use the best milk from happy, pampered cows to create ice cream that would soothe the soul, the way she had been pulled back from the brink by Bing cherry vanilla. And up until recently, she thought she would open her store in some cute refurbished pre-war building in one of the more gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

But some nagging instinct in the back of her brain, in her other nature, was calling her south. That insistent pressure had been there for years, since the day she’d set foot on American soil, but she’d been so deep in her own despair that she’d been able to ignore it. But now that she’d achieved some contentment, that call was becoming a blaring alarm torturing her. After a little research, she’d decided to open her creamery in Mystic Bayou, Louisiana.

Mystic Bayou was a bit of an El Dorado to supernatural creatures. A peaceful place where they could live in the open without worrying about persecution or discovery, a supernatural utopia where shifters and fairies and other creatures lived together without the normal territorial pissing matches. She could thrive there, living among her own kind for the first time in an age. She could live without fear, without worry. She could at least live without the energy it took to hide what she was, and that would be pleasant enough.

Also, it turned out that opening a business in New York was terribly expensive and prone to failure within the first year.

She wasn’t thrilled that the International League for Interspecies Cooperation had taken such a strong hold on the town. Google could only offer the carefully constructed lies that a still-in-hiding supernatural community wanted to offer to the general population. But Ingrid saw enough to know that the town’s government was practically partnered with the League. She had no interest in the shadow government or its machinations, she just wanted to open her shop and lead a comfortable, quiet life. She would avoid Dr. Jillian Ramsay, the League head of operations, like Dutch Elm Disease.

Ingrid settled back in her seat as the Edelweiss Hills ad faded from sight. She hadn’t posed for the company in more than two years, but she’d been told that the ads could run for the next decade thanks to something called “trademark law.” She supposed she could live with it, as long as the residual checks continued to roll in. She’d saved nearly everything she’d earned over the years, but a little extra financial cushion never hurt.

Ingrid peered through the window with interest as Spanish moss hung from the live oaks like unwanted facial hair. She’d never ventured past Manhattan. It had been too painful, the idea of seeing the fiery foliage of New England, all those colors dancing without her. But now, she could enjoy the pastoral beauty of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Alabama in a detached appreciation as it rolled by. She would have to get used to living among trees again. Mystic Bayou was a tiny village surrounded by them. There would be no hiding from them.

Hulder meant “hidden” or “secret” in Norwegian, and that was how she spent her early years, hiding. Here in the western world, she would find few of her sisters. There were other spirits dwelling in the rivers, rocks and trees, and she doubted they would bother with her. She was practically a dead battery compared to them.

She stared out the window, counting the mile markers, surprised by her own eagerness to reach her new home. Louisiana was like some strange alien world, the landscape shifting seamlessly from scrubby farmland to marshy swamp in what felt like an instant. Trees twisted themselves into bizarre shapes here, to survive the moss, the hurricanes, the wood-boring insects. They bent as the only alternative to breaking.

There was probably a lesson in there for her. But she was too tired from sitting in the same position for hours to examine it closely.

From behind the wheel, the driver called out, “Ten minutes until the Devil’s Armpit Stop!”

That did not sound promising.

The “stop” was actually an abandoned gas station with a single rusted pump. The Greyhound sign was dangling from the porch by a single chain link. A dilapidated building with the barest coat of faded white paint that it seemed to have gone out of business when Tab cola and Beechnut chewing gum were still in fashion, if the displays near the grimy windows were any indication. The bus barely had room to pull off the shoulder, onto a tiny split of worn gravel. The station was surrounded on all sides by trees, their limbs stretching toward the derelict building like they were trying to grow over it, to swallow it whole. The heat here was like a living thing, wrapping her in a wet, uninvited embrace that stank of rotten eggs and just plain rot. Everything was in some state of decay from the humid, unrelenting temperatures, but she could also sense the new growth. The swirl of that energy was dizzying.

It didn’t surprise Ingrid that she was the only person exiting the bus at the Devil’s Armpit, but the aging driver seemed annoyed that he had to dig through the storage compartment for her tiny duffle bag. The driver, whose embroidered name tag read, “Ben,” had to crawl all the way into the back of the bus’s underbelly to get to it, his knees cracking as he bent to reach it. His rounded, almost cherubic, face hid it well, but his tired sigh was evidence enough.

It could have been heavier. She’d sold nearly everything she owned when she cleared out of Manhattan, for convenience sake and because she wanted all the cash she could get. She had a reasonable amount of clothing, her sapling and her cookbook. That was all she needed. She doubted that would be much comfort to Ben.

“Ma’am do you have someone coming to pick you up? I don’t like the idea of leaving you out here by yourself,” Ben said.

“What do you normally do when someone gets off the bus at the Devil’s Armpit?” Ingrid asked.

Ben scratched the back of his neck, swatting away a mosquito. “I don’t know. It’s never happened before.”

Ingrid sighed. “Of course not. I have a ride. I promise.”

“All right. I make a return route through here in about six hours. If your ride doesn’t show up, just wait here and I can take you to the next ticket station.”

Ingrid smiled at him and he stumbled back, bracing his hand against the bus as if stunned. Ingrid tried not to smirk. Sometimes, humans were too easy. But she liked this man. He had a rare gentleness about him. If she was one of her sisters, she might grant him the Blessing of the Hulder, a sort of supernatural guarantee of future health and happiness.

But she wasn’t that kind of nymph anymore.

“I will be fine, but thank you for your concern,” Ingrid said.

“All right then, just be careful,” Ben said.

Ben climbed back onto the bus and reluctantly pulled away from the station. Ingrid coughed and waved the exhaust away from her face.

“No one else has ever stopped at this station,” she sighed, turning toward the trees. She wandered, bracing herself against the familiar smell of green life. It was like home and yet, the notes of thick delta mud and fetid water somewhere in the distance kept it from hurting too much. She could feel the energy of the woods, so much death hiding so much thrumming life. And the trees were crawling with more life than ever graced her Northern Woods. Insects and small rodents and in that deep water out of her sight, slithering monster reptiles. She shuddered at the thought of those gators and focused on finding the biggest tree she could. She stopped when she found a towering, crooked live oak. She threw her bag over her shoulder and closed her eyes. She pictured the house she’d bought—the photos she’d seen—and the huge magnolia in the yard nearest the old farmhouse.

She took a deep breath and walked into the oak, letting the bark take her in like warm bathwater. She gasped, allowing herself to connect to the oak, to feel her energy slipping into the roots that threaded through the earth and the limbs that stretched toward the sky. She could hear the rustle of every leaf, feel the sun seeping into the leaves. The joy of it was almost painful and then it stopped as quickly as it began and she fell to her knees on slick-sharp magnolia leaves.

Ow.

She’d forgotten how nauseating tree travel could be. All living things in the forest were connected, but trees of all species shared a special bond, cemented by their root systems. They shared messages and nutrients and warnings through those tiny tendrils. A nymph could slip through them like a thought through the nervous system. It came in handy when you wanted to visit far-flung relatives, or escape a particularly amorous human. But it always left Ingrid feeling like she’d swallowed a gnome’s toenail clippings.

Ingrid crawled out from under the sweeping maze of magnolia branches and their heady perfume. And while she could see her house in the distance, she certainly hadn’t traveled to the specific tree that she’d pictured. Then again, she hadn’t traveled by tree since she’d left Norway. It would take some time to get used to it again.

Scaling the gently rolling hill up to the old farmhouse, she surveyed her new home with a contented sigh. With her dairy paychecks, she’d purchased Sweetgrass Farm, a property as far as she could get from the water. It was no mean feat in a parish named for its enormous, all-encompassing bayou. The house was closer to town than she would have preferred in her old life, but now that she knew about conveniences like restaurants and shoe stores, she was grateful for it.

Tree nymphs did not learn how to drive.

At one point, Sweetgrass had been a vegetable farm, long abandoned by a family of rabbit shifters. Farms were a rarity in swamp environments, but the Wickersons had been able to grow enormous specimens thanks to the energy coming off the rift. During negotiations, her realtor had sent Ingrid old photos of pumpkins the size of smart cars and ears of corn the length of a grown man’s leg. Ingrid hoped that fertile earth would mean sleek, happy milk cows for her.

The house was a sturdy pre-war wooden structure with a heavily patinaed tin roof and faded green shutters. Someone had taken the time to make a filigreed gingerbread plaque for the front porch with the initials SGF. The house had been added onto multiple times over the years, because rabbit shifters expanded their families like… well, rabbits. It was far more house than she needed, really, but she thought she could use the extra space for storage or even an at-home ice cream laboratory. It would be nice to have the room after the tiny “studio apartment” she’d rented all those years—where she couldn’t open the refrigerator without the door getting wedged against the kitchen wall.

It was so quiet here. It had taken years before she’d become accustomed to traffic and police sirens and the constant movement of crowds in the city. She wondered if her brain would be able to make the transition back without running mad.

Smiling, she flopped down on the grass and let her fingers fan through the soft blades. For the first time in a long time, she stared up at the sky, watching the clouds roll by in their amorphous shapes. She closed her eyes and let the smell of sweet grass soothe her. She could feel the energy from la faille, the mystical energy rift that called her here in the first place, whispering in her ear like a lover. She was welcome here, and wanted, that energy told her. She would find a home here and be content. After all these years, mere contentment seemed like more than she deserved.

Even with the overwhelming humidity of early autumn, the sun felt so deliciously warm against her skin. While she enjoyed the winter like any proper Nord, she couldn’t deny the pleasure of the prospect of nearly year-round summer. In the summer, she and her sisters used to dance through the woods, circling ailing trees and singing songs of healing, thanking Mother Earth for her generosity and mercy, and then they would chase each other through the forest until the stars⁠—

“Welcome to Mystic Bayou!” A voice above her boomed like thunder.

She yelled, bolting up from the ground at the sight of a man in an extremely tight black t-shirt and jeans standing over her. He stood several inches taller than her not-exactly-petite frame and his hands were the size of shovel blades. He had thick, wildly curling black hair pulled back at his neck with a leather tie and a matching beard that spread across his enormous chest. He smelled beastly, of the apex predators who roamed her forest of her childhood, and killed without mercy or thought.

He grinned at her with his sharp teeth and stretched those enormous hands toward her. The alarm skittering across her brain caused the instincts she hadn’t used in years to flex. The branches of a nearby willow tree whipped sharply across the man’s face, making him yelp, windmill and fall backwards on the grass. The willow sent branches snaking around the man’s feet, dragging him across the grass and yanking him up by the ankles.

“What the hell!” he bellowed as he dangled upside down, his head scraping against the ground.

“Who are you?” Ingrid asked.

“I’m Mayor Zed Berend, I’m here to welcome you to Mystic Bayou! Theresa said you were due to arrive at the farm today!” Zed said.

“You are the Mayor?” Ingrid asked.

“Yes! Now, put me down! S’il te plait!” Zed said.

Ingrid turned her head to survey the man from head to toe. If she still believed in such things, she would guess he was a blacksmith to the gods or king of the mountain dwarves. But an elected official?

“Were there any other candidates?” Ingrid asked.

“Why does everybody ask that?” Zed demanded, sounding truly indignant as he spun like one of those pine tree air fresheners that never made cabs smell better.

Zed used his hands to steer his body, so he was facing the big white truck in the gravel drive marked “Mystic Bayou Parish.” A man, blond with a straight square jaw and full lips that had fallen open in shock, was standing beside the open passenger side door. He seemed frozen in place, though Ingrid wasn’t sure whether it was from shock or the fear that she would turn the tree on him.

“You wanna help me out here, Dr. Assface?” Zed asked.

But “Dr. Assface” just stayed frozen, gaping at Ingrid like a stunned cod.

“You stay right there,” she warned him.

He continued with the impression of a cod, so she considered that compliance.

“Gah,” Zed grumbled. “Lady, please just let me down.”

“How do I know you are who you say you are?” Ingrid asked.

“Take my cell phone off the ground,” he said, nodding to a sturdy looking smart phone that had fallen out of his pocket during his hog-tying. “Press ‘Work’ in the contacts, you’ll be connected to the Parish Hall. Ask for Sheriff Bael Boone, he’ll vouch for me.”

Ingrid edged toward him to snatch his phone off the grass. The wallpaper was a picture of a lovely, curvy brunette wearing oversized purple sunglasses, and posing pin-up style in a bikini printed with tiny llamas. Ingrid had to assume this was the man’s girlfriend. Brave woman.

“No pass code?” Ingrid asked, searching through his contacts.

“Dani got tired of resetting the thing every time I forgot it,” he grumbled.

She pressed “Work” and the phone rang. A soft voice with a slight Mediterranean accent answered and Ingrid recognized it almost immediately. “Teresa?”

“Ingrid?” the voice asked. “How did you get Zed’s phone? Is he all right?”

“He is a little tied up, at the moment,” Ingrid said.

“Oh, ha-freaking-ha,” Zed called as he spun.

Ingrid pulled the phone away from her face to check the number.

“How do you know my Realtor?” Ingrid asked Zed.

“Your Realtor has been running the parish hall since I was a cub. She likes to have multiple jobs. It’s natural for a shifter with so many arms!” Zed said.

“Are you at the house? Oh, I wanted to be with you the first time you saw it in person, but I’m busier than a bumblebee at a flower show today. What do you think?” Teresa asked.

“Could you please connect me with Sheriff Bael Boone? Zed would like me to speak to him,” Ingrid said.

“Is he stuck in a bear trap again? You’d be surprised how often that happens,” Teresa said.