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Teenagers Are Velociraptors
Harlow “Harry” Pierce caught a hex, and not one of the insignificant varieties where you reached for Clearasil pimple patches and hoped your new concealer really did cover it all. No, luck and Harry were not best friends nor acquaintances. At this point she’d take frenemies with benefits over the cold, hard reality.
This curse wielder meant business, throwing her off-kilter by messing with her commutes all week and then knocking her to the ground with a double whammy—getting fired from the company she’d built and surviving a horrific case of food poisoning. You’d think being sacked while puking your guts out would’ve delighted any ill-wisher, but nope.
Lulled into a false sense of security, she didn’t see the third clobbering until, after a quick sprint to the mailroom, she stood—dressed in her Wolf Girl Gone Wild summer pj’s—in the hallway outside her locked apartment door and realized the teenager who was supposed to be serving a grounding sentence in her bedroom was MIA.
But not for long.
Leaving the subway, Harry turned the corner of Lafayette Street and headed up Broome, her thick-soled wolf slippers protecting her from both the hot New York City summer sidewalk and its questionable puddles. Even in the SoHo neighborhood, no one balked at her choice of evening wear or the magical compass lighting her palm as she used her descry magics to track down a soon-to-be even more grounded sixteen-year-old.
Descry abilities didn’t come in handy often. Lost necklace here. Misplaced vibrator there. In the case of her professional organization business, her meager magics helped turn overcrowded and nonfunctional rooms into blissfully efficient spaces. But that was before she’d gotten the board boot that afternoon. Now, most of her magical usage would come from being the guardian of a surly teenager whose life goal was tripling Harry’s gray hair count before she hit thirty-five.
Harry’s palm flared brightly a second before the light flickered and petered out. Unease twisted her stomach into knots as she glanced up at a nondescript redbrick building. Blackened windows that hadn’t seen a squeegee’s damp side in goddess knows how long made it impossible to peer inside, and a precariously dangling sign hung over an aged green door, the only indication that the place hadn’t been abandoned eons ago.
A Demon’s Promise. Brokering Agency.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” She yanked open the door to the demon-brokering company, her earlier unease morphing into angry determination as she drilled the demon behind the counter with a hard glare. “Back away from the kid. Right now.”
Two heads swiveled her way.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Grace released her signature annoyed huff, shoulders slumping.
“Can I help you?” The Quell demon’s reptilian eyes flickered as he studied Harry with wary interest.
“No, but I can help you by giving you five seconds to throw away that contract before I call the Supernatural authorities. She won’t be needing it,” Harry snapped.
Grace glared at her, the teen’s staple facial expression right up there with the exaggerated eye roll and snort of derision. “What are you doing here?”
“Preventing you from doing something that you can’t take back. Making a Demon’s Promise will bring nothing but problems.”
“So, in other words, nothing will have changed.”
The supernatural behind the counter cleared his throat. “If I may interrupt…”
“You may not,” Harry and Grace said in unison.
Harry summoned her best mom glare, which was admittedly pretty damn weak, considering she’d only had a year’s worth of practice, and propped her hands on her ample hips. “I don’t know what kind of shifty operation you’re running here, buddy, but—”
“I operate a legitimate business.” He puffed out his barrel chest, the move thinning his nearly see-through shirt. “I don’t need to resort to shifty operations.”
“What’s so legitimate about signing a minor to a Demon’s Promise? Because the last time I checked, it was punishable by a lifetime sentence in the sulfur pits of Hell.”
The older demon’s red-scaled face paled to a dark pink. “I—I didn’t know.”
“And now you do. So, what will it be?” She held up her phone, careful not to show the blank screen. She’d gotten a low-battery warning the second she’d left the subway station, and the damn thing was as dead as her dating life, but that was on a need-to-know basis. “Am I calling the authorities, or will you be warming up your shredder?”
The demon snatched the contract laid out in front of Grace and, with a parting stink eye, hustled through a beaded curtain and into a back room. Harry waited for the following door slam before she turned to a feral teen.
“I can’t believe you just did that!” Grace accused angrily.
“And I can’t believe you even entertained this as an option! What the hell were you thinking … or were you even thinking at all?”
“He said he could help.”
“He’d say anything if it got your signature on that paper, Gracie, and Supernatural Law or not, once it was there, there wouldn’t have been anything we could’ve done to remove it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that it’s Grace? Not Gracie. Or Gracie Lou. G-R-A-C-E.”
Twelve dozen. Fifty. Truthfully, it didn’t matter how many reminders she got, Grace would always be the three-year-old toddler Harry had met when she answered an ad for a roommate thirteen years ago.
Harry pointed to the door. “Let’s go. We’ll talk about this more when we get home.”
Grace flicked her gaze over her outfit, landing last on her wolf-paw-clad feet. “I am not walking next to you when you’re wearing that.”
“Why? Embarrassing? Good. Then I’ll stick real close to your side so there’s not a doubt in people’s minds that we’re together. After all, if you’d been in your room, where you were supposed to be, then I wouldn’t have trekked across town wearing my pj’s.” She pointed to the door again. “Now move it before I decide that belting out ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ is a good way to pass time on our commute home.”
Grace’s dark eyes narrowed. “Even you wouldn’t be that embarrassing.”
“Oh yeah? Move it, kiddo. Or I’ll make sure we take the long way home for shits and giggles.” Harry rose to the challenge, mentally apologizing to the poor people about to suffer through her singing voice.
This time, on their commute back to Brooklyn Heights, she got a few looks and led two different sing-alongs, one on the R train, where Grace looked prepped to hurl herself out the nearest emergency window. Through it all, Harry mentally formulated a plan and a speech, and hoped like hell she didn’t say something stupid.
In all reality, she didn’t need to be hexed to put her wolf-slippered foot in her mouth. Unlike parenting, that came naturally, even more so when dealing with a teenager whose inner supernatural decided it was no longer content remaining confined in its human skin suit. Mystery genetics aside, her best friend, Cassie, made the parenting thing look so damn easy, which was one reason why Harry agreed to becoming Grace’s temporary guardian while Cassie attempted to track down her one and only one-night stand and demand answers.
They’d hoped for it to take a month, and then one month turned into two, then two morphed into six. Now at over a year, Harry mourned the loss of her Cool Aunt Harry title and warily accepted the hostile attitude, frequent eye rolls, and annoyed snorts that came with her new one …
Teenage Fun-Killer.
Never show weakness. Cassie’s parting words echoed in her head. Teenagers are like velociraptors. When they smell blood, they go in the for the kill.
Harry stopped singing Duran Duran while Grace keyed them into their apartment, and the second they stepped into their cozy two bedroom and closed the door, the teenager beelined to her room.
Copyright © 2025 by April Schwartz