Turtle Croakies Read online

  Turtle Croakies

  Sam Cheever

  Electric Prose Publications

  Copyright © 2020 by Sam Cheever

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Stay in Touch

  1. Bob’s Your Frog-Flippin’ Uncle

  2. Nope…not Bitter. Not me

  3. You Can’t Park the Turtle Here!

  4. Gone, Gone, Gone, G…Slap!

  5. Just Another Ogre on a Treadmill

  6. Jinxed Jurassic Style!

  7. I Say, You’re Very Strong Aren’t You, Pudsy?

  8. A-Void This!

  9. Run!

  10. You’re Kidding Me, Right?

  11. Dino Debbie Rides Again

  12. Things to be A-voided

  13. What Am I, Sauteed Frog Legs?

  14. Taking Tildy and Tasty Tacos

  15. They’ve a Mind to Heave Yer Ho

  16. Cha Cha Cha

  17. Holy Halibut in a Humvee!

  18. Crispy Crawfish Crackers!

  19. Different Jungle…Same Nightmare

  20. Duality’s a Mother Fluffer!

  21. Goddess in a Gondola!

  22. I Really Need a Vacation

  23. Am I Under Arrest, Officer?

  24. Leaping Lizard Biscuits!

  25. Skeeeeeerch!

  26. Bouncing baby bunions!

  27. A Shoulder to Snot On

  28. Thus the Chundering

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  About the Author

  Praise for Sam Cheever

  Sam Cheever creates some of the best characters you could ever find in the pages of a book.

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  Ms. Cheever writes with class, humor, and lots of fun while weaving an excellent story.

  The Romance Studio

  A frog, a cat, and a hobgoblin walk into a bar…in the Jurassic period. Nope…not kidding. Okay, maybe it wasn’t really a bar. But it was definitely the local drinking establishment. For dinosaurs…

  My old mentor, Alice Parker is back, and she’s brought a problem with her. A big one. One that’s already testing the sprite’s ability to keep it in lettuce and strawberries.

  It turns out that Alice has been on the run for a minute, trying to protect a magical tortoise from a dangerous sorceress who wants it for herself. You might be wondering why anybody would want to steal a tortoise. Well, if you had the chance to travel through time at the push of a button, or rather the press of a turtle’s shell, would you take it?

  Yeah, me neither. I have enough trouble dealing with this time and world… But clearly, we aren’t all diabolical magic users bent on our own empowerment. I mean, the possibilities for evil are unending if one can time-hop at will.

  * * *

  Luckily, I have two cats, two frogs, and a hobgoblin to help me stave off the latest crisis. The only question is…what am I going to do with a former KoA who was as ineffectual at the Keeper’s job as the goddess’s torn pantyhose are at holding water. The only thing she’d been worse at was training me!

  * * *

  And, more importantly, now that she’s here…how am I going to get rid of her?

  * * *

  Holy turtle trousers, this Keeper gig gets more challenging by the day…or the millennia!

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  1

  Bob’s Your Frog-Flippin’ Uncle

  We should have never left Croakies unattended. I realized that now. But when I received an order to retrieve a cursed girdle that makes its wearer gain instant weight and then resists being removed, my personal sensibilities wouldn’t allow me to put off its retrieval.

  I’d had trouble enough with my own weight to ignore such an unkind artifact. I was pretty sure my wide backside had nothing to do with the donuts, tacos, and brownies I’d been eating on a regular basis. No. That couldn’t be it. I’d just been born with a slow metabolism.

  Yes, I had.

  The long and the short of it was, I could just as easily have been the one donning that cruel latex and magic prison, instead of the woman who’d been trapped by it.

  And, to be fair, I’d had no way of knowing it would take me and my friends three hours to pry that poor woman out of the grabby girdle. If Rustin hadn’t thought of the flame thrower option, we might still be fighting with the thing.

  It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The woman, who’d been a bridge troll, would recover from lightly toasted buns. But she wouldn’t have recovered from instantly gaining fifty pounds.

  I mean, who would? One needs to build up to that kind of thing, preferably via lots of tasty goodies.

  Anywho… back to my problem.

  Imagine my surprise when we finally returned to find Croakies had been infiltrated.

  I stared at the monster in the center of the bookstore, some of the tension leaching out of my muscles as it stared back at me, its jaws lazily munching the lunch salad Sebille had thrown at it.

  My lunch salad, blast her evil sprite ways. Like it wasn’t hard enough trying to lose weight. Now she was throwing my tasteless, diet lunch at every Tom, Dick, and Turtle who wandered in off the street.

  The sprite was crouched near the small refrigerator from which she’d pilfered the ill-gotten garden castoff. She held Mr. Slimy in her hands, clutching him close in case the monster decided the little green squish looked good enough to eat.

  Standing near the door that divided the bookstore from the magical artifact library in back, my friend Rustin had his hands on his hips and was observing the creature with mute fascination.

  Our resident hobgoblin, Hobs, was perched on top of the nearest bookshelf, his eyes the size of soccer balls.

  My adorable gray cat, Mr. Wicked, sat two feet away from the monster’s grinding jaws, tidily folded into a watching position. His orange gaze was perfectly serene.

  “How in the world did that get into the store?” my best friend Lea asked. “And what in the wide, wide, world of witchery is it?”

  Lea was standing on top of the table, towering above us in a frothy skirt that vibrated as her knees bashed together. Her hands were out and green-hued earth-witch energy danced on the tips of her perfectly painted fingernails.

  Sebille’s gaze slid Lea’s way and she rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you ever seen a turtle, witch?”

  I got the impression Lea would have glared at my cranky assistant, but that would have required that she shift her gaze from the monstrous turtle for a beat. And the world would be overrun by three-legged caterpillars before that happened.

  “Technically, it’s a tortoise,” Mr. Slimy said in his snotty, know-it-all voice.

  We ignored him because if we didn’t, another giant argument about his Encyclopedia Magica ways would commence, and then we’d be off on a roller-coaster ride of verbal frog flogging for the next hour or so, completely forgetting about our unexpected and unwelcome visitor.

  Suffice it to say, Slimy was enjoying acquiring the knowledge he’d missed out on in his early years when he’d been a simple frog. Unfortunately, he enjoyed thrashing us about the head and shoulders with what he’d learned nearly as much.

  In the past months, he’d gained the ability to think, sp
eak, and read like a real person from having housed Rustin’s soul inside his squishy green frame. According to Rustin’s powerful aunt, who was also a witch, the obnoxious green squish had absorbed some of Rustin’s magical energy.

  And the result? The frog was special. It was true. Just ask him.

  “Of course I’ve seen turtles…” Sebille slid a quick glare toward the frog, “tortoises, before. But I’ve never seen one that was as big as Naida’s car.”

  To be fair, my car wasn’t really that big. It was a VW bug. Small but loveable. Still, she wasn’t wrong. The tortoise was nearly as big as my car.

  “I’m just wondering how it got through the door,” Rustin said, his piercing blue gaze sliding toward the aforementioned door. “Even if you tipped him on his side, he wouldn’t fit.”

  “What’s with the different colored patches on his back?” Sebille asked, frowning. “It looks like somebody painted him.”

  “Maybe it’s a statue somebody animated,” Lea offered.

  I tilted my head, moving a few inches closer to examine the thick, wrinkly legs. “He doesn’t look like he’s made of metal.”

  “Statues don’t eat salad,” Sebille said.

  “Apparently, neither do I,” I shot back, glowering in her direction.

  She rolled her eyes, putting a little extra disdain into the action to show me how much she didn’t care about my lost lunch.

  A toilet flushed and we jumped, all heads swiveling toward the bathroom door near Rustin. It opened a moment later, a woman walking out as she rubbed her hands dry on her long wool skirt.

  “Oy, that’s better,” the woman said, shoving a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles back up her pugnacious nose and blinking at us from behind the thick lenses. “Sorry, we passed through Mexico on the way here, and I drank some of the water.” She shook her head, the fluffy brown mess looking even less tidy than usual. Oliver, her tree frog, peeked out at us from within the brown mess. “I say, Naida, dear. You don’t happen to have a spot of tea you could offer a weary traveler, do you?”

  An enormous black cat trotted out of the bathroom behind her. Fenwald looked even rattier than the last time I’d seen him. The tatty black cat spotted me and gave a happy yowl, trotting heavily across the carpet to fling himself at my legs. I nearly went down under his prodigious bulk. Bending down to rub a hand over Fenny’s torn ears and unkempt fur, I said, “Hello, buddy. How are you?”

  “I’m afraid he had a bit of a chunder on your rug in there,” the woman told me impatiently. “Do be an angel and clean it up, won’t you?”

  I had no idea what a chunder was, but it didn’t sound good. Pain shot through my jaw and I realized I was clenching my teeth.

  Alice Parker.

  I couldn’t believe she’d just shown up at Croakies without any warning. And allowed her cat to chunder in my bathroom to boot.

  My erstwhile “trainer” and former Keeper of the Artifacts ─ a woman I hadn’t heard from or spoken to in years, had walked out on me without finishing the instruction I so drastically needed. She’d all but abandoned me to my fate as a Keeper, virtually untrained and out of my league. “Alice? What are you doing here? And did you bring this with you?” I asked, pointing at the tortoise.

  She leveled a beady gaze on me from behind her thick glasses. “This is an artifact library, is it not?”

  I frowned. “Well, yes, but…”

  “And you are a Keeper of the Artifacts, are you not?”

  “Sort of…” said Sebille in a murmur that wasn’t soft enough to be considered sotto voce.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, taking umbrage at Alice’s bossy tone of voice. “You know I am, but…”

  “Well then, Bob’s your Uncle.” She placed her hands on her hips and grinned at me as if anything she’d just said made sense.

  “Who’s Bob,” Slimy asked.

  Rustin looked around. “Where is this Bob, Naida. And why didn’t you tell us you had an uncle.”

  I growled. Just a little. Curling my lip back in a snarl. “There is no Bob. It’s just something she says.”

  Lea shook her head. “If you don’t mind my saying so, the British talk funny.”

  “Young lady,” Alice said in her best imitation of an English Queen, “you are the ones who speak like barbarians. I’m speaking perfect Queen’s English.”

  “If perfect English means flinging random Bob’s around,” Slimy muttered.

  I coughed to hide a laugh.

  Sebille rolled her eyes. “Are you saying this turtle…”

  “Tortoise,” said the tiny green know-it-all.

  Sebille eyed the frog with a look that promised to introduce him to a French chef if he didn’t button his fly-trap.

  “…that the turtle is an artifact?” she finished.

  Alice nodded. “She is. A very rare and dangerous one.”

  We all scanned a look over the painted bump on the rug.

  The painted bump stared straight ahead with a blank look, its totally non-expressive face placid as it ground another lettuce leaf to a pulp.

  We all returned our gazes to Alice, identical expressions of disbelief on our faces.

  “Dangerous?” I questioned with an arch of my eyebrow. “What does it do? Bore people to death?”

  Alice harrumphed. “For your information, Tildy is an Abracadabos Giant Tortoise from the Cayman Islands. A rare, magical tortoise. She’s a distant relative of the Aldabra giant tortoises from the Seychelles near the east coast of Africa.”

  “She?” I said, surprised. “How can you tell it’s a female?”

  “Well, obviously her plastron is flat and her tail is shorter,” Alice said in a superior tone not unlike the squishy green know-it-all’s.

  “Obviously,” Rustin said.

  I gave him a look and he grinned.

  “Tildy is in grave danger. She’s being stalked by a power-mad sorceress who’ll stop at nothing to obtain her magic.” Alice frowned. “That she-devil wants to grind the poor gentle soul into dust for a space-and-time-shifting spell and she’ll stop at nothing to get her hands on Tildy.”

  Banshee bunions! That didn’t sound good. “Have you gone to the Société?” I asked Alice.

  “Of course, I have. Do you think I’m a complete idiot?”

  I’d take the fifth on that one. On the grounds that Alice would smack me upside the head if I told her the truth.

  “They won’t help. Tildy is a non-registered living artifact. They said she needs to be registered and put under the protection of the KOA. So I brought her here.”

  And there you have it. Bob’s your frog-flippin’ uncle.

  2

  Nope…not Bitter. Not me

  An hour later, Lea and Rustin had returned to their respective homes. Lea lived above her Herbal Remedy shop next door, and Rustin across the street, in Sebille’s old apartment. Lea had declared she needed to put together a large order of herbal tincture for an Ogre with warts. Rustin insisted he needed to get home to Sadie, his rainbow-hued amalgamate dragon, who’d once served as a soul recharger when Rustin had been without a body and looking for a solution.

  Long story. His evil uncle Jacob Quilleran had ripped Rustin’s soul from his body and squashed it into Mr. Slimy. It had been a magical experiment that we’d all done our best to reverse. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been able to return Rustin to his body. Which was why I called him the ghost witch. He was mainly a spirit form. Although, his aunt Madeline and cousin Maude had been working on options for Rustin and had managed to infuse his spirit form with enough physicality to present as mostly solid most of the time.

  It had to do with giving him a dual nature. I didn’t really understand it. And we’d yet to witness Rustin’s “other” side. But he was more content and mostly corporeal, so I was happy to be happy along with him.

  Anyway, clearly expecting trouble, my friends had gotten out of Dodge at the first possible opportunity. Alice had given them a beady-eyed glare from behind her thick glasses when I’d
tried to quiz her about the car-sized eating machine she’d parked in the middle of my bookstore.

  Apparently, it was a secret.

  Hobs had disappeared into the back with his buddy Slimy. And Sebille was busying herself making tea because tea was the magic elixir that transformed Alice’s heart from a chunk of jagged rock to something more resembling really hard glass. Still a challenge to work with, but at least malleable if you managed to somehow melt it.

  Alice had tried to glare Sebille away too, but my fearless assistant stared her down and then asked the cranky ex-librarian if she’d like a cuppa.

  So, as Sebille created magic in a teacup, her pointed ears perked so as not to miss a single word of the “turtle tale”, Alice gave me the high points of her quest to Croakies.

  “I told you, Naida, Tildy’s in danger. I’ve taken her through time and across continents, trying to keep her safe. But that horrible woman keeps finding us.”

  Sebille placed a steaming teacup in front of Alice, earning a half-smile for her efforts.

  “Who is this woman?” my courageous assistant asked.

  Alice sighed her disgust at actually having to explain why she’d parked a five hundred pound dinosaur at Croakies. “I’ll speak very slowly, shall I?”