Butchered After Bark

please get me out of this contraption? I tried to tell her I didn’t want to be the official Halloween dog of the inn, but she wouldn’t listen. She’s turned me into a canine version of a snowcone.
Fish mewls. Don’t be a snow-cone-headed nitwit. Emmie can’t understand you.
“Hey,” I whisper to Fish. “Play nice.”
We have been playing, Bizzy! Sherlock jumps and leaps. I’ve been playing with Emmie’s dog Cinnamon and Leo’s dog Gatsby. But Emmie keeps calling it roughhousing and tells us to knock it off.
Fish yowls. Because you’re an oaf.
“He is not an oaf.” My chest trembles with a laugh. “And Cinnamon and Gatsby love you both.” Cinnamon is Emmie’s labradoodle, and Gatsby is Leo’s golden retriever.
I’m not sure how, but the animals always seem to understand one another, and I’m glad about it, too. It’s comforting to know they can communicate with one another.
“Hey, Bizzy,” a deep voice strums from my right, and I stand to see Leo Granger, Jasper’s best friend, smiling at me with that perennial mischievous look in his eyes.
Leo is a tall, dark-haired steed that’s not hard to look at, and he happens to be in love with Emmie. Leo and I met last fall when we discovered we both share the same strange gift. We’re both transmundane, and our ability to read minds falls under the category of something called telesensual. There are other powers that fall under the transmundane umbrella as well, but I don’t know all that much about them.
But I wasn’t always this way. Nope.
It wasn’t until one of my supposed friends, Mackenzie Woods, dunked me into a whiskey barrel filled with water and apples at a Halloween party and I nearly died that I came to this strange condition.
As soon as that exercise in asphyxiation was over, four things happened to me. One, I have an irrational fear of bodies of water. Two, I’m terrified of confined spaces. Three, it initiated my general distrust of Mackenzie Woods—although it wasn’t until she stole all of my high school boyfriends that I decided to part ways with her. Clearly, I’m a firm believer in giving people thirteen dozen chances. And four, I garnered the ability to read minds. Things have never been the same for me since.
Leo offers me a quick embrace. He and Jasper have been lifelong friends, with the exception of one interruption in which Leo made off with Jasper’s then-fiancée, a wily woman by the name of Camila Ryder.
For the record, Leo nods my way, Camila made off with me. She made the first move.
Yeah, but you kept things moving, I tease.
Nevertheless, Jasper and Leo have moved right past it. In fact, Leo was the best man at our wedding, just like Emmie was my maid of honor. And seeing that they’re in love, that made things extra special.
A pervasive thought that’s been haunting my mind ever since my wedding day comes back to me, and my stomach knots up.
Right after the wedding, Leo let me know that he plans on filling Emmie in on his supernatural abilities. Leo says he’s positive she’s the one for him, and he doesn’t want to keep anything from her as they progress. Which I agree with—the only caveat is, that puts me in a bind.
It’s bad enough I’ve been keeping this secret from Emmie for the last thirteen years, but to continue keeping it from her after Leo divulges his truth, I don’t think I could live with myself. So I plan on spilling my supernatural secret to Emmie, too.
I’m pretty sure she’ll hate me when she finds out I’ve had the ability to pry into her thoughts all these years and never bothered to tell her. And that’s exactly what I fear most.
She will not hate you, Leo says it curt with a quick nod as if to annunciate his point.
Emmie wraps her arm around my shoulders and squeezes me tightly.
“The four of us need to go on a double date asap.” She tweaks her brows as her excitement over the prospect grows. “How’s tomorrow night? I want to hear all about your honeymoon. Oh, and I want to see pictures. I looked the Maple Meadows Lodge up online and it looks amazing! I totally want to honeymoon there.” She winks over at Leo and my eyes widen.
Have they been talking marriage?
I clear my throat. “I’m glad you saw the inn online because I don’t think I took many pictures,” I say. “We didn’t really explore the grounds all that much.”
Emmie bucks with a laugh. “You didn’t leave the room, did you?”
Leo chuckles. “Sounds like a good time was had by all.”
Sherlock barks. Sounds like a waste of a good vacation. You could’ve slept at home, Bizzy. Emmie said they had hiking trails that led to rivers and endless meadows. I thought you and Jasper would be playing Frisbee a lot.
They played other games, silly. Fish swipes her paw his way. I bet Bizzy brought that ball of yarn we play with in bed. It’s Bizzy’s favorite thing to do before bedtime.
We played in bed, all right, but there wasn’t a ball of yarn in sight.
I cringe as I look to Leo, but before a smart-aleck remark could fly from his lips, the most frightening being of all pops before us—Camila Ryder herself, along with the blonde woman I met inside and that adorable fuzzy little Yorkie, Sprinkles.
“Well, if it isn’t Dizzy Bizzy.” Camila chortles as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
It’s not all that funny or creative. Bullies and mean girls alike have been calling me Dizzy Bizzy for as long as I can remember. She’ll have to try harder if she wants to impress me. But I know for a fact the only person she’s looking to impress is Jasper. And that’s exactly why she managed to score a position as the secretary to the homicide department a few months back. And don’t think for a minute it doesn’t irk me that she gets to