Not just on Harry’s whereabouts, but about Guido himself. According to Darnell, the resident demon and overall teddy bear of their OOPS group, whom Nina had texted the moment they knew Harry was gone, Guido was real. He wasn’t very good at what he did. In fact, some in the paranormal world compared him to a hack. Nay, Darnell had outright called him a hack.
Ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang.
But he was certainly real, and he did garner results. The results were just questionable and sometimes ugly. That information had sent Nina and Mara on the SUV ride from hell to get to Harry before he did something stupid.
As Mara cornered Harry, who appeared a little rough around the edges, the moment she burst through the door, she heard her heart throbbing in her ears. Something had happened. She smelled it.
She came to a halt just outside the room where this witch doctoring had likely occurred, screeching to a halt in front of his large frame. “Harry?” she huffed, fighting for breath. “In all of your,” Mara threw up her hands to make finger quotes, “‘logical reasoning,’ what made you think coming to see Guido the Witch Doctor was logical and/or reasonable? Setting aside his festive costume, I don’t know about you, but my first clue the gentleman wasn’t on the up-and-up might have been his name. Which is Guido, Harry. Guido. Not Mustafa, or—”
“That’s The Lion King,” Nina interjected, tightening her grip on Guido to make him stop squirming and clawing at her hands. “I know because I watch a lot of kid’s shit with Charlie now. For example, Dora the Explorer. Ever wonder how the fuck she fits all that shit in her backpack? It’s unrealistic and teaches kids to have unrealistic expectations.”
“Hakuna matata,” Mara replied dryly, pushing her way past a large urn with vaporous tendrils of steam rising into the stale air of Guido’s dank yet colorful shack to pin Harry with her angry eyes. “Either way, it just doesn’t ring very witch-doctor-ish, does it? I don’t want to discriminate against poor Guido, but it’s a stretch. Clearly, you didn’t think this through. Witch doctors heal people, Harry. They don’t reverse something irreversible. You’re not cursed.” And quite frankly, she was beginning to feel exceptionally slighted by his attitude toward her kind.
Harry’s eyebrow rose, arching with a haughty swell he had to fight to hold onto, but fight he did. “Says you. Guido and his whiteboard say otherwise.” He pointed to the large rectangle filled with prices written in scrawling red Magic Marker for Guido’s services.
Mara almost gasped when she saw the eraser marks where Guido also apparently catered to your witch doctor needs on a whimlike basis.
She stomped over to the spot on the wall reserved for Guido’s pricing and pointed at his list with a shaky finger. “Harry? Do you see here where he’s erased TURN YOUR EX-LOVER INTO A ZOMBIE at the bargain basement price of two thousand dollars into TURN A WEREWOLF BACK INTO A HUMAN? Does that look fishy at all to you?”
Harry’s chin lifted. His lovely, covered-in-a-lot-of-hair chin. “How do you know it says that?”
“Because I have amazing eyesight.” She yanked the board off the wall, taking some of the cheap paneling with it, and shoved it under a perturbed Harry’s nose. “See? You have amazing eyesight, too, Harry. Look with your amazeball eyes and see what he erased!”
Harry jammed his hands into the pockets of his thick, hooded sweatshirt. “He said he could lift the curse.”
Mara sighed. For all of Harry’s cute, he was getting on her nerves with the quest for reversion. “Harry—you’re not cursed! I’ll grant you, some might call it a curse. But it didn’t happen because it began as a curse. It was an accident. An accident of epic proportions, but an accident no one—not a soul on this earth—can fix. I swear it. What do I have to do to make you believe me?”
Harry’s jaw went stony again—reminiscent of Fletcher and his petulant attitude. “Nothing. If it can be created, why can’t it be uncreated? Riddle me that, baby-maker.”
“You!” Nina roared in poor, frightened Guido’s elaborately made-up face. “What the hell have you done to him? And what the fuck is that smell?”
Guido, pale even beneath his witch-doctor makeup, trembled and sputtered, “Grilled cheese? Look, lady, please let me go. Don’t eat me, please, please, please don’t eat me! I was just doin’ what I said I’d do!” He pulled at her hand to no avail, the large feathers of his headdress bobbing wildly with his struggle. “I can’t breathe!”