“What’s this?”
Marissa was waving the box I’d hidden in the hall closet. It’s
amazing how quickly my mate could find things I hid from her. Yes, I know I
shouldn’t hide things from her, but old habits die hard. My first mate had taught
me that hiding things meant I only got yelled at for things she noticed. She
hadn’t noticed much, unlike my sweet little witch.
I braced for an explosion and told her. “It’s , ah, I just
noticed that we didn’t have any smoke alarms, so I picked some up.”
“Huh. There’s one at the top of the stairs on each landing
and one in the coffee shop kitchen,” she murmured, reading the packaging. “These
talk to each other?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, nervous at the lack of reaction. “See?
When one goes off, it signals the others that there’s an event. That way, if
you don’t hear an alarm upstairs because you’re down stairs, you still find out
something is going on, because all of them go off.” She made a cute little face
at the box. Werewolves were generally attuned to body expression, but I’d never
seen that expression on anyone before. Bemused, maybe? “What’s funny about it?”
“Nothing, sorry. I just got a mental image of gossipy ladies
from the 1950s all gathering on the street because their smoke alarms all told
them that someone burned dinner.”
That mental image bloomed in my mind and an evil thought
soon followed. “I wonder if the range can be extended for how far they transmit
to each other.”
“Mooney, you are not going to put these things in Ziva’s
house!”
“Ohhhhh, yes I can! I still owe Nick from that prank last
month! Nothing like having his lady love informed every time he burns his
dinner!”
