Read Trouble with Gargoyles: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 3) for Free Online Page A

Moonlight's roof.
    "Is that really necessary?" I asked as Vale, Melanie, and I watched this skinny, middle aged man scuttle across my roof. With his black backpack riding high on his shoulders he resembled a crab. "I'm afraid you're going to fall off. I'll be honest: if you do, we can't call an ambulance because then the cops might check the place out and something really bad and magickal might happen."
    "Monkeys do not fall, young amiga !" Rodrigo called down to me. "We are more agile than cats and stronger than spiders."
    I grimaced at the mention of spiders but Melanie was eagerly bobbing her head so I quickly pretended that I was impressed.
    Rodrigo was dressed in denim overalls for some reason, like he was a farmer. He went shirtless beneath it, which gave me an unencumbered view of his dense, dark chest hair. He was also barefoot. He had Hobbit feet rather than the long 'monkey toes' I'd been teased as a child about having.
    "I work as an independent contractor for ordinary people," he called down to us, his cheerful voice carrying clearly to, oh, pretty much anyone in the neighborhood who happened to be awake. If I'd handed him a megaphone he would have happily used it to tell us about how he used magick for ordinary people who absolutely were not supposed to know anything about real magick. I guesstimated the odds that the Oddsmakers would be paying Rodrigo a visit to be about 2 to 1.
    "You'd be surprised how many of them get hit with curses," he went on as he scrambled across the roof.
    "I didn't know ordinary people dealt with curses," I admitted.
    " Dios mio , too many! Most of them are accidental fallout from sorcerers and warlocks who were sloppy with their spells, and shame on them. You use magick you must respect it, I say. You don't go hitting ordinary people with your spells. All sorts of terrible and unkind things can happen—and they do! Why, I saw—"
    "Sorry to cut in," I cut in, "but why did you choose the roof to check out first? You barely looked through the shop and that's where most of the curses are."
    "Because, young amiga , that curse you have now and the ones you told me about—they are just part of a soup curse."
    Vale raised his eyebrows when I looked to him. Melanie didn't appear to have a clue, either.
    "What's a soup curse?" I asked reluctantly, braced for a punch line to a lame joke.
    "Well, ha ha, it's truly called a chaos curse because it isn't very particular about what it uses. It affects all sorts of objects and places—animals, too—whatever is within reach. Anything that falls into it gets served up, which is why I call it a soup. That's why your curses are all over the place, young amiga . Electricity, wasps, flaming money—whoever cast it didn't care what it did, only that it got your attention."
    "Well, mission accomplished," I growled. I glanced at the scraggly dead tree in the yard. During the day it was just ugly, but at night it sort of worried me. It reminded me too much of the tree from Poltergeist . I wanted to go back inside. "So what does it being a soup curse have to do with you being on the roof?"
    "Because you cast a soup curse at the highest point, so it covers the most area and affects the most things. Think a big umbrella. Or a black magick net." Rodrigo patted his chest and grinned down at me, his teeth flashing whitely beneath his bushy mustache. "So I am on your roof!"
    "So you are," I muttered.
    "The Oddsmakers might grab him before he does us any good," Vale warned Melanie and me.
    But Melanie waved off the concern. "Nah, Rodrigo has been working underground for years! No one cares. I kinda think the Oddsmakers don't mind because at least he's removing proof that magick exists, right? If he left a curse in the hands of someone ordinary, well, then they could call the FBI or Homeland Security and then they'd have a talking coffee pot to study. Rodrigo is making us safer!"
    Weird justification, but she could have been right. Rodrigo wasn't exactly hiding what