Never Hurt Me - The Wish Makers, Book 3 (PAPERBACK)

Chapter 1
I’d never gotten close to any of my charges. Not that I hadn’t cared about them, I had. It’s just that I was put on their life path to do a job, not to become attached to them. We were never meant to have long-lasting relationships. Then came Mandy and Crissy.
In a little more than three months, those girls had become a permanent part of my life path. I’d do anything for them. That’s why instinct took over when Crissy was being attacked. I hadn’t thought, I’d just reacted. The call afterward to appear before Kaf, my boss, didn’t surprise me. The fact that he’d waited so long did. Crissy’s wish had ended days ago. Maybe the delay was a timeout, of sorts, so I could think about what I’d done.
I found King Kaf at the very back of his cave seated on a throne. An actual one this time, made of gold and emerald instead of the cloud formation he usually perched upon. Very formal. That couldn’t be good. Orange and green smoke swirled behind him like an acid trip through a kaleidoscope. He had his big book, his compendium of wishes, out and opened to a specific page. One that had been bookmarked by a strip of tie-dyed fabric.
“Is that from my shirt?” I asked.
Like a kid caught stealing a second dessert, he hesitated before answering, “It is.”
I’d been wearing that shirt the day we entered into our arrangement. I had jumped from the car I’d been riding in a split-second before it went over the edge of the road. Still, I tumbled a good seventy-five yards down the embankment before coming to a stop. I was broken and bloodied, barely conscious when Kaf appeared, my clothes little more than shreds.
“I don’t know if that’s a sweet souvenir or a twisted stalker-thing,” I said of the saved shirt strip.
As I stood before him my hands started to sweat, my heart to race. I tried to cross my arms, but they wouldn’t stay where I placed them so I let them hang limply at my sides instead.
“Just tell me,” I finally blurted.
“Tell you what?” he asked.
“What my punishment is,” I said.
“Why would I punish you?”
“Because I broke the one rule I had agreed to.”
“What rule, Desiree?” He asked this like a teacher would ask a student what she had learned when a lesson finally sunk in.
During Crissy’s wish I’d started to suspect my long-held belief that I couldn’t interfere with a wish was all in my mind. I now realized that I’d always been allowed to make decisions for my charges. The fact that I interacted with them at all was interfering. I could have simply sent a message that said “your wish has been granted” and moved on. Instead, I stood face-to-face with them and chose the details that would ensure their wish would be completely fulfilled.
“You understand now,” he said. I nodded. “Do you also remember where this self-imposed prohibition came from?”
I tried to think back to the beginning. Had I done something wrong with one of the wishes?
“Do you not remember what happened with your friend in the commune?” Kaf prompted.
Friend? What friend? My boyfriend, Glenn, had been there. My only other friend… “Do you mean Marsha?”
He gave a single nod.
“What about her?”
He waved his hand in the air next to him, as if removing fog from a window, and a small cloud formed. His version of a crystal ball.

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