June Daley VS The Universe: Bottomless Purse, #1

By Nora Oliver

Five years ago, June Daley was a hero. Her life was dedicated to saving those who couldn't save themselves, and her reward was a destroyed town and her magic forever bound in a way that made her overwhelmingly alluring to any wild creature out for blood. Which in New York City was a bit of an issue. She was meant to die because of her curse, but thanks to her bottomless purse, a whole heap of resourcefulness, and a refusal to get involved in other people's business, she forged a new life out of the things that were broken. Aside from the monsters that tried to eat her face and a house that liked to throw tantrums, her life was peaceful. Boring, even. Which was a whole lot better than being dead.

 

That is until a shapeshifter cursed into the form of a wolf rescues a cultist from certain death. His heroism accidentally pulls June into a plot of terror, reunions, and stolen elemental stones that hold the power to destroy entire universes. Against her will and better judgment, and armed only with her trusty not-exactly-a-wolf, her bottomless purse, a Sean Astin-worshiping eternally stoned troll, and a whole lot of snark, she'll have to work miracles to save the universe.

 

If the reunions don't kill her first.

 

June Daley Vs. The Universe is the first book in the Bottomless Purse book series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nora Oliver
• Release date: Aug 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201673352

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: CURIOSITY KILLED THE WRAITH

Tucked on a forgotten street, along a narrow alley, and between a run-down Thai place and a necromancer same-day un-death shop, sat Repair and Restore, where a terribly obvious thief was in the process of sliding a silver spoon neatly against his balls.

June Daley, curse breaker, people hater, and ex-magic user, ignored the man as she read from a book she had found in the library section of the labyrinthine store. Though the thief was anxiously aware of every move she made, she was happy to pretend she didn’t notice him shaking his leg like he thought it would make the ball-spoon situation less obvious.

The monitor that recorded his thieving flickered then died with a low whine, as it did whenever June was nearby. She mentally shrugged and went back to reading.

If Sam, the owner of the store and its weird assortment of antiques, random curios, and magical whatsits, had wanted his place to be thief-free he should have stayed to supervise. He knew she didn’t care what happened to the items once they left her workshop and were no longer cursed, hexed, or generally spiteful. Mostly, he should have hired a delivery driver a month ago instead of opting to do it himself when the old one quit. It would have probably meant less spoons rubbing against balls.

Hypothetically.

But Sam was cheap and liked not paying another salary. He was paying for that cheapness now in June’s unwillingness to stop the thieves that came in or greet the more legitimate customers outside of a cursory sweep to be sure they weren’t a threat to her.

Customers and thieves were not what Sam paid her for, and she refused to make his belief in her ability to be sociable easy on him. If he wanted her to deal with the junk that people brought in, fine, but life was better for everyone when Sam remembered that puzzles, not people, were her thing.

She had already scared away two customers just by looking at them, and the third was probably lost in the pocket dimension on the second level. The dimension didn’t like visitors inside it, so June was reasonably sure it’d kick the woman out soon enough, though only after it had made her feel like days or weeks had passed in the store.

It was a bit of a dick like that.

June flipped another page in the book, eyes getting caught on a paragraph about griffin hunting habits that looked interesting and wrong; wrong things always made her pay attention. She was argumentative that way.

When she looked up from the page again it was because the wards she had written into the stone at the threshold of the shop told her that Sam was back. Despite her lack of care about the thieving in progress, she didn’t want to miss the drama of his return.

He was a large man with a soft middle, pale skin, and dark eyes, and though his family came from a long line of druids, the magic in them had stalled in him at a young age, as it sometimes does in humans. It meant that he had instinct, some foresight and an affinity for earth and metal, but very little in the way of power.

His instinct upon entering the shop was to look to the left, to the high shelves packed with curios, where the thief was in the process of stuffing a previously haunted Katrina doll down the back of his pants.

The thief froze, eyes wide, as did Sam, whose expression flashed with furious indignation. They had a brief standoff, where eyes and eyebrows communicated vicious anger and caught-out guilt, then the thief slithered around the shelves, jumped over a trunk that used to eat anything under four feet tall before June fixed it, and somehow wiggled past Sam. The thief didn’t have magic, and certainly wasn’t made from magic, but he still managed to make it out of the door and onto the street before one of Sam’s meaty hands could snatch him. Sam swore and barreled out of the shop after him as the register in front of June flickered sullenly and died.

June turned another page in her book.

Ten minutes later Sam returned, panting heavily and limping a little. Sweat rolled down his face and onto his expensive cashmere scarf. He glared at June with all the familiarity of doing so five times a day as he angrily peeled the wet scarf away from his neck.

You catch him? June asked with a mocking grin.

You’re fired! he spat back.

You smell like eggs, she complained, wrinkling her nose.

I tripped on a trashcan!

Mmm.

I hate you.

I can always tell when you lie.

Sam crossed his arms and stared her down. It would be imposing to anyone who hadn’t seen him shaking what his mother gave him to Birch Tree’s latest hit about jiggling booties at lunch yesterday.

Recognizing defeat when it was smirking up at him, he turned on his heels again, far too dramatically for a weekday, and slammed through the small door that was the back way down to the offices and June’s workshop.

She pushed away from the counter and followed him, ignoring his sullen attitude in favor of annoying him some more.

You gonna call the cops on your thief? Have them track him down and return the spoon he had cupped around his balls? she mocked.

I hate the cops more than I hate you, Sam grumbled, wincing at the mention of the spoon. And you hate the cops more than you hate you, so I don’t know why you mentioned it.

This is why I love you so much, Sam. You have the right opinions when it matters.

Fuck off! he grouched, turning right at the end of the wooden stairs.

Stop putting me on the register when you leave, she offered in return as she went the opposite way down the narrow hallway, which made him flip her off grumpily. And hire a new driver!

He slammed the office door behind him, ending the conversation, and she laughed her way to her workshop, book tucked between her arm and her body.

The old building had three levels, some impossibly wider or taller than physics should allow due to its tendency to sprout random hallways, pocket dimensions, and stairways to nowhere. The library liked to move to the second floor on Thursdays, and sometimes new antiques appeared among the randomly stacked rows and shelves beyond Sam’s routine shopping expeditions to estate sales, yard sales, and auctions. They had learned to do a weekly inventory to make sure nothing cursed or haunted found its way to innocent people because of this, but for the most part, the building was harmless and enjoyed the magic that came into the shop daily.

The heart of Repair and Restore was June’s work fixing items for desperate owners willing to do anything to keep their family heirlooms despite the hauntings and curses, but the business had also shifted to include the antique market as more and more desperate people permanently dropped off their cursed items. They had been too traumatized by being electrocuted, cursed to speak in limericks, or forced to speak their innermost thoughts regardless of the audience to want them back.

As Sam had all the proper paperwork to either destroy or repair the cursed items, it made them feel like they weren’t simply throwing them out for the next person to catch the curse. It gave them a sense of relief and responsibility that meant Sam always had cheaply-bought merchandise he could mark up by 200 percent.

It also meant that June was always busy, which was how she liked things.

To accommodate her work, Sam had renovated a large room at the end of the building. It sat behind a reinforced brick wall that separated the cursed items from the rest of the shop. The walls were handy for containing explosions, acid meltdowns, and the various crying fits that either June or the cursed items threw from time to time. When she had first gotten hired, June had written additional runes into the walls and the floors to keep the things that liked to blow up from blowing up everything else.

It was her sanctuary in many ways.

The most important part of her sanctuary was the way protections she had written around the room meant the creatures that found her particularly alluring, thanks to the curse she was under, were either killed, redirected, or delayed long enough for her to escape.

The second most important way was that the walls were a warm, muted brick that offset her numerous hanging plants and the fairy lights that glittered brightly with charmed comfort on those particularly difficult days when the cursed objects weren’t cooperating or someone had tried to eat her.

In contrast to the put-it-wherever chaos of the rest of the store, her workshop was meticulously arranged. Rows of tables were carefully marked with chalk in descending order of how badly you might get maimed or die if you crossed it. Each table had a line drawn on the floor around it that shimmered against the fairy lights. More lines split the shop in four and contained extra warding, just because June had learned to be paranoid.

The less deadly things were in the first part of the workshop, while an archway separated a second room from the front that held the things that liked to kill, maim, and ruthlessly mock people. It was where she headed after setting her book on the table by the doorway that sat just beyond the glittering purple ward that marked the beginning of her protections.

She approached the grandfather clock she had been working on for a week, Sam and his thief falling away as she considered the perplexing mystery of the case.

It belonged to a vampire, and had a nasty habit of killing people at exactly midnight every two weeks like, well, clockwork. The vampire had kept it for ironical reasons, as he was impervious to curses that killed the living, but the police had cracked down on him when his employees complained about their coworkers dying. The cops had given him an ultimatum: get rid of the clock or face jail time. He had opted to have it fixed as a fuck you to them.

June was more than happy to oblige him, even if his door-to-door salesman routine to recruit new vampires weirded her out. She appreciated him asking for consent before he turned people, as his predecessors had a messy history of biting people against their wills, but she couldn’t help but find the smarmy, selling-you-something-you-don’t-need attitude creepy as a rule. Plus, he always smelled like garlic, and she found that unreasonably offensive.

This didn’t stop the clock from being a frustrating mystery, and working on it was turning out to be a larger job than she had first expected. She wasn’t sure she had the magic or knowledge for it. It happened sometimes, where her limited magic meant she had to turn away jobs, but it was rare. Mostly because she was too stubborn to give up quickly.

Determined to beat the clock, she opened the front of it and pulled over the wheeled cart she had abandoned when Sam had optimistically and foolishly asked her to watch the front of the store. She picked up a small screwdriver and started poking around in the inner guts, searching for runes, writing, hidden compartments, or anything that might mean an easy and simple unraveling of the curse.

At six, a fluttery feeling ran down her spine and she turned to see Sam looming in the doorway.

I’m not paying you overtime. Go home.

You’re barely paying me at all.

What’s that? You want a paycheck cut?

Do that and I’ll go into business for myself.

And lose all your customers in a day. This does take talking to people.

Not if I build some kind of... Her eyes glazed over as she thought about it. Hmmm, like an automated-magical-robot type thing. It could be preprogrammed to do your job.

Ha. Ha.

I’ll work on it and let you know when you can leave the shop to me.

Never gonna happen.

June grinned nastily and pushed her cart to the front of the workshop, tucking it next to the table that held her book and her purse. She methodically squared it along the wall and slung her purse across her body, stuffing the book inside to look at later. She wrapped her scarf around her neck and shoved on her puffy jacket, cursing fall and the cold it brought with it.

She bickered with Sam, who smelled decidedly less like eggs now, all the way up the stairs and to the front of the shop. He lowered the gate in front of the glass door, and she fondly patted the ward she had written in the wall to keep her things safe, walking off without waiting for him as it flared gold. Sam harrumphed and called a sarcastic goodbye as he walked two blocks east to where his boyfriend was waiting with food and a commiserating expression about June’s behavior pre-prepared.

It was nice to know she was such an integral part of his life.

She waved her own goodbye distantly, mind already on other things, like dinner and an academic paper she had read over lunch about plant magic being more powerful than most magic users, wondering if she could apply any of the hypotheses inside the article toward protecting herself.

Protection was central to most things she did these days. She had more runes, wards, and dampeners than anyone in the tri-state area had a need for around her workplace, house, and body, not to mention her purse, which held an assortment of carefully curated items she knew would be integral to her survival one day.

What there was left of her magic had told her so.

The reason June’s magic was bound, and the streetlights flickered fretfully above her as she walked, was because of a mistake she had made five years ago. Arrogantly, blindly helpful, and egotistically determined to do something when no one else could, she had tried to help a town get free from a centuries’ old curse that kept them indentured to the land upstate. They couldn’t leave the ten mile radius without dying a very painful death, and the beings had wanted more from their lives, had wanted freedom. Naively, she had promised to do her best to remove it, swept up in the idea of doing the impossible.

Instead of helping, she had erased them from existence altogether, the earth blackened where their town had once stood. Her subsequent arrest and trial had given her the life she had now. Cursed, her magic bound, but free.

It had not been a kindness or leniency.

She was supposed to have died already, as bound magic attracted the wild, desperate, and magically hungry. Most could control their impulse to kill her, as being dangerous didn’t necessarily mean someone was also murderous. But those who couldn’t or wouldn’t control the urge killed cursed beings like her indiscriminately.

In defensive habit, she put her right hand inside her purse as she walked, and her eyes were watchful and sharp as she passed dark doorways and alleys she had long ago mapped out as escape routes. Cars ran across the wet road in tandem to the sound of the winged beings flying overhead. Those with wings stopped when the lights turned red along with the cars, though with more noise and the general chaos of wings beating to stabilize their flights.

Grey clouds scudded overhead with the occasional plop of a fat raindrop, but the weather was content to hint at rain instead of doing anything more. The beings who recognized her from the neighborhood shrank back and out of her way as she approached, eyes cautious and holding fear. She bared her teeth at the harpy who had tried to eat her a year ago, and they went inside their townhouse with a disgruntled hiss.

Good riddance.

The thing she hated most about Repair and Restore being in Brooklyn, aside from the hipsters who liked to vape on the sidewalks and talk about their banana bread recipes in rapturous awe, was that all the magic in the world couldn’t move the subway lines closer. The subway knew where the money had once been, and though the walk would have been perfectly safe ordinarily, she was not most people. The five blocks to get to the platform were sometimes the most terrifying part of her day.

She was half a block away from the entrance to the station when a body fell out of the sky and landed directly in front of her, missing her toes by an inch. She stopped, hand clenching inside her bag, and tried to process the sticky, squishy mess she was fairly certain was blood flooding over her shoes.

She didn’t look down. Looking down meant getting involved, and she wanted nothing more than to go home, take a shower, and read the night away. She had no intention of getting herself into any shenanigans, situations, or especially any tomfoolery. She was tomfool proof.

Eyes still straight ahead, she stepped over the dead person and continued on her way.

She only managed four more steps before another body hit the ground in front of her. This one landed with less of a squish and more of a thud, and there wasn’t any added sticky wetness to her shoes, which she appreciated.

Despite her resolution to move along as quickly as possible, the low groan that followed had her looking down.

The being who had fallen had dark skin, pale lips that were nearly ice blue, and his child-like face made her diminished magic perk up and sniff around him curiously. He glowed to her, in the way her limited magic recognized most beings on sight, even through glamours and spells designed to alter appearance, but she hadn’t met his kind of being before and couldn’t place his origin. From the way his breath didn’t steam in the air and the paleness of his lips, she assumed him to be some kind of cold-weather being.

The worst kind, in her opinion.

In the time it took for her to look back up again, contemplating her choices and noticing that the street had shifted to eerily abandoned despite it being rush hour, a wail rose up out of the darkness. It was piercing and carried the wretched somberness of a being who could only ever be consumed by an unending need to feast on the souls around them.

A wraith.

Which was not ideal.

They liked to suck a person dry of their squishy bits and leave the dried-out husk of a body behind for people to lose their food over later. It was certainly not how June wanted to spend her Wednesday. Or any other day, for that matter. She could be particular about her plans that way.

She turned, searching for it, and watched as the wraith swooped down from the buildings above and covered the first person who had fallen from the sky with its body. She watched it happen in fascinated horror and realized with a sick lurch of her gut that she recognized the victim. It was Sam’s thief, looking impossibly pale and young in the streetlights as he bled out. The silver spoon had fallen to the ground at his feet, glittering wetly in the blood.

The wraith inhaled, still endlessly wailing. The thief’s body shriveled, bones breaking, and his soul drained out of his body.

June took an instinctive step back as the wraith dropped the desiccated remains of the thief and turned, its hunger now firmly focused on her.

CHAPTER TWO: TROLLING

June tried to step over the second man who had fallen, half turned to flee, but he caught her leg in a surprisingly firm grip and she toppled over him instead, scraping her palms on the sidewalk in an attempt not to fall on her face. She rolled and then crab-walked back and away from him, hastily stuffing her hand back into her bag as the wraith charged at them. With the familiar fear of being hunted in her chest, she willed something useful to rise to the surface.

The wraith went for the man first. He yelled in terror as it descended; sensibly, June supposed. It swooped over him hungrily, mouth opened wide. Before it could get its greedy hands on the man’s face and finish what it had started with the thief, another dark shape barreled into it.

She heard a heart-stopping snarl and saw dark fur backed by white teeth as their savior distracted the wraith long enough for her to stand and stupidly, inexplicably, involve herself in the situation.

Instinctively, she grabbed the man by the back of his blue robes and hauled him to his feet. Eyes half on the street ahead, half on the fight behind her, she guided him toward the subway. Their rescuer—a wolf—and the wraith chased after them. The wraith gained ground quickly, wailing loud enough that every sane being in the area ran, flew, or skittered for the safety of their warded homes and shops. The wolf sprinted just behind it, body graceful and coiling explosively with every strike of its paws on the ground.

At the stairs to the subway, June yanked the man down after her. She ignored his stumbles and groans, her hand cramping around his robes in her refusal to drop him, and made him jump down the last two stairs. He tripped after her, weakly listing to the side. Without mercy, she shoved him past a gangly-looking changeling boy and into a dark hall shielded by a heavy door.

She ignored the Do Not Enter sign and the way the lights flickered off one by one as the wailing unerringly followed her. Grimly, she flung back a second door, which had another Enter at Your Own Risk sign overlaid with a symbol for troll territory. She ignored that sign too, hoping against hope that Larry was feeling amicable. Sometimes he liked to pout at her for no discernable reason. Trolls could be dramatic like that.

Just as the wails reached a crescendo, the ground rumbled and rolled in a localized earthquake tied to the magic of a being who had been born from the earth and lived to protect it. She stumbled to a graceless stop. The man hit the wall next to her and collapsed at her feet for a second time. The wolf staggered from where it had caught up to them sometime between the stairs and the doors, but whirled around, teeth bared and an endlessly threatening growl rolling in time to the staggered power of the rippling ground.

June put her hand back in her bag, fingers grasping and desperate.

Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Irishman!

That’s giants, dumbass! And my family is from the Upper East Side!

Larry laughed, the walls contracting with the rolling, rumbling, glee. He stepped out of the dark with glowing yellow eyes and a face that could curdle milk. June would say that it was a face only a mother could love, but Larry’s mother had tried to eat him when he was twelve, and they’d been estranged ever since.

As Larry approached, June felt something metallic against her fingers. Trusting her magic and her purse, she wrapped her hand around it and tugged hard just as the wraith reached them. The wolf and Larry leapt forward, but June knew all they could do was delay the inevitable. Unless one of them had magic on hand that focused on controlling, summoning, or banishing the dead, which she doubted. She had only caught glimpses of the wolf, but it was enough to tell that whoever they were, they were a magical being and not a magic user.

Larry yelled in fear as the wraith tried to grab his face, then yelled again in surprise as the wolf jumped up and snapped its jaws around the darkness of the wraith’s wispy hands. The wraith circled higher, shaking the wolf off in the process, and flew around to face them again.

June fumbled with the metallic thing in her hands and realized it was a flashlight. Sighing in relief, she clicked it on just as the wraith popped up in front of her face. Its eyes were wide and vacant; its mouth open in a constant scream of agony. It shrieked in fear at the sudden burst of light, recoiling. The flashlight flickered, as though about to go out, drained by June’s cursed magic.

Which was decidedly not good.

Distract it! she yelled, as the wraith flew back and away from the light, wails sounding increasingly frustrated.

Larry swiped at it with one clawed hand while the wolf bit down on the bottom of the dark mass. June took several steps backwards, channeled all the long afternoons spent on the softball field growing up, and flung the flashlight at the wraith’s chest.

The wolf and Larry scrambled away as the flashlight caught in the darkness of the wraith’s body. The light swiveled and shone upward to reveal a dozen faces twisted in agony underneath the wraith’s face. The wraith paused, wails dimming as its chest expanded forcefully, like people were pressing restlessly against it. The hands trying to push out against the wraith stopped abruptly then were sucked back in toward the light, taking the wraith with them as it screamed in terror.

The flashlight hit the ground and rolled, and Larry took a cautious step backwards so that it wouldn’t hit his feet. Wise, considering it would have sucked him in to an alternate dimension that was probably deadly to anything not incorporeal.

Maybe.

eBay sellers weren’t always particularly forthcoming about the special features their items held, and she had learned to be cautious about their claims.

The overhead lights reluctantly flickered back on, fizzling at the end like they knew she was there and wanted her gone.

She looked down at her hands, which were shaking, then up at Larry, who stared at her, flummoxed. The adrenaline crackling through her met the release of her relief at surviving and she started laughing. He laughed with her, eternally polite, the ground and walls rumbling in his delight, and he watched in amusement as she slid down the wall in numb exhaustion. He slid down opposite her, the flashlight between them.

Hey, Larry.

Happy crossings, June.

With an amused shake of her head, she dug into her purse, searching for something to use to pick up the flashlight. She found a pair of tongs and a warded bamboo box, then used the tongs to bring the flashlight into the box with all the careful control and seriousness of a surgeon doing a heart transplant.

When the flashlight was safely sealed away, she exhaled shakily and stuffed the box into her purse to deal with later.

How ya doin’? she added, trying her best to hide how much she was shaking in the aftermath of the adrenaline. For some reason, she wanted Larry to think she was cool, even though he was probably the dorkiest troll she had ever met.

"I was watching The Bachelorette," Larry pouted.

Ah. Sorry.

Who are these? Larry gestured at the wolf, who had ducked his head defensively so that his throat wasn’t exposed and was watching them carefully with silver eyes against a backdrop of jet-black fur.

Some hero wannabe and...oh, he’s passed out. Great. June eyed the maybe-ice being critically, tucking her shaking hands under her thighs.

The wolf made a low sound of disagreement, and June’s wary gaze returned to him. Her magic whispered to her that he was a shifter, but something was off, charged, not how it should be. The magic of it reminded her of her curse, of entrapment, and she didn’t like it at all. She also refused to wonder about it. She had involved herself enough for one night.

Oh hush, June replied to his growl, and it died suddenly, as if the silence had been shocked out of him.

Satisfied that he wasn’t about to do anything dramatic, she pulled her purse close again and dug through it. Carefully, she extracted a Sean Astin bobblehead, a bottle of scotch, and a bag of weed. She held them out to Larry, who took them with a pleased smirk, radiating contentment and excitement.

Sorry for interrupting your show, but thanks for the save.

This is limited edition! Larry marveled, bringing the bobblehead close to his yellow eyes to inspect.

Larry had a thing for Sean Astin. She tried not to judge too much, but his fascination bordered on an obsession she only cared about because it made it easy to barter with him.

Came through the shop. Thought you might like it.

Thanks. You missed your train.

Of course she had. That was just how her night was shaping up.

Larry reached out and patted her ankle soothingly, which made her ankle ache. He often forgot he was three times as strong as June and that she didn’t have a troll’s rock-like skin. She subtly shifted her leg away from him, grimacing through a polite smile.

Another one will be by in...twenty-nine minutes. The line’s running nine minutes behind today.

June nodded, accepting the delay as the price she paid for not dying. She ignored the man she had saved, who was whimpering despite being unconscious, and the wolf, who was watching them with a mixture of suspicion, confusion, and something thoughtful and intense that she couldn’t quite place.

Aware that she had some time to kill, and liking Larry despite the way he always smelled of sweat, weed, and dirt, she leaned more comfortably against the wall and smiled at him, hands tucked back under her legs.

What’s new?

That set Larry off onto a tangent about the city harassing him about his territory because of the smell, the people who littered, and what he’d like to do with them—eat them—and the Twitter fight he’d gotten into over trolling rights.

He politely announced when the train was five minutes out, having talked himself hoarse, and she stood obediently, happy to finally be headed home. She called goodbye to him, his reply a hearty rumble of the ground, and tried to leave, only to have her path blocked by the wolf.

He stared at her, and she stared back, nonplussed.

What?

Somehow, the wolf managed to be scornful, imploring, and sassy all at once. With an eye roll, he raised one paw, unerringly pointing at the unconscious being.

He’ll wake up, she dismissed.

A low and contradictory whine was his answer.

I appreciate you helping me, even though you were stupid and the wraith would have killed us both had I not been prepared. The wolf growled in reply. June loftily decided to ignore it and the way it made all the hair on her neck rise in alarm in order to make her point. But I’m done being helpful now. I helped you get away from the wraith, but that’s as far as I go. You feel me?

The wolf considered her