Unbaked Croakies: A Magical Cozy Mystery with Talking Animals (Enchanting Inquiries Book 1)

by Sam Cheever

  I looked around too, trying to see it through her eyes. She was right. The cozy little bookstore was wonderful. I suddenly realized how much I’d come to love it. It was starting to feel like home. “Thanks,” I said, grinning. “Can I get you something? I don’t know if we have any pop, but I can make tea.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t stay. My dad’s expecting me home. He goes ballistic if I’m even ten minutes late.” She rolled her eyes, giving even Sebille a run for her money with her technique.

  “Okay,” I said, waiting for her to tell me why she was there.

  Maude looked down at the carrier in her hand. “I know you said you didn’t want me to pay you for helping…”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay, really. I was happy to help.”

  “Meow.”

  I blinked in surprise at the soft cry, my gaze locking onto the carrier. “Oh, did you get yourself a kitten?”

  A tiny gray face appeared in the mesh of the door, startling orange-gold eyes sparking in the overhead light. “Meow!” the little thing demanded, clearly sick of being inside the carrier.

  “He seems to be unhappy about being in that carrier,” I said. “How about if I got him some cream?”

  “That would be great,” Maude said, settling the carrier onto the carpet. She dropped to her knees and opened the door as I moved to the tea area and opened the small refrigerator, pulling out the container of cream.

  “Meow,” the kitten declared as he padded into the nook with me, winding around my ankles as I poured cream into a small bowl and placed it on the floor. The purring commenced as he bent to slurp his snack. “He’s adorable.”

  Maude nodded enthusiastically. “He’s going to love this place. So many nooks and crannies.”

  My head jerked up to find her looking hopefully at me. “Please accept him as my gift to you, Naida.”

  There was more to her request than a simple desire to pay me back. I could tell from the earnest expression on her face, and something that looked like worry in her pretty blue eyes. It was really important to her that I take the kitten.

  I scratched his tiny back and frowned as I felt bone. He was too skinny. And I noticed as I sat down next to him that he smelled.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “You’d literally be saving him, Naida. He needs a home. Someone to love him.”

  The fuzzy baby licked the bowl clean and then climbed into my lap, his contented purr rumbling against my legs. He closed his startling eyes and fell immediately asleep. “I don’t know…” I started to say.

  “Please, Naida?”

  The kitten rolled over in his sleep, belly up, and I found it impossible to resist the fuzzy tummy he exposed. I was toast and I knew it.

  I looked up and she smiled, the tension leaving her face at something she saw in my expression. Maude clapped her hands. “Yay! The only thing I ask is that you let me visit him once in a while.”

  “Any time. I hope you will.”

  She hopped up and down a couple of times and then glanced at her phone. “Yikes! I’m late. I have to go.” She started running toward the door. “I’ll see you soon!” And she was gone.

  I sat with my new baby for several minutes, enjoying watching him sleep. He sure moved a lot when he was sleeping. Hopefully, that didn’t mean he was going to be a handful.

  The bell on the front door jangled, and Alice came in. I panicked, realizing I hadn’t cleared the new house member with her. Then I straightened my spine. She was leaving, and Croakies was soon going to be mine. I had a right to bring Mr. Wicked into my home. I stilled. Mr. Wicked. The name had just popped into my brain.

  But I liked it. Loved it, in fact.

  I was laughing when Alice came around the corner holding the pizza box. She blinked owlishly behind her enormous glasses. “Oh, look at that. I leave you for a few minutes, and you get yourself a cat.”

  I opened my mouth to explain, but she smiled. Crouching down, she gave the kitten a scratch on his tiny belly with one fingernail. “He’s adorable. Fenwald will be thrilled to have his own trainee.”

  I watched in amazement as she moved toward the table and started putting out the pizza things. “I got us salads too, I hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t mind at all. Clutching my kitten close, I joined Alice at the table, feeling more certain of my future than I had in a very long time.

  “I’ll get you some food and litter from Fenwald’s stuff,” Alice told me later. It was getting late and we were sitting with full bellies, watching with amusement as the kitten put old Fenny through his paces. Alice had been right, the big cat seemed to be cherishing his role as mentor, even if he was severely underprepared for it.

  I yawned widely, my jaw cracking. “I guess I’ll go to bed then.”

  Alice nodded. “I’ll bring that stuff over in a bit.”

  Nodding, I shuffled toward the dividing door. “Come on, Mr. Wicked.” To my vast surprise, the kitten complied, bouncing over and batting at the laces on my shoes. “He doesn’t look tired,” I said, concerned.

  Alice laughed. “Don’t worry, kittens run until they collapse, but he’ll have lots of room to run in the library.”

  She wasn’t wrong there. I pulled the door open.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot. I put your medicine from Doctor Whom on Shakespeare’s desk.”

  All my weariness fled me in a wash. “You what? My medicine?”

  Wicked trotted into the library ahead of me, tail held high as he cast his bright gaze on the wonderland of stuff and places laid out before him.

  Squeak!

  My gaze shot to the enormous magical desk, finding the tiny, black-eyed critter trembling on its massive surface. Oh no!

  “Wicked!” I screamed as his sparkling orange-gold gaze lifted toward the frightened sound.

  Three things happened at once.

  My medicine took off running, tail rigid behind him.

  My new kitten hared off after him, a look of pure joy painting his adorable face.

  And, I forgot I was tired, as I stumbled after the burgeoning disaster unfolding itself before my very eyes.

  It was pretty much business as usual in the adventure that was my new life.

  The End

  Read More Enchanting Inquiries

  If you enjoyed Unbaked Croakies, you might want to check out the rest of the series. Please enjoy Chapter One of Tea & Croakies, Book 1 of the Enchanting Inquiries Paranormal Cozy Mysteries series as my gift to you!

  This is no boring librarian shushing people from behind a desk. This librarian corrals rogue magic. But more importantly, she has a frog and a cat, and she’s not afraid to use them!

  I knew when I woke up with a migraine that things were going to get interesting. As a magical artifact wrangler, it’s not an unusual way to start my day. But I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

  Until I found a frog sitting in my teacup.

  Even that, I could explain to myself if I had to. After all, I have a creative mind. But when the frog started talking to me, yeah, I was pretty sure I’d taken the wrong kind of pill that morning for my headache.

  If only I’d realized then what I know now. The talking frog was just the beginning of my problems. And quite a beginning it was!

  Tea & Croakies

  Beware Pinching Chairs

  I’ve been told from an early age that magic wrangling is a science. Color me skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s a science. It’s that, for me, the whole process is really more of a hit or miss, try until you die proposition. It’s like I’m missing something that will make it easier. As if someone forgot to give me my magic wand when I reached my eighteenth birthday and came into my powers.

  Or rather, my powers came into me. With a crash, thump, grab your rump kind of unexpectedness that left me hanging over the toilet horking and holding my head with both hands as it tried to split in two.

  Even now, five years later, I still get the migraines. I wish I could say they’ve gotten
easier over time. And maybe they have. But if you’re making a comparison between a tsunami and a level 5 hurricane, it’s really a distinction without a whole lot of difference for the people getting pounded by weather. Well, except one might kill you faster.

  I’m thinking my shelf life might be a little bit longer these days, though I couldn’t prove it.

  At the moment, with a thousand tiny gnomes wearing spiked golf shoes and using pickle forks as walking sticks dancing on my brain, I was thinking it might be preferable to die faster anyway.

  The world suddenly erupted in a series of explosions that had a familiar cadence to them. I hid under my long, brown hair and fought my lids to get them to open. But they fought back, eventually snapping closed again as the explosions stopped and the door my intruder had been banging on swung slowly open. “Naida? Are you awake?”

  All evidence to the contrary, I was, unfortunately, awake. I grunted something even I couldn’t decipher and my torturer took it as permission to come into my room.

  “I closed up downstairs. Do you want me to make you some tea?”

  My lips moved and more words nobody could understand eased through them. Fortunately, my loyal, if slightly annoying, assistant understood Migrainish Gibberish.

  “I felt the magic arrive a few minutes ago, so I went ahead and closed up,” she cheerfully said as she picked up my teapot and proceeded to bang out the Star-Spangled Banner with it on my stovetop.

  Not really, of course. But only because she wasn’t musically inclined and couldn’t recreate the Star-Spangled Banner if her life depended on it.

  “Ugh!” I said, hoping she could interpret that single non-word as “Please try to be quieter. My head is killing me.”

  Bang! “Oh say…” Crash “…can you see…” Clang “by the dawn’s early light…”

  “Sebille!”

  She jerked to a halt as I sat bolt upright in my bed, my blue eyes flying open with outrage. I immediately regretted the decision to move, my brain pulsing unhappily inside my head and the soldiers with pickle forks breaking into a rowdy rendition of the Irish Chicken Dance. “You’re killing me.”

  True to form, my non-serious friend simply rolled her almost iridescent green eyes. “Drama much?”

  I put my head into my hands and groaned. “Why do I bother?”

  A steaming mug appeared in front of my face. The sweet, floral scent undulated toward my nostrils in a siren song I could not resist. Taking the mug, I sniffed first, letting the sweet deliciousness infuse my sinuses.

  The headache eased a bit just from that sniff, and by the time I’d drained the mug a few minutes later, the pain was gone.

  I sighed. “Are you sure you’re not a witch? Tea never works this well when I make it.”

  Sebille dropped onto the edge of my bed. “You know I’m not a witch. I’m just tea-talented.”

  I would have sighed but the extra air rushing through my system probably would have enraged the soldiers with pickle forks. “Thank you. I was working up the courage to make myself some when you assaulted my door.”

  Sebille shook her head. “You always exaggerate so.”

  I glowered at her. “And you have zero compassion.”

  Shrugging, she tugged a strand of her bright red hair before tucking it behind a pointed ear. “That is unfortunately true.”

  No remorse. Which, BTW, perfectly matched her lack of compassion.

  “Did you get a read on the wave?” I asked.

  My assistant uncrossed a long, bony leg and tucked it underneath her, the other leg dangling over the edge of the bed. She wore her customary green and white striped socks and slightly pointed red shoes, making her look like the Wicked Witch of the West. Well, from the knees down, anyway. “No. But, I did get a sense it was important to Croakies.”

  Croakies was the name of my shop. Before you ask me why a magical artifact shop would be named Croakies, don’t. I couldn’t possibly tell you. That was the name of the store when I bought the place from the previous Keeper of the Artifacts. She’d been kind of scattered, seeming more interested in moving onto her next great adventure than preparing me for mine. I hadn’t gotten around to asking her where the name had come from. It had been all I could manage getting her to tell me how to flush the magical toilet in my apartment.

  I mean, jiggling the handle as I sang, Make me a Magic Muffin Mister, wasn’t just gross. It was also not at all intuitive.

  I’m just sayin’.

  Rather than trying to wrangle the information from the previous keeper, I silently promised myself that I’d change the name of the shop as soon as the paperwork was signed.

  Best laid plans and all.

  I’d tried to make the change. Multiple times. But the new sign I’d hung to replace the weather-worn wooden one bearing an ugly spotted frog and the name, Croakies, disappeared within hours and the old sign magically reappeared.

  I’d tried burning the old sign once. It resurrected itself right back onto the front of my store.

  I hadn’t even been successful changing the name on paper. No matter how many times I filed a new name with the city. The old name simply reappeared on the paperwork in its place.

  I gave up after the third try.

  Croakies it was.

  I had no idea why. But who was I to question the ways of the magical universe?

  Sebille untangled her bony limbs and stood. “Do you want me to consult the mirror?”

  I nodded. “Would you mind?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll be in the back room if you need me.”

  The “back room” of Croakies was the special area where all the magical artifacts lived. The front room was a bookstore. Though not your average bookstore. Even there, magic and supernormal reality dominated. But Croakies Books was available to everyone, which meant I got a lot of little old ladies looking for talking cat cozy mysteries and more than my share of ghost-busting wannabes.

  As a city Sprite, Sebille made liberal use of the mirrors to gain access to magical news and happenings. Her family used streams and lakes and lived in toadstool houses. Sebille would disintegrate into a puddle of pique and rage if she had to live in a toadstool. That’s why I’d dubbed her a city Sprite, though there really was no such thing. By contrast, her very large family found toadstool homes to be the height of comfort.

  Part of my odd assistant’s issue with the whole “live in the woods in a toadstool” thing was that it required she maintain her traditional size of one and a half inches tall. Sebille had discovered she enjoyed being the size of the rest of the world, which enabled her to do all the stuff that was key to her existence. Such as drinking half-caff, mocha latte grande made with steamed almond milk and coconut sugar, and hanging out at the Vape bar with perfect strangers who told her everything about their lives and then wondered why they had.

  Yeah, that was her other superpower.

  Sebille lived in a one-room apartment over the vapery across the street. She said she loved the atmosphere of the place and had even created her own vape flavor with magical herbs. I’d tried it once when she was in the testing stage and I’m pretty sure I entered a separate dimension for twenty very long minutes.

  That was the last time I was going to be vaping with Sebille.

  “Let me just wash out this mug and I’ll be right down,” I told her as she started down the steps leading to Croakies’ back room.

  Sebille flicked a hand dismissively and disappeared down the steps with thunderous steps. I’d never understand how someone whose natural state was teeny tiny with iridescent purple and green wings could be so heavy-footed.

  Then again, it could have something to do with the pointy red shoes. They hadn’t had her size in the shiny monstrosities and Sebille had been “absolutely certain” she couldn’t go on with her life if she didn’t get them. She’d bought them anyway and stuffed the toes with cotton balls.

  Thus the clomping aspect to her descent down my stairs. I’d personally witnessed the shoes taking a flyer m
ore than once. I’d even been nearly clocked on the head by one once.

  Shaking my head, I moved into the kitchen and ran water into the mug, adding some soap to the mix. Then I rinsed it out and placed it upside down in the drainer on my counter.

  My head still ached, but it was much better than it had been before the tea. I splashed cold water onto my face and squinted around for a towel, finally remembering I’d put it into the laundry the night before.

  Reaching blindly for the paper towels, I encountered an empty roll.

  In desperation, I tugged my shirt up and dragged it over my face, leaving a large wet spot on the bottom.

  Whatever.

  I headed down to the first floor, suddenly anxious to discover the source of my magical headache. The sooner we figured out which artifact needed rescuing, the sooner I could get pain-free.

  The door leading to the bookstore was at the bottom of the stairs. I stopped and peered through the glass, seeing an empty store and a Closed sign on the door. Just as Sebille had said.

  I released breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. It had been a long day and, though I loved my job at the bookstore, I was relieved that my day job wouldn’t be interfering with my night job. for once

  I locked the interior door and turned toward the large, open room behind the stairs. As usual, the light in the place flickered over the artifacts, a rainbow of colors that shifted and shuddered, depending on which artifacts held sway at the moment.

  There was a light switch I could use to disrupt the natural light of the artifacts, but I’d never used it. I’d never felt the need to disrupt the artifacts’ natural energy. I liked that they lit the space around them with an energy all their own.

  I found Sebille standing in front of an ancient, wood-framed standing mirror, hands on hips and shoulders stiff. I recognized the tiny figure who stared back at her from the age-marbled glass.

  “Don’t be such a derk!” Sebille’s mother exclaimed in a voice amplified by magic. It was very strange to see the bug-sized woman’s lips moving and to hear a voice as big as her full-sized daughter’s. “You know we must do as the magic commands.”