Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  WISTERIA WARNED

  WISTERIA WITCHES MYSTERIES - DAYBREAK BOOK 2

  Angela Pepper

  WWW.ANGELAPEPPER.COM

  Chapter 1

  ZARA RIDDLE

  WISTERIA PUBLIC LIBRARY

  MONDAY MORNING

  I set my second birthday cake next to the coffee maker in the staff room.

  I’d been the first to arrive at work that Monday morning, and the building was comfortably quiet around me. I loved the library at all times, but especially in the morning, before we opened.

  I heard keys jingling on the other side of the back door, which opened directly into the break room, then the door creaked open. My coworker, Frank Wonder, walked in slowly, his head down. The children’s librarian was in his mid-fifties, and extremely fit, with wiry arms, a svelte torso, and skinny legs. Frank dressed to be noticed, often in vintage cords and paisley shirts. His skin was naturally pale, but he tanned outdoors during the summer, often on the beach in a Speedo.

  Frank’s eyes were wide-set, small, and hooded. His face had a triangular shape due to his narrow, slightly crooked jaw. He had an odd way of talking out of the side of his mouth, but this was a trait most people didn’t notice because they were usually staring up at his hair, which he dyed bright pink.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wonderful,” I called out, using one of his many nicknames.

  He gasped and stepped backward, bumping against the closed door. “Zara! I didn’t see you hiding over there in the gloom.”

  I glanced up at the bright lights overhead. What gloom? I looked at Frank more closely. He was typically slow-moving upon arrival, before he got his fix of coffee, but that Monday he was moving less like a former Olympic gymnast and more like a sea turtle. I noticed his hooded eyes were downright wrinkly. He actually looked his age, which was not typical for Frank.

  “I brought cake,” I said, using a cheerful tone even though “I brought cake” was not a statement in need of embellishment.

  He blinked at me a couple times before smiling and saying, “Bless your heart, Zara Riddle. You are a fine woman.” His fake Southern accent that he used when he was joking around was back, so he couldn’t have been that bothered.

  “It’s Black Forest cake,” I said. “From Gingerbread House. My daughter arranged everything with Chloe, and she customized two cakes, just for me.”

  Frank dawdled over to the cake and sniffed deeply. “What’s that aroma? It’s not kirsch.”

  “It’s not kirsch,” I agreed. “Chloe made it with orange liqueur, since my enthusiasm for cherry desserts hasn’t been as strong lately.” Not since the cherry cheesecake at my early birthday party down in the DWM cafeteria. And the subsequent battle to the death.

  “Orange liqueur is nice, too,” he said. “But can you still call it Black Forest cake without the kirsch?”

  “I don’t see any pastry police around to stop us.”

  Frank rubbed his hands. “We should probably wait until coffee break to dig in.” He opened the cupboard that held the plates. He had no intention of waiting until coffee break.

  “It’s a pretty big cake,” I said. “We could always have some now, and still have plenty left for later.”

  “If you insist.” Frank’s sleepy eyes brightened.

  “Just a sliver for me.”

  “I’ll cut you a piece so thin you can see through it.” He plated two pieces and handed me a serving, along with a fork.

  “Oh, Frank. Do I need to buy you a ruler? This is hardly what I would call see-through.”

  “Oh? I can see through mine. Your eyes must be going, due to your advanced age.” He washed down a mouthful of cake with a slurp of coffee, swished his tongue over the front of his teeth, and gave me a small but bright grin. Frank’s teeth were supernaturally white, in defiance of all the coffee he consumed. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And thank you for not making me cram thirty-three candles onto this innocent cake. It’s a real fire hazard after a certain age.”

  “Wait until you get to be my age, and you need a special candle permit from City Hall,” he said. We both chuckled, then he asked, “How did your family party go yesterday? I heard some sirens. It must have been the fire department on their way to put out the flames.”

  “Ha ha.” I dug into my slice, careful to take the perfect ratio of chocolate cake and creamy white filling. “No fire, but there were a few drops of blood shed.”

  Frank grunted and nodded, as though he wasn’t listening. I expected him to ask whose blood had been shed, being the gossip hound he was, but he didn’t.

  “What’s going on with you?” I asked. “You seem distracted.”

  Frank sighed. “My sister is coming to visit.”

  That explained his distraction. Frank had only one sister, so I knew exactly who he was talking about. Bellatrix Wonder. She sounded like a colorful woman, but then again, Frank did like to embellish stories.

  “All the way from London?”

  He nodded.

  “I’d love to meet her,” I said. “Does she know about your big surprise?”

  “You mean this one?” Frank set down his plate, winked at me, and shifted into flamingo form.

  “Show-off,” I said, waving my finger at him while also taking a step back. Sometimes when Frank shifted, he reeked of anchovies, whether he’d eaten them recently or not. It was not his most endearing feature.

  Frank-Flamingo let out a loud squawk. Some shifters could speak in human voices while in animal form, but Frank didn’t have that ability.

  He pecked at the cake on his plate with his comically large beak.

  Just then, there was the sound of the back door being unlocked. Uh-oh.

  Frank-Flamingo squawked, “KA-KAAAAAA?” The stench of partially digested anchovies hung in the air.

  “Yes, it’s probably Kathy,” I said, trying not to choke on Frank’s breath.

  The head librarian wasn’t scheduled to start her shift until later in the day, yet she was about to walk in and find me sharing not-quite-Black-Forest cake with a giant pink bird that reeked of anchovies.

  I waved a hand to direct my magic, and pushed the door shut before Kathy could see us.

  “Change back,” I whisper-yelled at Frank. “Change back right now, you silly birdbrain.”

  Frank-Flamingo let out a low squawk, sounding like a kazoo.

  “I know, I know,” I said soothingly. “You can’t shift back when you’re nervous.” I waited, tapping my foot, keeping the magic pressure on the door.

  Frank-Flamingo flapped his enormous wings and flew upward. He landed on the break-room table, his claws scratching for purchase. He knocked an acoustic ceiling tile off its metal grid with the top of his head. The ceiling tile landed on the table next to him, which caused even more panicked wing flapping. He was supposed to have his full human faculties in shifted form, but he sure didn’t act like it.

  On the other side of the back door, Kathy demanded, “Whoooo is pushing on this door?”

  “Nobody is!” I called out. “I think the hinges are stiff!”

  She asked, “Should I come around to the front?” Then she immediately answered her own question. “No. I am not coming in through the front. I’ve been at this long enough to know better.”

  We all knew better. Before the library was open for the day, a librarian couldn’t be seen entering. To be spotted would lead to the front door being banged on, and a member of the public demanding to be let in at once, citing facts about whose taxes pay for whose salaries. We librarians loved the public and adored serving them, but not before coffee.

  The door rattled with force. Kathy was stronger than she looked. .

  I ran over to the door, braced it shut with my body,
and tried to calculate a way to solve the current dilemma. What came to mind first were two spells that would only make things worse, but then finally I remembered the calming spell my aunt had used on me a few times.

  I cast the spell at the pink bird. “Be calm,” I said. To my witch ears, the spell made a sound halfway between a whistle and a hum. The spell worked better if you were holding the person’s hand. However, in his current state, my coworker didn’t even have hands.

  Frank-Flamingo undulated his long neck into a complex curve. He folded his wings against his sides. He seemed less agitated, yet not calm enough to shift back to human form.

  I was hit with a sense of déjà vu.

  The same thing had happened to us once before, in that break room.

  That time, I hadn’t been as familiar with shifter magic, so I’d called the local secret agency to help. Three DWM agents had come to our rescue. Two of the agents were bird shifters. They took Frank on his first flight, and had since become his friends.

  “Should I call Rob and Knox?” I asked.

  Frank let out a long kazoo sound, then the room crackled with energy and he finally melted down into human form. He sat cross-legged on top of the table. His clothes were the same ones he’d arrived in, except his figure-hugging paisley shirt was on inside out.

  “No need to call the guys,” Frank said, uncrossing his legs and jumping down from the table. “And please don’t breathe a word to them about what happened. It’s so embarrassing.” He waved at the door. “You can let her in now.”

  “Your shirt’s inside out.”

  Frank looked down and muttered, “What’s that all about?” He unbuttoned the shirt and put it back on correctly.

  “Magic has a mind of its own,” I said.

  “She certainly does,” he agreed.

  While he retucked his shirt, I released the door for Kathy.

  The door flew open, and the head librarian appeared in the doorway like the physical embodiment of an accusation.

  Kathy Carmichael was short and sturdy, with dark skin, and brown hair that coiled in ringlets. She always dressed in shades of brown, gold, and red, like autumn leaves. She’d been the head librarian since long before I had started working there, and was forty-four, midway between my age and Frank’s. That Monday, her round, dark face was shiny from exertion and her light brown eyes were active, flitting left and right, and up and down behind her gold, wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Sorry about the door, boss,” I said. “I’ll put in a call to maintenance.”

  “I smell seafood,” Kathy said, her tone accusatory as she remained steadfast in the doorway. Her back was to the sunny outdoors and her face was in shadow. She looked a little scary to me, which was saying a lot, because I’d seen many scary things, several of which tried to kill or eat me.

  Frank and I exchanged a look, then Frank said, “Zara brought cake.”

  “I did bring cake,” I said, smiling like a ding-dong.

  “You two must take me for an idiot,” Kathy spat out.

  Frank and I exchanged another look. His eyebrows climbed so high, his eyelids pulled straight and his eyes were no longer hooded.

  What was going on? Kathy had her foul moods, but they were usually directed at the nameless miscreants who dropped “surprises” into the overnight book return.

  The head librarian stepped into the break room, moving like a simmering cauldron, and let the door slam shut behind her.

  “Honestly,” she said, in the irritated tone of someone who did not want to hear an explanation just yet. I’d never seen her so blustery.

  Frank’s wide eyes widened even more as he spotted something on the floor. A trio of pink feathers.

  “Honestly,” Kathy repeated. “Whooo could possibly tolerate being lied to, day in and day out, by her subordinates?” She blinked furiously behind her round glasses.

  “It was me,” Frank said. He took a big step forward, placing his foot on top of the three feathers.

  “It was Frank,” I agreed, hoping he had something good in mind.

  “I was playing one of my classic pranks,” he said. “That’s why they call me Franker the Pranker.”

  I shot him a look. Nobody called him that. Mr. Wonderful, yes. The Frankinator, yes. Even Pinkie. But nobody called him Franker the Pranker because, despite being true, it just wasn’t catchy.

  “This ends right now,” Kathy blustered.

  In unison, Frank and I asked, “What?”

  “I’m tired of you two going silent whenever I walk into the break room,” Kathy said. “Or worse. Changing the topic to some boring thing I know neither of you are interested in. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, nodding. “We will stop all the pranks. No more plastic spiders or fake book requests.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Kathy said.

  In unison again, Frank and I said, “It’s not?”

  Kathy shot us a dirty look that was so powerful, it actually forced her glasses to slide down her narrow, pointed nose. She grabbed the glasses mid-air without looking at them.

  “This calls for a demonstration,” Kathy said, her tone acidic.

  Frank and I started to ask what she meant, but we stopped when we saw what happened next.

  Kathy tilted her head back, let her jaw drop open, and released a snake from her mouth.

  Or at least that was how it looked.

  The snake was not a snake at all. It appeared to be her tongue.

  Kathy Carmichael, the head librarian, had a very long, prehensile tongue. The tongue snaked toward us, then lashed its way around my birthday cake, like a long bullwhip. Kathy’s mouth opened to an impossible size, then the tongue snapped like a whip. Into her mouth went an entire cake, minus two slivers, neat as can be. She didn’t drop a single chocolate curl.

  Frank and I stared at Kathy in stunned silence.

  “Now you know my secret,” Kathy said, sounding less blustery and more like the regular Kathy. “I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending I don’t know about both of yours.” She put her glasses back on and peered at me. “Zara, you are a witch, just like your aunt.”

  I said nothing. It would break witch code to confirming someone else’s powers as a package deal with mine. I wasn’t the best at the supernatural rules for discretion, but I was trying.

  Kathy walked over to where Frank stood, crouched down, and plucked one of the pink feathers from under his shoe. “And I believe this belongs to you, Mr. Wonder.” She straightened up and waved the feather under his nose. “Or should I call you Mr. Flamingo?”

  Frank said nothing while keeping a poker face. But then he sneezed from the feather tickling, and his grin gave him away.

  “You got me,” he said to the head librarian. “How long have you known?”

  “My family has known your family for a long time,” she said, which didn’t answer his question, but seemed to satisfy him anyway.

  “That’s quite the tongue,” I said. “What sort of shifter are you, if you don’t mind my asking? An anteater?”

  “Ew,” she said. “I’m not a shifter. I’m a sprite.”

  A sprite? That was not a word I’d expected to hear. I put my hands on my hips. “A sprite?” She had to be messing with us. “Are you sure you’re not something else?”

  “Such as?” She put her hands on her own hips, mirroring me.

  I had to ask. “Such as... an owl shifter?”

  “No.” Her face scrunched up in confusion. “Why would you think that?”

  “Maybe because of all the hints you’ve been dropping since the day I started working here? Owl shifter was my best guess.”

  “That was your best guess?” She smiled now, her irritation over being locked outside apparently forgotten. “You witches and your feelings. Your type puts far more stock in your hunches and whims than you do in cold, hard facts.”

  “My type?” I didn’t know if I was supposed to be offended, but I was.

  We stare
d at each other.

  This was why we hadn’t exchanged our supernatural identities before now. There were so many politics involved. Even though we were all interconnected and shared common issues, some supernaturals fixated on the differences between kinds instead of the similarities. Or they took on the prejudices of their ancestors.

  Our silent standoff was broken by a strange gurgling sound that filled the room. It sounded as unappealing as Frank’s anchovy breath smelled. It sounded like trouble coming our way. I glanced over at the break room’s sink.

  “Was that the sink?” Frank asked.

  “I hope the plumbing isn’t backing up,” I said.

  “Oh, dear,” Kathy said, patting her midsection. “That sound was me, I’m afraid.”

  “Wow,” Frank said. “How many stomachs do you have in there?”

  Kathy’s dark cheeks turned a deeper shade as she blushed. “Never mind about my insides.”

  Frank caught my eye and made a face. I looked away quickly, before he could give me the giggles.

  Kathy kept patting her midsection. The gurgling decreased to a milder sound that was almost relaxing, like a water fountain.

  “Oh, fluffernuts. I shouldn’t have eaten that whole cake,” Kathy said. “Now we’ve got a big problem on our hands.”

  “We do?” Frank took a step back, as though the head librarian might explode.

  “We do?” I echoed.

  “A huge problem.” Kathy held her fist to her mouth and let out a burp. “The cake’s all gone. What are we going to have at coffee break?”

  Chapter 2

  DINNER TIME

  “A sprite?” My sixteen-year-old daughter, Zolanda Daizy Cazzaundra Riddle, also known as Zoey, wrinkled her lightly freckled nose at me. “If a person has a freakishly long, prehensile tongue, that would lead me to believe that person is a troll.”

  “It does sound exactly like the troll descriptions in the magic books, but Kathy Carmichael informed me that there’s no such thing as trolls, therefore Kathy Carmichael, with her freakishly long, prehensile tongue, is actually a sprite.”

  Zoey squinted and slowly nodded. “I think I see where this is going. She’s a troll, but she doesn’t want to be called a troll.”