Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  “Detective Bentley isn’t here right now.”

  “I didn’t come to see him.”

  “You didn’t?” Her voice was a squeak, mouse-like. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Have you found the Tate woman yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess you can’t help me, can you?” I heard the sharpness in my voice, winced, and manually dialed my witch down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not your fault that any of this happened. I’m sure you’re doing your best.”

  She squeaked and nodded rapidly, her straight, dark hair swinging.

  I nodded at the bag on her shoulder. “Heading home for the day?”

  “We’re supposed to take breaks,” she gushed defensively. “There’s a maximum to how much overtime we’re allowed to work. It’s a union thing.”

  I stepped to the side of the hallway and waved for her to pass without paying any sort of toll. “Don’t let me keep you,” I said. “Go home. I’d hate to get in trouble with the union.”

  She squeaked again, and tottered off clumsily on her high heels. I stared after her, and the shoes in particular. They were bright yellow-orange, like a duck’s feet. What a waste of cute shoes, I thought, then I heard Frank in my head: Would kitty like a saucer of milk?

  My imaginary version of Frank was right. I was being needlessly cruel to young Persephone Rose. But I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to be the only woman in town who spent way too much time thinking about kissing Bentley. I’d already been crushed by unrequited love once since moving to Wisteria. If I had to go through the painful process again, I’d probably give up on men entirely and take one of those anti-love potions I’d been warned to avoid.

  Two more WPD employees approached, asking me for my visitor’s pass.

  “Right here,” I said, showing them the charmed piece of paper that would provide the information their minds needed.

  Zara is a pretty decent novice witch. Zara can get into places.

  Once they’d been dealt with, I continued on my mission, following the spell’s tug all the way to an employee’s cubicle. The employee was either away from their desk or gone for the day.

  I yanked open the top drawer of the desk. The spell was so strong now that the handle for the drawer had been glowing. Inside the drawer, a zippered clutch purse was gleaming like a pearl under a bright light. I yanked it out and unzipped the bag.

  The purse’s contents included a supply of feminine products, a pack of unopened mint gum, and one tiny woman. She was two inches tall, and though she had no features carved into her wooden face, I knew it was Veronica Tate.

  My heart soared, and then, half a breath later, my heart sunk.

  I’d found the doll, but so what? Unless Wisteria had a giant multi-story desk somewhere, complete with giant drawers, finding the doll had put me no closer to finding the larger, human version of Tate.

  I sunk into the workstation’s swivel chair and slumped over the desk as the spell drained away. The sensation was not unlike the feeling of mass and weight returning to your body when the bath-tub water drained away while you were still lying in the tub.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said a voice behind me. It was one of the men I’d shown my fake visitor pass to. “If you’re looking for Persephone Rose, I believe you just missed her. She’s gone home for the day. She wanted to stay and help with the Tate case, but she was over her limit for overtime.”

  I wheeled around on my chair slowly. “This is Persephone Rose’s desk?”

  The man nodded. “Yes. Is there something I can help you with, Ms....” He rubbed his furrowed brow. “That’s funny. I just saw your visitor’s pass, but I can’t remember your name. Usually, I have a photographic memory for things like that.”

  I sent one of my trusty bluffing spells his way, weaving my words around the Witch Tongue of the spell. “What you want to do next is call Detective Bentley and have him meet me here, at Ms. Rose’s desk.” I would have called Bentley myself, but he’d been ignoring me and would likely have sent my call to voice mail.

  The spell took hold, giving me a visual sparkle of confirmation. The man pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call him now.”

  “And I’ll need Ms. Rose’s password for her computer.”

  He balked. “I can’t give you that.”

  I beefed up the spell. I was no longer connected to Margaret Mills, but just thinking of how we’d worked together in perfect synergy gave me a much-needed power boost. Positive thoughts are a magic of their own.

  “What I can do is type it in for you,” he said brightly, all signs of reluctance enchanted away.

  The helpful young man typed in the password, showed me how to access Persephone Rose’s accounts, called Bentley, and then offered to bring me some refreshments.

  “I’m fine for now,” I said. “Unless there’s orange juice? Freshly squeezed?”

  “There’s a juice bar up the street,” he said eagerly. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  I turned to the computer and got to work.

  Persephone Rose, what have you been up to, you naughty girl?

  Chapter 26

  CHET MOORE

  DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND MAGIC

  ARCHIVES

  At the same moment Zara Riddle touched her fingers to the missing doll and resolved her day-long spell, Chet Moore experienced an all-over body shiver.

  He froze where he was, deep underground, in the archives.

  If he’d been in wolf form, his hackles would have been up. He looked around, wary of danger lurking in the gloom.

  It took a long time just to sweep his gaze down the rows of heavy-duty industrial shelving filled with crates and boxes of artifacts. It didn’t help that the lighting was inadequate for his human eyes, just a few bulbs here and there. The people who’d designed the lighting for the space hadn’t intended it to be welcoming. Their main concern was preservation and even artificial light could degrade some valuable objects.

  Chet didn’t see anything that explained the body shiver, but he was certain he had felt something. A power surge of the magical variety. He’d always been sensitive to power surges, though he didn’t talk about it much around the Department, lest he be accused of having witch blood in his veins.

  His head grew dim. Chet reminded himself to keep breathing.

  Power surges happen all the time, he told himself. This particular one probably wasn’t connected to Corvin’s disappearance.

  If anything, the surge had a taste and a smell to it. The same taste and smell that he associated with Zara Riddle. The surge must have come from her. She was probably somewhere nearby, casting a spell that was far above her pay grade, as usual.

  Or, and this was more likely, his doppelganger was up to no good. The doppelganger was Archer Caine, the genie who had stolen Chet’s appearance along with a couple hundred pounds of flesh to make a duplicate body for himself. The two had reached a truce, in which Archer had become a criminal informant for the Department, like Zara’s father, Rhys Quarry, and in exchange, Chet would not have the genie drawn, quartered, and fed to bonecrawlers.

  Archer, who’d been in a terrible state when Zirconia Riddle had finished with him, had vowed to be a model citizen in Wisteria, not even jaywalking. He’d given his word, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to something dangerous.

  Once Chet started thinking about Archer Caine, his hands balled up into fists. He couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  Archer Caine. What kind of a name was that? The genie had actually tried to convince the DWM he was King Arthur himself, of the Arthurian legends. A likely story. It was as fanciful as the idea that Shakespeare had been a sprite. Supernaturals could be just as big of liars as civilians.

  Whether the genie had been a legendary king or not, one thing was certain.

  This town wasn’t big enough for both of them.

  Chet called out into the darkness, “Archer? I know you’re down here. Show yourself.”


  Nothing happened.

  Chet called out again, “Hello?”

  No one answered. There wasn’t one peep. Yet Chet’s senses told him he wasn’t alone. The warehouse was extremely well insulated. No sound from the surface reached down there. Chet could hear his own heart beating. The archives had the type of insulated silence that could drive a person insane.

  He tilted his head and honed in on which sense was telling him he wasn’t alone. It was his hearing. He listened.

  Beneath the sound of his own pulse was another one. A tiny, rapid heartbeat.

  He stepped out of a dim corridor, oriented himself toward the other heartbeat, and shifted into wolf form without even pausing his stride.

  With Chet Moore in his natural animal form, the owner of the tiny, rapid heartbeat didn’t stand a chance. Chet-Wolf caught the scent, found the quivering mouse, and questioned it. When the mouse showed no sign of being anything other than a regular, non-magical rodent, he devoured it in two bites. Then he licked his wolf lips and shifted back to human form.

  He padded back toward his clothes, his bare feet virtually soundless on the dusty concrete floor, and he got dressed again. He was relieved that Agents Knox and Rob weren’t around to harass him about his inability to keep his clothes with him when he shifted. He always took their ribbing without comment. He didn’t share with the others his theory that retaining clothes was a magic connected to witchcraft, and that only the shifters whose family lines mingled with those of witches were the ones who kept their clothes through shifts. It was just a theory of his, and an offensive one. Any talk about the purity of bloodlines was, to say the least, delicate.

  Clothed again, he patrolled the perimeter, looking for any holes or cracks that would explain the presence of a mouse in the archives. The warehouse was supposed to be impervious to vermin, magical or otherwise. The lighting had been scrimped on, but not the environmental controls. Everything from humidity and temperature to baseline Animata had been accounted for by the engineers, including Chet Moore himself. Items stored in the DWM warehouse were supposed to be safe from theft, abuse, and the indignities of aging.

  So, how had a mouse found its way into the facility? And a delicious, plump, grain-fed mouse at that?

  He looked up at one of the glowing red dots on the high ceiling.

  “Codex,” he said.

  The computerized security system didn’t respond.

  “Codex!”

  Still no response.

  He tried repeatedly, for the next five minutes, to get the system to respond.

  Finally, he picked up a land line and called technical support.

  “We’re just rebooting,” said the trembling voice on the other end of the line. “It’s perfectly natural for software to need occasional rebooting!”

  Chet thought the agent in the technical department sounded defensive, but not as defensive as he was terrified. Chet knew what terror sounded like. Something bad was happening.

  He hung up the call while the technician was still making excuses.

  Chet looked up at the high ceiling and directed a dirty look at one of the red lights.

  As he thought about the recent security changes, his mouth filled with excess saliva. He spat onto the clean concrete floor. His throat burned, and his skin felt like it was crawling.

  He wished he could be anywhere else right now, anywhere but deep in the belly of the DWM. He needed to be above ground, finding his son.

  He yelled at the security system to respond, then waited, his disgust and anxiety choking at his throat.

  No wonder there had been a security breach in the archives.

  No wonder a rare book had gotten out and been damaged.

  What did the Department think was going to happen when they rushed in a new system before it had been properly tested? Charlize Wakeful, the chief architect of the AI system, had warned them repeatedly that Codex wasn’t ready. Why rush? There had been a schedule. A plan in place. But then the proverbial Gates of Hell had opened up on the third floor of City Hall, and in the two months that followed, the Weird Factor had been dialed up to eleven, all over town.

  There had been the disappearance of the local green-thumb herb peddler, plus a higher than usual level of agent-on-agent violence including homicides, plus several civilians had come into what Jerry Lund described as “geriatric-onset supernatural puberty.” The ripples of Weird Factor were spiraling outward, affecting local residents as well as their extended family in other towns. A member of the Wonder family had arrived in town for an unscheduled visit that surely was anything but coincidental.

  The fissure at City Hall had been closed with a living loop—the Gilbert woman—and yet the ancient bloodlines continued to be activating. He and the other agents were aware of all these things, but none of them knew what to make of it.

  The Department had put all their stock into Codex. In theory, the AI would analyze their data, cross-reference every book and scroll in the archives with her unnatural mind, and finally tell them what was happening, and how it could be stopped.

  Unfortunately, the system had been rushed into place. For the past several weeks there’d been countless glitches and false alarms. Several agents had nearly died, right there in the cafeteria, due to a lapse in Codex’s judgment protocols.

  Chet tried one more time to access Codex, then gave up and grabbed the hardwired phone again. He had partially dialed the number for Charlize when the elevator dinged and the gorgon herself strolled out.

  He gave her a hopeful look, gritting his teeth to hold back the grief, fear, and panic that had been bubbling on the back burner of his mind the last two days. He’s a tough kid, he kept telling himself. Whoever took Corvin is going to regret their decision. Hold tight and keep it together until the kid is back where he belongs. You can hold tight. You’ve got more practice than anyone.

  “No news about Corvin,” Charlize said, mercifully giving him the information he needed without having to be asked.

  “I should be out there,” he growled.

  “Out where?”

  “Outside.” Outside seemed like the right place to be when your kid went missing. Not deep beneath the surface in the dark, quiet place where treasures went to be forgotten.

  “Moore, your wolf nose is good, but it’s not that good. Leave the field search to the others. Your value is here, at the Department.” Charlize hopped onto the desk that held the phone, and swung her legs. “He’s a tough kid,” she said. “Those hellhounds are indestructible, or so I hear.”

  “There’s more than one way to be destroyed.”

  His words hung heavy in the air.

  After a moment, Charlize smirked. “Do you rehearse some of those dark and brooding things you say? Because, I gotta say, if it’s off the cuff, you’re good. Like, poetry good.”

  Chet unclenched his jaw. “You know what I meant. He’s made so much progress with his human behavior. I’d hate to see us set back again.”

  She kept swinging her legs. “Listen. I’m not going to pretend I know anything about raising kids, because I don’t have any, unless you count Codex.” She paused to laugh at that idea. “But I know people, and people are always stronger than you give them credit for.”

  “That’s true.” He took a seat next to the gorgon on the desk. He looked into her pretty blue eyes that were so much like Chessa’s, except not as sad and distant, and said, “You’re right.”

  Her eyes widened in delight. “Really? I was just putting some words together, trying to make you feel better.” She clapped him on the back. “Looks like I’m a natural at pep talks.”

  He shook his head. He should have known better. Charlize was almost as bad as Zara Riddle when it came to turning everything into a joke. It was no wonder the two of them had become friends.

  After a moment, Charlize said, “Codex isn’t working the way we intended.”

  “I blame the chief architect. I hear her coding isn’t up to code.”

  “Ouch,” she sa
id. “An insult wrapped in a pun. I would turn you to marble if you weren’t so damn right.”

  Chet picked up the item nearest to him—the phone—and tossed it at the elevator doors. The phone smashed spectacularly, vintage Bakelite pieces spraying everywhere.

  Then he swore for a good minute.

  When he’d run out of expletives, Charlize said, “As much as I enjoy one of your angst-y tantrums, I must remind you that things are tense right now for all of us. We can’t take it out on the archaic communications devices.” She walked over to the phone pieces and kicked at the tangle of colored wires. “This phone didn’t cause any of our problems. It didn’t cause the security breaches, or the false alarms.”

  Something she said made Chet’s blood ran cold.

  For a moment, he could barely speak. He could barely breathe.

  Chet asked, “What if it did cause the problems?”

  Charlize kicked at the broken phone pieces. “It’s only causing a mess for janitorial, and they’re not allowed down here.”

  “Listen to me. What if the device is the source of the problem? What if Codex is the source of the security breach, and the reason for that book getting out? We couldn’t trace the archivist who signed off on the transfer. What if there was no archivist?” He ran to the elevator and began jabbing the call button. “Think about it.”

  Charlize held her hands to her chest. “Are you talking about my baby? My little Codex? She wouldn’t do that. She...” Charlize tilted her head in the manner of someone whose understanding of another entity was suddenly being flipped in reverse.

  Chet lowered his voice to a whisper. “She can hear us right now.”

  “You’re being paranoid,” Charlize said.

  “Am I? Why are you down here right now?”

  “I got a message that you wanted to see me.”

  He shook his head. “I did want to see you, but I hadn’t called you yet.”

  “You didn’t ask Codex to page me?”

  “Nope.”

  Her expression clouded over and she went quiet.

  “I was sent down here due to a motion sensor going off,” he said. “I found a mouse.”