Pawsitively Swindled

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Tug.

  With her eyes still closed, she moved forward, inching toward the item giving off weak pulses of magic.

  Tug.

  She angled a little to the left, then kept moving. She followed the sensation blindly, letting her magic guide her forward like a child grasping her hand and pulling her along.

  “Careful,” Edgar chided softly.

  She cracked open an eye to find herself nose-to-wall with the shed.

  Keeping her eyes open, she rounded the back of the beige-colored shed. Her magic urged her toward its base, where the wood had begun to rot. Pushing weeds out of her way, she saw the rounded edge of something metallic sticking out from beneath a chunk of rotted wood.

  “I think I found it!” she said, grinning. She plucked the small, two-inch-wide metal tin out of its hiding place. Wiping the wet earth from its base and edges, she opened the box. Inside was a small rubber cat, one that looked very much like the ones Amber’s mother had given her and Willow when they were children. Hers was white; this one was brown.

  “One by one, let’s have some fun,” she whispered. “Two by two, let’s turn it blue.”

  The cat’s brown fur turned a navy blue for a few seconds before turning brown again.

  “Belle gave me that when I was ten or so,” she heard, and turned quickly to find Edgar standing a few feet away. She hadn’t even heard him approach, let alone get off the roof of the shed.

  “I still have mine,” she said, running a finger along the ridges of the cat’s “fur.” It still lay in the small tin.

  “Take it out,” Edgar said.

  The moment she did, a clipboard on a hook appeared before her eyes and she flinched, startled. It hung on the back of the shed, and a pen on a string dangled from the hook in the board’s clip. There was only one thing written on it.

  E. Henbane. Cache creator. April 2nd.

  He’d hidden it a week ago.

  “Every Magic Cache item has a guest log or book that appears once the item is picked up. Magic Cache is played all over the world. Some items have been in place for hundreds of years. The guest books for some end up looking like giant reference books. I tried finding some existing ones for you in town, but there aren’t any. Edgehill is a Magic Cache wasteland. Sad, really.”

  Amber grabbed the dangling pen and added her name to the second line.

  A. Blackwood. April 9th.

  When she put the cat back in the tin, the clipboard and pen vanished again. She touched the spot where it had been, her fingers meeting only wood. She slid the small tin back into its place under the rotting base of the shed.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to him. “That was fun. What next, oh wonderful magic tutor?”

  He pivoted and walked away from her. “Find the other six.”

  “Six?”

  “Like I said, your magic skills are utterly tragic,” he said, rounding the shed and disappearing from view. “We have a lot of work to do!”

  Had she really just been thinking she was “beyond grateful” to have her cousin back in her life? She took it back.

  Yet she followed after him all the same.

  Chapter 3

  After a week of playing Magic Cache with Edgar, Amber started to feel like her locator abilities were improving. Of course, every time she thought her speed was getting better, Edgar would make the object smaller or hide it in a truly obnoxious place—like inside a bird feeder hanging from branches several feet out of range without aid of a ladder.

  A new wrinkle to the game was him hiding a cache, and then calling her and saying, “It’s in place. Go!” like he was in a spy movie, before dramatically disconnecting the call. It was expected that she’d drop everything to go find whatever it was he’d hidden for her. He still wouldn’t tell her what any of this had to do with finding a hiding spot for the grimoires, but she was trying to trust his methods.

  So, when her phone rang at seven on Sunday morning, a week after she’d found her first cache item, she knew it was Edgar in spy mode again. He’d finally gotten a cell phone a couple days before, yet still insisted on calling her rather than sending a text like a normal person.

  Groaning, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, threw back her comforter and picked up her cell. “Do you always have to do this so early?” she asked by way of greeting. “Are you just constantly trying to get out of our Sunday breakfasts?”

  “When I called you during work hours, you pitched a fit,” he said.

  “Not everyone has the luxury of working from home like you do,” she said.

  “You live in your workplace,” he said. “So it’s basically the same thing.”

  She pulled the phone away from her ear so she could glare at it. It didn’t have the same effect as glaring at his smug face. When she put the phone back to her ear, she said, “So you’ve hidden another one?”

  “Yep!” he said. “If you find this one, we can move on to phase two.”

  “What the heck is phase two?” she asked, stifling a yawn.

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” he said. “Hopefully the Bowen sisters are helping you out this morning, because this one is a doozy. It might take you all day. Use the entire map of Edgehill this time.” Then, as usual, he dramatically disconnected the call.

  She tossed the phone onto her bed and flopped onto her back. Tom Cat immediately draped his body across her stomach. Ignoring Amber and Tom both, Alley was curled up on the bench seat.

  The same bench seat Amber’s parents’ cloaked grimoires were hidden beneath.

  She’d only had the books hidden in her studio apartment for about a month. At first, it had been a comfort to have them nearby. Somehow it felt as if her parents were there watching over her. The books had been spelled so that, for now, only Amber or Willow were allowed to open them. Even with safeguards in place, the longer the books were there, the more she worried the cloaking spells she and Edgar had put on them wouldn’t last. She was convinced they were leaking small quantities of magic, just like the cache items, and it was only a matter of time before a Penhallow highly skilled in locator spells would be able to trace the magic back to Edgehill. The thought of Penhallows taking her parents’ books from her because she wasn’t strong enough to protect them made her stomach lurch.

  Only one person could make her feel better. She eased Tom off her, then sat up, her bare feet on the floor, and grabbed her cell off her comforter.

  Even though Amber herself was not terribly fond of mornings, her sister was. Willow likely had already been up for a while, had gone for a run, and was now eating breakfast before she headed off to her job at an advertising firm where she was one of the art designers.

  Willow answered on the second ring, clearly chewing as she said, “Not only are you finally calling me back, but you’re doing so at the crack of dawn?”

  Tom inched forward so he could awkwardly rest his head on Amber’s thigh, then closed his eyes. Amber idly ran a finger back and forth between his ears until he was purring up a storm. “Good morning to you, too.”

  Willow swallowed whatever she’d been eating. “What’s going on with you? Aunt G is getting really worried. Neither one of us has heard much from you in almost two weeks. I swear Aunt G is thinking about coming down there to check on you.”

  Without preamble, Amber said, “Jack’s memories came back.”

  Willow didn’t say anything right away, but Amber could perfectly picture her sister’s wide brown eyes and hung-open mouth. “Uh … how?”

  “He was in the running for Best of Edgehill—he lost both categories, by the way—”

  “Aw, nuts,” Willow said.

  “—and I was getting some information from him on his submissions and taking a few pictures. Our hands touched and … zap.”

  A short burst of Willow’s tinkling laughter came through the phone, but it was more disbelieving than amused. “Oh, that sneaky witch!”

  “What?”

  Willow huffed out a breath. Amber could picture her sis
ter now with pursed lips. “She only used a temporary memory erase spell. They’re easier than the real deal, since any magic used on the mind is tricky, like a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. She must have done something so that touch would trigger the spell to dissolve.”

  Amber clenched her jaw. Her gut had already told her this was likely the case but hearing it made her even more upset with her aunt. “She could have warned me.”

  “She was trying to be helpful, I’m sure,” Willow said, tone softer now. “You know Aunt G isn’t good at the mushy feeling stuff. She’s practical to a fault. She probably thought, ‘I’ll just do this temporarily so they can try this again when they aren’t so worked up.’”

  That very much sounded like her aunt, but Amber still didn’t like it. She’d barely gotten used to Jack looking at her like an intriguing stranger, and now Amber had to deal with him knowing all over again that she was a witch. She didn’t want to worry about this on top of everything else.

  Amber couldn’t remember why she’d called her sister now; hearing Willow’s light, sweet voice hadn’t been the balm to her exhaustion that she’d hoped it would be. “I have to go, Will.”

  She disconnected the call and then flopped onto her back. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alley fastidiously grooming the spaces between her toes on a back foot. She still lay on the bench seat.

  The grimoires. Must keep them safe. At the moment, her only solid idea on how to keep them safe was to follow Edgar’s lead.

  Which was why—even if she didn’t understand it—she would keep playing Magic Cache.

  At seven a.m.

  Because her cousin was a monster.

  After getting ready in fifteen minutes flat, she pulled open the drawer on her coffee table that held her small collection of maps and took them out. The hand-drawn one of Edgar’s property was on top—the only one she’d been using all week—and she reluctantly slipped it back into the drawer, revealing the Edgehill one below it.

  She wasn’t sure if she felt pride that Edgar thought she was ready to move beyond his property, or irritation that he was advancing her too soon.

  His voice echoed in her head. “You do know that Magic Cache is something children play, right?”

  Grumbling, she unfolded the map and spread it out on her coffee table. She actively refused to acknowledge the state of her dining room table, which was stacked so high with her toy-making supplies that the mere sight of the chaos made her palms sweat. The Here and Meow was a little over a month away now, and the amount of pending orders was so daunting that, in between dreams last night of being choked by Kieran Penhallow, she’d had another where she’d been attacked by a giant plastic panther. Willow was due to come visit soon to help. Until then, Amber would pretend none of it existed.

  Part of the difficulty of Magic Cache was that when she usually did a locator spell, she had an idea of what she was looking for. When she needed to find her phone, she pictured it in her mind. When she tried to find Chloe Deidrick, she held onto one of Chloe’s lipstick tubes—an object that still held some of her energy—and relived a memory she’d shared with the girl.

  As Amber stared at the map now, she didn’t have the faintest clue how to approach finding Edgar’s hidden item. When she knew it was on his property, she could stand in his yard, ask her magic to find the object, and she merely waited. It was an extremely passive form of magic.

  Now, she realized, with all of Edgehill as the hiding place, she couldn’t approach this the same way. It was too much ground to cover. It also felt like cheating to pick up the baseball cap Edgar had forgotten in her apartment and use that as a jumping-off point. She’d then be using her magic to locate Edgar’s. It wasn’t his magic she sought; it was the object he’d hidden.

  What she needed to find was the anomaly in the ambient magic. She needed to locate the tiny blip that rose above the one percent baseline.

  Which meant crafting a spell and then scrying for the anomaly. That would get her close enough to the area in question so that she’d then be able to use a locator spell on the narrowed-down location. Scrying, unfortunately, would be like searching for an invisible needle in an invisible haystack.

  No wonder he’d said it would take all day.

  But Lily and Daisy Bowen were scheduled to run the store for her today, so Amber set to work writing a spell.

  Her first attempt—one for finding small spikes in magic—was so vague and general that when she conducted it, nearly sixty small black dots popped up on her map. All the dots were located in parks, near streams, and, strangely, around a spot where she knew an old home was being renovated. She had a sneaking suspicion that the spike in energy there was due to ghosts—as there was often an uptick in spiritual activity when a ghost’s former home was being altered in some way—and she absolutely wasn’t going near there if she could help it.

  It would be just like Edgar, though, to hide an object for her in a haunted house.

  The spell had taken her half an hour to write, and then another half hour to perfect a reversal spell that removed all the dots from her map so she could start over.

  Attempt two had resulted, somehow, in all the street names on the map vanishing.

  Spell five worked, she knew, because every inked line on the map—from the sketches of trees, to the words labeling town monuments—had glowed a faint gold. No dots popped up on the map, though. No thick black X marking the spot.

  Pulling out her scrying materials, she held her magic-strengthening amethyst crystal firmly in one hand. When she asked her magic for some guidance, her free hand was almost immediately jerked to the right until it landed in an area near the Edgehill Coroner’s office. Her stomach twisted. The last time she’d been there had been the day she’d used a memory retrieval spell on Melanie’s body. She could almost still feel the cold, hard skin of her best friend’s hand in hers. She shivered.

  After conducting the ritual three more times, she had the same result: her fist landing on the north end of town. No specific location, because of course it wouldn’t be that easy.

  After feeding Tom and Alley breakfast, Amber stuffed the map into her purse, put on a pair of sturdy tennis shoes—because goodness knew what terrain Edgar had chosen for her today—and hurried down the steps.

  She had narrowed the cache’s location to a ten-block radius. As she drove—radio off and window down, letting in the cool mid-spring air—she asked her magic for help. She’d slowly creep around a corner, ask her magic to find the cache item, and then wait for that telltale tug forward. When it didn’t come, she’d go up the next street and then down another.

  It wasn’t until she reached the intersection of Mew Way and Sphynx Road, idling at a stop sign with the coroner’s office to her right, that she felt it.

  Forward, it said.

  She glared straight ahead. He wouldn’t dare, would he? This would be even worse than a haunted house.

  Tug.

  Sphynx, after two blocks, tuned into Buttercup Road. Lips pursed, she rolled through the intersection. There was still time for the item to materialize before those two blocks. It had to. Edgar wouldn’t do this to her. The item had to be close.

  She passed the Edge of Glen Pizza Parlor on her left and a few houses on her right. Then she crossed through Camellia Way. Still, her magic gently urged her forward.

  One more block for her magic to tug her left or right.

  I’m going to wring your neck, Edgar. Don’t make me go any farther.

  More houses. And then she crossed Gardenia Street, and Sphynx turned into Buttercup. Street signs suddenly weren’t topped by metallic cats; sign faces had intricately painted flowers in their corners. The farther she went, the more she saw people’s front doors hung with wreaths made of peonies, lilies, and carnations. White picket fences were laden with roses.

  Yet her magic tugged her forward once more.

  She could no longer deny it. Her cousin had hidden the cache item—she shuddered—in Marbleglen.

 
; Aside from the joint committee meeting last week, Amber hadn’t actually been in Marbleglen in a few years. There were easier, more direct routes to both Salem and Portland from Edgehill that didn’t involve driving through the flower-obsessed town. She did her best to keep her eyes focused forward, with her magic honed in on the cache item, and not the increasingly distracting riot of color all around her.

  Spring was upon them, to be sure, but spring in Edgehill in comparison to spring in Marbleglen was no contest. Nearly every house here had a lawn full of flowers, with bees and butterflies flitting about in the late morning sun. Two blocks later, she came across a park on her left, a wide-open space of bright green grass ringed in leafy trees. Someone threw a ball for his dog, who tore across the middle of the massive park with such speed, little clumps of grass were torn up by its paws. A pair of women ran side by side pushing strollers along the wide sidewalk. A man sat on a bench facing the park, reading a book.

  Picturesque, peaceful, very clean, and full of color and life.

  Amber wrinkled her nose. This place was horrible.

  The tug near her abdomen urged her to turn left. She followed her magic and slowly cruised down streets of this residential area, with blooming gardens and well-tended lawns. The longer she drove, the more she saw signs for “Sorrel Garden.” After ten minutes—part of which involved driving past “Parking Lot D” several times before she realized this was where her magic wanted her to go—she pulled into the garden’s lot. There were at least fifty spots, a third of which were occupied.

  The parking spots were to the right of the garden’s entrance, and ahead of her, a row of Italian blue cypress trees stretched as far as she could see, running along the front of the parking lot and beyond. The thin evergreen trees stretched at least forty feet into the air, while their bases were no more than five feet wide. They grew so close together that Amber couldn’t see anything on the other side. The only break in the trees came from the cement path that had a metal archway positioned above it. The fence of trees started up again on the other side of the garden’s entrance.