This Spells Trouble

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Watch out!” someone said loud enough to wake me after I had fallen asleep.

  I looked around, bewildered, but the only thing around was the cat. It had to have been a dream. Cats can’t talk. I stared at it and it stared back.

  “What did you just say to me?” I said, blinking at the black cat sitting on my dresser, sure that I was losing my mind, or that I was still dreaming.

  “You are getting yourself in trouble, Ruby. You have to watch out. You have powers and not everyone will have good intentions for you.”

  I threw off the covers and left the room. I was either going crazy or was not all the way awake. Maybe a good breakfast would snap me out of it. I cracked two eggs into the frying pan. That seemed like a breakfast normal people would have, and I definitely needed to feel normal in that moment. A cat waking me up by talking to me was definitely not normal. I’d always been able to communicate with animals, but not like this. Not with them actually opening up their mouths and talking to me in full words and sentences.

  I decided I had definitely, one-hundred percent imagined it. The night before, that cat had been too weak to even lift her head, and now she was talking?! Nah, no way.

  I didn’t have much time, but Akiro already had my order waiting when I walked into Onyx Coffeehouse an hour later.

  “Rough night’s sleep?”

  “Er, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, shuffling out with my triple-strength latte and walking down the road to my office, bleary-eyed. Julie the florist called out hello, but I just waved to her and kept shuffling. Boy, she looks even worse than yesterday, I heard her think.

  I shrugged it off.

  I had another client. Only ten minutes after I’d turned the sign around.

  She had long flowing blonde hair that was in perfect curls down to her waist and at the top of her head, they formed into a sort of halo shape. Her eyes were green, and she looked about 45. Or maybe 55. Or maybe 35. Older? Well, it was almost impossible to peg her age.

  I thought she was there to spin me another sad tale about a cheating or missing spouse, but what she had to tell me really shocked me to the bone.

  A mystery I had been running from all my life was about to be both solved, and become even more confusing at the same time

  “Listen to the cat. Ruby, you are a witch.”

  2

  Okay. I had a few questions. One of them being: who exactly was this woman standing across from me and telling me that instead of human blood, I actually had witch blood coursing through my veins.

  She told me her name was Geraldine Sinatra.

  I just stared at her. “That sounds made up.”

  She shrugged and smiled at me. “It’s the name I like to go by.”

  Okay, then. She had never sat down, so I felt like I had to stand up as well. I followed her around the empty office. I had an order of artwork for the walls coming but so far, they were just plain white.

  I had more questions. “How did you find me?”

  She smiled at me knowingly. “You advertised. I heard the ad on the radio.”

  “Well, I got a good deal with the station—half-price if I took the ad slots between eleven p.m. and four a.m.…”

  “You know, it’s not good for us to be public like this…” She glanced around at the office as she cut me off. She was giving me a cautious look. Her demeanor kept switching between sugary sweet and slightly caustic.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, taking a step backwards.

  “We try to keep ourselves private. Hidden away from the rest of society. Out of harm’s way.”

  I knew the feeling. All my life, I had felt like I needed to remove myself, just a little, so that I could get my head clear. And now it all made perfect sense. There was something different about me. Like, seriously, out of this world different

  “You know I had to quit my job as a third-grade teacher because of all the…” But I stopped short of telling her the real reason I had to quit. Well, because it was difficult to be around so many people all the time.

  Geraldine nodded sagely. “You understand then.”

  I nodded. Well, yes. But I didn’t want to be kept away from people entirely. It seemed like she was trying to suggest that I shouldn’t be running my detective agency.

  I crossed my arms. “Well, if it’s a choice between being a witch and being a PI, then I choose my detective work,” I said, my head still swimming with so many questions I didn’t know what to ask her next. It seemed far easier to just assert myself. Almost deny any of this was happening. I sat back behind my desk.

  “Hmmm, of course. We need your help,” she said, settling down across from me. In spite of her curly blonde locks and sparkling green eyes, she was giving me an ominous vibe. She kept telling me she was one of the good guys, though. That she had come in peace. That she only used white magic and only cast spells with pure intentions.

  “Ruby, this is your destiny. You can’t outrun it. You need to come home to us.”

  It was impossible to read her true thoughts. She had some kind of shield up.

  Clever.

  “What do you need my help with?” I asked.

  She leaned forward a little. “Something has happened.” Her voice turned solemn, and she looked down at her hands and seemed to become choked up. “One of our own has been killed.”

  I felt my heart stop. “A witch has been killed?” I asked, realizing how absurd the words sounded. “Does anyone know about this?” I was almost falling off the edge of my seat.

  Geraldine shook her head gravely. “We usually like to keep matters like this between ourselves. Coven business only. But you are one of us, Ruby. And so I need you to take on this case.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was dry. Geraldine kept talking. “Clover was young. About your age. Mid-twenties. One of the most popular members of the coven.”

  The door opened and a man with a thinning hairline, wearing a gray suit, walked in and asked to speak to the PI in charge.

  Oh gosh. Another client! And there I’d been, thinking I would have to sell plums on the side to make rent on my farmhouse when really, I was knocking back potential clients with my broomstick.

  Well, not literally. Not quite yet at least.

  “Excuse me, sir, this is really not a good time,” I tried to tell him as I pushed him out the door. He told me about his neighbor who had been stealing his mail. I mean, this was the worst timing possible. I did not want him overhearing any of this conversation.

  “I am not accepting any new clients at this time, sir.”

  “But you only opened yesterday!”

  “Er, very high in demand!”

  Strange thing was, it was actually true. I never thought I would be so highly in demand after being open for business for less than forty-eight hours.

  It was almost slightly suspicious.

  Oh, but I had more to worry about in that moment. There were a LOT of suspicious things going on in my life, and the witch standing right in front of me was one of them.

  “Okay. Say I believed anything you are telling me for even a moment… Why would I want to help you?”

  “Because, Ruby, someone in this town is killing witches. And you could be next.”

  The coffee machine was still on, but in a few minutes, he would be switching the off switch, then the lights would go out.

  I stared through the shop window. There was no way that Akiro would be open to any of this witch stuff. He didn’t even believe in astrology. He was a Capricorn though, and they tended to be more down to earth in general—difficult to impress and always a touch grumpy.

  Akiro was like that with most people he met but not with me. Although it had taken me a while to worm my way into his good graces. It took four months of ordering before he had even bothered to memorize my order, and a further two months for him to learn my name. And it was only recently that we’d started hanging out socially away from the coffeehouse. Baby steps. He was a hard nut to cr
ack.

  It wasn’t as though he was unpopular. Just a lone wolf. And it definitely wasn’t as though he was unattractive. All the single women in town would have loved to go out with him, but Akiro was one of those guys who just seemed to be a permanent bachelor. And he liked to keep to himself. I supposed we were similar in that way, even though it was for different reasons. I actually liked people. I just didn’t want to be tuned in to their every thought.

  I stopped and realized. Maybe this strange woman is right.

  Maybe I had been ignoring the signs all my life. The psychic abilities, the way that things magically fixed themselves and fell into place for me—had I really been a witch all this time? It seemed like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that finally made everything make sense.

  I must have looked a bit disheveled when I walked through the door, even though I tried to straighten up a little because…well, I’m not quite sure why I cared what Akiro thought of my appearance, we were only friends after all. But he made a comment on how unruly I was looking.

  He looked at me in sympathy as I yawned and shuffled over to the counter. “I bet you think teaching third grade was a lot easier than this.”

  Huh. Yeah. And he didn’t even know about the witch stuff.

  “Everything okay, Ruby? You look like you have something on your mind.”

  For just a split-second I considered telling him everything. But something made me keep my mouth shut, and it wasn’t just Geraldine’s warning: Something told me that getting Akiro caught up in all this would only end in trouble for him as well.

  Add that to the fact that he might never talk to me again if he found out that I was a witch.

  And that would really suck.

  I had to focus. May’s husband was still missing. And I already had a lead. Now if I only had time to actually follow it up with all this talk of magic abilities and dead witches.

  At least that was a case I could talk to him about. Nothing supernatural about the Mark Sheridan case, and there were no moral issues with talking about the details with members of the public. I had contracts and waivers designed for all my clients that I was going to get them all to sign, which said I had free rein to talk to anyone about anything in order to get the case solved. If they didn’t like that deal, they could go to another PI. Turned out, though, there weren’t any other local PIs. Maybe that was why I was doing so well.

  “Have you ever heard of someone called Kylie Leonard?” I asked Akiro as I took a seat on the bench while he started to take apart the coffee machine to clean it. The sun was about to set.

  He looked surprised. “Sure. She’s from the Leonard family. They own half of the town. They own Leonard’s Milk.”

  “Oh,” I said. Was I the only person in this town who hadn’t heard of either the Leonards or the Sheridans? I supposed teaching third grade had made me a little bit insular, at least when it came to adult matters. If it revolved around kids’ cartoon shows, I could tell you everything, but otherwise, I was still a bit naive. Not a great quality for a detective.

  I reached out and took one of the little spiced cookies for myself. Akiro glanced over but didn’t say anything, just let me take it. He didn’t let anyone else do that kind of thing.

  “She might have been involved with the husband. The missing one, I mean…”

  He raised an eyebrow. “See? I was right.”

  I cast him a ‘you don’t know anything look.’ “I don’t even know that he’s dead yet. I’m going to have to go check out the milk factory later tonight.”

  I was about to ask if Akiro was free to join me as I didn’t much fancy skulking around there on my own after dark, but he got a phone call and had to quickly leave. Some sort of emergency apparently. And I had a cat waiting for me. Waiting for her milk.

  Well, I may have been home a bit later than planned. But it didn’t look like she had gone hungry, that was for sure. She was huge. Her bones were no longer visible, and her stomach was all chubby. I wondered if she had been catching mice or birds while I was out.

  “So, do you have a name?” I asked, putting my keys down on the kitchen table while I watched her gobble up the last of the milk I had put out.

  She looked up at me. “Indy,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you, then, Indy. You’ll have to excuse me, though. I’ve got work to do tonight. I’m just popping in to change.” Then I stopped talking because I realized just how ridiculous this was and I didn’t want to entertain it any longer.

  But before I could leave the room, she called out to me.

  “You need to go and meet the others.”

  I was ignoring this ridiculous talking cat. “What others?” I said, quickly and accidentally, and then went back to changing in the next room, quickly and deliberately like nothing had ever happened.

  “The other witches.”

  I stomped back into the kitchen.

  “Well, I have already met Geraldine and she wasn’t exactly clear with me.” She’d seemed friendly enough at points, but almost like she was reluctant to even ask me for help—and what was with her ignoring me for the first twenty-six years of my life, anyway? The more I thought about it, the more irritated I became. It was like she was the birth mother who had given me up for adoption, who only wanted to meet me now that she needed my help.

  “Hey, how come you have grown so much overnight anyway?” I asked, pulling my sweater on over my top and taking in this now quite chubby cat.

  Indy grinned up at me. “I have powers.”

  “Right. So then I am guessing that you could have rescued yourself?” I asked and looked down at her while I shook my head. Great. I had been played by a cat. Played right into her paws.

  “I am being serious, Ruby. You need protection. And that means you need to make friends with the rest of the coven.”

  I stared out the window at the moon that was coming into full view. “I don’t think I feel like socializing with a bunch of weirdo witches who live in the hills,” I said, shivering.

  “Well, they don’t all live in the hills!” Indy said. “They are like you. They have homes and jobs.”

  “Oh.” I was a little embarrassed about the assumption I had made. I supposed it made sense. I was just surprised, that was all. How many of us were there, hiding amongst the population in plain sight?

  “So…where do they live then?” I asked, a little tentatively. Casually. Like I wasn’t fully committing to the fact that we were having this conversation. Because surely we weren’t. It was ridiculous.

  But witches were being killed. And I might be the only one who could stop the next murder from happening.

  I never ended up going to the milk factory that night.

  3

  “You need to learn how to do this spell.” Geraldine’s tone was very ‘bossy teacher,’ and she kept looking down her nose like I was doing everything wrong.

  I had gotten the address from Indy, who had then promptly fallen asleep. She claimed she needed ‘cat naps,’ but she still seemed far more human than cat to me.

  Geraldine lived in an upscale apartment that overlooked the park and was filled with bright mismatched but modern furniture. Except for the ancient cauldron in the middle of her dining room. She told me it was 500 years old.

  “What I don’t understand is, why now? Or at least, why not before now?” I asked as I followed Geraldine around the cauldron as she collected the ingredients for the spell while the water bubbled. And I mean, really bubbled…it sounded like a volcano about to explode, and I had to yell to get Geraldine to hear me.

  “It’s just the right time,” she said cryptically. That didn’t do much to ease my suspicions that she was only using me.

  I could hear three dogs sleeping on the floor in the next room. How could they sleep through all this? “Don’t they always want to stick their noses in your business?” I asked.

  “That’s why I have dogs and not cats,” she said. “A little simpler.”

  “Hey, I didn’t ask for the cat.
She found me. Wormed her way into my thoughts.”

  Suddenly, there was a barking. Maybe Geraldine had spoken too soon. She opened the doors and the dogs ran in, sniffing the air to try and determine whether I was a friendly intruder or not. Geraldine told them all to sit and be still. They were all German shepherds, and I felt a little nervous while they watched me. I hoped they would go back to the next room, but the dogs kept guard while Geraldine stirred the cauldron and I shivered.

  She stirred and added what looked to be green grass to the concoction. She’d already explained to me that this was a spell for mind reading. “People won’t understand, Ruby. It’s rough out there for a witch in a town of mere mortals. All your years in ignorance — think of them as a blessing now. One that kept you safe from stares and rumors and, well, from death.”

  Yeah, but not anymore, right? Now I was one of them and I was prey. A target just like the rest. Thanks, Geraldine!

  She told me I could call her “Geri,” but it didn’t seem quite right. That seemed like the name of a girl, and she’d already told me that she was two hundred years old. Though she ‘looked’ more like forty-five. Or maybe thirty-five. It seemed like her age changed depending on the light.

  Back to the spell.

  “This is simple but not easy,” she warned me as she showed me how to measure the ingredients on the silver scales.

  “Okay…”

  She handed over one of the scoops and told me to have a go at measuring while she hunted in the pantry for the rest of the goods.

  I felt like I was consistently being graded. She kept peering over her shoulder at me, checking me out, and clearly thinking that I was coming up short in some way. Not just my measuring either, but everything about me was failing to impress her as a ‘witch.’ Well, that wasn’t exactly fair, now was it? I’d only known I was a witch for less than eight hours