“So?” I said. Hank looked at me like I was suddenly growing a third-eye in the middle of my forehead. “I don’t want anything to do with that poor man. I’m sorry, but I’m not some kind of crime investigator. I want to get home. I’ve got other things to do.”
“But wait…”
With utter conviction I strode away from Hank, down the street, and to my car. I think I heard him call my name once but I didn’t stop for him. I was done.
Chapter 9
“I didn’t realize you were as thoughtful as all that,” Kashmir said as I stumbled into the back door of the tea shop. The front was all closed down and locked up for the night, and the kitchen was, surprisingly, immaculately clean. I had supposed that Lucy would have just kind of taken off when I didn’t come back from my errand quickly and didn’t call.
But no, she’d scrubbed the place down, put some dishes that needed to soak in the sink, and otherwise turned it into a better place than she must have found it that morning. Conscientious, attention to detail. Slight pleasant smell of cookies in the air.
That was all too good. Suspiciously good. I still hadn’t talked to her about…
Kashmir nosed my leg, in a manner much more cat-like than his usual aloof familiar attitude.
“Huh?” I said, “What did you say? Thoughtful?”
“The snack you brought me, in your pocket. Toss it in the air so I can catch it. We’ll make a sport of it,” Kashmir said, balancing on his back legs with his paws on my knee. “Smells a bit burnt, though. I don’t want cooked bird.”
“If you so much as lay one mangy paw on this little dude, I am going to put a sign up in the front room that says, ‘Make sure to pet Kashy on your way out!’”
We both stared at each other for a long time. Kashmir was a master at winning these little battles of will… but I knew his kitty Achilles heel. He had a certain dignity he needed to maintain, and to put the name ‘Kashy’ out there where others might see it and, gasp, use it, would rob him of that. He got down off my knee and purred like it was his idea.
“That’s better,” I said, and pulled the bird out from my pocket and put him gently down on the immaculate counter. He took a couple of tentative hops, settled down, and promptly fell over like a bowling pin. I shrieked and tried to prop the bird up, but he went slack, and rolled.
It put my finger against its tiny chest, and felt the fluttering rat-a-tat of its tiny heart, going a mile a minute, but still going.
“Phew. Now…”
“Now that you’re done playing with your tools,” Kashmir said, leaping up onto the counter and eyeing the bird with a mix of contempt and hunger. “Did you find the woman with the book?”
“No,” I said, and then I laid out the entire thing for Kashmir. He looked mildly disinterested in all of the human parts of the story, flicked his tail in annoyance when I said I refused to investigate, and yawned at my meet cute with Hank.
“Go on, go on,” Kashmir said, and he yawned.
The little bird’s left eyelid fluttered, then both eyes went wide when it saw the large cat looming over it. Instantly, it squeezed both eyelids shut tight as Kashmir brought his nose down to give the bird a sniff.
“Kashmir…” My tone was strained and warning.
“It smells funny. How did it get itself burned?”
“When the warlock made a sphere of green fire to protect me from the demon, I think it caught this little fellow’s feathers out a bit.”
Kashmir slowly leveled his gaze with me, and his little nostrils flared.
“You did not tell me about that part.”
“You interrupted me.”
I continued my story, telling him about Hank’s spell, about the demon, about everything I could remember. When I got to the point about losing several hours, he let out a sound like he was going to hack up a hairball, and then turned it into a God-awful roar.
“That showboating trickster had no right to use you like that. There were a dozen different spells he could have cast that wouldn’t have had these ridiculous side effects. That wouldn’t have put you out of contact with the spell book for hours so that it could get away. He wasn’t helping you. He was probably in league with the demon. And I didn’t smell it on him.”
Kashmir’s tail whipped back and forth, hard and straight. It smacked right into the little bird and swept him to within inches of the edge of the table. The bird hopped up, finally awake and looked back and forth for anything that seemed remotely safe. I guess he decided that was my pocket, because he leapt in the air and darted right for it, hitting me with a surprising bit of strength.
“I’m not going to eat you, little one,” Kashmir said. “I’m going to eat that warlock’s heart if I ever see him, though. Right out of his chest.”
“That’s the disgusting spirit,” I said, giving Kashmir a frank look that told him exactly what I thought about his rancorous words and noises. He shook his head, and suddenly curled into a ball on the spot, watching the twitching end of his tail warily as it darted back and forth in front of his face.
“He’s not using me, he’s just… he was following the book, too,” I told Kashmir. “He said he’d had an associate that had recognized the scent of the book, just like you did, and put him on the trail.”
“Hmm…” Kashmir made a low rumbling noise in his throat. The bird dove deeper into my pocket, and I could feel him quiver there against my skin. “You trust him, but you trust everybody. It’s what makes you not bright. In an endearing way.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“And he said he has worked against demons before? You know who you need to talk to about that, to see if he’s on the level.”
I knew who he meant and I cringed inside. Sybil had a dark and secret background in the subject but she didn’t reveal it to anyone if she could help it.
I shook my head. “Have to think of something else.”
“Because you’re pig headed? Too pig headed to realize that the first thing you should have done is put a phone call in to big sister but—”
“She won’t talk about those times, and I’m on thin ice with her as it is. Drop it.”
We both started when the back door banged, banged, banged against its hinges. The tiny little bird in my pocket fluttered like it was trying to take off despite the sheltering, wing-pinning protection of my pocket. Kashmir, who maintained the cover that he was a normal cat, jumped off of the counter and found a corner of the kitchen to hide in.
I expected it would be Max. I’d been his right hand woman (or he’d been my right hand man, as the situation called for) in more than a single murder investigation. That was the whole reason I wanted to sit this one out - it gets to be too much for a girl who just wants to make tea… and magic spells. Who has had no desire in her life to be any kind of investigator, except for the investigations into the arcane, the unknown… and the scrumptious and tasty, which I investigated in my kitchen.
I imagined the conversation, his sarcasm and sly remarks, first chiding me for “wussing out”, then becoming a kind of older brother, “look kid, I get that it’s tough, but we got to get over it, you and me.”
Only none of it was going to work, because I knew what I wanted to do in my life, and solving murders wasn’t it. Dealing with dead people wasn’t it. Heck, my next week was going to be consumed with the most life affirming ritual that still existed in the modern world, a wedding. A whole day and thousands of dollars dedicated to looking at two people, plucked out of the billions in the world, and saying, “These kids got a future.”
Murder was the end of futures, the end of life, the end of so many things, and the last thing I wanted to spend any time on whatsoever.
So I said, as I opened the back door - not using my magic, but just the wonders of an opposable thumb and a working wrist, “I do not care what you say, I’m not doing it. Go away.”
“Not doing what? What are you talking about? What in the world is going on here?”
The words did not come ou
t of the tough, occasionally cigar chomping mouth of local newsman Max Ransom. They came out of my older sister, who stood at the back door with her arms crossed and a look of general disapproval on her face. She didn’t like much of what I did. She didn’t like when I left town to pursue a half-formed dream to work in the movies, and she liked it even less when I came back, tail tucked, our little sister in tow, to re-open the tea shop that had been closed out from under our grandmother, cruelly in the last few weeks of her life.
Because Sibyl, who stood nearly a head taller than me and with shoulders almost as broad as a man’s, wanted to live the completely typical American life. She was married, had two kids and someday might work up to 2.5. She and her very normal husband owned a normal house. There wasn’t a picket fence there when they moved in, but Sibyl was damned if she wasn’t going to have one put in as soon as possible, because she was normal as normal could be. And she had the build and training to beat up most anybody who wouldn’t agree.
“You,” I said, and then sputtered to cover up what sounded like a unpleasant greeting. “Sibby, what are you doing here? Are the kids okay?”
“Of course. If something were wrong with my kids, why in the world would I come here?” she said, as if the last place she would want to be for comfort was here, and the last person who could comfort her was me.
“Well, okay. But it’s well past bedtime, and—“
“I’ve been trying to call you for a couple of hours, Mimi. You skipped out on dinner and didn’t leave word with anyone. I wanted to know if you had… if there was any trouble or anything.”
The words were kind. The tone was… not nearly so friendly as the words were.
Sometimes I wished that Sibyl and I could have a straight conversation without both of us second-guessing the meaning of everything we said. Only, if we had that conversation, it would probably involve her telling me how much it cramped her lifestyle and happiness to have her younger sisters living in her grown-up house with her husband and kids. And I’d have to shoot back that her restrictions and recrimination and righteousness were not only making our lives impossible, but were also impossibly hypocritical, given everything I knew about her past. She was, after all, what they call now a “slayer”, and fought demons at the time. It was a secret life she held from everyone, and wouldn’t talk about even after I’d seen directly how it could effect her life.
“If I were in trouble…” I almost echoed her own sentiment, but in reverse and with a ton of bite. But what would I gain? Instead, I said, “If I were in trouble, I’d try to get out of it on my own, and wouldn’t expect my sister with kids and a husband and real-world responsibilities to drop her tough stuff and come and bail me out. I’m a big girl, Sibyl, have been for a while. I can take care of myself.”
“Not always,” she said, in a far-off voice that sounded ominous, which was, in a weird way, cheerful for me. If she had supernatural concerns I could talk to her, woman to woman, about what the heck had happened to me tonight.
Maybe leave out the warlock.
“Did you hear about what happened at the hotel?” I said, as an ice-breaker.
Sibyl didn’t answer me. She looked around the kitchen, like it was about to say something more interesting.
“You been baking cookies?” she said.
“No, I haven’t. Smells like it, though, doesn’t it? I guess Lucy had been,” I said, the notion suddenly dawning on me. It should have been obvious from the start, from the second my nose hit the room. But that was the price of pre-occupation: you don’t notice everything you should.
“Lucy has been spending a lot of time here lately,” Sibyl said, and even if her arms weren’t on her hips and her nose wasn’t in the air, her tone had a very hands-on-hips-nose-in-air element to it. Sometimes it seemed it didn’t matter what somebody else was doing, Sibyl knew how to disapprove.
“Yes, learning life skills. Helping to run a business. It’s worth a lot more than most of what they learn in school.”
Now the hands did go to the hips, but her nose didn’t hit the air - it pointed right at me as her mouth opened in an affronted, practically scandalized expression.
“Nothing is more important for kids than school,” she said. She was head of the PTA, so she probably even believed it. Most nights, I would just let it go. Tonight, I didn’t have the energy not to fight.
“Nothing is more important for kids than education. Now, if school is the only way they can get education, it might suffice, but—”
“Lafay’s high school is second to none in the county. We have the best facilities, the highest rated teachers…”
“I hear the English department is a little low on staff lately.”
Sibyl sniffed, and glared. Lafay High had lost two English teachers in the last six weeks, because one murdered the other. Using magic he’d procured from those awful Jiggs sisters. It was my last murder investigation, and I meant that as final. The LAST. I wasn’t doing that anymore, it was too ugly a business.
For Sibyl, it was magic that was to blame. All magic, and it wouldn’t have happened had I not re-opened Grand-Mere’s tea shop, and reignited the spark of magic that she’d brought to the whole blessed town.
“You never were good at school, were you?” Sibyl said.
“I got okay grades, but it wasn’t where I did my learning. It wasn’t where I was happy. Do you know what I looked forward to, every day, when I was sitting behind a desk and listening to some old person drone at me, saying things they’d probably said hundreds of times before in other classes?” I swung my arms open wide. “Right here. This was my education, helping Grand-Mere run the place as much as I was able. This is a place I love. You don’t, I know it. So why are you here?”
“I’m making sure you’re not doing something stupid, and running the Auclair name through more mud.”
“Aren’t you a Tanner these days? Not an Auclair at all, so what does it matter…”
Sibyl sighed, and held her head in her hands like the world was just too much for her. “Mimi, why are you being difficult?”
“I’m not. Or… I think your definition of difficult means I don’t just do what you say. Well, no, I don’t. I won’t. I love you, Sibyl. I appreciate you checking up on me.” That was only a little lie - the second part. I did love her, dearly. I did not appreciate her playing mom. We had a mom, and she was, unfortunately, God rest her, long gone.
“But you’re not going to tell me where you disappeared to,” she said. “You’re investigating again, aren’t you? The police are there for a reason, Mimi. And amateurs getting in their way does not make their job easier. I would think after what practically happened to you the last time…” she trailed off as if her point was self-evident.
“I recall if it wasn’t for my getting in the way, something terrible might have happened to a man that you drugged and tied up in your shed.”
Sibyl leveled her gaze at me, her eyes suddenly going cold.
“That was business.”
Malleus Tenebrarum business? I thought, but did not say. Something told me mentioning the name of an organization that my sister had belonged to and kept away from me would not be a very wise move. Not if I wanted her legendary self-control to hold out.
As if my life were on an infinite loop, our conversation was busted into just like the very important talk Kashmir and I had been having was by Sibyl. This time, the pounding came from the front door, and a man’s voice called through, barely audible here in the kitchen, “Mimi! Mimi, we need to talk.”
“That’s probably Max,” I said. “Who probably wants to check up on me, too. Let me go get rid of him, then we’ll continue… whatever this is.”
“Don’t bother. Dinner will be in the fridge, you can heat it up when you get home. If you get home.”
Sibyl let herself out the back and, with a sigh, I went out into the front. Again, I thought of the deflections and obstacles I would throw up in Max’s way when he didn’t take my simple, truthful, “I don’t
want to look at dead people” statement for a real answer.
Except, yet again, I was preparing for the wrong confrontation. Because it wasn’t Max pounding on my door and looking through the window into the dark store front. It was Hank. He had a look of quiet anxiety on his face as he knocked, a clenched fist striking the door in an even rhythm, while he waited for someone to notice.
“Mimi, I’ve got to talk to you. Are you going to let me in?” he said, ceasing the pounding, but pressing against the door with whatever internal intensity that motivated him making him practically jump out of his skin.
“I’m a woman alone in a deserted storefront. You’re a wicked warlock. How can I trust you?” I said, looking at him levelly through the glass door.
He held up both hands, now covered in thin leather gloves. “I need to snap my fingers, skin on skin, to cast my prepared spells. This is like putting the safety on. If you see me pulling off a glove, you can zap me.”
I had no idea how to zap anybody. It wasn’t the kind of magic I worked, or ever wanted to work, for Pete’s sake. But I accepted the gesture, and unlocked the door. I opened it partway, then blocked it with my body. Hank pushed a little, then stopped, and looked at me.
“What now?” he said, a genuine question, not just a grunt of impatience.
“What now is that… that I need to know why you came back here. I told you, I don’t investigate murders or anything like that. It’s not a job for a proper witch.”
“What in the world is proper about being a witch?” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. That twinkle died when I did not twinkle back, at all. “Okay, look, you’re the only person I know in town and my regular friends don’t use cell phones. The kind of magic we do, it fries out electricity pretty well. Give me some of your time, you won’t regret it.”
“I might,” I said, but then a bit of my brain got lost looking in those deep pools he had for eyes, and I was opening the door and letting him in without really meaning to. He stepped inside, and waited for me to shut the door.
I did, but I didn’t lock it. I didn’t distrust him, per se, but a girl cannot be too careful. He was a warlock, after all.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 7