The only constants I had were there because there was no way, physically or magically, to separate them from my life – and those were my eight, immortal felines – The Infiniti. Or, ‘We, The Lemniscate,’ when Onyx was feeling pompous.
It wasn’t such a reach, then, that Portia would be inclined to work her worst on Spithilda. And, as far as means? The mountain of pokeberry on the verge outside her manor quickly cinched that deal. But, there was no indication that Portia had had even a glimmer of an opportunity to administer the deadly poison.
Ugh! All the mental detecting was giving me big, fat headache.
Speaking of big, fat headaches.
“Now, Hattie, Chimera would put cayenne on your tongue if she caught you talking that way about somebody. Amber is not fat. A bit on the curvily bodacious side, maybe, but not fat.”
Darn it, Onyx!
Okay. So, maybe I wasn’t exactly ready to let David into my life as anything more than a friend just yet, but that didn’t mean I was immune to feeling a modicum of jealousy here and there when some other gal turned the Chief’s head.
But, jealously aside, Amber was a logical addition to the suspect list, even as an employee of the GIPPD. Any investigator worth their salt would have been remiss to discount her completely. Look at the facts. She had conveniently shown up on Glessie Isle just before her sour, spinster aunt had kicked the bucket. And her radical shift from boohooing niece to sidling siren had been just a little too quick to ignore.
Then there was the motive.
Hers would have been one of the oldest motives for homicide since the dawn of man…greed. Her aunt Spithilda had been one of the richest people in all of the Coven Isles. As one of the last remaining members of the Roach family line, Amber could have stood to inherit millions…six zeros if Alban Dewdrop were to be believed.
“But, aren’t you forgetting something?” Onyx countered, jumping into his familiar position as Devil’s advocate.
I harrumphed, giving up on any hope of matching my socks. I dropped an exasperated chin into my hand. “What’s that, genius?”
“Spithilda’s little ‘family death curse?’ No living relative of Spithilda’s can inherit her fortune? We all know that particular flourish of magic is unbreakable. No way around it; Amber can’t get her hands on that money even if she wanted to. So, pretty much bumps your would-be competition out of the running for Public Enemy Number One. There’s no motive, Hattie. You have to admit that Spithilda’s final magic has given Ms. Crystal a regular escape ‘claws.'”
Onyx nonchalantly licked his extended paw. I dumped the whole basket of mismatched socks, and Fraidy, on his head.
“Hey!” he spluttered.
“My hiding spot!” Fraidy cried in terror.
I stomped off to the laundry room and a basket of pants. Maybe I’d have better luck. At least pairs of pants were connected at the crotch.
I was busy checking pockets before I tossed them into the wash when I slid my hand into the pocket of the pants I’d been wearing on our visit out to Portia’s. I pulled out a dollop of salt and pepper fuzz, the same fuzz I remembered pulling from the door jamb in Portia’s hall.
My eyes widened. I dropped the pants and ran for the phone.
“I gotta call the Chief!” I blustered, nearly bowling Eclipse over backward as he sauntered into the room.
“Whoa!” he cried. “What’s with the stat, Hat?”
I slid in socked feet across the kitchen tile as I skidded to a stop at the kitchen door. I whipped around and looked at my cats. Midnight lounging in the sun, sleeping on the windowsill. Eclipse curling around the table leg. Gloom stretched out on the mat, her face buried in the pit of a sleeping Remulus’ underarm. Carbon lapping his Cronewart concoction, moaning softly. Onyx, picking staticky socks from his black fur. Fraidy taking each one his brother discarded and attempting to stick them to his own fur. No doubt, for camouflage. And two sets of yellow eyes peering from under cover of the onion bin. Shade and Jet were going to stink to high heaven.
“I think I know where Rad Silverback is!”
12
Hide and Shriek
“Do you think Hattie knows we hid the socks in the onion bin?” Jet tried to pass the sotto voce comment to his brother, Shade. Problem with Jet was, nothing was under the radar with him; from his rocketing speeds to his drastically failed attempt at whispering. My jittery kitty was as loud as he was fast.
“She does now,” I muttered. Jet face palmed a furry paw as I brought Grammy Chimera’s broom in for a landing outside Portia Fearwyn’s manor. When I placed the call to headquarters, I expected the Chief to ask me to pick him up on the way. Instead, he had just told me to meet him outside Portia’s. He would be taking his own broom.
“Oh,” I had replied, trying not to sound too hurt. I guess I had gotten a little too used to this whole dynamic duo thing we had been building. It felt odd not having him on the back of my broom, strong arms wrapped around my waist.
So, instead, I had opted to take two of the cats along. Although, considering the strong scent of yellow onion wafting from the two felines behind me, perhaps Jet and Shade hadn’t been the best choices.
“It, it was his idea!” Jet stuttered defensively.
“I don’t care whose idea it was,” I grumbled. “You’re both on laundry duty for the next week, or the only thing you’re gonna get to eat this week is Limburger cheese!”
“No way!” Shade exclaimed. “Fur real?”
I rested the old besom against a crumbling wall. “I’m absolutely paws-itive.”
“Whoa!” Shade shook his furry head. “Eau de Stinky Cheese is not a favorite scent with the ladies.” Shade said as the pungent stench of Gaunt Manor swamp engulfed us.
“Oh, but smelly onion is?” I pointed out.
Shade took a casual whiff of his fur and almost keeled over. “Man, oh, man! That’s rank! And,I have a date tonight!”
He popped a fuzzy paw on his brother’s head. “What were you thinking letting us sneak into the onion bin?”
Jet shook his head in confusion at how this escapade had somehow become his fault.
“Look on the bright side, Shade. If you get eaten by a werewolf tonight, you won’t have to worry about the date,” I suggested helpfully.
“That’s true,” Shade started to smile in agreement. Then, the gravity of my comment smacked the smirk right off his furry face. “Wait! What?!?”
“I’m too young to become puppy chow!” Jet moaned.
“Can we just go home, now, boss lady?” Shade sobbed melodramatically.
“Oh, wow! Now, you two are both starting to sound like Fraidy.”
That straightened them both up in the blink of the Three Fate’s Eye.
“No way!” they chimed collectively.
“I’ll take on a whole pack of wolfies!” Shade puffed out his chest, strutting proudly up Portia’s sidewalk.
“Just let one of those hellhounds try to catch me!” Jet launched into a rocketing black flash of fur and claws. “I dare ‘em! I’ll slice ‘em and dice ‘em into a bunch of wiener schnitzels!”
Shade shook his head. “Wait. Jet. Wiener Schnitzel is veal. Not hot dogs.”
Jet screeched to a halt. He cocked his head. “Oh.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t share the cats’ misgivings about coming out to Portia’s manor to search for Rad Silverback. The potion I had created for Rad was only good for twenty-four hours. Any effectiveness the tonic may have had had long since worn off.
Something that hadn’t worn off was the longevity of werewolf lore. Stories had existed about The Children of the Moon as far back as 440 B.C. when the Greek historian Herodotus scribed the tale of Scythian lycanthropes who could transform with ease between human and wolf form. Other scribes, like the Roman poet Ovid, portrayed the wolf as more of a curse. In 1 A.D. when he penned his Metamorphoses, he recorded the story of an ancient and evil king, Lycaeon, who perpetrated acts of unspeakable horror which so offended the Gods they
doomed him and his descendants to wear the mantle of a wolf for the remainder of eternity.
But, the lore didn’t stop there. The legend of the wolf was called upon to explain many dark and mysterious events throughout the ages. For instance, as the winter snow blanketed the ground between the 16th-century village of Bedburg, Germany and the dense, foreboding forest that surrounded it, the villagers toiled honestly during the days, going peaceably about their daily tasks. But, at night? At night, they huddled together inside their homes; doors bolted against an invisible evil as young women and children began to disappear, later to be found horribly ravaged. Farmers woke to mutilated cattle in their pastures, throats torn out as if by some savage beast. Surely, the villagers thought, it was the work of some demonic monster, some crazed creature, half man, and half-wolf.
But, the legend of the wolf was not limited to Germany. Indeed, France purported to be home to several werewolf legends, including that of Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun and the Beast of Gévaudan. The repercussions of the latter’s particularly brutal reign of savagery, including nearly two hundred separate attacks with over one hundred deaths, were felt as far away as Scotland by such luminaries as Robert Louis Stevenson, who chronicled the tale of the beast in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
And while David Naughton’s transformation to The Beast was more Hollywood hype than true hairy hex, believe you me, when a real werewolf transformed, there was more than a valid reason to “stay off the moors.” That much was fact.
At that very moment, a long, piercing howl echoed eerily in the distance.
“For the record, I am not a-MEW-sed,” Shade gulped, and he melted, cowardly, into the nearby shadows.
“Traitor,” I whispered tersely.
My mental history lesson had me on a definitive edge. I wondered, briefly, if wolf howls were like lighting. After you heard the first howl, could you count the time before the next howl to estimate just how close a bad attitude with teeth might be?
A second cry sounded. Maybe just a little bit closer than the first. Where was Chief Trew?
“Hattie!” the Chief’s voice suddenly called from above. I smiled in relief and waved eagerly. The Chief touched down neatly on his own broom. “Sorry, I’m late. Amber needed a ride home.”
I might have winced if I wasn’t so worried.
“Hattie, what’s wrong? You’re as white as a ghost!”
“Let’s just say I’d rather be in Disneyland.”
Dead tree leaves rattled across the empty courtyard like dry bones. The Chief looked around and nodded. “Okay. I get that. But, we’re out her for a reason. What makes you think Rad Silverback is here?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tell-tale swatch of fur. “I found this yesterday when we were out here questioning Portia. It was stuck in a splinter of a door jamb.”
The Chief shrugged. “Okay. It’s a piece of fuzz. Did you see the cobwebs in that place?” He jabbed a thumb in the general direction of Portia’s home. “It would take Indiana Jones years to excavate the furniture in that parlor.”
I shook my head. “No, no, no. It’s not fuzz. It’s fur. The salt and pepper is the same black and silver color as Rad’s hair.”
One of Chief Trew’s perfect eyebrows raised high. He folded his arms. “Okay. I’m listening.”
“Remember the massive door in the corner of Portia’s kitchen? The claw marks that were gouged on the inside?”
The Chief nodded.
“Remember at the station. Rad said something about his ‘safe sanctuary’? Well, what if Portia’s basement is Rad’s safe sanctuary? That door was certainly thick enough to hold him if he were to try and break loose. Think about it. Spithilda’s gone. He’s suspected of her murder. And now he has no potion to contain the wolf, where else would Rad be likely to go, but to the house of his former fiancée who is arguably, one of the most powerful witches on Glessie Isle?”
The Chief was paying such close attention to me at this point; I had almost forgotten about Amber’s little Über stunt. The Chief walked up to Portia’s door and knocked.
“What are you doing?!?” I protested. “You’re just going to knock?”
“I have to Hattie. I don’t have a warrant. Your hunches might be good enough for me, but I don’t know that they carry enough legal weight to convince a judge. So, our safest and most legal bet is to knock and hope that Miss Fearwyn is gracious enough to allow us to enter her home a second time. If she invites us in and we find something that leads us to Rad, we’re in the clear.”
I tried not to pout. The legal mumbo jumbo of this whole detective thing was sometimes more confusing than some of the archaic spells in Grammy Chimera’s grimoire. “Fine.”
“Otherwise, unless we have a valid reason to go in…”
A sudden loud and splintering crash of glass echoed at the same time a blood-curdling shriek echoed from the interior of the house.
Jet tilted his black head. “Breaking glass a valid reason?”
“Oh, yeah.” The Chief drew his service revolver. He motioned for Jet and me to get behind him and to the side. He rapped sharply on the door. Shade was undoubtedly the cause of that shattering glass, and as he wasn’t in line behind me now, I’d guess that he was on the inside.
“Miss Fearwyn? This is Chief Trew of the GIPPD.” Silence. The Chief tried the handle and found the door unlocked. The door swung wide, yawing open like the mouth of some dark monster. The Chief, Jet and I formed a quirky little totem pole as our three heads peered around the corner and dared a look inside. No movement stirred.
“Stay behind me,” the Chief warned. We were only too happy to oblige. We padded on the balls of our feet down the carpet runner of the narrow, crooked hallway of Fearwyn's past. I glanced behind at Jet, who was low, low, low to the ground, his haunches moving methodically, slowly, and his ears flat, and back. I’d never seen my wayward puss so composed, so poised. My eyes drifted to Atropa Belladonna’s portrait which had given me such shivers on our previous visit. I didn’t think it was possible for the austere matriarch’s likeness to stir any more dread in my soul, but then the sight of the five jagged tears shredding through the canvas turned me colder than ice. Atropa’s stern features hung, limp and impotent, in thin wafting shreds from the gilt frame.
“I think we’ve come to the right place,” I whispered, putting a cautious hand on Chief Trew’s shoulder. He nodded and we continued forward.
I pointed to the splinter in the door jamb where I had found the swatch of fur. “That’s where I found Rad’s fur.”
We stepped cautiously into the darkened kitchen. The deep, bass tick-tock of the grandfather clock echoed from the hallway, the heartbeat of the spooky house.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
My own heart threatened to thrum right on out of my chest. Long shadows stretched like groping fingers across the kitchen floor, waving, clutching toward us. The curtains over the kitchen sink waved in the breeze from the open window.
“There’s the glass.” The Chief pointed to a shattered pot and some limp stalks of chive.
“It must have fallen from the window.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” The bodiless voice apologized in an ethereal whisper. Only Chief Trew’s quick hand over my mouth saved me from shrieking out loud.
“It’s just Shade,” he grumbled quietly, pointing to my sneaky shadow surfer. Two yellow eyes materialized in the dark as Shade peeled himself away from the surrounding blackness.
Chief motioned to the broken pot. “So, you’re responsible for that?”
“Mmmmmmaybe,” Shade toed the floor. “It was an accident, I swear! But, seriously, what took you cats so long? What were you waiting for?”
Chief fixed him with a stern, law-abiding look. “Just cause.”
Shade shrugged. “Well, in that case, I broke in on purpose…just cause I wanted you guys to get your keisters in here!”
Before the Chief could give Shade a blistering lecture of proper pol
ice protocol a low, guttural growl rumbled through the darkness.
My eyes shot to the heavy oaken door across the room. It was closed and barred by a no-nonsense, solid beam.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
“Nevermind. Now I want your keisters out there!” Shade jabbed a paw in the immediate direction of the outside night and hightailed it down the hallway.
“Hide!” he caterwauled.
“Shade!” I hissed, but he was gone.
Another low growl emanated from behind the door. Chief Trew took a step closer, hand reaching for the beam.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” came the acidic, warning voice of Portia Fearwyn as she stood behind us; an Angel Apothecary bag in one hand and Shade, by the scruff of his immortal neck, in the other.
This time, Chief’s hand didn’t stop my shriek.
“Are you certain he can’t break through that door?” Shade asked, looking nervously at the door behind which Rad Silverback most certainly pawed. We were all sitting around Portia’s kitchen table once more, sipping a sweet, gentle Chamomile Tea Portia had procured from Millie at the apothecary when she had gone into town to pick up some of the items necessary to create Rad’s draught.
A loud thud sounded on the heavy wood. Shade jumped.
“No,” Portia stated straightforwardly.
“Oh, good,” Shade replied, prematurely assured and lapped some of the milk Portia had set out for the cats. He then did a milky spit-take, spewing a fine white mist all over his brother, Jet. “What?!?”
“Oh, don’t worry, Master Shade. It shouldn’t be long now before the draught starts to take effect and Rad will be quite harmless,” Portia assured him. Shade smiled dopily. Any apprehension he may have been feeling had been completely erased when Portia addressed him as “Master.”
The Violet Countercharm: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Hattie Jenkins & The Infiniti Chronicles Book 2) Page 12