Alexandra's Riddle (Northwest Magic Book 1)

by Elisa Keyston

  “Lily, come on,” Mr. Kowalski snapped, and she jumped up, her shoulder-length black hair whipping around her face as she moved. As it did, a wave of recognition washed over Cass. Black hair through the branches of the trees. Was this girl the one who’d been watching her yesterday?

  Before turning to follow Mr. Kowalski, she glanced up at Cass. In her hands was the metal colander that Cass had kicked into the bushes last night. She smiled shyly, setting it down on the steps before hurrying after Mr. Kowalski—her father, Cass assumed.

  Cass watched them climb into a sleek black sedan. Once it had pulled out of her driveway and disappeared down the road, she gingerly made her way—barefoot—down the pine needle-covered steps and picked up the colander. Goosebumps ran across her skin. Were they because of Mr. Kowalski, or the girl? Or was it just this weird reaction she’d been having ever since she arrived in Riddle?

  She looked around to see if that odd green fae was anywhere around. But she saw nothing. She sighed and carried the colander back into the house.

  * * *

  “That’s it, I’m coming to Riddle,” Em said firmly over the phone.

  Cass rolled her eyes. Her friend’s eagerness had nothing to do with Tom Kowalski and his million-dollar offer—she’d barely paid any attention to that. It was Cass’s account of the events of the night before that held all the appeal to Emma.

  “You can’t just drop everything and come here,” Cass said.

  “I can and I will!”

  “Emma,” Cass said, laughing, “you just used up all your vacation time visiting me in California. What are you going to tell your boss, ‘Sorry, I need a second vacation two months after my last one because I need to go investigate the paranormal activity in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oregon’?”

  “I could tell him ‘I quit.’”

  Cass looked at her phone in alarm. “Emma, you can’t quit your job over this!”

  Emma sighed in a long-suffering way. “I guess you’re right. But this is so unfair. You’ve had more supernatural sightings in the last twenty-four hours than you usually have in a year!”

  “Ugh, I know. This is why I stay in urban environments. Fae need trees to thrive. Old, established trees. Those are few and far between in the concrete jungle. I should never have agreed to this,” Cass moaned.

  Em made a tutting sound, and Cass knew she was once again wishing they could trade places. Believe me, she thought, if I could, I would in an instant.

  Finally, changing the subject, Emma said, “I want to know about those tarot cards you found. That’s different. Do you think the fae could have left them for you?”

  “I guess? But you’re right, it’s not their typical M.O.,” Cass said. “They’re usually known for taking things, not leaving them. Well, maybe household elves… but still, this doesn’t seem like a household elf thing, either. The whole thing just feels weird.” Like that green creature in the woods last night.

  “The first card you found in the yard—describe it for me,” Em commanded.

  “The Fool. Some medieval-y guy walking off a cliff with his dog.”

  “That’s the first card in the major arcana. It usually signifies the beginning of a journey,” Emma explained.

  “Well, that could be a good sign,” Cass said. “Maybe it means as soon as I offload this house, I’m going on an adventure.” If she took Tom Kowalski up on his offer, she could afford to take a nice trip—maybe visit Greece in Aunt Alexandra’s memory. She frowned, not sure how she felt about that idea.

  “Maybe. It can be hard to tell when the cards appear individually rather than in a spread. What about the other one?” Cass described the imagery on the card she’d found on the fireplace, The Empress. “Hmm,” said Emma. “I don’t know about that.”

  Cass felt the skin on her arms begin to prickle. “Why? What does that mean?”

  “It’s the motherhood card. It usually represents a mother figure, or maybe a pregnancy.”

  Cass choked on nothing again. “Excuse me?” she spluttered between violent coughs. “I don’t think so!” But what if it meant something was going to happen to her own mom? Should she take it literally? She’d have to call her mother later. Not that she could warn her—just like practically everyone else she’d met, her mom had never believed Cass about any of her premonitions, so she’d learned to stop telling her about them a while ago. But maybe she could poke around sort of nonchalantly, find out if she and her dad were planning any trips or if she’d been to the doctor recently…

  “Well, it does have another meaning, though it’s kind of more obscure,” Emma went on. “Sometimes it represents nature, a need to get outside to clear one’s head.”

  Cass sighed loudly in relief. “That must be it,” she said eagerly. “The card appeared right before I went for my walk last night.”

  Emma let out another hmm, but Cass refused to allow her to elaborate.

  “Well, thanks for your help, Em. I’ll keep you posted,” she quickly said before Emma got a chance to say anything else. “Talk to you later, okay? Bye!” She tapped the end call button even as Emma began to protest on the other end of the line. Then she shoved her phone in her pocket and exhaled. This was insane. Weird neighbors, fae everywhere, bizarrely prescient tarot cards materializing out of thin air? Life in Riddle was turning out to be way more complicated than Cass had bargained for.

  She couldn’t wait to see what would be in store for her on her first day of work tomorrow.

  The next day, Cass stood outside the locked doors of the Riddle Library sipping muddy-tasting coffee from a travel mug and wincing after every swallow. She’d been so flustered at the grocery store the other day she’d forgotten to get coffee for herself, or even flavored creamer to add to the ancient off-brand grounds she’d found in the back of Aunt Alexandra’s pantry. No amount of sugar would be able to counteract this taste, but she needed the caffeine to function this morning, so she kept doggedly sipping.

  She’d slept terribly. Pre-first-day-of-work jitters were normal and she usually had trouble sleeping whenever she had to go somewhere new the next day, but last night had been worse than usual. The sleep she had gotten was restless and fitful, racked with strange dreams about faery rings and a tiny green creature that watched her every move. Most of the dreams had faded as she’d jerked awake, looking at her clock to find that only five minutes had passed since the last nightmare she’d woken from. But one dream stayed with her, and it hung over her like a dark cloud even now in the sun-bright morning. It had featured the honey-haired man from the grocery store.

  Prominently featured him.

  She didn’t even know his name, but that hadn’t mattered in the dream. Her face grew hot at the memory of his dream-self lying beside her atop the eyelet bedspread in the Victorian’s guest room, her face resting against his chest, dozing while he read a book late into the night. His ghostly lips brushing lightly against hers, stirring her awake. The warmth and familiarity of it, like he’d been there before, like they’d done this thousands of times. Like he belonged there. And then the dream had shifted, to them walking through the overgrown woods, fingers entwined. After a moment Cass had realized they weren’t alone. A little girl, eight or nine years old, skipped along beside them. Cass felt a tug of affection as she looked at the girl, a warmth in her heart that she’d never quite felt before. Though she’d never seen her before, she knew, instinctively, that the girl was hers—theirs.

  Love.

  Then the girl had turned and smiled at her, and suddenly Cass realized that she did know her. This girl wasn’t hers, she realized with the odd detachment of a dream. It was Tom Kowalski’s daughter. Shoulder-length black hair, cut bluntly with straight bangs to match. Dark, round eyes set into a round face. A plaid skirt and a purple sweater.

  They were alone in the woods. The man beside Cass had disappeared. The warmth of his presence faded, leaving cold emptiness in its wake.

  “You have to stop him,” the girl said, looking down at her feet.r />
  “Stop who?” Cass asked. She noticed they’d stopped in front of a massive oak tree, gnarled and sprawling with limbs that forked in every direction. The ground at her feet was lumpy and uneven from the tree’s deep roots. Here and there they poked up from the ground, wooden loops like foot snares.

  “The warren must not be disturbed. Our retribution will be swift.”

  Cass started, searching for the origin of the voice. Finding nothing, she looked back at the girl, only to see the small green creature perched on her shoulder like a pet bird.

  “What’s the warren?” Cass asked.

  The girl didn’t seem to notice the creature on her shoulder. She looked up at Cass now. Her eyes had darkened, the pupils round as saucers and black as midnight. “If you don’t stop him, we’ll all die.”

  Cass couldn’t look away from her eyes. The darkness in them was growing. Any second it would swallow them all up.

  “Who—?”

  “We’ll all die.”

  Cass had woken with a start, drenched in sweat, her legs tangled in the sheets. Her skin was covered in goosebumps, and the usual premonitory lump in her stomach felt more like a developing ulcer. A muted gray light was streaming in through the sheer curtains.

  “That’s it,” she’d said, sitting bolt upright. Onyx had been curled tightly in the farthest corner of the bed, and at her sudden movement he’d rocketed away, splayed claws scritch-ing noisily across the hardwood floor. She flung the covers aside. No more attempting to sleep. Good morning, five A.M.

  She’d gotten up, taken a long shower to clear her head, and begun searching the kitchen high and low for coffee—any coffee at all. When she’d finally found the ancient tin of grounds and the even-ancienter coffee pot, she’d brewed herself a travel mug and, after shoveling some cereal into her mouth, headed straight over to the library. No sense prolonging the inevitable.

  She took another sip now, sighing. She’d gotten here too early. The library opened at eight o’clock. She figured one of the other librarians would be there by seven-thirty, but she’d figured wrong. There was no one here but Cass and her unwelcome thoughts.

  “It usually represents a mother figure, or maybe a pregnancy.”

  She chewed the inside of her cheek, remembering Emma’s words about The Empress tarot card. That must have been what had inspired the dream. But Cass was mortified that she’d had such an intense, vivid dream about two complete strangers, no matter how attractive one of them was. And the end of the dream—that really bothered her. That had all the signs of being a genuine premonition. The goosebumps, the lump in the pit of her stomach; she’d been so nauseous when she awoke that for a panicked moment she’d thought she was going to throw up. Classic premonitory symptoms.

  But “we’ll all die”… that was just a tad direr than her usual visions. The only other one she’d ever had that was even remotely on that scale had been—

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Cass jumped in surprise, sloshing muddy coffee over the sides of the travel mug. She frowned, debating whether to bother rifling through her purse for a Kleenex or just wipe her sticky fingers on the side of her pants, as a tall, slender young woman hurried up to the library door beside her. “Cass, right?” the woman asked. To Cass’s relief, she didn’t try to shake her coffee-covered hand—she was too busy trying to juggle her own coffee and a set of keys.

  “Yeah, I’m Cass. Are you one of the other librarians?”

  “Yes, I’m Darcy. Nice to meet you.” The woman shoved the keys into the glass door and then turned and gave Cass a little wave. “I’ll just be a second. Have to be quick to turn the alarm off or the whole neighborhood will know. Last thing we need is the cops showing up on your first day, right? Not that they have all that far to go,” she added, gesturing to the police station across the parking lot from the library.

  Darcy shoved the door open with her hip and hurried over to a box on the wall that was beeping loudly. She pressed a few buttons and the beeping stopped. “There,” Darcy said with a sigh and a grin. “Now that that’s taken care of. I hope you weren’t standing there too long! I was running late. Had to get my fix.” She held up a white cardboard coffee cup with a black lid and a sleeve that said Alice’s Pony Espresso on it.

  “Where did you get that?” Cass asked, her eyes widening.

  “There’s a drive-through coffee place in Myrtle Creek. It’s like twenty minutes out of the way, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice. If it means I have to go eighty on the frontage road getting back out here before the library opens, that’s a risk I’ll have to take.”

  “I’ll probably be right there with you tomorrow,” Cass said with a laugh.

  Darcy grinned cheerfully, revealing a small gap between her two front teeth. She was probably around Cass’s age, but the combination of that smile and the dusting of freckles across her tanned cheeks made her look younger. “Okay, we’ve technically got five minutes until the library opens, but I doubt it’s going to be exactly hopping. We usually get busier in the afternoon, so I can spend most of this morning showing you the ropes.”

  “Are you the head librarian?” Cass asked.

  “Oh, no, that’s Randy. He’s off today. We usually don’t have more than two people working at a time. Our branch is pretty small. Technically I’m the youth services librarian—children and teens—but we all kind of pitch in with a little bit of everything around here. Did the county fill you in on any of that when they hired you?”

  Cass shook her head. “I think it just said assistant librarian on the job offer. But this is the fourth library system I’ve worked in, so I know they’re all different. I figured I’d go where you guys need me.”

  “Fourth?” Darcy repeated with a cocked eyebrow. “Not that I’m surprised, really. I know most people don’t get what they want at their first job. Very few people seem to choose to be a children’s librarian, for example. Everyone wants to be an archivist,” she said, a note of mild disapproval in her voice.

  Cass smirked. “That is the dream job.”

  “I’m the odd one out,” said Darcy. “If I had it my way, youth services is all I’d do. It’s much more my style than the other work we have to do here. Too bad Douglas County’s budget is next to nonexistent.”

  “You could probably get a job at a bigger system,” Cass suggested. “Children’s librarians who actually want to be children’s librarians are a hot commodity. If a library knew you’d stay with them, they’d probably hire you in a heartbeat.”

  Darcy shrugged, avoiding Cass’s gaze. “Yeah, I know. It would just be hard for me to leave Riddle, you know what I mean?”

  Cass took a sip of her mud-coffee to keep herself from making a face. Why anyone would choose to stay in a backwater town like this—especially when she had good job prospects somewhere else, even somewhere reasonably close like Medford or Eugene—was beyond her ability to fathom.

  The next hour was spent introducing Cass to the ins and outs of the library. There wasn’t a lot to learn; Cass had worked at so many libraries at this point that even though they were all different, she was able to find overlap of one aspect or another from her past experiences. On top of that, the Riddle Branch Library was much smaller than any other library she’d worked at. There were less moving parts, so to speak. Soon Darcy had gotten her logged into the Douglas County system—which used the same software as the second-to-last system Cass had worked at, so she only needed a slight refresher—and set her to work processing the small stack of returns from the previous Saturday, plus the ones that had been left in the dropbox on Sunday.

  “While you work on that, I can start getting things together for our event today,” Darcy said.

  “Event?” Cass repeated.

  “The summer scavenger hunt winners party. I hid some items around town this summer. The kids who found them all get to come this afternoon for a party. You know, lemonade, cookies, a little goody bag. That kind of thing.”

  “The brown-and-
white dog,” Cass said, mentally connecting the dots.

  “You found the clue at the grocery store!” Darcy beamed. “I know it’s not the flashiest of activities, but it was something easy enough to do and affordable on our budget. I wanted to do something extra besides the usual summer reading program. Get the kids out of the house and into the community.”

  “I think it was a great idea,” Cass said with a smile. “Do you need help setting up for the party?”

  “No, I think I’m good,” Darcy replied. “If you could handle the desk, that’ll free me up for the stuff I need to do.” She let out a sigh, grinning. “It’s such a relief to have someone else here. I know we’re a small branch, but it’s still too much work for just one person. Maybe now I can focus on doing more kids programming than just boring old homework hour.”

  Cass smiled stiffly. Now probably wouldn’t be a good time to mention that she wasn’t planning on sticking around long. Darcy was so excited, Cass didn’t have the heart to burst her balloon so soon. She’d have to at some point, but there was no harm letting her be happy for a day. Darcy was so cheerful and enthusiastic, Cass couldn’t help but like her already.

  As Darcy had indicated, the library was not busy first thing in the morning. A few older patrons had wandered in, most heading for the computers or the periodicals. Only one came to the desk to ask Cass to check a book out for him, eschewing the self-checkout system. Cass was able to quickly get the stack of books checked back in and placed on the shelving cart.

  She was just debating whether she should leave her post at the front desk—not like she wouldn’t notice if someone needed help while she was restocking, considering how small the building was—when the glass doors at the front swung open. She glanced up, her eyes widening slightly in surprise.