“I… oh, sure.” His image flashed up in the movie of my mind. Sure, I remembered him. “Hey, Brent. Nice to talk to you. Why are you calling?” I said, again forcing niceness where I was not feeling it at all. That picture in my mind of somebody was vague, but somewhat memorable. Red shirt, red hair. Wearing a tie in high school. Super uncool. That type, the sort who wanted to be friends but made the whole thing impossible by being so… him. I forced myself to listen to what he was saying.
“Well, it’s part of school policy that twice a week, teachers have to man the office phones. We have more administrators than ever, and still they somehow pawn their jobs off on us knowledge miners.
“Wait a minute. Are you saying you’re teaching at Lafay High now? Seriously?”
“Yup. It’s my second year. Hey, listen, I’m set to take over this place in no time, Mimi. You ought to get qualified and join me. We could have a blast.”
“Right. I don’t think so. I’m don’t think teaching is my destiny.”
“Still, it’s cool to know you’re back in town. I’d seen Lucy but I hadn’t made the connection with the names. Do you remember when I asked you out—”
“Brent, you’re calling about Lucy,” I said, getting a little impatient with his rambling.
“Huh? Oh, right. Um… Lucy’s not in her first period class, so I need to call to see why. If you just haven’t called in her absence yet, it won’t count against—”
I hung up the phone. Furious and terrified, I dialed Sibyl on my cell phone as I charged out the door, leaving everything behind.
Lucy wasn’t in class. Lucy was somewhere, out there, and I needed to know why.
Chapter 6
Sibyl hadn’t called me back by the time I’d gotten into my car, and I was half a mile away from the shop before I’d realized I had left it unattended, with nobody taking care of my customers, of the till, of anything. I sent out a psychic message to anybody who could be attuned to me to please, please, please not let the Secret Angels suddenly go rogue and burn down the shop.
Or not let the Jiggs sisters sneak in when I wasn’t there to guard it. Kashmir should be able to stop that. The most important thing now was I had to find my little sister… who was somewhere, I had no idea where, and I was driving to the one place I knew she wasn’t: the school.
I took a turn here, a turn there, trying to sort out my thoughts, when suddenly I was stopped up short by a crowd of people in the middle of a street, along with some policemen and yellow tape. Without meaning to, I’d managed to drive not to the school but to what was, apparently, the scene of a crime. I was right outside Mrs. Higginbottom’s house.
Since the alternative was running over a cop, I pulled over to the side of the road, and got out of my car. The cop, a big man with a small mustache and a small face surrounded by muscle who looked like he lived at the gym when he wasn’t on duty, shook his head at me, his folded arms like enormous slabs of meat crossed over his chest.
“No, ma’am, you’ve got no reason to be here, so I suggest…”
“Mimi, finally. Officer Quincey, this is my secretary,” said a man who rushed up behind the cop. Officer Quincey turned and looked ready to pick up the man and throw him over his head, but that didn’t slow Max Ransom down for an instant.
He stood a full head taller than the officer, but Max didn’t cut the most intimidating of figures. The most prominent feature about him was the camera he wore around his neck, with a lens that looked like a futuristic weapon and probably cost more than my car.
“Daylight’s burning, Mimi, I’ve got to take pictures, you’ve got to ask questions.”
“Wait,” the officer said, but Max had already grabbed me and pulled me toward the crowd.
“Max, I—”
“What are you doing here? Come like half of these lookie-loos to see if the witch was really dead?” he said, with a wink.
I scowled. Not only at the suggestion, but at the word choice. I’m a witch. I know a lot of witches… well, maybe three including myself. Clarice Higginbottom was many things, at least one of those things included the letters “itch”, but it didn’t start with W.
“Why would I want to do that?” I said, letting my genuine offense show through.
“Because nobody liked her,” he said, whispering now. “Except maybe him,” he said, and we stopped just inside the lookie-loo crowd, just outside the yellow police tape, to see a man sitting on the side of the curb. Two police officers stood above him, another one I did not know, and a much more familiar figure: Sgt. Frisco.
Frisco took down notes while the other officer leaned down and looked at the man’s hands. I’d never seen the man before, but he looked like he’d aged beyond his years. Wearing a robe over boxers, unshaven with white hair that didn’t cover all of his head.
“Mr. Higginbottom?” I said, in a whisper.
“Nope. Not exactly. He’s her husband, but his name is Glen Wright. Higginbottom kept her name when they got married, five years ago. He found her this morning and immediately called the cops. She was in the second bedroom of their house, apparently strangled to death.”
I gasped, covering my mouth.
“Did he…”
“Says he came home late last night, saw her light was on in the second bedroom which she used as an office — for grading papers, and the like. That wasn’t unusual, and he didn’t want to bother her. Took his sleeping pill, which he apparently needed, slept like the dead. Woke up, she hadn’t come to bed. So, he checked in…”
“Wow,” I said, mortified. “So either someone came in and attacked her while he was sleeping…”
“Or she’d been dead the entire time, and if he’d just gone in to check he would have seen her last night, freshly killed,” Max said, with a completely unbecoming grin.
“Don’t tell me you’re enjoying this, you ghoul,” I said, thoroughly disgusted.
“As a citizen of this fine town, I want to see justice done,” Max said, with smug solemnity. “As a newspaper reporter who has papers to sell, who needs clicks on his website and who likes to be the first to hear about everything, well, nothing bigger is happening in town, or will for a while, I’m guessing.”
“Ugh,” I said, not so much at him as at the state of the world.
“Local beloved teacher attacked in her own home. Was it a secret lover, a husband lying to cover up his own crime… Or a vengeful student?” he said, looking knowingly at me.
My blood ran cold.
“What?” I said, loudly enough that some of the other people around us turned to glare at me. “Why would you say that? Why would anyone… I mean, she was just a teacher. Why would you say a student?”
Max’s conspiratorial smile faltered a little bit, probably because of my stridency. I was fraying at the edges here, worrying about Lucy, and beginning to seem a little unhinged to the folks who were, after glaring at me, pretending I wasn’t there at all.
“Whoa, kid, simmer down. I’ve just been gathering information, checking in on sources, eavesdropping on the cops, things like that. One of the women here… that one,” he said, pointing at a short, rotund creature wearing hair curlers and looking oddly satisfied with the attention she was getting from a police officer.
“That one what?” I said.
“The witness over there. Uh, Mrs. Sandinski. Can’t sleep at night, so she reads or watches out from the front window to make sure her neighborhood’s not being invaded.”
I looked at him with open skepticism. He pulled out a notebook, flipped open the cover, and read, in a slightly affected voice: “’I look to make sure we’re not being invaded. It’s going to happen. We’re going to be invaded, but they’re not gonna catch me off guard.’”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, pursing my lips. “Sounds like a credible witness.”
“Eh, everybody’s crazy if you talk to them enough,” Max said, smiling. “All it takes is finding the right thing to be crazy about. Like you with that cat…”
“We’re no
t talking about Kashmir here,” I said, feeling so frustrated. I’m a witch, I’m not somebody who should ever run out of options. But I was here at the mercy of a man who enjoyed torturing me, trying to squeeze out of him any bit of information that would calm the roiling, unpleasant ideas going through my head. “Please, Max, this whole thing has me real upset and I want to know… what did she say?”
“Okay, but you seem to be taking this awfully personally. Care to tell me why? Quid pro quo?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, after a deep sigh that could not contain all my exasperation. “But only after.”
“I’m holding you to that,” he said, looking like he’d pulled one over on me. “Okay, the Sandinski woman said she saw many signs last night. ‘Signs’, her exact word. There were three stray dogs that ran through the street, not making a noise. Hmm, silent dog packs, running feral in a small town. There’s a human interest piece on that.”
“Oh my gosh, I’m going to—”
“A van parked outside the house, and stayed there for a number of hours, then drove away. She saw no driver get in, and no driver get out, but it came and went,” Max said, looking at me significantly from over the notebook.
“Wow, a van. Did it have any markings?” I said.
“Yes, but she’s too nearsighted to read them, and wasn’t going to go outside to get a better look. She did say it had some kind of animal on it. A… let me read this… vampire hunting beaver.”
“That’s really dumb,” I said.
Max just shrugged. “The important part is, while the van was parked there, a young girl dressed like a music video dancer, whatever that means, also went by the house. Sandinski couldn’t see what the girl was doing because the van blocked her view, but she might have seen her shadow in the windows of the house. Mimi, you’ve gone all white. I think it’s your turn to tell me something.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but try to unhear the words I’d heard. A young girl. Dressed like a music video dancer. Yesterday, Lucy had been wearing a short, bouncy skirt over leggings, a short jeans jacket and her hair, the way it flounced like it had a mind of its own when she moved… it was a little 80s MTV.
“Mimi, I quidded. Now it’s time pro quo. Why did the imagination of a crazy lady make you go all… where are you going?”
“Um,” was all I could manage to say, and I was in my car and driving off before Max could reach my door. I scooted a little too quickly by Officer Quincey, whom I believe wrote down my license plate number and, no kidding, shook his fist at me.
I drove down a few lanes, getting further and further into the residential streets of Lafay and away from where anybody could see me, because I needed some privacy for this next part.
I parked my car at the undeveloped end of a cul de sac, a place where lots had been flattened years ago for houses that never ended up getting built. It wasn’t exactly discrete, and there were some houses just a few dozen yards away, but I didn’t need too much time to do what I needed to do.
In my purse were three things I needed, that I never went anywhere without.
The first was a box of matches. Inside that box, besides the matches themselves, was a little twist of corn-silk and chicken bone. It sounds weird, I know, but when you need to cast a spell, you need weird things to do it.
The second thing I always had around was Grand-Mere’s spell book. It was an intimidating looking volume that I kept at my side at all times. I couldn’t risk Sibyl finding it and getting mad at me. I couldn’t risk Lucy finding it and trying some of it on her own, unsupervised. And I couldn’t risk it falling into anyone else’s hands, so it was always with me.
I flipped through it, hoping that the exact kind of spell I needed was in there, somewhere. It wasn’t the kind of book that you could just sit down and read through. It was organized strangely, almost haphazardly, and I think that was on purpose. Being a witch was supposed to be a headache, and I think I literally got a migraine every time I tried to read too much at once.
Glancing here and there, I came across the section on familiars, which included diagrams, some passages in Latin with translations right underneath, and then the spell I needed, with the words I had to say.
It wasn’t a complicated spell — most spells having to do with familiars aren’t. Familiars exist to simplify a witch’s life, not make things harder on them. And to perform this spell, all I needed was that third thing I never leave home without, however much I try to. Anyone who owns a cat knows what I’m talking about.
Fur gets everywhere, so I always have a little of it on my clothes when I need it. One black, elegant strand of it was dangling artfully from the front of my shirt, like it was inviting me to use it.
I grabbed it, twisted it into the cornsilk and chicken bone, then opened up the ashtray in my front dashboard (old car, still had an ashtray, thank goodness.)
I said the words, the mix of English and Latin and all kinds of things that didn’t make sense, then I said, in plain, clear, bold words: “Kashmir, I need to speak with you.”
With that, I lit a match to the cornsilk, and it went up with (literally) supernatural speed, creating a flash of light. I held my hand in front of my eyes, then when I brought it down the fire was gone. The chicken bone had become completely red, and then it cracked, letting out a plume of black powder in a cloud above the bone. It hovered there, like smoke, and then formed the vague shape of Kashmir’s feline face, with gaps in the smoke where his eyes were.
“Meow?” Kashmir said, casually.
“I know what you said yesterday, but I need you, need you to look for Lucy,” I said, trying to sound stern and not like I was begging.
“I will need something in return. Your undivided attention searching for the grimoire.”
“Done,” I said.
“A renewed focus on finding out what the Jiggs are doing, and thwarting them, no matter what it takes.”
That would mean working with magic a lot more, and Sibyl was bound to find out. But it had to be done some time.
“Done,” I said.
Kashmir sniffed, and the shadow-cloud that made up his face rippled. The blank spots where his eyes were went dark then light again, as if he blinked long and slow.
“Fresh fish. Twice a week. Not from a can. That’s domestic cat stuff, and I’m a familiar.”
“Fresh… Kashmir…”
“I am risking everything by going out and doing duties that are not a familiar’s duties. My magic could disappear, I could become a regular cat… and at my age, that would mean no more Kashmir.”
“All right, all right. Fresh fish,” I said, feeling exhausted. I was spending all day dealing with exasperating people. And cats. “Now find Lucy.”
“Fine. She’s here at the shop, been here since about two minutes after you left.”
Chapter 7
“Keep her there, I’ll be by in a jiffy,” I said to Kashmir, dismissing the spell. Then I leaned back in my chair and nearly broken into bawling sobs. Just as quickly I jerked myself back straight up, turned on the car and headed back to the shop.
It’s always a bittersweet feeling when you find out something terrible hasn’t happened to someone you love who’s been missing. Once the initial flood of relief wears off, and you know they’re not dead in a ditch somewhere, all of that emotion needs somewhere new to go. And you can get very angry.
My head of anger was building so that by the time I got to the tea shop, I must have looked like someone in a cartoon, with my face completely red and steam shooting visibly out of my ears. I drove by the front of the shop, and saw that it had been closed about 30 minutes before it should have been.
That just made me madder. Lucy was losing me time, money, taking years off my life and she’d… I wouldn’t think of the other things she might have done. I parked in my space behind the shop and stormed in there, ready to shout.
“Ah!” Lucy screamed, as I came in. But she wasn’t screaming at me.
She was up on the counter, barely finding a place to stand between the packages and boxes and pans. She had a broom in her hands, and was whipping it around like a hockey-stick. The puck was a wild, ferocious and spitting Kashmir.
He whirled around the counter, hissing and slashing. Lucy pushed the broom to him, almost connecting with his back. The cat was too fast, and with a meow that came close to a roar, grabbed the broom and actually ripped it from Lucy’s hands.
She screamed again and fell backwards.
I was barely there in time for her to collapse into me, practically knocking the wind right out of me. She squirmed in my arms like a wild animal.
“The cat! The cat!” she screamed.
Kashmir was above us both now, looking like a feline hellhound.
“Kashmir, stand down,” I said.
As soon as the words were out of my lips, Kashmir stopped in his pursuit of Lucy, and licked his paws.
The only sounds in the place were the sandpaper sound of his tongue, and the rustling and scrambling of Lucy, who didn’t realize she was completely out of danger. I glared at Kashmir, who looked calmly at me, and gave me a single wink.
“Lucy, Lucy, calm down, the cat’s not going to hurt you,” I said, brushing her hair.
She froze like a statue, then pushed herself out of my arms.
“That thing’s a maniac!” she said, getting to her feet. Kashmir hadn’t moved from his spot, but he also didn’t spare Lucy a single glance. He was deep into his grooming ritual, cleaning himself with complete focus.
When he dropped forward and thrust a leg in the air, to better facilitate cleaning a nook here or cranny there, Lucy flinched.
“It’s just Kashmir,” I said. “He… has moods. And he can detect when somebody’s doing what they shouldn’t and he tries to stop them.”
Lucy looked me in the eye for a split second, then down at the floor.
“Well, look at the time. I’m late for school, but it’s a nice day and I’m going to walk. Don’t give me a ride, see you later Mimi, I took my wages out of the till, but only what I’m owed, and…”
Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Page 4