“A familiar?” I said.
“Is a terrier an owl, cat, or lizard?” he said.
“No.”
“Are we in England, where they let poodles be familiars?”
“No.”
“Then no, it’s just a dog. But that can be enough, some times.”
I kneeled down to get a better look at whatever might have happened to my familiar, and he batted away at my hands. I stood up, shaking my head, and saw that Lucy, just like when she’d caught her hat at the bus stop, was stuck like a mannequin, hands against her mouth, staring at Kashmir.
“Lucy?” I said.
“OMG,” she said again, and her body began to quiver.
“Kashmir, why are you—”
“Because she casts spells, she’s in the family, and it was important. That’s why I spoke in front of her,” he said, between cleaning licks of his side. “And she’s apparently too stupid to worry that anyone will listen to her, if she tells them about it.”
“Hey!” Lucy said, finally dropping her hands to put them on her hips. “Why would we keep this a secret? It’s the coolest thing ever in the history of stuff!”
“We keep it a secret for all kinds of reasons, Lucy, not the least of which is that it is witch stuff, and witch stuff is secret,” I said, trying to sound very serious while I said words that were very hard to take seriously.
But they seemed to sober up Lucy immediately. She nodded very solemnly, then took a step forward toward Kashmir. She leaned down, her nose halfway to the ground, and looked at him.
“Very pleased to meet you, Kashmir the cat,” she said, then held out a hand toward him.
He looked at it with suspicion. “Just Kashmir,” he said, a little sullenly. Getting back on all four feet, he pushed his head into Lucy’s hand, a very cat-like gesture that said, I shall be petted by you. For now.
Then he twisted back into his licking position.
“So, what was he doing?” Lucy said, keeping a look out of the corner of her eye at the cat while talking to me.
“He caught a whiff of magic on you that he recognized, and he followed it to the Jiggs. Right?” I said.
The only confirmation I got was the wet sound of a cat thoroughly licking a spot.
“Right,” I said. “And so he went over and got… this.”
“Don’t open it,” Kashmir said. “And set it down. In something you can cover. It’s dangerous to hold.”
“Hmm?” I said, and then I nearly dropped the pouch like Lucy had. I hadn’t noticed it while it happened, but the skin on my hand where I’d been touching the pouch was growing red, and even starting to blister, like I’d been badly burned. My eyes went wide, and I began whipping around, looking for something, anything to stop the sudden onset of pain.
But again, without being asked, Lucy whipped into action. A Tupperware container of cookies was suddenly emptied, and I dropped the pouch into it. She slapped the cover on the top, and then carefully put the container on the metal counter.
We both turned and looked at it, getting our faces down pretty close to see if it would do something, anything. We stared hard, but nothing happened.
Suddenly, a big black shape flew in front of us, making us both scream and fly back.
I didn’t recognize it as Kashmir until I’d already flown back to the far wall, my arms at my face. Lucy had the mop in her hand, ready to strike.
“Jumpy, you two,” Kashmir said with a touch of disdain. He pushed at the Tupperware with one paw, looking from one side to the next.
“Cat, what are you trying to do?” I said, grimacing.
“Scare us to death, I think,” Lucy said, setting the mop down.
Kashmir gave us a wise look, then began to study the pouch again. “The Jiggs are very clever,” he said, nose twitching. “And they have been planning to control magic in this town for a very long time, I think. They have little feelers out all over the place, like… weather stations.”
I blinked. “Weather stations? You know what weather stations are? Just two weeks ago you called a key a ‘go-inner’ and now you know about weather stations?”
“I am mysterious,” Kashmir said, casually. “But these are similar devices. Instead of measuring the weather, they measure when magic is used, anywhere in town. They’d be easy to hide, though not so easy to maintain.” He gazed at us both with wide, scary eyes and spoke delibrately, as though in warning. “And when a spell is cast, they can even, if they prepare ahead of time, capture that spell for themselves.”
Lucy and I looked at each other. “Are you following a single thing the cat is saying?” I said.
“The kitty’s talking!” Lucy said, practically jumping up and down.
“I’m saying, dumb humans, that Lucy cast a spell last night, and it was caught by the Jiggs. And I have recovered it myself, so we can see what it did. We have the means.”
We both turned to Kashmir at once, staring into his glowing kitty eyes.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Remember the paper airplane?” he said.
I nodded. He was referring to the experiment I’d done a few days before. I’d sent the airplane, but it had never shown up back at the house where I’d directed it.
“That was also in the Jiggs’ hiding place. I was trying to recover it when their monsters attacked me.”
“Oh, wow,” I said, trying to think through the implications. “So, how does this help us? ‘We have the means’?”
Before he could say anything, someone pounded on the back door. We both nearly jumped again, and before I could go to the door, it opened up and Max came in.
“You’ve got to hear…” He stopped dead as he took in the scene. He looked from one person to another, and then at the cat. “What are you doing?” he said, eyes widening.
“We’re—” Lucy said, but I cut her off before she could even come close to letting a particular cat out of the bag.
“We’ve found something that we think might be relevant, but we’re not sure how. It’s… complicated.”
Kashmir meowed, and jumped off the counter to wander toward the front of the shop.
Max’s gaze followed the cat, then returned to us, narrowing into a very, very suspicious glare.
“You were talking to the cat.”
“Yes,” I said, breezily. “And someday I hope he answers back. Something more than mrrlow. Or a yawn.”
Max stared for a moment, then shook his head, letting the mixed thoughts and emotions go. “Okay, later. For right now, I’ve got to tell you what I found. Uh… is the kid gonna stay?” he said, pointing a thumb at Lucy.
“The kid is completely in, 100%,” Lucy said, sticking out her chin and waving it like a defiant flag.
“Okay, but this is… look, I’ve got a few things. The handy man, uh…Whitten, he said he was asleep all last night, turned in close to 9.”
“Okay, sure,” I said.
“Well, a call to his shop, which he co-owns with another guy, says that his van was checked out from their office at 10 that night. I’m going to tell Frisco, make sure he checks out if there’s an on-board GPS, it might be a way to tell where the car was when.”
“His phone, too. But the police are going to be doing that, why are you coming to me with it?” I said.
“Because,” Max said, “I want to go and talk to him, and I need somebody to watch my back. My Girl Friday’s kept my bacon out of the fire before.”
“And nearly got shot for doing it,” I said, but I was just snarking. There was no chance I wasn’t going to see this thing through, if it might help out Lucy.
“I don’t understand any of this. What’s going on?” she said.
Delicately, Max and I explained to Lucy what we could while stepping over some of the more grown-up aspects of the situation. Which, of course, were just what Lucy latched on to.
“Really? Mrs. Higginbottom was…” She looked around and whispered the words, “sleeping around?”
I nodded wi
th a tight smile.
“But she was… old and gross and awful.”
“No accounting for taste,” Max said. “And, well… when I first got out of college I got this apartment above a crappy restaurant where the cook was this real specimen. I mean, she was as greasy as the burgers, and looked a little like ground meat, too. Anyway, one night when I went down for a meal, we were the only ones in the… why are you looking at me like that?” he said, staring at me.
“What’s the rating on this story?” I said, tapping my foot (like Sibyl again, darn it.)
Max’s eyes went big, and he suddenly went completely red. “Hey, let’s hit the road.”
“But your story,” Lucy said, looking a little too interested.
“No, no story. Work, we’ve got work to do…”
A slamming came from the front of the store, followed seconds later by other small sounds, a kind of skittering I couldn’t place.
“What the—” I said, and headed out there without a thought.
Well, the skittering was from a knocked over container of sugar packets. Shady Tree had nice custom packets, while we got ours by the palette full from a supply store… and now the little white packets were spread out. They were scattered around the overturned container, and then there was a line of them leading toward the office.
A perfect line, like the sort somebody would set down if they wanted a path to be followed. Somebody, or some furry thing.
“A little on the nose,” I said, kicking the perfect line of sugar packets into disarray before Max could blunder in and see clear evidence of Kashmir’s specialness.
I made it to the office door when it creaked open, pushed by a little black paw.
“Kash,” I said, then cut myself off as the door to the kitchen opened and Max and Lucy followed after me. Lucy, thoughtfully, had picked up the Tupperware container with the spell, and was holding it discretely inside the enormous cuff of the over-sized jacket. I saw it, but as she moved she hid it so Max couldn’t.
“The cat just playing around?” Max said, dripping skepticism.
“He’s a cat, that’s what they do,” I said, my voice trailing off as my attention went to the inside of my office, where Kash had settled on my computer. One paw on the special thingamajig we’d been working on to do our own magic detecting. That was a picture Max didn’t need to see.
But I finally understood my kitty and couldn’t help exclaiming.
“Of course! We have the means!”
Chapter 13
Without another word, I grabbed the Tupperware from Lucy, shoved Kashmir out of the way, and plopped it down on top of one of the devices Kashmir and I had been engineering. It was a magic field checker, and it worked… I have no idea how it worked. Or if it worked. But what I knew we had to do was take something magic, and put it in the middle of the ‘field generator’. That was a fancy term for what was essentially a metal dowsing rod.
“Okay, okay, this I’ve been fooling with for a while,” I said, excited. “Now, I get to see whether or not it works.”
If you’ve ever tried to get anything to work right on your computer, you know it either happens like magic, or it takes forever to even figure out what went wrong. This was more like the latter experience, and by the fifth time I’d had to unplug everything and plug it back in, I made sure Lucy was covering her ears so she wouldn’t hear me tell my computer just what I thought of it.
And then, all at once, the monitor went kind of fuzzy, like it was about to break… and a menu appeared on the screen, with only three options: “Examine Spell”, “Destroy Spell”, “Quit”.
“This looks really weird,” Max said, sounding very nervous.
I sat down at the computer, and the other two crowded around me. The mouse was in its place on the desk, but the keyboard was missing. Kashmir had made a real mess of things trying to get our attention, but it was worth it if this did… something.
“Well? What is it supposed to do?” Lucy said.
“All kinds of things,” I said, mysteriously, because I did not know, myself. I half-understood the magic we were working with, and Kashmir half-understood the computer bits. Between us, we’d gotten something going. Just what, we were about to find out.
“Let’s examine the spell,” I said, and I clicked on the menu option.
A burp came from the Tupperware container, and suddenly the pouch inside melted away as if it had been containing hot coals. In place of the pouch, there was… at first I thought it was nothing. A shadow, cast from the lightbulb above, but then the shadow stood up, and it was a little dark person. A girl, made entirely out of shadows but with a very familiar shape.
“Hello, Little Lucy,” I said, enchanted and scared all at once. My heart was beating very fast. This was it.
The shape jumped out of the Tupperware, and then froze in mid-air. There weren’t any sparks or anything interesting to look at going on, but I figured that meant the device we’d built had worked — the spell, represented by a little shadow figure of Lucy, was caught in the field.
Sound erupted from the computer. Nothing distinct or even very loud, just the sort of sound like if you had a microphone and were picking up ambient noise. A picture showed up on the monitor, too — of a dark room, of huddled figures. We were seeing through the eyes of someone else, almost exactly like the time Kashmir had let us ride around in his head, to see what he saw.
Max noticed it, too. “Hey, didn’t you need some kind of password to use the cat like this?”
“Yes, when you do magic properly,” I said with a very pointed glance at Lucy. “When you’re careful, you make it impossible for people to just grab it away from you like this. There are proper safeguards. You just have to use them.”
Lucy sighed, but she had the decency to look abashed. Then she brightened when the image on the monitor did.
“Hey!” she said. “It’s me!”
And there she was, huddled on the ground, her face lit by a flickering candle. There were other kids seated beside her, including that wussy little Ethan brat I’d seen at the sheriff’s station. Lucy’s little coven. Oh my!
The Lucy on the monitor spoke, saying, “Go now and do our bidding, spirit of the fire. Do unto this image’s namesake all that we require.”
“Weak rhyme,” I said, and Lucy lightly clouted me on the shoulder.
On the screen, coven-leader Lucy gave a little shake like a cold finger had touched her back… then images whipped by so quickly, it was almost nauseating. We saw the kids from above, then suddenly we were in another room, a supply closet where a janitor was holding a paperback book close to his face.
Then we were above the school grounds, then above the entire town, which was dark with night. The vision seemed to squirm and turn for a while, then it wooshed down again, moving into a different part of town….and landing right on Rochemon Street, across from Mrs. Higginbottom’s house.
I gasped for breath, feeling dizzy. Max had his hand over his mouth, his eyes huge and worried. Lucy was bouncing with excitement.
Suddenly text appeared in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
Shadow figure — magic spell to create a shadowy reflection—usually used for spying.
“Wow, this computer figured out what I was doing, even when I didn’t know,” Lucy said.
I’d have agreed, except that I had been, I think, the only one who heard the light tapping at keys. Wherever the keyboard was, it had a black cat on top of it, typing out messages he couldn’t speak in front of Max.
“Yeah, I’ve sure got something here,” I said.
Max shushed me, even though there was no sound going on. He was engrossed in the image of the dark, lonely street. Empty street, too, because there was no van. Our point of view moved across it, smoothly, more like a camera than a person walking.
“My spell! It’s going to the house. It’s going to attack her, I can’t watch this!” Lucy suddenly shrieked, and covered her eyes with her hands.
“No, wa
it,” Max said. Just as the shadowy figure reached the other side, there was a low rumble on the speakers. Images rushed through again on the monitor as the van drove completely through the shadowy figure, through the spell. Of course, it just passed through, but the view was disconcerting, to say the least.
“Check out who’s driving,” Max said. “Can you see who that is?” But the van passed through too quickly, and then the back of it took up the entire monitor. The door opened, and the shadowy figure crept around the side of the van.
A man walked up to the front door of the Higginbottom house, and pulled something out his pocket, something that glinted in the little light there was at night.
“What is that? A key? Who is it? I can’t tell, it’s too dark,” I said.
“Can you rewind this thing?” Max asked.
“I don’t know. Um…”
“Look, he’s going in…”
Then suddenly the vision was yanked again, as though someone had grabbed it and pulled away from the scene, whipping by streets super fast. The last thing we saw before it went black was the front of the Shady Tree cafe.
With a puff, the image went out on the screen. With a tiny cry, the little figure above the Tupperware disappeared, too.
We sat there, none of us saying a thing. The weirdness and impossibility of all we had just seen, it was going to take a lot of getting used to.
“Okay, wait,” Lucy said slowly. “So we were watching my spell as it flew to Mrs. Higginbottom’s house that night. Then some man drove up in a van and went to the house. And then…and then the Jiggs’ spell catching machine grabbed my spell and took it away? Before it could do anything to Mrs. Higginbottom? Is that it?”
I nodded.
Lucy cried out, jumped and grabbed me in a big bear hug.
“I didn’t do it! I’m not responsible! Yay!” She kissed me, hugged Max, then dove to pick up Kashmir. The second she reached him, he placed a halting paw right on her nose, and extended his claws just enough that she could feel them, touching her.
“Ahem,” she said, the stood upright, beaming.
Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Page 8