Tea & Croakies

by Sam Cheever

  I reached for the next book without looking, and my fingers touched warm leather. Too warm. I stilled, looking down as the leathery cover rolled under my touch. I jerked my hand away and stepped back, recognizing the phantom book from the artifact library

  I hadn’t put that book on the table. Had I?

  “Sebille?”

  A book slammed to the floor behind the shelves and I jumped, my pulse spiking. “Sebille?”

  A moment later she called out. “Sorry. Dropped it.”

  Movement caught at the corner of my eye and my gaze jerked to the book. The pages were flipping wildly, showing blank page after blank page, and then stopping on the now-familiar picture of Mr. Slimy. When I reached to touch the picture, the page flipped over to another blank sheet. It didn’t stay blank for long. Like blood seeping through tissue from a wound, letters rose slowly from the page. As my horrified gaze locked onto the rising ink, I finally recognized two words, and my pressure spiked to new heights.

  Help me.

  5

  Time is of the Essence

  I stood at the counter, staring into the donut box. Inside, comfortably ensconced on his mossy bed, Mr. Slimy stared back.

  “Are you just going to stand there and glare at that frog all day?” Sebille asked as she pulled on her coat.

  My gaze snapped up in surprise. I glanced at the tea-kettle-shaped clock above her head. “Is it five o’clock already?”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Sebille said, clearly disgusted with me. You might have noticed a pattern. Sebille spent a lot of time being disgusted with me.

  “Bye,” I murmured back. The jangling bell on the door reminded me that I had to be careful. Candace Quilleran had already swooped down on me once, trying to get her hands on the frog. I knew that was just the initial salvo into our new episode of Pet Wars.

  She’d be back. And if she wanted the artifact as badly as she seemed to want it, she wouldn’t come through the front door the next time.

  A simple expulsion warding wouldn’t keep her away indefinitely.

  Realizing that it wasn’t safe to leave him in the shop overnight, I made a quick decision. “All right, Mr. Slimy. You’re coming upstairs with me.”

  “Ribbit!”

  As I looked down on the bright, black gaze and rhythmically throbbing throat, I had a sudden memory of him chowing down on a hapless grasshopper earlier in the day and gagged.

  No, wait, that wasn’t the tender moment I’d been going for.

  Sigh.

  Ah well, I already had bats in my belfry. I might as well have a frog in my bedroom too.

  I scooped up the box, locked up the shop and headed for the stairs. Mr. Wicked came running from the artifact library when I called out to him, a spiderweb coating his fuzzy nose and a spider leg sticking out of one side of his mouth.

  “Erg! No wonder you two are bosom buddies,” I told the cat and the frog.

  Neither one deigned to respond to my observation.

  Snots.

  Settling my tea on the bedside table. I pulled a novel out of the top drawer. I smiled, my fingers caressing the glossy surface of the supernormal adventure that had been written by my favorite author. “At last we can be together,” I told the book.

  Mr. Wicked jumped soundlessly onto the bed and nestled himself into the cat-shaped dent in the center of my spare pillow.

  The frog stared at me from his box next to the lamp. I stared back. “What?” When he didn’t respond, I said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have a very judgmental face for a frog?”

  “Ribbit.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I turned on the lamp and settled myself comfortably against my pillows. As usual, the book drew me right in, carrying me through a fun adventure filled with witches, ghosts, vampires, and other such entertaining creatures.

  The human population’s ability to get nearly everything wrong about the supernormal world never failed to charm me.

  The warm room, the soft drone of Mr. Wicked’s purring, and a gentle rain pattering against the windows soon lulled me into sleepiness. My eyelids kept trying to close but I kept jerking awake, determined to finish the chapter before letting Morpheus wrap me in his chiseled embrace.

  But it wasn’t meant to be. Within moments I’d lost the battle and my eyes had fallen shut. I jerked awake at the sound of the book hitting the floor, and my eyes flew open.

  I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye and my gaze snapped in that direction. A dense gray haze, vaguely man-shaped, swirled on the air above my bed. I yelped, skittering sideways so fast I slipped off the bed and crashed to the floor.

  Wicked shot up on a surprised yowl, his tail snapping.

  I jumped to my feet and stood staring at the swirling shape, watching it slowly morph into a long body and a pleasant-looking face. The eyes sharpened, their color brightening until they were more blue than gray, and the mouth opened in a soundless plea.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what you want.”

  My shadow-intruder frowned, then turned to the nightstand and pointed. My gaze followed his and I blinked. Mr. Slimy was out of his donut box.

  And he was sitting on the Book of Blank Pages.

  If I hadn’t realized before that the frog was at the core of the recent magic wave, it would have hit me hard in that moment. But somehow the book was involved too. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen the Book of Blank Pages before the frog appeared.

  I didn’t think I had. But I just wasn’t sure. I got about a dozen new artifacts a week. Some of them I’d gone out into the world to gather and safely ensconce in my shop. Some came to me, unannounced and usually with problems attached.

  I started to shake my head again, still at a loss. The frog hopped off the book and the cover flipped open, pages flicking past at an increasing rate. It finally stopped and I figured I’d be seeing a picture of the frog on the page. Frustration made my chest tight. I didn’t know what the book…and now the shadow-man…were trying to tell me.

  I opened my mouth to tell him that when I realized the picture on the page had changed.

  It wasn’t Mr. Slimy on that page at all. It was a picture of a clock tower, the clock’s face large and white, the time set to eleven forty-five.

  I glanced at the digital clock on my bedside table and saw that it was only eleven fifteen.

  “I don’t understa…”

  Mr. Slimy hopped into the air and landed on the page, sinking into the picture in the blink of an eye. I squealed in alarm, taking a step toward the page as Mr. Wicked ran toward the book with a yowl and leaped into the air.

  “No, Wicked!” I shouted, but it was too late. My adorable little gray fluff hit the page and sank into the picture right behind Mr. Slimy.

  I gave a little scream and reached for the page. Then stopped as a wave of magic lifted toward me, my hand hovering over the page.

  I turned slowly toward shadow man and saw him nod before the shadows condensed, whirled, and shot toward the photo in the book.

  It hit me with the force of a second wave, agony spearing through my brain. I staggered forward, barely catching myself before I collapsed to the floor.

  Too late, I realized I’d placed my hand onto the clock tower on the page.

  A heartbeat later, the magic grabbed me at the top and the bottom and twisted, wringing me like a wet rag, and ripped me out of my bedroom and into a totally different world.

  My feet slammed down on hard, uneven ground and slipped sideways. I fought to regain my balance, seeing the slippery cobblestones beneath my bare feet. High above my head, a slow, rhythmic ticking sound worked its way into my awareness. The sound was made deeper beneath a thick, roiling fog that filled the air until it was hard to see anything past five feet or so.

  I looked up at the clock face, seeing the second hand ticking slowly toward the twelve.

  Beneath the ticking, which entangled itself into my heartbeats until I couldn’t separate the two, another sound emerged.<
br />
  The sound of footsteps on the greasy cobblestones.

  My gaze swept toward the sound, narrowing in an attempt to see through the cloaking fog, and I saw the familiar, man-shaped form.

  At his feet was another form, even more familiar. “Mr. Wicked!” I hurried forward, scooping my cat into my arms as he bounded toward me. I buried my face in his fur, feeling him all over as I snuggled him close to make sure he was unharmed.

  He meowed, wriggling against my grip.

  “He’s fine.”

  I jumped as the shadow man spoke. As my eyes lifted to his, I was shocked to see that he was real. No longer a shadow. A tall, well-made man who looked to be a few years older than I was, in his late twenties, with a strong jaw, piercing blue gaze, thick black hair and the cutest pair of wire-rimmed spectacles sitting on his classically perfect nose.

  There was something about his features that tugged at my memory. Something that twisted dread in my belly. But I couldn’t place it in that moment. “Who are you?”

  “That isn’t important,” he said in a husky drawl. “I need your help.”

  I frowned. “I don’t know who you think I am, but…”

  “You’re the keeper of the artifacts,” he said quite simply.

  “Yes. But you’re not an artifact.”

  “No,” he agreed quite reasonably. “But I’m the victim of one. And I’m running out of time.”

  My gaze narrowed with distrust. “What exactly are you asking for?”

  He lifted his arms out to the sides. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “If it was obvious, I wouldn’t be asking,” I responded, growing impatient.

  He looked down at the ground as if struggling for calm. Finally, he glanced quickly up at the clock and then back to me. “There’s a device, a tea infuser, which when used pulls the essence of a person from his or her body. This infuser has been in the hands of a single owner for centuries, considered safe due to the pure consciousness and motives of its owner.”

  He hesitated and I jumped in, having heard the story way too many times in way too many variations. “Let me guess. It fell into the wrong hands?”

  He nodded, lifting his arms again as if to say, ta-da!

  “Wait, are you saying you have the infuser? You’re the wrong hands?”

  “What? No. Pay attention.”

  The tone, the snarkiness, the lack of patience all melded together to push a memory forward. It was the memory of a dream…and a frog with its nasty butt in my teacup. Then I realized what he was telling me. “You’re Mr. Slimy?”

  He sighed. “Such a terrible name. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking it was a slimy old frog.” I frowned. “What else would I be thinking.”

  “Frogs aren’t slimy.”

  “I beg to differ. People have been getting high off frog grease for centuries.”

  “First of all, ew! And secondly, you’re talking about toads, not frogs. There is a difference you know.”

  “Not in my mind. You’re both bulgy-eyed and reptilian.” I held up a hand as he opened his mouth to argue. “Don’t bother telling me frogs are amphibians, not reptiles. You say potato. I say slimy reptile.”

  He shook his head. “If I’d known what a hard-headed, bigoted person you were…”

  “You’d what?” I asked, clutching Mr. Wicked closer as he tried to escape. “Go to another keeper of the artifacts? I hate to disappoint but I’m it, honey. I’m all there is.”

  His lips curled and the recognition I’d been searching for slipped into place. I gasped. “You’re a Quilleran!”

  The clock started striking midnight as he lifted his hands in supplication. “Please! I only have until the waning moon to be returned to my body or this is permanent.”

  His face paled as the fog started to swirl around me, agitated and thickening fast as the hour struck down. My legs disappeared into the fog from my feet to my knees and it quickly climbed upward.

  He took a step forward. “No, wait! Please!”

  But I had no control over whether I stayed or left. And I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have stayed anyway.

  Troll boogers! He was a Quilleran. And I’d let him into my home, into my bedroom. Sure, he’d been ensconced in a grease-coated donut box…but still.

  The magic wrapped clutching fingers around Wicked and me, twisting us in a relentless grip that felt, for a terrifying beat, as if it would rip us into pieces, and then flung us through the shadowy fog, where my mind, thankfully, stopped registering the pain or the dizzying spin of power around me, and eased me into a charcoal nothingness.

  6

  Shirley You Jest

  I awoke to a blindingly bright sun peering through my window the next morning and sat bolt upright, looking around in surprise to find myself in my own bed again, on top of the covers and sideways as if a giant hand had flung me onto the bed.

  Wicked!

  My gaze flew to the top of the bed, and the terror leached from my chest when I saw him curled into his favorite spot on the pillow. His eyes opened as if he’d felt me staring and he stretched, yawning widely.

  I flopped back onto the mattress. “Thank the goddess.”

  Then I remembered the frog and I jerked upright again. I lunged at the donut box, unsure what I was going to do, but certain at the very least that I was going to get the fat little traitor out of my bedroom.

  He was gone.

  Had the Quillerans already snatched him back? Maybe they’d known he was in the clock tower place and had yanked him from there.

  I dropped the box back onto my nightstand and told myself I didn’t care. He’d lied to me, though not really, and tried to fool me into helping him.

  But if he was a Quilleran, why had Candace been so menacing about getting him back? She hadn’t acted like she was doing it out of love.

  Were Quilleran’s even capable of love? Surely not.

  Yes, I’m talking to you, Shirley.

  The air sparkled above the box and I leaned away from it, seating myself on the edge of the bed and waiting.

  A burst of light made me blink and a tiny form hung in the air in front of me, enormous moth-like wings undulating on the air like an airborne manta ray.

  The tiny, puckish face frowned in my direction. The famous Shirley of “don’t call me Shirley” stared down at me, her customary glare fixed on her face. Shirley was a pixie. She was also the supernormal world’s version of Witch-a-pedia, with fun trivia and occasionally useful information about all the magical families and their ancestors. Inexplicably, Shirley hated being a Witch-a-pedia. Which was why she never wanted anyone to call her.

  And you thought that was just a cute saying, didn’t you?

  “Hey, Shirley.”

  She placed tiny hands on teeny hips and glared at me. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “I need to know if Quillerans are capable of love.”

  She pounded the air with her drab brown wings and rose above my head for a beat, still glaring. When she finally spoke, it was as if she had to wrench every word from her breast. “Quillerans can love but it is rare. Most of the clan love only power and control.”

  “So, they’re politicians, then?”

  Shirley tossed her head, which was covered in tight, dirty-blonde pin curls, and arched a pair of very judgmental eyebrows. “Don’t call me again.” She glared toward my kitchen table. “By the way, you have a frog in your teacup.” Then she disappeared in a burst of light that left behind a slight sulfur stench, like the scent left behind when a matchstick expires.

  I looked at Slimy.

  He looked back at me. “Ribbit.”

  I sighed. “Okay, so they didn’t take you. But why do they want you back so badly?”

  “Ribbit.”

  “Very helpful.” I thought about it for a moment. “I’m pretty sure that Candace isn’t trying to get you back because of a deep and abiding love for you,” I mumbled to myself. “And if they stuffed you into a frog like you said
, there’d be no reason for them to care about you now. I’ll have to assume you’ve gone rogue and they’re trying to stop you from doing…whatever.”

  I narrowed my gaze at the frog. His gaze didn’t narrow. “What are you up to, Slimy My Man?”

  The downstairs bell jangled, yanking me from my thoughts.

  Sebille had arrived to open the store. I shoved the previous night’s adventure aside and went to fix some coffee to jumpstart my day.

  I’d make time later to research the tea infuser issue. If he’d been telling me the truth about that, the consequences could be dire indeed.

  I needed to get hold of that infuser before somebody did something really horrible and changed the world for the worst.

  If I wasn’t already too late.

  I left Sebille in charge of the shop while I perused the books on ancient artifacts that I carried in the bookstore. When I’d gone through all of the available texts and found nothing, I resorted to the stacks of books I’d relegated to the artifact library.

  With Mr. Wicked trotting at my heels, I walked through the warehouse-sized space as magical lights flickered on far above my head.

  First-time visitors to the artifact library were always shocked by the magically enhanced space, which from the outside appeared a fraction of the size it actually was.

  The room was filled to the brim with magical artifacts of all kinds, sizes, and shapes, from a motorcycle that could fly, to a pair of socks that helped its wearer travel between dimensions.

  High above my head, long, narrow windows allowed sunlight to filter into the space while keeping curious gazes from seeing inside.

  A magical ceiling fan, its blades longer than I was, spun lazily from the apex of the domed ceiling, purifying the air as it kept the temperatures constant.

  I sat down at the scarred wooden table located in the written artifact section of the room, a stack of books nestled in my arms. With a weary sigh, I pulled the first book off the top and placed it in front of me. The black leather cover bore a line of bold hieroglyphs in red, the ink it was printed with still bright after thousands of years. The edges of the book were slightly ragged, the leather scruffy with age, but the pages inside had been magically preserved under a gloss of shimmering energy and looked as good as the day they were created.