Familiar Beginnings

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by Alice Winters


  “There’s a monster?” a woman who’s been watching asks.

  “Monster!” someone screams, and then there’s pure panic as the onlookers bolt in every direction. The news crew tries to capture it all.

  “Well, that got rid of them,” Johnson says, sounding pleased. He returns to the closed door.

  “I’ll go in,” I say as I grab the door and pull it open. The room is silent as I peer inside with Havoc so close to me he’s bumping into me.

  “I’ll let it eat you first,” he assures me.

  “My god, you’re so sexy and handsome when you protect me like that.”

  He chuckles but holds on to me protectively, or maybe as a shield, as we step inside. I know he’d jump in front of anything, even a cat, to protect me. But I really don’t think the cat is evil.

  I think.

  Maybe.

  We slowly walk into the room and look around as we assess the room for the cat. Even though there are no open windows and the door had been shut, I don’t see it anywhere. We hunt the room over, looking under the bed, in the drawers, nearly everywhere, but I don’t see the cat anywhere.

  “What’s this?”

  I look over at Havoc as he walks out of the bathroom with a receipt. “It was behind the trash can.”

  “Is it recent?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “To where?” I ask as he flattens it.

  “Daily Time.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Havoc shakes his head. “Me neither.”

  “I’m going to take pictures of the circle. Go ahead and give that to Johnson and tell him to come on in.”

  “The cat’s probably waiting for more victims. It’s not as much fun when you only murder two,” Havoc says.

  “Are you speaking from experience?”

  “Maybe.”

  I snort and shoo him off. Havoc and I stick around until they finish up, just in case the cat returns, but I’m really eager to head home to try and figure out what the symbol has been used for. I try calling Nicco, a vampire who lives in my other house, to see if he can research it, but his cell phone is dead.

  Again.

  Once they wrap up for the day, we head for home. We’ll need to call a council meeting soon to talk about this and the lack of clues we have, but for now, home it is.

  “Do you know what would make this day better?” Havoc asks as we walk through the door of the café.

  “Chocolate? Strippers? A blow job?”

  Havoc’s eyes get wide and a grin covers his face. “Wait… what? You’re going to strip and give me a blow job while coated in chocolate? Now this is a thing I can get behind. When do you start and how much?”

  “More than you can afford,” I tease. But then, annoyingly, my mind is pulled back to the case. “What was today? A step forward to finding Geoff? A step back? I mean, that was dark fucking magic. You know he was involved.”

  “Uh… how about just a step? Kind of sideways, a little diagonal, there was a stumble there in the middle…”

  I grin at him, even though he’s not being helpful. “Doesn’t it feel like it?”

  “What about a little relaxation time?” he asks with a grin that sends excitement running through me as I aim him toward the door leading to my home upstairs.

  “Ooh, let’s move quickly so they don’t ask us to help.”

  “Miles!” Yoko shouts the moment she sees us trying to slip from one end of the café to the stairs.

  “She’s not talking to you,” Havoc says. “She’s talking about how much she’s walked today.”

  “Ah, good. I’ve walked miles today too!” I tell her while hurrying away.

  “No, not… Miles, just a moment!”

  Havoc covers my ears, yanks the door open, and shoves me up the stairs. We rush through the hallway while snickering like children after having bullied poor Yoko.

  Havoc pulls the bedroom door open and literally screams. “What the fuck!”

  That’s when my eyes fall on the cat… that cat sitting on my bed grooming itself.

  Havoc yanks me back and we slam into someone behind me. Startled, we turn on them and Havoc lifts his arms like he’s going to karate chop Yoko right on the neck.

  “Like I was trying to say, there’s a weird cat in your apartment,” she says.

  “You didn’t think to tell us?” Havoc asks, like he’s annoyed.

  Her brown eyes get unbelievably wide. “Seriously? I was going ‘Miles! Miles!’ Neither of you heard that? Now that… creature walked into the café and right over to your door and pawed at it while meowing sweetly. I thought it was someone’s familiar, so I told it you weren’t around and to come back later. That’s when it pulled out these massive fucking claws and bared these… needle fangs. It really wanted inside, and I was scared it was going to murder us, so I might have opened the barrier for it.”

  “You opened my barrier to my safe haven to let it in?” I exclaim.

  “I was terrified of it!”

  When I look over, it cocks its head as it holds up a paw that wicked claws slice out of. Then it sets a paw on the top blanket and shreds it while never losing eye contact.

  “We’re going to die,” Havoc decides.

  “I was trying to call you, but before I could, you guys walked through the door.” Yoko nods at it. “What is it?”

  “I… don’t know,” I say as I take a deep breath and step back into the room.

  Havoc literally picks me up and carries me back out.

  “Havoc, stop! If it was going to attack, it already would have.” While this sounds reasonable, I’m not sure I even believe my own words.

  “It’s just playing with its meal,” he says. “Did you see it shred your blanket? And that’s my favorite blanket!”

  It responds by shredding it a little more. Then it reaches over and hooks Havoc’s pillow, like it knows exactly which one is his, and drags it over to itself.

  “Alright, that’s enough!” I say as I walk into the room and step in front of the bed. “My name is Miles. I’m assuming you’re interested in one of us if you’re following us?”

  The cat—I think it’s a male—walks up to me and sits down directly in front of me.

  “Do you understand me?” I ask.

  He stares at me for a moment before giving the tiniest of nods.

  “What’s your name?”

  He meows.

  Yoko takes a step toward me, excited about something. “Ooh! What if you get him like a way to communicate? Maybe he understands letters!” Yoko says before rushing off.

  “Oh, please don’t tell me it’s that smart,” Havoc says, but Yoko seems excited as she runs off.

  “I’m really trusting you by allowing you in my house even if you came in uninvited,” I warn the cat. “I don’t know what role you have in all of this, but I don’t take kindly to being stabbed in the back, so if you try anything, that’ll be the end of your life.”

  The cat yawns, clearly dismissing my threats. That’s when Yoko comes back with a paper covered in letters from the alphabet she’s printed off the internet. She sets it onto the shredded blanket and steps back.

  “Can you read that?” she eagerly asks.

  He glances down at it and promptly smacks the paper off the bed.

  “It’s dumb and an asshole,” Havoc says and the creature hisses at him.

  What the hell have I gotten myself into?

  Chapter Three

  “The meeting will now begin!” I say as I look at the other council members. We still meet at Rehna’s shrine, even though it’s no longer hers seeing as she’s dead. Instead, it’s where the celestial being who’d kept Rehna young has taken up residence. She’d been held captive by Rehna who was using her power to keep from aging. She rarely attends the meetings but seems to enjoy greeting us as we come in.

  The council is made up of “bosses” of nearby districts. Each state is broken into districts and each district is run by a boss. The boss is generally someone
nonhuman or of magical descent who can reign over and take care of everyone else. Sometimes it’s a power struggle, but if the boss isn’t working out for the district, the state’s council can overthrow them.

  “The question is whether or not Miles has clothes on,” Lanni says.

  “One time, one time, I come to a council meeting without clothes and you guys act like I’m a nudist. I had an illusion on! No one else but Lanni even noticed!” I’ve tried to reason with them again and again, but it falls on deaf ears.

  “You did notice how no one will sit in that chair, right?” Evan asks. Evan is a druid, which means he’s connected to the earth and plant life. That means he thinks he can get away with wearing air plants in his hair. He says it’s so he’s constantly connected to something living, even when indoors. I say it’s because he’s weird.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “No one wants to sit where your naked butthole was once parked,” Evan explains.

  Because this isn’t a full council meeting, only those involved in the Geoff case—which honestly should be everyone, but some are too “busy” to deal with the prospect of the end of the world—are present.

  That means we have Sam and Johnson, who aren’t on the council, but are honorary members; Jacob, who runs a nearby school for magical arts; Evan, and Lanni, who runs my district while I’m away. There used to be two more members: Aiden, who was killed by Geoff, and Rehna, who was working for Geoff and defeated by me.

  Aiden’s spot still hasn’t been filled, but there’s talk of who will take his place. Until then, the council is handling his district as a whole.

  “Another boss was found dead,” Johnson says. “This is the third one this month found with their chest cut open. We have no proof that it’s Geoff doing it, but clearly, it’s in relation to him. He could have people bringing the hearts to him and letting them do the dirty work.”

  “What kind this time?” I ask.

  “Another necromancer. It seems he’s now targeting stronger bosses. He’s probably growing in strength,” Sam says.

  “I still don’t understand how devouring the hearts is giving him their magic,” Evan says.

  I shake my head, not fully knowing, but having seen it myself when I was a teenager. “It’s all in the magic in the spell that brought him back and the magic he acquired with life. I don’t understand it very well myself, but I know it’s possible.”

  “We’ve been in contact with those districts to get more information. It’s highly unlikely there’s another monster around eating hearts for the hell of it,” Johnson says.

  “When you hear more from them, let us know,” I say.

  He nods.

  “Alright, I’m not sure about the rest of you, but could we talk about the monster on the table?” Lanni asks as the cat grooms himself like he’s a centerpiece.

  “This is my new pet! Do you guys like him?” I reach out like I’m going to pet it. The cat also reaches out and then exposes one single claw, which he sinks right into my finger. “See how cute it is?” I ask as blood runs down my finger and drips onto the table.

  I quickly mop it up, in case anyone decides to use my blood for something heinously magical.

  “It’s fucking evil, and it’s taken over our place,” Havoc says.

  I glance over at who might help save me from this pest. “Jacob, I was hoping you could tell me what it is. Or maybe take it home with you. Would you like to examine it? Dissect it? Experiment on it?”

  Jacob is a mage who has dedicated his life to the study of magic and teaching children magic, so I feel like if anyone might know what this thing is, it would be him. “I can tell you what it’s not,” he helpfully supplies.

  “Natural?” Havoc inputs.

  “It’s not a cat and definitely not a witch’s familiar.”

  “No, it’s smart too. It understands English.”

  That gets Jacob’s attention. “Like you tell it to sit and it sits?”

  “No, like you ask it complex questions and if it feels like answering with a head nod, it will. Most of the time it doesn’t. Not because it doesn’t understand, but because it’s evil.”

  Jacob’s eyes light up as he leans toward the monster. “Intriguing. Are you a unique type of familiar?”

  It one hundred percent ignores him.

  “It only likes Miles,” Havoc says.

  I look at my bleeding finger. “It likes me?”

  “More than anyone else. It’ll only answer to you.”

  I think back on all the fun times I’ve shared with the creature since I had him. The time where he shredded the curtain while I was in the shower because I asked if he wanted a bath. When I tried giving him cat food and he bitch slapped that bowl across the living room. When I suggested he sleep in a cat bed on the floor and he sliced the cat bed open and promptly curled up in my bed, so Havoc and I were forced to sleep on the couch. It’s been a long eighteen hours. Havoc even threatened to set our bed on fire when he rolled off the couch at one point. Once he turned into a raven, we fit a little better.

  “Ignoring the cat from hell, let’s continue this discussion. So does anyone recognize what this magic circle means?” I ask as Sam slides a picture that was taken of the circle from the motel room.

  Jacob leans in but he shakes his head. “It’s very strange. What’s the blood?”

  “Human. We believe the blood is from the spell casters. Though their bodies were mummified, we can see the cuts on their hands,” Johnson says.

  “Very interesting. Was it to summon the cat?”

  The cat meows, and we look over at it.

  “Do you know?” I ask. He walks toward me and jumps onto my shoulder before leaping onto a bookshelf behind me. When I look over at Havoc, I see he has his sword out like he’s ready to dice the creature up for touching me.

  “I was just about ready to cut that furball in half if it laid a paw on you,” he assures me, but we’re all more interested in the cat as it walks down the bookshelf before stopping at a book and pawing at it until it falls out and hits the ground.

  “Hey, hairball, those are expensive and old!” I say as the cat jumps down and starts pawing at the book. We huddle around it as the cat meows. I lean over to read what’s on the page, but the cat switches it to another and then another.

  When we clearly don’t get it, he jumps back onto the shelf and knocks another down.

  “Wait!” Havoc says as he cautiously nudges the cat off the book and flips through it. “Both of these are written by Hans Teller.”

  “The man who wrote the book with dark magic that was used to bring Geoff back to life?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah, that’s him… Is this about Hans Teller?” I ask the cat.

  The cat meows.

  “Maybe more of his magic? If we still had the book that was stolen from us, we could check if this is a spell from the book,” Jacobs says.

  The book had been stolen from me so they could use a spell inside it to bring Geoff back, and now they’re using another spell from it for this… cat. “But what did this spell do? Was the spell for you?” I ask the cat.

  He just stares at me.

  “Hmm… then what was its purpose?”

  “They wouldn’t be bringing Hans back to life, would they?” Evan asks.

  “It’s a different spell than the one used to bring Geoff back to life,” I say.

  Havoc continues to flip through the book. “At least we have a clue now. Johnson, did you get a location on that receipt?”

  “I did—it’s a clothing shop. It sells weird stylized clothing, but nothing of interest. Maybe just a regular receipt,” Sam says. “We asked if any of the employees could describe anyone who’d been in that day, but the one working said she didn’t remember anything distinct about any of them.”

  “Havoc and I will check them out,” I say. “I can’t imagine no one can remember anything about one of their few customers they had.”

  “Are you going to go in naked again?�
� Lanni asks. “I bet that’ll get them to talk.”

  “One time,” I say.

  “My eyes hurt for days.”

  I glare at her and head back to the table to finish up the meeting. It doesn’t take long, seeing as none of us really have any leads or anything of use. It always seems like Geoff is one step ahead of us.

  I’m wiping off the remaining table as Havoc slips inside the café. He’d run a charm to someone for me while I finished closing up the café. Now that it’s done for the night, it’s just the two of us.

  “You didn’t tell me the charm was going to that… woman,” he grumbles.

  “Gina?”

  His scowl deepens at the sound of her name. “Yes, Gina. She tried getting in my pants.”

  I can’t help but grin at the thought of Havoc dealing with Gina. “Ooh, did she succeed?” I joke.

  His eyes narrow. “I told her that I only needed you now. Do you want to know what she said?”

  I smile, kind of surprised he said that. “Sure?”

  “That you’re stuck up and she could show me things you could never dream of showing me.”

  “Oh?”

  “And so then I ran through every sexual position we’ve ever done. I made up names for a few of them.”

  I look at him in horror. “You did not.”

  “I most certainly did. Then I told her about that thing you do with your tongue.”

  My eyes are nearly falling out of my head at this point. “What thing?” I ask, mortified.

  “You know, that ‘aulala’ thing you do,” he says while doing something that I’ve never seen with his tongue.

  “I will never be able to show my face in the magical community again,” I realize.

  “Then I told her—”

  It gets worse? “I don’t even want to know,” I say as I hurry back into the kitchen.

  His laughter follows me. “Sweet pea, don’t run from me!”

  “Don’t call me that. When you call me that it means you know you did something wrong,” I say as I start packing up the stuff that’d been left out. “Will pie shut you up?”

  “Maybe.”

 

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