The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2)

by A. K. Caggiano

  Bridgette wined, slapping her hand on the mattress. “Can’t it wait, babe? I can’t stay that long, I have stuff to do tonight.”

  He ignored her, leaning down to look the toad in its orange face. “I know Arista can get angry, but I had no idea she could do this.”

  Lorelei explained the commotion upstairs.

  Conrad took Seamus from her and flipped him over, examining his white belly. “Pretty nice work.”

  “Conrad,” she chastised, saying his name in that way she only did when irritated with him, “Seamus has been turned into a toad, and you’re admiring the craftsmanship?”

  Bridgette popped up over his shoulder then, snaking her arms around his waist and digging claws into his sides, making him jump. “He has to wait it out, sis.”

  Lorelei narrowed her eyes, confused as to why Bridgette wasn’t yelling at her like she had expected. Instead, she was acting awfully smitten which wasn’t usual even when her mood was better. Conrad glanced at the witch, and a smile spread over his face dumbly, handing Seamus back to Lorelei without looking and nearly dropping him. They started kissing again, that much worse being so much closer.

  Lorelei stuck out her tongue. “Oh, my god, guys, please just fix him, and I’ll gladly leave.”

  “Huh?” Conrad pulled back from Bridgette and blinked. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes. “Oh, sorry, yeah. She’s right. It’ll probably take a couple hours, but this will wear off. I could try to force him back, but with living things it’s better to wait—you don’t want him to get stuck halfway.”

  Lorelei pursed her lips. “You’re sure he’s okay like this?”

  “Yeah.” Conrad bent down again to frown at the toad that was his uncle. “It sucks, but have you ever heard of Mothman?”

  She gave him a look to say she did, but had no idea where he was going with it.

  “Rick’s a pretty nice guy, lectured at the academy once—had to keep the lights really low—but I don’t think Seamus wants to go the rest of his life with those eyes or a penchant for flies. Hold on, I do have something that might help.” He crossed the room and started to rifle through his desk. Bridgette trailed after, and he swatted her hands away as she tried tugging on his pants, giggling. Regardless of how Lorelei felt about Conrad—not that she was admitting anything at that moment—it was extra strange, and she glanced down at Seamus. The toad’s eyes seemed to confirm what she felt.

  While she waited, she got a whiff of something sweet and glanced over to Conrad’s dresser next to the door. The now empty Moondoe’s coffee cups were sitting there, and the way Ziah’s client—a cupid, probably, just like Philomena—had looked at the cups in the foyer flashed in her mind. With both Conrad and Bridgette distracted, him looking for something in the desk, and her looking for something in his pockets, Lorelei grabbed both of the lidded cups and stuffed them into her baggy sweatshirt pocket.

  “He won’t remember,” Conrad was saying as he turned around. “His brain is literally a toad’s right now, but he’s going to have one nether of a headache when he transmutes back.” He brought a tiny jar to her with something orange inside it. “When he’s Seamus again, that will lessen the pain.”

  She took it, giving Bridgette a quick glance, still hovering over by the desk with a hand lazily flipping through the pages of one of the notebooks there, apparently uninterested in Conrad for the moment. “Well, thanks, I guess. Didn’t mean to interrupt your, uh…reunion.”

  Conrad’s eyes went a little wider, and he scratched the back of his head, face going red. “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s an emergency, like you said.” He tried leaning against the door frame, but slid off of it clumsily. He really was acting funny. And not haha funny, but peculiar-in-that-way-when-something-odd-might-be-happening-to-you-but-you’re-too-intoxicated-to-notice funny. Which really wasn’t funny at all.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course he is,” Bridgette called from her spot by the desk.

  Conrad straightened then, crossing his arms, and he snapped, “Of course I am.” He could be grouchy and arrogant, but he’d never used that tone with her, or looked at her like that.

  Lorelei frowned, wondering if she’d overstepped. “Sorry, you just seem…” Her eyes ventured over to Bridgette again who was glaring now like she had in the foyer but at the back of his head instead of at her. “You seem weird.”

  “Yeah, well, you, like, interrupted,” he said, sneering.

  Oh, right, that—she supposed if anything would provoke a sudden personality shift, it might be that. “Okay, sure, whatever. Congratulations on…this.” She gestured with the toad toward Bridgette then lowered her voice. “Or condolences, whichever you prefer.”

  She left him with his mouth hanging open in the doorway and hurried back upstairs. No one was in the foyer but Aly, dutifully watching the door, and so she pulled one of the Moondoe’s cups from her pocket and, one-handed, pried off the lid. There was still a tiny pool of coffee in its bottom.

  “Seamus,” she said to the toad as she capped back on the lid and climbed the stairs to where the guest rooms were, “on the off-chance you do remember this, I want you to know I have the best of intentions.”

  As she headed for room 168, she was at least being half honest, and so magic decided it might half help her out. But as The Rules went, there would be a price to pay. Lorelei knocked on Philomena’s door.

  CHAPTER 15

  RESPONSIBILITY

  Moonlit Shores was different at night. Lorelei pulled her coat tight against the cold of winter, but something else gave her a chill. Though the streets were decorated with lights and piney boughs, the glow of candles in apartment windows above the shops and the solemn sound of choral music floating out through restaurant doors gave her the willies.

  It could have also been, of course, that she and Grier were stalking one of their guests.

  Lorelei pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose, glad Grier had thought to wear a hat that hid all his wild, brown curls. They blended in with the others on the street that night, though they didn’t carry packages or skip along holding hands. The shops that remained open were busy as others closed with evening dwindling into night.

  “He’s supposed to be at the corner of Nightshade and Yarrow in an hour,” Grier said, gesturing with his nose ahead of them, his hands stuffed into his pockets.

  Lorelei hadn’t been far off of Moonlit Shores’ main square, but they’d passed city hall already, and took a turn away from where the big park the harvest festival had been. From what she could see ahead, the streets got narrower and the lights were dimmer. But first, Grier had other plans, and guided them into a shop with a friendly bell over the door.

  “What are we doing?” Lorelei was hit first with the smell of the place, grainy, then the trill of something scurrying in wood chips.

  “I really do have to get my secret Santa gift,” Grier said as he started down one of the aisles. A row of ornate, hanging cages were just at his eye level, and each held a bird that hopped along its perch to follow him.

  “Good evening, kids!” A string bean of a woman with thick-rimmed glasses stood at the very back measuring out kibble into bowls on the counter. “Anything you need, you shout!”

  Lorelei gave her a wave and followed Grier down the aisle. “Who do you have?” She knew she wasn’t supposed to ask, but since Hana had mysteriously found out she had Grier and convinced her to trade for Ziah, she figured the secret was mostly out of the game.

  “Ren.” He pursed his lips and looked closely at one of the cages. The brilliantly yellow finch inside hopped from one perch to another and chirped, a blast of icy air shooting out from its beak.

  She looked over the terrariums on the other side of the aisle, appearing to be mostly empty save for foliage and water-filled rocks. “And you want to get him a bird?”

  “Or a spider.” Grier bent down next to her and pointed out a massive, fuzzy tarantula that was plastered in the corner of the cage.

  Lorelei r
ecoiled. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “He loves animals.” Grier looked at her like she were stupid. “Way more than people, at least.”

  “Sure, but…” She raised a brow at the fish in the next tank. It winked back at her. “It’s sort of like giving someone a responsibility as a gift.”

  “Ren loves responsibility too.” Grier wasn’t wrong, and he knew it, sauntering off to the next aisle.

  “What are you going to do with it between now and Christmas? We still have almost four weeks, and you can’t just wrap it up in the meantime.”

  “I know that.” He reached into an open container filled with fuzzy, little creatures that could have been hamsters if they had two less sets of legs. The one he grabbed bit him, and he dropped it back into the tank where it scurried off under a straw dome. “Okay, buddy, you’ve made the short list.”

  She followed him to the front window where a big open pen held three puppies with nine heads between them. “By the way, what’s the plan here?” In the premature darkness of the evening, the bodies on the sidewalk were illuminated by street lamps well enough. A family of four passed the window, two children holding their parents’ hands, and an older couple ambled in the other direction carrying steaming drinks, but no one matched the tall and somewhat awkward presentation of Mr. Carr.

  Grier picked up one of the puppies. The right head immediately started licking him, and the left nibbled on his fingers while the center one squealed with a nonstop whimper. “He’s meeting someone at the old administration building, but that place hasn’t been open in over two years. No one else will be around, so we should be able to spot him easy.”

  “And he’ll be able to spot us,” she told him, scratching under the puppy’s left chin. If Mr. Carr was a wizard cop, like she suspected, he should be good at that sort of thing.

  “What do you think?” Grier held the dog up next to his face and grinned. It let out a high-pitched bark from its right head and the other two answered.

  “The resemblance is uncanny, but I think they’ll give away our position.”

  Grier set it back in with the others. The heads all tried to scramble in different directions, and it ended up running into the side of the pen. “That’s a good point. What about something silent?” He turned to another terrarium filled with lizards.

  Lorelei still wasn’t convinced, but she didn’t get a chance to tell him before she noticed a man in a long, brown coat with the lapels pulled up around his face striding empty-handed and a bit too fast down the main drag before turning off into an alley. “Put that thought on hold—there’s our guy.”

  They slipped out of the shop, pulling their hats down tighter and crossing the road to the same alley. No one was about, and they edged their way to the other end just in time to see a figure disappear further down the next road. “Yarrow’s only a couple streets down,” said Grier, and they hurried after.

  Swiftly and silently, they followed, only passing one other person who didn’t make eye contact. It was quieter in this part of town, the music and voices of Main Street falling away, and the lamps were farther apart. Lorelei didn’t know Moonlit Shores had a dodgier district, but it seemed they were coming into it by the empty store fronts and poorly kept apartment buildings.

  A row of businesses ran the next block, but there were no lights on in any of the windows. It was only Mr. Carr now, and they kept their distance so that when he stopped at the end of the row, they were able to duck into an alcove and hide when he glanced back in their direction.

  Grier and Lorelei stared at one another silently, their eyes peeled wide as they waited, counting the seconds. Then Lorelei eased to the edge of the alcove and peeked up the street. The door to the shop at the end of the row was just closing, and his figure was gone.

  “He went in there,” she said, stepping out onto the street.

  “Well, let’s go.”

  Lorelei grabbed Grier’s arm as he strode past her. “We can’t just waltz inside.”

  They carefully made their way down the row. The shops were clearly re-purposed as if they had once been one larger building. They passed an insurance office advertising a special for hexed individuals, the second E on the sign missing, and an apothecary that didn’t have a name or any posted hours. The third shop was also without signage, empty save for a desk in the center of the open space and a single book turning its own pages on the desk.

  The last storefront, the one Mr. Carr had gone in, had brown paper plastered all over the windows and door. The sign up top was old and had been painted over hastily, the words Administration and Records more or less visible beneath. Paper was peeling back from the corner of one of the windows, too high to see directly inside, but a dull light flickered beyond it to suggest movement.

  Before she could stop him, Grier tried the door, but to her relief and his chagrin, it didn’t budge.

  “Locked,” he told her nonchalantly.

  “What were you going to do? Just walk in and say hello?”

  “Well, I—” He screwed up his face. “What’s your idea?”

  She crossed her arms, more to keep out the cold than anything, then peered around the edge of the building. The side was brick with windows running along the very top of the wall, too high for either of them to peek in and all shut up tightly from the cold; however, there was a balcony off the second story and a ladder extended halfway to the ground from it. “Maybe if we get up there, we can see in those high windows.”

  Grier eyed the ladder, and he started toward it, rubbing his hands together.

  “Quiet,” she reminded him, their footsteps already too loud for the otherwise abandoned street. There wasn’t even the hum of crickets or call of frogs in the cold of winter to hide the sounds of their mischief.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Grier grabbed onto the ladder, and gave it a yank. She held her breath, but a clang never came, and it didn’t budge. Testing once more it was solid, Grier hopped and started to pull himself up, scaling it straight to the second-floor landing as if it had been nothing.

  Lorelei looked up at him, supposing she shouldn’t be surprised. Well, if he could do it—she rubbed her hands together and grabbed onto the lowest rung, level with her face. It was smooth, the cold of the metal biting through her gloves, but she held on tightly and began upward.

  Her arms extended over her head as far as they could go, and she jumped, extending another hand and just grabbing onto the next rung, making it perhaps a few inches off the ground, then found herself hanging there. Her shoulders instantly ached, but they wouldn’t do anything else.

  “What are you doing?” Grier asked. “Come on.”

  “Uh?” She tried scrambling her feet in the air, but they got nowhere, and her stomach, now exposed, was getting quite cold. “This is a lot harder than it looked.”

  Grier snorted and leaned down, reaching out for her. Stretching up with all the effort she had left, she clasped onto his wrist, and as if she weighed nothing, he pulled her up one handed until her feet found the lowest rung.

  Suddenly her head was above the landing, and she grabbed onto the railing. She looked at him with wide eyes, and Grier grinned back, his teeth perhaps a little sharper than she’d ever remembered.

  “You need to do some pull-ups,” he told her, hopping nimbly to his feet.

  Lorelei finished crawling up beside the boy, or man, she guessed. She hadn’t noticed, not under all the winter coats and how much like a child he still acted, but Grier had definitely filled out from the scrawny kid he’d been when she met him only a few months prior. It was fast, but maybe not that fast for a lycan.

  She shook her head and knelt down so she could peer over the edge at the skinny window along the top of the first floor. There was movement inside, she could see the long shadows of two figures in the dim light, but couldn’t hear anything.

  Looking back, she caught Grier reaching for the door. “Stop!” she hissed.

  He barely acknowledged her as he turned t
he handle, but it miraculously opened without the squeak of rusty hinges. He shrugged and went in.

  Lorelei scrambled to her feet and followed, pulling the door to. There were bigger windows on this floor, and they were not covered, so a street lamp illuminated the space. It was filled mostly with boxes and a few desks that had gone unused, chairs flipped up on top and old telephones sitting unplugged. Grier was flicking through a soft-cover ledger on one of the desks. “Nothing interesting.”

  Quiet, she mouthed back, pressing a finger to her lips. She listened hard, but couldn’t hear anything.

  Grier yanked his head to the other side of the room and started over. She followed him to the stairwell where a dim light was shining upward from the room below. They knelt beside it, peering over, but could only see the stairs and a set of shadows. The voices, however, were enough.

  “I can do that,” Mr. Carr’s voice came up at them.

  “Good,” said another, muffled and flat but feminine. “Do they suspect anything?”

  “Not yet.” Mr. Carr blew out a breath. “But I’m afraid—”

  “Don’t be. Take this.”

  There was shuffling and an exchange of words neither could quite make out.

  “…very strange.” Mr. Carr was saying. “Will it run out like the other one?”

  The other voice snorted. “That’s for you to tell me, and for me to pass on to your boss.”

  Lorelei glanced over at Grier, and he shrugged back.

  “When do I get to meet him?”

  The feminine voice sighed, annoyed. “Soon. Maybe.”

  Mr. Carr grunted. “Fine. Is this…is this going to be as painful?”

  Lorelei scrunched up her nose. What in the world were they discussing? She pulled herself a bit closer to the edge of the stairwell, pushing against the ground with her toes, but then her foot slipped. She kicked backward, and connected with a box, knocking it to the ground.

  The voices downstairs fell violently silent. Gritting his teeth, Grier got to his feet, and she followed, footsteps already on the stairs. The door to the balcony was on the far side of the room, but in the dark, back corner was a stack of boxes with just enough space behind to squeeze in and hide up against the wall. They slipped in and crouched down.