Bark Side of the Moon: A Paranormal Animal Cozy Mystery (Spellbound Hound Magic and Mystery Book 3)

by Jeannie Wycherley

  “That’s good.” Clarissa wasn’t sure she’d have trusted him with a goldfish, but to be fair none of his animals appeared to be even remotely unhappy. Quite the reverse. Clarissa had never seen such fat happy chickens, and Star, as enormous as she was, was a vision of beauty with shining eyes and a glorious coat. “Your wife doesn’t leave you notes about remembering to get dressed?”

  When he only stared at her, Clarissa indicated his pyjama bottoms. He glanced down at them but seemingly didn’t see anything wrong with wearing them, so she smiled politely and moved on. “About the Ministry of Witches?”

  Dom’s face fell. “I told you. I don’t have anything to do with them.”

  Clarissa lowered her voice. “You’re not a secret agent?”

  “A what?” Dom leaned forward, screwing his face up in confusion.

  “A secret agent,” Clarissa repeated.

  Dom stared at her incredulously for a few seconds, then threw his head back and belly-laughed so loudly he set the chickens outside in the yard clucking once more. When he could breathe again, he wiped the tears of mirth from his eyes and studied Clarissa. “A secret agent? What makes you think I’m a secret agent?”

  “It’s not that I think you are one.” Clarissa’s shoulders drooped. How had she and Toby ended up barking up the wrong tree so badly yet again? “I was expecting to meet one in the park yesterday. And they didn’t show. Afterwards, Toby said he’d met Star and that her owner was a wizard and I put two and two together,” she explained.

  “And made two hundred and two.” Dom laughed again but stopped when he saw her face. “No need to look so forlorn. I’m sorry, I’m not the secret agent you’re looking for.”

  Clarissa breathed out sharply in an effort to relieve some of her tension. “Never mind. I apologise for behaving like an idiot. You must have thought I was acting rather oddly.”

  Dom shrugged. “I’m not one to judge. Live and let live and all that.”

  Clarissa drained her tea, feeling calmer. “Why do you prefer to have nothing to do with the Ministry of Witches?” she asked. “I know it’s none of my business, and I can’t say I’ve ever had much to do with them myself, but that would be mainly because our paths haven’t crossed, rather than a conscious decision on my part.”

  Dom turned the left edge of his top lip upwards. “That’s what you think. They’re watching all of us all of the time. They monitor our behaviour, our everyday lives and any unusual exploits. That’s why I prefer to live off-grid. As far as anyone is able to, at least. I don’t bother them, and they don’t bother me.”

  Clarissa, who didn’t feel that she’d ever been bothered by an organisation who hadn’t really had much to do with her life as far as she was concerned, shrugged in confusion.

  Dom rolled his eyes. “Come with me,” he instructed her.

  Clarissa placed her mug in the sink on top of a pile of plates and bowls and carefully picked her way through several tall piles of books. Toby kept to her heels, so close in fact that his nose made contact with her calf. Behind them, the sound of running water gave her pause. She turned about. The sink had filled itself with warm soapy water, and crockery clinked and clunked as it agitated itself in the suds.

  “That’s pretty cool,” Clarissa said, glancing back. “I should definitely try that at home.”

  Clarissa pivoted in a circle, eyes wide with surprise.

  Presumably this had once been a library or a drawing room, but Dom had evidently turned it into some kind of workshop for his experiments. Neater than the kitchen, with bookshelves arranged along several walls, each packed to the rafters with jars and bottles and boxes and plastic tubs full of odds and ends, the centre of the room was dominated by a large wooden table covered in scattered flecks of paint, and strange-shaped plastic sauce bottles. Set on top of the table, something that looked an awful lot like a giant Bunsen burner glowed with an orange flame. Large glass bottles were arranged here and there, and several pairs of heavy-duty laboratory gloves had been abandoned on the floor.

  In one corner stood a battered fridge freezer covered in childish drawings and lists, held down by magnets. Next to it, in a pool of light, a pair of brightly-striped beach balls bounced slowly in rhythm, one smacking the floor as the other rose, both crossing over in mid-air, as though controlled by an invisible hand. Each time the balls crossed paths, the pool of light changed colour. Bright orange, green, blue and pink.

  Toby cautiously approached the beach balls and watched them as they bounced past his nose, wondering what would happen if he reached out and snatched one.

  “What do you do in here?” Clarissa asked, noting that the glass in the only window had been papered over. Not a chink of natural light made it into this room.

  “Anything I want to,” Dom replied. The tone of his voice suggested that much must be obvious.

  “Alright,” said Clarissa. “What were you working on when I disturbed you?” She walked over to the table and stared into the bottom of one of the large bulbous glass test tubes, partially full of bright blue elixir. A rainbow-coloured petroleum slick rested on top of the liquid.

  “Oh,” Dom clapped his hands in glee. “This is fun! Watch this.” He picked up a tomato-shaped plastic sauce bottle and squeezed several tablespoons of its red contents into a large litre-sized test tube, before clamping a pair of iron tongs around the neck.

  “Is that tomato ketchup?” Clarissa asked. Toby pricked his ears up. He liked a little tomato sauce on a chip sammich.

  “No, no, silly. This is a mixture I’ve been working on for some time now.”

  “It’s not tomato sauce?” Toby double-checked, unable to hide his disappointment.

  “Better than ketchup. This is an alchemical salsa, made from one-hundred-per cent natural ingredients that are so secret I can’t possibly tell you about them. I’ve finessed the recipe over the years and now—” with a flourish, he plopped the tube into a cradle over the flame. “Watch!”

  The liquid came to a rapid boil and began to sizzle. Clarissa, remembering her own attempts to master her chemistry—and alchemy—lessons at Ravenswood, fully expected Dom to turn the heat down or remove the tube from the flame, but instead he jigged around it, a crazy dance of glee. The liquid effervesced noisily, spitting and hissing, shooting up the tube heading for the neck where it threatened to spurt forth like a red volcano.

  But as they watched, the mixture frothed and broiled and began to change colour. From red to orange, from orange to yellow, from yellow to green, from green to blue, and all the while the shiny contents grew brighter and brighter. Finally, with a loud POOF noise, the liquid spewed forth from the tube, shooting like a Roman candle. Glitter hit the ceiling and rained down on their heads like some magickal shower of unicorn rain.

  “Wow!” cried Toby.

  “Wow!” echoed Clarissa.

  “Wow indeed,” grinned Dom.

  “So pretty!” said Toby.

  “It is.” Clarissa shook herself, shedding tiny shards of brightly-coloured sparkles all over the floor. A bit blooming messy, she thought secretly. “You invented glitter?” she asked Dom, unsure whether he understood someone else had gotten there first.

  “I’ve invented bio-degradable glitter from sustainable sources,” Dom nodded wisely. “The world needs glitter. It just doesn’t need plastic glitter.”

  Clarissa laughed in delight. “You’re so right. What will you do with it now? Patent it? You’d make a million.”

  “Make a million?” Dom sounded baffled. “Like money you mean?” When Clarissa nodded, he pulled a face. “No, no. I’m not interested in money. I like inventing things for the sake of it. Art for art’s sake.” He gestured grandly and began to waltz around the table once more. Toby followed him, mouth open in a smile, tail wagging furiously. “Isn’t that what they say? Magick for magick’s sake! Wizardry for wizardry’s sake!”

  Finally the penny dropped for Clarissa. “You’re a chaos wizard!”

  Dom laughed his happy belly
laugh. “I am that. Do you think any worse of me?”

  “Of course not.” Clarissa gawped at him. “I mean, I’ve heard of you guys, but I’ve never actually met one.”

  “You have now,” Dom responded, smartly.

  “And that’s why you don’t want to have anything to do with the Ministry of Witches?”

  “They’re not known to have any great respect for people operating outside the confines of what they define as right and proper in terms of witchcraft and wizardry. They are great fans of order, while I, most decidedly, am not.” He gestured around at the untidy laboratory with a self-satisfied smile.

  Clarissa sifted some of the glitter between her fingers. If you rubbed it hard enough it crumbled to dust. She couldn’t imagine ever being able to invent anything. Her creativity lay only in words. “I wouldn’t know where to start with something like this.”

  “That’s probably because you haven’t considered—or worked with—alchemy creatively.”

  “I did some alchemy at school,” Clarissa corrected him.

  “That would have been mainly learning the rules and regulations, I’m guessing? Basic experiments and quantities. Measuring the results?” Dom raised his eyebrows in question and Clarissa nodded. “Yes. I thought so. That’s a bit like doing chemistry. I’m not going to deny that learning the rules of magick is important, but only so you can then go and break those rules all over again.”

  Clarissa had heard this said before, but it wasn’t something she would ever have dared to do.

  “I turned my back on my coven many years ago and became a solitary practitioner. All that ritual and symbolism and asking goddesses for their benevolent assistance? It just didn’t sit well with me at all.”

  Clarissa scratched her head. “Then how does your magick work?”

  “I just think of the results I want, and I work towards that. There are no rules. It’s all trial and error.”

  Toby, still following Dom around, pricked up his ears. “That’s what I do!”

  Dom dropped to one knee. “You’ve been doing magick?”

  “Some.” Toby sat and regarded Dom with a serious expression. “I can levitate objects. I can speak to other animals—”

  “He can count and spell and read. He can fix broken stuff—”

  “I can open cans!” Toby laughed, huskily. “That’s my best magick. Especially when I’m hungry.”

  “And how do you do it? Do you know?” Dom asked him.

  Toby shrugged. “No. I just think it and I can do it.”

  Dom nodded emphatically at Clarissa. “That’s exactly it. We don’t need to work within one system of magick or one tradition of the occult. We shouldn’t have to choose our gods and goddesses. There’s no point in taking sides.”

  He stood and walked to his bookshelves and began to grab a couple of jars and containers. “We should each be creating our own magickal system. One that works for us alone.” Dom crossed to the table and dropped the items.

  He pointed at Toby but addressed Clarissa. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, this is what Toby has already started to do. He doesn’t know the way magick works, he just uses what’s available.”

  “Do I?” Toby asked, his eyes wide with wonder.

  Dom cleared his throat and glanced at both Clarissa and Toby. “Let’s have a bit of fun. I can conjure something up, right here and now, using these ingredients. What shall I make?”

  “A sammich!” Toby suggested instantly.

  Clarissa tutted. “How about a rain cloud? We haven’t had a lot of rain recently.”

  “That’s a spectacular idea,” Dom grinned, full of enthusiasm. “I just need one more ingredient.” He skipped back to his shelves and moved a few bottles around before returning with a large litre bottle of a pale blue liquid. “Okay, now watch!”

  He took a large glass three-litre measuring jug and slopped a little of the blue liquid into it, checked the measurement and added a little more.

  “You look like you’re measuring that,” Toby said. “I thought there were no rules.”

  Dom stopped what he was doing and looked down at Toby. “You know, you’re right, Toby. Thank you for pointing that out.” He slopped more liquid into the jug. “I was a little concerned about how much of the mix I was creating, but what the heck. Let’s live a little.”

  He added a pinch of gold powder from a small tin, and a thick wad of something that looked a little like black cotton wool. “Nearly done.” He addressed Toby once more. “What do you think of when you think of a rain cloud?”

  “It’s wet,” Toby stated the obvious and Dom raised his eyebrows.

  “You can do better than that. What are the components?”

  Toby puffed out his furry little cheeks. “Water of course. And it smells fresh afterwards.”

  “Mm-mm. Petrichor. One of my favourite smells.” Dom nodded.

  “And it’s cooling.”

  “Aha! Cooling! Yes!” Dom dashed across to the fridge freezer and yanked open the door, extracting a bottle of water and, with a little more difficulty, a chunk of ice. “I think we now have everything we need.”

  He dropped the ice into his mixture and added a dash of water, peered down at Toby and added a little more. “Remember, Toby. Absolutely nothing is knowable. There never can be any absolute truth. What is, is. What will be, will be.” Dom picked up a pen and began to mix his ingredients together. “This might not work. It shouldn’t work. What I have here is simply a bunch of physical ingredients. So why will it work?”

  Dom wiggled his impressive eyebrows, and flakes of glitter fell into his mix.

  “Intent,” Clarissa said at once. This was something her teachers had drummed into her at Ravenswood.

  “Belief,” Toby chipped in. Belief in his own capabilities was all he had.

  “Both of those,” Dom beamed and lifted his measuring jug to the cradle over the Bunsen burner. “The beauty of chaos magick is that you pick and mix what you want. We could pray to a goddess of water if we wanted to. I bet you know a few of those Clarissa?”

  Clarissa nodded. She’d learned the name and attributes and powers of hundreds of deities over the years. “Danu, Ahti, Condatis, Coventina, Freyr, Ganga, Lir, Nerites, Belisama, The Gorgons, Hapi—”

  “So very many,” Dom nodded. “But they aren’t necessary.” He gestured at the jug. The liquid inside was beginning to simmer. He picked up his iron tongs and clamped the jug between them, then gave it a swift, hard shake.

  “And no need for magick words either.” He smiled down at Toby. “Unless you really want to?”

  Toby jumped to his feet and lay his front paws on the table in order to get a better view of what was happening in the jug. The mixture had taken on a dark, more threatening hue. “Hocus pocus!” he shouted.

  Dom laughed and shook the jug once more. The mixture reached boiling point and shot up the neck of the jug, erupting into the atmosphere in the shape of a giant mushroom. Lighter than air, the black cloud floated up until it collided with the ceiling, where it began to spread out until it measured approximately one metre by a metre and a half and started to twist and rage and boil. Dom had been right about quantities. He’d created a monster cloud with an energy all of its own.

  Clarissa tipped her head back to watch. Toby, open-mouthed, did the same.

  “Pretty spectacular, eh?” Dom sounded smug.

  “It’s a cloud,” Toby agreed, “but it isn’t rai—”

  He didn’t manage to get any further. The booming sound of thunder filled the room. Clarissa cowered, while Toby shot for cover underneath the table and covered his ears with his paws. Lightning flashed, forking through the air and scoring a direct hit on the glass jug over the Bunsen burner. It exploded into a thousand tiny pieces. Clarissa’s shriek of alarm was cut off almost the second it tried to escape from her mouth. Hard drops of rain began to fall from the cloud above their heads.

  Dom threw his hands up at the ceiling and cheered. “Whoop! You see what we can do when w
e only turn our minds to it?” His guffaw was drowned out by another ominous rumble of thunder. The cloud above their heads had expanded sideways now, covering the majority of the ceiling. One more flash of lightning, a further peal of thunder that threatened to deafen them, and rain cascaded down.

  Clarissa screeched and reached under the table to haul Toby out by his collar. “Let’s get out of here,” she yelled above the din of the rain and Dom’s laughing. They slithered across the room, Toby’s legs struggling to grip the floor, given that it was already under an inch of water, until they made it to the kitchen door. Clarissa yanked at the handle, her hands slipping as the water teemed down on them.

  Finally she pulled the door wide and pushed Toby through. They exploded into the kitchen, Dom following them through, his cheeks glowing bright red like a slightly insane Father Christmas. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” he thrilled.

  Clarissa, soaked through to her underwear, her hair plastered around her face, could only glare at him. Toby picked that moment to add insult to injury by shaking himself hard, spraying water all over her.

  She pulled herself up tall and blinked water out of her eyes. “Yay for chaos,” she said.

  Chaos by name, chaos by nature, Clarissa thought as she huddled on an enormous squidgy sofa in Dom’s living room. Both she and Toby were wrapped in soft, sweet-smelling towels, fresh from the airing cupboard, and Dom had thoughtfully supplied a pot of tea and some biscuits too.

  “Sorry about that,” he apologised for the umpteenth time. “I may have gotten a little carried away.”

  “No, no,” Clarissa made an attempt at magnanimity. “We found it… erm… interesting. Didn’t we, Toby?”

  Toby, caught in the act of trying to slip one of the Jammy Dodgers from the plate of biscuits, froze. “Mm-hmm,” he said, his teeth clutching at the biscuit as if his life depended on it.

  “Toby!” Clarissa scolded, and quick as a flash, before she could reach for him or order him to drop it, he crunched and swallowed, and the tasty biscuit had disappeared. “I don’t believe you, you scoundrel. You’re so naughty!”