Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Amber thought that sounded great, but Willow’s devastated expression told Amber something else must have come with that confession.

  “He also said that part of the reason why he’s been so weird with me isn’t because of Molly, but because that big, secret story he’s been working on could destroy your business,” Willow said, wincing.

  “What?” Amber asked in a rush. “Connor had something to do with—” she gestured to her shop at large, “this?”

  “As soon as he confessed that part of it, the truth spell wore off. Then, like what usually happens with truth spells, he was all freaked out that he’d told me any of that—more so the love confession part than the destroying your business part.”

  Could Connor somehow know about Amber’s magic? A couple of months ago, while Edgehill had still been in knots over the kidnapping of Chloe Deidrick, Amber had run into Connor outside The Quirky Whisker early one morning. Amber had just magically changed the welcome sign on her chalkboard minutes before and realized it was possible that Connor had seen it happen.

  While looking at the chalkboard hanging in the window, Connor had asked if Amber majored in art in college. When Amber said she had inherited her artistic side from her mother, Connor’s response had been strange.

  “I wonder what else you might have inherited from your mother,” he said, taking a slow slip of his coffee without taking his eyes off her.

  She swallowed. “Meaning?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “You Blackwood women seem to have so many more layers than I first thought. Just curious what else there is to know about you.”

  How much did Connor Declan know about the “layers” the Blackwood women possessed? And if he knew about the magic layer, how had he come by that information? Run-of-the-mill journalistic research, or something else?

  “Did you find out why he’s targeting my shop?” Amber asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “And the weird thing? Just after the magic faded, he sounded really bummed out when he said, ‘You and you sister are more alike than I realized.’ I think he knows we’re witches.”

  Amber took another sip of her hot chocolate.

  “I can’t explain it—maybe it’s just because I know the guy, but my guess is, he didn’t come to his suspicions of us naturally,” Willow said. “I’m willing to bet someone got him started on this path.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think Edgehill and the surrounding areas are as magic-free as we once thought. I think we—you—have been on someone’s radar for a while, maybe years, and they got to Connor somehow.”

  If that were the case, it meant Amber hadn’t been living life off the magical grid after all. If the Penhallows had known for a while that Amber was still in the same town where her parents had been killed, and they suspected that Amber had access to the Henbane grimoire, then why had it taken them fourteen years to come crawling out of the woodwork?

  Amber supposed many things could have factored into the Penhallows’ hiatus, one of which was that the time-travel spell had been so well hidden that it had vanished off the magical map when Amber’s parents had been killed. But even magic as powerful as Annabelle Henbane’s—a cloaking spell so strong that it survived even after her death—faded eventually. Perhaps the Penhallows had needed to come up with a new game plan for solving their curse problem in the wake of the Henbane grimoire’s disappearance.

  And then once the powerful cloaking magic on it started to dissolve, the Penhallows had been able to sense it even if they hadn’t known where the magic came from—and the old plan was back on: getting the Henbane grimoire into their possession so they could turn back time and reverse the clan-wide curse.

  “I have a theory though,” Willow said. “As much as I started to like Kieran after he was healed, we don’t know the full extent of what he was up to before he got here, and what he was doing when he wasn’t harassing us.”

  Amber flashed back to the day she’d been outside their old family home. After finding her father’s beloved watch under the porch of 523 Ocicat Lane, Amber’s memory magic had been activated. When she came out of the memory of Neil Penhallow murdering her parents by fire, somehow Connor had been there to comfort her. It wasn’t until later that Amber discovered Connor hadn’t been there at all; it had been Kieran wearing Connor’s face.

  Amber had assumed then that Kieran had chosen Connor based on the perception that Connor was special to her. But what if Connor and Kieran had been the ones in contact?

  One day several months ago, Amber had literally bumped into Connor on her way out of Clawsome Coffee after an upsetting conversation with the always-awful Paulette Newsome. When Amber had accidentally barreled into him, he’d dropped his book. It had been a fantasy novel with a witch on the cover—a book which he then claimed he reread every year.

  With Connor’s love of fantasy and his inquisitive nature, maybe all Kieran had needed to do was plant a few enticing seeds to get Connor going.

  Amber asked, “Do you think Connor’s curiosity has overridden everything else at this point?”

  “I think so,” Willow said. “But … I get the impression he’s doing this because he thinks you’re dangerous.”

  “Me?”

  Willow sniffed. “I think he’s doing this in part to protect me. Like he needs to prove that you’re up to something terrible so he can save me from you. But he seems to have the same suspicions about me, so I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to accomplish.”

  Amber opened her mouth, then shut it again. She had no idea what to say to that. When she thought about Connor asking her to join him at the Sippin’ Siamese for his birthday celebration, she’d genuinely thought, at least for a short window of time, that Connor had been interested in her. She wondered if this fascination with her and her supposedly dangerous ways had come before or after the invitation to the bar. If it had come after, had a conversation with the cursed Kieran Penhallow been what had caused the shift?

  “We more or less got into a screaming fight after that,” Willow said. “I’ve been wandering around town for a while. He can’t really think taking you down would put me in his good graces, can he? If I somehow indirectly ruined your business because I can’t get over Connor Declan, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  Amber hugged Willow to her side, who dropped her head onto Amber’s shoulder. “Will, c’mon. There’s no way any of this is your fault. I would never blame you for any of it.” After a moment, she asked, “Does he have an opinion on Aunt G?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “All his focus is on you.”

  Amber held Willow to her side while Willow cried. She wasn’t sobbing or gasping for breath. She just sniffed occasionally and swiped at her eyes. It was the kind of crying that came from being deeply sad and unable to feel much else.

  Amber’s mind had drifted to Kieran again. Why had he ended up in Edgehill? Aunt G, via her tincture-induced premonition, had only seen one Penhallow heading their way three months ago. Once the cloak on the hidden grimoires started to fade, had Kieran been able to track the magical traces faster than anyone else? Amber would have thought that Edgehill—the current home of the Blackwoods’ eldest daughter—would be the first place the Penhallows would look. Yet, Kieran had come alone.

  He’d been reckless, using “flashy magic” and leaving his sticky, molasses-thick magical signature all over town. Maybe Kieran had gone rogue—a crazed lone wolf. But what if her assumptions about Kieran—and Penhallows in general—had been wrong? What if there had been a grander plan all along and Kieran had been sent in like a scout onto a battlefield to test the ground for land mines? The question was: had Kieran been sent in as collateral damage by someone more calculating—or had Kieran willingly come to Edgehill in search of the book while someone else waited in the wings to see what happened?

  Amber wished she knew where Kieran was now and who had orchestrated his escape, an escape that could very well be another pi
ece of the plan. She’d thought that she and her family were on top of it, that they were one step ahead of the cursed witches who sounded disorganized, wild, and scattered across the globe.

  But perhaps they’d been operating together underground this whole time. They’d made themselves known only because they’d wanted to be found. And now the WBI were in town, trying to recruit Amber.

  Just last week, after Willow had confessed that she’d found their uncle, she’d said, “I just keep thinking that the Penhallows are picking off our family. First Mom and Dad. Then they went after Edgar. One of them threatened to go after Aunt G. One tried to kill you. And now it sounds like they got to Uncle Raph, too. What if, even though they’re cursed, they’re too powerful for us to outrun forever? We’ll hide the book, sure, then what? What if they find it? Then it won’t just be our family that’s in danger, it’s … everyone.”

  What if Amber and her family were already too late to stop whatever was coming?

  Chapter 11

  Instead of Penhallow-filled nightmares being the source of Amber’s insomnia, now it was due to the animals inhabiting her apartment. Amber had no way of knowing if Thea retained her human mind while trapped in that furry little body, but the rodent sure seemed ticked off.

  Between the hamster making a ruckus in her wheel, and Amber’s need to shoo the cats away from the cage, Amber hardly slept a wink. The cats found that watching the hamster offered a level of entertainment that stretched beyond their wildest imaginations. Entertainment that paled, however, to the harrowing hour when the cats had gotten onto the counter in the middle of the night—during the brief window Amber had been asleep—and had managed to knock the cage over. Bedding, the hamster’s beloved wheel, and the hamster herself had been dumped on the counter. How the hamster had managed to not only get to the floor, but to do so unscathed had been a small miracle. Tom and Alley had taken turns chasing the poor rodent all over the apartment. If the crash of the cage onto the kitchen counter hadn’t woken Amber and her family up, the shrieks of the hamster as she dashed around the apartment trying to escape the cats definitely would have.

  Tom seemed delighted that for once, he was the one doing the chasing.

  Once the hamster had been safely deposited back in her cage—not before nipping Amber on the thumb—Amber had locked her in the bathroom. The cats sat outside the door and yowled as if they were being tortured within an inch of their nine lives. So Amber put the cage on the coffee table next to the couch where she tried to sleep. She had managed to fall asleep for all of a few minutes before she’d woken herself up, her heart racing, to find a wild-eyed Tom perched on top of the hamster cage, gnawing on the rubber-wrapped handle. One would think the hamster had been doused in eau de catnip, given how crazed her presence made the cats.

  When the sky outside her window finally started to lighten, Amber was so relieved, she nearly cried. After feeding the cats—Tom’s first true love still remained food—Amber sent Kim a text, asking if she needed any help today with Here and Meow duties. Kim had abruptly stopped giving Amber assignments a few days ago, which Amber had secretly appreciated. But now? Now Amber needed to get out of this apartment before she lost what shred of sanity she had left.

  She debated who the hamster would be safest with. If left unattended, the hamster might find a way to escape. If left in the vicinity of the cats unsupervised, Amber would have to break the news to Henrietta when she woke up that her sister had been eaten by a house cat. If left in the possession of her aunt or sister, who knew what would happen. Edgar was likely still too angry to even take her call.

  Aunt G had said the spell would last for twenty-four hours, meaning it would wear off around noon today. That gave Amber four or five hours to figure out what in the world to do about … everything … before Thea turned back into a human who likely would have even more questions than she had before her transformation.

  Amber’s cell phone rang and Kim’s smiling face popped up on the screen. Aunt G was still fast asleep, but Willow stirred. Amber quickly answered the call, grabbed the hamster cage’s handle, and then hustled down the steps, shooing the cats away with her foot as she went, which made descending the steps rather difficult.

  “Amber?” Kim said. “Are you okay? What’s happening? Why are you breathing so hard?”

  Amber somehow managed to get herself and the hamster into the shop, and the door closed between herself and her lunatic felines. She heaved out a breath. “Oh my God, Kim! I’ve had the most bonkers couple of days—which is saying a lot.”

  Kim paused and Amber could imagine her narrowing her eyes as she assessed the situation.

  “You asked if I need help,” Kim said slowly. “Are you sure you’re up for helping? You sound exhausted.”

  The hamster was back in her wheel. It must have gotten warped during the tumble onto the counter, because it offered the most annoying creaking sound now. Amber was reminded of a wonky shopping cart wheel. Creak, creak, creak. Pause. Creak, creak, creak.

  Amber’s eye started to twitch. “I’m so tired I could scream, but if I don’t get out of here, Chief Brown is going to have to arrest me for a crime I actually committed this time.”

  “I am intrigued and very worried,” Kim said. “But I also have a million things to do today. It’s Kids Day!”

  Ah, Kids Day. Tons of kid friendly events were scheduled a couple days before the festival as a way to jumpstart their parents’ spending. Amber had tentatively been scheduled to do a toy demonstration today—she’d supplied the demo toys weeks ago—but since Kim hadn’t brought it up, Amber wasn’t going to either. It was too precarious a time to demonstrate her toys right now.

  “The committee is trying to get as much done as possible this morning because we’re going to need all hands on deck for Kids Day. So, yes, I’d love the help, but don’t you want to be with your family—”

  Creak, creak, creak.

  “No.”

  “Yikes,” Kim said.

  “I’ll be ready in twenty,” Amber said. “Oh, and I’ll explain later, but I’m bringing a hamster.”

  Kim arrived in front of The Quirky Whisker in Ann Marie’s minivan. The back seats—save for one—had been laid flat so Kim could fill the vehicle with various boxes of supplies and decorations. The hamster was safely strapped into the only available back seat. For the next two hours while they ran errands, Amber filled Kim in on her conversation with the WBI.

  They picked up several boxes of black headbands—which had been outfitted with cat ears—from Letty Ortiz at Angora Threads. Then they dropped the boxes off at the community center. Participants of the Saturday 5K could pick up their running bibs, T-shirts, and extra goodies—including the cat-ear headbands—from the center on Friday.

  The center was filled with volunteers putting the bags together, and boxes of all sizes were stacked around the room. Some had yet to be opened, while others lay empty and dumped on their sides, packing paper spilling out onto the floor. Amber watched as a volunteer opened a box and took out a baby blue T-shirt, Ben’s design of the twelve Best of Edgehill businesses running horizontally across the front. Behind the volunteer, several others sorted the shirts on a long table, presumably arranging them by size. Other tables were stacked with what looked like postcards—most likely coupons from the various Edgehill businesses doing all they could to take advantage of the influx of tourists eager to spend money. The restaurants especially got an extra boost on Saturday after the race, when sweaty runners went in search of a meal or a cool drink.

  No sooner had Amber and Kim dropped off the boxes and Kim had thanked Ann Marie, the volunteer coordinator, and Chloe Deidrick, her assistant, for being rock stars, then they were on their way again.

  When they got back into the minivan, Amber was relieved Thea was still safely inside her cage. Amber had yet to go into detail about the hamster, as Kim nearly had a conniption over the fact that the Witch Bureau of Investigation not only existed, but that they’d given Amber a missio
n.

  “My best friend is a freaking spy!” Kim had happily chirped.

  Their next task was to drop off window decals to the winners of the Best of Edgehill competition, as well as rubber stamps for the scavenger hunt bingo cards. Halfway down the list—after they’d dropped off the materials to Grace Williams at Hiss and Hers—Kim finally got over her excitement about Amber being an “undercover operative” and asked where the hamster had come from.

  Steeling herself, Amber told Kim about Thea Bishop and how she’d come to the correct conclusion that Amber was a witch. Kim pulled into a parking spot outside Patch’s Pizza and turned abruptly in her seat to face Amber.

  “Shut the front door!” Kim said. “She must really be a good lawyer to have pieced all that together. What did you say to her?”

  Amber swallowed, debated the best way to diplomatically say this sentence out loud, then went with the blunt approach. “Aunt Gretchen turned her into a hamster.”

  Kim stared at her for a few long seconds, then threw her head back and laughed until she was in tears. “Oh my God, Amber! That was a good one. Hoo boy, I needed that. But really, what did you tell Thea? Her blabbing your secret all over town when a Penhallow is on the loose can’t be good. What if the WBI agents find out? Would they wipe her memory with those flashlight things like in that alien FBI movie?”

  Amber had no idea what Kim was talking about.

  It took a few more seconds for Kim to realize that Amber hadn’t been joking. She let out a soft screech, then unhooked her seatbelt and whirled in her seat. With her knees on the cushion, she gripped the sides of her seat and peered over the headrest at the hamster. Amber glanced back too and spotted the rust-colored rodent sitting at the gate of the cage, staring at Amber and Kim as if she’d been listening to the conversation the entire time.