Pawsitively Swindled

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Nothing exciting has happened all day—Jack said the same thing. Molly is in Edgehill a lot though,” Edgar said in lieu of a greeting, his voice ringing out through the car’s speakers. “A couple hours ago, the Daniels dot was in Magnolia Estates with Tillman, but he was only there for forty-five minutes and then Daniels left again.”

  “I know,” Amber said. “They both came to see me.”

  Edgar was silent, but she could almost hear his expression: those thick black brows of his jammed together on his forehead in consternation. So she quickly explained the encounter.

  “You need a new car,” he said.

  “We’re actually on our way to Salem now to do that,” Amber said. “Can you watch the maps and the cats for a while longer?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m in the process of getting you better Wi-Fi anyway and could use a little more time. Yours operates at the speed of a dead snail. It’s very sad. And how do you not have a screen in this entire shoebox that’s bigger than thirteen inches? Playing Sniper Patrol on a screen this small hurts my heart on a level I can’t properly describe.”

  “You’re very dramatic,” she said.

  “Wait … you said we. Who is we?” Edgar asked.

  “Hey, Edgar,” Kim said in a voice much softer and more subdued than usual.

  “Oh. Oh, hey, Kim.”

  The silence that settled over the car made Amber’s skin itch.

  “Okay, bye!” Edgar said quickly and the call went dead.

  “Ugh!” Kim groaned, throwing her head back against the headrest. “He gets me so flustered!”

  “You fluster him too, clearly,” Amber said.

  Kim turned in her seat as much as her seatbelt would allow. “Do you mean it?”

  Laughing, Amber said, “The thing you have to know about Edgar is that he’s made up of absolutes. He’s absolutely loyal, he’s absolutely honest, and he’s absolutely terrible with people. So that means if he didn’t like you, he would just very bluntly tell you that he wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t do it to hurt you; he just wouldn’t want to waste your time. So the fact that he’s acting like a total weirdo means he’s interested.”

  Even without looking at her, Amber could tell Kim was grinning.

  “But he’s been through a lot—is still going through a lot—so my guess is, he’s terrified that he’s interested. Whether it’s because you’re a non-witch—I know you don’t care about that,” Amber was quick to add when she sensed the protest rising up in her friend. “Or because he feels like he’s such a mess that he doesn’t want to force someone else to weather the storm with him, I don’t know. All I can say is if you’re really interested, just be patient with him. It took years to get him to let me in, and we’ve been in each other’s lives in some capacity since I was twelve.”

  Amber quickly glanced over to try to get a read on Kim’s expression, but her face didn’t reveal much.

  “He’s a great guy, and would be worth the fight,” Amber said. “But it’ll be a rollercoaster and a half getting there.”

  Kim nodded at that. “Good to know.”

  By the time they arrived at a Toyota dealership, Amber and Kim had switched to the topic at hand: how to not get taken to the cleaners by a salesman. The last time Amber had purchased a car had been five years ago, and she’d had Aunt Gretchen with her. Amber had nervously wrung her hands while her spitfire of an aunt did all the hard work. Amber’s contribution had been making a decision between black and slate gray.

  Kim’s experience had been limited to buying a car for five thousand in cash from her elderly neighbor a decade before.

  This would be a bit like the blind leading the blind, but they were grown women, dang it, and they could do this.

  Shortly after they’d started wandering behind a row of cars whose hoods and roofs gleamed in the late evening sun, Amber spotted a gaggle of salesmen inside the showroom. They had seen Amber and Kim already, and were gathered together like a school of sharks who had just sensed chum in the water and were taking bets on who could get the first bite.

  Amber cast her sound-enhancing spell and soon the conversation of the four men filled her head. In short order, she sussed out which of the four wasn’t a total sleaze—determined by which one didn’t feel it necessary to mention her and Kim’s anatomy as if it pertained to financial stability—and then confidently strode inside, leaving Kim to hurry after her.

  Though she was so nervous her knees were practically knocking together, she marched forward as if she owned the place. She channeled Bianca Pace and Melanie Cole as she called out, “Excuse me?” as if it were a statement rather than a question.

  One of the sleazier of the collection turned at the sound of her voice, his smile lecherous. “Hello, ladies. Would—”

  Amber came to a stop before the group, which had parted a bit. She held up a hand in the man’s face, halting his words. She hadn’t so much as looked at him. Her attention was focused on the man in front of her—a thirty-something African-American man with warm brown skin, kind brown eyes, and an easy air about him, whose name tag read Eugene. “Hi, Eugene. I would like you to sell me a car.”

  The man beside her tried to speak again. “Ma’am, if—”

  Amber put her hand in his face again. Attention still squarely on Eugene, she said, “What do you say?”

  Eugene nodded. “Right this way.”

  Amber and a snickering Kim followed after Eugene, leaving the three other men watching after them.

  Once they were outside, Amber cast a quick truth spell on Eugene, but at no point over the next two hours did surprise ever light up his features as it so often did with liars—that shock of your brain telling your mouth to say one thing, but something else coming out instead. Lying never seemed to be something Eugene considered.

  Around seven thirty that evening, Amber was the proud owner of a brand-new slate gray Camry that she both loved and had gotten a good deal on. She drove it off the lot, inhaling that crisp new car smell—as Kim followed behind her to drop off the rental. Amber’s current contract extended two more days, but if Tillman and Daniels were onto her now, Amber would rather eat the cost than have to worry that she was being tailed. Edgar hadn’t texted her that any of the dots had followed her to Salem, so she hoped she was in the clear for now.

  Once the rental was fully out of her possession, Amber and Kim headed back to Edgehill. The mechanic at Kat’s Car Shop had done a patch job that would keep Kim’s ancient car running for a little while longer, but Kim vowed that she would go back to Eugene herself in a few weeks, after the Here and Meow, to purchase a new vehicle.

  By the time Amber returned home, it was almost nine. The Quirky Whisker was closed, the only light in the building coming from upstairs. Because she knew her cousin well enough by now, she came armed with an order of Thai food that was so large, she had been given a cardboard box to carry it all in.

  As Amber walked up the steps to her apartment, she was met with the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and some of the vilest strings of curse words and name calling she’d ever heard come out of a person. Edgar sat at the dining room table in the chair closest to the stairs. The three maps had been taped together and attached to the wall opposite the table, presumably so Edgar could shoot virtual strangers with wild abandon while also keeping watch over the four dots on the map—which were all in their respective homes at the moment.

  A massive black laptop that looked more like a heavy-duty metal briefcase than a computer was propped up on a stand of some kind on the table. A second much larger keyboard and a mouse were directly in front of him. Both keyboards and the mouse were lit a bright neon red. Amber wondered what her customers must have thought to see grumpy Edgar walk across the shop while either carrying a bunch of loose electronics, or rolling in a massive suitcase. Amber didn’t see a suitcase anywhere …

  A pair of enormous black headphones covered Edgar’s ears, and a stick microphone was positioned before his mouth. He looked like a very
irate air traffic controller. His fingers flew over keys, he frantically jiggled and clicked his mouse, and truly foul curses and insults were hurled into the microphone.

  Amber was transfixed and horrified at once. She didn’t know how to alert him to her presence without scaring him half out of his mind, so she took the food into the kitchen and did her best to plate it while waiting for a break in the one-sided pandemonium she could hear. The cats were undoubtedly under the bed. When Edgar screamed “No!” and something slammed onto the table, she couldn’t say she didn’t blame them for hiding.

  Peeking out into the living room, she saw he was on his feet now, headphones off as he paced back and forth over a short distance. His hands clutched at his hair as he muttered about the injustices of war.

  “Edgar?” she ventured.

  He whirled around and let out a scream that was so high-pitched, one of the cats hissed in response from under the bed. “Holy crap!” He grabbed a fistful of his own shirt, above his heart, his eyes wild. “Don’t do that! When did you get here?”

  “Ten minutes ago,” she said, fighting off the urge to laugh at him. “I have food.”

  Edgar shook himself, as if warding off full body chills brought on by a run-in with a ghost. “Cool. I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.”

  She cocked a brow at him, mostly amazed that someone with an appetite like his could go that long without eating.

  He shrugged. “What? I forgot.”

  Sighing, she plated some more food and the two sat at the dining room table, where they both could periodically check the maps on the wall to make sure none of their charges were up to anything strange. Amber noticed then that Edgar had altered the dots. They were all black still, but each had a white letter in the center now. D for Daniels, T for Tillman, S for Sable, and M for Molly.

  “So I have an idea of where we might be able to hide the grimoires,” Edgar said after his second plate of food. “There are something like 200 ghost towns in Oregon—not unlike the one where we found Zelda’s doll.” He chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “There’s a dead zone in one of them up by Hood River. It’s a good three-hour drive from here, but it’s obscure, the location will be hard to trace magically, and then you can layer a ton of spells on top of it.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to let Neil know where we were going to hide them,” Amber said.

  “Where you’re going to hide them.” Edgar sighed. “When you’re an insomniac, sometimes all you can do is fall into internet wormholes. But if I don’t go with you, he won’t know a) what you did to hide the books, and b) where the exact hiding place is.”

  Amber mulled that over. “Should we talk to Zelda again? Get some advice on how best to hide a location in a dead zone?”

  “That could work, yeah. I don’t think we should tell her the location—I think the fewer people who know, the better—but maybe she can walk us through some of the steps.”

  Though it was late, Amber called both Willow and Aunt Gretchen and got them in on a video chat, and then she propped up the phone against the large Styrofoam cup her coconut chicken soup had come in. Edgar sat beside her. After a few minutes of playing catch-up, Amber told them about their plan to hide the books in a dead zone.

  Aunt Gretchen’s eyes widened. “Edgar, what a beautiful suggestion.”

  Edgar ducked his head. “Thanks.”

  “So now what we need,” Amber said, “is as many spells as you can think of to layer on top of the cloaking spells. Shields, deflection spells, confusion, blowback—anything you’ve got.”

  For the next couple hours, the four of them offered up suggestions and wrote out possible spells. Amber knew a wealth of useful spells would be in the very grimoires they needed to hide, but even opening one of the books for a moment would break the cloaking spells on them and that beacon would shoot into the sky like a searchlight—and then the Penhallows would come running.

  Around midnight, when both Willow and Aunt Gretchen were fighting off yawns every ten seconds, Amber suggested they call it a night.

  “When were you planning to do this, little mouse?” her aunt asked.

  Amber arched a brow at Edgar.

  “As soon as possible,” Edgar said. “I wanted to find out if one or both of you could come here to help Amber with this. I can’t go. Neil Penhallow is back in full force and I can’t risk him seeing the location through me somehow.”

  “Oh, Edgar …” Aunt Gretchen said, frowning. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m really sorry things have been so hard for you lately, Edgar,” Willow said. “You’ve done so much for us; I wish we could pay you back somehow.”

  Growing increasingly uncomfortable, he waved this away.

  “Anyway,” Willow said. “I can be there by tomorrow night. I was actually planning to tell you as much tomorrow, Amber. I’ve been working all day to finish up the rest of this job, then you’ve got me for at least two weeks—pretty sure I can stretch it to three.”

  “That works for me, too,” Aunt Gretchen said.

  “I’ll come pick you up around six p.m., Aunt G,” Willow said.

  “Perfect.” Aunt Gretchen staved off another yawn.

  They all said goodnight and Amber disconnected the call. A sense of comfort she hadn’t known was missing suddenly washed over her at the idea of her family being with her again.

  Edgar was slumped a little, his elbows on the table and a thumbnail idly scratching at one of the grain lines of the wood.

  She squeezed his shoulder. “We will get that guy out of your head, you know that, right?”

  Edgar nodded. “Yeah, I know.” Sighing, he said, “Since I’m the first morning shift, can I just camp out here?”

  “Of course,” Amber said, getting the feeling that Edgar wanted the company even more than he wanted the convenience of staying here. Plus it would be a pain to haul all his stuff home and back again.

  “I’ll take the first shift,” he said.

  Amber didn’t sleep much in that first handful of hours. Every time she fell asleep, she heard Neil’s voice in her head—what she imagined he’d sound like, anyway. I’ll find those books, Blackwood, he’d whisper-hiss in her ear. You can try to hide them from Edgar, but I’ll find them. I’ll drive him mad until he tells me where they are. I’ll break him, I’ll take the books, and then I’ll come for you. All of you.

  She’d wake with a start, finding her cats curled beside her, and Edgar at his computer, his face awash in blue light as he fought virtual foes on his screen, unable to fight the ones running around in his head.

  When she forced Edgar to go to bed later, even after he downed a couple of sleeping pills he was up again shortly after—whether it was a nightmare violently pulling him from sleep, or Neil’s actual voice in his head getting the job done, Edgar didn’t say. She imagined Neil sensing Edgar had fallen asleep, his mind’s voice quiet, and Neil poking Edgar in the figurative shoulder until he woke up again, like an early-rising kid trying to wake up an exhausted parent.

  At 9:30 that morning, as Amber headed for the door, Edgar was back in his place at the table with the maps on the wall opposite him, his headphones on, and his finger furiously clicking his mouse while he hurled insults at someone through his microphone. He’d promised to keep the vitriol quieter during working hours so he wouldn’t upset the customers.

  She stared at him a moment, at how tense his body was—shoulders up by his ears, jaw clenched, and forehead creased. She didn’t think any of that was because of the game. After calling a goodbye to him that he didn’t hear, she let out a sad sigh and left.

  From the hours of 4:30 to 8:30 p.m., Amber was alone in her apartment. Bianca had watched the maps from two to four p.m. and had fled the moment Amber had returned. Amber scrubbed, swept, and mopped every inch of her tiny space, checking on the maps as often as possible, but there still hadn’t been any noteworthy behavior.

  By 8:45, Willow and Aunt Gretchen were safely no
t only back in Edgehill, but in Amber’s tiny apartment. Aunt G was harping on Amber for how small the place was, and Willow was harping about the state of Amber’s hair—even though Amber had washed it last night and had even brushed it!—and Amber couldn’t have been happier to have them both here and driving her nuts in person.

  Once they’d all showered and changed into pajamas, they sat around the dining room table with mugs of Amber’s hot chocolate. Amber had tried to get them on the topic of how best to hide the extremely sought-after grimoires, but they both were far more interested in getting updates about how things were going with Jack.

  Amber deflected and changed the subject and deflected again until she finally gave in. “Ugh. They’re good, okay? I mean, I think they are,” she said. “He kissed me.”

  Willow squealed in delight. Aunt G plastered on a smug grin.

  “Can we talk about the grimoires now?” she asked, face hot, as she did another quick scan of the maps.

  “All right, all right,” Aunt G finally said from across the table. “We’ve embarrassed your sister enough for tonight.” Then she reached across the table and took one of Amber’s hands in hers and squeezed. “I’m truly glad to see you this giddy.”

  Amber ducked her head much like Edgar had earlier. “Thanks.”

  By the time they finally went to bed, they had a list of six spells they would layer on top of the cloaking spells they’d already put on the books themselves, and would put on the location once they found it. Amber was nervous about attempting Magic Cache without Edgar, but she was comforted by the fact that there were no magic veins under this abandoned town that could toss Amber around. Her ankle still gave a faint twinge any time she took even the slightest of missteps.

  Amber got a couple hours of sleep before the taunting voice of Neil Penhallow wormed its way into her dreams. She wondered if her subconscious was punishing her now with what she pictured Edgar going through on a daily basis. The witch being trapped in Edgar’s mind was no more her fault than Amber’s nightmares being Jack’s, but guilt rarely listened to reason.