Spells and Scones

by Bailey Cates

  Her head popped up. In her back porch light I saw a wisp of creamy frosting on her lip. She licked it off with a sheepish expression.

  “Really, Margie?”

  “Shh. You’re the only one who knows about my Twinkie habit.”

  One of these days I’ll have to make some real sponge cakes and fill them with real vanilla cream for her.

  “I’ve never told a soul,” I said. “How’re you feeling today?”

  “Oh, golly! I had a few bad dreams last night, but I guess things are mostly back to normal around here. Redding is getting ready for a four-day run over to Oklahoma City.”

  “You okay with that?”

  She took a big bite of yellow cake and closed her eyes as she chewed. Then they popped open, and she nodded. “Sure. We’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out how to make it work.” She snapped her fingers. “Speaking of that—I started Dr. Dana’s book.”

  I leaned my arms on the top of the fence. “What do you think?”

  She looked troubled. “Well . . . some of the things she says to do seem a little . . .”

  “Draconian?”

  She blinked. “Um, I was thinking they were kind of severe, you know? Over-the-top.”

  “Radical Trust, huh.”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticizing. The poor woman is dead, after all. I’m definitely going to finish the book.”

  “Let me know what you think,” I said, turning toward the carriage house. “And give a call if you feel nervous with Redding gone. I’ve got to run in and check on supper right now, though.”

  “Okeydokey. Thanks, Katie!”

  Chapter 11

  I fell asleep reading on the couch after supper and then never managed to get back to proper sleep that night. Hours passed in that strange twilight between waking and sleeping, my mind swirling with images of Dr. Dana, sweet tea, Twinkies, and Angie Kissel scratching my familiar under his furry chin.

  The dark hour of four thirty the next morning saw me downtown again. I parked in the nearly empty lot around the corner, and Mungo and I walked down Broughton toward the Honeybee. The street was abandoned at that hour on a Monday morning, and the sound of the key in the dead bolt seemed to echo down the sidewalk. I paused to eye the Fox and Hound before going inside the bakery and locking the door behind me. Hopefully, Croft would be able to open his store today.

  I wove through the tables and chairs in the customer area, aided only by the quiet light we always left on in the corner of the kitchen. Back in the office, Mungo jumped up on his club chair and immediately fell back asleep. Unlike me, he was not in the least a lark. He wasn’t an owl, either, though. My familiar was fond of sleep whatever the hour. Sleep and food.

  After shucking my tote, I selected a yellow-and-green-striped chef’s apron from the row of hooks on the wall and tied it on. Making my way through the calm of the pre-bustle kitchen, I started one of the ovens to preheat and then headed to the big refrigerator.

  As I carefully removed pan after pan of sourdough loaves risen overnight to puffy goodness, my mind kept going back to Steve driving by the day before. A part of me had expected to hear from him sometime in the afternoon, and then later it had been in the back of my mind that he might call during the evening. He hadn’t, though. Which was good. Declan was not going to be happy to hear that Steve had returned to Savannah.

  They had a past. Part of it included me—there had been a time when I’d been attracted to both of them, but it hadn’t taken long for me to choose Declan. Steve was sort of a bad boy, and I had to admit that had been part of his appeal. Heck, it still was, if I was being honest. Plus, he’d figured out I was a witch nearly as quickly as I’d learned of it, because Steve himself was a druid. I couldn’t deny the zing between us, but then he’d decided to join a druidic clan with questionable ethics, and I had wanted nothing to do with it.

  So there was that. But Declan had known Steve long before I’d moved to town. Steve’s brother, Arnie, had been Declan’s best friend and a fellow firefighter. A tragedy during a fire call had cost Arnie’s life, and Steve had always blamed Declan for letting it happen. It hadn’t been his fault, of course. Declan would never put anyone’s life in danger. Arnie, like his brother, had tended to be rash and had made a decision with fatal repercussions. Steve refused to believe that.

  The enmity between Steve and Declan was fierce and difficult. They had done their best to tame it when I was around. That hadn’t been easy, since Steve and I had tried to remain friends. For the most part it had worked out fine, until the events last August.

  Where had Steve gone? What had he been doing? In the brief moment I’d seen him, he’d looked as healthy and fit as ever. More so, maybe. His tan had been deeper than I’d ever seen it, and his hair blonder than ever.

  Sunshine, and lots of it.

  Should I call him? I shook my head, all alone there in the kitchen. No. If he wanted to talk to me, he knew my number. And if he didn’t, then that was that.

  I turned to check the oven temperature and saw the overflowing garbage by the back door. Dang it. Lucy and I had been so anxious to close down and chat with the spellbook club the afternoon before that we’d forgotten to take it out. Though to be fair, Ben usually schlepped the garbage out to the Dumpster in the alley—except on Sundays.

  In the half-light of the kitchen, I slid the loaf pans onto the oven racks, inhaling the sour tang of the raw dough. I’d brought the starter from Akron when I’d moved, and in the year and a half since I’d been in Savannah it had taken on the flavors of the local yeasts, the South deepening and ripening it much as it had me in such a short time.

  Timer set, I began to bundle up the garbage. Hauling the bag out of the bin, I opened the alley door and went outside. I paused to inhale the cool, humid air. I loved to run this time of morning, and I vowed to start again after Thanksgiving. The Savannah River, only a few blocks to the east, filled the air with its distinctive energy—mysterious and oddly thrilling, as if it had recorded the deep and unique history of the place in its ever-changing current.

  One advantage to being an über-early riser was the opportunity to experience silence. It wasn’t blackout quiet—birds were beginning to call to one another, the thrum of some kind of compressor vibrated down the alleyway, and my cotton skirt rustled against my canvas apron. The lack of engines, conversations, and the ubiquitous tour bus guides was notable, though.

  So I heard the new sound quite clearly, though it was barely above a whisper. A scraping, surface against surface. I paused with the bag of garbage suspended over the Dumpster. My breath stilled as my ears twitched like Mungo’s, and I tried to unravel what it might be. Cat? The wind moving a branch? But there were no branches back here. Only brick and metal, asphalt, fuse boxes, and back doors.

  A flash of light to my left caught my eye. It lasted only a microsecond, but I recognized it anyway. Head high, sweeping quickly across brick. Someone was standing in the alley mere yards away, close to the building and wearing a bicycle headlamp like the one I sometimes used to garden in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

  A shiver ran down my back, and my muscles froze.

  The light flickered again, faint, as if shielded. Then I realized the person was standing in the alcove surrounding the back door of the Fox and Hound.

  The scraping grew louder.

  Someone is trying to break in to Croft’s store.

  “Hey!” I yelled before I had the good sense to think about it.

  The figure backed out of the doorway, and I hesitated, hoping to see what the culprit looked like before he—she?—ran away.

  Bulky. Shapeless. Tallish. Hat.

  But whoever it was didn’t run away. The interloper ran toward me.

  Reason flooded back, and I dropped the garbage in the container. I turned on my heel and sprinted toward the open door of the Honeybee.
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  A rattle split the night, clanging and urgent. I spun around in time to see that the figure was pushing one of the big eight-yard Dumpsters toward me faster than I would have thought possible. The lumbering behemoth bore down on me like a freakish Mack truck. As I turned back to run into the bakery, my toe caught on the edge of a pothole in the alley, and I went down to my knees.

  Terrified, I looked up to see the metal container blocking out the stars above. A scream rose in my throat as it crashed and bumped across the rough pavement straight for me. Instinctively, I swallowed my voice into my chest, squeezing the silent shriek into something hard and powerful.

  The Dumpster suddenly stopped, one of its wheels also caught in a pothole, but its momentum tipped it up, up, up, until it teetered over my head. Falling . . .

  “Nooo,” I mouthed, still on my knees with one hand on the ground. Time slowed as I drew strength from the earth below. My mind coiled out to the river flowing nearby and the air all around me. Finally, I accessed the fourth element, fire, in my own chest—my scream tucked away and hardened to a red ember of fear. My other hand came up, glowing with white light as I pushed the Dumpster away.

  The heavy metal container flipped back onto its wheels, spinning halfway around with its own force.

  Or maybe my force.

  Hard to tell. All I knew was that I was more or less okay, and mighty glad about it.

  The light faded quickly from my fingertips, and footsteps sounded down the alley. I peered around the Dumpster in time to see a figure turning the corner.

  I tried to push myself to my feet but fell back, shaking all over. Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself to calm down.

  You’re safe. They’re gone.

  Wincing, I brushed gravel out of a cut on my knee.

  Mungo came flying out of the bakery, barking like a crazy dog.

  “Nice of you to show up,” I gasped, even though a part of me knew it had all happened in mere seconds.

  He ran down the alley like a shot.

  “Mungo!” I shouted. “Come back here.”

  He spun like a top and hightailed it back to launch himself at me. I barely managed to keep my balance but finally got to my feet with him in my arms. He licked my neck and chin and cheeks and nose, stopping long enough to look into my eyes as if checking to see that I was really okay, then starting in all over again.

  I was still shaking, but I had to giggle. “Stop it. You’re making me all soggy.”

  “Katie? Honey, where are . . . what are you doing out here?” Lucy asked from the doorway.

  “I thought I was taking the garbage out,” I said. “Turns out I might have foiled a burglar.”

  Her hand went to her throat. “Oh, dear.”

  “Would you mind calling 911? I need to get cleaned up.”

  “Well, good heavens, of course. Get in here. Let me look at you. What happened?”

  I was glad to hear her lock the door behind me as I began to tell her.

  * * *

  A pair of patrol officers came and took my statement. Then they drove down the alley and lit up the area behind the bakery with the floodlight on their patrol car. I described what had happened as they took notes. One policeman gave the Dumpster a push, and it rumbled a few feet.

  “You said it came at you pretty fast before you tripped?”

  “It seemed like it was going sixty miles an hour,” I said.

  He smiled. “I doubt that. But it’s empty and rolls easily. You couldn’t see anything about them? Tall, short? Anything about how they moved that seemed distinctive?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. The figure seemed a little taller than me, but other than that, I didn’t see much. It all happened so fast.”

  They called Croft, who showed up about half an hour later looking grizzled and disheveled and grumbling about being dragged out of bed before dawn. After Lucy gave him a couple of cups of coffee, his grumbles turned into a bitter diatribe about bad luck. Lucy offered him a slice of spice cake with the next cup of coffee, and I knew she was hoping the copious amounts of allspice in it would help with that luck problem of his.

  After the police had gone, Lucy and I began taking loaves of sourdough out to cool on racks as quickly as possible, knowing we had to play a bit of catch-up with the morning baking despite my intentions to get an early start.

  As we worked, I asked, “Do you think it was really bad luck that someone tried to break into the Fox and Hound this morning?”

  She frowned and reached for the ingredients for the special we’d decided on for the day: chocolate croissants. “You mean you think it’s related to the murder?”

  I shrugged. “Seems kind of a weird coincidence otherwise.”

  My aunt looked speculative.

  I pointed to the butter she held. “I don’t think we have time to make the croissants now.”

  Lucy nodded. “You’re right. Let’s figure something else out.”

  * * *

  Ben came in a little after six thirty to open up. When Lucy had filled him in on what had happened, he turned and gave me a hard look. “What were you thinking, Katie?”

  “Uncle Ben! All I did was take the garbage out. You can’t possibly think what happened was my fault.”

  “In the dark—,” he began, but I held up my hand.

  “I run in the early hours all the time,” I said.

  My aunt and uncle exchanged a significant look.

  I shook my head emphatically. “No. I’m not going to live my life in fear.” My fists found their way to my hips. “Besides, I can take care of myself—and did. Now, I’m going to get cleaned up and get back to work. We’re behind with the baking, if you hadn’t noticed.” I stalked into the restroom and shut the door.

  As I finally got around to picking the bits of asphalt out of my scraped knee, I knew I was lucky that I hadn’t suffered a more severe injury. The incident in the alley hadn’t been my first brush with danger. If I continued along the path of being a lightwitch, then it likely wouldn’t be my last. I didn’t relish the idea, believe me, but it didn’t frighten me as much as it could have. As much as perhaps it should have.

  A knock at the door. “Katie?” It was Lucy.

  I opened it. Mungo stood beside her, worry creasing his furry face.

  “I’m sorry,” we said at the same time, and then laughed.

  Ben was watching from across the room. Relief eased onto his face when he heard us.

  “He’s just worried about you,” Lucy said.

  “I know.”

  “Let’s take a look at that knee.”

  “Lucy, I don’t need—”

  “Nonsense.” She pushed past me and grabbed the first-aid kit from under the sink. “Come out here where the light is better.”

  I followed her out to the still-closed bakery and sat down in a bistro chair. With cheery thoroughness, my aunt bandaged my knee as if I were a little girl.

  Which was kind of nice, actually.

  Mungo supervised as she insisted on slathering my knee with antibiotic ointment and used up all the gauze in the kit. When she had finished, it felt like I had a cast around my knee, but I didn’t dare complain. Besides, the ointment quickly numbed the stinging pain, and my skirt was almost long enough to cover the bandage. Soon I was back in the kitchen, and Ben was opening the door to a waiting customer.

  As I measured and mixed, I tried to ignore the slightly spacey feeling that flooded my brain. It was a little like the endorphin high I got from running, but I knew from experience that this time it was a result of the supernatural “push” I’d given the Dumpster. It would wear off in an hour or so, and other than a scraped knee and feeling a bit disconnected, I was none the worse for wear.

  Or so I thought.

  Chapter 12

  I was in the kitchen, washing down the main worktable and wi
shing Iris didn’t have her metalsmithing class on Monday mornings. On this Monday, at least, we could have really used her help. Still, we’d made a few adjustments—switching simple molasses cookies in for the daily special instead of the more labor- and time-intensive chocolate croissants. Ben had stepped in to do some KP when he wasn’t needed at the register. Plus, the spacey feeling I got after practicing big magic came with a boost of extra energy.

  But that was wearing thin as I wiped my hands on a towel and quickly ran through my mental task list, checking things off.

  We’re in good shape.

  My stomach chose that moment to grumble loudly, and my thoughts shot to the fresh loaves of sourdough cooling on racks. Maybe just a nice, plain piece of buttered toast . . .

  A small noise drew my attention to Mungo, who was sitting patiently in the half-open door of the office. Waiting for his own seriously late breakfast.

  “Oh, gosh, little guy. I’m sorry!”

  I quickly scrambled an egg and toasted three slices of still-warm bread. One of them I split with my familiar, along with the egg. It didn’t take either of us very long to plow through the makeshift meal. The other two pieces of toast I slathered with spicy peach jam made by a local farmer and took out to Lucy and Ben.

  As I handed over their snacks, Lucy handed me a cup of steaming liquid. I inhaled the strong herbal aroma.

  “Rosemary?”

  She nodded. “And peppermint and turmeric. Good for the nerves and grounding.” She looked at me knowingly. “Which I bet you could still use.”

  I smiled gratefully and took a healthy swig.

  “I talked to Mimsey a few minutes ago,” Lucy said. “She said you have an appointment with Bing Hawkins at WMBK at eleven o’clock.”

  “Wow. That was fast.”

  My aunt smiled. “You know how much influence Mimsey Carmichael has in this town.”

  “Lucky us,” I said. “I’ll call Jaida and see if she’s free to go with me.”

  She was, and agreed to drive. I hung up as the bell over the front door sounded.