“Excuse me,” I said, pushing past Stacy. The entire cafe was staring at me as I walked from the backroom door to the front. Macy and Officer Quincey were quietly fuming.
“She’s trespassing,” Macy said, with a little hint of desperation in her voice.
Quincey seemed to consider this, then shook his head. “She’s leaving peacefully,” he said with a bit of disappointment in his voice. He’d love to manhandle me, I’m sure, and throw me in jail.
When I got to the street, Max had finally made the trek across the street, where he was chatting to the two other police officers who had come in the second car. Frisco was waiting besides his own police car, and I took the few seconds without the Jiggs to feel him out.
“Brought enough guys to ask one man to come in for questioning, did you?” I said.
“We were led to believe the man was dangerous,” Frisco said, looking mildly embarrassed.
“Mm-hmm,” I said, trying to sound like I thought the notion was ridiculous. The fact is, Henry Kramer, Hank to his friends, could be exceedingly dangerous. The real question was to whom, and why.
“What was the point of that show you just put on?” Frisco said. “What were you hoping to gain from running in there and… doing what, exactly?”
The point was… that I was upset and had the wrong idea of how to go about things. I thought I was going to show everyone how bad the Jiggs were, to get them on my side of this magical war that was brewing. But there wasn’t anything that I could do but look crazy. At least I got to give Stacy a little shock when I turned her monster dog into a cuddly munchkin.
How I did that? I have no idea. But it worked.
“I was upset,” was the only answer I could come up with for Frisco.
“Well, don’t be. And don’t be surprised if Quincey gets someone interested in sniffing around your shop’s backdoor. I’m sure there’s nothing to the Jiggs accusation,” he said, pausing briefly and pointedly to let me know he wasn’t sure about that at all, “but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be ignored.”
“I hear you loud and clear. The meth lab will be broken down before any of your drug-sniffing dogs can find it.”
“Not funny,” Frisco said.
I looked again at Hank, who was sitting in the back of the police car like it was a taxi cab stuck in traffic. He didn’t look upset, or nervous, or anything but slightly bored. I thought I should say something to him, tell him who to trust down at the station. Tell him something that would let him know I believed in him.
Except at that moment, it wouldn’t be true.
Max and I met just outside the front door of the Jiggs, and I said, “I’m walking to my shop.”
“I’ve got to put some time in at the office, but hold on. We need to talk about all this.”
I just shrugged and headed toward my tea shop. I needed to clear my head and figure out what I thought about any of this before I could say it out loud with Max. He looked disappointed when I didn’t wait for him to join me on my walk, and he headed for his car.
It was entirely possible that the Jiggs weren’t lying, and that Hank had been in Wilhelm’s hotel room before he had collapsed. He was there at the hotel, and though he said he was just coming inside, why should I believe him? I wanted to, of course, but a lot of that was because he’d been nice to me and he’d saved me from the demon…
Unless that was some kind of sham, too. I hadn’t had any time alone with my adviser on these matters, my familiar Kashmir, and I needed his input. What did all of this mean?
I was barely looking at where I was going, so familiar with this patch of town, so I didn’t see the man in black until I was almost on top of him. Then he plowed into me, knocking me down and back first against a bench on the sidewalk.
“Agh!” I shouted, barely catching myself before I nearly knocked my brains out on the metal frame.
The man rushed away, barely glancing back at me. Long coat, dyed black hair and black clothes, he shouted, “The nights keep getting longer, but I ain’t tired!”
In a high, piping voice. I could barely register it at all, but that wasn’t a man at all, it was a skinny girl, dressed up just like the pale-faced weirdo.
It was barely noon, and this had already been one of the weirdest, most frustrating days I’d ever had. And I hadn’t even started work yet.
Chapter 15
Auclair Tea was closed, at least according to the sign on the front door. But the kitchen was operating, the ovens were on, and somebody was baking cookies inside. I could smell them from the street corner. Someone was using my equipment and materials to make their own confections. Without asking me first.
It shouldn’t have made me mad, particularly when I was sure just who it was: Lucy, secret cookie maker. Not some group of strange elves coming out of their tree to make little barely edible cookies in their own shapes (and that struck me as weird: why would you want people to eat something in your likeness? If I were a tiny elf I would take pains to make people not think I was some sort of foodstuff.)
I was going to head around the back to open up the door with a giant magical flourish, except I noticed something when glancing in through the windows of my storefront: Kashmir was there, in the cafe, both paws pressed on the kitchen door, his nose pressed to its corner.
That was a swinging door that a lot of cafe kitchens have, made to swing both ways so that a cart could be pushed out or a person laden with dishes could back through it without having to use their hands to deal with a knob. There was also a small porthole in it, which you needed so you could see if somebody was about to swing the door right into your face.
The door was very light, so much so that even the pressed paws of the sizable but still cat-sized familiar could easily push it open with his weight, which he now pressed against the door to no effect. So it was locked in place. Which meant…
Hmm. Again, I thought of swinging the back doors open wide and storming in, shouting at Lucy for being a sneak and kicking out poor Kashmir and all kinds of things. But then I thought about it - wouldn’t that be like getting on her case for showing some initiative? Kashmir was not a quiet companion when he was alone with the people he would deign to talk to - so far, just me and Lucy. Maybe he offered plenty of unsolicited advice to Lucy on the finer points of baking cookies that she did not want.
So, the choice in front of me was whether to burst in on my sister unannounced, or talk about her behind her back with my cat. Which was exactly the sort of choice I wanted to have. Not who killed who, not distrusting the motives and stories of a dozen different people to determine who was worse than who. Something simple, and domestic, and that involved a talking kitty cat.
I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Kashmir, all fortitude and focus, twitched an ear in my direction, but that was all the notice he gave me. But something I hadn’t seen since just that moment did. On Kashmir’s left shoulder sat Coney, that cone-headed bird I’d left in a cupboard last night when I went away. It made a chirping sing song as I came in, and leaped in the air, fluttering toward me.
“Don’t do that,” Kashmir said, not to me. “You’ll only give her a swelled head.
Coney didn’t listen. He dove toward me, gliding toward the right side of my sweater. It rubbed against there a couple of times, apparently trying to get into a pocket my pink sweater didn’t have. After an annoyed chirp, he flew up a little, and landed on my shoulder.
“Wow, you guys are friends?” I said, agog.
Coney chirped.
“I have been forbidden from destroying that bird, so I shall teach it the right ways to live. With a cat’s dignity. Now, if you don’t mind,” he said, with limited patience in his tone.
“You’ll give it a complex. So, what’s been going on?” I said.
“Shh… I’m trying to listen,” he said, keeping his nose pressed hard against the kitchen door. “And smelling.”
“What do you smell?”
“Cookies. And… something under the coo
kies. I don’t know, she picked me up. Me, she picked up,” he said, demonstrating the exact same sort of wounded dignity I could see in Rahab’s face when she’d realized she’d let her master down by not mauling me. Of course, Kashmir had no master but himself. He was a cat, he was only disappointed when he did what was expected, not the opposite.
“So, does she do this often, when I’m not here?” I said.
“And when you are, but are stuck out here with customers. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I do not trust it. Why would one need bake cookies in private?”
“Maybe she didn’t want anybody’s advice. Especially not somebody who would get the cookies all covered in fur.”
“Bah, fur is just what you need down your gullet to cleanse everything. I’m convinced that the reason you humans are so troubled is that you do not purge yourselves regularly. Only when you’ve sufficiently poisoned yourself, not with handsome, delicate, clean fur. And maybe some grass.”
“I have no interest in your hairball manifestos. I do want to know, though, what she’s doing that’s so secretive.”
I might not be the brightest of the Auclair sisters, at least not according to academic placement (though I think that’s just because Sibyl is a good test taker and I get nervous.) But I’m not a dummy, and some of the disparate information that I’d gathered together suddenly connected itself, like an abstract jigsaw puzzle where, when one blob of color connects to another, their placement suddenly becomes clear.
“She’s selling cookies. She’s baking cookies and selling them. That’s why the weirdo in black was here. Those must be some tasty cookies.”
“Hmm,” Kashmir said, turning both of his ears toward the edge of the door. There were rubber seals along the edge of the kitchen door to keep in sounds and smells, so I don’t know if he heard anything. I didn’t have a keen cat’s ear, maybe he could pick up something I could not.
“Well, I need to do three things now, Kashmir. I need to burst in there and discover her and find out what she has to say for herself. Then I need to try a cookie and tell her how great it is. What’s the third thing?”
Kashmir snorted. “Obviously, then you need to smack her on the side for taking your things and working without permission. That’s a completely human concept, permission. Animals do without it.”
“Close. I need to find out what kind of records she’s been keeping, and extract my percentage from the profits. She’s got her own little enterprise, but it’s built on my foundation. I needs my cut.”
“Is that fair? She’s doing all the work.”
“But she’s not paying the gas bill for the ovens. She’s not paying the taxes on the building. All the equipment she’s using, little by little, gets more banged up or warped or a thousand different things from use, and she didn’t pay for any of them. Not to mention the flour, sugar, and whatever other ingredients she’s using. Making her own little business is the first adult thing I think she’s ever done. Now she needs a good adult kick in the keister, if she thinks anything’s free.”
Kashmir probably quit listening to me halfway through my little speech, but that was okay. Everything I’d said there was purely human concerns, which he could completely understand if he put his mind to it. But he would never do that. Again, beneath the feline dignity. I walked to the kitchen door, and peered through the window.
Completely black. I blinked at it, and tapped on the glass. The blackness shifted, slightly, and I could tell it was just taped up paper, and not well taped up - just one edge was secured. So whatever recipe that Lucy was employing she wanted to keep people from being able to see it as she did it. Not… totally suspicious, but I was feeling suddenly much more curious and less concerned with regard to her feelings on being interrupted.
“I’m hearing something so strange in there,” Kashmir said, just as I’d raised my fist to pound on the door and unleash my powerful maternal powers of nosiness on the sister I’d raised like a daughter for years.
“Huh?” I said, pausing.
“Voices. Two or three, talking, and none of them are Lucy’s. It is like she is consulting with vast and multiple powers beyond her ken.”
Had Kashmir dropped an ice cube down my back he could not have sent a deeper, darker chill through my entire body. I had a vision of a twisted pentacle drawn on the ground in blood, the remnants of some sacrifice turned into ash and smoke, and a portal cut in the middle of the air, things with many heads and mouths all screeching from them, talking to Lucy in multiple tongues, eating her very soul from her body.
“Oh my God she’s making demon cookies!” I shouted, completely without sense, but terrified.
I planted my feet square on the floor, and sent my will through it into the kitchen spells. I felt like my hands had suddenly grown huge, that my body was flat and round and square and all kinds of shapes more than just the two legs, two arms, and decently shaped other bits. I was the kitchen, and could sense all that was happening within it.
I exerted my will and flung the kitchen door open, ripping the lock from its mooring and sending it shooting across the room. The bird on my shoulder squealed and flew away, to hide somewhere in the cafe. I burst inside the kitchen, my senses open and my nerves raw, ready to take in whatever demonic inputs I had to to save my sister from her ill-considered bargains.
And I shouted when I did it, a roar of sisterly indignation.
This was met by a scream from inside the room. A scream of a devil, its bargain cut short by the interference of my righteous wrath?
No, unfortunately not. It was the scream of my sister, who had just ducked away from a lock the flew at her head, and then was shocked by the shout of an apparent madwoman leaping into the room. Despite Kashmir’s warnings there was not the smell of sulfur, no demon portal open in the middle of the room. Nothing except the pleasant scent of baking cookies, the worried terror of a teenage girl screamed at… and a TV show playing in the background.
“C’mon, Blake, we just have to run. There’s too many of them to fight!”
A pause. Dramatic music swelled. A surly, false Clint Eastwood impression of a voice said: “The night keeps getting longer. But however long is gets the sun still comes up. We’re not running.”
Music crescendoed. Then a different theme came on, sounding to me very much like the ending credits of something.
“Lucy,” I said, completely calm despite my lock-throwing, demon-worried screaming session of just seconds before. “Explain yourself.”
“Mimi!” she said, in a shriek that sounded half relieved. “I… um… I totally didn’t think you’d find out.”
I leveled my gaze at her. She was standing by the counter, an apron protecting her clothes, a chef’s hat on presumably because she thought that was required for proper baking. I had, in my mind’s eye imagined her mixing a ceramic bowl full of ingredients with an enormous wooden spoon. Technology has moved on from my imaginings, however. My large industrial sized mixer was still whirring, cookie dough clinging to it and falling with each turn. The only thing Lucy had in her hands was the tablet computer from which she played her TV show, which was now on the ground, still spouting the end credits theme.
“Lucy, explain yourself,” I said again, as completely calm as I could be. She looked around as if seeking cover, and failing to find any, just sighed and looked at me.
“I’m good at baking cookies,” she said. “I don’t know how, it just works out, right? And so… when you started getting heavy into the scones but wouldn’t let me help, I thought, like, ‘I’ll show her, I’ll be the cookie queen.’ Because I think weird things like that, okay? And I got really good at it, and gave some away to friends, and they told friends and… well…”
She just shrugged. That was her answer. And I loved her so much, her being my sister and my ward and my little witch buddy that I kinda… lost all my big kitchen boss ideas and ran forward to give her an enormous hug. Not my toughest moment as a girl running a shop, but gosh I was proud.
“How did you keep it away from me?” I said, working real hard not to make it sound accusationy.
“Well… honest, I think it’s a kind of magic. I can hide stuff, like, in plain sight. It’s in Grand-Mere’s book, but she just has some scribbled notes. I have this piece of chalk, which I put a bit of salt in and tell it that it’s invisible chalk. Then I mark something.”
I pushed her away, not roughly, and looked at her.
“Seriously?” I said.
“It makes sense,” Kashmir said, stepping into the kitchen. He looked around with his normal air of superior smugness. “Imbue an object with magic, and use it to carry out your purposes. It’s very different from what you do, Mimi, but not any better or worse.”
“Well,” I said, then I stopped and thought. Could that be the way it is? That Lucy’s magic wasn’t so bad or abnormal or substandard… just different than mine?
“Though,” Kashmir said, taking a deep sniff. “I’m surprised, given your attitude to the Jiggs, that you’d be so accepting of your sister placing magic inebriates inside her concoctions.”
I let go of my sister, and turned to look at the cat. He looked back up at me with his sanguine feline smile, his tail curled handsomely around his paws.
“You do know she’s drugging people with these cookies, don’t you?” he said, licking his lips.
I turned to Lucy, who had just picked up her tablet computer and muted it. She looked from me, to the cat, to the cookies, and just then I noticed something else in the air. A scent beyond flour and sugar. Something slightly tangy. The exact sort of thing used in witchcraft.
When I looked at Lucy, she just shrugged.
“People like it?”
“People like what?” I said, very careful not to raise my voice or scream or do anything that showed exactly how upset I was growing in that instant with my little sister.
“They like, well… you know. The spice. It’s just a little spice. Something Grand-Mere used to do all the time, I know it, I read it in her…”
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 12
