Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  I yelled back, “Sorry!”

  But what I thought he squawked wasn’t what he said at all.

  I hadn’t really had him that long. Some witches find their familiars; some familiars find their witches. Liesl’s smoke-colored cat with golden eyes had been put in an animal shelter along with her seven siblings. Liesl had a dream about her and went searching. They recognized each other instantly. Liesl smiled; the cat started a coffee grinder purr that rattled her tiny body. Of course Liesl named her Graymalkin. Why not? Who’d guess that names among familiars are remembered through vast webs of families and histories, way back into antiquity? Naming a cat Graymalkin is like adding yet another Josh or Elizabeth to the human list.

  As for Cawley, yes, that too is pretty much obvious. At the time, I thought it was clever of me. To name a crow Cawley. Duh.

  Cawley found me.

  Liesl had it easy in the sense that she didn’t have to learn to understand cat. They just read each other’s minds. If Graymalkin presents herself with her back arched and every hair standing up on end, that pretty much says it all. But Cawley doesn’t have a stance for Be afraid, very afraid. When I first saw him, he was pacing on a rain gutter next door and imitating the endless barking of an obnoxious dog in a neighboring yard. The noise had crept into the background of a dream I was having, and finally woke me up way too soon after a long night. I stumbled to the window and pushed it open to find out what exactly was the dog’s problem. Then I saw the crow waddling to and fro on the gutter and barking back at it. I laughed, and the crow flew over to me like he’d just been waiting for me to get up.

  I didn’t understand a word he said. But I felt as though somebody—something—had slipped a fine gold chain onto my wrist and said, Mine. I didn’t argue. I liked that feeling of having been chosen, of belonging to a dark, mythical bird that had my best interests at heart. Also, Cawley gave me status. I was True Witch now, not Apprentice or Journeyperson Witch. Familiars don’t stay with witches who are not yet True.

  I had gotten into the habit of watching crows. I never guessed they were watching me back. Who does? City crows mingle so easily with people that people hardly notice them. Crows know the habits of cars. They don’t even bother to stop pecking at roadkill or bugs or a spilled bag of chips in the middle of a street until a car is almost on top of them. They move aside grudgingly for the monster outweighing them by several tons, but with no real sense of urgency. They have the same hysterics teaching their fledglings to fly that human parents have teaching their kids how to drive. They imitate noises that catch their interest; that’s what Cawley was doing when we met. They get bored; they play tricks. And, at sundown, they all fly the same direction to some mysterious place, a coven of crows gathering at dusk for reasons Cawley can’t yet explain in ways I can understand.

  A murder of crows. That’s what they were called in medieval times. Maybe for their habit of chowing down on the dead. Maybe for something more sinister. But the city crows I see seem basically civilized. True, when they’re nesting they might peck at people, or they might chase a pet across the yard for fun. But mostly they act like they’re beneath our notice.

  I notice. Maybe that’s why Cawley came to me.

  The others in Which Witch, except for Rune, have their familiars, of course. Madrona, the skinny, white-haired whippet on percussion, has a parakeet named Hibiscus. Pyx, our lead singer, has a white rat named Archibald. Makes sense: Pyx is bald. They have squeak-fests together. Sometimes Pyx wears Archibald on her clothes along with a lot of ugly old brooches her mother left her, made of gold and diamonds and sapphires.

  So that’s us, Which Witch: Liesl, Madrona, Pyx, Pyx’s boyfriend Rune on bass, and me, Hazel. I know. Just like the witch hazel bush. Like Graymalkin and Cawley: with a name like that, what else could I be?

  Where was I?

  French fries, indeed. Granted, we crows like a snack now and then, and are not above a discarded bit of burger, preferably with pickle, or a salty, lightly tailpipe-smoked fry. But what I tried and failed so miserably to get my witch Hazel to understand was exactly why we had chosen the tree outside her window for our Twilight Coven. The monster creeping toward her as her attention flitted like a magpie to this red shoe, that purple sequin was ancient, powerful, and thoroughly nasty.

  And we were not just any tree full of gabbling city crows. We were a gathering from all over the land, most of us experienced, some of us with powers, and a few of us scandalously older than we had any right to be. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was still with us. She spotted the peril first. She had recently retired to live on warm southern beaches where plump briny critters and picnic leftovers were readily available. Having no human to guard, she watched everything else.

  “It broke out of the sea on a wave, crawled up to dry sand on a roll of froth and foam in the moonlight,” she said excitedly. She was looking pretty good for an old crow, though her tail feathers were a bit scraggly. “In the wee hours of the morning it gathered itself up and chose its human form. Cutest lifeguard you ever saw. Great abs. Spent the day sunning on its high chair, watching behind its dark glasses and flirting back at the girls who came up. I searched everywhere, couldn’t find what it had done to the real lifeguard. It was gone after sunset. I lost track of it while I watched the sun go down.

  “So I took to the air. I never spotted it again, but I followed rumors of it in the night roosts and covens between ocean and here.

  “Here, it stopped.”

  “I saw it last night,” I said, clutching the branch in my claws so tightly that the tree gave a little, irritated twitch. “Last night, where my witch Hazel plays music.”

  “Did you warn her?” my uncle Rakl asked sharply. What did he think? That I’d recognized it and gone on preening my feathers and picking at fleas?

  “I tried.” Uncle Rakl was watching me out of one eye, a bleak, annoying gaze, as though he expected nothing more or less from me.

  “You tried.”

  “We haven’t been joined long. I forget what human words I’ve learned when I’m agitated, and she is still struggling with crow.”

  He made the noise like his name, causing a half dozen youngsters on a bough beneath us to explode into raucous mimicry. They were screeched into silence by various parents; the fledglings subsided, perching sedately and pretending they didn’t know each other.

  “What shape was it?” my great-grandmother asked practically.

  “I felt it long before I saw it. The club was shadowy and very crowded. My witch’s band is extremely popular,” I added proudly and unnecessarily, then got back down to business before Uncle Rakl could open his beak. “I found the source of the dark emanation in an aging biker’s body, with stylishly frayed jeans, black leather boots, and a long, gray-brown braid down its back. Earrings, thumb rings, tattoo of a skull with roses in the eye sockets. No other visible piercings. Wealthily scruffy.”

  There were mutterings and soft rattles throughout the tree: that dead body shouldn’t be hard to spot if it was still in any recognizable form. A couple of messengers left immediately to spread the word to the night roost in the city park, a couple of miles away as we crows fly.

  “I smelled the death and the power in it. And it smelled me, so I had to leave.”

  “You left your witch?” Uncle Rakl again, ever ready to believe the worst of me.

  “Only,” I rasped back, “to get it to follow me. Which it didn’t. But when I flew back inside the club it was gone. I stayed with my witch, but she roosted with a friend that night; I had to sleep outside. They gave me no chance to try to warn her until this evening. She didn’t understand. As you saw.”

  I glanced over to my witch’s window. She had finally chosen her costume for the evening, a process I will never understand, and was giving herself a wide-eyed glare in a mirror, brushing the small hairs in her eyelids with a mixture of glitter and blue paint.

  “Perhaps,” Uncle Rakl said heavily, “it went its way already. Whatever
it wants or seeks isn’t in this city at all.”

  “Maybe,” my great-grandmother said. “And maybe not. What kinds of powers does your witch have?”

  “I wonder,” my young cousin Ska mused, “how that glitter would look on my tail feathers.”

  There was another rackety outburst of hilarity from the fledglings, during which my great-grandmother forgot her question. Just as well, since I had no idea. All I really knew of my witch Hazel’s powers is that she had drawn me to her side. And the ooze that had shaped itself into a semblance of the dead to watch her in the shadows of the bar, she might have drawn to herself as well. It was my fate and my duty to make such distasteful assumptions, and to go where few self-respecting crows should ever go.

  “Anybody up for some music? I can get us in as stage props.”

  Uncle Rakl rackled. My cousin Ska preened. The fledgling chorus erupted, along with most of the coven, until my witch turned her stare to the window, and, across the way from her, somebody threw a beer bottle at the tree.

  “Pipe down, birds!”

  We all fluttered up, with a great deal of noise and confused energy. A window slammed. As was our habit, we came to our decision suddenly, reading each other’s thoughts, including the image of where to go in mine, before we settled back down again in leisurely fashion, all of us talking at once.

  “That’s it, then,” Great-Grandmother said briskly. “We’ll all go. But you go with her. Cling to her, do what you must to make her understand. Peck her head if you have to, Whatever-it-is-she-calls-you. Cawley.”

  I had to listen to the derisive echo of that—Cawley, Cawley, Cawley—as the black cloud flowed out of the tree and swarmed away into the twilight sky over the city. I flew to my witch’s window, stood on the sill, and pecked at the glass until she let me in.

  Cawley was still trying to give me a language lesson when I left for the club. It was only a few blocks away and Quin would meet me there. Quin was Quinton Matthew Tarleton III. He had wandered with some friends into a place we were playing a couple of weeks before, looking earnest and geeky and too sweet for words. He had taken me out for ice cream on our first date. For breakfast. Later, after our first kiss, he had bought me a gecko pin for my hair. So it was a little hard for me to concentrate on what Cawley was saying, what with the slight weight of the gecko sparkling just above my ear and making me think of Quin.

  Finally one word penetrated, making me stop dead in my tracks, or rather, wobble to a halt in my high-heeled lace-up boots.

  “What? Wait. Did you say danger?”

  I was so proud of myself for picking that out of all his noises that I forgot for a moment what it meant. He flew around my head three times, squawking so excitedly that people ducked away from us, alarmed.

  “Cawley.” My voice did something strange then: it got sharp and slow and focused all at the same time. “Please. Stop. Sit. Start over.”

  He shut up abruptly and fluttered onto my shoulder. Luckily, I was wearing a retro 1940s-style jacket with some major shoulder pads in it; even so, I could feel his claws, loosening and tightening nervously. “Danger,” he said again, then another word I actually recognized. “You.”

  “Me? I’m a danger?” I looked at my outfit bewilderedly. “Why? Because I’m showing four inches of skin and a fake garnet in my navel between my shirt and my skirt, or I would be except I’ve got my jacket buttoned now and nobody can—Cawley, why are you suddenly sounding like my mother?”

  He pecked my head. Not hard, just a fingernail thump, but I couldn’t believe he had done that.

  “Cawley!” I yelped, seriously irritated. I wanted to smack him with my fiddle case. I shrugged my shoulder hard instead, shaking him off. “Go,” I told him in that voice again. “Just go. Leave me alone until you can talk to me like a normal familiar. You’re pretty much useless to me like this.”

  He hovered a moment in midair in front of my face. Then he made a sound, a sort of crow rattle of total frustration that I understood completely. He sailed off in the direction of the club. I stomped off after him, still smoldering, and wishing I had a familiar that was easier to talk to, like maybe an iguana.

  When I walked into the club it was like walking into some weird power field. I could feel the hair lift on my head, and I prickled everywhere, like a cat coming nose to nose with the Hound of the Baskervilles. I knew immediately: this was what Cawley had meant, what he had been trying to say. I could feel it creeping under my skin and dragging at my bones like a cold, bleak fog or the nasty breath of some animal that’s been eating roadkill. It weighed me down, fogged my brain, so that when I glanced around the club to see what caused it, the candles on the tables dimmed to a yellowy brown, and the shadows looked like solid blocks of black.

  I recognized Quin through the haze in my brain. He stood at the bar sipping at his usual undrinkable mix of sparkling water, tomato juice, and lime he called a Toothless Vampire. He lightened the air a bit, inside me and out. I took a step toward him. Then I saw what stood beside him, holding a mug and gazing at the ceiling.

  I glanced up, too, and saw every single fake ax-split rafter in the place crowded with crows, silent and motionless in the shadows, as though they were all waiting for someone to die.

  I wanted to shrink down into something very small and skitter my way out between the incoming feet. The thing beside Quin poked him in the shoulder and made some comment, laughing. It looked like the dark-haired, blue-eyed fry cook from the club’s kitchen, idling at the bar before her shift began. But she—it—had forgotten to change its shadow. What clung to her cowboy boots and slanted away underfoot across the floor didn’t look like anything remotely human.

  People were crowding into the place behind me, paying the cover and getting their hands stamped. I forced myself to move, wave at Quin until I caught his eye. I didn’t dare glance at the shape beside him. It would have looked through my eyes and into my brain and seen everything I was thinking. When Quin saw me, I slapped a smile on my face and tapped my wrist: late for work. He waved a kiss at me, then tapped his head where, on my head, the little, glittery gecko was pinned. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. I grinned like a pumpkin and nodded so hard the gecko nearly fell off.

  I felt its attention then, as though a new moon had looked at me, enormous, invisible, full of black light.

  I turned away fast and headed for the stage.

  Walking into the tension there was like trying to hurry underwater. Everyone seemed normal enough, dressed by a passing tornado and wearing the usual assortment of animals except for Rune, who was still Journeyperson status. He was tuning his bass, looking like a hairy Viking who had forgotten to do his laundry. He thumbed a note as I picked my way through cords and equipment, and said, without looking up, “Which witch are you, I wonder?”

  It was our code for Man, have we got Trouble. Anybody know what that is?

  Even the familiars looked spooked. Pyx was wearing every brooch she owned. Gold and diamonds, dirty silver and hunky jewels of every color flared on her orange silk vest. Usually she wore Archibald in the middle of them, the white rat with the garnet-red eyes, clinging with his strong little paws to her threads among the treasures. But he was on her shoulder, snuggled as close to her ear as he could get and probably wishing she had left some hair on that side of her head for him to crawl under. Madrona’s yellow parakeet was half hidden in her wild white curls. Hibiscus’s feathers were completely puffed out, as though she tried to convince Trouble she was two or three times her tiny size. Graymalkin was in her usual spot inside Liesl’s open violin case. But she wasn’t curled up and napping. She was crouched, motionless, staring into the crowd like she was watching a ghost. I had a feeling that if I put a hand on her fur I’d get a shock that would untie my bootlaces.

  “I’m the Wicked Witch,” I answered, which meant: I know. I’m armed and dangerous.

  Well, I could hope.

  “You look more like the Good Witch,” Liesl murmured, stroking her strin
gs with her bow. I puzzled over that for a moment until I realized it wasn’t code, it was a comment.

  “Sorry,” I said meekly. “I couldn’t figure out who I am tonight.”

  Madrona, who lived, slept, and possibly showered in black, said sweetly, “You look nice,” which of course is code for Your grandmother would love what you’re wearing. She sat down and picked up her drumsticks, which usually caused Hibiscus to take cover in the violin case with Graymalkin. But the parakeet only deflated a bit and shifted farther back into Madrona’s hair. She bopped a cymbal lightly and asked, “Do we have a set list?”

  Of course we did; we always had a set list. That was code for Does anyone have the slightest idea what to do?

  Liesl shrugged speechlessly. She was the Gypsy that night, from the rings on her bare feet to the gold loops in her ears and the ribbons in her long black hair. I opened my case and took out the bow, tightened the strings, then picked up the violin, which, freed from years of lessons, turned promptly into a fiddle.

  “Wing it?” I suggested, and above my head a crow—maybe Cawley—rustled feathers noisily. I hoped they might know what to do, not that any of them could tell me. I listened to Liesl’s tunings, tightened my A, then my G, which promptly snapped and curled with a little mournful wail. I said something I hoped the mikes didn’t pick up and scrabbled among the strings in the case. “Where is that … Liesl, did you take my G string?”

  “Borrowed,” she said unrepentantly. “In rehearsal yesterday—you were in the bathroom. You have another one.”

  “You took the good one. Do you know how expensive those are?”

  “Sure I do. Why do you think I grabbed it?”

  Madrona gave us a drumroll and a bling on the cymbal. “Pick it up, ladies. We’ve got a heavy night ahead of us.”

  That was pretty much code for If we get out of this alive, I’m calling my mom every week, I promise, and if I ever think of buying another pair of frivolous shoes, I’ll donate the money to the food bank instead. I clamped my teeth, changed the string, and wished with all my heart that Cawley would fly out of the shadows and come and sit on my shoulder.