by Molly Fitz
“I didn’t kill her,” the cat said in that strange breathless way of his, not so much as lifting paw as he regarded me calmly.
I, however, continued to shout. “But you hired the killer. That makes you just as good as.”
He stood and stretched. “I don’t have time to debate this with you, Tawny, so I’ll cut straight to the point. Do you want more people to die or not?”
Honestly, I just wanted this to all go away, but despite all the magic involved in this horrible situation, that didn’t seem to be an option. “I still don’t know why I’m a part of this. Can’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
“We never meant to involve anyone outside of the board,” he admitted with a sad shake of his head. “But when you stumbled upon Lila’s body, we had no choice but to bring you in.”
“You knew I didn’t kill her. This whole time, you knew!” I sputtered. “And since you’re the one who ordered the hit, I’m willing to bet you know who the real killer is, too. So, why make me a temp? Why give me magic at all?”
“We took you in for your protection. The rest of it was a ruse, to misdirect anyone who showed up to sniff around Lila’s murder with the hopes of gaining her magic. And, look, that’s precisely what happened. You would have been a target, no matter what, having shown up yesterday morning.”
“You made me a target!” This was the one point I just couldn’t get past. Even though I’d accidentally walked onto the scene, there had to be countless other ways to keep me safe. Giving me magic seemed mighty extreme, especially since they hadn’t done much to teach me to use it. What was the whole point?
“You were already a target,” Fluffikins shouted back, losing his calm for the first time since the conversation had started. “Playing into it bought us all time, but now that time has run out. We can’t stand here arguing. We need to act while we still have time!”
“I don’t understand. If Melony isn’t coming for you or for me, then who is she after?”
“She’s going after the actual killer, the person who absorbed the town magic. She wants it for herself by any means possible. We need to get to him before Melony does.”
“To who?” I demanded, stomping my foot. The more Fluffikins explained, the less I understood. “Who are we rushing off to save now?”
“The person who killed Lila Haberdash. Barnes.”
My mind kind of exploded then. Fluffikins had ordered Parker to kill Mrs. Haberdash? I really wanted to know the why, but I also believed Fluffikins when he said our time was running out.
I still had to ask. “Parker killed her? Why? Why would he do that?” My voice trembled as I tested these words aloud.
“Because it’s what Lila wanted,” he admitted. His chest heaved with the weight of this revelation, making the little white patch bob within the mass of black fur.
I raised an eyebrow at him. I believed what he was telling me, but that didn’t mean I understood. A part of me doubted I’d ever fully understand, no matter how many questions I asked. “She wanted someone to murder her?”
“Yes, and she trusted us to get it done right.” He hopped off the couch and landed by my feet.
“None of this makes any sense!”
Fluffikins stared up at me with bright golden eyes that seemed to see right through me. “Can you please just trust me on this? We’ve lost too much time already. Do you want to save Barnes or not?”
I’d seen the look in Melony’s eyes as she first questioned Greta and me and then charged out of the house with that enchanted hat. She was out for blood. Parker’s blood.
And I also knew deep in my gut that Parker was an okay guy. He’d been kind to me and seemed earnest in wanting to help me. Even if he’d been the one to get me mixed up in this whole magical business—which I still did not appreciate, by the way—it didn’t mean he deserved to die for it.
“But how can I help? I’m just a human,” I mumbled, feeling so useless in that moment.
Fluffikins’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, but you have magic now. What do you say? Join the good guys?”
Well, what choice did I have now? The stakes felt much higher now that someone I knew and liked was in jeopardy. I sighed and nodded. “If you’re sure you need me and that you’ll keep me safe, then I’m in.”
“Great. We’ve already wasted more time than I’d prefer, but luckily Melony is a low level witch. She’ll have needed to travel by the traditional means, so we still have time to beat her to our destination. Follow me.” The cat ran to the door and let himself outside.
I followed after, wondering if I was crazy for agreeing to help with what little information I’d been given.
“Now grab my tail,” Fluffikins shouted into the still morning sky.
I crouched down, closed my eyes, and clenched that tail like my life depended on it. The soft fluffy appendage turned hard in my grip and then it started to grow. When I opened my eyes again, I was no longer holding onto a tail but rather a broomstick, and I was no longer standing in my front yard.
I was flying.
18
The speeding wind whipped the bottoms of my pajama pants against my ankles—or rather it was the speeding me on top of the broom that I’d somehow managed to conjure from my talking feline escort’s tail.
Fluffikins flew effortlessly at my side. He looked as if he were suspended mid-leap as he zipped through the air like a bullet.
So there we were, racing against time to save a killer from being killed, because apparently he’d killed for the right reasons while his would-be killer wanted to kill him for the wrong reasons.
Yeah, I was confused, too.
I was also more than a little upset that I’d ended up wearing my frumpy PJs for this momentous encounter. I didn’t have much time to worry about either of these things, though, because Fluffikins and I arrived at our destination a couple short minutes after we’d departed.
I recognized the office complex from my visits the day before. This seemed like a good place to start, but would Parker even be there? He’d told me he had a regular policeman’s job, too, which meant he probably didn’t spend all day waiting around Paranormal HQ just in case the boss cat needed him.
Heck, for all I knew, Melony might have found him already.
Mr. Fluffikins muttered something under his breath, and the glass-topped conference room opened up like a blossoming flower. Pink glittering magic swirled about us as the building sucked us in like a Venus flytrap.
My broom disappeared and I lurched toward the floor. But then the pink stuff caught me and guided me gently into one of the many executive chairs that lined the table. This felt similar to the sensation I’d experienced in Mrs. Haberdash’s house, like I was floating in a bath of perfectly temperate water. The pink pulsed gently, calming and comforting me, providing a featherlight massage.
Fluffikins landed in front of me in a perfectly graceful and well executed maneuver that was all his own. The pink magic parted to allow him passage rather than coaxing him forward like it had done for me.
“I hereby call an emergency board meeting,” he said, his words echoing around the room. “All liaisons are required.”
The pink magic gathered into a ball and bounced up through the open roof into the sky above.
“Wh-what’s going on? Where’s P-Parker?” I sputtered. I felt the absence of the atmospheric magic acutely despite having only been under its effects for a few seconds.
Fluffikins paced the length of the table anxiously. “He’s on his way, along with the others. I rarely call an emergency meeting, but when I do, they have no choice but to travel here immediately.”
“What’s all this pink glittery stuff?” I asked, watching as it twisted and danced just above the open ceiling. “I didn’t see it when I was here yesterday.”
“You didn’t have magic when you were in the board room yesterday. It was here, but you couldn’t yet see it. It’s always here,” he answered distractedly as he continued to cross the table back and forth.
“W
hat is it?” I wanted to know, but more than that I needed to keep him talking, to protect me from my own thoughts and worries.
“It’s but a small piece of the earth’s most concentrated and most powerful magic, taken right from its very core. Each of our agencies around the globe has been granted a part to keep us connected to the whole. It works to stabilize the balance within each region and prevent any one center from gaining too much power.” He spoke so smoothly and eloquently that I wondered if he was quoting something or someone verbatim.
“How does it do that?”
Pace, pace, pace.
I was growing more frightened by the minute, especially since Fluffikins appeared rattled, too.
He took a few more loops of the table and then plopped himself down across from me. “By sparking non-magical humans’ so-called intuition and influencing them to act in a way that is good for humanity as a whole, even if they believe they are acting on selfish desires.”
“Huh. I’ve got to admit, this is all a bit out there. I was just coming around to this whole Town Witch thing, and now you expect me to wrap my head around a living strain of magic that balances all of humanity?”
He shrugged. “You asked. I merely answered.”
“Why am I here?”
“Because the magic chose you. There was a reason you discovered Lila’s body, that you bumped into Barnes, even that you were there when Melony showed up to reclaim the hat.”
“I’m nobody special.”
He nodded. “My inclination would be to agree with you, but the magic is always right.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “If the magic is so high and mighty, then how come terrible things still happen every day? People are murdered, as we well know. Kids are taken from their parents, wars kill millions. Why doesn’t the magic stop any of that from happening?”
“Balance encompasses both dark and light, good and bad. It’s difficult to understand for the uninitiated. Still, it has chosen you as someone who will play a significant role in what is to come.”
“Now there are prophecies?” I gasped as goosebumps rose to my arms.
The cat’s eyes flashed, but he quickly looked away, focusing his gaze just over my left shoulder. “No, no. I have no idea what happens next, but whatever it is, you’ll be an important player.”
I bit my lip as I thought about this. Part of me wanted to yell at Fluffikins for dragging me deep into this agency mess without explaining any of it in a way I could actually understand, but another very big part of me understood that I’d have never agreed to get mixed up in things here if he’d led with any of the craziness that had come to light over the last few minutes.
“What if I’m not enough?” I asked instead. This wasn’t just my greatest worry now. It was my greatest fear in life. I hadn’t been enough for my ex-husband. My rate of producing books was quickly not becoming enough for my literary agent. With all those failures to my name, could I be enough for something that mattered this much?
Fluffikins fixed his eyes on me, unblinking. “Oh, but Tawny. You already are.”
19
Not even two minutes after Fluffikins’s summons, the other members of the board began descending upon the room to join us at the table.
First came Greta. “I put the best wards on the house that I could to bolster the ones already there. Lila’s spells are fading fast now that she’s no longer in residence,” she informed us before she’d even landed in her spot.
Next came the old guy in the suit. “You’ve removed me from a very important procession, I’ll have you know.”
“It will wait,” his cat boss snarled. “What we have now affects the entire region across all departments.”
The old guy blinked hard and his mouth hung slightly agape. “All?”
Fluffikins nodded solemnly as two more liaisons fell from the sky and took their rightful seats. “Now let’s begin.”
“Wait? Where’s Parker?” I choked out as I searched the sky for his familiar form. “Why isn’t he here yet?”
“If he is able, then he will come,” Greta said from the seat beside me, reaching under the table to squeeze my hand.
If? But hadn’t Fluffikins said attendance was required? Did Greta mean he might already be dead or incapacitated?
I clung tight to her hand, needing whatever small comfort I could find there.
“Beginning now.” Fluffikins began to pace up and down the table once again. This time like a general. “First let me say, I’m sorry to have acted without the full board’s knowledge, especially now that I see my quick action did not have a positive effect on the outcome.”
He paused, but nobody spoke to fill the silence. We all waited.
“Lila Haberdash was compromised,” the cat revealed. “And so she requested that I organize her death so that we could control the passage of the town’s magic to its next host.”
Gasps rose up around the room. Only Greta beside me did not react. She already knew, I realized then. She knew everything, all of it. And she clearly disagreed, at least with my involvement in the fallout. Not because she didn’t like me, but because she wanted to protect me. My first impression of her had been completely wrong.
“How was she compromised?” the old guy asked.
Fluffikins stopped and raised a paw to his forehead as if in pain. “Lila’s grandniece, Melony Haberdash, manipulated her grandfather into revealing the family’s magical legacy, including how power was passed from one heir to the next.”
“So she was going to kill Mrs. Haberdash,” I supplied.
“Yes, Lila certainly thought so. Magic isn’t meant to be revealed until the preparations for a transfer are nearly complete, precisely to prevent this kind of thing from happening. But Lila’s brother, Melony’s grandfather, always resented that the magic had skipped him as the first born and gone to his sister. My guess is Melony didn’t have to press too hard to gain the information she sought.”
“I warned you,” the old guy said with a sad shake of his head. “Lila was a great asset to this town, but she didn’t come from good stock. That brother of hers never recovered from losing out on the position, even though he wasn’t even suited to it in the first place. Now he’s sending his heirs two generations down to cause trouble? We should have taken him out years ago when he first started causing trouble.”
“Lila never wanted harm to come to her family. I think a small part of her always hoped they could reconcile,” Greta answered. “It was only right to respect her wishes.”
“Lila was one of the good ones,” Fluffikins agreed. “Unfortunately, her family took advantage of her kind heart.”
“What’s Melony going to do now? And how do we know she’s acting alone? If her grandfather started this, couldn’t he still be in on it?” I asked aloud. On the inside I still yearned for Parker. What if Melony had already gotten to him? What if I never saw him again?
“We don’t know what the plan is, only that it needs to be stopped,” Greta explained softly, still holding tight to my hand.
“Well, where is she? Can’t we lock her up in a magical prison and throw away the key? We’ve got to do something!”
“It’s not that simple,” the cat argued.
“Magic always comes to a violent end,” Greta said, echoing the same warning she’d given me earlier.
“Then why would you put Parker at risk like this? If you knew Melony was coming for Lila, shouldn’t you have all known that she would come for him when she realized what had happened?” A mass of rage began to form in my gut. They’d knowingly endangered Parker. It wasn’t right.
Fluffikins sighed. “We didn’t have as much time as we’d hoped. Ultimately, Barnes volunteered to pick up the mantle because he didn’t want to risk Greta in his place.”
She squeezed my hand under the table. “He said the worst thing that could happen would be to compromise our schools. If we want a better world, then we need to guard the future like the treasure it is.”
No
wonder I liked the guy. He was handsome, brave, and loved kids. If I wasn’t such a pessimist about love, I may have succumbed to the crush that was threatening to overtake my heart. Instead I swallowed down all the many things I was feeling in that moment and asked the one thing that mattered most. “How do we stop Melony?”
I decided then and there that I would help in whatever way I could. Whether it was to protect Parker or to avenge him, I was fully in.
20
Despite the urgency of my question and the fact that it was a pretty great one to ask, Fluffikins failed to acknowledge it.
Perhaps he would have, but one of the liaisons immediately hopped to her feet and placed a hand on each of her ample hips. “Why wasn’t the entire board informed? I personally would have loved to hear about all this before it all hit the fan.”
“Apologies, Connie,” the cat drawled. Was he actually sucking up to her when he was the one in charge? “Lila preferred that as few people as possible know about the plan to preemptively end her life. As you know, it’s the ultimate sacrifice and highest duty for a Town Witch to die protecting her town. She knew what needed to be done, and she didn’t want anyone trying to change her mind.”
“But she knew.” Connie pointed at Greta accusingly. Her growled words sent a shiver right through me. They didn’t exactly sound human, but what else could they be? “What does this decision even have to do with her department? Nothing, that’s what!”
The cat’s patience had now worn thin. He sighed and rubbed at his forehead with a paw. “You know very well, indeed, that as the liaison of Schools, Greta is the most equipped to handle situations that impact the future. Besides, Melony is young, still a student herself. At least once this summer is over, she is expected to head to the Academy and begin—”
“That’s not happening now, obviously,” Greta interjected with a sullen expression.
“And Parker was informed,” Fluffikins continued as he directed an unhappy glare at Connie, “because the impending crime fell directly into his role as liaison to the Force.”
