“Sorry about the door, boss,” I said. “I’ll put in a call to maintenance.”
“I smell seafood,” Kathy said, her tone accusatory as she remained steadfast in the doorway. Her back was to the sunny outdoors and her face was in shadow. She looked a little scary to me, which was saying a lot, because I’d seen many scary things, several of which tried to kill or eat me.
Frank and I exchanged a look, then Frank said, “Zara brought cake.”
“I did bring cake,” I said, smiling like a ding-dong.
“You two must take me for an idiot,” Kathy spat out.
Frank and I exchanged another look. His eyebrows climbed so high, his eyelids pulled straight and his eyes were no longer hooded.
What was going on? Kathy had her foul moods, but they were usually directed at the nameless miscreants who dropped “surprises” into the overnight book return.
The head librarian stepped into the break room, moving like a simmering cauldron, and let the door slam shut behind her.
“Honestly,” she said, in the irritated tone of someone who did not want to hear an explanation just yet. I’d never seen her so blustery.
Frank’s wide eyes widened even more as he spotted something on the floor. A trio of pink feathers.
“Honestly,” Kathy repeated. “Whooo could possibly tolerate being lied to, day in and day out, by her subordinates?” She blinked furiously behind her round glasses.
“It was me,” Frank said. He took a big step forward, placing his foot on top of the three feathers.
“It was Frank,” I agreed, hoping he had something good in mind.
“I was playing one of my classic pranks,” he said. “That’s why they call me Franker the Pranker.”
I shot him a look. Nobody called him that. Mr. Wonderful, yes. The Frankinator, yes. Even Pinkie. But nobody called him Franker the Pranker because, despite being true, it just wasn’t catchy.
“This ends right now,” Kathy blustered.
In unison, Frank and I asked, “What?”
“I’m tired of you two going silent whenever I walk into the break room,” Kathy said. “Or worse. Changing the topic to some boring thing I know neither of you are interested in. I’m not an idiot.”
“Fair enough,” I said, nodding. “We will stop all the pranks. No more plastic spiders or fake book requests.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Kathy said.
In unison again, Frank and I said, “It’s not?”
Kathy shot us a dirty look that was so powerful, it actually forced her glasses to slide down her narrow, pointed nose. She grabbed the glasses mid-air without looking at them.
“This calls for a demonstration,” Kathy said, her tone acidic.
Frank and I started to ask what she meant, but we stopped when we saw what happened next.
Kathy tilted her head back, let her jaw drop open, and released a snake from her mouth.
Or at least that was how it looked.
The snake was not a snake at all. It appeared to be her tongue.
Kathy Carmichael, the head librarian, had a very long, prehensile tongue. The tongue snaked toward us, then lashed its way around my birthday cake, like a long bullwhip. Kathy’s mouth opened to an impossible size, then the tongue snapped like a whip. Into her mouth went an entire cake, minus two slivers, neat as can be. She didn’t drop a single chocolate curl.
Frank and I stared at Kathy in stunned silence.
“Now you know my secret,” Kathy said, sounding less blustery and more like the regular Kathy. “I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending I don’t know about both of yours.” She put her glasses back on and peered at me. “Zara, you are a witch, just like your aunt.”
I said nothing. It would break witch code to confirming someone else’s powers as a package deal with mine. I wasn’t the best at the supernatural rules for discretion, but I was trying.
Kathy walked over to where Frank stood, crouched down, and plucked one of the pink feathers from under his shoe. “And I believe this belongs to you, Mr. Wonder.” She straightened up and waved the feather under his nose. “Or should I call you Mr. Flamingo?”
Frank said nothing while keeping a poker face. But then he sneezed from the feather tickling, and his grin gave him away.
“You got me,” he said to the head librarian. “How long have you known?”
“My family has known your family for a long time,” she said, which didn’t answer his question, but seemed to satisfy him anyway.
“That’s quite the tongue,” I said. “What sort of shifter are you, if you don’t mind my asking? An anteater?”
“Ew,” she said. “I’m not a shifter. I’m a sprite.”
A sprite? That was not a word I’d expected to hear. I put my hands on my hips. “A sprite?” She had to be messing with us. “Are you sure you’re not something else?”
“Such as?” She put her hands on her own hips, mirroring me.
I had to ask. “Such as... an owl shifter?”
“No.” Her face scrunched up in confusion. “Why would you think that?”
“Maybe because of all the hints you’ve been dropping since the day I started working here? Owl shifter was my best guess.”
“That was your best guess?” She smiled now, her irritation over being locked outside apparently forgotten. “You witches and your feelings. Your type puts far more stock in your hunches and whims than you do in cold, hard facts.”
“My type?” I didn’t know if I was supposed to be offended, but I was.
We stared at each other.
This was why we hadn’t exchanged our supernatural identities before now. There were so many politics involved. Even though we were all interconnected and shared common issues, some supernaturals fixated on the differences between kinds instead of the similarities. Or they took on the prejudices of their ancestors.
Our silent standoff was broken by a strange gurgling sound that filled the room. It sounded as unappealing as Frank’s anchovy breath smelled. It sounded like trouble coming our way. I glanced over at the break room’s sink.
“Was that the sink?” Frank asked.
“I hope the plumbing isn’t backing up,” I said.
“Oh, dear,” Kathy said, patting her midsection. “That sound was me, I’m afraid.”
“Wow,” Frank said. “How many stomachs do you have in there?”
Kathy’s dark cheeks turned a deeper shade as she blushed. “Never mind about my insides.”
Frank caught my eye and made a face. I looked away quickly, before he could give me the giggles.
Kathy kept patting her midsection. The gurgling decreased to a milder sound that was almost relaxing, like a water fountain.
“Oh, fluffernuts. I shouldn’t have eaten that whole cake,” Kathy said. “Now we’ve got a big problem on our hands.”
“We do?” Frank took a step back, as though the head librarian might explode.
“We do?” I echoed.
“A huge problem.” Kathy held her fist to her mouth and let out a burp. “The cake’s all gone. What are we going to have at coffee break?”
Chapter 2
DINNER TIME
“A sprite?” My sixteen-year-old daughter, Zolanda Daizy Cazzaundra Riddle, also known as Zoey, wrinkled her lightly freckled nose at me. “If a person has a freakishly long, prehensile tongue, that would lead me to believe that person is a troll.”
“It does sound exactly like the troll descriptions in the magic books, but Kathy Carmichael informed me that there’s no such thing as trolls, therefore Kathy Carmichael, with her freakishly long, prehensile tongue, is actually a sprite.”
Zoey squinted and slowly nodded. “I think I see where this is going. She’s a troll, but she doesn’t want to be called a troll.”
“Nobody wants to be called a troll.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact she is a troll.”
“But is she? Really? If nobody calls them trolls anymore, are they still tr
olls?”
Zoey frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Wow. Now there’s a phrase I don’t often hear coming out of your adorable lips.” I turned to address the fluffy white cat who was weaving around my ankles in a figure-eight pattern. “Did you hear that, Boa? I’ve stumped my genius daughter with a philosophical question.”
“It’s more of a linguistics question,” my clever teenager said, correcting me. “Or a crossover between philosophy and linguistics,” she further corrected herself.
I chuckled. “You should have seen the way Kathy put away that cake. One enormous bite and it was all gone.”
“What a waste. She didn’t even taste it?”
“Not unless sprites have taste buds in their stomachs. I already phoned Chloe to order another replacement cake for tomorrow.”
“That will be your third birthday cake, or your fourth if you count the cherry cheesecake.”
“What else am I supposed to do? I deserve to get at least one big slice, to be eaten in peace, and allowed to fully digest. My official birthday cake got ruined when your father knocked it on the floor. I wasn’t going to eat floor cake.”
She smiled. “Since when are you too good for floor cake?” Her smile faded to a frown. “And what do you mean by ‘your father’?”
“Archer Caine is your father. I could call him ‘the genie’ if you prefer. Or ‘the demon,’ or ‘the devil’ with a lowercase d.”
The wrinkles on her brow deepened. “You said ‘your father’ as though him being my father was my doing, somehow. Archer Caine being my father wasn’t my doing.”
“You’re right. It was the doing of a six-pack of Barberrian wine coolers.” I took a breath. “Or so I believed, until I read that prophecy scroll with your name in it, and now I’m not so sure.”
She raised two red eyebrows. “I caused myself to be conceived?”
“Well, kid, you are part genie. How should I know how genie magic works? When we moved here, your father was out and about, floating around inside people’s heads, or in the ether, or who knows, and then he made himself a body out of spare Chet Moore parts. That sounds an awful lot like what you did inside me.”
She rolled her eyes. She was half genie, but she was also a quarter witch and a quarter fox shifter. Only the fox shifter aspect had manifested so far. The teenager aspect superseded everything else.
I went on. “Ask your father how genies get out of their bottles and into new bodies. And find out if the bottles are actual bottles or just a metaphor. I’m pretty sure he was the guy I heard talking to a disembodied Dorothy Tibbits inside Josephine Pressman’s head. In fact, I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure it was him. Then, after he got that new body of his, he dated the poor girl up at Castle Wyvern, and got her killed.” I shook my head. “I know it was Morganna Faire who got the genie-melting poison from that nasty little gnome, but Josephine wouldn’t have drank it by accident if she hadn’t been mixed up in their genie business.” I let out a low whistle. “It’s a good thing Jo’s spirit has moved on, or he’d always be looking over his shoulder for an angry ghost.”
Zoey opened her mouth, but I cut her off, talking faster.
“Ask your father about the prophecy, too. That old scroll they have at the DWM. Get as much information out of him as you can. You’ve got your deadbeat dad back in your life at the moment, for better or for worse. Why not make the most of it?”
She shook her head. “That’s enough, Mom. You’ve made your point. He’s connected to a lot of bad people and unfortunate events. He may even be directly or indirectly connected to everything weird that’s happened to us since we moved here.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you shouldn’t have let him into our lives.”
Her jaw dropped open. She blinked at me furiously. When she regained the ability to speak, her words came out fast and angry. “I let him into our lives? Me?” She thumped her chest with an open hand. “I wasn’t the one who invited him to your birthday party. It was your wish that brought him into our lives.” She pointed her finger at me. “Your birthday wish.”
“But my wish was on your behalf. I had to do something. Whenever the topic of your siring comes up, you always look at me with those sad puppy-dog eyes.”
“My siring? Don’t you dare distract me by using a weird, old-timey verb.”
I waved a hand, accidentally casting a spray of iridescent magic sparkles. “All I did was blow out some candles and wish that you could have a better relationship with your father than I had with mine. A mother always wants the best for her child.”
“And I appreciate that. I do. But I barely found out about Archer being my father before suddenly he was at our front door. I think I would have preferred more time to get used to the idea that my father looks exactly like our next-door neighbor, Mr. Moore, due to the fact he made himself a body using Mr. Moore’s spare parts.” She sighed. “Why Mr. Moore, anyway?”
“We think he snuck in there, on a physical level, when Chet was stuck inside that fleshy mind-erasing horror in the Pressman attic during the incident that you pretend to know nothing about.”
“Right. I certainly didn’t listen in on you talking to Auntie Z about it, because that would have been wrong.”
I sighed. According to the DWM’s internal investigation, Archer Caine had likely been in his non-corporeal genie form the last sixteen years. Morganna Faire, his sister, used his essence to power some diabolical machines they were going to use to erase minds, so the genies could be immortal without having to lose their memories every time they were reborn as babies. But then Archer had jumped ship into Chet Moore, like a virus.
“It’s a lot to process,” Zoey said. “My father, the body snatcher.”
“You should probably call him a genie,” I said. “Or Djinn with a capital D. Or djinn with a lowercase d. All I know is they don’t like being called demons.” I turned away from her, opened the oven, and pulled out the casserole I’d made with various leftovers, covered in cheese.
“Hmm,” was all she said.
“Just like how trolls prefer being called sprites.” I floated the hot casserole dish over to a trivet. Witches didn’t need oven mitts. “Speaking of trolls preferring to be called sprites, don’t you love it when a conversation naturally comes around full circle?”
“Hmm.” She swished her lips from side to side.
A wyvern flew into the kitchen and landed on the back of a chair.
Most people would scream at the sight of a mythological creature flapping into a room, but it was a regular occurrence in the Riddle household. And this mythological creature wasn’t that terrifying, since his body was all of seven inches long and his head resembled that of a large seahorse. Like a dragon, the wyvern did breathe fire, some of it in the shape of colorful ribbons. That was how he’d earned his name, Ribbons.
Ribbons the Wyvern spoke telepathically into my mind and Zoey’s. “Did someone say floor cake?” The wood of the chair squeaked under the pressure of his claws. Having a wyvern as a roommate was as hard on the furniture as it was on the grocery bills.
“There’s no floor cake,” I said.
“I know.” He preened himself. “I heard the entire conversation from the moment you arrived home from work, Zed.” He communicated in his unplaceable Old Europe accent and semi-formal syntax. “But was it not delightful how I chose that particular phrase with which to make my entrance?”
“It was pretty cute,” I said.
He snorted, emitting a sulfur smell, like a struck match. “Ribbons is not cute. Ribbons is delightful, and charming, not to mention handsome.”
Zoey said to me, “He’s extra cute when he refers to himself in third person, isn’t he?”
“So cute,” I agreed. “Someone should make a line of greeting cards with Ribbons saying all of his cute little catchphrases.”
He snorted again, this time emitting a delicate ribbon of orange fire. “I will eviscerate anyone who dares capture my image for commercial purposes. I will rip
them limb from limb, and spread their entrails across the land with great speed while their heart still beats. They will have no choice but to bear witness to their disembowelment, for I shall begin my revenge by removing their eyelids.”
Zoey and I exchanged a look.
“So cute,” we said in unison.
Zoey giggled. “The word ‘entrails’ always cracks me up when he says it with that Count Chocula accent.”
“It is your choice how you hear my voice,” he said wearily. “Stop hearing me as Count Chocula and choose something more dignified.”
“You know I’ve tried,” I said. “There was that whole day I heard you as Pierce Brosnan, but it didn’t stick.”
Ribbons puffed up his chest. “Pierce Brosnan is one of the finest actors who has ever lived. He made an excellent Bond.”
“You know who Pierce Brosnan is? Ribbons, you cheeky wyvern. You always claim you don’t know the names of any celebrities. What’s that thing you say? ‘The affairs of humans are of no more interest to wyverns than the affairs of an anthill matter to a dolphin.’ It’s one of my favorite catchphrases.”
Ribbons unfurled one wing and made a rude gesture at me with one of his claw-like fingers. Then he tucked in the wing, hopped onto the kitchen island where we ate most meals, and inspected the contents of a large bowl.
After a loud sniff, he asked, “Are these cabbage entrails?”
Zoey said proudly, “I made coleslaw using the food processor Gigi gave us as a housewarming gift.”
Ribbons wrapped both wings around the bowl possessively and gave us a malevolent grin, exposing sharp fangs. “My favorite. Cabbage entrails with Dijon and maple syrup dressing. But what are you two going to eat?”
Zoey jumped off her chair and grabbed a second bowl from next to the sink. “I made two bowls, so you get your own bowl, all to yourself.”
“Like popcorn night,” he said, sounding downright touched by my daughter’s thoughtfulness.
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