Earlier that day, the gang had received a surprise package from Zinnia. She’d included a letter explaining that postcards were stupid, basically the “humblebrag” of mail, and thus she would never subject her supernatural friends and coworkers to such a thing. Instead, she’d purchased a variety of goodies and keepsakes during her travels thus far, and so the box contained an assortment of items they could distribute amongst themselves as they wished.
The items were simple and of low-value.
Naturally, bedlam ensued.
Margaret Mills zapped three people with spells, and one of the couples broke up and got back together again. To everyone’s surprise, it was the younger couple whose love was tested over a trio of herb-infused olive oils, not Gavin and Dawna. Karl had to step in and whip everyone into shape. Literally. He’d extended his extra-long sprite tongue and actually whipped them.
The mood following the tongue-lashing was much more subdued and professional.
Best of all, Karl had snagged his favorite pick from the box of items: a hand-carved wooden elephant.
“Ding,” said the kid—Xavier—getting up from his chair and pulling on his light summer jacket. “It’s officially five o’clock now.”
Karl made a big show of walking back to his private office, then coming back with a HARUMPH.
“Barely,” he said.
Gavin and Dawna exchanged a look.
Gotcha. The look was enough to confirm Karl’s suspicions that the two of them had been responsible for tampering with the lying clock in his office. For the last two weeks, he’d been monitoring the thing. In the morning, it ran slow, so that all the subordinates made it in on time or even early. By lunch time, the clock would have sped up significantly, so that lunch break effectively started five minutes earlier. Then it slowed for the end of lunch and sped up again for the end of the work day.
It must have been Gavin’s gnome relative, that repugnant Griebel Gorman, who’d altered the clock. He was one of those low-lifes who would build or alter anything mechanical for the right fee, no matter who got hurt along the way. Karl had been wary of taking on the younger Gorman as a supernatural protegé, fearing he would be as dirty as his uncle, but Gavin turned out to be ethical and honest—or at least as ethical and honest as a gnome could be. The poker nights Gavin “generously” hosted were run mainly to take money from his coworkers.
This business with the time-hopping clock in Karl’s office had clearly been Gavin’s idea.
“I know about the clock,” Karl said.
Suddenly, everyone was very concerned with the contents of their laps, their purses, or something on the floor. Karl reassessed the situation and altered his conclusion.
“And I know you were all in on it,” he blustered. “All of you.”
Margaret Mills raised her hand. “I told them not to do it, Boss.”
Karl stamped his foot. “This department is not a cover. We are a real department, and we do important work here.”
The New Girl spoke up, albeit meekly. “Are you sure about that, Mr. Kormac? We seem to issue a lot of permits for things that don’t require permits in other towns. This afternoon we had a walk-in client who requested a special permit for putting more than forty birthday candles on a cake.”
Karl stared her down. “And?”
Liza Gilbert—that was her name!—scrunched her young face. “Don’t you think that’s a bit excessive?”
Karl had to fight very hard to keep a straight face. She wasn’t wrong, but he was their boss. The boss of a department that was partly a cover for more important operations, but he couldn’t admit that.
He dialed up his bluster and responded with more gusto. “More than forty candles constitutes a potential fire hazard.” He walked around to view Liza’s computer screen and asked, “Did you find the Form 40BC on the system?”
“I did,” she said, sounding surprised as she relived the experience of being surprised hours earlier. “And I issued the permit.”
“Good work,” Karl said. He addressed the group as a whole. “This is exactly the sort of high-quality, reliable work we do around here at the WPD.” He bared his teeth and added, “During standard office hours.”
The group murmured.
Karl continued. “Furthermore, I expect my office wall clock to be restored to its normal function by tomorr—”
He was interrupted by the door opening.
Into the permits department rushed one of the mayor’s staff members, his tie askew and his hair ruffled.
“You’re still here,” the young man said, sounding both surprised and relieved. “Mayor Paladini is putting out an alert to all staff members with special abilities.”
Xavier said, “Then that means I’m outta here.” He had already been standing, his jacket on, and his bag slung over his shoulder. “It’s past five, and I don’t have any special abilities.”
Liza admonished him, “That you know of.”
“Let it go,” Xavier said to his girlfriend. “We’re just the Red Shirts around here. Don’t you get it? We’re expendable, and we can’t even defend ourselves.” He thumbed his chest. “If trouble’s spewing out of some magic volcano, this Red Shirt would rather be at home when the lava hits.”
The young man at the door said, “You should be more concerned about whatever’s going on.”
Margaret Mills asked, “Does it have anything to do with this terrible indigestion I’m feeling? I thought it was my lunch going down the wrong way, but this pushing-pulling sensation in my gut keeps getting stronger.”
Karl asked, “Is it gas?” He was often plagued with terrible gas himself. Not enough natural chitin in his diet. He needed to visit a lobster buffet soon.
Margaret tapped her solar plexus with a loose fist, then burped. “There’s some gas, but that’s normal after I’ve been sitting all afternoon.” She tapped herself again. “Something else is still there. It feels like an object-location spell taking its sweet time to connect.” She frowned. “But I haven’t cast any spells today. I never, ever cast spells at work.”
“Except for at lunch, when you bit me on the butt,” Gavin said.
“And mine,” Dawna said.
Liza said, “That was a spell? I thought I was having a muscle cramp.”
Margaret huffed. “Well, I haven’t cast any object-location spells today.”
As though thinking with one mind, the group dropped their quibbling and turned toward the mayor’s sweaty member of staff. Together, they asked the young man to explain what the alert was about.
The man gulped, then admitted, “We’re not exactly sure. Mayor Paladini was hoping you might know something. We’re picking up alerts from all over, but nothing specific. A retired field agent called in about a warning from the Deep, and we’re trying to connect that to a misplaced book that’s since been recovered, but...”
They all waited with what Shakespeare first dubbed “bated breath.”
Fun fact: Shakespeare was a sprite. Most people didn’t know that, but Karl had evidence, being the bard’s descendant. That fact was, of course, beside the point, so Karl didn’t mention it but instead listened with bated breath for the mayor’s subordinate to continue.
“But nobody knows what was inside the book,” the sweaty young man said. “The words aren’t legible.”
“Genies!” Margaret exclaimed. “The last time ink was disappearing, it was genies. They had that man who used to run the Penny Pincher Gazette working for them on some atrocity. They cleaned out the local supply of several magical items. I thought someone was trying to make flying monkeys.”
“This case is quite different from that one,” the young man explained. “The book’s pages have all been blackened, not erased. And, before you ask, we brought in our best sniffer hounds, and there were no bookwyrms in the vicinity.”
Margaret muttered under her breath about genies being to blame, regardless.
Dawna cleared her throat and noisily shuffled a deck of cards. Everyone looked
at her, then went silent as the card mage prepared to do what only she could do.
Dawna finished shuffling with a flourish—she’d learned a few new moves—and spread an array of seemingly random cards across her desk.
“Mother is coming,” she said.
“And?” Margaret came over to watch over Dawna’s shoulder. “What else?”
“That’s all the cards are telling me.”
“Do it again.”
Dawna shuffled the cards and lay them out once more. To Karl, the sequence and distribution of cards meant nothing at all, but he trusted Dawna’s magic, even though she was new at cartomancy.
“Same message,” Dawna said, shaking her head. “Mother is coming.”
Karl’s first three stomachs churned, and the other two threatened to join in. He hoped the cards didn’t mean his mother. Then it would be a very bad day, indeed.
Dawna rotated in her office chair and gave the visitor an apologetic look. “That’s all I’ve got. The cards can only do so much. Since I’ve been practicing, my readings have gotten clearer, but less detailed.”
“Mother is coming.” The man in the suit nodded. “I will pass that information along.” He turned to leave but hesitated. “Ms. Jones, is there any chance you could come upstairs and—”
Dawna, who was already on her feet, designer purse at her side, cut past him on the way to the door. “It’s well past five o’clock, Alistair. That means I should be at home by now, with between two and five cats on my lap.” She stepped through the door and called over her shoulder, “If the apocalypse starts up, and you need someone to read cards and confirm the apocalypse is happening, call me. Or not.” Then she was gone.
“Same here,” Gavin said. “Call me if you need someone strong and brave to fight the forces of evil.”
Margaret added on Gavin’s behalf, “Or to zap himself straight home as soon as things get scary.”
The others laughed.
Gavin retaliated. “Alistair, let’s say the apocalypse does happen before the start of work tomorrow. Your best bet is to call Margaret Mills. If the forces of evil are a man—and isn’t it always a man?—Margaret can nag him into a deep depression.”
The others sucked in their breath. All the oxygen seemed to go out of the room.
“Too far,” Margaret said to the gnome, pursing her lips. “Too far, even for you.”
Gavin shrugged, stamped his foot three times, and disappeared. Karl noted it was a clean relocation. Not even a lingering puff of smoke. Even so, Karl would have to speak to the gnome about being a show-off.
Xavier muttered under his breath, “I’ll never get used to that.”
They all filed out past the mayor’s subordinate. Karl was the last to leave, and checked that the door was locked.
He stayed back and stood in the hallway with the mayor’s lackey, Alistair What’s-his-name. He placed a fatherly hand on the fellow’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes.
“My subordinates talk a tough game, but they do care about this town,” Karl said. “It’s just that we’ve had so many false alarms lately.”
Alistair nodded. “I understand perfectly. We’re all exhausted and on edge from these drills.”
“Level with me, son. Is this another drill? A training exercise?”
“No, sir.” He winced. “Not that I know of.”
“Is it true the DWM has an artificial intelligence running their security system?”
Alistair’s eyes widened. “How did you—” He cut himself off. “Sir! I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of any security systems.”
“So, you’re not at liberty to discuss whether or not it’s the AI software triggering all these false alarms we’ve been having?”
Alistair’s forehead beaded with sweat.
Karl nodded. That sweat was more than enough to confirm his theory. Following the incident with the third floor at City Hall, the Department of Water and Magic had stepped up their timeline for implementing their new computer software.
Karl knew very little about computer programming—he could barely figure out where his emails were going when they disappeared into folders—but he did know one thing about the DWM’s security system. It was software, and yet it was not.
He’d seen the blueprints in the mayor’s office. She had left them in plain sight. In plain sight... inside a folder, inside a locked filing cabinet, inside a locked office. But he had seen them with his naked eyes, when he’d been looking around for some information about departmental budget cuts.
He had not taken a photo of the blueprints with his phone—it might have been the clever thing to do, but it would also have placed evidence of his harmless office break-in on “the cloud,” or “the server,” or wherever it was the picture dots from his phone got stored.
However, despite the lack of a photo to remind him, he remembered the details of the blueprint clearly.
The DWM’s new artificial intelligence ran on a computer that was mostly cords, cables, and circuit boards. The usual computer stuff. Except this one had a cooling system of tubes filled with black scarabyce blood. And, at the center of the central processing unit, there was a heart. A beating heart. Salvaged from one of those person-eating Droserakops plants, or animals, or whatever they were.
In a handwritten note, the architect of the blueprints stressed that the heart was a safety feature, and not evil at all. If anything were to go wrong with the AI, there was a fail-safe to keep Codex from infecting the internet. The system could be shut down by manually disconnecting the beating heart.
That made perfect sense to Karl. For all he knew, every electronic device had a tiny beating heart inside of it. Why else would the darn things randomly shut down or inexplicably die without so much as a warning?
Karl headed home, his thoughts turning to what he would have for his first dinner, then his second dinner, and both desserts.
Chapter 24
ZARA RIDDLE
The object-location spell pulled me all the way to the Wisteria Police Department.
Then the trail went cold. I tried to find the thread again, the magical thread pulling me along, but it was like trying to remember a dream in the morning while the dream is being recalled back to the Dream Warehouse.
Where to next? Should I head home and wait by the phone? Boring.
I paced in front of the WPD entrance, doing some serious soul searching. Was it really the object-location spell drawing me there, or something else? Was my crush on a certain silver-eyed detective messing with my magic?
Or could my compulsion to be there his doing? His kind did have powers over the minds of others—powers he’d been vague about.
I took a seat on one of the concrete planters outside the front doors. I twisted my body to look at the plants, and touched the green leaves sprouting in the box. These planter boxes could use some love, I thought. Geraniums are fine, but...
My mind flooded with Latin names for plants.
Hello, Tansy Wick.
The spirit of Tansy Wick wasn’t actually there. She had moved on months ago, but some of her residue remained, haunting me. The plants had brought the echoes back. I’d sat on the edge of that same concrete planter not long ago, and I’d done something that seemed logical at the time. I’d informed a ghost that she was dead. The results had not been pretty. The spirit’s rage had knocked me unconscious, and given my aunt quite the scare.
But now, on a sunny summer evening, the memory felt distant and contained.
Because it was contained.
Thanks to my rezoning spell, where I’d rezoned myself as a library of sorts, and the visiting ghosts as books, I was now impervious to full possession. Some others in the magical community had expressed concern that the spell might have unintended side effects. But so far, everything was working out.
I rubbed some velvety geranium petals between my fingers. They were as red as fresh blood. Had I solved my ghost-possession problem only to encounter a whole new problem? The one in w
hich I was attracted to a supernatural being who could be my undoing, who could suck my remaining witch powers right out of me? That had to be the reason why witches were, as Maisy had informed me, drawn to bloodsuckers like, well... like my cat Boa was drawn to deli ham.
They were bad for us.
Bentley could be my undoing.
So what if he is? The question whispered through my mind.
So what if he did take away my powers? Life had been easier since my rezoning. I’d been happier than ever lately.
What if I could be even happier without any powers at all? I could focus on being a librarian. I could focus on parenting Zoey—not that she needed me much. I could find new hobbies, or go back to scuba diving lessons and take the next level.
Sitting in the sunshine, I lost myself in daydreams of a normal Zara Riddle, living a normal life, knowing about magic but without magic of her own. Without all the responsibilities that came with it.
CLIP-CLOP CLIP-CLOP.
The approach of a hoofed creature startled me from my thoughts.
I looked up to find that the clip-clop sound wasn’t coming from a goat or a small pony, as it had sounded, but a woman in hard-soled shoes. She was compact in build, in her forties, with a head full of frizzy, gray hair.
She was Margaret Mills, one of the few people in Wisteria I dreaded bumping into.
Every time I’d seen the woman and she’d seen me, something unpleasant had happened. The first time we met, she’d chewed me out for wearing fur—even though the fur was very much alive, and also my father. She’d also blamed me and my family for a bad day on the mini golf range.
I’d avoided her successfully a few times, but we had met up again three days earlier, on Friday. She had been picking up Thai food at Kin Khao at the same time I’d been there. Mrs. Meesang accidentally shorted Margaret’s takeout order, and Margaret blamed me for the mix-up. Me! Simply for being there at the same time she was.
I grabbed a twig from the geraniums and rubbed my thumb over it. I could cast a glamour spell to hide myself as a bush. If I acted quickly, without hesitation...
Wisteria Witches Mysteries Box Set 3 Page 74
