Pawsitively Cursed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Or her,” he amended. “Was there anything else, Miss Blackwood? It’s going to be a long night for me. We’re only a couple hours into this thing.”

  As much as Amber had always dreaded her interactions with the chief in the past—thanks to his general distaste for her—this professional, officer-of-the-law tone was somehow more off-putting. She needed him to talk to her. They’d been developing some kind of a rapport a few weeks ago. It wasn’t like they were ever going to be friends, but they’d been civil. He’d confided in her. She wanted that back.

  “Are you really just going to pretend like nothing happened?” she asked.

  It occurred to Amber then that she’d lost patience with merely sweeping things under the rug, and hoping everything would work itself out if you wore blinders for long enough. She knew now, more than she ever had before, that ignoring what was right in front of you was sure to come back to bite you in the butt later.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Miss Blackwood.” But his voice had lowered a fraction, and then she heard a door open and close. In a tone a little sharper, he added, “This isn’t a good time.”

  She imagined him closed off in that little closet-sized interrogation room, his back turned to the cameras that were wedged into two corners of the ceiling. On some level, she knew her anger and frustration with her aunt was being redirected at the chief, but she plowed ahead anyway. “I know more about this murder than you do.”

  He gave a short laugh of disbelief. “Didn’t you just call here a second ago asking how the woman died? How can you know more than I do if you don’t even know the cause of death?”

  “I know who, not how.”

  He didn’t respond. She pictured his blonde brows pulling together, his mind whirling. Should I believe her? his mind must be saying. Should I even entertain the idea of listening to her when something about her is so monumentally off that I don’t even have the proper words to label it?

  “Can you meet me down at the station in fifteen minutes?” he asked, irritation evident in his tone. Irritation at her or himself, she couldn’t be sure.

  “I can be there in ten.” She disconnected before he could chastise her for potentially ignoring the speed limit.

  She called her sister.

  “Hello?” Willow whispered. She’d answered the call so quickly, Amber hadn’t even heard it ring. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, turning back onto Russian Blue. “I’m going to meet with Chief Brown now, though, so I don’t want you to storm the place when I haven’t sent a message every ten minutes.”

  “The same chief who saw you use your magic and has treated you like a leper ever since?” Willow was still whispering. Was she closed in the bathroom? Sitting on the steps leading up to the studio?

  “Yep, that one,” Amber said. “I need to fill out some paperwork to get Aunt Gretchen’s luggage back.”

  The lie had come easy.

  “I’m on your side, you know,” Willow said. “It’s you and me against the world, right? Don’t shut me out now too.”

  Amber wasn’t sure how Willow could always tell when she was lying. “I just need time to process this. It’s been a rough night for me.”

  “They were my parents too.”

  Amber’s eyes welled up. “I know, Will. I didn’t mean—”

  “We can talk about it in the morning,” Willow said.

  Before Amber could get out another half-formed apology, Willow had ended the call.

  Sighing to herself, Amber pulled her purse onto her lap and fumbled around inside until she successfully unzipped one of the inner pockets. There was only one item in this particular pocket: a small, rubber white cat. Her mother had given it to her when she was eight, and an orange one to Willow. With the tiny cat in hand—the tips of its ears smudged from spending most of its days in her purse—Amber placed it on the inner lip of the dashboard. The cat stood on all fours, a tiny smile on its face. “What do you have planned for me now?” its expression seemed to say.

  Amber tossed her purse back onto the passenger seat and started the car. The dashboard lights flicked on, the muted green illuminating the grooves decorating the cat’s body in a rough approximation of fur. The lines were barely visible now, though. The end of the cat’s tail was missing.

  While she drove, she cast the simplest glamour spell she knew. It was a rhyme her mother had taught Amber and Willow when they were very young, and their still-developing magic needed an outlet. It was one of the few spells her mother had taught them.

  “One by one, let’s have some fun. Two by two, let’s turn it blue.”

  The white cat’s “fur” flipped to blue. Seconds later, it turned back. The spell was weak, but it had kept Amber and Willow busy for hours as children. They’d spent even longer penning other rhymes in hopes they could get their cats to turn something other than blue, but they’d never been able to. Amber wondered now if the little rubber cats had been enchanted by her mother to only turn blue.

  It was the last thing Amber had left that had graced her mother’s fingertips.

  “One by one, let’s have some fun. Two by two, let’s turn it blue.”

  Over and over and over. From white to blue and back again.

  The small bursts of magic helped ease some of the tension that had been mounting with every emotional interaction she’d had tonight. She needed to dispel some of it, like slowly letting the air out of a balloon, before she met with the chief. She couldn’t imagine he’d be very forthcoming with information if she got so upset that all the furniture in the police station levitated on its own.

  The small bursts also helped clear her mind enough to formulate a plan for this discussion with Chief Brown. She needed him to accept that she had information about this case that was literally impossible for him to understand without her knowledge—as limited as it might be—of magic and witches.

  She just hoped she wouldn’t actually have to levitate furniture in order to get him to believe her.

  There was only one available spot in front of the station, and she angled her car into the diagonally aligned space, wedging herself between two cop cars. She plucked the rubber cat off her dashboard and slipped it back in her purse, zipping it safely inside.

  After releasing a long, slow breath, she stepped out into the cool night air. The streetlights reflected off the dormant blocks of emergency lights lining the cop cars’ hoods. It was quiet in this part of town in the late hours, even if other areas were currently teeming with Olaf Betzen-obsessed tourists. This area was populated by now-dark businesses and office buildings that were a flurry of activity during work hours. Now it felt like the dark streets of a ghost town.

  Amber flicked a glance toward the Edgehill Gazette office a few doors down, and she wondered if Connor and his drunk buddies were still at the Sippin’ Siamese. Had Jack stayed? Had he driven home after he dropped Connor off? Had he gone home with a nice girl who wasn’t on a cursed witch’s hit list?

  Blowing out one more calming breath, Amber willed herself to concentrate. She could worry about men later. Well, there was one she had to concentrate on, but thankfully her entanglements with him weren’t romantic.

  There were only a few people in the lobby of the station. An aggrieved-looking woman sat between two teenage boys who had their arms crossed, mouths pulled down. They were slouched on either side of her on the sad-looking sofa. On the other side of the small waiting area in one of the mismatched plastic chairs sat a very drunk man who looked like he’d either taken a tumble down a hillside or gotten into a bar brawl—and lost. He hummed tunelessly to himself, eyes closed and head swaying to a song only he could hear. Occasionally he would burst into raucous laughter. His hands were folded neatly in his lap.

  The woman sitting between the two boys—her sons, if Amber had to guess—kept shooting sidelong looks at the man whenever he erupted into unexplained chuckles.

  Amber walked up to the glassless window where Dolores, aka Sour Face, was p
erched inside her wooden box of a desk, gaze focused on a computer screen Amber couldn’t see. The clack of keys stopped when Amber approached, but Dolores’s frizzy blonde head didn’t turn.

  Before she could come up with something to say, she heard, “Amber!”

  A grinning Carl strode over. When he stopped a foot away, his mouth suddenly pinched and he scanned the area behind her. “Is your … sister here?”

  He said “sister” as if were a swear word, one which his mother would box him on the ear for uttering in polite company.

  Amber supposed he knew on some level that Willow had done something to make him abandon the strict orders given by the chief. She couldn’t imagine how confused he must have been when the spell had worn off, and suddenly he’d found himself at the front door of the Manx Hotel’s lobby, when he’d been on the stairs talking to Amber and Willow just a moment before.

  “Just me,” she said. “I wanted to talk to the chief. He’s expecting me.”

  “Sure thing,” Carl said, turning quickly on the ball of one foot, then motioning over his head. “Follow me!”

  Dolores’s clacking resumed.

  Amber turned left, heading after Carl in the opposite direction from the tiny closet-sized interrogation room. She’d been ushered into said room a few weeks ago, shortly after she’d literally run into the chief as she attempted to flee the morgue where Melanie’s body had been. The chief had been suspicious then that Amber had something to do with Melanie’s demise, and her scurrying out of the morgue like her behind was on fire hadn’t helped her case.

  It had been a month and half since Melanie died; it still felt like it had just happened. Some part of Amber was still waiting for Melanie to call and invite Amber to play cards while they talked and laughed and drank wine.

  But her friend was gone.

  As Amber and Carl walked, the ringing of phones was a persistent sound in the background, paired with the murmur of voices. No other officers roamed the hall. Amber wondered how many were putting in long hours tonight, trying to track down leads relating to the maid’s death.

  Amber still didn’t even know the woman’s name.

  They passed a handful of closed offices and interrogation rooms, then stopped at the end of the hall in front of a wooden door. At chest height rested a small black plaque with the chief’s name etched in muted gold. However, it was more mid-stomach height for Carl, given his tall, lanky frame. He grinned at her, then rapped enthusiastically on the door in a familiar and easily recognizable pattern.

  There was a slight pause before the chief said, in a mildly annoyed tone, “Come in, Carl.”

  Carl opened the door and gestured Amber in with a flourish. Once she’d stepped past him, one hand still on the knob, he said, “Hey, boss? How come you always know it’s me?”

  “You’re the only one who knocks that way, Carl,” he said, tone slipping past mildly annoyed territory and into “If you don’t leave soon, I’m going to strangle you” territory. Amber had a sneaking suspicion that they’d had some version of this conversation many times over.

  When Amber glanced back at Carl, he tipped his imaginary hat to her. “And that’s why he’s the chief, Amber. Excellent detective skills.” He said it without an ounce of sarcasm.

  The chief let out a gusty sigh.

  “See ya, boss!” Carl closed the door behind him.

  Amber took a seat in one of the chairs in front of the chief’s desk, tamping down her amusement at the man, who was now rubbing the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as if hit with a sudden migraine.

  While he pulled himself together, she surveyed the room, feeling oddly strange being in the chief’s private office after all these years. It almost felt like being invited into his house; an intimate space belonging to a man who had once treated her with outright loathing.

  She wondered if, after this meeting, that loathing would return tenfold.

  The left and right walls were covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Most were crammed with what looked like thick textbooks and even thicker binders. Law books? Manuals? She assumed they were full of dull topics like citations, traffic tickets, city ordinances, and permits. A few of the top shelves were lined with plaques and trophies.

  The back wall had a large window cut out of it, but the dark brown aluminum blinds covered up any hint of the world beyond it. A faint layer of dust coated them; Amber wondered when he’d last opened the window. Below that sat a short bank of filing cabinets, the top stacked with papers.

  The chief continued to massage his face behind a modest-sized mahogany desk that ate up most of the available floor space. A computer monitor sat in one corner. The other side was piled with papers and folders. A keyboard rested atop a wide rectangle of plastic, business cards and photographs lined up in neat rows underneath it. A framed picture of him and his family faced out, the three Browns grinning at her. The chief had a nice smile when he decided to share it. He stood with an arm around his wife’s waist, and a hand on his son’s shoulder. The Space Needle in Seattle reached toward the blue, cloudless sky in the background. Jessica had a hand on her belly, though she wasn’t showing yet in the photo.

  “When is Jessica due?” Amber heard herself ask before she realized she was going to.

  That snapped him out of his face massage, which had moved from the bridge of his nose to his temples. He glanced up at her, bleary-eyed, as if he’d just woken from a dream and couldn’t recall how either of them had gotten here. “Four weeks.”

  “That’s exciting,” she said, plastering on a smile. “Sammy looking forward to it?”

  “Sort of. He’s getting a sister. He keeps asking if we can trade her in for a toy truck if he doesn’t like her.”

  Amber laughed, easily imagining sweet little Sammy making his request with complete sincerity.

  The chief smiled wistfully to himself for a moment before clearing his throat and sitting a little straighter. “So, what did you want to talk to me about, exactly?” He folded his arms on his desk. Though he was talking to her, he wasn’t quite looking at her. He seemed to be focused on her nose, her forehead, a spot just to the right of her. “You say you have information about the attack on the maid that the department isn’t privy to?”

  Amber stared at him a moment. “Why can’t you look at me?”

  The accusation got him to finally make eye contact. His jaw clenched, and a vein in his forehead seemed to throb. Goodness. What did he think she would do, turn him into a toad? It took him a long time to finally say, “Based on what you said on the phone earlier, you know that I saw something … happen in your shop.”

  Her heart thrashed in her chest; he actually admitted it. “Yes. And … what do you think you saw?”

  “A very clever magic trick?” His right eye gave a slight twitch. She wasn’t sure if he’d blinked since he finally stopped avoiding her gaze. Then, in a rush, as if he’d been keeping this bottled up for weeks—which he probably had been—he said, “I had been across the street picking up a cake from Betty Harris and saw movement in your shop even though the majority of the lights were off. I peeked in, worried you might have a prowler, and then …”

  Amber chewed on her bottom lip, hands grasping the armrests of her chair so tightly, she was sure her knuckles were white. She didn’t dare tear her attention away from the chief to check.

  The chief leaned forward a little, shooting a quick glance at the door behind her, as if he wanted to confirm that they were still alone, and goofy Carl wasn’t loitering in the doorway, listening. “I saw you wave your hand over a dozen of those cat toys of yours and they all sprang to life. I told myself there had to be a remote control in your hand that I couldn’t see. Some master switch that turned them all on at once. But they were all doing different things. I told myself it had to be very clever programming. But then one started hopping around like it had a mind of its own and launched off the table.” Now that he’d started, his blue eyes wide and his blonde brows hiked toward his hair
line, he seemed unable to stop, though his tone was still hushed. “Then you just … reached out a hand and stopped the cat in mid-flight. I thought maybe it was some elaborate system of wires and string that I couldn’t see since it was so dark. But then that look you gave me when you realized you’d been caught.” He shook his head, a look of disbelief on his face. “That look is what sealed it for me.”

  Amber uncurled her hands from their death grip on the armrests, her fingers aching. The chief watched her hands closely, as if he thought they were loaded weapons. Perhaps that was how he saw them. “Sealed what, exactly?” She needed him to say it. Assuming he had the right word for it.

  “After seeing the trick with the toy cats, how you saved Maddie from slipping into the pond at Balinese Park …” He shook his head again. “The only word I have for what I’ve seen you do is … magic.”

  Amber’s eyes involuntarily closed, as if they wanted to shield her from whatever expression came with that admission from the chief. When she opened them again, his mouth was slightly agape. Clearly, some part of him had hoped she’d laugh in his face, tell him he was out of his mind. He knew her silence was as good as confirmation.

  If this went south, she told herself, she had a memory-erase spell primed and ready to go. She’d gotten the idea from Aunt Gretchen when she admitted she’d used a memory wipe on Alice’s mother a few days before the fateful night of the house fire. Amber could erase up to five minutes of his memory if it came down to it.

  At the moment, he looked at her as if she were an exotic animal that had just wandered into his office. Fascinated, but not scared. Yet.

  Just say it. See how he reacts. “That’s right.”

  He visibly swallowed.

  “It’s a family trait,” she said. “It’s passed down from generation to generation, just like eye color or a cleft chin.”

  He snorted derisively. “I hardly think you can compare the use of … of magic with having a cleft chin, Amber.”