Library Cat Magical Mysteries Box Set (Books 1-3), page 2
Instead of apologizing, he dug his heels in, telling me to relax and it wasn’t a big deal. I was so furious I gave him a seven-day ban.
“I’ll see you later this afternoon,” he said, smiling smugly. He was a portly man, his graying hair slicked back in what I hoped was a healthy amount of pomade, but what I feared was actually its own grease.
“No,” I said. “You cannot come for three more days.”
“Nonsense,” he said. The volume of his voice was increasing, and a few people stopped to watch the scene unfold. “I have important research to do and a deadline for an article.”
“You should have thought of that before you violated library policy. You still have three days left on your suspension of privileges,” I said.
“That’s a fancy way of describing it,” he said. “But I’d expect no better from a small-minded witch on a power-trip such as yourself. I understand. It’s not your fault. This is the only small bit of power you have in your otherwise empty existence. It’s only natural for you to wring it for all you can.”
I was stunned speechless.
“On second thought,” I said. I was seething. Kong sidled up next to me and tried to wrap his tail around my ankle, but I shooed him away. “Your privileges are hereby permanently revoked. If you want to appeal the matter, you can do so at the Academy meeting next month.”
I knew he’d get his privileges back. I was truly on a power-trip, but this guy was so arrogant I couldn’t stand it.
It wasn’t just me. Any time Professor Florian was at a shop or a restaurant, he was rude to the staff. He was condescending to his students. His wife was a pathetic, cowering woman, always walking on eggshells.
The worst part of it? I knew I was wrong. I knew he’d baited me into this explosive burst of anger—and I could do nothing about it.
“Whatever you say,” he said, pulling back his thin lips away from yellowing teeth. “Enjoy your time at the Archives while you still can. You’re not going to be working there much longer.”
He turned on his heel and walked briskly down the sidewalk.
What had I done?
The library is my whole life. Without it… I can’t even imagine. I’ve worked there since my days as an Academy student, and I’ve been Chief Archivist for almost fifteen years; when I was chosen at age thirty, I was the youngest archivist in our coven’s history.
“Good one,” Kong said.
“Shut up.”
“He’s probably exaggerating,” Kong said. “He probably can’t get you fired.”
“Probably?” I repeated.
“I’m not going to lie to make you feel better,” Kong said.
I sighed. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter 3
I retrieved my niece Sophie (only a few minutes late) and we stopped at the pet store. Kong had gone wandering off, and I had to take advantage of my time away from him. He was struggling with a hairball but too proud to admit it. That beautifully soft and fluffy fur had plugged up his works. Usually he could hack up his hairball and continue with his life. But this one was stubborn. Every time he tried to spit it up, he just left a puddle of puke on the floor (usually on the rug or carpet… never on the wood or tile). He’d been puking up a storm the last few days trying to get it out, but to no avail. He needed medical assistance.
“Wow,” Sophie said. “Look at all the cool animals!”
Wren is the owner of Monkey Business and really does keep a fully-stocked menagerie.
“Who’s this?” Wren asked.
“My niece,” I said. “My older sister’s daughter, Sophie.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sophie said and stuck out her hand to shake.
“What lovely manners,” Wren said.
“I like your tattoo,” Sophie said. “My mom says I can get one when I’m forty. How old are you? Fifty?”
Wren pursed her lips and I couldn’t tell if she was holding back laughter or tears.
“I take it all back,” Wren said. In truth, Wren is about thirty. She’s got punky black hair with swooping side-swept bangs that cover one eye. She favors black and leather and must really be committed to the image because we live in the Arizona desert, where black and leather do not suit the climate at all.
Sophie bounded down the aisles, looking at the animals.
“What do you need, Francie?” Wren asked.
“You have something for hairballs?” I asked. “Kong’s been puking everyday trying to get one out.”
“You gotta brush him more often,” Wren said. “And feed him the hairball-formula kibble.”
“Neither one of those things is going to happen,” I said. “As it is, I’m going to have to slip the tablet into his steak tartare and hope he doesn’t notice.”
“You ever think the steak tartare is what’s causing his hairballs?”
“They’re hairballs. Not steak balls.”
Wren got me a box of something and told me to give him three tablets a day. “Though he’ll probably get suspicious of all that steak tartare,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Tell him you got a bulk package on sale so he doesn’t wonder.”
“You think that finicky cat is going to eat discount steak tartare?” I asked her.
“Point taken,” she said.
I took my niece back to the donut shop to get the box of books (and we may or may not have gotten the last two daily special chocolate peanut butter donuts).
“Do I get to see the Archives?” Sophie asked.
“Just real quick while I take the box inside. I’ll give you a proper tour tomorrow.” Truth is, I love showing someone the Archives and want to take my time with Sophie tomorrow. The building is nothing special from the outside, but once you step through the front doors, it’s like you’re transported to another dimension.
(In fact, there is some spatial-increase magic involved, to make the interior of the building large enough to house the vast stores of books.)
Towering rows of books go back as far as the eye can see. Huge windows face the south wall, each one fitted with overstuffed wingback chairs perfect for reading. Antique wrought iron candelabras hang from the ceiling, retrofitted with magical bulbs that emit the exact wavelength of light that reduces eyestrain.
“It’s amazing!” she said. “But I might get lost.”
“We have locators in each section,” I assured her. Getting lost is a problem. The first thing I did when I took over was to install locators throughout the library. They’re small stones magically bound to one large stone in the lobby. All you have to do is pick one up and it will pull you towards the mother stone. Easy as can be.
“Yar!” A thundering voice boomed through the quiet stacks.
“What was that?” Sophie almost jumped out of her formal buckled boots.
“That…” I said, not sure how to explain. Not everyone could see and hear the ghosts. My niece could because the talent (if you want to call it that) was probably hereditary. “That was Captain Ahab.”
“From the book?” she asked. “Or are you playing the movie? I think there’s a remake streaming on WitchFlix right now.”
Sophie was right; a Moby Dick remake was streaming on WitchFlix right now. It rekindled curiosity for the old Herman Melville book… and brought the ghost of Captain Ahab back to life.
You see, the Magical Archives is haunted.
But not by regular ghosts. That would be too easy.
It’s haunted by the ghosts of literary characters.
“Portside! Thar she blows. There be trouble brewin’ where angels fear to tread. Lash down the mizzenmast, mateys, we be in for a stormy night. Ahoy!”
“Let me go see what he wants,” I said.
“Is he going to harpoon you?” Sophie asked.
“He’s the captain, not one of the harpooneers,” I assured her. Though in truth, I wasn’t so sure. Ahab was the most unstable ghost to haunt the library in quite some time. I wished there was something I could do to put his spirit to rest—for his peace and my own.
“Ahab?” I called tentatively. He has so much residual vim in his apparition, it’s not out of the question that he could manifest a harpoon. “It’s Francie! Where are you again?”
“Take heart, my dearie, and gird the prow. For this be a sight not fit for a lady.”
I followed the sound of his voice up three flights of stairs, trying to make sense of his garbled mariner vernacular.
But when I saw it, it all made sense.
In the middle of the non-fiction section, on the floor, was Professor Florian. A paper cup lay next to him, the puddle of coffee spreading as I watched.
There was no question about it. The side of his head was bleeding from a ghastly wound.
He was dead.
And someone killed him.
Chapter 4
I heard the sound of the boots on the pavement before I could see them. I knew they were coming, of course.
The Werewolf Law Enforcement Brigade.
The marching got louder until it reached almost deafening proportions. It only stopped when the front door swung open.
The man (shifter, to be precise) who stood in the doorway was about fifty-five years old. He was muscular and stocky, but without a spare ounce of fat on him. The tip of one ear was missing. He had a wild, bushy beard that showed more than a few gray hairs, and there were some grays threaded through his mat of chest hair as well. The only places on his chest where hair didn’t grow were the shiny twisted seams of scar tissue.
That’s right, the Werewolf Law Enforcement Brigade performs its civic duty shirtless. They’d probably do it in the buff, in fully shifted form, if decorum allowed it.
Werewolf shifters have an excellent sense of smell. They use it to detect the residual vim of a magic user after a crime is committed. When a witch (or other magic practitioner) uses magic, she must harness her life energy—or vim as those in our coven call it—and use it to control the environment. That’s all magic is. Witches have a mutation that allows us to do it, but it’s only on the female chromosome.
(And while males can use limited magic, they cannot harness their own vim to do so, since they do not have the necessary mutation. If they want to do magic, they must store magical energy in a special stone called a lacrima. Usually a wife or mother recharges the lacrima, not unlike an allowance.)
If any magic was used in the commission of a crime, the Werewolves are able to smell it. As a result, most crime is not committed using magic, but with more traditional means.
Like in the case of Professor Florian. I’m no forensic scientist, but it looked like someone bashed him on the head.
The Werewolves went to work quickly, sniffing the shelves, the crime scene—
And me.
Rend Redclaw, the Werewolf pack leader, approached me without so much as a how-do-you-do. Despite his abundant body hair, he kept his head shaved down to the scalp. His dark eyes bore into my own, but I didn’t look away.
“Francie,” he said, nostrils flaring in a way I wasn’t sure he even noticed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. He stood very close to me, trying to suss out my guilt with his extrasensory talents.
Take a deep breath, a voice said inside my head. And when you get home, a nice cold shower. It was the voice of Kong. My familiar spirit can communicate telepathically, inserting his comments directly into my head so no one else can hear.
I’m fine, I responded in the same telepathic manner. I am not flustered in the least.
Tell that to your stomach, Kong said. It’s doing backflips like it’s auditioning for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad.
I hated to admit it, but Kong was right. Rend Redclaw was a visceral, macho ball of pure pheromones—and the primal lure was not lost on me.
“I came into the library to drop off a box of books,” I told him. “Can we sit down?” Truth is, I needed to get a table between me and Rend. He was too close. I’d known him my whole life, always admired his coarse good looks. There was a time even when I considered him a friend. But in our town, the shifters kept to themselves. They definitely didn’t date witches.
But that was a long time ago, Kong said. Times have changed.
“Shut up,” I muttered.
“What was that?” Rend asked.
“Over here,” I said and pointed to a small study table. I took a seat and gestured for him to sit in the opposite chair. Good. Breathing room.
“You were saying,” he prompted. “You came in to deliver a box? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing,” I said. “The door was locked as it should have been. Nothing was moved. No messes or—what do you call it? Signs of a struggle. Until I found him. I’d say that’s a pretty big sign of struggle.”
Rend grunted. “How did you find him?”
“Just like that,” I said. “On the ground. I didn’t move him. Didn’t get within ten feet of him.”
“No,” he said. “How did you know to look for him? He’s on the third floor. You said you were dropping off boxes for a book drive.”
“The book drive for the retirement home,” I said. “Where I used to read to your mother.” For the briefest of moments, his eyes flicked away.
“Why did you take the heavy box of books all the way up three flights of stairs?”
“I didn’t,” I said. This was where it was going to get tricky. Not everyone knows about the ghosts in the Archives. Not everyone can see them, though most people are somewhat attuned to their presence. Visitors complain about being cold or hearing noises. I often catch people quickly turning their head, as if they’re trying to see something they spotted out of the corner of their eye. I had no idea if Rend knew about the ghosts and didn’t want to bring it up. I was already under suspicion, and the last thing I needed was for him to think I was making up wild stories to mask my guilt.
“Then why did you go upstairs?” he asked.
“Kong told me,” I lied.
Leave me out of this, my cat said.
“The cat was in the Archives during the murder?”
“No,” I said. “He came out with me to the donut shop. But when I went to get my niece, he wandered off. He comes and goes as he pleases. He must have come back to the Archives right after the murder.”
“I’m going to need to talk to the cat,” Rend said.
“It’s your funeral,” I said. I called for Kong and he leapt onto the table and answered Rend’s questions. Kong must have satisfied him because Rend got up and continued his investigation.
“You could have just told him about the ghosts,” Kong said. “He probably knows about them. He’s a shifter. He’s attuned to such things.”
“Too late now,” I said.
“Where’s my favorite sister!”
Oh no. On a good day, I barely have enough mental energy to deal with her.
“Hello, Whitney,” I said.
Whitney is one of my Academy interns.
And also, technically, my sister.
Half-sister, to be exact, even though she’s not old enough to buy a pint of firefruit ale at a local bar.
It’s a long story.
Okay, not that long. My parents divorced and my father remarried a younger woman and Whitney is the fruit of their union.
I would hate her more if she wasn’t so nice, so honest, so genuine. It wasn’t her fault that my parents’ marriage fell apart and my father was enticed by a woman half his age.
No, that would be my father’s fault. And my mother’s fault. Whitney’s mother’s fault too, if you’re keeping score—and I definitely am not.
“What’s going on?” she asked. She put her book bag down and stared at all the Werewolves.
“Someone was killed,” I said. “Professor Florian.”
“Professor Florian?” she gasped. “What? Who? How? Here?”
“My exact thoughts,” I said. “I don’t know much. I left for about an hour, and when I came back, he was dead.”
“Did it have anything to do with the huge fight you had on Canal Street?”
I tried really hard not to blow up. I really tried. But it had been one of those days. “Huge fight? Are you kidding me? That smug jerk waltzes around town like he’s the grand high poobah and treats everyone without a PhD like we’re all a bunch of annoying flies buzzing around his head. Fight? Is that what everyone’s saying? Because he broke the rules, had the nerve to pretend he didn’t, insulted me, then threatened to have me fired!”
When I finished my little tirade, I realized that the whole Werewolf Law Enforcement Brigade was staring at me. I was out of breath and trembling with rage.
“I didn't mean—” Whitney started to say.
“I know,” I said. “And I’m not mad at you.”
“You know what this means,” she whispered.
“What?” I said. “That everyone probably thinks I did it? That they won’t try to find the real killer when they can pin it on me? That I’m going to die in a jail cell?”
“No,” Whitney whispered. “It means that we have to find the real killer. It’s the only way to get people to shut up.”
I laughed. These kids. They thought everything was like a movie.
Then again…
“We’re going to need to stay awhile longer,” Rend said. “Go home. I’ll lock up personally.”
“How considerate of you,” I said through gritted teeth.
“It’s not personal, Francie,” he said. “Everyone’s a suspect.”
“And some people are more of a suspect than others,” I said.
“I’m going to get everything sorted out,” he said. “But in the meantime—”
“If you tell me, ‘don’t leave town,’ I’m going to lose it,” I said.
