Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 2

  I jumped up, too, realizing I was in breach of professional etiquette, sitting down on the job, and smiled at the newcomer.

  “Welcome to Auclair Tea,” I said.

  “I already welcomed him,” Lucy said in a sing-song voice, dancing away from the table.

  I glared after her just before she disappeared into the kitchen and caught a bit of shine from her ears. New earrings, and if looks didn’t deceive me, that was the glitter of a diamond. Where on earth could she afford…

  “Hi,” the man said, drawing me back to him. “I was wondering if you could help me. You see, I need some tea, and a lovely lady to serve it to me. And a cup of soup. Do you know anywhere around here I could get something like that?”

  I supposed it speaks to my minor insecurities that my first reaction was to think for a second about where he could get a service like that, then I realized, with a minor shock, that I was being flirted with. Gosh… my brain froze, wondering how to react to flirting. Then it started to tell me I’d waited too long to react, and now I was going to look like a weirdo myself.

  Do an old standard, don’t think just giggle.

  I giggled, and waved a hand at him, and said, “Go on.”

  He smiled, and leaned back in his chair, which I think meant he thought he’d been successfully flirted back with and could now relax. I put a menu in front of him, pointed out the different teas we had available and promised to be right back with a cup of the rice soup that was today’s chalkboard special. I’d been experimenting with soups for a few weeks and had two that I could make with enough confidence that I could sell them to the general public: my vegetarian rice soup, which was an old recipe of Grand-Mere Auclair, and a split-pea that I’d copied from the Internet.

  I was hoping to come up with a clam chowder that would be worth a look, but my soup experiments had to go by the board when the Grainer-Tarkington wedding had come to me. I’d catered events before, but only in-store. To be ready with hot teas, fresh sandwiches and pastries and dips and sauces and creams all in some place 10 miles from my kitchen was a feat I had yet to fully comprehend. Soups were out, baking was in.

  When I came out of the kitchen with soup and tea on a tray, I could see Mr. Handsome wasn’t in his seat anymore. He was bent down near the Groves, talking to the ladies about their elaborate animal designs. I couldn’t quite hear what he said, but it made Kari Grove laugh so loud she flailed her arms back, and one knitting needle planted itself right in the head of one of Lana’s monkey brothers. Lana shrieked, and then she started laughing.

  Lucy leaned over the front counter, and watched all of this with a sly little smile.

  “What are you grinning about?” I said poking her shoulder.

  She stood up straight and blushed, slightly.

  “Oh nothing, I was just looking. At nothing, never you mind,” she said, then she whirled around and swooped into the kitchen.

  “Ah, my repast,” Handsome said when he looked up and saw me there, tray in hand. “Ladies, I’m going to have to leave you now, though it breaks my heart.”

  Like a gaggle of hens, the Groves all clucked at him as he stepped away, then began to whisper and smile at each other. He had sat back at his table by the time I’d reached it and watched me the entire time he put the napkin in his lap.

  “I think you’re a flirt,” I said, giving him a look of disapproval I certainly did not feel.

  “Just like to make myself, and everyone around me, feel at home. Makes everything in life go easier,” he said, leaning forward after I set down the soup. He wafted a hand over the soup, bringing the curls of steam that lifted from it up to his nose. “Hmm, there’s some rosemary in this, isn’t there?”

  “There’s all kinds of secrets that you’re not going to get to know,” I said, pouring his tea. I set down a little pitcher of cream, and he immediately picked it up and poured it into the cup, filling the thing almost to the brim.

  “Who knows what I’ll learn and what I won’t? I can be very persuasive,” he said, and he grinned.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said, not quite sure what I meant. Talking to Mr. Handsome wasn’t the best way to keep coherent thoughts going through my mind. He was a living distraction.

  “We’ll see about that,” he repeated, then he sipped his tea. “When? When will we see about that? Tonight? Dinner and a movie, when you’re done here.”

  My mouth about dropped open and I noticed the complete absence of click-click from the table over. I looked back to see all four Groves staring at me intently, a look of delighted eagerness on their faces. With those needles in their hands and those smiling expressions, they suddenly looked a little sinister. And that tiny sour note brought me right back from the brink of saying, “Yeah, sure.”

  “I have a lot to do tonight, and I do not know who you are. For all I know,” I said, walking back to the kitchen with the tray balanced in my hand, “You’re the big bad wolf.”

  “Awoo,” he said, and I disappeared behind the door.

  “Awoo,” I repeated, suddenly feeling myself out of breath and a little weak at the knee.

  It’s not like I get flirted at every day, or… ever, anymore. The tea shop was not a hot spot for single guys, and my nightlife consisted of being exhausted or working on magic stuff with my familiar despite being exhausted. The last time I had gone out to a bar, it had been as part of an investigation, and I was forced to drink weak beer while keeping a low-profile next to an undercover journalist.

  But that was the closest thing I’d had to a date since I moved back to Lafay, which should have made me very sad. But instead, it made me immediately suspicious. This kind of thing, handsome guy dropping in from nowhere and suddenly making all these googly eyes at Mimi wasn’t what happened to me. There had to be an ulterior motive.

  Something sinister.

  I needed to find out what, and that meant I needed my spy. Unfortunately, he’d gone crazy just about 10 minutes ago and chased out the other weirdo who had stopped by my shop, a shop which had suddenly become very popular with the fellas.

  “That’s really impressive,” Lucy said, breaking me out of the non-magical but still powerful little spell that had been cast over my mood.

  “What is?” I said.

  “The way you’re keeping that teapot on the tray, when it’s dipping down like that.”

  “Huh?” I said, then saw what she was talking about. Right at the moment when the porcelain, an antique handed down to me from my grandmother, a beautiful little decorated tea pot barely hung on the edge of a tray that, in my inattention, I’d allowed to dangle from my hand, completely off balance.

  Then, just as I started to right it, the tea pot gave up hanging on and fell.

  An instant of panic grabbed me, and then my mind shoved that panic right down, put it somewhere I could deal with it later, when there was time. At the moment, I had a lovely piece of my family’s legacy to keep intact. My focus went to the space of hard white tile on the floor of my kitchen, and imagined that space to not be hard fired material, but instead to be a cloud.

  Not a real cloud, but a puffy cartoon cloud. Something that a rich old tea pot would harmlessly settle into. And I said, in a whispered word, “soft”, and snapped my fingers.

  The tea pot hit the ground with a soft thud, and settled there like it had been tossed on a white bedspread.

  I picked it up, put the pot on the counter, then set the tray down. Finally, I remembered I had to breathe, so I started doing that, too.

  “Wowser,” Lucy said. “That was awesome.”

  “It was me saving a tea pot from my own stupid mistake. Nothing that awesome about it,” I said, feeling a little winded. It wasn’t much of a magical trick, but even the simplest spells can take a real physical toll, especially if you’re not fully prepared when you cast them. This was on the spur of a moment, and it was like doing a complicated physical move without stretching first. The muscles worked, but they were making me pay for it.

  “Yo
u have to tell me how. Right now, impromptu lesson. I thought you needed, like, all kinds of things to do magic. That you couldn’t just snap your fingers and have it work. It needed rituals and focuses and voodoo dolls and mumbo jumbo.”

  “Yes, you do, but…” And I was ready to launch into an entire spiel about how this kitchen, having been worked in by Gand-Mere for so long, was filled with her magics and her special little tricks, things that she had built up over years. I was sure she had lost a pot or two on the tile down there, so she had a spell at the ready for turning the hard tile into a soft surface that things could bounce off harmlessly.

  But explaining that was complicated, because I knew Lucy couldn’t… how could I put it? She could not hear the spells the way I could. I had been teaching her about magic ever since I found out she had been doing it on her own, and had nearly gotten in serious trouble. The lessons had been frustrating. I’d showed her precisely what to do in the few spells we’d worked out: making a potion for Kashmir’s hairballs, using the spell that opened the back doors to the kitchen (which automatically locked and kept closing on me). But she could only do them if she copied me, precisely. I had figured those things out pretty much all on my own.

  Lucy didn’t have the feel for magic I did, which made me sad on a number of levels. I heard magic, the way I supposed some people who were composers could hear music in their head, and then put it out in their fingers. But we’d keep trying… I guess.

  I didn’t speak a word of this, of course, because Lucy was my cute little sister who needed as much encouragement as I could give her, lest she fall into a dark mood and make her magic even worse. So I just smiled, breathed a little heavily because I was, after all, tired, and turned back to the front.

  “The Groves are probably rioting for more tea now,” I said, and I went to refill the tea pot, but just as I moved toward it, I heard a strange, piercing “Yaowl!” from right outside the back door. With a whoosh of air, the back doors flew open, and the handsome black cat who was equal parts blessing and plague on my existence sauntered through, gave us both a look of feline haughtiness, then sat back on his haunches.

  “Work to do. Close the tea shop. You,” he said to Lucy. “You get out of here.”

  “What?” Lucy said, irritated. “Uh-uh, if there’s neat magic a-doings a-happening, I want to be a-here.”

  Kashmir looked at her pout, and yawned.

  Lucy crossed her arms, not to be outdone, but I knew how this would end. The cat would win. Cats always win.

  “Kashmir, I’m open for another hour. What can’t wait?” I said, looking down at the little feline. He had that cat way of looking at you like he knew all the secrets you wanted to keep for yourself, and plenty more for good measure.

  “That man who was in here, with the parcel?”

  “Yeah, the cheapskate who didn’t pay for his tea.”

  “He was carrying a book.”

  Kashmir looked like we should have both been flattened on our rear ends by this stunning revelation and was annoyed that it hadn’t had the required effect.

  “So?” I said.

  “A magic book,” Kashmir said. “A book of magic.”

  I was still waiting for the punchline when the implications hit me square on the noodle.

  “I’ll close up in five minutes,” I said, and rushed out to the front of the store.

  Chapter 3

  I had almost forgotten Mr. Handsome when I rushed into the front of the tea shop, I had been so carried away by Kashmir’s news. A book, a book of magic. Those weren’t things that you could buy in stores - any ones you can find are fake. They were things that were passed down in families, or hidden for generations. Or burned.

  There weren’t any other fates for magic books, and nobody was making more of them. And the most important possession my Grand-Mere had owned was the Grimoire of Circe. When our parents had made a strong stand— that my sisters and I weren’t going to be caught dead anywhere near the witching trade, Grand-Mere made the decision to hide the book. And then she made the decision not to tell anybody about it.

  I only knew it existed because Kashmir had told me, back when I thought he was just some talking cat (an odd enough thing on its own.) Now I knew the he was a familiar, a powerful link to the world of magic as well as a link back to my grandmother, and all of the talent and power she could pass down to me.

  So however annoying the cat was, I knew when it came to things like books of magic, I had to take him completely on the level, and drop everything when he said it was important.

  Even if that meant telling Mr. Handsome that there would certainly be no movie and dinner with Mimi tonight… but maybe if he was still in town and he was free tomorrow, and if he’d go for a walk in the gardens rather than a movie because new movies were too loud and gave me a headache and…

  I could invent all the fancy conversations in the world I wanted, but I wouldn’t have anyone to tell them to, because he was gone. His table was empty, as was his tea cup and soup bowl. Fifteen dollars in cash (way more than that combo cost) sat there, a poor substitute for his smile and voice.

  I sighed, the only sound in the place besides the customary clicking of the Groves’ knitting.

  “Ladies…” I started.

  “I didn’t know Mimi was dumb,” Lana said, casually.

  I glared at her, but she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to her sisters, who were all nodding.

  “Flighty, I would have said. And too serious for her own good, but not dumb.”

  “Hey, I’m right here,” I said. “And how can you be both flighty and too serious?”

  “Not a complicated thinker,” said a third sister. “Certainly sweet, but I didn’t know she was dumb.”

  “If you all don’t stop this, I’m gonna start… I don’t know. Getting mad, and stuff! All kinds of stuff!” I said, practically jumping up and down.

  “She jumps up and down a lot, too,” Lana said. “Not the sign of great intelligence.”

  “This is getting mean,” I said.

  Finally, Tina, the third sister, looked up from the knitting and looked me in the eye. “We were just trying to understand how someone could let the handsomest thing that ever walked in this town go with barely a bat of her eyelashes.”

  “Well, I was… that is… closing time. Everybody out. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t knit here!” I said, clapping my hands, making a ruckus and doing whatever I could to distract from the growing blush I felt rising on my cheeks. These ladies were supposed to be my friends. Or at least well-wishers.

  They took the boot with generous good humor, used to me having occasionally irregular hours for all of my “odd habits”. I’d never told them what I do with my apparently copious spare time, and they never asked. That Grand-Mere was a witch was another one of the town’s open secrets, but it was still not something anybody talked about. I liked to think this wasn’t out of embarrassment (which my parents worked hard to instill in us three girls about the witches in our family history) and more out of a sense of shared camaraderie.

  A secret you keep from someone can be a shame. A secret you keep with somebody, that’s a bond. And so I took the knowing looks from the Groves to be something we understood between each other, without having to talk.

  I was glad they understood, ‘cause I had no idea what in the heck I was doing.

  The instant I turned the “open” sign to “closed” Kashmir was in the dining area, on the counter, violating health regulations with the look of smug cat-isfaction on his face that showed he knew it. And then he tapped a paw - an impatient, very un-cat-like gesture.

  “Come on, your finding spells are weak, girl,” he said, bristling and pacing with nervous energy. “A book, a book!”

  “But is it the Grimoire?” I said, suddenly feeling tight in the chest with nerves or anticipation… something.

  Kashmir practically spat. “Bah, of course not! If it was I would have chased the fella down all the way to whereve
r he was staying. As it was, he crossed in front of the Jiggs and… well…”

  Kashmir suddenly sat down, and licked one of his paws to clean his face, looking away from me while he did it.

  “The terrier,” I said, smiling. He paused for an instant, mid-lick, pointedly did not look at me, and resumed cleaning.

  Only after a moment of this did he say, in a small voice, “Bull terrier.”

  The notorious Jiggs sister were my rivals and nemesis every which way - in business, in personality… and in witchcraft. They had been a nuisance and a bother, responsible very directly for the tea shop closing out under Grand-Mere. But I had thought until recently that that had been the extent of their nefariousness.

  It turns out that they also have been engaging in secretive, dangerous magic all over town. Stealing spells, setting up spies all over the place. Worst of all, they were selling magical secrets. If there was a bigger red flag A-1 bad thing for witches to do, I didn’t know about it. Not just potions or trinkets, but actual written down spells for other people to use.

  Problem was, there weren’t any witch police I could call and have fly in on brooms with red and blue lights, sirens blaring. There wasn’t a witch jail to throw them into. So if somebody was going to save Lafay from their bad magic… it looked like it would have to be me. Boo.

  I was even making a little headway in that direction, and had sent Kashmir on some dangerous missions sneaking into the Jiggs’ cafe, in back where they kept their secrets. It was also where they kept a nasty little Terrier who had gotten a small piece of Kashmir the last time he went inside. And from the way my familiar avoided that place, he seemed sure the dog had acquired a taste for him.

  “So, you followed him a little while, and then he got away. What are we supposed to do?” I said, hands on my hips.