Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Page 2

I turned with a great big smile that completely disappeared when I saw who it was.

  Sibyl stood right inside the door, her arms crossed and her expression just as cross, as she looked at me with cold disapproval.

  “Something I did?” I said, glancing at the Secret Angels, in the hopes Sibyl would get the hint and not shout at me from across the crowded room.

  She somehow darkened her already very dark expression, and strode over to me, not uncrossing her arms as she did so.

  “That Lucy of yours,” she said, saying the words through clenched teeth.

  “Hey, she’s both of our Lucys now,” I said. “We both have to—”

  “You’re her guardian, you’re the one that for the last few years was raising her,” she said, her voice slowing down as she went on. I got the sense she was picking her words very carefully so as not to say something that was going to make me defensive.

  Smart move, because when it came to Lucy and who was taking care of her when, things could get awfully sensitive. It isn’t that Sibyl didn’t offer to take her, back when our parents died… but she offered in just the way so I knew she wanted someone else to do it. All those years ago, she’d just had her own first child, and she was in no way ready to take on a teenager AND a baby at the same time.

  So I didn’t resent it for real. It was just some part of me thought maybe I should.

  “Do you know exactly what the circumstances are?” I said, sure that Sibyl probably knew them more thoroughly than I did. She pushed being a good, informed mom almost to the breaking point, where I wouldn’t put it past her to start bugging her kid’s rooms. Or their clothes.

  “I know she mouthed off in class to Mrs. Higginbottom, who is a sour puss at the best of times. One of the things you learn when you start seeing from the other side, Mimi, the teacher’s side, is that they don’t all get along with each other. They pretend to be a solid wall of adultness for the kids, but it’s not the case.”

  Hmm. Something in that statement rang like a bell to me, a pure, solid sound. The sound of truth.

  “I know,” I said quickly, and I did, but I’d never really thought of it that way. “So you mean there are some sensible teachers who hate Hagbutt as much as every single one of her students does?”

  “Hagbutt?” Sibyl said, with a sniff that was entirely too grown-up for her own good.

  “Yes, Hagbutt. It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Higgin becomes hag, and then bottom just takes care of itself.”

  “Yes, I understand the origin of your childish witticism,” she said with icy, corporate frigidity. “I just don’t understand why you’d use it. You’re certainly not going to use that language around my children.”

  “Good point. She’ll probably still be around when they end up in high school. Don’t want them to let it slip when they’re in her class, God forbid.”

  “Our tea,” one of the Groves said. I couldn’t tell which one, and whoever it was had immediately turned her focus back onto her cards, so I didn’t have anyone to give a dirty look to.

  “What are they doing?” Sibyl said, coming around the corner to pull out cups while I got the tea ready to pour.

  Say whatever I will about Sibyl — she’s too authoritarian. Too tough. Didn’t even want us opening up the tea shop to begin with. Keeps her husband in the dark when she doesn’t have to. Wow, I had plenty to say about her. But, say whatever I will, she’s reliable. So for the next couple of minutes we served the ladies as if we hadn’t just been having a low-key argument about raising children and respecting teachers and all the kinds of normal things people argue about in normal small towns.

  She never mentioned the cat that sashayed through the kitchen, defying my orders. I don’t think she’s said a single thing about Kashmir since I decided not to routinely throw him out every time he came inside. She pretended he didn’t exist. It would have sparked another argument to notice him, and we were full up today.

  Once the ladies were all served and munching away on small cakes, we got back to the kitchen and began again. I started setting up for the next round of tea the ladies would need in about twenty minutes. Sibyl watched me while I pulled out the various containers of loose-leaf tea, and shoveled out specific amounts.

  “Are they… gambling?” Sibyl asked, cocking her head back toward the ladies.

  “No. Not so I’ve noticed. Or maybe I’ve made it my business not to notice since that would probably be illegal in a public place,” I said, smiling.

  Sibyl just shook her head, then she put her hands firmly on her hips.

  “Tonight, we’re going to have a long talk with Lucy. Make sure she gets home right after school… which should be twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, just remembering. “She sent me a text to say she was going to a study group after detention, and she wouldn’t be coming home until dinner time.”

  Sibyl tapped her foot on the ground, like she was looking for the beat of her patience, and not finding it. I had finished getting the tea ready to go into the various kettles, so I had nothing to occupy my hands and keep myself busy. I had to turn, and look directly at my sister.

  “She’s in trouble and you’re going to let her hang out with friends,” she said, in a very clipped tone that sounded awfully judgy to me.

  “Yes, I am, because it’s important that she study. It’s important that she has friends here so she’s not trying to go back down to Los Angeles to meet with the delinquents she used to hang out with.”

  “You said they were interesting and artistic,” Sibyl said, her voice flat but her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “Yes, that’s what I would say about them when it was impossible to escape from them, and I had to pretend that I liked her hanging out with them. Now that she’s away I can hope she meets other people. She has to if any of us are going to retain our sanity.”

  I put my hands together in a kind of pleading gesture, and for good measure gave my sister a healthy dog whimper.

  “I don’t know why you’re begging me. I’m not telling you what to do, it’s your responsibility.”

  “But we’re under your roof,” I said, so she wouldn’t have to.

  That elicited a rare smile.

  “Fine. But tonight at dinner we’re going to talk to her together. Sisters working in unison, tag-team style, not letting her play one of us off the other.”

  “Let’s shake on it.”

  “Let’s not, your hands are still covered with cupcake frosting. You work in a kitchen, don’t you ever wash?”

  “That’s what disposable gloves are for,” I said, pretending I wasn’t embarrassed.

  “Mm-hmm. Better get the second round of tea out to the Angels before they get rowdy.”

  Chapter 3

  Three more sets of customers came and went between when Sibyl left and closing time in the early evening. Two of them left when I told them we were a tea shop, didn’t serve coffee, didn’t have free WiFi or a place to plug in their laptops. The third was a young couple who sat in the corner and murmured at each other the way young people in love think they’re supposed to.

  They didn’t even jump when the Angels’ game of cut-throat gin rummy devolved into oddly good natured accusations of cheating and card counting. I do not know if counting cards helps in gin rummy, but Lana and Tina were sure their little sister was rooking them.

  “Probably sneaking off to Vegas to get tips,” Lana said, with a certain fire in her eye.

  “At the famous gin rummy tables on the Strip,” I said, smiling.

  She nodded like there were such a thing, and she thought she might have to go and check them out for herself. I ushered out the couple, who barely said a word to me (and barely tipped) and turned the sign on the door to CLOSED.

  “It’s about time,” Kashmir said the instant the door was shut.

  The thing about having a familiar is that their voices don’t sound like they should. Humans sound like humans because of the shape of our air passageways and our
mouths and lips and tongues, all coming together. A cat has a completely different shape, and his voice (should he have one) should sound meow-y. Or growly, or normal animal soundy.

  Kashmir, the familiar, sounded like somebody in the next room had attached a speaker to his neck, and was talking through a microphone. Those sounds should not come out of that body, and it was so odd that, even as used to it as I should be after all this time, it still made me shudder. It was… magic. And magic was scary.

  “About time for what?” I said, and then I turned around and just caught this magic creature doing a very unmagic thing — he was buried nose-deep in a cream container, lapping it up with a very feline focus.

  “Hey, get out of that!” I said, rushing to the counter. He gave me a glare out of the corner of his eye, and casually knocked the creamer over onto the saucer it sat next to.

  “There, I am out of it,” he said, smiling at me before he dove back in.

  “Bad kitty!” I said, which earned a tail flick. I rescued the creamer just before the saucer overflowed, and sighed. There wasn’t any winning with Kashmir. He may have been magic, with a magic voice and magic powers, but he was also a cat. Cat owners know that — eventually — the cat wins.

  I went back into the kitchen to start the clean-up when I got a feeling. Maybe it was a witch’s intuition, maybe it was just my good common sense kicking in. But I suddenly needed to know where Lucy was, right then.

  I threw a text her way, did some dishes, and when she hadn’t answered my simple query I went ahead and called her.

  Without ringing once, I was sent to voicemail.

  “This is Lucy. If you want to send me money, declarations of undying love, or your playlists, continue on. If you’re an authority figure, hang up.”

  Beep.

  “Lucy, pick up,” I said, as if I were talking into an answering machine that she could hear. “Or call me just as soon as you get this. And we’ll have a nice talk about why the cell phone that you do not pay for needs to be kept on and charged at all times. Get home on time. Study hard.”

  I was devolving into senselessness, so I just ended the call. There wasn’t anything I could say to her on that message that would make any difference. I needed to see the girl face to face, figure out exactly what she was doing.

  Hopefully, she was going through a phase. A blip in an otherwise… not spotless… but colorful record. Something that when we looked back on it in a few years it would be with amusement, not still sore feelings.

  The kitchen door pushed open and Kashmir walked in, licking his chops and with an expression on his face that looked like, yes, a cat who’d gotten into the cream.

  “Satisfying. Need something with more meat and feathers now. And you,” he said, staring right at my face. “You need to get to work.”

  “I just finished work,” I said, hanging up my apron. I still needed to scrub down the counters, and put away some food. And tidy the dining room… wow, I wasn’t done with work at all.

  “Not this,” he said, flicking his ears left and right. “The tea shop is important, but it’s just there to support your real job.”

  “Which is?” I said, slopping water onto the counter. Some few drops of it splashed Kashmir, whose fur rippled like it had come alive and wasn’t happy about it.

  “To practice and defend our own particular brand of magic,” he said firmly. “And in order to do that, you must find the book. The Grimoire of Circe, a powerful magical object that we will need if we’re ever going to wrest this town away from those nasty women.” He finished the statement and made a spitting sound that was a little like a hairball-removing noise.

  “Ugh,” I said, at the sound he was making, and at the thought of the nasty women. He meant, of course, the Jiggs. They owned the Shady Tree cafe just down the street, and had been entirely responsible for putting my grandmother out of business.

  Not through business acumen and delivering a better product, either. They were also witches, and not the friendly neighborhood type that my grandmother had been, healing people’s bodies and minds with remedies and quiet spells. They were the hexing type witches, the kind that gave the rest of us a bad name.

  So they were enemies on two fronts: business, which I understood, and magic, which had fascinated me since I was a tyke, but was also very much a mystery to me. Our parents had seen to that. Being related to a witch was embarrassing to them.

  Not to me. I was happy to become the village witch. I wanted to put out my shingle on that. Tea and Spells… or something. I didn’t have a catchy name for it, but it was a day I wanted to come, and soon.

  Which meant, as much as it wasn’t a lot of fun doing what a cat said, sometimes you had to sacrifice for the greater good.

  “Okay, fine, Kashy, where do we start?” I said.

  Kashmir blinked at me. Not the long, slow, loving blink that cats give you when they think you’re all right. This was a non-plussed, what the heck are you thinking blink.

  “My name is Kashmir. Not Kashy, nor Kashums, nor even The Big K. Kashmir, of a long line of Kashmirs.” His tail slunk down low, and whipped back and forth, moodily.

  “A long line? So, what are you, Kashmir the 5th? Kashmir the 9th?”

  “I am Kashmir. We are all just Kashmir. Who needs to count? What we need to do is search, high and low, until we find that book.”

  “Okay, I’m all ears. Where do we start?” I said.

  “You’re the witch, I’m the familiar. You can tell me where to look, and I can search with amazing speed, quickness, all done in quite a handsome manner. But you need to tell me where, first.”

  I finished cleaning the counter and let out a sigh as exasperated as sighs get.

  “Come on, Kashmir. Is this some sort of magic rule? Do I have to tell you the right combination of words to get the book popping out?” I said.

  “It is part of being a familiar. I am here to help you, not do your bloody job.”

  He might be right, but he was annoying about it.

  “Okay… well, we’ve got the computer set up, right? So we can use that to search around.”

  Kashmir licked his paw casually, flicking his tail. “No, we can’t just tell the computer find the book. We need to bring it something connected with the book, and let it figure things out.”

  Using a computer to work out something magical was something Kashmir and I had been working on since our first caper together, when I cast a spell that let me look through his eyes as he went on an adventure, through a computer monitor. Well, it turns out there’s some secret witch forums on-line where people talk about integrating their magic and their technology. We’d been lurking and learning. Using some plans that I barely understood, Kashmir and I had built a kind of magic detector we were hoping to use to help find the book — and gain more strength and skill as users of magic. But we had nothing to test our theories on yet, so we didn’t really know whether we were on the right track or not.

  And then there was the case of the missing spell. I’d cast a little cantrip a couple nights before — just a simple spell where I’d made a paper airplane that should have flown over our house (where I’d set up a camera with Sybil’s husband Gary to take a picture when it got there) and then come back here, to the tea shop. It flew out of the window, like… well, like magic, but it never got where it was supposed to go. It disappeared. It was our big mystery…

  But I had some more immediate problems today, and I began to wonder if we couldn’t use our plans and computer set-ups to help with those things. It would be a relief if we could.

  I wrinkled my brow in concentration, looking at Kashmir. “Let me think,” I said. “Here’s something we might be able to do.”

  “Yes?” Kashmir said, leaping up on the counter I’d just cleaned.

  “Tell me…” I said, leaning down.

  “Yes?” Kashmir said, backing away from me, a little. Like most cats, he wasn’t too interested in having his face touched.

  “Where is Lucy? You ca
n do that, right, go out and find her if I ask?” I said, smiling.

  He blinked slowly. “It would be a matter of moments before I located her. But let me ask you a question.”

  “Great, so get going. Wait, what?” I said, tapping my foot. I think it was an unconscious imitation of my sister, and so the second I noticed I was doing it, I stopped.

  “Does Lucy have the book?” he said.

  My turn to blink, non-plussed. “No, of course not.”

  “She did not accidentally eat it? Requiring me to tear her open to get it out?”

  After he spoke, he calmly brought a paw up to his face to clean it, and while doing so unsheathed his claws. For a cat his size, they were enormous.

  “What are you talking about, you crazy animal?” I said, horrified at the concept and practically shrieking.

  He stared. “Then she has nothing to do with the book, or your magic, and so has nothing to do with me. Wake me when you’re serious,” Kashmir said, and with that he whirled up and took a leap into the open cupboard above his head, pushed off of that to get on top of the cupboard, which had just a few inches of space between it and the ceiling.

  Snug, barely visible from where I was standing, he promptly went into an irritated snooze.

  “Well… be that way,” I said, walking out the back door and locking it. I supposed he had a point. He wasn’t a member of our family, or even our pet. He was my familiar. I guessed I was going to have to remember that there was a line of demarcation between those things.

  Still, I resented it a little. I wasn’t going to to be pushed around by some half-animal, half magical thing, no matter how important he was to me. So I would go home, walking, while I decided what to say to Lucy, who had certainly beaten me back home.

  She better have, for her sake.

  Chapter 4

  Lucy had not, indeed, beaten me back. But by the time one o’clock had rolled around and she hadn’t showed up, I was getting ready to beat her. With a stick. Maybe wrapped in a pillow, so I wouldn’t go to jail, but so she would know I was serious.