1 A Hiss-tory of Magic Read online

  A Hiss-tory of Magic

  A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 1

  Harper Lin

  Contents

  Copyright

  1. A Family of Secrets

  2. Treacle’s Warning

  3. The Humorless Detective

  4. A Lesson in Magic

  5. Marshmallow Moans

  6. Time Travelers

  7. Bea’s Books

  8. The Unusual Suspect

  9. Scratching Post

  10. A Doomed History

  11. Joy Ride

  12. Lost and Found

  13. Hide and Seek

  14. To Catch a Fish To Catch a Fish

  15. Respectable Accusers

  16. Gone

  17. The Order

  18. Trial by Fire

  19. The Social Network

  20. Rejoining the Brotherhood

  21. Another Attack

  22. Human Sacrifice

  23. A Failsafe

  24. A Visit to the Inn

  25. The Witching Hour

  26. One Loose End

  27. Uninvited Guests

  28. A Collection of Little Bubbles

  29. The Beginning

  Also by Harper Lin

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Harper Lin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.harperlin.com

  A Family of Secrets

  I shouldn’t be writing this down. It’s private. Not secret—no. I didn’t do anything wrong. At least, not in my opinion.

  Like I said, it’s personal, for me alone to deal with, but I just need to let it out, you know? I can’t just keep going along with how bizarre my life is all the time ever since this new hot mess blew up. Literally.

  I’m trying to make sense of all this, but I don’t know where to begin, and my cat keeps trying to use my open notebook as a bed when the cat bed is right there in the corner. Now he’s using my wrist as a pillow.

  I’m thirty-three years old, and I don’t know half of what I should about my own family.

  Mystery. That’s the word I keep looking for. Detective Williams just calls it a case and files it away neatly, but I think his partner knows a mystery when he sees one.

  This is about the mystery of Ted Lanier and his vegan poutine that tasted better than the real thing—why didn’t we appreciate him more back when he was still with us?

  This is about the mystery of Min Park—how could he have changed so much as a person?

  Then there’s my family. Some mysteries should remain hidden in the mists.

  This is “the wonderful town of Wonder Falls,” after all.

  My cousin and soul sister Bea could describe Wonder Falls better than I ever could. She’s a lot more like her hippie mother than she thinks, and she’s always at me to stop and smell the flowers blooming in the crisp Canadian springtime, to go with her on camping and fishing trips by the lake, and to see the waterfalls that the lake empties into.

  The waterfalls are magnificent. Of course, they’re big. Loud. Damp, eventually. There’s three of them. They generate enough electricity to power the whole town. Tourists come for miles just to look. As for me—well, I live close enough that I’ve just gotten used to it.

  No, no, scratch that. I was getting nostalgic about the way things used to be. I might never look at the falls the same way ever again.

  My name is Cath Greenstone, and I’m a witch.

  All the women in the Greenstone family line are witches.

  Bea’s hippie mother—my Aunt Astrid—owns the best café in town, the Brew-Ha-Ha. Bea and I grew up being taught how to run it, and—I write this with all the love in the world for my beautiful and wise Aunt Astrid, who took me in after my parents died—Bea and I both think that we’d run it a little differently than Aunt Astrid has.

  The fact that we’re witches is supposed to be a secret, but Aunt Astrid is convinced that the best way to go about things is to hide in plain sight. She does fortune-telling for customers, and she talks a lot about the way “mystical energy” moves through the Universe.

  Yes, Aunt Astrid uses a capital U, and you can practically hear when she pronounces the word.

  Most of the time, I’m afraid that she’s daring people to find out about us. On a good day—and we’d been having so many good days until the fire—it’s reassuring to know that Aunt Astrid has been a witch for longer than the years Bea and I have spent on this earth combined.

  Aunt Astrid can see the future, and that is probably the best magical talent that a witch can have, because a muddy future can be dangerous and painful.

  All right, so living with injury and illness is also dangerous and painful. Bea’s got that covered with her witchy magical talent, which is one that she can hide more easily. People just presume that Bea’s a naturally touchy-feely person. When they heal, they don’t make the connection that Bea had a hand in it and just assume that they were going to get healthy again anyway.

  It helps to know how the human body works, of course, so Bea’s done a lot of reading on that. She’s really smart, and she loves to study. She could have left Wonder Falls to go to university and come back with half a dozen Nobel Prizes, never mind a medical degree. Instead, she married Jake and took his name.

  I didn’t mean that to sound judgmental. Bea’s not just my family; she’s my best friend. Did I mention she was smart? I wasn’t exaggerating. As long as she’s happy, I know her talents aren’t going to waste.

  Jake’s a good guy, and everyone in town can’t help but like him. He’s a good detective, too, at least for a town as quiet and small as Wonder Falls. He just hasn’t been informed that the Greenstone heritage involves magic powers and, therefore, his wife is a witch.

  I can communicate with animals, especially cats. I was scared of my own special magical talent at first. Now that I’m older, I really appreciate that I can communicate with Treacle, who’s become my best friend, next to Bea.

  The skill certainly came in handle on the night of the fire.

  Treacle’s Warning

  Treacle is a street cat. I picked him up from the animal shelter run by old Murray Willis. Treacle has a scar on his forehead, probably from a fight with another animal. It has healed into a shiny white welt in the shape of a star, but I doubt that fur is ever going to grow over it again.

  Whatever incident caused the big scar hasn’t stopped Treacle from wandering out at night. Neither has the fact that I took him in. There’s no need for him to go wandering, but it’s what he likes to do. He’s a black cat, too, so I worry that he’ll find himself under the wheel of a car belonging to a driver that can’t see him in the dark.

  He’d call me if it happened. Not with a phone—I mean he’d call out to my mind, and distance wouldn’t matter. We’ve got a telepathic bond now, and the communication is getting stronger all the time, but I still worry.

  Treacle doesn’t speak Human. I speak Cat. It’s more of a mind-to-mind magical communication with ideas and images, not so much with actual words. That’s how I accidentally taught Treacle how to unbolt the cat door.

  You’d think I would have an easier time communicating mind-to-mind with humans because I’m human myself, but even with Bea, it doesn’t come naturally—or at all, except under special circumstances. On the rare occasions that it does work, I need several days to recover.

  Anyway, that was how I knew where Treacle was that night. He saw that the Brew-Ha-Ha was on fire, got scared, and bounded full speed all the way back hom
e.

  It was barely dawn, and whatever I’d been dreaming was interrupted by a fiery nightmare as Treacle shouted into my mind. I only woke up when he leapt onto the bed and started nipping at my face.

  A full understanding of what had happened bypassed my conscious mind and got my instincts going. I jumped out of bed and grabbed the phone on the nightstand.

  I was barely awake, completely panicking, and I almost let it slip to the dispatcher that I’d learned about the fire from my cat.

  I cleared my throat of its early-morning roughness, shook off the just-woken-up mist from my mind, and tried again. “I can see it from my window,” I lied. “That’s my aunt’s café, for sure, on fire. No, it hasn’t spread to any other building yet, but please hurry.”

  I gave them the address of the café as I strained to reach my closet to grab something to wear. The phone line snapped from its socket just as I finished talking.

  Treacle nuzzled my ankle, then pressed his head into it. He purred anxiously.

  “Do you think they got it?” I wavered between calling the dispatcher back and getting dressed.

  Treacle pawed and nosed the closet door ajar and said, “I can ask Marshmallow what’s going on.”

  Marshmallow was Aunt Astrid’s cat, a Maine Coon. They had a bond, just as Bea and Peanut Butter had a bond. Marshmallow could even do some magic. When it came to communicating with the cats, however, it was pretty ordinary guesswork between human and cats for Aunt Astrid and Bea. The cats could talk with each other, and I could talk to the cats.

  When they’ve bonded, like Treacle had with Marshmallow, then distance doesn’t matter. So Treacle didn’t mean that he’d go over to Aunt Astrid’s place to check with Marshmallow, then come back to help me decide what to do.

  Having a network of minds and being able to communicate instantly can be handy at times, as you can imagine. Although I’m a witch, I’m also a human, so if I do it too much or if I do it with someone whom I haven’t formed strong bonds with, then I get headaches. Sometimes it’s a failure, and I only end up receiving some mental static, or whichever animal that I’m sending my thoughts to just doesn’t get it as clearly.

  Treacle sent to my mind an image of Aunt Astrid in her bedroom. She was fully dressed except for the shoes. The image was from the height of Aunt Astrid’s ankle, looking up. That must have been Marshmallow’s point of view.

  Aunt Astrid’s pear-shaped, slightly overweight figure was very well suited to billowing drawstring peasant tops and gypsy skirts. Her hair had always been wispy, and it had never darkened from the dishwater blond of her younger days, although it was beginning to thin. She refused to dye over the pale streaks of gray.

  That morning, she’d styled her hair into a French braid, which didn’t stop the locks from loosely framing her face like an ethereal halo. Aunt Astrid had a friendly face. The wrinkles around her mouth and blue eyes bespoke a lifetime of smiling and laughter in spite of all the tragedies.

  I felt the ghost of a shift under my elbow as Aunt Astrid eased a pair of canvas flats out from under the giant Maine Coon. She dusted some strands of fur from the shoes before slipping her feet into them.

  “You need another grooming,” Aunt Astrid crooned to Marshmallow. “Just as well that there wouldn’t be any work today, I suppose. I’ll be back soon.”

  The image faded.

  Treacle leapt to the windowsill, flicked his tail, and meowed. He didn’t like fires. I wondered, right then, if it had something to do with how he got that star-shaped scar on his forehead. Treacle didn’t want to think about it to himself, let alone to me. The fire at the Brew-Ha-Ha had spoilt his morning, and he just wanted to take a nap.

  “I might as well go, since I’m already up. It would just be insurance stuff and renovating the place, then,” I said to myself. “No need to wake Bea, too.”

  I relaxed too soon, thinking that one of the perks of having an oracular aunt was getting a heads-up at times like this.

  As I said, I don’t know half of what I should, by now, about magic.

  Nothing could have prepared us for that morning.

  The Humorless Detective

  At the bench across the street from the Brew-Ha-Ha, I sat myself down beside Aunt Astrid. Wordlessly, Aunt Astrid nudged a paper bag towards me. I uncapped a large thermos of mine that I’d brought, poured some strong black tea into the cap, and passed it to Aunt Astrid. I poured myself some tea in the smaller, nested plastic cup that came with the thermos, and I reached into the paper bag for one of Astrid’s homemade maple bran muffins. Aunt Astrid sipped her tea and sighed. I rubbed my eyes with the back of one hand and stifled a yawn.

  Between the bench and the café, a fire truck’s sirens sounded in the otherwise peaceful morning. The glow of the dawn light had stiff competition with the pillars of lurid flames.

  Wonder Falls was small enough that I recognized most of the firefighters, even though I didn’t know all of them personally.

  Gillian Hyllis, the one shouting orders to coordinate the firefighting effort, had come from a family of elitist academics that she’d disappointed by following her passion into a more practical profession.

  Reuben Connors, rushing in without his gear, was an actual disappointment to the profession.

  At the fire hydrant, lining up the hose, was one fourth of the town’s support group for divorced fathers and one third of the town’s support group for alcoholism recovery. I only knew Wayne Walter by name because he had the distinction of attending both groups, and from the look of it, he was on the ball. That was good to see. Gossip can be vicious, but I think most townsfolk, like me, were silently rooting for him to get his life back on track.

  It was also a relief to see that most of the Wonder Falls fire brigade were in their best shape to get something done, despite being generally not used to being so busy.

  Eventually, some of our regular customers passed by and stopped to watch the fire. Some chatted with the firefighters. A few approached Aunt Astrid and me at the bench.

  “…all right, there?” The wiry, petite figure spoke so softly that I only caught the end of her sentence.

  I managed a smile. “No need to worry about us, Mrs. Park.”

  “If there’s anything you need…”

  I’d know where to reach her. It was a small town.

  That didn’t mean that everybody was friendly, though. After Mrs. Park wandered off, another figure cut into my line of vision. She had a loud, wheedling voice and smelled of artificial jasmine. “I had a meeting scheduled here for later this morning!”

  A part of me remembered being in sixth grade again, and I flinched back a bit from the verbal bludgeon of entitlement that was Darla Castellan. Some schoolyard bullies didn’t grow up.

  Aunt Astrid seemed to have woken up a bit. “I know,” she exclaimed. “This is so inconvenient for everybody.” She repeated, as a not-so-subtle reminder, “Everybody!”

  Darla folded her arms over her chest. “Well, what are you going to do now?”

  I took a gulp of tea, and I shrugged. “Apologize for the inconvenience?”

  “And thank you for your continued patronage after we restore the Brew-Ha-Ha,” Aunt Astrid said dryly. “It will take a few days.”

  Part of the café roof collapsed, sending firefighters scurrying to herd the spectators to a safe distance.

  “Weeks,” Aunt Astrid corrected. “A month, at the most.”

  “Continued patronage,” Darla scoffed, “is an awfully big presumption.” She stormed off in a huff. When she decided to snub or shun somebody, she meant it.

  “Genius,” I said, as I toasted Aunt Astrid’s teacup with mine. I was a grown woman and not at all worried about who else might follow Darla’s lead.

  The residents of Wonder Falls loved the Brew-Ha-Ha—the location, the architecture (so we’d keep it as close to the original as possible when we rebuilt the place, I thought), the impeccably polite staff, and the baked goods as only a genuine French chef could make.
/>   “Oh!” I gasped, as I realized, “I should have called Ted!” Ted was our baker and cook.

  “I left him a message on his answering machine,” Aunt Astrid assured me. “I told him not to come in today and that we’ll handle everything.”

  Another voice—high, sweet, and raspy, and coming from behind the both of us—added, “I wish I knew that! I called him just now, too, but he’s not answering.”

  It was Bea. There was no mistaking that shade of deep red hair in glossy waves. She’d inherited that from her father, along with the dark eyes. Our maternal grandfather must have been the one responsible for Bea’s flawless, almost olive complexion.

  “Good morning! I mean, better morning from now on.” Be a put an arm around each of us. “I brought mops, brooms, and garbage bags and stuff. We can get right to cleaning up this mess after the firefighters and the police are done.” She peered up at the building. “How did this happen?”

  The fire had already been extinguished. I caught sight of Jake across the road, shaking hands with one of the firefighters. He glanced towards the three of us and gave something between a wave and a salute. It wasn’t like him to be so cold, but I reasoned that I’d never seen Jake in action, so maybe he steeled up for his police work.

  “Well,” Aunt Astrid said, “I had a vision of the fire months ago, and since then I’ve been so careful. After closing up, I’d see to it that Ted turned the gas off. Everything that had plugs in the wall sockets, I’d unplug myself.” She heaved a sigh of resignation. “Sometimes, the future that I see is fixed.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” Bea declared. More quietly, she suggested, “Senior moment yesterday, maybe?”

  Aunt Astrid gave a deep belly laugh as I exclaimed, “Bea!”

  “Mother knows what I mean. You could have told us. We would have helped. That’s all I meant!”

  “I don’t have senior moments, Bea. I have ascended moments of omniscience.”