I have a secret. A big, fat, hairy secret.
And I’m
not talking minor-league stuff, like I once let Joseph
Applebaum feel me up behind the seventh-grade stairwell or I
got a Brazilian wax after work last Friday or I’m hiding a
neon blue vibrator called the Electric Slide in my night
table. Which I’m not, by the way. In case you were
wondering.
No, this is completely different. And as
far as I knew, only two—well, technically one, but we’ll
call it two—people in the entire world knew about
it.
Until this morning.
Usually, I waltz into
my office at Withers and Young with my skinny latte, extra
foam, and find nothing but a neat stack of manila folders
waiting for me. Today, however, next to the manila
folders—labeled with the new apple green and pink stickers
I’d bought last week—was a box.
Now, I should have
been suspicious right off. I mean, it was too early for the
mail, and the only thing on the front of the package was my
name, in swirly letters. Not your normal business
correspondence, for sure. And besides, I was an auditor. Who
in the world would be sending me care packages?
But
none of that percolated through my sluggish brain that
morning. I had just picked up the box when my nosy assistant
Sally walked in, wearing snug hip-huggers and a jarring
floral blouse that barely contained her bosom. “Adele wants
to talk to you about the Southeast Airlines account.” She
gave me a tight smile, accentuating the cupid’s bow she’d
drawn just outside the perimeter of her lips. Then her beady
little eyes fastened on the box. “What’s that? Something
fromthat tennis-player boyfriend of yours?”
“I don’t
know.” I shook the box, which had just the right heft for
Godiva. “Probably chocolate.” My boyfriend Heath had a
penchant for surprising me with boxes of truffles. I loved
them—especially those hazelnut cream ones—but it was
starting to play hell with my waistline.
“Yum. Can I
have one?”
“Sure.” I tried to pry up the tape with my
fingernail, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Jeez, that’s
wrapped up tight.”
Sally was right; it was the Fort
Knox of chocolate boxes. I ran my tongue over my razor-sharp
eyeteeth, tempted to use them on the tape. But with Sally
hanging over my desk, it wouldn’t be a good
idea.
“I’ll get scissors,” she said, heaving herself
off my desk and disappearing through the door. A moment
later, she returned with a pair of shears, cutting the paper
off with a flourish.
The box inside wasn’t gold foil.
It was plain brown cardboard. And my skinny latte must have
finally kicked in, because my instincts were telling me I
wasn’t going to like what was inside. And since my instincts
are on the strong side, I really should have listened to
them.
But hindsight, as they say, is always
twenty-twenty.
“Doesn’t look like chocolate,” said
Sally, who was hovering over me like a flowery vulture,
reeking of Aviance Night Musk.
“Not Godiva, anyway.”
A phone rang in the distance. “Isn’t that your
phone?”
Sally gave me a smile that told me I wasn’t
going to pry her out of my office with a crowbar. “No, it’s
Mindy’s.”
“Are you
sure?”
“Positive.”
She wasn’t budging, so I
went ahead and opened it.
Bad idea.
Instead of
neat rows of chocolate nestled in gold foil, inside the box
was a Ziploc bag of dried green leaves.
I slammed the
lid down, hoping Sally wasn’t an amateur
botanist.
Sally’s black-rimmed eyes grew huge. “Is
that pot?”
“What?” I croaked. On second thought,
maybe it would be better if she was an amateur botanist.
Wolfsbane might be poisonous, but at least you couldn’t be
arrested for having it.
“The bag in there,” she said,
pointing at the box. “It looks like weed.”
“Oh, it’s
just peppermint,” I said, tossing off a light laugh that
sounded like I was choking on a chicken bone. “Probably from
my mother.”
Sally narrowed her little eyes at me.
“Why would your mother send you
peppermint?”
“Peppermint tea,” I said. “She knows I
like it.” Actually, it wasn’t a total lie. My mother did
send me tea regularly, only it wasn’t peppermint.
I
moved the box to my lap, resisting the urge to panic and
trying to ignore the fact that Sally was still staring at
me. A phone rang somewhere in the building. “Shouldn’t you
get the phone?” I suggested.
“No, it’s Mindy’s
again.” Sally wrinkled her nose. “That stuff doesn’t smell
like mint.” She jabbed a finger at the corner of yellow
legal paper that was sticking out from under the lid. “Is
that a note?”
“You know, I’m kind of busy this
morning.”
“Aren’t you going to read it?”
Just
then, a ring that was unmistakably Sally’s phone burbled
from outside the door.
“Better go get that,” I said
brightly.
Sally pursed her lips. “It can
wait.”
I raised an eyebrow and tried to look
official. “I don’t think Adele would be happy to hear that.”
Adele was the head of the department and had an extremely
low tolerance for anything short of professional. Which had
always puzzled me, because it was Adele who had hired
Sally.
Sally flashed me a nasty look and flounced
from the office. When a few moments passed and she didn’t
reappear, I tugged the note out of the box and opened
it.
Roses are red,
Violets are
blue,
I know what you are
And your boss soon
will too.
Well, crap.
I stared at the
note. Despite what Sally thought, the stuff in the box
wasn’t pot. And it had a lot more punch than peppermint.
Most people, in fact, would consider it poison.
But I
wasn’t most people.
I was a werewolf.
And
somebody else knew it.
I took another sniff, inhaling
the familiar bitter scent. Since I’m the daughter of a
full-blooded werewolf and a psychic witch (lucky me), I’ve
had to drink the stuff several times a day for years.
Otherwise, I have a nasty tendency to transform every time
something scares me.
Unfortunately, my mother didn’t
hit on the right recipe until I was almost ten, which meant
a lot of my childhood was spent packing up my Barbie dolls
(I learned pretty early on that there wasn’t a Werewolf
Barbie) and sitting beside my mother in a U-Haul truck. My
werewolf dad scarpered before my first birthday, so my
mother raised me by herself, which meant I spent a lot of
time in child care.
Which is hard enough if you’re a
regular kid, but an absolute nightmare when you happen to be
a bouncing baby werewolf. Full moons were a problem, of
course—although these days, with the help of my mother’s
brew, my involuntary changes were limited to four times a
year—but what was worse was my propensity for sprouting
teeth and fur every time something startled me or pissed me
off. You can imagine what happened when I didn’t get my
bottle on time.
One of the more memorable episodes
occurred in second grade, when a snotty little girl named
Megan Soggs thought it would be fun to put a frog down my
shirt at recess. I don’t know who was scared more, me by the
frog or Megan by the wolf cub in penny loafers. But a week
later, we were back in the U-Haul again, off to another
city.
Fortunately, by the end of third grade, my
mother had figured out how to use wolfsbane tea to keep my
issues under control without doing me mortal harm. So once
we found a town that was werewolf free—which turned out to
be Austin—my mother unpacked the U-Haul and bought a small
house. Neither of us had moved since. I still drank gallons
of wolfsbane tea, and it still didn’t taste any better. As a
kid, I’d taken it with chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup,
and large quantities of honey, but these days I just used
Splenda.
I gave myself a quick shake and reminded
myself that all of that was behind me now. Since Sally was
still on the phone, I gave the box a quick sniff. Coffee,
cigarettes, the faint aroma of a woman, overlaid with the
deeper notes of male sweat. An animal smell too—cat, maybe?
I opened the Ziploc bag a crack. The wolfsbane was pure,
probably grown in the Alps, if the woodsiness of the scent
was any indication.
I fumbled the flaps closed and
jammed the box into my bottom desk drawer, behind the
Tension Tamer herbal tea box that I stocked with my own
special tea bags. Relax, Sophie, relax. I pulled up the
waistband of my panty hose and forced myself to take a few
deep cleansing breaths, like my friend Lindsey had taught
me. After the third breath, I gave up—otherwise, I was going
to hyperventilate. Besides, I didn’t want to explain what I
was doing pulling my control-top panty hose up to my boobs
if Sally waltzed back into my office. Instead I leaned back
and stared at the bottom left drawer of my desk.
The
box meant that somebody knew I was a werewolf. And that was
a big, big problem.
On the plus side—not that it was
saying much—at least whoever it was didn’t have all the
facts. The New Age books all say that if someone like me
gets within ten feet of the green stuff in the plastic bag,
we wilt like pansies in August. Kind of a nonviolent version
of a silver bullet. Or a stake.
But unless I ate an
entire bag of the stuff, wolfsbane couldn’t hurt me; in
fact, I drank it three times daily. Religiously. As in I set
a timer and plan my days around it. Because if I miss even
one dose, things can get . . . well, let’s just say . . .
hairy.
I gave the drawer a moody kick, scuffing the
toe of one of my new Prada pumps, and sank back in my
leather chair.
A moment later, Sally walked back into
the office on a fresh wave of musk. “Did you figure out what
it was?”
I shrugged. “Like I said, just a box of tea.
From my mom.”
Sally narrowed her painted eyes at me.
“Tea, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. It wasn’t too far from
the truth; since my mom did send me a box of special tea
bags every month.
As Sally eyed me suspiciously, the
phone rang. The call was from my mother’s shop. Which just
goes to show that you should never think about a
psychic—particularly one you don’t want to talk
to.
After a pointed look from yours truly, Sally
stalked out of my office. I couldn’t help noticing that her
too-tight pants had given her a major wedgie. Surprising,
really; I would have pegged Sally as a thong girl.
I
picked up the phone. “Sophie
Garou.”
“Sophie!”
It wasn’t my mother. Nor,
unfortunately, was it Heath, whose deep chocolate voice was
even more delicious than the truffles he surprised me with.
Instead it was my mother’s assistant. I relaxed a little and
gazed out the window at the Travis County courthouse, which
was glowing in the morning sunlight as if everything in the
world was hunky-dory and no nut job had left a nasty package
on my nice clean desk. “Hi, Emily. What’s up?”
“It’s
about your mom.”
Of course.
I don’t like to
admit it—particularly not to my clients, and definitely not
to my boss—but my mother is the owner of Sit A Spell, a
magic shop she opened fifteen years ago smack dab in the
middle of Austin.
“What about her?” I asked
apprehensively. The last time Emily called, I had had to
extricate my mother from a snafu with the IRS. My mother was
many things—a fortune-teller, a spell-caster, and a medium,
to name just a few—but she wasn’t a stellar bookkeeper. And
the last thing I needed to deal with right now was my
mother’s crappy accounting practices.
“Oh . . . it’s
too horrible for words,” Emily said.
“It can’t be
that horrible.”
“Oh, but it is . . .”
“Did she
forget to include the income from the mail-order spell
business again?”
“It’s worse . . .”
I groaned.
“Don’t tell me she forgot to file! After I filled out the
forms and everything!”
“Your mother . . .” Emily
sniffled, and I could hear her trumpeting into a
tissue.
I sipped my latte and licked the foam from my
upper lip. “Emily, just tell me.”
“Well . . . you see
. . . she’s in jail for murder!”
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