Lethal paws, p.12
Lethal Paws, page 12
“Welcome, welcome,” said the woman in the next cubicle, whose desk-plaque read Jessica Forrester. “You must be Blair! I’m supposed to give you a quick tour around. Then I’ll be on hand to answer any of your questions throughout the day.”
Blair was thrilled to get a look around the company offices. She’d always enjoyed this particular website as a consumer--it was half-journalism, half-cultural commentary and personality quizzes--and at first she’d been so excited to land this job.
But now, digging into her first day of work, she was disheartened to realize that she was going to be writing little more than vapid clickbait articles.
“Top ten Hollywood Hotties?” she muttered, staring at her itinerary. “The Summer’s Most Coked Out Celebs? Seven things in your house right now that can kill you?”
Well, at least Jessica seemed nice enough.
Around her lunch break, Blair checked her phone to find that it was totally dead. She must have forgotten to charge it the night before.
After looking over her shoulder to verify no one was watching, Blair sent a surge of electric magic into her phone. Just a few seconds and her phone charged up all the way.
She smiled with satisfaction as the device woke up, then displayed a new text from Maeve.
Headed to a coffee shop near campus after my last class today… got a lead on a part-time job! OMG, everyone has been SO nice and welcoming!
“Well, la dee fricking dah,” Blair muttered. She wanted to feel happy for her sister—was happy for her, of course. Other than Jessica her cubicle neighbor, Blair hadn’t had the same luck.
Blair made it home after her shift, sagging and exhausted. Her feet ached from all the walking she’d done.
There was something dramatic happening on Gary’s landing again.
Of course there is.
This time, it was some rough-looking men knocking at his door, to no answer. Gary failed to appear.
Don’t get involved, a voice inside Blair--probably her mother’s--told her. But she was too curious to leave it be.
“Can I help you guys?” she asked.
The men turned to her and glared.
“You a friend of that deadbeat Gary?” one of them growled.
“Friend? No, he’s just the building super,” Blair replied.
The man snorted and turned his attention back to pounding on the door.
Maybe it’s better if I just keep going…
Just as she was walking into her apartment, Blair’s phone buzzed. She fumbled for the device, hoping it was an update from Maeve. Instead, it came from a number she didn’t recognize.
Hey! This is Jessica from work. Sorry, I looked up your number on the registry--hope that’s okay! I know you’re new in town and was wondering if you might want to meet for dinner? I know the best pizza place.
“Sure, the real estate can be a bit sketchy,” Jessica said over a slice of what was, Blair had to agree, probably the best pizza she’d ever eaten. “But you can’t fault the location. Isn’t this neighborhood just the best?”
“We haven’t really gotten out much yet to check it out,” Blair confessed.
“Oh, you’ve just got to come to my gym with me some time,” Jessica insisted. “They’ve got these amazing early-morning yoga classes. And this super-hot trainer… I mean, like, smoking.”
Blair found it surprisingly easy to fall into companionable chat with Jessica. Like Blair herself, Jessica desperately wanted to be a real, serious writer. Unlike Blair, Jessica was from Washington Heights, and didn’t seem in the least overwhelmed by city life.
Blair figured she had a lot she could learn by befriending Jessica.
After pizza, they were walking back to Blair’s apartment building when several police cars, lights and sirens blaring, zipped past.
“Is that your building they’re pulling up by?” Jessica asked, curious.
“Yeah,” Blair said, concerned.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Jessica said. “See you at work.”
She waved Jessica off, thanking her for the pizza dinner.
As she drew closer to the building, she noticed there was an ambulance already parked out front, as well.
Paramedics loaded something into the back of it. Blair gaped in horror when she realized she saw.
It’s a body bag…
She pulled out her phone and dialed Maeve’s number, but there was no answer.
“This isn’t a peep show, ma’am,” someone said, bustling up to Blair. “Please move along.”
“Excuse me, I live here,” Blair said. She turned to see a tall, broad-shouldered, attractive man. Considering his clothes, he was most likely a Detective--a hunch he confirmed when he flashed Blair his badge.
“Christopher Farrow,” she said, reading off the name. “What’s happened? My sister should have been home by now. Is she…?” Blair looked at the back of the ambulance, fear gripping her heart.
“You’re Blair, aren’t you? Maeve is your sister?”
Blair nearly started crying. “That isn’t Maeve, is it?”
The Detective blinked, then laughed nervously. “Oh, no, sorry. I just realized what that sounded like… no, not at all. We’ve got Maeve down at the station for some questioning.”
“Questioning?”
“Not questioning questioning. She’s the one who found the body. Your landlord, I guess. Gary Kemp?”
Blair’s heart thudded. She might not have liked Gary all that much, but she still felt alarmed to hear that he was dead.
“We don’t suspect a homicide. Just your average, run-of-the-mill overdose. Gary had a lot of bad habits.” He led her up to the apartment door. “Still, we might come by later to ask some questions. In the meantime, you’re free to head on up. If you wouldn’t mind taking the elevator, that would be great. We’re still checking out the scene on the stairs.”
Blair did as she’d been told, making her way up to her apartment door.
Overdose? How likely was that, really? It was obvious Gary had some serious enemies. Even just living in the same building as him for a couple days had made that clear to Blair.
She opened the door, exhausted.
“Felix?” she asked, looking for her familiar. Eventually she found him in her bedroom, half-under her bed. He seemed to be meddling with something. “What’ve you got there?”
“Nothing,” the cat insisted, batting whatever it was under the bed.
Blair dropped onto the bed, too tired to call her familiar out on his lie. Too tired even to move from the spot where she’d collapsed.
“Better not be a dead sparrow,” she muttered before she drifted off to sleep.
Thirty-Four
By the time Maeve got home, Blair had fallen fast asleep in her work clothes. Maeve peeked in on her sister, then begrudgingly woke her up enough to help her get out of her shoes and blazer, at the very least.
“Trust me, I know you only have a couple of these,” Maeve muttered as she hung the blazer back on its coat hanger. “You do not want it to look slept-in.”
But Blair had already drifted back off and didn’t hear her.
Maeve meandered into her own room and dressed for bed. Also exhausted, Maeve was eager to go to sleep. Even the unbelievable amounts of city noise coming in through her window didn’t keep her from dropping off, for once.
The horrifying nightmares, however, weren’t ideal.
She woke up to Blair patting her face urgently.
“Was I screaming?” Maeve asked, wiping her face. There were tears on her cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“It’s okay,” Blair insisted. “Are you all right?”
Maeve hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
Blair frowned. “That wasn’t very convincing.”
“I’ll be fine,” Maeve amended. She glanced left and right. The room around them was unpleasantly dark. Every shadow seemed to curl and beckon with sinister suggestions.
Blair, seeing her sister’s fear, reached out her palm and pressed it flat against the wall. It wasn’t hard for her to feel the electrical wires just beyond the cracked and pitted sheetrock. She carefully pushed her spark of magic into them. Within a second, all the lights throughout the apartment winked on.
Maeve smiled. “You won’t be able to sleep like this,” she objected, but already she looked better at ease.
“Trust me, after today I think I could sleep through an explosion. Having the lights on is no trouble at all.”
“But you woke up when I was having a nightmare,” Maeve said.
“That’s different,” Blair insisted. “That’s sister stuff.” She tapped her temple as she rose from Maeve’s bedside. “Psychic connection and all that. Now, you get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise.”
Maeve did feel a little better in the morning, and so did Blair. They made coffee and were bustling around, getting ready for their day, when a knock rapped on the front door.
Blair opened it to find Detective Christopher Farrow, looking far too polished for such an early hour.
“Miss Barrows?” He gestured at his badge. “Remember me, Detective Farrow? Mind if I ask you two a few questions?”
Blair checked her phone anxiously.
“I’ve got to get to work, actually,” she said. “It’s only my second day. And Maeve has class.”
“Not until later on,” Maeve piped up.
Blair shot her a withering glare as Farrow stepped inside
“That works out fine,” Christopher said. “I wanted to interview you two separately, anyway. Maybe I can talk to Blair first? I don’t mind if you’re getting ready while we chat.”
Maeve excused herself into the other room and Blair finished packing up her lunch.
“So, have you noticed anything suspicious about your landlord since moving?”
“You mean besides half naked floozies, poker games with degenerates, and mob debt collectors pounding on his door at all hours of the day and night?”
Christopher laughed and wrote on his notepad. She had the disheartening feeling he wasn’t particularly interested in any of these leads.
“You ever hear of a guy named Carl?” Christopher asked. “Gary might have mentioned him? Maybe Carl dropped off some, shall we say party favors for him?”
Blair shook her head. “No. We really didn’t know Gary very well at all. But you really think this is an overdose? Has the autopsy backed that up?”
“I can’t share specifics,” Christopher said. “But it’s more about what we found at the scene. The M.E. is going to look at the body later on today.”
Blair couldn’t help but think that the police were on the wrong path. But her Midwestern politeness kept her from telling Christopher as much.
On the way into the office that morning, just as she was approaching the entrance, Blair’s eye was caught by something buzzing, humming nervously.
“A hummingbird?” Blair muttered. How common were they in the city? She thought hummingbirds would all be migrating south by now. Why would one be so far north?
She put the question out of her mind and headed up to her cubicle. The office was just waking up, and only a handful of her coworkers seemed to be around. Jessica’s desk was empty.
Oh well. It might be a good idea to focus on her actual work. She had a stack of articles left to write from the day before, and she started in on it directly.
She’d managed to power her way through one inflated fluff listicle when Jessica’s bright, chipper voice cut through her rising headache.
“Good news, Blair! Day two and you’re already not the new girl anymore.”
Blair looked up, her eldritch senses tingling. Jessica was standing at the mouth of her cubicle. Beside her stood a petite woman with large expressive eyes and a colorful business skirt suit. A ruby choker glittered at her throat as she darted her furtive gaze about, never settling it on anything for more than a second at a time.
Blair let her visual sense fade before her eldritch perception. The energy lines pulsing through the woman’s body seethed with magical accents. That explained the hummingbird’s suspicious presence!
The new girl was a shifter.
Blair immediately felt at ease with the new employee. At least she wasn’t the only magical being at the office any longer
“Blair, meet Danielle,” Jessica said brightly. “Danielle, Blair. You’re both new… and I’m supposed to help onboard both of you. Danielle works as an intern in the journalism department.”
“The journalism department,” Blair echoed dreamily.
“Oh, it’s not like I’m doing serious writing,” Danielle said in rapid, clipped speech. Her eyes continued to dart around. She flitted over to the water cooler and examined it before flitting back to Blair’s cubicle. “Just fetching coffee, fetching copy paper, fetching donuts, always fetching, fetching, fetching.”
“I saw her manager chewing her out over a spilled coffee order and just had to swoop in and save her,” Jessica answered. “Anyway, I’m hoping we can adopt you. Blair and I are already getting on like wildfire. What do you say, ladies? We’ll take our lunch together?”
Jessica’s energy was so friendly and engaging that Blair and Danielle had no choice but to agree.
Over lunch, Jessica asked Blair about the police cars that had been racing to her apartment building the previous day, so Blair told her new friends about what had happened to her landlord. They chatted about the case, speculating wildly, and Blair was thrilled to see Danielle come out of her shell a little more the longer they talked.
When Jessica zipped away to the restroom, Blair leaned across the table and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Hummingbird?”
Danielle’s eyes widened behind her wire-rimmed glasses.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked.
Blair smiled, then pointed at herself. “Witch.”
Danielle grinned. “Seriously?” She darted a glance behind her, where Jessica had disappeared. “She doesn’t know, does she?”
Blair shook her head, then mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key.
It felt nice to know another magical being in the city.
Maeve had already come back from classes by the time Blair made it home that evening.
“Christopher got a call while he was questioning me,” she told Blair as they stood in the kitchen together, chopping vegetables for dinner. “Evidently the coroner ruled Gary’s death suspicious.”
“Suspicious?” Blair asked. “What does that mean?”
Maeve shrugged. “He wouldn’t say anything else.”
“You know, I might just investigate this whole thing for myself,” Blair mused. “It would be much more satisfying than writing clickbait articles.”
Maeve only hummed in response.
That night, Maeve had another nightmare. Again, Blair woke her gently and switched on all the lights to help calm her.
“This one was about a shadowy hand,” Maeve groaned, wincing. “It was just… reaching out. I don’t know, it doesn’t sound that scary, I guess, but it was absolutely terrifying.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Blair reminded her sister.
It was this case, Blair thought. She doubted Maeve would feel settled again until they’d figured out what happened to Gary.
What she’d said about investigating… that had been only half-sincere. But now Blair felt powerfully motivated to look into what had happened with Gary.
Anything that might help put her terrified sister at ease.
* * *
Read more here!
Also by Corrine Winters
Kitten Witch Mystery
Dramatic Paws
Momentary Paws
Temporary Paws
Probable Paws
Sudden Paws
Tricky Paws
* * *
Familiar Curses Mystery
Witch’s Treat
Broom Mates
Witch Please
Occulture Shock
* * *
Hex and the City
Witching & Moaning
Life’s A Witch
Bottom Witch
Boss Witch
Payback’s A Witch
Corrine Winters, Lethal Paws
