Look, I know I can’t save every animal in the world. But if the opportunity presents itself to help another creature, I have to take it.
Oh—and there’s my well-known history of bad decisions. Honestly, going all-in on rat ownership probably wouldn’t even make my personal top ten list. As bad decisions go, it had nothing on, say, my very brief goth phase in high school, during which time I secretly donated all my non-Hot Topic clothing tothe local thrift store and my mother was so furious when she found out that she refused to buy me any new clothes for a year.
I moved around the cart to heft out the box that contained the ridiculously heavy cage, which Emma insisted was the one “all the rat people” purchased. “I just have to do this,” I told Horst as I struggled to wrangle the long, flat box from the cart.
He was next to me in a blink, taking the box from me and muscling it onto the sales counter with ease. “I get it.” He reached up and gently touched his shirt pocket, where, I knew, Oomy was curled up, safe and sound.
He knew how I felt because that was how he felt about his kobolds. I didn’t need to explain it to him—he just understood.
I suddenly felt all warm and gooey inside, like the molten chocolate chips in one of my fresh-baked cookies. I really hoped I didn’t look like I felt, because if I did, I probably looked like an idiot.
And then Horst looked down. “Why are theretwoboxes with airholes?” he asked.
I had a feeling he was going to be slightly less understanding about my decision to quite literally double-down on the rat situation. But before I could even start to explain, Emma paused in the middle of scanning the box with the cage and looked up at us. “Oh, that’s right. He was wearing a cape.”
Horst whipped his head toward her. “Who was wearing a cape?”
“The guy that bought the rat.” Emma resumed scanning.
“You didn’t think to mention that before?” I asked. I mean...how was a capeaverage?
She just shrugged. “I didn’t think about it until just now. We get some weird people in here occasionally.” A nearby display of mealworms made me wonder if Quill, the Unseelie queen who enjoyed adding freeze-dried worms to her food, was one of those people. “Like, aside from the cape, he was a regular dude.”
Horst pressed his fingertips on the counter and leaned slightly forward. “What color was the cape? Periwinkle? Vermillion? Mustard yellow? The kind of fabric that’s purple in some lights and green in others?”
I started loading the bags of scanned items into the cart. “Are you just guessing colors or do you know a lot of people who wear capes?”
“I’ve worked with a lot of magicians,” he said. Then he added, in a barely audible mutter, “Among other things.”
Emma shook her head. “No, it was black. Or wait—more like gray. With a hood.”
“A gray cape,” Horst said, and he paled under his swarthy tan. “That’s just what we need.”
Chapter Seven
“Who do you know that wears a gray cape?” I asked as soon as we had the car loaded and Horst was backing out of the parking space in front of Meow Do You Do.
He had his arm behind my seat, half turned to look where he was going because his Honda Civic was old enough to not have a backup camera. “Hmmm?” he asked.
“It seemed like you had an idea of who might have sent you the rat,” I said. “Who is it?”
He turned back around and shifted into drive. “I mean, I may know a few people who were known to wear gray capes, but I certainly don’t know for sure who sent the rat.”
He was silent as he navigated through the parking lot and out to the road, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was lying to me.That’s just what we need, he’d said.
