"Forty-two, sugar." Dean Martin fluffed his green feathers as his smooth crooner voice slid out of the leaves. "Forty-three. Make that forty-four. We've got ourselves asituationI do believe."
"I don't suppose," said the Siamese from the middle of the lawn, "anyone here could tell us where we are?"
Honey said, "Cauldron Falls, of course. At FACTS & FIBS, the familiar…." She tailed off as more cats appeared.
"Mom!" Honey called back through the screen door. "Mom, Dad, you need to come out here."
"Just a moment, sweetheart," Rhoda called from the kitchen.
"Now, please. Both of you." Something in Honey's voice carried. Rhoda Hadwin came through the door first, wipingher hands on the towel she'd been drying dishes with. Edgar followed a half-step behind. They both stopped in the doorway. Rhoda's towel stilled in her hand.
"Oh," Rhoda said.
Edgar said nothing. His eyes moved across the lawn like Roam's moved across the tree line. Counting. Reading. Cataloguing.
The Siamese lifted her chin. "Are you in charge here?"
"I am," Rhoda said. She let the screen door tap shut behind her and stepped down onto the porch proper. "I'm Rhoda Hadwin. This is my husband Edgar. My daughter Honey. Her Roam."
"Lady Grey," said the Siamese. "I am bonded to Hildegard Voss of Vienna, whom I last saw not six hours past, when she kissed me on the forehead and was off to bed as she does every evening. I closed my eyes. I opened them here. I should like very much to know why."
"So would we all," drawled the marmalade tom, settling onto his haunches as though his feet hurt. "Edinburgh, madam. The hearthstone. My warlock was reading aloud from the paper. I'm partial to the sports pages. And then your lawn."
"Budapest," said a small gray-and-white cat near the bottom of the steps. "Bedtime. Now this."
"Tuscany," said another. "My Marco. He'll be furious."
"Marseille," said a sleek silver tabby. "I was eating."
The voices layered on top of each other, polite, angry, frightened, some of them carrying the small tremble cats fall into when their dignity is threatened. Honey's skin went tight under her sweater. She had grown up in this house. Every familiar in the world passed through FACTS & FIBS, bonded, re-bonded, retired, rescued. She had heard familiars speak in every tone a voice could take. She had never heard this.
"Rhoda," Edgar said quietly.
"I know," Rhoda whispered back.
"This isn't…"
"I know, Edgar."
Rhoda had gone very still on the step. Her hand had drifted up to her chest, and the towel, forgotten, fell to the ground. She was looking at the cats in the grass like a doctor at a symptom she had only read about.
Honey had spent her whole life reading her mother's faces. She did not like this one. "Mom?"
"Sweetheart." Rhoda did not take her eyes from the lawn. "Inside. The big registration book and the quill. The good ink."
"On it," Honey said.
"Roam, sugar, take the door. Bring them in one at a time, slow as they need. Watch the tree line — tell me if more come. Edgar, we'll need the map." Rhoda's gaze still had not left the cats who kept coming.
Edgar nodded once. He was already moving. Honey hurried into the house behind him. Roam took the doorway.
The front hall still smelled faintly of her parents' travel: dust and pine needles and something weakly peppery that clung to Rhoda's coat whenever she came home from the east. The desk stood in the parlor where it had stood for longer than anyone could remember, a great slab of dark wood with a narrow-slit cut into its top. The slit was worn smooth as river stone by a thousand years of parchment slipping through. Honey had known that desk before she'd known how to control her own magic. She knew what lived under it. It housed rows of thin gold coins in tidy sleeves. An entire world's worth of familiar bonds and witch and warlock files. Her parents had never discussed the familiar vault that lay beneath FACTS & FIBS with anyone outside the family. The desk looked like an old table with a slot in it. It was the most important piece of furniture in the magical world.
Honey lifted the heavy registration book from the shelf beside the desk, set it down, and uncapped the good ink. The leather of the cover was warm under her hand, alive with its own small magic, like the whole house. She could hear the rest of her family organizing the night around her. From the front doorway came Roam's voice, low and even, easing one frightened cat after another across the threshold. Her mother's voice drifted in from the porch, slow and steady, the voice Rhoda used when a familiar was distressed.One at a time, my loves. We're going to bring you in one at a time. There's no rush.And from the dining room came the softer sound of her father, no words, not yet. Just the hush of something heavy being unrolled across the table.
Honey looked up. From her chair she could see straight through the parlor's back door into the dining room, and her father had spread the map across the long table. She had only seen it a handful of times in her life: the big enchanted one her parents took into the field. Its surface was alive. Faint glowing lines shifted along borders. Tiny lights pulsed in some towns and lay dark in others. Edgar stood over it with his lavender-tipped marker, shoulders set in the posture Honey knew from old photographs of her parents young in the field.
He met her eyes across the two rooms. He did not smile. He tipped his chin toward her book, then went back to the map.
