Lady Grey's head whipped around. "Hildegard is NOT wearing her own teeth."
The Persian, who had been dignified until this moment, howled out a long and bitter aria about her warlock's financial troubles.
The second wave rose. Lazlo raised one eyebrow. "My word," he said.
Rhoda was already moving. A hand going up to quiet the nearest cat. Another to signal Edgar. Her eyes already back on the bayou book.
"Come, Lazlo," she said. "I will tell you everything. Come with me."
"Of course." His hand brushed the inside of his coat. Dropped again.
They crossed the house together to the little room off the pantry, Rhoda's study, with its one window and its shelf of strange books and its quiet. Honey watched her mother tuck the bayou book under her arm as they walked, and Lazlo rest a steady palm on Rhoda's shoulder, the touch of an old friend when his friend was bearing a hard thing. The study door closed behind them.
Honey bent down again to peer behind the bookcase, the old black tom hadn't moved. His copper eyes stared through the gap at the room in chaos. He did not speak. The wave of spilling cats washed around him like water around a stone.
Chapter 3
Open House
Cauldron Falls woke slow. Mist curled up off the falls into the square, where ancient ginkgos had dropped another inch of leaves on the cobblestones overnight.
At the top of the lane, Murphy O'Reilly had already shouldered the heavy oak door of The Boozy Cauldron open and propped it with the brass cauldron-foot that lived there for that purpose. He stepped out onto the stoop with his broom in one fist and his apron strings half-tied, took a breath of the cold air and let it out.
"Aye, that's the stuff," Murphy said to no one. "That's a proper bit of October."
His broom moved by itself, in lazy sweeping circles around his feet, gathering last night's leaves into a neat brown pile. Murphy went on hooking his apron, watching the square.
Not far away, Colin Scott unlocked Spellbinders Bookstore & Library and pushed the door inward with his hip. He set his coffee on the counter and stepped back out to bring the morning paper in from where the wind had pushed it under the boot-scraper.
Colin straightened and squinted toward the south end of the square. A coach had just rumbled in. It was not a coach he recognized. It was rickety in the way of every long-haul magical conveyance, with wheels at slightly the wrong angle and paintwork blistered. The driver was a witch in a wool cap pulled to her eyebrows. She unlatched the side door with a flick of her hand and stepped down onto the cobbles, and the passengers began to trickle out behind her. There were perhaps eight of them. Colin lost count when one of them dropped a hatbox.
"Excuse me." A man in a tweed cape adjusted his small round spectacles and looked around the square as though it were a slightly cluttered library. "Could you assure me, please we are in Cauldron Falls, correct?"
"You are, sir," Colin said.
"Ah. Thank you." The man's shoulders relaxed.
A woman shoved past him. She was short, square, red-cheeked, and wore a green velvet cloak that had clearly travelled. She had a face built for fury and was currently using it.
"Where is the cat house?" she demanded. "The one with the cats. Up the hill. Which hill."
Murphy looked up from his broom. "That'd be FACTS & FIBS, lass." He pointed up the rise with the bristle end of his broom. "Top o' the hill. The old Victorian. Ye'll see the cats from a quarter mile out, I imagine." Then he leaned both hands on the broom and gave her and the half-circle of bewildered travellers behind her a steady look. "But I'll say this for the lot of ye, since ye'll not hear it from anyone else." His voice didn't rise. It didn't have to. "There's a great fierce ruckus on with the familiars. Aye, we know it. The whole town knows it. And Rhoda and Edgar Hadwin been up half the night and will be up half the next one, like as not, tryin' to make sense of it. Ye'll do yerselves and yer cats no favours by stormin' in on the only folk in the world who might sort this out. Best let the masters do their work."
The Irishwoman harrumphed, "Then mind yer broom, sir, and I'll mind me cat." She rotated on her heel and began to march up the hill.
Murphy watched her go. "Aye," he said. "Good luck to Rhoda, then."
The man with the spectacles watched her go with a small mild expression. He turned back to Colin, and his gaze settled, for a polite moment, on the painted lettering of the shop window behind him.
"Spellbinders," he read, and his face warmed. "A very fine establishment, sir, from what little I can see of it. I shall look forward to a proper visit once we have all of this," he gestured vaguely up the hill, "bother sorted out."
He set off after the Irishwoman at a much more reasonable pace. The rest of the coach followed in their wake and by the time they reached the bend in the road, they were marching almost in unison.
"Ye know," Murphy said. "I think we'd best be making a lot more coffee."
"And tea," Colin said. "Lots more tea."
Up the hill, on the wraparound porch of FACTS & FIBS, an emerald parrot lifted his head from where the wisteria had grown in thick around the eaves.
