It’s been a strange, stressful few days. I’m probably just imagining things.
“I’m a bit silly, aren’t I, Rafe? I’m scaring myself.” I go back to painting and thinking my plans out loud. “I’ll have to find a bottling machine somewhere if I want to sell bottles. Oooh, and I’ll need to design a label. I wonder if I could draw something. I haven’t done any art in a long time?—”
“You should put a picture of my face on them. They’ll fly out the door faster than that sparrow Celeste let in once.Mmmm, sparrow.”
Okay, that’sdefinitelya man’s voice.
It doesn’t sound like it’s inside my head this time.
He’s in this room with me.
I whirl around, and my heart leaps into my throat.
Rafe has disappeared from his spot on the counter. In his place, a tall, red-haired, creamy-skinned man with colourful floral chest tattoos luxuriates like a Bernini model, a mischievous grin playing across his lips as he stretches out his tongue to lick between his fingers.
There’s a strange man in my shop.
And he’s completely naked.
III
Veronika: I know we haven’t had much to do with each other since I started working for Warrick, but I’m worried about him, and you’re not answering my texts. I just want to know what the police said. You waited too long to talk to them. I should have listened to my gut and called them earlier, but I didn’t want to step on your toes. Well, the toes are being stepped on if you keep ignoring me!
“You…you’re not a cat!”
I’m aware that’s a ridiculous thing to say when confronted with a naked man in your shop. But I’ve never been good at thinking on my feet. My brain is short-circuiting with the non-computing information in front of me. I settle for waving my paint-soaked roller in his general direction.
How did he get in here? Did I leave one of the back windows open?
The man-who-is-not-a-cat-because-that-would be-impossible stops licking his hand and looks up to me. His hair is the same flame-colour as Rafe’s points, and it sticks up into two scruffy points at the side of his head, almost like cat ears. “Your observation skills leave something to be desired. I amsometimesa cat. Right now, I’m not.”
His voice soundsexactlylike the one I’ve been hearing.
“Whatareyou?”
“Apart from an incredible lover, a passable fiddler, and the scourge of husbands across England, you mean?” He admires his nails. “I’m a cursed familiar, I think? That’s the closest thing I can find in the spellbook on sale in the window of that witchy shop across the way. It’s hard to search the index when you don’t have opposablethumbs and the tarot reader is trying to decapitate you with a broom. I know what you are, though – you’re a witch.”
He juts his chin proudly in the air, as if he’s won something from me.
I don’t give him the satisfaction of replying, mostly because everything he’s said has me stunned silent.
“I know you’re a witch because I’m here, talking to you, in all of my human majesty. I’ve been trapped in this feline body since before the old hag died, and do you know whatno onemisses? Hairballs.” He makes a face. “Having a bendy spine is fun, though. I’ve never had such proximity to my own nutsack before. It’s hours of entertainment.”
My brain is slowly catching up to what he’s telling me. “You’re…you’re really Rafe?”
That’s impossible.
I’m a witch. I know that magic is real. I know that right next door is a werewolf, and that just outside the village is a property development for vampires with windows that block out UV light and a communal blood cellar. I know that Nevermore Bookshop houses the best collection of occult and magical books in England, and that the shop itself sizzles with magic, and I suspect, based on various goings-on I’ve heard in the village, that it brings infamous fictional characters from classic literature to life, and sometimes they cause chaos and mayhem. So there is every chance that this very naked, very attractive manisactually Rafe the cat.
But the kind of magic required to create a cursed familiar…that comes around barely once a century, and it would require the power of a full coven. The Widow Hardcastle was just a grumpy hedgewitch. Wasn’t she?
“I’m really Rafe, once an affable rapscallion, master cat burglar, and sometimes-musician, now an affable rapscallion with a yowl that won’t quit and a furry nutsack.” Rafe steps towards me. I notice his tail hasn’t shifted with the rest of his cat form. It’s grown to about the length of his full height, swishing with such force that it knocks over my bottle of cider. He catches the bottle with his tail before it hits thefloor. “I’m still a cat burglar, though. The irony isn’t lost on me. I think this was the Widow Hardcastle’s idea of a joke. She kept telling me this curse was for my own good.”
“Don’t come any closer.” I brandish the roller. “I have this paint thingie, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
The human version of Rafe rolls his eyes. “Please.I’m already down three lives. I’m not going to lose another one to a witch with a paint roller. Do you have any more steak morsels? They were excellent. They were from the smelly mutt next door, weren’t they?”
“Who are you calling a smelly mutt? Celeste is lovely.”
