No doubt dubbing himself the night watchman for the store.
Goddess knew we needed one.
Yawning widely enough to crack my jaw, I headed for the dividing door. I didn’t quite make it. The bookstore phone rang as I was reaching for the handle. Groaning aloud, I glanced at the wild-eyed black cat clock on the wall above the sales counter.
Ten o’clock. Technically, I didn’t have to answer the phone. The store had been closed for hours. But I felt as if letting it go to voicemail would be like shirking my duties. So I trudged over and answered, hoping whoever it was didn’t want anything that required a lot of brainpower. “Croakies Bookstore.”
“Hello…” There was a short pause, during which I contemplated whether the caller wanted me to return the greeting. I’d opened my mouth to do that when she said, “Is this the Keeper?”
My mouth slammed shut. I didn’t quite know what to say to that. Only the magic-using community knew that title and where to find the KoA. But it seemed imprudent of me to just blurt out verification of it over the phone. “Who’s calling, please?”
A sigh wafted through the line. “This is Maude Quilleran. I want to hire the Keeper to help me find an artifact. I know it’s late, but I’m kind of desperate.”
My thoughts tumbled over one another. It was clear the young woman…she sounded like she might be in her teens…knew of the Keeper and had a genuine need. I should turn her over to Alice. But Alice was resting and probably wouldn’t want to speak to the teen. I could, of course, tell her that Alice would call her the next day. But then I thought of my conversation with Sebille. I’d promised I’d step up my efforts to learn, in case Alice fell short of expectations again. So I screwed up my courage. “Tell me what you need help with, Maude.”
She made a happy little sound, and I couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, thank you, thank you! I’ve been freaking out!”
Definitely a teen. If the youthful voice hadn’t given her away, her tendency to speak in exclamation points definitely would have.
“What’s going on?” I nudged.
“It’s my hairbrush. It’s spelled, of course.”
Of course, I thought, smiling. Wasn’t everyone’s brush spelled?
“And Margo Collinsworth took it because she’s mean as a snake! I need to get it back because Margo’s a muggle…” she giggled. “Sorry. I know that’s not a real thing, but I just love that word, don’t you?”
“Um…”
“Anyway, Margo the muggle took my hairbrush because she’s jealous of my hair, and I don’t want her to use it!”
I frowned, feeling underwhelmed by the opportunity she was offering me. On the plus side, it sounded as if it was well within my limited means to accomplish. “That doesn’t sound too dire,” I started to say.
“Did you miss the part where I said it was spelled?!”
Shoving away irritation at her slightly snippy tone, I decided I needed to net the problem out. “What is it spelled to do, Maude?”
“Give me lustrous, perfect hair, of course!”
Of course. “Okay, well, aside from losing the brush, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Did you miss the part where I said she was a muggle?!”
Okay. Got it. A muggle…erm…non-magic teen would probably notice a brush that gave her perfect hair. “And it would be obvious to her that it’s spelled if she used it?”
“Duh! Margo’s hair looks like the backside of a porcupine. When that brush touches it, she’s suddenly going to have long, thick, shiny hair. The only way Margo could have hair that nice is if she wore a wig!”
Grinning at the “backside of a porcupine” reference, I said, “Got it. You want me to find the hairbrush?”
“Yes! Thank you! I’ll see you there tomorrow at six in the morning!”
“Wait!” I yelled, realizing as I did that she’d infected me with exclamation points. “You’ll see me where?”
“Oh…” More giggling. “At Enchanted High School.”
Holy halibut halitosis! I was going back to high school.
19
Baggy Underwear, Mean Girls, And Mortal Embarrassment
To say my days in Enchanted High were difficult would be to seriously underplay the situation. As a supernormal with no discernible magic but a tendency to create unintentional havoc wherever I went because of my latent energies, I was a serious liability to myself.
I didn’t really belong in the human world. And not belonging is about as mortal a sin in high school as one can commit.
But I also didn’t belong in the magic world. Or, as I was informed by my non-magic grandma, I wasn’t part of that world and it wasn’t part of me.
So it should seem clear that I carried around a lot of emotional baggage in the form of self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy.
Looking back, I now realize that it made me pretty much a typical teen. But at the time, I’d thought I was queen gnish in a prickly and uncomfortable crowd of one.
Unlike teen-me, the young woman who strode quickly in my direction as I did a turtle walk toward the building was delicately pretty, confident, and sure of her place in the world.
Maude Quilleran smiled and waved, tossing a thick ribbon of wavy blonde locks over her shoulder as she fixed a wide blue gaze on me. “Hi! I’m Maude. You’re the Keeper?”
I hunched into myself at her overloud proclamation. I was feeling like a fraud at the same time I was concerned over the young woman all but screaming my magical designation to the world at large. “In training, actually,” I told her, taking her outstretched hand. “I’m Naida. The Keeper is under the weather.” I assumed I was telling the young witch the truth, though I hadn’t clapped eyes on Alice before I left Croakies at the buttcrack of dawn.
I assumed she was still blissfully asleep, cradled in the muscular arms of Morpheus. Whereas I’d been wrenched from an uneasy sleep by
