But I liked it. Loved it, in fact.
I was laughing when Alice came around the corner holding the pizza box. She blinked owlishly behind her enormous glasses. “Oh, look at that. I leave you for a few minutes, and you get yourself a cat.”
I opened my mouth to explain, but she smiled. Crouching down, she gave the kitten a scratch on his tiny belly with one fingernail. “He’s adorable. Fenwald will be thrilled to have his own trainee.”
I watched in amazement as she moved toward the table and started putting out the pizza things. “I got us salads too, I hope you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind at all. Clutching my kitten close, I joined Alice at the table, feeling more certain of my future than I had in a very long time.
“I’ll get you some food and litter from Fenwald’s stuff,” Alice told me later. It was getting late and we were sitting with full bellies, watching with amusement as the kitten put old Fenny through his paces. Alice had been right, the big cat seemed to be cherishing his role as mentor, even if he was severely underprepared for it.
I yawned widely, my jaw cracking. “I guess I’ll go to bed then.”
Alice nodded. “I’ll bring that stuff over in a bit.”
Nodding, I shuffled toward the dividing door. “Come on, Mr. Wicked.” To my vast surprise, the kitten complied, bouncing over and batting at the laces on my shoes. “He doesn’t look tired,” I said, concerned.
Alice laughed. “Don’t worry, kittens run until they collapse, but he’ll have lots of room to run in the library.”
She wasn’t wrong there. I pulled the door open.
“Oh, I nearly forgot. I put your medicine from Doctor Whom on Shakespeare’s desk.”
All my weariness fled me in a wash. “You what? My medicine?”
Wicked trotted into the library ahead of me, tail held high as he cast his bright gaze on the wonderland of stuff and places laid out before him.
Squeak!
My gaze shot to the enormous magical desk, finding the tiny, black-eyed critter trembling on its massive surface. Oh no!
“Wicked!” I screamed as his sparkling orange-gold gaze lifted toward the frightened sound.
Three things happened at once.
My medicine took off running, tail rigid behind him.
My new kitten hared off after him, a look of pure joy painting his adorable face.
And, I forgot I was tired, as I stumbled after the burgeoning disaster unfolding itself before my very eyes.
It was pretty much business as usual in the adventure that was my new life.
The End
Read More Enchanting Inquiries
If you enjoyed Unbaked Croakies, you might want to check out the rest of the series. Please enjoy Chapter One of Tea & Croakies, Book 1 of the Enchanting Inquiries Paranormal Cozy Mysteries series as my gift to you!
This is no boring librarian shushing people from behind a desk. This librarian corrals rogue magic. But more importantly, she has a frog and a cat, and she’s not afraid to use them!
I knew when I woke up with a migraine that things were going to get interesting. As a magical artifact wrangler, it’s not an unusual way to start my day. But I had no idea how bad it was going to get.
Until I found a frog sitting in my teacup.
Even that, I could explain to myself if I had to. After all, I have a creative mind. But when the frog started talking to me, yeah, I was pretty sure I’d taken the wrong kind of pill that morning for my headache.
If only I’d realized then what I know now. The talking frog was just the beginning of my problems. And quite a beginning it was!
Tea & Croakies
Beware Pinching Chairs
I’ve been told from an early age that magic wrangling is a science. Color me skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s a science. It’s that, for me, the whole process is really more of a hit or miss, try until you die proposition. It’s like I’m missing something that will make it easier. As if someone forgot to give me my magic wand when I reached my eighteenth birthday and came into my powers.
Or rather, my powers came into me. With a crash, thump, grab your rump kind of unexpectedness that left me hanging over the toilet horking and holding my head with both hands as it tried to split in two.
Even now, five years later, I still get the migraines. I wish I could say they’ve gotten easier over time. And maybe they have. But if you’re making a comparison between a tsunami and a level 5 hurricane, it’s really a distinction without a whole lot of difference for the people getting pounded by weather. Well, except one might kill you faster.
I’m thinking my shelf life might be a little bit longer these days, though I couldn’t prove it.
At the moment, with a thousand tiny gnomes wearing spiked golf shoes and using pickle forks as walking sticks dancing on my brain, I was thinking it might be preferable to die faster anyway.
The world suddenly erupted in a series of explosions that had a familiar cadence to them. I hid under my long, brown hair and fought my lids to get them to open. But they fought back, eventually snapping closed again as the explosions stopped and the door my intruder had been banging on swung slowly open. “Naida? Are you awake?”
All evidence to the contrary, I was, unfortunately, awake. I grunted something even I couldn’t decipher and my torturer took it as permission to come into my room.
“I closed up downstairs. Do you want me to make you some tea?”
My lips moved and more words nobody could understand eased through them. Fortunately, my loyal, if slightly annoying, assistant understood Migrainish Gibberish.
“I felt the magic arrive a few minutes ago, so I
