Charms & Chapters by Elle Adams

Author:Elle Adams [Adams, Elle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-18T06:00:00+00:00

8

Early the following morning, a voice squeaked in my ear, “Rise and shine!”

“Ow!” I sat up, rubbing my ears. “Please, not so loud.”

“Rise and shine,” said Sylvester, in imitation of the crow.

“Shoo.” I flapped a hand at them. “Behave.”

“But I have news!” said Jet.

“I have news!” echoed Sylvester.

“Watch it.” I grabbed for the pen and paper I kept on my bedside table. “According to Cass, I have magic pouring out of my ears. You’d better hope I don’t try anything on you next, Sylvester.”

“You would never.”

I pressed the pen to the page, too half-asleep to think of anything more than a cheap bluff. “Try me.”

The owl flew out of the room with a shriek. I sighed and put down the paper. “Do I have a lesson to go to?”

“I know not, partner, but you asked me to spy on the townspeople and I did. William is cheating on his fiancée, Greg the goblin is stealing from the till at the Black Dog pub…”

“But are either of those things connected to the murder?” I asked.

“No, but Tansy is planning on leaving her husband for a troll, Rebecca thinks Wilhelmina looks like a toad in her new dress…”

Suppressing a groan, I went into the bathroom to shower, leaving the squeaking crow outside the door. He was still mid-monologue by the time I came out of the shower, fully dressed. Apparently, he’d stayed out the entire night gathering gossip from everyone he could find in the town. Note to self: next time, give him more specific instructions.

I grabbed my bag, left the room and tripped headfirst down a water slide.

Water filled my mouth, making me choke. My hands flailed, grabbing at the edges, but I was moving too fast to stop. My bag slid ahead of me, crashing into a shallow pool of water, and seconds later, I joined it.

Coughing, I spat out a mouthful of water. “Really, Cass? Now you’re wrecking library property?”

The contents of my bag, books included, lay scattered around me—including the Novice’s Guide to Vampirism, which I’d stayed up late reading. I staggered to my feet, my knees throbbing where I’d landed on them.

“Partner!” said Jet, flying above my head. “Need my help?”

“Yes, I’d like you to find Cass and make her regret this.” I shoved a handful of wet hair out of my face and set about picking up my ruined textbooks. Aunt Adelaide had had no trouble restoring the library to its previous condition after the kelpie had rampaged around the ground floor, so if I could make a bird talk, it should be no trouble for me to dry my textbooks.

I picked up the notebook and pen and wrote the word dry. Immediately, the water vanished from the floor, me, and the books. Even the shallow pool on the floor disappeared. I turned over the notebook. Every page was as dry as it’d been before the water slide incident. The textbooks were in the same condition, without so much as a wrinkle in their pages. Smiling, I opened my Biblio-Witch Inventory to record the new spell.

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