No Treats for Charlie by Tiegan Clyne

Author:Tiegan Clyne [Clyne, Tiegan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-29T22:00:00+00:00

In the morning, Matilda cleaned up the pumpkin mess, made a new jack o’lantern, and settled down at the kitchen table with her grandmother’s spellbooks. Charlie sat across from her, helping her go through the books as well. He turned the pages, careful not to use his claws. The spellbooks smelled like lavender, which he liked, and camphor, which made him sneeze. The newts munched on their meal worms and one of the last crickets, probably not long for the world, chirped away defiantly in a corner of the aquarium.

/What will you do if one of the crickets gets loose?/ he asked Matilda.

“Congratulate him on a fine sense of self-preservation.”

She sounded distracted, and she had her lips pressed into an unhappy line. Charlie could feel her emotions and knew that she was frustrated with the search for a spell that would work for what they needed. Underneath it, she was also feeling nostalgia with a tinge of grief.

/Tell me about your grandmother,/ he prompted, hoping the conversation would take the edge off the subconscious missing that she felt.

She smiled. “She was kind, and always very soft and huggable.” She glanced up at him. “She had a wonderful kitten shelf. You’d have liked her.”

/Aw, I’m sure I would have./ He rubbed his paw across his nose and shook himself. His new sweater, which was orange with a black stripe around the middle, shook with him. /Did she teach you much about witchcraft?/

Matilda’s eyes softened at the memory. “Silly little things. Divination, mostly. Like how you could find a star in an apple if you cut it the right way, and how to read fortunes in tea leaves. She gave me my first Tarot deck when I was seven years old.”

He glanced over at her reading table. The deck that sat there was ragged with long years of service. /That deck?/

“No. The deck my granny gave me is tucked away in a box under the bed. It’s too special to me to use every day.”

He could understand that. He was sure he’d feel the same way about the sweater that was currently on Matilda’s knitting needle, because it was made of the softest white yarn he had ever encountered. He couldn’t wait for it to be finished so he could show it off in town.

The window by the door rattled, and Henry appeared beside it, his coat coming into view before the rest of him. Matilda looked up, pleasantly surprised, and waited for him to finish materializing.

“Good morning,” she greeted as soon as he had all his parts in a visible form.

“Good morning to you, Miss Matilda,” he greeted. He looked around the single room that was their home. “A charming little cabin.”

“Thank you.”

He walked closer to the fire and held out his hands, warming what would never be warm again. The newts scurried away from him, and he chuckled.

“Silly creatures,” he commented. “I have news about your warlock.”

“Excellent! Where is he right now?” she asked, folding her hands over the vellum pages she’d been scrutinizing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.