Pawsitively Betrayed Read online

  “Hiya, Amber!”

  She looked up to see the gangly form of Carl, the chief’s youngest officer. A small smile broke out across her face involuntarily. Carl was the human equivalent of a golden retriever puppy. Excitable, goofy, and eager to please.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said, flopping into the only other available chair. “Chief Brown’s got me doing so much paperwork my hands are more papercut than skin.” He held up a long-fingered hand decorated in several Band-Aids—one covered in Superman symbols—as evidence. “How you been?” Then he winced and slapped a Band-Aid-covered hand over his face. “Dumb question! You’re in here. What’re you in for?”

  The door opened again and the chief came up short. “Carl, what on earth are you doing in here? There’s a huge pile of work on your desk.”

  Carl slouched in his chair and let out a whimper that seemed better suited to a little kid having a tantrum. “I just wanted to say hi to Amber.”

  The chief wordlessly pointed toward the door.

  “Fiiiine.” Carl dramatically pushed himself out of his chair and stood. Just before he left the room, he said, “Hope it all works out, Amber.”

  The chief muttered to himself as he sat down, dropping a legal pad on the table. He offered Amber a bottle of water. She waved it away.

  “Okay, Miss Blackwood, what I need from you is a statement of what ingredients are in your ‘sleepy tea,’” he said.

  She knew the formal tone was for the sake of the cameras recording this conversation, but it still irked her. She did as he asked.

  “You create your own tea blends in-house, correct?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Does the tea have an official recipe anywhere to prove that these are the only ingredients that are ever found in the blends?” he asked. “Has anyone recently observed you make the tea to help corroborate that this is how it’s made? Do you have a license for selling things like tea blends?”

  Amber flushed. “Well, no. I’m technically an herbalist and we aren’t required to get any kind of licensing. The ingredients are printed on every box and vial; as long as I let clients know what’s in the remedies, herbs, and tinctures, as far as I know, that’s enough. First amendment rights … or something.” She awkwardly cleared her throat. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “Technically, only physicians can legally prescribe cures and treatments for diseases and illnesses. I think as an … herbalist … you’re operating in a gray area and run the risk of being sued if you make a claim about the effectiveness of a treatment that then causes harm to the customer.”

  Amber groaned and buried her face in her hands.

  “I suggest you start compiling as many records as you can,” the chief said. “Write down when you made your last batch, if anyone helped with any part of the process, when Henrietta bought the most recent batch, and how much she purchased. You’ll also need to figure out if it was you who handed the tea over, or if one of your employees did.”

  “Her last batch was purchased yesterday and I’m the one who prepared her order and handed it to her,” Amber said. “The order was sitting in one of the cubbies behind the counter for a while before Henrietta came in, but I highly doubt Ben or the Bowen sisters would have done anything to tamper with it. Who’s to say the tea wasn’t tampered with after it left my store?”

  “Which is exactly why this compilation of information will be helpful,” he said. “Make it as clear as possible what your business practices are in case someone comes asking questions.”

  “Someone as in a lawyer convinced my products put her sister in a coma,” Amber grumbled.

  He held up a hand to placate her. “I just want to help you get ahead of this before Thea arrives. She already implied she thinks you need to have the book thrown at you for selling consumable products that haven’t been evaluated by the FDA. She may have used the term ‘snake-oil salesman.’”

  “This makes me scared to sell anything,” she muttered.

  “We’re only investigating whether someone committed a crime. We aren’t here to flesh out civil litigation claims.”

  Whatever the heck that meant.

  “Remember …” he said very slowly and deliberately. “The fear you’re experiencing now very well might be the reason for this. Someone might be trying to undermine your business …”

  Right. The Penhallows. She needed to keep her spiraling worries in check.

  “Do I need a lawyer?” she asked after a moment.

  “It might be worth it to make a few phone calls,” he said. “But we don’t know how much of Thea’s threats are those of a woman scared about the well-being of her sister, how much is posturing, and how much she’s truly hell-bent on going after your products. My guess is, the state of Henrietta’s health will guide Thea’s actions more than anything.”

  Amber had just seen Henrietta yesterday. She hadn’t been her usual immaculate self, and she’d asked for a job, but Amber hadn’t thought anything about Henrietta’s appearance or behavior was alarming so much as out of character. Amber would never forgive herself if Henrietta didn’t wake up.

  “I think that’s all I need for now, Miss Blackwood,” the chief said, picking up his legal pad and pen. “We’ll be in touch if I have any more questions.”

  Amber nodded absently, then followed him out of the interrogation room.

  When Amber got back to The Quirky Whisker, she didn’t immediately go in. Instead, she loitered in the parking lot beside the building and called Kim as promised, but the call went to voicemail. She left Kim a long message detailing what had happened at the station, and also apologized for needing to bail on the float decorating that evening in Marbleglen. The idea of maintaining a cheery outward demeanor while surrounded by people like Bianca Pace and Harlo sounded like too much to deal with today. Bianca was getting easier to tolerate, but Amber currently didn’t have the energy to even entertain the idea of participating.

  Once she finally entered the shop, she found both Aunt G and Willow bustling about helping customers, while Ben effortlessly worked the cash register, winning the customers over with his awkward charm. Amber was relieved to see that Sally’s outburst earlier hadn’t cut her profits for the day off at the knees, but she also wondered how soon news of the exploding bear would make its way through Edgehill.

  What would happen if news of Toast the Bear’s demise reached Thea Bishop? The exploding toy could potentially be even more of a problem than whatever had happened to Henrietta.

  The rest of the day passed by in a blur. Amber flinched every time a new customer walked into the shop. Any one of these unfamiliar faces could be the mask of a Penhallow. Any one of them could be a customer coming in to complain about a malfunctioning purchase. Both her aunt and sister attempted to catch Amber’s attention throughout the day, no doubt wanting an update on what had happened at the station, but Amber didn’t want to talk about it.

  That evening, when the door was finally locked behind the last customer of the day, Amber was tempted to bewitch her chalkboard welcome sign to say, “Sorry, we’re closed for the rest of time!” Instead, she merely flipped it over.

  Then she beelined for the section where she kept all the animated toys and grabbed the three remaining bears off the shelf. One woman had already tried to buy a bear today and Amber had gently eased her in the direction of a non-animated cat instead. Amber wanted to believe the chief’s assessment of the situation. She wanted to put the blame on a Penhallow lurking in town. But a bigger part of her was terrified her magic had glitched in some horrific way and had put young Noah in danger.

  All the same fears she’d faced when Melanie had died were resurfacing now. Grief she thought she’d been managing was now swelling up like a tidal wave she hadn’t seen coming.

  Without a word, Amber carried her purse and armful of toy bears up the stairs. She had just dropped them on the table and was about to tend to the cats’ dinner when Aunt G
stopped in front of her, hands on her hips. Amber came up short.

  Aunt G was a little shorter than Amber and tipped her head back to look up into her face. “I’ll take care of the cats, little mouse. You and Willow try to figure out what happened to that toy.”

  Amber frowned.

  “You can give us the silent treatment if you want, but I know you, little mouse. You retreat into yourself when you’re upset. And I know you’re worried about what could have happened to that sweet boy if the toy had exploded in his hands.”

  Without warning, Amber’s eyes welled with tears.

  “Just as I thought,” Aunt G said in her no-nonsense way. Even when she was being sympathetic, she still sounded practical. “Figure out what happened, hmm? I’ll join you two when I’m done.”

  Amber nodded.

  Tom jumped onto Amber’s bed then and let out a yowl. Aunt G turned to him. “Oh, relax, Tom Cat. You won’t croak in a matter of a few minutes.”

  He yowled in reply as if to say, “You can’t possibly know that, human.”

  Last month, Amber learned that a now-abandoned neighborhood in southern Edgehill had once been home to witches. When the ley lines—veins of magic that crisscross the entire globe—below the neighborhood had erupted several decades ago, expelling cursed magic into the air, it had first scared off the animals, and then had sent the witches packing so they wouldn’t be overcome with magic sickness. But even after the poisoned magic had sunk back into the earth and the cat familiars returned, their witches had not. Now it was speculated that the abundant cat population of Edgehill was made up of descendants of cat familiars. If that was true, Amber thought the regal, calmer Alley was likely a more direct descendant than scaredy-cat, food-obsessed Tom. The pressure of being a cat familiar would probably give the poor boy an aneurysm.

  Currently, while Tom yowled as if he would expire at any moment from starvation, Alley was curled up on the bench seat in a ball. One black ear swiveled this way and that as she took it all in even while acting like she didn’t care.

  Gently shaking her head, Amber turned to face Willow behind her, who already rooted around in Amber’s purse for the mangled bear. Once she grabbed it, she examined it from several angles to inspect the damage.

  “Do you remember which spells this one had?” Willow asked.

  “The bears all had ‘walk,’ ‘run,’ ‘lick paw,’ and ‘roar,’” Amber said. “The last one is the one that gave me the most trouble, since I had to add a noise dampening spell on top of the sound spell to make sure it wasn’t so loud that it rattled the windows—which happened the first time.”

  With her focus still squared on the bear, Willow nodded. “Well, I’m not sure if this is good news or not, but I can’t detect any Penhallow magic on this. That could mean the signature has already faded, or it could mean—”

  “It was never there to begin with,” Amber said, her shoulders slumping.

  Picking up the three unscathed bears, Amber lined them up in a row on the floor. On Amber’s long list for checking the safety of a toy, the last test involved activating spell after spell in rapid succession to help mimic the ever-changing desires of a child. If the toy was able to switch actions seamlessly for an hour without anything going haywire, the toy had passed inspection. Often if a toy malfunctioned, it happened in the first half hour of rapid play.

  Amber stood before the bears with her arms crossed and waited for the cats to finish eating. Tom was already growling while he ate, sensing immediately that the toys he so despised had been placed nearby. Once he gulped down his food in record time, he darted under the bed. Alley slithered under it shortly after.

  Blowing out a slow breath, Amber said, “Chocolate, Mocha, and … uhh … Potato … walk.”

  All three bears started to move, wandering aimlessly near her feet. She commanded them to lick their paws. She told one to roar, while the others were instructed to walk again. She cycled through each movement, save for “run,” several more times, before she got up the nerve to issue the command that had been connected to Toast’s demise.

  The bears started throwing their heads back and offering muted, but still mildly threatening roars. One stopped just beside the dust ruffle, stomped one front paw, and let loose a roar loud enough to cause Tom to sprint out the other side a second later, hissing and spitting. He scrabbled across the hardwood floor of the studio and almost ran headlong into another bear slowly making his way across the apartment. Tom made a quick last-minute decision and dug his claws into the wood to stop himself long enough to change course and dash into the kitchen. A moment later, he sat on top of the counter. His chest heaved and his pupils were dilated. Alley had made it safely onto the bed and was hunkered down low on the comforter, her black-and-white ears pinned to the sides of her head.

  Aunt G stood near the top of the staircase, her arms crossed as she watched the bears. “You’ve improved so much over the years, little mouse. I know you think of these toys as parlor tricks, but the precision needed to get these to react as quickly as they do is really remarkable.”

  Amber and Willow both gaped at her. It wasn’t that Aunt G wasn’t one to issue compliments, or even that she was a mean-spirited person, but Aunt G was the type to show you she cared through actions more than words. So when kind words were offered, it was a bit of a shock.

  “Thanks, Aunt G,” Amber said, her face flushing.

  After letting the bears roam around for another minute, Amber switched the command to “walk.” Eventually they were all in view and, one-by-one, she issued the “run” command.

  And, one by one, like fireworks, the bears exploded.

  Willow shrieked and clapped her hands over her mouth. Aunt G cursed. Amber’s mouth fell open.

  Boom, boom, boom. One after the other, the mangled bears, now robbed of their magic-given life, collapsed onto their sides, their faces blown away. Little bits of melted plastic marred Amber’s floor. The edge of her rug, where one bear now lay, was charred black.

  At a loss, Amber looked at her aunt and sister, then glanced over at the pile of newly magicked discs lying on the table. If the “run” spell was the one that was malfunctioning, all the cats she’d been working on for the festival were in jeopardy, too. Did she have to test every toy she’d made in the last few months to make sure it was safe? Did she need to toss this batch and start over completely? Almost every toy she made had a “run” spell. How many had she sold today that might encounter the same fate as the bears? How many in the past few weeks?

  A pair of hands grasped either of Amber’s elbows. She looked into her sister’s concerned face.

  “Stop it,” Willow said gently. “Whatever that panicked brain of yours is telling you, don’t listen. We’ll figure this out. We’ll start by testing one of each toy that has the ‘run’ spell. If only the bears were affected, that means we have a smaller number to worry about.”

  “Do you have a record of how many toys have been sold in the last few weeks—the bears especially?” Aunt G asked from behind them.

  “I have a ledger under the counter downstairs,” Amber said.

  Without a word, Aunt G descended the steps.

  “Let’s go get one of each,” Willow said. “You test them, and I’ll check your grimoire to see if I can find anything immediately obvious about the language of the spell.”

  Then Willow headed for the stairs too.

  Amber followed her but turned back toward her apartment. From here, she could only see the ruined bodies of two of the three bears. All of them had exploded the exact same way Toast had. It had to be her own faulty magic that did this.

  She descended into The Quirky Whisker, wondering how someone who had been called a “legendary witch” just days ago could also be someone who couldn’t even correctly bewitch a toy bear. If Amber and her magic were somehow the cure to the Penhallow curse, she thought the Penhallows were in even more trouble than they had been before.

  The next couple of hours were spent testing the
lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, ocelots, hippos, elephants, horses, and the like. None of the others exploded, though Amber was filled with unmitigated panic every time she commanded one to run. The floor of her apartment was nearly covered in various plastic animals. But they were all still intact. Only the bears had been compromised.

  According to Amber’s ledger, three bears had been sold to residents of Edgehill in the past week, including Sally. Amber would call the other two in the morning and ask for the toys to be brought back. She wasn’t sure if lying about the need for the recall was the best course of action, as she had to assume that by tomorrow, every parent who had ever purchased a toy from her would know what had happened to Toast the Bear. But being upfront that the toys had a tendency to turn into mini plastic bombs would likely cause the rumor mill to spiral out of control.

  Willow checked and rechecked the run spell Amber had written in her grimoire. She didn’t find anything amiss.

  They even worked to quickly get three more bears created—one with the run spell activated by each of the Blackwood women.

  Not one of them exploded.

  When the last of the new bears had been deactivated, Amber sat in the middle of the floor of her studio apartment and worried at a frayed end of the scorched rug. The reality of her findings had settled over her now. She couldn’t deny it: someone had sabotaged the toys. Another Penhallow—if not several—was in town.

  Someone had put innocent children in danger because of her.

  Willow and Aunt G, without discussing it, layered the apartment in sound-dampening spells while Amber sat listlessly on the floor. The spells they cast felt the same as the one Zelda had used in Sorrel Garden when she’d wanted to keep the discussion between herself, Amber, and Edgar from being overheard. Once they finished, they sat at the table silently. Amber could feel their eyes on her.

  Eventually, Amber said, “What do I do now? Those two other toys were sold over a week ago, so it could have been Damien and Devra. But … what if it wasn’t?”