Book One
ROMANCE
Chapter One
Two Years Ago
All stories are love stories if you love stories.
And I do love stories. As a Book Witch, you kind of have to love them. It’s on our recruitment posters, after all.
My name is Rainy March, and yes, it’s a bad pun and also a weather forecast, and no, sorry, I can’t change it now. It’s already embroidered into my underwear and printed on my bookplates.
This love story starts with a phone call, one of those pivotal moments you don’t realize will change your life until much, much later. It was two years ago on September 1st, back when I was a young and mostly innocent Book Witch of twenty-five. I don’t even have to look at my case notes to remember the exact date. After all, you never forget the day you fall in love with a fictional character.
Of course, having a crush on a fictional character is nothing new. Sherlock Holmes used to get more fan mail than his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Women would write 221B Baker Street proposing marriage to the fictional consulting detective, or simply offering their services as housekeepers to get close to him.
What I really mean is…you never forget the day a fictional character falls in love with you back.
Admittedly, I also remember the day in question was the first of the month because Koshka, my feline familiar, gets his flea and tick preventative applied on the first. Right before the phone rang, I had theboy wrapped in a towel and wedged between my knees on the bathroom floor. I can’t say who was enjoying it less, me or my cat.
“Big baby,” I said as he wiggled under me, slippery as a hot-buttered eel. “It’ll take two seconds. Do you want to get a tapeworm? No. No, you don’t.”
From inside his bath-towel burrito, he let out a piteous whine.
“All this fussing from a familiar.” The familiars of Book Witches are like normal pets except they can read. They certainly don’t handle taking medication any better than normal pets. “It’ll be over in a second, buddy.” With one hand, I parted the thick silvery gray fur on the back of his neck while I popped the medicine cap with the other. “Be strong, comrade! You are Russian. Act like it!”
He isn’t actually Russian, but don’t tell him that. He’s a Russian Blue and therefore thinks he’s Russian. Another Book Witch might have saddled him with a cutesy cat pun name like Alexander Puss-kin or Fur-dor Dostoevsky, but as I suffer from a cutesy pun name myself, I refuse to inflict one on another living creature. Since the only Russian I knew at the time was the word forcat,that’s what I called him. (Yes, I knowkoshkausually refers to female cats, but my Koshka is very comfortable in his masculinity. Oh, and if you want to pronounce it correctly, it rhymes with…well, nothing, but you say “kosh” as in the Hebrew wordkosher.Capisce?)
The moment I had the medicine tube in position, the red hotline phone across the hallway rang. During that split-second distraction, Koshka wriggled out of the towel and bolted.
Defeated, I dragged myself off the floor. I was a fur-coated shell of my former self as I reached the doorway to the library, only to see that Pops had beaten me to the phone.
“Sullivan March here,” he said, answering the call.
From behind his desk, my white-bearded grandfather gave me a wink. With his brown tweed suit and elbow patches, he looked like Santa Claus undercover as a retired English professor. But Santa Claus is a jolly old elf. Pops is a jolly old Book Witch, the first in our family to enter the storycraft trade.
He listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. By the dour look on his face, it was most likely our coven leader, Dr. ReginaFanshawe, who was older and white-haired but looked nothing like Mrs. Claus. More like a taller, angrier Dame Judi Dench.Muchangrier.
Pops pulled his old brown leather case notebook out of the top desk drawer and flipped it open, jotting down notes. I leaned across the desk, hoping to see what he was writing, but when he caught me looking, he covered the page with his arm.
“Understood,” Pops finally said. “I’m on it.”
My heart sank as he hung up. That “I” in “I’m on it” didn’t sound promising. I would’ve preferred a “we” or a “she.”
Pops looked at me. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“What’s the job? And can I do it?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Not a chance. Not this job.”
“Not a chance? Pops, need I remind you that I have been working the horror beat for months? Whatever this assignment is, I can handle it.”
Not only had I recently survived the machinations of a monstrous mansion in Shirley Jackson’sThe Haunting of Hill House,but I’d also sparred with both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and come out on top. And who was the only Book Witch in the world who knew the first name of the second Mrs. de Winter in Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic classicRebecca?
This witch.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said, shaking his head.
