“Or any night, yes? Please say yes.”
“Correct,” I said and blinked a few more times to get the last of the cauldron smoke out of my eyes. “Sorry, Shakespeare is heady stuff.” Koshka rubbed against my legs, then crawled into my lap. I gave him his favorite chin scritches. “I’m fine, comrade. Now let me up. We have work to do.”
Koshka leapt off my lap and onto the nearest desk.
“Umbrella achieved,” Duke said. “What’s next?”
“Children’s fiction.” I found the steps that led from the stockroom to the main floor. Duke and Koshka followed behind me.
We passed through the stockroom door into the Indigenous room, where the bookstore kept a good collection of fiction, nonfiction, and craft and cookbooks about the native Clatsop people. The floor creaked mournfully with every careful step we took.
“I don’t remember it being this loud during the day,” I said quietly, wincing every time my toes touched the ground. “They can probably hear us stomping around next door.”
“Carpeting,” Duke whispered. “That’s what we need. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting.”
Meanwhile Koshka, who barely weighed ten pounds and was born with rubberized feet, trotted merrily along, not disturbing so much as an atom of the universe.
“Or we should be cats,” I said.
“They are called cat burglars for a reason,” Duke said, and the floor whined under his shoes.
It felt like an eternity passed before we’d made it to the children’s book room. My hair was damp with flop sweat and terror.
Koshka found the book first on a shelf painted rainbow colors labeled asClassics.
I pulled a hardcover unabridged copy ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderlandoff the shelf with a sigh of relief. “Let’s get this over with,” I said and put the book on a tiny plastic table, open to the end of chapter six.
I pressed my hand to the page, reaching out with my magic to touch the story. Orange electric filaments crackled around my hand as they had when I tried to open my grandfather’s locked desk drawer.
“Oh no,” I gasped.
“What?” Duke asked.
“We have a problem.”
“Two,” he said.
“Two what?”
A light flashed through the shop window. Not headlights. A flashlight.
“Two problems,” he mouthed.
Book in hand, the three of us raced back to the stockroom, where we ducked behind a book cart.
“Can you get us into the book now?” Duke whispered.
The front door of the bookshop whined open.
A stern male voice called out, “Anyone here? Police.”
Eight or nine unprintable words passed through my mind.
“The book’s locked,” I whispered back to Duke.
“What do you mean it’s locked?”
The policeman’s heavy gait rattled the old window frames.
