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His tail droops. I noticed that last week when I put it on. When the three witches—the blonde, the redhead, and the brunette—appeared on screen to murder the child by drinking her life’s essence, he hissed. He growled when the teenage boy on screen was cursed to be a cat, though he did perk up a bit whenever the black cat appeared on screen… except for when Binx died. Mr. Whiskers turned his back on the TV then and…
“Screw that. Let’s watch Coraline instead.”
THREE
THE NAKED PIE THIEF
Iwake up with a start all because something crashes downstairs on the first floor, somewhere in my shop.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what did it.
One second, I’m curled up on my couch with the empty popcorn bowl on the coffee table and the television asking if I’m still watching Monster House; I’m not, and I don’t even remember it coming on after we put on Casper after finishing Coraline. The next, I’m sitting upright, my heart racing as I stare blearily around the dark living room.
I blink at the television, then the clock beneath it. It says: 12:07 a.m.
Happy Halloween to me. Yay! I’m either being haunted, was ripped out of a nightmare, or someone broke in.
No. Not the last one. I have an alarm that I set religiously before I head upstairs for the night. Shadowvale has a shockingly low crime rate—and I’ve heard a couple of my new neighbors mutter the names Hunter and Nicholas Reed, the twin owners of the local paper mill and the Shadowvale Sanitation Department as to the reason why—so I doubt there’s an intruder down there.
Unless it’s a black fuzzy one wearing a pair of pantaloons who is a little early for his three a.m. zoomies…
Believing I’m being haunted makes sense after the last movie I remember watching. I must’ve fallen asleep during Casper. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time that I knocked out on the couch. Between getting up before dawn, baking all morning, then spending most of the afternoon at the Fall Festival, I was exhausted before I even got home. Add in the disappointment over the Bake-Off, and I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did.
I rub my eyes, trying to figure out what the hell woke me up since I’m thirty-three years old and too grown to blame it on non-corporeal spirits, Halloween or not.
Crash.
…and that would be it, wouldn’t it? No ghosts. Just a troublesome former stray.
It has to be. Something is clearly going on downstairs, and since I didn’t wake up with the weight of Mr. Whiskers pressing against my chest, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it could be.
“Mr. Whiskers,” I groan as I throw the blanket I’d been using off of me and get to my feet.
He’s been living with me for six weeks, and despite what I told Bonnie earlier about him being a good boy, he’s also an asshole. An adorable asshole, but still. I learned early on in our cohabitation that, despite him settling in as a newly indoor cat, he hated closed doors. I gave up on locking him in on the upstairs so long as I knew the back door and the shopfront were closed, but sometimes that means he gets into trouble downstairs while I’m sleeping.
If he wasn’t so fluffy and cute, I might just boot him out the back door—and I’m kidding. From the moment he limped his way toward me, I knew he was mine… even if he has a tendency to disrupt my sleep.
Welp. I won’t be able to go back to bed until I find out how big of a mess he made. Here’s hoping he didn’t get into the flour again. It took days to comb out the white tint to his fur, and that wasn’t counting how annoying it was to sweep up the spilled five pound bag…
“Mr. Whiskers? Whatever you broke, you’re paying for it,” I mutter as I stumble toward the open apartment door. “Hope you’ve been saving your allowance, bud.”
My bare feet slap against the wooden stairs as I head down to The Pie Chart. I don’t bother turning on the stairwell light because I know every step by heart, though I’m halfway down to the bottom, when I notice a glow coming from the kitchen.
I stop, my heart suddenly racing.
I turned them off before I went upstairs. And Mr. Whiskers? He can’t turn on the lights. Despite all the trouble he gets into, he hasn’t figured out how to jump five feet and use his paws to flick the switch.
I take another step. “Mr. Whiskers?”
Something clatters.
I sigh, chiding myself that I’m suddenly so spooked when maybe I didn’t turn off the lights and I just forgot. I force myself down the last few stairs, turning into the kitchen—and I scream. I scream bloody murder. I scream so loudly that his head pops up, a look of concern on his handsome face… as well as a smear of cherries near the corner of his mouth.
I take that all in as I freak out because, holy fucking shit, there’s a man in my kitchen.
A naked man.
Shaggy blond-hair. Brown eyes. About my age or so, with a line of black scratches tattooed on his right bicep, and the rest of him perfectly sculpted. Sure, there’s a chance he’s just shirtless, that he has pants on that I can’t see from the way he’s standing behind the kitchen island, but then he takes a step away from it and, nope, he’s naked naked.
