Her latest job could have serious consequences for her descendants…
Zelda finds things. Small things. Innocuous things. Things that other people overlook. Or don’t even think about. What she takes rarely proves valuable in the traditional sense. So she never considers herself a thief. But that might just be splitting hairs.
The job her partner Jonesy brings her this time, though, could spell disaster if she fails. No one likes messing with witches. So meeting Jonesy at the witch run café, agreeing to meet the client there, means Zelda might get out of the job without trouble.
Either that, or her descendants will hate her for the generational curse.
Good thing the café serves tasty treats. Zelda’s gonna need them.
ZELDA AT THE CAFE is available to read for free until the 1st of October, when another story will be posted. For readers who would prefer to read on a device of preference, or who would like their own personal eBook of this story, you can find it here.
***
Zelda at the Café
A Café Story
So the café was pretty nice overall. Walked in. No issues. Smelled good, like coffee and pastries. Hint of the attached bookstore. Everyone loves coffee and books together. I suppose it’s nice. I read eBooks mostly so I can adjust the print size, but you know, print books are fun too. Thing is I move around a lot. And having print books to move around is a pain in the ass, so I’d always be giving them away frantically before the next move. But you can’t have a house without some books because then that’s weird right? The invention of eBooks was a godsend to me.
But I digress.
Bookstore, cool. Even if I couldn’t pick up any books on this stop. Coffee shop, excellent. Especially after I spotted those chocolate muffins under the clear cake toppers on their pretty white stands. They glistened in the overhead lights, melty chocolate chips poking out. Beautiful and on my list of Must Buys the minute I spotted them. I’m of the firm belief that muffins are just an excuse to eat cupcakes for breakfast—you take off the frosting, maybe add fruit, it’s just a cupcake with plausible deniability. And the chocolate ones, serious? That’s not even trying to disguise the cupcake nature of the thing.
Anway…
Cupcake and coffee bought from the nice lady behind the counter. She smiled and was friendly and that added a nice touch to the warm atmosphere. The giant Maine Coon on the tall stool next to the register slept the whole time I ordered. Really pretty cat with long pale gray fur. Tempting to pet. Probably would have if he’d been awake. Apparently his name is Boo. And, no, he wasn’t behind the counter getting all that long hair in the food and coffee. He was outside the counter, safely away from any food. Hygiene at this place looked excellent. He was just the café’s cat, is all.
What was I talking about?
Oh. Right. So anyway. I got my coffee. Sat at a table near the back so I could watch the door. I got a nod from an older lady reading erotica and drinking tea. How did I know she was reading erotica? Right there on the cover. Best Of something or other. This is the difference between paperbacks and eBooks. Everyone knows what you’re reading with a paperback. Covers are very revealing. On purpose. And I don’t believe in any of those silly book cover things to hide the real cover. Be proud of what you read, that’s what I say. You’re reading? You’re golden. No one should ever make fun of someone else’s reading material.
Back to the topic.
The older woman looked at peace with her reading and seemed happy with her tea. The writer typing super fast on his laptop a few tables away never even looked up when I sat down. There were a few other people scattered around. A woman by the archway into the bookstore reading hunting magazines. She was pretty magnificent. A nice-looking man by the front window who kept glancing up from his coffee and the papers on his lap to look at the barista—her name was Nina by the way. Owner too according to the brief conversation we’d had. Lovely woman. Pretty sure that man by the window either had a crush on her or they’re dating. He barely looked away long enough to read the files on his lap. I sort of wished I’d gotten a look at his papers. There’s the difference between a paperback and other physical reading material, though. No proper cover, no proper idea what’s being read. Magazines were okay for getting a look at someone’s reading material. Why I knew the one woman was reading a hunting magazine. Given the length of her nails, the hunting magazine seemed an interesting choice and I would have liked to have asked more about that too, but…
Oh. Yeah. I was there for a reason and I keep getting off topic.
Right…
So I didn’t really have to wait long for my contact to show up but I was just early enough I got to finish my muffin-cupcake before the bell over the door rang and Jonesy walked in. The cake was as good as it had looked under the cake topper. Didn’t need frosting at all. Coffee was excellent too. I didn’t normally get cappuccinos but I spotted an older man sitting near the counter with one when I’d walked in. And honestly, that had looked really nice. Like it would go perfect with the muffin. Did too. Good muffin that’s really a cupcake in disguise should always be consumed with a good coffee. Or tea. I’m not your mother…
Okay. So Jonesy was, as usually, a bit squirrely—ha!—when he walked in. His gaze scanning the place like he was casing it or something. Not that I’d allow him to do anything to this place. I mean, I was a regular now, right. I wasn’t yet, of course. But after that muffin? I was gonna be. At least until the next time I had to move.
Jonesy’s jittery scans caught the attention of both the barista and the guy sitting by the front window. The Maine Coon raised his head for a beat to look at Jonesy. Then Boo closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Nina put on a friendly smile. And the man at the window couch went back to reading his files. Jonesy was jumpy and looked nervous as all hell, but he was pretty harmless. And anyone with any instincts spotted that with a double take. Not the kind of squirrely—ha!—guy that you need to watch real close.
He spotted me and made his way toward the table. Paused when he saw me raise a brow. Then nodded and went to the counter for a coffee. He also got a chocolate muffin. Jonesy might have been a little greasy and nervous, but he did have good taste in pastry. He went with a black coffee though and that seemed like a waste to me. Why indulge in only half your order? You going to indulge, you should go all the way. That’s what I say. Chocolate for breakfast? Fill that coffee with milk and top it out with cinnamon or some shit.
Anyway.
Jonesy got his order and wove his way through the empty tables to where I was sitting in the back, his gaze constantly scanning the place. The woman reading erotic glanced up as he passed her, she sniffed and went back to her book. I couldn’t tell if the sniff was distain or just allergies and I suspected that was on purpose. The erotica was too obvious. No one missed you if you were proudly reading something we all knew included serious sexual content out in public. That sort of thing was designed to catch people’s attention. When you’re obvious that way, it makes for a good camouflage. Means people can’t tell if that sniff is a snooty sniff—and honestly when you’re drinking tea and reading in a café, a snooty sniff isn’t a far jump to make—or whether it was just a coincidence that you sniffed in that moment. And people presume everyone is polite as a default and then they make excuses and think maybe the café was dusty or something. It’s not.
But also, I didn’t think it was a sniff of distain. I couldn’t tell you why. Something about the lady…
I gave my head a little shake when Jonesy sat down. He was still scanning the few scattered people around us. It was mid-morning on a work day for most people. There were a few people in the bookstore and the handful in here and that was it. One of the reasons it was a good time to meet.
“You got the next job?” I asked Jonesy to get him focused on me.
He nodded, a rapid, jittery move. Then he ate his muffin, stuffing his cheeks before swallowing. I waited him out. We all needed to eat, right. And there was no rush. Plus, it was a great muffin and who was I to interrupt the guy as he enjoyed his desert breakfast?
We had worked together for years but I still didn’t know all that much about Jonesy. Outside of he got me good work and that work paid well and kept me in muffin-cupcakes and eBooks. Made the moving around easier. Well, I did that for work and for personal reasons. Settling in too long in one place, all the stuff started to build up. Life got cluttered. Got a bit overburdened with stuff. Moving meant clearing it all out. Like the paperbacks—though I did have a few of those that went place to place with me. Just not so many as to piss off any moving guys I was getting to help me. And I did need moving guys more and more these days. I wasn’t clearing out the clutter nearly as much as I did early on. Some things I was attached to. They went from place to place with me. Some shit, that got tossed. Or given way. Didn’t like to create waste.
The jobs I did for Jonesy put me in a way that moving regularly was a good idea too. Not so much because the people I went and got things from would notice me. But more because it got harder to go unnoticed in the same area for a long time. Couple of years and time to see what was what in a new location. New jobs. New atmosphere. I liked that sort of thing. And Jonesy could always find someone who was looking for something no matter where I landed.
I wasn’t a thief as what you might say. Despite what I did. And not what you’d call a bounty hunter either. A private eye is closer, but I never hung out a shingle or took on clients in the traditional sense. I wasn’t out here doing research for people. That was what others did first before coming to me. When they came to me, they were looking for something they knew existed but had trouble getting to it. A name. A flashdrive. A single page of a document. A ring. A gun. A bit of string. One little thing that would open up whatever the hell they were doing, solve the crime, provide the last clue, stick it to an ex, confirm the corporate espionage… Whatever the thing did for them once they got it, that wasn’t my job.
My job was to get that one little thing that no one could get their hands on.
And hunting it out, finding where it was, and retrieving it. I was good at that. But I didn’t do, like, big stuff. I couldn’t break into vaults and shit. That was for a real and proper thief. And maybe I’m splitting hairs here. Maybe this is the cupcake versus muffin thing and I was pretending to be a muffin when I was just the cupcake without the frosting, but it was a distinction that made a difference to the jobs I took. I didn’t feel like I had the skillset to be a proper thief. My skills came from finding that little bit of something that was hard to find and then sneaking it out from under the noses of people who’ve forgotten they had to pay attention to that little piece of ephemera.
I blinked when Jonesy set his empty coffee mug down and realized I’d missed him drinking the whole thing.
“So what’s the job?”
“Client needs a snapshot. A picture.”
“Digital or physical?”
“Physical.”
“Like a polaroid or just some random print.”
“It’s a print. Inside a photo album.” He slipped a piece of paper across the table. “This address.”
“What’s the picture going to do for our client?” I looked at the address.
A private house in the burbs. That was surprisingly not unusual. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went down in the burbs. I mean everyone is always complaining about how the city is where all the crime is, and like, yeah. There’s that many people crammed together, stuff happens, right? It’s the way of it. But that doesn’t make the suburbs any less subject to actual human nature and there is definitely a shit ton of crimeing going on. Tended to be more subtle, though. Like behind closed doors. That kind of thing. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Say no more, but we all know your smuggling ancient biblical relics in from Persia, Susan. And you’re not fooling anyone with that afternoon yoga class that you have to drive an hour to get to, Becky, since the local gym runs regular yoga classes, they just aren’t a front for fencing of stolen goods. There’s only so many “business trips” you can take, Chad, before everyone cops to the drug running…
Where was I?
The burbs. New client. Picture in a photo album.
“The photo will confirm the person at that address used to live in a house down in Louisiana.”
“And that’s important because?”
You’d think in my line of work, I’d ignore those specific details. Safer not to ask too many questions, right? Go about finishing the job, not worry about all the whys and wherefores of it all. But I didn’t do jobs, find those tiny seemingly unimportant things, without knowing why and what they’d be used for. I had a line in the sand that I didn’t cross because that way I could sleep at night and look at myself in the mirror and all those clichés.
The work got done for purposes that felt just to me. Righting wrongs. So like I didn’t hunt down wives or kids running from abusive situations or anything like that. I didn’t find the thing that would allow someone to bankrupt a relative just because that someone was cut out of the will for being an asshole. The trick to my work was all in the details. Details were the things I retrieved. Details were the things I paid attention to before taking a job.
Details were fucking important.
“It’s kinda weird shit,” Jonesy said, twisting his now empty coffee mug between his hands, his gaze jumping around. He had sat to one side of me so he was looking at the bookstore entrance and had his back to the counter, but he was still scanning the front door, and the guy in the window seat who was crushing on Nina kept glancing up at Jonesy before pretending to return to his papers.
“I got time and I like weird shit,” I said. “Enlighten me.”
***
“Alright,” Jonesy said, picking at the handle of his empty coffee mug absently, “so our client seems to think the woman living in this house in the burbs is a hex witch who lived in Louisiana. About a century ago.”
Century old witch living in the burbs, huh? Yeah. That was getting into some weirder shit. “Why’s this client care?”
Personally, I had nothing against a witch wanting to move around. You live a century, you gotta shake things up or life gets boring, right. And now, me personally, I wouldn’t have moved to the burbs, but then again, I’m not gonna tell a hex witch what to do. Because of all the hexes.
I gotta say, hexes are pretty freaky things to mess with. I think everyone can agree on that. Because what if that hex comes back on you? What if you hex the wrong person on accident and then you gotta live with that. I supposed you’d have to be pretty research heavy to do hexes. Like, more so even than me and Jonesy were. Gotta know the client. The target. Gotta pay attention to those details. Details, man. They were a thing.
Jonesy said, “Claims the witch put a hex on their family because of the wrongs of one of their ancestors and they want to negotiate getting the hex taken off but they’ve got to find the original witch.”
“Claims. They looking to try and kill the witch to remove the hex? That’s not going to go well.” Witches got mad when you tried to kill them. One willing to work in hexes was definitely not going to shy away from retribution if someone came and tried to kill her. That’s just common sense.
It really irritated me when people didn’t use the sense in their heads and their instincts and instead got all caught up in a story that was only gonna get someone hurt. Like think for a single moment about what you’re doing. What you’re saying. Why you think something is a good idea when it could lead to your death? I mean really. It’s weird and annoying how some people insist on going down dangerous paths.
And before you say it, Jonesy and I research. I mentioned that? We don’t do things that defy our common sense.
So I was starting to wonder if this was a good-idea job. Cause I didn’t want to get on the bad side of a hex witch either.
“I’ve been assured there’s no death threat here. Just a little negotiation. But no point in negotiating with the wrong witch, so they want to make sure they’ve got the right one, and the proof is in a picture.”
“Century old witch isn’t gonna keep a picture of herself from a hundred years ago in a photo album. People notice that kind of thing.”
“Not an old picture. It’s a picture the witch and her family took on a vacation to the house the witch lived in a century ago. The client has a picture of her from that earlier century. To compare to the modern picture. Thinks that’ll give him the definite proof.”
I suppose side by side pictures a century apart with the woman looking exactly the same could prove she was the original witch. But it could also just confirm that the family had strong genes and a look that stretched down through the centuries. Which, you know, some families had. My cousins all looked alike because their mother’s family line was that way. Barely any of their father in their faces. It’s all super strong mom’s side. And there’s a granddaughter now who’s the spit image of her grandmother. So, you know, it happens. I’ve seen it personally.
“Once he has the pictures and can compare, be sure he’s at least got the right family, he’s gonna set up a meeting in public with her, so everyone feels safe, and then ask if she—or an ancestor, he didn’t rule out an ancestor—used to do hexes and if so, could she please take it off now, he’s pretty sure his family has suffered enough.”
“He gonna offer her something in exchange? Cause if he doesn’t, she’s got no incentive.”
Jonesy shrugged. “He didn’t say. He was pretty vague about what the details of the negotiation would be.”
“But he assured you no murder.”
“He assured me no murder. At least not on his part. And when you see this guy, you’ll believe it. He’s not exactly the threating type. More jumpy and nervous than me, and without the physical characteristics to intimidate a kitten.”
“That’s because kittens are not easily intimidated.” I glanced at the Maine Coon sleeping on the stool by the register. That cat would not have been an easily intimidated kitten. That cat probably swatted anything trying to intimidate him with a careless paw and then licked his fur when the pest ran away whining.
“You know what I mean,” Jonesy said. “He’s that kind of guy. The quiet and wimpy kind that definitely don’t look like they could do anyone any harm even if they wanted to.”
I trusted Jonesy’s assessment but only because we’d been working together for so many years I’d learned to trust his analysis of people.
“Alright. I’ll get him this picture. But we’re meeting here for him to collect it. I wanna see this guy. I’m not doing anything that gets us on the bad side of a hex witch. Including confirming to a murderer that she exists.”
Jonesy spun his cup fast, then caught it before it could drop off the edge of the table. “I’m all for that. This place has good muffins. I’d eat twelve of those chocolate things. More like a cupcake than a muffin, right.”
“What have I been telling you about muffins.”
“I get you. But look, you’ll see when you see this guy. He’s harmless. There’s not even any strong vibes from him, you know. I think he’s just an ordinary guy looking to break a family curse that’s been dogging his heels.”
I could understand that. Sometimes ancestors were sonofabitches and deserved their curses and hexes and shit. But you start to get better humans as the generations go and the hex starts to feel a little much at that stage cause the better humans can’t just go back and beat their ancestor into a pulp for being the kind of sonofabitch that gets themselves hexed by a mad witch.
That’s the other thing! When you don’t use your common sense, when you purposefully or otherwise go down a path you just know is going to lead to no good, to destruction or whatever, and you do it anyway for reasons, you risk not only getting yourself cursed or killed, you risk the lives of all your descendants. It’s selfish shit, that’s what it is. I just will never understand it. People making stupid, easy-to-see-they’re-going-to-end-badly mistakes. And not only not thinking about themselves but not thinking about how this affects anyone else either.
Like, you see it in movies all the time. I suppose for plot purposes, but it never ceases to piss me off watching characters make stupid mistakes as if they’ve never read a book before. Even after experiencing the consequences of previous bad-thinking mistakes, they turn around and make another bad decision for reasons and expect not to suffer negative consequences for this new bad decision because…what? The Universe suddenly changed its mind about dolling out karmic consequences for stupid actions?
Anyway, I was going to go get this picture our client wanted and I was going to do it carefully so as not to piss off the witch—or her descendant since we hadn’t ruled that part out—and then I was going to suss out this guy whose ancestor had been such an asshole and make sure those particular tendencies hadn’t passed down through the generations.
Cause if they had, I was going to warn the witch. I do use my common sense.
***
The witch’s house was a pretty nice two-story craftsman that stretched over a lot big enough to have a front and back stretch of lawn. A big oak in the front. The backyard peeking into the edge of an oak and maple wooded area but fenced in because this was one of those neighborhoods. There were houses bracketing the witch’s place, and rows of houses across the street and the whole place felt very domestic upper middle class, but the kind of upper middle class no one could hardly afford anymore unless you were just shy of rich.
Every house looked similar but just different enough that the people could feel like they weren’t living in cookie cutter homes. And the lawns were all cut neat and short, the sidewalks clean of weeds and leaves even though there were a bunch of big oaks lining the street. The cars parked on the street were the nice brands even though everything looked alike.
Cars these days all looked alike to me. Two or three body shapes, SUV, four-door standard, and everything was gray or white or black. Hardly anything in bright colors anymore. I missed that. I like bright colors. Like the cars that used to be electric blue or sunburst yellow. Those were pretty and took up space and made you look and now everything looked like it belonged in a black and white picture someone had purposefully grayscaled to take out anything joyous and giddy.
Where was I?
The neighborhood. The kind of place that people aspire to live but that’s also pretty bland in the grand scheme of things.
A great place for a century old witch to hide in plain sight. In fact, she probably went around telling people she was a witch because it was trendy and acceptable for a suburban mom to be a witch these days since no one believed in real magic except the people who actually experienced real magic on the regular.
I was in my sneaking around clothes as I liked to call them. Being a squirrel shifter is… You know, it’s got its pluses and minuses. The pluses meant I could wander around areas like this as a squirrel and even the cats didn’t look at me twice. They might look very intently at me once, but they didn’t do it because they thought I was a shapeshifter. I got lucky in that I was an ordinary gray squirrel too. I had a cousin who was a black squirrel and people noticed those because they’re pretty and they stand out in a crowd of gray squirrels. Made her life a little harder cause she had to make sure she was in areas where there were other black squirrels.
Anyway.
I walked along branches to the roof and scrambled over the brown roof tiles until I found a place I could squeeze into the house. A vent that should really have been covered to prevent rodents from getting in, but maybe the witch didn’t care about mice in her house. And since it was the middle of the day, everyone was at work or out doing errands or dropping kids off at school or whatever. I knew the witch had kids but it wasn’t that early in the morning for drop off so maybe she was collecting the kids or maybe she was just at a yoga class. Which is a good idea for keeping up the flexibility if you’re of a certain age. After a few centuries, your body starts to get a little stiff and you need to keep those joints and muscles healthy.
So it was middle of a bright sunny afternoon and there were people walking along the sidewalks and a lot of cars moving around. A dog barked a few houses down. There was a cat in the house across the street sitting in a window watching me. Big orange thing that didn’t look like it was the kind of cat that ate squirrels so that was cool. The good thing about having a squirrel form is just how easy it was to get around in places like this in the middle of the day without anyone but the cats noticing you.
The house itself was neat and tidy and bland. Lot of whites and grays. The occasional splash of blue. The kids’ rooms were cluttered and full of books and toys and stuff. Lots of cool shiny things that I really wanted to get a closer look at. But I was on a job. It was one of the few times I made sure to stay focused. Relatively speaking.
The parent’s room was also remarkably cluttered with a few boxes of stuff stacked against a wall and the walk-in closet door wide open with a pile of clothes on the floor at the back of the closet. From the outside, you’d have assumed this place was super clean and neat. And the first floor was tidy and everything was in its place. But the second floor and all the bedrooms on that floor showed that real people lived here and they were collectors of stuff that they then didn’t have a place for and so had to stack everything up in boxes against walls in bedrooms. Kind of nice to see. Broke the veil of perfectly neat that so many people these days kept trying to project.
What was I doing?
Picture!
So I searched the downstairs first because I was looking for a photo album and people kept those on bookshelves and under coffee tables, but the ones I flipped through downstairs were mostly older pictures of weddings and new babies and that kind of thing. First days at preschool. A collection that looked like it was from the witch and her husband’s honeymoon. But nothing that looked like pictures from a Louisiana vacation. I checked the kitchen because…who knows. People store stuff in weird places. Mostly just cooking books—some pretty interesting ones, too, but I didn’t have time to explore those. Then I went to the bedrooms and kept myself confined to the grownups bedroom so I didn’t get distracted by all the shiny things in the kids’ rooms.
When I was like this, my focus was a little harder to maintain. I know. Shocking, given how focused I stayed most of the time. But my little squirrel brain was even more distractable than my human form brain.
There was a bookshelf in the bedroom but it mostly had potion books and chemistry books and a few comparative religious books. I sort of wondered what the witch’s husband was like. If he was also a witch. Or maybe just a chemist? Because I could see her being interested in all these subjects but wasn’t sure which part might also be something her husband was into. Didn’t look like he was a big sports guy, but there were a few baseball books on the shelf so maybe. No time for me to dig into that question, though.
No photo albums on the bookshelf. Just a few framed pictures. Mostly of the family in one of those formal sitting type pictures people took at the holidays to give as gifts. The frames were all pretty silver and shiny, but the mass-made kind you picked up from box stores and not, like, antiques or anything. The pictures hanging on the walls were similarly framed. Nothing too fancy. But nice enough to not look cheap. The pictures on the wall were all nature scenes with a few from the bayou. That was interesting. But again, nothing personal about them. Nice paintings and posters but nothing containing anything specific to the witch.
I did take a moment to look at one of the photos of her and her family. She was a lovely looking Black woman with her hair in long braids that were down in the pictures. The one I looked at had the family wearing matching winter holiday sweaters, all red and covered in white bows. Very sweet. Everyone was smiling big, looking delighted with their cuteness. The kids were probably seven and five in that photo. A boy and a girl. The boy leaning against his mother’s shoulder where he sat in her lap. The girl grinning to show off a missing front tooth and holding her dad’s huge hand in one of hers. They all looked so shiny and happy and relaxed. A perfect family portrait.
I wondered if the family life was as happy as it looked in that picture, and honestly, I hoped they were all that happy most of the time. I hoped they all loved each other and had fun together in their matching sweaters. Family was important. Whatever kind of family you made. I liked when families of all kinds were happy and not, you know, trapped in cycles of abuse and horror.
Photo album. Right.
So, there wasn’t one on the bookshelf or in the bedside tables or in the bathroom—I was just being thorough—but there were stacks of photo albums on a top shelf in the large walk-in closet. Getting up there was easy like this. I would have needed a step ladder in my human form because it was a really tall closet. The albums were stacked in a pile in a corner of the square closet, like they’d been set up there and then everyone forgot they were there because they were so far to the back of the shelf. Surrounded by boxes of hats and random shoes and a few plastic containers of papers and piles of old sweaters and a few boxes that, after a quick peek, proved to be full of old kid things like baby shoes and birthday cards and report cards from preschools.
The stack of photo albums was about five deep and they were all different sizes so the stack was a little precarious. Squirrel hands are remarkably dexterous and I managed, but I nearly dropped one of the albums to the floor and that would have been bad. I could shift and pick it back up again, find a step stool, get it back up here. But all that would take time and I didn’t know when everyone was getting home. I didn’t know for sure if the witch would spot the fact that I wasn’t an ordinary squirrel. And I didn’t want to take that chance. My descendants, should I choose to have any one of these days, didn’t deserve to have a hex placed on them because I got caught snooping around a hex witch’s suburban home.
Another tricky part, these albums were dusty. They’d been back up here for a while. Which meant it wasn’t likely that the witch would notice they’d been moved. But I couldn’t count on that either. So I had to ensure everything was back the way it had been. That was harder with the dust. Dust, once dusted, was gone. I didn’t have any magic of any kind to re-dust something that had had the dust removed. So…yeah fingers crossed there. But I had to at least get the albums back into their precarious stacks after going through all of the books.
Luck on the third book! A whole plethora of pictures around the bayou and New Orleans. Pretty pictures of swampy forests and French District balconies and a few of beignets and coffee. Those pictures had me craving coffee and muffins back at the café. And maybe I’d try one of their croissants the next time. Cause croissants are super yummy too. I was considering suggesting getting in some beignets to Nina when I spotted a few pictures of the family in front of a house.
An old house. Rough, weathered gray wood with a wraparound porch and a low peaked roof. There were plants hanging from the porch overhang and a short set of stairs up to the porch. The family were posed at the base of those stairs, the door behind them painted a deep blue that momentarily caught my full attention. It was a nice looking house. Through the window in one picture, I thought I could see the reflection of someone, but even when I looked really close with my squirrel eyes, I couldn’t tell if that was a real person or just a weird reflection of the trees. Someone probably lived in that house now, if the witch hadn’t lived there in a while, and it begged the question, who lived there? And what did the person in that house have to do with all this? And was there really a hex and a hex witch or was there something else going on?
Jonesy did thorough research before we took on jobs all the time. But even thorough research could sometimes have holes. And holes could lead to traps. And this was starting to feel a little like a trap. But I wasn’t sure if it was a trap for us, a trap for the woman who may or may not be a hex witch, or a trap for the guy looking to have his century’s old family curse removed.
I scanned all the photos in the album, looking for an extra person who wasn’t the family, someone even not around the house that might have been the owner of the house. Could just be one of the witch’s descendants for all I knew and the house had been passed down through the family. But all the people in the pictures were either clearly not with the family in any way and just happened to be in the background of a photo or were the family I knew from the pictures around the house.
Hey, and maybe I was making things up. Seeing things. Finding trouble where there wasn’t any. It wouldn’t be the first time. I had good instincts, but I was also a little paranoid—a survival trait—and that occasionally got the better of me.
I picked out the best picture of the family standing in front of the house, the one where the witch’s face was clear. She was smiling and her husband had his arm around her shoulders and the kids were standing in front of them with the boy staring down at something in the dirt and the girl leaning against her mom, grinning, with one of her fingers stuck in her mouth. Everyone looked happy and relaxed and like they were on a vacation and not, like, hunting down former enemies of the mother or something.
Just an ordinary family vacation that happened to swing them past an old house where the mom might have once lived. Or not.
I extracted that picture carefully from under the sticky plastic cover and made sure everything else was as it was supposed to be. Then I rearranged all the albums as best I could so they looked how I’d found them. With maybe a little less dust.
Tucking the edge of the photo into my mouth, careful not to get spit and teeth marks on anything important, I scrambled back out of the closet and hurried out of the vent that had gotten me into the house in the first place. I took the trees in the woods behind the house to get as far from the neighborhood as possible. Shifted near my car, where I’d left a change of clothes, and tucked the photo into the pocket of my cargo pants where it would be safe.
Meeting with Jonesy and the client the next day at the café meant hopefully some answers, some good coffee and muffins, and, with luck, no angry hex witch.
***
Coffee, chocolate muffin, and a croissant at the café set me up nicely for the wait on Jonesy and our client. I didn’t have to wait long. Jonesy was good about timing things, but I’d gotten there just a little early so I’d have time to enjoy my pastries before having to be all serious and on my best professional behavior. Which meant I couldn’t have chocolate stuck in my teeth and flaky pastry crumbs all over my shirt.
I did suggest beignets to Nina, too, since now I was craving them. And she said she’d talk to the bakery that supplied her pastries, so now I was going to definitely come back here a few more times to just see about these fried donuts. And maybe get some books because while I know I’ll just have to give them away the next time I move, sometimes it is more fun to read a physical book than an eBook.
Some of the same people were in the café again that day, including the older woman sitting in the same seat in the center of the café, this time reading something that looked like a Romance novel but there was a character on the front that looked like a kraken with the upper body of a man and he had his arms and tentacles wrapped around a scantily clad woman so that was a new kind of clench cover to me and I was going to have to look for that book in the bookstore. As long as I didn’t get myself generationally cursed by the hex witch sometime after all this. I still had hope things would work out fine. But also maybe I needed to read while I still could. And that was the nice part of having people reading paper books. Seeing the covers and getting some ideas for new reading material.
What was I talking about?
Oh! The people. The writer was back and typing away. The woman with the hunting magazine was back too, with an immaculate manicure that had winking diamonds set into her long nails and the glitter from those little diamonds kept distracting me. The woman didn’t seem to notice. Nina’s boyfriend or crush or whoever wasn’t in today, but there was a young man playing guitar in the nook between the counter and the front window and Boo the cat was sitting on the armrest next to him bobbing his big cat head to the musical beat.
There was another young woman who I’d lay money on being a relatively new vampire sitting against the wall not far from the writer, but she was so thoroughly engrossed in her book, I didn’t think she noticed much of what was going on around her. And an older man sitting in a cushioned chair not far from the woman reading her hunting magazine kept checking a pocket watch hanging from a silver chain which he had tucked inside the pocket of a gray suit vest. He wasn’t wearing a full suit, though. He had on a tweed jacket over maroon pants, an outfit that looked awkward if taken piece by piece but suited him and looked fashionable in that way some people can achieve but that I couldn’t. His watch looked really cool too, even at a distance, and I was tempted to get close to get a better look at it. But despite the fact that he had a pleasant face and smiled whenever anyone spoke to him, he struck me as the kind of person to… Not avoid. I wouldn’t say avoid. More like not interfere with. Like getting in his way might be a bad thing.
Wasn’t really sure where that feeling came from but there you have it.
A lot of people came and went through the café but not everyone sat, so there were plenty of seats available and I took one near the back again so I could watch the door and the entrance from the bookstore. My timing was great because I was just brushing off pastry flakes from my t-shirt when Jonesy walked through the door, another guy in his wake.
And yeah, Jonesy had been right. The other guy looked about as harmless as a human male could look. He wasn’t tall but he wasn’t short so still taller than Jonesy and me but not by much. He was skinny-ish but not in a painfully all bones sort of way. He had loose brown hair and his pale skin was covered in freckles. He wore glasses with thin frames and was dressed in cargo pants and a concert t-shirt that looked well worn and about as old as he was. He looked a little nervous walking into the café, ducking his head and nodding as his gaze darted around. Nervous and jumpy. Just like Jonesy said.
Nina smiled at him as she got him and Jonesy coffees and the guy smiled back but his gaze kept jumping around the seating area.
I didn’t bother to wave to Jonesy cause he spotted me right away and gave me a chin jut greeting. Instead, I watched the client as he dealt with Nina. He didn’t seem to cop to the fact that she was a witch though. A guy who’s under a generational curse from a hex witch who doesn’t notice another witch standing right in front of him is either a good actor or isn’t magically inclined himself or part of the preternatural community, so he wouldn’t know a nice friendly witch was passing him his iced coffee.
To be fair, Nina was really good at appearing non-witchy. But we squirrels have a nose for that kind of thing. Witches have a scent to them when you get close enough.
I was thinking back to the hex witch’s suburban house trying to remember if I’d caught that smell in the closet over all the smells of detergent and cleaner and dust and everything else. Personally, I got the scent better when I was standing across from someone. It tended to blend into other scents for me and I had a harder time sussing it out when the witch wasn’t actually present. But I hadn’t thought to look for that scent while I was hunting for the picture and maybe I should have.
To be fair, I sort of didn’t think about the fact that I smelled witch on Nina either. And it only occurred to me to even think about that hint of magic like sparkling burnt ozone around her because the client wasn’t reacting to her being a witch.
That was the thing about the scent of magic, too, is that burnt ozone smell was also a little like lightning and it was hard to tell whether I was just getting the smell of an incoming thunder storm when the weather was bad or if it was an actual witch scent sometimes.
Jonesy and our client reached the table I occupied before I could go down the rabbit hole of what storms smelled like. The table was round so we made a kind of triangle around it, which let me study the client without having to look like I was studying him. But I was studying him.
Even up close, though, Jonesy had a point. This guy really did look, smell, and act harmless. Little desperation in his sweat, but otherwise, nothing that screamed, “I’m about to double cross you and get you hexed.” So that was good.
“Thank you,” the guy said before I could even say hello. “I know this was a weird request. I’m not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t found you guys.”
To be fair, Jonesy probably found him, but I wasn’t going to quibble over semantics.
“This is Zelda,” Jonesy introduced, which was good. “And this is Tom.”
“Nice to meet you, Tom.” No last names. Kept things about as anonymous as we could get. I glanced at Jonesy and he gave a little nod which meant that Tom here had paid his deposit. And the rest was queued up and ready to send into our working account as soon as the picture exchange was finished. So I slid the picture I’d gotten from the witch’s house across the table. “Best I could find. This what you need?”
Tom looked at the picture and his eyes widened. Then without a word, he took a picture out of one of the thigh pockets on his cargo pants. He set it next to the one I’d gotten from the witch, and then slid the two pictures into the middle of the round wooden table, giving us all a good look.
Tom’s picture was in black and white, of course, and a little curled at the edges. Looked as old as it was supposed to be. And there was a little chemically smell off of it that I associated with old old photographs. Reminded me of the smell of a second-hand shop actually, but that could just be me. I liked that smell and the dust and everything because all the shiny stuff in one place, all the things that other people discarded but in a way that new people could find those cool things… I liked that.
Anyway.
The two pictures were remarkably alike. Except for the fact that in the one Tom had, the older one, there were two women standing in front of the house. One who looked just like the mother in the picture I’d brought, and one who looked older, softer. And remarkably like the witch.
So. A mother. An aunt. Some other relative. And either one that was a lot older than she looked—because she did look old and it took witches a long time to look old—or the older woman was just an ordinary non-witch human who happened to be related in some way to the witch.
I’d have said the witch was maybe not the same person, maybe a relative too. The resemblance between the older and younger women in Tom’s photo was remarkable so my theory about strong genes carrying a specific look down through the generations looked pretty probable at a glance. But looking between the two photos side by side, it was impossible not to see that the younger woman in the older picture was the mother in the newer picture. Made sense now why Tom wanted the photo to compare. Just looking at the photo and the real person… Bet it would’ve been hard to tell.
Impossible to miss that they were identical when put into the same setting.
“Where’d you get your picture?” I asked Tom as I moved the two photos around a little so I could get a better perspective.
“It was handed down through the family,” Tom said quietly. “Along with the story of the curse. I’m not sure how our family got it. Probably has something to do with why she cursed us, though.”
“It does.” A new voice that startled all three of us.
I blinked up at the lovely woman standing over us, the woman who was clearly starring in both the pictures sitting side by side in center of the table, and all I could think was…
Shit. I hope my descendants forgive me for this curse.
***
I was still blinking up at the woman who’s house I’d broken into not all that long ago, unable to speak. Jonesy beside me also blinking and silent. When Tom launched up out of his chair to face the witch, the look of absolute adoration on his face would have silenced me even if the witch’s presence hadn’t surprised me into silence already.
“You’re here! I thought I’d have to convince you to meet me and go through a lot of stuff before you’d accept but… You’re here!”
The witch gave Tom a narrowed-eyed look—and who could blame her!—and said, “You had someone break into my home and steal a picture and you’re happy to see me? I’m very curious as to why.”
“Of course. Of course. Please. Have a seat.” Tom offered her his own chair and that was going to get awkward because there wasn’t a fourth chair at the table. But there were enough free ones around, I figured if Jonesy or I stopped blinking in dumbfounded silence, we could get Tom another chair. “Can I get you something to drink? Eat?”
At this stage even the witch was looking a little confused and baffled. Couldn’t blame her. I was having a hard time with all the sudden changes too. Although, to be fair, if I was meeting with the witch who’d placed a multi-generational curse on my family and I was looking to butter her up to remove that curse, what Tom was doing wasn’t a bad way to go. Be nice. Be kind. Be enthusiastic and deferential all at once.
Definitely offer her food and drink.
I mean, I might even consider offering a shiny bobble or a little treat of some kind as well. Maybe some jewelry. Something that sparkles. A book. Books were always good. People liked books and we were right next to a bookstore. The witch had had bookshelves and books in her house. Chemistry stuff, but there was probably a chemistry book somewhere in the bookstore. And in this case in particular a physical book was way better than an eBook because the witch would be able to hold it and know she’d been gifted something—
“I’ll take a soy latte,” the witch said, still frowning at Tom like she was trying to assess his angle.
As my brain slowly adjusted to the new order of things and the fact that I hadn’t been instantly cursed, I tried to assess Tom’s angle too. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t that strange. The happy enthusiasm and fan-girling could absolutely be his way of trying to get on the witch’s good side so she took off the family curse.
There was just something so…happy about Tom now, though. It felt weird.
“Soy latte it is,” he said. “Anything else? Jonesy says the chocolate muffins here are really. Good.”
“Croissants are outstanding, too,” I said. Couldn’t help myself. Get onto the topic of excellent pastries and I’m going to have something to say about it.
“No thank you. I have a yoga class later.”
The fact that this century old witch fit so perfectly into the suburban mold was maybe as strange to get my head around as the fact that she was actually here.
What had I done wrong? Missed a spell? Missed a ring camera? I mean, any of that was possible. I usually felt spells if I went through them—weirdly enough magical spells to keep things out or protect houses and stuff didn’t work on squirrels. Often ignored mice too. Rats got caught in the spells. And dogs. Cats…depended on the cat. But squirrels slipped through magical shields and protections like they didn’t exist.
But honestly, I didn’t usually go after things that had to do with magical people because I didn’t want the backlash if caught. This had been an unusual job from the start and only that Jonesy had vouched for Tom did I even do it. And wasn’t that something Jonesy and I were going to have to discuss later. But first we had to survive this conversation without getting cursed. Which brought be back to how the hell had the witch found us and what had I done wrong to get us caught?
If there’d been spells and I’d triggered some sort of alarm after slipping through the spell unharmed, that would make sense. A missed ring camera was possible, but I looked out for those, and even if I’d missed something small like a nanny cam, all it would have recorded was a squirrel getting into the house and stealing a picture from the closet and to be fair, looking at it from a mundane perspective on a digital video replay, no one was going to think it was weird for a squirrel to steal something random from a house after slipping in through a vent. I bet the witch had covered that vent back up again, too. I would have because that was literally the only way I could have gotten into the closed house without breaking anything. The rest of the house had been pretty locked down…
Where was I?
Oh. Yeah. Not sure how the witch knew I was a shifter and not a real squirrel. And I had no idea how she’d found us at the café.
As Tom hurried to the counter to get the witch her order, she looked at the two photos on the table top, gently pushing them around with one long very long, beautifully manicured nail that had a tiny winking crystal at the tip. She lined the pictures up and looked at them, tapping her fingernail against the table.
Neither Jonesy or I said a word. I’m not sure Jonesy was even breathing. I was breathing, but I was also sweating and my heart was thumping a little too fast. Even for me. I was gonna have to move again. And that meant finding a new home for the physical books I’d managed to build up despite my dedication to mostly only buying eBooks.
“I haven’t seen this picture in a long time,” she said quietly, her nail tapping the table beside the older picture of her with the other woman who looked like a relative. She tilted her head to one side and smiled. “Rosa looks so young.”
Since the other woman did not in fact look young, I had questions. Questions I couldn’t ask because I was still worried about getting hexed.
“Relative of yours, ma’am?” Jonesy asked. His voice squeaked a little but I had to hand it to him for being able to speak at all.
The witch glanced up and took in Jonesy in one sweeping glance. Then looked at me. I tried not to visibly shrink back into my seat, but I was mentally shrinking back into my seat.
“You’re the one, right?” she asked me.
I nodded. I wasn’t certain what I was agreeing to. But I had a pretty good idea.
“Squirrels.” The woman huffed and shook her head. “Does the enthusiastic young man at the counter know what you are?”
I shook my head this time. Communication in simple gestures was a brilliant thing. I could have an entire conversation—given the right questions being asked—this way without having to find my voice from somewhere in the depths of my fear. Very handy.
“Do either of you know why he wanted this?” She tapped the newer picture with her and her family in front of the house.
“Said something about a generational curse,” Jonesy said, his voice quiet and strained. Sounded like he was having more trouble with the talking than was obvious in his first question. He was still doing better than me.
Tom arrived back at the table with a large to-go cup of what I had to assume was soy latte. Smelled like soy latte. He set the cup very gently down in front of the witch and said, “I don’t want to delay you too long, and I thought if you had to leave quickly for your class, you should be able to take your coffee with you.”
“Thank you.” The witch frowned up at Tom and continued to frown at him as he scurried away to get another chair from a nearby table.
“He’s not even a squirrel,” the witch murmured under her breath.
Tom hurried back, set the chair next to me so he could look at the witch without needing to turn, and then just…grinned.
“This is weird,” the witch said after a moment of Tom grinning at her.
“Feeling the same,” I said quietly. And was delighted with myself that I could speak again though words like that that drew the witch’s attention were not really wise. But I suppose after today, it was safe to say I wasn’t always as wise as I thought I was.
“Care to explain all this,” the witch said to Tom.
“I suppose I should.” His eyebrows shot up. “Yes, I guess you wouldn’t understand. Okay. So. There is a generational curse on my family that you placed a hundred years ago.” He tapped the older picture with the witch and the older woman. “Right around this time. This picture has been passed down through my family as a kind of warning. And I think my father wanted to find you and kill you. I think that’s why he gave me the picture.”
“So you’re here to kill me,” the witch said, carefully setting the to-go cup onto the table. “That won’t go well for you.”
I could feel the electrical zing of magic starting to coalesce around the witch—whose name I still didn’t even know. I forgot to check the mail while I was in her house. My bad. In hindsight I had all the time in the world because I’d already given myself away somehow, showed up on something the witch would see later and know I was not a regular squirrel, but since I hadn’t realized my mistake at the time, I was more worried about timing. And the downstairs had been so incredibly neat. I hadn’t seen any mail laying around anyway.
Nina gave us a sharp look from behind the espresso machine, but the witch didn’t glance her way. She held Tom’s gaze and her expression was a combination of deadly and do-not-fuck-with-me that was a little terrifying and also I suspect justified.
But before the whole thing got out of hand, Tom raised his hands, palms facing her, and actually laughed. “Oh no! No. I wouldn’t presume to even be able to. Even if I wanted to kill you. Which I absolutely do not. No. I’m a big fan. Of yours I mean.”
The sharp zing of electricity faded back as the witch’s expression went from murderous to confused in a blink. “What?”
The scent of ozone burning and electricity sparking dropped back to being barely detectible under all the coffee and pastry smells.
“Yeah. Huge fan. Do you know what your curse has done to the assholes of my family? It’s been amazing! My father was a racist bigoted sexist pig. And he was a miserable fuck his entire life. Nothing ever went right for him and the worse he got, the worse things around him fell apart. He was horrible to my mother, who is a lovely woman. It took her until I was five before she finally shut that marriage down and got divorced. He tried to get custody but the judge clocked him the minute they got into court and gave my mother custody, thankfully.”
“I’m glad to hear it?” the witch said and asked at the same time. Her brows were lowered over her eyes and she was looking at Tom from the corner of her eye. Couldn’t blame her. I didn’t know what to make of this either.
“Absolutely best thing that ever happened to me. My mom got more radically helpful as I got older and ended up being an activist. She fights for fair wages and better work conditions. Got her law degree, passed the bar, and now helps employees sue companies and bosses for wage theft and harassment in the workplace.”
The witch’s shoulders relaxed along with her expression, though she was still watching Tom from the side of her eye. “Sounds like a good woman.”
“Oh she is. You’d like her, I think. Maybe. But… Sorry. That’s not really the point. So my father and his side of the family continued to be pretty horrible people even though they thought they were good people. I have no idea how they could have thought that. And they regularly had things go wrong. None of them could ever get out from under all the bad things happening to them. They said it was your curse. My father told me the story when I was fifteen and gave me this picture.” Tom tapped the table near the older picture again.
“What story did he tell you?” the witch asked.
“Yeah, what did he tell you?” Jonesy said.
I nudged his leg under the table to get him to shut up so we didn’t miss this. He ignored the nudge, though he did shut up. But probably only because Tom started to tell us the story.
“He said my great grandfather was a sherif in this town in Louisiana back then and that he’d gotten on the bad side of an ‘evil’ witch—” he made air quotes around the evil and rolled his eyes, “—when he was trying to rescue some kids from a bad influence, and the witch had cursed us. The story was real vague so I was suspicious. My father wasn’t known for telling the truth if it would make him look bad. He didn’t exactly hide that he was a racist asshole, but he always twisted stories to try and make everyone else look bad and he was the victim.”
The witch’s mouth compressed and she nodded. “Always.”
“Right?” Tom shook his head. “So he tried to convince me that our entire familial goal in life was to find the descendent of the witch and kill her to break the curse. He said I couldn’t tell my mother about this. She was an outsider. This was a family thing. Really played on it being a family thing. And he was telling me all this at that age for teenagers, right? Especially teenage boys, when there’s all this anger and nothing to do with it. But also confusion and stuff? Am I making sense?”
“I have a son. There was a period there when I worried about him.” The witch’s shoulders had relaxed and she picked up her cup again, sipping the coffee out of the hole in the plastic lid. Her eyebrows lifted at her first taste and she glanced toward the counter where Nina was carefully watching her, standing next to Boo’s stool just outside the counter.
The witch lifted her cup and gave a little nod. Nina nodded back, her shoulder’s also relaxing, and she smiled at the fellow witch before returning behind the counter again to serve a new customer who’d walked in from the bookstore.
“I think my father was trying to play on that, pull me over to his side. But I’d spent a lot of time with my mother, hearing about her cases—we talked all the time—and I knew what kind of man he was and that his story about what my great grandfather had done was full of holes. I figured what he’d done was something horrible to have earned a generational curse from a hex witch.”
“It was,” the witch said.
She didn’t clarify and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask what the old guy did, but I figured if she wanted to say aloud she would. Jonesy did open his mouth, but I kicked him under the table this time and he snapped his mouth shut.
Tom nodded. “Given the kind of people we’re talking about, I am not surprised. Anyway. I took the picture but I actually intended on destroying it so no one would ever be able to find you. But something stopped me. I tucked it away and watched my family for years after that.”
“What happened?” Jonesy again. Because he just couldn’t not. I was going to kick him under the table, but his question didn’t derail Tom’s story so I let it go.
“Everyone who was an asshole and a racist had horrible lives,” Tom said. “Things always went wrong. Nothing they did worked. And sure, some of that was their own faults of course. They were horrible people and the only people who ever wanted to deal with them were other horrible people. But even when it looked like they might manage to accomplish something, things fell apart. Fires. Police investigations. Bottom dropped out of a business.”
The witch nodded, but didn’t comment, and she hid her expression in her coffee cup as she took another sip. She gave the cup a little frown and removed the plastic lid for her next sip.
Guess she was staying.
Tom returned the witch’s nod. “I also noticed that the few members of my family who got out of that cycle of being terrible people never had any of that horrible stuff happen to them. In fact, the parts of the family who did good things, who were actively good people, kind people, people like my mother who tried to help others… Those people had nice normal lives. Sometimes really really good things happened to them. Sometimes it was just ordinary good stuff, but none of the really horrible things, none of the sucky bad luck that went beyond the sort of ordinary swings of life.”
“What does all this have to do with me?” The witch was trying to sound haughty and disinterested, but she had her elbows on the table now and there was a little glint in her eyes.
I could see why. The hex she used must have been one hell of a powerful spell. Hearing how well it worked must have been very satisfying.
“So the thing is, I love the family curse and the way it works. I…” Tom glanced guiltily at Jonesy and he said, “Sorry. I lied. I had no intention of asking to have the curse removed.”
“So why did you want us to confirm she was your witch?” Jonesy asked.
“And I’m neither confirming nor denying that I even am this witch,” the witch said.
“What I really wanted to do was to thank her,” Tom said. “Thank you.” This he said directly to the witch. “From the bottom of my heart. Thank you. I know you’ve gone on with your life…” He raised his brows and then said, “I know this witch has gone on with her life. And I wanted to apologize for the terrible shit my great grandfather did to her family.”
“He organized the lynching of my…her grandfather.”
Well shit. I felt that hit in the solar plexus. Yeah. Truly horrible. A gross and terrible act that deserved righteous retribution. No wonder the whole family got itself hexed. That was way worse than just breaking into her house to steal a picture. Given how this meeting was going, I was sort of hoping she’d forgive me after all. What was so interesting, though, was how the curse only affected the people who remained gross excuses for human beings. Like, the people just trying to get along in life and do normal things and be kind people…they were fine. That was one super powerful hex because usually that stuff landed on all the descendants, no matter what kind of human they turned into.
Tom let out a long breath and nodded. “Yeah. I was afraid that had been the case. The way my father spun it, he never admitted to the murder.”
The witch nodded.
“Well, then he and his offspring definitely deserved every single thing they got,” Tom said. “And honestly, I’m surprised you…she spared any of us.”
“My grandmother asked me to,” the witch said quietly. She touched the older picture with the image of her standing next to an older woman in front of the house.
And I suppose that was the closest we’d get to her admitting to being this witch.
She sucked in a deep breath and the veil of semi-interest came down again. She checked the slim, elegant watch on her wrist and the movement caught the light which made the platinum sparkle and that was very distracting so I almost missed Tom’s next comment.
“I realize I’ve taken up more than enough of your time,” Tom said. “So I’ll let you go now.”
The witch frowned. “Why bring me here? Just to tell me you’re pleased with the result of a hex cast a hundred years ago?”
“No. No. Sorry. I mean, I did want to thank you for that. Thank you for the hex being so specific. Though I wouldn’t have blamed you if I’d had a shitty life because of my great grandfather. I mean, that was some messed up shit.”
“Mmm.” The witch sipped her coffee.
“But no, what I really wanted to do was to…” He shifted around in his seat a little, looking uncomfortable for the first time since the witch had appeared over their table. “I’m not sure how to say this now. Reparations seems like the wrong word because I’m not asking for the curse to end, but… Okay. This is going to sound odd, but I won a lottery.”
Jonesy and I both looked at Tom like we were seeing him for the first time. Cause that was just not the sort of thing you expected to hear in real life. The whole hex witch and family curse and stuff… Yeah. I mean, I was a squirrel shifter so the magical stuff didn’t really phase me. But I was sitting next to someone who’d actually won a lottery? The odds on that were astronomical. Lot higher than me sitting across the table from a witch getting ready to head out to her yoga class.
“How much did you win?” Jonesy asked.
“A lot. One of the big prizes. Like…a lot.”
Jonesy let out a low whistle.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “So I set up my mom for life and funded her work so she can keep doing the good lawyering she’s doing. She can do a lot more pro bono stuff now and that’s been great. And I’ve donated a bunch to different charities.” He ducked his head and shrugged. “And I flew first class to Europe and took a month long trip around, seeing the sights.”
The witch hid her expression in another sip of coffee, but I’d swear she smiled at that.
“And I was trying to think of something else nice I could do with the money, after watching all the relief and happiness my mother’s clients experienced when they realized they didn’t have to pay anything up front. And I thought…hey, I could do something for the hex witch.”
The witch froze with her cup halfway back to the table. “What, exactly, does that mean?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure. I mean, I could just give you money.” He shrugged. “Whatever works and doesn’t hit you with a big tax bill.” He half turned to me and Jonesy and said, “That’s been one of the eye-opening things. How giving money to people can get them hit with taxes if you’re not careful. And even donations have to be done right or it can cause issues. It’s really weird. You’d think giving money away would be easier, but there are tricks to it so the money gets where it’s going.” He faced the witch again. “So I can give you cash, or I can open a trust for your relatives. Or, I could donate to your favorite charity. Whatever you want.”
“How much?” the witch asked.
Tom named a number that left us all speechless and blinking. The witch set her to-go cup back on the table so hard some of the remaining coffee sloshed out.
“That’s a lot of money,” Jonesy said.
I leaned in close to him. “We got paid well, right?”
“Really well.” He patted my arm. “Of course! I wouldn’t have skimped on the fee when a hex witch was involved. Didn’t realize how easy it was for him to cover that fee.”
Yeah.
“So…no strings?” the witch asked. “Just…give me and mine money and that’s that? No expectation of anything in return?”
“No. This is long overdue to help… Well, there’s nothing that can change what’s happened obviously, but it’s what I can do. And like I said, I don’t want the hex lifted. I just want to do my part to make amends for the past. For what it’s worth.”
“Hmm.” The witch leaned back in her chair. “I think I’m glad now my grandmother talked me into the more complex spell.”
Tom chuckled.
“We’ll have to talk more,” she said. “This isn’t a five-minutes-before-yoga decision.”
“Of course. We can meet whenever you like and discuss it. You can bring your husband. Whatever you want.”
The witch nodded. “Okay. Okay then. Yes. We’ll talk.”
“And you’ll take my gift?”
“I will take that gift. There’s a lot that can be done with that amount of money.”
Tom nodded enthusiastically, grinning.
The fact that this guy wasn’t a squirrel kind of boggled my mind, to be honest. He’d fit right in at a family reunion.
The two made arrangements for their next meeting and then the witch left to make her yoga class, taking both photos with her. After a few more minutes of settling their business, Tom left and it was just me and Jonesy considering the whole thing.
“That was a weird job,” Jonesy said.
“But kind of cool in the end.”
“Yeah.”
“And now it looks like I won’t have to move again.”
Jonesy nodded. “And we won’t get hexed.”
Always a good thing.
He nodded to the bookstore. “You wanna pick up something? We’re due a pretty big pay day once Tom’s metaphorical check clears.”
I glanced at the bookstore. Yeah. A couple of books wouldn’t hurt. I had some room for a few more physical books.
And fortunately, it looked like I wasn’t moving any time soon.
I’m sure my descendants will be very grateful.
***
Thanks for reading ZELDA AT THE CAFE. I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like your own personal eBook copy of this story, you can find it for sale here. You can also peruse the previous Café stories that are individually available for sale here.
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ZELDA AT THE CAFE Copyright © 2026 Kat Simons
All Rights Reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.