GUARD DOG?
 Phoebe Matthews

 LostLoves Books
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Phoebe Matthews
Cover Design Copyright 2012 by LostLoves Books

Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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The three stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following collections:
 
 Guard Dog?
 Nine Horoscope-in-Catsup Stories
 Wicked Good, Book 1
 
 Bookstore Geek
 Steampunk Man and More
 Wicked Good, Book 2
 
 Wailing Witch
 Steampunk Widow and More
 Wicked Good, Book 3
 
 
 Mudflat magic is inherited, and with each generation the magic weakens. Or sometimes the magic remains powerful but the brain that controls it is weaker.
 
GUARD DOG?
 Seattle is a city of back alleys in the old neighborhoods. As I am usually traveling on foot, running to a bus stop, they are my freeways, shortcuts uncluttered with car traffic. This alley was in a small commercial district, behind office buildings, the short type that have realtors and hair dressers on the first floor and accountants and dentists on the second.
 As this was Sunday, the alley was empty of people. Just the usual dumpsters. A couple of old cars pulled up tight against the concrete block walls. Flowering weeds pushing out of the cracks in the blacktop.
 At the far exit, a BMW stood at the curb. It was parked, all right, and not actually moving, but somehow a BMW never quite looks stopped or parked. It always looks like a criminal about to make a dash for it. Or is my opinion of a BMW distorted because I know who owns one?
 Between tinted windows and normal light glare, I couldn't see who was in it, although I could see the shadow shape of a head. I knew Darryl Decko’s car way too well. If he was sitting at the curb, I didn’t want to go running past. For me, the Decko brothers are bad news.
 Darryl is the one with money, always in some hotshot job somewhere. Rock is the one with the magic, not a lot, but enough to get himself in trouble. The deal is this. Like me, the Deckos grew up in Mudflat, a neighborhood in Seattle where old magic lives, trailing its way through the Mudflat families like a hopscotch game, making one kid a witch, another a ghost-talker, and then it would skip a generation and a grandchild would suddenly turn out to be a spellcaster. The magic keeps trailing, getting a little weaker as it drifts down through the families’ gene pools.
 I inherited a bit, not much, just enough to make me a painfully accurate fortuneteller, which also makes me a target for Darryl Decko who would like me to forecast stuff he can make bets on. That’s forbidden for a whole lot of  reasons, none of which matter here, except that you’ll understand now why I avoid him. Larceny is his hobby. 
 What keeps either of the Decko boys out of jail is a puzzle.
 I slowed, then came to a standstill, waiting for that BMW to pull away. That’s when I noticed the open back door in a two-story cement block building.  Okay, I noticed it because it wasn’t simply open, it was shredded, hanging sideways on broken hinges, 
 The younger Decko, Rock, is a smash wizard, the only one in the city because smash wizards are territorial and competitors disappear. His skill is limited. Rock isn't the brightest bulb, but he has that smash thing down pat, all except the self-control part. He can hit a board with the side of his hand and the board doesn’t just break in two, the way some athletes do it, it actually disintegrates into a million pieces.
 If he hits a door too hard, it ends up looking like the door in front of me.
 Decko car in the alley, Decko damage to a building, gee, I didn’t need to be a fortuneteller to figure out that the two were connected. As Rock wasn’t the brother who scared me, I went to the broken door and took a step inside to a short, dark hallway that faced two more doors, one intact, the other not.
 Something exploded, not fire cracker size. Major. It sounded like somebody’d been lugging a refrigerator up a staircase and it got away from them and went crashing. If the building were twenty stories taller, the crash could even be a broken elevator cable. 
  “Rock?” I called softly. When I didn’t get an answer, I shouted. “Rock? Hey, Rock, you in here?”
 Have I mentioned that seven years ago, when I was sixteen, I dated Rock Decko? 
 No, I did not know that he had an older brother who was involved in a lot of illegal stuff, and I wouldn't have cared. Rock in black leather and chains was, uh, hot. And I was sixteen. Which I hope explains why I thought he was hot. 
 He was a couple years older than me. That made him a big man, plus he was into motorcycles, and really, really, really wanted to be a bad boy but had no special skills. Magic has its late bloomers, and at that time, neither Rock nor anyone else knew that in a year or two he would be a smash wizard.
 He can smash, all right, but even now, years later, he hasn’t learned  to control his strength. Be just like him to break a door by accident and then stamp in frustration and blow a hole right through the floor. That would explain the explosion noise.
 It also might explain why he wasn’t answering. Was he lying under a pile of rubble in the basement? Not wanting to join him in a crash to the center of the earth, I didn’t go dashing in, but I did walk in slowly, looking all around for weakened floor boards before putting a foot down.
 “Rock? You in here?”
 Dead silence. I glanced around  the room I’d entered. At one end was a large desk. The rest of the space was filled up with file cabinets. Nothing on the walls. Some sort of office but there weren’t diplomas on the walls or anything like that, so I couldn’t figure it out. And that’s when I noticed several little red lights flashing on a metal panel about the size of a circuit breaker box by the door.
 “Uh, Rock?” I’d seen those things in enough TV shows to suspect I recognized them. “Hey, Rock?”
 “Doll?” He poked his head around a doorway on the other side of  the room.  “You shouldn’t be here.”
 “Neither should you,” I said, because I had this sinking feeling that things were not going well. “You’ve set off a burglar alarm.”
 When he came into the room, he had a canvas bag in his hand, the kind used for bank deposits. Rock has dark hair and olive skin, an arched nose and eyes the color of copper pennies. Those eyes were tracking from side to side. Something had him in a sweat. I guess I don't have to say that he was wearing black jeans and shirt, because that's all Rock ever wears.
 “I don’t hear anything.”
 “That’s because it’s not going off here. It’s going off in some security company’s office or maybe at the police station.”
 About that time the phone on the desk rang and Rock nearly went straight up through the ceiling. 
 “Are you expecting a call?” I asked. 
 Okay, I was playing him. Sometimes I can’t resist. From the look on his face, I knew that deposit bag in his hand wasn’t his. What I didn’t know was the how or why. Oh right, the why was simple. The guy’s a thief.
 “You think I should answer?”
 “Only if you know the password,” I told him.
 “What password?”
 “Rock, there’s an alarm going off. And a phone ringing. That means the alarm is hooked to a security company and somebody in an office across town is calling to ask for a password. If you don’t know the password, they send out the cops.”
 “What happens if we don’t answer?”
 “Same thing that happens if you don’t know the password. I think I’ll be gone when they get here.”
 And that’s what I did, turned around and left with Rock right on my heels.
 “Hey, doll, I’ve got my brother’s car. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
 “You mean you’ve got your brother,” I said as we hurried out the back door to the alley. 
 It was hard to imagine sleek and slippery Darryl Decko playing getaway driver. Didn’t care. He wasn’t someone I wanted to run into. I started to turn back toward the other end of the alley figuring I’d circle the block and wait for the bus.
 “No, I don’t. Darryl isn’t with me.”
 “Well, there’s somebody in the car,” I said.
 He gave me a funny grin and caught my elbow. “Yeah, there is. Come on. You’ll like her.”
 Her? Okay, I didn’t hear any sirens. It would take a few minutes from the time of that security company phone call to the arrival of the police. If Rock had a new girlfriend, I wanted to see her because, gotta admit I am incurably curious.
 When we reached the car, instead of opening the door, he pointed through the side window.
 “That’s Skippy,” he said.
 Weird name for a girlfriend. And then I leaned toward the window and she pressed her nose on the other side and I must say, and did say, “Oh, she’s so cute!”
 A large scruffy dog with floppy ears started bouncing up and down and slobbering all over the window, and then she did a regular doggie dance, circling, jumping over the console to the driver’s seat, jumping back, jumping over.
 “When did you get a dog?”
 “Yesterday. I decided I need a watch dog and she’s a big one.”
 A watch dog to protect a thief’s house? Maybe he had better stuff in his house than I did. Living on my miniscule salary, gotta tell ya, I don’t own anything anyone would want to steal.
 While I watched and laughed at Skippy’s antics, the car let out a BEEP! and a HONK, HONK! followed by a whole lot of those other horrible car alarm noises.
 “What’s going on?”
 “Oh, damn, she jumped on my key tag.”
 Key tag? Right, those automatic buttons people have on their key chains for locking and unlocking cars from a distance and for turning the alarm on and off.
 “How could she do that?”
 “I left the keys on the seat.”
 It took me a second but I got there. If he’d left the keys in the ignition and then tried to exit or enter the car, it would make all sorts of noise. And if a noisy burglar alarm had gone off when he’d smashed the back door, he didn’t want to have to dig in his pocket for his keys. Instead, he planned on being able to cancel the break-in and make a fast getaway, with the keys on the seat where he could scoop them up and be off.
 While I tapped the window and grinned back at the grinning dog, Rock went dashing out in the street and yanked on the door handle.
 Well, you know how that went, don’t you?
 Skippy not only managed to hit the car alarm, she’d also stepped on the button that locked the car up tight.
 Rock howled.
 “You can smash the window,” I suggested helpfully.
 He glared at me over the car roof. “Are you insane! This is Darryl’s car! He’d kill me!”
 As I couldn’t think of any reason to stand around being insulted, especially as I could hear sirens approaching, I turned and headed back toward the alley. As I turned, my toe hit something and I looked down. It was the bank deposit bag. If I left it on the sidewalk next to the car, it could be a few decades before Mudflat got its smash wizard back. I wouldn’t miss him but probably someone would. 
 Besides, if he got tossed in jail, what would happen to Skippy?
 In one swoop, I picked up the bag and walked quickly away. About the time I was adjacent to the broken door, the siren drowned out the noise of the car alarm, and as carrying stolen stuff seemed a good way to get in trouble, I ducked through the door and into the office and across to the far door and holy gee! It opened to a closet that was mostly filled with a humongous metal safe with its humongous metal door shattered into a mountain of metal bits.
 I tossed the deposit bag into the yawning cavern of the doorless safe. And then I walked calmly to the broken outer door, stuck out my head, saw the back end of the police car angled on the other side of Darryl’s car, and heard a whole lot of voices, one of them shouting something about, “Stupid dog!”
 Seconds later I was out of the alley and walking calmly down the next cross street. Rock wasn’t my responsibility, but if he got tossed in jail, I might offer to adopt Skippy. 
END
   
 A Mudflat descendant tries to break the tie. His attempt opens some odd doors.
BOOKSTORE GEEK

 A steep flight of cement stairs edged by a black iron rail led down from the sidewalk to the underground level landing containing only a display window and a shop door. The sign in the window was barely readable beneath the layer of city dust.
 Zacklin’s Books.
 "Are you listening, Zack?"
 The sharpness in her tone caught his attention. He had been watching his fish tank, a really cool tank he had paid way too much for. It was small enough to set on the end of the counter in his bookstore, perfectly filtered and temperature controlled and the right size for the twelve assorted fish, all small, all exotic in shape and coloring.
 Marcia was frowning at him.
 As he had no idea what she had just said, he tried to cover by talking rapidly. "I spent hours discussing them with the guy in the pet shop. We looked them all up. I've got several species that are compatible."
 "What's that mean?"
 "It means they aren't supposed to eat each other. But yesterday I had fifteen and now all I've got is twelve."
 The woman sighed. "You weren't listening to me at all, were you? Zack, I am sorry but you and I aren't, uh, compatible, either. We have nothing in common."
 Now he did look at her, both with his eyes and with his full attention. She had a round-faced softness that he liked, and the first time she'd come down the steps to his basement level used bookstore, she really was that breath of fresh air in the dusty room. She smelled like a bouquet of flowers. And she so was normal, so wonderfully normal.
 He knew he lacked social skills. He was tall and plain and a whiz in college, but his own mother called him a geek. "Geek" from a wailing witch, and who would know better? His mother had a small house on a large lot, a house a room wide and four stories high topped by a flat roof edged in ornate wrought iron fencing. On stormy nights she stood on that roof and wailed along with the storm, never louder than the storm, her cries pitched to the roll of thunder and the crack of lightning, but mostly to the howling of the wind.
 He had spent his childhood hiding under the bed during the storms, terrified the wailing would anger the storm and send lightning crashing through the house. His mother insisted the reverse was true, that the storms strengthened her powers and protected their house.
 When this lovely woman, this Marcia, walked into his store to ask if he had any Regency romances in stock, he'd said, "Is that some kind of fiction? I don't have much fiction. A few classics. Would that be what you mean?"
 She'd laughed and said, "I have all the Jane Austins. I was hoping you had something newer."
 "Oh that Regency!" he'd exclaimed, lectures from history courses surfacing in his mind. And because she was already turning away toward the door and he didn't want her to leave, he started sputtering facts at her, explanations of Regents and the genealogy of the English monarchy. His excellent memory was cluttered with facts he'd learned once and never again thought about until someone mentioned a related subject. 
 She had turned back that day and listened wide-eyed. Since then they'd gone out a few times and he thought he was making progress.
 Now he said, "I like being with you. That's something in common, isn't it?"
 She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I really am."
 After she left he wondered if she had met someone else and if he should have asked. Or perhaps there was something she liked to do that she hadn't mentioned. Maybe she wanted to be taken someplace like the ballet, but if so, why hadn't she said so, because he'd be happy to take her anyplace.
 Was it possible she knew he came from a background of magic? He had moved out of the old neighborhood when he opened his bookstore downtown. Now he only went back for brief visits. Inherited magic lived in all the houses, occasionally missing a generation but always popping up again. His own magic was as weak as a single raindrop compared to his mother's storm.
 None of which explained the three missing fish. He leaned against a bookshelf and stared at the miniature aquarium and tried not to think about Marcia. Instead he counted the fish again. Was it possible someone broke into the shop the previous night? Who could have done that? Had he left the door unlocked? 
 Thinking carefully, starting from the moment he had turned his key in the lock that morning and entered the shop, he tried to remember. Facts popped up, facts he had noted and then put aside.
 He always activated the wards on the shop door before leaving for the night. A small room at the back of the shop contained the collected libraries of a mage, a sorcerer and a witch, bought from their estates and priceless to anyone who knew their use. None did, including the estate lawyers who sold him the books at normal scuffed and soiled leather-bound book prices, generally by shelf space in the range of ten dollars a foot.
 When he'd arrived, he had notice that a small pile of bookmarks he kept by the cash register were out of line and a few were lying scattered on the floor. Had he bumped them on his way out the previous evening? Possibly. And when he hung up his jacket on the hook in the washroom, the sliver of soap was in the sink rather than on the side. He'd never been a good housekeeper, so probably he'd done that, too.
 But there was something else. Right. When he picked up his receipt book off the counter, he'd noticed it felt damp and had set it back down without thinking any more about it, because he had a routine that always started with opening the cash register and putting the bills in the correct slots. It wasn't until he'd finished all the small opening chores that he stopped by the tank and looked down through the clear water at the beautiful little fish and realized three were missing.
 He had rented this space four years ago and never had the locks changed. Possibly someone who used to work in the space in the past still had a key.
 A key would not help them past his wards.
 Besides, the money was still is the cash register. None of his leather books was missing. Why would anyone steal fish? They were nice fish, several dollars apiece. In value they were nothing compared to the books.
 Throughout the day Marcia would pop into his mind, the sound of her voice when he phoned to ask her out, the softness of her fingertips when he handed her a menu in the Chinese restaurant, the scent of flowers when he sat beside her on her couch the one evening she invited him in for coffee.
 He pushed each memory away by thinking about the fish, recounting them, and then walking slowly through the store to see if anything else was missing. 
 His mother phoned at noon to say hello and invite him over to her house for supper. "And Zack, dear, could you bring my scarf? It's a white silk one. I think I must have left it when I was in last week."
 "You did, Mom. I put it away for you and I'll bring it next time I come over, but I can't come tonight."
 "Why not?"
 If he went to supper she would know he was upset. She always did. And she would ask and he would end up telling her about Marcia and then she would do a lot of fussing and sympathizing and he didn't want to have to handle it.
 "Umm, I have some things here I have to finish up tonight. Can I come another night?"
 She said of course, she was busy tomorrow but maybe Sunday dinner? "And don't forget to bring my scarf, dear. It was a gift from my friend Nicotiana and I'll be lunching with her next week. I'd like to wear it."
 "All right."
 "It is very special. It keeps me warm."
 He didn't ask if it was magic. Of course it was. Nicotiana was clever with spells.
 He hung up and went straight to the washroom, where he remembered seeing the scarf on the floor and remembered picking it up and hanging it on the towel rack by the sink and thinking he should call his mother to tell her, in case she was wondering where she'd left it. And then he'd forgotten about it.
 Standing in the doorway he stared at the empty rack. He peered under the sink and behind the door and even in the corners. The room was the size of a closet. Inspecting it thoroughly took thirty seconds.
 So after all, there was something missing in addition to the three fish.
 And Marcia. Wasn't life unfair enough? Losing the chance to work toward a relationship with a really lovely, normal, nonmagic woman was awful. Adding a break-in was that proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. He wasn't a person who angered easily, in fact, almost never, but now he could feel his anger rising. The more he thought about it, the angrier he felt.
 He went through the motions, managed to look calm with the few customers who came in even though his hands were shaking, checked his email and packed several mail orders, the primary source of his income, but by closing time he knew he absolutely could not bear to lose one more thing. If someone trespassed tonight and took another fish, it would be too much.
 After closing up for a half hour and running to a nearby deli to buy supper, he returned to the shop, closed the door, turned out the lights and sat down behind the counter in the shadow of a bookcase where he wouldn't be visible from the front window. He clipped a booklight to the top of a book and began reading about the origin of the use of the metric system.
 An hour later he realized he had forgotten to eat his supper. Reluctantly he stopped reading, noticed the sky outside was black and the streetlights on, stood in the dark shop at the counter and ate half of his sandwich and drank his lukewarm coffee and then returned to his book because it really was fascinating.
 He was so intent on reading he didn't notice a thing until he heard a small splash. He went dead still, unsure of the sound, and slowly raised his eyes without moving his head.
 It took him a moment to accept what he was seeing.
 Balanced on the rim of the fish tank was a thin black cat, its head down, its nose almost touching the surface of the water. A paw shot through the surface, making another small splash.
 "Hey!"
 Before Zack could stand up the cat leaped from the rim to the countertop to the floor, leaving a trail of bookmarks in its wake, and was gone.
 He had no clue where it went. It didn't leave footprints. Systematically he thought it through, took an empty cardboard mailing box from the space below the counter, placed it lightly on top of the tank so as not to completely seal it and disturb the balanced ecology, and then went searching. As soon as he had the time he would check through his back room collection for instructions on how to ward a fish tank.
 Tonight he needed to find the cat. It had probably come in yesterday when the door was open. Wherever it was now, if he didn't find it and evict it, it would continue to cause mischief, possibly flexing its claws on a valuable book. Zack turned on the overhead lights and did a search.
 He went up and down the aisles, peered in any spaces between the books and the shelves, got down on all fours to look under furniture, pulled boxes away from walls, ran his hands along the tops of cases, until he was sure he had examined every inch of the shop. He even checked the washroom.
 No cat. 
 He spun around in the small back hallway that opened to the washroom door on one side and the storeroom on the other and noticed, for the first time, that the storeroom door was open a few inches and how had he not noticed it earlier? He must not have closed the door tightly enough to click the latch yesterday. Not that the storeroom held anything of value. Mainly he used it to hold his shipping supplies. Could a determined cat nudge the door open?
 "All right, you've had your fun, now it's back outside with you," he muttered as he walked in and flipped on the light.
 Her eyes glowed in the reflected light as she looked up at him. She didn't try to run away, stayed put in the corner and made a small hiss. He knew she was a she the minute he took a step toward her. The cat was small and scruffy, but she stood bravely glaring at him, putting herself between Zack and two tiny new kittens.
 "Oh my God," he said softly and then he apologized. Her ribs stuck out under her thin fur. "I didn't mean to scare you. All right, you stay there."
 He hurried out to the shop, found his half sandwich, broke it into bits in the cardboard deli tray and carried it back and set it down next to her. He doubted she would move more than a step away from the kittens as long as he was in the room and he was right about that. Next he went back and tore away the sides of his cardboard coffee cup until he had a little dish with a rim about two inches high. He rinsed it out and filled it with clean water and took it in to her.
 She stopped eating for a minute, gave him a careful look. Food won. She returned to eating. When he peered past her without actually moving any closer, he saw his mother's silk scarf under the kittens. He didn't have to touch the scarf to know it was giving off a low heat. It was soiled, probably irredeemable. He filled a shallow box with shredded paper from his supply of packing materials and left it near her. 
 Zack slid down with his back pressed to the wall. He didn't want his height to intimidate her. And then he spent the next hour talking very softly, explaining that the fish were his but the storeroom was hers as long as she wanted it, and saying whatever else came to mind because in many ways the cat was easier to talk to than a person. 
 His last act, before he locked up and went home, was to hold out his hand and wait. She approached cautiously. After standing and staring at him for several minutes, she stretched out her head and licked his hand. He didn't try to pet her. Tomorrow would be soon enough. Maybe that had been his mistake with Marcia. Had he rushed the relationship, phoning her the same day he first met her?
 In the morning when he opened the door he heard a small sound, looked up, and saw the cat sitting on top of the books on the upper shelf of the case behind the counter. The cardboard was still in place on the fish tank. He had forgotten about it. Had the cat understood when he explained the fish were his? 
 "Good for you," he said to her. Today he would set a ward.
 He propped the door open, went to the washroom to hang up his coat, took a quick peek in the storeroom and saw the two little fluff balls sleeping on the silk scarf, went out and set up his cash register and turned on his computer.
 "I'm sorry to bother you again, but I needed to bring you this." From that first phone call, he'd loved the tone of Marcia's voice. Now she walked toward him, his green cardigan sweater in her hand. "You left it at my place."
 "You could have phoned. I would have picked it up."
 She didn't meet his eyes. "No bother. I was downtown anyway."
 He knew, from the way she looked around the shop at everything but him that she had brought the sweater because she didn't want him coming to her home again. There was nothing to say and so he didn't try. 
 She looked above his head at the bookcase behind the counter and gave a small gasp. "I didn't know you had a cat."
 "Neither did I until yesterday."
 "But whose is it?"
 "I guess it's mine now," he said, and when she looked straight at him he told her about the cat and the kittens.
 "Are you going to keep them?"
 "I can't very well toss them in the street. They'd get run over."
 "But I mean, you could take them to an animal shelter or something."
 He restacked the bookmarks to have something to do with his hands. "No. She's just a skinny black cat. Nobody'd want her. She'd get euthanized. She might as well stay here."
 "What about the kittens?"
 "What about them?" he snapped. He hadn't slept well and last night had been so strange, and if she didn't like him, he couldn't help it. He had no idea what he could do. He understood wards but he had no knowledge of love spells and even if he did, he would never use one. "I'm not tossing them out, either."
 Her voice went very soft. "No. Of course not. I had no idea you liked cats. I adore them, but the last two men I dated, well, they turned out to be cat haters and I could never, I mean, oh." She stopped and stared at him.
 "At least I know what happened to my fish. She ate them."
 "But you're keeping her, anyway. You'll need cat food and dishes and a litter box and you'll have to take them to a vet for shots. Can I see the kittens?"
 He led her silently into the storeroom. As soon as he pushed the door wide open so Marcia could see them, the mother cat dashed past his ankles and planted herself in front of the kittens. 
 "It's all right. We aren't coming in," he told the cat. Putting his hand on Marcia's shoulder, he turned her back toward the shop. "I have several books on cat care. I know what they need. Thanks for bringing my sweater."
 Marcia stopped in the little hallway outside the storeroom and looked up at him. He looked down into the soft roundness of her face and remembered the touch of her fingertips. He could smell her flowery cologne, or maybe it was Marcia herself who smelled like flowers.
 "Zack, if you can forget what I said yesterday, I would like to invite you over. I owe you supper. And an apology. If you aren't busy, that is."
 He didn't know what he should say and so he just grinned.
  END 

  Mudflat is that Seattle neighborhood where old magic lives. Most of the time. Occasionally Claire Carmody is caught by a stray bit of magic outside the neighborhood.
 WAILING WITCH
  Sometimes I turn into a total geek reader. If a book is full of information that is totally new to me and right in the middle of my major interest, I drown in it. My surroundings disappear. Time stops. My only reality is each new bit of info. So there I was in the back room of Zack’s bookstore, where he lets me read the way beyond my price range books, a lot of them leather covered and all of them bought from the estates of major magics. We’re talking old and rare here.
 So when I finally realized I had better stand up and stretch because my neck was full of cricks, I did that, stretched and heard a lot of  popping. Next thing I noticed was the dead silence. Zack has a radio somewhere near the front counter and he’s usually got it tuned to a ballgame or music.
 I slipped a bookmark in the leather bound volume before carefully closing it. The bookmark might or might not stay there. Books once owned by a mage sometimes reject bookmarks.
 “Zack?” I peered around the door.
 The only light in the shop was daylight coming through the dusty front window. I called his name a couple more times, figuring he was somewhere around, closing up. And then I checked the other two possible spaces in the shop, a storeroom and a washroom. They were both empty.
 Huh. He’d locked up and forgotten me. Annoying because after I opened the door from the inside to let myself out, would it lock up after me or was there a bolt lock that required a key? If there was, I would have to phone him to let him know I’d opened the bolt and the trouble with that idea was that I didn’t know his home phone number.
 What a bother. I glanced at my watch. Way late. I should have caught a bus an hour ago. By now my boyfriend would be home starting supper and wondering where I was. Well, no. He wouldn’t wonder. He would worry. He’s like that. The best thing for me to do was run to catch a bus, and once on a bus I could phone him.
 I grabbed my purse, turned off the light in the back room, and hurried to the front door. Grabbed the door handle.
 And right after that I was sitting on the hard concrete floor.
 Shafts of blinding light shot past me. My eyes felt like they were spinning in my head. Stunned, at first I figured somebody’d whacked me a hard one. No, couldn’t have. I’d gone all through the shop. There was no one else around.
 So what the hey? Oh, right. Dumb Claire. I grew up in Mudflat, a neighborhood in Seattle where old magic lives. I am not old magic but I also live there. And my grandmother might have been a borderline witch although she never said so. Thing is, I do know enough about magic to know a ward when I stupidly grab hold of one.
 Zack’s mother is a powerful witch. I have never seen her, but my grandmother once told me the woman was a wailing witch.
 “What’s a wailing witch?” I had asked.
 “A witch who can’t keep a husband, that’s for sure.” An odd comment from Gran who had had several husbands. None of them died of old age, at least, not while she was married to them. Instead they tended to walk out of the house without a word and never look back. Actually, my mother and her sisters had the same problem and they weren’t even witches.
 Zack doesn’t admit his powers, probably because they are weak and weak power attracts problems. But okay, clearly he could ward his shop door, which solved the question about dead bolts. He didn’t need them. What knowing about the ward didn’t solve was how to get me out of  there. Disarming a ward is way past my skills.
 I stumbled to the counter to see if I could find Zack’s phone number. Yeah, he had bookmarks on the counter with the store address and phone number. No, he didn’t have his own number anywhere visible. I mean, what if a water line broke or a fire started or something like that? What if the cops saw a burglar at his door? How would they contact him? With a head full of irritation, none of it sensible, I pulled out my cellphone and called home.
 Didn’t even get past the hello bit.
 “Claire, where are you? Are you all right?” Tarvik demanded. Told you, my boyfriend is a worrier. 
 “I’m fine,” I said and then went into a long description of the problem.
 “Okay, I’ll be right there,” he said and hung up.
 I tried to call back and of course got no answer. He’d probably dropped his phone on the kitchen table on his way out the back door because he is a jump first, think later guy. 
 A steep flight of cement stairs edged by a black iron rail leads down from the sidewalk to the underground level landing containing only a display window and the shop door. The sign in the window is barely readable beneath the layer of city dust. The words were backwards from my inside view. Zacklin’s Books.
 Would the window be warded? Wasn’t going to slap my palm up against it to find out, but I did touch it lightly with a fingertip. Nothing there except dirty glass. I leaned against it and tried to remember the home phone numbers of the two witches I knew. Aargh. They wouldn’t have their numbers in a phone directory. On the off chance they might still be at work, I tried Madeline. We work at the same place, so I knew that number. The phone rang and rang. And then her answering machine came on. So next I searched behind the counter for a phone book. Couldn’t find one. The other witch worked at the mortuary, a long shot. I could maybe turn on the computer and find the number, but normally she wouldn’t be there unless there was an evening visitation slotted for a local resident and the neighborhood is small enough that I knew no one had died in the past few days. Phooey.
 Fifteen minutes later someone rapped on the screen door.
 I raced back to the window.
 He rattled the screen door.
 I rapped on the window glass and beckoned to him. Tarvik saw me then and came over to squint through the window. With the city going dusky outside, the shop was dark. I thought about flipping on the light but would  that attract a policeman and would that complicate things a whole lot more?
 Because I’d finally got it worked out how Zack could stick a ward on the door and not cause a late customer to get hit by the ward. He had that screen door outside and it had a key lock and every night he locked it. It was harmless. Anyone could rattle it. They would have to intentionally break the lock on it to get to his wood door, which made them burglars and fair game.
 Through the window, Tarvik called, “Give me a second to get that screen door open. I think I can take it off the hinges without damaging it.”
 “No! Don’t! What I need is a phone number.”
 Apparently he didn’t get what I was saying. Thing is, he’s chummy with Nicotiana, the witch who works at the mortuary, does gardening for her and stuff, so he knows her number. But did he give me a chance to explain? Of course not.
 So I stood inside yelling while he pulled out his hammer and screwdriver and sure enough, it only took him a few seconds to get the hinges off the screen door, and another moment to lift the whole thing aside and lean it carefully against the stairwell and even less time to grab the front door knob.
 While I went on shrieking, “No! Don’t! No!”
 Tarvik flew back across the narrow space at the bottom of the well and crashed into the concrete wall. He landed on his ass, his legs sticking straight out in front. Stared up at me through the window, those blue eyes wide. He’s short and muscular and incredibly cute, with a mop of blond hair, and there’s a pale line of freckles across his elegant nose. Another major charm is his smile but, gotta tell ya, he wasn’t smiling now.
 “It’s warded,” I mouthed. I’d been screaming and got nowhere so now I did the slow pronunciation thing.
 He pulled himself up and came over to the window. “What about the window?”
 “It’s okay. The only problem is the door. It can’t be opened. And there isn’t any other outside door.”
 “You can’t stay in there all night.”
 Well, I could. And if I had to be stuck someplace all night, a bookstore wasn’t the worst place. And it did have a washroom. However, it lacked a bunch of stuff, like food and my own nice soft bed.
 “I need Nicotiana. Do you have her number?”
 Honestly, I hated to ask. She would not want to come downtown. However, as fast as he’d got here, Tar must have his car nearby. He could always drive back and get her.
 And yes, he knew her number, not that he had a phone, which was a real shame. How can I explain this? All the older women in the neighborhood are nice enough to me, possibly some of them even like me. Tarvik they adore. If he phoned and asked, she wouldn’t say no.
 With a shrug, I poked in the number Tar told me. It rang quite a while. “She must be out in her garden,” I shouted and Nicotiana said, “Who is this?”
 “Oh!” I brought my voice down to a normal level and explained my predicament. I could hear Nicotiana clucking her tongue.
 “Oh dear. Oh dear me. Oh dear. Claire, I can set wards. But, umm, I can’t break someone else’s wards.”
 I mentioned the local mage. He is more powerful but he has a big problem. It’s called agoraphobia or something like that. He never leaves his house for anything less than a death of a friend, and he considers me more of an annoyance than a friend and also, I wasn’t dying.
 “Breaking other people’s wards is extremely difficult. I doubt that he could,” Nicotiana said.
 With visions of Tarvik swinging his  hammer at the large window, I said, “There must be some way to open this door. Wait. Would it be possible to phone Zack’s mother and get Zack’s home phone?”
 Did Nicotiana laugh? Her voice sounded a little odd. “Yes, you can try. At least it isn’t raining.”
 She gave me the number and it wasn’t until I was dialing Zack’s mother, a witch I knew only by reputation because she was in many ways more secretive than the mage, that I took a look out the window and up the stairwell. Enough light to mean the sky was clear.
 After a long wait a voice said, “Yes?”
 Nothing more. And I could not for the life of me remember Zack’s mother’s name and why hadn’t I thought to ask Nicotiana?
 “Uh, this is Claire Carmody and I am really sorry to bother you but I need to get hold of Zack and I was wondering if possibly you have his phone number, not the one at the store but maybe his cellphone or something?” I rattled because I knew her reputation. And yeah, she kind of scared me.
 “Carmody,” she said slowly. “Oh. Yes. Of course. The girl. Yes.”
 The girl. Right. I am the only female in my generation. My one cousin is a ditzy guy.
 “Why do you need Zack?”
 Lying to a witch is pointless. Besides, maybe she thought I was stalking him and I sure didn’t want her thinking she needed to protect her son because witches can get a little crazy about stuff like that. 
 “I’m in his store and he’s gone and the door is warded.”
 “He was in a hurry tonight, I know that, leaving town for a camping trip with a friend. He won’t be back for a few days.”
 If she had been anyone else, I would have shrieked. Instead, I tried to convey my question with raised eyebrows  while staring at Tarvik through the glass and pointing toward the door. He did figure out I wanted him to look at something. He went to the door, leaned toward it without touching it, then rushed back and oh yeah.
 “There’s a sign on the door!” he shouted. “Be back Tuesday!”
 “I can’t get out of here for three days?”
 In my ear the voice said, “That won’t do. All right, stay where you are,” and she hung up.
 “I think she’s gone for help,” I mouthed at Tar.
 “I could break the window.”
 Three days? Would an alarm go off in a police station if Tarvik broke the window? We couldn’t leave it open, but we could come back and board it up. A lot of bad karma mixed in there, right?
 Trying not to tear my hair, I shouted, “Wait a bit! Maybe she knows how to locate Zack.”
 “Wait how long?”
 “A half hour?”
 “All right. And then I break the window.”
 When I opened my mouth to scream at him, he did his kissy face, so there wasn’t much to do except make faces back at him. He leaned against the outside of the window and I leaned against the inside and we could talk and hear each other a little bit. We talked about stuff that didn’t matter, like what we’d have for supper when we got home, and what shows were on TV, and anything at all except the possibility that we might actually have to break the window to get me out. And right after that, would we spend the night in jail?
 Tar tilted his head and stared at the sky. He held out a hand, palm up.
 In a matter of minutes the stairwell turned almost as dark as the inside of the store.
 “Looks like rain,” he called.
 Rain. Nicotiana had mentioned rain, which made no sense because, unusual to Seattle, we were having a dry spell. A dry spell in Seattle means four days in a row without rain. And nary a cloud in the sky.
 But yeah, Tarvik was right. I could see drops bouncing off him, big fat drops that soon started sliding down the window and leaving tracks in the dust.
 A woman called, “Are you a Carmody?”
 Tarvik looked up the stairs. “No, lady, the Carmody is the one stuck inside.” 
 “Ah.” I saw her coming down, first little boots with heels, the kind of boots that barely come up over the ankles, black, with laces, and the heels were maybe two inches high. Above the boots were slim legs wrapped in black stockings with a lattice pattern. The skirt started at mid calf.
 She stopped a couple steps above Tar and at that spot she was the same height. He’s five and a half feet tall. I kind of doubted if she made it to five feet, but maybe with the heels she did. The black dress was frilly and seemed to swirl around her by itself, with ruffles at the wrists and neckline. She leaned to peer in the window at me. Her face was elfin, a little heart shape with pale eyes, and her hair was a mass of reddish brown. She rapped with her knuckles on the glass and shouted.
 “How did you get in there, Carmody?”
 I shouted back. “The store was open. Zack let me sit in the back to read one of his reference books and I guess he forgot I was there.”
 She shook her head and for that brief moment, she did look like any mother annoyed by her child’s carelessness.
 “Can you remove Zack’s ward?” I shouted.
 “Eventually.”
 I didn’t get a chance to ask the time frame of eventually. 
 The rain came down in ribbons. Tarvik backed into the far corner of  the stairwell. In no time his fluffy hair was plastered against his head. His tank top and jeans were pasted to his body. 
 The witch stared up at the rain. It ran down her face but it didn’t flatten her hair or even seem to dampen her dress. Instead, her hair and her skirt swirled around her. 
 The rain came down in sheets and she smiled up at the sky. And raised her arms. Next thing was a flash of lightning followed by a roll of thunder.
 Tarvik held his hands against his forehead to shield his eyes. The witch started laughing, not at him but at the sky. And then, as wind whipped the rain until it fell at a sharp slant, her voice rose. In those few minutes, while I stared through the glass, I remembered another question I had asked my grandmother.
 “But why does the witch wail?” Even back then, I knew enough to keep nagging when I wanted answers.
 “She draws power from the storm.”
 “What if it’s not storming?”
 Gran had shrugged. “When she wants a storm, she gets one.”
 Don’t know which came first, but gotta tell ya, they were both out there now, the storm and the wail.
 Within the wind another sound rose, almost part of the wind but sharper. Increased in loudness. Increased in pitch. The witch  tilted her head back and her voice became a high screech, like wind whistling through a crack in the door, higher, sharper, and definitely a wail. On and on, weaving through the howling storm. What Gran forgot to tell me was how to close my ears when a wailing witch wailed.
 Tarvik did a small wail himself, pointing at the staircase. It was fast becoming a waterfall, the kind in parks where water drops from step to step in a fancy fountain. These steps weren’t fancy. They were plain old grit covered cement, and by the time the water reached the bottom, it was gray. It swirled in front of the door, a filthy pool. Tarvik jumped up on the lowest stair. Within minutes the water covered it and he had to go up another step to keep the water from filling his shoes.
 I tried shouting, asking her what she was doing. The wind and rain and wailing drowned out my voice. At the rate the water flowed, there were a lot worse things it could drown. So I pounded on the glass. 
 She finally heard me and looked at me. And let her wail drop to a keening and then to nothing. And then her face smoothed and she gave me a grin and shouted, “I think that’ll do it!”
 The next bit was stuff I’d seen Gran do, a lot of hand waving while her mouth worked in what was probably a chant. When she stopped, she pointed at Tarvik and waved him toward the door. He sloshed on down through  the water.
 He grabbed  the door knob at the same time I shouted, “No!” but yeah, I was too late.
 He opened the door and let in a river.
 “Shut the door!”
 He did. I raced to the wash room and grabbed the roll of paper towels off the wall.  We both  got to work and mopped away until there was a loud banging on the door. I looked up expecting to see the witch.
 Instead, I saw a policeman.
 My choices were limited. I could open the door and stand in the doorway and let in a flood.
 Or I could say, “Tar, I’m ducking out fast to talk to the officer,” and not give him a chance to object.
 I opened the door the minimum, slid through and pulled it closed.
 When I looked up at the officer, rain hit me in face. “If I open the door far enough to let you in, we’ll get water in the bookshelves.”
 “What are you doing in this store?”
 I did a quick glance up the staircase. Nobody here but me and  the policeman. “We started to close up and then this downpour began and there’s water all over the floor so we’re mopping.”
 “Why is the screen off its hinges?”
 I glanced at the screen door. It leaned against the end wall of the well. “Lost some screws and the workman was just starting to repair it when this storm hit. So I have him inside doing clean up.”
 “With the interior lights out?”
 By now my hair was plastered to my head and clinging in long soppy tendrils across my face. “Listen,” I said, “you can come inside and discuss this and I will show you my driver’s license or whatever else you want, and then you can help mop up the water you let in, okay?”
 “Excuse me, ma’am, but do you work here?”
 “I’m a personal friend of Zack and he left early to go on a camping trip so he left me to close up.”
 His expression changed, can’t say exactly from what to what, but right then I  realized the problem. Zack must have told the cop on the beat he was going camping. It didn’t say that on the sign. So when I knew where Zack had gone, the policeman accepted my explanation of why I was in the store.
 He sloshed back up the stairs and I sloshed back into the store. Tarvik had found a rag mop in the storeroom and was busy soaking up water and wringing the mop out into a bucket. I found paper and pen by the cash register and wrote Zack a short note. 
 You left me in the back room. Your mother came and broke the wards. Claire.
 I didn’t figure there was any need to explain the water. 
 Tar finished mopping and  then we agreed  there was no point hanging around. We couldn’t possibly get any more wet. So we set the spring lock and pulled the door closed behind us and dashed up the stairs to the street and stopped for one awful minute to stare.
 Traffic was a jammed mess. The street was a river, water up to the hubcaps on stalled cars. At a far corner I saw a traffic cop waving his arms while the rain continued to fall in sheets.
 Tarvik grabbed my hand and led me around a corner and down a block and by the time we reached the place where he had parked his car, the rain had stopped. No, that wasn’t right. The car was dry. The street was dry. The buildings were dust-covered.
 Tarvik pulled his tank top away from his body and tried to wring some of  the water out of the hem.
 “Maybe we should take a slow walk in the sun before we get in the car,” I suggested.
 “Going to take a while to get our clothes dry.”
 Going to take more than a while to get my brain dry. My thoughts were a soggy jumble. Except one.
 “Tarvy baby, next time there’s a choice between a broken window and a wailing witch, go ahead and break the window.”
END
 
 These short stories feature characters in the EPIC award-winning Mudflat Magic novels by Phoebe Matthews.  She is currently writing three contemporary fantasy series, Mudflat Magic, Sunspinners, and Turning Vampire.  Her novels have been published by Avon, Dark Quest, Dell, Holt, LostLoves, Putnam, Silhouette and others.
  
Here is the first chapter of the Mudflat Magic novel Welcome to Mayhem, Baby.

Welcome to Mayhem, Baby
CHAPTER 1
Seattle, Washington
When I heard that low, sexy whine of Darryl's BMW, I grabbed Nance's arm and slammed us both down the drive and against the cement retaining wall. My cousin's house is built on a hillside.  Actually, the whole city of Seattle is built on hills, but anyhow, this particular house is a half flight of stairs up to the front door and a six-foot drop down a sloped driveway from the street to the garage.
That's where we were, huddled in the corner between the garage door and the wall, hiding.
Nance swore.  Fast learner, that girl.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “That's the car we don't want to meet.”
She's a tough little blonde teenager. She moved free of me to creep up the drive, peek out at the street.
“Stay down,” I said.
Teenagers are fearless. At twenty-three, I am a whole lot more careful. I'd like to make it to twenty-four.
Bent low, Nance scurried back down to me.
“He's about two houses down. Claire, we need to get a gun.”
Late November rain didn't sweeten my attitude.
Her suggestion was tempting on an emotional level, impossible on a practical level. Sure, I'd love to shoot the bastard. Only I really wouldn't. Unlike Nance, I don't approve of violence and certainly not of murder.
I'd been home since the previous winter and avoiding creepy Darryl Decko all that time. I was really, really sick of it. I had to earn a living despite the Decko brothers.
Half my living is earned working at the Mudflat Neighborhood Center. I do a lot of paper shuffling for the counselors during the day. Two nights and a couple of afternoons a week I also teach teenagers. That means going home after dark in the winter.
Funny thing about tough-talking guys like Darryl, they never want daytime confrontations where there might be witnesses to see them bullying a skinny, helpless-looking woman. He was a big, handsome guy, dark hair and a cap-toothed perfect smile that never lit his eyes. Instead, he managed to chase after me a couple of nights a week when I headed home.
This night Nance and I were wearing dark rain jackets, jeans, sneakers. Nothing to reflect light except Nance's blonde hair. I reached toward her and pulled up her hood to cover it.
He didn't see us in the sloped driveway, but he knew we were close. The creep didn't want to catch me. He wanted to scare me. A shot rang out, and yeah, the scare part worked.
We huddled against the retaining wall of the drive, shivering and sweating at the same time, one of those body reactions that requires a massive dose of fear. Wasn't there anyone in the neighborhood to hear a gunshot?
My cellphone rang in my jacket pocket, because that's what cellphones do, ring when I don't want to make noise. I'd forgotten to turn it off.
Digging it out of my pocket, I flipped it open to shut it up.
The voice I expected was the one that spoke.
“All I want to do is talk to you, Claire. Where are you?” Darryl said.
Like I'd tell him that, a guy who follows me with a gun in his hand. And then I had a bad thought. Did he have one of those global positioning things in that car or some other device that could locate my phone?
I hit the off button fast.
“We should have headed the other way,” I whispered to Nance.
“Jimmy will help us.”
The girl had an odd amount of confidence in my scudzy cousin. Not that Jimmy was what worried me. It was the block. Trouble doesn't stay in one place. But that doesn't mean I go looking for the place it stays. And trouble was here, all right, on Jimmy's street.
A family who lived two doors down from Jimmy had disappeared. Not magic disappeared. Literally disappeared. No break in, no signs of robbery, and worse, purses, billfolds, money, car, all the stuff people take when they intentionally go on a trip? That stuff was still in their house and garage.
The Lettiwick family had been missing for a week now, long enough that we'd had police all over the place and way too many TV vans and cameras.
Except when they might be useful.
“A guy is shooting off a gun and there's not a TV van in sight,” I complained.
“How long are we going to hide here?”
“Until he leaves.”
“He can corner us down here.”
“He didn't see us run this way, or he'd be pulled up at the top of the drive now. He thinks we're in somebody's backyard.”
A Mudflat backyard is capable of containing anything, because Mudflat is where old magic lives.
Fortunately, none of the Seattle city reporters know the name Mudflat. When they follow crime reports here, they haven't a clue that they are in a space between Seattle’s designated neighborhoods, an area that is so well organized it has its own council.
Now the Mudflat council was forming into an army of searchers. The missing family's history in the neighborhood went back three generations to some strong magic, and who knew, it might pop up again in the missing kids.
They had to be found.
Until they were, it was anyone's guess about why they were missing. Was it the Lettiwick family specifically, or was something bad going down for anyone on the street?
Obvious direction to look, according to the law, was adjacent houses used for meth labs or by pushers. That was Seattle law enforcement's theory. Mudflat knew better. That stuff could happen anyplace else. But in Mudflat, look for a cranky wizard or a crackpot vigilante.
Either way, I didn't like to hang around near the Lettiwick house.
Another shot exploded.
END

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