Caged Kitten (All the Queen's Men #2) - Rhea Watson Page 0,2

once been stainless steel, top-of-the-line appliances when I’d bought them were now glamored to match the rest of the Victorian-gothic vibe we had going on around here. Black, white, and grey made up most of the counters, the chalkboards with kitschy drinks, the pastry display cases. Hanging bats and spiderwebs and pumpkins at the condiments station gave the place a pop of color, witches’ brooms and pointy hats and vampire fangs dripping red on our walls, our ceiling, the guest bathroom doors. It was over the top. Some supers even found it offensive, but humans gobbled up a year-round Halloween—and I had the numbers to prove it.

Year five of operating and Café Crowley had given back eight times the inheritance I invested into it at the start as sole owner. I didn’t want or need an outside opinion, and I owed that to my family, to the small bit of wealth my dad had accumulated that was supposed to eventually be split between three kids. In the end, it just went to one.

And kooky as it might be, I enjoyed the look of Café Crowley. I enjoyed the drama of a gothic coffee shop and library here in the heart of Seattle. Most places were going rustic and light these days, overflowing with succulents and sparseness. We had plants too—never mind that many in the hanging pots could kill a human in five minutes flat if ingested, or that I harvested and dried all of them for potion-work. Café Crowley gave the customers what they wanted: a fun atmosphere, delicious coffee, and pastries shaped like ghouls and goblins and cats. While I lacked a partner, I had a working relationship with an independent bakery around the corner who delivered fresh Halloween-inspired muffins, cupcakes, tiered cake slices, cookies, brownies—the works. Every morning, this place smelled like a veritable witchy Heaven, and I lived for that first deep breath of cocoa beans, sugar, and freshly baked bread.

But that was only half the appeal of this place. To my right, the seating area was spotless, all the old armchairs vacuumed, the board games put away, the fire in the working hearth extinguished. Beyond that, my eight stacks of sprawling bookshelves were orderly and dustless, full of manuscripts the Fox coven had collected over the centuries. Not only did I lack the room in my one-bedroom apartment, but someone ought to read them these days because I definitely didn’t have the time. Books were meant to be devoured again and again until they disintegrated between your fingers, and here, all the works that had been bequeathed to me—the non-magical ones, anyway—were lovingly tended to 365 days a year.

The place looked great, everything cleaned and put away. All the prep done for tomorrow. Cash counted, logged, and deposited in the safe. The one element that might be considered out of place in a café—not for Café Crowley, mind you—was the cat hammock suction-cupped to one of the huge storefront windows. It dipped under Tully’s generous weight, my familiar a magical beast in his own right, though I told any human who asked that he was a black Maine Coon to account for his size. Grinning, I set my spreadsheets on the counter next to the cash till, then sauntered over and tickled the underside of the silky soft hammock. His puffy black tail swished, dangling over the side, and after a quick stretch, he peered back, slow-blinking a set of blazing blue eyes down at me.

Witches and warlocks had the same eyes as their familiars. It made things difficult when you needed to deny that you even had a familiar, some fuzzy creature to bolster your magic, to tap into your more intense emotions—sometimes even to calm them, to wash them all away in your darkest moments. Dad had found Tully as a kitten, tossed in a back alley garbage bin when he was only a week or two old.

“As soon as I saw those eyes, I knew he was yours, kitten,” he’d said, handing me this little bundle when I was thirteen. Some witches didn’t stumble upon their familiars until way later in life; I counted myself lucky every single day that Tully had been with me for sixteen long years, and thanks to the fact that a familiar linked into its witch’s lifeline as soon as they bonded, my fat, fluffy, lazy boy would be with me until the end.

“Did you have a wonderful day?” I cooed, up on my tiptoes to stroke