All Hallows' Hangover Read Free Page A

better off. He worked at a bank.
    And oh lord, he was going to be late for work!
    Not that he could go to work looking like a dog. He couldn’t even call in sick.
    He’d probably get fired. His manager was a notorious hard case about people who were no call, no show.
    Could this day get any worse?
    Apparently it could.
    Daniel chose that exact moment to rush out of his bedroom, blanket in hand. Before Teddy could even think about how he could communicate with his roommate, Daniel threw the blanket over Teddy’s head and wrestled him to the floor.
    “Gotcha!” Daniel said.

 
     
     
     
     
    4
     
    Tabby hadn’t planned on taking inventory at Emporium Magique the morning after Halloween.
    Not after spending the entire night casting spells and dealing with customers.
    Most of the spells had been minor, but the cumulative effect was still the same. Tabby was about dead on her feet.
    Not for the first time, she wished she could use one of those handheld gadgets to do inventory. But electronics and wizards don’t mix, so here she was, counting the spells and potions left on the shelves by hand and comparing them to the handwritten tally of items sold during the night.
    She didn’t even have enough energy left to cast a spell to make the counting go faster.
    “You could at least help me,” Tabby said to the little black cat currently stretched out on a half-empty shelf watching her through lazy eyes.
    “What would be the fun in that?” Terrique said.
    Not that she actually spoke out loud when she was in her cat form. Tabby heard the voice of her familiar in her head. Annoying as all get out when she’d been a wizard in training and instead of helping Tabby learn spells like a familiar was supposed to, Terrique had sung show tunes—off key—during every exam Tabby had.
    When Tabby used to complain, Terrique always got a smug, self-satisfied expression on her little cat face. “You passed, didn’t you?”
    She had. And she’d never forgotten the ingredients to any spell, although whenever she mixed spells, she heard phantom caterwauling in the back of her brain.
    Were all wizards this weird? Or did they start out as normal people who’d slowly been driven insane by the spirits assigned to assist them?
    This morning, Tabby would have voted for insane.
    “Isn’t your purpose to assist me with whatever I need?” Tabby pulled out a box full of sleeping spells. She counted each bottle in the box without touching it. The last thing she needed was any help falling asleep. “I seem to recall getting that lecture right before I met you.”
    Along with a lecture about not abusing the spirit assigned to her as a familiar.
    Terrique stretched out a paw, claws extended, then brought it to her mouth to wash. “Who says I’m not?”
    “Oh, the bazillion or so boxes that I still need to...”
    Tabby let the sentence trail off. Helping her with inventory wasn’t what Terrique was talking about.
    That was another thing about familiars: they never got to the point using a straight line.
    And they never said more than they absolutely needed to say.
    So Terrique thought Tabby needed help, and not with the shop.
    What with, then?
    Tabby had a pretty decent life. She owned her own magic shop, a place that had started out as little more than a hole in the wall that she’d expanded over the years into a pretty nifty magical emporium, if she did say so herself. She employed a bunch of up and coming wizards, helping them to earn a living while they practiced their craft like others had helped her along the way.
    Sure, all the time she spent working meant she didn’t have much of a personal life, but she couldn’t complain. She had her bubble baths and her daydreams about a brown-eyed man she’d never met, and if she was a little lonely from time to...
    Oh, no.
    Tabby had made the mistake of telling Terrique once about her brown-eyed fantasy man.
    “You didn’t,” she said.
    Terrique kept washing her paw.
    “You cast a love