The coffee house had been mostly empty besides the three of us and Harold. Only one customer had sat in the corner sipping her coffee, and she’d left as soon as we asked her to.
Hmmm.
Another thing to consider was that the poison could have been meant for me, and Harold was merely collateral damage. The more I thought about it, the more I feared this could be the case. I’d only just witnessed Merlin’s magic for the first time before rushing into work. That had been a test, he’d told me, to see if I was ready to serve as his familiar. Then later that night he had revealed himself to me.
I already knew he had an enemy in Luna, and she lived very nearby. She was also crazy enough to kidnap me and brew some kind of voodoo potion, which she forced me to slip to my cat last night.
Was this because her first attempt to get at me had failed when Harold took the poison instead?
Officer Dash had hinted at a toxicology report but never shared the results. Had it been completed? Did we know for sure we were dealing with a poison—or could some kind of magic be at play?
So many questions, and literally no one to ask. Maybe if I was careful about how I spoke with Merlin, I could suss out some answers about Luna indirectly. I finished my coffee and lowered myself to sit beside him on the living room carpet.
“Do you have any idea who might have killed Harold?” I asked him softly.
Merlin kept his eyes closed, but his whiskers twitched, telling me he had heard my question but didn’t much like it. “Do you want to break into the morgue?”
I shivered at the thought. “Can you go without me?” I asked, preferring that option much more. “Just teleport in, check things out, and come back.”
“I could,” he said, squinting one eye open to look at me. “Except I don’t know which one is him.”
Crud. I really didn’t want to go sift through a bunch of cold corpses, but I also really didn’t want to go to jail. Could I suck it up for the greater good?
“Got a picture?” Merlin asked, rolling onto his feet and standing on four shaky legs.
Ooh, a picture. Smart! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Let me search the coffeehouse’s Facebook page. I’m sure there’s at least one useable shot there,” I told him and then trotted off in search of my tablet.
Why hadn’t we thought of this option sooner?
Well, better late than never, I supposed…
17
It didn’t take long to find a clear photo of Harold on the company’s Facebook page. Even though Harold’s House of Coffee only had a handful of likes, its former owner wasted no opportunity to get in front of the camera and show everyone how important he fancied himself to be.
“I can work with this,” Merlin informed me when I shared the image with him. “I can’t teleport directly into the morgue, so this little fact-finding mission may take me a while.”
“Why can’t you?” I asked, uneasy at the thought of being away from him—and his magical protections—for an extended period.
“Same reason I took us outside of Luna’s house, then flashed us in through the window. If you’re going someplace you can’t see and don’t know well, you risk getting yourself stuck in a wall or in some other precarious situation,” the novice feline witch explained.
“Oh,” I said stupidly.
“Lesson number four. Magic is much harder to wield than it may look to outsiders,” he announced and cracked his neck to either side.
“I’m beginning to see that.”
A knock sounded on the front door, and I briefly glanced over to it. By the time I turned back to Merlin, he had already vanished.
I groaned and headed to find out what Officer Dash wanted. Because, yes, I already knew it would be her. She’d bothered me so much the past couple of days that I readily recognized the unique cadence of her knock.
Bang. Bang. Tap, tap, tap. BANG!
I flung the door open, reminding myself that if she didn’t behave more professionally in this exchange, I’d be taking a trip to the station to issue a formal complaint. That at least brought me some satisfaction as I came face-to-face with my current least favorite person in all the world.
“The toxicology report came back,” Officer Dash informed me as she hooked a finger into her belt loop.