Cat and Mouse
An Inkling of Magic - Chapter 33
“Hunting what?” Elspeth asked warily, her eyes narrowing in scrutiny.
There was a sort of wild glee about him and it had her on edge. Trustworthy or not, the fae could be just as wild and untamed as the elements and every bit as deadly. She didn’t need him getting out of control and landing them both in trouble with Mrs. Hythe which would only lead to further trouble when she uncovered everything that they’d been up to.
He flashed her a toothy grin that did nothing to ease her concerns, the floorboards creaking a little as he sauntered over to lean against a bedpost. “Not what,” he said with a little more force than needed, “who.”
Her eyes widened with as understanding dawned in them and she couldn’t keep her voice from dropping to a breathy whisper. “You’re going after the stranger.”
“Hmm, that remains to be seen,” Derek replied noncommittally with a shrug and though his tone was as casual as if they were discussing the weather his eyes held a dangerous spark in them. A small, conspiratorial smirk played on his lips as he continued with an air of innocence so contrived that Elspeth didn’t buy it for a second. “Right now, I’m merely a concerned resident interested in locating and observing as part of my civic duty. Any actions I might take against said stranger are entirely dependent upon what I learn about him and I will learn about him.”
She wasn’t sure whether Derek’s response relieved or frightened her. And what about the stranger? her mind whispered. Does he frighten you?
“And exactly what have you discovered so far?” Elspeth asked, ignoring the creeping sense of unease when she recalled their encounter.
Friend or foe, there was undoubtedly more to the gentleman than what meets the eye and it couldn’t hurt to know a little bit more about him. She would certainly feel a lot better knowing what it was. She just hoped Derek knew what he was doing and would exercise prudence. She had enough on her plate what with finding out what had become of Mr. Grimmlich, honouring her agreement with Isulf and the Winter Court, investigating the break-ins, and clearing Derek of their suspicion all while trying not to get caught breaking probably every rule that existed for librarians by Mrs. Hythe without having to also clean up Derek’s mess if he didn’t.
A low growl rumbled from him in reply, interrupting her from tumbling back into a state of overwhelmed despair. “Not much yet, but I will. He’s been a hard quarry to trace and even harder to hold on to.”
Try as she might, which really wasn’t all that hard to be honest, Elspeth couldn’t keep from snickering at Derek’s clear vexation. The resemblance he had in that moment to an angry cat was far too amusing.
Perhaps it wasn’t the safest idea to taunt him, but, after everything he had put her through over the past two years, Elspeth couldn’t turn up the chance to put the shoe on the other foot. With the computer on her lap now forsaken, she scooted back on her bed to prop herself up in the far corner, leaned against the wall at her back, and quirked an eyebrow at him.
“Lost him did you?” her innocent tone belying the smirk she wore.
The scowl he gave her was petulant and fiercely unamused by her playful poking at him, yet the redness that was spreading up his pointed ears did nothing to hide his embarrassment. “I found him before, I’ll find him again,” he gritted out, his eyes darkening to a deep forest green.
It was strange to her that no one else had ever commented on how his eye colour could change like that. It went beyond the optical illusion that pupil dilation and blood vessel constriction could create by how they affected the way light interacts with the eyes. This wasn’t just a perceived brightening or darkening of tone, but a complete shift in shade though they always still remained green. Then again, almost no one else could see how his ears tapered elegantly to a gentle yet distinct point at the ends either.
She felt the heat rise to her face when she realized that she was staring and averted her eyes, coughing lightly to cover her own embarrassment and praying that he didn’t notice the light flush of pink she was sure would give her away. Since when did she care so much about how his eyes looked anyway?
“Out of curiosity, just how did you find him?” Elspeth asked, shaking herself out of the very strange and vaguely uncomfortable train of thought she’d found herself in. Refocusing on the matter at hand, her brows knit together when she struggled to recall anything she’d said that could have helped him find him in the first place.
Sure, she’d told Derek what he looked like when he’d interrogated her on him after abruptly teleporting them out of the bookstore. In fact, she’d even gone a step further and gotten out her art supplies to sketch him a likeness. However, knowing what the man looked like and actually finding one man in a town of roughly 3,600 people was another thing.
Elspeth tried not to notice the way that his eyes brightened at her question and she definitely was not interested in the way they seemed to dance with an impish light as his smile grew coy.
“Now that would be telling,” Derek purred playfully, “a fae needs to keep a few secrets after all.”
“Derek,” she growled, “what did you –”
“Alas, I’m afraid I must be going,” he cut her off with a grin, the glow of his magic already swirling about him before she could react leaving his last words floating like laughter in the air as he vanished. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
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“Qapla!”
A spluttering cough sounded from somewhere behind as though someone was choking.
“Please tell me you did not just yell something in Klingon?” Niamh wheezed, still recovering from tea going up and down places it didn’t belong – the perils of laughing while drinking, “Wait, they aren’t real too are they?”
Elspeth shrugged. “I do read more than just fantasy, you know. Also, I doubt it. Star Trek books are pretty much pulp fiction and when was the last time you knew pulp fiction to actually care about earth-shattering worldbuilding?” She paused, a smirk spreading across her face before she continued like that cat that had caught the canary. “So, rest easy, you can enjoy your guilty pleasure reads worry free. Don’t think I didn’t see that stack of Original Series books shoved under your bed.”
She snickered and ducked her barely managed to duck her head in time when, with a battle cry that would have made Queen Boudicca proud, Niamh lobbed something at her. Niamh had heckled her for ages for reading the books, but she really didn’t care. Sure, they couldn’t stack up against the works of Tolkien or anything from what was deemed by literary critics as the ‘golden age of literature,’ but, for pure fun, they were among the best.
It had been a hard thing to not call her immediately out on it when, with a considerable amount of smug satisfaction, Elspeth had first glimpsed one of the offending books tucked away in Niamh’s locker and hiding between her school books where she hoped no one would notice them, but she had refrained in favour of biding for the opportune time to spring it for best affect. Needless to say, Elspeth was not disappointed by her choice of calculated patience. A choice proven all the more glorious when, behind her, Kieran muffled a snicker of his own promptly followed by a loud squawk of protestation indicating that Niamh had heard it too and summarily turned her attacks on him and then back on her when she about fell over sideways from laughing so hard.
“Niamh,” Farren said bemusedly, stifling a yawn, “if you’re done trying to kill my sibling and yours, I’m hoping that Elspeth has an explanation we’ll all love for descending into fictional languages and she can’t share it if you beat her to death with pillows and stuffed animals.”
A huff and a mutter of Gaelic later and the attacks had ceased allowing Elspeth to lower the arm shielding her head. “I was running out of ammo anyway,” Niamh mumbled, leaning back against the head of the bed with a thump.
They had, once again, taken over Niamh’s bedroom with Niamh and Kieran sprawled out on the bed and Farren taking up a spot beside Elspeth on the floor sitting on one of Niamh’s many pillows. Somehow, after that first time, it had become a sort of unspoken agreement for them to meet at the O’Rourke’s house where fewer ears could overhear them as they dug through the files they’d pilfered – minus, of course, Derek who was still fixated on his game of cat and mouse with the stranger from the car ride. Elspeth liked to think it was also a bit of an unspoken apology for cutting them out of everything for so long – that and answering every one of Niamh’s rapidly fired questions until Kieran had to step in and rescue her and steer them all back on track. The same track that they’d been on for three days
“As a matter of fact, yes, I do have an explanation,” Elspeth said with a triumphant lift of her chin, “we’re done.”
“Done?!” three voices chorused at once with a mixture of shock, relief, and supreme elation and making her ears ring with their volume.
If time truly flies when one was having fun than Elspeth was convinced that, in the spirit of Newton’s laws of motion, that the opposite must also be true. It was the only logical explanation for how three days could possibly feel like three months. Three gruelling, agonizing months where suffering from an in-grown toenail would have been preferable to the mind-numbing drudgery of playing Where’s Waldo in five years worth of inventory records in order to create even more inventory breakdowns. In truth, though Elspeth was loath to admit it, it likely should have taken them weeks instead of days to finish. A feat they owed to Maelyn as she had been responsible for the bulk of the digitizing and she was overly meticulous when it came to organization. Everything had been broken down and cross-referenced in nearly every conceivable way, including separate spreadsheets for each product type. The only real difficulty had been that, even with entire spreadsheets broken down by year and dedicated to nothing but her father’s book purchases, they had still had to go through each listing one-by-one as there were names there that didn’t correspond to any of the break-ins and had needed to be marked as such since they couldn’t be ruled out as future targets. Similarly, the sales sheets were also broken down by year, but they consisted of every sale on the same list with only special shorthand tags for product type so were not nearly as friendly to search through. Still, they – or she rather – had managed it.
“Done,” she repeated, a relieved laugh escaping her as she rubbed her still ringing ears, “we have our lists. Now we just have to figure what our mystery thief is after.”
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“Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” a scolding voice asked.
Pausing the video on her screen, Elspeth slipped her headphones down to look up at Maelyn staring down at her from just inside her bedroom.
“Technically, I am,” Elspeth replied, pulling herself up to a sitting position so she didn’t have to crane her head so much to look at her, “with what happened last Friday, a lot of parents are really freaked out right now and refusing to send their kids to school until the police have solved everything. Akane and Latisha were evidently still at school when they went missing. Akane never even made it to class after I saw her on Thursday.”
Elspeth watched as a deep frown took over her sister’s face. Her dark brows pulling together as each part of her answer was taken apart and scrutinized by Maelyn’s analytical mind.
“But you went to school yesterday?” the counter falling from her tongue just as Elspeth knew it would.
She shook her head. “They let us come in, but sent us all home early. We’ve been given enough homework for the next three weeks and everything else is being setup online with lesson recordings, Zoom conferencing, and emailing in our assignments. Tests and quizzes they’re arranging to have proctored at the library.”
“And that’s supposed to keep you all safer?” Maelyn asked skeptically with one eyebrow raised.
“No, but it made everyone feel better about it. So, I guess that counts for something right?”
Maelyn still didn’t look too convinced, but she left it at that and turned to leave. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll leave you to it then.”
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Somewhere between Shakespeare and trigonometry the lines had blurred and Romeo and Juliet started trading equations instead of sonnets in Elspeth’s overstudied brain. With a tried groan, she rubbed her bleary eyes and flipped the cover of her trigonometry book closed and replaced it on the stack with her other school books before peeling herself off the floor where she lay and checking the time on her phone. She sighed when she read the time – only 2:30 PM. Farren would still be at work for a couple more hours and Niamh and Kieran were likely still attending to their own homework.
And who knows just what Derek might be up to, her eyes rolling at the thought, probably not anything part of the approved curriculum no matter how ‘educational’ he might deem it.
As if he knew she was thinking of him, her phone buzzed and the screen lit up with Derek’s name.
“Is this something that I really want to know or would plausible deniability be my best bet?” Elspeth asked in lieu of greeting when she answered his call, the automatic snark leaving her before she could even think to pull it back.
“Now where would be the fun in that?” the smirk audible in his voice.
“You’ve been awfully sparse lately,” she said, cringing when it came out as more like an accusation than a simple statement.
Her heart did stupid things in her chest as the line went quiet and she waited for his response. She told herself it was just that she was worried of what trouble he might be getting up to without her there to curtail him, but even in her own mind she knew it was a lie. She liked him and, stupid as it was, Elspeth had found she actually missed him. She didn’t know when it had happened, but sometime between being enemies, getting chased by giant cats, and finding themselves stranded in another realm she had grown used to his snarky presence and endless smirks. Not that she planned to tell him any of this. He’d be insufferable if he found out.
“Miss me did you?” he replied, dashing her hopes that he hadn’t noticed the hint of edge in her voice. Instead of the expected smugness though, there was a softness in his teasing that made her heart skip a beat. “Good, because I’ve no shame in confessing that I’ve missed you. Alas though, as much as the sound of your voice brings light into my black fae heart, that isn’t why I called.”
“Why did you call?”
Derek chuckled on the other end and the dark, triumphant quality of it sent shivers up her spine. “I’ll give you two guesses.”
There was only one thing Elspeth could think of that would put that cold ring into his voice. “You found the stranger.”
“Got it in one,” he chortled humourlessly, humming his approval, “Now, for a bonus question, care to guess just where he is?”
The low rumble of thunder in the distance didn’t go unnoticed and she was really starting to worry now. While Elspeth still hadn’t confronted him about her suspicions – or had time to consult the bestiary Mr. Grimmlich had gifted her and was currently secreted in the old blanket chest and keeping company with her tea and cocoa collection – she could connect the dots and every time his emotions took a turn for the worse, putting him at the edge of tether and on the brink of losing control, so did the weather. It had happened the first time when she told him of her encounter with Isulf, but there had been several more far too coincidental storms since then to not mean something – just like it did right now. There was something decidedly off about his laugh.
Abandoning her computer without bothering to shut it down, Elspeth raced from her room with her phone pressed hard against her ear.
“Derek, enough of the games,” she growled, stomping down the stairs without of a care of who might be around to hear her, “what’s going on?”
The ferocity of his response nearly made her drop her phone as she fumbled to get the front door open. Her hands started to shake and blackness seeped into her edge of her vision making it difficult to function while she kept the panic at bay.
“I’d say it looks like he’s gone back to the scene of the crime,” Derek spat.
A frown creased her forehead at that. Crime? What crime? Confusion coloured her thoughts and pushed out enough of her panic to let her get the door wrenched open and take off down the street even without knowing where it was she was going. Clarity hit her then as hard as the wind blowing in her face and pushing her back – Mr. Grimmlich’s bookstore – and she ran harder.
“Derek, don’t do anything foolish,” she urged, fighting to keep her voice calm when that was the very last thing she was. “It might not be what your thinking.”
“Perhaps not, but I know of one way to find out.”
“Derek, just wait for me! Derek!”