Page 1 of Caged Kitten

1

Katja

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stick around?”

I glanced up from the sea of tabbed spreadsheets scattered across my desk, a night of mind-numbing inventory ahead, and found Annalise loitering in my office doorway. Already bundled up for a chilly Seattle night, checkered cap hiding a head of golden curls and a thin pair of gloves poking out of her jean jacket pockets, she really was the best manager I’d ever had. In the five years of running Café Crowley, where it was Halloween every day and you could peruse weathered tomes from the stacks while slurping down artfully crafted hipster lattes, none of the senior staff ever volunteered to do inventory with me.

I mean, I always sent them home, rebuffed their offers, even told them up front that they would never suffer through an inventory overnighter. It was practically a job perk. I liked doing inventory alone, really immersing myself in what I had on hand, how my business was running, how the Fox coven’s legacy persevered inside these four walls. As the last of my matrilineal line, the only Fox witch left, I’d opened this place with the intention of crafting something that would endure. Brick and mortar, here to stay, the campy, vampy, gothic aesthetic appealed to humans and the secret supernatural world alike.

“No, no, really, it’s fine. I’m good,” I insisted. My chair offered a shrill creak as I leaned back in it, adding its two cents to the conversation, and we both grinned. The staff room had gotten a pricey face-lift recently: new chairs, a vintage oak table, and a pristine three-seater sofa with dizzying mandala patterns that the baristas liked to Instagram on during their breaks. It had cost a small fortune to redo that little room, but my people—all human, all awesome—were totally worth it. I, meanwhile, had an office chair straight out of the seventies, all the padding flat and the lumbar support nonexistent. My metal filing cabinets had seen better days, any semblance of interior décor dead at the door, and the only real piece of modern tech in here was my laptop.

But hey, whatever. Magic went a long way behind closed doors. I could be comfortable just about anywhere so long as the well inside me never ran dry.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with someone who actually enjoys whole stock inventory before,” Annalise remarked, her car keys dangling from her fingers. Even if every part of her read as ready to go, here she was, still pushing to be my little inventory elf.

I wish I’d found her years ago. Having someone I could delegate to, who I could trust unconditionally with my café baby, was huge. And with Annalise, the work actually got done. No more days or nights spent glued to the security monitors for me, willing my staff of human employees to just do what I told them. No more relying on my familiar Tully to sit on top of the safe to ensure all the money from the day got deposited. Annalise was the relief I never realized I’d needed until the end of her first week; back then, she had taken so much stress off my shoulders that I’d broken down crying, right here in my office, and all because something had finally gone right.

“I find it relaxing,” I told her with a shrug. Who would have thought the girl who absolutely despised arithmetic growing up found solace in numbers—but it wasn’t just that. Doing inventory myself, combing over every shelf, rooting through every cupboard, fed the paranoid beast inside me, and best of all, I did it alone. After long days surrounded by people, mostly human with the odd neighborhood witch or local shifter dropping by, I needed the downtime to de-stress—to relish the fact that I’d made it through another day, week, month, year without him finding me.

Annalise’s dirty-blonde brows shot up, her incredulous smile making me only a smidge self-conscious.

“You’re crazy, Kat.”

I chuckled right along with her, because that was the normal thing to do, all the while ignoring the stab of loss in my chest. It had dulled over the years but still flared in moments like these, when someone inadvertently reminded me of those long gone. Few people called me Kat these days—it was just far too close to kitten.

You’re crazy, kitten. I heard my dad’s voice often in the five years since I’d lost him, after I held his hand through that gruesome death rattle. It wasn’t real, and I knew that; unlike the odd spirit that made my beloved café its October haunt, Dad never dropped by.

Not that I blamed him.

Who would want to leave the beyond to come back here, of all places?

Still, a quick hello, kitten, just once, whispered in my ear or spelled out in office supplies across my desk, would be nice.

More than nice.

I missed him.

I missed all of them.

“Go,” I ordered with a nod in the general direction of the employee back exit. At this hour, only my car and hers occupied the gravel lot, and it was just getting darker. “Have a good night—and say hello to Charlie for me.”

My manager and my shift supervisor had been dating for almost a year and living together for the last six months. While Annalise was a statuesque blonde who modeled on the side, mostly for her social media fan base, Charlie was this short, squat, pink-haired punk who added a bit of authenticity to the off-beat vibe at Café Crowley. Weirdly enough, they totally fit.

And while it had been so sweet to watch from the sidelines as they fell in love, they were a poignant reminder that, as a workaholic, my love life had been dead for years—just like my coven, just like my brothers, my mom, my dad. Depressing.

Maybe that was why I looked forward to inventory nights so much. Tough to think about all the bullshit when you had to count every single thing on the premises at least three times for accuracy.

“Will do.” Annalise waved as she slid around my office doorway, vanishing into the night moments later when the heavy metal back door clunked shut down the hall. Picturing it clearly in my mind’s eye, every detail, I floated my hand right to left like I was sliding the dead bolt.

“Stricta cincinno,” I murmured. Spell cast, the door’s various locks snapped into place, officially sealing me in for the night. With the last of my staff gone, I piled the stacks of spreadsheets I’d been working on since this afternoon in a single mountain, and my chair let out another high-pitched squeal when I stood. I shut off the office lights in passing, swiping at the switch next to the door. Plunged into darkness, the back-of-house corridor stood long and quiet to my left, and the only thing keeping it from being a total blackout was the parking lot’s lamplight streaming through the back-door window. Some feared the dark, the silence; I found comfort in it, in the promise that at least here, I was safe.

Shouldering through the Staff Only door and crossing the threshold into front of house, I surveyed my Halloween-drenched kingdom with a sigh. As always, Annalise had killed it on all the closing procedures. Everything was locked up, floors swept, chairs on tables. To my left sat the café portion of Café Crowley, and what had 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.

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