Excerpt: Twinkles Takes a Holiday

If you’ve read Night Shift Witch, then you’re familiar with Twinkles the troublesome cat. Twinkles gets his own story, sort of… Well, at least he gets to be a murder suspect in a story 😉 

Raw and unedited, just for you! ***SNIP STARTS HERE***

“Where’s the cat?” A note of near panic entered my boyfriend Ben’s voice. “Star, where is that evil maniac?”

Twinkles wasn’t exactly evil.

Self-interested, yes. Completely unconcerned with pleasing the humans in his life, also yes. Intent on actively causing drama or even harm…probably not?

My mentor Camille had placed a lot of faith in Ben and me when she’d left her most precious possession under our care.

Granted, no one else could be trusted. Not a human. Twinkles had been living in close proximity with a witch for the majority of his life. Something happened to animals that lived long-term with witches. They became something…more.

Probably how the whole concept of familiars got started back in the dark days of witch-burnings.

Teensy problem: no one really understood what happened to witchy pets. They changed. This was a universally agreed upon fact.

They didn’t develop magic of their own, not so far as I’d seen or heard, but the magic they were exposed to made them more likely to understand the human (and witchy) world around them. In Twinkles case, I was pretty sure he followed our conversations with no difficulty and understood modern conveniences that improved his life: television, the internet, and Camille’s thermostat, to start.

I’d been inside the twerp’s head and knew how he had constructed a ladder of pillows, books, and a footstool to climb up to the thermostat and increase the temperature by ten degrees.

Not normal cat behavior.  

Second teensy problem: Twinkles did seem to be AWOL.

Ben could check under the sofa five times and peer into every shadowy corner of Camille’s house, but he wouldn’t find him. I could feel that Twinkles was absent.

“So, Ben?” I rocked back on my heels and waited for him to stand back up. He’d gone for a sixth look under the sofa. Not a good sign, since Ben was usually the calm one of the two of us. Super chill, my boyfriend—except for now.

He brushed his hands on his jeans, but then he saw the look on my face and started backing up. “I don’t like that look. That’s a bad look.”

Without asking for details, he headed straight for the liquor cabinet.

Not that Ben was a big drinker. He was usually the designated driver and perfectly happy to cart my lightweight self around. But these last few days had been…difficult. Trying. Borderline disastrous.

On the plus side, I had definitive proof that Ben was head over heels, completely gone for me. No way would a guy who wasn’t completely in love with me put up with the feline shenanigans of this last week.

He’d been scratched, peed on, bitten (in a rather sensitive area), and locked in a kitchen pantry. And that’s what I’d witnessed first-hand. I suspected Twinkles of several other less than admirable acts, but Ben wasn’t talking.

After the day before yesterday, when Ben had come home looking shell-shocked, I’d decided no more unaccompanied trips to Camille’s house to check on the fluffy menace. Strength in numbers and all that.

“There is no telling what that little ball of fluff will get up to if he’s escaped the house.” Ben added a few cubes to the seltzer water he’d poured. It looked like we weren’t quite to the point of booze. “How so much nasty can live in such a cute fuzzball body, I do not understand.”

“I’ll drive if you want to, you know, drown your sorrows in apple pucker.”

He laughed, thankfully. That’s what I’d been going for. I hated seeing my guy all twisted up especially over witchy goings on.

“Keeping a clear head is probably a better choice, but I’m glad you’ve got my back—in case the apple pucker starts calling my name. Wait, why does Camille have apple pucker?”

I gave him the don’t-ask face, then grabbed a pen. Better to brainstorm places Twinkles would be likely to go than revisit past (bad, very bad) alcohol decisions. Apple pucker had definitely been one of my Ben-free, girly nights. There had been a lot of pucker, a lot of Lifetime movies, and a little crying.

Right…Twinkles. What did Twinkles do all day long? I made a quick note to check on the neighbor two doors down with the pretty Persian and the neighbor directly behind with the barking dogs.

Ben leaned over my shoulder. “I’m thinking revenge before love.”

The scowl on his face prompted me to ask, “Any chance you want to tell me what happened day before yesterday? I know he’s gone a little crazy with the scratching and the biting—”

“Oh, it was more than scratching and biting.” Even though he was a red head, Ben didn’t blush much. The perk of being a generally chill guy who also had a lot of experience dealing with other people’s strong emotions. Being a funeral director meant a lot of tears came his way. And yet, he was blushing now.

But if he didn’t want to talk about it, that was his prerogative.

“You have anything for the list?” I asked, firmly shelving the Twinkles-Ben mystery for now.

“He has a ridiculous love of pizza. Add that local pizza place he likes so much to the list.”

That place was a good five miles away, maybe more, and didn’t deliver. “You do remember that he’s incredibly lazy.”

“But also clever. That cat is not normal.”

“Very true.”

And with that in mind, we came up with a list of places to check, regardless of distance from Camille’s home. It was about an even split of things we knew Twinkles loved (restaurants, primarily, but also the Persian a few houses down), places he would find entertaining (the yarn store, though he tried to hide his string obsession), and the people he would like to make miserable (the neighbors with the barking dogs.)

“I vote the two neighbors first,” Ben said, “and then the pizza place, then we make a circle and hit everything on the list, closest first.”

“Let’s do it.” In my head, I was thinking, “How bad could it be? He’s a cat.”

But I refrained from articulating such silly thoughts. If Ispoke the words aloud, that devilish beast, Murphy’s Law, would surely swoop inand show me exactly how wrong I was.

***SNIP ENDS HERE***

Twinkles Takes a Holiday will be available shortly! If you haven’t read the first three Night Shift Witch stories, maybe it’s time to catch up 😉