Hexed

This”—I waved my arms around—“is complicated. Too complicated for a demon cat. They mostly set fires, steal corpses, and walk around in human clothes, pretending to be your elderly mother so they can get free grub. There is magic here, really bad magic. It kind of scares me. The nekomata is dead, but the magic is still here. Something else is going on. This isn’t over.”
    Jim tapped one of the paper strips with his knife. The strip didn’t give. “And this?”
    “This is the curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls.”
    Jim slashed at the paper strip. The paper held. Jim scowled. “How the hell . . .”
    Kate, one of my friends, always said that the best defense is a good offense. “Before you say anything, yes, I know that the curse didn’t function as expected and I know that it would’ve been better to have the nekomata restrained so we could question it, and I was trying to do that, but it’s not like it’s an exact science, and how was I supposed to know that the binding scrolls would choke the stupid demon to death? So you don’t have to tell me—I know! You try guessing some weird creature’s identity and writing calligraphy while it’s trying to bite your nose off and then don’t come crying to me.”
    And that didn’t make even a tiny bit of sense. I was an exceptionally smart woman. Why did Jim always reduce me to some sort of ditzy bimbo idiot?
    “I was going to say, how the hell did you pull that off,” Jim said. “You made paper with the tensile strength of steel out of nothing. The physics of this makes my brain hurt.”
    “Oh.”
    “And I would’ve said it and some other nice things, except that you jumped in my face and started sputtering and waving your tiny fists around.”
    “Tiny fists?”
    “That’s the root of your problem right there. You always rush into things looking for a fight. You’re like one of those First Responder magic cops: Ride in, kill everything, and then sort bodies into two piles: criminals and civilians.”
    My face turned hot. My body was pumping out all sorts of angry, upset hormones. He was chewing me out like I was a child. I was this close to going furry, except it wouldn’t do me any good.
    “If you take a tenth of a second to check if the fight you’re charging into isn’t there, it would save you a lot of grief.”
    He didn’t get it and he would never get it. “Are you finished?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good.” I turned away from him and crouched by Roger’s body. Roger’s head hung in a weird angle, and both of his arms bent in places where no joints existed. Jim had broken him like a twig.
    “What is it?”
    You’re so special, why don’t you tell me, Mister Always Look Before You Leap. I dragged my finger against Roger’s skin. It came away with a powdery gray residue. I showed my finger to Jim. “I’m pretty sure normal corpses don’t do that.”
    “I saw that,” Jim said. “Michelle was slippery, too.”
    I rose. “We need to search the house.”
    We combed the house. We found no sign of the two other shapeshifters: Neither Mina nor August had been in the house for at least thirty-six hours. Their scents were old. I swiped the log from the front office and we escaped.
    Outside the cold night air swept along my skin, washing away the nasty magic. I headed straight for Pooki and opened the log on the hood. Four different types of handwriting filled the pages. The last entry was three days old. I flipped back a month and scanned the entries.
    “Are you actually reading this or just flipping pages?”
    “Jim? Shush. I need to concentrate.” Shift changes, notes on shapeshifters caught in the city for one reason or another crashing at the house, routine, routine, routine . . . Mina’s entries identified different types of herbal tea she drank during her shift. Roger documented the patrol routes of three neighborhood cats, complete with battles for territory and places where they chose to mark it.
    I kept turning the pages, and when I finally saw it, I almost didn’t realize it. Thursday before last, August failed to come in for the shift change. The log showed him signing in fourteen hours later. His p s, g s, and ys showed longer vertical strokes than usual. I ran my fingers on the other side of the page and felt the outlines of the letters. August had pressed too hard on the paper. He was excited when he signed in, confident, angry, maybe determined. His reason for the failure to show up read “overslept,” which