Charmed and Dangerous by Lindsay Buroker
1
“It’s a little drafty.”As Morgen Keller looked around the main room in what had been a tannery in the late 1800s and early 1900s, her vegetarian mind tried not to think about the building’s shady past. “And not in the core tourist area.”
Morgen waved toward a large dirty window with broken panes that faced Main Street. She would have to press her cheek to the grimy glass to see the Roaming Elk Inn, with its Go-Kart track and putt-putt course, which marked the north end of downtown. Even then, with rain pounding the pavement and the cracked sidewalk out front, she might have struggled to glimpse it.
“Your business is making and selling flea-and-tick charms and cat trees for witches’ familiars,” Phoebe, her mentor and self-appointed commercial-real-estate advisor, said. “You don’t need to be in the core tourist area. The people who want such things will know how to find you.”
“If not via the internet, then through a Ouija board, I suppose.”
“You’re thinking of ghost hunters. Witches get information from books.”
“I knew there was a reason you were my people.” Morgen tapped the e-reader sticking out of her purse.
“Flattery won’t get you more than a ten percent discount at the Crystal Palace, I’m afraid,” Phoebe said, naming her own business. Her shop had a prime location in town.
“Even if I bulk order?” Morgen had never thought she’d be the type to shop in a store full of geodes, crystal points, and stones sorted by how they affected one’s chakras, but that had been before she’d started making magical charms, some of which required gems and rare stones.
“I have to make a profit.”
“Uh huh. Anyway, normal pets can enjoy my charms and Amar’s furniture too,” Morgen said. “Their owners just won’t know there’s legitimate magic about them.”
“The tannery had quite the stench back when it was used for that purpose.” Martha, a mid-fifties coven member who was here today in a real-estate-agent capacity, spread her arms and smiled. “The denizens of Bellrock insisted it be placed away from the market and meeting hall, but today, it’s vacant and available for your needs. And the rent is very inexpensive.”
“For a reason,” Phoebe muttered.
“Because nobody wants to take on the task of cleaning it up?” Morgen wrinkled her nose and sneezed three times. Dust floated around the interior of the cavernous brick building like a haboob in the Arizona desert.
“Because it’s cursed and possibly haunted.” Phoebe pointed toward a loft filled with old tanning vats and furniture cowering under drop cloths. The broken railing and rickety stairs leading up to it would give a building-code inspector a heart attack. Many things about the place would. “Funny that you mentioned Ouija boards, because there’s supposed to be a ghost that lurks up there, pushing things to the floor.”
Morgen started to scoff, but Phoebe lowered her finger to point out numerous dark stains on the wide pine floorboards. The poor lighting made it hard to tell what kinds of stains they were. Perhaps that was a blessing.
She lifted her gaze toward the ceiling. A handful of bare light bulbs dangled on long chains from the rafters, linked by exposed electrical wiring that appeared to be stapled to the beams. They weren’t on, and she wondered if they were burned out or if Martha had deemed it too much of a fire hazard to flip the switch.
“Are those meat hooks?” Morgen asked, her gaze snagging on at least a dozen rusty hooks hanging from an equally rusty metal bar running vertically along one of the beams. Her stomach twisted with queasiness. She was fairly certain it would have objected to this place even if she hadn’t been a vegetarian. “I thought this was a tannery, not a slaughterhouse.”
“Maybe they were added later,” Phoebe said. “As decor.”
“Sure. Nothing says Welcome to my shop like giant hooks capable of impaling a rhinoceros.” Morgen looked at Martha. “Are there any other spaces available for our business?”
“In your price range?” Martha asked. “No. But look at all that room under the loft. Your hulking werewolf partner could get some real woodworking equipment, like a table saw and a planer. Then he wouldn’t be limited by what he can craft with his chainsaw.”
Tools to add dust to the air. Great.
“He does good work with his chainsaw. And he’s not hulking. He’s muscular and fit.” Morgen always felt protective toward Amar, especially when the witches took digs at him.
As a six-and-a-half-foot-tall werewolf, Amar didn’t need a protector, but he had feelings, the same as everyone else, and the way he growled when people spoke poorly of him or his work made Morgen want to stand up for him. He was a talented woodworker. An artist.
“Of course,” Martha murmured. “Do you want to see the back room? There are some counters and built-in cabinets with plenty of storage. I thought it might work for your crafting space.”
Morgen wasn’t sure she could imagine creating jewelry—technically, magic-infused amulets, talismans, and charms—in an old tannery. Though Grandma’s root cellar with the pentagram painted on the packed dirt floor wasn’t exactly a Bohemian artist’s loft in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it didn’t have a spiritual reek of animal death.
More dust crept up Morgen’s nose, prompting several additional sneezes. Spiritual reeks weren’t the only ones of concern. At least the place no longer smelled of animal hides, lye, and whatever else had been used in the industry. As a former database programmer and current app developer and jeweler, Morgen hadn’t spent a lot of time researching it and didn’t plan to.
At least Amar wouldn’t object to the building, not when he turned into a wolf and hunted prey numerous times a week. Suspicious stains and meat hooks wouldn’t faze him. He might even approve of the decor.
“Come, come.” Martha waved for them to follow her toward the promised crafting room.
The old floorboards creaked as they walked, and damp air swept in through the broken panes. Morgen counted how many windows they would have to replace in order to make this place serviceable for customers. It might not turn out to be quite the bargain that Martha kept promising.
When they stepped into the back room and turned on a light, a rat or something else dark and furry scurried under a counter.
“Look, a customer.” Phoebe smirked and pointed.
“As a fellow entrepreneur,” Morgen said, “you should have more sympathy for my predicament.”
“Why don’t you just sell online? You helped me get the Crystal Parlor into the twenty-first century, and more than half my business is coming through the website now.”
“I know, and I’m sure we’ll set something up, but if customers can’t feel the power of my charms and trinkets, they might not realize what they’re worth. Your goods are lovely, but they’re not truly magical.”
“Some of the powders in the back room are, but it’s true that witches looking for potion and crafting ingredients already know the properties of the various herbs and essences. You’ll have to establish a reputation before strangers in other states and countries believe they can order your charms and get something genuinely effective.”
“Yeah,” Morgen said glumly, then frowned at a dusty corner. “Is that the chalk outline of a body on the floor?”
“Ah.” Martha pursed her lips as she studied it. “I believe it’s another decoration. The last tenant was an artist and rather whimsical from what I remember.”
“Are you sure?” Morgen couldn’t take her gaze from the outline—or the dark stain in the middle of it. The dark bloodstain? “That looks like a crime scene.”
“I’m sure it’s just art. There hasn’t been a crime here in decades.”
How reassuring.
“And the authorities no longer use chalk outlines.” Martha chuckled, though she sounded uneasy. “You can ask Deputy Franklin.”
“Oh sure. He loves when I call him.”
“Here you go. Lots of counter space.” Martha turned her back to the outline and patted a paint-stained wooden counter, though she jerked her hand back when she realized it had come down close to a mouse trap. At least it didn’t have an occupant. “There are the built-in cabinets I mentioned, and that doorway leads to the bathroom. I guess you’ll have to put a new door on it if you’re concerned about privacy.”
“I hear customers like it.” Against her better judgment, Morgen peered through the doorway. She’d seen outhouses with more modern features.
Sighing, Morgen wondered if she could talk the Lobo pack into helping her clean and remodel this place. She’d already made Talismans of Imperviousness for them, magical jewelry that protected them from werewolf-control spells, but maybe they could use something else? Did werewolves also suffer from fleas and ticks in the summer?
“It looks like some of the previous tenants left tools behind.” Martha pointed at pegboards on the wall to either side of the bathroom entrance. “Maybe some would be useful in your work.”
Since she’d mentioned an artist, Morgen expected paint brushes, but all manner of axes and fleshing knives hung from the board, collecting dust.
“Those are included, you say?” Phoebe asked. “That’s a handy bonus.”
“Yes,” Morgen said. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve been making jewelry and thought if only I had a good fleshing knife.”
“Perhaps your woodworking werewolf can use them,” Phoebe offered.
Morgen’s doubts about the place increased with every passing minute. It might be better to simply use the barn back at the house, but as an introvert, she hated the idea of having customers driving up to her home to browse the goods or pick up pet furniture. And her sister Sian—an even more hardcore introvert—might never come to visit if she risked running into strangers. Besides, as Martha had pointed out, there was a lot more room here. Maybe Amar would like some professional woodworking tools.
Though she doubted she wanted to see whatever had been left in the cabinets, eight-foot-high metal double doors drew her eye. It looked more like the entrance to a swimming pool’s mechanical room than a storage locker.
Bracing herself, she tugged open the doors. Whatever she’d expected, a giant metal statue wasn’t it. The hulking bipedal… creation had a cylindrical tin-can torso and towered almost as tall as the doors. It looked vaguely like a robot from a turn-of-the-century comic book. The turn of the last century.
“Which former occupant was responsible for this?” Morgen asked, memories of the original Wizard of Oz and the Tin Man coming to mind. This thing was a lot larger than the Tin Man, though, and there was nothing human about its blunt face.
“Hm.” Martha peered over her shoulder. “It’s before my time, but I’ve heard that a mechanic who fancied himself a tinkerer owned the place in the forties and fifties and used it as a workshop. He reputedly came back from the war a little strange in the head, so he didn’t have a lot of customers.”
“You mean there wasn’t a big market for giant robots?” Morgen couldn’t imagine the technology of the time had allowed the thing to move or actually do anything, so what was the point? Like having a suit of medieval armor as a wall decoration?
“As a woman about to go into business making pet charms,” Phoebe said, “you probably shouldn’t mock someone else’s niche.”
“Ha ha.”
Morgen shook her head and closed the doors.
“I can take another two hundred a month off the rent,” Martha said, “if you’ll sign a two-year lease.”
“I should talk to Amar first.”
A creak came from the front room, and Morgen peered warily through the doorway. Deputy Franklin walked in with Mayor Ungar, and her stomach sank.
The pot-bellied deputy didn’t bother her, but the brawny lumberjack of a man, Ungar, had personally escorted the county tax assessor to her property a couple of months earlier to make sure she would be charged her fair share this fall. Worse, he’d been turned into a werewolf by one of the Loups Laflamme long before Morgen came to Bellrock, and he was presumably loyal to their pack. She believed he had been among those werewolves who’d attacked her home the night she and Amar had battled the rougarou.
“Hello, Deputy Franklin.” Morgen smiled at him and willed the expression to stick as she nodded at Ungar. “And Mayor. Are you here to see Phoebe?”
She waved to her mentor, aware that they had a relationship of sorts. Booty calls, the vet, Dr. Valderas, had called it.
“No,” Phoebe said quickly. “He’s not.”
When confronted, Phoebe had reluctantly admitted to the booty calls, and that Ungar got her motor running, but she’d been embarrassed about it.
Ungar smirked at her. He was handsome, in a Paul Bunyan kind of way, but Morgen’s mind still boggled at the thought of them together, especially after Phoebe had objected to Morgen having a relationship with Amar because he was a werewolf.
“Phoebe only invites me to visit after dark,” Ungar said. “She likes it when I growl for her.”
“I most certainly do not.” Phoebe lifted her chin, her cheeks growing pink.
“Doesn’t this qualify as dark?” Franklin grumbled, shaking water droplets from his raincoat and nodding toward the gray sky beyond the windows. “We were having lunch at the Timber Wolf when a concerned citizen reported that there were cars here and someone poking around inside. I thought hooligans might have broken in.” Franklin raised his bushy eyebrows toward Morgen, as if he suspected she had done just that, even though a real-estate agent stood at her side.
“To steal the copious valuables left here?” Morgen waved at the meat hooks.
“Teenagers have graffitied the place in the past,” Franklin said. “The owner is out of state and doesn’t pay enough attention to it.”
“I’m here representing the owner and have permission to do so.” Martha jangled a keychain. “Morgen is a prospective tenant.”
“Yeah?” Ungar eyed Morgen. “You pay your taxes yet?”
“They’re not due yet.”
“One month.” Ungar smiled at her—it wasn’t a friendly and encouraging smile. “It would be a shame if the county had to foreclose on your property.”
Morgen clenched her jaw for a long moment before managing to say, “I’ll take the place,” to Martha.
Amar was handy. They could clean it up together, and once they turned it into an appealing showroom for his furnishings and her charms, the business would flow in. Paying the taxes would be a simple matter then.
“Excellent. I’ve got the paperwork right here, and these are for you.” Martha waved a stack of papers and handed her the keys.
Ungar’s smile only turned smug, as if he was certain she would fail to start a successful business and pay her taxes. Maybe he was already envisioning the Loup pack hunting in Wolf Wood and lounging afterward on the deck and in the hot tub at Grandma’s house.
That wasn’t going to happen. Morgen would make her new business work, one way or another.