Portia Meadows runs one of the few pet stores that sells familiars to the magical. Familiars—delicate, moody creatures—keep magic clean and pure. To lose a familiar means losing magic. And on a bright afternoon, Portia’s assistant discovers that something essential has disappeared, threatening not just the magical within the store, but throughout the world.
“The Poop Thief” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers. The story is also part of the collection, Five Feline Fancies, available in print and online.
The Poop Thief
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Okay, this is just weird.”
The voice came from the back of the store. It belonged to my Tuesday/Thursday assistant, Carmen. High school student, daughter of two mages, Carmen had no real talent herself, but she was earnest, and she loved creatures, and I loved her enthusiasm.
“I mean it, Miss Meadows, this is weird.”
Oddly enough, weird is not a word people often use in Enchantment Place. Employees expect weird. Customers demand it. What’s weird here is normal everywhere else—or so I thought until that Tuesday in late May.
“Miss Meadows….”
“Hold on, Carmen,” I said. “I’m with a client.”
The client was a repeat whom I did not like. I’m duty bound at Familiar Faces to provide mages with the proper familiars—the ones that will help them augment their talents and help them remain on the right path (doing no harm, avoiding evil, remaining true to the cause, all that crap). I do my best, but some people try my patience.
People like Zhakeline Jones. She was a zaftig woman who wore flowing green scarves, carried a cigarette in a cigarette holder, and called everyone “darling.” Even me.
I called her Jackie, and ignored the “It’s Zhakeline, dahling.” Actually, it was Jacqueline back when we were in high school and then only from the teachers. The rest of us called her Jackie, and her friends—what few she had—called her Jack.
Whenever she came in, I cringed. I knew the store would smell like cigarettes and Emerude perfume for days afterwards. I didn’t let her smoke in here—Enchantment Place, for all its oddities, was regulated by the City of Chicago and the City of Chicago had banned smoking in all public places—but that didn’t stop the smell from radiating off her.
Most of my creatures vacated the front of the store when she arrived. Only the lioness remained at my feet, curled around my ankles as if I were a tree and Zhakeline was her prey. A few of the mice looked down on Zhakeline from a shelf (sitting next to the books on specialty cheeses that I’d ordered just for them), and a couple of the birds sat like fat and sassy gargoyles in the room’s corners.
Nothing wanted to go home with Zhakeline, and I didn’t blame them. She’d brought back the last three familiars because the creatures had the audacity to sneeze when they entered her house (and silly me, I had thought that cobras couldn’t sneeze, but apparently they do—especially when they don’t want to stay in a place where the air is purple). We were going to have to find her something appropriate and tolerant, something I was beginning to believe impossible to do.
On the wall beside me, lights shimmered from all over the spectrum, then Carmen appeared. Actually, she’d stepped through the portal from the back room to the shop’s front, but I’d specifically designed the magical effect to impress the civilians.
Sometimes it impressed me.
Carmen was a slender girl who hadn’t yet grown into her looks. One day, her dramatic bone structure would accent her African heritage. But right now, it made her look like someone had glued an adult’s cheekbones onto a child’s face.
“Miss Meadows, really, my parents say you shouldn’t ignore a magical problem and I think this is a magical problem, even though I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty certain, and I’m sorry to bother you, but jeez, I think you have to look at this.”
All spoken in a breathless rush, with her gaze on Zhakeline instead of on me.
Zhakeline smiled sympathetically and waved a hand in dismissal. Bangles that had been stuck to her skin loosened and clanked discordantly.
“This hasn’t really been working, Portia.” Zhakeline said with a tilt of the head. She probably meant that as sympathy too. “I’ve been thinking of going to that London store—what do they call it?”
“The Olde Familiar.” I spoke with enough sarcasm to sound disapproving. Actually, my heart was pounding. I would love it if Zhakeline went elsewhere. Then the unhappy familiar—whoever the poor creature might be—wouldn’t be my responsibility.
“Yes, the Olde Familiar.” She smiled and put that cigarette holder between her teeth. She bit the damn thing like a feral F.D.R. “I think that would be best, don’t you?”
I couldn’t say yes, because I wasn’t supposed to turn down mage business and I could get reported. But I didn’t want to say no because I would love to lose Zhakeline’s business.
So I said, “You might try that store in Johannesburg too, Unfamiliar Familiars. You can see all kinds of exotics. But remember, importing can be a problem.”
“I’m sure you’ll help with that,” she said.
“Legally I can’t. But you’re always welcome here if their wares don’t work out.”
The mice chittered above me, probably at the word “wares.” They weren’t wares and they weren’t animals. They were sentient beings with magic of their own, subject only to the whims of the magical gods when it came to pairings.
The whims of the magical gods and Zhakeline’s eccentricities.
“I’ll do that,” she said. Then she turned to Carmen. “I hope you settle your weirdness, darling. And for the record, your parents are right. The sooner you focus on a magical problem, the less trouble it can be.”
With that, she swept out of the store. Two chimpanzees crawled through the cat doors on either side of the portal holding identical cans of Febreze.
“No,” I said. “The last time you did that we had to vacate the premises. Or don’t you remember?”
They sighed in unison and vanished into the back. I didn’t blame them. The smell was awful. But Febreze interacted with the Emerude, leading me to believe that what Zhakeline wore wasn’t the stuff sold over the counter, but something she mixed on her own.
Without a familiar, which was probably why the stupid stuff lingered for days.
“Miss Meadows.” Carmen tugged on my sleeve. “Please?”
I waved an arm so that the store fans turned on high. I also uttered an incantation for fresh ocean breezes. (I’d learned not to ask for wind off Lake Michigan; that nearly chilled us out of the store one afternoon). Then I followed Carmen into the back.
Walking through the portal is a bit disconcerting, especially the first time you do it. You are walking into another dimension. I explain to civilian friends that the back room is my Tardis. Those friends who don’t watch Doctor Who look at me like I’m crazy; the rest laugh and nod.
My back room should be a windowless 10×20 storage area. Instead, it’s the size of Madison Square Garden. Or two Madison Square Gardens. Or three, depending on what I need.
Most of my wannabe familiars live here, most of them in their own personal habitats. The habitats have a maximum requirement, all mandated by the mage gods and tailored to a particular species. Each bee has a football-sized habitat; each tiger has about a half an acre. Most creatures may not be housed with others of their kind, unless they’re a socially needy type like herding dogs or alpha male cats. The creatures have to learn how to live with their mage counterparts—not always an easy thing to do—and its best not to let them interact too much with other members of their species.
Theoretically, I get the creatures after they complete five years of familiar training (and yes, you’re right; very few familiars live their normal lifespan. Insects get what to them seems like millions of years and dogs get an extra two decades; only elephants, parrots, and a few other exceptionally long-lived species live a normal span).
That day, I had too many monkeys of various varieties, one parrot return who’d managed to learn every foul word in every language known to man (and I mean that) during his aborted tenure with his new owner, several large predatory cats, twenty-seven butterflies, five gazelle, sixteen North American deer, eight white wolves, one black bear, one grizzly return, one-hundred domestic cats, five-hundred-sixty-five dogs, and dozens of other creatures I generally forgot when I made a mental list.
Not every animal was for sale. Some were flawed returns—meaning they couldn’t remember spells or they misquoted incantations or they weren’t temperamentally suited to such a high-stress job. Some were whim returns, brought back by the mage who either bought on a whim or returned on a whim. And the rest were protest returns. These creatures left their mage in protest, either of their treatment or their living conditions.
All three of Zhakeline’s returns had been protest returns although she tried to pass the first off as a flaw return and the other two as whim returns. It gets hard for a mage after a few rejections. Eventually she gets a reputation as a familiarly challenged individual, and might never get a magical companion.
And if she goes without for too long, she’ll have her powers suspended until she goes through some kind of rehab.
Fortunately, that’s never my decision. I’d seen too many mages fight to save their powers just before a suspension: I never want all that angry magic directed at me.
Carmen was standing on the edge of the habitats. They extended as far as the eye could see. My high school assistants didn’t tend the habitats the way that civilian high school assistants would tend cages at, say, a vet’s office. Instead, they made sure that the attendants that I hired from various parts of the globe (at great expense) actually did their jobs.
Each attendant had to log in stats: food consumed, creature health readings, and how often each habitat was entered, inspected, and cleaned. Then they’d log in the video footage for the past day—after inspecting it, of course, for magical incursions, failed spells, or escape attempts.
Carmen had called up our stats on the clear computer screen I’d overlaid over the habitat viewing area. She zoomed in on one stat—product for resale.
I frowned at the numbers. They were broken down by category. The whim returns and most of the protest returns were listed, of course, along with byproduct—methane from the cows (to be used in various potions); shed peacock feathers (for quills); and honey from the bees that had convinced the mage gods to make them hive familiars, not individual familiars.
Those bees only went to special clients—those who could prove they weren’t allergic and who could handle several personality types all speaking through their fearless leader, the sluggish queen.
“See?” Carmen asked, waving a hand at the numbers. “This week’s just weird.”
I didn’t see. But I didn’t have as much experience with the numbers as she did. And, truth be told, I didn’t think her powers were in spell-casting. I believed they were in numerology—not as powerful a magic, but a useful one.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling dense, like I often did when staring at rows of facts and figures. “What am I supposed to see?”
She poked her finger at one of the columns. The lighted numbers vanished, then reappeared in red.
“Available fertilizer,” she said. “See?”
I stared at the category. Available Fertilizer. Our biggest seller because we undercut the competition, mostly so we could get rid of the crap quickly and easily.
“There’s no number there,” I said.
“Zero is a number,” Carmen said with dripping disdain that only a teenager could muster.
“E…yeah…okay.” I knew I was stammering, but the big honking nothingness made no sense. “The assistants haven’t been cleaning the habitats?”
She pressed the screen, drawing down the earlier statistics. Cleanings had gone on as usual.
“So what happened to the fertilizer?”
“I have no idea where the fertilizer went,” she said. “I’m not even sure it came out of the cages. I mean, habitats.”
I had planned to give her a tour of the back, but I hadn’t yet. So she always made the “cages/habitat” mistake, something she’d never say if she actually saw the piece of the Serengeti plain that Fiona, the lioness who liked to sleep under my cash register and Roy, the lion who supposedly headed her pride, had conjured up to remind themselves of home.
Cleaning the habitats was a major job, especially for the larger animals, and usually required extra labor. Entire families came in for an hour or two a night to clean grizzly’s mountainside, especially during blackberry season.
I moved Carmen aside, pressed some keys only visible to me, and looked at several of the previous day’s vids in fast motion. Habitat cleaning happened in all of them.
Habitat cleaners weren’t required to log in what they cleaned unless the item was marketable which poop generally was. Animal poop that is. There’s never a big market for insect poop.
Animal poop (ground up into a product called Familiar Fertilizer) had a wide variety of uses. Mages bought it for their herb gardens. In addition to being the Miracle Grow of the magical world, it also made sure that wolf’s bane and all the other herbal ingredients of a really good potion, magical spell, or “natural” remedy was extra-powerful. Some mages vowed that anything fertilized with familiar poop could be safely sold with a money-back guarantee—especially (oddly enough) love spells.
“Must be a computer glitch,” I said and stabbed a few more buttons.
“Let me.” Carmen got to the correct screens quicker, without me even asking. She knew I wanted to check all that basic stuff—how many pounds of poop got ground into fertilizer at the nearby processing plant, how many pounds of fertilizer got shipped, and how many of our magical feed-and-seed brethren paid for shipments that arrived this week.
Each category had a big fat zero in the poundage column.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “You just noticed this?”
I tried to keep the accusation out of my voice. It wasn’t her job to keep track of my shipments and my various product lines. She was a high school student working two days a week part-time after school.
I was the person in charge.
“I was going over the manifests like you taught,” she said. “I let you know the minute I saw it.”
Which was—I checked the digital readout on the see-through computer screen—half an hour ago, one hour after Carmen arrived.
Pretty dang fast, considering.
“I mean, everything was fine on Thursday.”
Thursday. The last day she worked.
My lunch—an indulgent slice of Chicago pan-style pizza—turned into a gelatinous ball in my stomach. “Can you quickly check the previous four days?”
“Already on it.” She pressed a few keys.
I watched numbers flash in front of my eyes—too quickly for my number-challenged brain to follow. I could have spelled the whole thing, looked for patterns, but I had Carmen. She was better than any magical incantation.
“Wow,” she said after a few minutes. “Those animals haven’t pooped since Friday.”
The gelatinous ball became concrete. I reached for the screen to look at health history, then stopped. A few of those creatures would have died if they hadn’t pooped in three days. Some internal systems were less efficiently designed than others.
Still, I had her double-check the health records just to make sure.
“Okay,” she said after looking at health records from Thursday to Tuesday. “So they all have normal bowel readings. What does this mean?”
“It means that your parents are right,” I said.
“Huh?” She looked at me sideways, all teenager again. She hated hearing that Mom and Dad were right.
“Magical problems become bigger when they are allowed to fester.”
“This is a magical problem?” she asked.
“The worst,” I said.
She continued to stare at me in confusion, so I clarified.
“We have a poop thief.”
***
You find poop thieves throughout magical literature. Heck, you even find them in fairy tales.
Of course, they’re never called poop thieves. They’re “tricksters” who steal their victims’ “essence.” They’re evil wizards who rob their enemies of their “life force.”
Most scholars believe that these references are to sperm, which simply tells me that magical scholarship has been dominated too long by males. (Those inept male scholars don’t seem to be able to read either; a lot of the victims are women who are, of course, spermless creatures one and all.)
The scholars are right in that “life force” and “essence” are often composed of bodily fluids. Some (female) scholars have assumed that this essence is blood, but blood is a lot harder to obtain than the simplest of bodily fluids—pee.
Pee, though, is like all other water. It seeps into the ground. It’s difficult to get unless someone pees into a cup or a bottle or a box. (Or unless you’ve magicked the chamber pot—and there are a few of those stories as well [Those Brothers Grimm didn’t like the chamber pot stories, and so kept them out of the official compilation.])
Poop, on the other hand…
Poop, actually, on either hand is a lot easier to obtain.
Poop, like pee, blood, and yes, sperm, is a life essence. Even in its nonmagical form it has magical powers. It gets discarded only to be spread on a fallow field. The nutrients in the waste material break down, enriching the soil which is often used to grow plants—plants which later become food. The food nourishes the person who eats it. The person’s body processes the food into energy and vitamins and all sorts of other good stuff, and the leftovers become waste yet again.
Most of the non-magical have no idea the power held in a single turd.
Hell, most of the magical didn’t either.
But the ones who did, well, they were all damn dangerous.
And I’d already lost too much time.
***
It seemed odd to call Mall Security at a time like this, but that was the first thing I did. Mine wasn’t the only store with magical creatures.
If someone was stealing from me, then maybe he was stealing from the pet store down the way, the organ grinder monkey show just outside the food court, and the various holiday setups with their real Easter bunnies and Christmas reindeer and Halloween bats. Not to mention all the working familiars accompanying every single mage who walked into the place.
I let Carmen talk to Security. She was young enough and naïve enough to think they were sexy. She had no idea that most of them were failed magical enforcers or inept warlocks who’d been demoted from city-wide security patrol to Enchantment Place.
I stayed in the back room, bending a few rules because this was an emergency. Anyone who took that much poop had a plan. A big plan—or a need for a lot of power.
At first, I figured this thief simply wanted the magical support of a familiar without actually getting a familiar. Magical crime blotters were full of minor poop thieves who stole rather than get a new familiar of their own. They’d mine someone else’s familiar, using the poop as a tool with which to obtain the magic, and no one would notice until that familiar got sick from putting out too much magical energy.
Maybe what we had here was a more sophisticated version of the neighborhood poop snatcher.
Which made Zhakeline a prime suspect.
But Zhakeline’s magic had always been shaky at best, even when she had a familiar. That was why she looked so exotic and had so many affectations.
She had to appeal to the civilians who think we’re all weird. She mostly sold her small magic services to them. If she predicted the future and was wrong or if she made a love potion that didn’t work, the civilian would simply shrug and think to himself Ah, well, magic doesn’t really work after all.
But the magical, we know when someone can’t perform all of the spells in the year-one playbook. Zhakeline barely passed year one (charity on the part of the instructor) and shouldn’t have passed from that point on. But that happened during the years when telling a kid that she had failed was tantamount to murdering her (or so the parents thought) and Zhakeline got pushed from instructor to instructor without learning anything.
Which was one of the many reasons I didn’t want to give her another familiar.
And that was beside the point.
The point was that Zhakeline, and mages like her—the ones who needed the magical power of familiar poop—didn’t have the ability to conduct a theft on this massive scale, at least not alone.
And even if they tried, they’d be better off going to the back yard of a mage with a canine familiar. There was always a constant poop supply, and it provided enough power—consistent power (from the same source)—so that the thief might become a slightly less inept mage, for a while, anyway.
Next I investigated my assistants. Most had no magical powers of their own, but had come from magical families. They knew that magic existed—and not in that hopeful I wish it were so way that a civilian had, but in a this is a business way that led them to peripheral jobs in the magical field.
They worked hard, most had a love of animals, insects or reptiles, and they often had a specialty—whether it was cooking the right kind of pet food or calming a petulant hyena.
I couldn’t believe any of the assistants would be doing something like this because they would have to be working for someone else.
The nonmagical don’t gain magic just by wishing on a powerful piece of poop.
I scanned records and employment histories. I scanned bank accounts (yes, that’s illegal, but remember—emergency. A few rules needed to be bent), cash stashes and (embarrassingly) the last 48 hours of their lives. (Which, viewed at the speed of an hour per every ten seconds, looked like silent movies watched at double fast-forward.)
I saw nothing suspicious. And believe me, I knew what to look for.
Although I wished I didn’t.
***
You see, I got this job, not because I have a particular affinity with animals or I’m altruistic and love pairing the right mage with the right familiar.
I got it because I have experience.
I know how to look for mages heading dark or mages who should retire or mages who mistreat their magic (and hence their familiars). I know how to take care of these mages quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss.
It didn’t used to be this way. In the past, places like Familiar Faces existed on side streets and had just a handful of creatures, few of them exotic. Only in the last few years have the mega stores come into existence at high-end malls like Enchantment Place.
And even though we’re supervised by the rules of the mage gods like all other familiar stores, we’re run and subsidized by Homeland Security—Magical Branch.
(Not everyone knows there’s a Homeland Security—Magical Branch, including the so-called “head” of Homeland Security. Hell, I even doubt the president knows. Why tell the person who’s going to be out in four or eight years one of the world’s most important secrets. Knowing this crew, they’d probably try to co-opt the Magical Branch into something dark. Better to keep quiet and protect us all.
(Which I do. Most of the time.)
My job here is to watch for exactly this kind of incursion. Technically, I’m supposed to report it, and then wait for the guys with badges to show up.
But I didn’t wait for the guys with badges. I doubted we would have time.
(And, truth be told, I did want the glory. I was demoted to this position [you guessed that already, right?] for asking too many questions and for the classic corporate mistake, proving that the boss was an idiot in front of his employees. I’m a government employee and as such can’t be fired without lots and lots of red tape [even in the magical world], so I was sent here, to Chicago where I grew up, to Enchantment Place where I have to put up with the likes of Zhakeline with a smile and a shrug and a rather pointed [and sometimes magically directed] suggestion.)
I toyed with rewinding time in all of the habitats—another no-no, but it would have been protected under the Patriot Act, like most no-nos these days. But rewinding time takes time, time I didn’t really want to waste looking at creatures moping in their personal space.
Instead, I did some old-fashioned police work.
I went back out front where Carmen was still flirting with some generic security guard (and the mice were leaning over so far to watch that I was afraid one of them would fall down the poor man’s ill-fitting shirt) and beckoned the lioness, Fiona.
She frowned at me, then rose slowly, stretched in that boneless way common to all cats, and padded through the portal ahead of me.
When I got back to the back, she was sitting on her haunches and cleaning her ears, as if she had meant to join me all along.
“We have a poop thief,” I said, “and I think you know who it is.”
She methodically washed her left ear, then she started to lick her left paw in preparation for cleaning her right ear.
“Fiona,” I said, “if I don’t solve this, something bad will happen. You might not get a home of any kind and none of the other familiars will be of use to anyone. You might all have to be put down.”
I usually don’t use euphemisms, and Fiona knew it. But she didn’t know the reason that I used it this time.
I couldn’t face killing all these wannabe familiars. And it would be my job to do so. I’d get blamed for the theft(s), and I’d have to put down the creatures affected. It was the only way to negate the power of their poop.
She put her newly cleaned paw down on the concrete floor. “You couldn’t ‘put us down.’” She used great sarcasm on the phrase. “It would set the magical world back more than a hundred years. There wouldn’t be enough of us to help your precious mages perform their silly little spells.”
“Which might be the point of this attack,” I said. “So tell me what you saw the last few days.”
And why you never said a word, I almost added, but didn’t.
“I’m not supposed to tell you anything. I’m not even supposed to talk with you.”
Technically true. Familiars are only supposed to talk to their personal mages. But I get to hear and every one of them speak when they come into the store to make sure they really are familiars and not just plain old unmagical creatures looking for a free hand-out.
But Fiona had spoken to me before, mostly sarcastic comments about the store patrons. I’d tried pairing her up with a few, but she always had an under-the-breath comment that convinced me she and that mage wouldn’t be a good match.
“I haven’t seen anything,” she said.
“What have you heard, then?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “The system is working just fine.”
That sarcasm again, which lead me to believe she was leaving out a detail or two deliberately, hoping I would catch it.
Damn lions. They’re just giant cats. They toy with everything.
And at that moment, Fiona was toying with me.
“But something’s bothering you,” I said.
“Not me so much.” She picked up that clean right paw, turned it over, and examined the claws. “Roy.”
Roy was the lion to her lioness. He wasn’t head of the pride because there was no pride. We knew better than to get an entire pride of lions into that small habitat. No one would ever be able to see their individual natures—and no mage was tough enough to get that many catly familiars.
“What’s bothering Roy?” I asked.
“Ask him.”
“Fiona…”
She nibbled on one of the claws, then set her paw down again. “There was—oh, let me see if I can find the phrase in your language—an overpowering scent of ammonia.”
“Ammonia?”
“And a very bright light.”
“An explosion?” I asked. Fertilizer mixed with the right chemicals, including ammonia, created the same thing in both the magical and the non-magical world.
A bomb.
Only the magical bomb made of this kind of fertilizer didn’t just destroy lives and property, it also cut through dimensions.
“It’s not an explosion yet,” she said. “He claims he has a sixth sense about things. Or did he say he can see the future? I forget exactly. But it was something like that.”
“Or maybe he just knows something,” I snapped.
“Or maybe he just knows something.” She sounded bored. “He does say that because he’s king of the jungle, the wannabes tell him things.”
Which was the most annoying thing about Roy. He really believed that king of the jungle crap. Too much Kipling as a cub—or maybe too many viewings of the Lion King.
“I should really send you back to the habitat until this is resolved,” I said to Fiona.
She hacked like she had a hairball, a sound she (sort of) learned from me. She thought it was the equivalent of my very Chicago, very dismissive “ach.”
“I’d rather be out front, watching the floor show,” she said.
And I sent her back out there because I had a soft spot for Fiona. Technically, I don’t need a familiar. I have more than a thousand of them.
But if I did need one, I’d pick Fiona.
She knew it and she played on it all the damn time.
I waited until she was through that little curtain of light before I stepped through the hidden door into the habitat area.
It was always surprisingly quiet inside the habitat area. The first time I went in, I expected chirping birds and chittering monkeys and barking dogs—a cacophony of creature voices expressing displeasure or loneliness or sheer cussedness.
Instead, the area was so quiet that I could hear myself breathe.
It also had no smell—unless you counted that dry scent of air conditioning. The animal smells—from the pungent odor of penguins to the rancid scent of coyote—existed only in the individual habitat.
Just like the noises did.
If I went through the membrane on my left (and only I could go through those membranes—or someone I had approved, like the assistants), I would find myself in a cold dark cave that smelled of rodent and musty water. If I looked up, I’d see the twenty-seven bats currently in inventory.
We were always understocked on bats. Mages, particularly young ones raised in Goth culture, wanted bats first, wolves second, and cats a distant third. I’d given up trying to tell those kids to get some imagination.
I’d given up trying to tell the kids anything.
If I went through the membrane on my right, I’d slide on polar ice. Here the ice caps weren’t melting. Here, my six polar bears happily fished and scampered and did all those things polar bears do—except that they didn’t attack me. They didn’t even bare their fangs at me.
I stopped between the two membranes and frowned. Whoever took the poop hadn’t taken it from inside the habitats. It was simply too dangerous for the unapproved guest.
Hell, it was often dangerous for the assistants. I’d had more than one assistant mauled by a creature that didn’t like the way he was looking at it.
And the poop was not registered as collected either. So whoever had taken it had spelled it out between gathering and delivery into the outside system.
I walked between dozens of habitats, trying to ignore the curious faces watching me.
I did feel for the wannabes. They were like children in an old-fashioned orphans’ home. They hoped that someone would come to adopt them. They prayed that someone would come to adopt them. They were afraid that someone had come to adopt them.
And the only way they would know was if I brought them out of the habitat to the front of the store. (Except in the case of the dangerous exotics or the biting/stinging insects. In those cases, the mage had to enter the habitat without fear. That rarely happened either.)
Finally I got to the Serengeti Plain.
Or what passed for it in Roy and Fiona’s habitat. It was kind of an amalgam of the best parts of a lion’s world minus the worst part. Lots of water, lots of space to run, lots of space to hide. A great deal of sunshine and never, ever any rain.
I slipped through the membrane and, because of my past experience, paused.
The first step into Roy’s world was overwhelming. The heat (about twenty degrees higher than I ever liked, even in the summer), the smell (giant cat mixed with dry grass and rotting meat from the latest kill), and the sunlight (so bright that my best sunglasses were no match for it—and as usual, I had forgotten any sunglasses) all made for a heady first step into this habitat.
More than one assistant had been so disoriented by the first step that Roy was able to tackle, stand on, and threaten the assistant in the first few seconds. After you’ve had several hundred pounds of lion standing on your chest, with his face inches from yours—so close you could see the pieces of raw meat still hanging from his fangs—you’d never want to go back into that habitat either.
Unless you’re me, of course. I expected Roy to scare me that first time.
I didn’t expect him to catch me off guard.
So when he did, I congratulated him, told him he was quite impressive, and warned him that if he hurt a human he’d never graduate from wannabe to familiar.
And from that point on, he never jumped on me again.
But he always snuck up on me.
On this day, he wrapped his giant mouth around my calf. His teeth scraped against my skin, his hot breath moist and redolent of cat vomit. He’d been eating grass again. We were going to have change his diet.
“Hey, Roy,” I said. “I hear you have a sixth sense.”
He tightened his jaw just enough that the edges of those sharp teeth would leave dents in my flesh—not quite bites, not quite bruises—for days. Then he licked the injured area—probably an apology, or maybe just a taste for salt (I was instant sweat any time I came into this place).
Finally, he circled around me and climbed a nearby rock so that he would tower over me. If I weren’t so used to his power games, he’d make me nervous.
“It’s not a sixth sense,” he said in an upper-class British accent. That accent had startled me when we were introduced. “So much as a finely honed sense of the possible.”
“I see,” I said, because I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t even been certain he would talk to me, and he’d done so almost immediately.
Which led me to believe the king of the jungle was more terrified than he wanted to admit.
“You realize I am only speaking to you,” he said with an uncanny ability to read my mind (or maybe it was just that finely honed sense of what I might possibly be thinking), “because great evil is afoot, and I have no magical counterpart with which to fight it.”
I almost said, It’s not your job to fight it, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult the poor beast. Instead, I said, “That’s precisely why I’m here. I figured you know what was going on.”
“Bosh,” he said. “Fiona told you. She has a thing for you, you know.”
“A thing?” I asked.
“She wants to be your familiar.” He opened his mouth in a cat-grin. “She doesn’t understand—or perhaps she doesn’t believe—that you have hundreds of us and as such do not need her.”
I nodded because I wasn’t sure what else to do. And because I was already thirsty. I’d forgotten not just my sunglasses but my bottle of water as well.
“Well,” I said, “you do know what’s happening, right?”
“Oh, bomb-making, dimension hopping, familiar murder—all the various possibilities.” He laid down and crossed his front paws as if none of that bothered him. “And just you here because you seem to believe that you can save the world all by your own small self.”
“With the help of your finely honed sense of the possible.”
“That too.” He tilted his massive head and looked at me through those slanted brown eyes.
My heart rate increased. Occasionally I still did feel like prey around him.
“Well?” I asked.
“Have you ever thought that your culprit isn’t human?”
“No,” I said. “Demons don’t care about familiars. Only mages do.”
“Really.” He extended the word as if it were four. “Humans generally ignore scat, don’t they?”
“Generally,” I said. “We try not to think about it.”
“And yet those of us in the animal kingdom find within it a wealth of information.”
“Yes,” I said. “But the amount of power it would take to complete this spell tends to rule out anything that isn’t human.”
He made the same hairball sound that Fiona did. They were closer than they liked to admit.
“You humans are such speciest creatures. It doesn’t help that the mage gods allow you the choices and we have to wait until you make them. It leads me to believe that the mage gods are human—or were, at one point.”
I wasn’t there to discuss religion. “You’re telling me, then, that your finely honed sense of the possible leads you to the conclusion that a familiar has done this.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“A creature then. A magical creature of some kind.”
He slitted his eyes, the feline equivalent of yes.
“But you have no evidence,” I said.
“I have plenty of evidence. Consider the timeline. It took you forever to discover this theft, and yet no bomb has exploded. No one has made threats, and no mage has suddenly gained unwarranted power.”
“That’s not evidence. That’s supposition.”
He lifted his majestic head. “Is it?”
“So who do you suppose has stolen the poop—and why?”
He rested his head on his paws and continued to stare at me. “That’s for you to work out.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“That’s correct. I don’t really know.”
“But you’re not worried.”
“Why should I worry? From my perspective, removing the scat is a prudent thing to do.”
I hadn’t expected him to say that. “What do you mean?”
He heaved a heavy, smelly sigh. “I’m a cat who lives in the wild. Think it through.”
Then he jumped and I cringed as he headed right toward me. He landed beside me, chuckled and vanished through the tall grass.
He’d gotten me again. He loved that. He’d probably been planning to jump near me through the entire conversation, his back feet tucked beneath him and poised, even though his front half looked relaxed.
He wasn’t going to give me any more. He felt he didn’t need to.
Cats in the wild.
Cat poop in the wild.
Hell, cat poop in the house. Cats were all the same.
They buried their poop so no one could track them.
The problem wasn’t the poop thief.
The poop thief was protecting the wannabes from something else. Something that tracked through scat.
Something that wasn’t human.
I swore and bolted out of the habitat.
I needed my research computer, and I needed it now.
***
Very few things targeted familiars—or perhaps I should say very few non-human things. And I’d never heard of anything that targeted wannabes, because a wannabe’s power, while considerable, wasn’t really honed.
Wannabes were, for lack of a better term, the virgins of the familiar world.
And nothing targeted virgins (not even those stupid civilian terrorists. They got virgins as a reward).
So when I got out of the habitat, I had the computer search for strange creatures or things that targeted virgins. I got nothing.
Except the search engine, asking me a pointed electronic question:
Do you mean things that prefer virgins?
And I, on a frustrated whim, typed yes.
What I got was unicorns. Unicorns preferred virgins. In fact, unicorns would only appear to virgins. In fact, unicorns drew their magic from virgins.
But the magic was pure and sweet and hearts and flowers and Hello Kitty and anything else treacly that you could think of.
Except if the unicorn had become rabid.
I clicked on the link, found several scholarly articles on rabies in unicorns. Rabid unicorns were slightly crazed. But more than that, they had no powers because no virgin (no matter how stupid) was going to go near a horse-sized creature that shouted obscenities and foamed at the mouth.
That was stage one of the rabies. Unlike rabies in non-magical creatures, rabies in unicorns (and centaurs and minotaurs and any other magical animal) manifested in temporary insanity, followed by darkness and pure evil.
The craziness, in other words, went away, leaving nastiness in its wake.
Minotaurs, centaurs, and other such creatures attacked each other. They stole from the nearest mage—or enthralled him, stealing his magic before they killed him.
But unicorns…
Unicorns still needed virgins.
And the only solution was to steal the powers of wannabe familiars.
Provided, of course, that the unicorn could find them.
And unicorns, like most other animals, hunted by scat.
***
I wish I could say I got my giant unicorn-killing musket out of mothballs and carried it through an enchanted forest, hunting a brilliant yet evil unicorn that wanted to devour the untamed magic of wannabe familiars.
I wish I could say I was the one who shot that unicorn with a bullet of pure silver and then got photographed with one foot on its side and the other on the ground, leaning on my musket like hunters of old.
I wish I could say I was the one who cut off its horn, then snapped the thing in half, watching the dark magic dissipate as if it never was.
But I can’t.
Technically, I’m not allowed to leave the store.
So I had to call in the Homeland Security—Magical Branch anyway. I could have called the local mage police, but I wasn’t sure where this unicorn was operating, and HS-MB had contacts worldwide.
They found four rabid unicorns all in the same forest, somewhere in Russia, along with a few rabid squirrels (probably the source of the infection) and a rabid magical faun that was going around murdering all the bears for sport.
The unicorns died along with the squirrels and that faun. The poop reappeared in my computer system, and went back through the normal channels. That week, we made double our money on magical fertilizer, which was good since we’d made none the week before.
All seemed right with the magical world.
Except one thing.
I dragged Fiona to her habitat so I could confront both her and Roy.
They usually didn’t spend much time together. They blamed it on not really having a pride, but I knew the problem was Fiona. She hated having to hunt for him, then watch him eat the best parts.
She hated most things about feline life and once muttered, as yet another well adjusted young mage took a domestic cat as her familiar, that she wished she were small and cute and cuddly.
She had to fetch Roy. He wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t even attacked me as I entered the habitat—probably because Fiona was with me.
I waited as he climbed to the top of his rock, then assumed the same position he’d been in before he jumped at me. Only this time I was prepared. I had my sunglasses and my water bottle.
I also stood a few feet to the right of my previous position, a place he couldn’t get to from the top of that rock.
Fiona sat at the base of the rock, beneath the outcropping, in the only stretch of shade in this part of the plain.
“You want to tell me how you did it?” I asked when Roy finally got comfortable. He sent me an annoyed look when he realized that I had stationed myself outside of his range. “You knew that there was a rabid unicorn after wannabes, and you somehow got the entire group at Familiar Faces to cooperate with you, all without leaving your habitat.”
Then I looked at Fiona. She had left the habitat. She left it every single day.
The tip of her tail twitched, and she tilted her head ever so slightly, her eyes twinkling. But she said nothing.
Roy preened. He licked a paw, then wiped his face. Finally he looked at me, the hairs of his mane in place, looking as majestic as a lion should.
“I am king of the jungle,” he said.
This is a plain, I wanted to point out, but I didn’t for fear of silencing him. Instead I said, “Yet some of the other familiars don’t live in habitats like yours. The snakes, for example.”
He yawned. “The unicorn wasn’t after them.”
“But the animals?” I asked.
He closed his great mouth, then leaned his head downward, so that his gaze met mine. “The Russian Blues are refugees. You didn’t know that, did you?”
I got two domestic cats—purebred Russian Blues. Most purebred cats aren’t familiars—they have the magic bred out of them with all the other mixed genes—but these Blues were amazing. And pretty. And not that willing to talk, even when they knew it was the price of gaining a mage.
“Refugees?” I said. “They were adopted before?”
“Their mages murdered by the new secret police for being terrorists. I thought you checked all of this out.”
I tried to, but I never could. Animal histories weren’t always that easy to find.
“They’d heard rumors about something rabid getting into an enchanted forest somewhere in deepest darkest Russia. Then some young familiars—what you call wannabes—withered and died as their powers were sucked from them over a period of months.”
He tilted his head, as if I could finish his thought.
And I could.
“So the Blues suspected unicorns,” I said.
“There were always rumors of unicorns in that forest,” he said, “but of course, none of us had ever seen them. For normal unicorns, you need virginal humans. None of us had encountered abnormal unicorns before.”
I did the math. The Blues had arrived last Thursday, which was the last day Carmen had worked before Tuesday, when she discovered the problem.
“You went into protect mode immediately,” I said.
“It is my pride, whether you admit it or not.”
I didn’t admit it, but I understood how he thought so. He needed a tribe to rule, so he invented one.
“I still don’t understand what happened. You don’t have the magic to make other animals’ poop disappear.”
“But they do,” he said.
“I know that.” I tried not to sound annoyed. He was toying with me again. I hated being a victim of cat playfulness.
“So how did you tell them what to do?”
He opened his mouth slightly, in that cat-grin of his. Then he got up, shook his mane, and walked back down the rock. He vanished in the tall grass, disappearing against its brownness as if he had never been.
“He could tell me,” I said.
“No, he can’t.” Fiona hadn’t moved.
I let out a small sigh. He hadn’t been toying with me. She had.
“You did it,” I said.
“Me and the bees,” she said. “They’re creating quite a little communications network with those hive minds of theirs. They send little scouts into the other habitats every single time you go from one to the other. The ants too. You really should be more careful.”
I felt a little frisson of worry. I had had no idea. I didn’t want the bees to get delusions of grandeur. I already had to deal with Roy.
“You told them to spread the word.”
She nodded.
“And you told them how the animals could hide their poop.”
She inclined her head as regally—more regally—than Roy ever could.
“Why?” I asked. “You had no guarantee of a threat.”
“This is the biggest gathering of the Hopeful on the globe,” she said. “Of course we are a target.”
She was right. I sighed, took a sip from my water bottle, and frowned. This entire event had opened my eyes to a lot of scary possibilities, things I had never considered.
We were going to have to rethink the way we handled waste. We were going to have to protect the poop somehow, and I didn’t want to consult HS-MB about that. They’d have to hold hearings, and the wrong someone could be sitting in.
I didn’t want us to become a magical terrorism target, nor did I want us to be a target for every rabid unicorn in the world.
I would have to set up the systems myself.
“You need me,” Fiona said, “whether you like it or not. You can’t have pretend familiars. You need a real one.”
She was making a pitch. Cats never did that. Or they only did so if they believed something was important.
“Why here?” I asked. “I’ve found you some pretty spectacular possible mage partners, and you’ve turned them down.”
She wrapped her tail around her paws and stared at me. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
Then she said, “This is my pride. Roy might think it his, but he’s a typical lion. He thinks he’s in charge, when I do all the work.”
She raised her chin. That tuft of hair that all lionesses had beneath looked more like a mane in the shade than it ever had. It made her look regal.
“Well,” she added, “I’m not a typical lioness, content to hunt for her man and to feel happy when he fathers a litter of kittens on her only to run them out when they threaten his little kingdom. I don’t want children. And I want to eat first.”
“You can do that with other mages,” I said.
“But I won’t have a pride. Don’t you see? I’m the one who spoke to the Blues. I’m the one who keeps track of those silly mice—even though I want to eat them—and I’m the one who calms the elephant whenever she has the vapors. No one credits me for it, of course, but it’s time they should.”
No one, meaning me. I hadn’t noticed, and Fiona was bitter. Or maybe she just felt that I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s hot in here. Can we go back to the air conditioning?”
I laughed and stepped out of the habitat. She followed.
“I’ll petition the mage gods,” I said.
“I already did.” She was walking beside me as we headed toward the front room. “They said yes. I put their response under the cash register.”
We went through the portal. The mice were having a party on top of the cheese books. One of the snakes was dancing too, trying to come out of its basket like a charmed snake from the movies. The dance was a bit pathetic, since the snake was the wrong kind. It was the tiniest of my garden snakes.
They all stopped when they saw me. I looked toward the mall’s interior. The customer door was closed and locked and the main lights were off. The closed sign sat in the window.
Carmen had gone home long ago.
I went to the cash register and felt underneath it. Some dust, some old gum—and yes, a response from the mage gods, dated months ago.
“You took a long time to tell me this,” I said to Fiona.
She wrapped herself around the counter. “You should clean more.”
Come to think of it, a few months before was when she really started muttering her protests out loud. In English. She was doing everything felinely possible except blurting it out that she was now my familiar.
I had never heard of a familiar picking a mage.
Although that wasn’t really true. The familiars always made their preferences known. I knew how to read the signs. For everyone, it seemed, but me.
“Do you regret this?” Fiona asked quietly.
“Hell, no,” I said. “Your brilliance averted a major international incident and saved the lives of hundreds of familiars.”
“Don’t you think that makes me deserving of some salmon?”
I almost said I think that makes you deserving of anything you damn well please, and then I remembered that I was talking to a cat. A large, independent-minded, magical cat, but a cat all the same.
“Salmon it is,” I said and snapped a finger. A plate appeared with the thickest, juiciest salmon steak I could conjure.
I set it down next to her.
“Next time,” she said, “you’re taking me out.”
“Restaurants don’t allow animals,” I said. “At least, not in Chicago.”
“I wasn’t talking about a restaurant,” she said. “I meant a salmon fishery or perhaps one of those spawning grounds in the wild. I heard there’s a species of lion who hunts those grounds.”
“Sea lions,” I said. “You’re not related.”
She chuckled, then wrapped her tail around my legs, nearly knocking me over. Affection from my lioness.
From my familiar.
However I had expected my day to end, it hadn’t been like this.
Carmen was right. This day had been weird.
But good.
“So are you going to promise to take me to a fishery after the next time I save lives?” Fiona asked.
“I suppose,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.
Fiona licked her lips and closed her eyes. The mice started dancing all over again, and chimpanzees came out of the back to see what the commotion was.
After a weird day, a normal night.
And I found, to my surprise, that I preferred normal to weird.
Maybe I was getting soft.
Maybe I was getting older.
Or maybe I had just realized that I was a mage with a familiar, a powerful smart familiar, one I could appreciate.
One who would keep me and my animals safe.
One who would rule her pride with efficiency and not a little playfulness.
I could live with that.
I had a hunch she could too.
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Enchantment Place, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2008
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Kodo34/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.