Page 23 of Muddled Magic

The summer rain got everyone in the mood for an early bedtime, the break in the heat providing a respite, so none of my cousins stayed up late with me. Harvest time was always rough on the family, anyway, and I didn’t begrudge them. We were as close to being self-sufficient as anyone could get nowadays, and that took a lot more work than the average person realized.

Aunt Peony and Uncle Stag normally kept an immaculate—if cluttered—kitchen, but with all the canning, pickling, and egg glassing we were doing in preparation for the winter, the space was untidy. Bundles of half-used herbs and wicker baskets full of eggs waiting to be cleaned littered the table, bubbles popped silently in the sink where the soup pot soaked, and more than one errant vegetable scrap adorned the stone floor, whichever little nephews or nieces responsible for the post-dinner sweeping clearly assuming such small pieces wouldn’t attract the notice of mice. Perhaps not, but the ants would surely find it.

A sweep of my glowing fingers finished that chore—there was nothing more annoying than flies buzzing your ears or the feel of tiny ant feet tickling your ankles when you were trying to eat your breakfast. Then I settled back against the hearth wall on a thick cushion, the stones warm against the chill brought on by the storm.

Alone, I waited until I could hear only the popping of the wood in the fire and the splatter of rain against the diamond-paned windows before I shifted on my cushion, extracting the road atlas I’d swiped from the main library earlier that day—a feat far more difficult than it’d had any right to be.

With as many libraries as we Hawthornes had, Cousin Buck had taken it upon himself to be the family’s librarian/curator. While Great-Uncle Hare could almost always be found in one of the libraries, his research of forgotten fairy forts, ancient legends, and Celtic folklore had always occupied his time instead of cataloguing and maintaining all the books and scrolls. Though, as of late, most of his time in the library nowadays was spent on a settee in the sun, a book splayed across his chest as he napped.

So Buck oversaw them all, often spending most of his time away from the family, as the rest of us were normally somewhere outside. The color of his skin had suffered from the lack of sunlight, and since he’d always been on the leaner side, a few of us had come to call him the Livamprian—the Librarian Vampire—though, obviously, never in his or Olearia’s hearing.

Only his newborn, Stoat, accompanied him in a harness strapped to his chest, the smell of old, well-cared books and the gentle creaking of leatherbound spines easing Stoat’s colic rather than the birdsong he’d experience if he was with his mother Olearia.

So with nothing other than books and a baby to talk to, neither of which could talk back yet, Buck had a tendency to be… chatty.

“An incessant motormouth who can’t tell when to shut up,” Rose had once said of him. “He doesn’t suck the blood out of your body like a normal vampire, rather your sanity out from your ears.”

“Meadow,” he greeted me the literal second I’d crossed the threshold into the library earlier that afternoon. “Can I help you find anything today?”

I fought to keep from cringing. Thistle thorns, of all days, he’s in this library! “Um… no?”

“You sure? Bet I can find whatever it is you’re looking for faster than you.” He grinned.

I caught myself staring at his smile, specifically at his canines, wondering if there really was any truth to his Livamprian nickname. Maybe he sucked ink from the pages of the books instead of blood from necks?

“Meadow?”

I shook myself, forcing a smile. “Nope! I’m just gonna… peruse. Bye!”

And I scampered off to the second floor, which was nowhere near the atlases—those were in the map drawers next to the big globe on the first floor, right where Buck was dusting.

“You know,” the Livamprian’s voice drifted after me as I climbed the winding stair, “since you’re just perusing, we just got in this fascinating book on water-dwelling plants that might interest you. It’s so new it hasn’t even made its way to the herbology library yet.” He chuckled.

Never in my life had I been interested in water-dwelling plants. Except water lilies, and only the lilies, because they were so pretty and Dahlia captured their likeness so exactly in her watercolors. It was Rose who was obsessed with water plants, wanting to know what she could rustle out of the muck whenever she went on one of her backpacking (around the manor) adventures.

“Uh-huh.” Feigning interest in the stacks dedicated to witch history, I kept one eye on Buck’s feather duster, wondering when he’d move away from the maps.

He chuckled again. “I know it’s not as exciting as magical water plants, but sometimes the mundane can have power too. Just look a human medicine.”

Buck launched into a spiel about the history of the topic, often finding tangents that only he himself found interesting, and I worked on drowning him out as I “perused” to the other side of the library’s second floor, hoping he’d move to keep me in his sights. Nope. He just increased the volume of his voice to combat the barrier now posed by the second-floor balcony.

Thistle thorns, I had to get to those atlases. And certainly those shelves he kept dusting were free of dust motes for the next century. Honestly, with the way he kept sweeping that one area, I was beginning to suspect he’d beguiled us all, claiming that the libraries took up so much of his time that he’d been able to weasel his way out of the manual labor that the rest of us endured. Maybe that’s where he’d gotten the inspiration for his son’s name. Stoats were in the weasel family, after all.

“Livam—Buck,” I interrupted, coming to the balcony railing so I could shine what I hoped was a charming smile down at him. He craned his head back to look up at me. “Why don’t you get me that book on the water plants? It sounds absolutely riveting.”

“Sure. It’s right over—” He began to point with his duster.

“Can you get it? You did say you could get it faster than me.”

He grinned again. “Right you are. And Stoat would probably enjoy a little more movement. We’ve been in this quadrant for most of the day already.”

While he disappeared into the stacks, I came down the winding stair as quickly as I could without twisting an ankle, practically flew across the rugs to the map drawers, yanked out the one with the tri-folded atlases, shoved it down the front of my dress, and had just given the globe a nonchalant spin when Buck returned with the canvas-bound book in hand.

“Meadow?” His pale brow crinkled. “Are you… sweating?”

“Summers in August, am I right?” I plucked the book from his hand, clutching it to my sweaty bosom to hide the outline of the atlas as the Livamprian gasped that I would treat such a literary treasure like an athletic towel. “Thanks so much, Buck. Byeeee!”

I’d spent the first quarter hour of my hearth vigil flipping through the book of water-dwelling plants, mostly to make sure no family member stumbled in on their way for a glass of warm milk to find me pouring over an atlas that would then incite an interrogation, even a harmless one.

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