Page 11 of Jack of All Trades

Then the librarian came creaking over to him, her hunchback not stopping her from rushing around, telling one group of kids to hush their loud talking, and gathering books left behind on tables.

She had the whitest hair he’d ever seen. It was so white that it fairly glowed. She came over to him, gnarled finger pointing at him, making him remember that strange woman from a few days previous who’d told him he’d find his mate…

“You have a heck of a stack, there, son. Don’t forget to return them all to the cart. My back is aching to beat the band today.”

She turned to leave, but Jack stopped her with a hand on her arm. Keeping his voice low like the librarian, he stopped her with, “Excuse me, Missus…”

“Ms. Sunny Jim.Ms.Tempest. What can I do you for?”

With wrinkles and creases covering her face, she could have been a roadmap of the world. Still, her icy blue eyes were kind as they locked with his. “I’m not sure of what I’m looking for.”

“Oh?” She pushed around some of the titles on the table surrounding him and commented, “Magic, obviously.”

“But I’m not sure…what kind. I guess. I mean, what does it mean when you touch someone, and you get this weird…I don’t know, jolt? It threw me backward; it was so strong. I’ve never felt anything like it. I’ve never even heard of anything like it.”

As Ms. Tempest looked around, she whispered, “Come with me, son.”

He got up and followed her, walking much quicker than he anticipated. She scurried along like a mouse after a block of cheese.

Between two long stacks they went, his eyes trying to take in volumes around him to guess where they were headed, but once they went through a door into an entirely different section, he saw immediately they were in the section that had all books about shifters.

His disappointment was hard to mask as he said, “I, uh, I’m not a shifter. I’m…I come from a family of witches.”

She turned to him with a smile on her thin, heavily lined lips. “Oh? Is that so? I never heard of a witch having a fated mate.”

The shock of her statement made him speechless at first. She turned back to the aisle ahead of her, moving as swiftly until they came to the very end of that row, where she stopped and pulled out a thick, leather-bound tome that must have weighed twenty pounds. But the tiny old woman hefted it like it was nothing.

She took it to a table in the back of the room and set it down with a dull thud. “There. Read over the chapter about hellhounds.”

Unable to voice his shock, he simply stared at her.

“I’m going to head over to another area and get you another book while you learn a little about yourself.”

Jack sat at the table and stared at the book's cover. The gold embossed lettering was faded but legible.

A Guide to Uncommon Shapeshifters, Author Clarence Reginald

“I can’t be. I just can’t be! You don’t get a shifter from a witch.”

Noticing that his hand was shaking as he lifted it to open the book, he shook it hard and made a tight fist before he opened it again and opened the book to the table of contents.

When he saw the section on hellhounds, he swallowed, suddenly more terrified than he’d been in his life.

Hellhounds were evil creatures, he’d always thought. He didn’t feel evil, not much anyway. He was no saint, surely, but not an evil being. Basically, a damn demon?

Skimming over the first page of the section, he started to calm down. Early on, it disclosed that hellhounds, unlike their prey, were servants needed for the cycle of life. They were simply taking those from one plane of existence to another.

He sat back and took his eyes off the page, scoffing, “Sure. Dragging people to hell is just part of the circle of life. Great.”

Ms. Tempest was back, and she pushed the shifter book away from him, opening the book she’d brought. “Now, I am guessing your family had no idea about you. There are six families that have been known to produce hellhounds, but there are others that have claimed it, though no one was witness to it. There are thirty names here. Don’t bother telling me who you are before you look at these.”

The page of the book she’d brought had lists of all the hellhound families known to the author, with the disclaimer that not all hellhounds were aware of their roots. “That would be me,” he said mostly to himself.

“Adoptions have always been, son. Even before there was paperwork and courts. A parentless child would be given to a family for raising, unknowing of where they came from and what their powers might be.”

“But…I’m not adopted. I know I’m not. In fact, that would be the best-case scenario for me, because it would explain a lot.”

She sat in the other chair and gazed at him with the utmost sympathy. “Child, you look at the names, and if you don’t find your family here, maybe someone has some explaining to do. I’ve only ever heard of one before, a woman that found her fated mate by accident, the same way you did, with a jolt like that. That jolt…it’s killed a lot of folks like you. It killed that poor girl and her fated mate lived out the rest of his life in misery and never fully became.”

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