Girl's Guide to Witchcraft by Mindy Klasky Read Free Book Online

deep in his throat. Or was that a purr?
    I pressed the detached lid back into the can and started to drain the packing water into the sink. “No!” Neko cried, and I jumped back. “What are you doing?”
    “Um, draining the tuna?”
    “That’s the best part!”
    I looked at him as if he were truly crazy, but he was dancing back and forth beside me. I wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten, how long he’d been frozen as a statue in my basement. Could it be decades? Centuries? How much did he know about canned tuna, anyway? And packing water? What exactly was going on here?
    I put the can down on the counter and reached for a fork. Before I could hand him the utensil, Neko pounced on the food. I looked away, disgusted by his slurping directly from the can. Before I could say anything, there was a pounding knock at the door.
    Neko glanced up. “You’d better get that.”
    “Who could it be?” I shot a look at my watch. “It’s three-twenty in the morning.”
    “It’ll be the warder.”
    “The warder?” I couldn’t tell if my voice broke because of the strange word, or because Neko had already emptied the contents of the can. “Be careful!” I said, as he started to lick the lid. “You’ll cut yourself!”
    “Warder,” Neko repeated, reluctantly setting the container on the counter. It was clean enough that I could set it out for recycling. The knocking resumed. “They don’t like to be kept waiting. If you’re lucky, you’ll get one of the luscious ones.”
    I glanced down at my flannel pj’s and my bunny-shod feet. No time to dress for this meeting, “luscious warder” or not. I settled for kicking off my slippers and grabbing my Polarfleece blanket from the back of the couch. I draped the throw around my shoulders and pulled it close at my neck. I was sure that some glamorous movie star could have pulled off the look, but I felt like a barefoot little girl playing dress-up.
    The pounding resumed, and I hollered, “I’m coming!”
    I crossed to the door and waited for Neko to come stand beside me. After all, he seemed to have some idea who was out there. The amazing cat-man, though, only hovered in the kitchen doorway. He scratched at his jaw and said, “He’ll only get angrier if you make him wait.”
    Clutching my blanket close, I threw the deadbolt and opened the door.
    The man who swept in looked like he had escaped from a movie set. He was tall—he had a good foot on me. His dark hair swooped to silver on his temples, and he wore it a little long. He was clean-shaven, not even wearing the sideburns that Ashton Kutcher had made all the rage. His eyes were probably brown, but it was hard to tell because his pupils were enlarged from the nighttime dark. He wore a well-tailored suit of charcoal-gray, cut to accentuate his height, and his white dress shirt was open at the neck. The tendons on either side of his throat strained like metal cables.
    He filled his lungs, and Neko took a mincing step back into the kitchen. The newcomer whirled toward me. If he’d been wearing a cape, it would have swirled out behind him. “What the devil do you think you’re doing? Awakening a familiar on the night of a full moon?”
    “What the devil?” I actually laughed out loud. It wasn’t that the words were actually so funny. It was just that I’d never heard anyone use them before. Not in real life, in real anger. They sounded too high-flown, too Mr. Rochester or Heathcliff or someone like that.
    My amusement probably wasn’t the response he expected. I think that I was supposed to fall to my knees, cowering in terror. This guy was accustomed to people—to witches?—being afraid of him. “What the devil?” I repeated, and I closed the door behind him.
    “What is your name?” he demanded.
    “You’re the one pushing your way into my house,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that my feet were getting cold on the hardwood floor. “Don’t you think you should tell me yours