Page 8 of The Librarian’s Familiar

To this day, he wasn’t sure if either of his grandfathers’ knew exactly who they were married to. Because by the time they got home, his grandmothers had been all smiles and laughter. No one would believe him if he said they were out for blood on the ice.

His mother’s parents used to fly supplies in, and still spoke Russian from back when Alaska had been part of Russia—they’d been raised speaking it, and told stories of it still being used in some of the small paranormal towns. Shifters and witches who’d moved and stayed living well away from everyone else. They’d been the ones who’d flown him out to play in Fairbanks. How they’d convinced his mother he had no idea, but it had happened.

His sister now flew supply runs. The only reason she hadn’t picked him up was because she was doing a supply run to the human mine site.

He walked over to the statue and read the plaque. It was supposed to be a fox with two cubs under the northern lights. August peered up at it, still not seeing it, but he knew the story of the town’s founding and figured someone had paid a lot of money for the artist to make it. Hopefully a local artist.

Day two, and he was already kind of bored.

Maybe he should go feral for a bit and spend some quality time on four feet. And then, when he was done with that, which would only take five days, seven at a stretch, what then?

Not that he wanted to go out on his own, nor did he want to admit that he didn’t want to go out on his own. While his sense of smell and hearing were fine, the loss of vision had him turning his head too much because he didn’t want people creeping up on him—it was why he hadn’t been able to check out the witch properly; he’d have been way too obvious. Fuck, he’d spent too long among humans if he couldn’t trust his other senses.

He glanced at the library.

It wasn’t a place he’d hung out as a kid, though he had gone with his grandfather when he wanted to change his books over. His non-Russian-speaking grandfather liked practical books. How to build an airplane engine out of old tins and bits of wood, how to make your own liquor out of nothing but salmon bones and snow, that kind of shit. He was very much of the opinion that there was no need to buy anything when you could make it yourself out of what was lying around. His father was much the same. He hadn’t gotten that gene.

He was much more like his mother’s side, and their motto should have been YOLO.

Those grandparents would’ve loved that saying. Baba would have yelled it as she stuck her hockey stick out and sent him sliding over the ice on his belly. And he’d have cursed while his other grandmother told him off for swearing.

He smiled, missing those days when everything was fun and wild, and he was free. Yet there he was with no one claiming his time, and he was lost, something that would never have occurred to him twenty-five years ago.

He’d have made his own fun…and trouble.

He crossed the road and pushed open the library door, not knowing what to expect, but that was half the fun.

CHAPTER SIX

Charlie carefully placed the label on the spine of the book. He’d started the day by shelving returns and then begun categorizing the new non-fiction arrivals, as the more complicated Dewey decimal system was excellent for providing order.

While he’d been interrupted several times, they’d been exactly what he needed to let a little chaos out. By the time his stomach was thinking about lunch, he felt the way he assumed most witches felt—aware of the energy around him in much the same way he was aware of his own breathing every so often.

It was there, but not important.

Around Sinclair, it had been like holding his breath, though without the desperate scrabble for his next breath, which was weird. Though he had been around foxes when training with the Coven. They had been most interested, and troubled, by his magic, mostly because they were worried that too many of his kind might lead to the end of the world.

Charlie had no idea how many there were. Or if they even knew what kind of magic they possessed. Plenty of witches went through life thinking they were either imagining it or worse, insane, which was the furthest possible thing from the truth. Because his mother was a witch, she’d known what to look out for, so while Charlie thought he had the worst luck, his mother had sent him to the Coven to figure out what was going on.

In that respect, he was lucky because his family trusted the Coven. Many didn’t. And of course, once he learned what the Coven did, he wanted to join. If he’d known that he’d end up in Claw Lake, he might have changed his mind. But it was only for three years, and it was a good job. It also gave him the opportunity and time to go through the Coven databases on witch magic and work on his research project.

Since the Coven was formed, and probably before, people had been trying to group magic into various categories. The trouble was that magic wasn’t easily grouped, as it was the transmutation of energy from one form to another, and what it turned into was as individual as the magic user.

Add in the new discovery, or perhaps it should be rediscovery, that a witch’s magic was tied to their soul, which meant he’d lived with this magic before, it meant the previous theories about why a water witch might have a healer child, or why magic skipped a generation, were now obsolete. It was both exciting and terrifying.

So when he wasn’t shelving books and helping the general population find their next read, he was reading and putting together a research paper. He wasn’t sure if the Coven had tasked him with this, so he didn’t become bored enough to start unraveling things, or because they knew he was perfectly capable of, and enjoyed, sifting through data and organizing it.

Maybe a bit of both.

He tried to get through his library duties in the morning so he could do his Coven duties in the afternoon, and he was looking forward to getting back to some of the historical accounts and magical groupings—so far, he hadn’t done much more than read and think, and search for his own magic in those historic records.

The library door opened and closed.

“How can I help you?” he said as he stood up, only to see the polar bear from this morning standing in front of him. His smile froze on his lips, and anything else he might’ve said melted on his tongue.

“Thought I’d stop by. See how it’s changed,” the bear said with a friendly nod.

“Um…well, that depends on how long it’s been since your last visit?”