All Hallows' Hangover Read online

  The one thing Teddy remembered—well, two things, actually—was that if you screwed up and cast a spell you didn’t mean to and you wanted to reverse it, you needed to know exactly what was in the original spell, and that most spells didn’t last past dawn.

  He wasn’t sure why dawn was such a big deal. He thought it might have something to do with the energy of a new day, which sounded right because it explained why werewolves turned back into people once the sun rose.

  Only it seemed like his classes got that part wrong. Sunlight was still streaming into his living room since he had no hands to grip the rod he needed to turn to close the blinds, and frankly, closing the blinds had been the last thing on his mind. All that bright sunlight should have blasted whatever spell that had turned him into a dog to smithereens, but it wasn’t doing a darn thing.

  So if his classes got the sunlight thing wrong, were they wrong about needing to know the ingredients? Not that he had a clue what could have been in the spell.

  The only option he could think of was to go down to the magic shop where he’d purchased the (defective; it had to be defective) spell and see if they could help him out.

  He’d actually trotted all the way to the front door of his apartment before he remembered that he didn’t have hands. Or, more precisely, thumbs.

  He couldn’t grip the doorknob to turn it.

  And of course, it was one of those smooth round numbers, not a lever-type handle he could have tried to paw open.

  “Crap!” he said.

  Another yip came out of his mouth, this one louder than before.

  He sat back on his haunches and stared at the doorknob. If he clamped his teeth on it and turned his head just right, he might be able to get it to turn.

  He gave it a good try, but the metal made his teeth ache, and good lord, did that knob taste nasty.

  Teddy backed away from the door, shaking his head and making a terrible hacking sound as he tried to get the horrible taste out of his mouth.

  Strike that idea.

  He sat back down and fought the urge to whine. This was ridiculous. He might like look like a dog, but his mind was still his own. He should be able to figure this out.

  As far as he knew, he hadn’t ticked anyone off badly enough to cast a spell like this on him. Especially not someone who could afford to buy a spell just for fun.

  Spells were expensive, as he’d discovered. Hefty licensing fees were tacked on top of the cost of spells, which was supposed to keep magic users from casting them willy-nilly.

  Well, whoever’d turned him into a dog clearly wasn’t worried about money.

  Had any of the people at his party been that rich? Teddy doubted it. Daniel worked at a sporting goods store selling workout clothes for minimum wage. Teddy was only a little better off. He worked at a bank.

  And oh lord, he was going to be late for work!

  Not that he could go to work looking like a dog. He couldn’t even call in sick.

  He’d probably get fired. His manager was a notorious hard case about people who were no call, no show.

  Could this day get any worse?

  Apparently it could.

  Daniel chose that exact moment to rush out of his bedroom, blanket in hand. Before Teddy could even think about how he could communicate with his roommate, Daniel threw the blanket over Teddy’s head and wrestled him to the floor.

  “Gotcha!” Daniel said.

  4

  Tabby hadn’t planned on taking inventory at Emporium Magique the morning after Halloween.

  Not after spending the entire night casting spells and dealing with customers.

  Most of the spells had been minor, but the cumulative effect was still the same. Tabby was about dead on her feet.

  Not for the first time, she wished she could use one of those handheld gadgets to do inventory. But electronics and wizards don’t mix, so here she was, counting the spells and potions left on the shelves by hand and comparing them to the handwritten tally of items sold during the night.

  She didn’t even have enough energy left to cast a spell to make the counting go faster.

  “You could at least help me,” Tabby said to the little black cat currently stretched out on a half-empty shelf watching her through lazy eyes.

  “What would be the fun in that?” Terrique said.

  Not that she actually spoke out loud when she was in her cat form. Tabby heard the voice of her familiar in her head. Annoying as all get out when she’d been a wizard in training and instead of helping Tabby learn spells like a familiar was supposed to, Terrique had sung show tunes—off key—during every exam Tabby had.

  When Tabby used to complain, Terrique always got a smug, self-satisfied expression on her little cat face. “You passed, didn’t you?”

  She had. And she’d never forgotten the ingredients to any spell, although whenever she mixed spells, she heard phantom caterwauling in the back of her brain.

  Were all wizards this weird? Or did they start out as normal people who’d slowly been driven insane by the spirits assigned to assist them?

  This morning, Tabby would have voted for insane.

  “Isn’t your purpose to assist me with whatever I need?” Tabby pulled out a box full of sleeping spells. She counted each bottle in the box without touching it. The last thing she needed was any help falling asleep. “I seem to recall getting that lecture right before I met you.”

  Along with a lecture about not abusing the spirit assigned to her as a familiar.

  Terrique stretched out a paw, claws extended, then brought it to her mouth to wash. “Who says I’m not?”

  “Oh, the bazillion or so boxes that I still need to...”

  Tabby let the sentence trail off. Helping her with inventory wasn’t what Terrique was talking about.

  That was another thing about familiars: they never got to the point using a straight line.

  And they never said more than they absolutely needed to say.

  So Terrique thought Tabby needed help, and not with the shop.

  What with, then?

  Tabby had a pretty decent life. She owned her own magic shop, a place that had started out as little more than a hole in the wall that she’d expanded over the years into a pretty nifty magical emporium, if she did say so herself. She employed a bunch of up and coming wizards, helping them to earn a living while they practiced their craft like others had helped her along the way.

  Sure, all the time she spent working meant she didn’t have much of a personal life, but she couldn’t complain. She had her bubble baths and her daydreams about a brown-eyed man she’d never met, and if she was a little lonely from time to...

  Oh, no.

  Tabby had made the mistake of telling Terrique once about her brown-eyed fantasy man.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  Terrique kept washing her paw.

  “You cast a love spell on some poor unsuspecting guy because you what... feel sorry for me?”

  Tabby thought she saw amusement in her familiar’s green-gold eyes, but Terrique didn’t say anything.

  Wonderful. Just wonderful. Her familiar thought she needed a love life.

  Tabby closed her eyes and counted to ten. Again. And reminded herself it did no good to get mad at her familiar.

  Again.

  Well, at least now she knew where to look to see what was missing so she could fix whatever Terrique had done.

  Love spells weren’t in high demand on Halloween, but the store always kept a decent supply on hand. The Christmas holidays were right around the corner, and then came Valentine’s Day. Her staff would be spending a lot of time in January creating new love spells to build up the store’s inventory. Right now she had three shelves full of heart-shaped bottles.

  Tabby took down each box and carefully counted each spell, then compared her final count against the number she should have had in stock.

  The numbers matched.

  Terri hadn’t taken a love spell.

  She c
ouldn’t concoct a spell of her own. Familiars knew what ingredients went into creating specific spells, but just like ghosts, they didn’t have the right kind of life energy to activate the spells, so anything they tried to create fizzled and died. Good thing, too. Tabby didn’t want to imagine what life would be like if ghosts could whip up spells to cast on the living whenever they felt like it.

  That meant her familiar must have taken something else from the store. But what? If Tabby couldn’t figure that out, she’d be here the rest of the day and all night going through each box of spells and potions until she found whatever Terrique’s little cat mind had substituted for a love spell.

  If she’d even taken anything from the store. The costume she’d been wearing when she sauntered in the door right before dawn had been more revealing than anything in Tabby’s closet. For all Tabby knew, Terrique could have talked someone she met on the street into giving her a spell to cast.

  If that was the case, Tabby was screwed. So was the poor unsuspecting guy Terrique had cast the spell on.

  Tabby didn’t like it, but it looked like she had to keep working on the inventory until she found a missing spell.

  Or until some poor soul stumbled into the store, convinced he was madly in love with her.

  5

  Teddy tried to scramble to his feet, but Daniel held him firmly pinned beneath the blanket.

  Teddy’d always thought Daniel was a skinny little dude who never spent any energy he didn’t have to, but he’d tackled Teddy like he was one of the muscle-bound jocks he sold sportswear to.

  And he was a lot heavier than he looked.

  “Take it easy, big fella.” Daniel’s reedy voice sounded muffled through the blanket. “Not gonna hurt you.”

  “Then get off me!” Teddy said.

  Unfortunately, the words came out as a deep, throaty growl.

  “Whoa! Calm down. Calm down.”

  Daniel was leaning over Teddy’s back, mouth next to his ear. Teddy got a good whiff of weed, which answered the question of who’d smoked pot in the apartment last night. That also explained why Daniel had been so concerned that his bedroom had a window when he’d answered Teddy’s ad for a roommate.

  But why hadn’t Teddy noticed the smell before?

  Because you didn’t have the nose of a dog before, idiot.

  The realization made Teddy freeze. Worse than looking at himself in the mirror and seeing a dog look back—that could be an illusion, right?—finding out that his sense of smell was as sensitive as a dog’s made the whole thing seem real.

  And permanent.

  What about his eyesight? He’d heard that dogs didn’t see as well as they smelled. Teddy’d always had perfect eyesight, and the thought that he might not anymore scared the crap out of him.

  And dogs had shorter life spans, too.

  He didn’t want to die young. He had too many things he wanted to do. And he’d never even found someone special to share his life with.

  What if Daniel took him to the pound?

  Teddy couldn’t stop the whine that escaped his lips. He had to stop those kind of thoughts right now. He still didn’t have the urge to lift his leg on the furniture, so he wasn’t all dog yet, and he had a plan.

  If only Daniel would get off him and open the door.

  Teddy made himself lie still and let Daniel stroke the top of his head through the blanket.

  “Much better, dude,” Daniel said, his hand still stroking Teddy’s head, which Teddy had to admit felt kind of good, in an interesting, awkward way. “See, we can get along, right? You got a tag or anything? Man, I didn’t even know someone brought a dog last night. How wasted was I, right? But we gotta get you back where you belong.”

  Teddy fought to urge to tell Daniel he was where he belonged. The words would only come out as a growl again, and that wouldn’t do him any good.

  “Danny?”

  Teddy caught a whiff of the unique scent his nose told him was Lilibeth, Daniel’s half-elf girlfriend. She must have come out of the bedroom to see what all the ruckus was about. The woodsy scent she brought with her was part pine and part jasmine and buried beneath the pungent odor of weed and overlaid with the cool, moist odor of outdoors, which told Teddy both of them had been partying in Daniel’s bedroom with the window open.

  The combined scents made Teddy want to run. Just take off at top speed down a forest path, maybe scare up a rabbit or two, and let the wind blow through his fur as his ears flapped back with the pure joy of the chase.

  His legs actually twitched with the need to run.

  That wasn’t good.

  “What are you doing out here?” Lilibeth’s melodious voice had the slight slur of the happily but not thoroughly stoned. “And why are you on top of Teddy?”

  What?

  She could see through the spell?

  “Yes!” Teddy said.

  The exclamation came out as a short, happy bark.

  “Huh?” Daniel lifted the corner of the blanket away from Teddy’s face. “Honey, unless I’m really wasted, this is a dog. Looks like a dog, feels like a dog. Barks like a dog.” He gestured at Teddy with one hand. “Dog.”

  Teddy shook his head, and Daniel gave him a quizzical look.

  Lilibeth giggled. “Teddy,” she said, making the same ta-da! gesture toward Teddy that Daniel had.

  “Dude.” Daniel drew the word out. “Man, why didn’t you tell me? That’s messed up.”

  He managed to get to his feet without tripping on the blanket. Teddy shook the blanket off, then just shook himself for good measure because it felt so good, right down to his spine.

  Lilibeth came over to crouch in front of Teddy. Her eyes were the most beautiful shade of green, her hair the copper gold of the setting sun. Even half-stoned, she was the most graceful creature Teddy had ever seen. He’d always thought she was beautiful in a hands-off, she’s someone else’s girlfriend kind of way, but now he had the urge to lay down at her feet like she was royalty.

  And that was another dog thought. Definitely not good.

  He was going to have to fight to keep himself human. He made himself stay on his paws.

  His feet, damn it. His feet.

  Lilibeth held her hand out, palm not quite touching the fur on the top of his head. “This wasn’t your choice, was it?”

  Teddy shook his head.

  “Duuude,” Daniel said. “You’re talking to a dog.”

  “Teddy,” Lilibeth said. “I’m talking to Teddy.” She frowned. “For now. You’re fading. You can feel it, can’t you?”

  Teddy barked in agreement.

  “The spell needs to be broken, and soon.” Lilibeth stroked his head and down his neck, her eyes never leaving his. When her hand reached his chest, her eyes darkened. “And it’s something I don’t have the power to do.”

  “You can break spells?” Daniel asked. “Man, I did not know that about you. How cool is that?”

  Teddy thought it would have been cooler if she could have broken this one.

  “Spells cast by word,” Lilibeth said, “can be broken with the right word. My mother taught me many of them. Spells cast by potion?” She shook her head, her copper gold hair cascading over her shoulders.

  Potion. He’d been turned into a dog by a potion.

  The bubbling, steaming bottle of booze that had tasted so wonderful.

  The empty bottle wasn’t on the coffee table where he remembered leaving it. Teddy trotted out to the kitchen and nosed through the trash. He couldn’t remember what the potion had smelled like, but he certainly remembered the scent of the woman who’d brought it.

  There!

  He pushed the bottle onto the floor with his nose. Not having hands was a pain, but at least he’d figured out how to move things around with his nose.

  Lilibeth picked up the bottle with two fingers, like it was poison. Teddy supposed that in a way it was.

  The bottle had a label pasted to the bottom, but Teddy couldn’t read it. The words seemed to blend and
blur, and he had a horrible thought that he was losing the ability to read.

  Teddy nudged the bottom of the bottle.

  “Dude, I think he wants us to look at something,” Daniel said.

  Teddy barked, feeling less like himself and more like Lassie trying to tell people Timmy was stuck in the bottom of the well.

  Lilibeth tilted the bottle to look at the label. “Emporium Magique. I know this place.” She smiled down at Teddy. “Now we have a place to start.”

  6

  The little bell over the front door of Emporium Magique rang at exactly eleven fifteen, rousing Tabby from a sound sleep.

  She’d just put her head down on the counter for a few minutes. She’d managed to inventory half of the store—without any help from her familiar, thank you very much—and she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes open any longer. But the bell certainly woke her up, especially since the front door had been locked.

  Two people and a dog stood inside the store.

  Tabby recognized the woman, a gorgeous half-elf named Lilibeth who purchased herbs from Tabby on a semi-regular basis. She didn’t know the man she was with. He looked like any number of regular guys on the street. Skinny in a wiry kind of way, brown hair a little long and messy, and just the slightest glaze of something mood altering in his blue eyes.

  And thankfully not a hint of lovesickness when he looked at her.

  He wasn’t the guy.

  Tabby didn’t allow pets in her store—Terrique wasn’t a pet by any stretch of the imagination—and she was about to tell Lilibeth that when she got a good look at the dog.

  Specifically, at his eyes.

  The soulful brown eyes of the man in her fantasies.

  Tabby felt the pull of those brown eyes as the dog looked back at her.

  And growled.

  Lilibeth pulled a bottle from the man’s backpack. “We need to break this spell,” she said.

  The dog’s growl got louder.

  “Soon would be good,” Lilibeth added.

  Tabby agreed. Her familiar had turned this poor man into a dog. No wonder he was pissed.

  “Coming right up,” Tabby said. She only hoped the brief nap she’d taken had recharged her batteries enough to cast the reversing spell.