“I promise not to turn you into an evil puppet,” I said. “I don’t know any dark arts, anyhow. I don’t even know any card tricks.”
“Reassuring though that is, I think I’ll keep it to myself all the same. It isn’t you I’m worried about, Miss Rook,” he added, “but you will find my resolve on the matter absolute. I’ve not even shared my full name with Jenny, and she is not only exceptionally reliable but also dead.”
Jenny Cavanaugh was one of those peculiar details about the house on Augur Lane. The property had once been hers—and she had stayed on even after her untimely and mysterious demise. My employer raised no complaint, and the ghostly Jenny had simply become a regular member of the household. In spite of her grim history, Jenny was the most pleasant specter a person could ever hope to meet. She had turned out to be a closer confidante and far less of a curiosity than my enigmatic employer.
“May I guess?” I said.
Jackaby rolled his eyes. “You may do whatever you like. It will have no bearing on my decision.”
“Is it . . . Richard Frederic?”
“No, and I am not going to—”
“Russell Francis?”
“No. You’re being—”
“Rumpelstiltskin Finnegan?”
Jackaby sighed. “Yes, Miss Rook. Rumpelstiltskin. You’ve found me out. I am the devious imp of the fairy tales.”
“It wouldn’t be the strangest thing you’ve told me since I started working for you.”
Chapter Three
Upon our return to the house on Augur Lane, Jackaby sealed himself alone in his laboratory. I had offered to help him manage the furry little chameleomorphs, but he shooed me out with a waggle of his hand and kicked the door shut behind me. I shuffled down the crooked hallway and slumped to my desk in the foyer, resolving to throw myself back into my daily work. The piles of Jackaby’s wrinkled receipts and old case files were still in sore need of organizing, but as the afternoon stretched on, my mind refused to focus.
I had only recently managed to convince my employer that I was not some porcelain vase that needed to be protected. I was not inclined, now, to accept a role as the bull in his china shop, either. Admittedly, the fish fiasco was not my finest moment, but I could handle myself in the field. I could. I stuffed another long-forgotten receipt into the dusty filing cabinet behind me and scowled. Nothing set my skin to itching quite like feeling useless.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand my employer’s concern. My post as assistant to the foremost and perhaps only detective of the supernatural was wondrous in so many ways—but I couldn’t deny that it was also dangerous. Jackaby’s mad laboratory looked as though it might be equipped to raise Frankenstein’s creature, and the library housed menacing shadows that crept across the floor and reached for my heels if I trod too close to the Dangerous Documents section. All around me sat exotic animal skulls and angry statues of foreign gods. Even the innocuous-looking drab green frog in the terrarium beside me—Jackaby called him Ogden—had a habit of venting a noxious stench from his eyeballs when he felt threatened. Such was life with my employer, a medley of madness and menace, and all this within the walls of the house.
During my very first foray into actual fieldwork, I had nearly gotten myself killed, facing off against a murderous villain. Like a careless damsel from one of my storybooks, I had failed to heed the warnings and bumbled directly into mortal danger. I hated to admit it, but if it hadn’t been for Jackaby’s intervention, I would almost certainly be dead, and I wouldn’t be the only one.
“Does it still hurt?” came a gentle voice, startling me back to the present.
Jenny Cavanaugh had drifted into the room, her silvery feet hovering just above the floorboards, and her translucent hair drifting gently behind her. My hand had risen unconsciously to brush the small scar on my chest, a memento of that nearly fatal night, and I quickly let it drop.