Chapter OneTwo Years AgoAll stories are love stories if you love stories.
And I do love stories. As a Book Witch, you kind of have to love them. It’s on our recruitment posters, after all.
My name is Rainy March, and yes, it’s a bad pun and also a weather forecast, and no, sorry, I can’t change it now. It’s already embroidered into my underwear and printed on my bookplates.
This love story starts with a phone call, one of those pivotal moments you don’t realize will change your life until much, much later. It was two years ago on September 1st, back when I was a young and mostly innocent Book Witch of twenty-five. I don’t even have to look at my case notes to remember the exact date. After all, you never forget the day you fall in love with a fictional character.
Of course, having a crush on a fictional character is nothing new. Sherlock Holmes used to get more fan mail than his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Women would write 221B Baker Street proposing marriage to the fictional consulting detective, or simply offering their services as housekeepers to get close to him.
What I really mean is . . . you never forget the day a fictional character falls in love with you back.
Admittedly, I also remember the day in question was the first of the month because Koshka, my feline familiar, gets his flea and tick preventative applied on the first. Right before the phone rang, I had the boy wrapped in a towel and wedged between my knees on the bathroom floor. I can’t say who was enjoying it less, me or my cat.
“Big baby,” I said as he wiggled under me, slippery as a hot-buttered eel. “It’ll take two seconds. Do you want to get a tapeworm? No. No, you don’t.”
From inside his bath-towel burrito, he let out a piteous whine.
“All this fussing from a familiar.” The familiars of Book Witches are like normal pets except they can read. They certainly don’t handle taking medication any better than normal pets. “It’ll be over in a second, buddy.” With one hand, I parted the thick silvery gray fur on the back of his neck while I popped the medicine cap with the other. “Be strong, comrade! You are Russian. Act like it!”
He isn’t actually Russian, but don’t tell him that. He’s a Russian Blue and therefore thinks he’s Russian. Another Book Witch might have saddled him with a cutesy cat pun name like Alexander Puss-kin or Fur-dor Dostoevsky, but as I suffer from a cutesy pun name myself, I refuse to inflict one on another living creature. Since the only Russian I knew at the time was the word for
cat, that’s what I called him. (Yes, I know
koshka usually refers to female cats, but my Koshka is very comfortable in his masculinity. Oh, and if you want to pronounce it correctly, it rhymes with . . . well, nothing, but you say “kosh” as in the Hebrew word
kosher. Capisce?)
The moment I had the medicine tube in position, the red hotline phone across the hallway rang. During that split-second distraction, Koshka wriggled out of the towel and bolted.
Defeated, I dragged myself off the floor. I was a fur-coated shell of my former self as I reached the doorway to the library, only to see that Pops had beaten me to the phone.
“Sullivan March here,” he said, answering the call.
From behind his desk, my white-bearded grandfather gave me a wink. With his brown tweed suit and elbow patches, he looked like Santa Claus undercover as a retired English professor. But Santa Claus is a jolly old elf. Pops is a jolly old Book Witch, the first in our family to enter the storycraft trade.
He listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. By the dour look on his face, it was most likely our coven leader, Dr. Regina Fanshawe, who was older and white-haired but looked nothing like Mrs. Claus. More like a taller, angrier Dame Judi Dench.
Much angrier.
Pops pulled his old brown leather case notebook out of the top desk drawer and flipped it open, jotting down notes. I leaned across the desk, hoping to see what he was writing, but when he caught me looking, he covered the page with his arm.
“Understood,” Pops finally said. “I’m on it.”
My heart sank as he hung up. That “I” in “I’m on it” didn’t sound promising. I would’ve preferred a “we” or a “she.”
Pops looked at me. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“What’s the job? And can I do it?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Not a chance. Not this job.”
“Not a chance? Pops, need I remind you that I have been working the horror beat for months? Whatever this assignment is, I can handle it.”
Not only had I recently survived the machinations of a monstrous mansion in Shirley Jackson’s
The Haunting of Hill House, but I’d also sparred with both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and come out on top. And who was the only Book Witch in the world who knew the first name of the second Mrs. de Winter in Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic classic
Rebecca?
This witch.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said, shaking his head.
“If I can handle vampires, ghosts, and Mrs. Danvers, I can handle anything.”
“They will not send a young female Book Witch to Gangland Chicago. It’s far too dangerous, Raindrop.”
“Gangland . . . Wait, Pops . . . Is it the Duke of Chicago? Is he in danger?”
The Duke of Chicago, for those who haven’t read the books, is the star of a popular noir mystery series. According to his backstory, the Duke had been the youngest of four aristocratic sons. He’d inherited the dukedom, however, after the tragic deaths of his three older brothers. Feeling as if he were doomed if he stayed in England, the Duke ran off to America and set up shop as a private detective in Chicago. Although christened at birth Bartholomew Maximillian Augustus Fitzgerald Nicholas Ardingly, in Chicago he went by the moniker Nick Duke, Private Eye.
Everyone just called him the Duke.
And he was my favorite fictional detective of all time.
Instead of letting Mrs. Turner, our housekeeper, answer the door, Pops practically leapt to his feet with the energy of a man half his age. I, of course, gave chase. He wasn’t going to get out of this conversation that easily.
“He
is in danger, isn’t he? Let me take the case. I’ve read all the books a hundred times. I know where the Duke lives. I know his favorite drink. I know his valet’s name and birthday—Nigel, born August twenty-third, 1860. A father figure to the Duke and a constant source of irritation. Check the books. I know everything.”
Pops opened the front double-doors to find Professor Dodsworth on our porch. The Professor had been a Book Witch longer than Pops, since the days when paperbacks cost fifty cents, hardcovers a dollar, and if you wanted an audiobook, you asked someone with a decent voice to read aloud to you.
The Professor held out a bag. I don’t know how spies usually receive their mission dossiers—manila folders probably—but Book Witches in the Ink and Paper Coven get our mission documents in canvas tote bags from the local bookstore.
Before Pops could grab it, I snatched it away. “Thank you, Professor.”
The poor man opened his mouth to say something, but I’d already closed the doors.
“Rainy—” Pops said in a warning tone.
“I knew it.” Inside was a paperback copy of
Empty Graves, Duke of Chicago book two. “I’m going.”
“You can’t. You’re too close to the story. We both know you’ve been in love with the Duke since you were a teenager.”
“Pops, that was years ago. I’m over him.”
“Over him? Really?” He crossed his arms and eyed me sternly. “Did you or did you not attend a book conference last year playing a Duke of Chicago love interest?”
“I may have
allegedly attended Murder Me Con, where I cosplayed as the femme fatale Hennie Fox from book six,
Chicago River Red. I wouldn’t call her a love interest really. She’s a paid assassin hired to kill him, but in the end, she repents and turns herself over to the police, because she’s in love with him in a sort of sociopathic way.”
Copyright © 2026 by Meg Shaffer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
