Stormy Sky Magic (Familiar Kitten Mysteries Book 9)

for you?” Viv asked in her best please just go away but I’m smiling and being polite voice. She’d gotten up from the table and gone behind the counter. Evidently, she was just going to ignore his comment about getting her food license taken away. “The specials are on the board. I don’t have much else because there hasn’t been a lot of business today. Plenty of soup, though, and it’s good.”
“What is wrong with you?” he spat at her. “Why would you allow animals? You disgust me. Come on, Dixon. We’re leaving.”
“But I’m hungry,” Dixon protested. “The soup smells good. We could eat it back at your house.”
The way he said your house instead of home told me a lot.
“Shut up,” he said and glared at the boy. “What have I told you about begging? Huh? What’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry, Dad.”
“What, are you going to cry now? Why do you insist on being such a little girl? Huh? Ugh. I swear I should just stop taking you on these stupid weekends. I would, but then your mother would win. She’s already ruining you.”
Reggie started to stand up, but I put my hand over hers and shook my head, no.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Why don’t we go back to your house and I’ll make grilled cheese for us,” Dixon said. “I can make lunch.” He was trying to placate his horrible father, and it broke my heart.
“You’re going to cook now? Just like a woman. And you’re doing that pathetic thing your mother used to do. Trying so hard to make me happy by assuming you know what I want. You don’t, and I wish you’d stop acting like such a wimp,” the father snarled at him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Dixon began to weep in earnest.
“You’re disgusting,” his father said and raised his hand as if he were about to slap the boy.
I’d tried to get Reggie to back off, but I found myself jumping out of my chair so hard that I knocked it over and sent Meri and Tangerine scrambling. I crossed the room in a few steps and put myself between the man and Dixon.
“You touch him, and I will rip that hand from your body and shove it down your throat,” I growled.
“Kinsley!” Viv and Reggie gasped in unison.
But I didn’t listen. That man had activated the mama bear in me, and I would not back down.
“Now that’s how you act like a man, you little twerp,” he said and stepped around me. “Too bad she’s a skirt. The town sheriff needs to lay down the law in his own house.”
He grabbed Dixon by the back of the neck and practically dragged him outside before I could say anything else. I wanted to follow, but suddenly Viv was there holding me back.
“Don’t,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do that won’t cause problems for you and more pain for that little boy.”
It made me sick. “There has to be something,” I said.
“We’ll find out who his mother is,” Reggie said. “He was obviously on visitation with his father. The jerk said if he stopped seeing the boy, the mother would win. There’s probably a case in family court. You could just smell it. We’ll sign sworn statements for her, if she wants them. That’s how we can help.”
It wasn’t good enough, but it had to be. “It’s not enough,” I said.
“It might save him,” Viv said and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Right now, you guys should get home. There are worse storms coming, and I think I’m going to close up. Unless you guys want to ride it out here?”
“No, we should go,” I said as I felt my blood still boiling. I felt like a caged tiger. I had to get out of there even if it was just to drive home. “We’ve all got basements, right?”

I was significantly calmed by the time I pulled into my driveway. The rain had slowed a bit. It was almost like the eye of the storm, but I knew that was impossible. It was the Midwest, after all. There were derechos and huge lines of thunderstorms, but we did not get hurricanes.
Plus, just as the rain slowed, the weather warnings began to blare from my phone. I took Meri and Tangerine inside and fished some dry sweatpants and a t-shirt out of the dryer.
After I was dressed in dry clothes, I turned on my laptop so I could sit in the kitchen and watch the radar and warnings. I tried to call Thorn and got no answer, so I sent him a text asking him to please call me when he could.
I made some tea and settled in at the kitchen table to watch the angry red blob on the radar make its way toward Coventry. When my phone finally rang, I nearly dropped it because my hands were slick with sweat.
“Hey, babe,” I said nervously. “Please tell me you are on your way home.”
“I can’t, Kinsley.” Thorn’s voice sounded far away due to the wind howling around him. “I’m storm spotting for the county. We’ve got to make sure that no one is on the roads in the path of danger. I also call it in if… when I see this thing touch down so they can sound the warning system.”
“When what touches down?” I asked, but it felt like a dumb question as soon as it crossed my lips. I’d lived in Illinois my entire life, and I knew what was happening. Even without magic, I could feel it in the air and see it in the sickly shade of green sky.
“There’s a radar-confirmed tornado nearby, babe. We haven’t spotted it, but if the siren goes off, get to the basement. Or just go now… Yeah, just go now. I’ll call you soon, I promise.” Towards the end of his sentence, Thorn’s voice got shaky. I wanted to ask him what he was seeing, but I knew keeping him on the phone might put