Free The Reluctant Goddess (The Montgomery Chronicles Book 2) by Karen Ranney

accept the presence of a dog.
    To the best of my knowledge, Charlie didn't chase cats, but to be on the safe side, we had a heart to heart talk in the car.
    "There's a cat in there," I said. "Her name is Angelica and she's very, very old. You won't bother her, right?"
    Charlie drooled a little on my hand, then whined in agreement.
    I wiped off my palm with a tissue I had in my purse.  
    Before I left the car, I turned off my phone, remembering the last time it had rung when I was meeting with Mr. Brown. He’d refused to talk to me for a good ten minutes, until I was feeling dutifully chastised for my rudeness.  
    Mr. Brown was a Luddite and proud of it. He didn’t advertise on the web. He didn’t have a website or email, which had made communicating with him during his settlement a pain.  
    As an insurance adjuster, I’d handled one of Mr. Brown’s claims. A sign had blown off a shop on the opposite side of the street and careened into his storefront, shattering his large glass window. My investigation had concluded that it was one of those errant windstorms we get occasionally in San Antonio. Out of a clear blue sky, the wind can gust up to forty miles an hour.
    Mr. Brown was a curmudgeonly sort, completely antisocial and annoyed by all the bureaucracy I’d brought with me. Still, something about him reminded me of my late grandfather, a man as kind as my mother was cold.  
    Had my grandfather known what I was? He died when I was seven and I felt his loss keenly for years.  
    Now I wondered if he’d been a witch, too. Or a warlock. Was that a male witch? Funny, I’d rarely read of witches in any of my fiction. Had that been because of something Nonnie had done?  
    I had too many damned questions.  
    After clipping on Charlie’s leash, which I was using only because San Antonio and Alamo Heights had a leash law, I opened the car door and together we went in search of knowledge.  
    I took the three concrete steps up to the wooden boardwalk in front of the store. The place look like a storefront in Fredericksburg, Texas, something that dated back to frontier days. I knew from my earlier research that the building was only from the thirties, but Mr. Brown didn’t do anything to make it smell, look, or feel more modern. The last time I was here, he’d repaired the window, but I knew he didn’t intend to do anything about the sagging floors or the stacks and stacks of books.  
    I opened the door, hearing the little bell on the top ring as I breathed in the scent of wood, mildew, kitty litter, and old books.
    Mr. Brown never came to the front to welcome a browser or buyer. Instead, he sat behind his counter in a space I think of as his safe zone. The area was created by a massive circular counter. Once it had stood in the middle of the shop, but after the incident with the sign, he had moved the counter back until one end touched the far wall.  
    Not that anyone could tell there was a counter there. Every available surface was covered with books. Stacks and stacks of books ranging in size and age and date. The only way they were organized in any kind of order was by subject. Mr. Brown didn't believe in books that were written in the last twenty or thirty years. Instead, he concentrated on older books, some of them valuable enough to belong to a museum.  
    One of his most precious volumes was illuminated by a monk in the 14th century. He'd taken it out of his safe and showed it to me, only after I’d agreed not to breathe on it. Of course I wasn't allowed to touch it and when he did so, it was with a pair of white gloves set aside for that purpose.
    Mr. Brown would know if there was a book featuring paranormal creatures, like a Dirugu.  
    I stood there for a minute, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. Another thing Mr. Brown didn't like: natural light. Nor was he fond of florescent fixtures. Only one old fashioned banker’s light with a green shade sat at the end of the counter and it was here that he sat