in his pocket.
“Okay, I’ll go turn on the music. Celtic pipes?”
“Nah, let’s do some guitar this morning-that Mexican duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela.”
“Right.” Perry headed toward the back of the store, where the sound system was, and I filled a couple of kettles in the sink and put them on to boil. A couple of regulars would be coming in as soon as we unlocked the door, so it was best to have the water ready. I glanced over at the paper racks and saw that Perry had already filled them.
Some Spanish guitar came on through the sound system, its World beat suggesting to customers that here they could not only find refuge from corporate radio, but also much else that was stale and prepackaged and bereft of mystery. Perry strode back to the door, brandishing his keys, and said, “Okay to open?” and I nodded at him.
The first person to walk through the door was my daytime lawyer, Hallbjorn Hauk-he used the name Hal for modern American usage. He was dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit with a white shirt and pale yellow tie. His hair, as ever, was immaculately styled in a Joe Buck haircut, and the dimple in his chin smiled sideways at me. If I didn’t know he was a werewolf, I would have voted for him.
“Have you seen the morning papers, Atticus?” he said without preamble.
“Not yet,” I admitted. “Good morning to you, Mr. Hauk.”
“Right. Well, then, perhaps you’d better take a look.” He grabbed a copy of The Arizona Republic and slapped it down forcefully on the counter in front of me, pointing to a headline on the right-hand column. “Now, tell me, lad,” he said in his best faux-Irish accent tinged with ancient Icelandic, “would y’be knowin’ anything about this spot o’ trouble here?”
The headline read, RANGER FOUND DEAD IN PAPAGO PARK.
Casting off my American accent, I replied in kind: “I’d be knowin’ more than is comfortable, just between me and my attorney-client privilege.”
“I thought as much. I heard Coyote laughin’ last night, and he doesn’t laugh at the harmless, does he now?”
“No, he doesn’t, sir. I might be needin’ your help sooner rather than later.”
“Right. I’ll be seein’ you for lunch, then, at Rula Bula?” He named the Irish pub at the north end of Mill Avenue that was my favorite hangout. “I’m thinkin’ it’s high time we had ourselves a heart-to-heart, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be had over the best fish and chips in thirty states.”
I nodded and said, “At high noon, sir,” though I could not figure where he had pulled the number thirty from. Which twenty states had better fish and chips than Rula Bula? He had evidently been paying more attention to fish and chip cuisine than I had, and I must admit that I felt a twang of guilt. The finest fish and chips in the land was more than a mere trivial pursuit for me, and I had sorely neglected it for an abominably long time. Most places excelled in either one or the other, but rare was the establishment that paid equal attention to both sides of the culinary complement. Rula Bula was one of the few Irish pubs that savored the chip as well as the fish, and its presence had been a determining factor in my decision to grow roots in Tempe.
“Right,” he said. “See you then,” and he exited without another word.
My senior regulars came in: Sophie, Arnie, Joshua, and Penelope. Joshua grabbed a newspaper and pointed out the same article Hal had shown me. “God, would you look at this,” he said, waving at it. “It’s like we’re back in New York.” He said almost the same thing every day about one article or another, so I was oddly comforted by it.
A lone searcher arrived, seeking something that wasn’t Judeo-Christian and buying a primer series in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Wicca. “May harmony find you,” I said, and he dipped his head to me as he left. He had my respect: At least he wasn’t content to be fed the diet on the television. And then something unusual walked through my door.
She was a witch. Her personal wards radiated warnings, and even though I was not adept enough to know what they did or what they protected her from, I knew by her aura what she was. I hastily muttered a binding under my breath to keep all my hairs on my body. Witches could do some pretty heinous stuff with hair, blood, or even nail clippings, and I didn’t know yet if she was friendly or not. Her appearance marked her as nothing more than a trendy college student, however: no black robes or pointy hat, no hairy moles growing on the end of an oversize nose. She had her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, as carefully considered a decision as the makeup applied to her face and the pink gloss on her lips.
She was wearing a white bebe tank top and a pair of oversize white-rimmed sunglasses. She carried a pink cell phone in one hand along with a jangling key ring. Her tanned, silky legs were bare beyond a pair of turquoise cotton shorts that strained at the boundaries of modesty. Her feet were slipped into a pair of pink flip-flops, her toenails painted pink with golden glitter sparkling in it.
She took a moment to look around, inspecting the unseen more than the seen, before she turned and strode to my apothecary’s counter. She appeared to be my assumed age, twenty-one or so, but I knew how deceiving appearances could be. I could not tell her true age without more information, but the eyes behind those sunglasses were definitely older than twenty-one: She had seen things that separated her from the young and stupid. Still, she was less than a century old, judging by her aura, because it was still fluid and had none of the telltale markers of the truly old. If she could perceive the bindings around my shop and within them, she knew I was much older than I looked too.
“Are you the owner of this shop?” she said, approaching my counter.
“I am. What can I do for you?”
“You are Atticus O’Sullivan?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded once. Someone had told her whom to ask for. I did not put my name on the window.
“I have heard that you can brew some extraordinary teas.”
“Well, yeah, I can make you some oolong with an antioxidant booster that’s simply awesome. Would you like a cup of that?”
“That does sound fabulous, but that’s not the sort of tea I’m talking about.”
“Oh. Then whatcha lookin’ for?”
“I need a tea that will… humble a man who is attracted to me. Make me unattractive to him.”
“What? Wait. You wish to be unattractive?”
“To this one particular man, yes. Can you brew such a tea?”
“You want a sort of anti-Viagra, if I’m hearing you right.”
“You have understood me perfectly.”
I shrugged. “It oughtta be possible.” She smiled. Her teeth were very white and straight, a toothpaste commercial waiting to happen. “But how did you hear about me?”
“I am one of Radomila’s coven,” she said, extending her hand to shake. “The youngest, actually. My name is Emilia, but I go by Emily in America.”
I relaxed a little bit: Radomila and I had a professional and cordial relationship. She was the leader of the Tempe Coven, thirteen witches who actually knew what the hell they were doing. They had a fancier name for themselves than that, but they didn’t advertise it. Radomila was pretty powerful, and I would rather not get on her bad side. Oh, one-on-one I’d probably be able to dispatch her, but then her entire coven would come after me together, and they would chew me up and tell the Morrigan to go suck on it, because they most likely had their own goddess in their corner.
“Why do you need me, Emily?” I asked, shaking her hand once and knowing she was trying to gauge my power through the contact. That didn’t work too well on Druids. We draw our power from the earth as needed, so she probably felt nothing more than the low-level power I was using to maintain Oberon’s camouflage. It had caused more than one foe to underestimate me, so that was fine by me. I’m not into peacock displays of power. “Isn’t Radomila capable of looking after her own coven anymore? For that matter, you could take care of this problem yourself. You don’t need me.”
“That is true,” she said. “But Radomila wants no part in the crafting of this particular potion. Neither do I. We require… outside assistance.”
“And so you came here? I’m just a friendly apothecary who knows that witches are for real.”
“I pray you do not fence with me. I know full well what you are, Druid.”
Well. That was putting the cards on the table. I took another look at her aura, which was largely red and
