tossed about with the desire for power. She might be older than a century after all. College students these days didn’t begin their sentences with “I pray you,” and they thought fencing was selling stolen car stereos.
“And I know what you are too, Emily of the Sisters of the Three Auroras.” Her mouth formed a tiny O of surprise at my use of her coven’s true name. “If you don’t want to humble this guy yourself, then I don’t want to either.”
“If you would agree to this thing, then Radomila and her coven would be in your debt,” Emily said.
I arched an eyebrow. “Are you authorized to commit Radomila to such a pledge?”
“I am,” she said, and pushed a note across the counter to me. It was in Radomila’s hand. And the splatter beneath it was Radomila’s blood-even dried, I could see the power in it. Oh, yes, she had authorization.
I snatched the note off the counter and pushed it down into my pocket. “Very well,” I said. “I will agree to make this tea against your coven’s pledge of future favor, provided that you personally agree to follow my instructions to the letter and pay my customary fees.”
She bristled a little bit, obviously expecting the note to take care of everything, but eventually she nodded curtly. “Agreed,” she said.
“Very well.” I smiled. “How long do you wish to remain unattractive to this man?”
“A week should suffice.”
“Then you will appear here tomorrow at this hour to drink a tea I will prepare for you and every day thereafter for a week. Failure to appear will void our contract with no monies refunded.”
“I understand and agree.”
“Tomorrow you will bring me a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars.”
Her eyes widened. “Outrageous!” she spat, and she had a point. I never charged more than two hundred dollars for my apothecary services. “That cannot be your customary fee!”
“If the Tempe Coven is unwilling to take care of your paramour’s libido on its own, which they could do far more simply than I, then I am owed danger pay,” I said.
“But not that much!” she fumed, all but admitting the danger was real.
I produced the note and offered it to her. “Then I bid you good day.”
Emily’s shoulders sagged. “You bargain well,” she said, her eyes downcast to my countertop. Her hands made no move to take back the note, but I kept it raised within her reach.
“You will bring me the cashier’s check tomorrow, then?” I asked.
“Aye,” she said, and with that I put the note back in my pocket.
“Then we will begin tomorrow.”
“Not now?”
“Until I have the check, no.”
“Then if I bring the check today, you will begin?”
“Aye, Emily, that is the contract I propose.”
“And once begun, you will not renege?”
It was an unusual request to put so bluntly, but not an unreasonable one. All contracts should allow the customer a reasonable expectation of completion. But it seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through to make one guy go limp for a week.
“You have my word, Emily, that once payment is received, I shall execute the contract as stated, so long as you appear daily at the same hour to drink my tea.”
She spat in her hand and extended it to me. “Contract offered?”
I stared at her hand and made no move to take it. If I spat in mine and shook her hand, then she would have some of my spittle to work with. Giving a witch your body fluids is akin to slicing off a choice cut of your buttocks and offering it to a werewolf. “Received,” I said, keeping my hands on the counter. “You may consider my word my bond.”
She smiled triumphantly, not in the least offended, and exited my shop without feigning interest in any of my wares, though she pointedly waved at Oberon behind the counter and said, “Bye, puppy,” just to show me she had seen through the camouflage. And I wondered, far too late, whether I had behaved wisely in agreeing to this business. Probably not. Witches had better ways of controlling their bodies than drinking a Druid’s brews, and if they were willing to put their entire coven in magical hock to me and pay me ten thousand ducats to boot to get rid of one horny guy, then I was probably dealing with an incubus or something similarly nasty.
The magic of attraction is little more than science these days. I would brew her a blend of herbs that would suppress her natural pheromones, which were currently exciting the fella, and then, with a bit of clever binding, cause her to emit the chemical signature of a skunk instead. Unless this guy was a closet skunkophile, she’d be looking at a wet noodle all night. On top of that, I was going to make sure she didn’t get excited either, throwing in some natural monoamine suppressants. I had made this sort of brew before: I sold it to sorority girls as Humili-Tea. They used it on their exes or their stalkers or sometimes to end a relationship when they had no good reason to do so.
Back when I first learned how to make a tea like this, I didn’t have names for all the chemical reactions caused by the herbs-the herblore was just as magical to me as my bindings were to a layperson. Science had taken away some of the mystery of the process but none of the utter coolness I felt knowing that I could whip up compounds the pharmaceutical industry could only dream of.
But I will not pretend I was helping Emily to feel cool. I figured to come out far ahead in the deal, because having a coven in your debt was serious mojo, and I could use plenty of that if the Morrigan’s casting were to come true.
Chapter 8
It actually turned out to be quite a busy morning, making my opening of the second register seem like genius. Perry never found time to mess with the Tarot display until much later, and I never got time to read the full article about the park ranger. But I figured Hal would fill me in once I got to Rula Bula.
Come on, Oberon. Lunchtime.
‹Burgers?› He lifted his head up hopefully.
Fish. And we’re going to be in a restaurant, so you need to behave and stay out of the way.
‹Same rules wherever we go. Behave and stay out of the way.›
I waved at Perry and told him I’d be back in an hour or so. “Mind the fortress, will you?”
He waved back. “No problem.”
I slipped out the door and opened it wide so Oberon could follow me, then unlocked my bike from the stand and hopped on.
No stopping to smell the trees and fire hydrants, I said. I can’t be calling back to an invisible dog every few minutes to hurry it up.
‹When do I get to have some fun?› he whined.
After I close up shop. You can play around at the widow’s house. You can chase her cats in camouflage and totally freak them out. Heh!
Oberon made chuffing noises, which was the canine equivalent of laughter. ‹Oh, now that sounds like a good time! I can sneak up on that calico one and bark right behind it. It’ll hit the ceiling.›
We chuckled about it together as we made our way up Mill Avenue, passing the bars and boutiques and the occasional gallery. Oberon told me about his plans to just put his paw down on the Persian’s tail and watch what happened.
Hal Hauk had already secured a table inside Rula Bula near the window, and he had ordered a pint of Smithwick’s for each of us. I was both pleased and disappointed by the gesture, for it meant I wouldn’t get to go to the bar myself and take a whiff of the barmaid.
That’s not as creepy as it sounds.
Granuaile, the redheaded siren behind Rula Bula’s bar, was not entirely human, but I still didn’t know what she was, and her scent was my only clue. She was a mystery to me, and a beautiful one at that. Long locks of curly red hair cascaded over her shoulders, which were always covered in a tight but otherwise chaste T-shirt. She did
