“Oh my goddess, I am so, so sorry!” she stammered as he turned and fixed her with an irritated glare. Mostly norms couldn’t see a witch, unless of course, said witch threw hot coffee all over them. Her hand waved ineffectually at the brown mess all down the front of his suit and dribbling down his leg. “You’re soaked… I am really sorry!”
“Good job it wasn’t the back,” Garlick muttered. “If he’d taken off his jacket, it would’a looked like he’d sh—”
She trod on the cat’s tail to shut him up.
“You clumsy oaf!” Mr. Big City hissed, yanking a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at the stain. It resisted all attempts at cleanup. Instead, it merrily smeared itself around some more.
“Do you know how expensive this suit was?” he demanded, his handkerchief sopping wet now.
“It’s rags now. I wouldn’t give two hairballs for it.”
She ignored the cat in favor of offering a very apologetic smile. She was clumsy. She knew that. She always had been. When her sisters, all lithe and graceful compared to her short, dumpy form, had been the apple of the teacher’s eye at ballet, she’d barely mastered the basic movements. Anything more complicated and let’s just say… Swan lake had more drowning victims than a tsunami. She’d been banned from the end-of-year show. And every show. Ever.
“No.” She winced, biting her lip. “I’m sorry. It looks very expensive.”
Casting a quick look around, she wriggled her fingers unobtrusively and muttered quickly under her breath.
“Maiden, mother and crone, hear my plea,
Cleanse and clean, I think you’ll agree,
Is best to bring this suit back to its former glory,
And bring an end to this sorry story.”
White sparkles, the color of her magic, flew from the ends of her fingers and wrapped around the commuter, still dabbing at himself in irritation.
“This will need proper cleaning, and I don’t have time to go home. I have a big meeting at eleven and I’m going to need to order out for a new suit because of this…”
He blinked as the stain on his jacket grew smaller with each swipe of the now-clean handkerchief before disappearing altogether. “Oh… perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all.”
“See? You can barely see it.” She smiled. Norms rarely saw what was right in front of their noses, especially if it didn’t fit with their rigid view of the world.
Daffi waved her hand again.
“Maiden, mother and crone, aid me here,
his memory of coffee and me clear,
And set him on his merry way,
No thoughts to let him stray…”
“I could have sworn…” He looked confused and then glanced down at his watch. “Shit. Gonna be late.”
He turned and disappeared into the crowds, pushing his way toward the train just arriving without a backward glance. It was a norm one, and the crowds on the platform surged forward as all the suited and booted office-y peeps tried to get on at once. Now clean of coffee, Mr. Big City collided with another suit as they both tried to get through the gap at the same time.
Garlick hopped up onto her shoulder. “I wonder if they’re like walruses… they should drop it like it’s hot and fight for dominance right there.”
“You’re bloodthirsty,” she told him. “It’s a very distressing quality in a kitchen witch’s familiar, you know.”
“Pfft,” Garlick blew a raspberry in her ear.
His breath stank of tuna, the closest he deigned to come to sourcing his own food, with a vague odor of something that could have been brimstone. It could also have been something unmentionable out of next door’s bin. It was best not to know the answer to some questions.
“I keep telling you… you’re not a kitchen witch. Why would I, the great Lord Mephistopheles, shackle myself to a mere kitchen witch?”
She shrugged, ignoring the fact he’d pronounced the word kitchen in the same tones as one would “cockroach.” Mr. Big City had won the confrontation and boarded the train before the other suited norm. Perhaps there really was a pecking order between them?
“I don’t know, your lordship…” she murmured, looking up.
Above the milling crowds and the illuminated boards the norms used to signal when the next train was due sat a wrought-iron balcony. Crouched on it, his knees up by his ears and the top of his smart uniform hat almost scraping the ceiling, was the biggest gargoyle she’d ever seen. He saw her looking and acknowledged her with a nod, writing something on the tiny clipboard in his gargantuan hands.
She sighed in relief and watched the board beneath his clawed feet. It was the old-fashioned kind like the sort used to mark sports scores in days gone past, each number flipping over the last. It marked the time until the next train was due in. Currently it read zero zero point three zero.
Thirty seconds…
Almost before she’d finished the thought, the train rolled into the station.
“Excellent,” Garlick muttered in her ear. “Early. We might just make it before Whippy’s rounds.”
She nodded as the train pulled to a stop. Unlike the norms’ train in its modern metal and plastic glory, the trains of the Paranormal Transportation Company were straight out of the last century. Gleaming brass and painted metal, it chuffed into the station with all the noise and ambience of a steam train… but with no smoke to choke everyone on the platform half to death.
“This is us,” she trilled, checking her watch. They might just make it to the museum on time… or at least before Ms. Whipsnide started her rounds.
She pushed her way through the unmoving crowd of norms still filling the platform. None of them could see the ghost train, standing staring into space or looking at the tiny little screens on their phones. Several muttered in annoyance as Daffi passed by, her magic interfering with their devices. It was the reason most witches didn’t carry phones. The magic-blocking spells that enabled them to work were generally cheap and crap, either not working at all or working so
