My eyes got so wide I was afraid they’d pop out of my head.
“You… you… Are you telling me that…” I couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t even think of them, the level of betrayal they represented was so huge, so mind-blowingly monumental.
She had looked in Grand-Mere’s spellbook. She had mentioned it twice, and somehow the first time didn’t stick. This blatant admission, though… The one thing I had made her promise to never do without my supervision. She’d almost been accused of committing a murder the last time she played with magic on her own. And now she was doing it on some massive scale.
The Jiggs were telling the truth.
“Just a peek,” she said. “It’s just like a cookbook, right? You just need to get things in the right proportion, make sure that they’re made correctly, and nobody can get hurt. Like I said, people like it. I’ve saved every penny I made from the cookies, too, because I knew you would find out. I kept records and everything, so you should be proud. Well… not every penny. I… Mimi, stop looking at me like that.”
“Lucy?” I said, still completely calm.
“Yes?” she said, her voice barely a squeak.
“Do not talk anymore.”
She opened her mouth to protest, looked me in the eye and became suddenly quite pale. Even her hair, which is usually bouncing around her head like it had a mind of its own, seemed to decide this was a very good time to become less noticeable. I walked up to her mixing bowl, which was still stirring round and round with a mechanical whir. I turned it off, since I didn’t want to get my nose mixed in with the rest of it, and sniffed the cookie dough.
It seemed like regular cookie dough with an extra hint of spice. Something I couldn’t place. I needed a more sensitive nose to do this bit of investigating. Without me having to say anything, Kashmir was up on the counter, two paws on the edge of the bowl, his little whiskers moving as his nose twitched, taking in every scent.
“Show me what you put in this,” I said.
“It’s just some…”
“What did I say about talking?” I said, loud, imperious. Lucy made a frightened, ‘eep’ sound, then cut herself off completely.
“This is—” Kashmir began, but I cut him off with a look.
It wasn’t possible for me to communicate with the cat just with my mind, but something did pass between us. I was going to see what perfidious ingredient my sister put in for myself, and I wanted to hear what the cat thought it was independently. That way I could find out if she was telling me the truth (and boy, a lie would compound the hurt and anger that already had me reeling). Plus, it would give me a chance to test out the nose that Kashmir was always bragging about. Two birds.
Lucy, looking like a kid who was about to give an oral report she hadn’t prepared for, tip-toed toward me and very tentatively held out a little bottle in her hands. Inside… it could have been any crushed herb. Heck, it could have come from the Jiggs own stash, the wall of witch herbs I had just seen and been nearly eaten by their dog in front of.
It was not, as I’d secretly hoped, ginger. Ginger is a reagent used in most witchings (that’s what we called ingredients in witch spells - reagents. I think it was so that we could sound all sciencey.) It is possible when combined with other things to be a potent accelerant for magic… but on its own, ginger had no magic properties. It was benign, often helpful. For an instant, I had hoped that what Lucy had gotten wrong was not the magic she’d used, but that magic had been used at all.
Alas, I could tell from a glance, from a sniff and, lastly, from the hand-label on the jar, that it was the joy of the mountain.
“Marjoram,” I said, grimacing.
“No, I use butter,” Lucy said, then she made another ‘eep’ as I glared at her, my face very, very serious.
“It is joy of the morning,” Kashmir said, “And it has been prepared correctly. Activated, I mean.”
“Oh boy,” I said. “What you’ve done, little Lucy, is used the primary ingredient for love potions in your cookies.”
She swallowed, and looked at me as if I were not speaking English.
“I give you permission for two sentences,” I said, feeling quite generous.
“But nobody’s fallen in love with me, that’s silly. Or with anybody, they just like the cookies. Oh, does that mean…” She trailed off as she came dangerously close to overstepping her allotted amount of noise.
I was about to tell her exactly what that meant when a little disaster struck. A fist suddenly came pounding on the back door, making all of us jump. Well, all of us humans. Kashmir just looked casually at the door like he was expecting it.
And because Lucy was a little Witch in training, she was under emotional strain. The spells set up in the Grand-Mere’s kitchen were readily accessibly by any of her grand-children with the right mindset. So when Lucy looked at the door she accidentally triggered the opening spell.
There, standing in the doorway, was the weirdo, tall, in a flapping black coat, his black hair cut close to his head, his bloodshot eyes staring. He glared at Lucy, at me, and then at the cookie dough. Then he shouted.
“The nights keep getting longer… and I need to eat!”
Chapter 16
Sometimes, things happen so quickly your mind and heart and everything can’t quite react to them in the right way. When a grown man wearing silly clothing rushes into your kitchen and grabs two handfuls of cookie dough, right out of a mixer, there’s no internal programming for that. Grandma never told you what to do when he shoves those handfuls right in his mouth, gobbling them with grotesque, even obscene fascination.
What is even more alarming, though, is when a second man, dressed almost exactly the same, with the same haircut and make-up, charges into the kitchen after the first, and thrusts his own fists into the cookie dough. One and Two, I’d thought when I saw them, realizing just at that moment what I’d meant.
One was the weirdo who’d been sitting in my tea shop yesterday, waiting for Lucy to deliver a package that I now understood contained his desired, beloved cookies. Two was the guy I’d seen just this morning and mistaken, however briefly, for One.
When Three arrived, I wasn’t shocked anymore, just confused. Three was the girl who’d nearly knocked my head off just minutes ago. Much slighter than the other two (so skinny she could have passed for a boy were it not for a certain delicacy in her face and the size of those little hands she was using as cookie dough scoops) she fit right between them at the mixing bowl.
I was at a serious loss for what to do. What was the etiquette? If these were regular marauders, I could lay some magic whammy on the three of them without hesitating or feeling the least bit bad. But they were addle-pated by the cookie - in love with the dough that Lucy had inadvertently (I hoped inadvertently, for all our sakes) spiked with a love potion that made their baked confection compulsion completely conditioned. I couldn’t blame them for an instant.
Kashmir, not a human and not at all shackled by ethics or etiquette, just shrieked with a God-awful caterwaul and swiped a mighty claw at the nearest weirdo, Two. His claws connected and drew immediate blood. I expected a shriek and for the black-clad fellow to draw back, maybe even whimper. But besides a low, guttural grunt, he hardly seemed to react.
Then, after a second, he pivoted in his spot, and pulled something out of his coat.
“Here, Kitty, I’ve got my own claws,” he said, in a terrible rendition of a movie tough guy’s craggy drawl. He must had been in his 20s, even 30s, but his natural voice was practically prepubescent, and his attempt at sounding tough was like a little kid dropping his voice into an adult depth.
What was less child-like was the pistol sized crossbow he had pulled out from beneath his coat, cocked back and loaded with a nasty looking dart. The other two weirdos looked on with heavy-lidded approval. Lucy screamed at the top of her lungs.
I pulled the same trick I’d done on other people who were in my kitchen doing things I didn’t want them to do: with a wh
ispered word and a sudden thrust of my will, I made the ground beneath their feet completely unconducive to just standing there.
The one with the crossbow shifted his weight, and then his feet were above his head. There was a sproing sound, something flew through the air, and my ceiling had a new decoration, something that looked like a pencil sticking out of it. When the first one went down, he pinwheeled him arms like a cartoon and managed to knock into both of his look-alikes, yanking them to the ground like it was a planned move.
It was impressive to see, and since I didn’t hear any bones crack, and everybody (after a bit of initial shock) was getting up, I wasn’t worried I’d killed anybody. Only I had to rush forward to grab Kashmir who was in a rage, and had leaped directly from the table on top of his would-be attacker. That caused a bit of screaming, but I got the cat off of him before he could cause too much damage.
Lucy, recovering from her shrieking session, had come forward, too, and bending over so as not to contact her feet with the part of the ground I’d made slippery, she grabbed the crossbow away from its wielder. That wasn’t hard, because he’d dropped it to put both of his hands on his newly cat-attacked face.
Once the initial surprise was gone and done with, they started talking again. All three of them, in various terrible movie-hero scratchy voices, telling us about the night getting longer, about how they would not rest against the forces of evil. The darkness was strong here, but they were stronger, each one of them informed me.
Using magic is a lot like any physical activity, and it is physical, exhausting your body just as much as it tired your mind. I was gaining a great bit of control over the expertly crafted spells that Grand-Mere had built into this kitchen, and decided to see just how good I could be, in a pinch.
“Lucy, with me, shove them toward the door.”
She opened her mouth to speak, remembered she didn’t have permission, and kept her lips sealed.
She followed me to the side of the still-squirming limbs and black jackets that faced away from the door. I ducked down, she went with me, and we both gave them a shove. In between them and the door, I made the ground as slick as I could.
Sure enough, that trio of unwanted extras from a horror movie set slid like hockey pucks, right across the floor, then pitched like a bouncer had thrown them out over the edge of the threshold. With a gesture, I twisted my hand and the door slammed shut and locked behind them.
I took a deep breath, then checked on Kashmir.
“All your fur in place?” I said.
“I will kill that human,” Kashmir said, with a little growl in the back of his throat. “I will kill that human and any human that looks remotely like him. Then I shall find their families, and…”
“Nope,” I said, looking at him with dead seriousness. “No killing humans. It’s against the familiar code, which I have just made up. Law one of familiars: No killing humans.”
“Without the tacit permission of my witch, understood,” he said, with a tiger’s smile.
“No killing humans. No exceptions, codicils, or other legal terms. Uh-uh. And you, young lady, I see sneaking towards a door. Stop. Come here, explain what just happened.”
“Uh… three people dressed like Slate The Nightwalker really, really like cookies. I thought that was pretty self evident.”
Her sentences contained words that all made sense on their own, but brought together in that particular combination seemed to me to be a mess of nonsense. I tried to go for the most difficult part first.
“Who the What What?”
“Slate the Nightwalker. The hero of just the best paranormal mystery romance TV show ever. I think it was a Japanese cartoon first, and then they adapted it for an on-line network and it’s like, OMG. Slate is the cutest, saddest, most…”
Lucy petered out as I looked at her like she had a screw loose, a not-full deck of cards, and was in search of missing marbles. Then I just shook my head, and looked at Kashmir again. His eyes were still on the door, but his ears had gone cross-eared - one pointed toward that same door, the other twitched over toward Lucy.
“What do you think all of this means?”
“Well… there’s a number of love potions, and the thing they all have in common is that they do not work just generally.”
Lucy and I looked at each other, then back at the cat.
“Explain,” I said.
“It has to be made for an individual thing. Now, that thing can be a person, an idea, a philosophy, but the potion needs to be imbued with this notion. When Grand-Mere would, on occasion, make her To Die For Biscuits, she would pinch in marjoram and subsume herself completely in the making of the cookie. It was her entire focus, her entire ritual, and if she was interrupted by, say, a familiar who hadn’t had the requisite amount of ear scratches that day, the entire batch would be thrown out and started again… and the poor cat would be locked in a cupboard for the duration.”
Kashmir sniffed, but I just shook my head. I still didn’t really know what it all meant.
Lucy, though, seemed the catch on more quickly. “Oh, okay. So, if I wanted to make a potion to make, say, Graham Vesely, he’s on the swim team, fall in love with me, I would get something of his and put it in the mix. But if I wanted him to fall in love with, uh, say… square dancing, I would get something related to that in there.”
“Square dancing?” I said. Lucy shrugged.
“Somewhat true, though a true witch can imbue the scented spices with feelings and thoughts, so the actual physical object, though more powerful, doesn’t need to be there.”
“Hmm,” I said. “So that’s why you couldn’t mass produce love potions. They wouldn’t be properly aimed, and so wouldn’t work.”
Kashmir yawned, smacked his lips, then curled around into a tight ball. Apparently, he wasn’t really in the mood to direct us step by step through what exactly happened here with Lucy’s little side-business. He’d told us what he thought we needed to know, and would let us puzzle the rest of it out for ourselves.
I bet he would have been more forthcoming if I’d let him scratch Mr. Crossbow a bit longer. But I’m a softy.
“Okay, so… you were making love potion cookies.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t doing them with anything in mind. Shouldn’t that make them just cookies? Tipso acto?”
“Ipso facto.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
I rubbed my chin, and looked around the room. So much had happened, and almost all of it confusing, that I needed to refocus to discover what, exactly, I was missing. Lucy was looking less and less horrified, which was bad - she’d done something very dangerous and I needed her chastened.
Heck, this might be the end of all of our magic instruction altogether, and she needed to understand that. It was so frustrating to me to see her just… not growing. In the way she used her magic, in the way she tried to do things. It wasn’t magic done right, especially when she was sneaking things into people’s food to change the way they thought.
But… what the heck had she actually done? I looked at her ingredients, including the marjoram. Nothing in there that was inherently magical or weird. Then I saw the tablet computer she’d dropped. The voices that were coming in through the kitchen that Kashmir had interpreted (or pretending to interpret) as summoned demons.
“Lucy, were you watching this stupid TV show while you were baking the cookies?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. That’s one of the ways I pass the time while baking.”
“Every single time you baked the cookies?” I said, my voice full on insinuation. Kashmir was still pretending to sleep, but he put one ear up in response to the tone of my voice.
“Well, yeah, you can rewatch them again and again and pick up nuances and… oh. Oh. OMG.”
“OMG Indeed,” I said.
“You mean the cookies were making people dress up like Slate the Nightwalker because I was watching him while baking?”
I nodded.
Lucy just shook
her head, then started laughing. She began laughing so hard she doubled over, rolled on the ground. This was not the attitude of supplication that I had needed. And she was beginning to make me laugh, too. Hard.
So hard I didn’t hear the front door open, I didn’t hear the kitchen door swing wide, and I was caught totally off guard when hands clamped around my face, and everything went black.
Chapter 17
When I woke up, it was not a gradual process of coming-to, nor was it a shock awake, like I’d had water thrown in my face. It was like someone had pushed the mute button on my senses, and then they pushed it again to bring me back into the world. I wish at the same time, they had turned on the lights, because it was completely dark as to where I was.
The first thing I could tell for sure was that I was seated, and that whatever I was seated on, I was tied to. My arms were bound to the arms of the chair, my legs to each other, and more rope went around my chest and held me steadily against the back of the chair. I supposed I could whip my hips out and scoot around like that, since they weren’t secured, but I couldn’t think of what good that would do except for maybe hurt my back.
So I fought all the panic that was squirming in me like a bad dinner, and I settled it down. I breathed, and tried to keep my heart from pounding. Since I couldn’t see, I just sat there and tried to pick up what details I could from the senses I had that worked.
I smelled the air. I was inside, but I felt like the outside was very close, like I was right next to an outside doorway, or in some very small sort of building. The scent of wet earth was very strong, and of growing things. Mustiness, too, like I was in a place that wasn’t used very often.
So, in a place. No sensation of movement so I wasn’t being driven anywhere. As far as kidnappings went, this one could have been worse. No parts of me seemed to be leaking, after all, and except for a bit of a crick in my neck, I didn’t have anything to complain about. Beyond the confinement, of course.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 13