Love Potion #9

by Claire Delacroix

  He’d learn.

  Eventually.

  What Mitch needed was a woman to tie a big bow around his heart and drag him around behind her for the rest of his life. A woman like Lilith. That would keep him busy! And give him a much more appropriate focus for all that protectiveness.

  Hmm. She’d have to think of a way to get those two together somehow.

  Andrea’s smile widened as she thought about someone tying a bow around her own heart. Oh, she hoped the man of her dreams would be a really good dancer, as Lilith predicted. Three trips to the altar and she’d never yet married a man who could dance worth a hoot. Andrea dearly loved to dance.

  Especially waltzes.

  She would dream tonight of a Captain’s black tie dinner and dancing, dancing, swirling around an elegant room, locked in a perfectly eligible man’s arms. Andrea made a mental note to find a lovely swingy dress for that cruise.

  You had to dress for success, after all.

  * * *

  The calls of “bye bye” brought Lilith to her front window Monday morning. She peeked through the blinds, feeling a bit guilty for spying, but unable to miss witnessing Mitch saying goodbye to his kids. Little Jen gave him a big hug, that well-loved blue bunny right in the middle of the transaction.

  Lilith’s heart clenched and she bit her lip, those tears threatening to rise one more time. But she was never going to have children and she might as well get over it. Why on earth had it just started to bother her now?

  Maybe because her true love was back?

  Lilith wouldn’t have believed it, but Mitch looked even better dressed for work than he had on the weekend. His khaki chinos were pleated to perfection, his plaid short-sleeved shirt emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and his muscled forearms. Her heart twisted when he winked at Andrea and Lilith was certain he’d at least glance toward her house.

  She braced herself for that look.

  But Mitch just pivoted and walked toward Bloor Street and the subway. He didn’t even glance back. Lilith nibbled her lip and turned away, avoiding D’Artagnan’s perceptive glance.

  She had the very definite sense that it wasn’t a coincidence Mitch hadn’t looked her way. No, Lilith was knew that he was irked with her.

  But why?

  Lilith’s gaze landed on the tarot cards she used for her readings, but for the first time in a long time, they just wouldn’t do. Neither would the stack on her night table. Lilith impulsively raced upstairs, rummaged in her cedar chest and brought an ancient treasure to light.

  The tarot cards Dritta had given her. The tarot cards she had learned with. The tarot cards Lilith had not used since Sebastian drew The Fool.

  Since she left the Rom kumpania.

  They were heavy in Lilith’s hands, heavier than she remembered. Just holding them prompted a wealth of memories, she imagined the deck smelled faintly of patchouli. She cradled them in her hands, for they were frail after so many years, even with Lilith’s careful storage. She carried them down to the living room and eased them from the protective cocoon of silk.

  It had been so long since she had even revealed them to the light. Lilith held her breath as she unwound the last layer of silk, half expecting that the cards would have disintegrated.

  But they hadn’t, they were still whole, even though their edges were frayed and feathered. They were so thick! The colors of the paintings had faded, she supposed it was tempura paint or something equally perishable that had been used all those years ago.

  The images made her smile in recollection. Lilith went slowly through the cards, Dritta’s voice echoing in her ears with the sight of each one. When she reached The Fool, she paused, her fingertips easing over the painting, then lingering on the zero above his head.

  The first card. The null. Nothing on its own, The Fool increases everything it joins tenfold. A magical number, a mystical number, a card to be reckoned with.

  A card of journeys, follies, adventures.

  Lilith suddenly remembered an assertion Dritta had once made when they sat together late one night, a claim the other woman had never repeated. Lilith had never been able to coax Dritta to acknowledge again that she had even made the claim, let alone repeat it.

  But she had and Lilith remembered. Dritta had said that the high cards - those twenty-one numbered individually - marked the path of a journey or a transformation, a coming to wisdom.

  Lilith shuffled through the old deck with shaking fingers, unable to deny her sudden sense that she had remembered something very important.

  Sebastian had drawn The Fool, the zero card.

  On Saturday, Lilith had drawn The Magician, the one card.

  After Mitch left Saturday night, The High Priestess had separated herself from the deck. Her number was two.

  Yesterday, Lilith had drawn the Empress, number three.

  She spread the four cards out on the table and looked at them carefully. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they had been coming to her in order. Just to test her belief that there was no such thing as coincidence, Lilith drew another card randomly from the deck.

  It was The Emperor. Fifth card in the sequence, carrying the number four.

  Lilith’s heart skipped a beat and she was instantly reassured at the state of matters between herself and Mitch. The Emperor, signified an audience with authority, with the man in charge, with a charismatic and decisive man. A man who valued logic and tangible evidence, a man who could be relied upon to do what is right.

  Lilith had a pretty good idea who that man was.

  Mitch was coming to see her.

  But when?

  Lilith had a sense that the cards were telling her something, just as they did in every consultation. She studied the five cards more carefully, the horizontal figure eight hanging in the air over The Magician’s head reminding her of something Dritta had done that night. She had lain out the court cards in a strange way, a way that represented the journey upon which they were guideposts.

  Lilith quickly separated the rest of the court cards from her old deck and laid them out in her best recollection of how they should be. A few adjustments, some lip nibbling and concentration, and she was certain she had it right.

  Immediately in front of herself, Lilith had laid The Fool, followed to his left by the next ten cards. They made a circle - or the left half of the sideways eight - each card facing outwards, their toes into the circle. Closing the circle was the eleventh card, number 10, The Wheel of Fortune, at what could be called three o’clock.

  From there, Lilith had echoed the composition to the right, making the right half of the figure eight with the remaining cards. These ones, though, she had faced inwards, with their heads into the circle and their toes out. The twenty-second card - The World, number twenty-one - lay on top of The Wheel of Fortune.

  The result was a figure eight turned sideways.

  The symbol of infinity.

  Lilith traced the curve with one fingertip, beginning with the Fool and ending with The World. Then she did it again. Dritta had talked that night about the endless cycle of reincarnation, the cycle of renewal and transformation. The path of the lower cards she had called sunwise, outward, male; the path of the higher cards being moonwise, inward, female.

  Lilith understood instinctively that Sebastian had been reborn as Mitch, that he was on this journey, and somewhere, somehow, the course of his travels would mesh with Lilith’s. She supposed the cards were already telling her that it had.

  The Fool was the beginning of it all, the new threshold that Sebastian had crossed, Lilith supposed the one that she had crossed when she was declared mahrime.

  The Magician defined the moment she had chosen herself to have some influence on events, the moment Lilith had decided to act and create a spell. Perhaps it also represented the moment Mitch had chosen to buy his house, to make a home out of a neglected property, to conjure gold from dross.

  The High Priestess whispered of intuition. It had been she who told Lilith to have
faith in her conviction that Mitch was truly Sebastian, even if he didn’t remember. And maybe she had given Mitch a similar message, for he had been charming to Lilith when they next met.

  Of course, his dog had trashed her garden in the interim.

  Lilith ran her fingertips across The Empress card. Productivity was her realm, not just in terms of work but in terms of the earth itself. The Empress knew of gardens, of fruit and harvest. Lilith’s smile faded. And The Empress advised on parenting. Hadn’t yesterday shown what a protective parent Mitch was?

  And reminded Lilith of the parent she would never be?

  Lilith forced herself to consider the next card in their mutual adventure. A decisive man demanding an audience, that was The Emperor, which no doubt hinted at what Mitch would do sometime soon. But The Emperor was also concerned with the balance of power, with domination and submission, with defining who was in charge.

  Lilith sat back and chewed her lip thoughtfully, unable to dismiss her sense that she didn’t like the import of that.

  Eventually, Lilith turned the successive cards face down, leaving only those up to The Emperor face up. With one last glance over them, she left the cards where they lay and went to make herself a pot of chamomile tea to help her ponder Mitch’s next move.

  * * *

  The newsroom was a familiar cacophony of sound and Mitch welcomed the evidence of organization after his muddled weekend.

  “Get moved all right?” Isabel demanded cheerfully. Their current interim, she was young and idealistic, too thin to be healthy to Mitch’s way of thinking and a whiz with both her camera and their antiquated filing system. Today she wore black, despite the heat, her lips a decidedly Gothic burgundy.

  “Pretty much,” Mitch admitted. He gave her clothing a significant glance. “You look like you’ve been hanging out with those Edwardian vampires on Queen West.”

  “New guy,” Isabel conceded. “So, what’s going on today?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Mitch noted that his boss was beckoning him into their morning meeting. He grabbed a coffee and decided to take a chance. “But maybe you could do me a favor in the interim.”

  “Anything for the star reporter.” Isabel grinned. “Might as well learn from the best.”

  Mitch took the compliment in stride, knowing an investigative reporter was only as good as his latest scoop. “Have a look through the files and see if you can find anything about cons done by fortune tellers. Maybe in teams. And whenever there’s a woman involved, try to get me a description.”

  Isabel whistled. “Sounds like a juicy lead. We gonna bust somebody?”

  Mitch shrugged, striving to look more casual than he felt about this. “You never know. You can only follow them up.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can get.”

  “Thanks.” Mitch nodded, then headed into the meeting, scalding his lip on the coffee. It wasn’t even worth it, the stuff tasted so bad. All the same, he felt a grim satisfaction with both his idea and Isabel’s agreement to help.

  Because cons weren’t the only ones who could retrieve information and use it to their own advantage. A harmless wacko next door was one thing – but a scam being run on his stepmother by that neighbor was quite another. Mitch was markedly less well disposed to his beguiling neighbor. By the end of the day, he was certain he’d have the goods on Lilith Romano.

  Or whoever she really was.

  * * *

  By Monday afternoon, Lilith knew she had a serious problem.

  She hadn’t thought much of it when a trio of cable repairmen came to her door that morning, insisting that they had to have access to her yard to fix the main line. She didn’t have cable herself, but she knew the line ran across the end of the backyard, along with the telephone wires.

  It had been a bit strange that the trio had lingered on the porch grinning goofily at her, especially after she told them where the gate was.

  Even after she shut the door, they still stood there.

  And when they turned up in the backyard, they seemed to spend a lot more time looking for her than fixing the cable line. One waved so hard when he glimpsed her in the kitchen that he nearly fell off his ladder.

  Lilith decided they had just been compelled to sit through a seminar on improving customer relations or some nonsense and didn’t think too much more about it.

  Monday lunch brought the paperboy, whom Lilith hadn’t even known still came to collect personally. And she didn’t even have the paper delivered – she bought it at the corner every day. An earnest twelve-year-old, he stood in her foyer and gaped at her like a fish out of water.

  It was more than a bit uncomfortable, especially as the boy stammered and flushed and couldn’t manage to tell her why he was there.

  Then he comped her for a month of newspapers, blushed scarlet, and ran.

  Lilith watched him go in puzzlement. She checked her blouse and her skirt but found nothing odd about what she was wearing. Everything was done up as it should be, the foyer was orderly and there was no obvious indication of what could have made the boy respond that way.

  Maybe it was something in the wind. Or the stars. Lilith checked her charts, but there was nothing adverse there.

  She might have forgotten it all, if cranky Mr. Lewison next door hadn’t gone out of his way to be friendly when she was leaving to run errands. He even gave Lilith a bloom from his prize Austen rose, the one he guarded jealously from the most fleeting glance of admiration. He bowed, before her astonished eyes, and surrendered the rose with a romantic flourish.

  “Beauty to beauty,” he declared gallantly.

  Lilith put the rose in water and wondered if Mr. Lewison had gone back to drinking gin for breakfast again.

  The boy at the grocery store insisted on carrying her box of acquisitions all the way to the house, flatly refusing a tip. He just grinned and said carrying her groceries was enough of a bonus for him.

  Lilith was starting to think that things were definitely odd by the time she rode her ancient bike down to the occult bookstore for her afternoon session of readings. A startling number of car accidents seemed to occur right behind her.

  She supposed the roads were getting really dangerous.

  But she had never noticed so many men idling around, apparently with nothing better to do than whistle appreciatively at women on bicycles.

  At least, not until she got to the bookstore. Oddly enough, there was a whole line of people waiting for her to read their cards. That was a bit disconcerting. Usually there were one or two anxious older women, or a few giggling teenage girls, but Lilith had never been confronted by fifty men who looked like they probably had real jobs.

  Fifty men with their tongues hanging out.

  She frowned and entered the bookstore, just as the first two started a shoving match as to who was actually at the front of the line. The argument quickly escalated into a fist fight, even though the proprietor – a reedy man of the gentle, daisies-in-guns variety – tried desperately to intervene.

  One last punch resolved the matter and the loser went down. As Lilith watched in astonishment, the victor clutched his bloody nose and lunged into the chair opposite Lilith, a very familiar gleam in his eye.

  “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” he murmured, a wolfish grin at his own cleverness curving over his lips. “Maybe you and me could, like, make a love connection.”

  And Lilith suddenly understood. These men were all in lust.

  For her.

  And it was all because of her spell.

  She sat back in her chair and regarded the line of agitated men with dawning horror, the lines she had chanted trailing through her mind.

  “Lover true, come to me,

  Through the air or across the sea;

  Once we loved through the night with style –

  Come back NOW! I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Oops.

  Lilith checked the state of all the pants she could see and swallowed hard. Oops, oops, oops. She had
concocted a love potion, drunk it, and flat out forgotten to make it specific to Mitch.

  These men: the paperboy, the cable guys, the grocery clerk, they all hoped to seduce her. They were all expecting her to make it worth their while.

  They didn’t even know why they were attracted to her – they were just like dogs following a bitch in heat.

  And Lilith had done this to herself. Just like the song said.

  She really had made Love Potion Number Nine was apparently irresistible to the male gender as a result.

  Yet the one man at whom the spell was supposed to be targeted seemed to be immune. Didn’t that just figure? It was too bad, because Lilith could have used a staunch defender of her honor. She wasn’t entirely sure she could escape this bookstore unscathed otherwise.

  It was doubly annoying to realize that defending a woman’s honor was probably something Mitch Davison did quite well.

  * * *

  Mitch wasn’t in the best mood of his life. There seemed to be a lot of that going around. No doubt about it – when the facts didn’t come up the way he expected them to, the journalist in Mitch got cranky.

  He climbed out of the subway station to the street and swung his briefcase into his other hand. Sweat trickled down his back as he trudged up his street.

  He noted ruefully that his house was readily identifiable. Not only was it the worst-maintained dump on the block, the fastidiously kept house directly past it made the contrast unavoidable.

  Lilith’s house. Mitch growled at the unwelcome reminder of the woman who was tormenting him. Not only had Isabel come up with a big fat zip on con teams in her foray through the files today, but they had discovered that Lilith Romano didn’t actually exist. Mitch had double-checked everything himself. But there it was.

  It was as though she had never been.

  Mitch smelled a story. But without anything in the files, he didn’t know where he’d find a lead.