He sat and waited for the litany of jokes and innuendos he was certain were coming.
Ted’s eyes widened with excitement. “Working up your nerve to…ask her out, you mean?” He was practically vibrating with energy.
Chris attempted not to cringe and only half-succeeded. “Let’s not get carried away. I’m going to start by sitting at the bar.”
Some men might have thought that was a joke, but Ted knew Chris well enough to understand it wasn’t. “Oh, it’s like that, huh? So, you haven’t even said ‘hi’ to her yet, I take it?” He drained his coffee.
“Yeah,” Chris grumbled, “that’d be a no. Come on, you know me.”
Ted glanced around to make sure no one with authority was watching him waste time, then he slipped into the cubicle and pulled over the secondary chair. He leaned his elbows on his knees and got a faraway look, trying to figure out how to begin his lecture.
“Okay,” Ted began finally as if discussing tactics during a football huddle. “It’s like this, my man. You have to go up to her and say ‘hi.’ That’s always the first step. That way, if nothing else, you’ll find out if she remembers you from college, right?”
“I guess.” Chris grimaced.
“What? What’s that look?”
“Okay, say she remembers me.” Chris put his cup on the desk and leaned in as well. “Does that do me any good?” Though some girls had on occasion thought he was cute, he knew he was not the type who easily and automatically drew women’s eyes to him. He wasn’t classically attractive, and Kera was. Blonde hair, the figure to go with a cheerleading scholarship, and the down-to-earth vibe of the classic Girl Next Door.
Even if she remembered Chris from college, there was what seemed like an insurmountable gap between that and her wanting to date him.
“You ever heard the term, ‘necessary but not sufficient?’” Ted asked. He sat up a little to throw his coffee cup into one of the trash bins at the end of the cubicle row. “Hole in ooooone.”
Chris resisted the urge to sink his head into his hands. Ted was the kind of person Kera might go for. Ted, with the breeding and the money and the athletic skill. In fact, he was pretty sure Kera had come from the east somewhere too.
“Chris.”
“No, I haven’t heard that term.”
“It describes preconditions for a certain outcome.”
“Is this going to be HR bullshit?”
“No, thank you very much,” Ted said with great dignity. “It is economics bullshit.”
“Oh, well, then. Carry on.” Chris waved a hand.
“So, here’s the thing.” Ted held out his hands as if he were about to illustrate a football play. “Sure, her remembering you isn’t going to be enough to make her end up as your wife.”
“Wife?”
Ted waved his hands. “Keep your voice down, and whatever. Girlfriend. So no, her remembering you—or getting to know you—isn’t sufficient, right? But it is necessary. In other words, you are never going to go out with her if you don’t at least say hello.”
He had a point. Chris didn’t like that.
“So, say hi,” Ted said finally. “Offer to buy her a drink. Better yet, buy a lot of drinks, tip well, and, er...” He waved his hand in a circle.
Chris stared at his friend. “You want me to get sloshed in front of her? Is that really your suggestion?”
Ted considered. “Mmm, I was thinking of how to loosen your inhibitions to talk to her, and I didn’t think of the potential downside of loosening up too much. I always forget you’re a lightweight.”
Chris waited for a moment, then started to pivot back to his report, only for Ted to grab the arm of the chair and spin him around again.
“Got it!” Ted was grinning. “How about this? The Mermaid isn’t far. You start going there once a week, and I’ll go with you. We can do this together.”
“You’d go drinking with me just to help me get up my nerve?” Chris raised an eyebrow. Ted had never given him any reason to question his friendship, but the whole thing bemused Chris. What was a blueblood on the C-suite track doing slumming it with one of the geeky IT guys?
“Come on.” Ted raised an eyebrow right back. “Like we aren’t hanging out every week anyway? And,” he added, drawing the word out, “you’d be buying. Consider it my consulting fee for aiding you.”
Chris rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
Ted ran his tongue around his mouth as he thought it over. “Yeah, probably,” he admitted.
“Thank you for your honesty,” Chris said gravely. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I accept your premise, however. I will never go on a date with this woman if I can’t say hi to her, and you might just badger me into doing it. At least your plan has a chance of working.”
“What was your plan previously?” Ted inquired.
“If you must know, I was hoping for a miracle.”
“A good Plan B.” Ted stood up and slapped him on the back. In a jovial tone, he replied, “We’ll keep that one in our back pocket. In the meantime, see you at five o’clock!”
“Right.” Chris spun back to his computer before realizing what Ted had said. “Wait, what? Five tonight?”
But Ted was already gone—and looking down, Chris saw that he had a coffee stain on his shirt.
“Crap,” he mumbled. If he was going to the Mermaid tonight, he was going to need to get a new shirt on the way to the bar.
Unlike Ted, he didn’t think there was much he could do to increase his chances with his former classmate, but he was pretty sure a coffee stain on his shirt would decrease them.
James greatly preferred being at the estate when he and Mother LeBlanc were the only two in residence. Cramming all the other thaumaturgists in at the table made things too crowded and complicated. Without them present, the chamber could breathe. The tapestries, dating back to the fourteenth century, stood out better.
Plus, he had the entire council chamber to himself as a study.
Currently, he had his computer set up there and was clicking the refresh button on his sales tracker with dogged determination. “Come on, come on, come on…oooh.” He perked up. “Maybe if I switch browsers?”
“Who are you—” The door behind him creaked open.
James turned around to look at Madam LeBlanc, who was peering around the empty council room. “Just talking to myself.”
“Yes, I see that.” She came over to the table, her dress rustling. “What are you looking at?”
“Sales for the book.” He pointed at the sales dashboard, where a bar graph showed the prior days and the number of sales.
“Do they get sent to you each…” She paused, considering. “Year? Quarter?”
James grinned at her. “Keep going.”
She smiled back. “Each month?”
He savored the moment before saying, “Each hour.”
“Hour?” Her brown eyes widened. “You mean to tell me, you can learn how many people have purchased your book each hour of the day?”
“That’s the one.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head.
“I see.” She stood up straight again and wrapped her shawl more tightly around her. Though the house was toasty by James’s standards, she had never gotten used to upstate New York’s bitter winters and seemed able to feel the outside temperature even from inside the house.
James went back to opening a new browser. He logged in, checking his phone for the two-step verification—and stabbing each number in with annoyance—before leaping out of his chair with a whoop.
“Oh, yeah, baby! Oh, yeah! That’s right!”
Behind him, Madam LeBlanc cleared her throat.
“They tried to freeze the results,” James said, pivoting toward her with a giant smile on his face. “Their cookies tried to hang things up, didn’t they? But it didn’t work. I have multiple browsers, baby. I have the power!”
Her mouth twitched. “James.”
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“Yes?” He started dancing in place, grooving his hips.
“James, you remember when we spoke to the council, yes?”
“Uh-huh.” He began doing hip thrusts.
“And there was the business about how we would keep tabs on magic users, and how we would prioritize which we would get to first, and how we would handle things once we met them?”
“You got it, baby.”
“All that requires work,” Madam LeBlanc said mildly.
James only nodded as he transitioned into the twist.
“Work that we are presently not doing because you are focusing on your hourly sales reports.” She checked her watch. “In the middle of an hour.”
James slowly stopped dancing and stared at her. He cleared his throat.
“How much can the numbers change in an hour?” LeBlanc asked him.
“Well, it’s not really about that.”
“No?”
“See…” He sat down in his office chair and scratched his neck. “See, it’s like this.”
“Let me guess: you have a button that sometimes provides new numbers, therefore you must click it indefinitely.”
“That’s it! Yes!” He came out of his chair again. “High five.”
“James, get hold of yourself.” She gave him what would have been a withering glance if it weren’t for the humor dancing behind her eyes. “Would I be correct in assuming that you wish to show the other council members how successful your idea is?”
“That’s part of it,” James admitted.
LeBlanc smiled slightly. “In that case, I must remind you that Lady Mitchell is, to speak plainly, an idiot. You do not need to jump so quickly to secure her good opinion simply because she doubts you.” She reached into the pleated folds of her legendary garment and pulled out a curved wooden pipe, already lit and smoking. She took a puff, and the coals glowed orange while filling the space around her with aromatic fumes.
James sighed. She was right, of course, but the point rankled. He settled back into his chair and tried to look dignified. “For what it’s worth, I would also like to make this a bestseller.”
“For the money?” She raised an eyebrow and blew out a puff of smoke. “James, we have more money than we could ever possibly use.”
“No, not for the money. Because my background is in advertising and I want to win this thing.”
“Ah.” She smiled slightly; the smooth tobacco had relaxed her somewhat. “Well, as long as you’re clear on your motivations.”
“Exactly. I’m going to start taking out ads on the Amazon site soon. I’m trying to figure out all the intricacies of—”
“James, remember our true goal: more recruits.” She leaned over to put her hand on his, a rare gesture from her. “Enough of us to help if the world needs us.”
“Yes,” James agreed.
“Why don’t we get some lunch?” LeBlanc asked sensibly. “We can come back after to check the scrying map. James. James. Come along; you need to eat.”
“But…” James trailed after her, looking over his shoulder at the computer. “But…but the clicky button.”
Chapter Five
Little Tokyo was liberally dotted with restaurants, some on the ground floor of the many apartment buildings, others on corners or in strip malls.
The Mermaid, tucked away between two larger buildings, catered to a different crowd. It often didn’t open until 3PM and was filled with everyone from construction workers and bikers to the white-collar cubicle denizens who went elsewhere for lunch. Its menu reflected that, showcasing a mix between standard delicious bar fare and inventive cocktails whipped up by the various bartenders.
Kera pulled Zee into an alcove in the alley. Her bike wouldn’t be visible from the street, but she would be able to see it out of the back hall. There hadn’t been any thefts recently, but she was protective and liked to be able to peek at it over the course of her shift. Leaving it locked up in place, she trotted across the pavement and used her security code to let herself in through the Mermaid’s employee entrance.
Beyond the door lay a storage area where trash was staged before being taken out to the dumpster, as well as the usual assortment of fire extinguishers and supply boxes. It led into a narrow rear hall that forked toward both the staff’s break area and the kitchens and the bar proper.
Kera rounded a corner and almost bumped into Cevin, her manager. He was olive-skinned, with large, bony hands, and though he was tall, he perpetually stood in a stooped posture. He had a wide variety of shirts but only one blue tie.
Or possibly a bunch of identical ties. She wasn’t sure.
“Hi, Seven,” she greeted him with a cheeky smile. He had made a big deal when she was hired, of the fact that his name might be spelled with a C but it should be pronounced as if it were spelled with a K.
“Still on that, huh?” He shook his head, his mouth in a bunched-up squiggly line.
“Aww, you make such a fun face every time I do it.”
“Mmhmm. Well, how about this?” He paused at his office door and looked back at her. “I will give you one and only one reminder that I can schedule you for the entirety of every upcoming weekend.”
Kera clamped her mouth shut. “Okay, Cevin like Kevin-with-a-K, got it.” She gave him a hurried thumbs-up and pushed open the door to the break room with her hip. She had told her mother she was fine with being a barmaid, and she wasn’t lying.
But she liked having her weekends to herself.
Cevin stayed where he was but called after her, “What do you need weekends off for anyway? It’s not like you have a boyfriend or anything.”
“It’s personal,” Kera called back as she set the bag of the provisions from Mr. Kim’s store on the break room table. The door was swinging back and forth between them. “Besides, do I need a boyfriend to take time off work? And,” she added, warming to the theme, “aren’t businesses not supposed to pry into their employees’ personal lives? Don’t go all corporate-stalker on me. I work here to avoid problems like that.”
The supervisor snorted loudly and came to hold the door open. “How can it be stalking when you told me about it on your last shift?” He lifted one eyebrow. “I believe that was the same discussion where you said your mother was probably going to call you today because it was the two-month anniversary of your graduation from college. You were complaining that she would pester you about, and I quote, ‘all that motherly stuff—you know, job, boyfriend, apartment.’”
Kera looked over her shoulder with a multi-purpose glare that suggested he wasn’t supposed to remember these things and also that the call had been just as infuriating as expected. “She should know,” she said, holding up an index finger, “the old adage: ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
Cevin smiled and shook his head as he headed to his office. Kera went over to the row of lockers on one side of the room. She took off her leathers and folded them carefully, placed them at the bottom of her locker, and put her backpack on top of them.
She still had seven minutes until she was required to clock in. To pass the time, she pulled out her phone and opened her reader app.
“Right. Time to further smarten myself and get Mom off my case. Mostly the second one. New books…there it is. How to Be a Bad Ass Witch. Not what I had in mind when I searched for craft, har-har, but I might just get Mom to succumb to apoplexy if I tell her I’ve taken her suggestion and become a witch.”
She skimmed the table of contents, and her curiosity was piqued. She had expected her first sleepy perusal to be wrong, but the book did not appear to be about Wicca or any other witchcraft-oriented religion.
Without overly grand pronouncements or self-important talk about harmony and resonance, it seemed to be speaking entirely seriously about the practical applications of magic. It was, as far as Kera could tell, a twenty-first-century update on an old-fashioned grimoire.
One item in particular jumped out—a chapter beginning on page sixty-four enti
tled, “How to Erase Something You Can’t Stop Thinking About.”
“Well, well,” Kera murmured. According to this book, the key to inventing honest-to-gosh brain bleach was magic.
That, she admitted, made as much sense as any other solution she could think of. If nothing else, the book would be an excellent peek into historical ideas about magic and technology. Her mind had danced around the question of memory removal off and on for months, especially since she’d woken up today and remembered her mother’s birds and bees talk, but Kera hadn’t come up with an answer. She doubted that any ingestible formula could accomplish it. Maybe surgery.
But magic? That might be easier.
Not that she was seriously considering it. She snickered as she closed the app on her phone and got ready to clock in.
“Hey, Kera.”
“Hi.” Kera looked over her shoulder as Stephanie came in.
A few years older than Kera was, Stephanie was one of the longtime employees of the Mermaid. Whereas Kera tended to stay behind the bar, Stephanie primarily worked as a waitress.
Now, she smiled as she added her stuff to the break room table. “So, did your mom end up calling?”
“Ugh. Yes.” Kera stretched her arms, neck, and shoulders. “The whole shebang, with a disco remix. ‘You’re not doing enough with your life, sweetie, and please come home from that awful city now that you’re done with school.’ About what you’d expect.”
The other woman shook her head with an empathetic smile. “That’s too bad. I get it, but you know it’s only because she cares. My family’s lived in LA since forever, so I can’t speak to the ‘come home’ stuff, but I get the rest. Both my parents are always telling me, ‘Stephanie, you need to work in an office, one that’s open nine to five.’ As if that makes a difference in how good the pay is.”
Kera snickered. “Right, right. You’re not a successful, responsible adult if you wake up after the sun rises or are still at work after it sets. Makes perfect sense.” She checked her phone. “Shall we?”
How to be a Badass Witch Page 4