"Hey, Lindsey, I didn't expect to see you here," Cassandra said, checking the time on the wall clock as she entered.
"Tarot class ran late," her assistant shrugged. Noticing the men, her eyes got wide, and she broke into a huge smile.
"Don't you dare-" Cassandra warned under her breath as the guys entered behind her.
"Don't dare do what?" Merlin asked, loudly. It was too late.
"Nothing!" Cassandra said, turning, all smiles.
"I'll just get out of your way," Lindsey said, entirely too giggly for Cassandra's comfort. But she at least did them the favor of leaving, which might have been for her own sake rather than Cassandra's, though, since Cassandra's face probably communicated she was likely to murder her for being too obvious.
"Ah, it seems like your friend here is onto our chemistry," Merlin said, laughing boisterously.
Isaac turned bright red at this, then Nick buried his face into his hands for a moment before responding, "Shut up, Merlin. Cassandra, I apologize for-"
Cassandra blinked. "Look, y'all keep referencing things. And I don't miss your meaning. But Merlin, could we please solve one problem at a time?"
He sighed, putting a dramatic spin on it she was sure was intentional. "Of course, of course. We'll bring Rasputin back with the philosopher's stone, and then we'll discuss our future arrangements."
Cassandra was doing her best to take the weirdness in stride. The ghost had been surprising. Three attractive men showing up in her shop the morning after a love spell? A pleasant coincidence. Those attractive men continuing to refer to their life together in some future Cassandra couldn't quite place?
That, well... that was destroying her ability to focus on anything at all.
"Look, just go set up in the back," she told them, motioning toward the tables where they had tarot workshops during the day. She gathered the rest of the items from the list, mostly stones and herbs along with a few other odds and ends. She didn't pretend to understand why this combination of stuff was useful for them, but she trusted they knew what they were doing.
"Here," she said, trying to avoid addressing their bickering directly as she approached them at the table with a basket of the ingredients. "I believe this is everything?"
Isaac went over it all, checking it against the list. "Looks good to me," he said, giving her an awkward smile that made her want to kiss him.
She squashed the thought. Perhaps there would be time to explore those feelings later if what the men kept referencing was true. But for now? She needed to stay focused.
She brought her attention back to what the men were doing. Isaac had started a burner with a small cauldron burning on top. There was something to be said for modern technology, apparently. Meanwhile, Nick and Merlin were working together to read and interpret something in an old book, and Cassandra couldn't help but smile as they discussed it. It seemed Merlin had been honest in his reaction to learning which of the interpretations were correct, and much of what they were doing now was working through it to figure out what things meant given what the result was.
Honestly? It was attractive as heck. Not that she understood what their specific conclusions were, nor why it mattered, but she wasn't terribly concerned about it. She was surprised she’d been as helpful as she had been.
"Aha!" Merlin said suddenly. It occurred to her she wasn't sure why it was important that she tell them which one to pursue, and she filed the question away for later. Surely they could have attempted something via trial and error? Was it an ingredients issue? A time one?
What exactly were they up to?
Unfortunately, now was perhaps not the time. She wasn't sure she could pull their attention away from the impending discovery, regardless of her personal feelings on the matter, anyhow.
Besides, they were onto something, and even if she didn't understand the details, she was interested in knowing the results.
She sat next to Nick in one of the chairs—her favorite one. Supposedly they were all the same, but there was something different about this one that she couldn't quite explain, and she was beyond pleased they had done her the favor of leaving it open, even if she hadn't asked. Especially since she hadn't asked. She wondered whether this was another one of those things Merlin understood for reasons that couldn't quite be articulated.
Nick did his best to whisper what they were doing as they did it. The process made sense to her, even if the reason didn't yet. She thought she might be catching onto things and that was reassuring, at least to a point.
Merlin spoke in a language she didn't quite understand, but that reminded her of the witch language. She thought it might be an older version of it, perhaps, or a different dialect, if there was such a thing. Most witches learned about this in witch-college, if they went to it and took those classes. She looked at Nick with the question in her eyes, and he smiled.
"Old Witches' Language," he whispered. "I'm sure Merlin will teach it to you after we figure out the philosopher's stone."
There they were again with the allusions to what would happen after everything here was sorted.
She didn't respond.
Merlin said the last words to the incantation he was working through, and the pot simmered when he spoke.
"Is... is that it?" Cassandra asked, looking at the pot. She moved to get a closer look, and Nick extended one arm to stop her from advancing.
"Don't," he said. "We're not sure what it will... do."
"What was it supposed to do?" Cassandra asked.
"Well, it should have changed colors," Isaac said, staring at his notes.
"Great," Cassandra said. "So, I failed at this too."
Merlin held one hand out, motioning to her to be quiet. "Not so fast," he said. "If my calculations are correct, then adding this, should-"
As he spoke, he grabbed a piece of plant in front of him and dropped it in the mixture. It changed a bright orange, then a neon yellow, then exploded, interrupting him and splashing everyone.
Cassandra yelped as droplets of hot mixture hit her. Isaac and Nick glared at him.
"You should have warned her," Nick scolded. "Isaac and I are used to you. She's not."
"No, no, it's fine," Cassandra said, wiping the droplets off her skin and trying not to wince. She didn't want outrage on her behalf, not when it was at least somewhat her fault they had messed up so spectacularly. "But I have a question."
"Sure," Isaac said.
"What... what does it mean? If you didn't need me to be correct, why hunt me down in the first place?"
"Ah, there's more coming," Merlin said. "You'll get better with time. Plus, we had to account for the possibility that all of our guesses were incorrect. Which they were."
"So why not ask me what the correct one was? Why let me believe the one I chose would lead to the correct result?"
"Don't misunderstand," Merlin said, shaking his head. "The one you chose will lead to us finding the correct formula. Now that we've done this one and seen the result of it, I know precisely what we need to do next time to get it right. I don't suppose you'd be receptive to closing the shop for a few days so we can keep the formula safe while we work on it? I would be more than happy to compensate you for lost sales," he said.
"No, no need," Cassandra hurried to respond. "I don't... need the money from the shop. Family cash, you know how it goes I'm sure." She was babbling. She hated it. She couldn't get herself to stop. "It’s no big deal. I'll just write a sign up. Excuse me." She left the table, feeling heat on her cheeks that told her she was blushing, and tried her best to calm down.
For all the men kept talking about some ambiguous future, they seemed hesitant to acknowledge she was exceptionally awkward. Instead, they seemed to be operating under the belief that she was entertaining or, gods forbid, cute, and she wasn't sure if that was flattering or even more embarrassing.
She went to the office as they talked through various interpretations of what went wrong, coming to an agreement much more quickly than usual.
They wrote everything out on paper as they spoke, each one checking what they wrote multiple times to make sure there had been no errors. After she'd finally taped the sign to the shop door detailing they expected to be closed for a week, she returned.
Isaac, satisfied with their calculations, had taken on the practical step of discarding the failed mixture from the cauldron. He washed up the table and surrounding areas, then rinsed it out and wiped it out with a damp cloth. Cassandra wasn't sure what he'd done with the cauldron's contents, but somehow that didn't seem like the most important question facing them. Besides, Isaac seemed to be the most practically minded of the bunch, so it didn't seem super likely he would have done something too dangerous with it.
Then they began again. Cassandra took her same seat next to Nick, who, this time, seemed satisfied that she knew what was going on well enough to not need him to explain each move. She thought she was getting a handle on it as she watched them add things to the pot and Merlin say his incantation over it once more. This time, Cassandra thought she could almost make out some of his phrases.
The mixture changed from the muddy green color that would have been expected from the components to a bright white color. When it reached this hue, Merlin smiled in satisfaction and dropped a stone into the cauldron. To Cassandra, it looked like nothing more than a standard river stone, but she knew that there was more to it. That was the way of witches, after all.
After he dropped it in, he consulted their notes. "And it seems like this is where we leave it for the next twenty-four hours. I suggest an alchemist keeps watch on it at all times. I trust you wouldn't mind us going through your library to keep ourselves entertained?"
Cassandra blushed immediately, trying to find an excuse for why they shouldn't read her home library before realizing that Merlin was, in fact, gesturing at the store's bookshelves. "Oh, uh... Yeah, of course not, help yourselves."
Merlin laughed, a hearty chuckle that came from his stomach, then wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. "Something you want to tell us about your pleasure reading?"
Isaac rolled his eyes, and Nick smacked his arm. "Cut it out, dude. Be a gentleman."
But Cassandra, truthfully, was swooning. "You, uh, probably want one of the books from the top shelves," she said, watching Nick browse the mushy New Age section popular among teenagers.
As Isaac approached the shelves, however, he froze. She watched him stop moving, his face deep in thought, then turn and nearly run back to their notes.
"Is everything okay?" Nick asked him, his attention drawn from the shelves.
"It doesn't make sense," Isaac mumbled, then looked up at the others. "It doesn't make sense," he repeated louder.
"What doesn't make sense?" Nick put his hands on Isaac's shoulder, trying to break him out of whatever reverie he was in long enough to get some proper answers.
"Hang on," Isaac said, looking over the notes again. He pulled out a spare piece of paper, scribbled something on it while mumbling to himself, then flipped the old book they'd been working from open to a particular page and stared at it. "Yes. I'm right. The ink is different."
"What?" Nick went wide-eyed as Isaac said this, running to his side to stare at the page along with him. "You're right. It is."
Merlin had been contemplating something in a text he'd pulled from the top shelf, one Cassandra knew by sight was far more advanced than the cover made it look. It took a long few minutes before he pulled himself away from it, but when he noticed his companions were staring at the grimoire he'd been working from over, he joined them.
"What exactly is all the fuss about?" he asked.
"Someone changed the formula in here," Isaac said. "There's different ink on this page. They wrote over the old version... which was right."
"Is it possible someone just... made a mistake?" Cassandra asked. "Maybe they thought it was wrong and that they were fixing it?"
Nick shook his head. "Generally speaking, it would be possible," he said, measuring his words carefully. "That kind of thing happens from time to time. The trouble is that this... this is too much of a coincidence. The particular thing.... the particular way it was incorrect spells out a message."
Merlin tilted his head to consider what was before him on the page while Nick stared at it, aghast. He copied a series of letters and numbers onto a new piece of paper, once again not wanting to take what his companions were saying for granted, then treated it like a coded message and solved it.
When he finished, he burst into loud laughter.
"It's not funny," Nick said, glaring at him.
"Oh, come on," he argued, "It's hilarious. In three or four years we're all gonna look back on this over drinks and laugh about it."
Isaac had been trying to keep his mouth shut, but sighed. "It's a little funny," he said, reluctantly agreeing with Merlin.
"Hey, uh," Cassandra started, giving a small wave as she spoke to get them to listen to her without having to shout, "could someone please fill me in on what's happening?"
At this, Merlin's laughter became even louder, his entire body shaking as it thundered. This made Isaac laugh, too, and even Nick broke into a smile at the others' amusement.
"Here," Nick said, handing the sheet of paper Merlin had been working from to Cassandra.
She raised an eyebrow as she took it, then read down its length. Along the top were symbols and letters and numbers, and she followed Merlin's careful logic down the page until she read, clearly, three words:
TRICK OR TREAT
Chapter Seven
Cassandra stared down at the paper in her hands. She wasn't sure what this meant.
"Trick or treat? Like Halloween?"
Nick nodded. "Exactly like Halloween."
"I don't understand."
"It means-"
His explanation was interrupted by the lights in the store going out. Something like a wind swept through, blowing out the candles and taking the electricity with it. Everyone stopped talking, and for a moment the only light came from the windows that lead to outside and the only sound came from their breathing.
Then Cassandra blinked, and when her eyes opened, the lights were back, and another man stood before her.
"Rasputin, you scoundrel," Merlin said, laughing and walking toward him with one outstretched arm to embrace him. "You didn't have to fake your own death to get me to come visit you, you know. You could have just called instead."
Rasputin smiled, returning the hug. "But this was so much more fun! And look, it got you all to take the steps you needed to figure out the formula, so it wasn't all bad."
"We would have figured it out eventually no matter what," Nick said, a small smile on his face. He had given into being somewhat amused, finally.
"Ahh, but see, why take the hard route when you can take the intimidating but simpler one?" he clapped his hands together, then moved them back out in a motion to embrace Cassandra as he approached her. "Cassandra, my dear, I am entirely grateful to you for taking my plea and doing the love spell as I requested. I can't say how much that helped, but I assure you your work was invaluable."
She embraced him, but her face was all confusion as she pulled away and looked him over. "I don't understand," she said again. "You were dead. I saw you die. I talked to your ghost."
He shook his head and his finger. "An elaborate rouse," he said by way of explanation. "I cannot give you the specifics, nor do I find it wise to share why such measures were necessary. Everything will become clear with time. Or it won't."
"Is he usually like this?" she asked Nick.
Nick shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. This is the most straightforward he's been with me since I first met him years ago."
Isaac was taking everything in. He seemed to have his own understanding of the situation, and Cassandra watched him pensively as he appraised it.
"So let me get this straight," he said, speaking slowly, "you faked your own death to convince Cassandra to do a love spell and so we would come here seeking her
help to find the correct formula for the philosopher's stone faster... why?"
Merlin chuckled. Isaac ignored him, staring at Rasputin.
"Ah, see, when you found the correct formula didn't matter. You're all stubborn enough I knew I could trust you to find it eventually with or without my interference. You know those ancient languages and stuff aren't really my interest area." He waved his hand dismissively. "Or it wouldn't matter when you found the correct formula if no one's live if at stake. But if a person's dead? Well, then you'll hurry."
"I still don't get it," Cassandra said, staring.
"This was a gift. A Halloween gift from a friend. A good one, too, no?" he raised a glass—of what or where he got it, Cassandra wasn't sure—and continued, "I wanted my friends to fast forward to their happily ever after. The goal was not the philosopher's stone. The goal was introducing them to Cassandra here." He dipped his head toward her with a last smile.
"That's... actually pretty nice of you," Nick responded to this, his eyebrows raised, impressed. "Uh... thanks."
"Are you really suggesting I needed your help to meet a woman?" Merlin said, dropping his mouth in faux surprise and placing his hand over his chest as if offended. But even he couldn't hold his mock outrage, and his expression broke with a small bit of laughter.
Rasputin smiled in response. "I'm suggesting you are hesitant to introduce yourself when faced with the prospect of an actual happy ending," he said, more gently than Merlin was prepared for.
Merlin's face dropped, Rasputin's words finally breaking through his cheery exterior. "I-"
Rasputin held up a single hand to stop him. "There's nothing to be ashamed of, friend," he said, patting him on the back as he moved to Isaac. "And ah, my dear Isaac, I wish all the best for you."
Isaac bowed his head. "And I you," he said, "though I recognize we don't always see eye to eye, you have my respect."
"Joyously received, I assure you," Rasputin smiled in return then turned back to Cassandra. "I suspect I will come to know you more with time," he said, "but until then, please know I wish you all the absolute best. I trust the philosopher's stone will help you live long lives, and that finding each other now will help you have happy ones. And for you, in particular, I hope that gives you plenty of time to learn how powerful of a witch you truly are."
Wicked Souls: A Limited Edition Reverse Harem Romance Collection Page 215
