It was all so right and so wrong.
Her face fell and Zab stepped into the gap, the way he always did. “This is Bibbi. She’s new. Bibbi, this is Tippi.”
Bibbi smiled again, this one more hesitant. I got a hold of myself and reeled back on the Belinda that had just taken over my body.
“Hi, Bibbi. Nice to meet you.” I forced my upper lip into something that might resemble a smile as I scanned my table. She was using my baskets. She had my flower. That was my stuff. I’d taken it from other parts of the office fair and square. Why did she have my stuff? Couldn’t she go get her own?
“I liked your décor, so I left it. Hope you don’t mind.”
Her smile was still there, but her eyes kept slipping over to Zab, as if she were looking for reassurance I wasn’t going to kill her and then eat her.
Zab gave a subtle nod and patted the air, as if to reassure her. I tried to smile again. She took a step back.
“Let’s go get a cocoa,” Zab said, going to the coin box.
“Sure.” Just like old times, and yet not. This might’ve been the worst case of déjà vu ever.
He nodded at Bibbi one last time before we left. She waited until we were out the door before she sat back down at my table.
“I wasn’t trying to scare her. It was a lapse. You could’ve warned me.” I mean, I hadn’t been that scary, had I? Yes, I’d had some bloody thoughts, but they’d just been thoughts.
Zab wasn’t paying any attention to what I was saying as the street seemed to part for us.
“Is this what it’s always like now?” he asked, watching the sneering and nodding from the people passing by.
“Yeah. I barely notice it. So who is she?” I asked, dragging his attention back to the problem.
“Just someone Hawk hired her after you left.”
“To do what? Why is she in my spot? Why isn’t she at Belinda’s desk?” Belinda’s desk was much nicer. She could have it. She couldn’t have my table.
He cleared his throat. “Because he hasn’t replaced Belinda yet.”
I stopped walking. Zab walked another couple of steps before he stopped as well. When he turned, his face was scrunched up tighter than a tinfoil ball, his eyes squeezed shut, as if he were scared my expression alone might scorch the ground he stood on.
“He didn’t replace Belinda, whose job was more important, but he went out of his way to replace mine, a job that hadn’t existed before?” There was only one thing that said. Hawk had wanted to wipe my memory clean from the place. Bibbi was his palate cleanser after a bad meal. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me because apparently I’d left a horrible aftertaste. And now he was forcing my hand so I had nowhere else to stay but there? Why?
Zab opened one eye a sliver. “It turned out that your position was very useful.”
“Did you ask for someone because I’d made your job easier?” A glimmer of hope sprang to life in the midst of a pile of crap. If Zab had asked, it would’ve been because he missed me and was trying to find a replacement for his good buddy. Seriously, he needed someone to go get cocoa and chat with. Musso wasn’t a big talker, after all.
“Not really,” Zab said.
My glimmer had a sledgehammer hanging over it. “It’s a yes or no. You either asked or you didn’t.”
“Then no.”
Back to the foul aftertaste for me. “How fast did he hire her?”
He looked away.
“Zab, how fast?” I asked, crowding him.
“I don’t know. Time is different here than in Rest. I think a week there is actually seven days here.”
“A week is seven days. It’s the same. Now how fast did he replace me? Just spit it out.”
His shoulders went up, and it looked as if he would’ve tried to bury his head in them if he could. “I mean, maybe a day or two after you were gone, give or take a couple of hours?” He put his fingers to his temple, poised suspiciously close to his ears.
He didn’t have to worry. I wasn’t going to yell. I was beyond yelling. I had the quiet, boring kind of anger.
“Same day, huh? Didn’t even get a good night’s sleep, did he?”
“I know it looks bad, but—”
“I don’t want to hear about how he wasn’t the same after I left, because he didn’t skip a beat.”
I really was the Nowhere witch and Hawk was keeping me here because he needed me alive. That was the beginning and end of it all.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. I have bigger issues.” The immigration list, the wall breaking, and that was only the beginning of it. Forget someone taking over my table. I might not even be allowed in Xest at all soon.
“As to that, can you come by my place tonight? The sooner we get started, the better.”
“I’ll be there with cocoa in hand.” The less time I spent at the broker building, and around Hawk, the better.
15
As promised, I had a cocoa for each of us as I walked into Zab’s place.
“Good, you’re here,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to do in a small amount of time.”
“What’s that?” In the center of his apartment, on the top of his wood stove, was a black pot that looked like it might’ve come out of some fairytale, and then been reused for another fifty fairytales before someone left it out in the rain to rust over.
“It’s a cauldron for brewing potions. It’s part of your curriculum I’ve been working out. We need to cover all the bases with what those old crones might ask.” He grabbed a book lying on the table, flipped it open, and slid it over to me.
One quarter cycle each:
Cauldron and potions
Amulets and tokens
Wards
Review and practice for final week leading up to appointment.
“They might test you on defense and offense. Since that’s not my strength, we might have to ask…”
I jerked my gaze to his, daring him to say Hawk’s name.
“…Oscar or someone else,” he finished, smartly changing his answer. “I’d do it, but I’m not good enough in combat to teach anyone. What you’ve done already on instinct way surpasses my abilities.”
He was right. I needed to be prepared in that area as best I could. Problem was, if I asked Oscar, he might tell Hawk. I’d already been down that road and hadn’t liked the terrain even on much sunnier days in our relationship.
But there was another very solid option.
“I think I can handle that on my own,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’ve got something in mind.” I turned to the cauldron, trying to do a fast bait-and-switch with the conversation before he delved any further into plans he wouldn’t want to hear or agree with.
He took a rag and wiped out the cobwebs inside.
“Do people use these things much?”
“It’s a rarer field of practice. A lot of the old-timers like them, though, and they have their purposes.” He blew into it, trying to rid the thing of the last bits of dust and debris.
I backed up as some rust flakes headed for me.
“Why not just do a regular spell?” I wiped some gunk off my eyelashes.
“Spells are more of a broad magic. This is the stuff you go to when you need finesse and precision. Don’t mind its size. I never splurged on a bigger one. This is a hand-me-down, but it gets the job done.”
“It looks like a very nice cauldron. So what are we making?”
He put the cauldron on the wood stove, smiling at his achievement. I was just hoping we didn’t have to eat anything out of that thing.
“Do you cook stuff to eat in that?” I asked, figuring out an excuse for lunch if needed. I might be on a cocoa-only diet starting today.
“Definitely not.” There was a pause and a shrug before he added, “Well, mostly not. I might’ve used it for soup on the odd occasion, but that’s not what it’s meant for. Let’s say you want a guy to notice you but you don’t see him much. When you do, it’s in a crowded situation,
and maybe you don’t want people to know what you’re up to. That’s when you drag out the cauldron.”
He grabbed another book by the couch, brought it over, and flipped to one of the many dog-eared pages.
“I was going through this last night. There are basics that they might look for, but none of them will be easy to test. The love potion. The illness. The cure. The hate. Still, it’s better if you know them to be safe. There’s also another potion—it’s harder, but I’ve got a gut feeling they might throw something like this at you just to take advantage.”
“What is it?” I asked, trying to look at the page he’d marked.
“A time-reverse potion. It’s basically like the fountain of youth. It’s not easy, but I think we add it in anyway.”
“How much harder is it?”
“You’d need to be at minimum a high Middling and also have infinite magic, because it’s a real depleter.”
“Can I do that?”
“You’re kidding, right?” He pushed the book toward me.
“Not really. I know I’ve done some interesting things, but maybe I’m using up everything I have. What if I’m going to run out soon?”
“You and Hawk never talked about this?” Zab grabbed a nearby stool and sat.
I took the seat opposite him. “No.”
“That’s crazy. One of the most important discussions people have, and from a young age, is how much magic they have. It determines so much of their future. Didn’t you ask? How did you not want to know?”
“When I first got here, I was set on getting out. Then, for a while there, I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to know, because it seemed to increase the attention I was getting. By the time I was back in Salem, other than Rabbit, there was no one to ask. And even if she could shed some light on it, I wasn’t asking her. She’d just lost everything because she’d run out of magic. How could I bring it up with her?”
“Well, now that we’re talking about it, if you weren’t infinite, that wall you built would’ve wiped you out. That was an epic amount of magic to lay out. Even for a Maker, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d slept for a week after that one. The fact that you got out of bed the next day means you replenish fast. I don’t know enough about the upper magic workings, but I’d say you got dealt a good hand. If those hags want to get you out, they might go for something like this first, trying to weaken you.”
“Okay, so what do we do?”
He pointed to a trunk in the corner “We aren’t doing anything. You are going to go through that basket of supplies while following the instructions.”
I brought the book over to the trunk he’d pointed to and opened it up. There were all sorts of bottles and flasks, filled with powder, liquids, and goopy things. They all had faded labels that looked a hundred years old.
“Is this stuff still good?” I tried sneaking a discreet sniff of the contents.
“Yeah. The trunk was spelled to preserve it.” Zab’s breezy answer wasn’t a real trust builder.
I went through the list, finding the corresponding items, trying to not think of the names. Sometimes, though, when I was looking for frog guts, pigeon eyes, and tongue of a long-deceased liar, it was a bit tough to pretend this wasn’t what it was. It all came down to one thing: how bad did I want to stay in Xest? I’d gag, pause, and continue.
I assembled all of the items in the cauldron warming on the stove. “Now what?”
“Just stir. Whoever stirs the pot infuses their magic into the potion. That spoon acts as a conductor.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were bubbling up to a nice boil. The stuff smelled horrible, but my magic, for once, didn’t act up. Or I hadn’t thought it did. The stuff I’d made smelled like a rotting corpse.
“I’m not sure about this. It smells like an aging potion,” I said to Zab, who was flipping through some more potion books on the couch, dog-earing quite a few.
He got up and poked his head over the cauldron. “No, that’s right. I’ve smelled this before.”
“How are we going to test it? I don’t want to be any younger.”
He stared at the cauldron. “Neither do I. I’m not sure. Maybe we could give Musso some? He could handle getting a couple years knocked off.”
If he wasn’t offended by the offer, that would lead to other issues. “He’ll tell Hawk.”
“He might not have said anything, but I’m sure Hawk has heard about this already. He hears everything.”
There was a difference between Hawk hearing and reminding him. He hadn’t said anything yet, and I was going to try to keep it that way.
“I don’t want to tempt Hawk to get involved, and I feel like bringing this to the office in any way would.” In Salem, there would be a line out the door for a place offering youth. How much different could it be here? Certain things had to be universal.
“How many years will this take off someone and for how long?” I asked.
“Depends on the witch or wizard who made it. With your magic, it might take off decades. I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Once in a while it’s permanent, but that’s really rare. I’m not sure how strong you are, so it’s hard to say. Plus, they aren’t done a lot because they use up a lot of magic. That’s why there aren’t only twenty-year-olds in Xest. They’d deplete all their magic trying to stay young and then die early. You’d need to be an Infinite to keep it going.” He leaned over the cauldron again, taking a deep whiff. “Sure smells strong, though.”
I kept stirring, not sure if this stuff could burn. “So the stingier someone is with their magic, the less they have?”
He walked over to the trunk while he answered, “Sometimes. Other times they’re stingy because they don’t want people to know how much they have. It’s also considered bad form to throw magic about a lot. It’s like bragging.” He was rifling around in the bottles. “Ah. Here we go. You can use this to bottle it up until you find a tester.”
I glanced back at his trunk of old stuff. “Hey, do you happen to have a map of Xest in there? Or some book on the lay of the land? Just in case they ask me questions about the geography?”
“Sure.” He went to a shelf in the corner and handed me a rolled parchment. “You can keep it. I don’t need it.”
“Thanks.”
“You ready to call it quits for the night? You’re probably pretty tired after that.” He took another look at me. “Aren’t you?”
I wasn’t tired at all, but I did have some other things to handle. I faked a yawn.
“Definitely ready for bed.”
Two sweaters layered under a thick jacket and it was still freezing up here. But this was where I needed to be. There was one thing Hawk had been right about from the beginning, even if I hadn’t wanted to hear it. If I couldn’t figure out how to protect myself, I’d be a sitting duck, waiting to be plucked up or shot, targeted by anyone who wanted to use me or get me out of the way.
The map said Razor Hills was right past this bend. Hopefully my offering would be enough to keep Bautere from killing me before I had a chance to talk to it.
I crept along, trying to be as quiet as I could until I was close enough to call for it, holding out the offering. And if it didn’t want to be young again, or if it was already immortal, at least I’d be running downhill.
I hadn’t walked more than a few more paces when I could feel eyes on me. I slowly took the bottle out of my pocket, in case it was assessing me for a threat, and held it in the air as I turned.
“I’ve brought you an offering,” I said loudly, hoping I wasn’t yelling at squirrels and chipmunks.
There was a low growling noise as some branches and twigs snapped. The gossipers at the bar hadn’t explained what a Bautere was when they were gossiping at the bar. Was it too late to run? Maybe not. Was I going to run? The old Tippi would’ve. That probably meant I should stand my ground.
It went silent again, and I had a feeling that had been my first test. Or my only warning before I was a late dinner.
> I didn’t hear it approach. I hadn’t known it was so close until I made another full turn and it was there and I jumped back.
It was fifteen feet tall, standing on its hind legs, a strange cross of a polar bear and a man, with humanlike eyes and a blended body of both.
It growled low and deep as I clenched the bottle tighter, afraid it would slip in my sweat-slicked grasp.
“This is for you.” I knelt, reaching out as close as I dared to place the bottle in the snow.
He walked confidently toward it while I took a few steps back. He uncorked the lid and sniffed.
“A time-reverse potion,” he said, the words flowing through a muzzle that should’ve been made for growling and tearing flesh from bones. He sniffed it again. “It’s potent.” He lifted his muzzle in my direction, taking a deep breath. “It has your magical scent on it.”
I nodded.
He corked the flask again and then eyed me from my shoes to the tip of my hat. “What do you want?” he growled.
“I need to learn how to fight.” This definitely wasn’t a want, with the number of enemies I had and now the three hags on my tail. My life wants had been whittled down to necessity only. If it was something that could wait, it did.
His lip curled back. “I know who you are. You have others who can teach you. There are other options for you that might suit your human fragility better.”
I shook my head. “That’s the thing. I don’t want to be fragile. I can’t afford to be.”
If I wanted to survive, there was no room for softness, no matter the cost.
He dropped down onto all four paws, still a good six or seven feet tall, and circled me.
I stood still, letting him take my measure.
He walked back and stopped in front of me.
“No arguments, you do what I say.”
“Yes.”
“Then so be it.”
He growled and swung a paw in my direction. I slammed into the ground, and I knew Bautere had pulled his swing.
“Get up,” he said.
“We’re starting now?” I asked, wiping the snow from me.
The Nowhere Witch (Tales of Xest Book 2) Page 9
