Читать книгу This Strange Witchery - Michele Hauf - Страница 14

“Carrots, celery and an onion.” Melissande set the vegetables on the counter before the cutting board and handed Tor a knife. “When you’re finished, I’ll get the mirepoix simmering for soup. Meanwhile, I’m going to the spell room with Bruce to put that cloaking spell on the heart.”

“Please do.” Tor grabbed a carrot. “Peeler?”

“Nope, I leave the skin on. It’s better for you. Nutrients and all that.”

He gave an indecisive tilt of the head at that statement. “What is it that you do, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“Earlier, when I said you should go about doing what you do. I—Do you have a job? Will I be guarding you while at work? Or are you just...a witch?”

“Oh, I work! I mean, most of the time. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, like you. I worked at Shakespeare and Company for a few months. Then I got a gig at the ice-cream shop around the corner. I loved that place. They didn’t love me giving out free samples. Oh, and just last month I was taking tickets at the d’Orsay, but the manager fired me for letting in tourists on expired city passes. I’m sort of between jobs right now. Which is a good thing. I’ll be focusing my attention on perfecting the spell this week and making sure I’ve got it ready to go. Which means we’ll be spending a lot of time together! Come on, Bruce!”

The witch scurried out of the kitchen on a sweep of fluttering black hair. Tor paused before touching the knife to the first carrot.

Bruce floated through the kitchen, passing eye level with Tor. The frog delivered a judgmental croak. Then he floated out. Or levitated. But wait—wasn’t levitation more a nontraveling action? It was floating that moved a person—or frog—from one place to the next. Levitation merely moved an entity up and down. Maybe? He wouldn’t argue with the witch about it. She was just weird enough to have a completely rational explanation for it.

And he was just curious enough about her to want to engage in such a chat.

“Right, then.”

They’d be spending a lot of time together. Tor wasn’t sure how he felt about that. While she was definitely pretty to look at, and wasn’t at all a threat to him, he wasn’t sure her wackiness could be endured for more than short bursts at a time. He did value his privacy and alone time. He had his...ways. And he didn’t like when they were disturbed. Like finding his silk tie hanging about her neck. Even if she had been the cutest thing ever—

Well, she had been.

Tor remembered the time he’d had to protect a celebrity singer from the vampire she’d attracted by mistakenly answering a text she had thought was a tease to drink her blood. That woman had clearly defined high-maintenance to Tor. He would never live down the trips to the beauty salon for seaweed wraps if anyone learned he’d had to accompany her there.

He should be thankful Mel was seemingly self-sufficient and didn’t seek the spotlight or have too many friends. He liked to keep what he did a secret. It was a necessity.

He turned back to the task. Chop vegetables? Not a problem. He eyed the length of carrot, took a moment to calculate his slices, then began. She hadn’t told him how many carrots to chop. There were at least ten in the bag. And as much celery.

As he chopped, he decided this activity was a weirdly soothing task that occupied his brain in a way that allowed him to focus. So often, he had a dozen things going on at once in his temporal lobe. Where was the dangerous creature? How many? Was he surrounded? Where were the escape routes? Had he loaded enough ammunition? What chemical was required to clean up sticky, tar-like demon blood? And would he get a call for the second interview?

He felt the Skype interview this morning had gone well. And hoped to hear back within a few days for another in-person interview. He’d doctored his résumé as best he could, leaving out the parts where he did spin for a group that slayed vampires and, in turn, spinning his skills to show that he worked with the local news outlets and reported on current events that could impact the residents. Spin was making the unordinary sound ordinary. Vampires? Get real! It’s just a bunch of satanic idiots.

And while the accounting firm employed number crunchers, someone in the human resources department didn’t require such skills. So he was safe there. And he could make nice with humans and paranormals alike. Changing a man’s mind after he’d witnessed a werewolf tromping through his gardenias in the backyard? Not a problem. Did he know that gardenias gave off an intoxicating scent that was actually studied and determined could alter a person’s thoughts and give them illusions? No? Well, it was true.

Fake science worked every time.

Tor took pride in what he did. Every single thing he did. He pushed aside the growing pile of orange carrot cubes and eyed the bag of celery.

Everything.

Half an hour later, he set down the knife after a round of near-tears with the onions.

Mel bounded into the kitchen and set the container with the heart on the counter. When she eyed Tor’s work, her jaw dropped.

Behind her, Bruce floated over to levitate above her shoulder. The reptile croaked in the most judgmental enunciation Tor had ever heard.

“That’s a lot of vegetables,” Melissande declared at the sight of the piles that Tor had heaped onto the countertop on a piece of waxed paper. She noted the empty plastic bags that the carrots and celery had been in. “You chopped them all.”

“You didn’t say not to.”

“True. And...” She bent to study the meticulously chopped bits of orange, green and white. All remarkably uniform. “Did you use a ruler?”

“I have very good spatial awareness. I like things in order.”

“I guess you do, Monsieur OCD. It looks like a machine did this.”

“Thank you.”

Mel didn’t really care what she was going to do with a shit ton of veggies all chopped into perfect half-inch squares. This was too wonderful. The man was a marvelous freak. And she could fall in love with him right now if he wasn’t holding the cutting knife like he intended to defend himself against her.

“You trying to decide whether or not to stab me with that thing?” she asked carefully.

“Huh?” Tor noted the knife he held, blade facing outward and arm pulled back as if to stab. He quickly set it on the cutting board. “Sorry. Force of habit.”

“Right.” She pulled a big soup pan out of the cupboard, and with a swish of her fingers, she swept a third of the vegetables into the pot. “Thanks to you, I’ll have mirepoix for weeks! I should invite you over more often.”

“Always happy to help. What sort of soup are you making?”

“Whatever strikes my fancy. I’ll get the veggies simmering then toss in whatever is on hand. I’ve some gnocchi and chicken stock. Toss in some spices and spinach and there you go.”

The man straightened his tie, watching as she went about the motions of adding oil to the pot along with the veggies and a good helping of butter, because life wasn’t worth living without lots of butter. She and her family bought all their dairy products from a witch who lived an hour outside Paris. She milked her cows by hand and churned butter and made her own cheese. It was heavenly.

Meanwhile, she handed Tor a couple of plastic freezer bags. “Hold those open for me, will you?” He did so, and she again swept the chopped veggies into the containers with but a few magical gestures.

“Handy,” he said, sealing the lockable bags.

“It’s just...me,” she decided. “Kinetic magic. Never known any other way of life. We witches got it going on.”

“I’ll say. Makes normal look so...”

“Normal?” She leaned a hip against the stove. “How long have you been in the know with us paranormals?”

“Most of my life. Like you, I haven’t known much different. But I feel like it can be better away from all this...supernatural insanity. It’s hard to explain. It’s something I need to do.”

Unconvinced, Mel shrugged. “I’ll have you know I’m the normal one in my family.”

Tor’s eyebrow lifted in question.

“It’s all about perspective. Family full of dark witches? Then there’s little ole sparkly me.” She winked at him, knowing her purple glitter eye shadow caught the sunlight. “Do you know what it’s like to be the odd witch out?”

“I actually do. Which, again, is reason for me to want to pursue this job.”

“I suppose I can understand that. You need to see if the grass is greener. Trust me. It’s not.” She turned and stirred the pot. “Too bad for us paranormals. Not having you to have our backs.”

“Someone else will take up the reins.”

“How will that happen? How did you take up the reins?”

“Monsieur Jacques taught me after I moved to Paris. Well, uh...hmm...it’s not important.”

He hadn’t thought about passing along his knowledge to anyone? Mel felt sure he hadn’t thought through the whole idea of normal either. But who was she to overexplain something the man had to learn for himself?

“Did you get the heart cloaked?” Tor asked.

“Yep.”

He bent to study the container she’d set at the edge of the counter, cracking open the lid to peer inside. “It looks...like a real heart. Wasn’t it more glassy when you first showed it to me?”

“It was. And it’s not glowing as much either.” She seasoned the ingredients with pepper and her favorite smoked black sea salt. “But it doesn’t smell, so I think I’m okay.”

“That’s your determination of an efficacious cloaking?”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t it work for you?”

“Well—okay, I can agree with you on that one. Not like I know much about hearts left over from long-dead witches. What, exactly, is this spell you plan to invoke on the night of the full moon?”

“The full blood moon,” she said.

“Really? Ominous.”

“Right? There’s a lunar eclipse on the night of the full moon, which will make it appear reddish-orange. The blood moon portends the closing of struggles and new beginnings. Couldn’t be more perfect timing for such a spell, if you ask me.”

Placing the bamboo spoon across the top of the pot to keep the brew from boiling over, Mel turned her back to the stove to face Tor. The setting sun beamed through the front window in a cozy orange glow and backlit him in the most delicious manner. He looked less uptight this evening. More amiable. And she still wanted to run her fingers through his hair.

It was easy enough for her to reveal a few things to him. As a means to gaining his trust. Because he still wasn’t completely on board with her beyond this merely being a job she would pay him for.

“My mother needs protection,” she started, then cautioned herself from saying from a ghost. The man didn’t do ghosts? What did that mean, exactly? “And since she’s only recently died—again—my dad is busy getting her back up to speed with life, so I offered to do the spell and take that worry off his hands.”

Tor put up a palm to stop her. “So many questions.”

“You know my dad,” she offered. “Thoroughly Jones, dark witch, husband to a cat-shifting familiar.”

“Yes, and your mother is Star. And she’s recently died?”

“Fell from the top of my parents’ building. She was...” Couldn’t tell him Star had been spooked. “Doesn’t matter how it happened. Only that she didn’t land on her feet. That’s a myth about cats. Anyway. You know how it is with familiars?”

“I do. Mostly. I’m not sure about frogs.” He looked about the kitchen, but Bruce was nowhere in sight. “I do know that cat-shifters have nine lives. If they die, they come back to life the same age at which they died.”

“Exactly. But they never come back with memories of their former life.”

“Oh. That’s—I didn’t know that detail. Wow, that’s gotta be tough. For the familiar and for her family.”

“Tell me about it. In my lifetime, my mother has died four times. With each death, she forgets I’m her daughter. That she had two daughters, actually. She died after giving birth to me. Poor Dad had to take care of a newborn and a newly reborn wife who couldn’t remember him or that she’d had a baby. My sister’s birth was event free, thankfully. Mom made it through that one like a breeze.”

“You have a sister?”

“Had.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He splayed his hands before him. “Isn’t there a life history of some sort you could record to help get your mom up to speed?”

“Dad does keep a video journal for her. It helps a lot. But it’s never easy. Poor Mom.”