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I bypassed the apron to focus on the more important part. “You bake?”
“Very well. Would you like a madeleine?”
“When wouldn’t I want a madeleine?”
“Fair point,” he said, turning toward the kitchen.
I followed him through the house’s dining room and into the quaint kitchen, the smells of butter and lemon wafting through the air.
“They smell amazing.”
“They are.” Catcher wasn’t one for modesty. He donned a quilted mitt and pulled a narrow aluminum tray of shell-shaped cakes from the oven. They were beautifully puffed and golden and made my stomach rumble immediately. It didn’t care that I’d had breakfast; it recognized sugar and fat.
“These need to rest,” he said, putting the pan carefully on a wire rack to cool. “But there’s more over there.” He slid another tray into the oven, then pulled off the mitt, gestured to a plastic container half-full of the small cakes.
I grabbed one, bit in, and had a new kind of respect for Catcher. He took care of my grandfather, seemed to make Mallory happy, and had taught me how to wield a sword. And he could bake.
“Amazing,” I said, leaning against the counter as I savored the small cake—buttery and sweet with the tang of fresh lemon—bite by tiny bite. “What’s the occasion?”
The oven timer beeped, and he donned the mitt again, pulled out another tray, and made room on the cooling rack for a new batch of madeleines.
“I don’t need an occasion to bake, any more than you need an occasion to eat.”
“I’ll chalk that down as ‘I enjoy it.’ Where’s your intrepid blue-haired girlfriend? We’re supposed to go to the magic store.”
“Downstairs. She’s just finishing something up with the obelisk. Looking for source. Color of magic or some such. Frankly, it’s a bit more chemistry than I’m usually into.”
Since he’d just made madeleines—with carefully measured ingredients, if the digital scale on the counter was any indication—I found that ironic.
“I’ll see myself downstairs,” I said, and grabbed two more madeleines for good measure, tossing them between my fingers to keep from boiling myself.
I took the stairs to the basement and the meticulously organized workshop that had supplanted the cobweb-infested basement. The walls had been finished, the floors redone, the ingredients for charms or hexes or whatever she worked up down here in neat jars and baskets along shelved walls.
Mallory sat cross-legged on a white stool in front of the large white table that tonight held a stack of books and an array of ingredients in white ceramic pots, the obelisk in front of them.
Her hair was pulled into two side buns that made her look like Princess Leia had been dunked in Kool-Aid. She held a yogurt container in one hand and a spoon in the other, and she’d paired jeans with a T-shirt with HONORARY OMBUDDY across the front in block letters.
“Where did you get that?” I asked as she dug around the container for the remnants of vanilla with blueberries.
“The official Ombudsman gift shop, all rights reserved.”
I offered a (single) madeleine, which she happily accepted in exchange for the empty yogurt cup, which I tossed away. “Nobody told me about a gift shop. Or brought me a T-shirt. I want to be an honorary Ombuddy.”
“I think you probably are because, you know, genetics. Your grandfather hasn’t given you one yet?”
“No,” I said, jealousy prickling. “But the last time I saw him he did have other things on his mind.”
“Murder and whatnot?” she asked.
“In fairness, yeah. Mostly the murder. Little bit of the whatnot. You working on the obelisk?”
“I am,” she said with a frown, nibbling the cookie and using a hand to push off the tabletop, rotate on her stool. “And I am getting nowhere. Except that it’s a polyglot.”
“I’m sorry—the obelisk is a polyglot?”
She rotated again. “It speaks several languages.”
“I understand the word; I don’t understand the application.”
She grabbed the table’s edge with her fingertips, pulled herself to a stop. “So, when you magick something—as this bit of alabaster has been charmed—there are different ways you apply the magic. You can do it with words; you can do it with stuff; you can do it with feeling.”
“That will of the universe stuff?” That was how Catcher had first explained his and Mallory’s magic to me—that they were able to exert their wills on the universe. I’d learned later that was one of many approaches to the magical world, which were as varied and sundry as human religions.
Mallory nodded. “Precisely. And within each one of those ways, there are sub-ways. If you’re working up a spell, you can add the ingredients in a different order, say the words differently, mix it under a full moon, what have you. Those are basically languages.”
“And you can tell what language was used?”
“To some degree, yeah. Each step leaves a kind of”—she searched for a word—“fingerprint in the magic. You work a little reverse magic, you can try to read all those fingerprints.”
“That’s really awesome. It’s like magic forensics.”
“It is magic forensics,” Mallory said. “Just don’t tell Catcher that you said so. Too ‘newfangled’ for him. Although I am super good at it.”
“You could add it to your résumé. Along with SWOB.”
“SWOB!” she playfully chanted, throwing a fist in the air.
“So what are the fingerprints here?”
“Little bit of Speilwerk—that’s magic with Pennsylvania Dutch origins. Little bit of British herbalism. But the primary language is American, including the main ingredient.” She reached out, grabbed a bowl, and held it out to me. “Smell.”
I lifted a brow, looked down into the bowl, which held a fine gray-green powder. “Will it turn me into a newt?”
“Yes,” she flatly said. “Smell it anyway.”
I leaned toward the bowl, sniffed delicately. “It smells . . . green. Pungent. Herby. What is it?”
Mallory smiled, put the bowl back on the table. “Exactly. It’s filé powder—the ground leaves of the sassafras tree. It’s primarily used in gumbo or, in certain locations in the South, in certain herbal remedies and charms. Such as this little gal here.” She picked up the obelisk, put it down again.
