Nora reared up like a cobra at him. “Don’t youma’amme! I amhereto get myshit backand then I willleavewhen I amdone!”
“You are being disruptive and if you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the police.”
“Good! Have them arrest this bitch, too!” Nora pointed to Maddie. “Tell them to look through her bag and see if they find anythinginteresting.”
Maddie clutched her bag tighter. If cops searched her bag she wasdefinitelygoing to jail. She shrank into her chair and tried to seem more pitiful.
Craig mustered courage from somewhere and dared to put a restraining hand on Nora’s shoulder. “Hey, he asked you to—” His words cut off in a cry of pain as Nora grabbed his arm and twisted it back. She yanked her own keychain mace out of her pocket and sprayed him right in the eyes. He screamed and skittered away.
A few other people in the café took action. Someone grabbed milk and napkins from the self-service station and dashed to aid Craig. Two guys with shirts from the local college jumped up to get between Craig and Nora. A middle-aged woman approached Nora with her hands out defensively.
“Whatever this is,” the woman said, “you should take it outside.”
“Shut up!” Nora snapped. “No one asked!” She brandished her mace.
In a flash, the older woman tackled Nora. After a brief scuffle, the woman had Nora’s arms pinned behind her back as Nora knelt on the floor screaming obscenities. “Word of advice,”the woman said. “Don’t threaten a judo instructor.”
Maddie watched in awe as Nora was escorted outside and the two college guys stood guard at the door. Craig was in a chair whimpering with milk-soaked napkins pressed to his eyes. Brooke knocked back the rest of her coffee.
“We should get out of here,” she said. “Or…maybe try to sneak out the back.”
The manager crossed his arms at Maddie. “What is it that…firecracker thinks you stole from her?”
Maddie’s heart pounded in her throat. She took a tube from her bag. “Forty-dollar finishing cream,” she said. “She um…she borrowed it from me and refused to give it back.”
“That’s absurd,” the manager scoffed. “Forty dollars for that little thing?” He shook his head. “What women will pay for their beauty products,” he muttered before walking away.
Maddie sighed in relief. She put her cream away and turned her phone back on. Aside from over a dozen texts from Nora, Maddie had gotten a text from one of her friends saying they were on their way to get her and to specify an address. She quickly wrote them back asking to get picked up at the café.
“Sorry if this ruined our date,” Maddie said, hoping to salvage some of the situation with Brooke.
“Of the two dates I’ve been on today, I’d rather be at this one.” Brooke smiled. “Was she really throwing a fit over haircare products?”
Maddie bit her lip. She scooted her chair over to whisper in Brooke’s ear. “I actually stole all the party drugs she was going to take to this weekend’s rave,” she admitted. “Was gonna resell them and use the money to pay back the person whose couch I’m sleeping on.”
Brooke blinked. “Oh. Oh wow. Yeah. Okay, that…makes more sense.”
“And the finishing cream is only twenty bucks, but,y’know…”
“Okay, Iwasworried you paid too much for that.”
Maddie chuckled. “No, I don’t need my hair to lookthatgood.”
Brooke reached out to run her fingers through Maddie’s hair. “I still think it looks good anyway.” She smiled and arched an eyebrow mischievously. “And if you don’t have a buyer lined up already, maybe we could go back to my place and see if you’ve got anything else I like…”
Openings by K.L. Noone
“It’s an opening-spell.” Cyan traced spidery black ink like thorns, growing mysteriously over the antique scroll that’d landed on his already parchment-strewn desk. “Single use, I think. But it’s a powerful spell. No wonder it’s in a sort of code. Complicated. No accidental use.”
“Can you solve it?”
“Of course. But I don’t know that I should.” He regarded the librarian who’d brought the scroll; Harrington Burke had short sandy hair and short solid muscles and intelligent blue eyes, and had tackled cataloguing the late Duke of Gyre’s eclectic hazardous library with cheerful confident expertise, upon being requested by the new heir to deal with decades’ worth of collected hordes of unsorted manuscripts. Cyan Ro, tall and dark and awkward, the youngest professor at the Magicians’ Convivium, felt himself grow even more awkward, more clumsy and incoherent, each time they met.
Harrington had first sought him out to get a bibliomancer’s advice about a troublesome grimoire. Cyan, startled amid a fortress of book-boxes in his brand-new office, had found himself breathless at sun-hued friendliness, knocking at his door.
The knocking had happened twice, three times, a few more: any time Harrington had a question about a complicated manuscript, it seemed. Cyan could talk about infused ink or ancient riddles with some confidence; he tripped over words whenever Harrington smiled, easy and charming and affable. He had names for the feelings that opened and blossomed in his heart and his racing pulse; he did not know how to give them voice, to speak them into existence, when Harrington was so kind and so comfortable and so easy with everyone, while Cyan had knocked over a mug of tea onto a twelfth-centuryborrowing-text last week. His office still smelled faintly of sweet lemon, along with ink and parchment and old worn leather.
He did not know what to say now. Touching letters, he caressed power from a long-ago enchanter’s pen. Ink gave ideas body, shape, threads weaving past and present and future; this ink held puzzles. It tempted his magic. It spoke his languages: words, syllables, symbols that held meaning, and hence power. He could speak back. He could unlock it. With some study. That code, those substitutions.
