Page 62 of Vengefully Matched

Her thoughts were derailed, though, when Kevin opened the door to her office and was immediately ensconced in something red, thick, and gelatinous.

His face reddened, and he moved slowly through the Jell-O to clutch at his throat. Xiomara was the quickest to snap, and the Jell-O vanished from him into a puddle of red liquid on the floor.

Kevin coughed.

“Oh, shit,” breathed Xiomara. “She took it too far this time.”

“That,” said Kevin, sputtering, “is the last straw. I have been working my ass off, and I value my life too much to be choked by Jell-O. I only have one life, and I intend for it to be a long and glorious one. I don’t have time for this shit.”

“Please, Kevin. I’m sure she didn’t mean…” Agatha fumbled at the words. What had Priscilla meant, though? Pranking her now? Goddess, she was an idiot for thinking they were doing something. Maybe it had all been another trick, and now poor Kevin, who was wearing her coffee, which must have splattered as the hex hit, was seething, dripping in strawberry red.

“I’m taking a vacation. Paid. Two weeks.” He huffed, tapping the fingers on both his hands together, and drying himself, though the shirt remained red, and she had to imagine he was sticky.

“Of course,” she said, hoping her voice was placating.

Right, Kevin’s magic wasn’t particularly strong, which was why he needed two hands and couldn’t fully handle the mess. The prank would have been cruel to Agatha, but clearly it was even more so to Kevin, who was unable to fully remove the stain.

She rubbed her fingers across her hands, and the red goop disappeared.

Kevin turned, his expression morphing into something twisted and serious. “I don’t need you to jump in and save me. Just because I don’t have all-powerful witch magic doesn’t mean I’m not clever enough to make my own. I am my own witch and my own person. I deserve more right now than this fiasco.”

She recoiled. She couldn’t ever remember seeing Kevin this angry, and there was something ominous about it, but then again, perhaps a witch had a right to be angry when he’d just been coated in a low-calorie dessert food.

He stormed out without another word, and she rubbed her fingers together again, cleaning the last of the mess.

This was a fucking disaster, and she steeled herself, breathing for a moment, and remembering that Panamanian golden frogs are considered both lucky and an indicator species that signal the conditions of the environment they live in.

Amphibian facts or not, she needed a moment alone, and she did not want to talk to anyone here about this.

“I’m headed for the vault,” she announced to the room, and she made a beeline for the stairway, forcing herself not to jump at each clack of her sensible low heels.

By the time she got down the stairs, she heaved a breath of relief. She could have heard a pin drop in that Council office, but here in the stairway to the vault, the hum of the backup generator was comforting.

Keying in the code on the outer door from memory, she made her way into the chamber and pressed the button to sterilize her clothes so that any fragile artifacts wouldn’t be damaged by accident.

The second chamber was harder; she concentrated with all her might and willed the chamber to know who she was until it opened into the small room that led to the different collections.

The initial analysis on the elixir from the Hildebrand von Auden estate was that it could very well be authentic, and something about it had been bothering her since the incident with the chainsaws, something she couldn’t put her finger on until this morning, after the best orgasm of her life had cleared her mind completely.

The odd, rectangular canister with the screw lid was an outer chamber. They had been examining it without opening it, but she had read somewhere that the Fountain of Youth ran so magical that its glow could be seen through a container.

She had finally found that and confirmed. They had been analyzing the outer chamber, and opening the ornate obsidian container would not be actually opening the elixir. When the weight changed from one examination to the next, she knew it had been stolen, but she hadn’t dared open the container yet for fear of compromising some yet-to-be-discovered evidence of who was responsible.

Hoping she wasn’t about to ruin decades of scientific research on longevity and the elixir if she was wrong, she opened the container.

As she suspected, nestled in a soft slot was a delicate glass bottle, the size of a perfume bottle, with a narrow metal stopper.

As carefully as she could, she lifted the thing, holding it by the filigreed bottom point.

She frowned. All the initial magical analysis had indicated that there were precisely 4.2 ounces of liquid contained in the canister, and that every ounce of it did indeed appear to contain the sort of magical compounds that could cause a person, if they consumed it in full, to live forever. When she had analyzed it last, it had weighed precisely 4.2 ounces less, so she had assumed it had been stolen.

The research suggested it would take precisely 3.8 ounces to render an adult witch immortal.

“Oh, fuck,” she breathed softly. She had been correct. The very last existing elixir of the Fountain of Youth had indeed been stolen. There was a small droplet of a bright, glowing pink potion in the bottom of the bottle, but other than that, it was entirely empty.

Whoever had stolen the elixir, the last drops of the Fountain of Youth, had presumably used a sprinkle of it to enchant the chainsaws and distract them from a much bigger problem.

There was a witch, and it had to be a Council witch to get through the doors to the vaults, who was now entirely immortal. A witch who was essentially unstoppable.