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“She has big, fat lady balls!” Hilde said staunchly.
“I was looking for you,” I told her.
“Well, you’ve found me. Let’s talk.”
Chapter Four
I finally got some tea. A sylphlike figure with a pair of small, glittery wings that couldn’t possibly have supported her weight brought around a tray. It took me a moment to notice that both her hands were busy preparing my cup over the top of it, leading to the obvious question of how it was staying in the air like that. The easy answer was a levitation spell, or some kind of charm; but there was also another possibility.
I eyed the wings and wondered exactly how many arms she had.
She started to hand me a cup, hesitated, then pulled it back and added something out of a bunch of little vials in a wooden stand. “Flavoring?” I asked.
“Courage,” she answered, and moved on to a group of witches behind me.
I eyed my cup unhappily.
I’d really wanted some tea.
“It’s okay,” Saffy said, sitting beside me. “I got Restraint. See?”
I peered into her cup and found that it was faintly pink and somewhat floral. Mine, on the other hand, was dark brown, with a woodsy, almost earthy scent. I cautiously took a sip. I didn’t feel more courageous, that I could tell, but it was good tea.
“They’re giving some of the more combative ones Calm,” Saffy said.
“Think it’ll help?”
She shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”
I glanced at the brouhaha going on behind us and hoped some of them had gotten a double.
Zara, the youngest of the coven leaders who I knew, came over and pulled up a hassock. Not by grabbing one and dragging it over, you understand, but by holding out a hand and literally pulling it up from the floor. It was shaped vaguely like a mushroom, with a fat base and a round, slightly-indented-for-comfort top, and she settled onto it with a small sigh. I didn’t even blink at this point, even though I hadn’t seen her drop any water. But then, as powerful as she was, the tree probably figured it shouldn’t piss her off.
Not that she was looking particularly upset at the moment.
I glanced in her cup. “Calm?” I guessed.
“Peppermint,” she informed me, and took a sip.
I was actually kind of relieved that it was Zara who’d come to talk. I’d nicknamed her Jasmine when we first met, because she looked like a beautiful Middle Eastern princess, with sloe dark eyes and golden skin. And black hair with a sheen to it that was looking faintly purple at the moment, because a giant graffitied purple dragon had just stuck its glowing nose in the window and was looking around curiously.
A couple of the witches shooed it off, after which it went back to preening over a nearby smoke shop and Zara’s hair returned to normal. Which, unlike the real Jasmine’s huge, bouncy ponytail, was a shorter, swingy style that matched her modern suit and bright blue blouse. She drank tea at me for a while.
“You read the leaves?” she finally asked, and I realized that she?
?d finished her cup.
“Um, no. Sorry.”
She shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
I pulled a soggy pack of tarot cards out of my purse, because making a friend never hurt, but unlike normal, they weren’t talking. My old governess had had them enchanted for me when I was young, to give the overall aura of a situation, and I’d found them to be eerily accurate at times. But not today. Today, the cards, which were usually fighting, arguing, and trying to speak over each other, were a block of muttering, soggy paper, their voices so muddled that no one stuck out above the others.
Maybe that was the message, I thought, glancing at the quarreling witches behind me.
I put them back.
“Perhaps another time,” Zara said wryly. Right before a graffitied bat flew through the window and fluttered around everyone’s hair, causing another disruption. She sighed. “Annoying, isn’t it?”
