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Ez was right behind me, shutting the seven locks and whispering to seal the door once more. He called back through the c
urtain to let Gus know we were back. Through the front window I could see the sun had set and the gloom of dusk had settled over the street. The clock on the wall said eight o’clock.
We’d been gone almost ten hours.
My phone started to buzz as soon as we were through the door, lighting up with missed texts and emails. Rather than check, I made a beeline to the beaded curtain, looking for Wilder.
He was sitting at a small kitchen table with Augusta, eating a plate of spaghetti.
“Finally,” he said as I came through.
For some reason I’d been sure he would leave. I had forgotten how different time functioned in the basement, each minute the equivalent to an hour in the real world.
“Yeah, I probably should have explained how that was going to work.” I shrugged apologetically.
Wilder gave me a look not easily readable, but it was somewhere between annoyed and amused. I figured I wasn’t in too much trouble given the way his lips twitched in an effort to suppress a smirk.
Ez was still out in the shop, and the sound of clinking jars and rustling paper filled the silence in the kitchen.
“Do you want yellow and white candles, or just yellow?” he called, his big voice booming through the small space.
“Both.”
He hummed merrily to himself, moving about the shop to get the more basic parts of my spell together. Evidently now that I’d passed the test about the harder ingredients, he was willing to gather the dried flowers and herbs without a quiz.
“Can I get you a plate, Genie?” Gus pushed her chair back from the table and headed towards the stove.
“I can’t, we need to get going.” My stomach growled loudly, betraying me. The pasta sauce smelled amazing.
I recalled how Santiago had been making sauce the previous night and wondered if it was just something in the air causing witches around New Orleans to crave carbs. If it had been anyone other than Gus and Ez, I might have grown suspicious of the herbs mixed into the tomato sauce, but they wouldn’t pull a trick like that.
“Are you sure?” She lifted a ladle of sauce from the pot and held it out like she might feed it to me standing.
“If you have any garlic bread left, I wouldn’t say no.”
Gus beamed and opened the oven, wrapping two slices of thick golden-brown bread in a paper towel and forcing the bundle into my hand. I realized, then, I was still holding the basket from the basement, and Ez would need it to ring me up.
I moved back into the front of the shop, thanking Gus for my to-go meal, and set the basket on the counter. Ez had already wrapped the jar holding the elephant brain in bubble wrap and was busy putting small paper bags of belladonna and rosemary into a reusable tote bag with the shop’s logo on the side.
“Do you know the real name for belladonna is Atropa belladonna?” he asked.
I shook my head as I unloaded the owl eyes and beeswax, handing them over for him to weigh and package.
“Atropa comes from the name Atropos, the Fate who chooses when and how a person is to die.”
I stopped moving, and he kept an eye on me as he finished sorting my goods, setting two full bags—one with just the brain in it—on the counter in front of me.
“That’ll be seven thousand five hundred and forty-eight dollars. And twelve cents.”
Chapter Twenty-One
In spite of twelve hours spent in an alternate dimension of space-time and testing the upper limits of my credit card, we still beat Detective Perry back to the crime scene.
Good, because I wanted it to look like I knew what I was doing when he got here, and right now I just felt like a huge imposter.
Wilder parked his bike in front of the alley next to a row of other motorcycles. I hadn’t taken into account that the area would be full of people when we returned, which seemed like a gross oversight now.
Bass thumped from the strip club, and every so often I’d hear the DJ’s muffled voice introducing a new girl to the main stage. If my hearing was as good as I knew it to be, the woman currently taking her clothes off was named Badger.
