LITMIR.BIZ

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nearly to my ankles in the expansive throw rug. “Is all this your stuff? A guy bumped into me, slipped me a charm that wouldn’t invoke until there were no witnesses or causalities—other than me. I can’t believe Denon is serious about this. You were right.” I worked hard to keep my voice casual so Ivy wouldn’t know how shaken I was. Hell, I didn’t want to know how shaken I was. I’d get the money to pay off my contract somehow. “It was lucky as toast the old guy across the street took it off me.” I picked up a picture of Ivy and a golden retriever. She was smiling to show her teeth; I stifled a shiver.

      “What old guy?” Ivy said quickly.

      “Across the street. He’s been watching you.” I set the metal frame down and adjusted the pillow in the chair opposite hers before I sat. Matching furniture; how nice. An old mantel clock ticked, soft and soothing. There was a wide-screen TV with a built-in CD player in one corner. The disc player under it had all the right buttons. Ivy knew her electronics.

      “I’ll bring my things over once I get them dissolutioned,” I said, then winced, thinking how cheap my stuff would look next to hers. “What will survive the dip,” I added.

      Survive the dip? I thought suddenly, closing my eyes and scrubbing my forehead. “Oh no,” I said softly. “I can’t dissolution my charms.”

      Ivy balanced her mug on a knee as she leafed through a magazine. “Hmm?”

      “Charms,” I half moaned. “The I.S. overlaid black spells on my stash of charms. Dunking them in saltwater to break the spell will ruin them. And I can’t buy more.” I grimaced at her blank look. “If the I.S. got my apartment, I’m sure they’ve been to the store, too. I should have brought a bunch yesterday before I quit, but I didn’t think they’d care if I left.” I listlessly adjusted the shade of the table lamp. They hadn’t cared until Ivy had left with me. Depressed, I tossed my head back and looked at the ceiling.

      “I thought you already knew how to make spells,” Ivy said warily.

      “I do, but it’s a pain in the butt. And where am I going to get the raw materials?” I closed my eyes in misery. I was going to have to make all my charms.

      There was a rustle of paper, and I lifted my head to see Ivy perusing her magazine. There was an apple and Snow White on the cover. Snow White’s leather corset was cut to show her belly button. A drop of blood glittered like a jewel at the corner of her mouth. It put a whole new twist on the enchanted sleep thing. Mr. Disney would be appalled. Unless, of course, he had been an Inderlander. That would explain a lot.

      “You can’t just buy what you need?” Ivy asked.

      I stiffened at the touch of sarcasm in her voice. “Yeah, but everything will have to be dunked in saltwater to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with. It’ll be nearly impossible to get rid of all the salt, and that will make the mix wrong.”

      Jenks buzzed out of the fireplace with a cloud of soot and an irritating whine. I wondered how long he had been listening in the flue. He landed on a box of tissue and cleaned a spot off his wing, looking like a cross between a dragonfly and a miniature cat. “My, aren’t we obsessed,” he said, answering my question as to whether he had been eavesdropping.

      “You have the I.S. trying to nack you with black magic and see if you aren’t a little paranoid.” Anxious, I thwacked the box he was sitting on until he took to the air.

      He hovered between me and Ivy. “Haven’t seen the garden yet, have you, Sherlock?”

      I threw the pillow at him, which he easily dodged. It knocked the lamp beside Ivy, and she casually reached out and caught it before it hit the floor. She never looked up from her magazine, never spilled a drop of her coffee perched on her knee. The hair on my neck prickled. “Don’t call me that, either,” I said to cover my unease. He looked positively smug as he hovered before me. “What?” I said snidely. “The garden has more than weeds and dead people?”

      “Maybe.”

      “Really?” This would be the first good thing to happen to me today, and I got up to look out the back door. “Coming?” I asked Ivy as I reached for the handle.

      Her head was bent over a page of leather curtains. “No,” she said, clearly uninterested.

      So it was Jenks who accompanied me out the back door and into the garden. The lowering sun was heady and strong, making the scents clear as it pulled moisture from the damp ground. There was a rowan somewhere. I sniffed deeply. And a birch and oak. What had to be Jenks’s kids were darting noisily about, chasing a yellow butterfly over the rising mounds of vegetation. Banks of plants lined the walls of the church and surrounding stone fence. The man-high wall went completely around the property, to tactfully isolate the church from the neighbors.

      Another wall low enough to step over separated the garden from the small graveyard. I squinted, seeing a few plants out among the tall grass and headstones, but only those that became more potent growing among the dead. The closer I looked, the more awestruck I became. The garden was complete. Even the rarities were there.

      “It’s perfect,” I whispered, running my fingers through a patch of lemongrass. “Everything I could ever need. How did it all get here?”

      Ivy’s voice came from right behind me. “According to the old lady—”

      “Ivy!” I said, spinning around to see her standing still and quiet on the path in a shaft of late amber sun. “Don’t do that!” Creepy vamp, I thought. I ought to put a bell on her.

      She squinted from under her hand, raised against the fading light. “She said their last minister was a witch. He put in the garden. I can get fifty taken off the rent if one of us keeps it up the way it is.”

      I looked over the treasure trove. “I’ll do it.”

      Jenks flew up from a patch of violets. His purple trousers had pollen stains on them matching his yellow shirt. “Manual labor?” he questioned. “With those nails of yours?”

      I glanced at the perfect red ovals my nails made. “This isn’t work, this is—therapy.”

      “Whatever.” His attention went to his kids, and he zoomed across the garden to rescue the butterfly they were fighting over.

      “Do you think everything you need is here?” Ivy asked as she turned to go inside.

      “Just about. You can’t spell salt, so my stash is probably okay, but I’ll need my good spell pot and all my books.”

      Ivy paused on the path. “I thought you had to know how to stir a brew by heart to get your witch license.”

      Now I was embarrassed, and I bent to tug a weed free from beside a rosemary plant. Nobody made their own charms if they could afford to buy them. “Yeah,” I said as I dropped the weed, flicking the dirt from under my nails. “But I’m out of practice.” I sighed. This was going to be harder than it looked.

      Ivy shrugged. “Can you get them off the net? The recipes, I mean.”

      I looked askance at her. “Trust anything off the net? Oh, there’s a good idea.”

      “There’re some books in the attic.”

      “Sure,” I said sarcastically. “One hundred spells for the beginner. Every church has a copy of that.”

      Ivy stiffened. “Don’t get snotty,” she said, the brown of her eyes disappearing behind her dilating pupils. “I just thought if one of the clergy was a witch, and the right plants were here, he might have left his books. The old lady said he ran off with one of the younger parishioners. That’s probably his stuff in the attic in case he had the guts to come back.”

      The last thing I wanted was an angry vamp sleeping across the hall. “Sorry,” I apologized. “I’ll go look. And if I’m lucky, when I go out to the shed to find a saw to cut my amulets, there’ll be a bag of salt for when the front steps get icy.”

      Ivy

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