His chuckle rumbled low. “Saints, you really hate me, don’t you?”
Maude stiffened, quill poised above the inkwell. “Don’t flatter yourself. I hate everyone. You’re just…particularly offensive.”
“Particularly.” He nodded as if honored. “I’ll take it.”
She turned, grabbing a jar from the shelf just to give her hands something to do. But the words on the parchment glowed faintly in her periphery, a fragile order in the chaos. Her rules. Her control.
Wesley signed at the bottom with a flourish, his script annoyingly elegant. “All right,” he said, setting the quill down. “We have our truce. Now what?”
Maude exhaled slowly, staring at the grotesque cauldron-mixer hybrid across the room. “Now,” she said, voice flat, “we fix this. Before Samhain. Or we both go down together.”
His smile tilted, softer this time. “Guess I’d better get used to your charming company.”
Market Square was loud.
The kind of noise that made Maude want to hex her own ears shut just so she wouldn’t have to hear another vendor screeching about “fresh butter!” or “mystic charms guaranteed to attract true love!” It was late enough in the morning that the whole village hadspilled into the square, and early enough that the dew hadn’t burned off the cobblestones yet. Her boots slapped against them anyway, damp soaking into the leather, as she wound her way past stalls of candied nuts, steaming cider, and twinkling crystal lamps.
The whole place smelled like roasted chestnuts and too many perfumes fighting to be the loudest in her nose.
And none of it was what she needed.
Shadowbell.
It was the one thing she couldn’t fake, couldn’t replace, couldn’t substitute with clever runes or Bailey’s scribbled notes.
She stopped at a stall where a red-faced man sold jars of powdered roots and dried leaves. The labels were hand-scrawled, half-legible, and the kind of dubious that usually meant “exactly what you want if you don’t ask too many questions.” Maude leaned an elbow on the counter.
“Shadowbell,” she said flatly. “Do you have it?”
The man blinked at her as though she’d asked for unicorn marrow. “That’s a dangerous thing to say out loud.”
“It’s also a yes-or-no question.”
His face screwed up. “No.”
Ugh.
She pushed off the counter and stalked away, already irritated.
The next was a woman with a tray of dried mushrooms, all different shades of brown and black, the kind that made people believe they’d seen the future after chewing on them. Maude leaned down, voice low.
“Shadowbell.”
The woman barked a laugh. “Do I look suicidal to you? Try the grave robbers by the east wall. If anyone’s stupid enough, it’s them.”
Excellent.
The grave robbers—three men with missing teeth and the odor of people who lived closer to corpses than soap—looked at her like she’d grown horns when she asked.
“We sell bones, miss,” the tallest one said. “We don’t sellcurses.”
“It’s a flower,” Maude snapped.
“Exactly.”
They shuffled her off with nervous glances, like her even speaking the word out loud might taint their stock.
By the time she’d burned through every contact, her mood had frayed to a brittle, snapping edge. She’d gone through the obvious vendors, then the back-alley sellers, then the people who were technically “farmers” but definitely weren’t farming anything legal. Each time, the same reaction: wide eyes, nervous laughter, sudden silence.
