Ember Blackburn:-_-
Leland Stray:Echelons want you watched. It’s a Mentalist.
Skye huffed a loud breath, as if tired of waiting on me, and at the sound of her impatience, I instinctively stashed my transmitter like a kid caught doing something wrong.
“We’re not avoiding someone,” she decided to say, still holding us in the alley. “We’re avoiding the posters because they would make you feel bad.”
I wrinkled my brows. “Why would posters make me feel bad?” I’d noticed bulletins posted around town over the last few days. Help wanted ads. Tickets on sale for summer solstice concerts.
“If you insist,” Skye sighed, gearing up for a rapid stream of words. “The one on Honeysuckle has a human pointing a handweapon that apparently goesBOOM. The one on Windy Stream has a human crashing a large-wheeled object into another large-wheeled object. And the one on Callalily shows a human abandoning a box of kitties in a field!” A worried crease formed between her brows, and her mouth quivered. “Can you believe that?”
“I — yes, I can, but . . .” I hadn’t noticedthoseposters before. “Are they new?”
Skye did another scan of the street before crossing. “The Echelons voted on them yesterday. I didn’t want to explain that the Anti-Human Initiative was proposed by the Echelon Helen Blackburn.”
Right. Of course it was.
“Thank you,” I said dryly. “For not explaining that.”
“Oh, look! We’re here.” Skye bolted ahead and up the steps of a small, upscale clothing boutique called Anjelika Stork’s.
But Leland was right. The shopkeeper didn’t want to sell to me, and Skye had to put down twenty gold to get me past the door. It was a vast amount of money, I’d learned. More than a semester of tuition to Penn State Harrisburg. I wasn’t okay with it but didn’t see a better option. I didn’t want to make Leland’s job harder than it was. Though I did wonder how a twenty-one-year-old student had so much gold.
Skye tossed a canvas tote bag at me. “Hefting satchel,” she shouted.
An instant after I caught it, she started throwingwhat felt like every piece of clothing in sight on top of it. I waddled around the store behind her, my arms loaded a mountain high with clothes, shoes, belts, and purses, my arm muscles straining under the mounting weight as she tore through rack after rack. She didn’t ask what I wanted, but I didn’t object to most of what she picked out, other than noticing that, for someone who had shorn off her own sleeves, she seemed to gravitate toward long-sleevedgarments for me. Coats. Sweaters.Thatwould make Leland happy, I thought with an eyeroll.
Skye told me I smelled like an almond croissant, and I told her she smelled like apples. She pulled a long, golden hair off her black shirt, declaring it a safety hazard. I declared the mermaids doing rope bondage on the left side of her ribcage were distracting, then asked what she would be if she couldn’t be an Elemental. She said, “Dead. Because life would be meaningless.” I asked her if mermaid was the common term for water Elemental, and she said, “Obviously.”
“Skye,” I said, the last sweater overtaking my mouth. “I can’t see. And my arms are giving out.”
“Then use your hefting satchel as I instructed you, weakling.” She threw a pair of tennis shoes at my head, knocking half the pile out of my hands. “You also need to work on your reflexes.”
“Thanks.” I dropped everything on the area rug to search for the hefting satchel, which I now realized must’ve been a spelled bag, like Leland’s. Sure enough, I was able to fit everything inside, and the bag, once filled, remained relatively weightless, retaining the shape of a tote bag carrying only one or two books.
When we got to the bras and underwear section of the shop, Skye said my face was making her uncomfortable. She told me to wait in Briary’s, one shop over. Apparently, the witches who worked there were “not the worst,” and she’d rather “finish doing everything” here by herself. She slipped a few gold in my hand, and I gladly handed off my hefting satchel, happy to pass on shopping for thongs with someone I just met a few hours ago.
The scrying orb followed me out of Anjelika’s, lingering above me while I paused outside Briary’s Bookshop to stare atThe Most Eligible Bachelor in Everdenmagazine displayed in the window. Of course it was Leland. There was also a magazine for the most eligible bachelorette, someone named Vyra Lennox. I walked past the window, uncomfortably warm and thinkingabout the letterVon Leland’s ring finger.
I swallowed, forcing myself to think of something else, anything else, Gray.Iwanted Gray. For eight years, I’d wanted him.
My blood wanted Leland.
I heaved open the glass door to Briary’s and set off a bouquet of jingling, pea-sized, silver bells, so loud I was surprised when no one looked up from the front counter. The two girls working seemed busy, so I entered slowly, looking around. The large bookshop looked like it belonged in an old college town — and felt like it, with aromas of coffee and cinnamon. Dark wood shelves were stuffed with old and new texts, there were cozy reading nooks, plus an old-fashioned bar in the back, and in the middle of the shop, a central fireplace crackled with a large fire in it.
The young clerk — Alice, according to her nameplate — had straight, black hair, and hands streaked with blue-black ink. “Hi! Can I help you find anything?” she asked, in the middle of tacking a small yellow price sticker around the narrow circumference of a pen. The other girl, blond with a tanned white complexion, leaned against the red brick wall and flicked through her transmitter.
“Actually — ” I started.
Alice’s head jerked up, and in the next second, she was doing some kind of backward kick to grab the attention of her friend. “Baylee!Look.” Alice ceased all movement as Baylee nearly dropped her transmitter. “It’sher.”
“Hi.” My face was burning up, but I waved noncommittally, pretending not to feel it. “Do you sell any texts on Counterparts?” Specifically, I was looking for something more substantial than the one Ash had sent, and preferably one that didn’t rhyme.
But I don’t think Alice and Baylee were prepared for me to askthem anything. Slack-jawed, they stood in place and stared.
“Something on bonding? Ideally about how that process works — how to avoid it?”
Baylee snorted as Alice clamped her lips together and looked up at the ceiling. “Okay, so,” Alice said eventually. “We do have those. But we can’t sell them to you. We shouldn’t be talking to you at all, actually.”
