He went cold. So, therewassome kind of alarm system.
Before he could answer, he heard footsteps coming back.
“Do not drink the tea,” she said. “She puts in a truth potion.”
His mouth fell open. “You drug your vendors?”
“Um, more like bespell?”
“That’s not better.”
He shook his head vehemently as Niamh walked into the room with a delicate porcelain cup. She put it down on what looked to be a children’s book about frogs on the coffee table.
“That smells...” he began and trailed off. He couldn’t imagine how to describe it—like lemon and ozone.
Siobhan stomped back in with a notebook and settled beside her sister on the white cotton cushions of a chaise, and he met all three witches’ gaze and then looked down at the brochures in his hand.
He took a deep breath. “So I just present this.”
“Is this your first stop?” Niamh said kindly.
“Yes, new to the job,” he blurted, and tried to remember presentations by vendors for his own business. Granted, most of the time they were selling access to multimillion-dollar datacenters or transcontinental underground cables, but essentially the concept was the same. Business was business.
“Why don’t you focus on your favorites?” Cat said and pointed her chin at the booklet in his hands. “It gives us more of a chance to see what you’re passionate about rather than a written recitation.”
He grimaced. He had planned to read out the brief paragraphs beside each book.
“Great idea.” He drew his glasses out of his pocket and put them on before flipping it open.
Cat cleared her throat, and he glanced at her. She looked flushed.
“You wear glasses,” she said.
“I told you that. No, I didn’t. I told somebody recently.” He gulped and literally hid behind the brochure. He was glad the wolf was happy to see her and not protesting this ignominious task. “Just trying to pick a favorite. There are so many good ones.”
The first page was on astrology, and he couldn’t say anything about that, so he went on. The second and third pages were also about astrology.
He scoffed at the title on one page and turned that into, “Ohhh, here’s a good one.The Science of Astrology.”
He glanced around, and Niamh nodded. Siobhan crossed her arms, and Cat sealed her lips.
“Some might argue that there is no science to astrology and the accidental arrangement of random stars in the sky has absolutely no bearing on our lives, especially because we don’t have the same configuration of stars as when these systems were made up because the universe is expanding all the time, not to mention galaxies are changing, stars are becoming supernovae, and…” He glanced up. No one was smiling except Cat, who was openly grinning at him, and he cleared his throat. “But theywould be wrong. There is actually real and amazing science to this ancient art.”
“There’s science in art?” Cat repeated.
“Actually, that is an interesting story, how humans have been looking toward the heavens for meaning since time immemorial. In the Western system, it was considered a perfect realm, while everything on earth down here was changeable. That still affects how we think about the world today, even though we know what everything is made of now. It’s why quintessential is my favorite word.”
“I beg your pardon?” Siobhan said.
“Quintessential is Latin for the fifth element, meaning the stars. We know now there are 118 elements, far more than five, but we still talk about the fifth element every single day.”
“Fascinating,” Cat said. She almost sounded like she meant it.
“And what is your star sign?” Niamh asked.
He blinked. “That’s very personal information, but I can talk instead about my favorite star, which is Polaris, the north star, which you can trace from the handle of the Big Dipper. It’s almost exactly over the pole, but not quite, since our planet is off kilter.”
“But since that’s not on the ecliptic, that would not be a part of the zodiac,” Cat said. She had turned an odd shade of pink.
