P.S. The new parchment is nice. But I remember you mentioning that you didn’t have many silvers, so you should stop buying it. Don’t waste silvers just to send me a letter, the old crinkly stuff is perfectly legible.
CHAPTER 14
Fiella
“Hey, beautiful bitches!”
I glanced up from my pile of broken teacups to see Kizzi entering the shop with a very suspicious looking cauldron in her arms. I was afraid the steaming liquid was going to slosh all over her front.
Red smoke wafted from the cauldron and crept across the floor. It smelled like maple syrup, something spicy, and… petrichor? Weird.
Redd, surprisingly, hardly reacted to Kizzi’s dramatic entrance. This vampire was hard to rattle.
We had been working together on and off for more than two weeks now, and I learned that nothing seemed to faze him. It wassoannoying.
“Please tell me that’s for the beetles and not something you want me to drink,” I mumbled. I still got queasy when I thought about the last time Kizzi made me sample something from her cauldron.
Charcoal, lemongrass, fish guts, and gods knew what else. And she didn’t evenwarnme first. Asshole.
“It isssssss!” she sang, twirling alarmingly with the cauldron lifted above her head. She was definitely going to make a mess.
Redd snatched the cauldron from her before any disasters could strike. Smart man.
Kizzi explained to us the extremely dramatic process of activating the potion, which would involve an embarrassing dancing-and-chanting situation.
I didn’t knowmuchabout magic, but I was pretty sure she was just messing with us at this point.
“Sookie!” I yelled out to the cat. She might not have belonged to me, but shealwayscame when I called. My girl.
She meandered into the room, yawning. She had clearly just been napping somewhere.
I scooped her up and tossed her outside, quietly explaining to her that she didnotwant to witness this. She didn’t seem to mind much. I was pretty sure she was smarter than most folk I knew, and I didn’t want her judgmental ass around to mock me for what was about to happen.
“Okay, now I’m ready,” I said tentatively. I twisted my hair up into a tight knot, wanting to keep it out of my face for whatever was going to occur here.
“Alright, I’m the boss. Here’s what’s about to happen,” Kizzi proclaimed. She proceeded to explain the steps of the ritual, listing them off on her fingers as she did so.
We needed to burn sage, and then place crystals and herb bundles evenly around the whole shop.
We needed to join hands and skip around in a circle fifty times, to begin the energy cyclone.
We needed to all (unfortunately) drink a ladle of the potion.
The big finale, we needed to boil the potion until it reduced and burnt to ashes, while “singing the clarity song”, whatever that was.
