Ladybug wheezed. “Yes! Yes, everything’s fine, you-you just startled me, that’s all. But I’m very glad for the visit.”
He closed the distance between them, but his gait was hesitant, his dark brows still turned down. “Forgive me, I was intentionally staying quiet so as not to disturb you. I wasn’t sure if you were alone . . .”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m alone or not,” she answered succinctly, reaching up to smooth his brow as two arms encircled her waist. “This is your home, remember? You don’t need to hide from Holt. By the way, I have very good news. The weather forecast for the end of the week is positively balmy. We’ll be able to take a walk downtown for sure.”
He didn’t need to know. After all, she didn’t know with absolute certainty they were the subject the trolls had been grousing about, didn’t know what this talk ofordinancesmeant, and there was no sense in acting on baseless paranoia. He didn’t need to know, and she wasnotgoing to hide away in her house.
She had begun insisting, back in the autumn, that he join her on a walk every evening, late, once the streets had quieted. He needed fresh air, she’d argued; he pointed out that he went outside every day.
“The yard doesn’t count,” she’d insisted, and they’d begun the nightly constitutionals, although she was half convinced he was prepared to go scuttling into the bushes anytime a car passed. They avoided the business district and the branching road packed with bistros and pubs, making their way instead to the waterfall that tumbled over a rocky ledge in the center of town. The towpath was usually deserted that late, and she had gripped his hand steadily each night, holding her chin high until the weather had turned.
She understood the sacrifice it was for him to leave the house in such a way with her. The spider-folk kept to the shadows. They kept to themselves. They did not live amongst others, and if they were forced to, they stayed as hidden as possible. Anzan didn’t even like taking out the trash before midnight, waiting until there was no movement from the windows of their neighbors and houses were dark before scuttling down the driveway with his inhuman speed, dragging the bin and the recycling behind him as quickly as he could those weeks when she was not able to slip out and do it in the afternoon without his notice.
“Maybe tonight we can just go up the block, see if it’s too cold for you.”
“I can already tell it is positively arctic out there,” he argued. “You have to at least give me until your spring celebration, unless you want to find my corpse in the garden with my legs curled and frozen. I’ll be too heavy for you to move on your own and you’ll not likely find a disposal company in town willing to take the risk. You’ll have to see me every time you look outside, a decaying boulder covered in hoarfrost, forage for the crows right in the middle of your garden. Andthenyou’ll have to contend with the bird droppings. You will not care for the sight of an Araneaen felled by hypothermia, my Ladybug. It is not pleasant to behold.”
She was laughing before he’d finished.
“Ridiculous!” she pronounced, shaking against his chest. “Utterly, patently ridiculous.”
As she curled next to him that night, happy with his selection of a romantic comedy featuring a suave orc matchmaker determined to avoid love, Ladybug pushed away the unpleasant experience at the Food Gryphon.
They probably weren’t even talking about you. You’re just paranoid, no one cares that much about you anyway. It’s not like you’ve ever been good at reading people, why do you think you’ve become an expert all of a sudden? Just forget it happened and focus on getting ready for the Makers’ Mart. It was probably all a misunderstanding.
“Explain to me again why I have to do double the work and transfer everything to new bottles?”
Holt rolled his eyes as he stacked the boxes on the table, as if she were a hopeless case, beyond understanding. Maybe she was, Ladybug considered.
“Branding. Professional, cohesive branding. Professionally branded packaging, Elizabeth and that’s nonnegotiable. Handwritten labels on canning jars and leftover margarine containers was fine when you were making cold remedies for two or three desperate mothers who didn’t know better, but now you are making your debut as a professional witch.”
He’d ignored her gasp of shock and sputtered arguments that she had never once used an empty margarine container for anything other than storing leftover soup.
“Once you have everything transferred over we’ll have the new logo labels put on. I had my logo guy make something. I’ve already ordered a tablecloth and then we’ll get business cards that lead to your website.”
“I-I don’t have a website.”
His smile had been grim. “Yes, Elizabeth, I know. It’s like I’ve teleported back to 1995 every time I walk through the door. We’re going to need to change that. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s called junk mail for a reason. So get the thought of slipping hand-illuminated ad circulators being slipped under the rushes out of your pretty little time-warped head.”
“Yourlogo guy,“ she seethed, almost not recognizing the sound of her own voice.
This was a side of her personality Holt singularly brought out, one she had scarcely realized existed. An argumentative Ladybug who spoke her mind at the exact moment she wanted to, instead of second-guessing herself and her reading of the situation at hand, unsure of what the other person really meant, holding her tongue and replaying the interaction in her head for days.
“Yourguy has already finishedmylogo. Don’t you think I should have been consulted at some point for that?”
“Would you have been able to actually make a decision? Given direction? Or would we still be waffling, weeks later?”
Ladybug gasped in outrage, any witty rejoinders abandoning her as Holt shrugged unapologetically, thumbing open his phone.This is not the time to go tongue-tied! You need to tell him off and then show him the door.She cast a glance over her shoulder, hoping she’d catch the fast-moving blur of Anzan whizzing past her to bodily remove Holt from the kitchen, but he was nowhere to be found.A fine time to give up caffeine.
“I didn’t think you’d have any objections,” he sniffed, holding his phone out to her imperiously. “But by all means, tell me what you think.”
She snatched the mobile from his hand, preparing to lambast his totalitarian choice for her, but the words never had a chance to form. The image was black, but not the same jet black the familiar wore from head-to-toe. It had a smokier feel, the pre-dawn sky, dark and impenetrable, but still holding the promise of light. Her throat stuck at the sight of the sigil at the center of the dark field. Three hands — maiden, mother, crone, each of them holding a sacred object. The dagger, the serpent, the key; protection, knowledge, and wisdom.
Her eyes raised to find the same symbol there above the door. The hands and the moon phases above them were leaded, and when the early morning light stretched over the back of the property, her work kitchen was cast in a scatter of rainbows. As the sun made its journey across the sky, hitting the front yard in late afternoon, the rainbow display was replicated on the foyer and the front parlour, from the identical design in the transom above the front door. Witches at work. A variation of a symbol that was as ancient as the moon itself. It had been her family’s sigil since the Brackenbridge women first began keeping records of their craft. Their name was there, beneath the three hands, in silvery white letters, reminiscent of the moon herself, with a trail of starlight along their edges.
“It’s perfect,” she whispered, eyes burning. She hated crying, in front of him especially, but her emotions were all living too perilously close to the surface these days, and she didn’t know how to stop the flood.
Holt’s hand was slow to extend, taking the phone back. “I’m not here to be an adversary, Elizabeth.” His voice was low, a feline purr, buzzing at the back of her neck. “I’m not here to push you out of your own business. I have my own business to run. I’m only here to help.”
