She wasn’t expecting the question. Ladybug swayed, holding her breath, waiting for Anzan to answer.
“I do.” His voice was solemn and his face unsmiling. “With everything I have in me.”
Holt nodded. “And will you do your best to ensure she is happy and cared for until the end of her days?”
“It is my duty to care for her in any way I can, including those ways in which I cannot. Her comfort and safety and happiness are my only priorities.”
Holt grinned. Ladybug felt a strange tightness in her chest. They had never spoken vows. There was no need. No need, but this felt strangely like a bridal ceremony just the same. His feline eyes seemed to glow with green fire, and her neck prickled.Holt is made of magic. It may have been true after all, she thought, for as he took another step closer, the whole room seemed to vibrate, and his form wavered at its edges.
“And will you protect her, Araneaen? Will you lay down your life if it is required to keep her safe? Will you stand by her side when the night is darkest?”
Anzan’s blue eyes were locked on Holt’s, unblinking, as his smaller black eyes rippled in a frenzy. “I will.”
Ladybug couldn’t breathe. Something niggled at the back of her mind, something about Holt’s words, but she didn’t have time to think it through, for the moment was broken when the familiar grinned, turning to hop back upon the counter.
“Perfect. I love him. I literally love everything about him. I don’t know why you were so worried. What’s for lunch?”
“Willyoupleasesit down? I hate having people hover over me.”
Holt’s voice was bored.Bored!She felt as if she might vibrate out of her skin, and there he sat, slouched on his folding chair with nary a care in the world. Ladybug only glared. He’d been video chatting just a few minutes earlier with a pretty human woman with purple highlights in her hair and wide, black-rimmed eyes — his girlfriend, Ladybug surmised — discussing their dinner plans as if her entire future wasn’t resting in carefully placed positions on the table before them.
Now he was slouched in the chair, making his black leather jacket rise up around his ears like a cape as he tapped out a text with a pointed black nail. He was clean-shaven that morning, and the absence of his close-cropped beard somehow made him look even younger, the rankest sort of glamour, she personally thought. Nothing set her teeth on edge like a hundreds-year-old near-immortal chasing after human teenagers, simply because they were able to project an aura of youth to conceal their decrepit hearts. She didn’t know anything about the life Holt lived in Bridgeton, but she decided in that moment that she would find out, rifle throughhismail, and determine that this human he’d taken up with was an actual adult with a life, and not some besotted co-ed he kept clouded under his charm.
His thick black hair fell in a tumble over his forehead, concealing his sharp green eyes from her for the moment. He had one leg stretched out, his black boot disappearing beneath the table, preventing her from pacing. He was as annoying, she had decided, in his man skin as he was as a cat.
“Then stand up,” Ladybug snapped, cracking her knuckles for the tenth time that hour. “I’m too nervous to sit.”
The day had arrived, at last.
She couldn’t stop twiddling her fingers. Her hands were clasped in front of her, fingers interlacing, winding and unwinding together, over and over again. The room buzzed with the white noise of dozens of different voices, and she didn’t know how she was meant to concentrate on anything, let alone how she was meant to smile serenely and project an aura of professional witchiness. All she really wanted to do was curl up beneath the table, hidden by the satisfyingly long drape of the custom tablecloth he’d ordered, and let Holt handle things topside. She could pass him product as things ran low, keep the understock of jars organized . . . it might actually be worth making the suggestion.
She’d already gone tongue-tied once, when they were approached by a pair of goblins, her neighbors, she’d learned. The pair exclaimed in wonder as Holt unfurled the tablecloth, double teaming her with questions about who she was and what she sold until they were mollified that she’d be no competition for their hand-crocheted pot scrubbers, ambling off arm-in-arm while she breathed heavily.
She wasn’t sure how she was meant to get through an entire day of that, and now the time was nearly here. The doors would open to the public in little more than thirty minutes. The other vendors were still wheeling their carts in, most of them only just beginning to set up. She and Holt had been early, at her insistence, two of the first cars in the lot that morning, and he’d grumbled about that as well.
This was a mistake. This was all a terrible mistake.She should have never gotten out of bed that morning, should never have turned the application in, should absolutelyneverhave opened the door for this wretched cat.Holt!This was all his fault. He’d planted the thought in her head, where it had grown in the fertile soil of her anxiety, watered by her desperation to be liked and fertilized with her determination to prove herself, and now she was trapped in the vine, counting down the minutes until the Makers’ Mart opened.
Although . . . as she looked around the big room, watching their neighbors set up their booths from where she stood beside her towering pop-up banner with her custom table linen and professional display, she was forced to admit what an asset he actually was.A pain in the asset. But, an asset nonetheless.
He’d parked in the lot beside her that morning, taking a folding dolly from the boot of his sleek black car, emptying the meticulously packed boxes from hers in only two trips. When he’d returned from the lot for a third time, the dolly was loaded again — this time with a collection of display blocks, a black-painted wine crate, and an aluminum wash basin. The blocks were shiny black and a luminous white, as if they were coated with nacre, set up in alternating color as risers of descending steps, while the wash tub was flipped on its side.
It was a picturesque backdrop for the rows of soaps he set up, making it look as if they were marching out in a military formation, intent on banishing dirt and dry skin. A sea sponge loofah was set beside them, and before he moved on to the next corner of the table, Ladybug watched as he got down on his knees to snap a photo with his phone.
“We need to get you a website,” he’d reminded her, sliding the phone back in his pocket before turning to the risers. “I appreciate your dedication to tradition, but it’s not the eighties. No one is consulting their Rolodex to call the neighborhood witch when their kid has the flu.”
Ladybug had bristled, but Holt paid her no mind.
“Anzan already started it. He kept asking me questions,” she begrudgingly admitted, “but then he decided it was best to wait for you so that he didn’t build the wrong code.” She wasn’t sure if she was even using the right phrase, and Holt had only snorted at her words.
“I love him even more . . . well, this way he’ll have photos for the site and you’ll have something to copy when you do it on your own. You don’t have to keep things exactly the same week after week, change it up, but the point is not to just throw your crap on the table and call it a day.” He had sniffed at the time, looking askance at the vendors around them. “An elevated display will set you apart. And you just watch how fast others will copy what you’re doing once they see you selling out. The fastest way to earn imitators is to be independently successful.”
Rollerballs of intention oils were placed on the highest block, a scatter of loose crystal chips and dried herbs giving them an ethereal and high-priced aura. The next descending step held the face creams, the exfoliators, the serums. Her herbal steamers were grouped in a wire basket on the table, her strawberry rose shampoo and conditioner lined up like infantrymen. Abalone shells held the pots ofnon-waxylip balm, the more expensive medicinal offerings grouped in the center of the table. It was a retail display one might expect to find at the entrance table in the busiest of shops, and knowing Holt’s retail pedigree, she supposed that made sense.
The Cat & Crow had always been the name of Holt’s business — a purveyor of occultist supplies, curiosities, and fine esoteric goods since the 1700s. Monkey’s paws, rare altar artifacts, hard-to-source ritual supplies — he was able to procure them all, for a steep price. He’d opened the current Bridgeton shop with Bethany a few years earlier, and although she had never visited, Ladybug knew they’d amassed a bit of a cult following.
The shop might be relatively new, but he’d been a procurer for an age. There would not be many a vendor at the community center that day who could boast that they had been haggling over their wares with witches since practically the dark ages, but the familiar sitting in the chair beside her, scrolling through his phone without a care in the world, could.
“Does that mean you’re not coming back?” she’d asked then, as he snapped a photo of the intention oils, realizing the meaning of his words.
