Dahlia held out a hand, interrupting Maggie. “I need you to elaborate on that last one. What could he possibly have to judge about the way you teach?”
“He overheard one of my phonology students ask for an extension on her paper, and, of course, he told me I was getting taken advantage of.” Dahlia rolled her eyes so dramatically that Rodrigo laughed, and Maggie was thrilled to have Dahlia back on her side. “You should have heard him.” Maggie furrowed her eyebrows and lowered her voice an octave. “Our jobs are to prepare them for the real world.”
Before Maggie realized it, Rodrigo had set another drink in front of her and she was sipping on it happily, complaining about Taliesin and blowing off steam. And when the drink was half-gone and she felt buzzy and fuzzy, she said out loud, “And he just smells too good. It’s not fair.” Her eyes went wide as she looked to see if Dahlia had heard what she said, and, sure enough, her friend’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“Oh, no, ignore that,” Maggie pleaded.
“I will not. He smells good? Why are you so close you’re smelling him?”
“It’s a ten-by-ten room, of course I can smell him,” Maggie reasoned. “Like you haven’t noticed how attractive he is.”
“Well, sure, I have. I just didn’t know you had. All I’ve heard about is how miserable he is.”
“You can be miserable and hot,” Maggie said, frowning into her cup.
Dahlia tipped her glass toward Maggie’s, and they clinked them together. “I’ll drink to that.”
Chapter Seven
The crowd at Rodrigo’s had thinned, drink orders were less and less frequent, and Rodrigo stood near them while he chopped garnishes for tomorrow’s Saturday night rush. “How’s Lola?” Dahlia asked. “My apartment is too quiet without her. You need to go on another vacation.”
“I wish, but it will be a while before I can leave the bar again. Come walk her anytime. I know she misses you, too.” Lola, Rodrigo’s sweetheart of a beagle, was a fixture on Hawthorn’s campus, where she often stalked squirrels and stole snacks from students. “Did y’all want one more?” he asked, pointing at their empty glasses.
Maggie shook her head. “No, we’ve got to get—”
A clattering noise interrupted Maggie, loud enough that she heard it over the crowd and the music. Maggie and Dahlia both looked around the bar, confused, but Rodrigo started taking off his apron, muttering, “Shit.” The sound came again, this time louder, like something large and metal had fallen over in the basement. “Shit,” Rodrigo repeated. “That’s got to be another ghoul.”
Maggie and Dahlia jumped to their feet, any lightness or fuzziness they felt from the alcohol gone. Rodrigo turned onthe bar lights and shut off the music. “Sorry, everyone,” he shouted to a bar half-full of confused patrons. “We’re shutting down early tonight.”
As he worked to close out tabs, he reached for the ancient phone on the wall, still connected with a curling cord.
“I’m calling the wardsmith,” he said as Dahlia handed him a damp receipt and a handful of money from a patron. “I can’t afford to lose anything else to this thing.”
Maggie and Dahlia exchanged a look. “The same wardsmiths that couldn’t even do a simple banishment spell last time?” Dahlia asked, and Maggie was glad that her friend was thinking the same exact thing she was.
Maggie and Dahlia may not have been warding experts, but they’d both helped fortify Hawthorn’s wards for years, and understanding the basics of fantasmia banishment was a core skill for anyone who worked in advanced magic, no matter what your specialization was.
“It’ll take ages for them to get here,” Maggie said, with a little bit more confidence than she truly felt. “Let us do it.”
Rodrigo held the receiver to his chest and hesitated. “Fine,” he finally said. “But I’m calling the wardsmith for backup. And then I’m coming down there to help you.”
“No,” Maggie urged. “When was the last time you banished a ghoul?” She conveniently ignored that it had been more than a decade for herself since she had come face-to-face with a fantasmia in the carefully controlled setting of her advanced seminar on banishment and other safety spellwork.
Rodrigo still looked as though he was going to argue, whenDahlia said, “We’ve got this, Ro. We’ll have this thing out of here before the wardsmith even gets here.”
Finally, Rodrigo nodded, and they sprang into action. Dahlia produced a small, folded piece of quilted fabric from her purse and unrolled it, revealing five pieces of sharpened chalk in different colors. She plucked out the green one, rolling the rest back up. The chalk was made with a decoction of vervain, making it ideal to use in warding spells against fantasmia.
Maggie already had her phone out, scrolling through banishment spells they could use. Banishments were legacy spells with ancient incantations. It would need little modification for their current situation beyond time and place, same with the rune that Dahlia would draw. A banishment would not only get rid of this ghoul but protect the space for a few days, the magic lingering like a sticky film.
As Rodrigo shooed customers out of the bar, Maggie and Dahlia paused in a shadowed corner near the stairs that led to the basement storeroom. They opened the door slowly to try to avoid notice by the ghoul. Maggie held her breath, waiting for some sound to break through the eerie silence. Though she was prepared for it, she still startled at the sudden shuffling and groaning coming from what was undeniably a ghoul, searching for something, anything, to sate its relentless hunger, scratching against burlap and steel.
“I’ll distract it while you draw the rune,” Maggie whispered. Ghouls, with their insatiable hunger, could be dangerous, and banishment spells took time. Maggie’s stomach tied in knots as she thought about how to keep the ghoul busy long enough forDahlia to complete the rune and for her to say the incantation. It was a longer spell, with several stanzas. “I’ll signal when I’m done, and we’ll say the spell together. Then we can come back and fortify Rodrigo’s wards in the daylight.”
Maggie gripped the railing hard, trying to gather the courage to go downstairs. Ghouls were occasionally seen in cities, where they found restaurant stores and garbage bins as enticing as rats did, but wardsmiths were generally good at their jobs. Unless, of course, the ghouls were feeding on a pall and found themselves in possession of preternatural strength. Hawthorn should have done more to warn the town if the pall was going to last this long.
Ghouls were unsettling beasts. They were shaped like humans but didn’t quite know how to move like humans. They had skinny, too-long arms and legs; gray, sallow skin; and hair like cobwebs. Their teeth were often dull or missing, worn down by the constant chewing. Most often, ghouls lived deep in forests like the Wilds, where they wouldn’t be disturbed by humans, gnawing on bark and moss and the occasional squirrel that wandered too close. Like most wild animals, ghouls were relatively harmless when left alone, but a cornered ghoul stuck on the scent of sugar could easily become violent. And even though ghouls were not particularly smart, they possessed a poison on their skin that left a chemical burn.
“Ready?” Maggie whispered. Dahlia nodded. Maggie could see her face blanch even in the shadows as Dahlia gripped her chalk in her hands so hard that Maggie was afraid she would crush it. She was about to suggest that they leave this work to the wardsmiths, which was probably the smart thing to do,when glass shattered below them. No, they could do this. They needed to do this for Rodrigo.
