Every Witch Way But Up by Emily Elliot

Author:Emily Elliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: urban fantasy, fiction, fantasy, mystery
Publisher: Emily Elliot Books
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The Suburbs

The next morning, Lau blew into the shop like nothing had happened, trailing an airy scarf and carrying two cups from the bubble tea place down the street.

Blago opened the store, though the early hour meant there wouldn’t be customers for a while, so she had also pulled her scrying pot out and begun to set it up. Felicia supervised from the counter.

“I got you that hazelnut thing with pudding,” Lau said, her mouth a moue of distaste.

“Thanks,” Blago replied. She wasn’t going to talk about it if Lau didn’t want to talk about it. That was the second rule of being friends with Lau, the first rule being do as Lau said. Lau always knew better.

“What are you doing?” She set a cushion on the other side of the pot. “Scrying again?”

Blago shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, I still haven’t found my familiar and, well…” she trailed off.

“It’s getting more dangerous,” Lau finished as Felicia hopped down off the counter and prowled across the room to sit, tail thwapping back and forth, beside the pot.

“Yeah,” Blago sighed. She centred herself and tried to focus on the pot. Felicia’s tail hit the floor in time with her own, steady breath as she tried to clear her mind.

She focused on spreading her mind out, letting it pool from the bowl outwards, all while keeping the idea of her familiar firmly fixed at the front of her mind. Instead, the world sat wrong, somehow; stiff instead of liquid.

She had just begun to try and sift through those reactions when Felicia smacked the scrying pot, spilling its contents all over the wood floors with a thud and a clatter.

“Felicia! What the hell!” Blago and Lau both scrambled up and back, away from the contents. Felicia had self-satisfied look on her face, sauntering away with her tail high in the air.

Lau kicked her cushion away from the spreading mess. “I’ll grab the towels.”

Not exactly an auspicious start to the day, and things continued in the same vein.

A run of mundane customers swept in, but most of them simply wandered the store before they left without actually buying anything. The non-mundane regulars who stopped in that day all required a great deal of help for small purchases. Her till wasn’t particularly full and Blago’s head pounded.

So of course Eve showed up around five, when Blago typically got more customers from the post-work foot traffic. Of course she did. She fully expected to lose sales thanks to further BIA business.

Despite that, Blago decided to say hi, but Eve basically looked right past her like she was invisible and instead focused on Lau. She barely blinked, eyes focused though her shoulders had hunched slightly towards her ears. It was a strange look on someone who Blago had seen confidently wear pleather leggings and a matching jacket more than once, though never together. As someone who felt conspicuous in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt, she couldn’t imagine having the kind of confidence and self-assurance to pull off any of Eve’s looks.

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