Witch, Please
By Ansel Horst
hop off the bus and I close my flask. Normally I wouldn’t be so gauche as to drink on the bus, but the driver
was a dick who’d thrown me off a crosstown route once for tussling with a vampire who had announced to
everyone the he was going to murder everyone riding in full view of anyone. So I nipped at the vodka with
obnoxious flair, right in the view of his mirror, all the while daring him with my eyes to do something about it. He
didn’t, and so deserved it. Next time someone saves your life from an Cainite, have the decency not to throw him
off the bus six blocks from his abode because he loots the corpse afterwards. Mid-Victorian morality has no place in
my profession - deal with it.
I
Anyway, I didn’t drink all the vodka. It was just to spite the bus driver, and anyway, I had better things to drink than
small-craft Vodka, however trendy. I was about to engage in business with some Lillithites, which was always a
chancy endeavor, the more so because as a demonslayer with papers it was kind of outside the scope of my brief. So
I needed some element of sobriety to even ensure my situational awareness, such as it was. Also dealing with
Lillithites always carried with it the tantalizing possibility of drinking some Honest-to-Moloch Witch’s Brew, which
I needed a reasonably functional brain to savor properly.
So I closed my flask and pocketed it and inhaled deeply as I trod from the bus stop to Engilda’s Magic Shop and
Fortunes. It looked as nondescript and slightly dirty as ever, the kind of place who’s faded orange sign and
brownstone front somehow defied the eye to notice it, yet somehow managed to stay in business as yoga studios
and half-gaijin dojos closed around them. Only the H&R Block on the other corner had survived as long as
Engilda’s.
I open the door gently, take a full inhale of the clove aroma and let the bell ring hard in my wake. A girl who was
clearly torturing her hair to look like Fairuza Balk looked up, and was about to greet me with whatever banality
was appropriate to greeting customers to a New Age goop and nostrum shop, when she got a good look at me, and
sensed in that way that girls that age sense that you’re trouble, and not the fun kind. Instead, she said, with a voice
full of some kind of school-trained disdain that indicated she possessed a level of social hierarchy the was supposed
to mean something to me, “Yes?”
I took advantage of my male obliviousness and pretended to ignore her tone, barking “where’s Engilda?” at her.
She did not like that “She’s not here,” she said.
I might have enjoyed provoking her a little more, but I just wanted to be about my business. “She called me half-an-
hour ago, telling her to meet me here.”
“Well,” she said, cocking her head exactly like the cheerleader she used to be, “she’s left.”
“No,” said a voice coming from the back room, “I haven’t. Come in, come in.”