Hounded

it wash your spirit clean? Especially without soap? ‹
    Like I said, it’s symbolic. And it’s a different belief system .
    › Oh. Like going to church drunk is really going to church mellow? ‹
    I laughed. Yeah. Kinda like that .
    I put Fragarach on a shelf underneath my apothecary counter, let Oberon circle around a few times and get himself settled, and then opened the door for Perry, who looked appropriately gloomy for a Goth guy this morning.
    Sundays at the shop were usually decent business, as if all the non-Christians wanted to make a point of buying something pagan while everyone else was in church. You could always tell the ones who had been raised in a strict Christian environment: They’d put their books on Wicca or Aleister Crowley down on the counter and grin nervously, amazed at themselves for having the stones to buy something their elders told them not to buy. And their auras almost always churned with arousal, which I did not understand when I first opened the shop, but eventually it made sense: For the first time in their lives, they were going to read about a belief system where it was okay to have sex, and they could hardly wait for the validation.
    By the same token, you could always spot the ones who were a part of the serious magical community. They had auras that shouted their mojo, for one thing, but they also wore one of three expressions on their faces when looking at the magical wannabes buying their first pack of Tarot cards: They either sneered contemptuously, grinned faintly in amusement, or looked nostalgic for a time when they themselves were clueless.
    Emily the snotty witch was the contemptuous, sneering sort. She stormed into the shop dressed like a pampered horror from Scottsdale and promptly stuck her tongue out at me.
    » Emily! « a voice snapped from the open door before I could say anything. A frowning woman stepped in after the classic parenting reprimand—just shout the kid’s name in public and let the tone do the work—and Emily’s eyes widened a bit. She knew she was in trouble.

Chapter 13
    I assumed that the frowning woman must be Malina Sokolowski. She looked to be in her early thirties, but if Emily was the youngest of Radomila’s coven, then Malina’s real age had to be pushing a century or more. She was a true blonde, with pale yellow hair cascading past her shoulders in soft waves that shampoo companies like to put in commercials. It looked glossy, fragrant, and utterly mesmerizing. It fell onto a squarely cut red wool coat, which would be too warm to wear for another month or so but which provided a magnificent contrast in both color and texture.
    At that point, my amulet shut the noise down and I snapped out of it. Whoa. She had some kind of beguilement charm on her hair. It was something the wards on my shop weren’t designed to take care of, but the cold iron of my amulet caused it to fizzle. That meant it was not the everyday sort of witches’ magic. Cool. Scary, but cool.
    Her hair really did look good, but now I was able to look away from it and assess the rest of her. Pale eyebrows, just a shade or two darker than her hair and now drawn together in disapproval, provided a roof for a pair of startlingly blue eyes. She had a patrician nose and what looked like a generous mouth, but now it was drawn tightly down, lips painted to match the color of her coat. Pale skin—not the unhealthy pallor of Goths, but the white porcelain sheen of European nobility stretched over a faint blush—made a pillar of her neck, which betrayed a hint of a gold necklace before it disappeared underneath her coat.
    Nonverbal signals are so powerful at times that I wonder at our need to speak. Without looking at her aura, I already knew that Malina was classy where Emily was not; far more mature, intelligent, and powerful; and was reluctant to give offense where Emily could not wait to give it. And I also knew she was more dangerous by several orders of magnitude.
    » I thought I had made it clear you were to offer no offense to Mr. O’Sullivan, « she said. Her Polish accent was more pronounced than it had been on the phone, perhaps owing to her irritation. Emily lowered her eyes and muttered an apology.
    » I’m not the one who needs an apology. It’s Mr. O’Sullivan you have insulted. Apologize to him this instant. « Wow. She was scoring points with me already. But then I remembered that she was a witch, and they might have planned this whole scene ahead of