Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
“We’re stopping somewhere on the way home,” Ramona announced, pulling onto a street a few blocks from the apartment.
Zara smoothed the front of her jacket with both hands and said “very well” in the tone of someone being gracious about an invitation they hadn’t technically received.
When they parked, Ramona turned to look at the demon in her front seat. “Can you—” Ramona gestured vaguely at Zara. At all of Zara. The suit. The posture. The quality of presence that had made her car feel unreasonably small. “Try not to look like you’re about to conduct a meeting.”
Zara looked at her. “I always look like this.”
“I know. That’s what I said.”
“You want me to do something about my face.”
“I want you to do something about your entire—” Ramona stopped. Made a gesture that encompassed the situation. “Never mind. Just don’t make anyone feel damned.”
“I make no promises,” Zara said.
Ramona pushed The Grimalkin’s doors open without breaking stride. Zara paused on the threshold.
Ramona glanced back. “What.” It was not a real question.
Zara was looking at the door with an expression she hadn’t worn all day — not the cataloging attention she’d given the crystal display, not the professional assessment she’d applied to the customers. Something more careful. More alert. “This establishment has significant magical shielding.”
“Yep.”
“The kind that makes it invisible to those who don’t know it’s here.”
“Yep.”
“And you know it’s here.” Zara looked at her. “You’ve been coming here for some time.”
“Yep.” Ramona held the door. “Since I moved in. Are you coming in, or are you going to do a structural analysis on the doorframe?”
Zara stepped inside.
She stopped again just inside the entrance, and Ramona let the door swing shut and watched her take it in the way she’d once watched a first-year student encounter a genuinely old text for the first time — that specific quality of attention that meant something had landed.
She watched Zara clock it systematically — the hedge witches arguing in the corner, the elderly sisters at their Thursday table, Dennis the allegedly retired warlock at the far end of the bar — was like seeing it fresh, which she found mildly irritating.
“The fae,” Zara said quietly, nodding almost imperceptibly toward a far table. Two figures, drinks barely touched, too beautiful, too still, watching everything with the patient attention of beings who measured time differently. “They’re gathering information.”
“They always are.” Ramona steered them toward the bar. “Odette charges them double.”
Parliamentarian sat in Ramona’s usual spot, glancing toward her with an air of indifference as if to say: I won’t be moving.
Ramona, recognizing her place in the grand Grimalkin hierarchy, slid into the stool next to him.
Zara took the adjacent stool with the precise, deliberate movement she brought to all physical actions, as if posture was a professional obligation even in a bar. She was still doing her inventory of the room in her peripheral vision. Ramona could tell.
Odette appeared, turning to Zara. A pause. Brief, almost imperceptible, which meant she’d clocked exactly what Zara was and made a quiet professional note of it.
She set a second glass down. Dark, slightly iridescent, a small curl of smoke rising from the surface.
Zara looked at it. “What is this?”
“Borrowed Time” Odette said and moved away.
Zara regarded the glass for a moment. Then picked it up and took a careful, considered sip. Something moved through her expression — not quite surprise, but close. “Well,” she said.
“Well, what?” Ramona asked, sipping her own drink.
“It tastes like the first year I worked in Temptation.” She set the glass down and looked at it with an expression Ramona couldn’t entirely read. “I haven’t thought about that in quite some time.”
“The drinks do that here.”
“How?”
“Nobody knows. Odette doesn’t explain herself.”
Zara looked toward the bar, where Odette had already materialized somewhere else. “I respect that enormously.”
Parliamentarian meowed at Zara, his eyes narrowing. He watched her for a long moment, then leaned forward to sniff the air. His whiskers pulled forward, and he sat, his tail wrapping around his front feet. He closed his eyes.
“You passed,” Ramona said.
“I gathered.” Something in Zara’s expression had eased, almost imperceptibly.
They stayed for two drinks. The Grimalkin did what it always did around the second — softened the edges of things, made the ambient noise of other people’s problems feel companionable rather than intrusive.
The jukebox shifted from the torch song into something with a low piano, then into something with no identifiable era, just a feeling.
Zara asked questions, as she had all day.
About the sisters who came every Thursday.
About Dennis and his suspicious retirement.
About the orcs in the corner booth — she had opinions about supernatural mediation practices, and they were detailed and professionally informed and mildly disparaging about the methodology.
“They’ve been here longer than the furniture,” Ramona said. “Nobody knows if they came with the bar or the bar came with them.”
“Like Odette.”
“Like Odette.”
Zara turned her glass slowly on the bar. Something in her had settled in a way it hadn’t all day — the professional tension she carried like a second suit jacket slightly loosened, just around the edges. “You said since you moved in,” she said.
“What?”
“That you’ve been coming here since you moved in.” She wasn’t looking at Ramona, still doing her slow survey of the room. “You said it like somewhere that helped with something.”
Ramona looked at her drink. “It was a bad year. I found this place and it—” She paused. “It helped.”
Zara nodded. Didn’t push. Filed it away wherever she filed the things Ramona told her, which seemed more careful than expected.
Parliamentarian had migrated fully onto the stool beside Zara and was leaning against her arm with the boneless commitment of a cat who had made a permanent decision. Zara’s hand rested near him in a way that wasn’t quite petting but wasn’t not petting either.
“We should test the tether,” Ramona said. “Properly. While the apartment’s empty.”
Zara straightened slightly. Back to business. “Empty?”
“Tuesdays are usually pretty empty at home. Felix’s Crypts and Covens game usually runs until ten.”
“Then we have time.” Zara finished her drink, set the glass down with her customary precision. Odette appeared, glanced at both glasses, raised an eyebrow.
“We’re good,” Ramona said. “Thank you.”
Odette inclined her head. The almost imperceptible acknowledgment that meant you’re welcome and come back and I have noted that you brought a demon to my bar and have filed this information away for another time all at once.
They got their coats. Parliamentarian watched them leave from his stool with an expression of dignified regret.
At the door, Zara paused.
“This place,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’d like to come back.”
Ramona pushed the door open into the January cold. “I figured.”
The apartment was dark when they got back, which meant Felix was at his Tuesday night Crypts and Covens game. Posey would be at the community garden until sunset. Kashvi was probably at the library. Cammie would be closing at the café.
Privacy. Finally.
Ramona unlocked the door and immediately kicked off her shoes, leaving them in the pile by the entrance that Felix kept trying to organize into a “mindful shoe meditation space.” Her feet ached.
Her head ached. Everything ached in that specific way that came from standing on concrete floors for eight hours while pretending to be enthusiastic about rose quartz.
“I’m going to make dinner,” Ramona announced, dropping her bag on the counter. “You hungry?” Zara had refused breakfast and lunch, and Ramona was beginning to question whether demons even ate food.
Zara had followed her inside, pausing near the shoe pile. “Yes.”
Ramona pulled open the fridge, surveying the contents with the grim determination of someone who’d been putting off grocery shopping.
Eggs. Half a block of cheese with a questionable expiration date.
Some wilted spinach. In the back of the freezer, buried behind one of Posey’s elaborate fermentation projects, she found pasta sauce that Felix had made last month.
“Spaghetti okay?” Ramona asked. She glanced toward Zara. “You can come in, you know. Sit on the couch. Or at the table. You’re going to be here for a few weeks, you might as well get comfortable.”
Zara tilted her head with an assessing expression. “Do you need help making it?”
“It’s just boiled water. I can manage,” Ramona said with a reflexive snark in her tone. She filled a pot with water and set it on the stove, then rummaged through the cabinet for pasta. She found a box of spaghetti, half empty, that had probably been there since she’d moved in. Good enough.
She wasn’t a great cook. Simone had done most of the cooking when they were together — had enjoyed it, even, turning their tiny kitchen into some kind of experimental culinary lab.
Ramona had been the one who did dishes, who cleaned up when Simone had used every dish possible.
A fair division of labor, she’d thought at the time.
The water took forever to boil. Ramona leaned against the counter, watching Zara walk carefully into the kitchen, examining the room with that same cataloging intensity she brought to everything.
Taking in the mismatched mugs, the flourishing herb garden on the windowsill, the collection of takeout menus held to the fridge with magnets from exotic places none of them had ever been.
“Your roommates are all witches?” Zara asked.
“All of them but Cammie,” Ramona answered, adding salt to the water.
Zara nodded slowly, reaching to touch her hand to the edge of the saucepan. The water began to boil instantly. “But you’re not an official coven?”