Chapter Four
Summer storms were unpredictable beasts, and after leaving Opulence, Alora was foolishly unprepared to be caught in one.
She certainly wasn’t prepared to do so while hurrying through Enver’s Mugwort Alley, the only street, as far she was aware, that refused floral arrangements to replace their storefronts’ fish barrels and denied their homes’ doors a fresh coat of paint.
It was the least enchanting street of an otherwise enchanting town, and now she’d no choice but to either saturate the contents of her satchel or hurry into the nearest dilapidated shop in escape.
Potions she steadied it with a hissed curse.
It was common courtesy to purchase anything one had broken, but Alora knew she could not be made to purchase this.
With a base carved into a menacing scowl and its candleholders in the shapes of flames, it was far too hideous.
Her fingers came away coated in some sticking substance, and she shuddered.
Grotesque piece! It’s probably rotten old polish, and now I’ll be stuck with the smell.
Glaring down at her soiled hands, she couldn’t help her comparisons any longer.
If she’d been anywhere within lovely Thistledown Square, she would’ve had a proprietor smiling over her by now, eager with assistance.
Likely, she would have been offered refreshment.
Certainly a least a courteous question regarding her enjoyment of the day.
As it was, she wiped her dirtied fingers against her satchel and moved on—alone.
The entire place smelled oddly herby, like sage.
Sage and mint and a bit like leather. As she continued down the aisle, she found the source of the leather scent: a mangy top hat and cape to match.
It hung from a wiry mannequin and took up a great portion of an already crowded space.
When she stood before it, an eerie feeling of watchful eyes crept over her.
Enough that she jumped when the building groaned beneath the wind. Alora edged around it.
Past the mannequin were more clocks. Hourglasses and pocket watches too.
A break appeared in the shelves, and she switched aisles to find daggers in etched glass cases and pocketknives on beds of purple velvet.
She discovered jewelry too; old and tarnished, the stones still picked up what little light was afforded and reflected it back to her.
She reached toward a crooked, bony finger with a ring wrapped around its base.
Inhaling a gasp, she realized it wasn’t a peculiar mold, but a real finger bone.
Alora abandoned the shelf immediately with a hand pressed to her middle.
Hellish Mugwort Alley! What sort of shop displays human bones?
Around the corner, she skidded to a halt. Because here, she’d come upon something alive. Something that chirped faintly at her attention, its subsequent gurgles the most endearing sound she’d ever heard.
“Oh! Well, hello.” The little green creature watched her curiously from the confines of its cage. “You’re special, aren’t you?”
It was, of course, quite an odd thing. The animal possessed overlarge eyes like a bat and a body composed of a gelatinous-like substance rather than bone. Combined with the two tiny arms, two fins at its end, and three horns on top of its triangular head, she fell positively head-over-heels for it.
“What are you, my darling?” Alora scanned for something to divulge its name, or at least its origin, but as with everything else, the creature’s cage was unmarked.
There was mystery, but then there was just plain bad business.
Alora decided whoever owned this establishment must be lazy beyond reproach.
The creature continued to watch her steadily, offering a second gurgle at her remarks, which she didn’t know how to interpret.
It wriggled closer to its bars, leaving its makeshift pond.
“Are you hungry? Or only lonely? I’d like to know more about you so let me find the owner.
” She waggled her fingers in farewell. “Be back soon.”
At the end of the row stood a peculiar humming wardrobe with a skeleton key protruding from its lock. After she managed to skirt around that, she found the shop’s front counter.
Oh, Alora thought, rather dumbly, as her feet stopped propelling her at once.
A tied bundle of burning leaves sat inside a dish on a narrow countertop that stretched from one wall to the next.
More sad yellow light, too, spilled from the only other lamp in the room.
It highlighted the worn look of the counter.
It did even better at highlighting the sharp features of the man standing bent over a ledger behind it.
Whoever he was, he appeared wholly absorbed. His pen, held in a tight grip, marked across the page, swift and harsh. Her attention flicked to his opposite hand, where it pressed into his forehead, then down to a pewter cup sitting untouched beside him. A cup that didn’t so much steam as smoke.
He wore a black vest detailed in an alluring emerald-leaved pattern with a well-tailored black shirt beneath.
Only, the buttons had been left open at the wrists and throat.
It gave her the distinct impression that he couldn’t or perhaps wouldn’t be bothered with details.
Something which she couldn’t fathom for herself.
All in all, he looked irritated and busy, the antithesis of approachable. Which Alora promptly ignored as she made right for him.
“Don’t speak to the barshet,” he said, without his eyes leaving the page. “It might decide it enjoys the sound and burrow down your throat to retrieve it.”
His voice was deep and rough and decidedly bored. Horrified, but also skeptical, Alora stopped mid-step and didn’t even bother with a “hello” before she stammered, “But…it’s in a cage.”
“Little hindrance if it’s motivated. It doesn’t have our complicated matter of bones.” Closing the ledger with a startling snap, he lifted his gaze to her.
Alora knew a boy once with brown eyes so warm she felt like she’d melted every time they focused on her.
These eyes were not like those. They were an attractive color still, a mossy green, and framed by dark lashes and smudged with kohl, but they were also penetrating.
Like a deep winter cold or the jab of a needle.
She didn’t know what possible cause she’d given for him to narrow them at her.
Her skin pricked where his eyes landed. Because even though he stared with a gaze like frostbite, he was also decidedly handsome.
As in exceptionally. Perhaps the most handsome man she’d ever matched stares with.
Her hand pressed to her throat a moment, coaxing it to widen.
“Excuse me, but why would you have such a creature in your shop?”
“Peculiarities,” he said, gesturing around.
His hair was darker than hers, wet and tousled, like he’d just come in from the blowing rain.
A brief and outrageous thought entered her head that she should run her fingers through it and set it to order.
“Can I help you find something? A cursed ring? An heirloom dagger? A potion to poison your fiancé’s former lover?
” At the last suggestion, he nodded to the glass enclosure to the right of him, all manner of potions bottled and stoppered, and a sign that read: Don’t see what you need? Ask the proprietor.
Alora’s mouth fell wide in shock. “I would never kill someone! And had I planned to, I certainly wouldn’t purchase my weapon in a shop easily traced. I’d be the worst sort of criminal.”
“How would you do it then?”
She frowned at the lift of his lips. Scowled upon realizing he was mocking her. His hard eyes seemed to focus on her soft curves, the flared cut of her skirt, how perfectly incapable she looked of murder.
Alora was hungry and tired from her walk in the sun.
Her temper had shortened rapidly because of it.
She’d little energy for this smirking shopkeeper, no matter what she thought of his eyes.
She scowled her fiercest before turning, certain there must be another building more amiable than this to wait out the storm, but a quaking crack of thunder stilled her steps.
“Quite the weather we’re having.”
Alora glanced over her shoulder, watching the shopkeeper drink from his cup.