Chapter 12 Komal #2
I flash back to the first time I met Beth.
I’d been home for three weeks, living in the cancer bubble, doing everything I could around the house so Mamma could drive Papa to his treatments; making a colour-coded chart for medicines and appointments; helping Preeti paint the walls at her new clinic.
I’d only just managed to escape my family for the night and was heading across the green to Dora and Isis’s shop with a bottle of wine under my arm when I was hit in the face by a yoga mat.
“Sorry!”
I whirled around to discover my assailant was a harried-looking woman with blonde hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, balancing a tower of rolled-up yoga mats and various implements of torture.
“Keys,” she barked out in a musical voice.
“In my pocket. I don’t suppose you could get them for me. ”
Nothing bonds two women faster than one of them touching the other’s butt.
I slid the keys out of Beth’s tight spandex leggings and unlocked the shop.
She dumped her armload of torture implements on the floor and sighed.
“Thank you for saving my business from falling into the mud! I’m Beth.
I’m new in town. I’m opening a yoga studio and health food shop.
I’m an Aquarius Rising, and my favourite things are foraging for mushrooms, romance novels and true crime podcasts. What’s your name?”
Just like that, we became instant friends.
I invited her to join us for wine, and we spent all evening talking about serial killers and crystals and the right scone to clotted cream ratio, and the rest is history.
Beth slipped into our group of friends as if she’d always been there.
She and I are particularly close since our shops are right next to each other.
“If you’d do anything for me,” she whispers now, squeezing me tight. “Can you get me an exemption so I can rebuild my pole studio?”
I swallow. “Sure, Beth. I’ll find a way to fix it. I always do.”
“Hooray! You’re the best.” She gives me another tight squeeze, then pulls a crumpled piece of bright pink paper from the pocket of her harem pants and smooths it out.
“On to much happier things. Your dad wants me, as official campaign manager, to arrange everything for his little launch party at your house this weekend—”
I groan.
Beth frowns at me. “Obviously, I would have offered to host it, but an evil vampire burned down my pole studio. Your parents’ house is neutral ground.
Gideon and Arabella are inviting key Sanctus members, including the Conclave representatives, so you can meet them in advance of the Sanctus soiree.
Lilac will run the bar to make sure everyone has something they can drink.
Your dad is excited to do the catering—”
“Don’t let him overexert himself.” Panic surges through me. Papa only just got out of the hospital. He’s under strict orders not to set foot in his shop, but he’s not very good at sitting at home when there are parathas to be cooked and customers to joke around with.
“He begged me to let him help. You know how hard it is to say no when an Ahuja wants to help with something.”
I do know.
It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. I’ll spend every spare moment tomorrow cleaning the house, and I’ll get Preeti to take the boys out for the night, and brief the aunties on appropriate conversation topics around important foreign dignitaries, and somehow find time to go to the salon and get my rats’ nest hair done.
Oh, and make sure the vampires are on their best behaviour and that they don’t bite any of my family. Easy. It’ll all be fine.
“I’ve arranged for the local TV station to capture the whole event,” Maisie says.
“Wait? What?”
Okay, things are not fine.
I think of the toys everywhere, all the kids underfoot, my mother waving property brochures, my father chasing down guests and force feeding them parathas until they admit he’s the best cook in Argleton, Isis giving tarot readings and everyone yelling at me to fix things while the cameras roll.
“I don’t think a TV crew is the best idea,” I mumble. “Photographs we can stage, but it’s going to be too chaotic for—”
“That’s exactly what we want! The public should see you in your natural environment.
It will make for excellent TV. We might even be able to use the footage for some social media.
Augustin isn’t doing anything online, so we can hit the younger voters there.
I had a beer with Harry, the camera operator, and he tells me that Augustin refuses to do any publicity from his own home.
He doesn’t even know where Augustin lives. ”
“He lives in one of the little cottages in the woods,” Celeste says. “I’ve seen him through a window once when I was wolfing out.”
“Speak of the devil, what’s going on with Augustin?” Maisie asks, her gaze focused on the window behind me.
I glance around. The window looks out onto Butcher Street. Augustin stands under a streetlamp, with a stack of books under his arm, arguing with the shadows.