“Of course.” It’s only a couple of days before they come back with something, and they try it only on my healing circle to make sure they don’t mess up anything on my forearm, which is what allows me to shift planes and go home.
“This isn’t going to be a charm or a reverse charm or anything,” Agnieszka explains. “It was a fascinating conversation and we might use some of the ideas elsewhere, but for you, we think we’ve come up with a cloak.”
Berta first smears a clear but smelly goo on my hand. “Cooked it up myself,” she says, though I’d already assumed as much. It wasn’t the sort of thing one finds at CVS.
I thought Berta just enjoyed cooking when I first met her but it turns out that she and Martyna are the coven’s experts at potions and ritual ingredients. They cook and bake in the mundane sense as a way to one-up each other and often make me judge the results.
“What is it?”
“That’s a binder for the cloak. The cloak will attach to that binder, not your tattoos, but then that binder is being absorbed into your skin, so the cloak should stay there and conceal your tattoos without affecting your actual binding to the earth.”
“In theory?”
“Yes, in theory.”
The rest of the coven arrives and Agnieszka leads them in attaching the cloak. It’s much faster than the ritual for shielding me from divination, and when they’re finished, the healing circle on my hand fades from view.
“Oh, that is wicked cool,” I say, grinning at them.
“But you need to test it,” Malina says, handing me a knife. “We need to know if you can still heal.”
“Right.” I give myself a small cut on my left forearm, just enough to start the blood flowing a wee bit, then command my body to knit up the skin. The cut closes and you’d never know there was a wound. It works.
“Victory! Fist bumps all around! And mandatory preening at this evidence of your awesome skills!”
Success confirmed, the coven cloaks my forearm too, but I leave the shape-shifting bands on my biceps alone. I really like those. I give everyone hugs and have to judge two celebratory chocolate cakes before my shift begins at the brewery.
—
A couple of hours into it, around eight o’clock, a handsome man with a long-distance-runner’s physique approaches the bar, his cheeks falling away like the white cliffs of Dover and his jaw sharp as the edge of an anvil. Hair and clothes look like he has a date with a catalog photo shoot in a couple of hours. He’s crisp and clean and might not mind going shopping for a few hours. Pretty dreamy, if I’m being honest.
I ask him in Polish what I can get for him. His eyes flash down—not to my chest, which would be typical male behavior, but to my arms, which I have stretched out, leaning my weight on the bar. He’s looking in particular at my right arm.
“Is there an American working here, red hair like yours, but with tattoos on her forearm?” he asks. And the specific nature of that query creeps me out instantly. He’s come looking for me but is obviously a stranger, or else he would know that I’m the one he’s looking for. Someone told him to look for a redhead with tattoos; the cloak that the sisters put on them may have just saved me more than a minor annoyance at work.
“She’s not here yet but should be any minute,” I say, grabbing a bar napkin and placing it in front of him. “I can get you something while you wait.”
He looks uncertain, then lets loose with a sheepish snort and a grin. “I’m not much of a drinker.” His head turns to the man sitting at the bar next to him, enjoying a dessert that I wish I could find in the States. “What’s he having?”
“That’s beer pudding,” I tell him. “It’s outstanding. Shall I get you one?”
He shrugs a shoulder. “Sure,” he says, and pulls up a seat next to the other customer, whose name is Maciej. He’s become my first regular, a metalhead with a scraggly blond beard and a studded leather jacket. Occasionally his head will bob up and down in time to some sick riff he has looping in his head. He thinks I’m of his tribe because I know who Yngwie Malmsteen is and can even name a few of his songs.
“What’s it taste like?” I hear the newcomer ask as I turn to punch in the order on the computer.
Maciej pauses to answer. I’m sure he’s considering something epic, because he’s given to excess when it comes to description. I’m expecting him to say, “It tastes like the sweet desperate cries of your enemy as you burn down his house and then dive headfirst into a lake of his tears,” but apparently he’s decided the posh man wouldn’t appreciate it. “It’s plum pudding cooked in stout, so you get a little bit of that chocolate malty flavor mixed in with the plum. Very good.”
“That was a nice description, Maciej,” I say, flashing him a smile as I grab a glass of water for the newcomer. Maciej’s eyes look a bit worried when they meet mine. He’s getting a bad vibe off the new guy too, and he didn’t give me away when I lied about some other American girl with tattoos working here. Maciej had asked me where the tattoos went when he came in tonight, and I told him they were concealed because I was getting too much unwelcome attention from them. He hadn’t thought that would be possible—tattoos were a good thing!—but now he understands perfectly.
I use the noise of scooping ice to cover the fact that I’m casting magical sight under my breath. I don’t have a store of energy on me at the moment, but it’s not a high-energy binding, so I figure it’s worth taking the dip in my own reserves to figure out what I’m dealing with.
Maciej has a multicolored aura that suggests a preoccupation with sex and violence underneath a thick film of loneliness. Nothing surprising there. The handsome newcomer, however, has a dull gray aura with two pinpoints of red: one in his torso and one in his head. Which means he’s a vampire. And he has exactly one day to get out of Poland for good. The treaty we signed with Leif Helgarson in Rome states that starting tomorrow I can unbind any vampires I find in Poland on sight.
I place the water down in front of him, already knowing he won’t touch it or the beer pudding he ordered either. “What’s your name, sweetie?” I ask him.
“Bartosz.”
“I like it. Can I call you Bartosz with the Good Hair?”
He looks helpless at my question. He’s obviously not a Beyoncé fan, which means he’s out of step with most of the world. But I’ve seen that expression before: It’s exactly what Leif Helgarson looks like when he doesn’t understand what young people of today are talking about. Bartosz is from another era. “If you wish,” he says, waving slim fingers to dismiss something unimportant. “What did you say the name of your co-worker is?”
“I didn’t. What do you need from her, if you don’t even know her name?”
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out an envelope. “I am merely a messenger. I’m supposed to give this letter to the redheaded American with tattoos on her forearm.”
He places it on the bar: classy linen stationery in an ivory cream, not addressed to anyone. “Oh. Well,” I say, adopting what I hope is a casual, helpful tone, “I can give it to her if you want, no problem at all, if you’re in a hurry.”