“The reminder taped to your dresser?”
“Must have missed it under all the mess.” As if. Snowflake was anal-retentive tidy.
I slapped my hand against the giant paper calendar pinned to the fridge with magnets reading Yeah, bitch! Magnets! The calendar contained a single entry. The large square for Monday June 19 was festooned with gold stars. “Nava’s 21st birthday! Commence adoration!!” was written in all-caps black sharpie. In smaller penciled letters someone had added, “And Ari’s.”
“You do know the last person who joked about forgetting Nava’s birthday was never seen again, right?” Ari dumped the detritus of the meal in the trash.
“Don’t worry.” I threw a pointed glance at Rohan. “I’ve already got the remote gravesite picked out should people fail in their duties. Back to this forensic chemist idea.” I motioned at Ari. “Expound please.”
Rohan, eating his sandwich, nodded in agreement.
“I’ve been thinking about it since I heard the gogota attacked you and your scientist witch,” Ari said.
“Dr. Gelman. This isn’t a case of She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.” She’d gone off-grid after the attacks. Rabbi Mandelbaum, head rabbi on the Brotherhood’s Executive, maintained she was dead. While I was getting increasingly worried about her failure to surface, no way did I believe him. Dr. Gelman was a badass witch, and she was probably taking her sweet time getting back in touch just to annoy me.
“Then those yaksas attacked the village in Pakistan. That makes the sites of the attacks crime scenes.” Ari always talked faster when it came to chemistry stuff. Hand gestures, intense eye contact, the whole nine yards–it was actually kind of adorable. “Essentially, with both the gogota and the yaksas horn fragment, you removed material from those crime scenes to cast the spell. A forensic chemist does the same thing at a non-magical crime scene; they work to identify material found there. The spell that you and Ro cast was like basic magic chromatography. It led you to the discovery of the purple magic signature on both. The initial identification. Now you need someone who can dig deeper and isolate the specific components.” He pointed at the vial. “Same with this. If a forensic chemist specializing in magic existed, that person might be able to tell you which type of demon was behind this. The specific component, so to speak.”
My brother was a chemistry major. I’d bet a kidney he was dying to find a way to combine that passion with magic.
“That would be extremely cool.” I finished up my sandwich, licking buttery crumbs off my fingers. “I wish I could do that.”
“You have enough of a revolving list of powers,” Ari said dryly. “Electricity, magnetizing shit, however you’d oscillated your power to almost kill Malik. It’s weird.”
“You’re jealous that I keep rolling out new tricks.”
Rohan snorted, reaching for a napkin that he used to meticulously wipe off his hands. Fine. Maybe my magic was kind of weird, being variations on a theme rather than one ability gained all at once. But considering that all the other Rasha had ages to understand magic and what would happen when they came into their powers, and I was just mastering it on the go, I was acing the catch-up.
“How do we know these magic forensic chemists don’t exist?” I asked.
“Oh, I just asked Rabbi Abrams.”
“Ari!” I jumped off the bar stool, my heart hammering.
“Calm down, stress case, I didn’t tell him. But hasn’t he risked enough for us already? He deserves to know.”
“Save your breath.” Rohan removed the canister of ground coffee from the freezer, slamming the door. “We’ve had this conversation a dozen times.”
“And for the dozenth and first.” I stacked our dishes in the dishwasher. “I’m not saying anything until we know who’s responsible for the purple magic. The man is a billion years old. I’m not potentially causing him to stroke out based on supposition.”
They turned identical scowls on me. Even Kane had been nagging me to bring the head of our chapter on board. I was terrified to tell the rabbi. Partially because I didn’t want to upset him, but mostly because he was the one rabbi in this entire Brotherhood that I trusted. How was I supposed to tell him the core of the cause that he’d devoted his life to was rotten? It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the one responsible, I knew what they did to messengers, and I wasn’t ready to give up the fond smile he bestowed on me whenever he saw me.
“We don’t have a forensic chemist,” I said, “but we do have drugs with demon magic all over them.” I sealed up the remaining crystals in the vial once more.
“What happened?” Ari asked.
Letting me relay the events of the night, Rohan filled the coffee machine with a new filter and grounds, sliding the empty glass carafe onto the base. He flipped on the power switch, the machine gurgling to life.
Ari squeezed my shoulder. “Geez. That’s rough. Sorry to hear it.”
I didn’t even like Naomi, so why was I obsessively checking the clock on the wall to see if it was late enough in the morning to call Christina’s brother Henry for an update? I turned away from the clock with purpose. The only thing I could do to help right now was find the demons responsible.
“We’re going to need a new paintbrush.” Since the crystals had dissolved into the brush and saturated it with demon magic, it was now officially useless for further spell casting. Thanks to the spell, it would forever remain the color of the magic signature.
Generally, this didn’t matter, like with the gogota’s finger or yaksas horn, because we wanted that proof of the magic signature to remain, but sometimes it sucked. No amount of dry cleaning had changed the coat that I’d tested back to its natural pale green. I could have lived with a red coat, the color that Dr. Gelman’s witch magic had turned the fabric, but it looked like a bad dye job and was now unwearable.
I was so done with my ongoing loss of clothing.
I took a few deep breaths, letting the sweet burbles of the coffeepot melt away stress and tension better than any ylang ylang shit. Meditation with hippy oils was all well and good for people with no worries more pressing than destressing from their morning commute, but for those of us with hellspawn breathing down our necks on a regular basis, mainlining caffeine was a must.
Rohan got two chunky ceramic mugs out of the cupboard and held up a third. Ari nodded at him. “Oh, hey. I got a lead from Christina while I was consoling her,” Ro said. “She said she bought the Sweet Tooth from some skater kid who lives on her block. Told me where he hangs out. We’ll start there.”
“Leo and I have plans. As you very well know.”
“Nava,” he said, all blustery stern. “You’re still going there?”
“Rohan,” I mocked back in a deep voice. “We still need answers about the Brotherhood.”
He sighed and passed me my coffee with its correct 3:2 ratio of milk to sugar and a sprinkling of cinnamon on top. “It’s not that I don’t believe you can pull it off.”