brother own this store?”
“His wife.”
“You’re not sewing anymore?”
“Arthritis.” For the first time, she took her eyes off the quartz and eyed the bruise on my cheek. “Although I feel better than you. You look like shit, white girl. Someone’s been hitting you.” It was a simple observation. She did not sound particularly concerned about my welfare.
I touched the scarf around my neck, glad she couldn’t see most of the damage. “Do you know what they do or not?”
Her eyes slitted. “Of course I do. But information has a price.”
“Of course it does,” I countered. “God forbid Blossom Wheaton do someone a favor.”
Her face reddened, and I could tell she was about to wind up into one of her hard-core rants, so I held up my hands in peace. “I’m sorry. You’re right; I’m not feeling well. What do you want in exchange for telling me?”
I was expecting her to name a dollar amount—Simon, Lily, and I had pooled all the cash we could manage—but her eyes dropped to the stones on the counter. “I want them. The whole package.”
I almost laughed; it was too easy. I didn’t want the creepy rocks anyway. But the greedy way she was eyeing them made me pause. There was power in these stones; did I really want to give it to Blossom?
“Will you use them to hurt people?” I asked finally.
She looked up in surprise. “No. I’m going to sell them.”
“And the people who buy them, will they use the stones to hurt people?”
She shrugged. “S’pose they could. But only that big one is outright dangerous. The rest of ’em are high quality, to be sure, but not uncommon.”
“Then the big one never leaves your possession,” I stipulated. “And you don’t use it to hurt anyone.”
“Deal.”
She was still too eager, for Blossom, so I pushed a little farther. “And I want something I can use to stop the guy who used these on me.”
I could see her thinking that over for a long moment, then she nodded. “But you’ll have to pay for the stock. Crystals ain’t free.”
I held out my hand. “Deal.”
Her handshake was firm and leathery. Without another word, she tugged the copper wires out from under the crystals and moved them to a shelf behind the counter. Then she began sorting the stones into piles, a look of intense concentration on her face. I watched quietly, noticing how quickly she recognized subtle differences in the texture and color of the various crystals. Subtleties that I would never have noticed by myself. I had thought there were four or five different kinds of stones, but before I knew it, Blossom had sorted them into more than a dozen piles.
When all the stones were separated, she stared down at them and reached up to tug on her lower lip. “Two different casts here,” she said at last.
“How can you tell?”
She looked up long enough to glare at me. “I just can. Do you want my help or not?” Without waiting for me to answer, she pointed to a small pile of amethyst, which was next to some stones of a slightly lighter purple. “Amethyst and sugilite together . . . interesting.”
“Why?”
Her fingers went back up to her lip. “Because it’s not a conventional cast; your guy is improvising. Ignore the malachite”—she pointed to a pile of green stones—“that’s just a booster. Sugilite and amethyst and dream quartz all together in a grid . . .” She looked up sharply. “It’s a painkiller. A deadening of one’s senses and instincts. Placing these in a grid around someone’s home would be like giving them a heavy narcotic, or maybe one of those date rape drugs.”
I tried to keep the shock off my face. Emil had placed that spell around my house to make me less resistant to him. I suddenly remembered how relaxed and happy Quinn and I had felt the other night, and how I’d slept with no dreams of Iraq. Then I remembered that Emil had called that night, presumably to talk me into something. Betraying Maven, maybe? My fingers curled into fists. “Son of a bitch.”
Ignoring me, Blossom swept the piles of stones for that spell to one side, focusing on the remaining groups. “Now, this. This isn’t just unusual; this is a blitz. Celeste for other dimensions, blue tourmaline to see through the veil, mystic Merlinite for magic, obsidians for the dead . . . and the smoky quartz turns the whole thing into an offensive.” Blossom shook her head, taking