Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,16

said, sitting beside me. “I got Restraint. See?”

I peered into her cup and found that it was faintly pink and somewhat floral. Mine, on the other hand, was dark brown, with a woodsy, almost earthy scent. I cautiously took a sip. I didn’t feel more courageous, that I could tell, but it was good tea.

“They’re giving some of the more combative ones Calm,” Saffy said.

“Think it’ll help?”

She shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

I glanced at the brouhaha going on behind us and hoped some of them had gotten a double.

Zara, the youngest of the coven leaders who I knew, came over and pulled up a hassock. Not by grabbing one and dragging it over, you understand, but by holding out a hand and literally pulling it up from the floor. It was shaped vaguely like a mushroom, with a fat base and a round, slightly-indented-for-comfort top, and she settled onto it with a small sigh. I didn’t even blink at this point, even though I hadn’t seen her drop any water. But then, as powerful as she was, the tree probably figured it shouldn’t piss her off.

Not that she was looking particularly upset at the moment.

I glanced in her cup. “Calm?” I guessed.

“Peppermint,” she informed me, and took a sip.

I was actually kind of relieved that it was Zara who’d come to talk. I’d nicknamed her Jasmine when we first met, because she looked like a beautiful Middle Eastern princess, with sloe dark eyes and golden skin. And black hair with a sheen to it that was looking faintly purple at the moment, because a giant graffitied purple dragon had just stuck its glowing nose in the window and was looking around curiously.

A couple of the witches shooed it off, after which it went back to preening over a nearby smoke shop and Zara’s hair returned to normal. Which, unlike the real Jasmine’s huge, bouncy ponytail, was a shorter, swingy style that matched her modern suit and bright blue blouse. She drank tea at me for a while.

“You read the leaves?” she finally asked, and I realized that she’d finished her cup.

“Um, no. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

I pulled a soggy pack of tarot cards out of my purse, because making a friend never hurt, but unlike normal, they weren’t talking. My old governess had had them enchanted for me when I was young, to give the overall aura of a situation, and I’d found them to be eerily accurate at times. But not today. Today, the cards, which were usually fighting, arguing, and trying to speak over each other, were a block of muttering, soggy paper, their voices so muddled that no one stuck out above the others.

Maybe that was the message, I thought, glancing at the quarreling witches behind me.

I put them back.

“Perhaps another time,” Zara said wryly. Right before a graffitied bat flew through the window and fluttered around everyone’s hair, causing another disruption. She sighed. “Annoying, isn’t it?”

“Cassie likes it here,” Saffy said staunchly.

“It gets irritating after a while,” Zara told me, taking out a small cigarette case. “That’s why I live in town.”

“Then why have it like this?”

She shrugged. “Makes the fey feel more at home, so they come more readily. And we have to get potion supplies from somewhere.”

“You can’t just get them at the usual places?” I asked, because there were potion shops all over Vegas. Just on the street with the used furniture shop, I’d seen no less than three—four, if you counted a charm store that also stocked a few ingredients behind the counter.

To human eyes, they’d appeared to be closed and boarded-up storefronts, their interiors full of nothing but dust. But to anyone with magic in their veins, they looked like what they were: stores humming with shoppers and stuffed full of potion supplies, everything from the mundane stuff needed for cleaning and warding your house to stronger things used in medicine or pest control. Or the little beauty tricks that didn’t count as glamouries but still took ten years off your face.

There was even a Rothgay’s, the Circle-owned potion shop that had its towering main store in London. I’d never been there, but everyone had heard stories of its pristine interior, gleaming old-world fixtures, and knowledgeable staff, any of whom could have headed up a store of his or her own, but who preferred to stay and learn from the truly brilliant alchemists in back. They experimented on new potions and elixirs all the time, the best of which quickly made their