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Like talking to one, it seemed.

“Do you know when she may return?” Mircea asked, still polite.

“Couldn’t tell you.” Which could be taken several ways.

Unlike her deciding to turn her back on him to do the extremely important and urgent job of dusting a shelf.

The woman either wanted a fight, or else she was strong enough to think she could survive one. She was wrong. I wouldn’t have taken Mircea on, and I’d battled more vampires than she had ever seen.

But his smile never wavered; I had no idea why. And then I did when she suddenly rounded on him, the half of her face that worked set on a snarl. “Stay out of my head, vampire!”

“Tell me where your mistress may be found, and I shall. Or should I tell myself?”

He looked pointedly at the curtain behind her, and someone beyond it cursed. “Gi’e it up, girl!” a woman’s voice called. “He could smell me like as not when he came in.”

A lined and leathery face that honestly could have belonged to either sex poked through the curtain. It had a thick coating of soft fuzz on the chin and upper lip, almost enough to qualify as a beard, which contrasted with its complete lack of eyebrows. And was framed by a wild mop of wiry gray hair that the creature did nothing to conceal and which matched the storm-colored eyes.

I blinked, because if I’d ever seen the conventional depiction of a witch, that was it. All she needed was a mole on the side of her nose, supposedly where Satan had kissed her. And then she turned to look at the blonde shop girl, and there it was.

“Close up,” she instructed.

The girl frowned. “But sun’s not down.”

“Did I ask ye that? Close up!” The girl hurried to obey, and the old woman turned her attention to Mircea. “What d’ye want, vampire?”

A dark eyebrow raised. “You surprise me. I thought we left on better terms.”

“That was thirty years ago!”

“Was it? Surely not.”

The old woman rolled her eyes, which was understandable. But to my surprise, she opened the curtain in what I supposed was an invitation. Mircea chose to interpret it that way, and we passed behind the counter and into the back.

As I’d assumed, this was her workshop, with tables covered in chopped herbs, large sized mortals and pestles, and a scale for weighing out portions. There was a fireplace on one side, with the usual soot-stained bricks above it, bottles and vials of already brewed tinctures on shelves, and a line of glazed pots with ingredients on a counter by the wall. I went over to get a better look at them, thinking that I’d misread the labels.

But no.

“Tongue of dog?” I said, not really asking a question. But the old woman answered it.

“Gypsyflower, also known as houndstongue.”

“And Lion’s Tooth?”

“Dandelion.”

I looked back at her. “Are they all coded?”

“Well, what d’ye think, girl? That I’m out in the swamps, cutting off frog’s toes?” She cackled. And then tapped her finger down the line of oddly labelled pots. “Toe of Frog is buttercup; Adder’s Fork is adder’s tongue, a kind o’ fern; Eye of Newt is black mustard seed; Lizard’s Leg is ivy; Wool of Bat is holly, which the common folk sometimes refer to as bat’s wings. And so on.”

“Why change the names?”

“I didn’t. Apothecaries did, long before I was born. Didn’t want anyone ter know their secrets, did they?” she shrugged. “I just inherited the pots.”

She led us through the back door, into what should have been fresh, rain-laced air, but wasn’t. Possibly because the brewing was being done out here, I assumed to keep the fumes from completely taking over the house. And she had plenty of space for it.

It was an unusually pretty area for the center of a city, but part of that was the sunset making a splash in the sky. The rain clouds had rolled back, although a tree peeking over top of the woman’s private, walled courtyard still dripped. Leaving salmon and yellow tinting the skies with a watercolor brush, better than any Italian master could duplicate.

The courtyard boasted a wood pile in the left-hand corner and a pergola over the area by the door. The latter had an ivy-covered trellis on one side to give added protection when it rained, and sheltered a couple of old workbenches, a table so scarred that the weather couldn’t possibly have hurt it, and a stacked stone fire pit. I guessed that this was where the herbs had been dried, since the rest of the space had been left bare.