Page 18

THIRTEEN

The fashion mini-makeover rebirthed Thorn as a goat. Lowercase. A newborn goat, unfamiliar with the concept of legs.

Lily’s heels weren’t very high, but they were quadruple the height of Thorn’s regular boots, and that was enough to make Thorn’s journey from the cottage to the restaurant the longest she had ever taken. With each step, she feared for her life.

The digital map had said it was a fifteen-minute walk, but it had been thirty and felt like a thousand, and she was still a few blocks away. She had to stop and lean against a lamp pole to catch her breath.

Her phone chimed with a text from Walls.

WALLS: I have an emergency case. I’ll drop by later in the evening to tend to Bandit.

THORN: Let yourself in with the spare key Meg gave you. I’m a young woman out on a date.

She put away her phone and teetered on toward the restaurant.

When she arrived and saw her future husband waiting by the door, she would’ve walked ten more miles on stilts if she had to. Despite Janet’s and Lily’s warnings about something called catfishing, Brad looked pretty much like he did in his pictures.

“You look nice,” he said.

“You are dashing,” Thorn said before remembering Lily’s advice that men didn’t like women who seemed desperate. She should express her interest, but not too much. She quickly added, “my hopes and dreams.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean… uh, I wasn’t talking to you.”

“I get it. It’s a habit of people who live alone. I talk out loud to myself, too, or to my cat.”

“Right. Or to the voices in your head.” The second she said it, she knew she had gone too far. All her life, she’d found it difficult to be just right. Mother had always said she was too loud, while Thomas said she was too quiet.

But luckily, Brad laughed and opened the door for her.

Inside, it was mostly couples dining by dim candlelight, and Thorn and her date were ushered to a table by the window.

Once she was off her feet and not literally teetering over life and death, she noticed that right across the road was Thimble Veterinary Clinic.

She could only see the receptionist behind the desk, but she knew Walls was probably behind the door of the consult room on the left.

And she immediately felt less discombobulated.

It was a place she had been before, and someone she was familiar with was there.

To feel even more assured, she ordered two familiar items from the menu—bread rolls and tea.

“Get whatever you want. Tonight’s on me,” Brad said, handing his menu back to the server. “I’m in the mood for steak and white wine.”

Scanning the menu again, she didn’t recognize some of the dishes—what on earth was a pizza?

—while others sounded like abominations of flavor combinations.

(Fried chicken and waffles? That was just lunch and dessert rolled into one!).

But she was determined to make it as a modern witch, so she picked out an interesting-sounding food.

“I’ll have item number twenty-four instead, please. And tea.”

“So what do you do, Thorn?” Brad asked once the server left. He was smiling and looking into her eyes, but not in the way the blacksmith had under the True Love potion.

“I’m self-employed.”

“Doing what?”

Thorn downed the entire glass of water to buy herself time. Lily hadn’t prepared her for further questions. “I’m an endeavor fulfillment specialist.”

“I’ve never heard of that, but it sounds interesting.”

“It’s a very niche profession. I help people with their wishes and desires.”

“Like a fairy godmother?”

“Fairies definitely don’t grant wishes unless it’s a death wish. Those murderous little flies.”

Brad laughed again. She was beginning to think he had a very twisted sense of humor.

“Help me understand,” he said. “Give me an example how you’d grant one of my wishes.”

“Name it.”

“I wish I could escape the early-autumn heat. I love the cool nights, but during the day, it still feels like summer.”

A simple Hibernation Anytime potion would fulfill Brad’s wish; he’d simply sleep through autumn and wake up in winter.

But Thorn carefully worded her reply in order not to give anything witchy away.

“I’d go to my laboratory. I’d carefully measure out all the components of a specific drug and cook them all up.

After you took the drug, you’d become oblivious.

Which is a good thing. And then you’d wake up surrounded by ice. ”

Brad was speechless. Thorn started to panic, running through what she had just said to see if any of it sounded wrong.

But then he laughed. She was relieved, although she didn’t get this joke, either. Nevertheless, she reckoned she could live with his somewhat excessive mirth if he became her husband.

Their drinks arrived, and he paused the inquisition. “Excuse me. I need to use the restroom.”

Alone at the table and glancing around the room, she became acutely conscious of herself, suddenly very aware of her arms and legs and unsure what to do with them.

She was here with someone, so the feeling wasn’t due to the fact that everyone else seemed happily paired up.

Still, she felt like a turtle out of water.

Not a fish, because a fish would die within minutes.

A turtle could survive for a good while on land, but the adaptations that made them successful in water made them slow and vulnerable outside of it.

She sipped her tea, but it tasted like drain water.

She turned to watch the clinic. Walls was now in the lobby. He appeared somber as he talked to a man. She wondered if this was one of those moments he’d mentioned, where twenty-first-century animal medicine wasn’t enough. She had the strange urge to feed him some comforting wild mushroom soup.

When Walls disappeared into his consult room again, Brad was still in the restroom.

When the food came, he was still in the restroom.

When Thorn had polished off her plate, he was still in the restroom.

When the clinic lights turned off, and Walls and the receptionist walked out of the building and parted ways, Brad was still in the restroom.

When the waiter came up to her and said, “Ma’am. We close in half an hour,” Thorn knew that Brad, forty-five years old, marketing manager, cat dad, was never in the restroom.

The waiter handed her the bill and the payment terminal.

One hundred and twenty dollars. A hundred of that was for Brad’s untouched steak and wine.

Luckily the tour had been very popular, and she could cover it.

But no matter how she tapped on her cell phone, the screen remained as black as Brad’s heart.

She couldn’t even speed-dial Walls for help.

“I need to use the restroom first.” She could feel the waiter’s eyes on her back as she made her way through the tables of loved-up diners coyly debating about who should foot the bills.

She would have panicked and broken into a run, but the heels made it seem like she was confidently, if a bit clumsily, moving through life.

No one else was in the restroom. She dug in her pocket and fished out the vial containing the purple liquid.

Outside the restroom, the waiter lay in ambush, accompanied by a burly kitchen hand. They weren’t newbies at dealing with dine and dash. When the restroom door opened five minutes later, they were ready to make a citizen’s arrest, but it was a different patron who stepped out.

“Have a good night,” the waiter said as he stepped aside to let the old woman with the head of gray totter past.

As Thorn stepped out onto the streets, she silently and begrudgingly thanked the tourists for her escape from the law. It was thanks to their disapproval of her younger self that she had brewed the antidote.

Brad, forty-five years old, marketing manager, cat dad, had been perfectly suitable.

“He even found me hilarious,” Thorn muttered as she made her way home in the chilly autumn night. “What went wrong?”

She took off Lily’s heels and hastened her pace. The pavement was cold under her feet, and she wished she had worn stockings. She couldn’t wait to sip the best kind of tea—hot in her favorite cup at home, where she wouldn’t have to think about the right things to say or do.

Just before she reached the crossing, she ran into Pumpkin. “You crossed the road? That’s dangerous.”

More food in town.

She bent down and checked Pumpkin’s toe beans. “You still have eight lives. But that doesn’t mean you can be reckless.”

Cats don’t keep close track of how many lives they have left.

She picked up the cat. “But I do. And tonight I’m not letting you risk any more. Have dinner at home.”

As she crossed the road, she ran into Pepper trotting in the opposite direction. She scooped him up, too. He tried to squirm out of her embrace, but she held on tight. “You only have six lives left.”

She struggled to contain the pair of heels and two grown cats in her arms, but she made it home. At first she thought there was a burglar, because the lights in the windows were lit. Then a bean pole of a silhouette strode past the window.

She stepped inside to find Walls in the rocking chair, brushing the purring loaf of white bread on his lap. He said, “Welcome home.”

Maybe hallucination was a side effect of the Youth potion antidote. But this was practically a scene from her dreams, of coming home to a man who loved her. Bonus points that this one looked virile.

Look what the cats dragged in. Bandit’s acrid tongue and the cats leaping out of her arms snapped Thorn out of her delusion.

“It’s all right to come in,” she said to the stray cats. They lingered by the door with their ears pressed back. “Bandit will be nice. Or he won’t get those nice crunchy bits of beef liver with his dinner.”

Bandit said nothing, but his tail twitched with indignation.

We’re fine out here , Pumpkin said. We’re not used to “inside.”

“Suit yourself,” Thorn said.

She understood how out of place they must feel after a lifetime of living wild. Besides, Bandit was still throwing eyefuls of hate their way.

“Walls, thanks for taking care of Bandit again.”

“When I got here, he had escaped his cloak. Luckily he hadn’t completely chewed off the bandage.” Walls used two fingers to pull out the drawstring around the collar, then tucked it back under the cloak. “He shouldn’t be able to get out of it anymore if we tuck the drawstring underneath.”

Suddenly, an inexplicable surge of anger came over Thorn. She didn’t understand why it was all coming to a head now, but she tried to calm herself by busying her hands with preparing three bowls of cat food.

Walls gently removed Bandit from his lap and even more gently asked, “Thorn, are you okay?”

“It’s not my fault Bandit got out of his cloak.

” She was aware she was taking this all out on Walls because he was nice.

But at this point, she was a snowball rolling down a hill.

“I can’t watch him all the time. And my date fled, even though he said I looked nice and I made him laugh.

I ordered a modern food because I’m a modern witch, but it turned out a ‘burger’ was just ground meat stuck between two pieces of bread.

My date left me with the bill, which I couldn’t pay because my phone died.

Why hasn’t a self-charging battery been invented when people have been to the moon ?

Then I hid in the restroom and took the antidote to the Youth potion.

And the waiter didn’t recognize me anymore, because I’m my old self again.

And nobody paid for dinner. To be fair, nobody ate the steak or drank the wine.

But if the constables come around, you have to tell them I was here with you all night. ”

Her tongue rolled to a stop, and she waited.

She knew what would come next: Walls would pick up his medical box and walk out the door.

And when he returned tomorrow to tend to Bandit, he wouldn’t look at her the same, because he had seen her ugly side.

The same one that had made Father, Mother, Rose, and Thomas leave.

She’d try to take it all back, but there was no point.

If Walls came around for Bandit long enough, he would see her true colors. Better to rip that bandage off now.

Walls picked up his medical box.