Page 11 of When the Witch Met the Minotaur

The gargoyle nods his horned head. “Whatever happened earlier, well, it’s ripped up a bit of the garden beside Widow Warton’s place.”

“You sure it was the event?” I ask, ignoring the way Argos smells. It’s like woodsmoke and sandalwood almost. Annoyingly pleasant. “Grumlin said the shrub gryphons have been bad lately for him.”

“I watched the, the whatever it was tear up the ground,” Rom says.

I exhaled fiercely. “Fine. Thanks for letting us know. I’ll head over there.”

Argos has freed his tunic from his belt and pulled up the bottom to hold all the scones. “Who is Widow Warton?”

“You don’t need to know. You’ll be gone before you get a chance to meet anyone else here.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Who will be kicking me out? The mayor? Or am I lucky enough to be mistreated by you? I can only imagine the very bad, bad things you could do to me, a mere minotaur. But you might find that my kind isn’t exactly what you think.”

I roll my eyes. “I’d rather keep you in suspense on who is going to lob your arse out of town. Now if you return those scones to Kaya, she can use them to feed the birds or give them to Rustion for his pigs.”

Still smirking the smirk that is going to get him killed, Argos nods and heads off. I blink at his back. He is so incredibly strange. He taunts me and then compliments me. What a jerk, attempting to toy with my mind. I’m not snowed by his good looks and games. Not one little bit.

Swallowing and pushing him out of my mind for the moment, I bend to ruffle a dark brown maplecat’s leafy pelt, then I walk across the snowy ground toward the widow’s place at the edge of the town’s center.

The widow lived here before most of these buildings existed. Part pixie and part vampire, she’s alongliver. Grumlin, with his wizard blood, is the only one who will see as much time as she has. I knock on her plain wooden door and wait for an eternity for her to open the door.

“Oh hello, Scarlet.” Her voice is old parchment and the creak of branches deep in the snowy woods.

She’s always called me Scarlet because of my hair, and she’s the only individual who can give me a nickname and not suffer a punch to the nose.

“Morning. I heard that our newcomer’s dark magic tore up your kitchen garden. I’m here to fix it up if I can.”

“Come on in.”

She takes my hand and leads me inside her warm home. The walls are covered in paintings she did when she was young. She’s told me all her stories over our weekly tea times. The widow was once an artist for the king and her work is lovely. Bright stars, maplecats, rivers, and complicated patterns of color make her house incredibly pretty.

The thought reminds me that Argos called me pretty. Ugh. What a creep.

The widow leads me out back to her normally tidy kitchen garden. She bought a complicated casting from me to keep one side warm enough to keep growing the cucumbers, tomatoes, and dill she adores. But the view from the back door shows that there won’t be another winter magical harvest for her anytime soon. Argos’s stupid actions have uprooted all her plants and shredded them.

“I hate to tell you this,” I say, “but I’ll need a good week to get this right again. I’ll do some work today and return tomorrow.”

“Ah, that’s how life goes sometimes. What happened anyway? I’ve never known your magic to go awry. Was this Grumlin’s or Rom’s doing perhaps? I don’t really know what all they’re capable of, magically speaking. Wait. You mentioned a newcomer…”

She trails off, her slightly glassy eyes telling me she is trying to recall what exactly I said.

I pick up a glove she must have dropped at some point and tuck it into her hand. “Argos. A minotaur. He has some dangerous way of accessing power and uses it to make stupid illusions that make my spells explode.”

Patting my hand, she frowns. “I didn’t know minotaurs had magic.”

“Yeah, they don’t,” I say. “That’s the issue.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmmis right. It’s a puzzle I’m going to crack.”

I pull out my wand and begin casting over the area, easing the earth back into its proper beds and encouraging it to bring the shredded plants with it underground.

“So how does he do it, Scarlet?”