My eyebrows rose at the package of herbs in the basket that I hadn’t put there. “Is that catnip?” I asked, seeing the cellophane printed with little black footprints.

“I thought Rex might leave Jax alone if she had something else to do.” Brown eyes showing embarrassment, she dropped a step away. “You okay? Do you want to sit down?”

It was the third time she’d asked since leaving the motel, and I stiffened. “I’m fine,” I said. Liar, I thought. I was tired, weary in heart and body.

The soft clatter of the phone being picked up rustled in my ear. “Ceri,” I said, before she could say anything. “Just how much fixative do I need for the transference curse?”

The sound of the pixies shrieking diminished, and I guessed Ceri had moved into the living room. “A thumb drop,” she said, and I gratefully took up the smaller bottle.

“My thumb?” I complained. “What is that, about a teaspoon? Why can’t they use normal measurements?”

“It’s a very old curse,” Ceri snapped. “They didn’t have teaspoons back then.”

“Sorry,” I apologized, my eyes meeting Ivy’s as I placed the fixative into the basket. Ceri was one of the nicest, most giving people I knew, but she had a temper.

“Do you have a pencil?” the elf in hiding said politely, but I could hear her annoyance at my impertinence. “I want you to write this down. I know you have the inertia dampening curse in one of the books with you, but I don’t want you to translate the Latin wrong.”

I glanced at the proprietor—who was starting to eye Ivy skulking about—and turned my back on her. “Maybe you could give me just the ingredients right now.” The clutter in my basket was odd enough already. If the proprietor was worth her salt, she’d be able to tell I was making a disguise charm. The only difference between my legal disguise charms and the illegal doppelganger spells was a point of law, a few extra steps, and a cellular sample of the person to copy. I didn’t think she’d be able to tell I was also going to twist a demon curse to move the power from the statue to something else. What she would make of the ingredients for the inertia damping demon curse was anyone’s guess. Ceri said it was a joke curse, but it would work.

Joke curse, I thought sourly. It was still black. If I was caught, I’d be labeled a black witch and magically castrated. I wasn’t fooling myself that this was anything other than wrong. No “saving the world” crap. It was wrong.

Just this once, echoed in my thoughts, and I frowned, thinking of Nick. Telling Al about me had probably started with just one harmless piece of information.

Ceri sighed. “All you need for the joke curse is dust from inside a clock and black candles made from the fat of the unborn. The rest is incantation and ritual.”