“Just about. You can’t spell salt, so my stash is probably okay, but I’ll need my good spell pot and all my books.”

Ivy paused on the path. “I thought you had to know how to stir a brew by heart to get your witch license.”

Now I was embarrassed, and I bent to tug a weed free from beside a rosemary plant. Nobody made their own charms if they could afford to buy them. “Yeah,” I said as I dropped the weed, flicking the dirt from under my nails. “But I’m out of practice.” I sighed. This was going to be harder than it looked.

Ivy shrugged. “Can you get them off the net? The recipes, I mean.”

I looked askance at her. “Trust anything off the net? Oh, there’s a good idea.”

“There’re some books in the attic.”

“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “One hundred spells for the beginner. Every church has a copy of that.”

Ivy stiffened. “Don’t get snotty,” she said, the brown of her eyes disappearing behind her dilating pupils. “I just thought if one of the clergy was a witch, and the right plants were here, he might have left his books. The old lady said he ran off with one of the younger parishioners. That’s probably his stuff in the attic in case he had the guts to come back.”

The last thing I wanted was an angry vamp sleeping across the hall. “Sorry,” I apologized. “I’ll go look. And if I’m lucky, when I go out to the shed to find a saw to cut my amulets, there’ll be a bag of salt for when the front steps get icy.”

Ivy gave a little start, turning to look at the closet-sized shed. I passed her, pausing on the sill. “Coming? I said, determined not to let her think popping in and out of vamp mode was shaking me. “Or will your owls leave me alone?”

“No, I mean yes.” Ivy bit her lip. It was decidedly a human gesture, and my eyebrows rose. “They’ll let you up there, just don’t go making a lot of noise. I’ll—I’ll be right there.”

“Whatever …” I muttered, turning to find my way up to the belfry.

As Ivy had promised, the owls left me alone. It turned out the attic had a copy of everything I had lost in my apartment, and then some. Several of the books were so old they were falling apart. The kitchen had a nest of copper pots, probably used, Ivy had claimed, for chili cook-offs. They were perfect for spell casting, since they hadn’t been sealed to reduce tarnish. Finding everything I needed was eerie, so much so that when I went out to look for a saw in the shed, I was relieved to not find any salt. No, that was on the floor of the pantry.

Everything was going too well. Something had to be wrong.

Six

Ankles crossed, I sat atop Ivy’s antique kitchen table and swung my feet in their fuzzy pink slippers. The sliced vegetables were cooked to perfection, still crisp and crunchy, and I pushed them around in the little white cardboard box with my chopsticks, looking for more chicken. “This is fantastic,” I mumbled around my full mouth. Red tangy spice burned my tongue. My eyes watered. Grabbing the waiting glass of milk, I downed a third of it. “Hot,” I said as Ivy glanced up from the box cradled in her long hands. “Cripes, it’s really hot.”