“I saw.”
Outside, there was the distant wailing of sirens, but the man was already starting to stir a little, his eyelids fluttering, and Rhys assumed whatever the spell was, it wasn’t strong enough to last long.
Small mercy, that.
As he stood up, Vivienne moved closer to him and the two of them were able to slip back into the crowd of people gathered around the guy. As the ambulance pulled up outside, the owner of the shop put her phone back in her pocket and hurried over, leaving the counter empty and no one paying attention to anything but the EMTs currently coming in.
Which made it easy for Rhys and Vivienne to slip into the storeroom.
Unlike the back room at Something Wicked, there was nothing magical about this space. It was like the back room you’d find in any coffee shop in any town. Tall metal shelves stocked with stacks of paper cups, big sacks of coffee beans on the floor and several plastic crates full of mugs.
Rhys was, honestly, a little disappointed.
The girl with the turquoise hair was sitting on one of those crates, empty and overturned, her knees drawn up against her chest, the toes of her boots turned in and pressed together.
As soon as she heard the door open, her head shot up, and her dark eyes looked huge in her pale face. A name tag pinned to her shirt read, sam.
“Is he okay?” she asked, and Vivienne nodded.
“It’s already wearing off,” Sam said, and blew out a long breath, her shoulders sagging. “Okay, good.”
“Do you maybe want to tell us what you did to his drink to make him like that?” Rhys asked, and when she looked up at him now, some of her sardonic cool had returned.
“It’s a bespoke spell,” Sam said, sitting up straighter. “You wouldn’t know it.”
“Hipster magic, excellent,” Rhys muttered, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. Had he been like this as a young witch? All arrogant and so sure of his abilities?
Stupid to even wonder it, really. He knew he had been.
Next to him, Vivienne drew herself up a little bit taller. “What was it supposed to do?”
“Are you two the Magic Police or something?” Sam asked, scowling, and Rhys shoved his hands into his pockets, rocking back on his heels.
“No, pretty sure that doesn’t exist. If it had, I would surely have been arrested at some point. Just a fellow witch, trying to figure out what happened in there.”
He jerked his thumb back toward the shop, and some of the girl’s confidence faded, her eyes darting toward the door.
“It’s stupid,” she muttered, and Rhys shrugged.
“Lots of things in life are. So what was the spell?”
Sam tugged at the hem of her T-shirt, not meeting Rhys’s eyes. “He wanted a potion to make him, uh. You know.” She made a weird gesture with her hands, lifting her palms up and then flailing her hands in the general direction of Rhys’s lap. “Like Viagra,” she finally said. “But magic.”
Rhys was very proud of himself for not betraying the slightest bit of surprise or amusement over this. Truly, he deserved a medal. Possibly a parade.
As it was, he just cleared his throat and said, “Right.”
“I figured out how to make that kind of spell as a joke,” she went on, “but then I gave it to someone who asked for it, and he told a friend, I guess, and he told someone else, and now I get these dudes coming in here a few times a week for it. But it’s never done that.”
“So wait,” Vivienne said, stepping in front of Rhys and folding her arms over her chest. “You’ve been what? Dealing potions?”