Page 14 of Devils Don’t Deal

She cut off my excuses. “I’m the Grand Sorcerer. We take curses very seriously. If you don’t tell me, I could wrench the truth out of you with all sorts of unpleasant bindings. And you owe me for saving your rabbit. Look, how about I don’t charge you for saving the rabbit from the house curse, and you tell me where the bakery is? If we get there before anything disastrous happens, I won’t even penalize you for illegally destroying curses within city limits.”

The Grand Sorcerer? Weren’t sorcerers all men? I hesitated. “What if you throw in an ointment for the rabbit’s sores, and I’ll tell you where the bakery is.”

She raised a brow. “You’ve got some nerve, bartering with a sorcerer.” She winked at me, flourished with her hand then tossed a bottle to me. “I like it. Let’s go. We’ll take my car.”

She looped her arm through mine then led me forcefully to the gate while I clung to the rabbit and the ointment.

The car was sleek, silver, and looked like a ridiculous amount of money. She pushed me through the open door then clambered in after me. “Where to?” she asked cheerfully, closing the door behind me.

The driver glanced back at us, a woman who looked more competent than anyone I’d ever worked for. She almost intimidated me more than the Grand Sorcerer, because she was still Anna, the crazy healer, in my head. “It’s The Rabbit Hole, but we haven’t put the sign up yet. It’s a shop kitty corner from the Library of Antiquities, right next to The Cat’s Pause.”

Ann squeezed my arm. “Wonderful! Then we can go get sushi after we make sure the smoke doesn’t raise an ancient force of evil from the dead or something.”

“Does that really happen?” I asked, grasping the rabbit and the jar. Maybe I could put it on him in the car. But I didn’t want to spill, and the driver had really stepped on the gas.

“Oh, sure,” she said airily. “But it usually takes some time to really cause a disaster that would require the evacuation of both upper and lower cities. Actually, the last real evacuation was when my husband turned the city to stone.”

I stared at her. “You’re married? Congratulations!” Really, though, she didn’t seem like the type to have a husband, what with the Grand Sorcerer title and the scars, but mostly because she was so weird.

“Thanks.” She grinned at me, eyes flickering with lightning in a very creepy way. “He’s ridiculously handsome. I hope you’re dating someone, or I might get jealous.”

I blinked at her. Why would she be jealous when I’d never even met her husband? She was just as weird as ever. “I have a lot on my plate right now. Dating isn’t really…”

“And if an incredibly attractive man with tons of money hit on you? What would you think?” She peered at me like it was a deadly serious question, more serious than the cursed macaron smoke thing.

“I would think that was extremely strange. And I don’t think your husband would be attractive to me. I think the single most beautiful male in Singsong is the Devil of Wonderland, and your husband is probably not a devil.”

She beamed at me. “That’s the smell on you. You reek of devil. Are you dating him? No, you’re too busy to date, but you’re definitely doing something with him.” She wiggled her brows suggestively. “That’s all right then.”

“It’s all right anyway,” I muttered, snuggling the rabbit close, aware that my pale skin was probably blushing stupidly. I shouldn’t have said that about him being beautiful, but it was true, and she was irrationally insecure about her husband. Or she pretended to be insecure about her husband. Either way, everyone knew you got better results from Healer Anna if you humored her. And she had offered me sushi after this. I’d been working in the shop and baking for hours. I could use a dinner break.

We pulled up outside The Cat’s Pause, and Anna narrowed her eyes at the shop next door. “Huh. It’s hard to notice the place.”

“Yes. I’m still working on that.”

“Baking magic, you say?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t really say.”

She hmphed and got out, heading for the front door while gathering swirls of magic in her hands. I scrambled after her, almost dumping the bottle of ointment in the process. I followed her into the shop in time to see the standoff between my father holding a match in his fingers over the mountain of macarons and Anna holding a ball of destructive energy in hers.

“Can we not burn down the shop?” I said, edging between the two.

My dad frowned at me. “I’m not burning down the shop. I soaked the cookies in the most potent anti-curse accelerant you can craft. The tiles are anti-curse and anti-burn.”

“What about the ceiling?” Anna asked with a raised brow.

We all looked up. Some of the plaster was falling down. Correction, half the plaster had already fallen, but not recently.

“Definitely have to fix that,” I muttered.

“The floor is solid,” Anna said, stomping her foot. “Good work. How about you do your curse burning while I turn the smoke into a strengthening spell that should reinforce the structural integrity?”

My dad gave her a hard look. “What’s in it for you?”

“The sushi shop next door is essential to my health and happiness. That’s where we have all our girls’ nights. Unless they’re somewhere else.”

He nodded and dropped the match on the pile, muttering dark spells in goblin, producing noxious green smoke that Anna took and made into crazy shapes and pictures. Was that a gargoyle? And a squirrel? Was she just messing around?