Page 35 of Kill the Beast
“No,” Alderic said with a self-satisfied smile. “Thatis good shopping.”
Fortunately, Lyssa had never had much of a “womanly figure,” even before she took up blacksmithing. With the hat pulled low and her coat wrapped tightly around her, she looked like every other clerk or banker walking back to the office after lunch, and they managed to skirt by the Children of the Moonlit Grovewithout being pummeled by eggs—though Lyssa did get a flower crown jammed onto her bowler hat despite shaking her head when they asked if she wanted one. She had promptly discarded it the moment they rounded the corner; Alderic, meanwhile, was still wearing his.
“Hold on,” he said as Lyssa got out her chalk. They were in the Buxton Fields Memorial Park, standing beside the wall in the back, where people rarely ventured.
“We have wastedtwo hourswaiting for you to finish packing your bag,” Lyssa said through gritted teeth. “I’m not waiting any longer.”
“But I have something I wanted to…” He rummaged through the remainder of his shopping bags, balanced precariously atop Nadia’s wagon; she had agreed to bring home anything he didn’t pack, and store it safely in the cottage until he returned.
Lyssa pinched the bridge of her nose with a heavy sigh. “I thought we had agreed that you were satisfied with your choices,” she said, looking pointedly at his massive traveling pack. It was three times as heavy as hers and was stuffed with enough gear for ten people. If he hadn’t been so enthusiastic about demonstrating his ability to carry it without complaint, she would have made him get rid of half the stuff inside. “You do not need to add a single—”
“Aha!” he said triumphantly, holding up the thing he had been looking for—a drawstring pouch with a pattern of little black crows dotting the pale gray fabric. He presented it to Nadia with a flourish.
“You… you got me a present?” Nadia breathed, her eyes wide.
“Ididn’t get a present,” Lyssa said.
“I let you eat half of my taffy,” he reminded her.
“What’s it for?” Nadia asked him.
“Anything you’d like,” he said. “It made me think of you, so I bought it.”
“He’s an impulse-buyer,” Lyssa said. “Don’t be too flattered.”
But the little witch beamed, hugging the pouch to her chest. “Thank you.”
Lyssa whistled. “Well, well, well, youdohave other facial expressions besides—aaaaaand it’s gone,” she said when Nadia’s smile faded back into a scowl. “All right, bird-girl, time to go home. Al and I have to be on our way.” She drew a Door and knocked, the edges beginning to glow with magic.
Nadia hesitated. “Be careful,” she said, giving Alderic a quick embrace before stepping over the threshold, hauling the wagon full of supplies and excess shopping behind her.
When the wall had closed, Lyssa looked at Alderic, bemused. “She…huggedyou.”
“So?”
“Nadia does nothugpeople.”
He gave her a look. “She doesn’t hugyou,you mean.”
“And I vastly prefer it that way.” She turned to study the sky. Dusk was still a few hours away. “We need to figure out what phase the moon is in,” she said. If it was at the end of its lunation, they could hang around Warham and collect Lyssa’s grave dirt once it was dark.
“The full moon was two nights ago,” Alderic informed her, plucking the flower crown from his head and laying it gently in the grass.
Brandy leaned against her leg and she scratched behind his ear. “How do you know that?”
“Marcia. The shopgirl,” he added when she stared at him blankly. “I asked her.”
She refused to admit that she was impressed. The frilly bastard had actually made himself useful on day one. “And this…Marcia…didn’t think it was weird, you asking about the moon phases?”
“I don’t think she cared,” he said. “She told me that no one in the history of the shop had ever spent as much in one day. I could have asked her if she thought it was possible to teach a chicken how to ride a bicycle and she wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.”
Lyssa smirked. “Oh, she was certainly batting her eyelashes.”
Alderic looked puzzled. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Sure you didn’t.” She flipped her chalk idly and caught it. “So. The full moon was two nights ago. That means in a little less than two weeks it’ll be new. We’ll need to collect the grave dirt the night before that, when you can’t even see a sliver of it.” In terms of Ragnhild’s magic, the black moon was a time for banishing, whereas the new moon—when the first crescent was just barely visible in the sky—represented beginnings and fresh starts. An important distinction, for their purposes.
“What else do we need?”
