Page 94 of Do You Even Hex, Bro?
"Exactly." A hint of approval colors her voice. "She's got backbone. And brains. I like her."
This feels like dangerous territory. Sadie rarely approves of anyone, especially anyone connected to the pack. Her relationship with wolves is... complicated at best. Having a shifter stepbrother was definitely not in her goth witch life plan.
"You do?" I ask, surprised.
"Don't sound so shocked." She pushes through the building's front door into the crisp evening air. "I'm capable of liking people. Occasionally. Under specific astronomical conditions."
"When Mercury is in retrograde and the moon is blue?"
"Precisely." She flashes me a rare smile, one that reminds me we're family, despite everything. Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure she'd rather not be sometimes. "But seriously, she's cool. You guys don't deserve her, but you might notcompletelyfuck this up."
From Sadie, that's practically a blessing.
"Your confidence is overwhelming," I deadpan.
“You’re welcome.”
We walk in companionable silence for a few blocks, heading toward the older part of town where historic buildings crowd narrow streets. Stormvale at twilight has a certain magic to it, and I don't mean that figuratively.Actualmagic. The liminal space between day and night makes the air practically shimmer with potential energy.
Sadie stops abruptly at an unremarkable alley between a bookstore and a vintage clothing shop. To ordinary eyes, it's just a dead end filled with dumpsters and broken bottles. But even my wolf senses can detect the faint shimmer of magic. A veil separating the mundane world from something else.
"Ground rules," Sadie says, turning to face me. "Stay close. Don't touch anything unless I say it's okay. Don't make eye contact with anything that has more than two eyes. And if someone asks if you want to see something amazing, the answer isalwaysno."
"Anything else?" I ask dryly.
"Yeah. If I tell you to run, fucking run."
With that cheerful advice, she turns and walks straight into what appears to be a solid brick wall—and disappears. I steel myself and follow, suppressing the instinctive wolf growl as magic washes over me, cold and prickly, like walking through electrified cobwebs.
One moment I'm in a grimy alley, the next I'm... elsewhere.
Twilight Market unfolds before me like someone's fever dream of a medieval bazaar collided with every supernatural trope in existence. Tents and stalls of impossible colors stretch asfar as I can see, some floating several feet off the ground, others seeming to phase in and out of reality. Vendors of every conceivable species hawk their wares—vampires with merchandise suspended in blood globules, beings I can't even identify, witches with skin in impossible hues my shifter eyes can’t even fully register because I’m not a fucking mantis shrimp.
The scents all hit me one after another like a chain of slaps right to the face. Exotic incense, cooking meat of questionable origin, herbs both medicinal and poisonous, the metallic tang of fresh blood, and under it all, the electric buzz of pure, undiluted magic.
"Close your mouth," Sadie mutters, grabbing my wrist. "You look like a tourist."
I snap my jaw shut, not even realizing it had been hanging open. "This is... not what I expected."
"What did you expect? A witch-themed farmers market?"
"Kinda, yeah."
She snorts, tugging me deeper into the labyrinth of stalls. "The last ingredient we need is lunar venom. It's tricky to source because the merchant only comes out after the waxing crescent, and we're cutting it close."
I follow obediently, trying not to stare at a woman plucking eyeballs from a bubbling cauldron, testing them for firmness like picking out the perfect avocado.
Gods, I hope those aren’t human eyeballs.
"What exactly is lunar venom?" I ask, stepping carefully around a small creature that looks like a bipedal toad waving a paper fan twice the size of their body.
"Concentrated essence of moonlight, collected during an eclipse and filtered through basilisk fangs," Sadie explains. "It helps stabilize competing energies. And FYI, siphon energy and shifter energy is as competing as it gets."
"And I thoughtourbiology homework was complicated."
We weave through increasingly bizarre stalls. One offers "Memories of Your Future Self" in tiny bottles, another sells timepieces that apparently run backwards, and a particularly disturbing booth displays organs that are… inching and flopping around on a huge stone slab.
I try not to look too closely at any of it.
