She chuckled. “Ah hell. What else would I be doing with my time?”
“Harassing the eligible bachelors at the senior center.”
She winked saucily. “Damn straight.” She held out the vial of Gideon’s Dew.
I sighed, but couldn’t help a smile at her insistence. While she watched, I used the tiny loop on the vial’s lid to add it to the AA token necklace. Putting magical dew next to an Arcane abstinence symbol felt a little sacrilegious, but it was also kind of fitting given my life lately.
“Good night, Baba. Thanks for kicking my ass.”
“Anytime, doll.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I woke up feeling like a small animal died in my mouth. I washed away the funk with a liter of soda and a piece of cold fried chicken from the fridge. Danny watched my afternoon breakfast with a sneer. He must have gotten home from school at some point while I napped. But I was saved from having to talk to the kid when Baba arrived. She shooed me out the door to go do what needed to be done. I knew I’d need to have a reckoning with Danny eventually, but for the moment I needed to focus on making sure there was a city to hold that conversation in once Halloween was over.
Since I had no leads, I decided to check in with LM and Mary. A quick call to Morales confirmed he was busy chasing down leads with Shadi, so I told him I’d hit up the Wonder Twins alone. Frankly, it was a relief to know he wasn’t going to be joining me. After the clusterfuck the night before, I wasn’t ready to play the awkward-silence-all-day game with him—or worse, the let’s-joke-about-it-all-day game.
I called ahead just in case LM and Mary were in a running mood again, and was told to meet them at an address on the east side of town instead of at the park. After our last meeting I’d demanded they give me a phone number in case they decided to pull a disappearing act again. I didn’t question the change of location since they were already so worried about Dionysus finding out they were talking to the cops.
On my way across the Bessemer Bridge, I got a call from my good friend Val, who was a lab rat for the BPD. “Prospero, you got a minute?”
“What’s up?”
“Got some labs back from items collected at that college thing last night.”
I turned right off the bridge. “Okay,” I said slowly. I’d left before the CSI team arrived, but I figured with the confession from the satyr and all there wouldn’t be much to need processing through the lab.
“Eldritch said we’re not supposed to share this with the MEA, but he’s an asshole.”
I chuckled. “Go ahead. I won’t tell him.”
“The unis from the scene brought me some of the wine bottles from the sorority party. I know the perp said he potioned everyone, but I tested the bottles just in case.”
“And?”
“And from what I can tell, the potion was already in the wine before it was opened.”
My foot lifted off the accelerator. “Are you sure?”
“Yep. There were traces of the same potion stolen from Aphrodite Johnson’s temple inside the bottle and embedded in the cork.”
“Could it have been added to the bottles by sticking a needle through the cork?”
“Definitely possible.”
“Can you e-mail me the report and a picture of the bottles? Oh, and copy Mez so he can see it, too.”
The click-clack of fingers tapping on a keyboard came through the phone. “Done and done.”
“Thanks, Val. You’re a peach.”
“No problem. Just remember this next time I need some DNA run through your lab.”
I chuckled and promised I’d pass that on to Mez. After we hung up, I parked down the street from the address LM had given me. I opened my e-mail to find the picture she’d sent. Squinting at the small screen, I tried to read the label on the bottle in the picture. It featured a dancing satyr playing a flute.
Chewing on my lip, I tried to figure out how Dionysus could have gotten that potion into those bottles. The labels could easily have been printed off any color printer and attached to the bottles. I cursed myself for not investigating the wine bottles at the college the night before, but I’d been too busy trying to shove my hands down Morales’s pants to do any quality police work.
I pushed that thought aside and tried to see the clue Val had just provided as a blessing. It was more than I’d had an hour earlier, and hopefully I’d have even more to go on after talking to LM.
Blowing out a breath, I shoved the phone in my pocket and exited Sybil. The address led to an apothecary in the heart of Votary Coven territory. The storefront had a large plate glass window out front with gilded lettering that identified it as the Black Cat Commissary. I wasn’t familiar with the place, but I knew the type. They specialized in filling prescriptions from med wizes and selling over-the-counter herbs and tinctures. I also knew plenty of these apothecaries also had a side business out of a back room or basement where a wizard with enough scratch could score some harder-to-find illicit ingredients for dirty potions.
I parked a little ways down the street from the store. The bell over the door dinged when I walked in, but the long-haired wizard behind the counter didn’t look up from the potion he was cooking over a Bunsen burner. Judging from the bite of isopropyl alcohol on the air and the Soxhlet apparatus on the counter, he was making a Spagyric tincture.
The wall behind the counter was covered in rows of shelves bearing glass canisters of herbs and other components for homemade remedies. The rest of the store was filled with low shelving units bearing packages of arnica pellets, witch hazel, and various other legal herbal remedies for common ailments.
I took all this in quickly, noting as I did that Little Man and his sister were nowhere to be seen.
“Help you?” the guy behind the counter said in a bored voice. His hair was straight and black as an asphalt highway, and the butt-cut part harked back to a painted lane divider. His name tag identified him as Zane, but his ironic mustache labeled him as a total douchebag.
“Little Man around?”
He pressed his lips together. “You gonna buy something?”
I squinted at him. “No.”
He crossed his arms and sat back on his stool. “Then I ain’t seen him.”
There was no use in getting pissed. The Cauldron was the kind of place where even the old ladies sweeping their front stoops were on the make. I grabbed a pack of clove gum from the display at the front of the counter and slapped it on the surface. “How much?”