Whiskey and Water (26 page)

The angel smiled. :Morningstar will do.
Unless there's another name you prefer, Matthew Magus. I have so many. Kit?:

"Of course, introductions," Kit
said, stepping close enough to feel the warmth of the devil's radiance. "Lucifer
Morningstar, Matthew Magus. I hope you don't expect me to believe that timing
was coincidence, old Snake."

:I love your pet names, Kitten.:
Caressing, as if he meant it. A lover's tones.

Felix smiled and turned his ring with his
thumb, and said nothing that his folded hands couldn't say for him.

Kit forced a laugh. "Matthew, forgive
me when I say that I hope very dearly that you two do
not
get along."

:Nonsense,: Lucifer said. :We're going to
be tremendous friends. Matthew, my hopes are simpler than Kit's,
I
hope
you'll permit me to examine your hand?:

"My hand?" Matthew could hear
the thick stunned stupidity in his own voice.

:The ruined one,: Lucifer said, as Felix
hung behind him, a pilot fish off the stern of a shark. :Perhaps we can make it
beautiful again.:

Matthew caught Kit's warning glance, sharp
enough that it cut the seductive sapphire haze of Lucifer's regard. "Thank
you," Matthew said. He pushed his glasses up his nose with his thumb.
"I'd just as soon not owe you that."

Lucifer sighed and winked over Matthew's
shoulder at Kit, lifting his shoulders and letting them fall again under black
velvet. It was the most beautiful, negligent gesture Matthew had ever imagined.
:What's one thing, more or less?:

"Still," Matthew answered, with
a shrug of his own, a far less lovely, more awkward one. :Yes, still.:

That breathtaking smile. Literally.
Matthew had to stare down at his shoes to get air in past the pain that filled
his lungs when he tried to look the Devil in the eye. Something warm pressed
his shoulder: Marlowe, unexpectedly, standing beside him like a brother
warrior.

Lucifer's smile caressed Marlowe as well,
and Matthew felt him shudder. It didn't feel like a shudder of pain.

:As you wish, Matthew Magus. For now,
then, I've brought you Felix Magus, who was lost along the way. So if you will
forgive my haste, I must be about the errand I delayed to fetch him. Good day:

The Devil excused himself with a faint,
gracious bow, clean of any hint of mockery, and turned toward the waiting
Queen. And Felix Luray stepped forward, extending his right hand exactly as if
he'd forgotten that Matthew couldn't accept it, and said, "Do I have the
honor of addressing the second of Christoferus Magus, late of London?"

Matthew squared his shoulders and nodded,
and didn't bother to show Felix his hand. "Yes, Felix. You know that you
do."

*                                                           *       *

A traditional ratatouille takes time, and.
there are just enough burners on the average stove to manage it. When the dish
is constructed
classically
, the eggplant, zucchini, and green pepper are
cooked individually, and added to a rustic tomato, garlic, and onion sauce only
at the end of preparation, to allow the flavors to meld without muddling. The
dish is seasoned with
herbes du Provence:
basil, fennel, lavender,
marjoram, rosemary, savory, tarragon, and thyme.

Gypsy looked upon cooking as a ritual.

Which is to say, his interest was more
practical than ceremonial, and he was willing to sacrifice liturgy to
pragmatism. He started with one pan, heavy-bottomed and well-oiled, not cast
iron—because of the acid in the tomatoes—but copper-clad steel. As the oil
heated, filling his kitchen with the memory of seven thousand Cretan summers,
he sliced onions, no motion wasted.

The oil shimmered in the pan, and when he
glanced into the bottom, he scryed those summers: sunlit lads in fierce
competition, their bodies gleaming with Homer's "liquid gold";
Solomon and David; sun, stone, drought, silence, and solitude; the
olive-crowned heads of athletes and warriors; Athena's stern, helmed
countenance.

With both hands, Gypsy shoveled sliced
white onions in and stirred them with a long-handled oaken spoon. The visions
vanished in a hiss of piquant steam and a few drops of oil spattered the white
and green tile backsplash. Onion for autumn, onion for healing. He lowered the
heat: a sauté, not a sizzle. Garlic next, when it wouldn't burn, its pungent
raw scent mellowing to sweetness as it melted into the gilding onions. Exorcism
and relief from nightmares. A spell to keep witches at bay. He smiled, appreciating
the irony, as he brushed papery skins into the compost bucket and wiped his
blade.

His knife was good steel, with a black
wooden handle, sharpened until the blade slid through the crisp flesh of bell
peppers without a whisper of resistance. He only had one knife.

He only needed one.

Peppers in, cooking gently so there would
be no bitterness. And then the tomatoes, out of the sink in the colander where
he'd left them draining. The coring and scalding and peeling could be done in advance.
Summer was over, so he opened a can of tomato paste and added two spoonfuls for
the flavor. Wolf-apples, deadly nightshade's sweeter brother, gift from the Americas to the world. Olive oil floated in rose-tinted lenticular dots on the lightly
simmering surface as the tomatoes melted. Salt and pepper. He brought herb
bottles down from a cabinet well-removed from the stove, where he kept them in
darkness to compensate for the ridiculous clear glass.

Before the herbs, a taste. Too much acid,
so he added a pinch of sugar—brown sugar, to sweeten the tongue. And then he
opened the jars one at a time, and measured into his palm.

Basil, to summon scorpions—although
probably not in Massachusetts, whatever Pliny said—and to ensure prosperity.
Fennel—he crushed it in his ceramic mortar before sprinkling it into the
pot—for sweetness and cleansing. Fennel, too, to drive off witches. Gypsy chose
to interpret that as malign magic, a symbol of witchcraft rather than witches
per se.

Besides, he was fond of fennel.

Lavender, rolled between his fingers
before he laid it in three gentle sweeps across the surface of the sauce.
Lavender, sharp and sweet, the blossoms releasing their acrid, musty scent when
he crushed them. Lavender for peace, for purification. Lavender for dreamless
sleep, and thyme for purification too, purification and courage and protection
and the powers of the mind: each one another pass of Gypsy's knotty left hand.

He sang as he cooked, sock-footed in his
kitchen, standing in the angle between the chipped enamel face of the gas stove
he'd salvaged from a condemned house in Woonsocket and the pine-green painted cabinets
with the slightly crooked doors he'd cut and hung himself. It would do for an
incantation.

After thyme he added the savory — mental
powers again—and the marjoram, for protection and health. And then rosemary,
rolled between both palms to break the needles, silver-gray, redolent of
summer and hope and pine. Rosemary for remembrance, rosemary for youthfulness,
rosemary for all things honest and true. Rosemary to bind and rosemary to ward.
Rosemary over the crib to fend the Fae away.

He scattered the crumbled leaves across
the sauce, and stirred gently. Nothing left now but the tarragon, which he
bought fresh because it lost its flavor in the jar. It would go in at the end,
after the rest of the vegetables, but he stripped it from the stems and chopped
it now, his knife glittering in the overhead light.

There was no magic in tarragon. Oh, some
hardy souls would say it was cleansing or soothing, for polishing chalices or
banishing unwanted obstacles, for averting the bites of venomous things. It had
none of these powers. Gypsy suspected that to say otherwise was pity for the
nervous, woody little plant with no virtue but sweetness.

There was no magic in tarragon. But it
tasted good, and he inhaled its licorice aroma as he swept it from his cutting
board into a bowl, for now, humming another verse. No history, no images
shimmered over the blue and white rice-grained ceramic as he turned his
attention to the zucchini and the aubergines.

There was no magic in tarragon. Its French
name was
esdragon,
the little dragon, from the Latin
dracunculus.
Gypsy
pushed the floating pieces of eggplant and green squash down in the sauce with
the back of his spoon, sampled the sauce one more time, and covered the pot to
wait while it cooked on down.

The spell was a ward, a come-hither, a
simple thing meant to protect and bring trust, ease communication. It worked
like the charm that it was. The heavy old harvest-gold phone rang before he had
finished cooking. He answered on the second ring. "Hello, Autumn."

"Dammit." She laughed. "I
know you don't have caller ID on that old rotary dial — "

"Magic," he said, and then
laughed and spoke before she could realize she had had no reason to call him.
"Hey, as long as you're on the line, are you and Carel doing anything for
dinner tonight?"

"Tonight?" He heard a rustle as
she sat up straighter in her chair. She might have been dozing over the paper.
"No, um, I mean, Carel's not home yet. And I was just contemplating making
supper out of an orange and a bag of Doritos, actually."

"Well, don't do that," he said.
"I made stew and bread, and I have nobody to help me eat it. My date stood
me up. So what do you say? I'll be over in about an hour."

"You don't have to ask me
twice," she said, and laughed at him when he made quick excuses to get off
the phone.

He'd noticed something, when she'd dropped
by Moira's house the night before to talk to Moira about the friend of Carel's
who might be interested in the coven. Something new. He'd always liked Autumn.
She was a tough girl, in a crunchy-granola sort of way. But one thing she'd
never had was any real power.

Gypsy'd been able to see power, intermittently
after a sun dance on one hot North Dakota day in 1975, and consistently since
the Dragon. And Autumn had never owned any of her own, though she'd carried a
faint nimbus like glitter-dust on her skin, brushed off from Carel.

But now ... It still wasn't power. Not
her
power, anyway. But now looking at her made his scars warm, and he had to
know:
what she'd seen, where she'd found it.

Whether it had changed her.

He bundled the stew into the car, still in
its big enamel pot. Autumn didn't have a woodstove like Moira's, but she had a
warm and cozy kitchen, with a big oven for heating the bread and the
ratatouille in its blue-flecked enameled pot. It shouldn't take long; the stew
retained a lot of heat, despite transport.

Autumn made honey-butter with a hand whisk
while Gypsy set the table with mismatched stoneware bowls she'd bought in
Provincetown. He ought to have felt guilty. But he could still see the aura, something
else's power like a scatter of snow on her shoulders, and her air of
distraction had thickened.

There was nothing wrong with buying a
little insurance.

When she turned around and brought the
honey-butter to the table, Gypsy took advantage of the opening to rescue the
bread from the oven, using a pair of tea towels to protect his hands. He set it
on the cutting board and fetched out the ratatouille while Autumn went to find
a bottle of wine in the rack down in the cellar, then spooned the stew
carefully into the bowls.

The one he'd picked for himself was rough
and unfinished on the bottom, the artist's name pin-scratching the palm of his
hand. The glaze was a rich variegated blue that had feathered cloudy white. The
flaws added to the beauty; it was a shame to cover it with food.

He sat down to wait as Autumn came back up
the creaking stairs into the kitchen, a waft of cool, moister air following
her. She set the wine bottle in the sink and wiped the dust off. Gypsy got up
and handed her the corkscrew from the rack beside the fridge before she reached
for it. "What did you pick?"

"A Pinot Noir. I should have opened
it sooner, but I suppose it can air out in the glass as well as anywhere."

"Heathen," he said, cheerfully,
and pulled two wineglasses out of the hutch.

"If I wasn't, we'd all be in
trouble." She worried the cork from the bottle and laid it aside, joining
him at the table a moment later. She lifted the glasses out of his hand one at
a time to pour. "So this must be a new girlfriend?"

"Pardon?" Gypsy paused, the
bread knife in his hand.

"Nobody who'd
eaten
your
cooking would stand you up," she said. She took her seat as he sliced the bread,
and held out her hand for the heel. The aroma of rosemary, garlic, and olive
oil steamed from the cut surface, filling the kitchen, and she sighed and
breathed deeply, closing her eyes. "Not that I'm complaining of the errors
of others by which I benefit."

Gypsy dipped a knife in the honey-butter
and smoothed it over the rough crumb of the bread. Not enough milk, a little
too much oil. He chewed slowly, an excuse not to talk. Autumn's silence as she
dug in to the ratatouille was gratifying.

"You should open a restaurant,"
she said, when she paused in her methodical eating long enough for a sip of
wine. "I bet you hear that all the time."