Bitter Spirits (Roaring Twenties #1)(6)

“This is my workroom,” Velma announced casually. She scoured the shelves for several minutes and began pulling down jars. A couple were filled with tinted powders: one with a mixture of dried herbs, and another, unidentifiable. She set them all on the worktable with a dinged metal bowl, measuring cup, and spoon. While Aida inspected them, she retrieved a worn book with a broken spine, which was littered with scraps of paper serving as bookmarks, and opened to a page that said: UNCROSSING BATH TO REMOVE CURSES. A list of ingredients followed. Scribbled pencil notes filled the margins.

A muffled brring-brring rang through the walls. Velma quickly tapped her fingers on the tops of the jars she’d collected. “Rue, hyssop, dried okra, and the two compound mixtures needed. Stir all of these together. Follow the recipe. Don’t touch anything else,” she added, and then left the room in a flurry.

Aida stood still for several moments, looking around at the assortment of oddities crowding the shelves. As if she’d want to touch some of these things. Velma wasn’t the first person Aida had known to possess a talent for spellwork or to dabble in mysteries. Aida had stumbled upon witches, psychics, cartomancers, and other assorted characters with unexplainable skills, as they all seemed to be drawn to one another as iron is to a magnet. Like speaks to like. Aida’s own abilities often seemed tame by comparison.

It didn’t take much time to mix up the ingredients for the spiritual bath. As she finished, Velma raced back into the room, mumbling to herself, and dragged a wooden stool to a bay of shelves. She stood on tiptoes to retrieve a jam jar filled with what appeared to be evenly cut sticks with thorns—only, when Velma dumped out several of them inside a large mortar and pestle, Aida realized that she was wrong.

“Dried centipedes,” Velma said blithely when Aida stared. “My associate claims that Gu poison is venom magic. The sorcerer will put all kinds of creepy-crawlies inside a spelled jar—snakes, scorpions, frogs.” Velma pounded the dried centipedes with alarming gusto; the shells made a horrible crunching noise beneath her pestle. “Then it’s a fight to the death. The venomous insects and reptiles battle it out, eating one another. A spell is cast upon the last one standing. That’s what they use to brew the poison.”

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Velma stopped to retrieve two more jars. From the first, she used tongs to retrieve two frail, perfectly preserved scorpions, their curled tails stretched out and feet shriveled against their abdomens. She dumped them in the mortar with a sprinkling of some dark red powder and began grinding them up with the centipedes.

“The remedy for the hex is to fight like with like—the centipedes and scorpions will eat the Gu inside him. Let’s go ahead and do the unhexing bath. It should help weaken the spell and give the remedy a better chance to take hold. Here, give me your bowl.” Velma bowed her head as if praying and spoke a few mumbled words over the bath mixture. When finished, she let out a deep breath and handed it back to Aida. “Take this to the bathroom. Dump it in the bath water and mix it up.”

“Me?”

“It won’t harm you. I called downstairs and asked someone to bring ice from the bar. We want the water as cold as possible to shake the curse loose. Once you get the powder mixed up in the water, get them to put Winter inside. I’ll be in shortly with the antidote.”

Hugging the bowl against her middle, Aida hurried to the bathroom and nearly stumbled into a girl exiting with two empty ice buckets. Then she nearly stumbled again when she stepped into the bathroom and set her eyes on Winter. He was naked. Very naked.

“I swear to Buddha, Osiris, and your Christian God—”

“Who clearly hates me,” Winter said, interrupting Bo.

Velma’s man held one of Winter’s shoulders, Bo the other, and Aida stood, gawking at the bootlegger’s bare body. He was pale and more finely shaped than she’d imagined when she’d been eyeing him earlier: broad chested, upper arms thick with muscle, his stomach a brick wall. Dark hair peppered the center of his torso, from his breastbone to his solid, blocky legs. But it was the thicket below his rippled stomach that drew her attention. And the substantial length that hung under it.

Dear God.

She wasn’t exactly an expert on men’s naked bodies, but she’d seen a couple, and neither possessed anything between their legs quite like that, and definitely not in a state of rest. She could only guess what it looked like when it woke up.

She forced herself to look elsewhere. Twice.

Her gaze zigzagged everywhere, up and down, back and forth. No, Aida had definitely never seen a body like this, like a statue in a museum—not the athletic, trim David, but a meatier Zeus or Poseidon. As if one extra sandwich a day might take him across the line from stocky to stout. He was big and mighty and intimidating.

A mythological-sized beast.

She couldn’t stop staring. Her face warmed, not with embarrassment over seeing him naked, exactly—well, maybe a little—but mainly because of the raw lust he stirred up.

Oblivious to her entry, Bo flung Winter’s trousers onto the floor with malice and continued ranting. “This is the worst thing you’ve ever asked me to do. And I’m including the spy job in the hull of that steamer with all that rotting fish.”

Winter laughed and nearly toppled over, face-first.

“Whoa, now.” One of Velma’s men pressed a firm hand in the middle of Winter’s chest to hold him up against the tiled wall. He couldn’t stand on his own, but he was conscious.