Witcha Gonna Do? (Witchington #1)(16)

I hold the bag out of the raccoon’s five-fingered grasp. “What about the whiskey?”

“That’s for Newt,” she says, taking the animal that is now chittering away happily out of my arms.

“You give an animal whiskey?” That seems both wrong and completely in character for a three-hundred-year-old sprite going through a grunge phase.

“Actually, it’s Newt Sager from Ye Ol’ Wand Shoppe.” She sets the raccoon—Newt—on her stone floor. “He has a standing appointment to get turned into a trash panda, go do some digging in other folks’ garbage for a few hours, and then enjoy a little nip before I change him back.” I must be making a face, because she glares at me. “Don’t judge. Everyone has their quirks.”

Griselda definitely has more than her fair share of them.

She tickles Newt under his furry chin. “So why don’t you tell me what’s so dang important that it couldn’t wait.”

I look from her to the raccoon—fine, Newt—who is doing that blissed-out oh-you’ve-got-the-spot-right-there head cock with his beady little eyes closed while tapping his right foot against the floor. Definitely animal. Sorta. Kinda. Fuck. I need a damn guidebook for this.

“Can we talk in front of him?” I ask.

“You mean can he understand you in raccoon form?” Griselda shakes her head and squats down next to the raccoon, who immediately flops onto his back to give her full access to his belly. “He’s all raccoon.”

“But then why the whiskey?”

“Because raccoon Newt has a taste for it while witch Newt is a teetotaler.”

She starts petting Newt’s stomach and I’m afraid to even look down, because the sounds the raccoon is making are walking right up to the line of weird but acceptable and weird and not acceptable. There’s a good chance Newt is not just into the transformation for dumpster diving and whiskey—but I’m not going to delve any deeper into that outside of my nightmares.

“Next time you see him in the shop, don’t tell him about the whiskey,” she says. “He’d make me cut off raccoon Newt and you deserve to be happy, don’t you, you wittle wuv muffin.”

I’m trying to align my vision of Griselda as one of the leaders of the Resistance undermining the Council so they can’t do to others what they did to my family with the woman who just called a transformed shopkeeper “wittle wuv muffin” and is getting him drunk. Yeah. That is not gonna happen.

So, I open the bottle of peanut butter whiskey, pour a shot, and set it down on the floor next to the raccoon, who scrambles away from Griselda, grabs the glass, and settles in on the window seat to watch the birds and imbibe.

The world is a crazy fucking place.

Griselda takes the bottle and adds a healthy dose to two cups of tea and hands me one. “So, since I know your parents are at this moment on their way out of The Beyond thanks to the Resistance, I don’t suppose I need to make any threats or cast any spells now that you worked out what she is.”

I want to scream in celebration, jump, and dance. I do none of these things, though, because I understand exactly what Griselda is telling me. My parents are on their way out of The Beyond, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still in danger, that they won’t get stuck in exile—on purpose or by accident.

And this is why I don’t trust the Council or the Resistance. Both sides are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure their side wins. No shocker that I had to take the same stance. So I play it cool despite the fact that her not-threat is indeed a threat.

There’s no need to ask what she means about what Tilda is. “A spellbinder.”

“It almost gives you a shiver to say it out loud, doesn’t it?” She sips her tea, watching me closely as I stand on the other side of the giant kitchen island she uses to mix her potions, call her familiar, and—from the smell of it—cook tonight’s gumbo. “You understand what she’s capable of?”

“Juicing up other people’s spells.” I keep the bored tone in my voice because this confirmation means things aren’t just bad, they are on the precipice of disaster.

The Council hates duíl magic enough to exile anyone with the gift to The Beyond. A spellbinder? Whatever they’d do, it would make exile look like a vacation.

“To put it mildly,” Griselda says, her attention so intense it’s as if she’s working a mind-reading spell while I’m standing here drinking spiked tea, “whatever the witch’s power, she increases it fivefold. The Council sees spellbinders as being against the natural order of things and believes they should be destroyed at the first flicker of their abilities. So her parents decided that the best way to protect her was to keep her ignorant.”

“If she was a child, the Council would destroy her,” I say, blocking out the mental image of that. “But if she’s made it this far in life, they’d want her power.” It would give them the opportunity to come out from the shadows, to force everyone to follow their version of what’s right, and to grab the reins of power with such a grip no one could tear it away. “That would be a disaster.”

Griselda nodded. “Without a doubt.”

“And she has no idea.” I sit down on the stools lining the cooking island, trying to wrap my brain around all of this. It’s one thing to have a theory about something of this magnitude; it’s another to have it confirmed.