“No.” I somehow kept my voice calm. “If you want the girl, I need a minute. And you will give it to me.”
“You do not order me, Pythia. Perhaps what I’ll give you is a corpse!”
“Kill her, then,” I said, my voice harsh. “And I will shift upstairs and kill Lizzie before you can blink. And you will have nothing.”
For maybe half the time I’d asked for, we just stared at each other. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I was wondering how I’d ever thought those eyes attractive. They were too bright, too wide, too wild. Like maybe he hadn’t had his fix lately.
Or like maybe he’d had too much of it.
The whole crowd behind him was the same way, hopped up on magic and almost desperate for a chance to use it. It hovered over them like a fog, leapt from man to man like static electricity, welled up like a dam ready to burst. I couldn’t negotiate with men like this. They wanted a fight.
I just had to hope they wanted something else more.
“A minute, then,” he finally said. “No longer.”
I turned and strode back across the shop.
It was mostly a blackened, charred mess, with heaps of ruined finery that I had to wend my way through. But at least the fires were out. And the people seemed okay, huddled behind the counter, which must have provided some protection. Because everything behind it looked pretty normal.
Except for the dead bodies sprawled on the floor, all of which looked like me.
It took me a second to realize that they were the mannequins from the shopwindow, and that Augustine had cut open their backs like a disturbed toddler with oversized Barbies, and was stuffing something inside.
Something lethal, by the sound of it.
“Don’ttouchthatareyoucrazy?” the high-strung genius snapped at Carla, who was crouched on the floor assisting him. And who abruptly snatched her hand back.
“Sorry, but you said—”
“Chartreuse! Does that look chartreuse to you?” He pointed at a vial in a rack with a couple dozen others. They were all green.
Carla blinked at them. “Yes?”
“That’s green apple!”
She reached for another vial.
“That’s pear! That’s pear!”
“You couldn’t have made them different colors?”
“They are different colors!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she said, shoving hair out of her face. “Just point!”
“I’ll do it myself,” he told her, and reached over to grab the rack.
And had me grab his wrist instead.
“What are you doing?” I demanded as Françoise hurried in from the back, carrying another rack of vials.
Outraged blue eyes glared up at me. “Getting us out of this—what does it look like?”
“I’m not sure what it looks like.”
“I’ve been toying with a spell, to avoid the ridiculous fees models charge just to walk down a runway. I haven’t perfected it yet, but it’s good enough for our purposes—”
“Which are?”