After my shower that evening, I was standing by the chair I’d adopted to keep track of my piles of clothes. Drop it on the floor if it’s dirty and the seat if it’s reusable. The back of the chair was reserved as my towel rack.

Who says I’m not organized?

I’d barely hung up my towel when I heard a bright electronic tone coming from one of the nightstands. I turned and saw my phone lit up and vibrating.

“Oh, shoot!”

I dodged around the bed to grab it. Who on earth was calling me?

If it happened more often, it might not have taken me so long to recognize my own ringtone.

The name on the screen was Conrad Bauer.

I accepted the call and smiled as I put the phone to my ear. “Hey, Conrad.”

“Hey, Mera. Are you busy right now?”

I sat down on the bed. “No.”

“Thank god. Look, would you be willing to take a facetime call with Kappa?”

“Has he been asking about me?”

“Yes.”

My smile changed to a grin when I heard the deep finality of Conrad’s declaration. There was a chance that, some day, I would feel indifferent to knowing that Kappa worried about me when I was gone…but it was a slim chance.

“Put him on,” I said.

A second later, I got the invite to switch over to my camera and accepted. I pulled my legs up onto the bed and leaned back on the headboard, tilting my phone to get better lighting. Conrad’s camera was picking up nothing but a mess. The fuzzy image was mostly his chapped hand pads and a bit of fur, with a glimpse or two of undefinable background. The whole image kept freezing because he was moving his phone too fast. When it cleared up, I could see a view of the couch in the sitting room. Conrad was sitting at one end of it. Kappa was beside him, staring at the phone. The foreground was a line of dark wood that made me think Conrad had propped me up on the coffee table somehow.

“Hey, buddy!” I called.

“Mera?” Kappa leaned toward the phone, but then stopped and turned to look at Conrad.

“Go on.” He motioned toward me. “That’s her.”

I waved. “It’s me, Kappa. I promise.”

Kappa flopped off the couch, briefly disappearing from view, before his big black eyes and little fins popped up over the edge of the coffee table. “Mera-mera?”

“Hey, sweetie. I’ve missed you.”

“Mera!” He leaned in, filling my screen end to end with a close-up of his twitchy nose. He sniffed around the phone.

I chuckled and said, “Kappa, you don’t have to get that close.”

He backed up, but only a bit. “Mera, where are you?”

“I’m a few states away still, but you can see me on the screen, right? We can talk to each other.”

He backed up a bit more and eyed the machine skeptically. Whatever magical devilry it was, he wasn’t going to accept it without a good vetting.

“Why aren’t you here?” he asked.

“I’m helping Olivia, remember? I’ll be home in a few days.”

But I’d misunderstood the question. He probably wanted to know why he could see me, but not smell me.

The bulbs of his fingertips appeared on the edge of the coffee table. He pulled himself up so he could shove his nose against the phone. I laughed at the blurry macro-shot of his nostrils and the loud snuffing sounds.

Then his mouth opened, and I caught a glimpse of his long teeth right before his oversized tongue eclipsed the entire view.

“Ewwww! No!” I cried at the same time I heard in the background, “Kappa!”

There were a few more confused images. I closed my eyes—partly because I was laughing that hard, and partly because I was squeamish about seeing a giant tongue moving my direction. When I opened them again, my view had changed. Kappa’s inspection technique must have pushed the phone back on whatever was propping it up. I could see above the couch, closer to the ceiling.

Conrad had picked Kappa up with one hand and was holding him over his head. The bog-creature’s limbs were dangling between the wolfman’s fingers, and Kappa grabbed onto his little webbed feet with his little webbed hands. He hung there, looking down at Conrad from above, seemingly content in his new aerial position.

I almost died from an overdose of cute.

“Kappa,” Conrad said.

Despite how serious the wolfman sounded, Kappa seemed to like the sound of his own name. The edges of his mouth turned up and the fins on the side of his face flitted like insect wings. “Yes!”

“You know I love you?”

“Yes!”

“You know you’re my buddy?”

“Yes!”

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“Good. Don’t lick my phone.”

“Kay!” Kappa pulled himself up, stood on Conrad’s hand, and took a flying leap out of my view.

“Hey! Wait a—” Conrad reached for his phone. I started getting the freeze frames of too-much-movement. I heard his voice. “Sorry. I’ll call you back in a minute.”

“Whenever,” I said.

We hung up, and I let my phone rest on my chest as I replayed the last part of that call in my head to bask in the afterglow of…whatever that was. Delightful—that’s what that was.

My phone rang. Would I accept a non-facetime call from Conrad Bauer? Of course I would.

I put my phone against my ear. “Hello?”

“Hey,” Conrad said. “Sorry about that. I had to clean my phone.”

My nose wrinkled; it does that whenever I stifle a giggle. “Do you want me to try talking to him again?”

“Nah. He put himself to bed a second ago. I’m not sure he understands the concept of a phone. Thanks for trying though.”

“Any time.” Rarely have I uttered such a heartfelt sentiment. “Is he taking good care of you?”

“I’m not dead yet. Any idea when you’ll be home?”

My smile faded. “Sorry. No.”

“You don’t have to apologize.” He paused. “Is it a hard case?”

My stomach sank. “Yeah.”

I pulled the blankets close, even the half that Olivia should've had rights to, and curled up with them.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Conrad asked.

A faint smile spread over my face. I leaned back to let my head rest against the headboard.

I told that poor guy everything.

I started with a few observations about witches in general, and the Oliversens in particular.

“It’s crazy, Conrad!” I whispered into the phone. “Olivia makes so much more sense now. They’re all these vicious thorned plants, and Olivia’s this little vicious thorned plant struggling to survive in a hostile environment!”

I told him about Rall Axton, who wasn’t so much the token male as the token sane person.

“But I think he had a hard time buying the idea we were packmates—which is weird because we look so much alike, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

I told him about running into Ashworth and the looming threat of the cocktail party I was supposed to be attending the next day unless an important lead suddenly materialized—a prospect that was looking more and more unlikely by the second.

“I mean, what are you even supposed to wear to something like that?” I moaned.

“Would you believe me if I told you you’re asking the wrong person?”

I did believe him. As hard as I tried—and as funny as it was—I couldn’t picture Conrad all dazzled up to go to some fancy soiree.

“Hey, Conrad, what would you wear to a cocktail party?”

“A fur coat.”

I laughed. “Isn’t wearing a fur coat considered cruel?”

“So’s being forced to go to a cocktail party.”

“I take it you’re not a fan of parties?”

“Too many people.”

Oh, my poor, shy wolfman. He had a hard time around people he didn’t know, and he hated standing out. If he ever did go to a party, he’d probably end up as a wallflower—or, in his case, a wall-redwood.

I told him almost everything about the case—Mrs. Lehm, ARC Hall, our assumptions, Autumn Langley, Nolan Kirby, and the lonely apothecary shop with its automatic lights shining down on an empty store—but I left out all the stuff I’d learned about Olivia’s abilities and her past. That was her story to tell, and I didn’t know if she was trying to keep it a secret. But I definitely told him about my visions.

He listened without saying a word.

When I finished, I rested in the comfortable silence, curled up in my pile of blankets and pillows. I felt like I was a cocoon spun to cradle the fragile sadness and anxiety I had adopted.

“Are you okay, Mera?” Conrad asked.

I took a deep breath. “Yeah. I mean…sure.” I made a face that no one could see. “I’ve been through worse.”

“Just because you’ve been through worse doesn’t mean this isn’t bad.”

I closed my eyes so they wouldn’t tear up. “I think Autumn’s in love with Kirby.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I want to bring him home so that she can give him a hug and get his stupid phone number.”

I heard a quiet chuff of air over the phone.

“Are you laughing at me?” I demanded.

“A bit.”

“This is a super serious situation!”

“I didn’t say I was laughing at the situation.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I tried to put all the menace I could into that question, framing it, by my tone, as a warning to proceed with extreme caution.

The wolfman wasn’t intimidated.

“Mera, you’ve shown me a lot of anime. By now I’d be surprised if you weren’t shipping two characters by the end of the first episode.”

I opened my mouth, stalled, let out an indignant huff, and opened my mouth to try again. “Okay. First of all, I haven’t shown you that much anime.”

He erupted in a loud laugh.

I ignored the unseemly outburst and went on, “Secondly, I usually have to wait until the second or third episode so I can meet all the characters!”

“You’re right, you’re right. I didn’t mean to imply you were an irresponsible shipper. Just a passionate one.”

I felt my cheeks get warm.

He went on, “Some people might think it’s not much of a motivation.”

“It’s not—well, yes, that is part of my motivation, but it’s not like that. I want—” I shut my mouth. My cheeks became positively scorching. “I want people to be happy.”

“I know,” Conrad said. “You want to make the world a nicer place because you’ve been there.”

Stupid wolfman. He wasn’t supposed to remember the dumb things I’d said.

“Have you had any nightmares?” he asked.

“One so far.”

“Was it bad?”

“It was painful, but not really bad. It’s a repeat of the vision I had—darkness and someone choking me out.”

There was silence over the line.

“I don’t think I can learn anything from it,” I said.

“That wasn’t what I was worried about,” Conrad grumbled. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

A smile crept over my face. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a vacation from me? If I need to curl up with someone and force them to watch anime, it’ll have to be Olivia.”

“The girl you recently called a thorny little plant?”

“Any port in a storm, Conrad. And that girl owes me.”

The door to the room opened. I looked up as Olivia stepped inside. She was in her pajamas. A damp towel and her dirty clothes were draped over her arm.

“Speak of the redheaded devil,” I said.

I faced forward again and curled over so I was looking at the foot of the bed. It helped maintain some illusion of privacy. I had every intention of telling Conrad how much I appreciated his call, saying goodbye, then hanging up.

But when I opened my mouth, the words couldn’t get past the mash of emotions that spurted up from the mess in my chest. Seriously! It was like someone had crammed some Mentos of happiness and gratitude into a bottle of Sadness and Anxiety Cola™, brought to you by your friends at All My Old Issues, Inc.

I was glad Conrad wasn’t around to smell it. I had a hard time explaining why I felt sad whenever I felt too happy.

Could I tell him I missed him?

He didn’t seem like the type who’d read too much into it, but I didn’t know if it’d make him feel awkward. And Olivia was listening.

They’re not the problem. It’s you. You think it’s less real if you don’t admit it out loud.

I grabbed that insight, threw it into a deep, dark mental closet, and locked the door.

I could thank him! That was a socially appropriate behavior that would let him know how I felt (or part of what I felt—the important part) without making anyone feel awkward.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Thank you for letting me talk to you for so long, Conrad.”

“Any time,” he said. “See you in a few days.”

“Hey! Get some ointment for those poor toe-beans!”

“I can’t hear you. You must be going through a tunnel.”

“Uh-huh. Good night, Conrad.”

“Good night.”

We both hung up.

Olivia was putting her clothes away.

“Were you talking about me?” she asked.

I hooked my phone back up to its charging cord. “We were talking about how friendly you were and whether or not I’d be able to force you to watch some anime.”

“Unlikely.”

“But Netflix has this sweet, funny, pastel-toned series about the power of friendship and mushrooms!”

She gave me a long, hostile look before turning back to her task and asking, “What’s it called?”

I grinned like an imp. “Little Witch Academia.”

“No.”