Mel met up with Rosa, whose arms were already loaded with various plants and bottles, and pulled an apron from the rack. She wasn’t going to let Arthur ruin her night. Brewing was what she’d always wanted to do. From spending every childhood weekend practicing no-magic brews to attending one of the top potion arts schools in the country, Mel had relentlessly pursued this very moment with her entire heart. Arthur wasn’t allowed to take that from her.
She set about categorizing the orders based on how long they would take and what ingredients they had in common. It wasn’t the first time they’d been instructed to do the impossible, and though no amount of clever planning could change the number of hours in a night, nor the time it took to brew, she could do her best to mitigate the disaster ahead.
“These always make me a little sad,” Mel said, holding up one of the orders. “Familiar bonding potions. They don’t fix anything.”
“They make the problem worse, if anything,” Rosa agreed. “Trouble connecting with your familiar is trouble connecting with yourself. That’s what a familiar is, right? Like an external embodiment of your will.”
“That’s how they described it in school.”
“Therapy would be better,” Rosa said.
“You know, they taught first aid as part of the potions program I went through. I always thought psychology should be included, too.”
“Maybe you can start your own school someday!”
Mel added the order back to the stack. “I just wish we’d stop selling these. Gods help anyone who’d try to bring that up to Arthur, though.”
They slid into a comfortable routine. Rosa pre-measured the liquids, labeling each as she went, while Mel chopped, crushed, boiled, and burned herbs according to their purpose. With the liquids ready, Rosa moved on to unpacking, washing, and laying out the new bottles for them to store the potions as they finished brewing.
“Hey, Mel,” Rosa broke their focused silence.
“What’s up?”
“You want to hear something funny?”
Mel picked up a note of sadness in Rosa’s voice. “Always.”
“I thought werewolves were made up.”
“Is that right?”
“Totally,” Rosa laughed. “I thought they were like Bigfoot or something.”
“I mean, that makes as much sense as anything.” Mel blew out the small flame at the end of the sprig of rosemary she held, pinching the blackened tip over a bowl and rolling it between her fingers to crumble burnt needles from the stem. “Wait, you don’t mean, like, recently?”
Rosa placed the last of the bottles. “No, when I was younger. Did you… You don’t have to answer this. Did you know about Gus?”
Mel wiped her rosemary-smudged fingers across her apron, already dirtier in the first hour of her shift than Kit’s had been at the end of his. “No. I had no idea. Honestly, how weird is it that werewolves are real?” After a beat, it occured to her to ask, “Did you know about Gus?”
“No. I’m losing my mind over it a little bit,” Rosa said.
“Me, too. Of course we are.” Mel couldn’t help her smile, pained though it was. Someone was finally willing to say this out loud with her. “I mean, it’s so incredibly rare.”
“Are they… Was Gus…”
Mel busied herself with filling the sixty-quart standup mixer, giving Rosa room to collect her thoughts. They’d need twenty cups of powdered rock root. Ideally the day shift would have had time to prep a little more, but the potions would benefit from the delay. Freshly crushed was best.
Rosa recovered herself. “It’s just that I always thought I had a good sense for people, you know? Like I was a good judge of character. I thought it was kind of my whole thing.”
“What do you mean, Rosa?”
“I never would have guessed in a thousand years about Gus.”
“Oh, sweetheart, werewolves aren’t bad people. They’re just in a shitty position. They don’t have any control over what they do in their wolf form. Gus was a great person; you were always right about him.”
“That’s a relief. But the people who take the werewolves, the state’s hunters- why do they kill them if they’re not bad people?”
Suddenly Mel wondered if she was qualified to be having this conversation. “I’m so sorry, Rosa.”
“I’ll get the rock root,” she said quickly, hurrying to the back storage.
“He didn’t deserve it,” Mel told the standup mixer. “Gods, what the fuck. What the fuck happened.”
Gus had always made a crinkling sound as he walked by in the lab, his pockets filled with snacks that he would go through one by one over the course of their shifts together. He’d offer them up whenever someone got too overwhelmed by their work. If he’d been on shift tonight, he would have come armed with a feast of chips and cookies. He would’ve made the workload seem half as light, too. Mel had never met a more naturally gifted brewer.
She pulled herself together when she heard Rosa come back in. “Thanks. Throw in the rest of that open box. We’ll use it up.”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
As she did so, Rosa asked, “Do you think whoever turned Gus in knew what would happen?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure they knew. I’m pretty sure they’re a monster, whoever did it.”
Mel gave it a moment. Rosa seemed done for the time being, and Mel didn’t blame her. She hit the on button. The metal paddle’s pulverizing would drown out any attempt at talking for at least ten minutes.
But less than a minute in, Mel heard a crash come from the front of the store. She turned to Rosa, who was calibrating the scale with no sign of disturbance, then turned the mixer off to say:
“I thought I heard something. Just going to make sure everything’s good.”
“Be careful.”
They weren’t licensed to produce weapons-grade potions, or even defensive ones, but they had no shortage of freshly sharpened knives. Mel grabbed a small one and slipped through the door to the front.
Once her eyes adjusted to the dark, she spotted it— the phone basket had fallen off its shelf. Mel must have accidentally moved it when she took Gus’s phone. She checked to make sure nothing had been broken and realized Kit had left his phone behind. Mel put everything back in its place and went to check the front door. Kit had remembered to lock up behind himself, at least. Mel reflexively felt the back of the nearby shelf for the store key and found it empty. It wasn’t on any of the shelves, and hadn’t fallen to the floor, either.
They weren’t supposed to be without a key. The lock was such that it required one to open the door from inside as well as the outside, meaning Mel and Rosa had no way to leave until the morning shift arrived. She knew she should call Arthur, but no part of her thought it would be worth the grief. She returned to the lab.
“It was nothing,” Mel reported.
“Thanks for checking.” Laughing with relief, Rosa showed Mel the pocketbook of sigils she’d taken out, open to the instructions for a protection sign. “I don’t know what I was planning to do. Write this on our foreheads?”
Mel giggled. “You were ready for action! I love it.”
She went to the sink to wash her hands after handling the phones. Though most of their potions were self-sterilizing, excepting only those whose makeup couldn’t tolerate the necessary ingredients, Mel didn’t like to introduce germs unnecessarily to the brewing process. They could influence the outcome of the potion even if they were eliminated by it.
Rosa smiled to herself, setting the pocketbook on the table next to the bottles. “Did you know the sigil for freshness was derived from the sigil for protection?”
“I had no idea! That totally makes sense, though.”
“Right?” She cracked her knuckles. “Thanks for checking out that noise. I don’t think I realized how nervous I was, what with the full moon and all.”
“Yeah, I hear you… Wait, tonight? The full moon is tonight?”
With an apologetic wince, Rosa nodded.
“Shit. I should’ve been paying attention. All right, look, the store key is missing. You haven’t seen it, have you?”
“No,” Rosa said, eyes wide. “Did Kit take it by mistake?”
“I doubt it. I gave him the employee key right before he left.”
“Gus must have had it,” she suggested in a soft, reluctant tone.
Mel expressed agreement with a furrowed brow. “I was just going to let it go, but I don’t like the idea of us being trapped here on the full moon.”
“We’re safe in here. It’s out there I’d be worried about. As long as no one can get in, we don’t have anything to worry about, right?”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. As much as Mel agreed with Rosa, as much as she dreaded calling Arthur, she couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong.
“No, we better play it safe. Think about it— what if a fire broke out? Sure, we could break the windows, but that’s dangerous all on its own.”
“Ok. I’m getting the water boiling.”
“Thanks. Can we cut any of the brew time on the eye color changing potions?”
“Not much,” Rosa said slowly, thinking it over. “Half an hour, if I raise the temp three to five degrees for the first two hours.”
“You’re a genius! Let’s do it.”
Mel grabbed the landline, took a deep breath, and dialed Arthur’s number. He answered on the first ring.
“What’s wrong?” he barked.
“Hey, Arthur. Sorry to disturb you. Do you know where the store key is?”
“It was on the shelf when I left. Did Kit take it?”
“I don’t think so. He has the other one.” Mel picked at her apron, her heart rate increasing. “I, um… I’m not sure we should be here without a key.”
“You’re not leaving.”
Mel recoiled from the receiver, her ear ringing. “Th-That’s not what I was saying. We actually can’t?”
“Why the hell are you calling me? Get Kit to bring the key back.”
“I would, but um, he left his phone here. I’m not sure how to get in touch.”
“Fuck, Mel. I don't know how many times I have to tell you guys to take your phones with you when you leave. How hard is it to remember? What do I have to do?”
“So, we really shouldn’t be here with no way to leave,” Mel pushed ahead.
“It’s one night. Don’t burn the place down and you’ll be fine.”
“Legally speaking—“
“Fuck me.”
Mel waited. She looked to Rosa, diligently adding flakes of ash bark to a scale with tweezers to get the exact right amount, and doubled down. “You’ll have to bring us a key. It’s not safe.”
“I just wanted to be home tonight for once in my life.”
“It’ll take five minutes, Arthur.”
“If the fucking truck even starts.”
“Do your best. It’s that or I’m calling the police to break us out.” Mel hung up the phone.
Almost immediately, it started ringing, Arthur’s number displayed on the ID charm crudely zip-tied to the phone. Mel picked it up and set it down again. She called out to Rosa, “He should be here in a few minutes.”
Mel rolled her shoulders back, sore and scared and not the least bit certain she’d have a job after pulling that stunt.
As if reading her mind, Rosa asked, “Why are you still working here, hun?”
“Why are any of us?”
“I cleaned up my resume. I’m sending it around next week.”
Mel gave her a sad but encouraging smile. “Good for you. You’re so talented. You deserve better than this.”
“You know you do, too, right? Why don’t you apply somewhere else?”
She didn’t have the heart to tell Rosa that no part of her believed there was better out there. It would have been harder still to admit that after all this time, Mel hadn’t let go of the hope that Arthur would go back to the way he used to be. Joking around with them, giving them advice, sharing his life stories. She’d felt close to him once.
Mel only said, “I’ll get around to it one of these days.”
As the adrenaline rush wore off, a surprising sense of peace took its place. Mel felt more clear-headed and steady than she had in months. She stood up straight— it even felt easier to breathe— and reset her intention to enjoy the night of brewing. Arthur wouldn’t fire her on the spot, as he preferred the drama of a long, drawn-out tension, and she wouldn’t quit. She would fix this. If she just found the right way to show him that he’d been hurting the people around him, things could go back to the way they were.
“I’m going to start the enchantments,” Mel announced.
“Perfect! Would you put the mixer back on, too?”
“On it.”