Page 64 of Shroom for Improvement

“Just a prick. A single drop of blood, that’s all.”

“No. I can’t. I... You do it.” He thrust the knife into my palm and held out his own.

I cradled the back of his hand in mine. The skin-on-skin contact zinged up my arm, made my heart thrum in the base of my throat, made my sweat glands go into hyperdrive. “I’ll try to make this as pain free as possible.”

Claude screwed up his face, and I nicked the point of the blade against the pad of his ring finger.

“Oh, that wasn’t too bad,” he said, prying his eyes open as I squeezed the end of his finger, eking out a drop of blood and letting it fall into the centre of the stone tablet.

The tablet appeared to absorb the blood. Sucked it in like a sponge. The little circle of red disappeared entirely. Not even a wet patch remained.

“Did that work?!” Claude squeezed out even more blood. “Does that mean it worked?”

Once again, the stone absorbed the droplets.

“Jenny?!”

Claude paused while he listened to the house’s response.

“It says we’re getting warmer,” he said.

Hadn’t Jenny already said no to the hotter-colder guide? This house and its inconsistencies were starting to annoy me a little.

“But the blood isn’t the ritual?”

“I guess not.” He puffed out a huge lungful of air.

“This is good, though,” I said. Claude looked at me like I’d lost my senses. I never expected the blood to work; I was merely crossing another thing off the list as a formality. The next words I tried to phrase in the politest way possible. “If Jenny could tell us when we’re getting hotter or colder, that would... be so incredibly helpful.”

“Can you do that?” he said . . . paused . . . turned to me. “It’ll try.”

“Okay.” That might work. We’d simply have to take whatever the house said with a pinch of salt. I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure we could trust it, but I also didn’t have Claude’s ability to communicate with Jenny. I’d never understand its idiosyncrasies the way he already seemed to. “This is a great start so far.”

Claude stared at me whilst sucking his wound, clearly not as enthused as I was about everything. I skipped a few pages ahead in my notepad.

“There are a few folktales, stories, beliefs, whatever you want to call them, that transcend shroom lore and have made their way into other cultures over centuries, millennia even. Like human folklore, other types of fae, shifters, warlocks, et cetera, and I reckon that’s why we can talk about them.”

“Okay?” Claude said, taking his pricked finger out of his mouth.

“There’s one. If any of these folk-inspired things are gonna work, it’s this.”

Claude licked his lips. “Okay,” he breathed again, the word barely a whisper. “What is it?”

“Agents of thunder.”

“Huh?”

“It’s long since been believed that thunder and lightning and rainstorms cause mushrooms to... sprout. Apparently, where you see a flush of mushrooms in the earth, it’s becauselightning has struck that spot. Scientifically, there’s no evidence to support this, but the belief is so ubiquitous, and spans so many cultures, species, religions, that it’s worth looking into further.”

“What are you suggesting?” Claude’s features somehow seemed shadowed.

“Weather glamour,” I said. “Magic a bolt of lightning directly onto the stone.” A simple enough piece of magic. A party trick to most fae.

Claude blew out a breath, removed his hat, ran a hand over his curls, and got to his feet. “I can’t... no... I’m not.”

I stood too, so Claude had to look up to see my face.

“I’m shit at glamour. Shit. I know every fae is supposed to have this innate ability to do weather magic, but I... I’ve never even successfully pulled off a storm in a teacup.”

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