Page 60 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
He unfurls it. “Underwear?” he asks in slow confusion. Not just any underwear. Topher’s underwear. The pair he’d soaked and left with them to launder and return. The pair Mateo had yet to return because he hadn’t worked out a good time to give a guy a single pair of underwear back. Ophelia had seemingly just been carrying it around in case the moment presented itself. Recognizing this doesn’t help. “What?” Mateo adds.
“I can use them to track his energy. Find out if he’s the one at the hospital or somewhere else.” Ophelia tries to snatch the underwear back, but he doesn’t let go.
“No way.” He has no intention of arguing this point. The fact that they have no idea where Topher is makes it untenable.“You could follow his energy into oblivion for all we know.” Now they’re glaring at each other, about to have a tug-o-war over Topher’s underwear.
Except when he pulls, she gasps, and he remembers her hand—burnt from dragging him away from his mother’s evil spell book when it lit him on fire. He wavers and she snatches the underwear away with a sneer.
“You’re not the only one allowed to risk themselves, you jackass,” she yells. Like, a proper yell, extremely loud in front of a breakfast place. “If he dies because you stopped me from doing something I was made to do, I’ll never forgive you.”
Mateo wilts. In the twelve years he’s known her, she’s never yelled at him.
Everything inside of him wants to yell backno. She wasn’t made to astral project; she was forced to. By a manipulative bunch of assholes in a cult. Her family ran away because Ophelia was gifted, which meant the cult leaders had big, dangerous, cult-y plans for her. But gifted or not, her connection is damaged. The greater the distance she travels, the higher the likelihood of losing her way back to her body.
When astral projection goes wrong, it goes really wrong. See: Her entire very dead family. He spends a lot of his life thinking about walking in on her dead.
They stare at each other for a long time, her eyes wild because she’s mad and his eyes wild because he’s scared. Fear’s the only emotion properly piercing through the curtain of numbness since he untransformed.
But she’s not wrong. He could have died a half a dozen times in the past week. She’d hated it. But she hadn’t stopped him. She’d helped, even.
Which is how they end upinsidea Country House of Waffles while one of their friends might be dying in a hospital or spirited off by an evil wizard.
Mateo orders coffee and says they need time to decide on food to keep the waiter away.
Ophelia slumps down in the booth, bare feet appearing on the bench beside him as she gets as close to lying down as she reasonably can in a chain restaurant while clutching underwear to her chest.
“Don’t die,” Mateo says uselessly, and she gives him a grim smile and closes her eyes.
Setting a timer for thirty minutes—arbitrarily chosen based on how much he doesn’t like her doing this—he drinks his flavorless coffee and tries not to look like a creep who is definitely intently staring at a lady passed out in front of him. At the seventeen-minute mark the waiter’s circled enough times to be suspicious in an undefinable yet soon to be actionable way.
But Ophelia’s eyes pop open. In the terrible yellow light of the restaurant, they’re the neon blue of a highlighter.
She’s got something.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ophelia has to be familiar with a person’s energy to find them in the astral plane. A personal item helps strengthen that connection—and it doesn’t get much more personal than underwear—but her Traveling isn’t GPS. Catching the edges of Topher’s energies still means Ophelia has to wander around playinghot or coldto follow it to the source.
An extremely awkward rideshare later, Mateo types in a generous tip to a baffled driver and gets out of the car. He has to jog to catch up with Ophelia, who’s already half a block away.
“It’s pastel,” Ophelia says as he comes up beside her, gaze directed at a particular picture-perfect, cute-ass San Francisco row home.
With what the Evil Wizard had been wearing, Mateo expected spires, dark brick work, and some stained glass. “Hiding in plain sight?” he suggests.
Ophelia frowns at the pale blue home. “Same energy as Christopher’s office and Linnéa’s door. Same bad cleanup. And I can see a line of Topher’s weird haze if I concentrate.”
Seeing Topher’s haze here is good, right? Because seeing it means Topher’s still alive. Probably. He doesn’t ask in case the answer isnot necessarily,and they keep standing there because their plan hadn’t gone any further thanfind the place and text Ulla.
Mateo flexes and unflexes his hands, trying to will the claws out. Unfortunately, his new weird shit isn’t interested in being helpful, his hands offering only normal human nails that could use some polish. Amazingly typical that it won’t come out when he wants it.
They really should wait for Ulla and Linnéa. They’re not human. Way magic. Scary. Ulla has a dagger. She’ll know what to do.
Except, standing yards from where Topher might be dying, it’s obviously impossible to wait for the luck sisters who are an unknown amount of San Francisco traffic away.
He doesn’t discuss this bad idea so much as just starts doing it. “Should we knock?”
Ophelia joins right in. “I guess.”
He cranes around to see the neighborhood. Pristine little flower boxes. Unassuming. He turns back to the house. An L-shaped staircase with two pillars carved with floral flourishes leads to the front door. The cost and view must be insane because it sits on one of those vertical streets San Francisco’s famous for, right on the edge of the neighborhood and overlooking the bay. The other homes are in neat, connected rows, but this one’s got its own lot.
