Pie is crying. Shaking her head, and pointing to her feet, and trying to cover herself with crossed arms, because she’s naked.
Well, she’s got fur, so not really. But she feels naked. I don’t know what just happened inside that tomb, but it doesn’t matter. I walk up to her, put my arms around her and hold her close. “It’s OK,” I murmur. “It’s going to be OK.”
She lets out a long breath. “I don’t understand what’s happening.” Then she pulls back. Grant is still screaming at us from outside the walls, so she’s momentarily distracted by this. “Why’s he here?”
“It doesn’t matter. He can’t get in.”
Pie looks up at me. She doesn’t have a book, but she is holding a page that looks like it came out of the book I’m looking for. “Things are getting weird, Pell.” She looks over her shoulder in the direction of Tarq’s tomb, then back at me. “That was not what I expected.”
“Did you get the spell?”
She holds up the page. “He said this is it. And he said to tell you hi. But…” She waves a hand in the air. “What do we do now?” She looks down at herself. “I need a shirt, I guess. But I don’t want to go down to the cottage. So. Whatever.”
I arrange her hair so she’s properly covered. “I promise not to look.”
This makes her smile, at least. “It’s not like you haven’t seen it all before.” She pauses to sigh heavily. “Well. Should we go do this spell and get rid of that jerk?” She nods her head in the direction of still-screaming Grant. “I just want the outside world to go away for a little bit. I need to think.”
I want the outside world to go away as well. Because I’m starting to worry that Grant might not have been lying about all of it.
Pie made the phone call. That’s our proof she had a real life outside of Saint Mark’s.
But something else is going on here too. Obviously. Since she has horns and hooves right now.
I take her hand. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
We go inside and up to the apothecary. Pie sets the page down on the alchemy bench and then smiles. “Holy shit. My flannel.” She walks over to a table on the far side of the room and picks up the flannel she was wearing the day she arrived. She holds it up. “It’s a little bit bloody and it’s ripped down the back. Remember? I fell out of your freeze and hit my nose.”
“Oh. Shit. I feel terrible about that.”
“Don’t. That was like… lifetimes ago. Bygones.” She slips the flannel on with a sigh. And even though she’s still a wood nymph chimera, and nothing about this day is normal, I can tell this one piece of clothing from her past is enough to ground her for now. “OK. Let’s do this shit.”
I shouldn’t say anything. I should just let it go. But I can’t help myself. “You’re handling this whole thing”—I move a finger up and down in her direction to indicate her body—“very calmly.”
Pie shrugs. “What can I do about it?” Then she looks down at herself. “I mean, I hope I don’t stay like this forever, but I’m not going to worry about it.” Her eyes meet mine and they are suddenly serious. “Now we’re the same.” She grins at me. “Now I’m your dream girl.”
“I actually… love that. But.” I hold up a finger. “If there’s a way to get you back to your natural body, I’ll do everything I can to make it happen. If that’s what you want.”
“We’ll see.” She sighs. “One thing at a time.”
“Agreed. Let’s take a look at that spell.”
“It’s this side,” Pie says.
I take the page from her and start reading, then frown. “What the fuck?”
“What’s wrong?”
“This can’t be it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the same spell we just did to get you in the tomb.” I turn it over, checking the back of the page, just in case Pie got them mixed up. But the back says something about wings. So that’s not it.
“What’s wrong?” Pie comes over to me and her new wood nymph scent comes with her. It’s intoxicating. But not in a magical, bad way. A good way. She smells like the forest. She smells like home. She takes the page and looks at it. “Hmm. You’re right. Only two ingredients. Bloodhorn and a dragon scale.”
“Hey, what happened to your dragon scale?”
“It disappeared when I went through the tomb door. We have a lot to unpack about that trip, but let’s just do this spell first.”
“What’s there to do? It’s the same ingredients. How can it banish something? There aren’t even magic words. It’s a fucking amulet.”
“Stupid amulets. That’s what got us into this trouble, ya know.”
I walk over to the bench I was working at earlier. There’s a vial of bloodhorn and the two remaining scales. I paint some oil on the scale with a brush, then hold it up and shrug. “There. It’s done.”