Page 49 of The Nowhere Witch
I walked Xest for a good hour, trying to shake the dark cloud, before I gave up. The broker’s office was silent as I walked in—until the monkeys started their funeral procession music to the beat of my step. They’d been practicing that one—a lot. They didn’t need the directive to stop this time. Once glance did the job.
Zab smiled, but it was the pitying variety. Bibbi was giving me straight-up pity, sans the smile to water it down. My situation was so bad that apparently pity had outranked fear.
Musso glanced up and looked around the room and then back at me. “So she got fired? So she’s got a black cloud? Not the end of the world.” He grunted and went back to work.
“You all know.” Who needed a newsflash paper when gossip traveled at the speed of light?
“Zark posted a sign on his door that you were gone and it was safe to come back about a half an hour ago,” Musso said.
“So you got fired?” Zab asked.
I dropped into Belinda’s old seat, afraid to get too close to anyone in case it was catchy. “Yep. The tides seem to be turning. I was good luck, and now I’m bad. So bad that he offered to continue to pay me to stay away. It was too humiliating to accept.”
Although I’d thought of it, right after, the thought of food occurred to me. In the end, the shame of getting paid to stay away beat out hunger, especially when there were usually crackers or rolls at the tea station here. Wasn’t sure if that logic would hold up after eating nothing but crackers for a month. Looked like I’d find out. At least there was no rent to pay, but that would probably change too if this black cloud didn’t go away.
“How does a person even end up with a black cloud?” I asked the room in general.
Musso shrugged, not bothering to look up from his work. “It happens. You probably did something you didn’t even realize.”
“Did you open an umbrella inside?” Zab asked.
“Or spill salt that wasn’t being used in a puddle?” Bibbi asked.
“Break a mirror? That would do it for sure,” Zab said.
The monkeys broke into something suspiciously close to a murder-mystery theme song. They were getting better. If their timing wasn’t so horrendous, I might appreciate it.
“Not. Now.”
Their playing screeched to a halt, literally.
“Always suppressed. We’re artists. We need to express ourselves,” Speak No Evil said.
I ignored the glares coming from the band and turned back to Zab and Bibbi, since Musso had already moved on. “I didn’t do any of those things.”
Zab started drumming his pencil on his desk. “Well, they do sometimes just spontaneously appear. It could’ve happened by pure dumb luck.”
“Are bad things going to start happening now?” I waved a hand. “Forget I asked that. I just got fired. That’s obviously not a good thing.”
I slumped forward, my forehead in my hand. That was when the silence hit me. The black cloud had followed me here. Had it scared all the people away?
I squinted an eye open. “Why is it so empty here? Has it been empty all day?”
So much for not paying rent. I might be homelessandjobless soon. I felt something invisible and furry brush against my hand right before a wet tongue licked my nose. Even Dusty pitied me.
Bibbi started fidgeting and suddenly needed to go into the back room. Musso was following her before she was out of the room, mumbling about how she messed up the tea station every time she touched anything. Zab watched them leave like they’d taken off with the last lifeboat on theTitanic.
“Zab?”
He stopped drumming his pencil as if he’d given up the fight. “We were busy, but not overly so. Probably just a lag about this time.”
Musso walked back into the office. Now that he’d handled the tea problem, he’d give me a straight answer.
“Musso, was it busy before I showed up?”
Without a pause in his step, he said, “The place was packed until someone saw you. They came in and said, ‘The Nowhere witch is heading this way and she’s still got the cloud.’ We cleared out in under two minutes.”
“I should leave. I don’t want to ruin business for you guys too. It’s bad enough I emptied out Zark’s.”