I let out a breath and tried to steady myself. It took a while.
By the time I was calm again, the sun was setting. Luna was still down in the shop, working away. This was taking longer than I’d expected—my best guess had been that her visitor should have arrived by now—but divination’s never reliable when it comes to free will. Still, the futures were converging and it shouldn’t take more than another ten minutes. I was glad that Avenor and Saffron hadn’t stuck around. This was going to be risky enough already.
The futures settled, and I felt a stir of gate magic from somewhere behind the shop. About thirty seconds later, there was the sound through the speakers of the shop’s inner door opening. Luna’s head snapped up and she went still.
“Surprise!” Anne said. “Is this a bad time?”
Anne had changed a lot in the last few weeks. Her hair had grown to fall almost to the small of her back, and in place of her old clothes she wore a jet-black skater dress with an off-shoulder design that left most of her arms and legs bare. The biggest change, though, was in how she moved. The old Anne had been tall and striking, but she’d downplayed both, hanging back and staying quiet. Now, she walked onto the shop floor as if she owned it.
Luna’s head moved to track Anne as she passed, but her hands stayed on the counter. “Love what you’ve done with the place,” Anne said, glancing around. “Not sure exactly what you changed, but it really feels different from when Alex was running it, you know?”
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Luna said.
“Yeah, well, you know how it is,” Anne said. “Or actually, I guess you don’t, since you never had the whole fugitive experience, but you can probably imagine I don’t pre-book much of a social calendar, right? So how’s it going? Still working nine to five?”
“Mostly.”
Anne shook her head, her hair swaying with the motion. “I don’t know why you stick at it. Selling crystal balls to fat women who want to win the lottery? You’re not an apprentice anymore, you don’t have to keep minding the till.”
“I’m not minding the till,” Luna said. “This place is mine now.”
“God knows why you’d want it.” Anne pulled out a chair from against the wall and dropped into it, studying Luna critically. “You do look good though.”
“Thanks,” Luna said. “So what have you been up to?”
“Oh, you know,” Anne said. “Council wants me, Richard wants me. It’s kind of dull, really. They chase me, I run away, they chase me, I run away, I get bored of running and murder them all, they scrape up more guys to chase me again. Same old same old.”
“Are they chasing you right now?”
Anne shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t really keep track.”
The answer to that was yes. A Council team was trying to track Anne at this very moment, and they would have succeeded by now if I hadn’t intervened, using the fateweaver to scatter the threads of their spell. Neither Luna nor Anne would have been in immediate danger, but it would have given the Council a reason to investigate Luna more closely.
Luna wasn’t looking happy at all. “Could you maybe not lead them straight to my shop?”
“Hey, I have to find you somewhere. Not like you’d come visit if I’d sent you an invitation.”
“I would have, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Luna said. “You were my best friend. Remember?”
“Aww!” Anne smiled. “Of course I do. Nice to know you do as well.”
“Look,” Luna said. “I would like to talk to you. But knowing that a Keeper team might show up at any minute is not exactly making me feel relaxed here.”
Anne waved a hand. “Fine, fine, I’ll get to the point. What if I told you there was a way you wouldn’t have to worry about the Council breathing down your neck?”
“How?”
“Same way that I don’t.”
“You don’t have to worry about the Council because you’ve got a bonded jinn.”
Anne smiled. She raised her eyebrows.
Luna paused. “You’re not serious.”
“You remember those talks we used to have?” Anne asked. “You always said you wanted to do something. Make a difference.”
“And you said you didn’t,” Luna said. “That you just wanted to be left alone.”
“Yeah, well, that was then, this is now. So what do you think? Ready to shake things up a bit?”
“Anne,” Luna said. “I’m not in your league. I never was. You were ten times stronger than I was before you got that jinn. You and Vari and Alex can get away with things like thumbing your noses at the Council and daring them to do something about it. I can’t. That mage status I have, the one you’re putting at risk by being here now? That’s the only reason the Council haven’t just pulled me off the street already. I know the Council treated you like a bottom-rank mage, but that was still better than how they treated me. You really don’t understand how little it takes for them to come down on me.”
“So stop worrying about them coming down on you,” Anne said. “Make them afraid that you’ll be the one coming after them.”
“You want me to bond to your jinn as well.”
“Not mine. But there are others.”
“Why me?”
“Because like you said, we were best friends,” Anne said. “I’d like to think we still could be. And when it comes to jinn, you’ve got some firsthand experience.”
Luna was still for a second. “You’re talking about the monkey’s paw.”
Anne rose to her feet and began strolling around the room. She didn’t answer, not straightaway.
“You’re hoping I’ll get it for you, aren’t you?” Luna said. “Wait. Is that why you came here? Were you hoping it’d just show up on the shelves?”
“I was kind of wondering,” Anne said. She trailed a finger along one of the shelves, disappearing from my view for a few seconds before coming back into sight. “I mean, that was the way it worked back when Alex was running the place, right? Just sort of pop into existence when the right person came along?”
“Yeah, well, it’s not popping.”
“There are other jinn,” Anne said with a shrug. “It’s you I really care about.”
“So what’s the idea?” Luna asked. “Us two, each with a jinn, going on a rampage?”