Katerina Ross: tenderly wicked

The girl lingered beside him by the bar counter. A petite brunette with a gaze surprisingly sharp for such a nice face. High heels, but no make-up. Casually dressed, certainly not for picking up strangers in a bar, more like for relaxing with friends on a Friday evening. Normally, she would be a type to interest him, but he was far from normal now. He wished she would go away already, turned off by his surly, indifferent countenance.

“Is it easier for you to speak Latin?” she asked instead, tilting her head curiously.

Yes, his Czech wasn’t ideal, and it became clear just from a single short phrase. Those who said all Slavic languages sounded the same should have tried learning them instead of simply listening. But nothing indicated he knew Latin at all. It was international, but mostly for scholars and well-educated people. He didn’t look like one of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Nor did anything in his appearance betray his former occupation. He seemed more of a rough and rowdy biker type, clad in an old leather jacket, jeans, and heavy, thick-soled boots.

“How do you know?” he asked, curious, though he hadn’t been in the mood for a nice friendly chat. He rarely was nowadays.

“It’s a complex curse, very intricate, very skillfully done,” she said, like she marveled at it. “You must have been an important person for someone to put this spell on you. Also, I see there have been attempts to remove it. Unsuccessful but insistent. Only very strong mages would even try to do it, and only in a joint effort. Why would they care? My guess is you were one of them.”

“Not anymore.”

He emptied the contents of his glass in one large gulp. Uh. Nasty stuff.

“Are you a witch or a mage?” he asked and waved to the bartender to get a refill.

He wondered how other magicians saw his curse, invisible for common people. As a sigil burnt into the flesh of his shoulder where the wicked hand had touched him? Was it all the more ugly, scarred and disfigured, because of the messy endeavors to get rid of it? He decided he didn’t really want to know.

“Just a witch, nothing high class,” the girl said with a small smile as she watched the bartender pouring more slivovice into Dragomir’s glass. “A bit of fortunetelling, a bit of herbal potion-making, a bit of coaching. I keep a small family business. Want to see my license?” she suggested almost playfully.

“Nope,” Dragomir said briskly and took another sip from his glass.

Unlike her, he’d been a magician, having finished the famous Scholomance school in the Carpathians. Also unlike her, he had no license at the moment and didn’t intend to apply for one.

“Does alcohol reduce the effect of the curse to some degree?” she asked, not flirtingly this time, but with what seemed like genuine sympathy.

“Nope.”

More importantly, alcohol reduced him to nothingness. Numbed him. But not enough. Not yet.

He already regretted starting a conversation, annoyance building up slowly but steadily. Why would she ask? Why would she care?

“I’m Ida, by the way,” the witch said, as if she hadn’t noticed his obvious displeasure. Or maybe she didn’t want to notice. Stupid, stupid girl.

Mild irritation was starting to evolve into anger, both at her for being so amiably intrusive and at himself for wishing it could lead to something. He willed himself not to look at her, not to answer. It would only be worse. It would end up badly, just like it had the last time.

He hadn’t been with a woman for quite a while, and it took him all his resolve to feign indifference.

“Nobody will be able to take off your curse, except for the one who made it,” she said as if he wasn’t well aware of it. But then she added, “Maybe I could be of some help though.”

Sure. A witch from a seedy bar for tourists and local drunkards would do more than a bunch of highly skilled magicians from the Scholomance school. He would laugh her in the face if he felt like facing her now.

“When you’ll be in the mood, call me,” she said and slipped a business card along the counter, towards him, until it stopped at his glass. A simple white rectangle with her name and address. And a small silhouette of a black cat on top.

After that, thank God for small mercies, she left. He didn’t watch her go, but in a few moments, he heard the squeaky front door opening and closing.

He crumpled her business card in his fist, crushed it like a fucked-up origami, and tossed it to the floor.

Having emptied his glass, he caught his grumpy reflection in the large mirror behind the liquor bottles and automatically reached to smooth his hair. He trimmed it short, out of an old habit, but when it grew just a little, it always stood up in wild spikes and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like almost anything of late.

Behind his back, three men marched to the door. He wouldn’t have paid attention to them if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of a familiar tattoo in the mirror. One of the guys had a studded mallet smashing through a pentagram tattooed on his forearm. Malleus Maleficarum. The hammer of witches. Uh-huh. It didn’t look good, not for the girl who had just left.

Witchbashers, that was who they were.

It had been long since women were allowed to practice magic freely and enter magic schools along with men. It had been even longer since magicians of whatever gender had acquired any problems with state or church authorities for what they did, having settled a mutually satisfying deal centuries ago. But there were always some douchebags who had their own thoughts on the matter, always eager to see evil outside of themselves.

For a moment, Dragomir wavered. Maybe they weren’t after her. Maybe she was long gone.