Haunted Moon by Yasmine Galenorn

sigh, headed out the door.
    Beth, who had been watching him from behind the counter, marched over and tried to smooth the ruffled pages, then sighed and carried the book back to the counter. She turned just in time to catch my eye.
    “Camille!” She bustled over to give me a hug.
    “Who was Mr. Disappointed?” I nodded to the figure retreating out the door.
    “Oh, him. Don’t mind him, except, damn it, he ruined another book. I don’t like to send them back—it messes up the authors—so I just buy them and add them to the lending library I keep in my home. Then I send Jake an invoice and he pays it without comment.”
    “What’s his problem? He looked disgruntled.” In fact, he’d looked downright pissed off.
    “Disgruntled? Yeah, that’s Jake all right. He’s always in here, looking for books to give him power. He doesn’t want to actually do the work, and he’s always looking in the sections that would burn his fingers,
if
he ever tried casting any of the spells from them. He’s not a bad person, per se. Just lazy, whiny, and apathetic. He shouldn’t be practicing magic in the first place. But enough about him. What do you need?”
    She wrapped an arm around my shoulder as we turned to face the wall of herbs. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place?”
    “I love it.”
    And I did. Everything was organized and tidy. I glanced up at Beth. She was taller than I was, and larger—the woman was plump, that was for sure, but she wore it well, and her gypsy skirt and halter top suited her, as did the armful of bangle bracelets and the large chunk of smoky quartz hanging around her neck.
    “I need herbs. Mandrake, wormwood, and a few others. I’m also looking for several oils—and they
must
be essential. No fragrance oils. Rose, and jasmine.” The differences between synthetic oils and essential were myriad—sometimes the scent was what I needed when it came to spell work and a fragrance oil was fine. But in this case, I definitely needed the essence of the plant.
    She snorted. “
Pure
jasmine oil? You prepared to pay a hundred bucks for a tiny bottle? Then I have it for you.” She nodded me into the back room. I glanced at Delilah, who was sitting at one of the small tables in the corner of the shop, flipping through a magazine. She waved for me to go ahead.
    The room into which Beth led me was small, with a desk and two chairs on the other side. She motioned for me to sit down. While I waited, she unlocked a drawer on an apothecary chest behind her desk and pulled out a small bottle.
    “Here we go. Jasmine oil. One-eighth of an ounce for forty-five dollars. And the rose absolute is forty.”
    I picked up the bottle. One-eighth of an ounce was a verysmall amount, but for what I was making, I didn’t need a great deal. “Two bottles of each, please.”
    “Good. And what herbs did you need? I can start Kerri on getting them packaged for you.”
    “I need some cut mandrake root—two ounces—an ounce of sacred tobacco, as well as an ounce each of wormwood, damiana, and kava kava; a big chunk of amber resin; and three ounces of galangal.”
    She set out my oils, locked the drawer again, and then quickly jotted down what I wanted. “Anything else?”
    “Yes, actually. Bone chips. Silver dust. A sweetgrass braid. Two smudge sticks—sage and cedar.” I usually made my own, but we’d gone through my entire stash and my herbs weren’t mature enough to plunder in order to make more. So, until later in the season, I was working off store-bought ingredients.
    As we headed back to the front of the shop, Beth stopped to give Kerri—her older daughter from her first marriage—my list. The girl began to pull herbs and measure them out for me. I wandered over to Delilah.
    “Almost done. Anything interesting?”
    She was reading an issue of
Supe-R-Natural Weekly
, a small newspaper on a shoestring budget at a regional press started by two Weres and one of the ES Fae. We had a subscription, though