Al's focus shifted over his glasses to me. "It's one of Newt's."

"Newt? Since when do you need to get an aura from Newt?" I asked. No one liked the insane demon, but she was the reigning queen of the lost boys, so to speak, and knew everything—when she could remember it.

"Not your concern," he said, and I winced, embarrassed. Al had lost almost everything in his effort to snag me as a familiar, ending up with something vastly more precious but broke just the same. I was a witch, but a common, usually lethal genetic fault had left me able to kindle their magic. Al's status was assured as long as I was his student, but his living was bleak.

"I'll just pop over and find out who it is before we finish this up," he said with forced lightness, setting the bottle down with a sharp tap.

I looked at the assembled pieces. "Now? Why didn't you ask her before?"

"It didn't seem important at the time," he said, looking mildly discomfited. "Pierce!" he shouted, the call for his familiar lost in the high ceilings coated in shadows and dust. Mood sour, he turned to me. "Don't touch anything while I'm gone."

"Sure," I said distantly, eying the green swirling in the bottle. He had to borrow an aura from Newt? Jeez, maybe things were worse off than I'd thought.

"The crazy bitch has a reason for everything, though she might not remember it," Al said as he tugged his sleeves over his lace cuffs. Glancing at the arranged spelling supplies, he hesitated. "Go ahead and fill the bowl. Make sure the water covers the name." He looked at the image of an angry, screaming face scribed into his black marble floor. It was his version of a door in the doorless room. "Gordian Nathaniel Pierce!"

I pushed back from the table as the witch popped into the kitchen atop the grotesque face, a dish towel over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up. "I'd be of a mind to know what the almighty hurry is," the man from the early 1800s said as he tossed his hair from his eyes and unrolled his sleeves. "I swan, the moment I start something, you get in a pucker over nothing."