Stef’s head bobbed. “Yes. I haven’t had the chance to have a fire since I started my internship. And then I got a real job and apartment, and . . . well, they won’t let you have a fire in the parking lot. Even on Halloween,” she finished somewhat sourly.

True. Jenks hummed closer to land on my shoulder. “She’s got the knack to start one,” he said. “Better than Matalina ever did. That woman couldn’t start a fire if I left her instructions.”

He said it with love, and I felt good that he could again think of her and smile. Content, I sat on one of the rocks and put the books and ingredients on the stone between Stef and me. Magnetic chalk, spelling salt, mortar and pestle, fern sap, cohosh flowers . . . and dew from a lady’s mantle. All set.

“I can’t believe you’re going to use that to make a spell,” Stef said, her disbelief obvious.

Taking a short one-by-one, I poked at the fire. “Some of it’s a spell. Some is a curse.” Worried, I looked up. Stef had gone still, her eyes wide in the fading light.

“Stef, don’t freak,” Jenks pleaded. “It’s a curse because of how far she’s stretching the natural order of things. Not because it’s bad. I’ve known her for almost four years, and she’s never done anything bad.”

Which was also a stretch, but Jenks had a flexible view of good and bad.

“San Francisco . . .” Stef said, eyes darting. “And Margaretville. I went online. They had to flash-point the building.”

I grimaced, my attention on the flames as they warmed my shins. “I was fighting a psychotic demon.” Either Stef would accept that I was a good person and stay, or she’d freak and leave. Showing her the process might help, and I flipped the first book to where I’d earmarked it. It didn’t have a title and the curse had been handwritten. It also made my fingertips tingle, and when the ring Trent had given me began to glow, I spun it to hide the pearl in my fist. Demon magic.

“It’s not illegal to practice curses anymore,” Jenks said, his dust dimming in worry.

“Just hurt someone with them,” I added with a forced cheerfulness. “Curses are governed by the same laws that address magic done with the ley lines or earth magic.” I hesitated, and Jenks gestured for me to keep going. “You want to see it?” I added as I extended the book, hoping she’d look only at the page it was open to. If she saw the rest, it wouldn’t matter what the law or Jenks or I said.

Stef leaned tentatively closer, the firelight catching the shine on her ear piercings. She didn’t touch it, though. Jenks hovered right over the old tome as if to prove he wasn’t afraid, a studious expression on his tiny face as he pretended to read it. His dust made the handwriting glow, and I blew it off before she noticed.

“Looks good, Rache. It passes the pixy test,” he said and I put the book on my lap. It immediately began to make my knees tingle.

“I think it’s the curse Newt used to make a surface demon live its entire two thousand years backward, then forward.” Like some perverted carousel, I thought as I looked at the incantations. “Bringing a plant to maturity is well within the realms of a white curse. But first,” I blurted when Stef’s lips parted, “I’m going to make and attach a standard grow charm to it to extend the life and maintain the potency of the flowers. We want this to be more than a passing irritant.”

Either she would stay or she wouldn’t. This was who I was.

Settling myself, I tucked a strand of escaped hair back and looked at the budding branches. The sun had finally set, and the waxing moon had yet to vanish, sliding the ambient power to growth. It felt good here, but when I heard the kids in the street, I was glad the walls surrounding the place were over six feet tall and the firepit couldn’t be seen through the rusted car gate.

“I use medicinal amulets every day,” Stef said as she held up her left hand and rubbed her pinky with her thumb. It was thick from years of pinpricks of blood to invoke them.

“Well, this first part is going to be just like an amulet, but I’ll be making it from scratch, not simply invoking it,” I said as I set down the curse book and took the spell book instead.

“Can I help? I’ve never made a charm, but I had a couple of semesters of spell prep.”

Jenks’s wings rasped in surprise, and I hesitated. “Um, sure,” I said. “Could you grind up the rosemary? I don’t need a lot. A few leaves.”

Stef reached for the mortar and pestle, looking professional in her scrubs as she plucked a few leaves and began to mash them. Jenks watched for a moment, then shrugged.

“I need a small amount of paste,” I added, a little uneasy despite her confidence. “Our limiting factor is the fern sap, and I’m going to have to downsize everything to match it.”

“Yeah.” Jenks rose up. “You ever try to get fern sap? It’s like squeezing stones.”

Not sure what to make of the help, I studied the mundane spell text book. Trent had given it to me from his mother’s library, and I knew he’d be tickled that I’d used it. The charm was a standard, industrial, plant nursery spell. “It’s usually done on a much larger scale,” I said, finger running down the print. “But we don’t have any cacti. Fern sap will work if I supplement it with the dew from a lady’s mantle.”

“You’re miniaturizing it with alternate ingredients?” Stef asked. “Isn’t that risky?”

“It can be,” I said. “But lots of plants can be used interchangeably, especially in earth magic. You just have to make sure you balance everything. Which is why,” I added as I took up the drying plantain root, “I’m using this to make a bowl instead of a potato. Some things, though, you can’t substitute. If we didn’t have the black cohosh flower, I’d try a different spell.”

“That stuff is like gold,” Jenks said. “You’re using what’s left of Matalina’s stores,” he added, wing pitch lowering.

“That was lucky,” Stef said, her head down and her ear piercings chiming faintly as she worked.

It wasn’t luck, it was planning, and as I used my ceremonial knife to carve a pixy-size bowl from the thick, white root, I wondered why I was so intent on leaving. Jenks, though, had experienced too much grief here, and that was more important.

Slowly the companionable silence grew, and Jenks flew up on silent wings to check something out. If there was a problem, he’d tell me. The fire crackled, warming me as the spring damp rose. Stef didn’t seem to have a problem with silence, and I appreciated that she didn’t feel the need to fill every second with chatter.

“Good?” she said as she held out the rosemary for my inspection.

“Hang on.” I wrangled my phone out and used the light to see. “Perfect,” I added, and she eased back on her foundation-stone seat, clearly pleased.