Asa ground his back teeth at the usage of Rose’s name, as if she was rubbing it in that she knew his name and could use it anytime she liked.

  “I want a cure for the conditions caused by violating the terms of a contract,” Rose said, leaning on the counter in a performatively casual move. Asa could see the tension in his jaw and shoulders even as he smiled to match Namah.

  Namah scoffed. “Everyone wants that,” she said. “How boring! I thought you would be more interesting than that, Ambrose Thorne.”

  “What would you find more interesting?” Rose inquired. “Perhaps…a meeting with Galatea Rex?”

  Asa turned to Rose, his heartbeat pulsing in his ears. “What the fuck, Rose,” Asa said, hot anger climbing from his stomach to his chest. “Is that why you brought me here? Because you want to use my mom?”

  Rose gave Asa a cool look. “If you can’t be calm, you can wait outside,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” Asa said, taking a step toward Rose. “If you think you can use my mom like that—”

  Namah said a word that made Asa freeze in his tracks, a coolness trickling down his spine. “Shush,” she said. “Let the adults talk.” Then she turned to Rose with avarice in her eyes. “A meeting with Galatea, hm? And how do you propose to do that when the House has wards that could keep 1,000 demons out?”

  “She can leave and come here, of course,” Rose said smoothly. “I can make that happen.”

  “If the rumors about you are true, you could contact any Galatea in any number of time-lines,” Asa said fiercely. “Why does it have to be this Galatea?”

  \Namah rolled her eyes. “Do you know how many nearby time-lines I would have to sift through to find a Galatea that wasn’t contracted to the House as a child?” she said. “I haven’t found one yet.”

  “Why do you even want to talk to her?” Asa said. Hot demonic energy flowed through to him from his demon, which loosened the coolness of whatever Namah had done. The demon himself hopped off Asa’s shoulders after his little nap, starting to wander the shop. He sniffed in between shelves, pawed at books, appearing totally unconcerned with what was happening to Asa.

  “Nunya,” Namah said easily, smirking.

  Asa blinked, confused. “Nunya what?” he said.

  “Nunya business,” she said and then cackled. “Also, tell your demon to stop chewing my books, or I’ll tell him for you—and he won’t like how I do it.”

  Asa saw red power fill her eyes for an instant, which reminded him instantly of the red demonic power in the other Galatea’s time-line, when he was in her office.

  “Hey, demon,” Asa said immediately, filled with reflexive nervousness, “Get back here.”

  “Aw, but the power tastes good,” the demon grumbled, dragging his little paws to return to Asa. “Get my name right, human. The next time you call me demon, I am biting you.” He fixed Asa with a speaking look, and Asa suppressed the urge to sigh.

  “So do we have a deal?” Rose said to Namah.

  Namah smiled with even more teeth. “Step into my office,” she said. “Let’s make a contract.”

  Namah stepped out from behind the counter, barely shorter than Asa, and he caught the wafting scent of poppies. She wore a red dress and a long white apron, as if she had been working before they arrived. Namah gestured for them to follow her deeper into the shop, which caused PQ-9 to send Asa a short video of a chicken being hunted by a fox. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Asa muttered under his breath, looking around as they walked.

  The ceilings were surprisingly tall for how small her her shop appeared on the outside—if Asa reached his arms all the way up, his hands still wouldn't touch the ceiling. Electric blue light in torch sockets lined the walls, which gave the shop an eerie glow, as if they were at the bottom of one of those restaurant aquariums. The ceiling grew taller and taller as they went, the bookshelves long and endless and filled to the brim with paper texts and unidentifiable magical objects.

  The demon jumped back up onto Asa's shoulders to curl around his neck, and Asa didn't blame him. The sense of magical power intensified as they walked, bleeding from the walls and the bookshelves, an invisible magical pressure that was dense and stifling. Asa found it hard to take a full breath.

  Asa turned to Rose in order to ask him—once again—what the fuck he was thinking, when he realized Rose wasn't there. Asa twisted to look behind himself, where Rose had been loitering a few steps behind. Asa hadn't even noticed, so focused on the building magical miasma as Namah led them to her office.

  Rose raised his eyebrows sarcastically because he was a fucking asshole who had gotten them into a stupid mess with no context and no warning.

  "Ah, here we are," Namah said suddenly, ducking into an alcove that was off to the side.

  Asa would never have found this place on his own.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Rose and Asa followed Namah into a small, doorless room where candles were lit for light, and there was a small wooden table with a few chairs. Complex instruments were strewn across the table, along with sheafs of paper and open boxes of powdered inks. There were even more bookshelves, and they were crammed full of notebooks. The room looked more like a workshop than an office, as if Namah spent significant time here working on....whatever witch demons did in their spare time.

  Asa tracked movement in the corner of his eye, and he jumped. Two children entered the room with their arms stacked high with even more books. They looked identical to each other and appeared around Mouse’s age. Both of their faces were very serious as they piled their burden of books and papers onto the table for Namah's use. Asa couldn’t help noticing that this was probably his mother’s dream library; he ached that he couldn’t give this to her.

  Namah flipped through one of the books until there was a blank page. "Make fresh ink, please," she instructed the children, and they immediately started the process of mixing dried demon blood into a paste.

  "Now," Namah said, sounding deeply satisfied. "As far as I'm aware, there isn't exactly a cure for the problems that happen when breaking a contract, but there are some, shall we say, substitutes."

  "And what do those substitutes entail?" Rose said, sounding bored.

  Asa wished he could get Rose alone for a moment—he wondered, suddenly, why Rose even needed a cure. Was it just to have for the sake of emergency?

  Namah selected two of the books from what the twins—presumably, Namah's apprentices—

  had brought. She flipped to relevant pages in the books before sliding them over to Rose. Without looking at the books, Rose immediately slid the books to Asa. "My assistant will review these," Rose said, crossing his arms.

  "Your assistant?" Asa said, incredulous.

  "You want to help Luna, don't you?" Rose said, his voice not changing in tone at all.

  Asa’s heart dropped into his stomach like a stone. "Luna broke a contract?" Asa said.

  Rose shrugged. "A small one," he said shortly.

  "She looked fine when I saw her," Asa said, his brows drawing together tightly, even as he started skimming the contents of the books Rose had slid in front of him. “What about Sol?”

  "And she will continue to be fine," Rose said firmly, as if he could say it with enough belief, then it would be true. He didn’t answer his question about Sol, Luna’s younger brother. Asa had just assumed Sol had been out on errands like usual—or what had become the usual since Asa had left the House, and Rose had seemed intent on shutting Asa out of his life.

  Breaking a demon contract could have different consequences depending on the degree of violation, and what the terms of the contract had been. Demon contracts took compensation from the person who broke the contract: compensation that was equal to the terms that had been violated. Demon contracts didn't want money either. Demon contracts wanted blood or memories or humanoid life. Sometimes the demon contracts even took other people as collateral. Asa had heard once of a parent that had broken a contract. The demon contract had then killed their child, the child’s life taken as compensation.

  Demon contracts wanted pain.

  Asa chewed on his bottom lip as he contemplated what contract Luna had broken, what the terms were, and what the contract was taking from her. "Is the violation ongoing?" Asa asked Rose in a low voice.

  Rose didn't answer, probably because Namah seemed to be listening intently to their conversation. Asa knew he shouldn't have asked, but he couldn't help himself. He had once been so involved in Luna's life because Asa and Rose had been attached at the hip—Luna might as well have been one of the apprentices under Asa at the House.

  The book in front of Asa was written in Micna, a rare academic demonic dialect, and it detailed the consequences of violations of demonic contracts, including the types of payment the contracts would ask for in terms of compensation. There was a long case study of a man who had lost all memories of his spouse due to violating the contract that allowed his spouse to live with terminal illness. This spouse had gone to extreme lengths in yet another contract to retrieve these memories. It was unclear whether the spouse had been successful.

  When Asa looked at the other book, which was also written in Micna, it contained a list of magical objects that had legendarily been claimed to reverse the consequences of contract breaking.

  "This doesn't say anything useful," Asa said bluntly to Namah. "How are you expecting to fulfill what Rose asked?"

  Namah nodded her head toward one of the twins. "Bring the other books," she ordered.

  "Are you intentionally wasting our time?" Asa said, trying to stay calm. PQ-9 tugged on a piece of his hair to remind him to play nice.

  Namah looked amused. "For some people, these books would be enough," she said, waving her hand at the table. "They would look at that information, and they would say to themselves: gee, I just need to find—“ she made a show of lifting up the book, “—the wand of seven stars, and then everything will be okay."

  "I grew up at the House," Asa said in disgust. "These books are worthless.”

  Namah laughed, and it actually sounded like a real laugh. "I can see why you brought him," she told Rose. "He's not easily fooled by demonic language." She shrugged one shoulder. "I suppose that shows he really was raised by Galatea."

  "Rose isn't signing anything unless there's something actually in it for him," Asa said firmly. And he was certainly not going to sign off on Namah meeting his mother. His mother already had enough troubles. "And furthermore—"

  Namah's entire face suddenly sharpened into ice, which was when Asa realized how warm and open her face had seemed previously. "Ah," she said with such a chill in her voice that Asa felt the urge to take a step back. "I see. This wasn't your game. How clever."

  "If you give me back what’s mine, we won't have to do this," Rose said, just as coolly. Asa didn't see how he was still keeping calm. The air in the room had gotten so cold that Asa could see his own breath. The warmth of his demon curled around his neck kept him from shivering.

  "That child fell into my trap," Namah said, sounding bored. She looked at her hand, as if examining her nails, and Asa realized that ice had formed the length of her wrist, her fingers, sharpening into points at her fingertips. "Finder's keepers."

  There was a rumbling from behind the wall of Namah’s workshop that caused Asa’s demon to perk up and sniff the air. “Demon,” he said in a low growl.

  Rose didn't wait to see what would happen. He said a string of words in Casipho dialect that caused an enormous hole to form in the wall behind them—right in Namah's workshop. Then Rose ended the spell with one final word, and a magical smoke bomb went off. Asa couldn't see at all. But the sound in the walls grew louder and louder.

  "Go, Asa," Rose barked, pushing Asa forward.

  It was only when Rose shove Asa inside the hole in the wall that Asa realized it was a tunnel. PQ-9 turned on his flashlight function, and Rose called for light in Casipho, which appeared as a glowing little sphere in the palm of his hand. This revealed a stone tunnel ahead of them with no end in sight.

  And then Rose started running, and Asa was instinctively running after him. As Asa always had, even when they were kids.

  [Namah's Workshop]