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Kira whacked me with her handbag. “If you don’t enjoy yourself tonight, I’m gonna be so mad at you.”
“Fine.” I folded my arms and allowed her to tug me inside, Allison squeaking as she stumbled after us.
We stepped into a tiny green reception area with nothing but a small desk manned with a receptionist wearing a Venetian mask and a black suit.
“Ladies, welcome,” he said, rising from his seat and walking around the desk toward us with a clipboard in hand. “My name is Mervyn, and I’ll be guiding you through your dates tonight. Can I take your names, please?”
We listed our names, and after ticking them off his list with a flourish, he ushered us through a door behind the reception desk.
The room we stepped into was well lit, lighting up the only objects in the room. There was a red curtain that was completely pulled across one half of the room and a bin.
Yeah, this place really gave off some serial-killer vibes.
“So… we’ll have safe dates, right?” I asked. “Nobody’s going to come at us with a machete?”
“Certainly not.” Mervyn bent forward at the hip a little before returning to his upright posture. “Any weapons, magical or otherwise, would have been detected by our talisman-based screening system the moment the offender walked through our front door.”
Well that was reassuring, if this screening system was up to scratch.
“Who would like to go first?” Mervyn gestured to the front.
“Ooh! Me!” Kira all but leapt forward.
The attendant pulled a leather pouch out of his pocket and unwrapped it, taking a needle and a tiny piece of cloth out.
“Wait. Are you taking our blood?” I asked.
“That’s how it works.” Allison nudged me.
“We pride ourselves on providing the closest viable matches, and to do so, we need blood to enter into our database,” he said. “Will this be a problem?”
“So you’re using spells?” I said. “Not like a questionnaire or something?”
“Ignore her, she’s boring,” Kira said and stuck out her finger.
I snorted as Mervyn pricked Kira’s finger and dabbed a drop of her blood onto the cloth.
Did boring people leave home to remove dead bodies for a living?
“Anyone else?” he asked, tossing the needle into the bin.
Allison went next, her shoulders almost up to her ears as he drew her blood. She shivered as he dabbed a fresh cloth piece onto her finger.
“Are you partaking?” he asked me.
Kira glared at me over her shoulder.
If I didn’t, I wouldn’t hear the last of it.
With a sigh, I held out my finger.
Once he had taken my blood, Mervyn excused himself and disappeared behind the curtain with our blood samples.
“We don’t get to see them do the spell?” I tapped my thumb against my clutch.
“They don’t want anyone learning how they do it. They’re the only one of their kind,” Allison said, hooking her arm through mine.
How convenient.
