Free Leashing the Tempest by Jenn Bennett Page B

filled with a potent cocktail bearing the same name. When I dumped the contents in a small bar sink, the kid acted like I’d just thrown gold in the trash. He glared at me before stomping across the room to rejoin his broke buddies.
    If I were a bartender in any other small bar in the city, I might be encouraged on occasion to double as a bouncer. As the only trained magician on staff at Tambuku, I didn’t have a choice; it was my responsibility. After two years of sweeping up broken glass and trying to avoid projectile vomit, I’d seen enough demons-gone-wild behavior that would make a boring, corporate desk job appear attractive to any normal person. Good thing I wasn’t normal.
    â€œArcadia? Cady? Hello?”
    Amanda leaned across an empty bar stool, waving her hand in front of my face.
    â€œSorry, what?”
    â€œI said that I need another Scorpion Bowl for booth three. Jeez, you’re distracted tonight,” she complained, unloading two empty wooden snack dishes from her tray before circling around the L-shaped bar top to join me.
    â€œHow wasted are they?” I craned my neck to see the booth while scooping up Japanese rice crackers from a large bin.
    â€œThey’ve passed over the halfway mark, but they aren’t there yet. No singing or fighting.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with a dirty bar towel. Amanda was one of three full-time waitresses we employed at Tambuku. Tall, blond, tan, and permanently outfitted with a stack of worn, braided hemp bracelets circling her wrist, she looked like the stereotypical California girl.
    Her family had lived on the central coast for several generations in La Sirena, a small beach community thirty minutes away from the city; it captured its bewitching namesake with photo-worthy vistas of the rocky coastline and the blue Pacific that bordered it. Her parents had a ceramics studio there, and we’d commissioned them to make most of our tiki mugs and bowls, which now sat in neat rows on bamboo shelves behind the bar.
    â€œI’m more concerned about the couple at hightop three.” Amanda peered into the cracked mirror over the cash register that allowed me to watch the bar when I had my back turned; she poked a few stray wisps of hair back into her braid.
    Keeping our specialized clientele happy without sending them into a drunken frenzy was difficult at times. I strained to get a look at Amanda’s hightop couple, two women who were red-faced with laughter. One of them had dropped something under the table and, after retrieving it, was having trouble getting her ass back up onto her chair. They were verging on sloppy drunk, so I made a mental note to cut them off. Still, my money was on the obnoxiously loud group at booth three.
    Amanda waited while I constructed the four-person Scorpion Bowl from brandy, two kinds of rum, and fresh juices. When no one was looking, I smuggled in a few drops of a tincture derived from damiana leaf, one of my medicinals that I kept stashed away in a hidden compartment behind the bar. Most of these were brewed from basic folk recipes, steeped herbs and macerated roots. They soothed nerves, calmed anger, or sobered the mind. Nothing earth-shattering. Well, mostly . . .
    A few were intensified with magick. Spells in liquid form, I guess you might say. Just as perfume smells different in the bottle than on a person’s skin, magical medicinals react with body chemistry and produce unique results; the same medicinal that creates a mildly lethargic feeling in one person might put someone else in deep sleep. Sometimes I had to experiment to find the right one for the job. The one I was using now, the damianatha, has a calming effect that usually wears off pretty fast; I often use it to quell potential bar fights.
    I didn’t feel guilty about dosing people without their permission. I had a business to protect, and the sign at the entrance—marked with the two interlocking circles that