The Witch's Key

Episode 9: Unprepared

Ms. Greer had somehow managed to make the entire building transparent. Every wall was now invisible, meaning that we could see straight through to every single thing happening inside.

The building had been partitioned into several rooms. One space appeared to be a party hangout, which is where the loud music was coming from. On a makeshift dance floor, there were about seven moon sprites dancing together and giggling. They hadn't even noticed that their building had turned invisible, but they certainly didn't seem to be in any distress.

Another room was completely empty and dark, but there was nothing much to see there, anyway. An unmade bed on the floor and some clothes strewn everywhere.

In the very back, though, there was some kind of mechanism set up. It almost looked like a chemistry lab attached to a conveyer belt.

"What in the heck is going on in the back there?" I asked.

Kai looked as though he was in more shock than I was. He shook his head and seemed to notice the lab for the first time.

"I can't quite tell," he said. "This guy is obviously making some kind of home brew back there. See the bubbling cauldron in the very back near the wall?"

He pointed toward it, and I had to squint to see it in the very back, but he was right. There was a cauldron full of some type of glowing liquid in the very back.

"There's a glass tube siphoning liquid out of it and pulling it up to the glass beakers on the table," he said, following the progression of the liquid with his fingertip. "See those vials on the right there? The multi-colored ones?"

I nodded. There were vials in six different bright colors. Purple, pink, green, blue, yellow, and orange. We watched for a moment before Kai spoke.

"From the looks of it the golden liquid in the cauldron gets pulled up to those beakers, boiled or processed there in some way. Then, the new liquid travels up through that second set of tubes, dropping small amounts into each of the vials, where it takes on a new property. The vials then drop into small bottles before uprighting themselves to collect more liquid."

I watched the process closely. He was right. This was a factory of some kind.

"Watch the bottles," I said. "They travel down that conveyor belt, go into that small oven-looking machine, and when they come out—"

"Dust," he said, cutting me off.

"Moondust in different flavors?" I asked.

Kai shook his head. "This guy isn't some demon mastermind kidnapping girls," he said. "He's a glorified drug dealer."

He rolled over onto his back and ran a hand through his hair.

"I can't believe I got it so wrong. I feel like an idiot," he said. "I should have seen this coming. He was probably coming into Sir Bean to distribute the drugs to someone there. I just never caught the exchange. That would explain his sometimes-dark intentions. He's doing bad things, but this is peanuts compared to kidnapping and murder. It's not like Moondust ever killed anyone."

I let my head fall into my hands.

That likely explained Ms. Greer's involvement, too. She wasn't in cahoots with some evil demon. She was following up some lead about a low-level dust dealer.

Ms. Greer exchanged a few more nasty words with Bates, probably telling him to clean up his act or get out of town, and then climbed into her car. As she drove away, the walls of the building slowly came back into view.

Bates shook his head and sat down on the back end of his black sedan. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket with trembling hands, snapped his fingers to light it from a magical spark, and started to cry.