"Out of the Frying Pan..."

She was arguing with a werewolf about the price of saffron when the veiled woman wandered in.

Veils were presently having one of those small renaissances that the fashion features of bygone years sometimes experience, so the shoulder-length sweep of dark gauze by itself wasn’t enough to seriously distract Annabelle from the ongoing disagreement. She turned back to Harl and said, “Look, you can't expect to pay supermarket prices for this stuff, especially since this is not a supermarket! In case you haven't noticed. When you consider what my saffron goes through before it gets here – “

“I know what you say it goes through,” Harl said, leaning on his elbows on the counter and absently twirling one side of his mustache, “but the prices you’re discussing are insane! Only the fact that you're the extremely nice lady that I know you are – for a one-skinner – has kept me from complaining about the markup until now…”

Oh boy, Annabelle thought, here we go, the Witch With A Heart of Gold ploy. Why is it we’re all either Good Mommies or Crone Mothers and never anything in between? And next, I bet, comes the not-so-thinly-veiled request for a discount. How many seconds will it take?...

She decided not to wait -- possibly since Harl had arrived in a middle transitional stage, and his studded biker leathers were starting to come across as increasingly incongruous when taken together with his burgeoning ear hair and the muzzle that Annabelle could swear was lengthening as she watched. “Smile when you call me that,” she said. “How would you know how many skins I have hanging in the closet?” She pushed some of the small impulse-buy merchandise off to one side of the cash register and leaned on the counter too, while the veiled lady in the dark amber kaftan ambled around the far product island, apparently intent on the cookware. “Harl,” Annabelle said, looking up at him, “my markup has a whole lot to do with what my suppliers charge me. We're not talking about scamp short-stigma saffron grown on some vacant lot outside Marbella! We are talking about prime violet-petal sativus-x corms containing back-patched genetic material from the original Akkadian azupiru heritage strain, and planted on a particular south-facing hillside outside a village in the Cevenne hills in the department of Gard in southern France. And it’s not,” and she held up a finger as Harl started drawing breath to say something, “just the corm stock at issue. Before the saffron was planted, that hillside had to be certified safe by the Institut Nationale des Thaumatoxisme, a government regulatory agency which, at great expense which you’d better believe gets passed down the line, first cleared the ground of piled-up malign influences. Kind of like dealing with toxic waste, except that toxic waste doesn't normally leap out of the ground in the shape of a blood-colored dragon and twist your head off.”

Harl idly picked the lid off the bowl of lollipops by the cash register: Annabelle slapped his hand, took the lid out of it, and replaced it on the bowl. “Do you want to rot your teeth? Stick to Milk-Bones. Then the detoxed ground in question got checked over by not one but two feng shui agencies, one hired by the grower and one commissioned by the distributor, each of them checking the other, and trying hard to find details about the topology that the other geomancer has missed. And that cost got passed down to me too. Along with the labor costs of the nice local people who break their backs picking all those fiddly little stamens out of the flowers on Samhain Eve every year.” She sighed, picked up the lid off the bowl, and went burrowing among the lollipops, hunting for one with a chocolate center. Unfortunately she had eaten them all: she dropped the lid back on the bowl. “So you should not be complaining to me that this stuff costs eighty bucks a gram. Because the price means that when you and some nice lady friend who’s also in her second skin and also in the mood for luuuuuuve get together at the full of the Moon and stick it up your noses, you’ll get the desired effect…and not find yourself stuck in your skins the next morning when you need to change and go to work. Nor will you fail one of those embarrassing random mana tests later in the week. So if you want to pay less, sure, go on, go down the street to Dominick’s or the Jewel and pay twenty bucks a gram. What you get’ll be either the Marbella vacant-lot saffron, or maybe dyed safflower stamens, and you’ll deserve it.”

Harl rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Annabelle, they have to be ripping you off somewhere along the line. If you go online there are bulk-order places that’ll cut you a much better deal, all you have to do is…” Blah, blah, blah, Annabelle thought, doing her best to look courteously interested, but feeling less inclined by the moment to indulge Harl’s pouting. This was the third or fourth time this month he’d started giving her grief about prices. The first couple of times, an insufficiently clued-in customer might be allowed to get away with it: but Harl knew perfectly well that the special needs of weres called for a much higher-grade spice than “single skinners” or other varieties of just plain mortal could get away with. I may lose him as a customer…

But Annabelle was finding it harder to bring herself to care. Harl had never referred anyone to her, as far as she could tell, and he frankly didn’t buy enough stuff in the course of a month to make it worth her effort to try to hang on to him. Getting more weekday traffic in here was a much bigger issue. She flicked a glance at Mrs. Kaftan-and-Veil, who was still eyeing the cookware, and now reached up a thin wrinkled hand to touch a pot; cast iron clonged faintly against iron in her wake as she moved away and headed around the far side of the island toward the generic spice racks. If I could please have about fifty more like you every morning, Annabelle thought. More plain-vanilla mortals who can touch cold iron and don’t make me order in high-end nonferrous utensils at high-end prices and low-end profit margins… I’ve got to find ways to leverage our advertising to a wider customer base without alienating the supranormal market. It was just one more aspect of her ongoing problem. The overhead involved in keeping this place going was proving to be higher than she’d thought it would be at first, after the rent increase last year. In fact, after this morning’s jolly little visit to from the shopping center’s unit management agent, who after a look at the store’s books had started sweetly insinuating to Annabelle that she really should move downstairs into a smaller unit – Yeah, off the main drag where I’ll get even less walk-in than I get now. She looked up at Harl again. Oh, come on, the phone’s been ringing all morning with bad news, can’t I have a little more, please, just to shut this mouthy wolf up?...

But the phone would not oblige her. I’ll throw a cantrip at it, Annabelle thought. Or him. And the Threefold Rede can just go chase itself. The thought was tempting. But no. “Harl,” Annabelle said, “the heartbreak of mange is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog…”

He gave her a sudden horrified look. See, that’s all it takes: I’m the Crone Mommy now. And ask me if I care!

“Oh, all right,” Harl said, checking his watch. “I have to get going or I’ll miss my train. Just give me a gram to hold me over.”

Train, shmain, Annabelle thought as she pulled out the electronic scale pad and set it on the counter. Around the curve of the world, the moon’s going full, and you have a hot date waiting…