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Prince’s Apothecary had been passed down through the family for generations, along with the family feud with the Sanders next door and a swarm of loyal trick or treaters.
Underneath the counter, there’s a series of scorch marks from where Roman’s grandma tried making pick-me-up muffins as a kid. Behind the bottles of beetle eyes there’s a large purple stain from his dad popping in and ignoring the sign on the door that clearly said I’ve moved the glowing fool’s gold while I repaint the shelf. It will explode if you touch it. Please don’t touch it. There’s bits of graffiti scratched into shelves and walls and tables. Every year the amount of lavender sashes hung around the shop to combat the overwhelming smell of potion ingredients grows.
It’s Roman’s favourite place in the world. And if he doesn’t one up Virgil this year, the entirety of his family tree will have something to say about it.
“Do we need more fake cobwebs?” he asks Janus, because Janus has been inside Virgil’s dastardly flower shop and knows all of his secrets. It’s not the only reason he hired him, of course, but it’s the one that goes down the best at family dinners.
“Yes, of course ,” Janus replies, and Roman goes to grab another box. “It’s not as if you sold out the shop by buying, let me check, thirty boxes.”
Was it really thirty? Mum had called him asking about his plans on showing those Sanders who beat them for a decade straight and he’d lost track of what he’d been shovelling into his trolley. It couldn’t have been thirty.
“It was really thirty.” Sometimes it’s like Janus can read his mind. “If you’re still unsure, I’ll lock you in the backroom and you can count all of the empty boxes.”
That sounds like a threat Janus would carry out, so Roman wisely prods it one more time. “But they were small boxes. And who knows! Maybe they were sold out because Virgil went on a raging cobweb spree to make us look like fools who don’t have enough cobwebs in our display!”
Janus sighs a world weary sigh and mutters something to himself that sounds like Remy should be dealing with this, that motherfucker. Roman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not as if he had to say yes when Remy had asked to swap shifts so he could go down to the coast with Emile for their anniversary.
“By all means, go out and see if you can find more cobwebs—”
Actually. “I don’t think we need any more now,” he decides. “It would be tacky. We can’t be tackier than Virgil, Mum would have a fit.”
“Well then,” Janus bites out with the attitude of someone who has given up on humanity. He takes a deep breath to compose himself, or to at least repress the urge to curse Roman out until the cows come home. “Polly sent over a few more pumpkins. Where do you want them?”
Roman grins. Polly’s pumpkins are a wonder to behold, with the most intricate designs he could never have the patience to carve. Last year brought a stunning selection of memes, cats with various expressions of shock, and some spoopy ghosts. “I love your sister.”
“You don’t have to live with her.”
“True.” He recalls the details he’d managed to coax out of Janus about the last prank war, and once again resists the urge to send Polly a card to congratulate her on her victory.
The cobweb dilemma solved (or at least tabled for an hour), Roman consults the Ancient Text Of Beating That Bastard Sanders’ Arse. It’s been handed down with the shop over the years, each member of the family adding their own plans and strategies, tidbits of information like the prime time for purchasing decorations and a plethora of pumpkin designs. But on the very first page is the most important step, the cog that kept the Prince winning streak running unrivalled, at least when someone had the courage to follow it.
Espionage.
*
(“I told you Virgil’s taken to booby-trapping his garden.” Janus says, packing a delivery of some basic first aid potions into a paper bag. “He’s always had a knack for wards.”
“ Well, ” Roman grits out, dripping head to toe in tomato juice. “Excuse me for not thinking you meant it. ”)
*
The first trick or treaters come knocking on the door as soon as it starts to get dark, buckets empty as they start off the night on a high note. Usually they leave it open, but on Halloween Roman thinks it adds a little something more to the experience. Speaking of adding to the experience, he can’t help but marvel at the detail Larry-From-Down-The-Road had put into his kid’s Stitch costume.
“Trick or treat!”
“Well, don’t you all look terrifying!” Roman says, reaching for the bowl of sweets he’s kept by the door. Popping candy is the family favourite, and every year Roman cooks up his special recipe that makes brightly coloured sparks come out of your mouth. What can he say? It’s worth it to see them running down the road shrieking at the different colours.
When they’ve all taken a good handful, he makes a show of going to put the bowl back, before pausing dramatically. “I wonder…” he says, and grins at the hushed whispers of you remembered your charm, right? from his audience. “I don’t suppose any of you have something to show for a few extra sweets?”
They start off the night with a drawing of a butterfly that flies off the page thanks to the charms drawn on the back in crayon. After that comes costumes that come to life to the excitement of their wearers, and Roman’s personal favourite, a pair of tap shoes spelled to tap out Under The Sea on their own.
*
He’s wrestling Dot’s Carnivorous Foxglove into a pot when the next group arrives, so he gives Janus the nod to go open the door.
It creaks open ominously. He pretends not to notice the rushed chalk scribblings on the inside of the frame.
“Trick or treat!”
“Well, I don’t know—” Janus has a smile on his face that only means mischief. “—What’ll your trick be?”
What the fuck. The bowl of popping candy is right there, the extra box of odds and ends if anyone was allergic is right there, this is why Roman should have gotten someone else to take the Halloween shift.
He cranes his neck to see the two kids at the door, dressed as a…sea monster? and a skeleton. On closer inspection, a labelled skeleton. Sea Monster looks confused. Labelled Skeleton looks like he’s blown up a bank for science and would do it again.
The Foxglove seizes the opportunity to bite Roman’s finger and jump out of the pot. Apologising profusely to Dot, who only seems mildly amused, he runs after it again. As he rushes forward to finally grasp it around its puny stem, he hears—
“I am going to use the Prototype.”
“Fucking finally.”
—Before narrowly avoiding the large seed that was just lobbed at his head. They have a rule about throwing unknown objects in the shop, ever since Remy tossed him a bag of what he thought were sunflower seeds, and a giant beanstalk started growing from them mid-air. At least the patch job that’s predominantly held together by please for the love of all the patch jobs this roof has seen before don’t fall down spells is still holding up. Roman’s been getting the hang of them recently, something which is most definitely not related to the sign he has in the backroom reading Days Since Our Last Accident.
The seed clatters against the floor. Dot’s Foxglove is distracted long enough that he can pot it, bag it, and ignore the puncture marks in his finger.
“Aw,” Sea Monster groans. “It didn’t work.” They look so disappointed that Roman’s tempted to give them some extra anyway — points for effort and all that.
“Thomas said it would,” Labelled Skeleton insists, “It’s the Prototype , you need to give it some time to—”
Crack. A tiny stalk bursts through the floor.
Labelled Skeleton’s face lights up like the sun. “To do that!”
Janus opens his mouth, and before he can say something nasty like Not much of a trick, is it? the stalk grows into a sapling and grows into a tree . Roman’s impressed. It didn’t even break the ceiling.
Crack. Crack. Crack, crack, crack.
The floor is slowly being overtaken by tiny green shoots, which is slightly alarming but he’s sure Labelled Skeleton and Sea Monster will undo their trick now—
“Hey Logan, look,” Sea Monster says, “They’re growing out of the walls!”
They’re fucking what now.
“Obviously,” Logan says, looking incredibly pleased with himself. “No forest transplant is complete without a series of directional and gravitational shifts.”
Roman’s brain manages to throw out a series of fucking what now? as the air stings with the stench of a feisty charmed plant, and everything explodes upwards.
The shoots growing behind him shove him to the floor, and before he’s catapulted straight into the recently repaired ceiling, he scrambles over trees stretching like taffy in all directions to get to the door. As he crosses the threshold, a large sturdy oak, similar to the one he’d made a rope swing for in the woods when he was a kid, forces the door shut.
“What the fuck,” Sea Monster breathes in wonder. Logan is scribbling down observations in a notebook. Janus is—
Janus is nowhere to be seen. There’s a loud oomph from inside the shop, then a wet choking noise, and a yell of “Roman!” that sounds like injured trying for exasperated. Shit. Roman paints on a smile to hide how he’s starting to panic and asks Logan if he can fix it.
“I haven’t reached that part of the experiment yet. That’s why it’s called the Prototype.” Shit.
And, to put the cherry on top of the cake, he hears a yell of, “ What the hell have you done to my patio, Prince?” from Virgil’s shop. With emphasis, shit.
He turns to Sea Monster. “I’ll give you extra chocolate if you go right on over to his door and tell him his traps are lame.”
“Deal!” Sea Monster shakes his hand with gusto, before dragging Logan off, and Roman can’t find it in himself to feel bad for Virgil, not even a little bit.
*
It takes two hours to get to Janus. Two hours of yelling out, dreading the time he won’t get an answer, two hours of throwing the weak telekinetic spells that you pick up in school because Roman’s always been better at potions, two hours of summoning all of the flexibility he never had in PE and squeezing through gaps. But finally, finally, he sees him. “Janus?”
“Roman?” Janus attempts to twist around to look at him, but before he can move very far he’s hissing in pain. “Took you long enough.”
“Don’t complain about the knight in shining armour. You alright?”
If Janus could look at him, Roman would imagine he’d be on the receiving end of a rather deadpan stare. “Of course, Roman. I just got catapulted into the ceiling by trees that burst out of the walls, and who knows what damage that’s done. I’m just dandy, thanks for asking.”
“Alright, don’t pile it on.” Stupid question, he gets it. “Can you move?”
“If I could move, you wouldn’t have been hacking your way through branches for the past four hours.”
“Two, actually.”
Janus scoffs. “It felt like four.”
It probably did. Roman tries not to feel too guilty about not being faster, and looks instead for a better way to get them out. His method of pulling himself through gaps in the branches worked for getting up, but there’s no way he can slide both himself and Janus down without something breaking.
“Anything explosive near you?”
“Roman, we are in a wooden shop.” It’s like after a year of working here, Janus has learnt absolutely nothing . Prince’s Apothecary has been passed down through the family for generations, and when Roman flipped the sign from closed to open for the first time, every fireproof charm under the sun had been cast. He tells this to Janus, who pokes around as much as he can until— “Why do you keep fire worms on the top shelf?”
“So I don’t have to look at the damn beasts. They remind me of the time someone put a whole nest of them in my locker at school.” This makes Janus laugh, because Janus is a little shit when it comes to Roman’s tragic backstory. “I reckon if you chuck them in front of you they’ll burn a decent sized path down to the ground.”
“If I can reach,” Janus says, mostly to himself. Roman tries to squeeze himself under another branch so he’s able to guide the box down to the wood. The fire worms pour out of the box, each one a large red lump of flame, and turn the tangle of branches in front of them into an easy climb down. It’ll be a nightmare to herd them all back in afterwards, but Roman will take what he can get when it comes to dramatic rescues.
“Do you need me to carry you?”
“You do not need to carry me.” Janus tries to push himself forward without jostling his arm, and it looks like he’s succeeding, until Roman hears the very quiet “Fuck.”
“Janus?”
“I’m fine, Roman,” he bites out, looking the very opposite of fine. There’s a moment of silence, and then he relents. “I think I broke my arm.”
“Which arm?”
“Right.”
Roman moves as close as he can, ignoring the branches digging sharply into his side. “Tell me if this hurts.” He eases Janus’ left arm around his shoulders, doing his best not to move the broken one even a millimetre. Slowly, as if he was handling fine china, he starts to help Janus down, finding footholds and refusing to flinch when a fire worm slid dangerously close to his foot.
He doesn’t know how long it takes until they’re both on the ground, and Roman’s forcing open the door with strength apparently reserved for situations like this one, and not for when he needs to open anything with a particularly tight lid.
“You need the hospital,” Roman tells him, and Janus nods, his uninjured arm still slung around his shoulders. He leaves the bowl of candy out on the doorstep, knowing it’ll all be gone by the time he gets back, and asks Larry-Down-The-Road (who’s just finished going around town trick or treating with his kids) if he wouldn’t mind driving them down.
In the back of the car, scrolling through his contacts for someone who could help fix up the remains of the forest growing in the apothecary, Roman gently nudges Janus’ shoulder.
“Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“Happy Halloween? Even if this year was a bit shit.”
Janus smiles. It’s a nice smile this time, one that doesn’t promise future retribution via imprisonment. “Happy Halloween. I’m never working this shift again.”
“Fair enough.” There’s a pause while Roman considers if this is how he wants to ruin the moment. “Are you sure we had enough fake cobwebs?”
The kick to the shins that Janus delivers is worth it for the laugh that comes with it.