Raven Mortis had six days until Halloween and a lease that started to bleed money on November first. She stood in the middle of her empty shop with a staple gun in one hand and a list in the other. The walls were bare white. The counters were chrome. It looked like every other dispensary in town, and that was the problem. She wanted the only haunted weed shop in the county, the place kids dared each other to walk into, the place adults came back to. She locked the front door and flipped the sign. Then she dragged in the crate she'd been building in her garage all month. First, the counter. She hauled out the scarecrow head, burlap stitched over splintered wood, one eye burned hollow. A slow curl of incense smoke leaked from the socket where she'd hidden a cone. She bolted it to a beam above the register so it looked down at whoever paid. The chrome under it stopped mattering. Next, the strain wall. She'd spent three paychecks on antique embalming jars from an estate sale two towns over. She lined them on a black iron shelf, filled each with a different flower, and taped a handwritten label to every lid. Purple Wake. Grave Digger. Sunday Mourning. The shelf looked like a mortician's pantry. She stepped back and grinned. The back corner was still dead space. She rolled in the tree she'd welded from rebar and painted over three weekends. The leaves were cut plastic, wired with pink and green neon, dripping fake blood down the trunk. She plugged it in. The shop washed pink. Her chrome counters finally looked like a crime scene. She cued up a playlist on the store speakers, low church organ and something screaming underneath it. Then she let her axolotl out of its travel tank into the big display tank by the window. The little pink thing pressed its face to the glass and waved its frilled gills at the street like it was greeting a crowd. Raven walked to the door, stepped outside, and turned around to see what a customer would see. Through the glass: pink neon, a smoking scarecrow, a wall of specimen jars, an axolotl grinning at nothing. A woman on the sidewalk stopped, took a picture, and kept walking without going in. Raven felt the drop in her stomach before she understood it. The shop looked incredible. It looked like a haunted house. That was the problem. People would photograph the window and post it. They would not open the door. A haunted house is something you dare yourself into once. A dispensary needs regulars. She unlocked the door and went back inside. The scarecrow smoked above her register. The organ groaned from the speakers. She had six days, a finished set, and no plan to get anyone across the threshold. She picked up her phone and started typing an ad.

Raven typed and deleted the same ad three times. A social post would sink in an hour. She had no mailing list, no radio budget, no time to build either. She needed someone who already had a crowd pointed at her kind of weird. She locked the shop and walked to the coffee place two blocks over, the one wrapped in vines and climbing green, because she thought better with something hot in her hand. Jade Rivera was already at a corner table, laptop open, headphones around her neck. Raven knew her the way everyone in town knew her: the tattoo artist with the podcast, the one whose waitlist ran nine months. They had traded nods at shows for years and never much more. Jade looked up, clocked the pink neon dust still on Raven's sleeves, and pointed at the chair across from her. "You're the haunted weed girl," Jade said. "Saw the window. Didn't go in." "That's the problem." Raven sat and laid it out. Six days. A shop that looked like a dare. No way to tell the town it was open for business, not just for photos. She slid her phone across the table with the ad draft on it. Jade read it once. "It's boring. Your shop isn't." "Then help me." Jade tapped her laptop. "I record Thursday. Ninety thousand listeners. Come on. Bring something they can hold." Raven thought about the counter, the jars, the axolotl. None of that traveled. "Giveaway," she said. "Rolling papers. Custom pack. Green skull, purple teeth, the whole nightmare. First hundred through the door on opening day get one free." "Better." Jade pulled a napkin over and sketched fast. A grid of coupons, dripping. "And this. Print it ugly. Staple it on every pole from the tattoo shop to the college. My apprentices can hang them tomorrow morning. People rip coupons. They don't rip flyers." Raven stared at the napkin. It was already the poster. "Why help me," Raven said. Jade didn't look up. "Three of my clients are gone. Same tattoo. I've been talking about it on the show for a month and it's eating me. I want to talk about something that isn't a missing person for one episode. You're it." Raven didn't push. "Thursday." "Thursday. Wear the shop on you." Raven walked back with the napkin folded in her pocket. She stopped at the print place before it closed and ordered two hundred bloody coupon posters for pickup at seven a.m. She called the paper supplier from the sidewalk and put a rush on a hundred custom packs, green ink, purple ink, overnight freight, credit card groaning. By the time she unlocked her shop the sun was down and her phone was buzzing. Jade had already posted a teaser. Fourteen hundred likes. A comment at the top asked when opening day was. Raven had reach. Now she had to survive Thursday's interview without saying anything stupid on tape to ninety thousand strangers.

Raven woke to a hangover of hype. The teaser was up past three thousand likes, and buried in her inbox sat a note from the state board reminding her that a licensed budtender had to be on the floor from the minute she opened the door. Six days. She had no one. She grabbed her keys and drove to the only place open at that hour where people who sold weed for a living ate after closing. The diner sat off the highway with its striped awning and glowing windows. The back booth by the smoke lounge was full of budtenders still in their work polos. Raven bought a round of coffee and pitched. Two shook their heads. One was already spoken for at a chain across the county. A fourth laughed at her timeline and went back to his waffles. She left with syrup on her sleeve and nothing in her hand. She called Steven from the parking lot. Steven had been her lab partner in high school, then vanished into jungle work, cutting rough diamonds out of riverbeds. Steven picked up on the second ring like no years had passed. Raven asked the only question that mattered. Steven still held a state cannabis license from a stint managing a friend's shop three summers back. It was current. Steven owed her from a bail night in eleventh grade neither of them talked about. "I'm home for two months," Steven said. "Ring me up." Raven drove straight to Steven's apartment with the signing bonus she'd cobbled together overnight. She slid the envelope across the counter. Inside sat a stacked pack of Eminem tour passes, floor section, VIP row. Steven had loved that man since they were fourteen. "Six days," Raven said. "You run the counter. I run the shop. You keep the passes either way." Steven flipped one pass, then the next, then closed the envelope. "Deal." On the walk back to the car Raven's phone rang. Harold Mercer. She'd met him once at a neighborhood meeting, the retired pharmacist who smoked on his porch and knew every regulation in the county by heart. She'd left him a voicemail last night as a backup. He hadn't heard she'd already solved it. "Heard you're hiring," Harold said. "I filled it." "Good. One thing." A pause. "Board did a sweep last week. Three shops. Surprise audits before opening. Paperwork on the wall day one. Not day two." "Noted. Thank you." "Don't thank me. Post the license where they can see it from the door." He hung up. Raven sat in the driver's seat with the key in her hand. She had her budtender. She also had five days to get Steven's license transferred, printed, framed, and mounted before an inspector she hadn't planned on walked through her door.

Raven drove home with Harold's warning still in her ear. Steven's license was current. Steven had also spent three summers running a friend's shop, and Raven had never asked how that shop closed. If the state pulled his file on audit day and found a violation, her opening was over before it started. She had four days. She needed to see his record before the inspector did. She started with the county clerk's office and got a queue ticket for Monday. Monday was too late. She called two lawyers. One wanted a retainer. The other wanted a week. Raven sat in her car and thought about who moved paper fast and asked no questions. She drove to the diner off Route 9 at the end of the overnight shift. The waitress there had a reputation. People said she'd worked a records desk before whatever happened last summer, and that she still had the logins. Raven slid into a booth and ordered coffee she didn't want. The waitress poured it with both hands and the cup still rattled. Her name tag was crusted brown at the corner. She hadn't cleaned it. Raven had heard the story in pieces — three coworkers who didn't come out, and this one who did. "I need a license history," Raven said. "Cannabis board. Private. Today." "Name." "Steven." Raven wrote the license number on a napkin. The waitress looked at it. "Two hundred. Cash. (I don't take cards.) One hour." Raven paid. She sat in the booth and drank a can of blood orange energy from the cooler by the register because her hands needed something to do. The waitress went to the back and came out fifty minutes later with a folded printout. "Clean license," she said. "But the shop he managed got fined. Unlogged inventory. His name's on the incident sheet as manager of record. Not on the license itself. Board can flag it in audit if they cross-check. They usually do." "How do I kill the flag?" "You don't. He files an amendment. Says he wasn't the responsible party that night. Needs a signed statement from the owner. Forty-eight hours to process if you drive it in." Raven took the printout. "Thank you." The waitress was already wiping the next table. "Don't come back for a week." Raven drove to Steven's apartment and put the printout on the counter. Steven read it and went quiet. Then Steven picked up the phone and called the old owner. The call took twenty minutes. Steven hung up and nodded once. "He'll sign. I drive up tonight." Raven exhaled for what felt like the first time in a day. The license would clear. The audit wouldn't void her. Then Steven said, "There's one other thing on that sheet you should probably see before I go."

Steven tapped the printout and pointed to a line below the fine. A second case number. No description, just a code and a date three weeks out. "That's an open matter," Steven said. "Not closed. Board's still building it." Then Steven grabbed a duffel and left for the old owner's place. Raven stood in the kitchen with the paper and a code she couldn't read. She called the waitress at the diner. No answer. She'd been told not to come back for a week. That door was shut. Raven needed someone inside town hall who could tell her what the code meant before the auditor walked in with it. She drove to the grow house on the edge of town. Clem answered the door in a rubber apron streaked green, goggles shoved up in her hair. Clem sold clones to half the county and filed her permits at the same window as the cannabis board. She knew the clerks. She owed Raven nothing, but Raven had never told anyone what pulsed in Clem's basement. "I need a favor," Raven said. "Pending case, cannabis board. Number's on this sheet. I need to know what they're building." Clem chewed the inside of her cheek. "The girl at the third window owes me a flat of cuttings. I can ask. One hour. You wait in your car." Raven waited in the lot behind the hall. She drank warm coffee and watched a crow work a dumpster. Forty minutes in, Clem climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door hard. "It's not about Steven," Clem said. "It's about your lease. The board flagged the address. Previous tenant sold unlicensed product out of that unit two years back. They kept the file open. When your permit crossed their desk, they attached Steven's incident to it. They're coming Friday to argue the location is compromised. Denial of opening license." Raven set the coffee down. "Friday. Not next week." "Friday morning. Nine." Steven's amendment wouldn't matter. The fine wouldn't matter. The audit wasn't about the budtender. It was about the building. "Who signs the denial?" Raven asked. "Regional inspector. He drives in Thursday night. Stays somewhere in town, I don't know where. Files the report Friday afternoon from the board office." Raven nodded. Clem got out and walked back to her truck without a goodbye. Raven called Marcus. Marcus ran deliveries across three counties and had done twelve years on the force before the pension. He'd told Raven once, over a dropped case of soda he refused to let her pay for, that he owed her for a night she didn't ask about. She'd never cashed it. "I need you to find someone," Raven said. "Regional cannabis inspector, arriving Thursday. I need to know where he sleeps and what he's carrying before nine Friday morning." Marcus was quiet a beat. "I'll call you tomorrow night." Raven hung up. The fine was the smaller problem. The building was the fight.