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Blow out the candles and the Banished Male will bother you no more.
“Wow, that’s convenient—if it works,” I murmured, still flipping pages.
There were other spells too—love potions, spells for fruitful harvests, lots of protection spells for home and family and children, spells for good health and for finding misplaced items and healing the sick as well as hexing enemies and repelling evil…there were so many I couldn’t count them all.
And mixed in with the spells were pages and pages of herbal lore with recipes for curing different ailments. Many of them included drawings of the plants in question or even dried specimens. One especially looked interesting to me. It was a plant called Valerian and it was supposed to “Loosen the tongue and gladden the heart.”
To make a tincture of Valerian, take equal parts crushed root and flowers and add to it equal parts dried blackberries, fresh Passionflower blooms, and dried Lavender. Steep in hot water until a sweet scent fills the room. Sweeten with honey and drink, it read. But be cautious! For this tincture may loosen more than the tongue.
Hmm…I thought I had seen most of those ingredients down in the greenhouse room. Along with the many plants, there were also jars filled with dried herbs and bottles filled with other concoctions. Could it be that Grandma had actually made some of these recipes or cast these spells?
Had my Grandmother been a witch?
The thought was both weird and shocking. Witches were bent old crones with crooked noses who rode broomsticks. They owned black cats and stirred potions in cauldrons and cackled menacingly. They weren’t kindly old ladies who made the best brownies and apple pie and quilted and knitted and read Harlequin romances—right? Surely Grandma hadn’t really followed any of the pages in the book…had she?
As if to answer my question, a few of the pages flipped by themselves and I saw myself looking down at a recipe written in my Grandma’s spidery handwriting.
Best Apple Pie, it read.
I looked through it and saw it called for many spices, including cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and mace. That was quite a long list of ingredients—I wondered if all those spices were still downstairs in the kitchen and if so, were they still good? If so, maybe I could recreate Grandma’s apple pie after all.
Then again, I didn’t know if I dared to pick any more apples. After being nearly scared to death by that asshole Orc, it was going to take some real courage to go into the backyard and get enough apples for a pie.
I tried to put the Orc out of my mind as I firmly closed the book. I could look at it all night, but there was still more of the house to explore. As for the question of if my Grandma had been some kind of witch, I decided to put it out of my head.
Clearly the Grimoire was an ancient book that had been passed down in a matrilineal line through my family. Grandma must have used the recipes but the rest of it was just nonsense from the past.
Nonsense? whispered a little voice in my head. If magic is nonsense then how do you explain the door that brought you here?
I had no answer for that, so I pushed it away. It was time to see the rest of the house that I now owned. I left, closing the door to the library behind me and went to look in the last room. I opened the door, and stood there, staring.
The library had been fascinating but the last and final bedroom was even more amazing…because it had all my things in it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
At first I didn’t notice—I just thought it was a guest bedroom with a king-sized bed covered in a colorful handmade quilt. The frame was solid oak and looked extremely sturdy, I noted. But then I saw what was lying in the center of the bed.
In a neat little pile were my purse and my laptop—the very items I’d been worried about.
“What? How did these get here?” I exclaimed and Sebastian mewed as I leaned over and picked up my purse. Sure enough, my wallet and my ID as well as my single, sad credit card were intact. Even the emergency 20-dollar bill which I always kept folded behind my driver’s license was still there. Apparently whatever magic had transported me here knew what I needed if I was going to stay here, and it wanted to keep me happy.
“Thank you,” I said and after a moment of hesitation, I added, “I mean, thank you, Morris. I was worried about these. I appreciate you bringing them to me.”
There was no answer but I felt a warm sense of welcoming again and the little voice in my ear whispered,
“You’re welcome, child.”
My clothes—such as they were—were hanging in the closet and folded in the drawers of the heavy oak dresser that matched the bed frame. They were a lot neater now than they had been back at my house. And there were a few new things there as well—some nice casual dresses that looked like they would fit me, some cardigans that matched them, and a pair of boots that looked like they would be good for hiking or walking.
The boots were an especially nice touch—they would look good with the dresses and keep my feet warm, especially since it seemed that Winter and snow were just around the corner.
I tried on one of the dresses—a dark blue one that made my gray eyes stand out—and twirled in front of the full-length mirror that was fixed on the back of the door.
“Wow,” I murmured, loving the way the dress draped—somehow it managed to compliment my curves without making me look fat. I wondered if my Grandma had made me the dress before she died—or “faded”—as the Orc had put it. It looked great with the black boots.
In fact, I looked almost pretty—which wasn’t something I often thought about myself, with my long, witchy nose and my overly plump cheeks. I don’t think much of my looks from the nose down—my pale gray eyes and my long lashes are definitely my best features.
I don’t wear much makeup, but it had been brought along too and it was stacked neatly on top of the dresser. There was another little oval mirror hanging there so I could see my face if I wanted to put some on.
