Chapter Three
MONDAY, APRIL 4
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Strength in coven, fire in the oven,
for curses most foul, seek cures of fowl.
For the precious wares and the gravest cares,
find thee fast a Farewitch lair.
—a Farewitch fable
On Monday morning, I fasten a note to the Apothakery’s narrow yellow door.
BACK SOON. PROMISE.
Our dangling wooden sign out front seems to scrutinize me from its high ground.
Fine—I know I’m not kidding anyone. I didn’t close the shop today on a whim. Thinking ahead, I delivered this week’s orders yesterday when most folks were sitting down to dinner. Even the banana cake for Nurse Carolina’s niece, who has averyimportant eighth birthday party on Wednesday.
I didn’t get to bed until the rooster living out back woke up, but what is sleep, anyway? I’m already used to getting less rest than my bread dough. The gluten can relax, but a Frost can’t.
Word will get back soon enough that the Apothakery didn’t open today, that for the first time in its history, it closed without warningor explanation. As long as the town has feared the Widow Witch, the Frost women haven’t taken a break. When my mom gave birth, a retired Momaw Frost just stood in. When Momaw passed, my mom just putgrieveon a to-do list.
But I’m ready to see this through, for my mom… even if she has no idea where her daughter is this morning.
Making what is perhaps one of my more foolish decisions, I drive the old Frost family pickup truck to the edge of the Holler. Theedgeedge.
With shut-eye eluding me since Saturday’s hospital visit, I used what little time I wasn’t baking to research and try to make sense of the Holler’s history with Warlock Knight.
Storms and droughts and crop infestations and barren seasons for livestock, tornadoes and floods, an earthquake or two… There have been plenty of newspaper-worthy environmental oddities here. When the online records ran dry, I unearthed Momaw’s newspaper clippings from the attic, ignoring the nostalgic pain. Having grown up poor, Momaw was a hoarder in her old age, and kept boxes of announcements, births and weddings and funerals. Boxes.
Then I cross-referenced town news with the rumors the neighbors love:
He ruins crops, particularly around the summer solstice.
Hens won’t lay eggs if he’s within fifty miles of town.
He burned the town’s library in a spell gone wrong.
But I quickly hit a wall. If the general assumption is he’s immortal, he could be the destructive magical force behind everything odd. Or nothing at all.
Everyone in the Holler knows why the library burned down twenty-five years ago—reckless magic caused a fire that took several lives—and that it was never rebuilt. Too expensive, when the town needs to pave roads and keep the hospital running. The exact cause—Witch magic or Warlock magic—was never determined.
Around the same time, the Warlock simply disappeared from Foxe Holler. No goodbye. Rumors or not, folks love to point fingers, and there’s no counterfeiting the fear I saw in my customers’ eyes. Maybe the blame that hitchhikes to a tragedy like that is enough to drive someone into isolation.
I’m going to say hello and find out.
Eventually, finally, I turn onto a narrow gravel road leading up into the hills, and soon gravel becomes dirt. By the time I pull up to the iron gate of an estate cocooned in black birch and pine trees, I’m not sure I’m even in the same holler anymore. The winding, unpaved dirt back roads add time, but this is ridiculous. No wonder the Warlock never comes to town. The gas money would bankrupt a person.
Dense foliage curtains everything beyond the gate like the stage of some forgotten performance. Any mansion remains completely hidden from view. The iron metalwork of the gate twists in elegant script above its large winged doors.
KNIGHT MANOR
