“Then we lose. The Frosts don’t come to you for help ever again, and the Warlock succumbs to his own illness on the solstice with Lazlo.”
The Witch smiles, revealing charcoal-black teeth, canines sharp as nails, just like her hounds. “You have two days. I’ll return then to taste what you’ve made. Don’t try to leave—my grimoires and anything else you need are here.”
Standing, she snaps. The sonker disappears from the fireplace and materializes on the kitchen table. The flames behind her cackle.
I stick out my hand, hoping the nervous spasm in my fingers isn’t visible.
She stares at my hand like it’s odd magic she’s never seen. “No one’s ever brave enough to touch me, girl.”
“I was raised to be polite.” My voice might be trembling like my hand.
The Warlock looks ready to murder me.Manners, I mouth in his direction.
“Very well,” the Witch croons, toxic glee spilling into her features.
We shake on it. Her magic jolts through me and I hold on to her hand as long as I can. The energy there… it’s not violent. It’s weak, dying, like the Warlock said. But there’s also something else underneath the centuries of power and knowledge.
Melancholy.
She drops my hand as a cloak appears and drapes over her shoulders, like limp roadkill. “Oh, and the hounds need to be fed every four hours.”
“Or what?”
She vanishes.
Then it’s just me and the Warlock, all alone in the Widow Witch’s cottage.
“For the undeniable and permanent record, Ms. Frost, this is the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
I swallow, flexing my hand where the Witch’s magic still tingles, a dull static buzz of worry pulling at my chest. “That’s what you said about the cookie bake.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
SATURDAY, JUNE 18 (STILL)
3 DAYS UNTIL THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Memories are the best recipes, and a recipe is only as good as its ingredients.
We’ve got forty-eight hours to cure a formidable Hedgewitch of Holler legend.
No big thing.
We split up to cover more ground, and the Warlock shuffles outside to look for ingredients I might need, muttering about the state of the garden.
I immediately pilfer the kitchen. Cornmeal, dark potatoes, molasses, ears of corn dangling from the rafters. And moonshine. Plenty of moonshine. The fridge, an icebox that predates the first Roosevelt, holds an entire zoo of game and unlabeled jars whose contents jiggle. I don’t open those. Okay, so the pantry might be more woefully barren than the Manor’s when I first moved in.
But the Witch wasn’ttotallylying about the cottage having what we need. I find what I’m looking for hiding above the kitchen: a low-ceilinged loft, each wall a bookcase stacked two rows deep. Her library of grimoires and magical texts.
The first few books I grab snap closed on my fingers. But myfrustration pricks more than the pain. When I threaten to start cracking spines, the assault stops. For now.
Déjà vu wallops me. I’ve traded one tetchy library for another.
Then I get snooping.
