Just as I thinkI don’t want to go yet, the Warlock in my false memory puts his lips on mine. Fire floods my blood, searing every pathway to my heart.
I take a gasping breath. Heat courses through me, the ice in my limbs thawing.
The illusion’s hold on me vanishes and my eyes flutter open.
I’m back in the cottage. No daydream, no nightmare. My blood pumps back into my extremities. I can move, I can breathe, I can think. I’malive.
The grimoire is still in my hands, but I’ve broken its hold on me. That was a helluva nasty spell to punish prying eyes. One formed with years of grief and despair.
I shudder. Even on my worst nights, I haven’t thought about giving up like that. When I run my thumb over my lips, there’s no taste of thyme.
There’s no time to ponder the illusion. I came in here for one reason, and I intend to leave in one Honey-shaped piece.
The grimoire’s brittle pages crackle as I pry them open. Dust puffs up and I hold in a sneeze. Thinking about the Warlock’s journal, I check the back first.
Thank you, Mr. Knight.
The recipe isn’t labeled. Grease spots and dried flour stain its surface, a history of countless evenings and meals together, connection over shared food. The best kind of love story.
A handwritten note runs across the top of the page. Like a riddle or puzzle.
If it walked, crawled, or flew…
There you are.
Chapter Thirty-Four
SUNDAY, JUNE 19
2 DAYS UNTIL THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Witches fall in love, too.
—Beulah Buchanan
What I think is Sunday morning arrives.
Probably. In this cave, only diffuse sunshine sifts into the cottage, and the warped window glass sculpts shadows into odd shapes. Time here feels adjustable. Untrustworthy. The fireplace and the Warlock’s nearby body kept me blessedly flushed until morning. When I wake, the fire is just embers, the bedroll next to me empty.
He’s already outside. So I get to work, too.
I jostle between dicing onions and okra, digging through cupboards, and stoking the fireplace to keep it roaring. A few of my knives disappear throughout the morning. The cottage has some kleptomaniac tendencies. I don’t need my food tasting like panic, so I try hard to be grateful the cottage hasn’t yet attempted to stealus.
All morning, my thoughts swim in a sea of fear and what-ifs. Glimpses of my grocery list in the Warlock’s journal bob along in my mind, little rafts in the maelstrom.
“The hounds eat secrets,” the Warlock says when he comes inside around lunch.
I look up from the icebox where I’m mining for meat. “Excuse me?”
He removes his gardening gloves to grab water. “You have to feed them a secret, and then they’ll settle down.”
“That… is abnormally specific.”
He studies the disarray of ingredients and kitchen tools I’ve strewn across any free surface, mymess en place, as it were. “Any success in here?”
