I used a lot of my herbs for teas that could help with headaches, sleeplessness, upset stomachs, and several other ailments.
My old-school remedies rarely involved magic, just patience and accumulated knowledge. Humans had become strangely dismissive of older remedies in modern years, which I found unfortunate. It wasn’t that contemporary medicine lacked value—quite the opposite. Antibiotics alone deserved poetry written in their honor.
But there was room for both in the world.
If a child developed an infection, I intended to march them directly to a doctor and demand appropriate medication. If they struggled to sleep after nightmares, however, warm chamomile tea with a touch of valerian root before bed might help more gently than pharmaceuticals.
If they scraped a knee, comfrey salve beneath the bandage would ease healing.
The kettle whistled softly while I tied my boots.
Framed photographs hung on the far kitchen wall. They weren’t family, exactly, but three generations of children I’d nannied for.
The Blackwoods in 1912. All lace collars and solemn expressions except for little Henry Blackwood, who had hidden a frog in his pocket moments before the photograph was taken.
Lady Ferdinand’s family in 1978. Four children grinning wildly around a backyard birthday cake while their exhausted mother laughed somewhere beyond the frame.
The Chen sisters in 1997, arms wrapped around me after high school graduation, despite my protests that I did not belong in the picture.
I loved children. Well, not universally. Some were deeply unpleasant. Little shits, even. But most children were softer than the world allowed adults to become. And grief complicated childhood in uniquely painful ways.
The Lawrence family was not the first grieving home I had entered. But Mr. Lawrencewasthe first single father to employ me.
That altered the rhythm considerably.
Fathers grieved differently in domestic spaces. Often more functionally. Especially men who were convinced they needed to remain useful at all costs. Conrad Lawrence perpetually looked moments away from apologizing for existing while simultaneously working himself to the bone so his children could live luxurious lives.
He was an interesting man with disarmingly kind eyes. He also had very broad shoulders, which was irrelevant and yet also not.
Annoying.
I poured tea into my favorite mug while mentally reviewing the morning ahead. School preparation. Breakfast logistics. Boundary assessment. Behavior observation. Testing whether Billie would attempt to scale furniture unsupervised.
The answer to that was almost certainly yes.
My gaze drifted toward the front window where the hearse was parked beneath the trees. Technically, it was not a hearse anymore. The exterior had been modified decades ago, though the elongated shape still remained noticeable to anyone with functioning eyesight and enough confidence to ask questions.
Inside, my traveling casket rested.
Many magical beings maintained similar arrangements while traveling. Witches rented storage units. Werewolves purchased heavily reinforced campers. An ancient selkie I knew lived almost exclusively on houseboats because she claimed owning land felt too restrictive. And I had sunscreen and a casket in a hearse.
We all adapted.
Personally, my greatest bureaucratic challenge remained identification documents. Being two centuries old made for a complicated time at the DMV. Fortunately, magical communities had solutions for these things.
Specifically: a guy.
There was always a guy.
Mine was named Leonard. He lived in New Jersey with six cats and several illegal computers. Every few decades, he adjusted records appropriately so I could continue existing on paper as a perfectly ordinary woman with a perfectly ordinary birth year instead of an immortal creature old enough to remember when dentistry involved whiskey and a prayer.
Modern civilization functioned almost entirely through paperwork.
Which, frankly, was terrifying.
I finished my tea, washed the mug, and gathered the rest of my things by the front door.
Parasol? Check.
