Page 85 of Potion Sickness

Englebert crosses through the thick of it toward the witches, and the glamour stutters. It’s fast — a flicker at the hem of the cape, the wrong silhouette for half a second, a tail where no tail should be, there and then gone. My heart is in my ears. In the wing, Tiffany comes up out of her chair with both hands up, and the picture snaps taut. Damien Carter finishes his cross and demands answers of the witches in a voice that dares anyone in the building to have seen anything.

I scan the house. Nobody seems to be reacting. A kid in the third row leans over to her mother, and the mother shakes her head, and the kid settles back. In the front row Annabel’s shoulders fall back down. In the back, the real Damien has pushed the sunglasses up onto the hat, and his mouth is open.

Then the forest moves.

In reality, it’s a line of neighbors walking slowly with sticks, but in the dark, with the fog running ahead of them and Cody bringing the lights through green, the forest really moves. Ms. Pelham, seated in the row in front of the audience where the messengers sit, says “the wood began to move” with an impressively chilling rasp.

Eventually, we make it through. The company walks out through the fog to take their bows.

The house comes up off the folding chairs in one motion. Pru gets a roar and looks genuinely affronted by it, which only makes it louder. The witches get their own raucous applause. Tiffany, hollowed out but still upright, holds the picture through the whole call. The glamour of Damien Carter comes downstage for his bow, and the room erupts.

In the back row, against every instruction Annabel gave him, the real Damien Carter is on his feet. Skye has him under one arm and his mother has him under the other, and he’s applauding over his head, howling “bravo” at his own face with tears running down the real one. Around him, the standing crowd accepts this weeping stranger without a second glance.

“Bravo,” he’s shouting. “BRAVO.”

Beside me, Emma consults her watch, writes the time in the log, and next to it, in the incident column, writes ‘NONE.’

CHAPTER 25

The Hearth & Stone is fuller than I’ve ever seen it. Half the company is still in stage makeup. Jackie Chambers has Banquo’s gore flaking off her hairline, because Lily once again applied it with particular generosity and no one was brave enough to intervene.

Dorcas comes in behind us with the as-of-yet untouched sheet cake and sets it on the pool table which Dana has closed for the evening by decree. The cake has Damien’s face on it, printed in frosting.

Hannah’s mother arrives at ten to collect the girls and is made to wait, because Lily is mid-performance. She’s commandeered a barstool and is walking the nearest six adults through the duties of the Blood Assistant, which include rationing, application, and knowing where the extra corn syrup is hidden.

Emma is silently reviewing her notes at the table to Lily’s left.

“So, the curse is over?” I ask.

“The file is closed,” Emma says. “Closed isn’t the same as over.” She caps her pen and allows herself to be taken home.

Gabe comes in last, carrying the concessions box, and begins moving through the bar handing out the leftovers.

“On the house,” he keeps saying, to people who paid two dollars for these exact cookies at intermission. “Everything’s on the house. It’s a celebration.”

“You’re giving away my inventory,” Emma had told him on her way out.

“I’m liquidating,” Gabe said. “The next show is a new fiscal year.”

“The next show is tomorrow.”

* * *

At the corner table, Tiffany is holding court. She’s upright in a chair with most of her witch eyeliner intact, nursing a glass of wine. Her hands aren’t entirely steady, and she’s explaining, to a rotating audience of people who watched her do it, exactly what it was they watched.

“It’s a family craft,” she says. “It’s not a spell spell. Anyone can learn a spell. This is generational. But what I did tonight” —she pauses, locating the appropriate scale— “what I did tonight, nobody in my family has done. Nobody in anybody’s family has done.”

“And you did it marvelously,” Englebert says from the next table, his glamour long dissolved.

Tiffany agrees and points at at me with her wine glass. “You can print that, Mari.”

“I can’t print any of this, Tiffany.”

“Then at least remember it.”

Englebert hops over to her table with a surprising grace.

“Tiffany,” he says. “When they write the history of this company — and they will, for our historian friend is in the room and taking notes — there will be a debate about who gave the great performance of this inaugural season. Let the record show the producer’s position: that this honor belongs to Third Witch.”