Chapter 23
A hush fell. A beautiful, serene hush.
Joell blinked slowly. “Wow. My brain’s… quiet.”
Brianna nodded dreamily. “Chad, dearest, did you know you haven’t screwed up once in over a week? I think you’re a capable liaison.”
Chad blinked. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Sahara lifted her hand. “Huh. My fingers are tingling.”
Crowe leaned against Joell, raised his hand, and patted his mouth. “Why are my wips numb?”
Wally sat on the floor, blinking in slow motion. “Mrrrrp?”
The witches floated in a bubble of peaceful stillness, their expressions soft, serene, and borderline sedated.
Magda frowned. “That’s too calm.”
Sebastian nodded pleasantly. “Yes. Too calm. But it feels wonderful.”
Rayna crossed her arms. “I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with how comfortable everyone is.”
Then something in the potion snapped. A humming ripple of magic shuddered through the greenhouse. Everyone straightened at the same time, plastering on smiles like people paid to grin-fuck unhappy customers at Christmas.
Brianna sighed sweetly. “Chad, you have the most symmetrical ears.”
“Thank you,” he replied earnestly. “Your eyelashes are curly and cute.”
Sahara turned to Lioness. “Your aura is… buttery.”
Lioness sighed and crossed her hands over her heart. “That’s so sweet. Yours smells like cinnamon if cinnamon had an aura.”
“Oh, cinnamon absolutely has an aura,” Magda added.
Joell patted Crowe’s cheek. “You’re doing such a good job existing as a human.”
Crowe smiled dopily. “You’re doing a good job of being pretty.”
Rayna stared around the room in horror. “Oh no. No, no, no. If anyone breaks into ‘Kumbaya,’ I swear to the Goddess I am burning this greenhouse down.”
Magda pinched the bridge of her nose. “Sebastian, what did we do?”
He blinked serenely. “Our potion might have inverted polarity.”
“Meaning?”
Sebastian cleared his throat, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“What you’re seeing is basically an inverted polarity of molecular charge.
The ingredients were supposed to balance each other, calming the mixture as the reaction settled.
But somewhere along the way, the charges flipped.
Instead of dissipating energy, the potion started pulling it inward, like a reversed magnet.
It doesn’t cancel out; it amplifies. Which is why everyone went from relaxed to destructively serene.
” He paused, glancing at the witches’ syrupy smiles.
“Scientifically speaking, that shouldn’t be possible. But here we are.”
Rayna nodded. “Got it. We may have yanked electro-positivity inside out.”
Wally rubbed Magda’s ankle lovingly, then tried to cuddle the pottery.
Rayna pointed at the witches, all now complimenting each other in slow-motion sincerity. “Fix it, Sebastian. Now.”
Sebastian nodded, still smiling a little too serenely. “Right. We need a counter-counterspell.”
“Let’s go outside,” Magda suggested. “Too much warm magic in here. The Goddess can help ground us.”
The witches drifted toward the courtyard like polite zombies.
Rayna followed, grumbling. “This is why we don’t dose ourselves with anything Magda brews on a weekday.”
The last one out, Wally, paused to give the fish-shaped watering can a gentle forehead kiss before wobbling after them.
Magda dropped to her hands and knees on the grass. The other witches followed suit. “Goddess, take this foreign energy and neutralize it. Restore us to our bitchy selves.”
“Wait a minute…” Chad said. “Can we lose the word ‘bitchy’?”
Magda looked at him cockeyed. “I said witchy, not bitchy. Didn’t I?”
“I heard bitchy,” Joell said.
“Oh. My mistake, Goddess. I meant to say, ‘Please restore us to ourselves.’ Our intelligent, irreverent, creative, loveable, witchy selves.”
The witches all pushed their energies into the earth beneath the grass, giving the Goddess the energy from their failed experiment. As soon as their moods and personalities reset, they rose.
“Ready for a do-over?” Chad asked.
“No!” All of the witches said in unison. All except Magda, that is.
Sebastian noticed her reticence. “Maybe we should make one more attempt and agree that if we haven’t managed to create a harmless love potion that can be replicated and controlled, we should give up.”
Magda looked up at him with deep sadness in her eyes. “I guess you’re right. I need a couple of days to study some of our obscure occult books and see if I can find something new and promising.”
He smiled. “Take all the time you need. I’ll be catching up on some academic work. Besides,” he added, rubbing the back of his neck, “after everything I accidentally inhaled in that greenhouse this week, I’m probably immune to whatever we brewed. Let me know when you’re ready to go again.”
“If ever…” she replied under her breath.
That night, the mansion gave a soft groan. Not enough to wake the witches, but it sensed something slightly off. The mansion groaned again, louder this time, as if trying to clear its throat. No one heard it. The witches were out cold, sprawled across their beds like magical crime-scene outlines.
But someone else was awake.
A slender shadow darted along the mansion’s eastern wall, muttering to itself like a man arguing with his own conscience and losing.
Derek Hollis, Sebastian’s chronically dissatisfied and questionably ethical graduate assistant, skulked across the dewy lawn wearing all black, except for the bright white university lanyard he forgot he was still wearing.
“Sebastian thinks he’s so brilliant,” Derek hissed to the hedges. “Ooh, look at me, I got a grant. I was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I have a magical girlfriend. Please. Anyone can date a witch if they have access to a coven.”
He held up the tablet he’d stolen from the lab hours earlier.
“Password one-two-three-four. Honestly, he deserves to be hacked for that alone.”
He tapped the corner of the screen.
“And look at that… The gate code, courtesy of his little magical side project. Idiot never encrypts anything. I should be running that lab. I’m the future of biochemical innovation. Not Dr. Botching Botany.”
The mansion’s side door clicked open for him because, technically, he had the code.
Derek puffed up as if he’d personally conquered national security.
“See? Easy. Even the creepy house knows I’m supposed to be here.”
The house dimmed its lights in disgust.
He strutted inside, whispering an ongoing TED Talk to no one.
“Imagine the accolades when I publish the first peer-reviewed study on magical love compounds. ‘Derek Hollis: Bridging the Gap Between Biochemistry and Enchantment.’ Netflix will call. I’ll get a miniseries. Sebastian can fetch my coffee for once.”
He reached the greenhouse door, pushed it open, and gasped as if he’d stepped into Eden.
The moonlight reflected off the glass walls in silver ribbons. Leaves shimmered. Something glowed faintly from the workbench.
Derek practically salivated.
“There it is. The prototype. The culmination of all their ridiculous folk-science.” He lifted his chin. “Good thing someone with actual ambition is here.”
He approached the cauldron.
Inside, a shallow pool of blue potion residue glimmered like a tranquil lagoon. Soft, serene light pulsed on the surface—calling to morons.
“This is it,” Derek breathed. “The breakthrough. Who needs field mice? I can test it myself. Direct data acquisition. Pioneering. Bold. Then I’ll grab a couple of vials of the stuff for those co-eds who wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
He dipped two fingers into the residue, sniffed, and, because the universe loves poetic justice, he licked them.
For a moment, bliss washed over his face, smoothing every potential wrinkle.
“Ohhhh… Wow…” he sighed. “I am… incredible. I am… limitless. My brain feels like warm pudding.” He swayed. “I should have some more!”
He found a beaker and filled it. “I should tell someone. I should tell… the moon! The moon loves me. The moon has always loved me.”
Derek stumbled toward the greenhouse door, giggling.
“Gravity is so… relative,” he whispered, floating across the grass like he was wearing invisible roller skates. “Everything is beautiful. I should compliment that hydrangea. She’s stunning.”
He approached the hydrangea bush and bowed deeply.
“You,” he told the shrub with reverence, “are the queen of horticulture. I toast to your beauty.” He took a big swig from the beaker.
Then he dropped dead at her roots, smiling beatifically, as if he’d just been graded on a cosmic curve and gotten an A+.
The mansion exhaled, long and exasperated.
Somewhere upstairs, Wally snorted in his sleep, sensing something deeply stupid had occurred. He hopped down the stairs and into the conservatory. He pressed his paws to the glass and froze at the sight of the body on the lawn.
This time, the mansion didn’t groan. It just locked the door with a firm, you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me click.
Wally just knew that in the morning, the witches were going to be pissed. And somewhere in the future, Rayna would take one look at the scene and mutter, “Well… natural selection works fast.”
The mansion woke the witches first. Every lantern crackled awake in a nervous flutter, as if the house tried whispering but then accidentally hit “shout.” Floorboards vibrated in a staccato rhythm.
Rayna shot upright. “Okay, that is not a normal hum. That is a ‘brace yourself’ hum.”
Down the hall, Joell groaned, “If this is about the laundry chute again, I swear—”
Before she could finish, Wally scrambled into Magda’s room in full panic. His eyes were wide, ears pitched forward, fur fluffed as he jumped up and down.
Magda pushed off her blankets. “What is it, sweetheart?”
Wally gave her a tush push with frantic insistence.
“Okay, okay! You go first, and I’ll follow.” It’s safer.
Rayna poked her head in. “Wally’s lost his mind, the house is having heart palpitations. Either the coffee machine died, or something even worse happened.”