Chapter Twenty-Eight
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
You must put your pie dough in the fridge and let it rest. Otherwise, the butter that makes the core of it special will get too warm and your crust will dissolve into a mess.
Honey Hazeleen Frost. What in heaven’s name is going on?”
My eyes flutter open. I’m in a narrow bed. Morning light peeks through the vertical blinds, and my forehead pounds with a headache. Did I fall and hit my head?
Marigold Frost sits in a wheelchair next to the bed. She’s in a hospital gown, her long gray hair unwinding from her braid, looking thinner than the last time I visited.
“When they brought you in, you were half delirious and swollen like a plump Christmas pig.”
“Lovely.” My voice comes out as a dry rasp. Memories rise, foamy as feeding yeast: Warlock Knight, pressing a cool rag to my forehead… “How did I even get here?”
“That Governess—” She cuts off, clearing her throat through a phlegmy cough. Not good.
As she collects herself, I notice the table under the little television.
There’s a prickly cactus—definitely Arna Jean.
The Bookwitch likes her houseplants as self-reliant as possible, to survive long periods of neglect when she falls deep into a reading phase.
Or is that what she said about her relationships?
Tucked next to it, almost hidden, is a young thyme plant. Odd.
When I dare to check my phone, the Kentucky fried coven group chat is responsible for no fewer than fifty new texts, the other Witches checking in on me because of course they heard I’m here, too.
Arna Jean is mostly threatening to sneak me in some airplane bourbons.
The screen quickly hurts my eyes, and my stomach stirs, growling.
“I can’t tell if I’m starving or need to hurl.”
“You upchucked everything when you got to the hospital last night. About tossed my own supper when Carolina told me my only child was in the emergency room.”
My headache doubles. “Mom, I’m fine. You should be resting, in your room.” Save me from this cross-examination, Carolina. “If someone sees their mayor in a hospital gown, the rumors will have you dead by morning, killed by the Warlock, and the town will panic. More.”
“Fine? Fine?” She crosses her arms. Blue veins pop under her skin. “Doctor says you had a wicked allergic reaction. Shellfish allergy.”
I let out a disbelieving snort. “You’re saying I’ve been in the hospital for hours just because I needed a Benadryl?”
A fire I haven’t witnessed in a long time lights in her gaze. “Listen, little girl. You’re downright lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. You could be dead! Because of food. My own daughter. A Farewitch. What happens if you ever get really sick? Who will take care of you when I’m not around?”
My headache triples. More memories wiggle back, nauseating, slimy little things: trouble breathing, stomach pain. Even though I’ve been asleep, I’m tired and cranky, and I don’t need another lecture right now.
“Is that what happened to you? You overworked yourself and then had to drag me back to town to fill your shoes because you didn’t watch your own health?”
The words are a low blow but I’ve been thinking them for a while now. At some point, we’ll have to talk about this, but not now. When she’s better. Or maybe when I’m stronger.
At last, my mom’s frail fists unclench in her lap. She pats my blanketed leg. “You scared me is all, girl.”
I squeeze her offered palm, a truce. Her grip is much too weak.
“Here, I brought your favorite.” She pulls out a pack of Lemonheads. “Can’t fathom how you stand these things.”
“The sour brings out the sweet.”
“Just don’t tell Carolina. She already caught me with Cheetos this morning.”
I pop a candy into my mouth, hoping it’ll help what is probably terrible breath.
“Shellfish? I’m a Farewitch. In the South. I can’t be allergic to an entire food group.”
“Get you some EpiPens, you hear? Carry them at all times. It’s a protein allergy, so each reaction is worse, and before you know it, you’re swollen up like roadkill—”
“Well, look at you. Glad to see you’re alive,” Silas says as he strides into the room. “Those bangs, phew—we’ll work on them.”
His suit is black today, and I wonder if he wore it just in case the shrimp took me out and we needed an impromptu memorial service.
“You know, no one carried me to the hospital when I overdid it on shrimp on my thirtieth in New Orleans,” he says, placing a full cardboard coffee tote by the cactus.
Mom jerks a thumb at him. “He agrees with me. You need to take better care of yourself.”
I scowl at him. Conniving, up-to-no-good gossips.
He shrugs. “Your mother is, for once, being sensible about rest and recovery. I didn’t have the heart to sabotage the therapy.”
“I mean it. Who would take care of Foxe Holler? There’s no plan B Farewitch in a town this small.”
And why not? Arna Jean can’t help me forever, and that girl is not made to be anyone’s understudy.
“At the moment, the Holler might not go for plan A, either.” Silas hands me a coffee, charcoal black, the way I take it.
He’s redeemed. For now. “Once they heard the mayor’s daughter was at the hospital, Webb and his followers posted up outside.
He still hasn’t mentioned you, Marigold, but they’re going on again about evicting the Warlock from town.
Claiming if magic can make a Farewitch sick, it’ll make all the patients sicker, that kind of nonsense. ”
When my mom sighs, the sound rattles in her chest. “They just want someone to blame so they can fundraise to repair the church.”
Silas shakes his head. “It’s more than that this time. Carolina and I have done our best to dissuade the crowd, but we can’t just rip the signs from their hands.”
“They have signs?” I say.
“Magic Is Poison, Not Food.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Farewitches Are Still Witches.”
My temples throb. “Okay, that’s enough—”
“Neighbors Not Necromancy.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” my mom says.
“Right? Clever.”
“I get it!” I exclaim.
Just then, another person bursts into the room at the same moment my addled brain realizes Silas brought four coffees, not three.
Warlock Knight halts when he sees I’m awake.
The candy slides whole down my throat, choking me. I must still be caught in a crustacean-induced delirium.
The Warlock of Foxe Holler is here. In town. Outside of Knight Manor, the one place he told me he never left. But he did. He left the safety of his wards. To come here.
I’ll kill him.
His eyes dart over me, and that intense curiosity is almost more unsettling than his usual frown.
I’m glad I’m not hooked up to any heart monitor because the beeping would betray my pulse for sure.
What looks like relief flickers across his face, but I’m probably imagining it.
He likely just wants to gauge if I’m well enough to finish our argument from earlier.
I’m ready for him. I swear to all in heaven above, if he so much as lobs one I told you so at me—
“Done terrorizing the hospital?” my mom asks him, breaking this silent spell.
“Had to take him on a walk earlier because he wouldn’t stop pacing,” Silas tells me, like the Warlock isn’t even there. “Worse than Ms. Buchanan’s frenetic poodle.”
My mom nods. “And as weak as it is, his magic is making all the machines in here staticky.” On cue, the lamp in the corner gives an annoyed flicker.
Warlock Knight finally remembers how to move. “Did you know they have this monstrous thing in the vending machine called a Cow Tale?” he asks, approaching my bed. “Even worse, something called pig ears—”
“Pork rinds,” Silas corrects.
“Regardless, you have your choice of any part of the animal.” He holds up… snacks. A Warlock is hand-delivering me junk food. “I don’t even recognize vending machines any longer. Back in my day—”
Silas cuts him off. “Don’t finish that sentence.”
“Right.” The Warlock drops the snacks next to the coffee. “I’ve evaded Nurse Carolina. She’s still cross with me.”
My mom rolls her eyes. “Can you blame her? Every time you walk by an elevator, it switches directions.”
The Warlock grabs the last coffee and folds himself into the empty chair at my right. His cheekbones are sharper than usual, gaunt. He hasn’t slept. Probably hasn’t eaten. I almost feel guilty. Almost.
“Ms. Frost, this is twice in as many weeks you’ve made me engage with the public. I cannot be expected to live this way.”
Despite our tennis match of harsh words last night, he almost makes me smile. “Did it occur to you it might be more of a hazard to my health to drive me here in your condition than let me fight anaphylactic shock?”
“It did,” he muses, completely serious. “But I don’t have a working portal at the house and Ms. Zeen doesn’t have magic, so alas, here we are. We had to take two vehicles since you were horizontal, but we only have two-door pickup trucks apparently, so I followed Ms. Zeen in the Dodge with you—”
“You drove my truck?” You’ve got to be kidding me.
“—then I took a wrong turn at one point—that’s unimportant. Regretfully, we’ll have to drive back.”
“Let me know what I owe for gas.”
“I’ll deduct it from your paycheck.”
Lord does it feel good to be back to our normal… whatever this is. “Mr. Knight, this is my mom, Mayor Marigold Frost. Mom, this is—”
“Oh, we’ve spent the last twelve hours together in this hospital,” she says. “Believe me, we’ve met.”
I swallow. “Outstanding.”
Given the Frost family’s history with Warlocks, my mom is sitting on years of resentment, yet here she is chatting with one at my bedside. Both cranky and stubborn. Oddly alike. No—sick. Neither feels good, a lot of the time.
“What did you talk about for twelve hours?” The new question has the benefit of keeping my focus safe from paralysis. The Warlock is here—here!—in town.
My mom looks around the room, anywhere but at me. “You sure you don’t need another Benadryl? Another nap?”
“Mom.” I won’t be distracted.
“All right, all right.”