Chapter Thirty-Four
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 steal us.
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, my mess en place, as it were. “Any success in here?”
The June warmth has left him doused in sweat, even in this grotto.
I keep sneaking glimpses of him through the back windows to see what he’s up to, but he’s always on his knees in the soil beds, his back to me.
If things were different, I might relish the domesticity of it all.
But every time he comes in from the garden, it takes him longer to work up the energy to go back outside, and his eyes are more opaque than not throughout the day, the hazel dull.
He’s stopped eating as much, too. The loss of his appetite worries me more than anything.
“Yes,” I say, getting a grip on myself. “I found the recipe. Her recipe.”
Lord, it better be the right one. It’s a bold gamble on my part.
“Already? Where? And nothing’s popped out of a settee to steal your soul?”
He almost sounds impressed. Does the Warlock even do impressed?
“The Witch’s bedroom,” I say, and leave it at that.
He doesn’t need to know his journal gave me the idea, and the less he knows about my questionable survival instincts, the better.
I pour us rich black coffee from a pot in the fireplace. “There are ingredients I can’t find in the house, but I think I can gather most of them from the meadow around the cottage. I saw mushrooms near where we appeared.”
“The hounds like to dig up garlic bulbs, if you’re in need of those,” he says between sips of coffee. “You’ll have to trade them a secret, of course.”
“I could use an herb-hunting, canine version of a truffle pig. Lazlo would love us if we brought back a hound.”
He rubs a tired hand across his face, his stare finding me through his long fingers. “He loves you already, Ms. Frost.”
“My cooking, maybe.”
Something about his answer is odd, off. The difference between imitation vanilla and the real stuff. If I could just have a moment to think, out from under all our ticking clocks…
The Warlock finishes his coffee and hauls himself to his feet. “I’ll be outside. If you hear howling, assume it’s me.”
“Was that a joke?”
“I can be funny, Ms. Frost.”
Of course he waits until he’s at death’s door to be cheerful. Unbelievable.
“What are you doing out there anyway?”
He elbows the back door open. “My best.”
Once he’s gone, I find a massive cauldron and lug it into the hearth, hoping it’s only been used for stew.
Then I spend the afternoon collecting ingredients from the cave’s meadow, and learn the hounds can sniff out many a vegetable.
Later, from what must be a non-dying part of the garden, the Warlock unearths carrots, celery, and green beans for me.
As the sun sets beyond the grotto, I finally have everything I need.
Working by firelight now, I reserve enough extra ingredients to make us a quick dinner of braised leek and mushroom soup. But as the Warlock and I eat, my fear turns every spoonful of flavor into dishwater.
What if we fail?
Too soon, the Midnight Bloom appears as we’re unfurling our bedrolls once more in front of the popping fire. We’re both exhausted and wide awake, anticipating tomorrow, and as we stare at our bedrolls, the Warlock finally breaks the tense silence.
“Ms. Frost, if this doesn’t work tomorrow…”
“Then don’t take it personally,” I say, forcing a grin. “But it will.”
“It might not.”
“Then what? You and Lazlo keel over on a random Tuesday?” The soup from dinner bubbles in my gut, slowly turning to acid. Failure isn’t an option. “No thanks.”
“It wouldn’t be a random Tuesday. It would be the solstice, my birthday.”
“We wouldn’t even get to have a cake,” I protest. Everywhere I turn, my measuring cups are portioning time left. Can’t we pretend the bad isn’t a possibility until it actually happens?
“Ms. Frost.”
“Or a party! You know how disappointed Silas will be if there’s no party.”
“Ms. Frost.”
“What?” I snap.
“You’re…” He eyes me, lips in a tight line. “Delightful.”
His sullen frown somehow eases. He’s actually smiling. At me. My heartbeat picks up as his words settle into my bones.
“You’re tolerable.” I step away to lean against the kitchen table and breathe. The cottage feels extra cramped tonight. My hands itch to be busy. But he’s already washed all the dishes, the scoundrel. “We should go to sleep.”
Now said scoundrel is standing in front of me, his back to the fireplace. Awfully close to me. “Should we?”
The blood leaves my face, thrumming everywhere but where I need it, like my brain, my good judgment. All I can focus on is how the backlit glow of the fire sears the edges of his silhouette. He’s giving me that look again, where his gaze hangs heavy, anchoring me.
The silence is too loud. Panicking, I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Do you ever think about how, if you’d gotten your wish the way you wanted, we wouldn’t have met?”
“I prefer to believe I would meet you in any timeline, Ms. Frost.”
“Like one of those fixed points? Like death?”
“Well, yes. Less morbid, though.”
“Less morbid? Careful, someone might think you’re flirting.”
I mean the words to be funny, to ease this tightrope of tension pulling between us. But instead, his eyelids lower, the firelight catching the sheen of his dark pupils.
“Come here,” he says.
The rough edge to his voice sends my heart right into my gut-soup. Oh Lord.
Instead of moving, I say, “Why do you keep one of my grocery lists at the back of your journal?”
His lips part, the surprise on his face gone as quickly as it appeared. “Would you believe me if I told you it’s because I forgot it was there?”
“Try again.”
His next step toward me brings him nearly up against me. “Then you know why.”
Without thinking, my nervous fingers come up and begin fiddling with the buttons at the collar of his shirt. What the hell am I doing? What if we do only have until the solstice together? Why torture myself with a taste I can’t taste again?
I think you’ve gotten too used to starving yourself.
In the next moment, he bends down and his lips flutter against the side of my neck. My mind shorts out on me, all excuses gone. He. Smells. So. Good. I’ll never be able to cook with thyme again without sticking my head in the freezer to cool down.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out how old you are,” I manage to whisper.
His warm breath coasts over my skin, lips barely touching me. “And?”
“I thought you were having some mid-millennia crisis, but you’re barely in your forties. You’re a—” The pulse in my throat jumps when his lips brush my earlobe. “You’re a baby.”
He hums against my neck before leaning back to look me in the eye. “That’s the first time anyone has called me a baby.”
“That you know of.” Of their own accord, my fingers flip aside a few stray pieces of black hair that have fallen across his eyes. “I think you need a haircut, baby.”
In one quick movement, he lifts me onto the kitchen table so my legs hang off, my knees on either side of his hips. His hands settle firmly at my waist while his mouth returns to its teasing expedition over the skin of my throat. Never kissing, just raw, featherlight madness.
“Listen very closely, Witch,” he murmurs against my neck.
“I would like to kiss you. Not because of what might happen tomorrow. Not because I haven’t kissed anyone in ages.
Not even because you’re always wearing a frustratingly adorable apron.
” To prove his point, his long fingers crawl under the strings of the tie at the small of my back, tugging against the knot.
“But because I’ve wanted to kiss you for a shamefully long time. ”
I try to breathe but it’s not going very well. “Since when? Since giving me a tour of your gardens?”
“No.”
“Since you fed me an animal cracker?”
His mouth runs over my jaw. “No.”
My voice shudders from my lungs. “Don’t be shy. Tell me.” If he’s torturing me, I’ll torture him. I’m not one to back down from a recipe I haven’t tried before. Something about this man makes me want to let go and lick at fire I can’t find in the kitchen.
“Since you shoved that hideous clog in my door and ordered me to clean something.”
White-hot sparks ignite in my core, and now my brain is reexamining every interaction after that moment, every smirk that was almost a smile. The man took his time.
“Ordered is a strong word…” I mumble.
“That’s one of the secrets I told the hounds.” His fingers dig for purchase under my rib cage. “Frankly, I’d like to do more than kiss you,” he adds in a breathless whisper. “But given what pitiful amount of energy I have left as we near the solstice, a kiss might be all I can do.”