Chapter Thirty-Five
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Leave your ego at the door to the kitchen. You might know more than the recipe but you’ll know less than your oven.
Monday arrives like all Mondays before it.
Horribly.
The Warlock wakes before I do, and stops me on my way outside to the outhouse. Judging by his bloodshot eyes, he didn’t sleep at all last night. Even so, he still manages to look at me with an impressive intensity for seven in the morning Witch Standard Time.
He holds up a folded square of paper. With most of his fingers faded into a mere outline, it looks like the paper is floating.
My heart floats with it, unmoored in my chest, like a bad egg. Right. The stupid letter. Just in case.
He tucks the letter into the chest pocket of my apron, then dons a shield of stoicism. My apron used to feel like armor, too, once. Finally, I’ve got his name, resting so close to my heart. So why does he feel further away from me than ever?
Maybe because I feel like I could lose him twice.
Now that I know the truth about Lazlo, I keep looking for the boy in the Warlock’s face.
The physical resemblance was always clear, but I just can’t blend them together in my head.
Lazlo is Lazlo. Mr. Knight told me I know everything he knows now, but all this still feels like the Swiss cheese of answers.
A loose end, but also a loose beginning.
It’s like I told him—no Witch can just break physics. Something can’t come from nothing.
And Lazlo is a big, lovable something.
But I don’t have time to dwell on the details, and Farewitch magic depends on sincere intention. So I archive all the feelings in my sternum and get to cooking.
Too short a time later, the Widow Witch returns.
Poised at the kitchen table, she looks exactly as she did before, not a braid out of place. Since manners have gotten us this far, I don’t let her eat alone, and set two extra places across from her. Right where the Warlock kissed me senseless last night.
I hope Hedgewitches can’t read minds.
The Warlock is already sitting, slumped, elbows braced on the table so he doesn’t pitch over. He looks ready for a coffin.
The Witch scrutinizes the bowl of thick stew in front of her. Sniffs it. Prods it with her spoon. I’ve never seen someone stir with derision before. “This is no recipe of mine.”
“It’s Kentucky burgoo. Thick enough to stand a wooden spoon in.” My chest swells with satisfaction as realization simmers on her face. “I’m sure you know the saying: If it walked, crawled, or flew, it goes in burgoo.”
And made in the hands of a Farewitch, great for the flu. But I don’t think the Witch is suffering from something as banal as a stomach bug.
“I know the old adages, child. I spoke them first,” she snarls, pushing her bowl away. “I won’t eat this.”
“What?”
“You had to use one of my recipes—that was my condition. I didn’t ask you to prepare whatever drivel you wanted to make.”
I jam a finger into the table between us. “I’m a Farewitch. I don’t make what you want, I make what you need.”
“You serve a community of folks who’ve been living here since before your mama was no more than too much wine and a bad decision. What you need is to respect your elders and our legacies of spellwork and recipes.”
“She won’t eat it because she knows it will work,” the Warlock rasps.
The Witch lets go of a wicked chortle. “How are you two so disgustingly confident this mush will make me better?”
Stowing my anger, I slide the recipe I nearly died for across the table. Just below the ingredient list is a handwritten note, the basis of my entire plan.
For anniversary.
“Because it’s your husband’s recipe.”
The instant venomous look that overcomes her face makes the hounds seem as threatening as cotton balls. Something dangerous burns in her dark eyes. I want to shout Just kidding! But I haven’t come this far because I’m afraid of angry old women. I’ve gotten this far because I listen to them.
“The oldest resident of Foxe Holler is Beulah Buchanan,” I explain, forgoing the besides you.
I’m not trying to get incinerated. “She has history to share if someone slows down to keep her company. One story is even about you. You weren’t the Widow Witch because you preyed on couples.
Not at first. Folks called you Widow Okolona first. You were the widow. ”
Before the Warlock and I left town, I took Ms. Zeen’s advice and paid a last-minute visit to Ms. Buchanan. Seems the sage old lady was right.
She wasn’t always the Widow Witch, sugar. Witches fall in love, too.
A gamble, sure, but this recipe is our lottery ticket out of this mess. It has to be.
“I’m sorry. About your husband.” And I mean it.
“I’m not,” she huffs, exactly the way Ms. Fudge does. “Hedgewitches always live longer than folks without magic, and Witches, too. Life and death, past and present, that’s the nature of our magic. I knew that meant I’d bury my husband someday.”
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to mourn him.”
“Unpaid debts and magical imbalance might weaken your power,” the Warlock adds, “but that’s never been the root of your illness, Okolona.”
He looks sideways at me, and I nod, confirming our theory from this morning when I told him the details of my plan. Seeing him and my mom, a Warlock and a Witch, put their heads together at the hospital gave me the idea. If a Farewitch can burn out, so can a Hedgewitch.
“We think your grief is poisoning you.”
I barely get the words out before the Witch slams a fist on the table. Spittle clings to her lips. “Doesn’t matter what you think. You picked the wrong recipe. You failed.”
No.
My gut twists. We’re so close. And I’m so damn tired.
The Warlock heaves a terrifyingly ragged breath.
No no no.
“We watched your dogs, didn’t we?” I blurt, desperation in my voice. “You owe us. Try the burgoo. Or would you leave that debt unpaid?”
She raises one wild, unkempt eyebrow. Picks up her spoon.
The smallest bite of thick gravy vanishes into her mouth and I hold my breath. She swallows. Then closes her eyes.
I love it when they close their eyes. Like I said, best feeling in the world.
The cottage grows eerily quiet, like it’s well behaved and not the unruly hellion I’ve come to know. When the Witch finally opens her eyes, they’re glossy and wet.
“Where did you find his recipe?”
“It was buried in a journal. Forgotten. Or hidden away.”
The lines on her forehead relax, like she’s aged backward with just a bite. “I couldn’t touch his things after he…” She pushes her bowl away. “I should curse you double for rifling through my business.”
That’s when I lose it.
My chair skids back as I stand, slamming my hands on the table. Frenetic static buzzes in my veins. The bowls of stew begin to mold right in front of us. Once the color of a perfectly browned Thanksgiving turkey, the gravy festers gray then blue with spots and chartreuse fuzz.
Decayed.
My outburst of magic is an accident, but one with pristine timing.
“That recipe is right. I chose right. If you don’t honor your side of our deal, I’ll rot that Midnight Bloom to dust.”
The Warlock gives me a heavily disapproving look through his pallid complexion. Harming plants wasn’t part of the plan.
The Witch is trembling. “Why would I care about that silly flower?”
“Because your husband was the gardener,” he says. “He grew the Midnight Bloom for you and it’s the only thing that’s lived as long as you have. I’m guessing the garden began dying when your husband did, and the decay is catching up with you.”
Her wrinkled lips squirm, as if the words want to fight their way out. “His plants were his children. I tried—I wanted to keep them alive, but I never had his green thumb.”
She takes a heavy breath, her voice turning to steel.
“But then you asked for the impossible. I can’t bend the rules of time so you can rewrite mistakes. Instead, I granted you what I could, and taught you a lesson about what I couldn’t.”
“But you’ve already bent the rules,” I say, trying to leash some of this fury. “Lazlo is the Warlock, just a younger version. And you conjured him out of thin air.”
If anything, Lazlo has felt more real than Warlock Knight at times. The Holler remembers Lazlo. Folks who visit the Manor recognize him. But the Warlock?
A theory itches at me, the tiniest mosquito bite begging to be scratched. Our neighbors aren’t just bad at remembering the Warlock. Written over. Erased. But why? Why is the gap in their memories a canyon? Someone can’t be real and a ghost at the same time.
Just like no Witch can make a boy out of nothing.
Life and death, past and present, that’s the nature of our magic.
Past and present.
That’s it. Why I could never read Lazlo’s memories. He’s not missing them.
He is one.
“Lazlo is a memory,” I realize. “The Holler’s memory of the Warlock.”
He isn’t a boy from nowhere. He’s a thought, a feeling, a figment. Real, but not anymore. A back then, not a here and now.
I turn to the Warlock. “That’s why—well, why everything.
Why your health is tied to Lazlo’s, why you’re fading just like him.
He belongs here, just not… now. He—the town’s memory of you—isn’t in the right time.
Which means there’s no you in the past to grow up into you now.
So you’re fading from the Holler’s memory. Right in front of our eyes.”
The Witch smiles. “Very good, little Farewitch.”
Bless his heart, the Warlock doesn’t have enough energy to look surprised. “I see.”
He shakes his head. “You brought him here, then gave him only a year to live, unless I cured him of his wasting illness. But if I had managed to find the right cure, and he grew healthy and stayed here, it wouldn’t have mattered.
The memory of me would still be absent from the past. I’d be fading away here. Gone.”
“That sounds about right.”
His shoulders straighten with the barest breath of strength. “So there was never a choice. You’ve—I’ve—been wasting Honey’s time. Does that sound right?”