The Witch and the Dead

by Heather Blake

  My customers cared only about whether I could make their lives better. Be it an upset stomach or a relationship falling apart . . . they wanted healing.

  And when there was a divorce forecast, they were relentless until I made them a love potion ensuring their marriage was secure. I had a lot of work to get done today. Work I’d rather not do with Delia around.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  “You’ve been ignoring my calls.”

  If one was especially myopic and viewing us from afar, we might pass as sisters. The blond hair, the same height, the same nose and jawline. Which made sense. Seeing as how we were first cousins. Delia’s mother, Neige, was my father’s sister.

  Delia (Hartwell) Bell Barrows was a snowy-white blonde with shoulder-length hair, ice-blue eyes, and creamy, pale skin. I was a cornfield blonde with golden wheat–colored hair, big milk chocolate–colored eyes, and dozens of freckles. Where I was the very image of a girl next door, Delia was ice-princess striking.

  “You’ve been calling?” I asked, straight-faced.

  My cousin was persistent, I’d give her that. I had been ignoring her phone calls for the past two days. I could only imagine what she wanted as she looked around the shop—it was the first time she’d been in here. Just as I’d yet to step foot in her shop, the Till Hex Do Us Part boutique, a mystically themed gift shop that featured her personalized liquid hexes.

  “You know I have.” She used minimal makeup, and that was the only thing that kept her from looking as though she’d completely lost her mind, with all the black she wore. “It’s quite rude of you to make me track you down.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been called rude. “Don’t you have to get to work?”

  Our businesses were yet another thing that set us apart. I used our hoodoo roots to heal people, and Delia used our voodoo roots to create hexes.

  It was a divide that had defined our heritage, really, harking back to our great-great-grandparents, Leila Bell and Abraham Leroux. The legend of what happened to them was infamous in Hitching Post as one of those bittersweet stories of star-crossed lovers that was retold over and over again as a warning to young girls as to why they should never, ever marry a bad boy.

  “Carly,” she said, taking hold of an engraved round silver locket, an orb that swung from an extra-long chain around her neck. “This is serious.”

  The engraving on the locket was of two lilies entwined to form a heart, and inside it held a strand of our great-great-grandmother Leila’s golden hair.

  I knew, because I had an identical locket around my neck.

  Beyond our looks, common middle name, and nail-biting habit, Delia and I also shared one big similarity, a trait passed down to all the women on my father’s side of the family.

  We had all inherited Leila’s ability to feel other people’s emotions. Their pain, their joy.

  The lockets, protective amulets given to us by our grammy Adelaide when we were babies, weren’t meant as defense from others. They offered protection from ourselves. From our own abilities. These lockets allowed us to shut off our empathetic gift at will so we could live as normally as possible.

  Well, as normally as possible while practicing magic in this crazy Southern town.

  My ability was almost always turned off, way off, except when I needed to tap into a client’s energy in order to create a perfect potion for him or her. However, there were times, despite my charmed locket, when I was overstressed or tired, that I couldn’t control the ability at all and was forced into hibernation until I could handle society again.

  My empathetic gift also came with an added bonus that no one else—not even Delia—shared: a sixth sense of sorts that I had no power over whatsoever. Warning signals that all wasn’t quite right in my world. My best friend, Ainsley, called them my “witchy senses.” It was as good a description as any.

  “How serious?” I asked.

  “Very.”

  I was feeling warning twinges now, and had to wonder if they were coming from the crowd outside . . . or Delia’s dramatic pronouncement.

  “Well, out with it already.” I was very wary of Delia, and wondered if she was trying to trick me somehow. As a dabbler in the dark arts, one who used her magic with no concern for its consequences or side effects, Delia’s magic was definitely dangerous but not nearly as potent as my magic.

  She’d do just about anything to learn my spells and uncover the secret component that made my potions so successful—mostly because she was still in a snit that due to an unfortunate (for her) case of bad timing, I had possession of the secret magical ingredient and she didn’t. And essentially, because of that one ingredient, my magic was more powerful than hers would ever be—and that bugged her to no end.

  “Rude,” she muttered.

  “I’m kind of busy, if you can’t tell.”

  Delia was six minutes younger than I—a source of contention that had created a chasm as deep as Alabama’s Pisgah Gorge through the Hartwell family, splitting brother and sister apart.

  All because I had been born two months prematurely, making me the oldest grandchild.

  Making me the heir to the family grimoire and the keeper of the Leilara bottle and all its magical secrets.

  Making my abilities superior to Delia’s.

  The grimoire was basically a recipe book for Leila’s hoodoo remedies, folk magic at its most natural. It had been handed down to the oldest child on my father’s side of the family ever since Leila and Abraham died tragically. And the Leilara, well, that was pure magic born from their deaths. The way the Leilara drops mixed with specific herbs and minerals in a potion was what made that concoction effective. I couldn’t rightly say I understood how it worked, but I firmly believed magic was one of those things to feel rather than study.

  If my mother hadn’t gone into labor two months early, the grimoire and the Leilara would have gone to Delia and the dark side. Aunt Neige had argued for years that gestational age should have taken precedence over actual birth dates, but her outcry had been overruled by Grammy Adelaide.

  Currently, the grimoire and the Leilara were safely hidden, tucked inside a specially crafted hidey-hole in my shop’s potion-making room. Hidden, because if Delia had her way and got her hands on the book of spells and the bottle of magic drops . . . Right now the Leilara drops were used for good, to heal. But with Delia, they’d be used for evil, to make her hexes that much more wicked.

  “I had a dream,” Delia said, fussing with her dog’s basket.

  “A Martin Luther King Jr. kind? Or an REM, drool-on-the-pillow kind?” I asked, looking up at her.

  “REM. But I don’t drool.”

  “Noted,” I said, but didn’t believe it for a minute. I shifted on the floor; my rear was going numb. “What was it about? The dream?”

  Delia said, “You.”

  “Me? Why?”

  Delia closed her eyes and shook her head. After a dramatic pause, she looked at me straight on. “Don’t ask me. It’s not like I have any control over what I dream. Trust me. Otherwise, I’d be dreaming of David Beckham, not you.”

  I could understand that. “Why are you telling me this?”

  We weren’t exactly on friendly terms.

  Delia bit her thumbnail. All of her black-painted nails had been nibbled to the quick. “I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you, and I daresay the feeling is mutual.”

  I didn’t feel the need to agree aloud. I had some manners, after all. “But?” I knew there was one coming.

  “I felt I had to warn you. Because even though I don’t like you, I don’t particularly want to see anything bad happen to you, us being family and all.”

  Now I was really worried. “Warn me about what?”

  Caution filled Delia’s ice-blue eyes. “You’re in danger.”

  Danger of losing my sanity, may
be. This whole day had been more than a little surreal, and it wasn’t even nine a.m. I laughed. “You know this from a dream?”

  “It’s not funny, Carly. At all. I . . . see things in dreams. Things that come true. You’re in very real danger.”

  She said it so calmly, so easily, that I immediately believed her. I’d learned from a very early age not to dismiss things that weren’t easily understood or explainable. Maybe Delia’s dreams were akin to my witchy senses—which should always be taken seriously.

  “What kind of danger?” I asked. I’d finally caught my breath and needed a glass of water. I hauled myself off the floor and headed for the small break room in the back of the shop. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Delia followed.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  I flipped on a light. And froze. Delia bumped into my back.

  We stood staring at the sight before us.

  Delia said breathlessly, “It might have something to do with him.”

  Him being the dead man lying facedown on the floor, blood dried under his head, his stiff hands clutching a potion bottle.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Heather Blake is the national bestselling author of the Wishcraft Mysteries, including Gone with the Witch and Some Like It Witchy, as well as the Magic Potion Mysteries, including Ghost of a Potion and One Potion in the Grave. She’s a total homebody who loves to be close to her family, read, watch cooking-competition TV shows, drink too much coffee, crochet, and bake cookies. Heather grew up in a suburb of Boston but currently lives in the Cincinnati area with her family. Follow Heather Blake online at heatherblakebooks.com, facebook.com/heatherblakebooks, and twitter.com/booksbyheather.

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