Page 3 of Wickedly Ever After
I took exception to the dandelion seeds you sent on the wind to spoil my lawn. But next time, you’ll want to give more attention to their vulnerability to goat-urine herbicide. I’m pleased to say I’ve eradicated them, and your attempt to sabotage my entry into the Witches’ Weeds Annual Gardening Contest has failed, yet again. By the way, how are your Cinderella pumpkins? Thriving? You might want to check.
Wickedly yours,
Hector West
Hector signed the letter with his trademark flourish and folded it exactly five times before inserting it into the envelope along with a curse for blistered fingers. Ida would probably defuse it before she even touched it, but he could hope. Sometimes he could still get one past her. Satisfied, he sealed it with his personal ring in the hot wax dripped from the human fat candle that Adorphus handed him.
“Will that be all, Hector?” Adorphus asked, putting the letter in the outgoing mail.
“No, my dear fellow.” Hector sighed. “I need more goat-urine herbicide.” Ida’s stupid dandelions. But he would get rid of them all, even if he had to dig them out by the light of the crescent moon and recite a cease-and-desist over each benighted hole in his lawn. Irritating old witch.
“I don’t know if they made enough for a bottle. You bought me out the last time you were in.” The little goblin disappeared entirely when he stepped off the ladder. His sharp ears moved like disembodied puppets behind the long black counter before he emerged through the swinging door at the end. With a sudden, stinking smell of billy goat, he disappeared down a trapdoor.
Hector helped himself to a pickled eyeball from the counter jar. He still had six weeks until that infernal competition, and he intended to win this time. He wanted to rub it in Ida’s face after the Happily-Ever-After. But he wouldn’t put it past her to curse his sawbriers to puny brambles or send thrips to attack his death lilies. She certainly knew how to get him where it hurt the most. Curses! And for a good witch too. Her great-great-great-grandmother must have had a touch of fae in her. She’d inherited both their fabulously good looks and eviscerating wit. The first timehe’d seen Ida North, he’d completely underestimated the power of both.
He’d been twenty-six at the time. It was his first formal function as the Wicked Witch of the West, and although he would never have admitted it to anyone—a sure way to get himself hexed to infinity—he was nervous. He’d never been good at speeches, and with the newly minted Witches’ College first-year class staring at him like a parliament of wide-eyed owls, and the remaining two witches from Happily-Ever-After basking like ancient dragons on the stage behind him, he tripped over half his words and almost over his own robes on the way down the stairs.
When the young woman came up to the punch bowl where he was eating his anxiety in the form of dead man’s peanut butter fingers, he was relieved to find he could crack a smile. She was lovely, like some fairy at her christening had dispensed gifts with the randomness of a drunk uncle—breathtaking beauty, sparkling presence, a dazzling smile, and the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen. Red hair fell in waves to the middle of her back, and both it and her eyes seemed to change color in the light. They shifted from evening blue to morning lilac when she looked up at him.
“Nice save,” she said, dipping a glass of blood-colored punch into a crystal cup. “I thought you were going to go heels over broomstick there for a minute.”
“I thought the same myself.” He laughed.
“Not the sort of thing I’d have expected from the youngest-ever Wicked Witch of the West.” She sipped her drink. “Did you mean what you said about a blight in the north being good for the economy of the southern regions, or was that just a bad joke like all the others?”
He almost choked on his cookie. “I beg your pardon?”
“Because if you’re going to make a habit of turning us into your perennial target with your dastardly magic, I’m going to fight you. I didn’t spend the last three years working on a new breed of grain for you to wipe it out in a week, is that clear?”
“I…well…” He had a million things to say, most of them quotes from his reams of notes he’d taken in case of questions about the balance of good and evil, but somehow, under that serpent stare of evident dislike, he couldn’t find anything to say, at least nothing diplomatic. “It’s my job to be wicked,” he finally managed. “You don’t have to like it, but you do have to live with it.”
“We’ll see.” She turned her back on him and sailed off, trailing pixie dust from her long blue cloak, which had been bewitched to resemble the night sky shedding stars.
Flabbergasted, he turned toward a sprite popping a fresh batch of frosted strawberries into a silver bowl below the rose-chocolate fountain. “Whowas that?”
The sprite looked up. “Ida Moonshadow—apprentice to the Good Witch of the North.”
He’d hated her on the spot.
Two years later, when she took her place across the table from him as a Cardinal Witch, he’d made an enemy for life.
A thud behind the counter told him Adorphus had raised the trapdoor. He folded his hands in front of himself, as if he’d not been pilfering eyeballs.
“Here you are, Hector,” Adorphus said, placing a gallon of yellow and green goat-urine herbicide on the counter. “Anything else?”
“Perhaps a small jar of these eyeballs—”
Adorphus glanced suspiciously at the counter jar. “You know what Tinbit says. Those things make your gout worse.”
“Tinbit has been saying that forever,” Hector argued. “And I’m not laid up in bed yet.”
“It’s your funeral.” Adorphus wrapped a small jar of the pickled eyeballs in crisp brown paper before adding it to the basket holding Hector’s weekly groceries: a pound of liverwurst, a half-pound of boletes, pasta shells, a portion of gorgonzola, and two pounds of lamb, along with his usual magical purchases of nightshade berries, henbane leaves, and hemlock roots.
“Oh, and one of those flats of skunk cabbages outside,” Hector added, unable to resist the charms of the small plants reeking their fetid odor into the shop when the door opened. They’d be beautiful in a drift next to his bat orchids.
“Oh, congrats on the Unicorn Jubilee. One thousand years of Happily-Ever-After is a credit to you, Your Wickedness,” Adorphus yelled after him as he left the shop.
***
