Page 73 of Wickedly Ever After
“I know it’s not real. I know I’ll have to take more of that damned potion and it burns and makes me sick, but I can’t help it. He looks at me, and I love him. He smiles, and I melt. He sets a vase of roses down beside me because he thought I’d like the way they smell, and all I can think about is how he smelled when he was in bed with me—spicy, dark, and warm—and I want him. Oh, Ida, if he told me to walk off a cliff with him, I’d go.”
She rocked him in her arms like she used to do when he was a gnomelet. Of all the miserable revelations she’d been through this evening, this might be the worst. Yes, love magic was running amok; yes, Happily-Ever-After had broken and she was pretty sure that was all her fault now, but if it was wrong, if they were wrong all along, maybe they’d been wrong about this too.
“You’re stronger than that,” she said, stroking his hair. “If he took you to a cliff, you’d pull him back from the edge and take him home with you.”
He sniffed. His eyes filled with confusion. “Ida?”
She stroked his hair. “I’ll talk to Hector. If you really feel that strongly, maybe I’m wrong and there’s something real there. I’ll ask him if he could use another gnome.”
He sat up, horrified. “But…I can’t leave you!” He covered his face with his hands. “I can’t let him see this.”
“I’ll let Hector know. He’s a witch; he’ll keep your secret safe if that’s what you want.”
“No.” Hari’s jaw tightened. “No. I can’t. You’re right. It’s not real.”
“Honey—”
“I’ll fight it. Besides, you’re going to fix it, and it will be over then.”
She patted his hand. “It will be over. But Hari, if there’s anything still there, you have my permission to follow it as far as it leads. I won’t interfere. If you won’t leave me, perhaps Tinbit might come back with us.”
“He won’t,” Hari said stubbornly. “And I’m not going to make him.” He lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. “Go. I can handle this on my own.”
Feeling terrible, she shut the door to the room gently and let herself out.
33
Hector
Among the most important things a Wicked Witch should consider when designing their evil lair is to include a space where they can reflect on their plans and schemes when things go awry. It’s better to break a flowerpot than someone else’s head.
A Thousand Years of Wickedness: A Memoir
Hector West
Cear vanished furtively into the coals after Ida left. Hector was glad. He didn’t want to hear any further questions that he didn’t have answers to. After a while, he left the window and went to his desk. He pulled an ancient parchment folio from the drawer he’d bewitched into a never-ending file cabinet. He opened it hopefully, but it was nothing more helpful than his mentor’s treatise on slugs and how to eradicate them from one’s flowerbeds without resorting to inviting a murder of crows every day for breakfast. He put it back before it crumbled to dust in the modern air of his library. There had to be something he could do to save this situation. He hadn’t given up his own life and chance for love to let everything he’dworked for crash down in ruins a thousand years later.
He didn’t like to think about that, but it was foremost on his mind now along with all the horrors he’d grown up with. He picked up another folder of his mentor’s old writings, a collection of her gingerbread recipes. There was a time when nothing would grow in the polluted land, and families like his, with too many mouths to feed, sent their surplus children out the door with nothing more than a crust of bread for lunch and told them to get lost in the woods. And sometimes that was a far better option than going home…
He sighed. Even after Happily-Ever-After, healing the land had taken a long time. Fields flourished, but without a population to work them, food was scarce. Plague became a thing of the past, but so many people had been wounded or were already ill from the wars. They died by the thousands. People blamed his monsters for their continued misfortune. And they died by the millions.
He rose, walked to the table, and poured himself another glass of wine. This made three, and he seldom took more than a half glass with dinner, but tonight felt like it called for more. The anger Ida had directed at him for not talking to her earlier rankled. True, maybe he should have been more suspicious, but love wasn’t something he dealt in, only in ways to delay it, hinder it, to thwart it as much as Happily-Ever-After called for, and all in carefully measured and precise ways. He deeply resented having it all upended like a cart of compost, especially by the prince.That spoiled-rotten rich boy with a bad mother and a worse father, he’s the one who gets a choice in his life now? I never had one.
“Cear, I’m going out for a walk,” he said to the flames. “I’llsend someone in to bank your fire before bedtime.”
***
Hector’s gardens had been his sanctuary since he’d first moved into the castle, back when it was little more than a round tower built on very structurally unsound foundations by a former sorcerer who thought it had been a good idea to make his life force the cornerstone. Along came a freelance hero with a second-hand magical sword and boom, there went his “fortress of adamant.” But the location was ideal, nestled in the bosom of the mountains, and when he’d seen the backyard and the lovely bog in the corner, he’d been sold.
Just past the stable and the field where the bone-horses frolicked, he’d planted his poisonous plant garden, a full half-acre of the most dangerous and deadly herbs and flowers from around the world, each one given its own favorite habitat. It had taken him the better part of three hundred years to accumulate all of the seeds and raise the plants. The corpse flower alone required regular applications of bone dust. Whole graveyards full of it, for centuries. He’d been so proud when it finally bloomed, even if Tinbit had walked around with a clothespin on his nose for a week.
After the garden, he’d built the greenhouse. This was his pride and joy, where he bred sentient species of plants, like the sensitive fern. His young bat lilies were there, fluttering around and eating insects, the carnivorous sundews were happily eating careless bat flowers, and the man-eating flytrap—well, he’d probably need to see if the kitchen had a leg of mutton lying around because it might be a week before he fed it again, and maybe more than that if he didn’t come up with a way to fixHappily-Ever-After.
“Hector?”
He turned.
Ida was coming out of the rose gate that led to Tinbit’s house.
