Page 2 of Witches of Honeysuckle House
With a laugh, Angela handed it over. Florence peered inside as Angela unlocked the door. “Sticky buns!”
“You really think I would’ve teased you about …” Angela dropped her voice to a whisper as she glanced down the sidewalk “… the curse, if I didn’t have sticky buns?”
“All is forgiven.” Florence took a giant bite and washed it down with a sip of her latte as they stepped inside.
Though Florence had left the Caldwell ways behind, she still tucked sliced lemons in hidden corners and blew cinnamon through the front door at each new moon. Houseplants and crystals kept company among the books. Just inside, a collection of spider plants and several raw chunks of black tourmaline prevented negative energy from coming through the doors. In the self-help section, a calathea and blue lapis lazuli offered clarity and strengthened intuition. Two monsteras framed the romance section, with several raw pieces of rose quartz scattered among the shelves, fostering self-love. Finally, a fiddle-leaf fig sat right near the register surrounded by bright orange citrine points for abundance and happiness.
These were the things Florence had taught herself in an effort to fight back against the candles her mother had once lit to control her—one that blinded her for a day when she’d mistakenly dipped a wick orange instead of red, another that muffled her ears for a week after she’d eavesdropped on her father accusing her mother of using her magic on him, a third that stole her voice for a month when she tried to tell a neighbor how her mother had locked her in her room without food for three days (the house had kept her fed, but it was the principle of the thing).
Was it magic? Only insomuch as the sun rising every morning and setting every night was magic. What mattered was that it wasn’t the Caldwell family magic, which Florence was convinced had brought about the curse.
At least, that’s what she told herself on that early October morning. In four short days, Florence would finally know if all of her efforts had been enough to stop the curse, or if her sister’s decision to build a life around the very magic Florence abandoned would outweigh those efforts, leaving Florence with the most heartbreaking sort of “I told you so.”
After the curse had claimed their mother and almost taken Florence along with her, the sisters had been determined to never let it happen again. Florence had wanted to leave Honeysuckle Housebehind, convinced the curse was tied to their childhood home. Every death had happened there. If they avoided Honeysuckle House, she reasoned, then maybe the curse wouldn’t claim them. But to Evie, it was the witches who were cursed, not the house.
They turned to tarot, as Caldwell witches are known to do. But they’d been unable to agree on what the cards had shown them: The hierophant reversed, temperance reversed, the hermit.
The meaning had been clear for Florence. She had to be her own guide—she couldn’t trust anyone else to lead her—and her plan to stay away from the house was the right path. Their power had gone out of balance, putting a curse on their family. The only way to undo it was to give that power up altogether. To become the hermits the cards told them they must be.
Evie hadn’t seen it that way, and the sisters hadn’t agreed on anything since.
Chapter Two
Evie, Now
The Caldwell family home stood at the edge of Burdock Creek. Honeysuckle wove around the handrails, up the thin columns, and all along the porch. Red-orange blossoms flowered on the vine, the wind whipping them this way and that. Storm clouds muted the soft yellow clapboard, a match for the maple leaves that littered the grass. In the far corner of the house, a turret rose up from the third story.
Evie Caldwell stood just inside one of the turret’s black-framed windows, a candle on the antique bureau in front of her. Her wavy blonde hair hung loose about her shoulders, and her hazel eyes looked almost brown in the shadows cast by the oncoming storm.
She stared out at the grounds of Honeysuckle House. Wildflowers grew rampant along the creek bank, glistening with the first drops of rain. Her daughter Clara stomped her way through the grass in bright yellow rain boots, a spot of light in the fall gloom. Before Clara was born seven years ago, Honeysuckle House and the candles Evie dipped for the town had been her whole world. She’d been so desperate to prove to herself and her sister that she was right about how to end the curse that Evie hadn’t let herself think of anything else.
She still remembered the diary the house had presented her with after her mother’s death. The words inside that led her to this life.
She’d found it face down on her mother’s bed, open midway through. She’d flipped it over to find her mother’s handwriting scrawled across the paper. It had been so long since she’d read anything the woman had written. She’d trailed her finger over the words, which had taken her back to her childhood. To the years after her father’s death when Linda left notes each morning because she dipped and burned candles late into the night and couldn’t be bothered to rise with her daughters and get them ready for school.
Things like:
There’s eggs in the fridge. Don’t use them all.
The dishes in the sink won’t do themselves.
Evie, stop leaving your bike out on the front lawn or I’ll take it away.
She’d held her place with a finger and flipped to the front of the journal. The inside of the cover read,Property of Linda Caldwell. 1986.It was the year Evie’s grandmother had died; the year Florence was born.
The window had opened, and a soft breeze blew through the room, flipping the pages back to the way Evie had found them. From what she could tell, they were notes her mother had written to try to understand the curse. In the center of the page, someone had circled a few paragraphs.
Can magic be good or bad?
I’ve never used my magic to hurt anyone. Yes, it made it easier to fall in love, to ease Robert’s anxiety over the curse, but that’s good magic, isn’t it? And what of Mother? Her spells have helped us meet our needs. The town fears us because of the curse, so we’ve gotten by as best we could, and we have the magic to thank for that.
But is magic that’s only meant for yourself—that doesn’t help other people—inherently bad?
All my life, Mother has kept that magic here, locked behind these walls, unable to escape. Perhaps that is what has caused this curse. Too much power hoarded in one place. If we were to use our magic for the good of the town, could that bring balance?
Those words, Evie believed, had been what the tarot cards pointed to when she and Florence had consulted them for answers, no matter what Florence had said. The hierophant could represent tradition. Reversed, it was a breaking of tradition. By sharing their magic, that’s exactly what Evie would be doing.
She had lost the journal soon after, as if it had never been there at all, but the lesson had stayed with her. The only path to restoring the balance of the Caldwells’ power was to turn their backs on the way their mother and their grandmother had hidden it away.
