Page 24 of Witches of Honeysuckle House
Evie lifted Clara’s foot, and though Clara winced, her mom’s touch was gentle and cool as she pulled the shard of glass free and tugged off Clara’s sock. Blood welled at the site of the wound, but not nearly as much as Clara expected.
“Something is wrong with the house, Mommy,” Clara said. “The wall burned, and my foot got cut.”
“That may be,” Evie said as Angela reappeared. Evie gently cleaned and dressed Clara’s wound as she spoke. “But it did spill our moon water trying to put out the fire—and if that’s not a good use of it, then I don’t know what is. And, yes, the rug and the wallpaper are probably ruined, but the house is okay. And look,” Evie gripped Clara’s chin gently and guided her attention to the hole in the wall. “We didn’t even know there was a room back there! We’ve discovered something new.”
Clara sniffled and rubbed at her nose. Angela handed her a tissue.
“And you get to stay with me tonight,” Angela said.
Clara’s eyes brightened. She’d stayed with her Aunt Florence a few times, but never with Angela.
“We’ll go to the store and get your favorite snacks, and I’ll make popcorn, and we can watch any movie you want,” Angela said.
“But won’t the house be lonely without us?” Clara asked.
Her mom’s eyes clouded as she looked over the room. “It probably will be a little bit lonely,” she admitted. “But the firefighters think we need to stay somewhere else tonight, and I’m sure the house understands.”
Again, that window opened and closed softly.
Clara nodded, still convinced she was at least partially responsible for what happened. “Can we at least look in the hole before we go?”
Evie gave her daughter a small smile. “I suppose we could take a peek.”
Clara jumped up, then winced and grabbed her foot. Evie picked her up and carried her across the room. As they approached the wall,the curtains rustled, and the glass along the floor started to move like someone was shaking the boards.
“See?” Evie asked. “The house is going to be fine.”
Clara worried at her lip but gave a short nod as her mom set her down in front of the wall.
“Let me make sure it’s safe,” Evie said before she stepped into the hidden room. Clara followed her as soon as she was through the opening.
“Seems safe enough.” Clara turned in a circle. Though her foot still stung, what she found was enough to make her forget the pain—at least for now.
It almost looked like an extension of her mom’s attic room. Taper candles in all sizes and colors hung from hooks. On the far wall, a bookcase had been built into the corner, packed with books and jars full of herbs and tinctures and honey. Several journals had fallen from its shelves and lay in a heap on the floor in front of it. Next to them sat a plush chair with a high back, all dark green and tufted like the ones she saw at the antique shop whenever she and her mom delivered candles, and in front of the chair, a small table. A leather journal lay open in the center alongside a pool of wax, as if someone had walked out while they were in the middle of a spell.
Chapter Thirteen
Evie, Now
After finding her mother’s journal thirteen years ago, Evie had turned Honeysuckle House upside down searching for more of her things. Where Florence had avoided any run-in with their shared trauma, Evie was desperate for an explanation, a reason for all the pain they’d gone through. Yes, their mother had hurt them. Yes, Evie still carried the effects of that hurt in the way she flinched at Florence’s anger. At how she sought to make everything just right for a disgruntled guest and agonized over guiding Clara too much in her magic or too little or really at all in fear she’d get it wrong. But if she could piece together her mother’s life before she had come into it, maybe she could find some sort of peace with the broken parts of her, or at least uncover enough to patch the holes.
She stared out over the room. It had been hidden just beyond where Evie worked her own magic. Had her mother cast some sort of spell to keep Evie from finding it?
Evie wouldn’t put it past her. Linda Caldwell had used magic to keep the curse from Evie and Florence for years, leaving them unprepared for their father’s death back in the 90s. After that, once they were old enough, the sisters had looked everywhere for answers about the magic that haunted their family. But there was little to be found beyond a few newspaper articles about the past victims—their grandmother,their great-aunt, and a woman who must’ve been a friend of the family long before their mother came into the world. After their mother’s death, they still had little to go on with only tarot to guide them. But now? Maybe the answers Evie needed had been hiding in the house all along.
She wanted to flip through each of the leather-bound journals, to collect the crystals and cleanse them in water and moonlight, to run her fingers over the candles her mother had dipped. She wasn’t foolish enough to light them, but she wondered what magic lingered in the wax.
Clara was way ahead of her. Already she’d crossed over to her mother’s altar, lifted the large wooden box containing her tarot cards; the deck was a sister to Florence’s, but where Florence’s card backs were green, these were black. Evie recognized her mother’s deck from her childhood. She’d searched for it after her mother had died, but she’d come up empty-handed.
When Evie took the cards from Clara, her daughter looked up at her, tears still glistening on her cheeks.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It was my mother’s,” Evie said. “I didn’t know it was here.”
“Are we going to take the wall all the way down?”
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” Evie said.
