Page 25 of Witches of Honeysuckle House
“But not yet,” Angela said as she followed them through the hole. Evie raised her eyebrows, and Angela shook her head with a smile. “I see that look in your eyes.”
Evie laughed softly. She was tempted to go get her sledgehammer and have at it then and there.
“Fine,” she said, “not yet.”
She crossed over to her mother’s altar and rested a hand on the top of Clara’s head, ruffling her hair as she looked over what Linda Caldwell had left behind. The candles were curious, but Evie was more interested in the journal laying open in front of them, dated thirteen years ago. She ran her fingers over her mother’s handwriting, likely the last time the woman put pen to paper.
“Is that a spell?” Clara asked.
Evie blinked away thoughts of her mother, focusing instead on the words scrawled on the open page in front of her.
Something offered
Black candle
Brown candle
Tourmaline, obsidian, and quartz
An anchor
Objects belonging to spell subjects
String
Magician card
Temperance card
Dip the candles with the intention of the spell infused into the wax. Create a spell circle, placing each crystal to form a triangle. Tie the anchor to the objects, bind them with string, and place them in the center. Make the offering. Light the candles. Use the flame of the black taper to burn the cards. Once the wax finishes melting, the spell will be sealed.
Evie looked from the book to the pooled wax to the tied objects. With Caldwell magic, candle and flame and occasionally a circle of salt were enough for most spells. This went far beyond that. Only the most difficult work required ritual.
“It looks like a spell,” Clara said, when Evie didn’t answer her question.
“You have a good eye, honeybee,” Evie said. “I think it’s a binding spell.”
The anchor, the black candle, the string. She wasn’t quite sure how the brown candle—a color for home—or the temperance card fit in, but the rest seemed clear. Such spells were difficult work. Evie had avoided them because to bind was to enforce your will on someone else, most often to cut a witch off from her magic. It didn’t surprise her that her mother would use one, but by the look of it, this was the last spell she cast before the curse took her. Who, Evie wondered, had her mother spent her final moments trying to bind?
Clara lifted her head up, looking right at Evie. “What’s a binding spell?”
“It’s tricky magic,” Evie said. “When you bind something, you’re changing it, stopping it from doing what it wants to do.”
“That’s against our rules,” Clara said.
“Which is why I’ve never taught you about them,” Evie said. “My mother never taught me about them, either.” All Evie knew about binding spells and other sorts of manipulative magic came from books and speculation. Spells written but never cast.
Clara looked from her mom to the table and back again. She reached for the bound objects in the center of the circle and plucked out a tarnished brass sphere with a honeysuckle engraved on the front. “This looks like the doorknob to my bedroom!”
A string had been knotted around it, tied to a pair of necklaces, each one half of a heart. They’d been a gift from Evie’s father—one for her and one for Florence. They’d stopped wearing them by the time Florence went to high school. Evie thought she’d lost hers. It hadn’t been in her jewelry box when she and Florence moved out of Honeysuckle House on Evie’s eighteenth birthday. It seemed her mother had taken it.
Clara glanced up at Evie and asked, “Was grandma trying to bind the house?”
The pipes started to groan, a low sound that echoed through the attic.
Evie stared at her daughter, her eyes going wide as Clara’s suggestion sank in. Evie had been so focused on trying to break her family’s curse for the past thirteen years—and to prove her sister wrong—that she hadn’t stopped to think about the possibility that it wasn’t the family that was cursed at all. The house had been the one who showed Evie the journal. The house had been the one who tried to convince her she was safe within its walls.
This spell called for an anchor, and what more powerful anchor was there than two Caldwell witches? Yes, Evie knew her mother had hurt her over and over. Yes, the wounds lived on. But what if she had been on a path to redemption, to finally making things right for her family? Perhaps shehadbeen trying to bind the house, and if so, what had stopped her?
