Page 60 of Witches of Honeysuckle House
“Isn’t that your favorite?” Angela asked.
Clara nodded gravely. “This way the house will know I’m coming back.”
Evie’s meeting didn’t last long. The damage was superficial, not enough to warrant closing the bed and breakfast, but she would still be able to get her insurance to cover the cost to tear down the burned wall and repair the damage if the house didn’t end up taking care of it on its own. With the exception of a few flickering lights and creaking floorboards, Honeysuckle House had mostly behaved through the whole process. When it was done, Evie had thanked the man and sent him on his way.
Then she turned her attention to more pressing matters.
She still hadn’t fully puzzled out the spell, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get her preparations underway. She’d always trusted hermagic and intuition to guide her, so if she made the candles, then perhaps that would be enough.
She set up her double boilers and got to work. Normally, she talked through her spells aloud with the house as company. But she couldn’t let it know she planned to bind it.
“With the curse coming, we’ll need extra protection,” she said while the water heated. “And after the fire, I want to make sure you’re safe, too, so I think we’ll do a black candle and a brown candle.” Though her grandmother’s spell had lacked the brown candle, she opted to follow her mother’s work instead, assuming her mother had been building on what hadn’t worked for her grandmother.
Before she put the wax in to melt, a slip of paper fell from the ceiling, floating slowly until it landed beside Evie, face down. An old photograph. She flipped it over to find herself and Florence standing side by side in front of Honeysuckle House on Evie’s eighteenth birthday. The day they finally escaped their mother.
Evie’s throat grew hot with the memory, and tears pooled in her eyes. She quickly brushed them away.
“I’m not bringing Florence into this,” Evie said. “She made it perfectly clear she wants nothing to do with the curse or you or any of us.”
The flames on the stove turned off, and Evie sighed.
“You have made your point,” she said. “You and Angela both.” Evie didn’t blame either of them. She wanted Florence there, too. She’d wanted her there for years—the two of them, together, putting an end to their family’s tragedies and building a new life.
She turned the knobs to bring the flame back, but the starter wouldn’t click.
“I thought you wouldn’t want to be alone after the fire,” Evie said. “But if you won’t let me do this, I’ll pack up and dip these candles at Angela’s.”
The walls shifted like a sigh, and the burner came to life. At first, the flame was small, then it flared bright and hot, coming around the side of the pot and threatening to singe Evie’s shirt.
“Too much!” Evie said. The walls shook a little before the flames went back to where Evie wanted them. “Much better, thank you.”
Evie wanted to tell the house she was trying to save it, but she didn’t know if she could trust it. And if it came down to it—if she had to choose between the house and Clara—she knew what choice she would make.
Instead, she said, “Thank you.”
Once the wax melted, she poured enough black dye into the first pot for one candle. With her weights tied to both ends of the string, she dipped one side in the darkened wax. She thought of the temperance card in her mother’s spell. A call for balance. She wanted to remove whatever malevolence her mother had discovered in the house, the magic that caused it to hurt instead of help. If she could redirect it somehow, tip the scales in favor of good, perhaps it would be enough.
“An offering,” she whispered, more breath than words, thinking about everyone she wanted to protect from the curse—her daughter, her sister, Honeysuckle House. Then, her mind stuck on Angela. Memories from the night before brought heat into her cheeks. “Please let this work.”
The familiar spark of magic in her heart flickered erratically, like a match that wouldn’t light, and she couldn’t seem to direct it into the wick. She lifted the string from the boiler to find not even a drop of wax had clung to the cotton.
She brushed an errant lock of hair out of her eyes with the back of her free hand and huffed a breath. “I told you I’d leave if you didn’t let me do this.”
The stove creaked in response, low and sad.
“This isn’t you?”
The window opened then closed.
Evie narrowed her eyes. The curse, then. That would make completing this spell more difficult, but Evie wasn’t going to give up.
After her fourth try, her intention took hold. With each dip of the wick, her power went into the candle. It took longer than she expected, and the wax bubbled in some places, but the first candle was complete.
On the other side of the wick, she dipped the brown candle. This one, too, took time. But after a few tries, her magic flowed from her heart to her fingertips and into the wax. “For Honeysuckle House,”she whispered, loud enough to pass her lips but not loud enough to be heard.
“May my magic be good, my loved ones be safe, and my work be a blessing.” The words brought tears to her eyes. She’d said them with every spell since her mother’s death, each time hoping her benevolence would undo the work of the Caldwell family curse, never realizing the problem may lay in the house itself, not her family. But as far as Evie was concerned, Honeysuckle House was family, too, and she’d do whatever she could to fix it.
Chapter Thirty-Three
