Chapter 13

The hobs pickedup that I wasn't in a socializing mood as I dropped off the crate of honey for them to continue mass producing Sweet Cider Farm Wassail, and I returned to the farmhouse in a disgruntled mood. While I'd never once reacted poorly to insect stings, the sting on my arm was now the size of a dime and itching something fierce.

The moment I stepped inside the farmhouse, the hearth's fire flared red and a warning pulse rippled beneath my feet.

Sawyer lurched upright from where he was studying on the hearth mantle, nails digging into the wood to keep himself steady as the hearth pulsed again. "Red flames? They've never been red before! Is it the warlock?" he whispered frantically.

"He's gone," I whispered back, hardly daring to move. Sawyer was right about the flames. "I checked the fairgrounds myself after Cedar Haven. Not even a wagon rut left behind."

The hair along the cat's spine continued to rise. "Still. We stole from him. He might've had tracer spells of his own."

"The hearth would've told me when we got back last night." It would have done exactly what it was doing now—alerting me that something foul was afoot.

"Green flames for health and spells, and red for ne'er-do-wells," Aunt Peony had taught us in a sing-song voice years ago. Apparently my hearth was strong enough to communicate in colored flames now, just like the one back at Hawthorne Manor. Which was good, except I didn't like what it was saying.

My stomach sank into my toes as my gaze shifted to my forearm, to the tiny sting that was now the size of a quarter. It resembled a blister, red inflamed flesh surrounding a bubble of white. Definitely not normal, especially when coupled with the hearth's warning.

I plucked a jar off the shelf and a skewer and ran for the kitchen sink. Sawyer jumped into the windowsill to watch, careful to tuck his tail in so he didn't knock the goldfish plant flowerpot nor the little glass bowl of pixie keepsakes. As he leaned forward to give my wound a sniff, Mrs. White lowered down on a line of spider silk as if to lend a second opinion.

"Misty? That looks disgusting."

"My eyes work, you know," I grumbled. "One of Arthur's bees stung me."

Lancing the blister with the rowan skewer yielded only a fleeting bit of pain; scrubbing and flushing it out with hot soapy water and then packing it with poultice hurt much more. As I wrapped a bandage around my arm to keep the poultice in place, I sent a pulse of healing green magic to the affected area to give it a boost. To my relief, the pain in my arm started to dull.

I wasn't cursed or hexed; it was just a bad sting. But while the hearth wasn't sending out warning pulses anymore, its flames still flickered with the occasional red light. Maybe it was my own apprehensions taking physical form?

"You say a bee stungyou?" Sawyer asked. "But aren't you, like, an ally of theirs or something? You know, with your green magic?"

"I didn't stick around to interrogate it," I replied irritably. "But I'm fixed now, and I have a lot of work to do today. Now, are you going to do your schoolwork or help me?"

The cat wrinkled his nose. "Neither. School's boring today and I'm not going anywhere near that warlock hoodoo again." He dropped down onto the back porch. "I'm going on patrol. And don't forget about the hobs' breakfast!"

I'd run out to Cedar Haven first thing this morning without thinking about the orchard caretakers, my trip into town even longer as I'd diverted to drive past the fairgrounds at what I hoped was a casual pace. A low-lying fog had clung to the grass, to the stumps of the corn maze that had been buzzed down. No scraps of trash, not even an abandoned pennant clinging to a spotlight post or a pile of horse dung remained behind to indicate that the Carnival Cauchemar had even visited.

The warlock and his gypsies were gone, as was whatever they'd taken from Codrin Alder. My thoughts swirled as I relived all I'd witnessed, all motions of preparing bread from preheating a Dutch oven on the hearth coals to shaping the loaf on autopilot.

Arthur had said the bees and the trees weren't related, but I wasn't so sure.

Focus, Grandmother's voice tolled inside my mind like the peel of bell. How does worrying about this little backwater town help you with the grimoire?

It didn't.

What would would be organizing all that I'd learned at the carnival and making a plan. As the bread baked, I dug out the notebook I'd started keeping since coming to Redbud. It was like my own personal grimoire in a way, bound in paper birch and the covers and pages sewn with milkweed cordage, clasped together by the finger-length thorn of a honey locust tree.

On a new page, I started to write:

And then what?

Well, first things first and all that. Figure out what I was dealing with, perhaps see if it could be reasoned with—it never hurt to ask—and then evict it from the spell book and into another vessel for disposal.

I was tempted to write something about the Alders and Jakob Tabrass, but my hand hovered over the page instead. Their deal wasn't pertinent to lifting the curse on my family's grimoire, so I set my pen aside.

Just in time, too, for I hadn't set a timer for the bread and from its scent, it was a few seconds away from burning.

With the loaf salvaged—I didn't even need to scrape off any black bits from the bottom—I traipsed through the wildflower field to the orchard to deliver a belated breakfast. Like it had during the breadmaking, my mind switched to autopilot as I reviewed again and again the tasks I would perform today, primarily fashioning a new parasite bracelet and layering the groundwork spells on a container to hold the parasite if eviction didn't kill it outright.

"Misty?" Dale's voice cut through the fog of my thoughts. "Um, what happened to the bread?"

"What?"

The loaf in the basket I had looped on my arm was green with mold.

"Thistle thorns!" I yelped, shucking the basket as if the mold would creep from the bread and up the wicker to engulf me.

Roland pinched his nose shut. "You try making sourdough today, lass?"

"Quick, the vinegar," I cried.

The hobs, who had taken to mixing their own salad vinaigrette from the apple cider vinegar they produced, kept a bottle or two in their barn for easy access. The seven-percent acidity level would be the vanguard to my disinfectant procedure.

When Roland thrust it into my hand, I popped the cork and declared,

"Mold, spores, plague, and blight,

ill-wishes all, begone from sight!"

Brown fizz erupted from the bottle a second before the glass exploded.

"Cernunnos' Horns!" the hob shouted, throwing up his hands to protect his face. "Lass, you're cut! And why is your finger glowing?"

As the parasite ring blazed white, I clutched my bloody hand to my chest and fought to keep my voice steady as I ordered, "Get the pitchfork and get that bread and its basket into the fire pit. Light it on fire. And get the hay contaminated by the vinegar in there too. Keep this patch of earth bare. Dale, come with me."

The hobs sprang into action, Dale doing his best to keep up as I ran for the farmhouse. The hearth pulsed at my entry, flames flaring red, and I knew for sure now that bee sting was not just a sting and I was not as healed as I thought. I jerked my head towards the big jar on the lowest shelf. "Take three bundles of sage, light them, and waft the smoke towards the bare ground in the barn," I instructed. "When it's done smoldering, sprinkle the ashes everywhere. Get two others to help you. Be quick about it! And send someone to find Sawyer. He's on patrol."

As the farmhouse was punctuated by the sounds of the snapping red flames in the hearth, a chair being dragged across the wooden floor, the clink of glass as the lid was lifted from the jar, then bare feet racing out the door, I cleaned my hand in the kitchen sink. More poultice, more bandages, and as that took effect, I peeled back the bandage on my left forearm to reveal inflamed purple skin instead of red.

I practically ripped off the chain from around my neck and shoved it into the hearth fire. While the flames turned red around my flesh, they turned a nice deep green around the amazonite pendant.

So it was just me who was contaminated, not the magic stored in my pendant. And apparently I was contaminated enough that it was affecting my control, as evidenced from my blazing parasite ring. So why didn't I feel sick?

I left the pendant hanging on a peg above the hearth and returned to my shelves for the muddler. The attendant at the Cold Beer had assured me this polished piece of wood could fully macerate limes and sugar for a daiquiri in under three seconds, and while it had definitely proved itself a valuable tool in my potion-making arsenal, I now slipped it between my teeth so I wouldn't bite down on my tongue.

Returning to the pendant, I wiggled the bandage off my forearm to reveal the ugly purple-and-white blister and thrust my hand into the hearth. When the fire instantly reacted, its flames wholly crimson, I gripped the pendant in my bloody hand and called on its stored magic.

It tore up my arm and into my heart, and when I directed it towards the sting, it disobeyed. It diverted to my core like a bloodhound who'd chosen to follow the path of a different scent than the one chosen by its master.

No! The sting, I insisted. But the power of the pendant persisted, surging for my core and the innate magic stored within.

Oh my Green Mother. It's not me that's contaminated. It's my magic! That's why the bread had soured and molded and why the vinegar spell had backfired. Anything I touched with my magic became as polluted as I was.

The magic that I had stored away in the pendant knew instinctively where to go. Root out the infection in my core, and my body would take care of itself. I released the reins, giving the power unrestrained access to wherever it needed to go.

The heat was becoming uncomfortable now, but the flames were flickering between red and green. Green! The color of a healthy witch. The green color denoted not only health, but the witch's potential. When I'd left the manor, its hearth fires would've blazed a deep emerald green. With the parasite ring curbing me, the color of my potential was something more akin to grass green, but green was green and I'd take it!

The pendant went cold in my hand despite the heat of the hearth—spent. There was no more magic inside, but the hearth fires weren't wholly green yet. They were a muted chartreuse at best, and, as I watched, the red color became more dominant. The power of the pendant had failed.

"Impossible," I whispered, panic rising. "It's one of the most—"

And then I saw it. The blazing white star on my finger.

I'd forgotten to remove the parasite ring, and it had siphoned all the amazonite's magic away for itself.

A low sob rose from my throat as my knees buckled and I crumpled to the hearth slates.

Grandmother had told us youngsters stories of what happened to green witches with corrupted cores, how they went mad from the leaking magic until their cores finally ruptured and they became monstrous tree-like creatures that could only be destroyed with flaming ash arrows.

Oh my Green Mother, what was I going to do now? Forget the grimoire and my family's curse, how was I going to survive? I didn't feel sick yet, but it was only a matter of time. I had to get help. But who could help me and keep my secret?

My head snapped up from where I cried against the hearth stones. "Flora!"

The garden gnome was powerful and full of green, life-giving magic. And with my tea keeping her hay fever under control, she'd be in top form and have magic to spare. Her shop might be closed on Sundays, but her personal cell phone…

Was a number I didn't have. Of course. Because the fewer ties the better, right? When I pulled up my cell phone's contact history, there were only two numbers: Cedar Haven and Arthur. While Cedar Haven was closed on Sundays, my honey run and their fussing over the rotten wood aside, this was Arthur's personal number. He could answer. He could give me—

But he doesn't want anything to do with you, Meadow. He made that abundantly clear.

I lurched upright, hastily smearing the tears from my eyes. "But he's not the only person with Flora's number. Daphne and Shari!"

No doubt Daphne had already cared for the animals at the RescueLove shelter and the two older women were on their porch enjoying tea and crafting. I could get to Flora through them.

Scrambling to the windowsill, I plucked up a fresh tourmaline stone to replace the bleached one. I couldn't be both magically compromised and a sitting duck with my magical signature exposed for any to see. After sparing only another moment to stuff my empty amazonite pendant into my pocket, I grabbed the car keys and bolted out the farmhouse door.