Page 5

FOUR

There were six intruders, all of them downright ill-mannered.

“Is this it?” one said as he looked around. “This house is even smaller inside than it looks on the outside.”

“Quite dull,” another said.

“Smells like old people.”

Thorn watched the intruders from behind the olive-colored couch that was not hers.

She made a mental list of all the booby-trap curses she could lay down in the forest, perhaps in a mile radius all around the house.

All these years, fear of the man-eating black panther had been enough.

But in a span of one night, or one day—she hadn’t figured out yet what exactly had happened—seven people had managed to trample through the forest and reach her cottage.

The six new intruders, however, looked nothing like her regular clientele. Their clothing was bizarre. A radical new wave of fashion must have swept into town.

“A cat!” said a man in chunky white shoes that reminded Thorn of a cat’s paws.

Bandit had crawled halfway out from under the bed and was frozen with the choice between saving his life and suffering with his witch. Then, without so much as a sorry, he darted between the intruders’ legs and disappeared out the open door.

“That traitor.”

All the intruders’ heads swiveled toward Thorn, and only then did she realize that she had uttered the words aloud. She had no choice but to crawl out from her hiding place.

“A witch!” a woman in pants exclaimed.

“I curse all your noses to rot and fall off!” Thorn was bluffing. She had never been successful in concocting such a curse. But they didn’t know that.

But the six of them turned out to be masochists. They didn’t flee for their lives or even cower. Instead, they were delighted. Smiles broke out on their faces. Cat Paws clasped his hands with glee.

“I’d have visited sooner if I knew,” said a man who wore breeches without stockings. “They should have included the witch on their website.”

Thorn had no idea what spiders had to do with anything. She scooped Penny-Pincher out of her pocket and stared her in the eye. “Did you bring these weird people with you?”

A woman who wasn’t showcasing her décolletage laughed. “Look, she turned someone into a frog!”

Thorn gulped. She hadn’t realized there’d been witnesses to her little prank. Worse, her witnesses were non-witches, a group prone to paranoia about magic, even if they didn’t mind using magic when it was convenient.

“Get out!”

“Watch out! She’ll bibbidi-bobbidi-boo us into frogs, too,” Cat Paws said. But his fear was clearly feigned, because he made no move toward the door. The other five laughed.

Thorn didn’t get the joke, except that she was the butt of it. “Your wish is granted.”

She tucked Penny-Pincher back in her pocket and made for her shelves of potions.

Strangely, they seemed bare, even taking into account the recent decimation by Bandit and Penny-Pincher.

But that investigation had to wait. She snatched up another flask of Croak potion from the bottom right corner, uncapped it, and aimed it at Cat Paws.

But he remained bone-dry. Nothing had splashed out of the flask. The potion was still contained in the glass. But instead of bright green, it was cloudy green. She shook the flask, and it rattled, now a solid.

“It’s curdled!”

“Hiring an actor to play a witch at the tour is marketing gold,” Cat Paws said, clapping his hands. “And this one’s quite convincing.”

Turning the intruder’s feet into actual paws would just have to wait.

Thorn needed to figure out what tomfoolery had occurred here.

The longest she had left a Croak potion unused was six months; it hadn’t turned cloudy, and it still transformed her target into a frog.

And this batch Thorn held in her hand had been brewed just last month. It should still be fresh.

She scanned the shelves. Most of the flasks and vials were empty, and the ones that were filled had all curdled.

Perhaps she had been unknowingly cursed by another witch?

But aside from her limited interactions with Madam Maude, she hardly crossed paths with other witches, and definitely not enough to warrant a curse that blighted her potions. That took way too much effort to cast.

She studied the intruders’ strange clothing again.

Fashion changed with time, as she’d learned firsthand when she’d traipsed into town after being holed up in the forest for a whole decade after Rose and Mother died.

She had been greeted by breasts. Many of the women were in dresses with scooped collars when previously, flaunting one’s bosom was reserved for harlots.

Apparently, while Thorn had been playing hermit, a fashionable lady from the capital had visited the town baring half her chest.

And now breasts seemed to be out—of fashion, that is—again; women wore pants, and men exposed their hairy knees and preferred chunky shoes. What drastic changes from the trends Thorn had seen in town just this afternoon. Fashion had evolved so rapidly. Impossibly rapidly.

She gulped as another plausible explanation struck her. “Or a lot of time has passed.”

Many witches had attempted to concoct a time travel potion, mostly because it would be handy to be able to fix a past mistake or avoid a future calamity. But as far as Thorn knew, none had succeeded.

“What year is it?” she asked, her voice nearly cracking.

“Do you not know?” Cat Paws raised an eyebrow. “It’s 1660.”

“Bones and blood! I’m the first witch to have done it!

” Thorn pumped her fists in the air. She had indeed traveled back in time.

Quite a bit had gone wrong in her brewing of the New-and-Improved True Love potion.

She had been most distracted by Penny-Pincher peeking in through the window, and she must have added an extra pinch of salt and somehow, that had resulted in a Time Travel potion.

And she was, as far as she knew, the first witch to successfully brew one.

But then she realized this wasn’t the time for relishing in accidental achievements.

There was something more important: a chance to undo the tragedy that had occurred thirty years ago.

She was about to ask what month in 1660 it was when the intruders laughed.

Then the sight of the potions on the shelves reminded her that their curdling suggested a journey forward in time.

“I’m not kidding. Tell me before warts sprout upon all of you, what year is it?”

Yet another intruder sauntered in. “We do not know the exact year Covenstead was built. It was discovered twenty years ago when the city developed this area, but they couldn’t decide what to do with it. It was pretty much left alone until the Historical Society purchased it ten years ago.”

This knowledgeable woman also wore pants. But unlike the other intruders, she had a lapel pin that was inscribed:

MEG MILESTON

HISTORICAL SOCIETY TREASURER

COVENSTEAD TOUR GUIDE

“The roof had caved in,” Meg continued. “And most of the furniture had been ravaged by rain and time. But the bones of the house were solid, and even the floorboards were still in tip-top shape. To turn it into a heritage museum, we salvaged what we could. What we couldn’t, we replaced with close replicas.

And we only carried out minor renovations for safety and to add a bit of modern convenience.

Otherwise, it remains mostly unchanged.”

Meg paused her lecture. She had finally noticed Thorn. She unhooked the red rope from the golden pole and gestured for Thorn to join the intruders. “Please step back behind the barricade,” she said sternly. “And please refrain from touching anything.”

Thorn thought of cursing Meg with Rotten Toes potion, but Meg’s lips were pressed into an intimidating thin line. It might be best to play along until Thorn could figure out when she was, and what was going on.

Cat Paws smirked and whispered to another intruder, “The tour guide is a surprisingly great actor, too!”

Meg waited until Thorn was in the makeshift hallway between the ropes before continuing her lecture. “There was nothing in historical records, as this was just a little house in the woods. We named it Covenstead because from studying the contents, it seemed that a witch once lived here.”

The six intruders turned toward Thorn with anticipation. They believed her to be an actor playing a witch. She was terrible at pretending, but if there was a role she could play, witch would certainly be it.

“That’s me, all right. I’m the great witch Thorn Scarhart. I shall hex you for trespassing into my house: May your tea always be lukewarm.”

Meg furrowed her brow. She opened her mouth to protest, but before she could, Cat Paws exclaimed with unbridled joy, “Never knew history could be this fun!”

Meg looked at him, then at Thorn, and the annoyance on her face disappeared.

She gestured to a torn letter framed and displayed next to the wall of drawers.

“History is fun! When the Historical Society was first going through this house and cataloging its contents, we found part of a letter dated 1690. So Covenstead is at least that old.”

Thorn walked over to the framed letter. The handwriting on it looked like Madam Maude’s, and she was inviting someone to “A Night of Love and Lemonade.”

“I’ve heard of this lemonade drink becoming popular in the big cities,” Thorn said. “And how old does 1690 make the letter?”

“Looks like witches don’t math,” the woman in a pair of skintight blue pants said.

“Witches must not like interior design, either,” Hairy Knees said, sweeping his hand from one half of the house to the other.

“I love open-plan homes, but this is a little too open. There’s no clear separation of living room, kitchen, and apothecary.

Even the bedroom isn’t a room—just a bed in the corner. ”