Which I do.
Now here…hereis where Emily keeps all her incredible and innate talent tightly sealed up in little vials. The White River coven is the only one I have, but there are many other kitchen-witch covens in this part of the world and we do trades with them. The church pantry isn’t actually a food bank, it’s the storefront for my very lucrative apothecary.
Joshua follows me in, closes the door, and starts reading off the list he made, adding a question mark after each statement. “Dizzy? Sleepy? Exposed? Living Dead?”
“Hmmm.” I ponder these options. “What is ‘exposed’?”
Joshua’s eyes flick up to the ceiling like he’s thinking. Then he looks back at me. “It makes you kind of… impressionable? But with a healthy dose of ‘don’t give a fuck.’”
“What do you suggest?”
“Well.” He takes a moment to think again. “Are we going to kill him?”
“Definitely.”
“Milk him?”
“Yes.”
“Sex?”
“Orgy.”
Joshua smirks. “Well, that’s fun.”
“I certainly hope so. He’s kind of a dick.”
“And what are we harvesting? Liver? Heart? Gonads?”
“All three, I think. But we’ll let Emily decide once we get up to the coven.”
Joshua nods, collecting the jars off the shelf. “OK. Well, if Emily’s tweaking, let’s just take all four.”
“Perfect,” I say. “Do you want to ride with me? Or meet us up there?”
Joshua glances in the direction of the pantry, then looks at me. “I’ll meet you there. He’s…”
“Scary?”
He points at me. “That.”
“Well, you won’t have to worry about him, Joshua.” Then I reach over and place a loving hand on his cheek. “He’ll never touch you. He’ll never even get the chance.”
The entire town of White Riveris mine. All of it, including the people. They are all part of the coven of witches I’ve been breeding for the last hundred and twenty years, give or take. But they are nothing like the line of witches that Syrsee comes from. There is no Black blood running through my women. In fact, it’s the men who have most of the power in my line.
The women, like Emily and all the cooks who came before her, are good at manipulating the inherent properties of plants and mixing them all together in certain proportions using recipes passed down through generations of mothers and daughters. But the potions can only do so much. They help things along.
All the real magic is in the secretions. And manipulating secretions is the magic of men.
Which is why I keep an ample supply of scions. It wasn’t a hedge against Ryet. Well, maybe a tiny hedge. But I knew he was going to work.
No. I keep the scions, like Kael here, for his blood. Blood that is half mine. Which makes it all mine. And then, should I ever need some help to move things along, I come up here with a scion, have a little ritual, kill him, milk him, harvest him, and give that all to Emily—or whoever was in charge of the kitchen at the time, which hasn’t always been Emily, but nonetheless, it is now— and this little kitchen witch will cook me up a custom potion and put it in a vial, or cook me up a pudding and put it in a jar.
Most of the time I take the potion or eat the pudding myself and then I offer Ryet a drink. This is how I slowly,slowlychanged him over the last several decades.
It wasn’t the Darkness.
It wasmeusing the Darkness and the men of the White River Coven to create a special kind of magic that I call the Dusk.
