Page 64 of The Witch They Fear

"Mama, you look—"

"I look like a woman who's been reading dead-language spell theory since midnight. I'm aware." She flips a page with the careful reverence of someone handling explosives. "Not until I call, you hear? Now go."

So, giggling, we go.

The Saturday market fills Main Street like a party that started without us. Folding tables and striped canopies line both sides of the road, and the whole town seems to be here—families with strollers, old men in lawn chairs, kids chasing each other between the booths. The smell hits me first: frying batter, fresh herbs, something smoky and sweet that has my mouth watering. Music is coming from somewhere—accordion and fiddle again, a live duo set up near the hardware store.

And the magic is everywhere. If you know how to feel it.

To the humans browsing tomatoes and arguing over hot sauce, this is just a farmer's market. But I can feel what they can't—the witch vendor three tables down whose sachets of "dried lavender" hum with enchantment under the ordinary packaging. The shifter running the crawfish booth whose warm, restless signature presses against my awareness every time he laughs too loud. The woman selling candles whose eyes flash amber for a half-second when the sunlight hits them wrong. They're all here, tucked into the fabric of a Saturday morning, hiding in plain sight the way supernaturals have always hidden—behind normal jobs and normal smiles and the comfortable assumption that humans don't look too closely.

I stop walking. Nellie stops with me.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, I just—" I look around. At the witch selling enchanted lavender as aromatherapy. At the shifter whose handshake with a human customer lingers a beat too long, like he's reading something through the contact. At the candle woman adjusting her sunglasses to cover the amber flash. "They're everywhere. We’re… everywhere."

"Welcome to small-town Louisiana." Nellie links her arm through mine. "The ratio's different out here. Less segregation, more... cohabitation. With a deep history of spiritualism and spooky vibes," she says it as she waggles her fingers, “the people sort of lean into eccentricity.”

"That's wild."

"That's Thibodaux." She shrugs.

We drift through the market. Nellie knows everyone—she's stopped every ten feet by someone who knew her as a kid, went to school with her mom, sold her dad fishing bait in 2003. She introduces me as "my friend Calypso from school" and nobody asks follow-up questions and nobody flinches and I realize, with a slow, aching clarity, that this is the first time since I was thirteen that I've been in a crowd of people who don't know what I've done.

I'm just a girl. Nellie's friend. Browsing tomatoes on a Saturday morning.

We stop at a booth selling potted herbs—the witch with the enchanted lavender. Up close she's got silver dreads and rings on every finger, and she clocks me the second I step into her space.

Witch recognizing witch. A small nod.

"Go ahead," she says. "They don't bite."

I reach out. My fingers brush the leaves of the nearest rosemary plant.

It shrivels.

The green dulls under my fingertips. The leaves curl inward, edges going brown and brittle, the stem drooping like something vital just got pulled out of it. The rosemary plant that was vibrant and humming three seconds ago sags in its pot, half-dead, looking like it's been sitting in a drought for a month.

I yank my hand back. Shit.

The vendor's eyebrows climb. She looks at the plant. Looks at me. Her mouth opens.

"I'm so sorry—I didn't mean to—"

Nellie's hand reaches past me. Her fingers close gently around the wilted stem and I feel her magic pulse—warm, green, earthy, the opposite of whatever I just did. The rosemary shudders. The brown recedes. The leaves uncurl, plumping with color, and tiny white flowers bud along the stem, opening one by one until the plant is fuller and more alive than it was before I touched it.

Nellie pulls her hand back. Gives the vendor a sheepish grin.

"Light and dark," the vendor says quietly, looking between the two of us. She angles her body so the humans at the next booth can't see the plant that just died and resurrected in thirty seconds. "Hand in hand. That's how it's always been."

Nellie bumps my shoulder. "Don't look like that. You didn't hurt it—you just... overwhelmed it. Your magic runs hot. Plants aren't used to that kind of intensity."

"I killed a rosemary bush by touching it."

"And I brought it back. That's what friends are for." She links her arm through mine and steers me away from the booth before I can spiral. "Also, you owe that woman a rosemary plant. We'll come back later."

My eyes burn. I blink it back.