“Have you eaten yet?”
I realized that in my worry about Jade and the search for the ingredients, I had forgotten about dinner.
“Um…no, I guess not. Jade had some-”
I won’t say no to food.
I rolled my eyes, giving Faith a long-suffering look. “She had half a block of cheese and a whole sleeve of crackers.”
Not a whole sleeve.
Faith waved away the explanation. “I’ll get something for both of you, don’t worry.”
She came out several minutes later, motioning to us to join her in the dining room. We sat at the huge old table, Faith and I facing each other with Jade in the seat at the head. Faith dished up bowls of a delicious smelling chicken noodle soup. I noticed that she’d made more of her homemade bread, and my mouth began to water.
“Eat first, then we’ll talk.”
I had no problem obeying. The soup was out of this world.
“Thanks, Faith. I needed that.”
She grinned. “This soup was another of Willa’s specialties. It really does have healing properties, and it’s made using herbs and vegetables she taught me to grow.”
Her smile faded a little as her gaze drifted off into space. My heart broke a little as I watched her. She and her sisters had been so close. I couldn’t imagine being in her position, her husband and sisters gone, all the people she loved slaughtered by some sadistic witch, forced to live out here like some kind of fugitive.
“So what brought you here, Sage?”
I straightened, snapping out of my dark thoughts.
“There have been a lot of weird things at Grandma’s house. That’s why I didn’t come for so long. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
Faith’s face creased with concern. “You poor thing. What’s been going on?”
I told her about the note on the door, the face at the window, the invisible person following me, and the multiple break-ins. Faith’s expression grew fearful, and a little confused.
“What does this person want?” she mused. “As far as I know, Celeste didn’t have any kind of ultra-powerful weapon or potion or anything like that.”
I frowned. “I know, it’s really weird. Jade and I have a theory that maybe when this witch followed me to the shop, she was trying to steal potion ingredients for a spell to weaken the house’s defenses.”
I related the story of finding the potion recipe and my idea for combining it with the shield spell to get rid of the barrier on the door. She raised an eyebrow and gave an approving smile.
“That could work. Did you get the ingredients from the shop, then?”
I grinned as I opened my bag to show her the bottles inside.
“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s get brewing!”
Jade and I followed her to the kitchen, where she hauled a large black cauldron out of a cupboard. After hoisting it onto the stove, she hurried into the neighboring den and came back with a piece of paper and a pen.
“If you’ve got that recipe on your phone, I’ll need you to copy it to paper. I just can’t abide machines.”
Chuckling to myself, I copied it out and handed it to her. She put on a jeweled pair of reading glasses and squinted down at the writing.
“Good Lord, these are rare ingredients.”
“I know, I’m out of stock for five of those now.”
She tsk-tsked to herself as she scanned the instructions.
“This is a complicated one. You know I’m not as good at potions as Celeste was, right?”
I nodded. “You told me. But maybe between the two of us, we can figure it out.”
“All right. The directions have to be followed exactly. You read, and I’ll measure and pour.”
Faith got the water boiling, then added the ingredients one at a time in their exact order. The potion simmered, a burgundy-colored steam rising from the cauldron, exactly as the instructions said it should.
After a few minutes, though, the potion started to reek. Faith and I both began to cough. I looked back at the ingredients and realized that we hadn’t set a timer. It was only supposed to simmer for two minutes.
“Take it off the heat, quick!”
With a strange, burp-like sound, the liquid in the cauldron fizzled, then evaporated. Faith sighed as she leaned against the countertop.
“Oh, dear. Maybe we should have started with something simpler.”
I looked over the jars. “We didn’t use the entire bottle on any of these. We could try again.”
Faith tapped her chin, considering. “Okay. But we really should try something simpler first.”
