Page 17 of Poison Nights & Twilight Alchemy

“Love is the least of my concerns.”

“For now,” Vesta declared. “However, we have an important task ahead of us to focus on.” She guided Dulce down the cellar’s stone staircase, its familiar scent of peonies enveloping her. Her mother had always sprayed a mixture of peonies down here to keep the musky smell of earth out, and even though it had been three years since her mother passed, hints of the scent still lingered.

When they reached the cellar, nothing peculiar caught Dulce’s attention, even when she looked back at her memories of playing there as a child.

Everything was the same. Shelves of yarn, bolts of fabric, and embroidery threads lined the stone walls. Worn tables of oak stood beneath wide chandeliers ofhalf-melted candles, knitting needles in brass canisters across their surface. The comfortable chairs with their silk cushions worn, thick carpets of wool displaying animals she had loved to make stories of while her mother crocheted on a winter afternoon, and the massive hearth.

Vesta carefully put the candlestick along the floor and pulled a chair from a corner to a nearby shelf. She climbed onto the chair and ran her hands across the top of the shelf until she found a thin braided rope and tugged on it.

The sound of scraping stone against stone echoed behind Dulce, and she whirled around, gasping. A wide slab of stone slid aside, leaving a cavernous opening within the cellar’s wall.

Perhaps Dulce didn’t know all the manor’s secrets after all.

“Your mother learned about this room on her twentieth birthday,” Vesta said, carefully stepping down from the chair, “just as her mother before her. I don’t know the precise answer to what this land holds, but I do know you are to protect it. All firstborn witch daughters are.”

Vesta disappeared into the shadows of the mysterious room and returned to face Dulce. She held a tome of leather and gold reverently. “See if you can find something in her spell book,” she started. “Though I guarded this room, I vowed to your mother that I would never read this, only do my duty to make certain it and you were safe until your twentieth birthday. When I thought you had passed, I was sure I’d failed.”

“No, Vesta, you didn’t. I’m here.” Dulce rushed forward to grasp the older woman’s shoulders and gentlysqueezed them. “Mother made sure I could never be poisoned.”

Pushing the spell book into her hands as tears streamed from her eyes, Vesta gently stroked Dulce’s hair just like she did when she was a child. “Your mother was a very wise woman.”

“She was.” Dulce suddenly laughed while embracing Vesta, such happy relief washing over her. She was alive, something she didn’t know she’d taken for granted.

“Take your time in here,” Vesta said at last, lifting the candlestick from the floor and placing it within the shadowy room, preparing to leave Dulce alone. “I’ll check on Sylvan and Lucas.”

“Thank you, Vesta. For everything.”

Alone, Dulce stepped hesitantly into the new room, the scent of peonies even stronger within. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, filled with jars of every shape and dimension. Both dark and colorful candles, mysterious metal objects, and cauldrons the size of her palm to the size of a tub. Dulce placed her mother’s spell book on a lone table covered in embroidered silk. The tome appeared ancient, its pages yellowed and frayed, the leather binding peeling.

She lit a few more candles around the room, noticing that not a speck of dust lingered on any surface. Resting her candlestick on the table beside it, she opened the tome, and what appeared to be a regular-sized book expanded into something much larger with many more pages than the human eye would’ve seen. Here wasn’t just any common parlor book—this was a true alchemy spell book, one any witch would certainly treasure.

Studying the first page, Dulce scanned through spellafter spell, fascinated instantly. Growing things from seeds in a matter of moments, levitation, shifting, dream-walking. As she read one page after another, she found nothing about drawing magic from land. Not until she reached the middle of the book where a folded letter had been placed, its crisp paper much newer than the tome’s. It was written in her mother’s familiar hand.

Dearest Dulce,

I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for you longer, but I am part of the land now. Land that you will protect. My ancient bristlecone pine is yours, a Tree of Life, one of five secretly scattered across the territories. Each represent a point on a star. They are the key to everything, to life itself. If their power is ever disturbed, even just one, their roots will begin to lift, altering magic. They would eventually become stone, the plants and animals the same, our land’s vital water turned to brackish death, and the air will be filled with a poisonous fog as the sun itself dies, leaving nothing to flourish.

You must not let this happen. You must protect our land, our single tree, as generations have done before you, my beautiful, brave girl. It will come as no surprise to you that you don’t come from a line of common witches, but great ones. I didn’t want magic to be forced upon you during your younger years as it was on me, perhaps that was selfish on my part by not showing you this book sooner. But I wanted you to slowly learn to love magic and not have it be a burden on you. However, I’m now regretful that I won’t get to see you truly grow into your magic completely after your twentieth birthday.

Everything you need to know is already in your heart.

Love you always and forever,

Mother

Dulce’s hands shook as fresh tears rained down her face. It was as though she could hear her mother’s voice speaking to her in this very room. She missed her so much she was sure her heart would break. She wished she’d told her all the things she hadn’t gotten a chance to, thanked her for all the times she’d failed to. If she were there now, she would tell her that she’d taught alchemy to Dulce in the perfect way, that she had loved it, and still very much did.

Her mother wanted her to protect the bristlecone pine, but that only reminded her how another witch had done something to the tree the night before with magic.

Dulce slammed the book shut and fled from the room, not slowing until she reached the ancient tree. The gentle giant towered over her, its great twisted bark a comforting sight in the drab daylight.

Her lips parted in horror as her gaze met the earth surrounding the tree. The land lay cracked in wide jagged wounds, a web of injuries, oozing tar like open veins.

CHAPTER EIGHT

REED

“You two fine gentlemen ever heard the one about the two cows and the old goat-herder with the giant pizzle who caught the hog pox?” Reed poked his elbows into the burly enforcers sitting too close at his sides.

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