She nodded. She wished she were back in her bedroom in West Chester that moment. She saw in her mind the windows there and her bed with the blue and gold comforter that matched the wallpaper: planets and stars and a cow jumping over the moon. She wondered where Mom had stored that comforter these days. The attic? A guest bedroom closet?
“You are now a part of my world, Cali,” Anise continued, emphasizing her new name, an undercurrent to her voice that was vaguely menacing. “You are a part of Sage’s world and Clary’s world and the world of some striking people who can make a difference for good or ill in all that you know. You are not a part of your precious Pennsylvania. You’re in New Hampshire. In Bethel. So don’t cross me. Not this afternoon. Not ever.” She brought her fingers to Garnet’s cheeks and gently grazed the skin there with her nails; when she did, the silver bangles on her wrist jingled like chimes. “Think of that skull you found in your basement. The bones you touched with those little fingers of yours. The next time you are pondering whether you like your name or whether you should follow one of my instructions, I urge you to recall that skull. Recall the eye sockets. Recall the jaw. Recall the very idea that someone was buried in your new house and how scared you were when you found the remains. You, too, Rosemary. Now, do you have any other questions?”
Garnet thought she was going to cry, and so she bit her tongue and breathed in deeply through her nose. Then she glanced at Hallie, who was staring down at her feet. Her sister was wearing blue jeans and what she called her cinnamon toast socks: They were brown with yellow spots.
“Good. And if it makes you more comfortable with your new names, rest assured that your mother is taking one, too. And she rather likes hers.” Abruptly Anise stood up to her full height. Garnet noticed that Clary and Sage were now standing beside Anise, the three of them looking like severe and demanding teachers, their eyes ominous and their arms folded across their chests.
“So, Cali,” Anise said finally, her voice once more sounding calm and caring and kind. “We have the rose hips to prepare. I believe Sage will show you how.”
W hen Emily walked into John’s office, he was pressing his phone against his ear with his shoulder, finishing a conversation with a client. He was rubbing a cream onto his hands. He smiled at her, motioned for her to sit, and said good-bye to whomever he was speaking with.
“Want some?” he asked, tipping the small compact with the cream toward her. “My hands are chapped raw after a White Mountain winter. Between the woodstove and the time I spend on the mountain, they’re an absolute disaster.”
She dipped two fingers into the compact and took some. She wondered if it was the same sort of cream Ginger Jackson had rubbed near her eyes that night at Reseda’s. “Did Ginger make this?” she asked.
“Nope. Clary.”
“Ginger makes something similar.”
“Of course she does. All the women do.” He paused and smiled. Then: “You must think we are all awfully vain.”
“No.” She decided to try a small joke, hoping she might learn from it. “But I do think you’re all witches.”
He laughed ever so slightly and shook his head. “More like chemists,” he said. “It’s not about spells and magic. It’s not about pendants and charms and”-he waved his hand dismissively-“crystals. It’s about chemistry. It’s about natural medicine.”
“Potions.”
He pretended to shush her, his eyes wide. “Tinctures,” he said, aware this was a semantic difference at best. Meanwhile, she felt her skin tingling where she had massaged in the cream. Already her hands looked better.
O n the first spectacularly warm day of spring, you sit on the walkway outside your front door and watch the ants, which built a small hill between two edges of slate overnight. It is lunchtime, and you have brought with you a piece of banana bread that Anise baked. You decide that you really know nothing about bugs. Really, nothing at all. But in the past you have watched ants eat. Everyone has. You have watched them move crumbs that look proportionately like boulders. An efficient, almost robotic swarm. They break apart what they can and move what they can, carting the bounty above their heads and their trunks, disappearing either into anthills in the ground or nests behind the walls. They move in lines. You have seen it as you sat on the front stoop of your old house in West Chester and, years and years ago, as you would lie on the grass in Connecticut when you were a small boy.
And you are quite sure that you have never seen ants do this. Never. The small ones die within inches of the banana bread morsels. They take one of the minuscule crumbs you have broken off and collapse under its weight seconds after starting off. And the larger ones? They last a little longer. They stagger in circles as if they have grown disoriented-panicked-and then they wobble and crumple. It’s as if their tiny legs have just buckled.
You tell yourself that they were not really panicked. Not even scared. You know that an ant’s nervous system isn’t built that way. Most likely, they were merely confused, suddenly unsure of what they were doing or why they were dying. It just looked like they were scared.
Still, you cannot help but wonder what herbs would poison an ant-and what those herbs might do to a human.
I t was sixty-five degrees outside, but Reseda could feel the temperature was about to plummet. The sun had been high overhead at lunchtime, but now a great swash of gunmetal gray clouds was darkening the sky, rolling in from the northwest and stretching deep into Canada. She gently shut the door to her greenhouse and turned toward Anise, who was misting the tentacles, nacreous as marble, that were branching out from the poisonous acedia. The acedia was spreading like a spider plant, and its tentacles were dripping over the sides of the pedestal on which it resided. Reseda knew that Anise didn’t approve; she felt it should be trimmed back, the shoots chopped and the toxins harvested. But Reseda was so pleased with her success with the plant that she couldn’t bear to don gloves and take a knife to it. Not yet. No one had ever had such a triumph with acedia. The plant was named after the Latin word for sloth because it was a sedative and, used improperly in a tincture, lethal. She wondered how she would feel about her achievement if it had been named for the Latin word for pride.
“What are you feeding the pilot?” she asked Anise now.
Anise continued to circle the plant, careful not to make eye contact with her.
“Crumpets,” she answered evasively, her voice uncharacteristically light. “Always vegan. Always delicious.”
“I’m serious.”
“I am, too.”
“I don’t see what good could possibly come from poisoning him.”
“Me, neither,” said Anise, and she put down the mister on one of the gardening tables and stroked the stone Baphomet’s beard. “Do you ever find it odd how out of touch a pilot is with the earth? Oh, they see how beautiful it is from twenty or thirty thousand feet. But their whole purpose is to separate themselves from the soil. To be above the ground, rather than one with it. You grow beautiful things, Reseda. That pilot never will. I’m really not all that interested in him.”
“But you have been constantly filling the Lintons’ refrigerator. Bringing them small confections with his name on them.”
“I’m a one-woman Welcome Wagon. You’re a real estate agent: That should make you happy.”
“Just because you put the captain’s name on it doesn’t mean he’s the only one eating it. I am sure the girls have eaten some of your… confections.”
“Perhaps. But it’s not like they’re hash brownies. Anything special in them would demand, well, repeat exposures.”
“Hallie had nightmares.”
“We all have nightmares,” Anise said, dismissing her concern. “I find both girls very interesting. Don’t you? I find them curious. Or do only the dead inspire you these days?”
“I worry about them,” she said, ignoring the dig. “They have endured an awful lot.”
“I agree. And that’s what makes them so… special. So receptive. It changes the brain chemicals. You know that as well as anyone.”
“You’re not trying to up the level of trauma?”
“Maybe a little. But mostly I’m just an observer. I’ve been watching them. We all have. I had them working at the communal greenhouse again this afternoon. And I know you’ve been watching them, too,” Anise said, and
