A Potion to Die For: A Magic Potion Mystery Read Free

was forced into hibernation until I could handle society again.
    My empathetic gift also came with an added bonus that no one else—not even Delia—shared: a sixth sense of sorts that I had no power over whatsoever. Warning signals that all wasn’t quite right in my world. My best friend, Ainsley, called them my “witchy senses.” It was as good a description as any.
    “How serious?” I asked.
    “Very.”
    I was feeling warning twinges now, and had to wonder if they were coming from the crowd outside . . . or Delia’s dramatic pronouncement.
    “Well, out with it already.” I was very wary of Delia, and wondered if she was trying to trick me somehow. As a dabbler in the dark arts, one who used her magic with no concern for its consequences or side effects, Delia’s magic was definitely dangerous but not nearly as potent as my magic.
    She’d do just about anything to learn my spells and uncover the secret component that made my potions so successful—mostly because she was still in a snit that due to an unfortunate (for her) case of bad timing, I had possession of the secret magical ingredient and she didn’t. And essentially, because of that one ingredient, my magic was more powerful than hers would ever be—and that bugged her to no end.
    “Rude,” she muttered.
    “I’m kind of busy, if you can’t tell.”
    Delia was six minutes younger than I—a source of contention that had created a chasm as deep as Alabama’s Pisgah Gorge through the Hartwell family, splitting brother and sister apart.
    All because I had been born two months prematurely, making
me
the oldest grandchild.
    Making
me
the heir to the family grimoire and the keeper of the Leilara bottle and all its magical secrets.
    Making
my
abilities superior to Delia’s.
    The grimoire was basically a recipe book for Leila’s hoodoo remedies, folk magic at its most natural. It had been handed down to the oldest child on my father’s side of the family ever since Leila and Abraham died tragically. And the Leilara, well, that was pure magic born from their deaths. The way the Leilara drops mixed with specific herbs and minerals in a potion was what made that concoction effective. I couldn’t rightly say I understood how it worked, but I firmly believed magic was one of those things to
feel
rather than study.
    If my mother hadn’t gone into labor two months early, the grimoire and the Leilara would have gone to Delia and the dark side. Aunt Neige had argued for years that gestational age should have taken precedence over actual birth dates, but her outcry had been overruled by Grammy Adelaide.
    Currently, the grimoire and the Leilara were safely hidden, tucked inside a specially crafted hidey-hole in my shop’s potion-making room. Hidden, because if Delia had her way and got her hands on the book of spells and the bottle of magic drops . . . Right now the Leilara drops were used for good, to heal. But with Delia, they’d be used for evil, to make her hexes that much more wicked.
    “I had a dream,” Delia said, fussing with her dog’s basket.
    “A Martin Luther King Jr. kind? Or an REM, drool-on-the-pillow kind?” I asked, looking up at her.
    “REM. But I don’t drool.”
    “Noted,” I said, but didn’t believe it for a minute. I shifted on the floor; my rear was going numb. “What was it about? The dream?”
    Delia said, “You.”
    “Me? Why?”
    Delia closed her eyes and shook her head. After a dramatic pause, she looked at me straight on. “Don’t ask me. It’s not like I have any control over what I dream. Trust me. Otherwise, I’d be dreaming of David Beckham, not you.”
    I could understand that. “Why are you telling me this?”
    We weren’t exactly on friendly terms.
    Delia bit her thumbnail. All of her black-painted nails had been nibbled to the quick. “I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you, and I daresay the feeling is mutual.”
    I didn’t feel the need to agree aloud. I had
some
manners, after all. “But?” I