A Sorceress Comes to Call

by T. Kingfisher

“Does he often complain about hair?” asked Cordelia weakly. “Now that I don’t know,” admitted Alice.

She looks like a horse that’s been beaten so often that it doesn’t know what is expected of it any longer. And who doesn’t expect that to ever change.

Hester was no hero, but there was nothing in her that would allow her to turn away from a person who had been dropped on her doorstep. Even if that person had brought Doom along with her.

There you go, she thought, as Evangeline turned away to the sideboard. Ignore me. Keep thinking that I’m just a silly old woman. It will make it easier for me to do whatever I’m going to do to stop you. I just wish I knew what the hell that was going to be.

“We’ll take murder off the table for the moment,” said Hester, not without a trace of regret.

Fight back a little, child. Even a rabbit in a trap can bite.

“No!” said Cordelia a bit desperately, wondering how she had been batting her eyelashes, maybe she’d just been blinking, oh god, she was blinking wrong, she knew it, she’d been worrying about it ever since visiting the dressmaker.

“When they tell you to chase your dreams, I suspect they mean something else entirely. Though I do wish my dream had given me just a glimpse of whatever it was.

“I go to confession whenever the guilt gets to be too much.” “And how often is that?” “It hasn’t happened yet, but you never know.

“I was not expecting this house party to involve quite so much premeditated murder,” he muttered.

“Look,” said Evermore, “there’s a reason I describe it as a collection and not as a library. Granddad wanted to own the books. Catalogue and display were someone else’s problem.”

“If it turns out that the secret was hidden in A Brief Treatise on the History of Potatoes, I shall be very cross,” Hester said. “You may blame me,” Willard told her, “and I shall retire and take up potato farming to make up for it.”

“Madam.” He frowned at her. “I am a butler. Do you truly believe that I do not know how to dispatch a houseguest if required?”