“Fine. But, Carly?” she said, sugar sweet.
“Yes?” I slumped over the counter, exhausted from this conversation.
“Be sure to leave your pitchfork at home.”
My pitchfork was my home-protection weapon of choice. It had gotten a lot of use over the past six months, what with a couple of murder cases I’d been wrapped up in. It was also what I’d used when I forked Patricia Davis Jackson in her aerobically toned tush. I’d been tempted to smuggle it into the party tonight just for old times’ sake. “But—”
“Tonight has to be perfect,” Mama continued. “Our family must paint the picture of propriety.”
That was going to take a very large canvas and a small miracle. My family was anything but proper. “I can’t make any promises.”
“So help me, Carly Bell, if you raise a ruckus . . . There must be no scenes, no drama, no nothing, y’hear?”
“I hear, I hear!”
Delia smiled. Clearly, she heard, too. Lordy be, people over in Huntsville could probably hear.
Before she could say anything else, I quickly said, “I’ll see you later, Mama!” and hung up.
No scenes. No drama. No ruckus.
Shoo. I couldn’t help but think my mama had just jinxed this party seven ways to Sunday.
Maybe this shindig wasn’t going to be as deadly boring as I had thought.
Which was just fine by me—I loved a front-row seat to drama.
Just as long as it didn’t turn out plain ol’ deadly . . .
Chapter Two
“I still can’t believe you’re going to this party,” Delia said, carrying the garment bag over to me.
Despite the fact that up until six months ago Delia had been my nemesis, she knew me well.
“Word is the guest list tops two hundred and fifty,” she added, concern etching her gaze.
I understood why she was worried. As an empath, someone who can feel other people’s physical ailments and emotions, I used my gift to diagnose my customers by reading their energy. I then used that information along with my witchy heritage to create the perfect potion to cure that client. But that was on a one-on-one basis in a comfortable, controlled environment here in the shop. It was a situation where I had the ability to turn on and off my abilities at will, which was something I’d worked years to achieve.
Large gatherings, however, were another matter altogether and gave me nothing but anxiety. Just thinking about it made me reach for the engraved silver locket that hung from a long chain around my neck. It was a protection charm gifted to me by my Grammy Adelaide when I was born. It gave me the ability to block overwhelming energy in my immediate surroundings so I could lead a somewhat normal life without being consumed by the idiosyncrasies of those around me. Over the years it had become a bit of a security blanket as well; I often held it out of habit and for comfort.
Unfortunately, my charmed locket wasn’t foolproof, and it was especially weak when I was in a crowd.
Delia knew all this, because she was an empath, too, a characteristic passed on through the women in our family, straight from my great-great-grandmother Leila Bell, who’d been an empath and hoodoo practitioner who’d died tragically.
“Dylan,” I said simply. “He wants nothing more than for Patricia and me to patch up our relationship.” I wasn’t sure that was possible, but for him I’d try. The things I did for love. “And my daddy might need my help keeping Mama under control.”
“Impossible,” Delia said with a smirk. “On both counts.”
She knew Patricia and my mama well, too.
Delia and I had been estranged growing up, the result of a family fight over the legacy of this shop’s secrets: The charmed Leilara drops and the herbal recipes that made my potions magical.
The Hartwell family’s magical secrets had always been passed down through the eldest child in the family. Currently that was my daddy, but because he wasn’t an empath, he had opted to turn his role in the family business over to me as soon as I was old enough.
That decision had sent my aunt Neige into a fury, because she believed that if the role was to be turned over to anyone, it should be her. And if not her, then to Delia, who’d technically been gestationally older than I had been on the day we were born, because Delia had been full term while I’d been born two months prematurely. Prematurely . . . six full minutes before my cousin.
When denied her request by Grammy Adelaide, Neige rebelled by embracing the dark magic half of our heritage that came from our great-great-grandfather Abraham Leroux, a voodoo practitioner. She eventually opened a shop in Hitching Post that specialized in selling hexes, a store Delia now owned after her mama followed love to New Orleans.
The rift between the siblings had divided the Hartwell family for thirty years until last May when Delia had extended an olive branch to me, and I’d grabbed on to it with both hands.