dreading the flood of emotions I was sure would overwhelm me at any moment.
On the other hand, those emotions could’ve been waiting to catch me off guard. Hit me when I wasn’t expecting them. I needed to keep an eye on them. Keep them locked down tight.
The door creaked as if it was making the only sound the house had heard since the last time I closed it. Or was it a sad kind of greeting? Or a cry for help? I couldn’t tell.
I suppressed a shiver as I entered the open first floor. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Furniture covered in sheets, boards on the windows, the whole shebang. The air was stale and smelled of dust, old magic, and salt.
Hurrying to the kitchen, I put the grocery bags on the dusty white drape-covered kitchen table and flicked on the light. To my relief, it came on. It would be dark in a few short hours, and the last thing I wanted was no power. And that saved me a phone call to the electric company. They were lucky.
I opened the fridge and sniffed, then groaned while covering my nose. I’d scrubbed it before leaving it to be turned off, but it had still developed a smell. It was at least still clean. I just had to get rid of the smell. I didn’t have any herbs to mix up a spell, but I had picked up some baking soda while at the store. Thank the goddess for small things.
Unpacking my bags, I opened one of the boxes of baking soda and put it in the back corner to start absorbing the smells. The freezer was next. I slid the second box in and remembered I forgot to buy a bag of ice. This old fridge didn’t have an icemaker, so I was SOL for my Diet Cola for a while.
And on that thought, I realized I might have to replace it to put the house on the market. I’d know for sure when the realtor came by. For now, I’d get the place ready for visitors.
Grabbing a towel out of the cabinet where they’d been all my life, I smelled it. It still had a faint scent of the homemade detergent Auntie used. She’d scented it with dried roses. Smiling, I dampened it and wiped out the cabinet my Yaya and Aunt Winnie had always used for dry goods, then put away the rest of the food.
With the kitchen settled, for the time being, I walked around the house before I went out to the car to unload the bags I’d brought with me.
Ah, but first, the boards needed to go. Drawing on my witchy side and not the other part of me that I refused to use, I used the magic to remove the boards from the windows. The bright afternoon sun streamed in, lighting up each room so there was no need to turn the lights on as I went. The home was built with large windows in each room. I walked out of the kitchen toward the back porch and was surprised when a sense of dismay washed over me. Auntie had always kept an herb garden out here. It’d once been full of life and beautiful.
Someone well in the past had converted the original porch of the house into a sunroom, then added another porch on the back of that at some point. Both the sunroom and the porch had been filled with a variety of herbs and flowers during Aunt Winnie’s life.
Seeing it without all the little pots of greenery only drove home that I’d never see my Aunt Winnie again. She’d raised me, along with my grandmother, Yaya, and filled the hole that would’ve been there from losing my parents at such a young age.
My amazing parents were Beth and John Howe. I was five when dad died in a car accident while coming home from work. I didn’t remember much about him, but the few memories I had were happy, and I cherished having that piece of him. We moved in here after that and became a house full of witches.
Mom’s death had hit me hard. I was ten and she climbed a ladder to hang some holiday lights. A freak bolt of lightning had hit her. She was dead before she even fell off the ladder.
Shaking out of the memory, I backed into the kitchen, closing the door to the sunroom and my memories with it. Then I